The Reluctant Assassin - By Eoin Colfer Page 0,1

accent had started to slide off his words like fish from a wet slab.

Every man Jack of us crawled forth from the filth and dust, and unto that stuff we shall return, mark you. I just send ’em back quicker. A few heartbeats early so that we may enjoy life’s comforts. That is the way of our situation and if you have no steel in you for it, Riley, then …

Garrick never completed his threat, but it was clear that the time had come for Riley to earn his place at the table.

Riley felt the cracks between each board through the thin soles of his shoes that had been painstakingly shaved down on the lathe in Garrick’s workshop. He could now see the mark in the bed. An old man with a thatch of grey hair jutting out from under a puff quilt.

I can’t see his face. He was grateful for that much.

Riley approached the bed, feeling Garrick behind him, knowing his time was running out.

Unto dust. Dispatched to dust.

Riley saw the old man’s hand resting on the pillow, the index finger a mere nub due to some old injury, and he knew that he could not do it. He was no murderer.

Riley cast his eyes about while keeping his head still. He had been taught to use his surroundings in times of emergency, but his mentor was behind him, observing Riley’s every move with his eerie, non-blinking intensity. There would be no help from the old man in the bed. What could a grey-hair possibly do against Garrick? What could anyone do?

Four times Riley had run away and four times Garrick had found him.

Death is the only way out for me, Riley had thought. Mine or Garrick’s.

But Garrick could not be killed, for he was death.

Unto dust.

Riley felt suddenly faint and thought he would sink to the cold floor. Perhaps that would be for the best? Lie senseless and let Garrick do his bloody work, but then the old man would die too and that knowledge would weigh on Riley’s soul in the afterlife.

I will fight, decided the boy. He had little hope of survival, but he had to do something.

Plan after plan flitted through his fevered brain, each one more hopeless than the next. All the time, he moved onwards, feeling the frost of Garrick on his neck like a bad omen. The man on the four-poster grew clearer. He could see an ear now, with holes where a row of rings must have once pierced.

A foreigner perhaps? A sailor?

He saw a ruddy jaw with tallowy runs of flesh tucked underneath and a lanyard that ran to a strange pendant lying on the quilt.

Look for every detail, was one of Garrick’s lessons. Drink it all in with yer eyes and maybe it will save your life.

No chance of saving my life, not tonight.

Riley took another sweeping step and felt his forward foot grow curiously warm. He glanced down and to his surprise and confusion saw that the toe of his shoe glowed green. In fact a cocoon of light had blossomed round the frame of the sleeping man, its heart an emerald blaze emanating from the strange pendant.

Garrick’s words gusted past his ear. ‘Hell’s bells. Trickery! Dirk him now, boy.’

Riley could not move, petrified as he was by the spectral light.

Garrick pushed him further into the strange warm glow, which immediately changed hue, becoming a scarlet hemisphere. An unnatural keening erupted from somewhere in the bed, piercing and horrible, rattling Riley’s brain in the gourd of his skull.

The old man in the bed was instantly awake, popping up like a wind-up Jack from his box.

‘Stupid sensor malfunction,’ he muttered, his accent Scottish, his eyes rheumy and blinking. ‘I have a pain in my …’

The man noticed Riley and the blade emerging from his fist like an icicle. He allowed his hand to trail slowly down towards the glowing teardrop pendant resting on his scrawny chest, then tapped the centre twice, silencing the dreadful wail. The pendant’s heart displayed a glowing series of numbers now, seemingly written in phosphorus. Flickering backwards from twenty.

‘Now there, lad,’ said the old man. ‘Hold on to those horses. We can talk about this. I have funds.’

Riley was transfixed by the pendant. It was magical certainly, but, more than that, it was familiar somehow.

Garrick interrupted Riley’s thoughts with a sharp prod in the ribs.

‘No more delay,’ he said briskly. ‘Make your bones, boy. Unto dust.’

Riley could not. He would not become like Garrick and