The Book of Jhereg

by Steven Brust

  “Success leads to stagnation;

  Stagnation leads to failure.”

  I SLIPPED THE POISON dart into its slot under the right collar of my cloak, next to the lockpick. It couldn’t go in too straight, or it would be hard to get to quickly. It couldn’t go in at too much of an angle, or I wouldn’t have room left for the garrot. Just so . . . there.

  Every two or three days I change weapons. Just in case I have to leave something sticking in, on, or around a body. I don’t want the item to have been on my person long enough for a witch to trace it back to me.

  This could, I suppose, be called paranoia. There are damn few witches available to the Dragaeran Empire, and witchcraft isn’t very highly thought of. It is not likely that a witch would actually be called in to investigate a murder weapon and try to trace it back to the murderer—in fact, so far as I know, it has never been done in the 243 years since the end of the Interregnum. But I believe in caution and attention to detail. That is one reason I’m still around to practice my paranoia.

  I reached for a new garrot, let the old one drop into a box on the floor, and began working the wire into a tight coil.

  “Do you realize, Vlad,” said a voice, “that it’s been over a year since anyone has tried to kill you?”

  I looked up.

  “Do you realize, Kragar,” I said, “that if you keep walking in here without my seeing you, I’ll probably die of a heart attack one of these days and save them the trouble?”

  He chuckled a little.

  “No, I mean it, though,” he continued. “More than a year. We haven’t had any trouble since that punk—What was his name?”

  “G’ranthar.”

  “Right, G’ranthar. Since he tried to start up a business down on Copper Lane, and you quashed it.”

  “All right,” I said, “so things have been quiet. What of it?”

  “Nothing, really,” he said. “It’s just that I can’t figure out if it’s a good sign or a bad sign.”

  I studied his 7-foot frame sitting comfortably facing me against the back wall of my office. Kragar was something of an enigma. He had been with me since I had joined the business side of House Jhereg and had never shown the least sign of being unhappy taking orders from an “Easterner.” We’d been working together for several years now and had saved each other’s lives often enough for a certain amount of trust to develop.

  “I don’t see how it can be a bad sign,” I told him, slipping the garrot into its slot. “I’ve proven myself. I’ve run my territory with no trouble, paid off the right people, and there’s only once when I’ve had even a little trouble with the Empire. I’m accepted now. Human or not,” I added, enjoying the ambiguity of the phrase. “And remember that I’m known as an assassin more than anything else, so who would want to go out of his way to make trouble for me?”

  He looked at me quizzically for a moment. “That’s why you keep doing ‘work,’ isn’t it?” he said thoughtfully. “Just to make sure no one forgets what you can do.”

  I shrugged. Kragar was being more direct about things than I liked, and it made me a bit uncomfortable. He sensed this, I guess, and quickly shifted back to the earlier topic. “I just think that all this peace and quiet means that you haven’t been moving as fast as you could, that’s all. I mean, look,” he continued, “you’ve built up, from scratch, a spy ring that’s one of the best in the Jhereg—”

  “Not true,” I cut in. “I don’t really have a spy ring at all. There are a lot of people who are willing to give me information from time to time, and that’s it. It isn’t the same thing.”

  He brushed it aside. “It amounts to the same thing when we’re talking about information sources. And you have access to Morrolan’s network, which is a spy ring in every sense of the word.”

  “Morrolan,” I pointed out, “is not in the Jhereg.”

  “That’s a bonus,” he said. “That means you can find out things from people who wouldn’t deal with you directly.”

  “Well—all right. Go on.”

  “Okay, so we have damn good free-lance people. And our own enforcers are competent enough to have anyone worried. I think we ought to be using what we have, that’s all.”

  “Kragar,” I said, fishing out a slim throwing dagger and replacing it in the lining of my cloak, “would you kindly tell me why it is that I should want someone to be after my hide?”

  “I’m not saying that you should,” said Kragar. “I’m just wondering if the fact that no one is means that we’re slipping.”

