Prologue
The night was dark, like a dark chocolate bar sitting on a table with some kind of obstruction between it and the light. Tonight there was no moon, and the light of the stars was hidden behind a shroud of storm clouds, heavy with rain. It was a grand evening for creatures of the night, and a black cat skulked through the alley, on the hunt for tender morsels, its green eyes shining with what little light was available as it searched hungrily for prey.
Without warning, there was the slash of a sabre, so quick that the cat did not have time to cry out, yet there was a careless, lazy attitude about it, a nonchalance at sending another creature to its death. The owner of the sabre stepped closer to the body to survey his work. He was tall and slender, with the face of a youth but the eyes of an old, cruel man. He was dressed in a dapper fashion, bordering on foppishness, and held himself with the arrogance of someone without any doubt of his superiority. He was also evil. He had killed the cat to demonstrate how evil he was, and also to be ironic, because although the cat had been planning to kill a mouse, it was the cat who was killed instead, which he thought was very clever. He was thinking about how clever this was when the second fellow arrived.
“Ianniello,” said the cat-killer, the sides of his lips turning up in a sneer as he spotted the visitor.
“Dummyhead,” replied the new arrival, which caused the other man to frown.
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