It would have been the perfect job. Done so neatly and in broad daylight that every assassin between here and the Free Cities would have marveled at it. All Calliope had to do was wait for the perfect moment to spring her trap, the moment when all the clockwork of days and nights of preparation, dozens of spells, hundreds of inked sigils, all came together. Then her eyes locked with a dead man. For a moment she thought she was simply hallucinating, she had thought of him more than once in the intervening weeks, partly in admiration at his pluck and partly in frustration that her job had been completed in a way she hadn’t really anticipated or earned. Now she saw him, apparently alive and well, she didn’t quite know what to think. Or at least she didn’t until Magister Therman’s carriage clattered past her magical ambush point, barkers still yelling obnoxiously, and onwards to his day of debauchery and dark dealings at the Arcane Assembly. “Fuck!” she snapped, yanking her hand away and scratching herself on the henna needle. The woman applying the ruined image cringed back, apparently believing she had punctured a clients skin. “Please mistress, I’m sorry, forgive…” Calliope wasn’t listening. Instead she sprang to her feet took a running start, jumped onto the stone balustrade and leaped out over the shocked gasps of the crowd. Twisting slightly in the air she landed on the sidewalk, took the three steps to the bridge at a sprint and hopped over the lip, dropping to the alleyway below like a falling arrow, skirts billowing out around her. The various denizen’s of the alley, stared in shock, watching a second person dropping from the sky what must have been moments after the first. She scanned the alley, searching for Neil, a slight commotion at the end of the dark narrow street was all she needed and she sprinted towards it. This was foolish, it might be a trap, but she had seen the shock in his eyes and reckoned he was as surprised as she was. Well maybe not quite as surprised as she was, given she thought he was a corpse. If she lost him now there would be no easy way to track him, and as the Syndicate had said, and experience borne out, he was a slippery bastard. A staggering drunk stepped out from the end of the alley carrying a bottle in a paper bag. “Have a drink with me girly,” he mumbled toothlessly. Without breaking a strike Calliope raised a hand and an invisible force blew the drunk off his feet and smashed him into the mounded garbage and out of her way. “Read the fucking room!” she shouted as she sped past in pursuit of her quarry.