I Read What?!

So last time, Vlad got a job offer from a fantasy mob boss. It seems straightforward enough, but this is the fantasy mob after all.



Well, if the chapter titles DO refer to Houses in the Dragaeran Cycle, this chapter's is too vague to really count. "Everyone is a predator" can refer to pretty much any animal, so I'm probably going to stop mentioning the episode titles unless there's one that really stands out.

We start with Vlad talking about "work", meaning, "assassination". This is an info-dump section, but I find it pretty interesting nonetheless.

The simplest is not used often, but happens enough to have acquired the term “standard.” The idea is that you want to warn an individual away from a certain course of action, or toward another. In this case, for a fee that starts at fifteen hundred gold and goes up from there depending on how hard the target is, an assassin will arrange for the selected individual to become dead. What happens after that doesn’t much matter to the killer, but as often as not the body will eventually be found by a friend or relative, who may or may not be willing and able to have the person revivified.

Revivification costs heavily—up to four thousand gold for difficult cases. Even the easiest takes an expert sorcerer to perform, and it is never a sure thing.

In other words, the victim will wake up, if he does, with the knowledge that there is someone out there—and he usually knows who—who doesn’t really care if he lives or dies and is willing to expend at least fifteen hundred gold Imperials to prove this.

One big takeaway we get is that death is not as permanent in this setting as it might be in other book series. Vlad notes that this happened to him once, as a warning, when he started expanding his territory a little too aggressively and someone took offense. Apparently Kiera had found his body and brought him to someone called "Sethra Lavode", who returned him to life. Vlad hasn't bothered the guy since, though he implies that "someday" that might change.

Vlad also tells us a bit more about the legalities of killing in the Dragaeran Empire. Basically, dueling is okay. Assuming that it happens in an "authorized dueling area" and there are "Imperial witnesses". Assassination is generally not okay. In fact, a key part of assassination is that the victim doesn't see your face, because if he's revivified and reports on you (and it's interesting that Vlad uses the pronoun 'he' in this example), you could end up convicted of murder.

Murder, in the Empire, has the death penalty. And they burn the body to make sure that it can't be revivified.

Now all this talk of the impermanence of death might fool the reader into thinking Vlad's more heroic than he actually is. But just because "standard" is the most common type of assassin work, that's not the only kind that Vlad practices. Because that's when Vlad tells us of another type of assassin work: "morganti".

This is what Vlad tells us about this:

Unlike any other kind of situation, you will probably have to explain your reasons. Even the coldest, most vicious assassin will find it distasteful to use a weapon that will destroy a person’s soul. Chances are he won’t do it unless you have a damn good reason why it has to be done that way and no other. There are times, though, when nothing else will do. I’ve worked that way twice. It was fully justified both times—believe me, it was.

This is a setting where death is fixable and, while Vlad hasn't mentioned it, I remember that reincarnation is a thing as well. So destroying someone's soul is a pretty big thing. And the Empire sees it that way too. A morganti murderer meets his fate via morganti blade himself.

It's a fantastic character beat that Vlad will spend pages infodumping to us about assassination methods, but not about the city he lives in or the general political structure beyond what effects him immediately. We have to figure that stuff out from context.

There's a middle ground, of course, which Vlad calls the "bread and butter of the assassin". This involves killing someone in a way that they can't be brought back, without destroying their soul. It costs at least 3000 gold, more if the victim is difficult. (The 65000 gold that Vlad has been offered for this job is the highest he's heard of, though he guesses that Mario Greymist, the aforementioned legendary assassin who'd killed the old Phoenix Emperor probably charged more - Vlad's never heard a price mentioned.)

I kind of love that Vlad pays attention to that kind of thing.

Anyway, Vlad tells us how this last type works. There are three methods that he knows of:

First, you can make sure that the body isn’t found for three full days, after which time the soul will have departed. The most common method for doing this is to pay a moderate fee, usually around three to five hundred gold, to a sorceress from the Left Hand of the Jhereg, who will guarantee that the body is undisturbed for the requisite period. Or, of course, you can arrange to secrete the body yourself—risky, and not at all pleasant to be seen carrying a body around. It causes talk.

