The Book of Jhereg (15 page)

Aliera was sitting by the back of the bed, staring off into space. I noted that, curled up as she was, she could still draw Pathfinder. I scanned the room carefully.

Entering, I moved a chair so my back was against the wall. Aliera’s eyes focused on me, and she looked puzzled.

“Is something wrong, Vlad?”

“No.”

She looked bemused, then quizzical. “You’re quite sure,” she said.

I nodded. If I were going to take someone out from that position, I thought, how would I go about it? Let’s see. . . .

Aliera raised her hand suddenly, and I recognized the gesture as the casting of a spell.

Loiosh hissed with indignation as I hit the floor rolling, and Spellbreaker snapped out.

I didn’t feel any of the tingling that normally accompanies Spellbreaker’s intercepting magic aimed at me, however. I lay there, looking at Aliera, who was watching me carefully.

“What’s gotten into you, anyway?” asked Aliera.

“What was that spell?”

“I wanted to check your genetic background,” she said drily. “I thought I’d look for some latent Teckla genes.”

I cracked up. This just broke me up completely. I sat on the floor, my body shaking with laughter, and felt tears stream down my face. Aliera, I’m sure, was trying to figure out whether to join me, or to cure me.

I settled down, finally, feeling much better. I got back into the chair and caught my breath. I wiped the tears from my face, still chuckling. Loiosh flew quickly over to Aliera, licked her right ear, and returned to my shoulder.

“Thanks,” I said, “that helped.”

“What was the problem, anyway?”

I shook my head, then shrugged. “Someone just tried to kill me,” I explained.

She looked more puzzled than ever. “So?”

That almost broke me up again, but I contained it, with great effort.

“It’s my latent Teckla genes,” I said.

“I see.”

Gods! What a nightmare! I was pulling out of it, though. I started to think about business again. I had to make sure that Mellar didn’t go through what I’d just gone through. “Were you able to do whatever it is you do on Mellar?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Did he detect it?”

“No chance,” she said.

“Good. And did you learn anything of interest?”

She looked strange again, just as she had when I first walked in. “Vlad,” she asked me, “what made you ask about his genes? I mean, it is a little specialty of mine, but everyone has his little specialties. Why did you happen to ask about this?”

I shrugged. “I haven’t been able to learn anything about his background, and I thought you might be able to learn something about his parents that would help. It isn’t something that’s easily found out, you know. Normally, I don’t have any trouble finding everything I need to about a person, but this guy isn’t normal.”

“I’ll agree with you there!” she said fervently.

“What does that mean? You found something?”

She nodded significantly in the direction of the wine cabinet. I rose and fetched a bottle of Ailour dessert wine, and presented it to her. She held it for a moment, did a quick spell to chill it down, and returned it to me. I opened it and poured. She sipped hers.

“I found out something, all right.”

“You’re sure he didn’t detect it?”

“He had no protection spells up, and it’s really quite easy to do.”

“Good! So, what is it?”

She shook her head. “Gods, but it’s weird!”

“What is? Will you tell me already? You’re as bad as Loiosh.”

“
Remember that crack next time you roll over in bed and find a dead teckla on your pillow
.”

I ignored him. Aliera didn’t rise to the bait. She just shook her head in puzzlement. “Vlad,” she said slowly, “he has Dragon genes.”

I digested that. “You’re sure? No possible doubt?”

“None. If I’d wanted to take more time, I could have told you which line of the Dragons. But that isn’t all—he’s a cross-breed.”

“Indeed?” was all I said. Cross-breeds were rare, and almost never accepted by any House except the Jhereg. On the other hand, they had an easier time of it than Easterners, so I wasn’t about to get all teary-eyed for the fellow.

She nodded. “He’s clearly got three Houses in his genes. Dragon and Dzur on one side, and Jhereg on the other.”

“Hmmm. I see. I wasn’t aware that you could identify Jhereg genes as such. I’d thought that they were just a mish-mash of all the other Houses.”

She smiled. “If you get a mish-mash, as you put it, together for enough generations, it becomes identifiable as something in and of itself.”

I shook my head. “This is all beyond me, anyway. I don’t even know how you can pick out a gene, much less recognize it as being associated with a particular House.”

