The house listed on the form for the messenger he hadn’t recognized was a small hut on the outskirts of the village. Kelsai, like most small towns, looked less like it was carefully laid out and more like someone had just taken a handful of buildings and flung them at the ground as hard as they could. The greatest concentration of them remained around the center, but as you moved away from that area, you’d encounter other structures that seemed almost randomly placed in a splatter pattern.
Even given that, they didn’t get much farther out than the place Albanos found himself standing in front of now. He’d had to ask around about where to find it, having foolishly assumed that a house in the village would have been in the village. That it was given an address at all seemed more an act of pity than anything. Even declaring what street it was on would have taken an estimate of what street it would be closest to if you were to carry it back to Kelsai in a straight line. The dark looks he’d received when asking about its owner gave him the impression that the rest of the village was perfectly fine with the place being as far away from them as possible.
Glancing around the front lawn, he could begin to understand why. Trash and various other forms of refuse stood in drifts around the place, grazed upon by rats large enough that one had to wonder if they were pets. Or paying rent. An odd smell permeated the area, the mingled aromatic symphony of rotting food with a tinge of something more sinister.
The house windows were boarded shut, with additional nails hammered through point-side out to dissuade anyone who might try to squeeze close enough to get a peek. A “Beware of Dog” sign hung on the wall beside the front door at a haphazard angle. Albanos glanced around to make sure fanged death wasn’t bearing down on him. Either the poor thing had run away, or intruders were supposed to mistake the rats for dogs while trying to sneak in during the night, which was a distinct possibility. Regardless, he could only imagine how pleasant the person inside must be, given the effort made at a first impression. He wondered how someone who kept their house in such a state could earn their way into the first-class messenger division. Perhaps because they were fast by necessity after all the running away from angry mobs they’d done in their life.
Albanos picked his way carefully through the miniature landfill and climbed the porch steps to the door. His knocks met with silence. He simply shrugged and got his lock-picking kit out of his belt. The door fit the same paranoid motif as the rest of the house, with five different locks fitted into it. Still, it wouldn’t take long to let himself in and have a look around. This was probably for the best, anyway. Had someone been home, he’d have had to explain himself and try to get his answers the civil way out of some half-hearted obligation to morality. Then, when that inevitably failed, he’d have to spend several hours getting them the hard way. His clothes were too nice to be torturing someone in this morning. Besides, people lied. Their possessions didn’t.
As he leaned against the door and tried to push his torsion wrench into the first lock, the stained slab of wood gave a little, swinging open an inch or two with enough resistance to suggest something was pushed up against it. The new opening was enough to let the rest of the smell he’d been trying to place come rushing out to meet him, happy to be free of the stifling confines of the house. Albanos had stepped back and drawn his dagger before his conscious mind could even finish registering everything. Something was rotting inside, and it wasn’t food. Well, not if you weren’t one of the rats, at least.
Albanos flattened against the wall closest to the hinges and finished pushing the door open. There was still resistance, but not overly much, just enough to make his arm feel a little strain at having to do all the work by itself at this odd angle. Typically, he’d have just put shoulder to wood and been done with it, but he wasn’t willing to give anyone who may still be alive inside something to aim at. From the smell of things, though, whatever had happened here had happened a while ago.
Peering carefully around the door frame, his eyes had no quicker adjusted to the darkness inside before they recognized the shape of a man sprawled face down across the floor a few feet inside the entryway. He occupied the center of a rather large, ruddy patch of dried liquid, and looked about as good as he smelled. The resistance had been the door having to slide one of his outstretched arms along the floor as it opened. The girl at the dispatch office said the place's owner reported home several days ago and hadn’t been heard from since. That seemed about right.
Pulling the top of his shirt over his nose to try and keep his breakfast from escaping, Albanos moved into the house. As far as he was concerned, there were two possible scenarios here. Either this was the messenger he’d been looking for, or this was someone who’d been waiting with malicious intent for that messenger when he got back, and things had not gone according to plan. If that were the case, the guy he was looking for was leagues away by now, panicked at the thought of the dead body in his house and putting all that elite messenger training to good use to run like hell. Either way, it was going to be an inconvenience.
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Albanos knelt over the body, trying not to gag as he shooed a few of the more pioneering rats away to a chorus of impertinent squeaks. To an outside observer it might seem odd for a merchant of death to react so poorly to a decomposing body, but another perk of being an assassin is that most of the bodies you encounter haven’t had time to go south yet. Most of them weren’t even “bodies” before you got there, and if you were still around when they started to stink, something had gone terribly awry. Nevertheless, pulling his gloves tighter around his hands, Albanos checked the man for any clues to his identity. Thankfully, it didn’t take long.
Using his years of assassin experience, Albanos quickly categorized the cause of death as “having his gods-damned throat slit.” With a good, sharp knife, too, in the hands of a professional. It had left a clean cut with no ragged edges or hesitation marks. He hadn’t even had time to struggle from the looks of things. Clutched in one hand was a key ring with five keys on it. After carefully prying it away from the man, a quick test revealed that each key fit one of the locks on the front door. He’d barely finished getting in the house when his unexpected visitor had introduced himself.
Further inspection revealed the insignia of the dispatch office on his breast pocket. This was his man, or what was left of him. What he did not see, however, was an assassin’s mark; the official seals they were required to leave on all legitimate contract kills with the name of the victim on it so the local authorities could confirm with the Academies that everything was in order. And this was done by a skilled assassin, if not a particularly careful one.
Then again, why risk spending extra time around a crime scene, where people can spot you and place you when the guy you just offed isn’t someone who will be missed? The smell wouldn’t bother anyone this far from the village, and the dispatch office had made it abundantly clear just how much they cared about him, sending a complete stranger to let him know he’d been fired.
“It was just not your day, was it?” Albanos asked the corpse, hoping he wouldn’t get an answer. He looked around the house, but there was nothing else of interest to find, no clues as to why this guy had gone to the castle or who’d sent him there to begin with. When he finally couldn’t take the smell any longer, Albanos retreated and sat on one of the porch steps, lighting up a cigarette as he fell into deep thought, as much to drown out the odors as to relax.
The girl at the dispatch office had said something that had bothered him even before his grisly discovery but was legitimately gnawing at him now, like the rats on his friend inside. First-class messengers were only available to himself and his deans. Billicks and Elwhite. And if you couldn’t dispatch them, they wouldn’t give you the request forms to fill out. And if you couldn’t fill out the request forms, you couldn’t forge someone else’s signature, namely his.
Billicks was the one who had the bigger problem with him of the two. Still, he was so stuffy and such a stickler for the rules that this seemed entirely out of character, and if that persona was just an act, it was one he had been holding up for everyone long before Albanos had arrived. A non-contract killing was the sort of thing that would send him into apoplectic lectures for days. But that only left Elwhite, and Albanos couldn’t imagine her lurking in the shadows of a more-or-less innocent man’s house, waiting to install a second smile below his chin the moment he walked through the door. She’d have at least made pleasant conversation first before poisoning his tea.
Of course, assuming that someone went through proper channels to acquire some dispatch forms when you were sitting in a school full of professional thieves might be naive to begin with—his day had just gotten significantly more complicated. He was tempted to return to bed but knew that wouldn’t do. The whole “killing off the witness” thing seemed worth following up on, his mind warning him that nothing that started like this ever ended well.
Albanos snuffed out his cigarette and headed back to campus. It was time for some staff meetings.