Lyra felt slightly disappointed.
It was the night of her examination, and it was raining buckets. Her clothes stuck to her body (that wasn't too unusual) and she felt cold and damp. After five minutes, her hair, although in a tight bun, has started to feel like an angry octopus (she had put one on her head as a hat on the beach once, for some reason). Melting snow and puddles of icy water had invaded the city. A full moon could be seen, occasionnally, between two heaps of clouds.
The whole situation should have contributed to the difficulty of the test, but had miserably failed. Slippery rooftops helped her increase her speed, and the mist generated by the rain hitting any surface made her even harder to spot for the teachers.
They knew she had turned up only because she had left a note on a chimney that was on the route she was supposed to take, and it said « Don't worry, I'm here! Keep following the path we agreed on, thank you. Nil mortifi sine lucre, L. »
She could see them; there was Lady T'Malia leaning over the sign of a tavern, trying to see something through the cascades of water falling from the sky. The woman was only a shadow slightly darker than the others, but she was recognizable, partly because shadows don't struggle for their corsets to stay in place every minute or so.
Mister Nivor was waiting in an abandoned attic about twenty meters away, comfortably seated in an armchair, facing the only window. Candelabres had been installed to light the place. She would have to jump over a street and slip into the room, unharmed.
Oh, and mind his traps, too.
As jolly as he would seem, the redhead could never get herself to come near him without checking the whole space in a radius of at least three meters around the man.
She was currently crouched on top of the Beggars' Guild. The examiners had apparently found it funny to make her jump up and down the roofs of every Guild in the city, and that wasn't even close to being the shortest path for a panoramic tour.
Whatever happens, do not rush it; they won't like it, it's not classy enough. She took a few seconds to study the space that was separating her from Mister Nivor.
There.
For some reason the owner of that inn (possibly a brothel; whoever laughed and squealed stupidly like that was definitely neither asleep nor lonely) had wanted, and managed, to keep torches alight around his or her establishment.
There was a tiny gleam of metal in the torchlight.
Right where her landing spot was supposed to be, the man had set a wolf trap. It seemed brand new and sharp enough to chop a leg off; on the tiles of a building next to the inn, a crossbow was held by Madame les Deux-Epees, who seemed ready to shoot at whatever she could see, which, at the moment, was really not much.
Lyra was aware of her presence; she had felt the lady before she saw her. The teacher's immobility was unnatural, and people usually didn't put statues on top of their houses, and something that was too still was unnerving enough in Ankh-Morpork to raise suspicions.
The trick was to aim. If she could lodge the sharp little disc of steel in the right place, and then throw something onto the wolf trap to trigger it while leaping off the Guild to settle on top of another house without getting noticed, she could be sure to get more than an average mark.
She looked at the little spheres she had made; these were actually balls of No 1 Powder mixed with a catalyst from the Alchemists' Guild, which involved a lot of alcohol, coated with copper. Attached to them were little pieces of string, which made the devices blow up once ignited.
The few student Alchemists she had managed to meet had assured her that all you needed to do was set fire to the thing, throw it far away and run like hell.
She had tried one of them, and didn't plan to tell anyone that she had been responsible for last month's fourth explosion in the Street of Alchemists. The boys had advised her well; the fact that the biggest deflagration was caused by an experiment of hers (i.e. adding chili sauce to the spheres' composition) was to remain unknown. Even if it had sent pretty much everything flying a dozen of feet high, with cute blue flames.
She intended to keep these little marvels for the end of the night; hopefully there was enough material available to make pretty fireworks. She watched Madame les Deux-Epees carrying on with not moving, closed her left eye and threw the steel disc. Its speed made it follow something closer to a straight line than to a proper parabola, and it went ting as it broke the string on its way to the mechanism within the teacher's crossbow.
The woman stared at her useless weapon in astonishment, then turned towards the empty spot from where it had emerged. She flinched as the wolf trap's jaws suddenly clapped around what seemed to be an old boot, or possibly a dead rat; it was hard to tell, with the rain viciously streaming everywhere.
What was more concerning, was the fact that the piece of junk had come from behind her.
« Keep going Lyra, you're doing great! You ensured yourself extra points for disarming me from afar... but you'll have to be heard at some point. Melting snow can be so treacherous. », she called, while trying to stop shaking.
There was no need for the lady to shout like that. Lyra was kneeling right over the window... and here was yet another trap. Anyone pushing the glass panes aside would trigger a small and complex mechanism which would eventually release a poisoned needle.
The girl took a deep breath and pulled out her longest blade. It was thin, carved out of a mountain troll's tooth, and blackened to avoid the tell-tale shine. One of dear Steven's gifts. She proceeded to gently touch the window with the dagger's tip.
