Juri was a devious man indeed. Just for the morning assembly, he had come prepared with a deadly contact poison which had nearly killed the wounded. Haso could only thank the divine for the foresight of the former Anzabos member. Without the antidote she had administered to everyone who had gone hand-to-hand with the traitor, the entire trainee squad might have been wiped out. She recognized the symptoms and administered the antidote to the remaining wounded before the symptoms became dangerous, but still many of the group who had rushed in to engage the traitor initially were showing symptoms which would leave them useless.

Unfortunately, the poison was potent, and the antidote had symptoms of its own, as Jazirqe had warned. Those who had taken her antidote would live, she promised, but they were effectively out of commission for the next day or two. A day which they would spend shitting their guts out and rolling around in agony as their guts rebelled against them. But it was better than a slow death by suffocation, which appeared to have been the alternative.

Haso hadn’t realized that Juri was a poisoner. Another misjudgment about the man. Haso had figured that the older cultivator was simply a muscle-head who was being recruited to knock skulls together. The idea that it was all an act, an act that he had failed to see through … he was troubled. But the Whisperers would not make an accusation of treachery lightly.

Five remained of the original fourteen, including Jazirqe and Haso himself. The cautious ones who had stood back and allowed their fellows to rush in by ones and twos, each eager for the credit of taking the traitor down. The fools had all been defeated easily and had barely served to slow Juri down. Only those cautious enough to observe the target before engaging remained to team up with. Fortunately, those trainees were also the best of the lot.

“How are we going to capture him,” Siella asked as they jogged along, trusting Ghaso to keep them on the traitor’s trail.

“We’re going to kill him, obviously,” Littin said. “We don’t have much other choice, do we? We can’t win in a straight up fight unless we go in with the intention of killing him. He’s stronger than the rest of us, only Jaz and Haso are past the first Reformation here and he’s past the third.”

“Jazirqe is past the second, not the first,” Siella objected. “She does well against him in sparring.”

“That’s because it was sparring and not fighting,” Jazirqe said calmly. “It was always about the exercise, not winning, when we went up against each other. I can’t win against him any more than the rest of you can.”

“What about your poisons?” Haso asked. “We won’t need to beat him into submission if we can win just by scratching his skin.”

“I have a few things,” Jazirqe admitted. “Here, stop a minute and I’ll coat some daggers with bomues. A scratch will slow him down, and each dose after that will slow him down more. It will give us an edge, but it takes time to enter the bloodstream.”

The hunting party stopped and gathered around Jazirqe as she withdrew a bottle from one of the pouches on her jerkin. She motioned for Haso to give her one of his daggers, which he did, and carefully coated the blade using a cloth to distribute the poison evenly.

Then she jabbed it into Haso’s thigh.

“Sorry about this,” Jazirqe said, throwing a flask at a stone on the ground. The clay broke and the contents immediately burst into flame, giving off a violet smoke. She fought her way away from the others while holding her breath, and by the time they realized that the fumes were poisonous it was too late, and all four of them were paralyzed on the ground. Lingering on the edge of the smoke for a moment, Jaz quietly waited for it to dissipate while the others cursed her for a traitor.

“Never bunch up around a poison expert,” she said simply.

“We trusted you,” Siella shouted.

“Traitor!” Litten accused.

“Idiots, I’m saving your lives,” Jazirqe answered with equanimity. “Now, look, I’m going to give all of you the same thing I gave the others. You’ll be miserable for a day and unable to fight, but you’ll live. When the paralysis wears off, you should see to Haso’s leg.”

“Why’d you stab me and not the others?” Haso asked.

“Because you’re the only real threat,” Jaz answered simply. She made the rounds as she spoke, pouring a little bit of liquid from the canteen she had used to mix her ‘antidote.’ Haso cursed himself for his foolishness. “I suppose I could have stabbed Ghaso instead, since you needed him to track Juri down. But having you go toe-to-toe with Juri while the others supported you makes you the biggest danger to actually killing him.”

“Juri isn’t a traitor, is he?” Haso said, the realization coming to him in a flash. “You are.”

“Correct on both accounts, congratulations,” Jazirqe replied. “And you were going to kill Juri just because someone fucking told you to. Idiots.”

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

“You framed him! I don’t know how, what you did to make the elders suspect him, but they’ll figure it out and--”

“You should have stopped while you were ahead,” Jaz said, pouring a bit of the ‘antidote’ into his mouth as it was his turn. “I don’t have to explain myself to you. I don’t have to explain myself to anyone. I’ve completed my mission. I’ll see you back at the village.”