The second method, if you aren’t so greedy, is to pay these same sorceresses something closer to a thousand, or even fifteen hundred of your newly acquired gold, and they will make sure that, no matter who does what, the body will never be revivified. Or, third, you can make the body unrevivifiable: burn it, chop off the head . . . use your imagination.

Vlad's got his own method, he tells us: hours of planning, split-second timing, precise calculations, and a single, sharp, accurate knife.

He ends this section with a boast: he hasn't bungled one yet.

It occurs to me that this whole section was basically the equivalent of Drizzt Do'Urden's journal entries. But it blends better with the narrative, since it's all first person. And, well, I find Vlad less irritating than Drizzt, so there you go. I've never denied my hypocritical streak.

So after this, Vlad returns and discusses the mission with Kragar. They have some back and forth that makes me chuckle:

“It’s too bad,” he remarked when I had finished, “that you don’t have a ‘friend’ you can unload this one on.”

“What do you mean, friend?” I said.

“I—” he looked startled for a minute, then grinned.

“No, you don’t,” he said. “You took the job; you do it.”

Kragar elaborates on his misgivings though, noting their would-be victim was on the council. This won't be an easy job. Kragar is however on board for prep work, and will be getting a cut himself. They discuss the best way of finding the guy.

As mentioned, Dragaeran sorcery is out. There are ways to block that, and the Demon has the best folk looking for that kind of thing.

Dragaeran sorcery isn't the only type of magic in the world though, as we learned from the prologues. Kragar asks about Eastern witchcraft. Vlad notes that he could probably get an image and a psionic fix, but that's a far cry from an exact location or teleport coordinates.

Kragar has another idea though: they have an acquaintance called Daymar, a weird guy who specializes in psionics. He's not a Jhereg, but both Kragar and Vlad trust him. And we've got enough of an idea of Vlad's personality by now to be a little surprised by that. Daymar's also a show-off and he might well help for free.

Vlad doesn't explain psionics to us, specifically, so we have to draw some conclusions. I don't think it's meant to be a separate type of magic from sorcery or witchcraft, because Vlad describes what he's doing with witchcraft as making a "psionic" fix. I think it's meant to be more of a description of the effect: having to do with the mind. Either sorcery or witchcraft can be used to create psionic effects, but in very different ways.

So the first part is up to Vlad, and it should be pretty simple as long as Mellar has no blocks against witchcraft. As we've seen from this setting, Easterners are not terribly respected, and witchcraft is a specifically Eastern thing, so that might be an exploitable vulnerability.

It's a nice character beat that Vlad's next thought is to meet with his friend Kiera, at his office, where there are witchcraft protections and alarms. He thinks the Demon wouldn't want him to be talking with Kiera, though her presence might shock his own staff.

Vlad doesn't get into why Kiera's presence would be a shock. Kragar's reaction reinforces this, as Vlad tells us that Kragar seemed about to say something, but realizes that Vlad would have gone over the objections himself.

Vlad sends Loiosh to find Daymar. They exchange some telepathic banter as he does.

Once alone, Vlad starts getting expositional about assassination again. This is apparently his forty-second assassination. That's a fucking lot. Especially since I did the math once and I'm pretty sure Vlad's only supposed to be about 23 or 24 years old at this point. It's an interesting character beat that he doesn't specify if he's counting standard or more permanent assassinations in that number.

The monologue is interesting though, also because it kind of gets into how Vlad, who seems to be a fairly okay guy for the most part, emotionally copes with the kind of work that he does. He notes that as part of the job, he ends up rather intimately acquainted with his target.

The fourth one? He was the button man who would always order a fine liqueur after dinner and leave half the bottle instead of a tip. The twelfth was a small-time muscle who liked to keep his cash in the largest denominations he could. The nineteenth was a sorcerer who carried a cloth around with him to polish his staff with—which he did constantly. There is always something distinct about them. Sometimes it is something I can use; more often it is just something that sticks out in my memory. When you know someone well enough, he becomes an individual no matter how hard you try to think of him as just a face—or a body.

