Wren and the berserker princess sit and sip tea and watch the Occlusian muttering direly to herself, as with shaky hands she attempts to pick a lock.
The locked chest — only large enough to hold several handfuls of coin, and currently empty — has been lent for practice purposes by the princess. The assassin has a great many tiny tools, cunningly bunched on a ring like a castellan's keys. Their slim shafts are sheathed in black velvet, reducing any clinking together or glitters of light off metal.
The Occlusian hisses as she slips, and gouges her thumb with a fine point.
"Perhaps you should rest for a minute, and allow your hands to steady," Wren observes.
"Have tea!" the princess adds genially, already pouring a cup.
The assassin makes a disgruntled noise, scratches viciously at the stitches around her neck, and tucks her tools away in some secret pocket. She drops a sketchy bow to the princess, and suffers a teacup to be pressed on her.
"Sugar?" Wren says, arching an eyebrow, little silver tongs in hand, eyes on the assassin's face, so as to draw no attention to where her attention is, on the assassin's fingers.
"No, thank you," the Occusian says, and pokes suspiciously at a tiny, dainty sandwich filled with wafer-thin slices of mild pickled vegetable.
"Highness," Wren says. "Might we revisit the question of what you know of your Occlusian guest's mission?"
"Oh, a wizard matter," the princess says airily.
"Highness," Wren says firmly. "If you believe keeping her close will deter further Occlusians from accepting a contract against you—"
The princess gives her a guileless smile. "Goodness, if I thought that," she says, "I might as well have hired an Occlusian myself!"
"Mmm," Wren says.
Around halfway between their point of departure and intended destination, Wren is woken in the night, from habitually light sleep, by a flare of light and the smell of smoke. Cursing, she rolls out of bed, scarcely stopping to glance over the line of Tarot cards tacked to the head of her bunk.
She has operatives on board, of course; most of whom she doesn't know, and intentionally wouldn't recognise. They know how to introduce themselves, if need be, but also how to simply signal an emergency. She sprints, barefoot, leaving the Occlusian's card still burning, before reining herself in; no sense piling into a bad situation with too much haste to do any good.
The berserker princess has a suite of rooms — which is to say, two small cabins — at the end of a long corridor. Wren sidles up to an intersection, peeps around the corner.
The outer cabin's door stands open; she sees the Occlusian by candlelight, back turned to the doorway, hunched over the locked box with still shaking hands. And approaching the doorway, in shadows, another figure—
She almost misses what happens next. As the second assassin, much like Wren, takes a swift and silent look around the cabin's doorframe, there's a wink of light in the Occusian's hands: a snap of her wrist extends a tiny angled mirror on a handle from her bunch of tools. She does not look round; she doesn't need to.
Her second gesture sees something spark off the lid of the locked box, again as it richochets against the cabin's back wall, again against the cabin's ceiling, and then the assassin in the doorway, without time to duck back out of sight, catches it in the face.
High-tension sprung needle, Wren's knowledge of Occlusian tools supplies. Two inches of steel, stiff enough to sew sailcloth, launched at killing speed. But Occlusians are hard to stop, and she doesn't trust the newcomer to stay down, even with his head skewered.
A flick of her own hand sends a spark jumping the length of the corridor, effortless as a flea. In the second it takes to fall on the downed killer, it's bloomed from a mote of deeply wrong unlight, horrible purple, into a flailing fronded tangle, like a panicked long-legged spider. It hits the assassin in the chest, and each frond goes straight through flesh like a good knife through a block of cheese, and the flailing flings abruptly chopped chunks of man in all directions.
It winks out when its fronds fall to the floor beneath, but by then its work is more than done.
Wren jogs up even as the Occlusian leans cautiously out of the cabin, hands braced either side of the door, to gawp at the mess. The fragments of assassin on the floor, seen close to, are not cut apart; instead, each frond of unlight has transfigured its way through flesh, unzipping muscle and organ into a bristling carpet of spider-legs in lieu of wounded surfaces.
"Fuck me," the Occlusian says. "Not a fucking wizard?" and Wren bares her teeth in a terrible smile of predatory adrenaline.
"Of course not," she says. "Wazir has an entirely different etymology. Where's the princess?"
The Occlusian jerks her head toward the inner cabin, and steps back from the door.
"How much does it cost to hire an Occlusian to have her head cut off as a distraction?" Wren adds, pleasantly, and the assasssin grins back at her, picks up a water-jug, and pours a glass with rock-steady hands.
"Couldn't possibly comment," she says.
