In whatever corner of the universe all the records both grand and trivial are kept, the entity in charge of documenting uncomfortable silences would, presumably, be in awe. The nearly complete lack of sound in the Kelsai Academy's main conference hall was one of the finest specimens it could ever hope to come across. Even the ambient noise of the day was too sensible to wander in. It was as though someone had muted the whole world, or thrown a weighted blanket over reality's head.

All ten senior staff members currently sat around the big, rectangular oak table that occupied the center of the room. Their eyes kept darting around, trying not to look at one another and most certainly not at the figure occupying the head chair, carving little symbols into the surface with his dagger. The scratching noises his steady defacement of the antique furniture made were very nearly the only noise in the room, accompanied from one of the far corner seats by the pained and labored breathing of a man sporting more than a few bandages. The dark red spotting on some of them suggested that they were fresh. There was also a plaster cast covering his right wrist, on which had been drawn a smiling face, with the name "Albanos" signed underneath it.

"So, Mr. Rodderick...how is your hand feeling?" asked Albanos, not looking up from his carving.

The bandaged figure simply grunted.

"And your ribs?" There was a slightly more forceful grunt, followed by a small whimper of pain.

"You leapt at me, you know. How was I supposed to react? You people have been trying to kill me for a while now.”

The silence closed back in again. This had not gotten off on the right foot at all. He had opened the door to find the senior staff waiting for him, as Portnoy had promised. There had been, to their credit, a few seconds of peace while everyone's brains worked out what they were seeing. Then Rodderick had come at him with a roar, dagger out, eyes burning with murder.

Albanos had since learned, while flipping through the staff files in the drawn-out silence between their arrival in the conference room and Rodderick being brought back up from the medical wing, that the man was the instructor of the class devoted to showing students how to kill him. He took some satisfaction in the fact that even the teacher had failed his ultimate test, but it didn't make the situation any easier to live with now. There were many better ways to introduce yourself into a hostile environment than a non-lethal stabbing and a bone fracture. But at least he had their attention. Signing the cast was just something he'd had to do. The day had been so surreal already, making a contribution of his own seemed appropriate.

He'd also noticed while going through the files, that assassin life spans had been steadily decreasing in recent years. Now, at 50, he had a full 8 years on the second oldest person in the room. Senior staff indeed.

Still not looking up, he stabbed the dagger into the table, where it stuck, wobbling back and forth gently. He heard the noise of several chairs scraping back just a little across the stone floor, as if, say, their occupants had just jumped several inches into the air, their momentum carrying the furniture a smidge on the way down.

Yes, he definitely had their attention. Now it just remained to be seen what he could do with it.

For the moment, this situation was still eliciting a vague fascination from the gathering, a kind of disbelief at the turn things had taken. They were going along with this game for now, their morbid curiosity allowing for nothing else. It wouldn't last, though. A reputation only protected you long enough for the mob to puzzle out the odds of you being able to kill every last one of them. Then it was on to determining acceptable losses, and nothing good ever followed that. You had to use this window of opportunity, while you were still a novelty, to keep the mob confused, continue to fascinate them or take steps to befriend them. He risked a glance at Rodderick, the red splotches continuing to spread on one or two of his bandages.

Confusion or fascination it was, then...

Albanos stood and began to walk, very slowly, around the table, making a point of staying within arm's reach of each chair's occupant. He was fairly confident he could stop any given one of them if they decided they were feeling particularly brave. He was equally confident that none of them were, not after his earlier demonstration. Besides that, the act of giving any assassin a clear view of your back unnerved them enough to make the risk worth it. He was keeping them off balance. Academy graduates of any respectable age had learned the Principle of the Unarmed Man long ago.

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A smiling man without a visible weapon is almost always as dangerous as ten scowling men with swords and shiny armor. When dealing with Albanos, the smile was implied.

No one moved, but they were beginning to watch him now, even Rodderick, though he couldn't quite twist his battered torso well enough to see him at certain angles.

"I know none of you like me, even though none of you have ever laid eyes on me in your life," he began. "I was cast into the wilds before most of you were accepted as masters. My exile began when some of you still believed acting dark and foreboding and throwing around your titles was a good way to pick people up at the pub. You probably even thought that lines like 'Would you like to see my long sword' were incredibly clever."

A few of the men in the group shifted uncomfortably with the memories of many a drink-soaked lap and stinging face.

"So I would ask you, then, why you all hate me when you literally do not even know me. What precisely drives this anger of yours, besides being instructed to possess it?"

Mr. Billicks, dean of the assassin students, immediately spoke up. His tone was even and detached, reading verbatim off a memo stored somewhere within his mind.

"Your actions directly led to the death of a girl under your care. You betrayed your order, disregarded our most important rules and traditions, and disgraced us all. Need we any more reason?"

Albanos halted mid-stride and turned to glare at the man whom he had passed not moments ago. Billicks visibly withered and pressed himself further in to the cushion of his high-backed chair. He furtively cast his gaze in to the corners of the room, as if seeking out who could have said such an insolent thing.

"Well, Mr. Billicks, that was very impressive, although I would expect nothing less at this point. You've had plenty of time to rehearse. But tell me, if you please, who the girl was, and exactly what I did to bring about this unthinkable disgrace to our oh-so-prestigious order."

The man in the chair squirmed. It had been nearly a minute since Albanos had blinked and it was beginning to unnerve him. He felt if those eyes drilled any further, they'd begin pulling the stuffing out of the cushion now threatening to completely envelop his head. Billicks rallied the best he could.

"You...you know quite well what you did!"

"Yes, I do." He began approaching Billicks at a deliberate, methodical pace, each step falling on the emphasized beats of his speech.

"Which is why I've always been confused at how things happened afterward." He was upon him now, hovering over his shoulder, leaning in by slow, agonizing degrees.

"I'm looking for answers, Mr. Billicks. I know what I did. Now I want to know, what you know that I did."

"I don't feel the need to sully this academy by speaking of it openly!"

"Nor should you sully the name of that girl by speaking it, but by all the gods, she was not simply a girl under my care, she had a name, a name they have attempted to scrub from your histories, and I want you to SAY IT!"

Their faces were inches apart now. Billicks, sallow on a normal day, was made paler still by contrast to the violent, flushed red of the man standing over him. Hot breath, stale with bad coffee and cheap tobacco, washed over him with each deep, angry exhalation. Billicks found no response, his mouth opening and closing like a dying fish until his inquisitor straightened and spun on his heel without notice.

"I rather suspect that you do not know." Albanos pinched the bridge of his nose. He'd suspected that this would be the end result anyway, but he'd had to ask, in case the truth had somehow come staggering back home before him. But the details of the incident had been sealed and seemed to have stayed that way. A young Portnoy Hagglit's suggestion to the Council had seen to that.

Out of respect for the dead, is what he had told the elders.

An endless stream of vague half-truths and outright fabrications is what he had told everyone else until all that was left was a muddied, unspecified hatred for his former rival.