  I slid a dagger into the sheath on the outside of my right thigh. It was a paper-thin, short throwing knife, small enough to be unnoticeable even when I sat down. The slit in my breeches was equally unnoticeable. A good compromise, I felt, between subtlety and speed of access.

  “What you’re saying is that you’re getting bored.”

  “Well, maybe just a little. But that doesn’t make what I said any less true.”

  I shook my head. “Loiosh, can you believe this guy? He’s getting bored, so he wants to get me killed.”

  My familiar flew over from his windowsill and landed on my shoulder. He started licking my ear.

  “Big help you are,” I told him.

  I turned back to Kragar. “No. If and when something comes up, we’ll deal with it. In the meantime, I have no intention of hunting for dragons. Now, if that’s all—”

  I stopped. At long last, my brain started functioning. Kragar walks into my office, with nothing on his mind except the sudden realization that we should go out and stir up trouble? No, no. Wrong. I know him better than that.

  “Okay,” I said. “Out with it. What’s happened now?”

  “Happened?” he asked innocently. “Why should something have happened?”

  “I’m an Easterner, remember?” I said sarcastically. “We get feelings about these things.”

  A smile played lightly around his lips. “Nothing much,” he said. “Only a message from the personal secretary to the Demon.”

  Gulp. “The Demon,” as he was called, was one of five members of a loose-knit “council” which, to some degree, controlled the business activities of House Jhereg. The council, a collection of the most powerful people in the House, had never had an official existence until the Interregnum, but they’d been around long before then. They ran things to the extent of settling disputes within the organization and making sure that things didn’t get so messy that the Empire had to step in. Since the Interregnum they had been a little more than that—they’d been the group that had put the House back together after the Empire began to function again. Now they existed with clearly defined duties and responsibilities, and everyone who did anything at all in the organization gave part of the profits to them.

  The Demon was generally acknowledged to be the number-two man in the organization. The last time I had met with someone that high up was in the middle of a war with another Jhereg, and the council member I’d spoken to had let me know that I’d better find a way to get things settled, or he would. I have no pleasant memories of that meeting.

  “What does he want?” I asked.

  “He wants to meet with you.”

  “Oh, crap. Double crap. Dragon dung. Any ideas why?”

  “No. He did pick a meeting place in our territory, for whatever that’s worth.”

  “It isn’t worth a whole lot,” I said. “Which place?”

  “The Blue Flame restaurant,” said Kragar.

  “The Blue Flame, eh? What does that bring to mind?”

  “I seem to recall that you ‘worked’ there twice.”

  “That’s right. It’s a real good place for killing someone. High booths, wide aisles, low lighting, and in an area where people like to mind their own business.”

  “That’s the place. He set it up for two hours past noon, tomorrow.”

  “After noon?”

  Kragar looked puzzled. “That’s right. After noon. That means when most people have eaten lunch, but haven’t e
aten supper yet. You must have come across the concept before.”

  I ignored his sarcasm. “You’re missing the point,” I said, flipping a shuriken into the wall next to his ear.

  “Funny, Vlad—”

  “Quiet. Now, how do you go about killing an assassin? Especially someone who’s careful not to let his movements fall into any pattern?”

  “Eh? You set up a meeting with him, just like the Demon is doing.”

  “Right. And, of course, you do everything you can to make him suspicious, don’t you?”

  “Uh, maybe you do. I don’t.”

  “Damn right you don’t! You make it sound like a simple business meeting. And that means you arrange to buy the guy a meal. And that means you don’t arrange it for some time like two hours past noon.”

  He was quiet for a while, as he tried to follow my somewhat convoluted logic. “Okay,” he said at last, “I agree that this is somewhat abnormal. Now, why?”

  “I’m not sure. Tell you what; find out everything you can about him, bring it back here, and we’ll try to figure it out. It might not mean anything, but . . .”

