Steven Brust - Jhereg

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 thing 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?”