07 - Orca by Steven Brust

Author:Steven Brust [Brust, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780441001965
Publisher: Ace
Published: 1996-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

Vlad had said something about missing the people who once did his legwork for him, but I have my own ways of finding out what I need to know. Breaking into Fyres’s house, when I had the house plans and all of the information ahead of time, was nice, and it had left me free to only look for certain things. This time, when I wasn’t even going to break in, I had more leisure—I’d even had the leisure to return home and study up on the House of the Orca, so I wouldn’t make any mistakes that I could avoid, although there could easily be pitfalls I wouldn’t know about. But if you’re trying to pull off a scam, the more information you have the better, so I went about collecting the information—my way.

I stood in a small wooded area, about two hundred meters from Lady Vonnith’s front door, and studied her. That is, I studied her grounds and her house, which told me a great deal more about her than a similar study had told Vlad about Endra or Reega. But then, I have the advantage of age, and of spending a great deal of time learning about people only by seeing their houses (and especially trying to judge the inside by what I see of the outside), so maybe it isn’t a fair comparison.

Vonnith’s home was much older than Fyres’s place, and, without doubt, had been built for an Orca. The gentle curves of roof and front were the trademark of the way they had liked their homes in the late Fifteenth and early Sixteenth Cycles—perhaps because it reminded them of their ships, but more likely because it reminded them of the sea. The late Fifteenth and early Sixteenth Cycles, incidentally, were also one of the periods when the richest of them made a point of living as far inland as duty and fortune would permit, which was a further indication, as we were several leagues from the shore and there wasn’t even a river in sight.

There was a high, ivy-covered stone wall running along one side of the grounds. It was recent enough that it had to be Vonnith who had it put in. It certainly wasn’t for security, or it would have gone around all the grounds, and it wasn’t attractive enough to have been put in for aesthetic reasons, so it was probably done to hide whatever was on the other side of it, which a quick glance told me was more of the same gentle, grass-covered hill Vonnith’s house was built on. Conclusion: she wanted to mark her boundaries. Second conclusion: she spent a great deal of time in that room on the second floor whose window looked out that way, with additional evidence provided by a not-unattractive stone monument midway between house and wall.

The monument was of a person, probably an ancestor, most likely the person who had had the house built, yet it seemed new enough that Vonnith had had it put up herself.

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