The Book of Jhereg

by Steven Brust

  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.”

  Now there was an idea. Daymar was strange, but psionics were his specialty. If anyone could do it, he could.

  “I’m not sure we want to get that many people involved in this,” I said. “The Demon wouldn’t be real happy about the number of potential leaks we’d have to generate. And Daymar isn’t even a Jhereg.”

  “So don’t mention it to the Demon,” said Kragar. “The th
ing is, we have to find him, right? And we know we can trust Daymar, right?”

  “Well—”

  “Oh, come on, Vlad. If you ask him not to talk about it, he won’t. Besides, where else can you get expert help, on that level, without paying a thing for it? Daymar enjoys showing off; he’d do it for free. What can we lose?”

  I raised my eyebrow and looked at him.

  “There is that,” he admitted. “But I think the risk involved in telling Daymar as much as we have to tell him is pretty damn small. Especially when you consider what we’re getting for it.”

  “If he can do it.”

  “I think he can,” said Kragar.

  “All right,” I said, “I’m sold. Quiet a minute while I figure out what I’m going to need.”

  I ran through, in my mind, what I was going to have to do to locate Mellar, and what I’d have to do so that Daymar could trace him afterwards. I wished I knew more about how Daymar did things like that, but I could make a reasonable guess. It seemed that it would be a pretty straightforward spell, which really should work if Mellar had no blocks against witchcraft.

  I built up a mental list of what I’d need. Nothing out of the ordinary; I already had everything except for one small matter.

  “Kragar, put word out on the street that I’d like to arrange to see Kiera. At her convenience, of course.”

  “Okay. Any preference on where you meet?”

  “No, just some—wait!” I interrupted myself, and thought for a minute. In my office, I had witchcraft protections and alarms. I knew these were hard to beat, and I wasn’t happy about taking any chances at all of this information leaking out. The Demon would be upset, anyway, if he knew that I was dealing with Kiera. I didn’t really like the idea of having one of his people see me talking with her in some public place. On the other hand, Kiera was . . . well, Kiera. Hmmm. Tough question.

  Hell with it, I decided. I’d just shock the staff a little. It’d be good for them. “I’d like to meet her here, in my office, if that’s all right with her.”

  Kragar looked startled and seemed about to say something, but changed his mind, I guess, when he realized that I’d just gone over all of the objections myself. “All right,” he said. “Now about Daymar. You know what kind of problems we have reaching him; do you want me to figure out a way?”

  “No, thanks. I’ll take care of it.”

  “All by yourself? My goodness!”

  “No, I’m going to get Loiosh to help. There, feel better?”

  He snickered and left. I got up and opened the window. “Loiosh,” I thought to my familiar, “find Daymar.”

  “As Your Majesty requests,” he answered.

  “Feel free to save the sarcasm.”

  A telepathic giggle is an odd thing to experience. Loiosh flew out the window.

  I sat down again and stared off blankly for a while. How many times had I been in this position? Just at the beginning of a job, with no idea of where it was going, or how it would get there. Nothing, really, except an image of how it should end; as always, with a corpse. How many times? It isn’t really a rhetorical question. This would be the forty-second assassination I’d done. My first thought was that it was going to be somewhat different than the others, at some level, in some way, to some degree. I have clear memories of each one. The process I go through before I do the job is such that I can’t forget any of them—I have to get to know them too well. This would certainly be a problem if I were given to nightmares.

  The fourth one? He was the button man who would always order a fine liqueur after dinner and leave half the bottle instead of a tip. The twelfth was a small-time muscle who liked to keep his cash in the largest denominations he could. The nineteenth was a sorcerer who carried a cloth around with him to polish his staff with—which he did constantly. There is always something distinct about them. Sometimes it is something I can use; more often it is just something that sticks out in my memory. When you know someone well enough, he becomes an individual no matter how hard you try to think of him as just a face—or a body.

  But if you take it back a level, you once more wind up with the similarities being important. Because when they come to me as names mentioned in a conversation, over a quiet meal, with a purse handed over which will contain somewhere between fifteen hundred and four thousand gold Imperials, they are all the same, and I treat them the same: plan the job, do it.

  I usually worked backward: after finding out everything I could about his habits, and following him, tracking him, and timing him for days, sometimes for weeks, I’d decide where I wanted it to happen. That would usually determine the time and often the day as well. Then it was a matter of starting from there and working things so that all of the factors came together then and there. The execution itself was only interesting if I made a mistake somewhere along the line.

