NEKROS: Husband To Ruin

The Assassin's Anatomy

They came on the fifth night, each arrival spaced roughly two hours apart, which meant either three separate contractors who hadn't coordinated, or one employer smart enough to send them in waves so that the failure of the first wouldn't warn the others off.

I had been expecting them since the ceremony. The signed contract had gone to Kalephis with Petros three days ago, by now Varek knew the poison hadn't worked and the touch hadn't killed me. He would have sent birds, the birds would have reached other interested parties. Three factions with three separate reasons to want me dead meant a minimum of three separate responses, and those responses had legs and blades, and had just arrived at the edge of the dead ground.

I was in the library when the first one came through the tower door.

He was Church, I could tell by the way he moved — that specific combination of physical discipline and absolute moral certainty that the Ekklesia Apokryfa trained into their operatives from youth. 

They moved like men who believed their cause excused the method, which made them precise but also made them rigid. 

He came up the stairs quietly, I waited at the top of the first landing with the lamp turned down and Moira's toxin-reference volume open in my hands, which is to say I was standing in the dark holding a very heavy book.

When he reached the landing I hit him with the book across the back of the skull. He went down, I caught him before he hit the stairs, and dragged him to the room on the second landing and tied him to the chair with the curtain cords.

Then I went back to the library and waited for the second one.

The second was Kaleth, also Church-trained but differently — the Imperial military's close-combat school, which prioritized speed over silence. 

He came through the window on the third landing, which was a choice that told me he had scouted the tower in daylight and identified the window as the least observed entry point. Good intelligence work. Wrong conclusion, because the least observed entry point was only least observed from outside.

I was already in the third landing when he came through.

"Varek," I said, before he had his footing.

He spun blades out, saw me standing four feet away with my hands visible and empty.

"You're not fighting," he said.

"Neither are you, if you're thinking clearly." I kept my voice level. "You're Kaleth military, which means you answer to a chain of command, which means you file reports, which means someone above you knows where you are tonight."

He said nothing, watching me.

"Here is your situation," I said. "There is a Church operative tied to a chair one floor below us who will confirm, when he wakes up, that I am currently winning this evening. There is a third contractor I haven't identified yet who is presumably somewhere in the tower, and you are standing in the home of the Plague Weaver who, to my knowledge, has not yet decided to go to sleep."

"What I'm offering," I said, "is the door. Take it, go back to Kalephis. Tell whoever sent you that the tower was empty, the contract is invalid, I was already dead when you arrived. I don't care what you tell them but you leave now, and you leave the Church man's weapon behind so I have something to work with when I question him."

The Kaleth man looked at me for a long moment, then he set the blade on the floor and went back through the window.

I picked up the blade and went looking for the third one.

The third was the problem. He was Sarreth, Elpida's organization, which meant someone had decided that this was the moment to test whether their investment in me was worth maintaining or whether removing me now was the cleaner play.

He was in the ground floor entrance room when I found him. Going through my coat, which I had left on the chair by the door. He had Varek's letter in his hand — the copy I had made before burning the original, the one I had placed in the coat pocket because I expected exactly this.

The copy had one difference from the original.

A single extra line at the bottom, in my handwriting, that said: If you are reading this then you are the third one tonight and you are going to put that letter down and sit in the chair and answer my questions or I am going to wake the woman who lives in this tower and explain to her why a Sarreth operative has broken into her home.

He read it, set the letter down and sat in the chair.

I leaned against the wall across from him and crossed my arms.

"Who authorized this?" I said.

"I'm not going to tell you that."

"Then tell me this — does Elpida know you're here?"

He said nothing.

"Unauthorized," I said. "Someone inside Sarreth who doesn't agree with the current strategy, someone who thinks removing me now is safer than letting the prophecy continue."

"You're going to do something for me," I said. "You're going to go back to whoever sent you and you're going to tell them that Elpida's asset is aware of the internal disagreement and that if another unauthorized contractor arrives at this tower, I will send documentation of the disagreement to every faction currently invested in this situation, which will create a problem for your organization significantly larger than I am." I paused. "Do you understand?"

