by O. J. Lowe
“I’ve forgotten more than you’ll ever know, Charles,” Nivendis shot back.
“That’s what I’m getting at,” Windemere replied.
“People!” Valentine said, clapping his hands together. “Not in front of the help.”
Prick. I kept my face deliberately neutral. Antagonising them wasn’t going to end well. Not when it felt like a major payday might be in my grasp. Kill a knight? No problem.
“Anyway,” Valentine said, rubbing the back of his head, his face contorted in regret. “This is the contract, Mister Armitage. There is a man named Garrett Moulton. The shadow knight. Nivendis’ chosen enforcer. He has betrayed the Shining Council; we need him killed and quickly.”
Four.
How exactly does one behave when encountering a character from a biblical myth? I’d never had the chance to wonder before I met Job for the first time, the man the Novisarium would later come to know as the Heavensent, it was a learning curve for us both. I guarantee he’d never met someone like me either. He knew what I was too, think he’d worked it out the moment we met, though never mentioned it. Too polite.
Dear, but he stank when I met him, little more than the blackened remains of the man he used to be inhabiting a corpse several days past its best. Maybe I’m a sentimentalist at heart, but I felt for the poor bastard, now imagine how that’s supposed to make me feel. I’m a killer, I’m not supposed to have a heart, I’m supposed to be cold-blooded. Like a lizard or something. (Please note, I’m not a lizard. That would be ridiculous, even in the Novisarium.)
Perhaps it was because we were both one of a kind. I never encountered many more beings like me, we were hunted almost to death a long time ago. I only survived because I hid, learned how to become a hunter rather than prey. I became someone nobody in their right mind would mess with.
In time, Job became that way too. He was pathetic when I encountered him for the first time. I found him a better body, a younger, fitter body. Okay, what I should actually say is that I dropped someone for him, a young man with an angelic face, stabbed him in the guts and watched him bleed out before Job took possession of him. It’s unsettling when people you’ve killed get back up.
I never do anything for free, the kill was an exchange for Job joining me, learning the craft of an assassin. His first kills were messy, rushed, imprecise, but it wasn’t like he could be killed and so he had longevity on his side. In a way, I’d attached an anchor around my neck, one that could well drag me to the depths of the ocean if I slipped. For although he swore loyalty to me, if ever he decided he wanted rid of me, I doubted I’d be able to dissuade him. The bastard would keep coming back. And yet, he became damn good at what he did. Decades of practice became centuries, throughout it all, thick and thin, we were there for each other. In a way, he started as a partner, he became the first of the cadre of killers I set up, the earliest incarnation of the Red Claw. There were others, but always I’d figured Job would be there through thick and thin, I sometimes even figured he might outlast me.
I’ll have to credit Levitt, years later he found a way to kill him, something I’d never have guessed at. The assassin in me appreciated what he’d done, even if I wasn’t sure how. Did being rid of Job make me feel more at ease? It was hard to say, I’d lost a peer, as damn close as an equal as I’d ever find. Had I considered him a friend? As close to one as someone like me was going to get, I supposed.
What was the moral to that story? I guess society has expectations of us. When you’re backed into a corner, you do what you need to in order to survive. If your morals get you killed, make you go extinct, then what’s the point of them? My people never harmed anyone, not until me. Sometimes, I wonder if any of them would recognise me, who I’ve become in the time since I last met one.
Briefly, admittedly. A lot of the time, I tried not to care.
I leaned forward in my seat, made a pyramid out of my fingers as I looked across the room, from face to face, part of me wondering whether any of this was a joke or not. “What did he do?”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m being sworn to secrecy, you might as well tell me,” I said. “I’m just curious. What did this Moulton do to make you turn on him?”
“He betrayed us.”
“How?”
