Orca by Steven Brust Read Free Book Online Page B

do about it?”
    “I don’t know yet. Just find out what I can and then think about it.” Or, at any rate, if Vlad had had any other plan, he hadn’t mentioned it to me. “What else can you tell me?”
    “Well, he was about fourteen hundred years old. No one heard of him before the Interregnum, but he rose pretty quickly after it ended.”
    “How quickly?”
    “He was a very wealthy man by the end of the first century.”
    “That is quick.”
    “Yeah. And then he lost it all forty or fifty years later.”
    “Lost it all?”
    “Yep.”
    “And came back?”
    “Twice more. Each time bigger, each time the collapse was worse.”
    “Same problem? Same sort of paper castles?”
    “Yep.”
    “Shipping?”
    “Yep. And shipbuilding. Those have been his foundations all along.”
    “You’d think people would learn.”
    “Is there an implied criticism there, Kiera?” His look got just the least bit hard.
    “No. Curiosity. I know you aren’t stupid. Most of the people he’d be borrowing from aren’t, either. How did he do it?”
    Stony relaxed. “You’d have to have seen him work.”
    “What do you mean? Good salesman?”
    “That, and more. Even when he was down, you’d never know it. Of course, when someone that rich goes down, it doesn’t have much effect on how he lives—he’ll still have his mansion, and he’ll still be at all the clubs, and he’ll still have his private boat and his big carriages.”
    “Sure.”
    “So he’d trade on those things. You get to talking with him for five minutes, and you forget that he’d just taken a fall. And then his secretaries would keep running in with papers for him to sign, or with questions about some big deal or another, and it looked like he was on top of the world.”
    Stony shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve wondered if he didn’t have those secretaries pull that sort of thing just to look good; but it worked. You’d always end up convinced that he was in some sort of great position and you might as well jump on the horse and ride it yourself before someone else did.”
    “And there were a lot of us on the horse.”
    “A lot of Jhereg? Yeah.”
    “And in deep.”
    “Yeah.”
    “That isn’t good for my investigation.”
    “You worried you might bump into the Organization? Is that it?”
    “That’s part of it.”
    “It might happen,” he said.
    “All right.”
    “What if it does?”
    “I don’t know.”
    He shook his head. “I don’t want to see you get hurt, Kiera.”
    “Neither do I,” I said. “How far beyond Northport does this thing go?”
    “Hard to say. It’s all centered here, but he’d begun spreading out. He has offices other places, of course—you have to if you’re in shipping. But I can’t say how much else.”
    “What was going on before he died?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I have the impression things were getting shaky for him.”
    “Very. He was scrabbling. You wouldn’t know it to look at him, but there were rumors that he’d stepped too far out and it was all going to crumble.”
    “Hmmm.”
    “Still wondering if someone put a shine on him?”
    “Seems like quite a coincidence.”
    “I know. But I don’t think so. As I said, I never heard any whispers, and the Empire investigated; they’re awfully good at this sort of thing.”
    I nodded. That much was certainly true. “Okay,” I said. “Thanks for your help.”
    “No problem. If there’s anything else, let me know.”
    “I will.” I stood up.
    “Oh, by the way.”
    “Yes?”
    He leaned back in his chair and looked at the ceiling. “Seen anything of that Easterner you used to hang around with?”
    “You mean Vlad Taltos? The guy who screwed up the Organization representative to the Empire? The guy everyone wants to put over the Falls? The guy with so much gold on his head that his hair is sparkling? The guy the Organization wants so bad that anyone seen with him is likely to disappear for a long session of question and answer with the