Black silk fluttered against the midnight wind as twelve hooded figures dropped from the outer academy wall.
They moved with the eerie, fluid grace of hunting panthers. Not a single pebble rolled down the embankment as their boots met the turf.
These were the Shadow-Blade assassins, the elite death squad of the Grand Regent’s Pill House.
Each had survived forty assassination contracts in the border trenches. Each carried paired crescent daggers forged from black spirit-iron, coated in three drops of numbing viper venom.
Their orders from Patriarch Morvane were brutally simple: bypass the guards, infiltrate Cold-Spring Grotto, and slit the throat of Master Ash’s errand boy in his bed.
The squad leader, a veteran killer named Ghost-Eye, raised two gloved fingers, signaling his men into a silent arrowhead formation.
They slipped through the pine trees like shadows cast by clouds.
“The perimeter is strangely unguarded,” the scout beside him whispered through his black linen mask. “No ward-arrays. No guard dogs. Only a field of vegetables.”
