Jhereg by Steven Brust Read Free Book Online

the guy's going to bungle it, my friend will have to put him down."
    The Demon nodded.
    I sighed. Communication was such a fine thing.
    I raised my glass. "To friends," I said.
    He smiled and raised his. "To friends."

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    "Everyone is a predator."
    "Work" comes in three variations, each with its own effect, purpose, price--and penalty. The simplest is not used often, but happens enough to have acquired the term
    "standard." The idea is that you want to warn an individual away from a certain course of action, or toward another. In this case, for a fee that starts at fifteen hundred gold and goes up from there depending on how hard the target is, an assassin will arrange for the selected individual to become dead. What happens after that doesn't much matter to the killer, but as often as not the body will eventually be found by a friend or relative, who may or may not be willing and able to have the person revivified. Revivification costs heavily--up to four thousand gold for difficult cases. Even the easiest takes an expert sorcerer to perform, and it is never a sure thing. In other words, the victim will wake up, if he does, with the knowledge that there is someone out there--and he usually knows who--who doesn't really care if he lives or dies and is willing to expend at least fifteen hundred gold Imperials to prove this. This is rather chilling knowledge. It happened to me once, when I started pushing into the territory of a fellow who was just the least bit tougher than I was. I got the message, all right. I knew just what he was telling me, without any room for mistakes. "I can take you any time I want, punk, and I'd do it, too, only you aren't worth more than fifteen hundred gold to dispose of."
    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