Assassin

The world said nothing for three days.

He noticed it on the first morning and went on noticing it, and the noticing was itself worth examining, because a man does not keep account of a silence unless some part of him is waiting for it to end.

Two lines had arrived on his knees on the boards with the rain going. Then the panel had folded itself away in the manner of a thing which considers a matter closed, and after that the world had gone back to being weather.

Nothing further came.

He had expected something further. He could not have said what, and that was the difficulty with it. There had been no promise attached to the two lines, and he had still spent three days in the low state of attention a man keeps for a door he has been told nothing about.

The days themselves were ordinary, which was the other thing.

There was a contract at a holding west of the wall on the second day and he took it and did it and was paid, and the work was the same work it had been the week before he went north. The wheel on the cart still wanted attention. Poppy still lost things. Maren was down in the yard before light with the stone out, and the sound of it came up through the boards exactly as it always had.

Nothing in the building had changed at all, and he found that harder to sit with than he had expected and did not immediately see why.

On the first evening he had tried to tell them about the tag.

He had done it badly, which he understood at the time and could not correct for. He was still in the plate and there was blood on the boards which had come out of a shoulder that no longer had anything wrong with it, and he had got as far as saying that the goblin leader had been small.

"Small," Poppy said.

"Small and thin. Badly fed. It had nothing on it."

He had reached for a thing to measure it against and what came up was not a thing he had gone looking for. There had been a goblin on his second morning in the world, in the scrub off the Ashwood road, before Grennet, before he had spoken to anybody at all. It had run from him. He had not been able to read one line of its face and had spent an hour afterward trying to.

The memory arrived whole, with the green label still standing over it. He had not thought about that goblin in months and did not understand why it presented itself now, and he set the question down, because he had something else to get said.

"Worse fed than the first one I ever saw," he said. "Thinner. And the tag was red."

Poppy did not disbelieve him.

That turned out to be the problem, and he watched it happen from about a foot away. She took the fact the way a person takes a fisherman's account of a fish, with a grin and a small private adjustment and no argument anywhere in it, and went straight on past it to the part where he was home and it was raining and there was a kettle. The tag went by unexamined. It was filed under things men say about places they have been alone.

He wanted to say: no. It was red. I read it four times from three positions because I could not believe the first three readings either.

He understood, holding the words, that saying them a second time would only make it a better story.

He let them go.

Maren had said the one thing she was going to say about any of it and had then said nothing else, that evening or after.

He counted her the following morning. She was at the jug with her back to the room and the jug stood four paces from the door and the cups stood beside it, and getting water was a five second job. She took eleven. She did something to a jug which did not require doing and she did it with her back turned, and the whole of her opinion sat inside those six extra seconds, and he could not read one letter of it.

He did not ask. He had worked out by then that Maren's opinions were not improved by being requested.

Somewhere in the second day he stopped rehearsing the sentence.

He had been building it since the boards. It had gone through several forms and the last of them had been short and had been true, and he had carried it around the holding west of the wall for most of an afternoon with it fully assembled and ready and had not said it to anybody.

It did not go all at once. It thinned, the way a road thins, and at some point on the second evening he reached for it and found he had put it down somewhere and had not marked where.

He did not build it again.

On the third day he was eating.

It was mid-morning and the bread was going stale at the crust and there was dripping to put on it, and Poppy was arguing with Maren about whether a contract two valleys over was worth the walk. The stove was doing its work. The rain had stopped in the night and the light coming in the long window had the thin washed quality light has after weather.

The panel opened in front of him without a sound.

He put the bread down before he had read a word of it.

His hands did that on their own, and he noticed them doing it, and understood why afterward. The ones with a chime were transactions. A contract accepted. A payment cleared. A level. Those announced themselves the way a shopkeeper announces a total, because a total is a small thing and wants only to be heard once.

The silent ones were different. The map had opened itself in a forest without a sound, on his first morning, when he had nothing and was nobody. The trial had arrived at a breakfast table without a sound. Both of those had been decisions, already taken somewhere else, delivered to him the way weather is delivered.

His hands had sorted it before his eyes had.

[CLASS ASSIGNED: ASSASSIN]

One line.

He read it twice more.

He was not reading it the way a man reads news. He was searching it, running along it the way he ran along a treeline, looking for the word which would turn it into something with an explanation attached. Some qualifier. Some small text underneath, of the sort he had learned to hunt for at the guild counter in his first week, where PARTY RECOMMENDED lived and where SOLO lived.

There was no small text.

The line was short and flat and did not mention the chamber, or the throne, or the blade, or the disc, or a man leaving a hall in less than a second with his shoulder open. It did not mention the goblin at all. It did not mention the three days.

It said what he was now.

He went and got the card up.

The field had said UNASSIGNED since a forest. Since before Grennet, before the well, before Poppy, before he had a name he had chosen off a wheel. He had looked at that field perhaps two hundred times in five months and had come to hold a small private fondness for it, because it was the one honest line on the whole card. Every other line asserted something. UNASSIGNED asserted nothing. It said: no decision has been made about this.

It was occupied now.

Something had been decided, and it had been decided three days ago, and it had taken three days to tell him.

He went looking for the rest of it, and he went looking properly, in the way of a man who has learned that the world does not volunteer.

There was no description. He checked the class line for anything behind it and there was nothing behind it. No list of what an Assassin does, no summary, no note, no page. No choice either. He had been given a choice once, a real one, with YES and NO standing side by side and nothing happening until he pressed one of them, and he had sat with it a long time before pressing.

There was nothing here of the kind. No three doors. No confirmation. Not even the small courtesy of being told at the time.

The System had never explained anything to him and he had stopped expecting explanation somewhere around his second month. This was a different thing. This was the System deciding something about him, holding the decision for three days for reasons it did not state, and then setting it down beside his bread.

