Out of Context

I am unseen. My footsteps are as silk on snow.

I weave, unnoticed, through the throng of swaying patrons. Their already inferior senses are dulled more so by the cheap mead that flows as freshet come Spring.

I am unseen.

Tarted maidens smile and twirl, dodging jutting elbows and wildly swinging extremeties to deliver draught after draught.

Decades have passed, but I remain as sharp as ever.

I perch at the end of the bar and nudge a full tankard off the side. It crashes to the floor, spilling its contents. Its former owner drunkenly apologises profusely to nobody in particular.

I am unseen. I am Kelothur. I am Spymaster to the King of Thornjord, rival to the King of Arven.

Ava stops before me and puts her hand on my neck. Her fingers move quickly behind my ear and my back arches involuntarily. ‘You’re a good kitty’ she whispers and kisses my head. I like Ava.

I lick my paw as I watch her work. They reach for her and she flits away. Pigs all and amidst them, Ava. Dear Ava. She will be the last to die when I escape this infuriating malediction and begin to systematically dismantle Arven from the inside, out…

She essentially had one job. Two, to be picky about it.

One:  Shelve the books.
Two:  Ignore the ‘customers’.

That’s as complex as it should ever have been.

That’s as complex as it had been for nearly twelve years.

Yet for the first time ever in those nearly twelve years, she faltered on the second task. She glanced, when she should have focused more intently on sliding THO in beside THU. She closed her eyes and cursed inwardly at herself.

Of all the days.

Now she stands in the burnt ruins of a once beautiful library.

Smouldering curtains cling pointlessly to their twisted railings. Embers dance and glow on padauk tabletops and mahogany shelves. Shreds of parchment lie scattered and tiny specks of once valuable pages begin to settle like snowflakes around her.

‘What do fish think of the rain?’

‘Heh’ chuckled the old man, his voice deep and warm. He breathed in steadily and let out a gentle sigh, in wonderment. Not a single day passed without such a delightful conundrum finding its way into the child’s mind.

‘A careless fish’ he began, ‘that pays little attention to its surroundings, may find itself in an ever shrinking puddle atop a rock as the tide recedes’. The old man retracted his hand slowly to illustrate his meaning. ‘This fish would be grateful for the rain and would vow never to be careless again’.

‘The bigger fish, though careful enough to no longer get stuck on the rock, may have grown complacent since water is plentiful and now takes the rain for granted. Understand?’

The child frowned, took a moment, met the man’s warm gaze, then nodded confidently. ‘Thank you’.

Sophia put it down to imagination, the way her daughter would talk to herself. The child never asked her any questions, apparently preferring to sit on the verandah day after day and send her question out onto the wind. It never took her long to somehow arrive at a solution that satisfied her curiosity.

The smell had bothered him from that morning and he swore it followed his roommate around, getting faintly stronger as he approached and only fading as he departed.

‘Have you got a new aftershave on, Steve?’ he queried, not bothering to look at his mate on the couch. ‘It actually smells like… shit’. Daniel snorted at his own jibe.

The show was terrible. A regurgitated, heavily scripted ‘reality’ offering about home renovations on free-to-air television, interspersed with advertisements for KFC and a telecom agency he would otherwise had forgotten even existed. Two broke uni students hardly had the pleasure of choice.

As soon as the snapping started, Daniel likened it to the sound of gristle on a lamb shank tearing between his teeth.

Steve’s face was splitting open, quite evenly down the middle. His skull was parting and despite it being covered in blood and flecks of torn flesh, Daniel instantly recognised his own face emerging from the human debris.

‘Fuck me’ was all he could manage as his doppelganger opened its eyes and smiled, toothily.

Beads of sweat were forming on Doctor Evans’ face, though he was quite calm indeed.

The man opposite him was similarly slick with perspiration, yet he looked the model addict; legs curled up, hugging his knees, rocking steadily. The cracked faux leather finish on the seat cushion creaked with each of his movements, adding a rhythm to the drone of the ineffectual air purifier.

The doctor pushed his wire framed glasses up his nose with his middle finger, leaned back and sucked his teeth.

“You can’t keep popping these pills like mints, Mr. Sanders” he scolded. “I told you they had a certain… addictive quality.”

“It’s Bolt doc, Steven Bolt” the nervous man spewed forth eagerly “and I know you told me, but I managed to lift the corner of a piece of paper with my mind the other night and I just need a little more-”

“Mr Sanders, please, you’re not making any sense” the doctor interrupted. He attempted a smile, but he couldn’t fight the disappointment suddenly weighing him down. He had only just gotten used to this city.

