What an Assassin Does

He asked properly, in order, because nobody had told him and because the world does not volunteer.

He had established the second part in his first week and had never had cause to revise it. Information existed. Information was held by people. People handed it over when asked directly and almost never otherwise, and a man who waited to be informed would wait a long time and learn nothing.

So he started at the guild hall, which was where the answers to guild questions lived, and worked outward from there over four days with the method he used for everything. Ask. Listen. Ask a second person. Compare the two.

The guild hall contained no Assassins.

He established this by asking the room, which was not a thing he would have done in his first month and which he did now without any particular effort. He stood at the end of the long bench at the busy hour and put the question to it, and the room answered him.

There were Bulwarks. There were two Menders, one of whom had been standing at the end of the bench for an hour without moving or answering anybody, which the room treated as ordinary. There were two Trailblades, a Drayman, a woman who did something with contracts and would not say what, and a man who claimed to be a class Alaric had never come across, and who was, on the evidence of the laughter round him, lying.

Nobody had met one.

"Rare, I think," said one of the Trailblades, in the tone of a man inventing a fact to fill a silence. "You get them out east."

"Out east where?"

"East," he said, and drank.

The counter clerk produced the same pleasant block of speech regardless of the question.

Alaric asked in several different ways. He asked what an Assassin was. He asked whether the guild held any record of the class. He asked whether there was a book. He asked, at the end, a question about the weather, purely to see.

He received the guild's business hours four times, at the same volume, in the same order, with the same small courteous tilt of the head at the end.

He was not hurt by it. He had understood what the clerk was in the practical sense for a long time, without ever having a word for it, and he adjusted inside a single sentence and stopped trying. It was the same adjustment he made for a door which had swollen in the frame.

On the third of the four days, which was the ninth since the gate, he gave Poppy back her strip of cloth.

He did it at the long table at breakfast, because that was the day she had said and he had counted. He took it off the sill and put it down beside her bowl, folded the way it had come out of the sacking.

Poppy looked at it for a moment as though somebody else had left it there.

"Oh," she said. "That."

"Nine days."

"Was it?" She picked it up and turned it over and put it back down on his side of the bowl. "Keep it. It's nothing. I told you it was nothing."

"You told me to give it back."

"And you did, and now you can keep it, and that is a completely different thing." She went back to her bread. "It's off a coat. I don't even like the coat."

He put it in the bottom of his pack that evening, where the sword had been.

He did not examine why he had counted. He had counted in a chamber with his shoulder open and on a stable floor and on a stair with the card up, without once deciding to, and the count had come out at nine on the right morning, and he had put the cloth down beside her bowl, and she had half forgotten giving it to him.

Two people gave him jokes he could not detect.

The first told him, with a straight face, that Assassins were required by tradition to work barefoot. Alaric thanked him and filed it, and spent some part of the following week considering the practical difficulties of barefoot work in a boar meadow in high summer.

The second gave him a long and detailed account of a code of honour involving never speaking aloud on a Tuesday. There was a reason for it. The reason was elaborate and involved a founder. Alaric asked two clarifying questions, both of which were answered fully, and thanked him, and filed that as well.

It took him the best part of a fortnight to work out that he had been had.

He was not angry, which surprised him a little when he checked. He ran the test the way he had learned to run it, holding the situation up against the barrow man and the four coppers, and nothing came up. What came up instead was a mild and slightly rueful interest in the fact that both men had gone to real trouble. The Tuesday one had invented a founder.

The third answer was a good one, and it was wrong.

It came from a woman at the end of the bench with a mended coat, and it was detailed, and it was confident, and every part of it agreed with every other part. Stay off the front. Read ground before committing. Take the long route and arrive where the fight is not. Carry two of everything.

He built a week of behaviour on it.

On the fifth day a contract went wrong in a specific manner which could not have happened if the answer had been correct, and he stood in a wet field afterward with a torn sleeve and unbuilt the whole structure, piece by piece, and understood that she had described a Trailblade. Accurately. She had been a Trailblade for nine years and had answered the question she was equipped to answer.

He crossed the week out and went back to nothing.

So he worked it out by using it.

He arrived at this out of exhaustion rather than insight, which he noted at the time and did not much enjoy. Nobody was going to tell him what he was. He had a week of contracts booked and the contracts did not care whether he understood himself, and there is a point past which asking becomes a way of not doing.

He went to work.

What he found was a shape rather than a definition, and it assembled itself over about a fortnight without ever announcing that it had.

He was faster. Not slightly. The twenty points had gone somewhere useful and the difference was large enough to change which routes existed. Ground he would have gone round in his first months he now went over. A slope he would have called impassable turned out to be a slope, and the thing at the top of it turned out to be reachable from a direction nothing expected.

