The Book of Jhereg (79 page)

I walked through the doorway. The flat itself had a real door. A heavy door, with a lock on it. I looked closer, just from curiosity. A
good
lock, and a
very
heavy door. It would take a great deal of work to break into this place, and it would be almost impossible to do silently. I wondered about windows and other doors. In any case, I decided I was impressed. Cawti had probably advised them. I started to clap, remembered, and, after a moment’s hesitation, pounded on the door with my fist.

It was opened by my dear friend Gregory. His eyes widened as he saw me, but I didn’t let him start in on me. I just pushed past him. It was rude, I know, and that still bothers me to this day, but I’ll just have to learn to live with it.

One look told me that this flat was laid out the same as the other; I was almost certain I could walk into the next room and be in a library, through that to Kelly’s office, and through that to a kitchen. But this room was cleaner; the cots were collapsed and pushed against the wall. The windows, I noticed, were heavily boarded.

Kelly was sitting in the room, talking to Natalia and a Teckla I didn’t recognize. Cawti wasn’t there. The talking stopped when I walked in, and they all stared at me. I smiled a big smile and said, “Is Cawti around?” Then they all looked at Kelly, except for Natalia, who kept looking at me. She said, “Not at the moment.”

I said, “I’ll wait, then,” and watched them. Natalia kept watching me, the others watched Kelly, who squinted at me, his lips in a bit of a pout. Then, quite suddenly, he stood up and said, “Right. Come on back and I’ll talk to
you.” He turned and headed toward the rear of the flat, assuming I would follow obediently. I cursed under my breath, smiling, and did so.

This office was as neat and well-organized as the other had been. I sat down on the other side of the desk. Kelly folded his hands over his stomach and looked at me, his eyes performing their usual squint.

“So,” he said. “You’ve decided to call in the Empire and force us to respond.”

“Actually,” I said, “I just came to see Cawti. Where is she?”

His expression didn’t change, he just continued watching me. “You have a Plan,” he said at last, pronouncing the capital letter, “and the rest of the world is filled with details that may or may not have something to do with it. You weren’t out to get us, we’re just a convenient tool.”

He didn’t put it as a question, which is partly why I felt stung; he was accusing me of something like what I had been thinking was wrong with him. I said, “My primary interest is actually saving Cawti’s life.”

“Not your own?” he shot back, his eyes squinting just a bit more.

“It’s too late for that,” I said. That startled him a little; he actually seemed surprised. I felt inordinately pleased about this. “So, as I said, I’d like to see Cawti. Will she be around later?”

He didn’t answer. He just kept looking at me, his head back and his chin down, hands wrapped over his belly. I started to get mad. “Look,” I told him, “you can play all the games you want to, just don’t include me in them. I don’t know what you’re really after and I don’t much care, all right? But, now or later, you’re going to be carved up between the Empire and the Jhereg, and if I have any say in it my wife isn’t going to be carved up with you. So you can drop the superior act; it doesn’t impress me.”

I was ready for him to blow up, but he didn’t. His eyes hadn’t even narrowed anymore. He just kept watching me, as if he were studying me. He said, “You don’t know what we’re after? After all you’ve been through, you really don’t know what we’re after?”

I said, “I’ve heard the rhetoric.”

“Have you listened to it?”

I snorted. “If what everybody around here parrots originates with you, then I’ve heard what you have to say. That isn’t what I came here for.”

He leaned back a little more in his chair. “That’s all you’ve heard, eh? The parroting of phrases?”

“Yeah. But as I said, that isn’t—”

“Did you listen to the phrases being parroted?”

“I told you—”

“Have you never understood more than you could put into words? Many people only respond to the slogans—but they respond because the slogans are true and touch a spark in their hearts and their lives. And as for the ones who don’t want to think for themselves, we teach them to anyway.” Teach? I suddenly thought of what I’d overheard of them berating Cawti and wondered if that was what they called teaching. But Kelly continued, “Did you talk to Paresh? Or Natalia? Did you ever, once,
listen
to what they said?”

“Look—”

He shifted forward in his chair, just a bit. “But none of that matters. We aren’t here to justify ourselves to you. We’re Teckla and Easterners. In particular, we are that portion of that group that understands what it’s doing.”

