The Whisper of the Nightingale

Chapter 52: Nailing It

Raven wiped off the blood from her dagger, using the robes of the dead man in front of her.

"Another dead end," she muttered to herself as she pulled out a small piece of paper from the folds of her robes. It had gotten damp due to the rain but the slightly smudged writing was still legible. Using a cheese knife that she had found lying around, Raven pinned the note to the man's chest, grabbed the ledgers he'd been reading not even twenty minutes earlier, and left the house.

Although the night's exploits had yielded little new information, Raven was at least relieved that she had managed to convince Hoatzin not to come along. She didn't mind performing the additional requests that the Assassin Guild's clients often had - in fact, these personal touches made it less obvious who'd actually done the killing so she almost welcomed them - but Raven suspected that her brother wouldn't approve.

The reason was that, hours later, when the early-rising firstborn son of the Featherborn household wakes up and sneaks out towards the kitchen for a morning snack, he would come to find the eyeless corpse of his father, propped over the kitchen table with the words "Who's lacking vision now?" stabbed to his bloodied chest, and his gorged out eyes staring back at the boy from a plate on said table.

Raven was no saint, far from it. In her past life she was singlehandedly responsible for more assassinations than anyone in that ancient world's recorded history; her death toll was in fact comparable to some of the more extreme natural disasters. The time she had spent with her new family at Nightingale Palace had been her first and only true reprieve from all that bloodshed. Those four years had changed her greatly, but at the moment, her old persona fit her needs better and she effortlessly slipped back into it.

As Raven made her way back towards the outskirts of town, she sent a mental message to her brother; "It's done." she said. "Anything new on your side?"

Just through their connection, Raven could almost feel how Hoatzin sighed heavily. Over the past few days Hoatzin had been tailing one of the Talon Clan's Elders, in hopes of catching him making contact with someone interesting. However, so far, the Elder had made no suspicious moves at all.

"It is like watching paint dry. . . ." grunted Hoatzin.

"We knew this would take time, big brother. They are being extremely cautious, but they will slip up eventually," assured Raven.

"Yeah, yeah," muttered Hoatzin, causing Raven to raise a thin eyebrow in surprise. Her brother rarely used such informal language; this fruitless spying was clearly bothering him.

"Keep up the good work, big brother. If we don't get anything useful in the next couple of days, we'll consider other options. Starting tomorrow I'll go back to the Abyss to raise my rank above 25th. It's high time we get access to the B-level spiritualist records at the Assassin Guild Hall."

"Then what about the Lunar Trials?" asked Hoatzin.

"What about them?"

"Well, they start tomorrow, do they not? Practically the entire academy will be shipped off into the wilderness for three days."

Raven stopped walking and swore under her breath; the upcoming exam period had totally slipped her mind - an impressive deed since it was all any of the students would talk about these last few days. That, and Raven's challenge to Dunlin of course.

When Raven gave him no reply, Hoatzin sent another question; "also, what are you going to do about Dunlin, and can I come and watch?" There was a hint of excitement in his voice.