He was quieter, and quiet turned out to be a resource rather than a quality. It could be spent. Thirty seconds of it could be laid down in front of a problem the way a man lays a plank over mud, and where he chose to lay it decided most of what followed.

He got that wrong for the first week by spending it too early. He would put the thirty seconds down at the start, when he was still walking in and nothing had begun, and it would run out at the exact moment it became worth having. It took him a handful of contracts to learn to carry it unspent, close to the chest, and let the fight tell him where the plank went.

He was worth considerably more from behind than from in front. He established this twice by accident before he established it once on purpose, which was the correct order and he would not have trusted it the other way round. Accidents are honest. A thing you set out to prove has a way of getting proved.

And he could not hold anything.

He established that in a gully in the rain by attempting it, when the shape of a fight collapsed and something large came at the middle and Maren was a dozen feet away. He set himself the way he had watched her set herself perhaps two hundred times. He got it right. Feet, weight, angle, all of it correct.

He was knocked down so comprehensively that he lost a moment, and came round with his ears ringing and his shoulder in the mud and Maren standing over the top of him doing the thing properly.

Afterward she said, "Not you."

"No."

"Mm."

Maren began building the fights around it.

She did not announce it and he was not certain, afterward, that she consciously decided it. She simply began putting him wide instead of in the line. She held the middle herself, which she had always done, and she began sending him round, which she had not, and inside three contracts the sending-round had become the standard shape and nobody had remarked on it.

There was no conversation about it.

That was the part worth noticing and he did eventually notice it. There had been no discussion, no trial period, no explanation offered or requested. She had watched him for about a week and had rebuilt her formation around a thing she had no name for, and the rebuilt formation was better than the old one, and not one word had been spoken about any of it by anybody.

He noticed the fights changing before he noticed why.

For several days he simply had the sense that work had got easier. Contracts came in cleaner and shorter. Less of the standing about. Less of the moment in the middle where everything is noise and somebody is shouting a correction nobody can hear.

He attributed it, privately and with some satisfaction, to himself.

Then on a wet afternoon outside a mill he arrived at the top of the lane early, as he did now, and looked down at the yard while the others came up behind him, and watched Maren set the shape of a fight before the fight had started.

She did it in a moment and did not appear to be doing anything. She moved Itta two paces. She put herself in the gap by the wheel. She glanced up the lane at him and then at the far side of the yard, and the glance was the whole instruction, and he went to the far side of the yard.

He understood, standing in the wet with a hand on a gatepost, that she had been doing this for a fortnight.

He found it pleasant in a way he distrusted.

That was the honest reaction and he made himself examine it, on the walk home, in the rain, behind a cart with a loose wheel.

The world had arranged itself around what he was.

It had never done that. Not once, in five months, in any part of his life. He had spent the whole of his existence so far arranging himself around the world, which had a shape already and had not been consulted about his arrival. He had learned its hours and its prices and its manners, badly and by trial, and had fitted himself into the gaps it left.

Now a woman had quietly rebuilt something so it had a slot in it he fitted.

He had no procedure for being accommodated, and found himself doing the thing he did with any transaction he did not understand, which was to wait for the cost to be named.

Nobody named one.

The prices came down that fortnight.

He noticed it because he noticed numbers. Bread went down a half. Rope went down more than a half, which struck him as odd, since nothing had happened to rope. A stallholder in the square gave him back two coppers he had not expected and shrugged at his expression.

"Good year," she said.

At the hall that evening Poppy was delighted about the rope and made a case for buying a great deal of it against future need, and Maren said no, and Poppy made the case again with different numbers.

At the next table two people were having a disagreement he could not follow.

"It got put back," one of them said. "The whole thing got put back. It was one way in the spring and now it is the other way and nobody said anything."

"It was always the other way."

"It was not always the other way. I was there."

"Then you misremembered."

"I did not misremember. It got reverted."

It was not a word Alaric had come across. He turned it over for a moment, decided it belonged to a conversation about something he had no part in, and let it go, and went on listening to Poppy lose an argument about rope.

Poppy called him a menace across the table.

She did it affectionately, in the middle of a story about the mill yard in which he came out considerably better than he had in reality, and everybody laughed, including him.

The word did not settle.

He turned it over that night in the dark with the rain going, and got nowhere with it. It was not an insult. It had been said warmly, by somebody who was fond of him, in a room where he was welcome. He had watched her say it and there had been nothing underneath it.

It sat oddly all the same, at an angle, like a stone in a boot which is not painful and is definitely there.

He gave it about ten minutes and then let it alone.

He would come to the reason eventually, and it would take him longer than ten minutes, and by the time he had the words for it the moment would be well behind him and he would not connect the two.