much too quickly. The steward may bring the lord his tea any minute, so I have no time to waste, no time even to attempt a poisoning instead of using my knife. Everything could still go wrong at this point, but the deed will only take a split second. And if I can’t make it out of the room before it’s discovered, I’ve planned several potential hiding places.
Now that it’s time for my job, I start counting again in my head.
One, two, three.
I oil the hinges and latch before I even attempt to open the door. I focus my mind on my actions, on the curved, gold-plated handle, the carved frame, the faint whiff of lilac and candle wax.
Four, five—
The door creaks when I open it.
My heart flies to my throat. If I hadn’t frozen so completely in the shadow of the doorway, I’d have stared flabbergasted at those hinges. They weren’t supposed to make a sound. For a split second, I consider the possibility of magic, of the lord hiring a spellcaster to make a warning bell of this door, but immediately I brush it away. There are better ways of accomplishing that feat. Besides, am I so unwilling to shoulder the blame that I’d foist it off on something as rare as a spellcaster?
No, I’m not being careful enough. I’ve allowed myself to be rattled. I’m losing my sense of control over this job, which is never supposed to happen.
Briefly, I cast a look behind me. No matter how I search the darkness, there’s not a sign of another human being. Why am I so off-kilter tonight? I’ve learned not to doubt my intuition, so why is my intuition saying that there is another person in this hallway with me when there clearly isn’t?
Six, seven, eight.
A wave of dizziness forces me to pause. I don’t want to move. I want to stay here; wait until I’m discovered, arrested, killed. Wait until I’ve sabotaged my own plan and there’s no hope that this job will get accomplished.
It’s a foolish hope. Utterly ridiculous to entertain the notion.
I need to pull myself together. My mind flits back to what I used to recite to myself, only a few years ago, when I was fifteen and sent on jobs like this. I’m a killer. I don’t care about my victims.
It didn’t take me long to realize that, for some lies, it doesn’t matter how often I say them. I can’t keep my gut from reacting, from immediately insisting on the truth.
So, I developed my rules and techniques for assassination. Jabir may be able to force me to kill, but he can’t tell me how to kill. And I know for a fact that of all the assassins here in Risya, capital city of Arbasa, I give the swiftest, most painless death.
It is my way.
My first rule of assassination is that it must be dignified. My victim is dead; there is no need to humiliate him too. Second, it must be swift. I do not kill with average weapons or random poisons from the bazaar. I kill with my knife, Separator, and with kizmiba extract. Third, they must not be afraid. I refuse to suffocate; there is far too much panic and pain involved. My goal is never to torment, and never to allow for the spiking of a heart rate. Far worse than death itself is the fear of death. But worst of all—the fear of the breath just before death. That moment you realize the end has come, and now you must lose everything you’ve spent your life gaining.
I spare my victims that fear. That moment. And though I never try to reason away the blood on my hands, sometimes I think to myself that the death I deal my victims is far better than any natural causes awaiting them.
Eleven. Twelve.
I can’t close the door without making a sound, so I leave it open and slink through the bookshelves toward the back of the library, where I know Lord Kishon manages his estate at this late hour.
“Steward? Is that you?” a sleepy, gravelly voice calls into the stillness.
I bite back a curse. He heard the door. And he won’t hear my footsteps or the clatter of porcelain on a tray.
Thirteen.
There’s no choice left if I’m to spare him his fear.
I break into a silent run and rip my knife from its sheath. Since I’m still hidden by bookshelves, the lord doesn’t see the blade catching the light. In less than a second, I’m behind him, his face in his hands as he stares between parted fingers at the accounts before him. He looks nearly asleep, his graying beard trailing on the desk as if it’s taking every bit of strength to keep his eyes open.
“Perfect timing on the tea,” he says groggily.
I swallow. Fourteen.
The entire world goes sticky with warmth before my eyes.
And then I’m sitting cross-legged on my bed. My toe catches in a hole on the patchwork quilt. I blow a lock of dark hair out of my face, using the back of my wrist to shove a particularly stubborn strand away. My hands move rhythmically, counting the strokes as I sharpen my knives.
Fifteen, sixteen.
By now, my hands know exactly what to do. I don’t need to think or feel. I merely exist, listening dully to the shing of my blades.
Seventeen.
“Master! I’ve come with your tea!”
The blackness clears, and I am no longer blind. Candlelight flickers on the desk, just like it had been mere seconds ago, but now blood pools around its base, seeping into parchments and dried ink, staining wood and the robes of the corpse.
Eighteen, nineteen, twenty.
I wipe my blade on my own garments, never on the garments of my victims. Numbly, my fingers move of their own accord, and I feel like I’m slogging through syrup as I watch myself sheathe my blade and withdraw a note from my cloak to prop against the candle.
I’m oddly calm, even though my brain can’t think. If Eshe asked me my name right now, I couldn’t answer. It’s like I am the corpse. That’s my blood dripping onto the floor. Over in a flash, without even a blink of fear or realization that the end had come.
Twenty-one.
My limbs are moving, and I’m climbing the nearby bookshelves and laying myself flat atop them in the second it takes for the steward to round the corner and drop his tray in a shattering of boiling tea and porcelain.
When a scream pierces the air, I almost think it’s mine. I wish it were. I hear scuffling footsteps, frantic panting, and I close my eyes as I hear him pick up the note. His voice is gravelly as he reads it aloud:
“I am sorry.”
A dead silence follows. My own words, written on that note, echo up into the dome of the library roof.
Then, “Murad! Guards! Lord Kishon has been murdered! The Mourner has struck!”
I close my eyes, keep myself from rubbing my hands together, wishing I had a bowl of water to wash them. But I’m wearing gloves, a hood that covers my face. Hardly an inch of flesh is exposed anywhere on my body—there’s no blood on my skin.
