Orca Read Online Free PDF Page B

turn around when I came in. Loiosh flew over and greeted Rocza, who was curled up next to Savn.
    I said, “What did you learn about the boy?”
    “I don’t know enough yet. I can tell you that there’s more wrong with him than a bump on the head, but the bump on the head triggered it. I’ll know more soon, I hope.”
    “What about curing him?”
    “I have to find out what’s wrong first.”
    “All right.”
    “What about you?”
    “I’m fine, thanks.”
    She turned and glared at me. “What did you find out?”
    I sat down at what passed for a kitchen table. “You,” I said, “are a tiny, tiny cog in the great big machine.”
    “What does that mean?”
    “A man named Fyres died.”
    “So I heard. What of it?”
    “He owned a whole lot of companies. When he died, it turned out that most of them had no assets to speak of, except for office furnishings and that sort of thing.”
    “I heard something of that, too.”
    “Your land is owned by a company that’s in surrender of debts, and has to sell it before the court orders it sold. What we have to do is buy the place ourselves. You said you have money—”
    “Well, I don’t,” she snapped.
    “Excuse me?”
    “I thought I did, but I was wrong.”
    “I don’t understand.”
    She turned back to the fire and didn’t speak for several minutes. Then she said, “All of my money was in a bank. Two days ago, while you were out, a messenger showed up with information that—”
    “Oh,” I said. “The bank was another one? Fyres owned it?”
    “Yes.”
    “So it’s all gone.”
    “I might be lucky enough to get two orbs for each imperial.”
    “Oh,” I said again.
    I sat thinking for a long time. At last I said, “All right, that makes it harder, but not much. I have money.”
    She looked at me once more, her lined face all but expressionless. I said, “Somewhere there’s someone who owns this land, and somewhere there’s someone who is responsible for that bank—”
    “Fyres,” she said. “And he’s dead.”
    “No. Someone is taking charge of these things. Someone is handling the estate. And, more important, there’s some very wealthy son of a bitch who just needs the right sort of pressure put on him in order to make the right piece of paper say the right thing. It shouldn’t disrupt anything—there are advantages to being a small cog in a big machine.”
    “How are you going to find this mythical rich man?”
    “I don’t know exactly. But the first step is to start tracing the lines of power from the top.”
    “I don’t think that information is public,” she said.
    “Neither do I.”
    I closed my eyes, thinking of several days’ worth of my least favorite sort of work: digging into plans, tracing guard routes, finagling trivial information out of people without letting them know I was doing it, and all that just so we could perhaps get a start on how to address the problem. I shook my head in self-pity.
    “Well?” said the old woman when she’d waited long enough and decided I wasn’t going to say any more. “What are you going to do? Steal Fyres’s private papers?”
    “Do I look like a thief?”
    “Yes.”
    “Thank you,” I said.
    She sniffed.
    “Unfortunately,” I added, “I’m not.”
    “Well, then?”
    “I do, however, know one.”
    Interlude
    “I suppose, if one must lose a finger—”
    “Yes. And it had healed cleanly.”
    “It hurts to think about it. I wonder what fell on it?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “You didn’t ask?”
    “He didn’t seem inclined to talk about it. You know how he gets when there’s something he doesn’t want to talk about.”
    “Yes. A lot like you.”
    “Meaning?”
    “There’s a lot you aren’t telling me, isn’t there?”
    “I suppose. Not deliberately—at least not yet. Later, there may be things I’d sooner not discuss. But if I told you everything I remember as I remember it, we’d still be here—”
    “I understand. Hmmm.”
    “What is it?”
    “I