Gregory Hawk walked though the early morning fog of the capital streets. He had never taken his current route before, but then, he never took the same route to anywhere twice, it made you hard to ambush. In any case, Hawk was confident that he could handle most anything likely to happen on his way to the safehouse. This was proven correct when he was accosted by a couple of young thugs while taking a shortcut though an ally. He strode out a few minutes later with a small bloodstain on his coat, which while irritating, wasn't a real problem. It wasn't his blood, after all.

The rest of the walk went without incident and when he got to his destination he stopped for a moment, taking in the battered facade of the building. He rather liked this one, a shame it would have to be destroyed within the next couple months, but a new place would be found, made suitable for it's purpose, and used for a while until it too was demolished. That was the thing about secret hideouts, if you left them in the same place for too long, some drunk bastard was libel to mistake the place for abandoned and try to move in, and then he had to be either bribed or silenced, and either way you still couldn't keep using the place. No, it was better this way, a bit more costly perhaps, but being spymaster had the perk of an almost unlimited budget. Sometimes Hawk liked to imagine the look on the kings accountant's faces if they were to see some of the stranger expenses that been seen to under his command.

Hawk entered the house via a door in the rear that only he knew about, walked to the kitchen and after pressing an unexceptional tile in the wall, opened up a cabinet built to his precise specifications. Inside was an aged looking bottle and a glass. He took both and walked into the main room. In one corner, a rope hung from the ceiling. He pulled it, and grinned as a series of bells went rang in the sleeping rooms, designed to be as loud and annoying as possible. 

"That ought to get their attention." He thought as he opened the bottle and poured himself a glass of some of the finest, and most expensive brandy that could be found in the kingdom. Being a spymaster was a difficult, bloody, and for the most part thankless task. There was no lordship or lands that came with it, several of his predecessors had been killed while doing the job, one or two had been hanged for treason. Even the king thought he was mad for doing the job. But he did it for one reason that trumped all the downsides: 

He was damned good at it. 

And as he sat back in a chair and sipped his drink, and heard the groaning of the recently awakened he grinned again. For all the shit that came with it, there were times when he loved his job.