Chapter Text
Deserted villas flank my sides. Gunshots ring out over the night streets of Kraków.
Even worse, I’m out in the open in a town square.
Through the darkness, my eyes watch the sky - watching for the fleeting shadows of my pursuer. I grip my pistol tightly. It’s too light. How many shots do I have left?
Before I have time to consider, there are footsteps to my rear and from above: the familiar sound of leather shoes on a paved roof. I turn around, my eyes searching across the ridged stone and find, for the briefest of moments, a darker roundness against a dark night sky.
Two shots erupt from my pistol toward the reckoner’s exposed head, but they disappear from my sight as if stolen away by the light of my pistol. My breath is cut short when the night replies with the bellowing rage of gunpowder.
I lunge desperately away, and the stone beneath my feet shatters from a wayward bullet. Smoke rises from the impact, and the crater’s dust scatters almost to my neck. A chill settles on the back of my neck when I realise the hole it’s bored into the ground is deeper than the length of my hand.
I crouch behind a bench. It’s weak and thin, and I half-expect lead to be ripping through it and my body in the next few moments. But the gunfire doesn’t come. Did they lose me?
In the darkness of the night air, with only the wind’s noise and a bloodthirsty sniper as company, there is an uneasy stillness. My fingers begin to tap the trigger of my pistol. Tip, tap. Tip, tap.
I just need one good shot.
The silence holds. I grit my teeth, tap my pistol, watch my breath in the night’s cold air. It’s barely visible in the darkness. My eyes dart back and forth, from rooftop to rooftop, from alley to alley.
There is a shuffling on the roofs above me. My body, coiled like a spring, aches to leap outwards and take my chances with the moon and the wind, but this time, I stop. A voice from my childhood nags at me from inside, harsh like a knife and weathered like battered sea cliffs.
It hasn’t worked the last three times. It won’t work now. What did I teach you? Stop and think.
Stop and think, stop and think. I grit my teeth. He taught me everything I know, but still…I hated that. I hate hearing him, hate hearing his voice, hate remembering him, but…
Fine. I stop and think.
Even if I have the first shot, I can’t hit them. It hasn’t worked the last three times. I might as well be trying to shoot a fly out of the sky at this point.
More shuffling on the rooftops - running, leaping steps. My body tightens, ready to take the shot, but… stop and think. The voice and memory of my mentor keep me crouched in shadow, like an old cold hand resting on my back.
…they’re obvious and loud. Maybe desperate for another shot?
The hand tightens around my right shoulder, and a rebuke follows. No. Look around. What do you see?
My eyes snap away from my pistol to the square around me. In the darkness of the night, the familiar shapes in the streets of Kraków are nothing but colourless shadows. All I can make out clearly is the reflection of a moon in the water of a public fountain.
I turn towards the moon in the sky. The light of the moon is faint like silk, but still, that silk permeates the entire night sky like a curtain, and when I look upwards to the sky… of course.
The moonlit sky is dark, yes, but not darker than the shadowed figures in Kraków. Looking upwards, I would be able to see my pursuer’s figure, darker than the darkness of the night sky. But what about them, their eyes looking down from the light towards the darkened earth?
Did they have sharper eyes than me? Perhaps, but why hadn’t they already shot me? Why did they keep themselves vulnerable and distinct against the sky? Inexperience? Foolishness?
But I had been missing all my shots. And always, always, the shots of return fire would send me scampering for my life, and they would vanish in the - light - of my gunfire.
The cold night air settles on my fingertips, but my fingers have grown still. The voice in my mind, as suddenly as it came, is now silent. My shoulders are light.
I reach into my coat pockets and feel my hands grasp leather and string. The pouch is sealed deathly tight with wire, but I can hear a soft rattling when I put the pouch to my ear and shake gently. The adept’s powder within is black and supposedly ‘bitter’ - although I doubt anybody who’s actually gone and tasted it would have their mouth, tongue, or skull intact and unburnt enough to report the taste.
This powder would be illegal if enough people knew it existed.
A pinch goes up like lightning-struck thermite; a pouch and you could level a building. And it crackles and pops like a thousand firecrackers at once when it touches water.
I rise from my hiding place but make no steps. The footsteps start up again, off and above to my left now, closer and closer, but I don’t react. My eyes scan the roofs, and I see them - the briefest of figures flashing across the sky with a loud jump from one roof to another. It’s a shot I think I could take - if all my last ones hadn’t gone sailing into nowhere.
Instead, I begin to undo a knot of string.
The shadow flashes across the roofs again, this time almost covering the moon, as if taunting me to fire again, to put the finger on the trigger and tear them from the sky in a flash of gunfire.
The salt burns my flesh at its touch, but nonetheless, I grab a fine pinch. The fountain is close enough for me to toss the powder toward it and have at least one particle of dust impact the water.
When adept’s powder goes off, it’s almost always a violent and explosive surprise.
The granules of salt detonate in the water like the deafening sound of firing pistols. The darkness and silence of the night shatter like glass, and at this distance, I’m almost deafened and blinded by the light of the continuous detonations. But I raise my gun and watch the rooftops, my eyes and hands somehow still searching for that killing shot.
At the first flashes of fire, I had lost sight of that figure. But now, at a rooftop very close to me, I see, or feel, or hear, the flickering presence of the reckoner. Their figure is erratic, buzzing, trying to make out their mark from the blinding light of what they think are the flashes of gunshots…
The light fades. My eyes are struggling to adjust and my ears are ringing, but my hands have already lined up the shot.
Finally, I can see them. Finally, they can see me.
This time, I make sure that my shot will hit. For a moment too long, I stand in the open, silently aiming. The reckoner’s hands fly upwards in panic, bringing the rifle to their shoulder in sloppy haste. The sound of the firing marksman’s rifle bellows like a raging lion, and I feel an intense burning pain rip through my clothes and past my flesh to graze my right shoulder. Blood leaks immediately from the marred flesh; the scarring graze of a marksman’s rifle could send even the strongest man tumbling to the floor.
But it wasn’t a hit. It was a graze. And a graze would not deny me from my victory.
Tush. And I thought you were better than that.
The nightly symphony of exploding powder, roaring rifle shots, and poignant pistol fire is concluded with a final resolving note - the muffled impact of lead on flesh. I let out a quiet sigh of relief as the moon’s light traces an assassin and their rifle tumbling from a rooftop.
I am more like my mentor and father than I would like, but some habits I am proud to have inherited. I am proud to have his cunning and his patience speaking in my mind, tempering my foolishness. I am proud to have his aim, his keen sight, and sharp hearing.
And perhaps, I am a little bit proud to hear from my own mouth a scraping guttural chuckle when I hear the reckoner’s body slam against the ground with a satisfying thump.