On Sat, 26 Oct 2002, eshivak wrote: >I seem to recall that Vlad himself explained how he was able to lie under >the orb. It only works if the person being questioned believes the answer >to be a lie... > >Q: Did you kill "X". >A: No, he killed himself. (By pissing me off enough to need to kill him) I don't think he said "no" in answer to the question [checks...]. It's described in "Phoenix", pg 152-153: And somehow my name came up, and, after spending a couple of weeks in the Imperial Dungeons, I was ordered to testify "Under the Orb," [...] and all these peers of House Jhereg who had no power at all in the running of the Organization. I was asked things like, "When did you last see him alive?" and I'd say, "Oh, I don't know; he was always pretty dead," and they'd rebuke me sternly. They asked my opinion as to who killed him and I said that I believed he had killed himself. The Orb showed that I was telling the truth, and I was; messing with me the way he'd been doing was like asking to die. The thing is, if they really wanted to nail him, they could have asked him a series of questions, and demanded he answer "yes" or "no". Questions like "Do you know who killed him?", "Did you kill him yourself?" and "Did you pay someone else to kill him?" are really tough to evade when you can only answer "yes" or "no", and have the truth verified by the Orb. Unless, of course, he *didn't* actually have anything to to with Taishatinin's (or whatever his name was) death - I think it's not stated specifically that he did, only that he was (a) severely pissed off at him and (b) took advantage of the man's death to take over his area. It's possible Vlad has been messing with us all along. :-)