Day 429 4:40 PM
“I love mankind, he said, "but I find to my amazement that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man in particular.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky
I was a kid when I first watched Gel Mibson in Bravehearth. The most beloved movie in Scottish history has a scene in which Gel pops up in the middle of a castle, in a noble’s bedroom and bashes the old backstabber’s head with a flail, or some other noble contraption using a ball on a chain in a similar fashion for identical purpose.
I always wondered how realistic that scene was. How difficult is it to enter a high noble’s bedroom? Can you really bash their head just like that?
The dead king laying before me, his face purple, his tongue sticking out, seems to say that Bravehearth scene was realistic, possible, and overly dramatic. No guards are rushing in, there’s no galloping on a huge-ass horse through the castle, nor throwing the poor beast to its death.
Nobody heard me snap the bastard’s neck, aiming not to kill, but to paralyze. Then I took my time strangling him. My whole situation still feels surreal. The night was too young when I found my hiding place, it wasn’t even midnight yet. So I decided to check out the inner wall.
It was manned properly, but there were obvious gaps, ones I tested. Then I found myself inside, and one thing led to another and the king is dead, and now I really need to think my next steps through.
The window stays open wide. They will certainly bring bloodhowlers, and they will track my scent, so I have to obscure it.
I light the lamp and quietly search the room until I find just the thing I was looking for. Two dozen bottles of perfume, enough to drench the room a dozen times over. I keep looking until I find something even better.
This can’t be what I think it is! A grin escapes me, as I stare at a box of this world’s cocaine. There must be two pounds in here.
I hate bloodhowlers, and dousing the room in drugs and perfume is gonna make their day’s sniffing memorable for everyone. It wouldn’t work if they had my scent, but catching it in a room that smells of several perfumes with psychoactive drugs added on the side should make me undetectable. Naturally, they will sniff my scent at the base of the tower, but that should buy me extra time, or even make my plan a complete success.
I can hardly suppress my giddy grin as I get to work. There’s still some hours before daybreak, and before all hell breaks loose.
First order of business, I devour the late-night snack of cured meats, fine cheeses and crisp, fresh vegetables, which waited for the king in case he grew peckish. With my belly full, I tie the first perfume bottle to the end of a poker, and then splash its contents around the room, starting from the door, and trying my best not to get any perfume on me. I spill six bottles to drench the room. Could have done it with less, but I had enough to waste. I climb up the wardrobe and into the thick wooden beams, splashing the last perfume-free patch of rug.
Next up is peppering everything with coke. I spread a solid pound around, like a drug-dealing Tickle Bell, and all that’s left is for me to wait. Dawn arrives, and ages into an early morning, then just morning.
Manny and I are up and running with a hundred things to do by this time, but nobody’s interrupting the king’s rest. Not even a soft knock on the door to check whether he is alive, which they really should have done, since he isn’t.
Finally, there’s movement, three bloody hours after dawn.
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“Sire,” a dry, aged voice says beyond the door after a gentle, almost timid, knock. “You have a war meeting in fifteen minutes.”
A long minute of silence follows.
“Sire?”
To nobody’s surprise, the dead king remains quiet, and the old man opens the door. The hinges are well oiled, and the first thing I can see from my vantage point is a bald patch surrounded by gray. King’s advisor wears brown and blue, indicating he’s not a servant, but a noble with a house of his own.
He covers his mouth with his sleeve and freezes.
“Sire?” He can tell something is wrong, and metal creaks as the guards behind him shift their weight.
“Follow me,” he says, and walks towards the bed, the guards clad in full plate armor clanking behind him.
“Sire,” the old man repeats for some reason. It should be bloody obvious something’s wrong with his sire.
The three men slow down. I can’t see their faces, but I’m guessing it’s the puffs of white dust they raise with each step that drew their attention.
Finally, they reach the king. The old man gasps and one of the guards drops his halberd, sending a slightly bigger white could from the fluffy carpet.
“The king is dead!”
“Seal the castle!”
The chaos I have been anticipating finally hits. The old man shouts for a physician, while the guards call for a sweep of the garden, immediately spotting the wide-open window I left to act as the red herring.
It takes almost no time before the doc arrives. The man keeps wiping his forehead, looking at a purple corpse, several hours dead. He takes the king’s pulse and checks his breathing before finally confirming that Garacia’s former monarch is in fact no longer living.
While the doctor is drinking what he describes as heart medicine, but I’m positive it’s distilled honeyfire, the kennel master brings over the bloodhowlers. The disgusting, oversized rats start sniffing around the room, and after several seconds they start howling excitedly, startling the doc as the man leaves the room.
“They found something,” the fat man holding their chain says before the rats go berserk. Two of the beasts pounce on their unsuspecting handler, while two others start fighting. The fifth and final one frees itself and starts humping the bedside table.
After a moment of terrified confusion, the guards attack the bloodhowlers, but they are too late to save the fatty. His blood sprays the carpet as he lies on his back. His terrified, darting gaze passes over me several times, but it does not linger, and in his trashing he lifts an even bigger white cloud.
A dozen more guards storm the room, slaying the beasts, save for the final one, which moved from humping the nightstand to humping the bed itself, drawing awfully close to the dead king. The confusion persists for a moment, but then a soldier realizes a giant rat might defile the body of his sovereign.
His halberd tears into the bloodhowler’s back, severing the spine. The beast thrashes, turning its head and biting the halberd’s shaft, but the other guards hack at it, killing it in an instant.
“What the hell?” A guard screams, but nobody can give him a proper response. Meanwhile, the airborne coke should be making its way into their bloodstream.
They were exposed to trace amounts, but hopefully enough to impede their judgment. Fifteen royal guards may seem like a small number, but if the psychoactive substance hits them just right, they might try to select a king from among their number.
I would love it if they did something so intrinsically Roman, but I don’t have my hopes up. The rest of the day passes more or less the way I expected it. Bloodhowlers howl outside the window, picking up my scent and leading the guards on a wild goose chase towards the slums from which I had arrived, hollering all the while.
Four guards carry the king out of the bedroom, and then servants arrive to clean the chamber. They take out the sheets, covers, and the carpets before spending hours scrubbing the floors. Other than the dying kennel master, nobody bothered to look up and check the beams I’m hiding in.
I can hear the castle has become a hive of activity, but even with my enhanced hearing, there’s little I can catch so far away from where the talks and deals are happening. Hopefully, the competent king, Corvein VII, has exterminated or imprisoned anyone threatening his rule, and there should be a suspicious lack of king candidates, save for Corvein’s brothers and children. His children should be rather young, and I can hope he had killed his brothers, assuming he had any.
With nothing left to do, I allow myself to nap atop a thick beam, keeping an ear out for anything interesting.
Nothing catches my attention until the evening. The bloodhowlers should have found my trail all the way to the outer wall, but there’s little the guards can do if the assassin had escaped from the besieged city.
At least, I hope that’s the logical deduction they had made with the clues I have left behind. Whatever, as the darkness descends, it is time for me to move again. Time to kill several important people and decapitate the country before I retreat from the castle, my mission hopefully a success.