Author's Annoying Note: Hello there, wenches and gentlemen, even though I don't think many gentlemen will read this story, and, um, welcome (if I can use this word for something to read (!)) to the first chapter of this story. I have already put it on this web site, but I put it again, with some mistakes rubbed of, literally of course, but nevertheless rubbed off. Please, read, then think, drink a little bit of tea/coffee/fish-tank water to calm yourself down, and REVIEW. And please give me some advices and tell me what you don't like as well as what you like about this story.
Well, um, enjoy. (And don't forget to review, or ELSE :evil way of talking, like all the evil characters of the movie and cartoons—you know, the slow, drawling o-r—e-l-s-s-s-s-:)
Chapter One
Room 333
The sun was slowly falling behind the neat line of the shining grey sea, and the thick silvery mist was starting to come down from the Light-Less Woods, its long, pale ribbons coiling around the tall grey trees, the narrow, unsymmetrical houses, the half-rotten dark wooden pills of the many, labyrinthine docks, sliding on the smooth, dangerously still, deep-dark water. Everything seemed sad and soulless in the grim falling dusk, and even the sun was just a dim light behind the veil of thick, faded, grey-white clouds that were serving as only sky above the big, dark-grey, narrow village that was sticking tightly against the sad savage Wreck Sea. Here and there, through the deepening, thickening mist, the pale yellow and green lights of the torches were starting to glow, like dots of eerie light in a city were night meant a whole other universe, and the peoples started to go back to their houses, hurrying and hunched after their hard day of labor, knowing perfectly that when it would be dark, the city would put on its second mask, the terrible, hard, cruel, twisted one, and become dangerous.
Nevertheless, it was already deep dark in the night when Arach stumbled out of the Alchematoria, where she had spent the whole day helping tiny, distracted Master Alchematorian Morphine to prepare his well-known potions of Death With A Lot of Pain. Too young to be a Master herself, yet too talented not to be allowed in the Alchematoria, at eighteen Arach had already the experience and the talent of any Master Alchematorian, even if she didn't look like one. Not tall enough, too thin, not even with the advantage to be muscled, and even less graceful, she had a small pale face, with narrow black eyes like slits of jet incrusted in her marmoreal visage, a tiny nose that crooked in a very slight arch over a mouth that was bloody red with all her sins and disturbingly twisted with a coil of mingled mean irony, harsh exasperation and invincible wit. She had long, raven hair, cut unequally, falling over her eyes, cheeks, shoulders and back, uncombed, untidy, abandoned, in a long veil of ragged tenebrous and savage silk. Dressed with a black corset of faded silk that she had been using for at least four years, a simple black tunic of cotton tied with leather straps and black leather trousers and boots that she had also been using for quite a time, a large, old, baggy and extravagantly elegance-lacking long brown coat with the hood pulled on her face and sleeve-less gloves of faded, cracked leather at her hands, she seemed more massive in the dark, her spidery, nimble white hands pulled deeply in her big pockets, her back hunched under the crushing weariness of the harsh routine. Like so many miserable peoples of StonePort, her work of the day was immediately followed by her work of the Night, which, of course, was much more different.
She briskly walked down the great Main Path, which slithered importantly between two lines of narrow and brightly lit inns and hostels, kicking down the dark stealthy shapes that were stretching their hands for the thin brown purse that hung from her old silver-buckled belt, escaping with hisses of fury from the arms of longing and bold sailors from the ships that never ceased to come and go from the crowded port, throwing square, hard cuffs in the wan faces of the sneaky beggars that annoyed her so much, and finally arrived at the Dancing Tree, a great, warm, beautiful, bad frequented inn, held by an opulent, gorgeous, forty year old tall blond woman named Roseeh.
'Arach!' cried the latter in her languishing, friendly and booming voice, 'How is the personal life?'
'As ever,' replied Arach under her breath, answering in a way so that nobody, not even Roseeh herself, could hear her, and ducking away behind a man.
