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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