“Yeah? What
are
you doing?”

“We are defending ourselves the only way we can, the only way there is—by uniting and using the power that we have due to our own role in society. With this, we can defend ourselves against the Empire, we can defend ourselves against the Jhereg, and we can defend ourselves against you.”

La dee da. I said, “Can you?”

He said, “Yes.”

“What’s to stop me from killing you, say, now?”

He didn’t bat an eyelash, which I call bravado, which a Dzur would consider brave and a Jhereg would consider stupid. He said, “Right. Go ahead, then.”

“I could, you know.”

“Then do it.”

I cursed. I didn’t kill him, of course. That was something I knew Cawti would never forgive me for, and it wouldn’t accomplish anything anyway. I needed Kelly there to push his organization into the path of Herth and the Phoenix Guards so they could be neatly cleaned up. But I needed Cawti out of the way first.

I noticed that Kelly was still watching me. I said, “So, you exist only to defend yourselves, and the Easterners?”

“And the Teckla, yes. And the only defense is—but I forget; you aren’t interested. You’re so busy chasing fortune up over a mountain of corpses that you have no time to listen to anyone else, have you then?”

“Poetic, aren’t you?” I said. “Have you ever read Torturi?”

“Yes,” said Kelly. “I prefer Wint. Torturi is clever, but shallow.”

“Um, yeah.”

“Similar to Lartol.”

“Yeah.”

“They came out of the same school of poetry, and the same epoch, historically. It was after the reconstruction at the end of the ninth Vallista reign, and the aristocracy was feeling bitter toward—”

“All right, all right. You’re quite well-read for a . . . whatever it is you are.”

“I am a revolutionist.”

“Yeah. Maybe you’re a Vallista yourself. Creation and destruction, all wrapped up in one. Only you don’t seem too effective at either.”

“No,” he said. “If I were of one of the Dragaeran Houses, it would be the Teckla.”

I snorted. “You said it; I didn’t.”

“Yes. And it is another thing you don’t understand.”

“No doubt.”

“But what I said is true for you as well—”

“Careful.”

“And all human beings. The Teckla are known as a House of cowards. Is Paresh a coward?”

I licked my lips. “No.”

“No. He has something worth fighting for. They are known as stupid and lazy as well. Does this match your experience?”

I started to say, “Yes,” but then decided that, no, I couldn’t say they were lazy. Stupid? Well, the Jhereg had been hoodwinking Teckla for years now, but that only meant we were clever. And, furthermore, there were so many of them it could be that I only ran across the stupid ones. It was hard to conceive of the total number of Teckla even within Adrilankha. Most of them were not customers of the Jhereg. “No,” I said, “I guess not completely.”

“The House of the Teckla,” he said, “embodies all the traits of all the Dragaeran Houses. As does the Jhereg, by the way, and for much the same reason: Those Houses will allow others into their ranks with no questions asked. The aristocracy—the Dzur, the Dragons, the Lyorn, occasionally others—see this as a weakness. The Lyorn allow no one in; some of the others require the passing of a test. They think this strengthens their House, because it reinforces those things they desire—usually strength, quickness and cunning. These are thought to be the greatest virtues by the dominant culture—the culture of the aristocracy. If so, the mixing of blood without these traits must be a weakness. Because they think it’s a weakness, you see it as a weakness, too. It is not; it is a strength.

“By requiring those traits, or whichever ones they do require, what are they leaving out that might occur on its own? All of these traits exist in some measure in the Teckla, the Jhereg and some Easterners—along with other things that we aren’t even aware of, but that make us human. Think about what it means to be human. It’s far more important than species or House.” He stopped and studied me again.

I said, “I see. Well, now I’ve learned something about biology, history, and Teckla politics all in one sitting. That, and what is required to be a revolutionist. Thank you, it’s been very instructive. Except I’m not interested in biology, I don’t believe your history and I already knew what it takes to be a revolutionist. Right now I want to know what it takes to find Cawti.”

He said, “Just what is it that you’ve found it takes to be a revolutionist?”

