The Book of Jhereg

by Steven Brust

  Five minutes after the hour, according to the Imperial Clock, I received a warning from Loiosh. I set my right arm crosswise on the table, so that my hand was two inches away from my left sleeve. That was as close as I wanted to come to holding a weapon. A rather large guard-type appeared in front of my table, nodded to me, and stepped back. A well-dressed Dragaeran in gray and black approached and sat down opposite me.

  I waited for him to speak. It was his meeting, so it was up to him to set the tone; also, my mouth was suddenly very dry.

  “You are Vladimir Taltos?” he asked, pronouncing my name correctly.

  I nodded and took a sip of wine. “You are the Demon?”

  He nodded. I offered wine and we drank to each other’s health; I wouldn’t swear to the sincerity of the toast. My hand was steady as I held the glass. Good.

  He sipped his wine delicately, watching me. All of his motions were slow and controlled. I thought I could see where a dagger was hidden up his right sleeve; I noticed a couple of bulges where other weapons might be in his cloak. He probably noticed the same in mine. He was, indeed, young for his position. He looked to be somewhere between eight hundred and a thousand, which is thirty-five or forty to a human. He had those eyes that never seemed capable of opening to more than slits. Like mine, say. Kragar was right; this was an assassin.

  “We understand,” he said, swirling the wine in his glass, “that you do ‘work.’”

  I kept the surprise off my face. Was I about to be offered a contract? From the Demon? Why? Perhaps this was just an effort to get me off my guard. I couldn’t figure it. If he really wanted me for something, he should have gone through about half a dozen intermediaries.

  “I’m afraid not,” I told him, measuring my words. “I don’t get involved with that kind of thing.”

  Then, “I have a friend who does.”

  He looked away for a moment, then nodded. “I see. Could you put me in touch with this ‘friend’?”

  “He doesn’t get out much,” I explained. “I can get a message to him, if you like.”

  He nodded, still not looking at me. “I suppose your ‘friend’ is an Easterner, too?”

  “As a matter of fact, he is. Does it matter?”

  “It might. Tell him we’d liked him to work for us, if he’s available. I hope he has access to your information sources. I suspect this job will require all of them.”

  Oh, ho! So that’s why he’d come to me! He knew that my ways of obtaining information were good enough that even he would have trouble matching them. I allowed myself a little bit of cautious optimism. This just might be legitimate. On the other hand, I still couldn’t see why he’d come personally.

  There were several questions I very badly wanted to ask him, such as, “Why me?” and “Why you?” But I couldn’t approach them directly. The problem was, he wasn’t going to give me anymore information until he had a certain amount of commitment from me—and I didn’t feel like giving him that commitment until I knew more.

  “Suggestions, Loiosh?”

  “You could ask him who the target is.”

  “That’s exactly what I don’t want to do. That commits me.”

  “Only if he answers.”

  “What makes you think he won’t answer?”

  “I’m a jhereg, remember?” he said sarcastically. “We get feelings about these things.”

  One of Loiosh’s great skills is throwing my own lines back at me. The damnable thing about it was that he might be simply telling the truth.

  The Demon remained politely silent during the psionic conversation—either because he didn’t notice it, or out of courtesy. I suspected the latter.

  “Who?” I said aloud.

  The Demon turned back to me, then, and looked at me for what seemed to be a long time. Then he turned his face to the side again.

  “Someone who’s worth sixty-five thousand gold to us,” he said.

  This time I couldn’t keep my expression from showing. Sixty-five thousand! That was . . . let me see . . . over thirty, no forty times the standard fee! For that kind of money I could build my wife the castle she’d been talking about! Hell, I could build it twice! I could bloody well retire! I could—

  “Who are you after?” I asked again, forcing my voice to stay low and even. “The Empress?”

  He smiled a little. “Is your friend interested?” He was no longer pronouncing the quotation marks, I noted.

