heard his own body say. He looked down to the figure he now wore, the killer's weak form.
"And so messy," the assassin continued.
"How .. . ?"
"I do not have the time to explain, I fear," the assassin replied.
"What is your name?" Vaclav cried, desperate for any diversion.
"Ghost," answered the assassin. He lurched over, confident that the seemingly androgynous form, one he knew so well, could not muster the speed to escape him or the strength to fend him off.
Ifcclav felt himself being lifted from the floor, felt the huge hands slipping about his neck. "The ghost of who?" managed the out-of-control, desperate man. He kicked as hard as his new body would allow, so pitiful an attempt against the burly, powerful form his enemy now possessed. Then his breath would not come.
Vaclav heard the snap of bone, and it was the last sound he would ever hear.
"Not 'the ghost,' " the victorious assassin replied to the dead form, "just 'Ghost.' " He sat then to finish his drink. How perfect this job had been; how easily \fcclav had been coaxed into so vulnerable a position.
"An artist," Ghost said, lifting his cup in a toast to himself. His more familiar body would be magically repaired before the dawn, and he could then take it back, leaving the empty shell of Sclav's corpse behind.
Ghost had not lied when he had mentioned pressing business in the west. A wizard had contacted the assassin's guild, promising exorbitant payments for a minor execution.
The price must have been high indeed, Ghost knew, for his superiors had requested that he take on the task. The wizard apparently wanted the best.
The wizard wanted an artist.
Placid Fields
adderly walked slowly from the single stone tower, across the fields, toward the lakeside town of Carradoon. Autumn had come to the region; the few trees along Cadderly's path, red maples mostly, shone brilliantly in their fall wardrobe. The sun was bright this day and warm, in contrast with the chilly breezes blowing down from the nearby Snowflake Mountains, gusting strong enough to float Cadderly's silken blue cape out behind him as he walked, and strong enough to bend the wide brim of his similarly blue hat.
The troubled young scholar noticed nothing. Cadderly absently pushed his sand-brown locks from his gray eyes, then grew frustrated as the unkempt hair, much longer than he had ever worn it, defiantly dropped back down. He pushed it away again, and then again, and finally tucked it tightly under the brim of his hat.
Carradoon came within sight a short while later, on the banks of wide Impresk Lake and surrounded by hedge-
lined fields of sheep and cattle and crops. The city proper was walled, as were most cities of the Realms, with many multistory structures huddled inside against ever present perils. A long bridge connected Carradoon to a nearby island, the section of the town reserved for the more well-to-do merchants and governing officials.
As always when he came by this route, Cadderly looked at the town with mixed and uncertain feelings. He had been born in Carradoon, but did not remember that early part of his life. Cadderly's gaze drifted past the walled city, to the west and to the towering Snowflakes, to the passes that led high into the mountains, where lay the Edificant Library, a sheltered and secure bastion of learning.
That had been Cadderly's home, though he realized that now it was not, and thus he felt he could not return there. He was not a poor man - the wizard in the tower he had recently left had once paid him a huge sum for transcribing a lost spell book - and he had the means to support himself in relative comfort.
But all the gold in the world could not have produced a home for Cadderly, nor could it have released his troubled spirit from its turmoil.
Cadderly had grown up, had learned the truth of his violent, imperfect world, too suddenly. The young scholar had been thrust into situations beyond his experience, forced into the role of hero-warrior when all he really wanted was to read of adventures in books of legend. Cadderly had recently killed a man, and had fought in a war that had blasted, torn, and ultimately tainted a once-pristine sylvan forest.
Now he had no answers, only questions.
Cadderly thought of his room at the Dragon's Codpiece, where the Tome of Universal Harmony, the most prized book of the god named Deneir, sat open on his small table. It had been given