A Magic of Nightfall

The White Stone

There were easy killings, and there were hard ones. This was one of the easy ones.

The target was Honori cu’Belgradi, a merchant dealing in goods from the Magyarias, and a philanderer who had made the mistake of sleeping with the wrong person’s wife: the wife of the White Stone’s client.

“I watched him tup her, ” the man had told the White Stone, his voice shaking with remembered rage. “I watched him take my wife like an animal, and I heard her call out his name in her passion. And now. .. now she’s pregnant, and I don’t know if the child is mine or.. .” He’d stopped, his head bowed. “But I’ll make certain that he’ll do this to no other husband, and I’ll make certain that the child will never be able to call him vatarh…”

Relationships and lust were responsible for fully half of the White Stone’s work. Greed and power accounted for the rest. There was never a dearth of people seeking the White Stone; if you needed to find the Stone, you found the way.

Honori cu’Belgradi was a creature of habit, and habits made for easy prey. The Stone had watched him for three days, and the man’s ritual never varied by more than a quarter turn of the glass. He would close his shop in Ville Serne, a town a half-day’s ride south of Brezno, then stroll to the tavernhouse on the corner of the next street over. He would stay there until four turns of the glass after third call, after which he would go to the rooms where the woman-the wife of the Stone’s client-waited for their nightly tryst.

On the way to those rooms, Honori would pass the alleyway where the Stone waited now. The Stone could already hear the footsteps in the cool night air. “Honori cu’Belgradi,” the Stone called as the figure of the man passed by the opening of the alley. Honori stopped, his face cautious, then eagerly interested as the Stone stepped into the light of the teni-lamps of the street.

“You know me?” cu’Belgradi asked, and the Stone smiled gently.

“I do. And I would know you better, my friend. You and I, we have a business arrangement to make.”

“How do you mean?” cu’Belgradi asked as the Stone stepped closer to him. So easy… Only a step away. A knife thrust’s distance apart, and cu’Belgradi tilted his head quizzically.

“Like this,” the Stone answered, looking around the street and seeing no one watching, and clapping cu’Belgradi on the shoulder as if the man were a long-lost friend. At the same time the hand holding the poisoned blade drove hard up under the man’s rib cage and twisted it up into the heart. Cu’Belgradi made a strangled, blood-choked cry, and the body was suddenly heavy against the Stone’s athletic build. The Stone half-dragged, half-carried the dying cu’Belgradi into the alleyway, laying the body quickly on the ground. Cu’Belgradi’s eyes were open, and the Stone dug into a cloak pocket and brought out two stones: both white in the dimness of the alley, though one was smooth and polished as if from much handling. The stones were placed on cu’Belgradi’s open eyes, the Stone pressing them down into the sockets. The one on the left eye the Stone left there; the gleaming, white, and smooth one over the right eye-the eye of the ego, the eye that held the image of the face it saw in its last moment-that one the Stone picked up again and placed back in a leather pouch around the Stone’s neck.

“And now I have you, forever,” the apparition known as the White Stone whispered.

A breath later, there was no one left alive in the alley, only a corpse with a white pebble over its left eye: a contract fulfilled.