  Kragar once asked me, when I was feeling particularly mellow, if I enjoyed killing people. I didn’t answer, because I didn’t know, but it set me to thinking. I’m still not really sure. I know that I enjoy the planning of a job, and setting it in motion so that everything works out. But the actual killing? I don’t think I either consciously enjoy it or fail to enjoy it; I just do it.

  I leaned back and closed my eyes. The beginning of a job like this is like the beginning of a witchcraft spell. The most important single thing is my frame of mind when I begin. I want to make absolutely sure that I have no preconceived notions about how, or where, or anything. That comes later. I hadn’t even begun to study the fellow yet, so I didn’t have anything to really go on. The little I did know went rolling around my subconscious, free-associating, letting images and ideas pop up and be casually discarded. Sometimes, when I’m in the middle of planning, I’ll get a sudden inspiration, or what appears to be a sudden burst of brilliance. I fancy myself an artist at times like this.

  * * *

  I came out of my reverie slowly, with the feeling that there was something I should be thinking about. I wasn’t really fully awake yet, so it took me awhile to become aware of what it was. There was a stray, questing thought fluttering around in my forebrain.

  After a while, I realized that it had an external source. I gave it some freedom to grow and take shape enough for me to recognize it, and discovered that someone was trying to get into psionic contact with me. I recognized the sender.

  “Ah, Daymar,” I thought back. “Thank you.”

  “No problem,” came the clear, gentle thought. “You wanted something?” Daymar had better mental control, and more power, than anyone I’d ever met. I got the feeling from him that he had to be careful, even in mental contact, lest he burn my mind out accidentally.

  “I’d like a favor, Daymar.”

  “Yes?” He had a way of making his “yes” last about four times as long as it should.

  “Nothing right now,” I told him. “But sometime within the next day or so, I expect to need some locating done.”

  “Locating? What kind of locating?”

  “I expect to have a psionic tag on a fellow I’m interested in finding, and I’ll want some way to figure out exactly where he is. Kragar thinks you can do it.”

  “Is there some reason why I couldn’t just trace him now?”

  “He has a block up against sorcery tracing spells,” I told him. “I don’t think even you can get past them.”

  I was damn sure Daymar couldn’t get past a block that was holding off the best sorcerers of the Left Hand, but a little judicious flattery never hurt anything.

  “Oh,” he said. “Then how do you expect to put a tag on him?”

  “I’m hoping he didn’t protect himself against witchcraft. Since witchcraft uses psionic power, we should be able to leave a mark on him that you can find.”

  “I see. You’re going to try to fix him with a witchcraft spell, and then I locate him psionically from the marks left by that. Interesting idea.”

  “Thank you. Do you think it will work?”

  “No.”
r />   I sighed. Daymar, I thought to myself, someday I’m going to . . . “Why not?” I asked, with some hesitation.

  “The marks,” he explained, “won’t stay around long enough for me to trace them. If they do, they’ll also be strong enough for him to notice, and he’ll just wipe them out.”

  I sighed again. Never argue with an expert.

  “All right,” I said, “do you have any ideas for something that would work?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  I waited, but he didn’t go on. Daymar, I said to myself, some day I’m definitely going to . . . “What is it?”

  “The reverse.”

  “The reverse?”

  He explained. I asked a few questions, and he was able to answer them, more or less.

  I began thinking of what kind of spell I’d have to do to get the kind of effect he was talking about. A crystal, I decided, and then I’d start the spell out just like the other one, and then . . . I remembered that Daymar was still in contact with me—which, in turn, brought up another point that I really ought to clarify, given whom I was dealing with.

  “Are you willing to do the locating for me?” I asked.

  There was a brief pause, then: “Sure—If I can watch you do the witchcraft spell.”

  Why am I not surprised? I sighed to myself once more. “It’s a deal,” I said. “How do I get in touch with you? Can I count on finding you at home if I send Loiosh again?”

  He thought about that, then: “Probably not. I’ll open up for contact for a few seconds on the hour, each hour, starting tomorrow morning. Will that do?”

  “That will be fine,” I said. “I’ll get in touch with you before I start the spell.”

  “Excellent. Until then.”

  “Until then. And Daymar, thanks.”

  “My pleasure,” he said.

  Actually, I reflected, it probably was. But it wouldn’t have been politic to say so. The link was broken.