The trap was designed to be extremely sensitive. As the needle shot forward into the rainy night, she heard Nivor say « Brilliant, miss, as always. Since you have already passed the stealth test – thanks for the sign, by the way – you don't need to hide while coming in. There's a towel and a nice hot cup of tea for you in there, chop chop! »
Lyra let herself slip into the room, but only after carefully checking the window frame qnd pretty much every place where you could hide a weapon. She politely accepted the soft and thick piece of tissue that was handed to her, once she had inspected it. No trace of powder or of any substance. No blade within the folds. No strange smell.
While she was doing her best to get less soaked (you couldn't possibly call that dry), Mister Mericet casually entered the room, through a door that was close to collapsing. He was followed by an old woman who was pushing a tray with quite an impressive number of tiny filled cups on it.
The teacher positioned himself next to the selection of liquids, then his elderly companion left.
« So, Lyra... would you care to tell me about the composition of one of these recipients' contents? he muttered, while preparing to scribble on a piece of paper.
- The first one from the right in the second row is a camomilla infusion, with about forty-two grams of phenol. It hasn't completely diluted yet, there are a few crystals left at the bottom, which means that the solution has been prepared in a hurry. It should be completely ready in, let's say, eight minutes or so. Then if drunk, it will cause severe internal burns, and when it enters the blood, puts the ingester to sleep and slows his or her pulse until death stops the process. The problem with it is that it tastes horrible, as far as I read, and camomilla will surely not stop it from being disgusting... so unless the drinker is an extremely slow-thinking person, I would not use it.
- A fairly complete answer. You didn't pick the easiest one », he said, without looking up. One of the porcelain mugs had not resisted the solution that had been poured into it and had started to dissolve, turning itself into a smelly brownish heap. « Now, could you pick a cup and drink it? »
Mericet could have sworn that she had chosen the beaker completely randomly. She had been right, he knew it, but at the first attempt? Without even looking at the other drinks? He felt almost betrayed. Fifty-three different poisons. Preparing them had taken him all afternoon, and the girl had just passed his test in less than five minutes.
She left a bit later, after nonchalantly answering a few trick questions, increasing the teacher's frustration, and finally using half his concoctions to produce a fine blend that was sure to taste like black tea and have you dead if one droplet entered your body.
That was the only time a teacher saw Lyra, until she reached her final destination, which was the second floor of a manor, not very far away from Lady Ramkin's refuge for swamp dragons.
The senior Assassins knew she was near them the whole time, because she wanted them to. She had left little notes here and there, pinned to a wall or hidden under a tile, most of them reassuring them about her presence.
They felt as watched as she felt tired. They had kept her going for nearly five hours now, without a break. They hadn't missed out on traps, snipers, dangerous places, steep slopes... she was all the more happy because that meant that her examiners respected her; they had done everything they could to build up a really damn hard test.
Now there was one last thing to do. The proper inhumation. It was going to be a dummy, but she had to put all her skill into it.
She met the four teachers in a vast, empty living room. Lady T'malia stepped towards her, seemingly ill at ease.
« My dear, there seems to be a little change in our programme, she said, avoiding her student's gaze.
- What is it, m'lady?
- Well, you see, about the inhumation... well, it's up to you to cancel it, but...
- Tell me.
- It's going to be a real person. A man. He volunteered for it.
- He did what?
- Well, actually he paid a thousand dollars to make sure that you would be the one to put an end to his sufferings, or so he told us. He's waiting for you in the room behind this door behind you. He wants you to do it, tonight; he insisted on that. »
Dear me, another lunatic, Lyra thought. What's with all these people wanting to be killed by moonlight and stuff of that kind... must be another one of those silly religions.
She straightened up. « I will deal with him with great pleasure, Madam. Allow me to take my time for that one. », she replied, beaming.
Yes. I'll deal with him, nice and slowly, she thought. Then I'll start the fireworks.
She braced herself and opened the door carefully. The bedroom seemed comfortable; it was warm in there, thanks to a huge fireplace, and looked pleasant, although in a mess, as if someone had gotten very angry at the furniture and clawed everything they found. Provided that humans had claws. Which normally wasn't the case.
A massive man was standing in the middle of the room. He was facing a large window, contemplating the rain, and beyond it, the full moon.
He had shoulder-long, matted hair, and his shirt was torn in various places. He must have been clothed like a gentleman some hours ago. Muscles moved under the tanned skin. He had a tattoo on his right shoulder.
Lyra froze. She knew only one person in the world who would want to print that into his skin forever. It was a capital L, with a black rose around it and a crescent moon as a background. And it was shaking. This, she realized, was because the man was sobbing.
Of all the people on the Disc, here stood the one person that had loved her.
« S-Steven? » she stuttered.
