Mina Ostrohaya

From my desk above, I watch the intricate machinery of human cruelty turn its gears. Let me tell you about the jesters—those peculiar architects of chaos who have perfected the art of controlled destruction. You see, I've watched civilizations rise and fall, witnessed empires crumble under the weight of their own ambition, but the jester system? That is uniquely human in its calculated brutality. Malavie finds them fascinating. He collects their stories like others collect coins, turning them over in his mind during his attacks of life sickness. "Look," he says to me, pointing at the streets below with fingers that shimmer between corporeal and not, "look at how they've systematized suffering. How very... efficient." He's not wrong. The hitmen—they're simple creatures, really. I watch them from my vantage point, these desperate souls who've chosen the quickest path to coin and the fastest route to an early grave. They operate in the shadows of Johan Strabe's neighborhood, cheap and disposable as the bullets they fire. Two silver coins for a merchant. Five for a minor noble. Ten if the target has guards. The mathematics of murder, reduced to its most basic equation. But the jesters? Oh, the jesters are poetry written in blood and terror. Let me show you how it works. You see that building there, the one with the blue-painted shutters that are actually green beneath decades of grime and pollution? That's the Laughing House, though no one laughs there. Not really. It's where the jester apprentices train, where boys and girls—some as young as eight, though most are in their teens—learn the craft that will define the rest of their short, violent lives. I lean forward at my desk, adjusting my view. This is important. This is what Malavie wanted you to understand before he shows you his islands of suffering. The jesters are proof that humans don't need divine intervention to create their own hells. The training begins before dawn. I watch as Master Corvus—that's not his real name, of course; jesters abandon their birth names when they take the red and black—I watch as he lines up twelve apprentices in the courtyard. They're shivering. It's late autumn in Linz, and frost has begun to claim the cobblestones, turning them treacherous and bright. Their breath comes out in clouds, little souls escaping their mouths only to dissipate in the cold air. "A hitman kills," Corvus says, his voice carrying across the courtyard. From my position above, I can see everything—the way the apprentices lean forward to catch every word, the way their hands instinctively move to the weapons at their belts, the way the morning light catches on the frost and makes everything look almost beautiful. Almost. "A hitman kills," he repeats, "and that is all. Quick. Clean. Forgettable. But you? You are artists. You are architects of fear. You don't just end a life—you unmake it first. You strip away everything that makes your target feel safe, feel human, feel real. And only then, when they're hollow and broken and begging for the mercy of death, only then do you deliver the final stroke. If the contract calls for it." One of the apprentices—a girl with hair the color of rust and eyes that have already seen too much—raises her hand. I've been watching her for three weeks now. Her name is Petra, and she has a natural talent for this work that even Corvus finds unsettling. "Master," she says, her voice steady despite the cold, "what if they break too quickly? What if they give us what we want before we've properly unmade them?" Corvus smiles. It's not a pleasant expression. "Then you're not doing it right. A proper unmaking takes time. Weeks, sometimes months. You don't just threaten their life—any fool with a knife can do that. You threaten their sanity. Their sense of reality. You make them doubt everything they thought they knew about the world." He begins to pace, and the apprentices' eyes follow him like flowers tracking the sun. I've seen this lecture before. I've seen it a hundred times, in a hundred different forms, across a thousand different cities. But I watch anyway, because Malavie is right—there's something horribly fascinating about how humans have industrialized terror. "Let me give you an example," Corvus continues. "Three months ago, I was contracted by the Merchant Guild to handle a problem. Lord Vasheron had been intercepting their shipments, undercutting their prices, generally making himself a nuisance. They wanted him gone, but more than that, they wanted him discredited. They wanted his family name to become synonymous with madness." The apprentices lean in closer. This is the part they love—the case studies, the real-world applications of their training. "So I studied him. For two weeks, I did nothing but watch. I learned his routines, his habits, his fears. I learned that he was a creature of order, that he kept meticulous records, that he prided himself on his rationality and control. And I learned that he had a daughter he loved more than his own life." From my desk, I can see where this is going. I've seen the files, watched the operation unfold in real-time. It was masterfully done, I'll admit that much. Horrifying, but masterful. "I never touched the daughter," Corvus says, and there's almost a note of pride in his voice. "Never even approached her. But I made him think I had. I started leaving gifts at his door—little things at first. A ribbon the same color as the one she wore in her hair. A flower from her favorite garden. Notes written in a child's handwriting that said things like 'Papa, why don't you save me?' or 'Papa, it hurts.'" Several of the apprentices are smiling now. Petra's expression hasn't changed—she's analyzing, learning, storing this information away for future use. "Within a week, he'd hired guards for his daughter. Within two weeks, he'd stopped sleeping. He became paranoid, erratic. He started accusing his own servants of conspiracy. He saw threats everywhere. And the beauty of it—the absolute beauty—was that his daughter was fine. She was always fine. Safe at home, playing with her toys, completely unaware that her father was falling apart." "By the third week, he was screaming at shadows. By the fourth, he'd attacked a city guard who he was convinced was one of my agents. By the fifth week, the Merchant Guild had him declared mentally unfit and seized his assets. He's in an asylum now, still raving about the men who took his daughter, even though she visits him every week and begs him to recognize her." The courtyard is silent for a moment. Then Corvus spreads his hands wide. "That, my students, is the art of the jester. We are not mere killers. We are weavers of nightmares, sculptors of madness. And we are paid accordingly." I watch as he dismisses them to their training exercises. Some will practice lockpicking. Others will work on forgery—learning to replicate handwriting, official seals, documents that can destroy a reputation with a single glance. A few will study poisons, not the quick-acting kind that hitmen favor, but the slow, subtle ones that mimic natural illness or gradually erode mental faculties. The jester system has ranks, hierarchies as complex as any royal court. At the bottom are the apprentices, like the ones I'm watching now. They're learning, testing, occasionally being sent on minor jobs to prove their worth. One level up are the Masks—full jesters who've completed their training and taken their first major contract. They wear half-masks painted with grotesque smiles, earning their name and their reputation. Above them are the Painted, jesters who've successfully completed at least ten major contracts without being caught or identified. They wear full-face masks and are permitted to take on the most lucrative and dangerous assignments—the ones that involve nobility, clergy, or government officials. The Painted are ghosts, moving through society without leaving traces, their very existence a subject of debate among those who don't know better. And at the top? At the very peak of this pyramid of calculated cruelty? The Laughing Lords. There are only five of them at any given time, scattered across the continent. They don't take contracts anymore—they assign them. They're the ones who decide which jobs are worthy of jesters and which should be left to common hitmen. They're the ones who train the trainers, who write the manuals, who ensure that the jester system continues to function with clockwork precision. Master Corvus is a Painted, aspiring to become a Laughing Lord. I've watched his career with the same detached interest I watch everything—the way a scholar might observe insects building a colony. He's good at what he does. Terrifyingly good. And he's teaching the next generation to be even better.