For all but forty students of the Kelsai Academy, the next day passed uneventfully, or at least as uneventfully as expected. There were a few minor arguments over bunk assignments, but none of the ensuing knife wounds were severe. After the unpacking was finished, everyone began wandering around the halls, looking for their friends or rivals from previous years. This resulted in only a dozen trips to the infirmary, much to the dismay of most of the faculty, who had bet the over.
Even the most pessimistic teachers noticed that everyone seemed a little more cautious this year, a little more respectful of their elders, and less willing to draw attention to themselves. As far as the staff could figure, this was all a result of having been given their welcome-back address by what may as well have been the boogie-man. The students had endured years of people using Albanos as an empty threat, and suddenly, he was the man who had to sign off on all their disciplinary forms. He had no way of knowing it, but his popularity among the faculty grew with every minute that they didn't have to break up the traditional back-to-school riots.
However, this increased awareness of the consequences could still not save the "Welcome Back Students" banner. At daybreak of the students' first full day at the school, Mr. Billicks was found gagged and tied to a tree, the banner having been wrapped around them both so tightly that his feet were suspended a few inches off the ground. While the custodial staff that made the discovery agreed that he should be untied immediately, they also decided that he could undo his own gag, giving them time to run before the lecturing could begin.
For the forty students who had been called into the principal's office, the first night held no such familiar comforts. Or sleep. While Albanos had promised them that failing simply meant that they wouldn't be admitted to the class, old habits died hard, and more than one student pictured themselves chained to a wall with their incomplete test pinned to their forehead.
Most had picked out good positions in the library and had fortified there, trying desperately to remember the exact wording of the questions and digging through the history books for any kind of precedence for this sort of thing. Others, who had been too nervous to pay attention and couldn't remember the questions, had simply marched down to the Staggering Shadow to ensure they spent the last few hours of their lives drunk and happy.
All those who intended to try and turn their papers in were mapping out entry and exit strategies, mending their best camouflage suits, sharpening their weapons, and writing long letters to people back home for the academy to ship with their belongings. Optimism was not a trait that ranked high among thieves and assassins.
Albanos, on the other hand, spent most of his day wandering through the halls, humming happily to himself and feeling as nearly in control of his situation as he had in a long time. There was some work to do in preparing his room for the night's festivities when the students and their papers would start surreptitiously arriving, but the looks on their faces would make the effort worth it. With these preparations finished well before dusk, he slipped down to the kitchen to get some good, home-cooked food, half-heartedly trying to charm the serving girls the entire time in hopes of an extra helping. The novelty of meals that did not consist of hard tack and meat he’d killed himself had not yet worn off.
The day slowly faded to night, and when the last traces of twilight had vanished, Albanos quietly slipped back into his office. He lit nothing that would give away his presence, felt around to ensure all his earlier work was still in place, and took up his vigil in the corner of the room farthest from the door.
There, he waited.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Burnston Willis, fourth-year thief student and elite class nominee, checked the knot around the gargoyle for the eleventh time. It wasn't that he lacked faith in his ability to do something as trivial as prepare a good rappelling rope – he'd done that a hundred times while at the academy. What he lacked at the moment was the ability to convince himself that this was anything but a terrible idea.
The plan itself was simple. He felt that Albanos was the kind of man who liked to make things far more difficult than they needed to be but who would also never turn down the opportunity to mess with a person’s mind. Therefore, it stood to reason that he would certainly not be in his office since that was exactly where he wanted the students to think he would be. Oh no, Burnston was on to him.
He was convinced that the mad principal would be stalking the halls of the main building, trying to make good on the "I must not catch you sneaking around" portion of the agreement. And he'd probably catch all the students who went that way, too, the poor things. But Burnston Willis was prepared for this. He'd studied the facade of the building, noted that one of the decoratively menacing gargoyles was directly above the window to the office, and had decided to take full advantage of that fact. A sturdy length of rope, one good rappel, and he'd be in. The windows of this place were flimsy, drafty, wood-framed, cheap, and easy to replace. It was a cost-cutting necessity in a school constantly teaching its students the finer points of breaking and entering and encouraging them to practice. Burnston didn't imagine that crashing through one could hurt much at all.
