Steven Brust - Jhereg

“I’ll agree with you there!” she said fervently.

“What does that mean? You found something?”

She nodded significantly in the direction of the wine cabinet. I rose and fetched a bottle of Ailour dessert wine, and presented it to her. She held it for a moment, did a quick spell to chill it down, and returned it to me. I opened it and poured. She sipped hers.

“I found out something, all right.”

“You’re sure he didn’t detect it?”

“He had no protection spells up, and it’s really quite easy to do.”

“Good! So, what is it?”

She shook her head. “Gods, but it’s weird!”

“What is? Will you tell me already? You’re as bad as Loiosh.”

“ Remember that crack next time you roll over in bed and find a dead teckla on your pillow. ”

I ignored him. Aliera didn’t rise to the bait. She just shook her head in puzzlement. “Vlad,” she said slowly, “he has Dragon genes.”

I digested that. “You’re sure? No possible doubt?”

“None. If I’d wanted to take more time, I could have told you which line of the Dragons. But that isn’t all—he’s a cross-breed.”

“Indeed?” was all I said. Cross-breeds were rare, and almost never accepted by any House except the Jhereg. On the other hand, they had an easier time of it than Easterners, so I wasn’t about to get all teary-eyed for the fellow.

She nodded. “He’s clearly got three Houses in his genes. Dragon and Dzur on one side, and Jhereg on the other.”

“Hmmm. I see. I wasn’t aware that you could identify Jhereg genes as such. I’d thought that they were just a mish-mash of all the other Houses.”

She smiled. “If you get a mish-mash, as you put it, together for enough generations, it becomes identifiable as something in and of itself.”

I shook my head. “This is all beyond me, anyway. I don’t even know how you can pick out a gene, much less recognize it as being associated with a particular House.”

She shrugged. “It’s something like a mind-probe,” she said, “except that you aren’t looking for the mind. And, of course, you have to go much deeper. That’s why it’s so hard to detect, in fact. Anyone can tell when his mind is being examined, unless the examiner is an expert, but having your finger mind-probed is a bit trickier to spot.”

This image came to mind of the Empress, with the Orb circling her head, holding up a severed finger and saying, “Now talk! What till have you been in?” I chuckled, and missed Aliera’s next statement.

“I’m sorry, Aliera, what was that?”

“I said that determining a person’s House isn’t hard at all if you know what you’re looking for. Surely you realize that each animal is different, and—”

“Wait a minute! ‘Each animal is different,’ sure. But we aren’t talking about animals, we’re talking about Dragaerans.” I repressed a nasty remark at that point, since Aliera didn’t seem to be in the right mood for it.

“Oh, come on, Vlad,” she answered. “The names of the Houses aren’t accidents.”

“What do you mean?”

“Okay, for instance, how do you suppose the House of the Dragon got its name?”

“I guess I’ve always assumed it was because you have characters similar to that of dragons. You’re bad-tempered, reptilian, used to getting your own way—”

“Hmmmph! I guess I asked for that, eater of carrion. But you’re wrong. Since I’m of the House of the Dragon, it means that if you go back a few hundred thousand generations, you’ll find actual dragons in my lineage.”

And you’re proud of this? I thought, but didn’t say. I must have looked as shocked as I felt, though, because she said, “I’d thought you realized this.”

“It’s the first I’ve heard of it, I assure you. Do you mean, for example, that Chreothas are descended from actual chreothas?”

She looked puzzled. “Not ‘descended’ exactly. It’s a bit more complicated than that. All Dragaerans are initially of the same stock. But things changed when—How shall I put this? All right: Certain, uh, beings once ruled on Dragaera. They were a race called Jenoine. They used the Dragaeran race (and, I might add, the Easterners) as stock to practice genetic experimentation. When they left, the Dragaerans divided into tribes based on natural kinship, and the Houses were formed from this after the formation of the Empire by Kieron the Conqueror.”

She didn’t add “my ancestor,” but I felt it anyway.

“The experiments they did on Dragaerans involved using some of the wildlife of the area as a gene pool.”

I interrupted. “But Dragaerans can’t actually crossbreed with these various animals, can they?”

“No.”

“Well, then how—”

“We don’t really know how they went about it. That’s one thing I’ve been researching myself, and I haven’t solved it yet.”

“What did these—Jenine?”

“Jen-o-ine.”

“Jenoine. What did these Jenoine do to Easterners?”

“We aren’t really sure, to tell you the truth. One popular theory is that they bred in psionic ability.”

“Hmmm. Fascinating. Aliera, has it ever occurred to you that Dragaerans and Easterners could be of the same stock originally?”

“Don’t be absurd,” she said sharply. “Dragaerans and Easterners can’t interbreed. In fact, there are some theories which claim that Easterners aren’t native to Dragaera at all, but were brought in by the Jenoine from somewhere else to use as controls for their tests.”

“ ‘Controls?’ ”

“Yes. They gave the Easterners psionic abilities equal to, or almost equal to, that of Dragaerans. Then they started messing around with Dragaerans, and sat back to see what the two races would do to each other.”

I shuddered. “Do you mean that these Jenoine might still be around, watching us—”

“No,” she said flatly. “They’re gone. Not all of them are destroyed, but they rarely come to Dragaera anymore—and when they do, they can’t dominate us as they did long ago. In fact, Sethra Lavode fought with and destroyed one only a few years ago.”

My mind flashed back to my first meeting with Sethra. She had looked a bit worried, and said, “I can’t leave Dzur Mountain just now.” And later, she had looked exhausted, as if she’d been in a fight. One more old mystery cleared up.

“How were they destroyed? Did the Dragaerans turn on them?”

She shook her head. “They had other interests besides genetics. One of them was the study of Chaos. We’ll probably never know exactly what happened, but, in essence, an experiment got out of control, or else an argument came up between some of them, or something, and boom! We have a Great Sea of Chaos, a few new gods, and no more Jenoine.”

So much, I decided, for my history lesson for today. I couldn’t deny being interested, however. It wasn’t really my history, but it had some kind of fascination for me, nevertheless. “That sounds remarkably like what happened to Adron on a smaller scale, a few years back. You know, the thing that made the Sea of Chaos up north, the Interregnum . . . Aliera?”

She was looking at me strangely and not saying anything.

A light broke through. “Say!” I said, “That’s what pre-Empire sorcery is! The sorcery of the Jenoine.” I stopped long enough to shudder, as I realized the implications. “No wonder the Empire doesn’t like people studying it.”

Aliera nodded. “To be more precise, pre-Empire sorcery is direct manipulation of raw chaos—bending it to one’s will.”

I found myself shuddering again. “It sounds rather dangerous.”

She shrugged, but didn’t say more. Of course, she would see it a little differently. Aliera’s father, I had learned, was none other than Adron himself, who had accidentally blown up the old city of Dragaera and created a sea of chaos on its site.