“I hardly see that it’s any of your business,” Belladonna said, her face stony. “After all, you’re not being paid to—”
“Talk of payment is going to come,” I replied. “I just want to know. Depending on what a target did, how bad they screwed up, it affects how well they go to ground. Something moderate, sometimes they half-ass it, they want to be found on some level so they can explain themselves. Part of them hopes that they’ll get off. It doesn’t save them, but it’s human nature.”
“And if they did something really bad? The sort of thing you don’t come back from?”
“Good luck finding them. They’ll dig themselves in so deep you’re lucky to smell their shit in the wind. Especially if he’s a magic knight, he’s no doubt got all manner of mundane and mystical protections surrounding him. Just trying to get into his head.”
“He tried to kill someone,” Valentine replied.
“That doesn’t sound so bad,” I said. “Isn’t that kinda what he’s supposed to do?”
“It was Queen Leanna of High Hall.”
Ah. That’d do it. I deliberately kept my face neutral. “I see.”
“Based on our conversations with her emissary, he set about an attack on her city, a full-on revolution by something he called troll-apes and the andah, threw them against the walls in an assault, snuck into her throne room and tried to assassinate her.”
“Wow,” I said, I couldn’t quite hide my disbelief that someone would be so dumb. “That is… Wow. I take it you didn’t tell him to do that.”
“Of course not!” Valentine snapped. “We have no considerations towards High Hall at all, it simply does not interest us. Our priorities have always been the Novisarium. Should Moulton have done what her emissary claimed, we had no knowledge of it.”
“All we know is that he hasn’t been seen since,” Commodore said. “He’s refused to come in for questioning, we’ve been to his apartment and he hasn’t been back.”
“Moulton isn’t a traitor,” Nivendis grumbled. “He was a good knight.”
All ignored him, Valentine fixed his gaze on mine. “So, you see our problem. In order to avoid a political incident, we have a guilty knight and we need him removed. It could spark a war between High Hall and the Shining Council if we don’t prove we had nothing to do with his actions.”
“And killing him is the fastest way to accomplish that?”
“The fae cannot lie,” Windemere said. “Queen Leanna cannot speak an outright untruth.”
“Her mortal knight can though,” Nivendis replied. “I’m sure it’s the only reason that the fae queens have them. Someone to feed bullshit when it’s due.”
“You’d have to be suicidally stupid to make that up,” Commodore said. “For everything Sir Ronald said, I didn’t think him as that.”
“I can kill a magic knight,” I said. “That’s not an issue.”
“That’s not the only thing we require you to do,” Valentine said. “Moulton has in his possession the shadow amulet. There are five knights representing five families, each representing one of the five branches of magic. Each of those amulets can summon their armour, the living embodiment of that power. When you kill him, we want that amulet back in our possession. Lord Nivendis needs to anoint a new knight.”
Nivendis didn’t say anything, simply barked a sound of disapproval.
“Something of that power cannot be let loose in the Novisarium. If it vanishes, we’ll likely never see it again,” Windemere said.
“It’s useless to someone without a strong affinity to shadowmancy,” Belladonna offered. “But if you believe no such person exists in the Novisarium who wouldn’t willingly pay good money for the sort of power, then I question your
judgement.”
“So, kill the knight, retrieve the amulet,” I said. “Gotcha.”
“You won’t be able to remove it while he’s alive,” Valentine remarked. “They’re magically bound to their owner for as long as they live.”
“Right, right,” I said. “So, about payment.”
“What do you desire?”
The fact that they hadn’t named a price set my teeth on edge. It meant they were desperate. In my experience, desperate people aren’t known for playing it straight with you. They’ll do all sorts to wriggle out of the consequences. The fact they were turning on one of their own, someone they had far more reason to be loyal to than they did me, it set warning bells jangling.
For a moment, I considered the practicalities of walking away. I had three gold bars in my pocket, weighing the lining of my jacket down. It wouldn’t be a bad haul for an hour of work, I could quit while I was ahead. It wouldn’t be the worst thing I could do.