Steven Bolt’s last thought was one of disbelief as the laser sight mounted to the good doctor’s blaster blinded him briefly. It didn’t have long to sit in his brain before it was blown away with what remained of his wasted life.

Pawpaw.

He smiled lopsidedly as he remembered the name, dredging it from so deep in his mind that he was afraid of drowning in the memories.

When he was younger, his mother would make him eat it. He never liked the smell of it, but he came to appreciate the subtle sweetness.

He looked down at her, still writhing, as he tongued the blood from his palm.

“Yes”, he decided. “Like pawpaw.”

With a flick of his hand, he sent man after man flying out over the ridge. This was no challenge. They were but fruit flies against his might and yet they continued to charge, blind hope leading them to their death in the chasm below.

He grew more bored than tired.

‘Hold them off’, he commanded. His trusted second nodded, tightened his grip on his sword and grinned manically before taking up position ahead of him.

The shaman raised his arm and twisted his hand into a claw as if trying to tear a hole in the very fabric of the air itself. His gigantic muscles bulged and strained, causing his blue skin to ripple. His mouth was open in a scream of rage, his teeth bared, but he produced no sound. He held his pose upon the unstable ground.

Dark grey clouds appeared and began to swirl above him. This battle, if anyone would remember it as such, would be over soon. The familiar numbing in his fingertips began to spread across his hand as the crackling of energy grew.

Tonight, he would hold. He would hold until his entire arm was numb and he would unleash a fulmination so devastatingly shattering, that it may just split their entire world in two.

He was the one, true shaman. The bringer of life for his tribe and the agent of death for all others!

When the numbness spread down to his shoulder, he pulled his arm back and down, took a deep breath and-

‘Jack? Bryce? Dinner!’ came the call from the kitchen.

Jack jumped down off his bed, scruffed his little brother’s hair and said ‘race you, loser!’, already half way to the stairs.

 

‘Level B4, column C, fifth row…’

She mouthed it silently under her breath as she ducked and weaved between the hordes of weekend shoppers.

‘Level B4, column C, fifth row…’

She had to find an elevator, fast.

For a brief moment, she thought she saw a PeeVee drone stop along its patrol route and turn in her direction. Maybe it was paranoia, though that wouldn’t be unjustified.

In the split second she glanced at it, she made a mental note of the variations in the cooling vents. ‘Jesus, that’s not a one-one’ she thought, referring to the model number. ‘They’ve upgraded already!’

About the size of a football and frustratingly quiet at all but the closest range, the Perpetual Vigilance™ series of drones could hang in the air relatively unnoticed, analysing the movements and body heat of each person within view for potentially suspicious activity.

She swallowed past the lump in her throat and attempted to look nonchalant, lightly hopping between shoppers, smiling and apologising in as friendly a manner as she could muster as she bumped a lady with her elbow here or nudged a security droid there.

She noticed a second drone ahead as she neared the elevator platform. They tended to stay no more than 100 metres apart, but any closer and you could guarantee that they were watching somebody.

She did her best to ignore it and pressed her identification card against the sensor. It chimed cheerfully and a disembodied voice stated that the elevator would arrive momentarily.

‘Level B4, column C, fifth row…’

As she leaned back on her assistant’s office desk, her blouse fell open slightly, revealing her smooth chest and stunning cleavage.

He swallowed hard and squirmed in his chair. Was she out of her mind?

Her patent Manolo Blahnik dangled from the toe of her crossed leg, teasingly close to his now bulging groin.

Her smooth pantyhose, coating her legs like silken paint, glinted under the…

‘Under the what? The “cool glow of the office neons”?’

He sighed, then mashed the backspace key repeatedly, frustrated and aroused.

It was a brilliant cover. The only profession that could drive freely, anywhere, without anybody questioning what was blatantly advertised on the side of the van.

Pest Controller
– All areas. Call to arrange interstate appointments.
– Fully licensed.
– All quotes honoured as is.
– First time, done right.
– Guaranteed results.

To people in the know, it reads like this:

Contract Killer
– Nationwide. Worldwide by negotiation.
– All weapons and techniques. Suicide? Holiday accident? Business hit? No problem.
– Make sure you’re absolutely certain you want the target erased. Once the contract is agreed upon, I go dark until the job is done.
– One time only. Once confirmation of contract completion is delivered, no further contact will be accepted.
– FIGJAM.