I knew he was trying to change the subject, but I couldn’t resist. I said, “The worship of ideas to such an extent that you become totally ruthless toward people—friends, enemies, and neutrals alike.”

“The worship of ideas?” he said. “That’s how you see it?”

“Yeah.”

“And where do you suppose these ideas came from?”

“I can’t see that it matters a whole lot.”

“They come from people.”

“Mostly dead people, I imagine.”

He shook his head, slowly, but it seemed his eyes were twinkling, just a bit. “So,” he said, “you have no ethics at all?”

“Don’t bait me.”

“Then you do?”

“Yeah.”

“But you’ll abandon them for anyone who matters to you?”

“I told you not to bait me. I won’t tell you again.”

“But what are professional ethics other than ideas that are more important than people?”

“Professional ethics guarantee that I always treat people as they ought to be treated.”

“They guarantee that you do what’s right, even if it isn’t convenient at the moment?”

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

I said, “You’re a smug bastard, aren’t you?”

“No, but I can tell that you’re speaking nonsense. You talk about our ideas as if they fell from the sky. They didn’t. They grew out of our needs, out of our thoughts and out of our fight. Ideas aren’t just thought up one day, and then people come along and decide to adopt them. Ideas are as much a product of their times as a particular summoning spell is the result of a particular Athyra reign. Ideas always express something real, even when they’re wrong. People have been dying for ideas—sometimes incorrect ideas—since before history. Would that happen if those ideas weren’t based on, and a product of, their lives and the world around them?

“As for us, no, we’re not smug. Our strength is that we see ourselves as part of history, as part of society, instead of just individuals who happen to have the same problem. This means we can at least look for the right answers, even if we aren’t completely right all the time. It certainly puts us a step ahead of the individualists. It’s all well and good to recognize that you have a problem and try to solve it, but for the Easterners and Teckla in this world, these aren’t problems that an individual can solve.”

I guess when you get in the habit of making speeches it’s hard to stop. When he’d run down, I said, “I’m an individual. I solved them. I got out of there and made something of myself.”

“How many bodies did you climb over to do it?”

“Forty-three.”

“Well?”

“What of it?”

“What of it yourself?”

I stared at him. He was squinting hard again. Some of the things he was saying were uncomfortably close to things I’d been thinking about myself; but I didn’t go around building elaborate political positions around my insecurities, nor inciting rebellion as if I knew better than the rest of the world how everything ought to be.

I said, “If I’m so worthless, why are you wasting your time talking to me?”

“Because Cawti is valuable to us. She’s still new, but she could turn into an
excellent revolutionist. She’s having trouble with you, and it’s hurting her work. I want it settled.”

I controlled myself with an effort. “That fits,” I said. “Okay, then, I’ll even let you manipulate me into helping you manipulate Cawti so she can help you manipulate the entire population of South Adrilankha. That’s how it works, isn’t it? All right, I’ll go along. Tell me where she is.”

“No, that isn’t how it works. I’m not making any deals with you. You called in the Phoenix Guards to manipulate us into an adventure that would destroy us. Whatever reasons you had for this, it didn’t work. We aren’t getting involved in any adventures now. We held a mass meeting yesterday at which we urged everyone to stay calm and not to allow the Guards to provoke an incident. We’re ready to defend ourselves against any attacks, but we won’t allow ourselves to be endangered by—”

“Oh, stop it. You’re doomed anyway. Do you really think you can stand up to Herth? He has more hired killers working for him than Verra has hairs on her . . . head. If I hadn’t forced him into action, he would have destroyed you as soon as he realized you weren’t going to back down.”

Kelly asked, “Does he have more hired killers than there are Easterners and Teckla in Adrilankha?”

“Heh. I don’t know of
any
professionals who are Teckla, and I’m just about the only Easterner I know.”

“Professional killers? No. But professional revolutionists, yes. This Jhereg killed Franz, and we mobilized half of South Adrilankha. He killed Sheryl and we mobilized the other half. You’ve brought the Phoenix Guards in, probably thinking you were working on some big plan to solve all your problems, when in fact you did exactly what the Empire required of you—you gave them a pretext to move in. All right, here they are, and they can’t do anything. The instant they overstep themselves, we’ll take the whole city.”