The city of Salitona glowed blue as Akaris’s eyes fell on the man she was to kill.
She shifted from her perch on the rooftop of a nearby building, watching him as he separated from his group of friends and into the dark alleyway that was the path back to his home. She rolled her shoulders back, wincing at the stiffness. She had waited almost all night, watching the bar where he had laughed and drank with friends. It had been difficult to find a place to hide where she had a clear view of the bar’s windows, and away from any prying eyes, but Akaris had been watching the man for cidems now, so she had had time to prepare.
She began to follow him, her form low to the roof, careful not to make a noise. The man—Kezian Matias—was not a small target, a trained killer of the Salitonan assassin guild and one high up in its pecking order. He was not a good man, but few were in the assassin’s guild that enforced the Selenian Empire’s authority, the Empire’s Syrana. The guild had once been independent, but the Empire was rich, and it was both easier and more reliable for them to have a constant income.
Over the course of his years serving the Syrana, Akaris had determined that Kezian had killed over fifty people—most guilty of breaking curfew or some other menial transgression. Hopefully, she wouldn’t become another statistic.
She treaded slowly under the cover of darkness, her shoes padded, her clothes fitted snugly to prevent any noise from leaking out into the alleyway. She had walked this same path for several cidems now, pacing after him in the darkness to make sure this went exactly right. Akaris was not a physical threat to many members of the guild; she simply didn’t have the body mass to take on men twice her size. To compensate, she had to act quickly, and in this case, leverage her surroundings to her advantage.
Salitona’s buildings dropped off in cascades, not unlike a staircase, and it made it easy to drop from one rooftop to another. In fact, it wasn’t unusual for residents to use rooftops as roads themselves, but since it was past curfew, she was alone with Kezian on the city’s aptly named sky streets. Akaris dropped from building to building until she was closely following Kezian through the night, a few strides above him.
She was careful, and careful planning wasn’t something the Syrana anticipated or bothered to care for. They were a large group, and while they coordinated in important efforts, they were unorganized. That lead to mistakes, and mistakes were what Akaris exploited.
She reached for the coil of rope at her side. Created with sentia by a metapath and dyed brown to have the appearance of a regular rope, the whip would curl around what her hand—gloved with a gauntlet linked to the whip—directed it towards. Luckily, the sentia had been instructed to recognize not to curl around her, which she was grateful for. The rope would only work for twelve days—a cidem—as the sentia expired, but it would be renewed if she could spare the funds.
Admittedly, that would be unlikely.
The whip unholstered from her side, she waited another moment as she clenched her hand around the whip. She dropped the level that she had over Kezian, now only a few steps behind him. In the next second, she shot the rope towards him, allowing extra for the rope to catch him by the neck. At the touch of the man’s skin, she twisted her gloved hand in a circular motion, and the whip mimicked the movement, curling around his neck like a snake would its prey.
He yelped, his hands shooting to his neck to try and free himself. The rope shimmered sepia against the night and Akaris dragged her hand backwards, instructing the whip to pull Kezian towards her.
She overestimated the distance and he came towards her too fast, causing him to trip backwards into her. Cursing, she passed the whip from her free hand to her gloved one and unsheathed her knife. With the gloved hand on top of the rope, it would respond as a regular rope would to her movements, allowing her to make short-ranged provisions. She looped her arm around his neck, pinning his hands in place with the rest of the whip.
“Why me?” he gasped. He still struggled against her, but Akaris had the upper hand and her grip was firm. She didn’t answer him, struggling to maintain her position as she worked the knife closer to his neck.
He continued to fight though now it was useless. “Who are you?” he choked. “Can’t I know the Nameless of the Night’s name before I die?”
She finally worked the knife close enough to him. Without hesitation, she thrust the knife into his neck. But before she let him fall, she took the knife sheathed at his belt, just in case he suddenly decided to become a folk hero to the Syrana and stab her in the foot. She let go, and he fell.
He didn’t; Kezian died before thirty heartbeats passed.
