Jhegaala (Vlad Taltos)

by Steven Brust

  High on the list of the steminastria’s natural enemies must be itself, when considering its reckless disregard for the size and characteristics of its predators, even when based on its own experiences….

  —Oscaani: Fauna of the Middle South: A Brief Survey,

  Volume 6, Chapter 17

  5

  B O R A A N (DETERMINED): Search! Hunt! Find it!

  FIRST STUDENT (frightened): What if it isn’t anywhere?

  LEFITT (calm): Then it will take rather longer.

  —Miersen, Six Parts Water

  Day Two, Act III, Scene 5

  When I woke up, I hurt.

  My shoulders, my arms, my back, my legs.

  Why my legs? I don’t know. What do I look like, a physicker?

  I lay in bed moaning for what seemed a long time. If the Jhereg had found me then, they’d have had an easy target. I’m not even sure I’d have minded.

  Eventually I moaned, moved, moaned, sat up, moaned, swung my legs down to the floor, and moaned.

  “If I so much as suspect you are even thinking about laughing, by Verra’s tits and toenails, Loiosh, I will—”

  “Never entered my mind, Boss.”

  Putting on my boots was a test of my manhood; I just barely passed. Then I moaned some more. Eventually, I made my way to the stairs, and then down them, one at a time, slowly.

  “Boss, how far can you go?”

  “As far as I have to.”

  Inchay looked up. “Coffee?”

  “Brandy,” I said. “The foulest you have.”

  He looked startled, but didn’t argue. I took the cup, downed it in one shot, and shook my head. “That’s better,” I said. “Now I’ll have some coffee.” I made my way over to a table and sat down.

  After about an hour of drinking coffee I started to feel like maybe I could move. I mentally ran through the inventory of witchcraft supplies I had with me. Not many, but they’d do, and I didn’t feel like going back to the shop in town and trying to actually purchase anything; I’d either kill the first merchant who looked at me wrong, or, worse, be unable to.

  Okay, I had what I needed; I didn’t doubt my ability to make the spell work. The only question was: Where should I do it? I didn’t want to cast right there at the inn, because I had to take the amulet off, and it was bad enough giving the Jhereg a chance—slim but present—of finding the area where I was; handing them the inn I was staying at was just making their life a little too easy. I could maybe find a place out of town, but being surrounded by people—humans—was part of my protection.

  I hated that I had to do this that I was being forced to take this risk, just because of blisters and stupid body aches that I gotten—

  No, no.

  Not going to be able to do any sort of spell while having dismemberment fantasies. The Art involves channeling and controlling emotion, but the emotion needs to correspond to the spell, and the emotions I was feeling right then didn’t have a whole lot to do with healing.

  I remembered pleasant days with Cawti, which made me a bit melancholy—okay, maybe more than a bit—but that’s always a good cure for rage. I thought about what went wrong, and what went right, and made stupid plans in my head to win her back. Funny, that; they always involved rescuing her, when I knew damned well that rescuing her had been one of the problems. No one likes being rescued. The only thing worse is, well, not being rescued.

  So, yeah, I played tricks with my own head until I felt like maybe I could do a Working, and by the time I’d done that, I knew where I could do it, too. And, besides, the thought made me chuckle. Loiosh would have a lot to say about it, and that made me chuckle too.

  “What are you planning, Boss?”

  “Just a spell, Loiosh. You’ll see.”

  I stood up and made my way—still slowly and painfully, but maybe a little better—out of the door, and began walking down the street. Slowly.

  “Loiosh, I hurt.”

  “We can stop for cheese.”

  “Oh, shut up.”

  Eventually, I made it to the other end, to the other inn, and went into the stable. The stable-boy was there; he seemed to be in his early twenties, and had deep-set eyes and thin lips. He said, “Greetings, my lord, may I—” He stopped and stared at his hand, into which I had just placed three silver coins. “My lord?”

  I gestured to the stable. “I need to use the space there for about an hour.”

