“Lord Virzal, there is a masked Assassin in the hallway who brought this under Assassins’ Truce,” he said.
Verkan Vall took the wafer and pared off three of the four edges, which showed black where they had been fused. Unfolding it, he found, as he had expected, that the pyrographed message within was in the alphabet and language of the First Paratime Level:
Vall, darling:
Am I glad you got here; this time I really am in the middle, but good! The Assassin, Dirzed, who brings this, is in my service. You can trust him implicitly; he’s about the only person in Darsh you can trust. He’ll bring you to where I am.
Dalla
P.S. I hope you’re not still angry about that musician. I told you, at the time, that he was just helping me with an experiment in telepathy.
D.
Verkan Vall grinned at the postscript. That had been twenty years ago, when he’d been eighty and she’d been seventy. He supposed she’d expect him to take up his old relationship with her again. It probably wouldn’t last any longer than it had, the other time; he recalled a Fourth Level proverb about the leopard and his spots. It certainly wouldn’t be boring, though.
“Tell the Assassin to come in,” he directed. Then he tossed the message down on a table. Outside of himself, nobody in Darsh could read it but the woman who had sent it; if, as he thought highly probable, the Statisticalists had spies among the hotel staff, it might serve to reduce some cryptanalyst to gibbering insanity.
The Assassin entered, drawing off a cowl-like mask. He was the man whose arm Dalla had been holding in the visiplate picture; Verkan Vall even recognized the extremely ornate pistol and knife on his belt.