Armor clanks as the clamor of guards grows to a crescendo. I stay atop my bookshelf, wanting to believe I’m too numb to care if they find me; when in truth, the numbness is wearing off, and I can barely contain my own gasps of terror.
No one said we were heroes.
No, indeed.
Thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two.
Eventually, I’ll have to get up, leave my hiding place and slink away. My heart shudders in my chest, despite my contingency plan. I know the risks and the pieces at play, but this was definitely my least favorite outcome.
Above the din, above the shouting and clattering armor, I hear a new pair of footsteps run into the room, and I try to force away the flashing visions of dozens of faces, long enough to think clearly, to note the moment I can escape.
“The vault!” comes a panting gasp. “Someone’s broken into it!”
“What?”
The faces finally vanish, and I’m staring up at a domed ceiling with shadows dancing across gold-trimmed plaster. Everything inside me narrows to those voices below me, and the fog dissipates into clarity.
No.
They shouldn’t know already that Eshe broke into the vault. They shouldn’t . . . They should be smart enough to send someone there first, to ensure it is still intact, and then potentially paranoid enough to search its locked depths, but they shouldn’t already know something was missing.
Unless . . .
What did I tell her? I’m up in a flash, crouching on top of the bookshelf and looking out at the guards crawling below.
“He’s very warm. The killer might still be nearby.”
“We found her upstairs by the vault!” someone shouted. “We found the killer!”
Adrenaline surges frantically through my body. Keeping track of every pair of guards searching the room, I move swiftly from one shelf to the next like a creeping spider that now actually wants to murder someone.
Eshe.
I told her! I told her exactly what to do if this happened, if she ran out of time. If she’d followed the plan, she wouldn’t have gotten caught. But now . . .
Now I must enact my final contingency, which involves a dizzying number of uncertain variables. At least they’re less likely to discover me if they believe Eshe to be the murderer.
I perch atop the shelf closest to the door, keeping my body low, and try to listen over the commotion to what might be waiting for me in the hallway, since I’ve already eliminated the window as an escape route.
Though I’m beginning to wonder if a few streetlights might be preferred to a hallway of guards. Risk, risk, risk. Everywhere I turn, I see a thousand different ways I could get caught, and then my life will be over. Sometimes I wish it would be. But then I remember the sight of criminals impaled on stakes, mounted on the city walls, and I’m so sick I’m afraid I might vomit and doom myself right there.
Jabir had scoffed at my insistence that one of my contingency plans involve a rescue, should worst come to worst. I allowed the tiniest voice in my head to say, “I told you so.” Eshe might know me better than anyone else, but I also knew her better than anyone else.
Where Eshe is, trouble follows.
Why didn’t she go to the hiding place I’d told her? The shadows of the roof by that window would have concealed her—I’d made sure of it when scouting.
Thirty-nine. Forty.
I drop to the floor soundlessly, my neck and back prickling. I whip my head around, glancing toward the deepest shadows of the library, but no one has spotted me yet.
I slip out of the door, dodge beneath the shadows of a decorative long table, and fold myself tiny as another guard hurries past. The moment he’s gone, I start moving, heading in the direction I know not to go.
Jabir’s scratchy, grating voice rings in my head, telling me that I’m only going back for the artifact. I clench my jaw and give my head a quick shake. Just like Jabir can’t tell me how to kill someone, he can’t make me not plan and enact a rescue for my friend.
I move in the shadows, and my breath catches every time a guard steps close, every time I fear I’ve been spotted. But though I might have lost my cool the moment I stepped into that washroom, my muscles know what to do. I let instinct guide me, the specifics of the plan for Eshe’s rescue running through my brain.
My heartbeat pounds faster than the counting. Nearly twice as fast.
Forty-four, forty-five.
How did everything manage to go so wretchedly?
Typically, I hide in the deepest, darkest shadows. But tonight, something about the very darkest corners in this low-ceilinged servants’ hallway makes my skin crawl.
A hand clamps hard around mine.
I’d scream if I hadn’t had that knee-jerk reaction beaten out of me by Jabir. Instead, I’m wrenching blades from my bicep sheaths, and plunging them toward my attacker.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” a chipper voice replies, easily dodging my knife.
My legs turn to water at the sound of her voice, and I nearly collapse. “Eshe?” I gasp, glancing back over my shoulder to ensure we’re still alone. “Sultan’s beard! Didn’t they catch you?”
A flash of white teeth, and then we’re all but running together, silently, with me leading back toward the washroom. It should still be as safe an exit as before, though I suppose we won’t be sure until we get there.
“They did catch me,” she says around pants. “Or, at least, they thought they caught me. You didn’t actually believe I’d be unable to get myself out?”
“I heard them say they’d caught you!”
“Just because you freeze when things go wrong doesn’t mean I do,” she replies.
“Did you get it?”
“Pfft. Of course!”
We reach the washroom, and I refuse to let myself search out that tiny pair of cloth shoes. I won’t think about it. I won’t. Instead, we barrel toward the window, and I slip back into my outdoor shoes as we swing out. In less time than it takes to spit out a date pit, the shutter is back on its hinges and we’re escaping into the night.
Sixty.
I stop counting.
“That’s a lot of shouting,” Eshe says, glancing back at the dozens of torches held in the hands of more guards as they pore over the grounds. She fishes something out of her cloak and holds up a golden egg. Rubies and emeralds stud its surface, with a fat, glittering diamond at its middle. It’s smaller than my fist. “Pretty, isn’t it?” She grins.
I raise an eyebrow, purse my lips, and then we’re disappearing into the dark city like ink into sand, taking the path through the bazaar.
I still feel like eyes are following me.
