Jackal at the Door (Cyrah & Ifran)

[Ifran]

57th Spring, 510 A.V. After an evening of singing and sword-dancing for an audience, Ifran returned to the residence of his House on a litter. It was part of the Northwinds mystique: artists, scholars, wealthy merchants of wadj. Aristocracy. Their stock had been soaring ever since his grandfather, Sadiki, put the current pressorah on her throne and helped her consolidate her power. The Northwinds were good at Eypharian decadence, and Ifran, as one of their sons, walked the walk to maintain that mystique. If people thought him merely another artist, all the better. Though his khopeshes remained behind at the opera house, he was guarded. It wasn't until he was walking the halls of the family residence that he was not watched, and he repaired to his rooms for the evening. Slaves bathed him and washed the theatrical makeup from his skin, clever fingers working out knots of tension in his muscles. Finally, he was left truly alone, the security of the house maintained by a cadre of professionals. At his desk, he read reports from his grandfather, keeping abreast of the family industry. Strange reading for a performer, but there it was.

[Cyrah]

She'd followed him from the theater. Eypharian nobility was not, she would've admitted, her forte, though of late they'd been more and more popular. Something had begun to stir the great houses of Ahnatep, and that meant plenty of business for the opportunistic jackal to trowel her nose in. She hunted him as woman, though, not beast. Duskers and shadowmen, scorpions and even the occasional Ahnatep Jackal, for laughs, she'd hunt in the canine form more naturally conducive to stealth and anonymity, but for nobility one required a more delicate touch. Cyrah wasn't so old that her fingertips had mastered such a thing, but she had the basic idea down. Few in the house of the Northwinds looked twice at the pretty, veiled girl carrying a tray of tea and biscuits down the corridor. Woe upon the original serving girl – she was shoved into a cabinet somewhere, her throat slit – but the price for her death would be paid, in due course. Every debt was always paid; every marker always collected. When Ifran entered his personal suites, the tray was already waiting for him. She let him get settled in, let him begin the dull task of browsing paperwork, let his muscles relax into the banality of practiced monotony. She'd long determined that her best option was to get to his throat before all those hands of his got busy; the problem with Eypharians: too many appendages. Hard to keep track of what they were all up to at any given moment. She struck swiftly, from behind him. Like so much forming shadow, she snatched his head back by the hair with one hand, dropping a blade to slice open his throat with the other.

[Ifran]

While stage combat was a slower, more formalized cousin of true battle, and while the vast majority of his training revolved around the ancient backsword of his people, the instincts were still there and, for the moment, they saved his life. One of his six hands managed a sloppy grapple of her offending wrist, another reaching back for hair. The other four flailed with markedly less success, and his voice nearly broke with surprise. "Stop!" he commanded; he was used to commanding. This wasn't right, his mind decided, racing to calculate. Nobody knew of his political ambitions yet save Aru, the follower of Gnora who deemed his ascension to be an act of balance, and none of his rivals within the company could afford an assassin who could bypass his grandfather's guard. Scrabbling for a grip on her weapon arm, he twisted, legs pushing up to stand with explosive power.

[Cyrah]

She bit back a curse when he caught her wrist; fucking arms, too many godsdamned arms! But she didn't stop, just grit her teeth and braced her heel against the back of his chair, trying to leverage her weight against his to better drive the blade against his throat. Ducking her head to avoid the grasp of his fingers towards her hair, she slid sideways in the same moment that he pushed to his feet. His sudden momentum knocked her further to the side, and she took a wild slash at him in an attempt to at least bleed him even if she couldn't outright kill him just yet. A stumble, but her bare heels caught the tiles of the floor and she twisted away from him, rounded about with the blade still gripped between her fingers. Knees sank, her posture low like she'd dive for his throat at any moment. The distance afforded them a chance to look at one another, and he found himself the furious focus of a pair of vicious silver eyes. Most of her face was hidden by a black veil, and the rest of her clothing was loose and swirling, a dark-hued gown that didn't fit her well enough to actually have been hers. She was a small person, but she looked quite intent on killing him.

