The Book of Jhereg (5 page)

“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.

T
HE 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.

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 was 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.”