Albanos watched the man’s face pale at that thought as he finally stepped out of the shadows to take up a perch on the corner of Hagglit's scarred mahogany desk. Looking him up and down, Albanos was amazed at how rude time had been in his absence.
Rationally, he knew Portnoy Hagglit to be in his early 60s, though he seemed to have acquired an extra decade or two somewhere along the way. He had been the principal of the Wolf Academy in Kelsai for going on 20 years now, and a junior instructor in the days when Albanos had been a student himself, some 10 years before that. Hagglit was the kind of man who, while a good study and reasonable hand at the technical aspects of the job, never had the heart to professionally stop the beating of others'.
He also had an overly-developed sense of possession to ever make a proper thief. So it was that he had just kind of lingered around after graduation until someone had offered him a job, and he’d never looked back. He was a born administrator, red tape being the only thing he was truly proficient at severing. No one knew why he’d studied here, to begin with. No one was even certain if he had ever actually killed anyone, a deeply ironic situation for someone of his position. He was still around though, which did say something about his survival instincts.
Two decades on as the headmaster of a school full of people learning to steal everything up to and including your life had indeed taken its toll. The puffy gray circles around his eyes spoke to too many sleepless nights and too many strange ailments, any of which may have been the insidious attrition of over a thousand poisons in circulation. The paunch around his midsection told of many hearty dinner portions that being a senior faculty member earned you, equally deadly for more delicious reasons.
It had all teamed up to rob him of any lithe, killing machine physicality he may have ever had to his name. He’d developed a ponderous gut and some well-defined jowl lines. His overall complexion was pale, even for a man who lived by a schedule that entirely excluded the sun if it could be helped. And his hands shook slightly, whenever he held things. Albanos had tried not to focus on that as he’d watched him eat his breakfast.
“Look, I’ve come quite a long way, I’m tired, and this place makes me nervous, all things considered. If you would be so kind as to let me know what this is all about, I’d appreciate it.” Albanos brought the letter back out from his cloak and dropped it on the desk.
Hagglit’s smile suddenly assumed a genuine quality, which unnerved the assassin more than any fake expression he’d ever seen him wear. And there had been many.
“I felt we had some things to discuss, and that face-to-face would be the only proper way to discuss them. All things considered.”
Albanos could feel the ages-old rage and bitterness stirring again. He’d fought hard to get over the incident that had driven the wedge between him, Hagglit, and the rest of the underworld for that matter, and had largely succeeded, to the point where sometimes he could go an entire night now without the terrors. But the speed with which Portnoy Hagglit moved to bring the charges that banished him from the good graces of the Academies had never set right. It wasn’t as if he had meant for--
He quickly shook his head, as if trying to forcibly fling the thoughts from his mind. If he let himself go back to that time and that place while standing in the presence of this man, he’d end up with even more blood on his hands. Instead, he just invited him to continue his story by way of a menacing and impatient scowl.
“I’ve had you put back on the registers," Hagglit intoned with rehearsed nonchalance.
Albanos fell off the desk, quickly standing back up and trying to look as dignified as possible, like a cat caught slipping off a railing.
“Excuse me?”
“I’ve had you put back on the Academy register. Effective immediately, your banishment has ended, and all outstanding bounties on your head--” he paused to pull an entire bound volume, nearly a foot thick, from a drawer in his desk, sliding it near the stunned assassin, "--are lifted.”
Staring at the book as though it might explode at any moment, Albanos tried to process what had just happened. Absentmindedly, he extricated yet another cigarette from his bottomless cloak pockets, lighting it on one of Hagglit’s candles. The principal feigned a few demure coughs before he’d even exhaled once.
“I’d really rather you not do that in—“ His protest was cut short by a throwing dagger slamming into the back of his chair, a hair's width left of his head, embedding itself nearly an inch into the wood and decapitating a few unfortunate split ends.
“I’m thinking. I smoke when I think. No smoking, no thinking. Trust me, you want me to think long and hard about what I do next.”
“The dagger seems highly ungrateful considering the news I’ve just given you.”
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“It didn’t hit you, did it?"
After a thoughtful moment, Hagglit nodded in concession.