[Ifran]

A serpentine hiss escaped him as her blade scored on his arm, but the chair was thrown at her by another and he backed up a few paces, crouching, six arms warily arched to counter whatever moves she might make. He was fast enough, but his mind worked faster. "You are too good to kill me," he said in Common, though his mind attacked the problem with more subtle tools. It wasn't that he considered himself safe. He had rivals and there were the sad aficionados of his art who, in their insanity, would take his life in order to own his glory. Dira knew he had killed as well to secure his position. Every hour wounded, and the last one killed... "Who sent you?" he demanded, the language incapable of containing the nuances of his desire to know. "This is too much." There was a framed ikon of Gnora on his desk, a reminder from Aru to divorce himself from emotion as much as possible to find his true course. Gnora, he assumed, would agree with him. If this assassination attempt--for she had not yet succeeded--was related to his work, then it was messy. Poison or some accident would suffice for taking out a rival and maintaining Eypharian propriety, but not a slit neck in the family residence of a Great House.

[Cyrah]

Ifran was wrong to assume that his body would have been found sometime later with a slit throat. Mess, at least, Cyrah never left behind. Her eyes narrowed on him and she shifted side to side, trying to figure out how to feint at least half of his arms in one go. It might have been easier to shift and attack him that way, but she wasn't sure how easy it would be to get out of the house in her canine form once all was said and done. For as long as she was able, she wouldn't talk to him. Wouldn't answer his questions. That was foolish; he was a life to be snuffed out, and nothing more. A debt needed to be paid; a marker needed to be claimed. She dug her toes into the floor and launched herself into the air, heels skidding across the surface of his desk. One foot lashed out to kick at two of his arms, while she slashed again with the blade. One nick at a time, she would take him down, if she had to.

[Ifran]

Those of the Ano Cult might not have approved of the sudden, animal instinct of fear. She was good, but if he had his sword, he might have taken her. As it was, he saw death as a likely outcome, even as he deflected her with as many hands as it took, side-stepping out of the way. With his luck her blade was poisoned and he was already dead. "How much are they paying you?" he asked, trying a different tack. There were few as wealthy as his House, and his grandfather would surely pay to keep his grandson alive, and to root out an enemy of the House for extermination. Since implication might be wasted on an assassin in the heat of battle, he said outright, "I can pay you more. How much to even the scale?" Next question likely, 'How much to slam it hard in the other direction?'

[Cyrah]

She'd been warned he was good, and she privately cursed herself for having not been quicker in her initial attack. It may have been a better idea to wait until he'd gone to sleep, but that sort of thing didn't sit well with her. Not that Cyrah believed in things like fair fights, but if one's hour had arrived and it was time to go, she believed in at least going out with your eyes open. She'd sooner stab him in the back than smother him to death, or something silly like that. This, though, was starting to annoy her. Even using the desk as a sort of higher ground, he was young and fit and well-trained, and all those arms were like a pinwheel between her knife and his heart, any of the spokes of which could get in the way or snap the weapon out of her fingers, and then things would get messy, indeed. She lowered even further, into a crouch atop the desk, one hand between her heels and the other turning the blade, like she was about to just tackle him outright to the floor and tear his throat open with her white, white teeth. When he started talking about money. And money was important – it may not have been the beginning and end, for her, as it was for some – but here he was talking about scales, and that was her kind of language. So she went still there, in the posture of pre-attack, pale eyes weighing him harshly. “Quite a bit,” she said quietly, her voice semi-muffled by the veil she wore. “How much do you think you're worth, Northwinder?”

[Ifran]

"I am the firstborn son of the firstborn son of Sadiki of the House of the North Wind," he said matter-of-factly, without arrogance. "We are a wealthy house and family is of paramount importance." This was progress, but he didn't relax. His body was hovering in that space between concentration and relaxation from which he could anticipate and react, or take action himself, with the greatest ease possible. If it came to it, he should be able to choke the life out of her before he bled out. In the quick calculation of risk versus payoff, that wasn't the best outcome, but it was better than some. "Are we negotiating?" he asked without scorn. "Make an offer."

[Cyrah]

"I know who you are," she half-laughed, though the sound held little humor. She knew precisely who he was, and also roughly how much he was worth. She'd been more interested, in that moment, in knowing how much he thought he was worth. Wealth aside. A tilt of her head as she regarded him, the gesture almost canine. "600 gold mizas," she decided aloud, a dark eyebrow rocking upward. Now they were negotiating.