by O. J. Lowe
“Ignore Tony,” the woman said. “We’re all a little on edge lately.”
“And punching me solves that issue how?” I raised an eyebrow. “I’d well be in my rights to walk away and leave you to stew in whatever mess your boss got himself into now. How much wrath would you incur then, I wonder?”
“You could do that,” the compact man who’d been driving said. “But you’d be missing out on a hell of a payday.”
“Some things are more important than money, I think you’ll find,” I said, giving him a grin. “Although not by much. I’m not walking away. Not yet anyway.”
Would I turn out to regret that decision? Already I found myself silently debating that question as I followed them into an elevator, a featureless metal box. Intriguingly, the buttons didn’t have numbers against them, rather vaguely arcane symbols. I couldn’t understand them, but as security measures went, it was an intriguing notion.
A close confined space, four against one. This would be a great place for a kill zone. Wouldn’t need to go for the gun in these conditions, just draw a knife and hack away, go for the throat of the nearest, their instant reaction will be to cut loose with magic, but they’d have the risk of collateral damage. Magic didn’t distinguish between friend and foe. I ignored the twitching in my fingers, tried to shut out the ache in my gut. Reacting wouldn’t solve anything.
The corridor they brought me out in at the top of the elevator came across as even more disparate, strangely subdued grandeur, gold embossed marble on the floor, the walls adorned with portraits of various old, white men in spectacular robes and stoles. I wasn’t impressed by any of them, an assassin learns to read people. While they might have been meant to look important and grand, you soon spotted the flaws, the shifty eyes, the weak chin, the foolish, vapid expressions. Wanting a portrait to hang of you for posterity, there’s got to be a character flaw in the individual. If they ever offered to commission a painting of me at the school I set up, I’d burn it to the ground and start over. The moment people know what you look like, you become a target and as someone who puts targets in the ground, I appreciate just how dangerous that is. They even had a couple of mini chandeliers above my head, more glass and diamonds than I’d ever seen in one place. I found myself more impressed by that than the portraits of the wizards. If this wasn’t the Shining Council headquarters, I’d be surprised. Only wizards would be this tasteless. All that power and not a buggering clue about the best way to use it.
I couldn’t shake that feeling of being escorted, two at the side, one in front and one behind, like I was being marched to the electric chair or something. I’ve suffered that in the past, they tried to kill me in it, but I got better. It didn’t take.
As we reached the doors at the end, huge oak things with knockers in the shape of golden lions, I couldn’t help rolling my eyes. Jesus H Christ, who thought that was a classy thing to do? If I narrowed my eyes, I could just about make out some of the runes adorning the wood, sigils of power laced into it. Those who tried to enter without access, it’d make life unpleasant for them. Hence the wood, I guess. It’s a better conductor of magical energies than other materials. Why do you think wizards make their staffs out of it? I might not be a wizard; I know a thing or two.
At that point, we stopped, the woman studied me with a fierce glare. “Now let’s get one thing straight before we enter,” she said. “As you meet our bosses in there, you’re going to show the correct respect at all time. You’re going to accord them what they deserve.”
Hands ran across my body, I sighed and shook my head in resignation, more for show than anything else as they found my gun and one of the knives, at least on the first sweep. The second, a much more thorough effort, turned up the blade at my ankle. If nothing else, they’d finally been professional. Or maybe they simply valued the lives of their bosses more than they did their own.
Never trust anyone who does that. Self-interest makes the world go around and anyone who tells you otherwise is either a liar or a communist.
“In addition,” the man with skin the colour of aged shoe leather said, “anything you hear in here is strictly confidential. You might be some hot shit assassin, you repeat anything from the following conversation, we’ll hunt you down ourselves.”
“Should I be scared?” I asked.
“You should,” he grinned. “But hey, you’re going to have a massively productive discussion with them, so—” He shoved the door open, gestured for me to enter— “In you go. Have fun.”
Three.
I’ve been in boardrooms before, never for a discussion like this though. Once I went in there, shot someone through the forehead and leaped out a thirteen-story window. Obviously, I had an escape plan, I’m not mentally deficient. Granted, it was more arcane than most, ancient symbols in the middle of the table, similar to the ones in the elevator. I pulled my jacket about my neck, found it a little chilly for my liking. Five people sat around the table, a round object that made me think of Arthurian legend, even if the similarities were ridiculous.
“Mister Armitage?” one of them said, rising to his feet, his robes an onyx black with a red trim. The gentleman himself was perhaps in his sixties, with a greying version of the sort of hair that had likely been dirty blond once upon a time. He smiled with his eyes, a subtle blue, rather than with his mouth, though at least he looked as if he kept himself in shape. “I’m Thomas Valentine, the speaker of this group. Thank you for attending us as swiftly as possible. I appreciate you don’t like to be summoned—”
“Damn right I don’t,” I said, before giving him a grin. “But after all, what’s life without compromise. You’ve made it in my interest to see what you desire.”
“A practical man,” an old, bald man rasped. His robes were as black as Valentine’s, but they lacked the red trim. His skin was the colour of caramel, I noticed. Impressive. “I like that. You can deal with practical men. Idealists fuck the world up.”
