“Someone who’s worth sixty-five thousand gold to us,” he said.
This time I couldn’t keep my expression from showing.
Sixty-five thousand! That was . . . let me see . . . over thirty, no, forty times the standard fee! For that kind of money I could build my wife the castle she’d been talking about! Hell, I could build it twice! I could bloody well retire! I could—
“Who are you after?” I asked again, forcing my voice to stay low and even. “The Empress?”
He smiled a little. “Is your friend interested?” He was no longer pronouncing the quotation marks, I noted.
“Not in taking out the Empress.”
“Don’t worry. We aren’t expecting Mario.”
As it happened, that was the wrong thing for him to say just then. It started me thinking . . . for the kind of gold he was talking about, he could hire Mario. Why wouldn’t he?
I thought of one reason right away: The someone who had to be taken out was so big that whoever did the job would have to be eliminated himself, afterwards. They would know better than to try that on Mario; but with me, well, yes. I wasn’t so well protected that I couldn’t be disposed of by the resources the Demon had at his disposal.
It fit in another way, too: It explained why the Demon had shown up personally. If he was, in fact, planning to have me take a fall after doing the job, he wouldn’t care that I knew that he was behind it and wouldn’t want a lot of other people in his organization to know. Hiring someone to do something and then killing him when he does it is not strictly honorable—but it’s been done.
I pushed the thought aside for the moment. What I wanted was a clear idea of what was going on. I had a suspicion, yes; but I wasn’t a Dzur. I needed more than a suspicion to take any action.
So the question remained, who was it that the Demon wanted me to nail for him? Someone big enough that the man who did it had to go too . . . A high noble? Possible—but why? Who had crossed the Demon?
The Demon was sharp, he was careful, he didn’t make many enemies, he was on the council, he—wait! The council? Sure, that had to be it. Either someone on the council was trying to get rid of him, or he finally decided that being number two wasn’t enough. If it was the latter, sixty-five thousand wasn’t enough. I knew who I’d be going after, and he was as close to untouchable as it is possible to get. In either case, it didn’t sound hopeful.
What else could it be? Someone high up in the Demon’s organization suddenly deciding to open his mouth to the Empire? Damn unlikely! The Demon wouldn’t make the kind of mistakes that led to that. No, it had to be someone on the council. And that, as I’d guessed, would mean that whoever did the job might have a lot of trouble staying alive after: he’d have too much information on the fellow who had given him the job and he’d know too much about internal squabbles on the council.
I started to shake my head, but the Demon held his hand up. “It isn’t what you think,” he said. “The only reason we aren’t trying to get hold of Mario is because there have to be certain conditions attached to the job—conditions that Mario wouldn’t accept. Nothing more than that.”
I felt a brief flash of anger, but pushed it back down before it showed. What the hell made him think he could stick me with conditions that Mario wouldn’t accept? (Sixty-five thousand gold, that’s what.) I thought a little longer. The problem was, of course, that the Demon had a reputation for honesty. He wasn’t known as the type who’d hire an assassin and then set him up. On the other hand, if they were talking about sixty-five thousand, things were desperate in some fashion already. He could be desperate enough to do a lot of things he otherwise wouldn’t do.
The figure sixty-five thousand gold Imperials kept running through my head. However, one other figure kept meeting it: one hundred and fifty gold. That’s the average cost of a funeral.
“I think,” I told him at last, “that my friend would not be interested in taking out a member of the council.”
He nodded in appreciation of the way my mind worked, but said, “You’re close. An ex-member of the council.”
What? More and more riddles.
“I hadn’t realized,” I said slowly, “that there was more than one way to leave the council.” And, if the guy had taken that way, they certainly didn’t need my services.
“Neither had we,” he said. “But Mellar found a way.”
At last! A name! Mellar, Mellar, let me see . . . right. He was awfully tough. He had a good, solid organization, brains, and, well, enough muscle and resources to get and hold a position on the council. But why had the Demon told me? Was he planning to kill me after all if I turned him down? Or was he taking a chance on being able to convince me?
“What way is that?” I asked, sipping my wine.
“To take nine million gold in council operating funds and disappear.”
I almost choked.
By the sacred balls of the Imperial Phoenix! Absconding with Jhereg funds? With council funds? My head started hurting.
“When—when did this happen?” I managed.
“Yesterday.” He was watching the expression on my face. He nodded grimly. “Nervy bastard, isn’t he?”
I nodded back. “You know,” I said, “you’re going to have one bitch of a time keeping this quiet.”
“That’s right,” he said. “We just aren’t going to be able to for very long.” For a moment his eyes went cold, and I began to understand how the Demon had gotten his name. “He took everything we had,” he said tightly. “We all have our own funds, of course, and we’ve been using them in the investigation. But on the kind of scale we’re working on, we can’t keep it up long.”
I shook my head. “Once this gets out—”
“He’d better be dead,” the Demon finished for me. “Or every two-silverpiece thief in the Empire is going to think he can take us. And one of them will do it, too.”
Something else hit me at that point. I realized that, for one thing, I could accept this job quite safely. Once Mellar was dead, it wouldn’t matter if word got out what he’d tried. However, if I turned it down, I was suddenly a big risk and, shortly thereafter, I suspected, a small corpse.
Once again, the Demon seemed to guess what I was thinking.
“No,” he said flatly. He leaned forward, earnestly. “I assure you that if you turn me down, nothing will happen to you. I know that we can trust you—that’s one reason we came to you.”
I wondered briefly if he were reading my mind. I decided that he wasn’t. An Easterner is not an easy person to mind-probe, and I doubted that he could do it without my being aware of it. And I was sure he couldn’t do it without Loiosh noticing.
“Of course, if you turn us down and then let something slip . . . ”
His voice trailed off. I suppressed a shudder.
I did some more hard thinking. “It would seem to me,” I said, “that this has to be done soon.”
He nodded. “And that’s why we can’t get Mario. There’s no way we can rush him.”
“And you think you can rush my friend?”
He shrugged. “I think we’re paying for it.”
I had to agree with that. There was, at least, no time limit. But I had never before accepted “work” without the understanding that I had as much time as I needed. How much, I wondered, would it throw me off to have to hurry?
“Do you have any idea where he went?”
“We strongly suspect that he headed out East. At least, if I were pulling something like this, that’s where I’d go.”
I shook my head. “That doesn’t make sense. Dragaerans out East are treated about the same as Easterners are treated here—worse, if anything. He’d be considered, if you’ll pardon the expression, a demon. He’d stand out like a Morganti weapon in the Imperial Palace.”