  “My lord?”

  “Yes?”

  “The stable?”

  I nodded.

  “You need to use …”

  “The space. Don’t let anyone in. For an hour.”

  He looked at me, a thousand questions on his lips, then at the coins in his hand, then said, “Ah, the horses—”

  “Will not be harmed.” He had a sense of responsibility. How about that? “I won’t touch them, or even go near them.”

  He heard the ring of truth in my voice, or the ring of metal in his hand, or something. He nodded abruptly. “Yes, my lord.”

  I added a fourth coin. “And there’s no need to mention this to anyone.”

  “Of course not, my lord. An hour, you said?”

  “An hour.”

  He bowed clumsily, and I went into the stable and locked it after myself.

  “Here?”

  “Why not?”

  “How can you defend yourself here?”

  “I’m hoping I won’t need to.”

  “Um, going to let me in on this?” He was genuinely nervous; I could tell because Rocza seemed jumpy.

  “Look, chum, what exactly are we worried about?”

  “The Jhereg finding you.”

  “Right. Now, either they already know where I am, in which case it’s pointless to worry about it, or they don’t. If they don’t, then, if they get lucky, they’ll be able to trace me while I have the amulet off doing the witchcraft spell. If they trace me, what will they do?”

  “Uh … kill you?”

  “They’ll have to come to Burz to do it.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Know any Dragaerans liable to have this little Eastern town memorized enough to teleport to it?”

  “Probably not, Boss. Going to bet your life that some sorceress from the Left Hand can’t work around that?”

  “No, but I’ll bet my life that if an assassin does show up, I’ll be ready. I’m doing a spell, not falling asleep. I’m in the middle of an open space. There’s no way he can come at me without you seeing him.”

  “And if he’s invisible?”

  “Look around.”

  “What?”

  “Horses, Loiosh. They’ll smell him. Keep an eye on the horses during the spell. If the horses suddenly get jumpy, and start looking where there isn’t anyone, I’ll stop the spell and, ah, kill him.” I made a mental note to make up more Nesiffa powder; I didn’t mention to Loiosh that I was out of it.

  “Boss, sometimes I wonder about you. Okay, and if they track you, but don’t come immediately?”

  “They’ll be across town from where I am, with plenty of time for people to notice that there’s an ‘elf’ in town, and I’ll no doubt hear about it.”

  “‘No doubt’?”

  “And they want it Morganti, Loiosh. Morganti. The Jhereg won’t be happy with anything less. There is no chance, none, that they can bring a Morganti weapon into a town full of witches without creating an uproar the likes of which this town has never seen.”

  “And then, sometimes, I don’t even wonder.”

  “Heh.”

  “Go ahead, then.”

  “Glad to have your permission.”

  I cleared an area of hay, because burning the place down would have attracted unnecessary attention to myself as well as disrupting the ritual; not to mention breaking my promise not to harm the horses.

  I lit three candles—two white, and one black—then removed the amulet and carefully separated the two parts. The gold I replaced around my neck; the black I set into my pouch. Once
I closed that pouch—I’d crafted it myself—the stone might as well have been a hundred miles away.

  I laid out what few things I’d need: herbs, a tube of purified water. I didn’t have a brazier with me, but I didn’t need one for this.

  As I combined the salve with purified water—just a drop—I considered the nasty blisters on my fingers, and thought about what my fingers would be like without them, imagined them healing with a chant that came from inside my body painful muscles unknotting working past the resistance because it cannot stand up to me I am Taltos Vladimir and the power is mine and the body is mine it will do as I will keep at as long as my heart continues to drive the blood mixing with the salve and the fingers inside worked them over and understanding the body is the key to opening the doorway of knowledge of all things within and without a pause in the constant drone in the ears full of my own voiceless calling to a place that is here and also not hearing it again and again becoming part of my own fingertips as they clench against the heel of my hand, unwinding and yielding now, flowing faster as they tap the heel and heal and hear and see and smell the damp moldy straw of the stable in the flickering light of the candles as I stopped.