He got up and went out to the stairs.

He did it without saying anything, and Poppy called something after him about the bread, and he made a noise and kept going. He sat down a few steps from the top, where the wall came in and the noise from the room went soft, and got the card up again and read it properly, alone, in order.

ALARIC.

LEVEL 12.

CLASS: ASSASSIN.

RACE: HUMAN.

Four lines. He had chosen one of them, and he had chosen it by standing in a forest with no memory in his head and pressing an icon twice, and the wheel had come up with a sound like a coin on wood.

He examined the word ASSASSIN for anything he recognised.

There was nothing in it. It was a sound. He had no story attached to it, no man he had met who was one, no contract he had seen posted for one. It had the general shape of a thing which does something to other things, and past that it was as empty to him as the grey country at the edge of his map.

He was sitting with that when the second panel arrived.

[STAT POINTS ALLOCATED: AGILITY +20]

It came while he was still reading the class line, and the timing gave it the character of an afterthought, like a man returning to tidy something he had left half done.

His agility number, which he had never examined closely because it had never seemed to be the interesting one, was twenty higher than it had been at the top of the stairs.

He had not touched it.

He read the word allocated over and over, in the same way he had read assigned.

In Ashfield he had been given five points. He remembered the shape of it exactly: the panel, the list of four names, the small figure beside each. He had spent them badly. His hand had gone to VITALITY and had put the whole five there before the rest of him had caught up, and he had worked out afterward, standing in a shed with a sore arm, that it had not been the best of the four.

The point was the shape of the thing and not the outcome. There had been a prompt. There had been a moment in which nothing happened. The world had held still and waited for him, and had not moved until he moved.

This had none of that.

Twenty points had been spent on his behalf, correctly, by something which had not consulted him.

He sat on the stairs and laid the three of them side by side, which was his method and had been since a forest.

A name off a randomiser.

A completion he had not earned.

A class out of nowhere.

In every case something had decided, and in every case he had afterward been the thing which had been decided about, and the deciding had been instant and final and had produced no receipt. He turned them over and set them beside one another and the shapes matched, edge for edge.

He had three facts which identified him to the world and he had chosen none of them.

Then he checked himself for anger, because it seemed a thing which ought to be present.

He did it carefully and honestly. It was the same procedure he had run in the forest when he went looking for a name and had found nothing behind his own eyes. He held the situation up against the things which had produced anger in him before, and those were mostly small. The barrow man at the crossing who had taken four coppers off him for a lie about the road. Poppy losing his good knife in a hayrick and being cheerful about it for two hours.

Those had all produced something. He could locate the sensation in each case.

He tested this against them and nothing came up. Not at that scale and not at any other.

He was not angry.

What he found instead took a while to name, and he sat on the stairs with the noise of the room coming soft round the corner and worked at it.

It was attention.

Something in him had come awake and was watching, in the manner in which he watched a treeline before crossing open ground. Not hostility. He had nothing against a treeline. It was the interest of a man who has been treating a thing as weather for five months and has now understood that it has preferences, and acts on them, and waits three days when it suits it, and will not say why.

He filed it.

The filing was different in quality from his other filings, and he noticed the difference and had no word for it. Most things went into the file flat. This one went in standing up.

He got up and went down.

Poppy came at him before he had cleared the bottom step.

"What can you do?"

"I have no idea."

"You must be able to do something. There's always something. Poisons? Is it poisons?" She was working through it out loud at speed, which was how she worked through everything. "Daggers, obviously daggers, you'll want a second one, you can't be an Assassin with one dagger. Is there a hood? I want there to be a hood."

"There is no hood."

"There should be a hood." She sat down on the corner of the table, which Maren disliked, and did it anyway. "Right. Denn's cousin knew a man who was a class nobody had heard of and it turned out he could hold his breath for nine minutes. Nine. Useless. Marvellous, but useless. So it might be anything."

"It might."

"You are being very calm about this."

He considered whether that was true and decided it probably was.

"There is nothing to do about it until I use it," he said.

She was enjoying herself enormously and he found, somewhat to his own surprise, that he was enjoying it as well. The stairs were still with him, standing up in the file where he had put them, and the enjoyment did not cover the stairs over. Both things sat in him at once without much difficulty. He had got used to holding two facts which did not agree.

Maren had not said anything for some while.

She was at the long table with the stone out, though she had not started, and she had the sharpening cloth folded under her hand and was not using it. She had been watching the conversation the way she watched a beam she suspected of something.

"What does an Assassin do," she said.

It was not the same question Poppy had asked. Poppy had asked what he could do, which was about him. Maren was asking what the word meant, which was about the world, and it was a better question, and it landed in the room and stopped everything.

Nobody had an answer.

He watched the room fail to produce one. Poppy opened her mouth and shut it, which was rare enough to be worth noting. Itta was in the doorway with her bowstring loose over her shoulder, and she looked up, and offered nothing, and went on with what she was doing.

The kettle rattled its lid.

"Somebody in the hall will," Poppy said at last, and it came out with less certainty than her sentences usually carried.

"Probably," said Maren.

She started sharpening.

It took him four days to establish that nobody in Grennet had an answer either, and by the end of the four days the not-having-one had stopped being funny to everybody except Poppy, and had stopped being funny to Poppy about a day after that.

But that was four days off.

For the moment he sat down and got the bread again, which had gone properly hard at the edge now, and put dripping on it, and ate it while Poppy invented six more possible Assassins out of nothing at all, each less likely than the one before.

He had a class. He had twenty points he had not been the one to spend.

He had, sitting quietly on the stairs behind him where he had left it standing up, the first serious question he had ever had about the thing which ran the world he lived in.

He did not raise it at the table.