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of his neck while watching his face.
    Hwdf rjaanci said, “Will you be staying here?”
    “I have a place in town.”
    “All right.”
    Vlad went over to the table, took out the papers, and began studying them. I knelt down in front of the boy and looked into his eyes; saw my own reflection and nothing else. His pupils were a bit large, but the room was dark, and they were the same size. A bit of spell-casting tempted me, but I stayed away from it. Thinking along those lines, I realized that there wasn’t much of an air of sorcery in the room; a few simple spells to keep the dust and insects away, and the dog had a ward against vermin, but that was about it.
    I felt the woman watching. I kept looking into the boy’s eyes, though I couldn’t say what I was looking for. The woman said, “So you’re a thief, are you?”
    “That’s what they say.”
    “I was robbed twice. The first time was years ago. During the Interregnum. You look too young to remember the Interregnum.”
    “Thank you.”
    She gave a little laugh. “The second time was more recent. I didn’t enjoy being robbed,” she added.
    “I should think not.”
    “They beat my husband—almost killed him.”
    “I don’t beat people, Mother.”
    “You just break into their homes?”
    I said, “When you’re working with the mentally sick, do you ever worry about being caught in the disease?”
    “Always,” she said. “That’s why I have to be careful. I can’t do anyone any good if I tangle my own mind instead of untangling my patient’s.”
    “That makes sense. I take it you’ve done a great deal of this?”
    “Some.”
    “How much?”
    “Some.”
    “You have to go into his mind, don’t you?”
    “Yes.”
    I looked at her. “You’re frightened, aren’t you?”
    She looked away.
    “I would be, too,” I told her. “Breaking into homes is much less frightening than breaking into minds.
    “More profitable, too,” I added after a moment.
    I felt Vlad looking at me, and looked back. He’d overheard the conversation and seemed to be trying to decide if he wanted to get angry. After a moment, he returned to looking at the papers. I stood up, went over to the dog, and got acquainted. It still seemed a bit suspicious of me, but was willing to give me the benefit of the doubt. Presently Hwdf rjaanci said, “All right. I’ll start tomorrow.”
    By the time I got there the next morning, Vlad had covered the table with a large piece of paper—I’m not sure where he got it—which was covered with scrawls and arrows. I stood over him for a moment, then said, “Where’s the boy?”
    “He and the woman went out for a walk. They took Rocza and the dog with them.”
    “Loiosh?”
    “Flying around outside trying to remember if he knows how to hunt.”
    He got that look on his face that told me he’d communicated that remark to Loiosh, too, and was pleased with himself.
    I said, “Any progress?”
    He shrugged. “Fyres didn’t like to tell his people much.”
    “So you said.”
    “Even less than I’d thought.”
    “Catch me up.”
    “Fyres and Company is a shipping company that employs about two hundred people. That’s all, as far as I can tell. Most of the rest of what he owned isn’t related to the shipping company at all, but he owned it through relatives—his wife, his son, his daughters, his sister, and a few friends. And most of those are in surrender of debts and have never really been solvent—it’s all been a big fraud from the beginning, when he conned banks into letting him take out loans, and used the loans to make his companies look big so that he could take out more loans. That’s how he operated.”
    “You know this?”
    “Yeah.”
    “You aren’t even an accountant.”
    “Yeah, but I don’t have to prove it—I’ve learned it because I’ve found out what companies he was keeping track of and looked at the ownership and read his notes. There’s nothing incriminating about it, but it gives the picture