The Book of Jhereg (6 page)

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.”

“W
ORK
”
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.”

And it worked. I was returned to life by Sethra Lavode, after Kiera found my body lying in a gutter. I backed off. I’ve never bothered the guy since, either. Of course, someday . . .

Now you should understand, to begin with, that there are some rather strict laws concerning the circumstances under which one person may legally kill another, and they involve things like “authorized dueling area,” “Imperial witnesses,” and the like. Assassination just never seems to qualify as a legal taking of a life. This brings us to the biggest single problem with the kind of job I’ve just mentioned—you have to be sure that the victim doesn’t get a look at your face. If he were to be returned to life and he went to the Empire (strictly against Jhereg custom, but . . .), the assassin could find himself arrested for murder.
There would follow an inquisition and the possibility of conviction. A conviction of murder will bring a permanent end to an assassin’s career. When the Empire holds an execution, they burn the body to make sure no one gets hold of it to revivify it.

At the other extreme from simply killing someone and leaving his body to be found and, possibly, revivified, is a special kind of murder which is almost never done. To take an example, let us say that an assassin whom you have hired is caught by the Empire and tells them who hired him, in exchange for his worthless soul.

What do you do? You’ve already marked him as dead—no way the Empire can protect him enough to keep a top-notch assassin out. But that isn’t enough; not for someone low enough to talk to the Empire about you. So what do you do? You scrape together, oh, at least six thousand gold, and you arrange to meet with the best assassin you can find—an absolute top-notch professional—and give him the name of the target, and you say, “Morganti.”

Unlike any other kind of situation, you will probably have to explain your reasons. Even the coldest, most vicious assassin will find it distasteful to use a weapon that will destroy a person’s soul. Chances are he won’t do it unless you have a damn good reason why it has to be done that way and no other. There are times, though, when nothing else will do. I’ve worked that way twice. It was fully justified both times—believe me, it was.

However, just as the Jhereg makes exceptions in the cases where a Morganti weapon is to be used, so does the Empire. They suddenly forget all about their rules against the torture of suspects and forced mind-probes. So there are very real risks here. When they’ve finished with you, whatever is left is given to a Morganti blade, as a form of poetic justice, I suppose.

There is, however, a happy middle ground between Morganti killings and fatal warnings: the bread and butter of the assassin.

If you want someone to go and you don’t want him coming back, and you’re connected to the organization (I don’t know any assassin stupid enough to “work” for anyone outside the House), you should figure that it will cost you at least three thousand gold. Naturally, it will be higher if the person is especially tough, or hard to get to, or important. The highest I’ve ever heard of anyone being paid is, well, excuse me, sixty-five thousand gold. Ahem. I expect that Mario Greymist was paid a substantially higher fee for killing the old Phoenix Emperor just before the Interregnum, but I’ve never heard a figure quoted.

And so, my fledgling assassins, you are asking me how you make sure that a corpse remains properly a corpse, eh? Without using a Morganti weapon, whose problems we’ve just discussed? I know of three methods and have used all of them, and combinations, during my career.

First, you can make sure that the body isn’t found for three full days, after which time the soul will have departed. The most common method for doing this is to pay a moderate fee, usually around three to five hundred gold, to a sorceress from the Left Hand of the Jhereg, who will guarantee that the body
is undisturbed for the requisite period. Or, of course, you can arrange to secrete the body yourself—risky, and not at all pleasant to be seen carrying a body around. It causes talk.

The second method, if you aren’t so greedy, is to pay these same sorceresses something closer to a thousand, or even fifteen hundred of your newly acquired gold, and they will make sure that, no matter who does what, the body will never be revivified. Or, third, you can make the body unrevivifiable: burn it, chop off the head . . . use your imagination.

For myself, I’ll stick with the methods I developed in the course of my first couple of years of working: hours of planning, split-second timing, precise calculations, and a single, sharp, accurate knife.

I haven’t bungled one yet.

* * *

Kragar was waiting for me when I returned. I filled him in on the conversation and the result. He looked judicious.

“It’s too bad,” he remarked when I had finished, “that you
don’t
have a ‘friend’ you can unload this one on.”

“What do you mean, friend?” I said.

“I—” he looked startled for a minute, then grinned.

“No, you don’t,” he said. “You took the job; you do it.”

“I know, I know. But what did you mean? Don’t you think we’re up to it?”

“Vlad, this guy is
good
. He was on the
council
. You think you can just walk up to him and put a dagger into his left eye?”

“I never meant to imply that I thought it was going to be easy. So, we have to put a little work into it—”

“A little!”

“All right, a lot. So we put a lot of work into the setup. I told you what I’m getting for it, and you know what your percentage is. What’s happened to your innate sense of greed, anyway?”

“I don’t need one,” he said. “You’ve got enough for both of us.”

I ignored that.

“The first step,” I told him, “is locating the guy. Can you come up with some method for figuring out where he might be hiding?”

Kragar looked thoughtful. “Tell you what, Vlad; just for variety this time,
you
do all the setup work, and when you’re done,
I’ll
take him out. What do you say?”

I gave him the most eloquent look I could manage.

He sighed. “All right, all right. You say he’s got sorcery blocked out for tracing?”

“Apparently. And the Demon is using the best there is to look for him that way, in any case.”

“Hmmm. Are we working under the assumption that the Demon is right, that he’s out East somewhere?”

“Good point.” I thought about it. “No. Let’s not start out making any assumptions at all. What we
know
, because the Demon guaranteed it, is that
Mellar’s nowhere within a hundred-mile radius of Adrilankha. For the moment, let’s assume that he could be anywhere outside of that.”

“Which includes a few thousand square miles of jungle.”

“True.”

“You aren’t going out of your way to make my life easy, are you?”

I shrugged. Kragar was thoughtfully silent for a while.

“What about witchcraft, Vlad? Do you think you can trace him with that? I would doubt that he thought to protect himself against it, even if he could.”

“Witchcraft? Let me think—I don’t know. Witchcraft really isn’t very good for that sort of thing. I mean, I could probably find him, to the extent of getting an image and a psionic fix, but there isn’t any way of going from there to a hard location, or teleport coordinates, or anything really useful. I guess we could use it to make sure he’s alive, but I suspect we can safely assume that, anyway.”

Kragar nodded, and looked thoughtful. “Well,” he said after a time, “if you have any kind of psionic fix at all, maybe you can come up with something Daymar could use to find out where he is. He’s good at that kind of thing.”