Vish sat on the end of the bed and stared at the two black poppy seeds in his palm.

  Why wasn’t he just taking them? This was his chance. Dinner, which he grudgingly admitted to himself had been quite good—what he could taste of it, that is—with its roast pig and truffles and little birds marinated in wine, was over. Everyone else had retired to their chambers. He had all night to enjoy the sweet delights of not one, but two poppy seeds he had taken from Elpis.

  A double hit. The hot rush as he first swallowed them, the building intensity in his head as his body processed them, the wave upon wave of pleasure that would gradually overwhelm his entire being, the warm afterglow he would eventually bathe in afterwards, the loosening, the calm, the relief. This was his chance.

  So why hadn’t he taken them yet?

  The old man.

  Damn the old man! The old man had planted a different kind of seed in his mind.

  ‘If you space out the hits far enough and start to come off it, you can start to feel other things too. It is possible. I’ve seen others do it. I’ve helped others do it.’

  But Vish didn’t really want to do that, did he? The poppy was his life. The poppy was pure joy. The poppy was the greatest thing it was possible to experience. He didn’t want to ‘come off’ that. He didn’t want to lose that. He didn’t need to be ‘free’ from that.

  But then why hadn’t he taken them yet?

  He put the seeds down on the nightstand and began to pace the room. The floor was made of white marble shot through with wisps of black. The walls were hung with tapestries and paintings that in the light from the candle on the nightstand he could see depicted long-haired Manolians winning battles over other nations or successfully defending their realm from invaders.

  There was no god on any of them. A strange people, these warrior-women who made the men do all the women’s work and worshiped a single invisible god without acknowledging any of the other gods. Though not uniquely strange, he supposed. The old man worships this ‘One’ as well, after all...

  Vish drew back one of the thick velvet curtains to look out the window, but only found his reflection. He pulled off his head-scarf, revealing the branded ‘X’ scar on his forehead, his cropped black hair and the necrosis around his mouth.

  Someone glancing briefly at him might be forgiven for thinking it was a beard. But if they looked for any length of time, they would see that, no, in fact it was the skin around his mouth and the lower part of his nose that had turned from barky tan to black–deep black, black as a poppy seed, black as the darkness outside. The flesh itself had died and Vish had no sensation in those places.

  Why did the poppy do that? Yes, it went into his body through his mouth, or sometimes crushed up through his nose, but then it went into his stomach and his blood. Vish supposed that the poppy was so powerful that it simply had this effect on his body at the point where it entered him. There were probably parts of his insides that were dead as well. He strongly suspected that eventually it would kill him.

  He turned and looked back at the seeds lay on the nightstand, two inky dots staining the room. Wasn’t there a life that he had once had before that Imperial agent had got him hooked on the poppy and recruited him for the Emperor’s Hand?

  It had been a difficult life, of course, working as personal assassin for the Leader of Aibar, and he hadn’t known the poppy. But it had been his life. And he had had a measure of freedom: the ability to do what he wanted between assignments, money, his own dwelling. He had been able to fully enjoy the taste of food, the touch of a woman, the feel of the breeze on his face…

  The poppy had taken all of that from him. It had enslaved him, made him only want it, only really able to feel it. The times in between the hits had just become times when he was waiting for his next hit or doing something to enable himself to get his next hit. Times when he wasn’t really alive to the world, just trudging through a pale grey landscape searching for the next poppy seed.

  That was no way to live, was it?

  Vish walked back over to the nightstand and picked up the seeds. He had lived in this bondage for too long. He was going to throw them away.

  He walked back to the window and slid it up. He barely felt the chill of the night air on his body.

  Come on. Throw them out the window.

  Only...only what had he gained by taking the poppy? What would he lose if he threw it away?

  The greatest pleasure he had ever felt. Pure, all-encompassing ecstasy washing over every inch of his body. Thrill. The ability to be completely focused on and lost in something that wasn’t pain, self-hatred, regret.

  How could he throw all that away?

  He shut the window, walked back to the nightstand and put the seeds down on it.

  He sat on the bed and looked at them.

  He wouldn’t throw them away, but he would wait a while before he took them. That way he would be ‘spacing out’ the hits a little more, and maybe he would be able to come off it eventually like the old man said.

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  The thing was, it had been a while since his last hit. Not since that Zerlanese village they had stopped in to rest and stock up on supplies a few days ago.

  Just one now, and one later.

  He picked up one of the seeds and pinched it between his thumb and forefinger. A little black orb encompassing a world of pleasure.

  But if he was going to have one hit now anyway, why not have two? A double hit. How often did he get to have a double hit? Even the old man only gave him one seed at a time. There was no way that he would ever give him two at once, especially with his talk of spacing out the hits and coming off them.

  Vish picked up both seeds and chucked them into his mouth, swallowing them.

  Pleasure exploded in his body, starting in his mouth, his head, then spreading down through his neck, chest, arms, and the rest of him.

  He lay back on the bed, falling into the poppy trance.

  *

  In his poppy trance, Vish got up off the bed.

  He looked around the bedchamber, working out where he was.

  Manolia, he surmised from the white marble. Home of the Crystal-keepers.