  “Not in taking out the Empress.”

  “Don’t worry. We aren’t expecting Mario.” As it happened, that was the wrong thing for him to say just then. It started me thinking . . . for the kind of gold he was talking about, he could hire Mario. Why wouldn’t he?

  I thought of one reason right away: The someone who had to be taken out was so big that whoever did the job would have to be eliminated himself, afterwards. They would know better than to try that on Mario; but with me, well, yes. I wasn’t so well protected that I couldn’t be disposed of by the resources the Demon had at his disposal.

  It fit in another way, too: It explained why the Demon had shown up personally. If he was, in fact, planning to have me take a fall after doing the job, he wouldn’t care that I knew that he was behind it and wouldn’t want a lot of other people in his organization to know. Hiring someone to do something and then killing him when he does it is not strictly honorable—but it’s been done.

  I pushed the thought aside for the moment. What I wanted was a clear idea of what was going on. I had a suspicion, yes; but I wasn’t a Dzur. I needed more than a suspicion to take any action.

  So the question remained, who was it that the Demon wanted me to nail for him? Someone big enough that the man who did it had to go too. . . . A high noble? Possible—but why? Who had crossed the Demon?

  The Demon was sharp, he was careful, he didn’t make many enemies, he was on the council, he—wait! The council? Sure, that had to be it. Either someone on the council was trying to get rid of him, or he finally decided that being number two wasn’t enough. If it was the latter, sixty-five thousand wasn’t enough. I knew who I’d be going after, and he was as close to untouchable as it is possible to get. In either case, it didn’t sound hopeful.

  What else could it be? Someone high up in the Demon’s organization suddenly deciding to open his mouth to the Empire? Damn unlikely! The Demon wouldn’t make the kind of mistakes that led to that. No, it had to be someone on the council. And that, as I’d guessed, would mean that whoever did the job might have a lot of trouble staying alive after: he’d have too much information on the fellow who had given him the job and he’d know too much about internal squabbles on the council.

  I started to shake my head, but the Demon held his hand up. “It isn’t what you think,” he said. “The only reason we aren’t trying to get hold of Mario is because there have to be certain conditions attached to the job—conditions that Mario wouldn’t accept. Nothing more than that.”

  I felt a brief flash of anger, but pushed it back down before it showed. What the hell made him think he could stick me with conditions that Mario wouldn’t accept? (Sixty-five thousand gold, that’s what.) I thought a little longer. The problem was, of course, that the Demon had a reputation for honesty. He wasn’t known as the type who’d hire an assassin and then set him up. On the other hand, if they were talking about sixty-five thousand, things were desperate in some fashion already. He could be desperate enough to do a lot of things he otherwise wouldn’t do.

  The figure sixty-five thousand gold Imperials kept running through my head. However, one other figure kept meeting it: one hundred and fifty gold. That’s the average cost of a funeral.

  “I think,” I told him at last, “that my friend would not be interested in taking out a member of the council.”

  He nodded in appreciation of the way my mind worked, but said, “You’re close. An ex-member of the council.”

  What? More and more riddles.

  “I hadn’t realized,” I said slowly, “that there wa
s more than one way to leave the council.” And, if the guy had taken that way, they certainly didn’t need my services.

  “Neither had we,” he said. “But Mellar found a way.”

  At last! A name! Mellar, Mellar, let me see . . . right. He was awfully tough. He had a good, solid organization, brains, and, well, enough muscle and resources to get and hold a position on the council. But why had the Demon told me? Was he planning to kill me after all if I turned him down? Or was he taking a chance on being able to convince me?

  “What way is that?” I asked, sipping my wine.

  “To take nine million gold in council operating funds and disappear.”

  I almost choked.

  By the sacred balls of the Imperial Phoenix! Absconding with Jhereg funds? With council funds? My head started hurting.

  “When—when did this happen?” I managed.

