Steven Brust - Dzur

“Yeah, okay. I know what you mean.”

“Do you think you can do that, without letting anyone know you’re trying to get information?”

“I think so. What happens if I get caught?”

“You don’t get paid.”

“I mean, will they do anything to me?”

“No, I wouldn’t think so. They aren’t like the Jhereg, they aren’t inclined to hurt people. Also, there is the matter of getting the information to me.”

“Hmm?”

“Well, I can’t have you and several others just coming to me in the open, one after another. It will attract attention.”

“Oh. What do we do then?”

“Do you know your symbols?”

“Sure.”

“Then what you do is write out anything you need to report, and you leave it outside of your bedroom window, pinned in place with, I don’t know—”

“A stickpin?”

“That would work.”

“Then what?”

“I’ll arrange to have it picked up.”

“Oh, so I get the glamorous work again?”

“Shut up, Loiosh.”

Ernest nodded.

“I think that’s it, then. Interested?”

His mouth worked. “How much?” he said at last.

There are advantages to having a lot of money. He agreed. Over the next couple of days, I had that same conversation eleven more times. None of them said no. After that, it was a matter of pointing out the runners to them, emphasizing the importance of not letting it be apparent what they were doing, and setting them to work.

By the time I had finished instructing the last of them, infor­mation was only starting to trickle in from the first of them. It would be a while before I had enough to be useful, and, by that time, I needed to have a more solid background. I did something I’d never had to before: my own research. I crossed over to the City, and, still in disguise, I made my way into the Imperial library.

I worked my way down to the history section, settled in, and started studying. 10. Salad

A young man I didn’t know came by and removed the plates with the remains of the fish, then returned a moment later and gave us each a slightly smaller plate. Then Mihi returned with a large wooden bowl, and a pair of wooden spoons.

Valabar’s has several salads. Today’s was a combination of the round and the tall, broad-leaf kinds of lettuce, along with flatnuts, blanched tomato wedges, soul of palm, pimentos, scallions, and artichoke heart marinated in sweet vinegar, which functioned as a dressing. A grated nithlan cheese—sharp and musky—was shredded over it, and the whole thing was topped with candied rose petals.

Mihi dished it up with his usual matter-of-fact fluid elegance, and my mouth was watering.

“What are those?” asked Te1nan.

“Candied rose petals.”

“Candied rose petals?”

“Yep.”

“Is that a term for something, or are they actually rose petals?”

“They’re actually rose petals. Candied.”

“Very lightly candied,” said Mihi. “They aren’t too sweet.”

“Uh ...”

“Just eat it,” I said. “Trust me.”

“All right.”

He took a forkful, a dubious expression on his face. I blissfully dived into my own.

After a while, I said, “Well?”

“Hmmm?”

“How is it?”

He swallowed. “It’s wonderful.”

I wished I had someone like Kragar to kick the information around with; he was always an excellent sounding board. In some ways, that’s what I missed the most. I could always talk to Loiosh, of course, but Loiosh’s job involved keeping my emotions balanced, not working over information and helping me look for patterns. Something about the way the reptilian brain works, I suppose.

But I didn’t want to bring Kragar in on this, which not only left me on my own as the information trickled in, but left me spending hours at the Imperial library learning things I could have had him get for me. It did give me a bit more of an appreciation for the sort of legwork I always used to assign him. If I ever spoke with him again, I’d have to mention that.

No, I wouldn’t.

But I did learn things.

The Imperial library is not, in fact, organized so you can, say, go to the far corner of the third subbasement and find a book called Here Is What the Left Hand of the Jhereg Is Up To . It isn’t even orga­nized so you can find the history of the Left Hand of the Jhereg. In fact, I’m told that in comparison with various university libraries, it isn’t even organized. And, to make matters worse, the librarians tend not to be excessively helpful to Easterners; I got looks that ranged from the mildly puzzled to the downright unfriendly.

But, eventually, after wandering aimlessly for a while, I found myself among piles of unsorted manuscripts where I ran across a very tall and, for a Dragaeran, portly fellow with wispy hair and heavily lidded eyes who didn’t seem to notice my race. He seemed to be involved in making notes on these manuscripts and moving them from one pile to another.

When I told him I was trying to track down the history of the Left Hand of the Jhereg, he got a sort of feral gleam in his eye and nodded to me.

“This way,” he said, and led me off.

His name, it turned out, was Deleen, or something like that. He was a Tsalmoth, and I think loved his work. He never asked why I was interested, never appeared to notice that I was an East­erner and never even gave me lectures on how he did his work—something that’s pretty much endemic to specialists forced to work with amateurs. I got the impression that sifting through disorganized documents and obscure books in order to pull scraps of information out of them was what he lived for.

I didn’t especially care for it, myself.

I noticed him performing spells from time to time and asked about them. He grunted and said something about finding recurring patterns of symbols within documents. I had never known sorcery could do things like that.

We spent about eleven hours a day at it for three days, most of it with him digging through documents and making notes, me standing there, occasionally holding things for him, or taking notes to colleagues of his which resulted in them handing me a manuscript or document of some sort, which I would deliver to Deleen. Every day I would offer to buy him lunch, and every day he would decline and shuffle off to eat on his own. We’d meet an hour later and resume. He spent his time about evenly between histori­cal records and contemporary reports—most of these latter being in the form of quasi-legal gossip sheets. I observed at one point that I was surprised the Imperial library collected such things. He mut­tered something incomprehensible and I didn’t bring it up again.

It was not the most exciting time I’ve ever had. Loiosh didn’t like it much either—we weren’t used to being apart, and he com­plained of boredom a great deal. I knew exactly how he felt.

In the evenings, I would speak with my “investigators,” if I can call them that, and try to figure out if they’d learned anything.

Those are three days I would not care to live through again. On account of I’m such a nice guy and all, I’m going to give you what they call a precis instead of making you live through them with me. I accept gold and silver tokens of gratitude.

First of all, it turned out that Kiera was right—there was no history whatsoever of the Left Hand interfering with anything the Jhereg did. They were, or, rather, had been, entirely their own or­ganization, with the only overlap being that they sometimes used the same contacts within the Imperial Palace. Next, I learned (or rather, Deleen deduced) that while the Empire monitored the ac­tivities of the Left Hand as best they could, they had never had much luck in actually prosecuting them for anything, except for the occasional individual who was caught with an illegal artifact in her possession. And third, it seemed that the Left Hand was even more loosely organized than the Right; they almost never exercised any control over their members.