The Nameless Assassins

Our Order of Ornery Orphans

I slunk back to the railcar, fully intending to mope in my compartment for days. However, a new distraction soon popped up.

In addition to new furnishings and the unwelcome wildlife you'd expect in the Old Rail Yard, we'd slowly been accumulating an assortment of (more or less) wanted pets. Almost as soon as we moved in, my hideous, three-legged dog Sleipnir had showed up, and lately Faith's loyal-to-the-hand-that-dismembers-juicy-ghosts-to-feed-it companion Cricket had also taken to loitering around her compartment. In fact, I held Cricket directly responsible for our next batch of pets.

Faith, who bore equal blame for the affair, triggered that fatal chain of events with an innocent-sounding request: "Isha, I'm going to be running errands for the next few hours. Would you do me a favor and tail me to make sure nothing untoward happens to me?"

Listlessly carving a slot into my armrest so I could hide a stiletto there, I asked without real interest, "What kind of errands are you running?"

She, naturally, talked right over me. "Also, please report on my behaviors when I get back!"

"What?" I nearly dropped the stiletto before I rammed it into the armrest and clicked shut the compartment. "What's going on, Faith?"

"Thank you, Isha! You're the best!"

She darted forward, pecked me on the cheek, and scampered back into her compartment before I could even finish protesting, "Faith, wait, explain!"

About fifteen minutes later, she re-emerged, still wearing the same fluffy, lavender dress, but moving in a distinctly un-Faith-like manner. Purposefully, she clattered down the railcar steps, marched straight through Nightmarket without even glancing at the ribbons on display, and made a beeline for Six Towers. Stalking right up to the Arms of the Weeping Lady, an opera-house-turned-soup-kitchen near Rowan Bridge, she plowed through the line of raggedy men and women waiting for their daily allotment of canal weed soup, and vanished into the unlit alley behind the building. By the time I'd skirted the irate heap of beggars she'd bowled over, she was crouched over a hole in the ground, retrieving a pistol hidden under a cobblestone. Holding it expertly (something I'd never seen Faith do before), she rose, walked in a businesslike way into a tenement, and matter-of-factly picked the lock on one of the flimsy doors (I was pretty sure Faith didn't know how to do that either – both the matter-of-fact part and the lock-picking part). Straightening, she drew back one high-button-kid-leather-booted foot, kicked open the door with a dramatic crash, and strode into the room.

My own gun at the ready, I sprinted forward and reached the doorway just in time to glimpse an elderly couple seated at a broken table, forks frozen over the remnants of a worm-'n-rat pie (another Doskvolian specialty). A rusty oil lantern cast flickering shadows over their shocked faces.

Almost without bothering to aim, "Faith" coolly raised the pistol and fired two shots in quick succession.

The elderly couple crumpled in their chairs, blood streaming from holes in their foreheads, and "Faith" smiled – a grim, satisfied rictus of a smile.

Childish shrieks pierced the room.

Edging sideways, I peered around the doorjamb to see a small clump of ragged children in the far corner, clinging to each other and trying to press themselves into the wall. (Given the flimsiness of tenement construction, that wasn't as ludicrous a proposition as it might have been in a Brightstone mansion or, say, on the Anixis estate.) Without sparing a glance for the children or me, "Faith" turned smartly on her heel, marched back out of the tenement, replaced the pistol under the cobblestone, and strode back towards Coalridge.