From his hiding place beside the main building, Albanos could see that most of the students had filtered onward to their nefarious destinations now, leaving the yard clear and the dorm, hopefully, relatively empty. Their absence was a pretty good indication it was finally time to get moving. The fact that he was down to his last cigarette was an even better one. He'd been traveling so hard he hadn't had time to roll new ones.

He pulled the envelope Hagglit had handed him out and, making sure the area was clear, struck a match against the wall. In its brief light, he rummaged through the various papers inside until he came across a small scrap with a number written on it. This he stared at for a few seconds before muttering a stream of words well short of kindness on the subject of Portnoy Hagglit.

It was his old room, from when he'd been a student. Assassins were very much against change.

At the very least, he knew exactly how to break into it. There wasn't a student on this campus, at least not one with a hope of passing (or surviving, as those concepts so often directly intersected), who did not know how to sneak into and out of their rooms without a monitor or faculty member seeing them. Because there was, inexplicably enough, a curfew; given the schedule of this particular school, this consisted of a period of four hours, straddling the two hours on either side of dawn, when everyone was expected to try and get at least some sleep.

Most students wondered why they even bothered with a curfew at all, being in a school full of people specifically trained for the nightlife, for stealth and obfuscation. The faculty knew the rule was a surefire way to make sure the students practiced their skills outside of class. It is common knowledge that nothing will get a teenager to do something faster than telling them they are not to do it, under any circumstances. If you were caught after curfew, you weren't being reprimanded because you were out late, you were being reprimanded because you were careless.

It wasn't as though Kelsai was a booming metropolis offering countless opportunities for debaucherous fun. Primarily, it offered The Staggering Shadow, a tavern nearly as old as the school itself, run by an ancient family of former thieves who knew that, while they did remarkable business around the dawn hours, they were better off having never actually "seen" any of their customers. It may well have been the only place in the world where you could be a regular and a first-time patron, all at the same time, trapped in your own alcohol-soaked paradox

All these memories came flooding back as Albanos stalked toward the male dorm. Men and women were housed in separate buildings across the yard from one another at the Academy. It wasn't for prudish reasons, and it hadn't even been that way in the beginning, which is when the incidents occurred. Early headmasters discovered the hard way that it wasn't a good idea to force young women who were highly skilled with sharp implements to share a privy and a living space with the mobile rubbish heaps that were young men on their own for the first time. It had taken years for the male population to recover fully.

He came at last to the far back corner of the male residence, where his old room was located, two floors up. Feeling around the brickwork of the corner, he found exactly what he'd been looking for. Old hand and footholds, cut subtly to look like normal wear and tear on the plaster, maintained by students farther back than anyone could remember. Repair the facade as much as they want, the groundskeepers could never keep these little nooks and crannies out of the architecture for very long.

Albanos scurried up as quickly and quietly as possible, did a half-swing, half-leap over to what he knew to be his windowsill, slid the window open, and ducked inside. He found himself once again trying not to focus on how all this had been a little easier when he was young, and definitely not paying any attention to the fact that he was slightly winded.

He remained crouched on the floor at the foot of the window for a moment, staring at the carpet that, regrettably, also hadn't changed since last he'd set foot on it. His mind was telling itself he was simply awash in memories, while his body insisted it was catching its breath, but whatever helped him sleep at night. It was then that he noticed the hairs on the back of his neck were standing, and instincts that had gone far beyond second nature were firing.

Without taking the time to look, knowing it was time he didn't have, he brought his hand up and caught his assailant by the wrist as the arm came down toward him. With its movement arrested, he noticed, in his odd way, that the dagger it held was very pretty, especially up close like this, where you could see all the fine engravings.

Once he'd finished admiring the craftsmanship, he pulled backward hard, angling the knife over one shoulder, kicking his legs out low to the ground at the same time. Very few people ever pull unknown persons with knives closer to them, so the move caught his attacker off guard and, more importantly, off balance.

Legs made contact with legs, removing the aggressor's anchor points, which combined with Albanos' backward momentum to send the unknown party sailing a few inches overhead. The figure's skull hit the wall beneath the window hard enough to dent the plaster. A stream of expletives at the explosion of pain and disorientation was quickly replaced by a concerned yelp, when they found a rather angry assassin kneeling on their back, knees pinning their arms to the ground, a bicep wrapped around their neck so tightly that they couldn't find the space to breathe, much less explore the more colorful parts of their vocabulary.

"Normally I'd snap your neck and be done with it, but I've had a very long day and I'm in a bit of a reflective mood concerning my life choices. Not that you care at the moment I'm sure. Still, it's your lucky night, so we're going to have a sensible, perhaps a bit one-sided, and potentially very brief discussion."

The body beneath him went limp. Albanos couldn't tell if this was acknowledgment or unconsciousness until he heard a faint, sniffling whimper.

