The Book of Jhereg by Steven Brust Read Free Book Online

bodyguard, who had been standing politely (and safely) out of earshot, placed a rather formidable-looking sheaf of papers in it. The Demon handed these over to me. “It’s all there,” he said.
    “All?”
    “As much as we know. I’m afraid it may not be as much as you’d like.”
    “Okay.” I briefly ruffled through the papers. “You’ve been busy,” I remarked.
    He smiled.
    “If there’s anything else I need,” I said, “I’ll get back to you.”
    “Fine. It should be obvious, but your friend is going to have all the help he needs on this one.”
    “In that case, I presume you’re going to continue with your searching? You have access to better sorcerers than my friend has; you could keep going on that front.”
    “I intend to,” he said drily. “And I should also mention something else. If we happen to run into him before you do and see an opportunity, we’re going to take him ourselves. I mean no disrespect by that, but I think you can understand that this is a rather special situation.”
    “I can’t say I like it,” I said, “but I understand.” I wasn’t at all happy about it, in fact. Sure, my fee would be safe, but things like that can cause complications—and complications scare me.
    I shrugged. “I think you can understand, too—and
I
mean no disrespect by
this
—that if some Teckla gets in the way, and my friend thinks 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.”

3
    “
Everyone is a predator
.”
    “W ORK ” 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