  I took a deep breath, and, my hands trembling, removed the piece of the amulet from my pouch, re-attached it, and replaced it around my neck.

  “Anything, Loiosh?”

  “I’m not sure, Boss. I thought I felt something for a minute, but I can’t be sure. It was subtle. Someone good, if it was anything at all.”

  “You blocked it, then. I didn’t feel anything.”

  “I blocked you from it, Boss, so it wouldn’t mess up the ritual. I don’t know if I blocked it from you. I don’t know if there was anything to block.”

  “All right. If the Jhereg could find a witch at all, I doubt it would be someone good.”

  As spells go, that one was pretty easy; there isn’t much in witchcraft that comes easier than convincing your body to do what it wants to do anyway. By the time my equipment was put away in my pack, the blisters had already started to heal, and the general aches in my body were noticeably improved. I still didn’t like the idea of fighting anyone, but I figured I could probably do it if I had to. Of course, I paid a price; I was pretty exhausted and my head was fuzzy, but it was a reasonable tradeoff.

  Best of all, no assassins showed up to put a nice shine on my epidermis during the process; my remarks to Loiosh notwithstanding, interrupting a spell to fight is neither easy nor fun. I have, a couple of times, actually performed a spell in the middle of a fight, the way sorcerers do. I don’t recommend it, and I really hope I’ll never have to do it again.

  I gave the boy another silver and a smile as I left, shaky but much improved.

  “What now, Boss?”

  “Hey, I’m up for anything, as long as it doesn’t require moving or thinking.”

  “So, no moving then, but other than that, just as usual.”

  “After I’ve worked that out, I’ll probably swat you for it.”

  The walk back across town to the inn seemed very long indeed. And odd. Things always look different when you’ve just exhausted yourself with a Working, even a minor one; sometimes, I’ve never figured out exactly when, the effect is amplified: edges are fuzzy, people seem to blur into the background of whatever they’re near. Any reflective surface seems shinier, and texturing moves and shifts. There are some witches who believe that in this state you can see profound truths that are normally concealed. Some of them devote themselves, not to the Workings, but to the aftereffects, and reveal hidden secrets of the ages.

  I think it’s just that your brain is tired and you aren’t thinking right.

  I made a life-enemy during that walk, too. I think he must have been about six years old, and he was throwing a wooden ball against a house—presumably his—making “thunk-splot” “thunk-splot” sounds as it struck the wall then the street. He missed it, and it rolled across the street right in front of me, and from there down into a gutter and away down the street. I was considerably past it when I realized that I could easily have stopped it, picked it up, and tossed it back to him, and around the time I was finally reaching the Hat it came to me that he had been glaring at me. I actually thought about going back and apologizing, but the explanation would have been beyond my powers so I didn’t.

  Oddly, I don’t remember anything about the smell of the town during the long, long trek; which may indicate something or other. I went to the door and walked through it; the host gave me a sort of look, but I wasn’t quite aware of it until I was past him and climbing the long, long, long flight of stairs up to my room, where I collapsed on the bed and stared at the ceiling. The bed felt wonderful, and the ceiling looked remarkably interesting, with all sorts of odd texturing that I could almost see moving if I squinted just a bit.

  I wasn’t in need of sleep, I was just mentally and physically exhausted. There’s a difference, you know. Considering that difference is the last thing I remember for an hour or two.

  Naps don’t usually do much for me; the few times I’ve tried napping—when I was with Cawti, who felt about them the way a cat does—they always left me feeling groggy. But that one seemed to do the trick. At any rate, the world wasn’t fuzzy anymore when I woke up, and I felt like I could move a bit.

  I went back down to the jug-room. Inchay explained that he didn’t keep coffee this late in the day. I explained that I wished to drink coffee. Presently coffee appeared.

  Inchay had his back to me, and the thought came out of nowhere: What an idiot. He shouldn’t have his back to an enemy.

