Vish sat on the end of the bed and stared at the two black poppy seeds in his open palm.

Why wasn’t he just taking them? This was his chance. Dinner, which he grudgingly admitted to himself had been quite good--what he could taste of it, that is--with its roast pig and truffles and little birds marinated in wine, was over. Everyone else had retired to their chambers too. He had all night to enjoy the sweet delights of not one, but two poppy seeds. A double hit. The hot fast rush as he first swallowed them, the building intensity in his head as his body processed them, the wave upon wave of pleasure that would gradually overwhelm his entire being, the warm afterglow he would eventually bathe in afterwards, the loosening, the calm, the relief. This was his chance.

So why hadn’t he taken them yet?

The old man.

Damn the old man! The old man had planted a different kind of seed in his mind. A different kind of seed that had slowly been growing, and had now produced a small shoot that was big enough to notice. If you space out the hits far enough and start to come off it, you can start to feel other things too. It is possible. I’ve seen others do it. I’ve helped others do it.

The old man had planted the seed of the idea in his mind that it was possible to come off the poppy and learn to enjoy and inhabit other things again. But he didn’t really want to do that, did he? The poppy was his life. The poppy was pure joy. The poppy was the greatest thing it was possible to experience. He didn’t want to ‘come off’ that. He didn’t want to lose that. He didn’t need to be ‘free’ from that.

But then why hadn’t he taken them yet?

He put the poppy seeds down on the nightstand next the bed, stood up and began to pace round the room. The floor was made of white marble shot through with whisps of black. The walls were of white stone, hung with tapestries and paintings that in the light from the candle on the nightstand he could see depicted long-haired Manolians winning battles over other nations, or successfully defending their realm from invaders. There was no god on any of them. A strange people, these warrior-women who made the men do all the women’s work in their country, who worshiped a single invisible God who made everything and didn’t acknowledge any of the other gods. Though not uniquely strange, he supposed. The old man worships this ‘One’ as well, after all...

The curtains were thick and made of purple velvet. Vish drew one back to look out of the window, but only found the blackness of the night beyond it. Except for his reflection, which looked back at him, lit up in the candle glow. He pulled off his head scarf, revealing the branded ‘X’ scar on his forehead, his thick, cropped black hair, the black discoloration around his mouth.

Someone glancing briefly at him might be forgiven for thinking it was a beard. But if they looked for any length of time, they would see that, no, in fact it was that the skin around his mouth and the lower part of his nose had turned from barky tan to black, deep black, black as a poppy seed, black as the darkness outside. It was almost as if the flesh itself had died, and indeed he had much reduced sensation in those places. Why did the poppy do that? Yes, it went into his body through his mouth, or sometimes crushed up through his nose, but then it went into his stomach or his bloodstream. Vish supposed that the poppy was so powerful that it simply had this effect on his body at the point where it entered him. There were probably parts of his insides that were black and had reduced sensation as well. He had often wondered if it would eventually turn the whole of him black. Then he would truly have become a creature of darkness; his transformation as a Shadowfinger would be complete.

He turned and looked back at the night stand, where the two poppy seeds lay, two inky dots staining the room, marring it. Wasn’t there a life that he had had before the Imperial agent had got him hooked on the poppy and recruited him for the Emperor’s Hand? Yes. In Aibar. Of course it had been a hard life, working as a personal assassin for the Leader, and he hadn’t known the poppy. But he had had a measure of freedom, the ability to do what he wanted between jobs, his own dwelling. He had been able to fully enjoy the taste of food, the touch of a woman, laughter with friends, the feel of the breeze on his skin.

The poppy had taken all of that from him. It had enslaved him, made him only want it, only really able to feel it. The times in between the hits had just become times when he was waiting for his next hit, or doing something to enable himself to get his next hit. They had become times when he wasn’t really alive or tuned into the world, just drifting or trudging through a pale grey landscape questing for the next poppy seed. That was no way to live, was it?

Vish walked back over to the night stand and picked up the poppy seeds. He was going to throw them away. He had lived in this bondage for too long.

He walked back to the window and slid it up and open. He barely felt the chill of the night air on his body.

He was going to throw them out of the window.

Come on. Throw them out the window.

Only...only what had he gained by taking the poppy? What would he lose if he threw it away?

The greatest pleasure he had ever felt. Pure, all-encompassing, ecstatic sensation washing over every inch of his body. Thrill. The ability to be completely focused on something and lost in something that wasn’t pain, self-hatred, regret and bitterness.