It didn't matter anyway. Arach's life was always as ever. Her life was as monotonous as the Cathedral's huge solemn, cruel-sounding clock, with its hard work, dangerous night business, cold, lonely nights and harsh mornings. It was well known in StonePort that Arach, the Alchematorian Apprentice, the Assassin, the mysterious girl from somewhere else, the hard worker, was without any lover, which was a great surprised, as she frequented very handsome men, and as she was not rich. Debauch, was the word employed by Arach. Debauch. Who would possibly be enough honour-less to sell her body to a man, even if she is dying of hunger and cold? Honor was her bad point, one of her many bad points, people said. If she would have been homeless, foodless in the road and that someone had given her a gold coin, she would have rather had spit at his face and die, than to accept it and own a dept of pity and mercy. Honor, in her heart, was the only thing that allowed her to live, the only thing that pushed her away from her black misery, from the long, unbearable calamity of life at StonePort. So her honor, deep in her heart, had raised such hopes, such expectations she sometimes lost confidence even in honor. These times, however, life was rather better, even if she knew that she would have to sleep in a cold bed, in a humid bedroom at the back of a cheap, miserable inn.
'There's someone for you in the Room333,' said Roseeh, leaning over the massif wooden counter, beaming down at the girl's pale, hostile young face as she burst up from the crowd in which she had just duck like someone gasping out of heart-frosting water.
'Room333? Oh hell…'she said in under-tones, throwing an angry look to a man that was looking at her with a look of sympathetic anticipation and friendship. The man seemed thunderstruck against her aggressive glare, and quickly looked away at his perfect, beautiful nails.
Arach, hands in pocket, her head between her shoulders, went at the far end of the tavern, slipping between the tables and the peoples, in a dimly fire-lit room where three peoples were talking quietly. One was a woman with blond hair and a huge diamond-incrusted golden sword hanging at her hip, the other a man drinking some ale, and talking to her, holding a heavy-looking bag of gold in a hand, looking extremely suspicious; the last one was another woman, dressed in a dark dress of rich materials that fell in a sea of precious velvet all around her slender frame, her pale blond hair tightly pulled behind her head, which was covered with a white fur-trimmed hood. When she saw Arach come, she sat straighter, sweeping up the crystalline blue eyes in a fair, piercing gaze, and gestured her to come to seat next to her in the opposite leather armchair. Arach went to seat at the very edge, and said unceremoniously:
'I want heavy gold.'
'You shall have. Here…is the reward,' said the woman, discreetly taking a little bag away from a fold in her skirts.
Arach, manner-less, grabbed the bag, and opened it abruptly; it was full of gold coins, Empire Gold, gleaming tenderly in the firelight and lighting up her own eyes. She raised her head toward the blond stranger, her eyes glittering as much as the gold between the untidy, dirty strands of her lusterless black hair, and said in a pleased tone:
'Very well. What's the job?'
'I want you to find and kill—the hunter named—Hawkke.'
'A hunter?' said Arach, leaning back in the chair, smiling smugly 'shall be easy. I take the job.'
'You have two nights. If in the third you're not here at this same hour, then the gold will never be yours.' The stranger stood up, raised her head majestically, and went away from the room with a discreet murmur of her elegant skirts.
Author's Irritating After-note: Hope you are already addicted to those writings. Now, do not forget to review (you'd better not, anyway, because I cast a spell over this story, so that if you don't review it immediately, your hair will rot off your head, your eyes will pop out of your sockets, all shriveled, like raisins, which, by the way, are totally delicious, especially the golden ones, but this is not the point, and your fingers will freeze until they just cut off from your knuckles and the blood spurs away and boils down to the floor and in fact is alien acid and ruins your best shoes/socks/carpet. So—I warned you, and my magic cannot be defeated by any reasonable and totally horrid means, like onions, garlic, little brothers, and Unsharpened Pens, uurgh :shivers: Anyway, you get the thing: REVIEW!)