Jhereg Read Free Page B

possession of his fangs. The message was amazingly distinct.
    " Mamma? " he said.
    Right. Mamma. I thought that over for a while, then tried to send a message back.
    " No, Daddy, " I told him.
    " Mamma, " he agreed.
    He stopped struggling and seemed to settle down in my hand. I realized that he was exhausted and then realized that I was, too. Also, we were both hungry. At that point it hit me--What the hell was I going to feed him? All the time I'd been carrying him, I'd known that he was going to hatch someday, but it had never really sunk in that there was actually going to be a real, live jhereg there.
    I carried him into the kitchen and started hunting around. Let's see ... milk. We'll start with that.
    I managed to get out a saucer and pour a little milk into it. I set it down on the counter and set the jhereg down next to it, his head actually in the saucer. He lapped up a little and didn't seem to be having any trouble, so I scouted around a little more and finally came up with a small piece of hawk wing. I placed it in the saucer; he found it almost at once. He tore a piece off (he had teeth already--good) and began chewing. He chewed it for close to three minutes before swallowing, but when he did, it went down with no trouble. I relaxed.
    After that, he seemed more tired than hungry, so I picked him up and carried him over to the couch. I lay down and placed him on my stomach. I dozed off shortly thereafter. We shared pleasant dreams.
    The next day, someone came to my door and clapped, around mid-afternoon. When I opened the door, I recognized the fellow immediately. He was the one who'd been running the game the day before and had told me not to come back--with a knife held against the back of my neck for added emphasis.
    I invited him in, being the curious type.
    "Thank you," he said. "I am called Nielar."
    "Please sit down, my lord. I'm Vlad Taltos. Wine?"
    "Thank you, but no. I don't expect to be staying very long."
    "As you wish."
    I showed him to a seat and sat down on the couch. I picked up my jhereg and held him. Nielar arched his eyebrows, but didn't say anything.
    "What can I do for you, then?" I asked.
    "It has come to my attention," he said, "that I was, perhaps, in the wrong when I faulted you for the events of yesterday."
    What? A Dragaeran apologizing to an Easterner? I wondered if the world was coming to an end. This was, to say the least, unprecedented in my experience. I mean, I was a 16-year-old human, and he was a Dragaeran who was probably close to a thousand.
    "It's very kind of you to say so, my lord," I managed.
    He brushed it off. "I will also add that I liked the way you handled yourself." He did? I didn't. What was going on here?
    "What I'm getting at," he continued, "is that I could use someone like you, if you have a mind to work for me. I understand that you don't have a job at the moment, and--" He finished with a shrug.
    There were several thousand questions I wanted to ask him, starting with, "How did you find out so much about me and why do you care?" But I didn't know how to go about asking them, so I said, "With all respect, my lord, I can't see what kind of things I can do for you."
    He shrugged again. "For one thing, preventing the kind of problems we had last night. Also, I need help from time to time collecting debts. That sort of thing. I normally have two people who assist me in running the place, but one of them had an accident last week, so I'm shorthanded just at the moment."
    Something about the way he said "accident" struck me as strange, but I didn't take any time out to guess at what he meant.
    "Again with all respect, my lord, it doesn't seem to me that an Easterner is going to look very imposing when standing up to a Dragaeran. I don't know that I--"
    "I'm convinced that it won't be any problem," he said. "We have a friend in common, and she assured me that you'd be able to handle this kind of thing. As it happened, I owe her a favor or two, and she asked me to