Once through, he would be at liberty to place his paper on the desk and then leave at his leisure. Albanos had said nothing about having to get away without being caught. On paper, it had been the perfect plan. Now that he was standing on the roof with the rope around his waist, the torches of Kelsai village glittering in the darkness away down the hill, looking a lot smaller than he'd expected, something was nagging at him. As talented as Burnston Willis knew he was, some part of him couldn't help but wonder at how easy this had been.
"Oh well," he muttered, backing towards the edge. "Too late to turn back now."
After a few short hops down the side of the building, he felt the office had to be about the proper distance below him. He took a few deep breaths to brace himself, then kicked off the wall hard, feeding out the rope until his feet came directly towards the window. In the brief second between lining up his body and impact, he was pleased to see it was dark inside, as he knew it would be. His feet hit, glass and wood shattering explosively in testament to their poor craftsmanship, as he knew they would. Then, amid the sparkling shards flying in every direction in the moonlight, he saw the metal bar wedged vertically into the middle of the window, from the sill to the top, directly behind the glass.
In the kind of slow-motion revelation that only genuine dread can cause, he noticed that his feet had gone around it, one on either side.
The sensitive bits of Burnston Willis hit the bar with a dull thud, managing to shift it slightly despite how snugly it fit into the frame. He hung there for a second, eyes rolling back into his head, opening and closing his mouth but only managing to make tiny, half-hearted squeaking sounds. From somewhere in the room's darkness, a voice announced that this wasn't what the instructions had intended for him to do at all. Then he fell, watching as a merciful blade cut his rappelling rope before it could become taut and snap his spine in half.
He landed on a pile of mattresses and cushions, carefully positioned behind the bushes directly below the office window, which, he vaguely noted through the haze of pain and nausea, had not been there this morning.
Above him, Albanos made a tally mark on a sheet of paper and continued waiting.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Things continued this way throughout the hours leading to the midnight deadline, with each scream, thud, or stream of obscenities becoming another tally mark.
One student, ignoring the crumpled forms lying in various stages of recovery around the pile of cushions, decided to try setting a rope-and-grapnel hook into the office window's outer sill to climb up. The hook hit its desired target, but with the first pull to make sure it was secure, the stone it had set into came loose entirely, hitting the student on the head and knocking him unconscious.
The next student to come along, also with a rope-and-grapnel, decided that all the prone bodies lying around her simply must not have done it right. Her hook set where it was supposed to, and her stone stayed put, but about halfway up, she began to notice glints of metal in the moonlight. On closer inspection, she found thin blades pushed into the seams between the bricks of the building. She had enough time to realize they were far enough out to catch hold of her rope. She was even close to becoming seriously concerned about what a climbing rope's slight, natural back-and-forth motion would do against numerous sharp objects like these. She didn't quite get there, though, because one of the dozens of now badly frayed places above her chose that moment to snap, and she joined her comrades in a heap on the ground.
Yet another student, wary of the inherent weakness of trusting something as easily defeated as a piece of rope, chose a different approach. He broke into a room adjacent to the main office, climbed out of its window, and began to work his way across the face of the building to Albanos's room via hand and footholds in the wall. Much to his surprise, he found that the grips halfway across had been covered with a foul-smelling, oily substance. The shock of this discovery, the sudden loss of traction, and the general nausea at the odor found him shouting and plummeting earthward toward an appointment with another conveniently placed pile of cushions.
And again, somewhere above, there was a chuckle and another tally mark.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“Oh gods, Elayna, we should really turn back. This is not going to work, and no one likes a literalist.”
The voice was Willam’s, quivering even more than usual. He and Elayna were picking their way carefully down the dark hallway that led straight to Albanos’s office door.
“Hush, Willam,” she scolded. “I’m telling you, this is what he had in mind. We went over this. And of course he likes literalists. He’s practically their king.”
