Monday was, unfortunately, still Monday.
I sat behind my desk and looked at the stack of papers in front of me. They were neat. Freshly printed. They smelled like ink and pulp, a smell I didn't like much but had gotten used to long ago. Every last one of them was mine to deal with.
At least the job looked respectable.
I had an office. Imagine that. A high-ranking office job as a man in my thirties, that didn't happen very often. Usually I'd be an assistant, or a secretary.
This wasn't a backwater hideout where I would scurry back to after finishing a job.
And nobody could accuse me of sleeping my way up here, as the only person above me was another man.
The office sat halfway up the building, tucked along a staircase above the press floor. It wasn't very big, but it had large windows that looked out over the floor below. What drove me nuts at first was the constant noise and thumping of the presses, but like everything else, I got used to it.
Right now I had stamps, ledgers, schedules, and invoices in front of me. Everything needed a signature. Then another one. Sometimes two more after that, because someone somewhere wanted proof that someone else had already approved it.
It was always one after the other.
Paperwork was a curse. In every sense of the word. In two ways, actually.
I didn't mind reading. I didn't mind writing. What I hated was keeping track of it all.
The work wasn't hard. Just dull. Not how I'd thought my life would turn out.
During the day, everything needed a reason. Shipments needed papers. Names needed to match seals. Seals needed permission from people who barely knew what they were approving. If something went missing, there were forms for that too.
The press looked boring from the outside. Predictable. But it was more work than what I did at night.
Night work was simpler.
There, what I said went. That was the rule.
I guess that made me the boss, at least most of the time. I never liked that part much. I wasn't built for giving orders.
The only people with more pull than me were Lord Shadowboon and Lord Woodborn. Woodborn was the public face of the press. Shadowboon handled the really big decisions.
At night, I mostly tracked who moved what and where it went.
Still, I didn't like that work either. Neither job felt like my calling. But both were better than what I used to be.
I was a petty criminal. Pickpocketing, stealing, a goon. The sort of work that kept me fed, but never proud.
Later, I got worse. I even worked as an assassin. I don't like thinking about that part.
I didn't kill many people myself. I worked in groups. That didn't make it better.
Killing never got easier. No matter the repetition. That's something you'd learn quickly in the business. But if you're low on funds and need a lot quickly because you fell into the wrong crew and owe a lot of money, then it's a golden opportunity.
I looked down at the ledger again.
I guess this was better. Far less blood, with arguments with words instead of knives - or magic, not that I had learned much magic in my life.
Sometimes I wondered what would happen if the boss vanished or never had appeared in the first place.
Men like me don't vanish. Someone always filled the empty space - usually someone louder. Crueler. Someone who didn't mind blood so long as it wasn't theirs.
The boss wasn't like that.
I didn't think he enjoyed violence, at least not much. But he didn't avoid it either. He used it like a tool, never more than necessary.
I could live with that.
Under him, things were nice. There were lines. Nobody wrote them down, but everyone knew where they were, and you wouldn't cross the boss's lines.
Still, there was something in me that wouldn't shut up. A feeling that this was all just… less bad.
That there had to be something else.
If I was honest, what I wanted was simple. I wanted to work with clothes. Maybe shoes.
Not uniforms. Not armor. Soft fabric. Good leather. Things people wore because they liked them.
I thought about how cloth folded. How seams sat. How a shoe felt when you walked in it all day without pain.
I'd watched tailors and cobblers for hours when I was a kid. I don't know why. Maybe how raw materials turned into something beautiful? Could be.
You could tell a lot about a person by their shoes. How they stood. How they walked. Whether they dragged their feet or moved lightly, like a cat.
I heard the thump of the press downstairs in a steady rhythm.
I looked at the ink of the printed sheets in front of me. I noticed a misaligned margin on the top of the pages - there were many copies.
It was a finger's width off. Nothing most readers would catch.
But once the plate was set, that mistake would repeat.
Again and again and again. Hundreds of pages, all wrong in the same exact way. Identical errors, reproduced faithfully.
One bad stitch, one misjudged cut didn't ruin everything. Only sometimes did it ruin the pair; most times it taught you something.
Clothes were honest in that way people weren't.
I'd tried once, when I was young. Stolen leather scraps. Thread from a market stall. The shoes I made were ugly and stiff, but they held together.
I remembered the feeling. Pride. Pride in your own work, done honestly and with passion.
That part of me never left. It just got buried under hunger and debt and bad choices.
Now things were different.
I had money. Enough to buy proper tools. Enough to fail and not starve.
I even sketched sometimes, when I had spare paper. I wasn't good at it, but it was something.
The dream was closer than it had ever been.
I told myself I'd do it someday. When things were quieter. When there was less to manage.
Maybe when the boss said it was all right. Not that I feared quitting.
It was safe. And a steady income was a very strong argument to stay. Plus, there weren't any madmen to deal with.
Without really meaning to, I pulled a blank sheet toward me.
I held my quill over it and thought about what a resignation was supposed to sound like.
I couldn't call him boss in the letter, could I? Lord Shadowboon? Wait. He wasn't company head officially, was he? That was Lord Woodborn.
I don't think Lord Woodborn would mind too much if I quit, and also, I didn't really care for him.
I wouldn't wish him ill, but…
How should I break it to the boss, then?
Short and respectful, like my momma taught me.
I'd been here nearly a decade.
But I didn't write anything.
Then the floorboards groaned.
I knew that sound right away.
Only one person could have made a sound like that, like the entire building had problems holding him up.
There was no warning. One moment the room was quiet. The next, the door was opening.
The Boss.
I didn't even have time to move the papers.
He never knocked. I don't think it ever crossed his mind. He did own the whole place.
By the time the thought finished forming, he was already there, pushing the door open without knocking, as if the idea of announcing himself had simply never occurred to him.
He didn't come unless he wanted something - or had an idea. Sometimes both.
I looked up and felt the same strange mismatch I always did. He looked like a teenager.
He dressed like a noble. Expensive. Clean. Beautiful, in a way. Not to say that it didn't suit him, but there was something nagging me about it. I always thought something simpler would fit better.
If I had the nerve, I would've asked to resign right then.
But he trusted me. And I'd never try to fail him. There was no reason to if I could do the job.
He unsettled me. Just a little. He didn't look around the room. His eyes stayed on me.
I remembered our first meeting.
I'd been part of a group hired to kill the future king.
I still don't know how he beat us. I only remember the knife at my throat and how calm he looked.
But he wasn't looking all that calm now. Still more neutral than anything else, but not calm.
"Something wrong, boss?" I asked. But I wasn't sure if it was the right thing to ask.
"Put everything on hold," he said. "Research the most hostile organization in Astar. I want everything by tomorrow."
"Tomorrow?" I asked. "Hostile organization?"
I wasn't getting it.
"We're going to kill them all."
I didn't understand.
The floorboards groaned once more. Then he was gone.