I called him “Loiosh.” He called me “Mamma.” I trained him. He bit me. Slowly, over the course of the next few months, I developed an immunity to his poison. Even more slowly, over the course of years, I developed a partial immunity to his sense of humor.
As I stumbled into my line of work, Loiosh was able to help me. First a little, then a great deal. After all, who notices another jhereg flying about the city? The jhereg, on the other hand, can notice a great deal.
Slowly, as time went on, I grew in skill, status, friends, and experience.
And, just as his mother had predicted, I became a hunter.
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1
“Success leads to stagnation;
Stagnation leads to failure.”
I slipped the poison dart into its slot under the right collar of my cloak, next to the lockpick. It couldn’t go in too straight, or it would be hard to get to quickly. It couldn’t go in at too much of an angle, or I wouldn’t have room left for the garrotee. Just so . . . there.
Every two or three days I change weapons. Just in case I have to leave something sticking in, on, or around a body. I don’t want the item to have been on my person long enough for a witch to trace it back to me.
This could, I suppose, be called paranoia. There are damn few witches available to the Dragaeran Empire, and witchcraft isn’t very highly thought of. It is not likely that a witch would actually be called in to investigate a murder weapon and try to trace it back to the murderer—in fact, so far as I know, it has never been done in the 243 years since the end of the Interregnum. But I believe in caution and attention to detail. That is one reason I’m still around to practice my paranoia.
I reached for a new garrotee, let the old one drop into a box on the floor, and began working the wire into a tight coil.
“Do you realize, Vlad,” said a voice, “that it’s been over a year since anyone has tried to kill you?”
I looked up.
“Do you realize, Kragar,” I said, “that if you keep walking in here without my seeing you, I’ll probably die of a heart attack one of these days and save them the trouble?”
He chuckled a little.
“No, I mean it, though,” he continued. “More than a year. We haven’t had any trouble since that punk—What was his name?”
“G’ranthar.”
“Right, G’ranthar. Since he tried to start up a business down on Copper Lane, and you quashed it.”
“All right,” I said, “so things have been quiet. What of it?”
“Nothing, really,” he said. “It’s just that I can’t figure out if it’s a good sign or a bad sign.”
I studied his 7-foot frame sitting comfortably facing me against the back wall of my office. Kragar was something of an enigma. He had been with me since I had joined the business side of House Jhereg and had never shown the least sign of being unhappy taking orders from an “Easterner.” We’d been working together for several years now and had saved each other’s lives often enough for a certain amount of trust to develop.
“I don’t see how it can be a bad sign,” I told him, slipping the garrote into its slot. “I’ve proven myself. I’ve run my territory with no trouble, paid off the right people, and there’s only once when I’ve had even a little trouble with the Empire. I’m accepted now. Human or not,” I added, enjoying the ambiguity of the phrase. “And remember that I’m known as an assassin more than anything else, so who would want to go out of his way to make trouble for me?”
He looked at me quizzically for a moment. “That’s why you keep doing ‘work,’ isn’t it?” he said thoughtfully. “Just to make sure no one forgets what you can do.”
I shrugged. Kragar was being more direct about things than I liked, and it made me a bit uncomfortable. He sensed this, I guess, and quickly shifted back to the earlier topic. “I just think that all this peace and quiet means that you haven’t been moving as fast as you could, that’s all. I mean, look,” he continued, “you’ve built up, from scratch, a spy ring that’s one of the best in the Jhereg—”
“Not true,” I cut in. “I don’t really have a spy ring at all. There are a lot of people who are willing to give me information from time to time, and that’s it. It isn’t the same thing.”
He brushed it aside. “It amounts to the same thing when we’re talking about information sources. And you have access to Morrolan’s network, which is a spy ring in every sense of the word.”
“Morrolan,” I pointed out, “is not in the Jhereg.”
“That’s a bonus,” he said. “That means you can find out things from people who wouldn’t deal with you directly.”
“Well—all right. Go on.”
“Okay, so we have damn good free-lance people. And our own enforcers are competent enough to have anyone worried. I think we ought to be using what we have, that’s all.”
“Kragar,” I said, fishing out a slim throwing dagger and replacing it in the lining of my cloak, “would you kindly tell me why it is that I should want someone to be after my hide?”
“I’m not saying that you should,” said Kragar. “I’m just wondering if the fact that no one is means that we’re slipping.”
I slid a dagger into the sheath on the outside of my right thigh. It was a paper-thin, short throwing knife, small enough to be unnoticeable even when I sat down. The slit in my breeches was equally unnoticeable. A good compromise, I felt, between subtlety and speed of access.
“What you’re saying is that you’re getting bored.”
“Well, maybe just a little. But that doesn’t make what I said any less true.”
I shook my head. “Loiosh, can you believe this guy? He’s getting bored, so he wants to get me killed.”
My familiar flew over from his windowsill and landed on my shoulder. He started licking my ear.
“Big help you are,” I told him.
I turned back to Kragar. “No. If and when something comes up, we’ll deal with it. In the meantime, I have no intention of hunting for dragons. Now, if that’s all—”
I stopped. At long last, my brain started functioning. Kragar walks into my office, with nothing on his mind except the sudden realization that we should go out and stir up trouble? No, no. Wrong. I know him better than that.
“Okay,” I said. “Out with it. What’s happened now?”
“Happened?” he asked innocently. “Why should something have happened?”
“I’m an Easterner, remember?” I said sarcastically. “We get feelings about these things.”
A smile played lightly around his lips. “Nothing much,” he said. “Only a message from the personal secretary to the Demon.”
Gulp. “The Demon,” as he was called, was one of five members of a loose-knit “council” which, to some degree, controlled the business activities of House Jhereg. The council, a collection of the most powerful people in the House, had never had an official existence until the Interregnum, but they’d been around long before then. They ran things to the extent of settling disputes within the organization and making sure that things didn’t get so messy that the Empire had to step in. Since the Interregnum they had been a little more than that—they’d been the group that had put the House back together after the Empire began to function again. Now they existed with clearly defined duties and responsibilities, and everyone who did anything at all in the organization gave part of the profits to them.