Another slightly rewritten chapter. Emmanuelle, your canonical backstory is a pig to cater to!
Alice didn't remember what she ate. It was just a method of passing time and fuelling her body. Guild food was usually wholesome and well-prepared but that evening it was merely starch, sugar, protein and fat. She passed the time re-reading the Concordat, as she knew many of her students would be, and tried to attune herself to the necessary ordeal that lay ahead for them. She'd had to undergo it herself, after all, as a mature entrant to the Guild, to qualify for the Black. At least they get seven years to prepare. We had barely a year.
Her mind went back eight or nine years…
Alice Band, aged twenty-three, a reluctant graduate of the Quirm Academy for Young Ladies, who, in the circumstances of her latter years there, is not one of its starred alumni, and later a graduate with Firsts from the Quirm College of Archaeology, is seated with twenty-nine others in a light airy conference room on Filigree Street. Everybody in that room, they have just been reminded by Dr Cruces, has come to the attention of the Guild of Assassins for the same reason and has something in common. His deputy Dotor Downey, whose white-haired seeming benevolence did not deceive Alice one little bit, and several othe very senior Assassins, were watching the batch of trainees intently, as if reading them for reaction and possible character flaws.
She looked around the room. The fierce red-haired girl from a strange foreign place, who alternated girlish innocence with hard-eyed glares, putting her in mind of a combat-hardened fighting soldier. Maybe she was? The older woman, seemingly out of place until you saw the look in her eye, her brunette hair going to grey. the big hearty-looking sporty type, with PE Master written all over him. The dapper and slightly fey little accountant. What did such a mousy little man do to arrive here? Her attention went back to Cruces.
"None of you are Guild members, and yet at one time or another, you have all, without exception, accepted money in return for facilitating annulments. I'm glad that in our private discussions with you, you have all agreed that this is a regrettable state of affairs that the Guild simply cannot allow to continue. We just cannot allow freelance, non-Guild, Assassins to operate."
Cruces paused to allow this to sink in. His eyes scanned the room, meeting the eyes of each in turn. Alice held his gaze in a neutral and steady manner, and allowed him to break eye contact first. She nodded, having made her point. She noticed him having a similar battle of wills with the fierce red-haired girl, the one who spoke with the strange and unfamiliar accent. Again Cruces' gaze broke first and he looked away. Alice was interested to see he briefly shared a look with the dark Quirmian woman, but glanced away quickly. She read.. conspiracy? Embarrasment? Some sort of shared secret? Then she shrugged and put it away as not immediately important, choosing to listen to his words.
"The circumstances in which each of you inhumed have been investigated. In many cases you carried out the inhumation, despite your lack of formal training, with commendable qualities of skill, resource, discretion and style. Most of you are of good or reputable family. You therefore, in the eyes of the Guild, have the aptitude and background to rectify this earlier omission and qualify as licenced Assassins. As the guild does not approve of un-necessary or wasteful death, I am pleased you have all chosen the option of joining this Guild as mature candidates for full membership."
Alice wryly considered the single alternative, which would have entailed a fairly immediate necessary and purposeful death – looked around. Death probably hung over everyone in this room. She would not be unique.
"You are to undergo, over the next a year, a greatly accelerated version of the training course which produces at its end a Licenced Assassin. As mature students, as people from good social backgrounds, you will of course have assimilated many of the social and life skills which we normally have to teach to pupils of school age, which attenuates the course somewhat for you.
"Not all of you will succeed. Some will fall by the wayside in various ways, and others will fall at the final hurdle of the Examination. But simply by being here, you have all tacitly agreed that this is the best of the available options. All that is necessary now is for you all to sign an affidavit to the intent that you are here of your own free will, and to agree that in the event of failure to complete the course, your next of kin will not be able to sue the Guild. Although, of course, compensation for loss of a parent will be paid by the Guild to children under eighteen, as we are not an uncaring organization.
"Some of you, in arriving in this room today, will have committed inhumations upon individuals for whom a Guild contract existed. This deprived a Guild member of the opportunity to earn a fee, which was another good reason for us to step in and detain you, and presents Mr Wimvoe the Guild Treasurer with a minor book-keeping problem. We are not an unfair organization. In those instances, the fee due will remain in abeyance until you have qualified as an Assassin. It will then be retrospectively paid to you – you will have more than earned it – the moment the situation is rectified and you have your Licence. Less, of course, tuition and accomodation fees. The rest of you, if you are not in a position to pay for the cost of the training you are about to undergo, will be offered a zero-interest student loan, redeemable against your first successful inhumations. Of course, some of you will go directly to the teaching faculty at the School to meet our perceived need for more specialist teachers, certainly for more female teachers. A similar de facto loan will be redeemed against your salaries over the first few years of employment.
"All that remains for me to say is "Good Luck", ladies and gentlemen , and I look forward to meeting with you over the coming year – which will be one of hard dedicated work and commitment. Thank you."
Alice had caught the eye of the Quirmian woman sitting opposite. She was sure her own eyes were communicating something like "Mes Dieux!".
The Quirmian woman shrugged, and made an expressive gesture of sympathy.
Welcome to Hell, Alice had thought. Bienvenue á l'Enfer.
The dark-haired Quirmian woman smiled back. Alice wondered what she had done to end up here. There had also been a definite moment of embarrassed pretending-not-to-recognise-each-other between her and Downey. She also moved with confidence and familiarity, as if she knew the place. Alice, who like the others was still painfully finding her way around the Guild complex, had been struck by the confident way she had led the way around the building, from the rooms the four women candidates were to share back to the public areas of the Guild, without hesitating or needing to ask. She also seemed to know who was who in the heirarchy.
We're sharing rooms, Alice thought. I'll ask her. Maybe she's just confident and the sort who settles in quickly as if they've been there all their life. Or maybe... a more sinister possibility occured to her. She reminded herself she was theorising with insufficient evidence, and put the thought from her mind.