Or, I could name some exorbitant price, see how willing they were to take the deal I offered them for my services. “You’ve given me gold for my time. I want fifty bars of equivalent size. Gold. Real gold. No leprechaun shit.” Just to be clear, that has happened before in the Novisarium, not to me or any of mine. People wouldn’t dare. But you need to be clear with them or they’ll start to think they can take liberties and it saves making your point with bullets through the heart. “I also want four of your people.”
“Our people?” Valentine looked bemused. “How come?”
“The Red Claw’s ranks recently took a bit of a hit,” I said. “We lost a number of assassins. I need new ones. I was hoping for a meeting like this, truth be told”
“Is Eric Steele dead?” Belladonna asked.
“No longer on the board,” I said. “The Vigilant took him into custody after an altercation with Paul Levitt—” The name drew blank looks— “and a wizard named Mark Halston.”
“This is someone we are aware of,” Valentine replied. “He’s John de Souca’s apprentice.”
“The only reason I haven’t set about retaliating against him,” I admitted. “I don’t have any desire to make an enemy of de Souca. I’m not that desperate for revenge.” Along with Cameron Cavendish, John de Souca was a sevo of the Vigilant, sevo being the rank bestowed on the pair directly beneath the big boss, the Morningstar himself. I believe the Conclave thought they were doing the right thing when they gave Lucifer the job as the top cop in the Novisarium but thinking something is right and it actually being the best thing are two different scenarios. I largely got the impression de Souca and Cavendish did most of the work, the Morningstar was just someone who showed up when they needed to impress a formidable enemy. Either way, de Souca had the capacity to make my life very difficult indeed and I didn’t need that.
Except, that wasn’t the case anymore, was it? When we’d been hired to kill Loki, Cavendish had countered us by setting Levitt against us to keep the trickster safe. When Loki had died on the steps of the Vigilant, Cavendish had taken the blame and gotten himself a suspension. I’d planned for most things, but not him using Levitt. Cavendish notoriously hated half-breeds and non-humans, it was a change of tactic for him.
“John de Souca is a traitor of the worst kind,” Windemere said, scorn in his voice. “He could have been majestic, one of the finest members of the Shining Council in generations. He is a match for any of us.” As a member of the Vigilant, de Souca had been declared neutral. Anyone who joined had to renounce allegiances to their ruling councils or monarchs. It avoided a conflict of interest.
“Greater than some, perhaps,” Nivendis chuckled through a gravelly voice, coughing as if he had phlegm filling his throat. I got the impression he was quite enjoying the way everyone had started to squirm at the mention of de Souca. “I’m all too aware of my shortcomings. Can all of you say the same?”
“I knew John de Souca as a boy,” Valentine said. “We played together; we were good friends. If only things had been different…” He tailed off, looked wistfully into the distance as if recalling good times.
“I think we all wish things were different sometimes,” I offered.
“What about you, Mister Armitage. What would you be if you hadn’t been an assassin?”
“Dead,” I said simply, determined to kill that line of conversation stone-dead. “So, yes. I need four of your youths, they don’t have to be highly skilled, I doubt you’d give up your good ones. As long as they’re capable, I don’t mind. I know you think magic is useful for more than destruction, but that’s the sort of person I need. I’m not bothered about healing or meditation or talking to trees; I need someone capable of burning someone alive or drowning them from a distance or pulling the air from the lungs of a target.”
“We can’t give you four of our students,” Valentine said simply. “It’s not happening. There is change in the air of the Novisarium, Mister Armitage and we need as many of our people pulling together as we can get in order to survive. Four is not negotiable.”
“Three then.” I hated bartering downwards, but as they say, something is better than nothing. The truth was, I’d have been happy with the gold. If you can get a little extra, well asking never did hurt anyone.
“We’ll give you one,” Valentine said. “Not-negotiable. And you can collect them on completion of the mission, the death of Moulton and the return of the amulet, in addition to your pre-requisite payment.”
