Free Blood and Money by Unknown

Chapter One: Nightwalker
    It was well after midnight in the garden. He was not alone. Aphids crept and crawled across his bare skin, and a hot wind blew in from the desert. The unseasonal sirocco was an excuse for madness. Men would use it as a rationale for particularly savage beatings, claiming the wind had driven them to it. Isra had no patience for weak men or liars. He did, however, appreciate the beauty of the well-tended garden.
    The topiaries of Hasim Rakhman’s palace were legendary, all manner of fabulous beasts carved out of the shrubbery to stand guard over the merchant’s equally legendary maze. Isra stood in the shadow of a leonine predator. The scent of jasmine was thick in the air, overpowering other, far subtler musks from the many more delicate plants in the garden.
    He hadn’t moved so much as a muscle for more than a quarter of an hour. In the landscape of shadows, even the slightest movement, a finger moving to scratch an itch, was exaggerated and could so easily betray him. Despite the fact that Rakhman had a dozen men patrolling the gardens, none of them had marked Isra’s presence—but then, he was good at what he did. Even so, Isra was well aware that the longer he waited before making his move, the greater the chance of him being discovered became. It wasn’t magic, just was simple mathematics. Probability. He used the skill in his other life, when the sun was up and the Nightwalker didn’t exist. It was the kind of thinking that had helped make him rich.
    But with the sickle of moon high in the sky, he was very much the Nightwalker now, and his instruction had been clear: kill Hasim Rakhman on this night. The client was very particular about the timing. It had to be tonight. He would make sure Rakhman was vulnerable, and it was up to Isra to exploit that weakness and get the job done.
    And the reason his client could assure him the principal would be vulnerable? He was captain of Rakhman’s personal guard. The price of loyalty? About half a year’s salary. That and a shapely woman eager for said guard captain to take her overweight husband’s place in bed. Permanently.
    It was always the same. No matter how complicated clients believed their motives to be, they always came down to lust. Be it for money, power, or sex, it was always about craving more.
    But that didn’t explain why there were so many guards in the grounds tonight. Sweat trickled down into the bay at the nape of Isra’s neck. Still he did not move.
    He hadn’t stayed alive this long by walking blindly into traps, and this was some kind of trap. He harbored no illusions about that. It would have been easy to slip away into the night and leave them to whatever game it was they were playing, but he had an obligation. The contract was open. He was the Nightwalker. He was the killer who never failed to execute a contract. He breathed in deeply, savoring the heat in his lungs. He could understand why the heat of the night drove men to thoughts of passion and murder. People were simple creatures at the best of times. The constant heat robbed them of the ability to think, reducing them to the most base of instincts. It didn’t matter that they wouldn’t stain their hands with the blood, they craved it just the same. Who was he to deny them? There would be blood tonight, he promised himself.
    He studied the marbled facade of Rakhman’s palace, his eye drawn to the veranda that led into the merchant’s study, and caught a glimpse of his employer, the regally handsome captain of Rakhman’s force pacing back and forth within. He was huge, and more than capable of snapping a weasel like Hasim Rakhman in two like a brittle twig—a corpulent, sweaty one, but a twig all the same. But his hands had to be clean. That he was here rather than in some public place making the kind of spectacle of himself that would ensure he had an alibi only added to Isra’s sense of unease.
    Again the thought of simply slipping away into the darkness