Bird's Eye View

            Rosanna Jaroka sat on the rooftop, using the binoculars to watch the woman going by the name of Valerie Justinian. A false name, certainly. Not one easily intimidated, though. The other agent had been killed in a traffic accident before she arrived, but as far as Jaroka could tell, Justinian had not hesitated to pick up the search once again.

            Jaroka had been on the run from the House for well over a year now. The day that Paul Sabein was supposed to meet with her, everything had changed. Sabein was a member of the Circle of Thorns, which was the ruling body of the Temple of the Stag’s Head. Jaroka had been raised in the faith, had known the hatred with which the rest of the world looked upon her people. The spiritual truths did not hold Jaroka’s interest except in the most abstract way, but all her life she knew it was her duty to strike fear into the hearts of the enemies of her god.

            And the Stag’s Head had provided for her. For years, Jaroka and her team had lived in relative comfort thanks to the benevolence of the Circle. Not everyone in her team even worshipped Sadafeth, but the Stag’s Head was generous to those who served, even if they did not believe.

            All of that ended the day Paul Sabein failed to show up in Entraht. Her team - her dearest friends - were all killed in one brutal act of betrayal. Yet Jaroka herself had been spared. It was months before she realized the truth, that Sabein had never even heard of her, and that the plot to kill the Bone King’s ambassador was the work of the House.

            And here they were, chasing her again, for whatever reasons they had. The Justinian woman was actually quite pretty, in a haunted sort of way. That seemed unusual. In Jaroka’s experience, the House preferred to employ the unremarkable as their agents, when they could afford to.

            She hadn’t heard Justinian speak, but her manner and poise did not match up with the rest of her appearance. She looked like a fellow Retron, though Jaroka could not be sure. This could be an intentional affectation – to distract from greater truths with small lies. The House was known – insomuch as it was known at all – for hiding behind layers and layers of falsehood.

            Instinct told her that violence was the best option. Agents of the House were frightening, certainly, but they could still be killed – at least she hoped so. She had her rifle in the bag next to her on the ground. Her heart began to beat faster, and she even went so far as to take hold of the bag’s zipper.

            Not now.

            Justinian was nearly at the door of her hotel. There were many people around. Escape would not be impossible, but a sniper bullet was much harder to pass off as an accident than a steam-cart speeding through an intersection.

            Besides, this one looks like a talker.

            She had the look. Athletic, certainly, and driven, but there was a softness in the Justinian woman that Jaroka could sense even through her binoculars. She would not deal with pain well. Perhaps it was that she had been too good, had never been caught, but Jaroka decided that she would be useful alive.

            “Getting soft? You of all people?” she could imagine her old friend Brun saying. Brun had been killed with the rest of them after the botched job in Entraht.

            Not soft. Trying something new.

            Justinian entered her hotel room. The curtains would be drawn, so there was no way of knowing in what window to look. But the assassin had gotten her look, so she judged the night a success. Next would be confrontation. Jaroka slung her bag over her shoulder and walked down the stairs into the building.

            “I thought she’d be there all night!” said Four Eyes, and he stood up, cracking his back as the dimness around them faded. “Don’t suppose we could have taken chairs, could we?” he asked. They had been squatting in the corner, a mere fifteen feet from Jaroka, in the corner where the northwest and northeast facades of the building met.

            “Are you going to make the drop, or should I?” asked The Inked Man.

Four Eyes reached down and touched his toes. He groaned as he did so. “Damn it, my back is killing me. I’m bringing a folding chair if we have to do something like this again.” He pulled a notepad out from his shoulder bag. “Right, let me just write out my report.”

“You weren’t writing while she was here?”

Four Eyes smiled. “Even if I could see a damned thing while I was in there, the sound of my pen scratching along the paper would be too loud. Hell, I was afraid she’d hear us breathing. Lucky that there was all this wind.”

“It is a tall building.”

Four Eyes held the pen cap in his teeth as he wrote, holding the paper at an angle where the floodlight could hit it. Four Eyes did not wear glasses. The Inked Man had long ago stopped caring why he had that name. The Inked Man himself was named in a fairly straightforward manner, as practically everything from the neck down was covered in tattoos. At first he worried that it would make him too easily recognizable, and that it would interfere with his duties, but Four Eyes had put him in touch with someone who taught him how to control the tattoos – to make them shift and re-form themselves with little more than meditative technique and a some chemical alterations to the ink.

Still, in retrospect he wished he’d gotten a different name when he’d become an Agent. He wondered who Four Eyes’ superior was, and why he or she had decided to give him the ironic name. No one in the House knew their superiors’ real names, or at least that was how it was supposed to be. The Inked Man could name several House Agents, but their actual identities were a complete mystery even to him, a House Agent for almost fifteen years. The Inked Man wondered on occasion if the names remained while the Agents came and went, but if they did, he was in the dark.

Four Eyes scribbled one last word on the note and tore off the page. “Done. Wait, just wanted to check with you to be sure. Crescent Moon comes after Square, right?”

The Inked Man nodded. “Yeah.”

“I just do not have a mind for these codes, Ink.”

“Is that why you keep me around?”

Four Eyes chuckled. “It’s just one part of your diverse skill set.” Four Eyes folded the note up and creased it, then handed it to the Inked Man. “Loose brick outside the ice cream shop off Mercer Avenue. And if you stop there, I highly recommend the Sea-Salt, Chocolate, and Cayenne Pepper. Shockingly good.”

The Inked Man nodded and slipped the note into his pocket. “Hey Four Eyes,” he said. “Where’d you learn that trick?”

“What trick?”

“The thing that made it dark where we were sitting.”

“Oh, you mean the dimness?”

“Yeah.”

Four Eyes walked up to him, and looked around to make sure no one was listening. “I learned it from my superior. My superior learned it – I think – from an Agent called the Patient. But the Patient, well, he-she-it supposedly… and I can’t guarantee you this is true, but I like to think it is, because frankly it would be really cool… supposedly, the Patient learned it from the Diplomat.”

(Copyright Daniel Szolovits 2012)