‘I want the girl dead,’ said the severed head of Lord Hairstreak. It stared – glared, really – at Jasper Chalkhill, a Faerie of the Night who had undergone dramatic changes in the past decade. He’d lost weight, for one thing – hadn’t we all? – and a great deal of it. Did he still have a wangaramus up his bottom, Hairstreak wondered. The worms had their benefits, but they did leech nourishment. Their hosts all tended to get thinner by the month: it was almost the standard way of spotting them. Chalkhill was positively wraith-like. He was showing cheekbones for the first time in years. But that wasn’t the only change. He’d abandoned his camp act, thank Darkness, and he spoke very little. He was no longer anybody’s spy, not Madame Cardui’s, not Hairstreak’s own. He was an assassin now, perhaps the best assassin in the Realm. Which was just what Hairstreak needed.
Chalkhill glared back. There was a time when he’d been very afraid of Lord Hairstreak. But it was difficult to take the little turd seriously now he was just a severed head supported by an onyx cube. You could see the veins and sinews trailing from the stump of neck if you looked hard enough. All the same, Chalkhill had to admit His Lordship had made a miraculous – if highly secret – comeback. Working with extreme cunning through a network of proxies, he was almost as powerful as he’d ever been and a great deal richer. More than rich enough to pay Chalkhill’s outrageous fees.
‘Not possible,’ Chalkhill said. ‘The security arrangements in the Purple Palace are impregnable.’
The lips of the severed head began to writhe. It took a moment for Chalkhill to realise the contortions meant Hairstreak was trying to smile. It was a creepy sight.
‘She is no longer in the Purple Palace,’ Hairstreak said at length.
An interesting development, Chalkhill thought. The faeman child’s condition meant she only ever left the Palace on State occasions – once, perhaps twice a year at most. And there were no State occasions scheduled for the next six months.
‘Where is she?’ Chalkhill asked.
The energies generated by the onyx cube were erratic and sometimes caused one of Hairstreak’s eyes to roll without reference to the other. It did so now, turning momentarily white in the process, before coming to rest focused disconcertingly on a spot beyond Chalkhill’s left ear. ‘No one knows,’ Hairstreak said.
There was a discreet Body in a Box sticker on the cube beneath the intertwined CMS logo of Consolidated Magical Services. The cube itself and the head resting on it were both protected by a military-grade spell field, which meant Hairstreak – what was left of him – had become indestructible and virtually immortal. The cube drew its power directly from the sun, so you couldn’t even shut him down – an ironical outcome for a botched suicide attempt.
Chalkhill said, ‘So I have to find her before I kill her?’
‘Obviously.’
‘In that case my fee is doubled.’
‘I thought it might be,’ Hairstreak said, but voiced no objection.
Chalkhill said, ‘There’s a time limit?’
‘For having her killed? Of course there’s a time limit. One calendar month from today. But obviously earlier if possible.’
Chalkhill did the calculation in his head. One calendar month from today was Princess Culmella’s sixteenth birthday. So the job had something to do with the Imperial succession. He half wondered if he should ask Hairstreak directly, but decided against it. Probably safer not to know. He took a deep breath. ‘Triple fee for fast jobs.’
‘Agreed,’ Hairstreak said.
Chalkhill chewed thoughtfully at his lower lip. ‘Any special instructions?’
‘Just one,’ said Hairstreak’s head. ‘You must bring her here to kill her.’
Chalkhill blinked. ‘Here? To your Keep?’
‘Exactly.’
It made sense for Hairstreak to want the faeman girl dead, but it made no sense to have her killed in his own home. ‘But if she is killed here, won’t that throw suspicion on to you, Your Lordship?’
‘Let me worry about that,’ His Lordship said. ‘The terms of our contract will be that you find her, bring her here and kill her.’
‘In that case -’ Chalkhill said.
‘I know, I know,’ said Hairstreak irritably. ‘Your fee is quadrupled.’ He got his eyes under control and fixed Chalkhill with a piercing gaze. ‘Can I take it you’re prepared to do the job?’
Chalkhill smiled benignly. ‘Oh, yes, Lord Hairstreak, yes indeed.’
Chalkhill’s personal stealth flyer was marked by a tiny Imperial flag stuck in a flowerpot just a few yards from the side door. Anxious though he was to get away unseen, he could not resist a backwards glance as he walked towards it. Hairstreak’s Keep was a Gothic nightmare of obsidian blocks and granite towers clinging to a cliff edge above an angry sea. Rain lashed down and wind whined perpetually, the result of weather spells that, some said, were so well crafted nobody could turn them off. There were rumours of a curse on the place. It had been owned by Hamearis, Duke of Burgundy, when the demons got him. Soon after Lord Hairstreak took it over, he’d attempted suicide by flinging himself off its battlements.
Chalkhill could not decide whether that had been Hairstreak’s lucky or unlucky day. He was certainly lucky not to be killed, unlucky in that death was what he wanted, lucky that Hamearis had installed safety spells designed to help guests blown off open parapets, unlucky that his suicidal leap caused him to land with his head inside the spell zone while his rain-soaked body smashed itself to a pulp on the surrounding rocks. It was nearly six months before anybody found him – he’d fallen on hard times and dismissed his servants – by which point his body had rotted. The head, however, was perfectly preserved. An admirer bought him his first Body in a Box – the cheap, basic version that supported brain function, but allowed no communication. Hairstreak developed an eye-blink code and set to rebuilding his fortunes. Now, just sixteen years on, he was once again among the richest, most powerful faeries in the Realm, although very few people realised it. And he still harboured ambitions for the throne, to judge by the latest developments.
Chalkhill pulled his vanishing hood over his head, climbed into the invisible flyer and grinned. Ambitions to become the head faerie, you might say.