  There were no others in the room with him this time, and once again he was unbound, so he was free to explore.

  He padded to the door of the chamber and turned the bronze knob gently till it clicked, then eased the door open slowly and silently.

  Ensconced candles lit a long corridor. The Shadowfinger looked both ways. Ornate hangings, an artisan chair, a table with a vase atop it. He had been here once before. Not just Manolia, but the palace in Orma, the capital. He could not believe his good fortune.

  He shut the door quietly and made his way down the corridor, sticking to the shadows, taking care that his footsteps did not make a sound on the marble, poise only enhanced by the trance.

  Where would what he was looking for be kept?

  He allowed his intuitions to lead him to the most opulent area of the palace, a great hall bedecked with more huge versions of the ridiculous tapestries, through a door at its far end, up a flight of stairs, and…

  There.

  Vish drew back from the corridor into which he had just peered.

  There were two guards posted outside of the door, of course. The Manolains were stupid, but they would have to be colossally stupid not to guard her. And it.

  He could use his talents in this state to slip past them, but they would be alerted by the sound of him opening the door to the chamber. He could also kill them, though probably not without making a bit of noise, which would be counter-productive,

  No matter. He knew what he needed to know now.

  He walked the route back to the room in which he had awoken, keeping silence. As he did he paid close, poppy-enhanced attention to how many stairs he descended, to the particular twist and turn of the corridors he took, to the overall distance between the two rooms.

  He shut the door to the first room carefully behind him.

  He walked over to the window and slid it open. Cool night air blew in.

  He took off his gloves and let them fall to the floor by the window.

  He reached into a pocket stitched into the left breast of his tunic and drew out another pair of gloves, slipping these on instead.

  He held up his fingers and gave them a little wiggle. Ten vicious small points twinkled back at him in the moonlight from the tips of his fingers.

  He turned and climbed out of the window backwards, clasping onto the wall outside the window with one clawed hand.

  Vish smiled. The points on the end of his fingers stuck in the stone, giving him purchase.

  Slowly, carefully, the Shadowfinger made his way along the outside of the wall in the direction of the chamber he had identified, crawling across it like a spider in the darkness. He drew on his considerable strength, honed by all those years of training, and held himself up with his arms alone as he crawled, though whenever he passed a ledge he allowed it to take his weight.

  He traversed the walls to the chamber he had found, making use of the mental map he had formed in his mind when he walked back from it inside the building.

  He arrived at where he knew the chamber must be.

  Not just one or two windows here but a whole wall of them, looking out on the courtyard below which was, thankfully, empty at this hour.

  Many windows, but they looked to have the same design as the one in his room, and would therefore open the same way. Vish supposed the Manolians had never counted on anyone being able to infiltrate the palace in this manner.

  He crept over to the nearest window, got level with it and then took off one glove by pulling it off with his teeth as he hung from one hand.

  He pressed the palm of his now gloveless hand to the window, cold to the touch, and slid it silently up and open.

  He swung himself underneath a curtain into the chamber, crouching as he landed to take his weight and muffle any sound, and was still.

  Darkness cloaked the chamber. But darkness was Vish’s element. His eyes grew accustomed to it even more quickly than usual, helped by the trance, and he saw that the chamber held two large cupboards, a dressing table and chair, a nightstand, and a bed.

  Vish listsned.

  No sound broke the stillness of the room except, if he strained his hearing to its limit, the rhythmic rises and falls of a sleeper’s breath.

  Good, the thought echoed in Vish’s entranced mind.

  He took a step.

  The person in the bed grunted in their sleep, and Vish froze ice-still again, but then they rolled over and the rhythmic breathing resumed. Vish exhaled noiselessly.

  He moved to the bedside like a cat closing on its prey.

  It was not on the nightstand.

  It wasn’t on the table either.

  That must mean the person in the bed was wearing it.

  A girl. The one from Vorr’s reports. Fortunately she was sleeping on her back. A blanket covered up to her neck.

  Vish slipped his hand onto the hem of the blanket, paused, then ever so carefully folded it back, making no sound.

  A chain. The girl was indeed sleeping with the Crystal.

  Unfortunately she was also clasping it tight in one fist.

  Vish put his finger underneath the girl’s left ear and tickled it very gently.

  When the girl did not respond, he tickled it slightly less gently.

  The girl grunted in her sleep and let go of what she was holding to itch her ear, then let her hand lie flat on the pillow. The rhythmic breathing resumed.

  There it was. A pendant and, set into it, a crystal which even now glowed faintly with the silent crackle of pent-up lightning.

  Vish’s mouth made a smile underneath his face covering. Too easy.

  The Shadowfinger reached inside the fold of his uniform to another of its many inner pockets, this one sewn into the right breast, and found there a small implement and silk bag.

  He reached over the girl and used the implement to scrape the crystal slowly once, twice, thrice.

  The girl murmured, and Vish froze again, but then her sleep-breaths restarted.

  He held up the implement and when he was satisfied that it had enough minute glittering crystal scrapings on it, he deposited them carefully in the bag.

  The Shadowfinger left the room by the way he had come in, closing the window behind him.

  TO BE CONTINUED…