A man approached Garron Banick. Ostensibly he was another gala-goer, part of one of the many retinues or among the many retainers present. The party in the ballroom continued around them.
"Have you met the hostess yet, Lord Banick? What do you think of her?" said the man.
Garron smirked, took a sip of his wine, and said the word. "Charming."
The man smiled politely and nodded.
And then he departed.
* * * * *
Charming.
That was the command from his benefactor, passed to him through his handler. That was the command to set the plot in motion. That was the command to kidnap both the head of
House Luana and the Hostess of this very gala.
Ulren Varchek didn't need to know why. In fact, it was preferable that he didn't know anything other than what he strictly needed to know. It was a hard facet of his line of work, that you couldn't tell what you didn't know. Not even the best magic or most horrific torture in the world could extract the real truth from him, because he didn't have it.
All the better. He didn't care about the inner workings of Anirian politics. His work as an asset paid well. Period. And after tonight's task was done, he would go back home and kiss his wife good morning and wake their daughter and make her favorite breakfast, scrambled eggs with pepper, as if nothing at all extraordinary had happened during the night. Although it remained his great and quiet fear that his daughter would catch onto the pattern, that she'd figure out that every time she got scrambled eggs with pepper, her daddy had hurt or killed someone to get it.
Worries for later.
It was go time.
Ulren and his team had staged themselves by the back entrance, and things couldn't have worked out more perfectly. Both of their targets had come of their own free will to the room just beyond the back entrance, the one holding the donations and the lantern (of disputed complexity).
The door burst open. Ulren and nearly a dozen armed, equipped, masked men stormed inside with shocking violence of action. They fell upon
Mina Pirian and
Jiya Luana, subduing them easily, binding them and extracting them from the premises. As quickly as they had stormed in, they flooded out, Ulren the last to exit and closing the door behind himself.
Just outside the back entrance door, in the courtyard, there was the slain body of a Pirian House guard. And there was one last thing Ulren was instructed to do.
He clapped a hand onto the shoulder of one of his own men. The youngest man of the lot, as it so happened. Mirhem, was his name.
"Good work."
"Th—"
And Ulren stabbed him, saw the look of shock in his eyes before the light of life went out, and he laid him out beside the body of the Pirian guard as if they'd fought one another and perished together. Ulren took something out of his own pocket and stuffed it into Mirhem's pocket. Something that would be found on his person when inevitably his body was searched.
A blue handkerchief with gold trim.
With that, Ulren and his team fled into the night, their captives secure.
Mina Pirian Jiya Luana
