broken arrow [r]

The bright airy sounds of a party floated from the manor. All the windows facing the street had been flung open, and from his vantage point, he could see gilded silhouettes move against the golden light from inside. It was a careless set up. His target was aware that he had enemies. His willingness to make their job easier was incomprehensible to Skeyti.

A fact arose from the blankness of his mind as he surveyed the building: the noble knew he had enemies, but to demonstrate fear of them, raising visible safeguards and precautions, would indicate weakness in the Game. Better to appear fearless and yet still survive. There would be hidden measures inside.

He didn't know where the information had come from any more than he knew where his ability to speak the language of this country had come from. An implant for the mission, most likely. It was unimportant except that it helped him kill his target. He circled around the back of the manor, to where the stone walls crumbled at the edges with neglect, and began to scale the house.

He hauled himself up over a window sill on the second floor with ease, landing lightly in a nearly empty room. There was a guard standing at the door, facing the wrong way. He was dressed out of armor, holding a wine glass, but Skeyti knew he was a guard just as he had known the noble's seeming unconcern about his safety had been an affectation. 

The man started to turn as Skeyti rose to his feet. Before he had even begun the movement, Skeyti crossed the room and snapped his neck. He lowered the man's body to the floor and removed his mask for himself. After a moment, he took the wine glass at well. It held colored water instead of wine; it was only a prop. But now it was his prop. 

He stepped into the hallway, his face cold and expressionless beneath the mask. It restricted his vision. He noted the encroachment of the material on his peripheral, the angles it cut off, accommodated for them automatically in his movements, and began walking. There were few people in the hallways, but he could hear the muffled din of laughter, conversation from behind the doors.

There was an elven woman in the hallway, wearing the same style mask as Skeyti had retrieved from the dead guard. Another fact blossomed forth: elves are servants in this place. Closer to slaves. Something in his chest twisted, and he stopped for a moment, raised a hand to touch the skin over his heart. Had there been some sort of trap he had missed, a latent trigger now activated? That was impossible. He would have seen it, dissembled it.

The feeling passed without answer and he dismissed the incident. He pressed forward to the servant. He fell into an impersonation of the guard. He had blended with people before, on previous missions. Imitating the living was not a hard task.

"There was an attempted intruder," he said to her, voice low and pitched not to carry. "We have him in one of the empty rooms in the back. Is our master still busy with his games, or should I come back later to inform him?"

Maeve Flynn

He considered. His orders had been to make an example of this man, to put on a show for the Game. He would follow his orders. If the woman summoned her master and Skeyti managed to get him alone, the killing would be easier but discreet. He discarded that plan as the least ideal one to execute, and settled on another.

"He managed to kill one of the other guards before we subdued him," he said to her. What would someone feel in that situation? Sadness, probably, perhaps a sense of wounded pride or professionalism. He frowned as if in distress at what he had said. "We have him tied up. I left him with two others. He didn't say what he wanted. I searched him. Didn't find anything bearing another noble's crest."

He looked at the pastry tray in her hand, then back to what he could see of her face.

"I can take it in, if you'd prefer, and inform him myself," he said. "If he takes the news badly, it might be better if I should be the messenger than you."

Maeve Flynn

The plan changed as she spoke. Before she'd even finished speaking he ran through the recalibration of his plans, teased out any flaws.

Fact: he'd been ordered to make a scene.

Another fact: he'd been ordered to make sure there were also no potential witnesses. An example was to be made, but there would be no loose ends. Another person might have viewed the two objectives as mutually incompatible. He wasn't a person, though, he was a weapon. Disparate goals would be achieved concurrently, as long as they were ordered. He would do it.

The third fact: To witness, one had to be a person. He didn't smash the windows on the street for bearing his reflection. In Orlais, elves were not people.

The final fact: the elven woman had red hair. Why was this important? None of the information they had given him contained a woman with red hair. Skeyti dug back further, searching for the record of missions previous, but they were fragmented and shattered, slipping away from his grasp when he reached out for them. They'd been taken from him; imperfectly, but they were still gone. The side of his head flared with sudden pain at the effort. Why was this important?

Conclusion: the elf was not a person to the eyes of those who would seek answers after the completion of his mission. She could not witness. She was not a loose end. There was no need to dispose of her.

"--I'll be better off than you."

He had already turned away. The door splintered easily under his shoulder, and then Skeyti's momentum carried him further still, into the heart of the room. The people around him fell into shocked silence. A note of music hung in the air. From an instrument or a voice. He dropped the flask with a sharp crack and pandemonium took the crowd. Some of them turned on each other in a frenzy, clawing and tearing with reckless abandon, while others stampeded out the wreckage of the door.

He ignored them both equally, scanning the room for his target. There, frozen against the wall. The noble was just beyond the reaches of the toxin, or it hadn't reached him yet. Irrelevant either way. He was dead. Skeyti removed the mask--he'd lost the wine glass somewhere in the initial charge--and dropped it on the floor. The time for props was over. It hindered his vision and while he had no doubts that he could dispose of the target easily, even handicapped, he had a minute, maybe less now, before guards started pouring in. Besides: this was a message. His face was the face of death, and his master prized it above any Orlesian mask.

He drew two knives and advanced.

Maeve Flynn

The noble started to beg. Skeyti threw one of the knives. He wasn't fluid or graceful. He was efficient. The blade was buried in the man's throat before he'd even choked out the second syllable of whatever it was he was going to say.

Skeyti rotated the other knife still in his grip, and leaned forward to retrieve the knife from the noble's corpse. He wiped it clean on his thigh, sheathed it and turned around to leave.

He almost missed her word. The name Luc didn't mean anything to him. If he hadn't turned and seen the woman, he wouldn't have even registered it, dismissing the sound with the rest of the noise that had erupted with his enry. But he turned and he saw and the word snagged on the edge of his mind.

She looked at him like she knew him. Another one of the facts he had no anchor for floated up: Skeyti had never been recognized before. He had never even considered that he might be recognized. He had never considered where he came from or if he had a history. There was only the mission, and between missions, the low hum of magic wrapped around his bones, keeping him preserved.

But the elf from the hallway was looking at Skeyti like she had another name for him. He raised the knife he hadn't thrown in front of himself defensively, shifting his weight backwards.

"I'm not Luc," he said. It was true. He knew that, at least, whoever this Luc was. He was Skeyti and Skeyti was the mission. There was room for nothing else. He twitched to launch forward, slit her throat and disappear out the window. Skeyti didn't. He didn't know why.

Maeve Flynn