Tsalmoth

Steven Brust Tsalmoth Vlad Taltos - Book #16 ISBN: 9781466889705, 9781466889705 Kindle / ASIN: B09XL5FXZ3 Genre: Fantasy Goodreads Rating: Paperback, 288 pages Published: 2023 Tsalmoth is the next installment in Steven Brust’s bestselling Vlad Taltos series—hold on to your hats and get ready for another swashbuckling adventure! First comes love. Then comes marriage… Vlad Taltos is in love. With a former assassin who may just be better than he is at the Game. Women like this don’t come along every day and no way is he passing up a sure bet. So a wedding is being planned. Along with a shady deal gone wrong and a dead man who owes Vlad money. Setting up the first and trying to deal with the second is bad enough. And then bigger powers decide that Vlad is the perfect patsy to shake the power structure of the kingdom. More's the pity that his soul is sent walkabout to do it. How might Vlad get his soul back and have any shot at a happy ending? Well, there’s the tale… 2023 - ePub verification and revisions by zardox Begin Reading Table of Contents About the Author Copyright Page This one is for Sisi, with love, and art, and music. PROLOGUE Have you ever noticed that getting married is like trying to collect a debt from a dead guy? If you’re gonna get married, you gotta decide which traditions to keep, and which ones to throw away, and what to do that’s got nothing to do with tradition. And you gotta work it out with someone else—you know, the one you’re marrying? That one? Well, you gotta work with that person to get something that’s okay for you both. But if you’re living in the Dragaeran Empire, and all your traditions go back to Fenario, where your family came from a few generations ago, then you got a whole ’nother layer of stuff to get through. It’s complicated, and it’s different for everyone. Just like if some jerk dies owing you money, and you want to get it back, there are a lot of things to consider, and you might start out dealing with it one way, but then change your mind, and you’ll have to deal with different sets of customs: one being the Jhereg, that’s my House and my organization, where we have policies about loaning money and collecting it, and the other from whatever House the dead guy was in. And then there’s the Empire, which exists to make everything more complicated. And sometimes they get all tangled up together, and mixed in with other stuff that you’d think had nothing to do with any of it. Let’s go into detail. 1 INTRODUCTIONS Most marriages among my people, Easterners, start when you meet someone you’re attracted to. I mention that because among the Dragaerans, or at least the high nobility, it usually starts with families arranging things. Sometimes, like with the House of the Phoenix, they arrange for their great-great-grandchildren who don’t exist yet to marry each other if the omens are right, or something like that. Not sure how that works, but it isn’t my concern. I also wonder, since they live so much longer than we do, if that makes a difference in how they think about marriage. I’d guess it does, but I don’t know in what ways. Funny thing I’ve noticed, by the way: anytime marriages are arranged, it’s like, between a man and a woman, but among Easterners, and with the Houses where people pick for themselves, you get men marrying men and women marrying women or whatever. You can think about that if it’s worth the bother. Me, I’ve always kind of liked girls. Like Cawti. I met her on a warm, pleasant day with a nice breeze flowing in from the ocean-sea when she killed me. Nothing personal, she’d been paid. And I got better, didn’t I? Death is only permanent if you’re unlucky, which makes it the opposite of marriage. But, anyway, that’s how we met, and then we hung around together for a while, and we got along pretty good. I mean, that isn’t all it takes, but it’s a good start, isn’t it? Also, I discovered that she was a kind of amazing kisser, and that never hurts. So we started spending time together, and we found out we both liked to cook. If you get along when it comes to kissing, cooking, and killing, there’s a good chance everything else will fall into place, right? There are problems that just can’t be solved by sticking something pointy into someone. I try to stay away from those kinds of problems, because they get complicated, and I don’t like complicated. I’m a simple guy. Ask anyone. “That Vlad,” they all say. “He’s a simple guy.” “Hey Kragar,” I called out to the next room. “I’m a simple guy, right?” I heard footsteps, and he stuck his head into my office. “What?” I repeated my question. His eyebrows did funny Kragar-things, and he came in and sat down across from my desk. “What happened?” “Why should something have happened?” He just waited. I said, “You know that Tsalmoth who went into us for eight and scampered?” “Bereth. Sure, I put Sticks on it.” “Yeah, Sticks just got back to me.” “And he found him, and got the money, and broke his legs, and everything is fine now, right?” “Heh,” I explained. “Someone killed the son of a bitch.” “Need an address to send flowers?” “No, I need a way to get my Verra-be-damned money.” “Hmmm. Tricky.” “I know,” I said. “Tricky. And I’m a simple guy.” “Can he be revivified? We could add the cost on to what he owes us.” “Sticks says no.” “In that case, Vlad, I would suggest a clever strategy: write off the money.” I felt myself scowling. “It’s not tricky,” he added, with his fake innocent smile. My familiar, Loiosh, arrived in the window about that time, flew over,