It was a quick and fast death; a far better death than most of his victims had received. She panted, sweat already working under her clothes in the hot night. Men always seemed to become excessively wordy before they knew they were about to die, perhaps to stall the inevitable, perhaps to appeal to her conscience. But Kezian was a rapist and a murderer. Her conscience was clear.
She took off her sentia-made glove and the rope went limp around Kezian. She reached down, untangled it from him, and coiled it back at her side. She put his knife at her belt. She hoped she could sell the whip back to her informant. She’d almost botched that. It would take too much practice to perfect the technique, and more importantly, would be too expensive.
She dragged his body to the edge of the flat roof, where a small lip had been made to protect any dwellers of the establishment from tripping on accident. She left him there, where he’d only be in sight to this level of the building or the one stacked above it like an ascending step of a staircase.
Akaris looked to the sky and cursed. The sky was beginning to turn from pitch black to indigo as the sun neared the horizon, and there were perhaps thirty minutes left before dawn. She cursed again, more at herself for losing track of time while waiting for Kezian at the bar. She would be late.
She began to jog through the sky streets, making her way quickly through the city, occasionally dropping one level or taking small footbridges to pass over any alleyways that acted as valleys to the city.
The path she took was familiar, and as it neared dawn, it became easier and easier to see. The city’s characteristic glowing blue murals slowly began to dim as the sight of her home and workplace came into view in the growing morning light.
While the buildings of Salitona were stacked like escalating platforms of a staircase with many steps, the Sacrin Church of Salitona stood sovereign from the rest of the city. Instead of a flat roof with another building stacked on top of it, metallic arches looped from wall to wall of the church’s hallways, preventing any from walking over a place of worship and enlightenment. Thus, most of the church was roofless save for those arches, the only rooms that were protected by ceilings were places of study where paper would be ruined if rain touched its pages.
Akaris moved quickly; she gave the church a wide berth around its unroofed portions in case any would see her. Once she found the church’s dormitories, she walked until she found her window. She had kept the outward-opening pane cracked open with a pebble, and it opened without any hindrance. She dropped into her room, her padded shoes absorbing the sound of her impact. She shut the window behind her, the pebble placed on the window’s sill for the next night—or rather tonight.
She stripped as quickly as she could, keenly aware of how late she was. The loud knock that came pounding on her door a heartbeat later made her jump, her shirt in her hands.
“Akaris!” Someone was calling. “Come on! If you’re not awake, I’ll kill you myself!” That was Ryn.
“One moment!” Akaris replied. Her voice came out too low, her throat dry from hours of sitting in the heat. She cleared her throat and repeated herself, louder.
But the door started to creak open—her reply had come too late. Her heart skipping a beat inside her chest, Akaris vaulted across the room to stop it. She hit it with her back and was just able to close it before Ryn would’ve been able to see through. “I said one moment, Ryn, not come in!”
Damn these doors, Akaris thought. Would it really have been that difficult for locks to be installed on them? Usually she remembered to leverage her chair on the door’s handle, but she’d rushed to Kezian’s bar tonight, too eager to finally put an end to the cidems of work she’d put into researching and hunting him.
“You’re not even dressed?” Ryn sighed, audible even through the door. “Akaris, honestly. It’s almost dawn. You should’ve been dressed ten minutes ago.”
“I overslept,” she replied, finally peeling the last of her clothes off.
Akaris’s skin, a shade of beige tanned by sun, was caked with sweat from the warm summer night. She hurriedly began to wash herself with a cloth lying beside a basin full of fragranced water, though she let one eye stay on the door. She had bought the fragrances just for a day like this, when she didn’t have time to bathe before coming, but she still felt disgusting once she’d finished her makeshift bath.
She slid into the tight white undershirt and pant legs that were one garment combined and then pulled on the long white dress that fell to her feet and past both her hands. She took a pewter circlet off a dresser and pushed it onto her head until it ran across her forehead in a long, silver line. Then, she grabbed the two chains that were to be braided into her hair and moved to leave, walking into a pair of beaded white slippers.