Haso cursed but could do nothing, even as the others managed to move again. Whatever had been in the smoke was short-acting, then. The poison in his wound kept him immobilized for longer, even as the third poison in his bloodstream activated, triggering extreme gastrointestinal distress. The others ran off into the forrest to relieve themselves. Haso was incapable of doing the same.

And so for the first time since he was a very small child, Haso shat his pants.

~~~~~~~~~~

“You should write a book. Jazirqe Anzabos’s guide to making friends and earning trust. You’d have quite the following,” Qiste teased after Jazirqe had given her report.

“Whatever. You said from the beginning that all of us candidates are rivals, not teammates,” Jaz reminded the instructor. Qiste, a woman appearing in her late middle ages, was calmly spinning wool as they spoke. Only during the mornings did the permanent residents of the village break appearances of being a real village.

“Indeed. Congratulations. If you were simply another recruit, I’d graduate you based upon your performance today, it was extraordinary. Unfortunately --”

“Unfortunately I’m here because my head is one of the most requested commodities in the empire at the moment. Not the rest of my body, just the head,” Jaz said with a sigh. “I know. I’m here because nowhere else is safe.”

“That, and there’s also the fact that you have a lifetime of bad habits that you’re still getting over,” Qiste agreed. “There are other safe houses we can stash you. Places we control, where we could keep you protected until your appearance has changed enough for you to return to work.”

“I’ll never be up to your standards, will I?”

“Don’t fret, nobody is, even me,” Qiste said calmly. “The moment you say ‘okay, that’s good enough,’ is the moment you stop improving and begin stagnating. Stagnation means complacency, and complacency means failure, or death, or failure and death. Graduation simply means that you’re ready to begin learning in the field, rather than a safe environment such as the village.”

“Safe? One of us died today,” Jazirqe reminded the instructor.

“I know. And when they find out that it was because they had been fed false intel, how many lives do you think it will save in the future?” Qiste challenged. “Tricking a spy organization into killing their allies is basic counterintelligence. That’s one of the reasons why the Anzabos’ sacrifice was necessary. We needed to allow the guilty to implicate themselves. Your clan’s willingness to play traitor was necessary in order for the purge to happen properly.”

“What?” Jazirqe asked, dumbfounded. “Willingness? What are you--”

“Oh, it was several generations back now,” Qiste explained, waving it away. “We encouraged them to take on the role that they did. That is one of the reasons we were so lenient to those who were acting only upon their loyalty to the family, for it was us who set their ancestor’s on the path they walked. Unfortunately the role of the double agent is a narrow one, and many of your relatives knowingly stepped off of it for the sake of coin and an easy life. We knew it would happen. It had to happen, as if we did not have a few to hang then the entire clan would have been purged by our enemies.”

“Instead you have placed the target entirely upon my back,” Jazirqe realized.

“Indeed. Unfortunate, but it is a role you stepped into willingly.”

“Without knowing all of the details,” Jaz challenged, raising her voice. “You think this doesn’t change things?”

“As I was told, you weren’t asking for details at the time,” Qiste said calmly. “You knew your clan was filled with traitors, and that was good enough for you at the time. That hasn’t changed. If anything, we let a few of your clansmen through the net because we couldn’t prove their guilt.”

Jazirqe considered this new angle based upon her old picture of the events. Would it have changed anything if she’d known her clan had, at one point, been a knowing and willing accomplice in exposing the traitors of the empire? That her ancestors had chosen to sacrifice their descendants for a short term gain? Or had they done it for loyalty to the empire, as she had?

“I need to think on this,” she admitted. “Do you have any records of--”

“The whisperers don’t keep records,” Qiste said. “We just have very long memories.”

“Right,” Jaz said, holding back a curse.

“We gave your ancestors the same promise we gave you, Jazirqe, if that’s what you’re wondering,” the woman said, not looking up from her task. “Their descendants would face disgrace. They would have their property confiscated. They would be ostracized. Any of them that stepped off the narrow path between treason and patriotism would hang. But those who did not knowingly harm the empire for profit? They knew that those would be spared their lives, and allowed to rebuild.”

“But you have only your word that this is true,” Jaz objected.

“If you do not trust my word, then what are you doing here?” Qiste asked. Jaz had no answer to that, so she left, returning to her cottage to maintain her gear before the communal evening meal was served. It would be the last she could enjoy for a while, as she was quite certain that her fellow trainees would attempt retribution, even after they had learned the truth of the day’s events. Ironic, considering that she had likely saved many of their lives.