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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