She caught herself at the last moment and proceeded to gather her black clothes she’d worn in the night. She loosed a floorboard underneath her bed and deposited them there in a ball of dark fabric, her weapons wrapped inside.
“Akaris—”
Akaris opened out of the door and closed it behind her. “See? Ready.” In record time too.
She glanced over at her from where she was waiting, leaned against the wall. Her mouth dropped open. “Your hair isn’t even braided yet!”
“I thought Devot Lander wouldn’t notice,” Akaris said, flippantly. “It’s such a small part of the uniform, I thought it would just slide right past him.”
“Now you’re late and delusional,” Ryn said.
“I’m joking.” She began to braid it into a strand of hair that fell down her face as they walked down the hallway. Everyone was already gone in the women’s side of the dormitory and they walked quickly, nearly running. Akaris finished the one strand of hair and moved to the other, the braid falling in front of her face as a tendril of black hair as she worked.
“You need to braid them quicker,” Ryn whispered to her. She glanced back, as if expecting a scolding.
Akaris finished the second and began to loop the two strands over and under the silver circlet. “Done.”
Ryn took one skeptical glance at her, and then turned forwards to open the door in front of them. “They’re asymmetrical.”
Akaris touched the braids self-consciously. But as they entered the church’s primary courtyard, she let her hands drop as she saw the already formed lines. Students stood in the left corner of the courtyard, members of the church’s infirmary on the center and in the right-hand corner, devots of the church devoted to the maintenance of its rituals. Her eyes found her own division. It stood separate and was the church’s smallest department of only three people in total, devoted only to research and the church’s school for children. The two other members already waiting for her, and Akaris hurried over, departing from Ryn, who left for her own department in the medical devotry.
As Akaris approached, Devot Lander, the research devot of medicine, raised both of his arms up in an expression of exasperation when he saw Akaris. “Is it your primary purpose in life to make our division look like a bunch of fools, Samane?” he asked. “Almost everyone else in the entire church is here!”
“In fairness,” Akaris said as she fell in line beside Halian, the research devot of theology, “my intention to annoy you is more of a secondary purpose rather than a primary goal.”
Lander sneered at her, and opened his mouth to reply, but was cut off. “Will the two of you shut up?” Halian said with an exasperated sigh. His dark brown eyes were droopy, black crescents resting underneath them stark against his golden skin. “Lander, she’s two minutes late. Akaris, don’t bait him. We’re all tired, all right? We don’t have to make ourselves any more miserable than we already are.”
A few more students filed into the courtyard, and only a few moments later, Devoti Situla, the church’s head began roll call, effectively silencing the opportunity for any more quarrels.
Halian glanced back at Lander and then back to Akaris as the names were listed off. He leaned over to whisper, “You have the books I asked for, right? And today you’re coming to my office to help with research? Lander has teaching duty this cidem—that’s probably why he’s in such a mood.”
Akaris nodded in assent to his question. As devot of theology, Halian was interested in the interactions of the gods and their impact on history, and as the research devot of history Akaris had texts she had already read from the church’s academic library that could prove useful to him.
Halian’s eyes glanced up to the top of her head. He frowned. “Your braids are crooked. And—” He sniffed at the air. “You smell odd. Like a bunch of flowers cooking in a vat of molasses.”
“I’ll fix the braids later,” Akaris grumbled.
Roll call ended, and the crowd that had formed in the courtyard dispersed as the different divisions of the church exited through the courtyard’s six different entrances and exits. As Akaris walked, she self-consciously began to space out the tendrils of hair by touch, so they were more evenly distributed along the pewter circlet.
“Devot Samane!” a voice called behind her. She turned to see her apprentice, a boy of perhaps thirteen or fourteen running up to her, a stack full of papers in his hands.
“Valen!” she responded, stopping in her tracks, Halian stopping with her as Lander went ahead to the devots’ shared classroom.
The boy huffed for a moment to catch his breath before he held out the stack of papers held in his arms. “Your notes. I didn’t have enough time to bind them.”
“Gods above, Akaris!” Halian exclaimed. “Those are notes?”