  “Yesterday.” He was watching the expression on my face. He nodded grimly. “Nervy bastard, isn’t he?”

  I nodded back. “You know,” I said, “you’re going to have one bitch of a time keeping this quiet.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “We just aren’t going to be able to for very long.” For a moment his eyes went cold, and I began to understand how the Demon had gotten his name. “He took everything we had,” he said tightly. “We all have our own funds, of course, and we’ve been using them in the investigation. But on the kind of scale we’re working on, we can’t keep it up long.”

  I shook my head. “Once this gets out—”

  “He’d better be dead,” the Demon finished for me. “Or every two-silverpiece thief in the Empire is going to think he can take us. And one of them will do it, too.”

  Something else hit me at that point. I realized that, for one thing, I could accept this job quite safely. Once Mellar was dead, it wouldn’t matter if word got out what he’d tried. However, if I turned it down, I was suddenly a big risk and, shortly thereafter, I suspected, a small corpse.

  Once again, the Demon seemed to guess what I was thinking.

  “No,” he said flatly. He leaned forward, earnestly. “I assure you that if you turn me down, nothing will happen to you. I know that we can trust you—that’s one reason we came to you.”

  I wondered briefly if he were reading my mind. I decided that he wasn’t. An Easterner is not an easy person to mind-probe, and I doubted that he could do it without my being aware of it. And I was sure he couldn’t do it without Loiosh noticing.

  “Of course, if you turn us down and then let something slip . . .”

  His voice trailed off. I suppressed a shudder.

  I did some more hard thinking. “It would seem to me,” I said, “that this has to be done soon.”

  He nodded. “And that’s why we can’t get Mario. There’s no way we can rush him.”

  “And you think you can rush my friend?”

  He shrugged. “I think we’re paying for it.”

  I had to agree with that. There was, at least, no time limit. But I had never before accepted “work” without the understanding that I had as much time as I needed. How much, I wondered, would it throw me off to have to hurry?

  “Do you have any idea where he went?”

  “We strongly suspect that he headed out East. At least, if I were pulling something like this, that’s where I’d go.”

  I shook my head. “That doesn’t make sense. Dragaerans out East are treated about the same as Easterners are treated here—worse, if anything. He’d be considered, if you’ll pardon the expression, a demon. He’d stand out like a Morganti weapon in the Imperial Palace.”

  He smiled. “True enough, but we have the fewest resources there, so it would take a while for word to get back to us. Also, we’ve had the best sorceresses from the Left Hand looking for him since we found out what happened, and we can’t find him.”

  I shrugged. “He could have put up a block against tracing.”

  “He definitely has done that.”

  “Well, then—”

  He shook his head. “You have no idea of the kind of power we’re pouring into this. We could break down any block he could put up, no matter how long he’s been planning it, or who the sorcerer is who put the block up. If he was anywhere within a hundred miles of Adrilankha we’d have broken it by now, or at least found a general area that we couldn’t penetrate.”

  “So, you can guarantee that he isn’t within a hundred miles of the city?”

  “Right. Now, it’s possible that he’s in the jungle to the west, in which case we’ll probably find him within the next day or two. But I’d guess he’d bolted for the East.”

  I nodded slowly. “So you came to me, figuring that I can operate out there easier than a Dragaeran.”

  “That’s right. And, of course, we know that you have an extremely formidable information network.”

  “My information network,” I said, “doesn’t extend to the East.” That was almost true. My sources back in my ancestral homeland were few and far between. Still, there wasn’t any reason to let the Demon in on everything I had.

  “Well, then,” he said, “there’s an additional bonus for you. By the time this is over, you’ll probably have something where you didn’t before.”

  I smiled at his riposte, and nodded a little.

  “And so,” I said, “you want my friend to go out to wherever Mellar is hiding and get your gold back?”