"Besides, wasn't it you that gave me news of a very different, and wholly opposite manner, 15 years back? Seems like we're simply even now. You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t quite know how to handle that prospect anymore.”
“There’s a condition if it makes you feel any better.”
The old assassin exhaled in scant relief. “Oddly enough, it does. It’s when you’re being generous that I get nervous.”
Hagglit stood with some effort and wandered over to stare out the window, leaving his back fully exposed to Albanos, an act which, in its pure symbolic recklessness, put the assassin a little off his guard. The figure by the window’s shoulders slumped. His hair was a lot grayer than he remembered. He looked immensely burdened. And so very, very old.
“We’re not getting any younger, Al,” Hagglit began, the words landing as close to his company's thoughts as the dagger had to his ear moments earlier. “Me, in particular. I’m tired, I ache all the time, and I haven’t been outside Kelsai, I mean really outside, in nearly 40 years. I don’t have the energy or the stamina to keep up with these kids anymore. So I’m retiring. And I am leaving the Academy in your charge.”
Albanos caught the cigarette en route to the ground after it fell out of his slackened jaw. He was getting damnably tired of surprises.
“I don’t want the Academy. How many of your people have I shuffled off this mortal coil? I feel like a lust for my blood is likely a prerequisite for admission by now. That, and the…the memories, you know.” He thought he saw the slightest of flinches, a barely perceptible shift in the silhouette on the edge of the candlelight. “Besides, I’ve got some life left in me. I belong out in the field.”
The back of Hagglit's head shook slowly.
“You turn this down, you come back out of the register, and the hunt begins anew. And while you are not getting any younger, the people coming after you are. You can’t hold them off forever, and you don’t want to die like that. Not just another disgraced assassin slain and forgotten in the wilderness, carrion for the birds, a pile of bear scat. You’re too good for that. You know it, and…and I suppose I know it.”
Hagglit turned away from the window and came around his desk to stand directly in front of Albanos. Well within dagger’s reach. The thought did, indeed, cross his mind, but something about the man’s demeanor dripped of helplessness, a resigned quality that would have taken all the fun out of it.
“Besides, it’s catching up to you. I know all about your last job. I have eyes everywhere too, you know. Your safe houses haven't seen you in six months. Your network of sympathizers is actually beginning to wonder if you've killed yourself, the only person who ever truly could. I know how that poor man's life ended, his final breaths spent as a mauled, writhing, slashed-up pulp, no?"
Hagglit advanced a step into the already narrow space between them, uncharacteristically bold, never breaking eye contact but making no move for a weapon.
"Let me guess, you’re having problems steadying your hands, right? You thought you could control it. Nerves, not age, couldn’t be age, right? Thought that the cigarettes would calm you enough, same as always?"
Despite himself, Albanos subtly, gently slipped his hands into the folds of his cloak.
"Then the time came, one clean strike, quick and painless...but the blade slipped. An inch too far to the right, maybe, and now he's got a punctured lung instead of a severed artery. Now he's gurgling and spewing blood and trying to scream but just painting the walls with spatters and gobbets. How many times did you have to stab him, before that noise stopped? Seven? Eight? Do you still hear him, choking on his own blood when you sleep?”
Albanos felt his concealed fists clenching, edging toward the knives in his belt, but still, he couldn’t do it. Because he wasn't wrong. And he wasn't lying. His last job had been a disgrace. One of the perks to being an assassin, or a good one at any rate, was you rarely had to look your victims in the eyes. Apart from the surprisingly high pressure the contents of the human neck were under, it was clean, by murderous standards. Downright merciful, compared to the hands that so many people in the world were dealt.
Last time had not been clean, or merciful. Last time, he had been an intern at an abattoir. And he hadn’t been able to go back since.
“When you reach my age," Hagglit continued, "which is not as far off as you would like, you will finally see how pointless these grudges really are. I hope you will, at least. I feel that I may have wronged you, but I still can’t quite bring myself to believe it was not deserved or to apologize. Instead, I beg you. Please, take this offer. Get back in good with people, and give yourself the chance to die warm and safe in your own bed of old age and contentment, as so few of us do.
"You know she would have wanted this for you.”