“Yes,” she replied, defensively. Valen handed them to her, and her arms dropped under the weight of them. “Notes,” she grunted.
As Akaris balanced the stack on one hand to peruse through them with the other, Halian turned to Valen. “How long did she give you to write those for her?” he asked.
“A cidem,” Valen said proudly. He straightened his posture and puffed out his chest. “But it’s only been ten days.”
Halian turned to her, aghast. “You’re working this poor boy to death!” he accused.
“He finished early, didn’t he?” she asked. “I don’t give him anything he can’t handle. I write my own notes most of the time, and then I work myself to death. But, he’s fine. You’re fine, aren’t you, Valen?”
He nodded eagerly. “Yes, Devot Samane.”
“The boy’s fine,” Akaris said. “See? He said so himself. I didn’t even coerce him to say that. Now, Valen, did you happen to bring my spectacles?”
He handed her spectacles and she slid them on. They were circular, dominated a large portion of her face, and she shifted them to the bridge of her nose as she paged through the notes. Selenian characters scaled across the pages, the language’s characteristic dotted figures easily legible and well-composed.
“Excellent as always,” she said as she skimmed. “You’ll be taking my job out from under me in two or three years.” She looked up and smiled at him. “Take these back to my office. You can study whatever you want today for such good work. If you need anything from me, I’ll be with Devot Melas in his office. Otherwise, I’ll return at two hours past noon to see if you need any help and stay for the rest of the day.”
Valen nodded, taking the notes from the texts she had given him and shouldering them as he walked in the opposite direction along the church’s maze of hallways.
“He’s an excellent apprentice,” Halian said as the two resumed their path to his office. “I hope you know how lucky you are. He worked hard under Devot Marian before you, and he works even harder now as he’s become older.”
“I know,” Akaris said. She glanced backwards to see Valen’s form quickly disappear down the hallway. She turned back forwards. “Unfortunately, I’m not as lucky with…other colleagues.”
“I certainly hope you’re not referring to me.”
“Lander is always on my ass,” Akaris replied. “It’s irritating.”
“He knows he has seniority,” Halian said. “You have only been here a year and half. He’s been here twenty and a half. He was here when I was an apprentice, and that was fifteen years ago. It’s hard for him to accept a young upstart who is occasionally late, has her braids in disorder.”
Logically, she knew that was true. But Akaris had given up much to be here. She’d made difficult sacrifices to be here. Lander was one small fish in a large pond of difficulties.
She’d come to Salitona a year and a half ago to find two members of the Syrana, not to assassinate many. But life had had different plans. By the time she’d arrived, those two members had been gone on an expeditionary mission, and what had been meant to be a two-month affair had become a near two-year stake-out.
She had been stuck in a city in a foreign country with no goals, no prospects, and most importantly, no job. Akaris hadn’t forgotten how close she’d come to homelessness in those first few months. This job was secondary in her mind, but it was first in practicality. She couldn’t continue to pursue members of the Syrana at night if she had no income; she couldn’t continue to fund her informant on the two Syrana members she still desperately wanted to find if she had no income.
“You’re right,” she said finally. “I’ll be more…careful.”
“More respectful too, I hope,” Halian said. “More respectful in ambiguously referring to annoying colleagues, when I am, in fact, an excellent colleague.”
“More respectful too,” Akaris amended.
They finally reached Halian’s office in the labyrinth of the roofless church’s many corridors, on the church’s theology wing.
“So, I was thinking,” Halian began, “we would start with the Epic of Vallian. I have The Book of Sacrin Truths, you have the Epic.”
She sat at her desk across from Halian’s, where Valen had already left her a stack of her own neatly written notes on the famous tale. “The Epic it is,” she replied, flipping open the packet.
And thus, another day at the Sacrin Church of Salitona began anew.
AUTHOR'S NOTE:
Hi guys! Thanks for reading! The magic system can be a lot, but there will be more of a tutorial-style introduction in the next upcoming chapters. I write a bunch but this is my first time posting something online. I'm open to feedback and would love some! I'm planning on posting new chapters every Tuesday.
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