The sun was just beginning to dip below the western horizon as Albanos crested the final hill between himself and his destination. His attire and demeanor suggested that this was all well and good, as he had little use for the daylight anyway.
Loose clothing in various shades of dark gray and green revealed itself, as the midnight blue cape wrapped tight around his shoulders parted in the brisk wind of the hilltop. From the recesses of his hood, a brief flare of red could be seen, as he took a deep pull from another cigarette and gazed down into the valley through the wisps of exhaled smoke.
He'd been meaning to quit, but his nerves had been bothering him more lately. He needed them to relax, or so he'd tell himself. Had to try and relax somehow. Had to steady his hand. After all, in his line of work, unsteady hands led to…
His eyes glazed over as a memory forced itself unbidden to the forefront of thought, and his face, haggard and scarred and hardened as it was, flinched at it, as though physically struck. A few seconds passed before he came to the present again with a long, ragged sigh, and another deep draw from his cigarette. His eyes refocused on the tiny village below, its shadows steadily crawling toward him as the sun slipped further into the hills beyond. Old friends coming out to greet him. Mostly, it looked like any one of a thousand hamlets strewn all over the countryside, and why shouldn't it?
They were all founded roughly the same way, these wayward communities. Some poor wandering family or band of settlers came to a river clean enough to drink, spied out some good farmland in the immediate area, beat their leader senseless after he insisted the land over the next set of mountains would be even better, and set up shop. If it weren't for the large, foreboding manor set within an onyx perimeter fence a little way back from the north end of main street, it would have been completely indistinguishable from its innumerable rural counterparts.
This difference was, albeit, a significant one.
The grounds within the fence were quite sizeable. A large, dual-winged, three-story building dominated the center of the yard, the epitome of menacing, gothic design, down to the last gargoyle. Several smaller buildings clustered nearer the walls, trying their best to look grim and evil as well, without as much success. To the casual eye, there seemed to be no activity anywhere within, and even with the approach of night, only one or two lamps lit the windows in any given blackened facade.
The eyes of the traveler on the hill, however, saw a structure nocturnal in its very nature, and it was beginning to stir, very subtly, with the approach of its own rather unique business hours.
As the last arc of the sun slipped below the horizon, the man clad in various shades of night took one last, deep pull, tossed the cigarette butt into the grass, and set off down the hill. His course steered him off to the right, avoiding the village entirely and heading straight for the smooth, black walls of the manor yard. He found himself thinking highly uncharacteristic thoughts about sunsets, and how pretty they were, especially this one, then scolded himself for going soft, if even for a moment. It was not what he needed right now, not in the slightest. Despite the mental scolding, as he drew nearer his goal, his mind slipped one more fervent hope in that this would not be the last sunset he'd ever see.
He pulled a battered letter from somewhere inside his cloak, glanced over it one more time in the dying light, and stuffed it back in to whichever one of his countless pockets from whence it came. With a quick appraisal of the wall, he was on his way in.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
It is a commonly accepted fact that there are very bad people in the world, who spend a great deal of their time and energy doing very bad things, such as politicians, lawyers, clerics, thieves, and assassins. For our purposes, however, we will be focusing on those last two, as stories about any of the former three are not, as a rule, nearly as interesting. What people don't think about very often, at least if they know what's good for them, is how those who genuinely excel in these particular fields managed to get that good at being so very bad.
On the whole, most thieves and would-be assassins in the world are common thugs playing the part. Smashing doors, beating guards to death, taking whatever they want by brute force, or killing people in broad daylight with multiple witnesses, for a measly handful of coin. This manner of behaving and carrying out jobs may be all well and good for two-bit criminals, but there also exists a certain upper-class element to the seedy underbelly of life. Well-to-do types who sometimes find they need the services of someone of substantially more negotiable morals than they, who will not draw a great deal of attention to themselves, or the matter at hand.
Art collectors who find a specific piece they require rather stubbornly held onto by a silly thing like a museum. Rulers who need a rebellion's leader silenced in a freak accident which leaves no room for martyrdom. Ambitious politicians who suspect that their opponents may have seen them the previous night with some inquisitive barnyard animals. One never knows when a situation will arise that a smash and grab (or, in some cases, smash and just keep smashing) simply will not solve. Sometimes, you need someone with a little more skill, precision, and professionalism to handle more delicate matters.
And if anything can be said for the human spirit, it is that it knows a potentially lucrative niche market when it sees it.
Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.
So had been born the Academies, places of study for young, prospective thieves and assassins who wished to be more than their street-thug peers, suppliers of the finest hired "assistants" that wheelbarrows full of money could buy. The first Academy was founded a couple of centuries prior, by an assassin whose name is lost beneath the dusts of time, several thousand feet of ocean, a burlap sack, and several heavy bags of rocks. No good idea goes uncopied, and soon there were hundreds of institutions scattered all over the world.
