On Fri, 7 Mar 2003, David Silberstein wrote: > [Afterthought] > > On Fri, 7 Mar 2003, David Silberstein wrote: > > >On Fri, 7 Mar 2003, Philip Hart wrote: > > > >> And isn't taking out the leading Dragon a job for the Jhereg's > >> leading worker? In the absence of Mario, would that be Istvaan? > >> He's assigned to take out Vlad, perhaps the #1 priority of the > >> House. Note however that he isn't involved in _Jhereg_ when > >> Mellar was #1 > > > > There are probably more factors involved in hiring a Jhereg assassin > than we know. Vlad was probably chosen to take out Mellar for various > reasons, including his friendship with Morrolan, not because he was > the "best". And Vlad's assessment of Mario being the "best" may not > be 100% accurate. And Istvan may have simply been the one that > accepted the contract on Vlad, after better assassins refused for > various reasons. And we don't really *know* who took out Baritt; it > might have been Laris, or Laris might simply have been the agent that > the SiG & StY used, and Mario *was* the one who took out Baritt. > And note that Laris is now dead. So to expand on my "thinking" leading up to the paragraph above, how many high-profile workers are there in the Jhereg? We don't have even a guesstimate for the population of the Empire (do we?), but can there be one million Jhereg? Say 60% are in the Right Hand, 5% of that do work, 1% of that are top-notch, that would be 300, and Vlad has gone through about a dozen of those personally? (I assert that Vlad has long been considered highly elite - one of his jobs was to take out someone who had gone to the Empire - and thus the workers sent after him in, well, most of the novels would be elite. Istvan, I assert, is elite because of Vlad's use of him in _Phoenix_, Vlad's assessment of whoever it was Istvan took out at the end of the novel, and his assignment in _Athyra_.) And 10^6 Jhereg sounds crazy - I would get maybe a billion Dragaerans if I say there are 90 Tecklas per noble and assume a high casualty rate for Jhereg relative to Issola/Athyra/Iorich/... Also there was a recent (in generational terms) Dragon/Jhereg war, which presumably thinned out the ranks (plus the plagues etc. associated with the Interregnum). One could perhaps estimate the population of Dragons from the non-conscript numbers in _Dragon_ - maybe their casualty rate is comparable to Jhereg (hard to say). Ballpark - there are about 50 elite assassins in Adrilahnka and we've seen 1/3-1/2 of them.