She shrugged. “It’s something like a mind-probe,” she said, “except that you aren’t looking for the mind. And, of course, you have to go much deeper. That’s why it’s so hard to detect, in fact. Anyone can tell when his mind is being examined, unless the examiner is an expert, but having your finger mind-probed is a bit trickier to spot.”

This image came to mind of the Empress, with the Orb circling her head, holding up a severed finger and saying, “Now talk! What till have you been in?” I chuckled, and missed Aliera’s next statement.

“I’m sorry, Aliera, what was that?”

“I said that determining a person’s House isn’t hard at all if you know what you’re looking for. Surely you realize that each animal is different, and—”

“Wait a minute! ‘Each animal is different,’ sure. But we aren’t talking about animals, we’re talking about Dragaerans.” I repressed a nasty remark at that point, since Aliera didn’t seem to be in the right mood for it.

“Oh, come on, Vlad,” she answered. “The names of the Houses aren’t accidents.”

“What do you mean?”

“Okay, for instance, how do you suppose the House of the Dragon got its name?”

“I guess I’ve always assumed it was because you have characters similar to that of dragons. You’re bad-tempered, reptilian, used to getting your own way—”

“Hmmmph! I guess I asked for that, eater of carrion. But you’re wrong. Since I’m of the House of the Dragon, it means that if you go back a few hundred thousand generations, you’ll find actual dragons in my lineage.”

And you’re proud of this?
I thought, but didn’t say. I must have looked as shocked as I felt, though, because she said, “I’d thought you realized this.”

“It’s the first I’ve heard of it, I assure you. Do you mean, for example, that Chreothas are descended from actual chreothas?”

She looked puzzled. “Not ‘descended’ exactly. It’s a bit more complicated than that. All Dragaerans are initially of the same stock. But things changed when—How shall I put this? All right: Certain, uh, beings once ruled on Dragaera. They were a race called Jenoine. They used the Dragaeran race (and, I might add, the Easterners) as stock to practice genetic experimentation. When they left, the Dragaerans divided into tribes based on natural kinship, and the Houses were formed from this after the formation of the Empire by Kieron the Conqueror.”

She didn’t add “my ancestor,” but I felt it anyway.

“The experiments they did on Dragaerans involved using some of the wildlife of the area as a gene pool.”

I interrupted. “But Dragaerans can’t actually cross-breed with these various animals, can they?”

“No.”

“Well, then how—”

“We don’t really know how they went about it. That’s one thing I’ve been researching myself, and I haven’t solved it yet.”

“What did these—Jenine?”

“Jen-o-ine.”

“Jenoine. What did these Jenoine do to Easterners?”

“We aren’t really sure, to tell you the truth. One popular theory is that they bred in psionic ability.”

“Hmmm. Fascinating. Aliera, has it ever occurred to you that Dragaerans and Easterners could be of the same stock originally?”

“Don’t be absurd,” she said sharply. “Dragaerans and Easterners can’t interbreed. In fact, there are some theories which claim that Easterners aren’t native to Dragaera at all, but were brought in by the Jenoine from somewhere else to use as controls for their tests.”

“‘Controls’?”

“Yes. They gave the Easterners psionic abilities equal to, or almost equal to, that of Dragaerans. Then they started messing around with Dragaerans, and sat back to see what the two races would do to each other.”

I shuddered. “Do you mean that these Jenoine might still be around, watching us—”

“No,” she said flatly. “They’re gone. Not all of them are destroyed, but they rarely come to Dragaera anymore—and when they do, they can’t dominate us as they did long ago. In fact, Sethra Lavode fought with and destroyed one only a few years ago.”

My mind flashed back to my first meeting with Sethra. She had looked a bit worried, and said, “I can’t leave Dzur Mountain just now.” And later, she had looked exhausted, as if she’d been in a fight. One more old mystery cleared up.

“How were they destroyed? Did the Dragaerans turn on them?”

She shook her head. “They had other interests besides genetics. One of them was the study of Chaos. We’ll probably never know exactly what happened, but, in essence, an experiment got out of control, or else an argument came up between some of them, or something, and boom! We have a Great Sea of Amorphia, a few new gods, and no more Jenoine.”

So much, I decided, for my history lesson for today. I couldn’t deny being interested, however. It wasn’t really my history, but it had some kind of fascination for me, nevertheless. “That sounds remarkably like what happened to Adron on a smaller scale, a few years back. You know, the thing that made the Sea of Chaos up north, the Interregnum. . . . Aliera?”

