Teckla by Steven Brust

to see him?"
    "I plan to leave all my worldly wealth to the biggest idiot I can find and I wanted to interview him to see if he qualified. But now that I've met you, I can see there's no point in looking any further." He glared at me. Sheryl laughed a little and Gregory flushed. Kelly appeared through the curtain then. I looked at him more closely than I had before. He really was quite overweight, as well as short, but I somehow wanted to call him extremely chubby instead of fat. Cute, sort of. His forehead was flat, giving the impression that his head was large. His hair was cut very short, like half an inch, and he had no sideburns at all. His eyes had two positions, narrowed and squinting, and he had a very expressive mouth, probably because of the amount of fat surrounding it. He struck me as one of those people who can turn from cheerful to vicious in an instant; like Glowbug, say.
    He said, "Right. Come on." Then he turned and walked toward the rear of the flat, leaving me to follow him. I wondered if that was a deliberate ploy.
    The back room was narrow and stuffy and smelled of pipe smoke, although Kelly didn't have the teeth of a smoker. Come to think of it, he probably didn't have any vices at all. Except overeating, anyway. Shame he was an Easterner. Dragaerans can use sorcery to remove excess fat; Easterners tend to kill themselves trying. There were rows of leather-bound books all around the room, with black or sometimes brown bindings. I couldn't read any of the titles, but the author of one of them was Padraic Kelly. He nodded me into a stiff wooden chair and sat in another one behind a rickety-looking desk. I pointed to the book and said, "You wrote that?" He followed my pointing finger. "Yes."
    "What is it?"
    "It's a history of the uprising of two twenty-one."
    "Where was that?"
    He looked at me closely, as if to see if I were joking, then said, "Right here, in South Adrilankha."
    I said, "Oh." I cleared my throat. "Do you read poetry as well?"
    "Yes," he said.
    I sighed to myself. I didn't really want to walk in and start haranguing him, but there didn't seem to be a whole lot else to talk about. What's the use? I said, "Cawti's been telling me something about what you do." He nodded, waiting, "I don't like it," I said, and his eyes narrowed.
    "I'm not happy that Cawti's involved." He kept staring at me, not saying anything.
    I sat back in the chair, crossed my legs. "But all right. I don't run her life. If she wants to waste her time this way, there's nothing I can do about it." I paused, waiting for him to make some sort of interjection. When he didn't, I said, "What bothers me is this business of teaching reading classes—that's what Franz was doing, wasn't it?"
    "That, and other things," he said, tight-lipped.
    "Well then, I'm offering you a deal. I'll find out who killed Franz and why, if you drop these classes, or get someone else to teach them." He never took his eyes off me. "And if not?" I started to get irritated, probably because he was making me feel uncomfortable and I don't like that. I clenched my teeth together, stifling the urge to say what I thought of him. I finally said, "Don't make me threaten you. I dislike threatening people." He leaned over the desk, and his eyes were narrowed more than usual, his lips were pressed tightly together. He said, "You come in here, on the heels of the death of a man who was martyred to—"
    "Spare me."
    "Quiet! I said martyred and I meant it. He was fighting for what he believed in, and he was killed for it."
    He stared hard at me for a moment, then he continued in a tone of voice that was softer but cutting. "I know what you do for a living," he said.
    "You don't even realize the depths to which you've sunk." I touched the hilt of a dagger but didn't draw it. "You're right," I said. "I don't realize the depths to which I've sunk. It would be really stupid of you to tell me about it."
    "Don't tell me what is and is not stupid. You're incapable of judging