“How about we go around the room,” I said. “Because after all, you know me, but I don’t know you all. As I was saying to the folks below, you can’t put a price on good manners and hospitality.”
“But of course, anything for our distinguished guest. That delightful gentleman who dislikes idealists is Ian Nivendis,” Valentine said. I’d heard the name before, never been able to put the name to the face.
“Pleasure,” Nivendis grumbled.
“The lady to his right is Eileen Belladonna.” Belladonna had to be in her forties, hinting at Mediterranean heritage, handsome rather than pretty with fine brown hair, though it was hard to tell amidst all the makeup she’d elected to wear. Women, eh? I’d never known they’d let women onto the Shining Council, the Novisarium is notoriously slow to adapt to the times. Hey, I don’t dislike women. Some of my best killers have been women. If a woman can do a job better than a man, then all power to her.
“Madam,” I said, inclining my head. She fixed me with a glassy stare, as if staring at something on the bottom of her shoe. Her robes weren’t black, rather a shade of dark blue with a purple trim.
“James Commodore.” Commodore looked like he’d come from a variety of heritages, hard to pin down one exact race in him, with white hair and dead eyes, his mouth set into a perennial sulk. His robes, light grey, fit tight against a prodigious belly and he sank back in his seat, avoiding looking at me if he could help it.
“And finally, Charles Windemere.” The last of the people in the room, hunched over the table, looked at me through spectacles, his eyes strangely enlarged, like pools of copper. His skin was dark, as were his hair and beard, albeit with streaks of salt in them. Resting his hands on the table, splayed out, they looked the size of dinner plates.
“A pleasure, Mister Armitage,” he said with a rich voice, like chocolate being poured over velvet. “It’s rare we have such distinguished guests in our presence these days.”
“You do me great honour, Mister Windemere,” I replied. “You all do. But, given I know your names,
if not your faces, I have to ask you what I can do for the heads of the five families of the Shining Council.”
The five families made them sound like gangsters. I always thought the comparison was strangely apt, given the stranglehold they had on magic in the Novisarium.
“It’s a rather sensitive subject,” Belladonna said. “I don’t know if the knights outside gave you the talk, but anything you say in here remains confidential. We’d like you to sign a contract to that effect.”
“Do you not trust me?” Huh, the knights. Now that was interesting. The knights of the five families, their enforcers. Except, how come I’d only seen four of them. Where was number five?
“It’s not about trust,” Nivendis croaked. “It’s about good practice. After all, most would say you’re a shady character.”
“You wound me,” I said, holding a hand to my heart in mock-hurt. It was probably justified, but it didn’t make it any less impolite.
“Regardless, we’re protecting our interests,” Valentine said. “We’re all people of business here, we’re happy to have you here, we’d like to hire you. Believe me, Mister Armitage, we’re very generous to the people we hire.”
I didn’t even want to know what was so bad that the five most likely powerful magic wielders in the Novisarium couldn’t or wouldn’t deal with it. I glanced around the room, across the faces as I tried to get some sort of read on them, anything to tell me what I was dealing with.
“I’ll sign a confidentially agreement,” I said. “I’ll hear you out. If we can reach an agreement, if I think it can be done, then we’ll see about the job you have. After all, what are we if we can’t be reasonable to each other? You don’t trust me to keep my mouth shut, hell I don’t entirely trust you all full stop. It’s what makes the world go around.”
“You jumped up—” Commodore started to say before going silent at a stare from Valentine. No mistaking who the boss was in all of this, I noticed. Whenever you had a council like this, there was always someone who had to be in charge. Valentine’s family was the largest, it had the most power behind it, in no small part down to him being a notorious womaniser in his younger days. One of the stories about him even had it down that he’d spawned a daughter on a Valkyrie, though I didn’t know how true that was. “Apologies.”
“You’ve accosted me off the street and had me brought to you,” I said, fixing Commodore with a glare. “You refused to have your goons tell me why. At what point does that sound like someone who doesn’t have something to hide.”
“We’re not in the habit of explaining ourselves to the likes of you,” Windemere said. “We want to hire you to do a job and keep your mouth shut about it, we don’t want our dirty laundry aired across the Novisarium. Ears are everywhere. Are you clear about that?”
Well, I didn’t like his attitude. I was tempted to tell them to stick the job where the lack of sun wouldn’t shine. Except, they’d gotten me curious and I’d be damned if that wasn’t a lethal state of mind for someone like me. We all know what happened to the cat.
I think everyone has a time in their life when they want to be challenged, they want to face the unknown and come out the other side. Setting up the school, letting my best assassins handle the tough contracts, it’d left me a little jaded, a little on the laissez-faire side of life. When I’d been playing elder statesman, I’d let myself go rusty. Maybe, just maybe, I wanted that chance to prove that I could still pull off the impossible.
So, I did what everyone would in those circumstance. I sucked it up and let it go. “You got that contract. The sooner we get that out the way, the sooner we can talk business. After all, none of us are getting any younger.”
Ha!