But if you take it back a level, you once more wind up with the similarities being important. Because when they come to me as names mentioned in a conversation, over a quiet meal, with a purse handed over which will contain somewhere between fifteen hundred and four thousand gold Imperials, they are all the same, and I treat them the same: plan the job, do it.


It's worth noting that over the course of the series - the books that specifically follow a narrative line at least - Vlad does move from his anti-heroic origin to a more traditionally heroic role. But we're at the beginning of that journey. While I wouldn't go so far as to call Vlad a villain protagonist (he has lines he won't cross, and isn't prone toward cruelty or sadism or those other things that, in my mind, plant a character comfortably in the "evil" column), he's definitely in the jerkass phase of his development at the moment.

So Vlad tells us a bit more about the methodical nature of his preparations: watching, tracking and timing his target for days, sometimes even weeks. He'd figure out exactly how and when it should happen, and then bring everything together. The execution, Vlad tells us, is only interesting if he's made a mistake somewhere.

But this is also interesting:

Kragar once asked me, when I was feeling particularly mellow, if I enjoyed killing people. I didn’t answer, because I didn’t know, but it set me to thinking. I’m still not really sure. I know that I enjoy the planning of a job, and setting it in motion so that everything works out. But the actual killing? I don’t think I either consciously enjoy it or fail to enjoy it; I just do it.

I leaned back and closed my eyes. The beginning of a job like this is like the beginning of a witchcraft spell. The most important single thing is my frame of mind when I begin. I want to make absolutely sure that I have no preconceived notions about how, or where, or anything. That comes later. I hadn’t even begun to study the fellow yet, so I didn’t have anything to really go on. The little I did know went rolling around my subconscious, free-associating, letting images and ideas pop up and be casually discarded. Sometimes, when I’m in the middle of planning, I’ll get a sudden inspiration, or what appears to be a sudden burst of brilliance. I fancy myself an artist at times like this.

The second paragraph both supports the first and makes a lie of it at the same time. Vlad likes the planning, the inspiration and the success. He likes the "art" of it. But in the end, the art DOES involve killing people. You can't divorce the process from the end result. The blunt truth is that, even if Vlad can't admit it to himself yet, he DOES like to kill people.

It's up to Vlad, over the course of these books, to determine what that means for him.

So Vlad is interrupted from his exposition by telepathic communication:

I came out of my reverie slowly, with the feeling that there was something I should be thinking about. I wasn’t really fully awake yet, so it took me awhile to become aware of what it was. There was a stray, questing thought fluttering around in my forebrain.

After a while, I realized that it had an external source. I gave it some freedom to grow and take shape enough for me to recognize it, and discovered that someone was trying to get into psionic contact with me. I recognized the sender.

“Ah, Daymar,”I thought back. “Thank you.”

“No problem,” came the clear, gentle thought. “You wanted something?” Daymar had better mental control, and more power, than anyone I’d ever met. I got the feeling from him that he had to be careful, even in mental contact, lest he burn my mind out accidentally.

One thing that you'll notice in this book is that Vlad seems to know a lot of very powerful people, who he namedrops into conversation as shamelessly as Tahani from the Good Place. One of the perks of the scattered publication timeline is that eventually we see how Vlad ends up meeting and befriending a lot of these extraordinary people. In this book, however, they're already here.

Anyway, Vlad explains what he wants from Daymar. He uses some judicious flattery when he mentions that even Daymar might not be able to get past the sorcerous blocks, which seems to confirm my suppositions earlier: that psionics isn't separate from sorcery or witchcraft. Daymar uses sorcery for his psionic efforts.

Daymar understands Vlad/Kragar's idea pretty quickly, namely that Vlad fixes Mellar with a witchcraft spell and Daymar finds him from that, but he doesn't think it'll work. The "marks" won't last long enough. Daymar, with some prompting (he comes across as being maybe a little flighty), suggests "the reverse".

Vlad does not relay Daymar's explanation to us, though he does start thinking about how to do it. Daymar is willing to help with the locating, on the condition that he gets to watch the witchcraft spell. They make arrangements for contact.

The chapter ends with Loiosh's return and Vlad going back to his assassination brainstorming as he waits for the visitor who will appear next chapter.