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Continued from the previous post: the life and times of Silverlock D'Alestri.

About a year before the end of his indenture, and after about a week of intensive summoning work, an assassin breaks into the house. Silverlock (who was asleep on the couch at the time) throws a paralysis cantrip at him and forgets about him until morning, when Gannet leaves for the university for the day.

The assassin is Hawk Samarkand, and by the time Silverlock wakes up enough to release him from the paralysis cantrip, he has one hell of a crick in his neck. Hawk isn't completely incompetent, but he's not used to doing solo missions, and his partner is out of commission with a set of broken ribs for a few weeks. (Maddel frequently gets pissed off at the various assassins who come through his infirmary, and will refuse to magickally heal them until he feels they've learned their lesson.) Once he promises to not assassinate anyone, Silverlock gives him a cup of coffee and they chat for a while. Hawk is worried that he won't be able to support himself and his partner on his own, and if he can't manage for a few weeks, how is he going to manage for a few months when he and his partner eventually decide to have kids? Silverlock, meanwhile, has no idea what he's going to do with himself once his indenture is up; he still has thousands of marks of debt to pay off because Gannet is an asshole who steals things (and people).

Hawk is a nice guy at heart- a truly good person, honestly, for all that he kills people for a living. ("It's a living, you know? Been the family business for generations, and it's not like I'm bad at it. Sure, I'm not as good at it as Civet, but most people aren't. And I just wouldn't be satisfied doing something like, I dunno, carpentry, or bartending. There's no thrill. And I meet interesting people this way, too.") He offers to sponsor Silverlock in the Guild, if he can't find any other, more suitable work once his indenture expires. Or, at the very least, he'll pay back the cup of excellent coffee Silverlock gave him.

(Silverlock falls a little bit in love with Hawk, too, but he does that a lot. It's one of the things Aya mocks him for most frequently- to which he usually responds with, "And I suppose you're so much happier, being the frigid bitch that you are.")

A year later, Gannet kicks him out, and he leaves with nothing but the clothes on his back and a plethora of interesting and potentially dangerous tattoos. He goes looking for the Assassins Guild, and finds it- ("If you're looking for the mage covens, you're in the wrong area." "I'm not looking for any trouble, milady. I'm looking for Hawk Samarkand." "Then you are looking for trouble, since it follows that man like stench on a bog corpse." "Be that as it may, he owes me a cup of coffee.") and gets sponsored as a provisional apprentice.

The only Assassin-Mage in the Guild takes him on. Banshee is a 4'9" black woman with vaguely sentient hair, and she kicks Silverlock's ass six ways to Sunday in the first half hour of their acquaintence. Then she teaches him everything she knows about destructive necromancy, which is considerable.

He keeps up his acquaintence with Hawk and Civet until Civet finally gets pregnant; they still remain friends, but by that point he's too busy with his apprenticeship and they're too busy with raising a kid and getting paid for them to see each other much. He does occasionally get to hear Hawk lamenting the kid's clumsiness, and he finds out in a peripheral sort of way that the kid got sent off to the Thieves' Guild and was doing well there. (This doesn't become important until a good twenty years later, when he meets Blaine. After a few years, some pieces click into place, and Silverlock spends a day alternating between beating his head against a wall in frustration and laughing hysterically.)

He spends somewhere between five and ten years as Banshee's apprentice- probably closer to five, since he already has a thorough background in magickal stuff, and is physically in better condition than most of his fellow Guildsmen. She teaches him some advanced weaponswork to supplement his streetfighting skills (and the stuff he learned from Aya, way back when), and she teaches him to integrate his magick with his fighting, and she spends two or three years attacking him without warning to build up his reflexes and his resistance to various poisons. (For years, that's his one failing as an assassin- he doesn't have the immunity gained by spending a lifetime absorbing small amounts of poison, and this leads to some humorous episodes in the infirmary when his career is just beginning. He figures out how to neutralize most poisons magickally, but that was a trial and error process that also frequently ended hilariously.)

Sometimes he runs into other mages, who twitch violently at the thought of his chosen profession. Most mages with strong empathy become healers or psychotherapists; very few of them become serial killers. ("I see it as the natural progression of things; the only rush greater than sex is death. And I can see by your horrified look that that isn't a satisfactory answer. Ah, well. Let's just say I'm a masochist and leave it at that, shall we?") Being part of the Guild means he has an enormous extended family- he has a society to belong to, and everyone who isn't part of that society is a nonentity until they prove themselves otherwise. Killing them is a bit like killing very large rats that twitch and squeak in entertaining ways when you poke them. He's a very well conditioned, functional sort of sociopath.

When he finally earns his tags (Guild-speak for graduating one's apprenticeship; proof of membership and identity are a set of dog tags, magickally imprinted by the Guildmaster himself), he and Banshee work as partners for a few years, until she retires. Then he's on his own; he uses the connections he has to the Candlemark gangs and the more eccentric parts of high society to good advantage, and he builds up an information network that is the envy of many in the Guild. Most of his close acquaintences from his youth are in positions of power once he becomes an assassin.