My middle finger to them was that when the contract was set in front of me, all twenty pages of it, I made the point of reading every single word. Twice. After all, you don’t fuck around with wizards where promises are concerned. If I signed that without reading it, they could hold me to literally anything. I’ve not lived this long by making rookie mistakes like that. Just to be extra awkward, I got to the end and read it all again, made a show of flipping back to the start. More than one annoyed glance went my way, I took it for what it was. This was a political duel. They wouldn’t respect me if I simply signed it without reading it. You couldn’t afford to look weak in front of them. If I took it too far, they’d be insulted. Life is a balancing act.
When satisfied, I drew a fountain pen from my pocket and scrawled my signature on the document, gave them a smile. “Well, that wasn’t so bad now, was it? See how much better it is when we talk with words, rather than furtive meetings and grabs off the street.”
None of them said anything, I slid the contract back towards Valentine, he rubbed his fingers above it and flames caught hold of it, turning it to ashes in an instant.
“Well that was pointless,” I said.
“You’re amenable,” he replied. “That’s all I needed to hear. You repeat anything you hear here; we’ll bring our full power against you and none of your group will survive that.”
I ignored the threat. Only weak, petty, stupid men made threats when they didn’t have to, they assured the world that they lacked the vision to be able to do it without screwing up. Ignoring an insult takes infinitely more wisdom than giving one, though you have to know when retaliation is necessary. “So, what are we going to talk about then? Or if we’re placing all our cards on the table, who do you want killed?”
“Let me be very clear about one thing, Armitage,” Valentine said. “We don’t agree with what you do. You and your kind, you’re not good for the Novisarium. Nobody should have the sort of power over life and death that you do.”
“And yet I’m sat in your office, so what does that say about me? It says you’ve got a problem you can’t deal with on your own.” I leaned back in my seat, folded my arms and crossed my legs, gave them all the biggest grin I could. “The sort of problem so troublesome that it requires a man like me to deal with it.”
“We could deal with it,” Commodore said. “We’re simply choosing not to. There are reasons.”
“You met the knights,” Belladonna said. “Five of them, or there’s supposed to be.” She shot Ian Nivendis a dark look, the old man brushing it off with disdain.
“There are still five knights,” he rasped. “Get him in, he’ll give his side of the story.”
“Do you truly believe that, Ian?” Windemere asked. “Or do you simply hold out the hope that things will work themselves out without interference?”
“I think we’d all like that in the end,” Nivendis croaked. “Wouldn’t it be simple if everything worked out for the best?”
“Sounds boring,” I said. “So, they were the knights, huh? I always thought them a myth.”
“We like it that way,” Valentine replied. “Getting punched in the face by something that you didn’t believe existed always hurts more. We don’t like people outside our council to know.”
“And yet, you said there was five. Not four. What do you want me to do? If you’re missing one, what do you desire me to do, I wonder? Is one dead and you want the killer found?”
“If it were that simple, we’d do it ourselves,” Windemere said. “We’re not without considerable ability when it comes to something like that.”
“Or you could simply use the Vigilant, I suppose. Murders, that falls under their remit.”
“That would be the right and reasonable thing to do,” Valentine said. “They’re rather busy though. And well, it’s not the sort of thing we’d ask them to deal with.”
“A murder of one of your knights isn’t—”
“Don’t make the mistake of assuming it’s a revenge killing, Mister Armitage,” Commodore said. “That’s not why we called you here.”
“Then why?”
“We don’t want a knight avenged,” Valentine said, hesitating as if the words were heavy in his mouth, too distasteful to contemplate. “We called you here because we want one killed. Qu
ietly and quickly.”
I blinked. I hadn’t seen that coming at all. “You want me to kill one of your own?”
“He’s not one of our own anymore,” Belladonna said. “We put considerable trust in him, and he let us down.”
“Massively,” Windemere added. “We take the choices of our knights very seriously, it’s a sacred duty.”
“Make them take vows and everything,” Commodore said dryly. “Their duty is to act in the best interests of this council and none other. They’re even supposed to put us above their families.”
“And what did this rascal do?” I wondered. “Why can’t you guys deal with it?”
“We can’t be seen setting our knights against each other in the streets. It wouldn’t be good for our image,” Valentine said. “If we sent the other four to hunt him, there’d be a mass of collateral damage. People would talk. We need it done as quickly and quietly as possible.”
“That’s twice you said that.”
“That only underlines the importance of it all!” Valentine growled. “The Shining Council has to be seen as above petty street brawls. People don’t believe our knights exist, to see them trading blows in the streets like common brawlers, it would destroy a lot of the mystique. It’d destroy our aura of infallibility.”
“Nobody thinks that you’re infallible,” I said. “The fact you think they do—”
“Making our mistakes in public is not something we’re willing to do.”
“He was not a mistake!” Nivendis barked. “He was of impeccable character; he had some power—”
“I never thought he was altogether there,” Belladonna remarked. “Something off about him. Something creepy.” She did a shudder, though I was sure it was fake. Most people in her position wouldn’t be that squeamish, for sure.
“Power does not equal loyalty,” Windemere commented. “Far from it. I think you forgot that somewhere, Ian.”