The Eye of Wysaerie

Chapter Nine-Stranger Beasts and Honored Guests

Though Nine Tails liked to kill the messenger, he did not like to kill children, so when a nineteen year old boy arrived with his fee and signed contract, the assassin gave the peasant the run of his manor. Though not as effective as a knife's edge, he would instruct his staff to let Caldur do anything he wished except leave Kelisori, and the boy would be silenced by luxuries too many to be counted. While Nine Tails wished no evil on Caldur, such kind treatment overtipped the indolent lad, who traveled a ten day journey in a month while spilling his pay in beer halls and brothels. But even if Caldur did escape, he wouldn't overtake Nine Tails, whose dogged, relentless ride, changing out exhausted horses at his safe houses, would bring him to Vanoor in four days.

As Nine Tails rode from Kelisori to Vanoor, he contemplated how to make this death special, befitting the extra-ordinariness of the subject. After a spate of mundane victims—faithless lovers, business rivals, and heirs—his murders were so uninspired and workmanlike that he left the bodies unmarked for any faceless killer to take credit. This, more than anything else, said that Nine Tails had succumbed to the malaise of routine, for he despised his Vanoori competition, whether that bumpkin The Green Mask, the artless Dragon's Claw, or the indiscriminate poisoner Little Lolly, whose toxic extracts killed a wedding party to target a bride.

But this Lord Leonidas Andercruik, on the other hand, quickened him, for the risk and the reward were both intoxicatingly large. Ensconced in a manor staffed by hundreds, and enmeshed in foul rumors of razing a village, hosting a murder party and corpse cooking, all the while living in his own rut of extortion, whoring, and pretending sycophancy to the king—this Lord was a dream contract.

As much a theorist of assassination as a practitioner, Nine Tails preferred speculation to execution. Which death in his lethal repertoire would annoy this bully lord the most and leave such a frightful scene as to be worthy of a signature? Though he leaned towards the poetic death of a kitchen accident, or making the Andercruik manor a flaming tomb, he continued to rotate various deaths on his mental rotisserie.

***

When the legendary healer Brynnel Remar founded the hospital three hundred years ago, brothels and gambling halls sprang up, then restaurants and carnival attractions followed to clothe the resultant resort village in the illusion of wholesomeness. Though Duremar was incorporated into Vanoor, it had a distinctly different character composed of two starkly different tourist populations: those who came for a hospital bed, and those who were living it up.

As Duremar was the district most in need of law and order, the city guard steered clear—unless employing the facilities—and the hospital depended on The Brynnelmark, a sect of shield maidens that swore their lives and the holiness of their bodies to the hospital. Only eleven were allowed on staff, and to ensure that these chosen few were paragons, they were required not only to be erudite, athletic, puissant, but also at least seventy-one inches in height, the better to manage unruly patients.

Though it took him ten miles out of his way, Nine Tails never passed an opportunity to visit Duremar—not to take in the attractions, but to visit his virtuous sister, as they, and one other, were all that remained of their once large family.

As anonymous patients were dubbed Honored Guests, when his bruised, wounded, and nameless sister arrived in tattered finery, they called her Lady Honored Guest, a name which stuck when she stayed on as a Brynnelmark. The eldest of that order stepped down to become a Matron and make room for one who so obviously had found her calling. Though they since learned who she was, and who and what her brother was, they continued to call her Lady Honor and treat him with honor as well.

He reined in his horse to a canter, then a trot, toward a crowd mobbing a man clad in foppish finery, a blue sateen raiment bedaubed with curlicue dragons and griffins, so contorted as to first give the curious impression of fleurs-de-lis. From the Knight of Nine Tails's saddle, the liveried man—perhaps a herald on some mission of import—seemed to be astride a horse, as he loomed over those that fought to pet the feathers of his steed.