  Kragar smiled and pulled a small notebook from inside his cloak. He began reading. “The Demon,” he said. “True name unknown. Young, probably under eight hundred. No one heard of him before the Interregnum. He emerged just after it by personally killing two of the three members of the old council who survived the destruction of the city of Dragaera and the plagues and invasions. He built an organization from what was left, and helped make the House profitable again. As a matter of fact, Vlad,” he said, looking up, “it seems that it was his idea to allow Easterners to buy titles in the Jhereg.”

  “Now that’s interesting,” I said. “So I have him to thank for my father being able to squander the profits from forty years of work in order to be spat upon as a Jhereg, in addition to being spat upon as an Easterner. I’ll have to find some way to thank him for that.”

  “I might point out,” said Kragar, “that if your father hadn’t bought that title, you wouldn’t have had the chance to join the business end of the House.”

  “Maybe. But go on.”

  “There isn’t much more to tell. He didn’t exactly make it to the top; it would be more accurate to say that he made it somewhere, and then declared the top to be where he was. You have to remember that things were pretty much a mess back then.

  “And of course, he was tough enough, and good enough to make it stick. As far as I can tell, he hasn’t had any serious threats to his power since he got there. He has a habit of spotting potential challengers while they’re still weak, and getting rid of them. In fact—do you remember that fellow, Leonyar, we took out last year?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, I think that may have come indirectly from the Demon. We’ll never know for sure, of course, but as I said: he likes to get rid of potential problems early.”

  “Yeah. Do you think he could see me as a ‘potential problem’?”

  Kragar thought that over. “I suppose he might, but I don’t quite see why. You’ve been staying out of trouble, and as I said before, you haven’t really been moving very fast since the first couple of years. The only time there’s been any problem was the business with Laris last year, and I think everyone knows that he forced it on you.”

  “I hope so. Does the Demon do ‘work’?”

  Kragar shrugged. “We can’t say for sure, but it looks like he does. We know that he used to. As I said, he took out those two council members personally, back when he was getting started.”

  “Great. So in addition to whatever he could have set up, he might be planning to do the job himself.”

  “I suppose he could.”

  “But I still can’t figure out—look, Kragar, with someone like the Demon, something like this wouldn’t happen by accident, would it?”

  “Something like—?”

  “Like carefully arranging a meeting in just such a way as to arouse my suspicions.”

  “No, I don’t think he—What is it?”

  I guess he caught the look on my face, which must have been simply precious. I shook my head. “That’s it, of course.”

  “What,” he asked, “is what?”

  “Kragar, arrange for three bodyguards for me, okay?”

  “Bodyguards? But—”

  “Make them busboys or something. You won’t have any trouble; I own half interest in the place. Which, I might add, I’m sure the Demon is aware of.”

  “Don’t you think he’ll catch on?”

  “Of course he’ll catch on. That’s the point. He knows that I’m going to be nervous about meeting him, so he deliberately set up the meeting with an irregularity to make me suspicious, so I’ll have an excuse to have protection there. He’s going out of his way to say, ‘Go ahead and do what you have to, to feel safe, I won’t be offended.’”

  I shook my head again. I was starting to get dizzy. “I hope I don’t ever have to go up against the son-of-a-bitch. He’s devious.”

  “You’re devious, boss,” said Kragar. “I sometimes think you know Dragaerans better than other Dragaerans do.”

  “I do,” I said flatly. “And that’s because I’m not one.”

  He nodded. “Okay, three bodyguards. Our own people, or free-lance?”

  “Make one of them our own, and hire the other two. There isn’t any need to rub his nose in it, in case he recognizes our people.”

  “Right.”

  “You know, Kragar,” I said thoughtfully, “I’m not real happy about this. He must know me well enough to know that I’d figure out what he was doing, which means this could be a setup after all.” I held up my hand as he started to speak. “No, I’m not saying that I think it is, just that it could be.”

  “Well, you could always tell him that you can’t make it?”

