“Don’t even start. The cases are nowhere near each other.”
“It seems to me—”
“But on reflection ...”
I stopped and waited for her to continue.
“I admire your courage in coming here like this,” she said after a moment. “It is unlike you.”
“I’ve been hanging around Dzur.”
“But you didn’t come here to destroy me. What do you really want?”
“An explanation.”
“You know you aren’t getting that. What do you want?”
“I—”
“Don’t play me, Taltos Vladimir. You need help, and you’re too angry to beg me for it, as is traditional. Well, I’m inclined to help you for several reasons, mostly because, as you know, I have use for you. But you must cooperate. You must tell me what it is you want. Otherwise, I can’t do it.”
“Goddess, you don’t know me as well as you believe you do.”
“Were you actually intending to kill me?”
“What do you think?”
“What do you wish of me?”
“We’re not finished with this, you know.”
“I know that better than you. In the meantime, what do you wish?”
I actually hadn’t thought about it. But ...
“I’m not sure. If I were to walk into a house filled with sorceresses of the Left Hand, all determined to kill me, could you protect me?”
“I can’t interfere with internal matters of one of the Great Houses.”
“Great.”
“At least, not directly.”
She smiled, did the Goddess.
“If you know an indirect method for getting me out of there alive, I’d be glad to hear it. I had been thinking in terms of breaking a teleport block.”
“No, that would be direct.”
“Then I suppose a divine manifestation is out of the question?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Well then?”
“I’m rather good at sending dreams.”
“Yeah. You’ve sent me a few, haven’t you?”
“Yes.”
“The last one sent me off East and cost me a finger.”
“That wasn’t the last one.”
“Oh.”
“Well? What about it?”
“I think I see what you’re getting at.”
“And?”
“All right.”
“Then I’ll return you.”
“Well, tell me what’s going to—”
That’s as far as I got before Verra’s Halls were gone from around me, and I was once more standing next to her altar in South Adrilankha. 15. Dumplings
My father spent hours and hours trying to teach me to make good dumplings, but I guess there are just some things I wasn’t cut out to do. On the other hand, even if they had been good, they wouldn’t have had the perfect consistency of Valabar’s.
The thing about dumplings, more than perhaps anything else I’ve ever tried to prepare, is that they take patience: patience to get the mix exactly right, patience to push out each individual dumpling, patience to make sure to pull them from the water at exactly the right moment. I used to put about the same amount of work into preparing to put a shine on a guy, but guess I must have enjoyed that more or something.
Since I’ve been spending so much time making analogies between murder and cooking, I ought to dwell on patience for a bit, because it really is a key factor in both. It’s funny, but until I got into this line of work, I had thought I was by nature an impatient person. It turns out that, when it came to committing murder, I had no trouble sitting around waiting for the perfect moment before striking, or standing outside someplace watching for someone, or following some guy around for days and days to track his movements.
I’m not sure why it is that I’m able to exercise great patience with some things, but with others I get jumpy, jittery, and eventually just curse under my breath and declare the task finished, or else convince myself that it’s good enough.
With cooking and murder, there really shouldn’t be a “good enough.” You need to get as close to perfect as possible, otherwise find another line of work. Which, in fact, I did.
I studied Telnan, who was working on his kethna, accompanied by Valabar’s cabbage, about which I could say a great deal if I felt inclined. One of the arts of putting together a meal—and one that Valabar’s has completely mastered—is determining what goes well with what. I guess it’s like selecting the proper weapon to finalize someone; it goes along with all the other factors, like the individual’s particular skills, and the right time and place.
So there is another similarity between murder and cooking, to ac-company my thoughts about the need for patience when making death or dumplings. But these are my thoughts now—well after the meal and all that followed it. At the time, I was just eating, I wasn’t thinking about murder at all though I guess I did have a few passing thoughts about how I’d never been able to make dumplings to my father’s satisfaction. Or my own, for that matter.
The reward for doing the dumplings right is that you have the perfect accompaniment for the Valabar’s brisket of beef. I mean, you bite into one and you get an explosion in your mouth of the pure sauce that it’s been absorbing. It’s magnificent.
The only problem is that by this time, you really have to pace yourself; there’s been just too much food in too short a time, and you are very much aware that soon you’re going to reach the end of your capacity.
I think Telnan made a couple of comments that I didn’t hear during all of this, or else that I heard at the time but no longer remember; I think they were about the way the sausages worked with the kethna, but I’m not sure. What with the beef, the sauce, and the dumplings, I just didn’t have a whole lot of attention to spare.
Another similarity, if you will, between committing murder and indulging in supreme pleasure: Both take one’s full concentration.
“Boss!”
“Damn.”
“What is it, Boss?”
“All is well, Loiosh.”
“If you ever do that again, I’ll bite you. I mean, really, really hard.”
“Understood. How long was I gone?”
“Forever. Almost an hour.”
I checked with the Orb. I’d been gone about twenty minutes. “Okay. Let’s go home.”
I returned to the sanctuary of my room, and settled in to wait. The waiting lasted about three minutes before I realized that sitting there doing nothing would drive me nuts.
“You know, it could be days, Boss.”
“It could be weeks.”
“You can’t just walk around for weeks.”
“I’m not just walking around. I have a destination in mind.”
“Oh, all right. Where to, then?”
“Anywhere.”
We went out and walked anywhere, Loiosh and Rocza staying above me, but pretty close. I guess Loiosh was nervous.
Mostly what I remember from that day are faces, passed in the street. The faces of Easterners, of my people: old and young, one who seemed pleased about something, a couple who appeared unhappy, several who were lost in thought, a couple who were looking around. One guy, about my age, made eye contact with me and gave me a nod. I remember nothing of where I saw them, or what I was doing—just walking, I suppose. But I remember the faces.
“There is a moment,” Telnan had told me, “when you either attack with everything you have, or you do something else. That moment, right before you commit yourself, that’s when you learn who you are.”