“One works,” I said, finding it tough to hide my smile. I love it when people think they’ve gotten one over me. First rule of negotiation. Work out what you’d be happy with and multiply it by three or four times. Always leave them feeling like they’ve won. “Pleasure doing business.”
“Have you heard anything?” Commodore demanded. “There’s something not right in this city these days.”
“This is the Novisarium, Lord Commodore,” I replied. “There’s never been anything entirely right with it. Those like you and me, we’re not welcome anywhere else so we made our home here, they thought we were everything wrong with the world and so they exiled us to here. Maybe they hoped we’d eventually die out.” I shot him a winning smile, banged my fist on the table, was disappointed when none of them gave me a visible reaction. Never play poker with wizards. “I like to think we’ve gone the opposite way, thrived on the adversity. But to answer your question, no. Nothing. Something is going on; I’ll give you that. You read the people, the mood, I think they know something’s coming. There’s been too many strange occurrences of late and that, that’s not good for business.”
“Thank you,” Commodore said quietly. “That was in no way helpful at all.”
“I’ll need Moulton’s address and a list of his known acquaintances. I might even need to interview the knights.” I shot them a look, focused firmly on Ian Nivendis. “I’d definitely like to talk to Lord Nivendis at some point.”
“Any help you need to track him down is at your disposal,” Valentine said, giving Nivendis a hard look. Nivendis gave the impression he considered me on a par with someone who’d run his dog over and then offered to give him a prostate exam.
I love having that effect on people.
Five.
Having spent most of my earlier life as a target, I like to think it gives one a singularly unique advantage when it comes to working in the field. By all definition, once I set my sights on someone, they’re a target. If Moulton had done what they’d told me he had, he knew he was going to be a target. That made it trickier, because he was going to dig in hard, just as I’d told the Shining Council earlier.
In comparison, those who don’t know they’ve had a hit put out on them, it gets easier, pop them in the back of the head with a sniper rifle from a good distance away. It was part of the reason Matthew Black had been so effective. He’d been ex-special forces, some army or another in the world beyond the Novisarium, he’d come here to get away from his demons, he’d found whole new ones when he’d fallen into the clutches of Santiago Vre
ssiere’s Sunlight Court. He’d been made a vampire; worked as an enforcer for the king before I’d made them a recruitment pitch. Black had been exactly the sort of person I’d needed, and in truth, I think he’d been happy to leave the Sunlight Court behind. Sometimes, a person joins a group out of necessity and eventually they find they’ve outgrown them. Black became too big for the Sunlight Court years before he left, even men who’d been vampires for centuries couldn’t match him for savagery or bloodlust. A man like Black, he’d been a professional killer before he lost his soul. When he got turned, it truly took him off the leash, surgically removed what little guilt he’d possibly had before. If you pointed him at a target, they were as good as dead.
He'd not looked like much. Movies always show special forces guys as huge, hulking brutes of men but Black had been more like a panther than a lion, swift and sneaky in his savagery. You never saw him coming, a slightly built guy with balding hair he had a propensity to dye jet-black. It helped he’d been a master sniper, a surgeon with a PSG-1, vampires don’t breathe, they don’t need to piss or shit, can go a while without feeding if they need to, sometimes they don’t even need to move. Now, imagine how convenient that is for someone with a rifle laid in wait for a target. I knew for a fact he’d once waited the best part of eighty hours for someone, put a round through their skull from eight hundred metres and then gotten away scot-free.
Black was dead now. I’d need someone like him again, as tricky as that was apt to be. We’re always going to miss what we’ve had; all we can do is look forward to what’s coming.
“Mister Armitage.”
Commodore beckoned to me, inclined his head towards one of the doors in the corridor. Our business had concluded, I needed my chat with the knights before I left, I’d meet with Nivendis later. Even now I had a folder under my arm with everything they had on Moulton, including a photo of him. I’d seen the scars on his ears and winced, he looked normal otherwise, pale blond hair with even paler skin. Those eyes unnerved me, though I didn’t know why.