"You didn't make yourself hard to find."
A man froze in the act of shelving a book.
"I gave up on that. It never seemed to work."
It was night and the single candle was fitful. The figure in the shadows behind the librarian was nothing more than the suggestion of an outline.
"So you are tired of life. It would have saved many lives if you had become so earlier."
The librarian was thin with a shock of unkempt black hair. It was longer on top, as though it had been cut into a queue at some point in the past.
"Do they still call me a traitor?"
"You know they do. It is why I have been sent here."
The librarian nodded. He shelved another couple of books, shuffled across the room and stopped to look out of the window. The town was lit, as it must be, but the streets were quiet. So many towns he'd passed through. They blurred into one. Never a chance to truly relax.
"You know," he said, annoyed, "they never call me 'the wall-builder' or 'the scholar'. They only ever call me Wu-"
The word turned into a hiss as the dagger entered his back. After the body had slumped to the floor the assassin made sure of the job by slitting the fallen man's throat. It was a quick, professional killing.
He pinched out the candle. For a few seconds the only sound was soft footfalls on the roof.
Four hours later, just before dawn, the body sat up.
Still dripping blood, the figure sorted through a desk drawer until it found a milky healixir to splash on its neck.
"Ouch," he said, once it had healed enough for him to talk again. "Time to move on."
He grabbed a backpack from under the desk, tiptoed around the pool of blood, and let himself out of the back door.
YOU ARE READING
A Weapon Too Free
FantasyEssendra was an inexperienced adventurer. She'd found a good party to join and was easing her way into an occupation very different form the one she knew. Then disaster claims her friends and she barely escapes with her life. What she found during t...