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"I'm going to loosen my grip on your throat Together, we're going to work through how you knew I was here, who the hell you are, and why you're trying to kill me. Your level of cooperation will determine where we go from there. I'll give you five words to start with. Make them convincing."

Albanos' arm loosened ever so slightly, and a trembling male voice squeaked out, "You're not who I thoughtGRAAK!" The grip on his throat tensed once more.

"I was told this room was empty for the summer. Mind telling me who you were actually looking to kill then? We'll say...ten words."

"I wasn't gonna kill no one! I was meeting myAAGGH!"

"See, now I feel we're making some progress. You were expecting someone, but they were supposed to come in through the door, probably with a coded knock. Standard. This made my appearance via the window a bit suspicious. Since you're using an abandoned room in an academy student dorm, I can only assume that whatever's happening shouldn't be happening. You felt you needed to deal with me to avoid trouble. Sensible of you, although I'd have picked a better location to begin with.

"Unless...unless this has something to do with a student in the building, but they're strictly off limits to outside violence, a subject near and dear to my own heart, so in fifteen words, please tell me--"

"I'M A STUDENT!" the prone figure managed to exclaim in a harsh, gurgling rasp.

Of all the possible scenarios and explanations that had been playing through Albanos' mind, hard-wired into a permanently paranoid state by decades of being on the lam, this simplest of answers had not been one of them.

Every academy student loved creeping about. It was literally in the curriculum. But creeping was generally something that happened outside where you lived. A male student sneaking into an abandoned room in the male dorm was a bit like a chef sneaking into his own pantry. Even if someone did catch them, no one would care, and where was the satisfaction in mischief that annoyed no one? If anything, they'd scold them for a lack of ambition. It certainly wasn't anything worth taking a knife over.

"Alright. You've still got twelve words, and the first three just confused me even more." Muscle relaxed, to a greater degree this time, allowing the lungs to take their fill of air once more.

"Waiting for a girl. Thought you were her boyfriend." Albanos could hear the young man count under his breath for a second. "He's an ass."

Now it all made perfect sense. Of course! Anytime you catch a teenage boy in the act of doing something incredibly stupid, such as charging at strange men with knives, you can almost be certain that love is involved somehow. He should have known.

"I believe we have established by now that, while I may be AN ass, I'm not THE ass you're looking for. In any sense of the word."

Being sure to pry the dagger out of the boy's hand first, Albanos rolled off of his back and quickly stalked over to the writing desk pushed against one wall. Normally he wouldn't turn away from someone so recently considered a combatant, but he was now distinctly of the opinion that the only dangers present anymore were acne and poor hygiene. Shoving the dagger into the wood on one end of the desk's surface, Albanos hopped up next to it, taking out his crossbow and putting it on his lap -- partly out of caution, but mostly because he liked the effect it tended to have on people.

"What's your name, unknown assailant?" he inquired, fumbling around inside one of the desk drawers until he found the spare candles they always left lying around for the cleaning staff.

The young man, who had still been on his stomach, rubbing his head from the impact and admiring the dent in the wall, finally rolled over to appraise his unexpected guest through the concussed fog in his mind. His gaze fell to the crossbow, glistening black and smooth curves made all the more menacing in the dancing shadows of the candlelight as it flared into being. He quickly crab-shuffled back into the farthest corner from it...

You became intimately familiar with crossbows in this school, including entire labs devoted to studying the effects of a bolt both as it goes into, and occasionally comes out of, a human being. The killing was not to be taken lightly. It was your profession, and you were expected to take pride in your work, to know exactly what you were doing to your victim to make it as painless as possible. Killing was necessary. To the Wolves, that didn't mean you had to be uncivil about it. Jugulars and vital bits were key. Less pain for them, less energy expended for you, more resources to put towards your escape.

This was not a normal crossbow.

Even in the dim light, he could make out extra bits on it. Parts that weren't standard design, but parts he recognized, nonetheless. Parts that he'd seen in classroom diagrams, bearing labels like "bolt storage" and "repeater lever." Parts that his memory frantically suggested made it a good idea to ask the question that was trying to claw its way through a deep morass of panic to the front of his mind.

"Willam, sir. Um...s-sir...are you...er...that is...I mean...are you...gods, are you who I think you are?"

He couldn't see the man's face under the hood, but in his mind, possessed of a very active imagination even with a potential skull fracture, he was dripping saliva, a tic under one eye, nostrils flaring, smelling his fear, waiting for an excuse to kill him. Willam wasn't sure if asking his name was reason enough. He suspected it might be.

In fact, Albanos was smiling. He smiled a great deal more than people gave him credit for. Given his particular line of work and his reputation, he found it advantageous that everyone imagined him as a sneering, frothing demon. Ironically, it was, in truth, infinitely more disconcerting to watch a smiling man kill seven bodyguards in as many seconds.

"Probably."

Willam closed his eyes and waited for death.