  I pondered that for a little while. You know a thought like that comes from somewhere, but that doesn’t mean it’s reliable. Yes, it could be my subconscious telling me it had noticed something about that guy. It could just as easily be my paranoia at work, combined with some of the nasty looks and remarks he’d given me, starting with his absurd idea, when I’d first walked in, that I take Loiosh and Rocza out.

  I mean, I knew I didn’t like him much; but that wasn’t sufficient to convince me he was working against me. To the left, though, I certainly wasn’t about to turn my back on him.

  When you get a tip like that from your subconscious, there’s as much danger in paying it too much heed as too little. You can’t ignore it, but you can’t let it distract you, either.

  When he turned around, naturally, I was no longer looking at him.

  Okay, we have a Guild of merchants, unlike any guild Noish-pa told me could exist. No, Noish-pa isn’t infallible, but it’s enough to make me think there is something very odd going on here.

  Then you’ve got Count Saekeresh Veodric: landowner, and paper factory owner. In the Empire, to have an aristocrat owning a factory wasn’t worth a raised eyebrow, but from everything I understood, it was unusual in the East. For one thing, I guess, there were very few factories of any kind, so perhaps I was putting too much weight on that. Still, what was between him and the Guild? Cooperation? Competition? Hostility mitigated by a truce, armed or unarmed? There had to be something.

  And then, that strange matter of “light” and “dark” witchcraft. That just made no sense at all. If there was anything to it, I needed to know what; and if there wasn’t, I needed to know why it was commonly believed that there was.

  How did good old Inchay here fit in, if at all? And Orbahn. He had some part in this too; I was sure of it.

  And then, there was the Jhereg; probably not involved in this, but never, ever to be forgotten; I did not want my last sight to be the point of a Morganti dagger. I shuddered.

  Someone had brutally killed my mother’s family, and at least one of those parties was responsible, or knew who was responsible.

  Well, okay, those were the questions I knew about now; efforts to answer them would naturally generate others, but at least I had a place to start.

  I sat there and drank my coffee and made plans.

  Ha.

  You have to understand, looking back on things, that
’s pretty funny. But it’s true, I made plans, just as if I were going to carry them out, just as if no one else could be making plans at the same time. Do you even care what they were? Could it possibly matter, all the things I would have done if …

  If, if, if.

  If the world was what I wanted it to be, instead of what it is.

  Pointless. If the world was what I wanted it to be, I’d still be married. I’d never have gotten involved with the Jhereg in the first place, because I’d never have had the need or the desire to. Instead, I’d be … what? Count Szurke, safe in my manor near the lake, fishing and having hunting parties, with Cawti on my arm discussing the latest fashions from B’nari Street? No, I couldn’t see that either; and, as I said, it’s pointless.

  When you’ve been paid to kill a man, you have to learn everything you can about him; there’s not a lot of value in learning about what he might be, or you wish he were. Do that, and all you’ll get is Fiscom’s Honor, which, if you haven’t heard the term before, means having your name added to the list cut into the tall, wide marble blocks around the Executioner’s Star.

  You look at what is, and if you don’t know what is, you make it your business to find out. And sometimes that, too, turns out to be just another offering on the altar of the futility deities—the ones who make the crops fail.

  So, yeah, I sat there and drank coffee and made plans. Just as if.

  Loiosh was still tense; I could feel him watching the door, and Rocza kept shifting and bouncing on my left shoulder.

  But I didn’t let it bother me; I was working. Turning my anger into decision, decision into intention, intention into plan. I was going to learn who was behind this by going in a neat, orderly way; I had it figured out how to get the information from those who must have it, so I could decide just exactly who was deserving of what I intended to do.

  An hour or two must have gone by while I went over it in my mind—or, actually, subvocalized it to Loiosh, who ignored it; just because I think better when I’m talking. Finally I said, “Okay, I’ve got it.”

  “Whatever you say.”