She was looking at me strangely and not saying anything.

A light broke through. “Say!” I said, “That’s what pre-Empire sorcery is!
The sorcery of the Jenoine.” I stopped long enough to shudder, as I realized the implications. “No wonder the Empire doesn’t like people studying it.”

Aliera nodded. “To be more precise, pre-Empire sorcery is direct manipulation of raw chaos—bending it to one’s will.”

I found myself shuddering again. “It sounds rather dangerous.”

She shrugged, but didn’t say more. Of course, she would see it a little differently. Aliera’s father, I had learned, was none other than Adron himself, who had accidentally blown up the old city of Dragaera and created a sea of amorphia on its site.

“I hope,” I said, “that Morrolan isn’t planning on doing another number like your father did.”

“He couldn’t.”

“Why not? If he’s using pre-Empire sorcery . . .”

She grimaced prettily. “I’ll correct what I said before. Pre-Empire sorcery is not
exactly
direct manipulation of chaos; it’s one step removed. Direct manipulation is something else again—and that’s what Adron was doing. He had the ability to use, in fact, the ability to
create
amorphia. If you combine that with the skills of pre-Empire sorcery . . .”

“And Morrolan doesn’t have the skill to create amorphia? Poor fellow. How can he live without it?”

Aliera chuckled. “It isn’t a skill one can learn. It goes back to genes again. So far as I know, it is only the e’Kieron line of the House of the Dragon that holds the ability—although it is said that Kieron himself never used it.”

“I wonder,” I said, “how genetic heritage interacts with reincarnation of the soul.”

“Oddly,” said Aliera e’Kieron.

“Oh. So, anyway, that explains where the Dragaeran Houses come from. I’m surprised that the Jenoine wasted their time breeding an animal like the Jhereg into some Dragaerans,” I said.

“
That’s another one I owe you, boss
.”

“
Shut up, Loiosh
.”

“Oh,” said Aliera, “but they didn’t.”

“Eh?”

“They played around with jheregs and found a way to put human-level intelligence into a brain the size of a rednut, but they never put any jhereg genes into Dragaerans.”

“
There, Loiosh. You should feel grateful to the Jenoine, for
—”

“
Shut up, boss
.”

“But I thought you said—”

“The Jhereg is the exception. They didn’t start out as a tribe the way the others did.”

“Then how?”

“Okay, we have to go back to the days when the Empire was first being formed. In fact, we have to go back even further. As far as we know, there
were originally about thirty distinct tribes of Dragaerans. We don’t know the exact number, since there were no records being kept back then.

“Eventually, many of them died off. Finally, there were sixteen tribes left. Well, fifteen, plus a tribe of the Teckla, which really didn’t do much of anything.”

“They invented agriculture,” I cut in. “That’s something.”

She brushed it aside. “The tribes were called together, or parts of each tribe, by Kieron the Conqueror and a union of some of the best Shamans of the time, and they got together to drive the Easterners out of some of the better lands.”

“For farming,” I said.

“Now, in addition to the tribes, there were a lot of outcasts. Many of them came from the tribe of the Dragon—probably because the Dragons had higher standards than the others—” She tossed her head as she said this; I let it go by.

“Anyway,” she continued, “there were a lot of outcasts, mostly living in small groups. While the other tribes were coming together under Kieron, a certain ex-Dragon named Dolivar managed to unite most of these independent groups—primarily by killing any of the leaders who didn’t agree with the idea.

“So they got together, and, I guess more sarcastically than anything else, they began calling themselves ‘the tribe of the Jhereg.’ They lived mostly off the other tribes—stealing, looting, and then running off. They even had a few Shamans.”

“Why didn’t the other tribes get together to wipe them out?” I asked.

She shrugged. “A lot of the tribes wanted to, but Kieron needed scouts and spies for the war against the Easterners, and the Jheregs were obviously the only ones who could manage it properly.”

“Why did the Jheregs agree to help?”

“I guess,” she remarked drily, “Dolivar decided it was preferable to being wiped out. He met with Kieron before the Great March started, and got an agreement that, if his ‘tribe’ helped out, they would be included in the Empire when it was over.”