Jhereg (3 page)

"Again with all respect, my lord, it doesn't seem to me that an Easterner is going to look very imposing when standing up to a Dragaeran. I don't know that I--"

"I'm convinced that it won't be any problem," he said. "We have a friend in common, and she assured me that you'd be able to handle this kind of thing. As it happened, I owe her a favor or two, and she asked me to consider taking you on." She? There wasn't any doubt, of course. Kiera was looking out for me again, bless her heart. Suddenly things were a lot clearer.

"Your pay," he continued, "would be four Imperials a week, plus ten percent of any outstanding debts you are sent to collect. Or, actually, half of that, since you'll be working with my other assistant."

Sheesh! Four gold a week? That was already more than I usually made while I was running the restaurant! And the commission, even if it were split with--"Are you sure that this assistant of yours isn't going to object to working with a hum--an Easterner?"

His eyes narrowed. "That's my problem," he said. "And, as a matter of fact, I've already discussed it with Kragar, and he doesn't mind at all."

I nodded. "I'll have to think it over," I said.

"That's fine. You know where to reach me."

I nodded and showed him to the door, with pleasant words on all sides. I looked down at my jhereg as the door snicked shut. "Well," I asked him, "what do you think?" The jhereg didn't answer, but then, I hadn't expected him to. I sat down to think and to wonder if the question of my future were being settled, or just put off. Then I put it aside. I had a more important question to settle--what was I going to name my jhereg?

I called him "Loiosh." He called me "Mamma." I trained him. He bit me. Slowly, over the course of the next few months, I developed an immunity to his poison. Even more slowly, over the course of years, I developed a partial immunity to his sense of humor. As I stumbled into my line of work, Loiosh was able to help me. First a little, then a great deal. After all, who notices another jhereg flying about the city? The jhereg, on the other hand, can notice a great deal.

Slowly, as time went on, I grew in skill, status, friends, and experience. And, just as his mother had predicted, I became a hunter.

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Phoenix sinks into decay

Haughty dragon yearns to slay.

Lyorn growls and lowers horn

Tiassa dreams and plots are born.

Hawk looks down from lofty flight

Dzur stalks and blends with night.

Issola strikes from courtly bow

Tsalmoth maintains though none knows how.

Vallista rends and then rebuilds

Jhereg feeds on others' kills.

Quiet iorich won't forget

Sly chreotha weaves his net.

Yendi coils and strikes, unseen

Orca circles, hard and lean.

Frightened teckla hides in grass

Jhegaala shifts as moments pass

Athyra rules minds' interplay

Phoenix rise from ashes, gray.

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"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, Krager," 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 eaten 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."