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While Elayna’s caution was rooted in her natural air of confidence, Willam was fully expecting a shadow to drop from the roof at any moment and…well, he wasn’t sure what would follow after that. His mind had presented him with a full range of options, though, from being fatally stabbed to being tagged and told they were It. It was always so difficult to predict what a lunatic would do.
After the meeting in the office, he and Elayna had gone their separate ways to avoid suspicion from anyone who might go back and report to Bruno. They met back up an hour later in the library to put their heads together for the exam. Bruno and his crew avoided the library like the plague, so they were usually safe there, entrenched among the stacks with the fearsome librarian guarding the entrance. There, they had filled out their questionnaires, being sure to use sufficiently different wording so as not to have Albanos give them “Poison Immunity Through Exposure” for third period. Afterward, Elayna filled Willam in on her plan to turn in their papers. Once he’d stopped hyperventilating, he agreed to come along, more because he couldn’t take the thought of trying to infiltrate the office on his own than anything else.
And now here they were, standing in front of the office door, straining to hear any noise that would give them a clue as to the whereabouts of Albanos. Then, with her heart racing a little despite itself and Willam clinging to her like a drowning man, she boldly raised her hand…
And knocked on the door.
Willam felt the silence that followed the knocks echoing down the hall had a sepulchral feel and lasted for a small eternity before the door swung silently open. There was a shape standing in the doorway, somehow darker than the blackness around it. He was sure it was sneering at them as much as a shadow could.
“Yes?”
Elayna stepped forward without hesitation. “Hello Mr. K’hras! We’ve come by to drop off our papers.”
“Have you now?”
“Yes, sir! It’s an hour before midnight, so we’re still on time, and you haven’t caught us sneaking around, as instructed. We’re standing here and telling you we’ve brought our papers by. Would you like us to hand them to you, or should we stick with the original plan and put them on your desk?”
“And why should I accept them at all? What makes you think this is how I wanted this done?”
“Well, I think the general idea was that you should never over-complicate things or make them any harder than they should be. Our jobs are generally difficult enough as they are without reading too much into our assignments and contracts. There’s no reason to get fancy. You find the most intelligent and efficient way to carry out your orders to the letter, and that’s that. And we’ve done that. So I don’t see how you could hold it against us. Willam helped me develop this theory, by the way, before you even ask why you shouldn’t take my paper and not his.”
After a few moments more of grave silence, a hand emerged from the darkness and took the papers Elayna was offering.
“Nicely done, you two. I will grade them tomorrow and let you know my decision before the end of the day.”
“Thank you. Wait, Mr. K’hras!” Elayna exclaimed as the shape turned and the door began to close.
“Ye gods, girl, what is it?”
Her eyes flickered to the room behind him for a second, but before he could pursue it any further, she offered a quick nevermind and hurried off, Willam in tow. He watched them go, wondering again how such an odd couple ended up together, then stepped back into his office. Shutting the door, he turned to see if he could figure out what Elayna was looking for.
He first noticed that the metal bar from the window was gone. The next thing that caught his eye was that the office wardrobe was now open. And there, on his desk, was a paper stuck to the surface with a black-handled dagger, still wobbling back and forth slightly. He checked the name on the top. It was Lillith’s.
Cursing himself steadily for letting his hunger in the early evening make him careless, he considered who the paper was from and decided to search the wardrobe for any nasty surprises she might have left for him. After all, it’s what he would have done. All he could find was a note pinned to the inside of the door, which simply read, “You’re slipping in your old age.”
Albanos chuckled. “So true, so true,” he muttered, putting the note into a drawer for posterity. He liked Lillith’s spirit more and more, even if she would not hesitate to separate his own from his body. He wandered over to the window to see if she could be spotted, even though he knew there was no chance of that happening.
There was a figure standing in the middle of the courtyard, though. It was holding something odd-looking, which he could not reconcile in the darkness.
“Fire in the hole!” a distant voice called out. There was a flash powder burst from whatever the mystery person was carrying. Then, an ominously crescendoing hum.