  “Sure. Then, if he isn’t planning to kill me now, he’d be sure to after that.”

  “Probably,” admitted Kragar. “But what else can you do?”

  “I can bitch a lot and go meet with him. Okay, that’s tomorrow. Anything else going on?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Some Teckla got mugged the night before last, a couple of blocks from here.”

  I cursed. “Hurt bad?”

  Kragar shook his head. “A fractured jaw and a couple of bruises. Nothing serious, but I thought you’d like to know.”

  “Right. Thanks. I take it you haven’t found the guy who did it?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, find him.”

  “It’ll cost.”

  “Screw the cost. It’ll cost more if all our customers get scared away. Find the guy and make an example of him.”

  Kragar raised an eyebrow.

  “No,” I said, “not that much of an example. . . . And find a healer for that Teckla—on us. I take it he was a customer?”

  “Everyone around here is a customer, one way or another.”

  “Yeah. So pay for a healer and reimburse him. How much did the guy get, by the way?”

  “Almost two Imperials. Which could have been the Dragon Treasury, to hear him tell it.”

  “I suppose so. Tell you what: Why don’t you have the victim come up and see me, and I’ll pay him back personally and give him a talk about crime in the streets and how bad I feel, as a fellow citizen, of course, about what happened to him. Then he can go home and tell all his friends what a nice guy Uncle Vlad the Easterner is, and maybe we’ll even pull in some new business out of the deal.”

  “Sheer genius, boss,” said Kragar.

  I snorted. “Anything else?”

  “Nothing important, I guess. I’ll go arrange for your protection for tomorrow.”

  “Fine. And make it good people. As I say, this has me worried.”

  “Paranoia, boss.”

  “Yep. Paranoid and proud.”

  He nodded and left. I wrapped Spellbreaker around my right wrist. The two-foot length of gold chain was the one weapon that I didn’t change, since I had no
intention of ever leaving it behind me. As its name implied, it broke spells. If I was going to be hit with a magical attack (unlikely, even if this was a setup), I’d want it ready. I flexed my arm and tested the weight. Good.

  I turned to Loiosh, who was still resting comfortably on my right shoulder. He’d been strangely silent during the conversation.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked him psionically. “Bad feelings about the meeting tomorrow?”

  “No, bad feelings about having a Teckla in the office. Can I eat him, boss? Can I? Huh? Huh?”

  I laughed and went back to changing weapons with an all-new enthusiasm.

  2

  “There is no substitute for good manners—except fast reflexes.”

  THE BLUE FLAME IS on a short street called Copper Lane just off Lower Kieron Road. I arrived fifteen minutes early and carefully selected a seat that put my back to the door. I’d decided that if Loiosh, working along with the people we had planted here, couldn’t give me enough warning, the difference it would make if I were facing the door probably wouldn’t matter. This way, in case the meeting was legitimate, which I strongly suspected it was, I was showing the Demon that I trusted him and negating any feelings of “disrespect” he might get from seeing that I had brought protection. Loiosh was perched on my left shoulder, watching the door.

  I ordered a white wine and waited. I spotted one of my enforcers busing dishes, but couldn’t identify either of the free-lancers. Good. If I couldn’t spot them, there was a good chance that the Demon couldn’t. I sipped my wine slowly, still chucking slightly over the meeting I’d had earlier with the Teckla (what was his name?) who’d been mugged. It had gone well enough, though I had had to work to avoid bursting out laughing from my trusty jhereg familiar’s constant psionic appeals of “Aw, c’mon, boss. Please can’t I eat him?” I have a nasty familiar.

  I kept a tight control on the amount of wine I was drinking—the last thing I needed right now was to be slowed down. I flexed my right ankle, feeling the hilt of one of my boot-knives press reassuringly against my calf. I nudged the table an inch or so away from me, since I was sitting in a booth and couldn’t position my chair. I noted the locations of the spices on the table, as objects to throw, or things to get in the way. And I waited.