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Chapter Two
The Assassin’s Guild
The Assassin’s Guild offered an excellent education to boys and girls (but mostly girls, whom the Guild considered to be more naturally suited to the subtlety of the profession).
It was a common place for orphans to wind up, or for parents, who lacked the financial ability to raise a child, to deposit their offspring. I didn’t know which category I fell into, the Guild didn’t record such things; once you were there, you were theirs. End of story.
Did I regret that absence of a family? Sometimes.
But my idea of family was only theoretical, something I thought about when I read books with families in them and wondered what it might be like to have been in one. On the whole, though, the Guild wasn’t such a bad place to be brought up. The rules were firm, but not overly strict. The masters and mistresses were considerably more pleasant than Mistress Rosana, and the trainee assassins considerably less cruel than the maids I currently bunked alongside.
At some point, you did have to deal with the fact that you’d eventually be expected to kill someone, which was something difficult to train for and impossible to practice (the Guild did not permit indiscriminate killing; it was a professional organization by all accounts) but assassination loomed heavy in the future, even if it was something I hadn’t really thought about during my lessons.
And I’d enjoyed those lessons.
I was a good student and I excelled in my studies. Because assassins were predominantly called on to kill the nobility (when poor people kill each other it’s termed ‘murder’), it was important that Guild assassins be able to move in polite society and converse intelligently, so we were taught a broad curriculum.
This meant, I could speak multiple languages, I knew which fork to use at dinner and could discern the difference between a good wine and one that was merely indifferent. I had an extensive command of geography, history, politics and philosophy; I was extremely well-read, had seen most of the theatrical classics and could play the harp, the lute and the flute with aplomb.
I excelled in sports as well, being both a good runner and jumper, I learned acrobatics and captained my house’s athletics team. Alongside these classes were what might be termed the more ‘vocational’ ones, but I was good at those too. I could climb a sheer wall faster than any of my classmates and I currently held the record for hanging upside down without passing out. I was skilled in six forms of unarmed combat, I could handle a sword, a knife, a bow and a short staff (but not an axe, as it was considered a barbarian’s weapon). When I graduated at the age of twenty, I did so at the top of my class, and my tutor joked that many of my classmates might well want to assassinateme.
This was one reason why I was chosen for a particular assignment that would prove to be the most important commission the Guild had ever taken on. I was chosen to assassinate Master Nicolo of Woodfall Gath. I didn’t know who had taken out the contract on Nicolo’s life, nor did the Guild. Once the money was paid, the Assassins Guild took no interest in the identity of a client, they simply completed the commission, no questions asked. It was a matter of professionalism.
The other reason I was selected was that I was (according to others) extremely attractive, something which was deemed to be helpful in this particular assignment. Many others before me had tried to assassinate Master Nicolo (both men and women), some even sent by the Guild. Regardless, they’d all wound up the same way: no longer breathing.
Even so, the Guild and whoever had hired the Guild hadn’t given up. And it was decided, based on all available information about Master Nicolo, that a beautiful girl would have the best chance of taking him unawares. Furthermore, it was explained to me that I would have to seduce him.
But such information was all I was given. Usually, the information given me included just what type of victim my target was—a hero? An intellectual? A dandy? A rake?
This would prove to be my first obstacle to overcome because no one seemed to know just what sort of target Master Nicolo was—he appeared to be a bit of all of them. Thus, it was up to me to get close to him, to ascertain just what poison he might pick.
Naturally, the Guild offered classes in seduction, because such was a fairly common way to get close to a male target. Women of the Guild learned to dress and move provocatively, how to flutter eyelashes, lick lips and lean over in such a way as to flaunt backsides, bosoms or both. We learned the right things to say and when to say them. We learned how to flatter in a believable way, how to judge a man with a mere look and how to play the role of the coquette—alternatingly being warm then cold. We learned when and where to use daring and theatricality—how love was a constant game, as challenging as warfare.
We learned to tailor our flirtations to the individual, himself. We learned how to read a man and to decide which types of seductive character would best cause him to fall victim—should we play the part of the siren, the innocent, the coquette? We even visited nearby towns and the outskirts of the Gath itself to try out the techniques we’d learned. And when we had mastered the art of seduction, then the lessons became more serious and Mistress Aurore got out her collection of anatomically accurate models for classes in Arousal.
Again, I came top in Seduction, Arousal, and what was tactfully referred to as Post-Arousal, but there was a rare gap in the Guild curriculum in this last category; there were no ‘practical’ lessons. Generally, the Guild of Assassins believed in learning by doing, the two exceptions to this were the actual act of killing and the act of sex.
We were taught how to kill, but you would never know if you were truly capable of killing until you were actually put to the task. In response, some girls snuck out after dark, breaking Guild rules in order to visit the most dangerous areas of Crammer (the town in which the Guild was situated), waiting for someone to attack them, just so they could get that first kill out of the way. The masters and mistresses understood this sort of thing happened and turned a blind eye to it, no doubt figuring these indiscriminate killings would no doubt aid their pupils.
But the rules on sex were stricter, because pregnancy was a huge risk no one wanted to take. We were taught the biology and physics of the process, what happened and how it worked. We were taught technique—I’d studied and memorized every page of theCodex of Congress, which detailed every conceivable sexual position (and several in which conception was impossible), including the variations, substitutions and inversions.
We were taught the seven philosophies of love-making; intimate, casual, rough, dominant (fore and aft), recreational, hasty, and reproductive. We were taught about pleasure, how to give it and receive it, how to make the experience fun, special, tender, dirty, exhausting; how to make it last and how to bring it to a sudden stop. We learned why pain was not all bad if you knew what you were doing. And here, again, it was imperative to target one’s seduction to the type of victim one was dealing with. Were it a soldier or a highly masculine man, the siren was the go-to with her overly feminine ways, her sexual presence and her goddess like enchantments. Or was the target a rake, himself? Then it was best to don the face of the coquette to beat him at his own game.
They were interesting lessons, but in the end, what was inevitably left over was many overheated girls with nowhere to go and no way to vent their desire. The Guild insisted its girls remained ‘maidens’, because the men we would be seducing often preferred women in such condition. You could only lose your virginity once so the Guild employed as many maidens as possible. And I was among them.
Because the Guild was all I’d ever known, I never thought of my upbringing and schooling as unusual, but looking back, I suppose it was a bit odd.
***
Listening to the other girls, it sounded as if seducing Prince Balduin would not have been difficult (staying out of his bed was harder than getting into it). But Master Nicolo was another story.
Nicolo was more cautious.
It wasn’t that he never indulged, but when he did, it was often in the company of Balduin; two young men out on the prowl together. And that was decidedly no good to me.
The master appeared to take his pleasure elsewhere than within the walls of the castle; perhaps he preferred a better class of bed-mate (there were ladies in the court who had joined him for a night or two). Perhaps he didn’t trust the maids, who came and went from the castle all the time. Someone who was constantly under threat of attack learns to be cautious. Yet there were still drawings of Nicolo in various forms of undress on the walls of the dormitory and statements that made it seem as if he’d bedded at least a maid or two. Of course, those could simply have been the desires on behalf of the women employed here and not the truth.
I didn’t have a lot of time to figure it out. Assassins were only given a limited amount of time to fulfill a contract. In deference to the difficulty of the assignment, I had a generous two months in which to kill Nicolo, but, by the end of my first two weeks in the castle, it had become clear that it would take years of flirting to make any sort of headway with the obtuse and frustrating man. I needed a more direct approach and I was worried the Guild sending me in under the guise of a maid might have been a mistake—it seemed Nicolo’s tastes might have been for those in a more esteemed role.