Albanos hit the floor just as something zipped over his head, careened off the roof with enough force to ricochet from the wall to the floor, and then back off the roof before finally coming to rest on his desk, smoking only slightly. He pulled his crossbow out and, when there didn’t seem to be any more projectiles headed his way, slung it over the windowsill, raising his head only enough to see if he could get a good bead on whoever was attacking. The courtyard was empty, save for a small patch of blackened grass where the figure stood.
Crawling over to his desk, still unwilling to present anyone with a standing target, Albanos examined whatever the thing that had nearly taken his head off had been. If he didn’t know any better, it seemed to be a now badly damaged scroll case. There was a cap on one end, which he carefully removed, pointing away from himself. There were no further explosions. Albanos tipped the case forward, causing four rolled-up and slightly singed pieces of parchment to slide out and uncurl. He pulled the topmost sheet toward him, which proudly declared, in some of the most flowery writing he’d ever seen:
This message delivered to you by:
Michael Sartan’s Amazing High-Powered Message Delivery System
For all your moderate-range message delivery needs!
(final design pending)
He recognized the name as one of the second-year assassin students, and sure enough, the remaining three sheets of paper were his test – on his desk, before midnight, with no sneaking around required. It was, in all technicality, a fair cop. And while Albanos had not explicitly said you were not allowed to explosively decapitate him in the process, he still made a note to have a word with the boy about what in all the gods’ names had just happened and what this delivery system of his consisted of.
But right now, he’d had far more excitement than he’d planned on having tonight. He put Lillith, Elayna, Willam, and Michael’s tests into a pile, made four checkmarks on his tally sheet, then resumed his quiet stakeout in the corner, hoping that everyone else from this point on would find far more mundane ways to pass or fail.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Willam and Elayna emerged from the front entrance to the main building, elated that the plan had worked and that they were officially candidates for the elite class – Elayna perhaps a little more elated than Willam.
“Come on, Elayna. We’ve got to get to the Staggering Shadow to celebrate,” said Willam, always happy to have a reason to head into town. All concerns about Bruno were washed away in a flood of adrenaline.
“Not just yet. Let’s just wait here for a second, okay?” Elayna seemed to be looking around for something down here, too, making Willam even more curious about what had happened at the end of their encounter upstairs.
“Elayna, what were you going to ask Albanos? I mean, what was with that little outburst up there?”
“Indeed,” came a female voice from the shadows off to one side of the entry arch. “What was with that little outburst? That was the best you could come up with? ‘Hey, wait…nevermind?’”
Elayna visibly bristled at this. “Well, I expected you to work faster than you did. You were supposed to be well and truly gone before he even took the papers from me.”
Lillith stepped out into the moonlight, grinning her odd little grin and causing Willam to shrink away reflexively.
“I do apologize for that, I suppose. The daft bastard had wedged a metal rod into the middle of the damn window. I wasn’t sure I’d ever get it clear without him hearing it. It took all the hinge oil I had left. Besides, sitting in his wardrobe for several hours would make anyone a bit addled. I don’t know the last time they fumigated that thing or, gods forbid, washed the robes of office.”
“Yes, well…it’s over now at least. Now, for our little agreement?”
“Payment due for diversion services rendered. Although I should dock you some for being so unimaginative. But that wouldn’t quite be fair, and we can’t have dishonor among thieves and killers, now can we?”
Lillith handed a cloth pouch to Elayna, which made a hefty clink when it changed hands, and then stalked off without another word. Elayna opened the bag and counted the gold within to make sure it was all there. Willam eventually remembered to begin blinking again.
“You…you made a deal…with her?!”
“Why not? She’s loaded, we needed celebration money, and her pride’s too big to admit to Albanos that even she cannot sneak past him on a level field or to ever get caught trying. Seemed like a good deal to me.”
“But she’s practically—“
“What, like him? Honestly, Willam, you’ve got to stop being so hung up on that man. Come on. I’ll buy you a round or three for putting you through all this and use the spare gold to buy everyone a few hush rounds so Bruno won’t find out we were down there together. You’ll have forgotten all about it soon enough. I’d say around the fifth pint or so.”