How could he throw all that away?

No, he wouldn’t throw them away, but he would wait a while before he took them. That way he would be spacing out the hits a little more, and maybe he would be able to come off it eventually like the old man said.

He shut the window, walked back to the nightstand and put the poppy seeds down on it.

He sat on the bed and looked at them.

The thing was, it had been a fair while since his last hit. Not since that Zerlanese village they had stopped in to rest and stock up on supplies.

Just one now, one later.

He picked up one of the seeds and pinched it between his thumb and forefinger. A little black orb that contained a world of pleasure.

But, if he was going to have one hit now anyway, why not have two? A double hit. How often did he get the chance to have a double hit? Even the old man only gave him one poppy seed at a time. There was no way that he would ever give him two at once, especially with his talk of spacing out the hits and coming off them.

Vish picked up both poppy seeds and chucked them into his mouth, swallowing them in one gulp.

Pleasure exploded into life in his body, starting in his mouth, his head, and then spreading down through his neck, his chest, his arms, and the rest of him.

He lay back on the bed, falling into the poppy trance.

*

In his poppy trance, Vish got up off the bed.

He looked around the bedchamber.

He padded to the door of the chamber and turned the bronze knob gently till it clicked.

He eased the door open slowly and silently.

Only the glow from the wall-mounted lights lit the corridor. Vish looked both ways down it. Only furniture--wall hangings, a wooden chair, a table with a vase atop it. The guards were posted further away. That was a mistake on the Manolians’ part.

He shut the door quietly and made his way down the corridor, sticking to the shadows, as was his way, and taking care that his footsteps did not make a single sound on the carpets or marble floor, his poise and focus only enhanced by the poppy trance.

Which chamber was he looking for?

He stopped in front of another door, one down from his own.

This one.

The Shadowfinger drew back his head scarf from over his right ear, and put the ear to the door.

No sound came through it to break the stillness of the night, even to Vish’s poppy-enhanced senses. Only, perhaps, if he strained his hearing to its limit, the rhythmic rises and falls of sleeping breath.

Good, the thought echoed in Vish’s entranced mind.

He eased the door open just as he had done his own and shut it with the faintest click. The person in the bed grunted in their sleep, and Vish froze ice-still for a moment, but then they rolled over and the rhythmic breathing resumed. Vish exhaled noiselessly.

Darkness cloaked the chamber. But darkness was Vish’s element. His eyes grew accustomed to it even more quickly than usual, helped by the poppy, and he saw that the chamber was laid out exactly as his own: curtains drawn over two high windows, cupboard against the wall, dressing table with mirror and chair, nightstand, and bed, in which lay the sleeping boy, Ryn.

Vish moved to the bedside like a cat closing in on its prey.

It was not on the nightstand.

It hadn’t been on the table either--Vish would have caught its glint from the candle-glow in the brief moment the door had been open.

That must mean the boy was wearing it.

Fortunately, the boy was sleeping on his back, where he was breathing heavily. A woven blanket covered him up to his neck.

Vish slipped his hand around the hem of the blanket, paused, then ever so carefully folded it back, not making a sound.

A chain. The boy was indeed sleeping with the ruby ring on its chain about his neck.

Unfortunately, he was also clasping the Jewel tight in one fist.

What to do?

Vish put his finger underneath the boy’s left ear and tickled it very gently.

When the boy did not respond, he tickled it slightly less gently.

The boy snorted in his sleep and let go of what he was holding to scratch his ear, then let his hand lie flat on his pillow. The rhythmic breathing resumed again.

There it was. A ring, and set into it, a ruby which even now burned faintly red in some borrowed moonlight finding its way around the curtains.

Vish’s mouth made a smile underneath his face covering. Too easy.

The Shadowfinger reached inside the fold of his uniform to one of its many inner pockets, the one sewn into the left breast, and found there a small implement, which he retrieved, and a small hessian bag, not unlike the one that the old man kept his poppy seeds in, though this one was currently empty.

He reached over the boy with his gloved hand and used the implement, a small steel rod that came to a thin sharp line at a right angle at its end, like a miniature pick, to scrape the ruby slowly once, twice, thrice.

He held up the implement, and when he was satisfied that it had enough minute glittering red scrapings on it, he deposited them carefully in his bag.

The Shadowfinger left the room by the way he had come in.