He has as many enemies in the Guild as he has allies; for the most part, he's seen as an eccentric, but he's respected for his skills. He's not the best at what he does, but he works hard to be damned good at it, and he doesn't get involved much in Guild politics.

He mourns Civet's transition to Guildmaster, and is one of the few people who says goodbye to Hawk when Hawk leaves the Guild. (Hawk becomes a bartender in Eastmark.)

He had an apprentice, who would've been another assassin-mage, but the kid died in a stupid accident. Silverlock doesn't talk about the incident ever, really. He doesn't blame himself, but he still sees it as a failure of sorts. He took Foxbird on her apprentice test, which is a bit different- he just oversaw her first assassination, and made sure nothing got too terribly fucked up. He wasn't her actual apprentice-master; most apprentices do not, in fact, get individual training of that sort. They tend to be communally trained by the older Guildsmen. Only those who require specialist training, like assassin-mages or poisonmakers, usually receive an apprentice-mster.

As an assassin-mage, and as a leechmage, he frequently gets called on to clean up other people's messes. He works a lot with the Guild mystics to track retrieve the tags of dead assassins, and he often gets called on to interrogate Guildsmen who've failed their missions. This is actually the case when he meets Blaine for the first time; an assassin came back to the Guild in shreds, after failing a time-sensitive assignment. He has to get all of the pertinent details out of the assassin in question before Maddel puts him under for intensive healing, so someone can go out and finish the job.

Blaine gets a nasty jolt from encountering Silverlock's leechmagick while in the middle of channeling his deity; Nagendra's curse kicks in, and his connection to his god shuts down, leaving him with a backlash migraine of epic proportions.

For a few moments, however, Silverlock was able to get a very good "look" at his soul, and what he saw was fascinating. (Deity-born mages like Blaine always parse a bit strangely to those with aetherial sight. To someone as sensitive as Silverlock, he's like an Escher done in irridescent colors.) Really, he was doomed before he and Blaine ever had their first civilized conversation; when he gets attached to people, he does so on an aetherial level. I wouldn't use any term as trite as "soulmates," since the feeling isn't at all reciprocal, and because on any given day, he's likely to run into five or six people whose souls operate on a similar wavelength. It just happens to be a wavelength that his soul finds irresistable.

(According to Silverlock, it's like cats with catnip, and he's very, very embarrassed to admit this.) It's because of the buzz he got off of thirty seconds in the presence of Blaine's soul that he decides to get to know him better. (Blaine figures this out after he dies, and spends a good deal of time wishing he had a corporeal form with which to kick Silverlock in the head.) The irony here is, of course, that to be within thirty feet of Blaine, Silverlock has to shut down his empathy, or Blaine loses contact with his deity. (This is really only potentially harmful when he's in the middle of spellcasting; the rest of the time he would just feel vaguely disoriented and slightly nauseous. As a priest, he has a direct connection to his god, all the time; he hears hissing in the back of his head, and the sound of water. When that connection shuts down, the lack manifests itself as something like an inner ear imbalance. They give each other migraines! ...no, I don't believe in writing functional relationships, why do you ask?)

It's fortunate for both of them that they actually like each other; Blaine is a lot like Hawk when he isn't wangsting, and Silverlock goes out of his way to be a likeable person when it suits him. They also bond over a shared affection for Foxbird and a shared distaste of Greymalkin. (I still need to write the scene where Blaine gives Greymalkin syphilis.)

Aya and Blaine don't get along very well; Silverlock thinks this is poetic justice, since he despised her boyfriend. Aya terrifies Blaine just a little bit, though by the time she's a general and head of the DeLavrey family, she terrifies most people just a little bit. It's the eyepatch- you still get the feeling her missing eye is staring at you, somewhere. (There are a great many people who think she actually had her eye magically preserved and uses it to spy on her enemies. This is blatantly untrue, but Aya does nothing to discourage this rumor.) Aya mostly just doesn't have time for Blaine's wangsty nonsense, and she thinks Silverlock could do much better for himself than some whiny, underfed religious fanatic. In this, and perhaps only this, she and Blaine are in agreement.

The actual story still needs a number of plot points worked out, but the biggest spoiler is that it was the Guildmaster the whole time. That's a subject for another post, I think- this one is mostly about Silverlock.

After the story, and after he gets his hands put back on properly (Blaine stuck them back on, but it was more of a quick fix than anything permanent), he keeps on assassining for a few more years- ten or twelve. As a reward for helping to save the world, Parliament agreed to waive his taxes for the rest of his life, so he finally pays off the last of his debts to the Guild and works when it pleases him to do so. (At the time, he wasn't planning to live forever, but the no taxes thing was definitely a marker in the "pro" column we he did make that decision.) When he gets tired of working, he starts teaching, though he refuses to teach any new assassin mages.