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jhereg, remember?
” he said sarcastically. “
We get feelings about these things
.”
    One of Loiosh’s great skills is throwing my own lines back at me. The damnable thing about it was that he might be simply telling the truth.
    The Demon remained politely silent during the psionic conversation—either because he didn’t notice it, or out of courtesy. I suspected the latter.
    “Who?” I said aloud.
    The Demon turned back to me, then, and looked at me for what seemed to be a long time. Then he turned his face to the side again.
    “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 suddenlydeciding 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