But the nature of this business is a competitive one, and after years of spirited capitalist and academic rivalries between the schools (which left hundreds dead and many more maimed), five dominant Academies emerged, each with their own distinct schools of thought and training, and each named for the animal whose predatory styles they had most fervently adopted.
Wolf, Adder, Spider, Panther, and Wasp. Their exact philosophies a mystery outside of their students, faculty, and (briefly) their victims, but their distinctive reputations all too familiar to anyone with blood to spill, or money to take.
Each maintained offices in nearly every major city, though typically fronted as some other “legitimate business” venture. It was through these offices that new recruits were selected from the more promising local riffraff, and people with simple “favors” they needed performed could enlist the aid of eager alumni from their registries. The kingdoms knew of these activities, the more astute kings even knew the locations of the Academies themselves, but no one felt particularly inclined to do anything about it.
Petty crime in the civilized centers of the world had dropped significantly since the Academies came around. Many of the thugs who thought they were hard because they ruled their small-picture fiefdoms of dark alleys and city streets discovered during their admission trials, in quite a terminal manner, that they were not quite so untouchable as they would like. Those that did make it through came out feeling as though small-time gigs like mugging and kidnapping were now beneath them. Peasant’s work. There were cartels to plunder and hardened vaults to crack.
Even political corruption – or any kind of smaller corruption which contradicted the greater, ruling corruption of the time -- had been diminished due to the ever present shadow of a trained pool of assassins. The quality of leadership improved overall, for that matter. It was survival of the fittest; the rulers that stayed in power were obviously alert and cunning enough to live through a night. Running a kingdom was no problem after that.
A quiet system of checks and balances had fallen into place, with everyone fully aware that all their enemies could hire an assassin just as easily as they could, and that there was no reason to go and start stirring things up and getting everyone jumping to conclusions. You'd have to be a complete fool to do something like that.
Given the average intelligence and temperament of the families with enough money to afford the service, business was always good.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The principal of the Kelsai School of Assassins and Thieves Under Wolf was in his office, finishing his breakfast and watching the last rays of sunlight fade from the sky. It would be a warm, clear, yet moonless night, a perfect time for exercises. It was a shame most of the students were gone for the summer. He forked the last of his eggs into his mouth and finished his water as twilight died, and all the flickering light that remained came from the blood red candles on his desk.
When the glass hit the warped, stained wood for the final time, one of the shadows in the corner of the room gave a polite cough.
Hagglit froze. You did not last long as the headmaster of this sort of school without taking great care to protect yourself against certain things, shadows being one of them. He was certain he'd never heard the hinge he left purposely dried out in his door creak, nor had any of the meticulously loosened floorboards groaned. For that matter, his door had been locked and barred and he'd been staring out his window. Were it a student, they would have been awarded an immediate highest mark for the year, posthumously mind you. As it was, he'd been expecting something along these lines. Or more accurately, someone.
"How long have you been standing there, Albanos?" he asked the dark corner of the room.
"Several minutes. It seemed rude to interrupt breakfast, though. Especially after you were so gracious as to invite me back after all these years."
Squint as he might, Hagglit still couldn't see anything stirring outside the dim firelight. "I won't even bother asking how you got in, but really man, I told you that you would be safe coming through the front."
"That you did, but I couldn't help but wonder if you'd told the rest of the faculty, the staff, the students, or the janitors for that matter. You've only been teaching them how to kill me for the past…what, 15 years now?"
The principal put on his most innocent 'dealing with a naive child' smile and said, "We do have our little misunderstandings, don't we?"
"Misunderstandings?" Now a dim shape was advancing, detaching from where it had been seamlessly lounging in the corner. It circled, pacing, never straying quite in to the candles’ wan illumination.
"My dear Portnoy, I do believe for 10 of those 15 years, you have had a class outside your normal curriculum for hand-picked elite 4th year students titled 'Albanos Engagement Tactics,' devoted entirely to the many theoretical ways an ambitious young rake looking to make a name for themselves could claim the bounty on my head."
The smile froze on Hagglit's face, even the feigned emotion withdrawing behind a mixture of anger and fear. For one, he hated being called by his first name, but beyond that, the conversation had already taken a turn he had not foreseen, but probably should have. He hated how this man could hijack even the most innocent of topics. You could ask him how the weather was and end up having to defend stealing his friend's milk money on their way to the market when they were six.
"So how is it, would you say, that you know about this class?" Hagglit managed, through slightly gritted teeth.
"It's amazing the kind of information you can gather from a former student who has found out that the gap between theory and practice can be very, very wide in places."