  “That would be nice,” he admitted. “But it’s secondary. The main thing is to make sure that no one gets the idea that it’s safe to steal from us. Even Kiera, bless her sweet little fingers, hasn’t tried that. I’ll add that I take this whole thing very personally. And I will feel very warmly toward whomever does this particular little job for me.”

  I sat back, and thought for a long time, then. The Demon was politely silent. Sixty-five thousand gold! And, of course, having the Demon owe me a favor was better than a poke in the eye with a Morganti dagger by all means.

  “Morganti?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “It has to be permanent, however you want to do it. If you happen to destroy his soul in the process, I won’t be upset. But it isn’t necessary. Just so that he ends up dead, with no chance of anyone revivifying him.”

  “Yeah. You say that the Left Hand is working on locating him?”

  “Right. The best they’ve got.”

  “That can’t be helping your security any.”

  He shrugged. “They know who; they don’t know why. As far as they’re concerned, it’s a personal matter between Mellar and me. You may not realize it, but the Left Hand tends to take less of an interest in what the council is doing than the lowest pimp on the streets. I’m not worried about security from that end. But if this goes on too long, word will get out that I’m looking for Mellar, and someone who notices that the council is having financial trouble will start counting the eggs.”

  “I suppose. Okay, I suspect that my friend will be willing to take this on. He’s going to need whatever information you have about Mellar as a starting point.”

  The Demon held his hand out to the side. The bodyguard, who had been standing politely (and safely) out of earshot, placed a rather formidable-looking sheaf of papers in it. The Demon handed these over to me. “It’s all there,” he said.

  “All?”

  “As much as we know. I’m afraid it may not be as much as you’d like.”

  “Okay.” I briefly ruffled through the papers. “You’ve been busy,” I remarked.

  He smiled.

  “If there’s anything else I need,” I said, “I’ll get back to you.”

  “Fine. It should be obvious, but your friend is going to have all the help he needs on this one.”

  “In that case, I presume you’re going to continue with your searching? You have access to better sorcerers than my friend has; you could keep going on that front.”

  “I intend to,” he said drily. “And I should also mention something else. If we happen to run into him before you do and
see an opportunity, we’re going to take him ourselves. I mean no disrespect by that, but I think you can understand that this is a rather special situation.”

  “I can’t say I like it,” I said, “but I understand.” I wasn’t at all happy about it, in fact. Sure, my fee would be safe, but things like that can cause complications—and complications scare me.

  I shrugged. “I think you can understand, too—and I mean no disrespect by this—that if some Teckla gets in the way, and my friend thinks the guy’s going to bungle it, my friend will have to put him down.”

  The Demon nodded.

  I sighed. Communication was such a fine thing.

  I raised my glass. “To friends,” I said.

  He smiled and raised his. “To friends.”

  3

  “Everyone is a predator.”

  “WORK” COMES IN THREE variations, each with its own effect, purpose, price—and penalty.

  The simplest is not used often, but happens enough to have acquired the term “standard.” The idea is that you want to warn an individual away from a certain course of action, or toward another. In this case, for a fee that starts at fifteen hundred gold and goes up from there depending on how hard the target is, an assassin will arrange for the selected individual to become dead. What happens after that doesn’t much matter to the killer, but as often as not the body will eventually be found by a friend or relative, who may or may not be willing and able to have the person revivified.

  Revivification costs heavily—up to four thousand gold for difficult cases. Even the easiest takes an expert sorcerer to perform, and it is never a sure thing.

  In other words, the victim will wake up, if he does, with the knowledge that there is someone out there—and he usually knows who—who doesn’t really care if he lives or dies and is willing to expend at least fifteen hundred gold Imperials to prove this.

  This is rather chilling knowledge. It happened to me once, when I started pushing into the territory of a fellow who was just the least bit tougher than I was. I got the message, all right. I knew just what he was telling me, without any room for mistakes. “I can take you any time I want, punk, and I’d do it, too, only you aren’t worth more than fifteen hundred gold to dispose of.”