Steven Brust - Jhegaala

It was strange. His voice was so calm. I swear, give me half a year with this kid and I'll make him an assassin. "I haven't laid a finger on anyone," I said.

"How many?"

"In Burz? Seven."

"You killed seven people. Just like that."

"You probably shouldn't kill me," I told him. "It'll make you as bad as me. Not that I think I'm that bad, really. And besides ..." I nodded at Loiosh and Rocza. "I've got defenders."

"I don't know if I would have done it," he said.

"How did you know?"

"How did you know?"

"Oh," I said. "Yeah, I always figured showing away like that would get me in trouble. Well, do you have any idea why I did it?"

He shook his head.

"Would you like me to tell you?"

He hesitated, then nodded.

"Then back away a few feet so Loiosh can relax a little."

He did, and sat down.

"I left home," I said, "for reasons that don't concern you. My home is in the West, in the Empire. But my family is from Fenario. My fath—"

"But you're human."

"Yes, but I'm more Dragaeran than human now. Never mind. My father died when I was young, my mother when I was younger. I never knew her. I wanted to know who she was. Can you understand that?"

He nodded, just barely. He wasn't giving anything,

"I learned that her name was Merss."

"You learned?"

"That's not my name. Though it could be." I shrugged. "In any case, I wanted to find her family—my family. I learned of this town, with its paper mill, and that seemed the place to start looking, as long as I was leaving home anyway. So I came here, with nothing more in mind than seeing my family and introducing myself, to them, maybe getting to know them a little."

I gave a short laugh. "Yeah, that was the plan. So I asked around, and none of the merchants would tell me anything about them; the name seemed to upset them. I met Orbahn, and he— well, it doesn't matter. I was suspicious of him. But he warned me about the Guild, and denied knowing where the Merss family was. Possible, but in a town this size I didn't believe it. A family well known enough that the merchants took the name as a threat, yet he didn't know them? No."

He nodded, still listening.

"Eventually, I found Zollie, who was willing to tell me about the Merss family. I went out to see them the next day, and they'd been killed. And I learned that the person who'd given me the information was also dead. Most interesting, someone had poisoned him, and tried to blame it on the Coven."

"You knew about the Coven?"

"I guessed, I didn't know. There's usually a Coven in a town like this, so my grandfather told me. They act just like a craft Guild, for witches."

"What is a craft Guild?"

"Like the Merchants' Guild, but without the disease."

"Disease?"

"The Guild in this town is sick, twisted; depraved, power-mad, and greedy."

"You say that like it's a bad thing, Boss."

" It is when they get in my way, Loiosh."

I continued, "A craft Guild is, well, it's an organization of people in a single craft. All the tinsmiths, say. Or all the masons. Or the glazers."

"What's a glazer?"

"Never mind. It was possible there was no Coven, since there were none of the other Guilds. But there are always witches, and they sort of need to band together sometimes, so it's hard for there not to be one."

"There isn't one now," he said accusingly.

"There will be again. Give it a season. You see, in a town like this—" I bit my tongue so as not to make any remarks about superstitious peasants. "In a town like this, if anything goes wrong, it's very easy to blame the witches for it, so those who practice the Art need to have some means of banding together to defend themselves, and so no one can play witches off against each other. So, I assumed there was a Coven, and someone

wanted it blamed for Zollie's death."

"How did you know they hadn't killed him?"

"Red lips? A 'witch's mark'? There are a thousand ways to kill someone using the Art. Why pick one that would point right at them?"

He nodded and I went on. "Who wanted Zollie dead? And who wanted the Coven blamed for it? Whoever fit that was almost certainly who killed my family."

He looked down.

"Except that I was wrong."

"You were:

"Yeah. I'll try to explain my thinking. My first idea was the Guild, just because they'd been ordering me—through Orbahn— to stay away."

"He told you he was with the Guild?"

"No, he tried to say he wasn't. I didn't believe him."

"Oh."

"I kept coming back to why. The Merss family lived here all their lives, for generations, and then I show up, and they're killed. What did I do? What did I say? Who did they think I was?"

I sighed.

"I saw the Count and got nothing but an invitation to visit the mill. I tested him with a story of coming from the Empire to see if he was the greedy sort, and he was. The invitation scared me; I didn't accept it. I was right to be scared, but it didn't help."

I was quiet for a while; I hadn't realized talking about it would hit me like that. He waited, not looking at me. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "I had a whole plan for pulling the information I wanted out of the people who had it. It got as far as my first contact with the Guild. You see, they knew my name."

He looked up. "Your real name?"

"Yes."

"How could they know it?"

"My name flashed through my head during the spell, so if someone was watching me, well, it could be done."

"What spell?"

"It doesn't matter. A minor Working." It was embarrassing, that part.

"Okay."

"So, the next question was, why was the Guild watching me so closely? By then, I was pretty much convinced they were the ones who had killed my family, and Zollie, but there were things about it that didn't make sense. To get my name, they had to employ a witch. Just what was the relationship between the Guild and the Coven? They ought to be enemies, because the Coven was the one craft Guild they hadn't absorbed. But if they were working with the Coven, why try to blame them for Zollie's death? And what about Count Saekeresh? Zollie thought being under his protection made him safe. Why was he wrong? So, I wasn't sure enough to act."

I shook my head. "It was quite the muddle."

He nodded.

"I'd learned some of the history, by then. You should too, sometime. Find Father Noij and shake him until he tells you the real history. It's something you should know."

He frowned, started to say something, but didn't.

I said, "I learned, at any rate, that the Merss family had been part of a group of witches with either a different Coven than the one that had survived, or no Coven at all. Covens like that frown on independent witches, and so they either die, leave, or give up practicing the Art, except perhaps in secret. The Merss family had, in parts, done all of those, including changing their name to Merss.

"And there was more, going back to when some poor bastard found an old, old manuscript, or engraving, or, well, something, that told how to make high-quality paper cheaply, in quantity. Up till then, there were different Guilds, like there are most places. But with the paper mill, most of those in the Guilds started working for the Count for cash. And what was left combined into one Merchants' Guild, both to make it easier for the Count to bargain with, and to have more leverage bargaining with him. It ended up functioning as the town government as well. The Guild has been fighting with the different Counts Saekeresh for generations—over laws that help trade versus laws that help industry, and over who has jurisdiction over what. The merchants are all Guild, which is what gives them any sort of power at all. The mill workers have His Lordship as their protector and enemy at the same time; an odd situation to be sure, but the cheaper he can convince the merchants to set the prices, the less he has to pay the workers. He has to protect them because he needs them. And, in all this, there are the peasants, who are caught in the middle because Count Saekeresh doesn't really need them anymore. He gets more money from the mill than he ever did from ground rent. To him, they're just a convenient way to feed his workers. And the Guild doesn't care about them at all; when I went into a shop and was taken for a peasant, I was treated as if I were a thief."