at the windowsill first, knuckles ashy. Hands pulled up the elbows, which pulled up the head. Black head wrap around the forehead and the mouth. Eyes, an opium-lover red, sweeping the room, locking with my eyes, but not seeing me. Shoulder robes in blue, a leather sash over the left shoulder. One leg in, and at the bottom of the sash, two sheaths for two swords and a dagger dangling. I waited until all of him was in and his long blue robes swept the floor.
“Hail.”
He jumped. He grabbed for his sword. My first dagger cut his neck, my second plunged under his chin, killing his head before his legs knew he was dead. He fell, his head slamming into the floor right at my foot. Undressing him felt more like unwrapping him. Scars on his chest, a bird, lightning, an insect with many legs, glyphs that looked in the style of the note. Top joints of both index fingers missing. He was not Seven Wings. And he had the knotty, violent crotch scar of a eunuch. I knew I did not have much time, for whoever sent him was either awaiting his return or followed him here. He had no fragrance other than sweat of the horse he rode on whatever journey led him to be lying dead on Miss Wadada’s floor. I turned him over and traced the glyphs on his back to remember. Two thoughts came to me, one just gone and one now come. Now come: that there was no blood, though where the knife stabbed him, blood usually bursts forth like a hot spring. Just gone: that the man really had no smell. The only scent coming from him was his horse, and the white clay from the wall he’d climbed.
I rolled him over again. Two glyphs on his chest matched the note. A crescent moon with a coiled serpent, the skeleton of a leaf on its side, and a star. Then his chest rumbled, but it was not the rattle of the dead. Something hitting against each bone of his ribs, pumping up his chest and his heart, making his eyes pop open. Then his mouth, but not like he was opening it, but as if someone was pulling his jaws apart, wider and wider until the corners of his lip began to tear. The rumble shook him all the way to his legs, which hammered into the floor. I jumped back and stood up. Ripples rose from his thighs, moved up to his belly, rolled under his chest, and then escaped through his mouth as a black cloud that stank of flesh much longer dead than the man. It swirled like a dust devil, getting wider and wider, so wide that it knocked over some of Ekoiye’s statues. The spinner closed in tight on itself and turned to the window. In the spin of cloud and dust it formed and then broke apart back into dust, the bones of two black wings. It might have been a trick of poor light, or the sign of a witch. The spinning cloud left through the window. Back on the ground the man’s skin turned gray, withering like a tree trunk. I stooped. He still had no scent. I touched his chest with one finger and it caved in, then his belly, legs, and head crumbled into dust.
Here is truth. In all the worlds I have never seen such craft or science. Whoever sent the assassin would certainly be coming now. The man, or spirit, or creature, or god behind such a thing would not be stopped by two daggers, or two hatchets.
His name, Basu Fumanguru, walked into my thoughts right then. Not only did they kill him, but they that did so wanted him to remain dead. I had questions, and Bunshi would be the one to answer them. She left the child with an enemy of the King, but many men challenge the King in great halls and in notices and writs, and they are not killed for it. And if the child was marked for death, why not kill him before? I have heard nothing that would push anyone to get rid of Fumanguru that would not have done so before, certainly no King. As a man he was no more than a chafe on the inside of the leg. Then the thought you knew you would be left with, but denied because one would never wish to be left with such a