He left.

I locked the door after him and went back upstairs to the Church operative, who was awake now and abviously not pleased about the curtain cords.

His name was Dexios. He told me that within ten minutes, which meant he had a threshold and we had reached it.

"Dexios," I said, sitting across from him. "I'm going to ask you one question and I want a specific answer. Not a theological position, not a Church statement. A specific, factual answer."

"I won't betray the Ekklesia," he said, his voice was steadier than I had expected.

"I'm not asking you to, I'm asking how many more they're sending."

He looked at me.

"After tonight?" I said. "When you don't report back, how many more will they send before they try something different?"

There was a long noment of silence, "Two more waves," he said finally. "If all three waves fail they escalate to divine sanction."

"They'd go to the Pantheon directly."

"To Phthoros specifically." He looked at me steadily. "Phthoros created her, if he decides to revoke her instead…."

"He can't," I said. "The transformation is irreversible at this stage, that's in Moira's own notes in the third volume on the library's east wall." I stood. "But I appreciate the timeline. That's useful."

He stared at me. "You read her notes."

"She let me into the library."

"She let you into the library," he said again.

"Third landing, three rooms. Extraordinary collection." I untied his left hand, keeping the dominant right bound. "You can free yourself from here, it'll take you twenty minutes. That gives me time to write down what you told me before you're mobile again."

I left him to it.

The sun was coming up by the time I finished writing, coming through the library window and moving across the reading table in a slow line.

I heard her before I saw her, she moved almost silently in the tower. It was the quality of the air that changed when she entered a room, that shift in the hemlock-and-sweet scent that had become, over five days, something I identified without thinking about it.

She stood in the library doorway, looked at the notes in front of me, at the Kaleth blade on the corner of the table. At the curtain cords coiled next to it.

"Three," she said.

"Church, Kaleth, and an unauthorized Sarreth operative."

"You handled them."

"One's still in the tower, he'll be free in about ten more minutes."

She was quiet. Looking at the table, at the evidence of a night's work laid out with the same organization she used in her own workroom — everything in its place, nothing wasted.

"You could have woken me," she said.

"I know."

"Why didn't you?"

"Because waking you would have meant three dead men and a diplomatic incident that would have voided the contract under the Eidyn clause on hostile acts during cohabitation. I needed them removed, not killed." I set down the pen. "Also because you were asleep and you're not sleeping enough as it is."

"You noticed that."

"You work until the third hour most nights and you're back at the bench by the sixth. That's not enough, even for someone who doesn't need sleep the way mortals do."

She looked at me for a long moment. 

"No one," she said, and her voice had gone very precise, "has monitored my sleep in four hundred years."

"I'm not monitoring it," I said. "I'm noting it, there's a difference."

"Is there?"

"Monitoring implies I intend to do something about it. Noting implies I think you're capable of making your own decisions once you have the information."

She was still looking at me, then she moved to the shelf, pulled a volume, set it on the table in front of me without explanation. It was a text I hadn't reached yet — older than the ones she'd given me on the first day, the script so archaic it was barely recognizable as the same language.

"The missing conversion mechanism detail," she said. "The part you won't find in the other five volumes because I removed it from circulation myself two hundred years ago." She turned to leave, then stopped.

"The Kaleth blade," she said. "Keep it, you'll need something with more reach than a penknife if a second wave comes."

She left.

I looked at the volume she had placed in front of me. She had removed that text from circulation herself two centuries ago. Which meant she had been protecting it — protecting the information about what she was, what could be done with that information, who could use it against her.

And she had just handed it to me.

I opened the volume carefully, and I began to read.

Outside, somewhere below, I heard the tower door open and close as Dexios finally freed himself and left.

And somewhere behind me, at the bottom of the stairs, I heard Moira pause.

Standing at the foot of the stairs in her own tower, pausing, for no reason I could name except the one I was not yet ready to name out loud.

Then she walked away.