Prologue

The eye stirred.

The eye had been called a marble numerous times over the course of two and one half days, and it was getting a little bit tired of it. But the duchess knew what it was. A scrying crystal, capable of seeing the past and the present. Incredible power that in the wrong hands could be disastrous.

The eye disappeared.

Relocated, rather. It popped out of one location and straight into another. That second location happened to be the eye socket of Mister Jonathan Teatime, former Assassin, deceased. For a while.

The body of Mister Teatime relocated, as well, out of the morgue and into a Necromancer's office.

Mister Chainlin was a Necromancer. The capital N was necessary. It differentiated those with the talent for speaking to the dead from those who pretended and ran a company out of it, which is what Chainlin did for a living.

And at the moment, Chainlin was scared out of his wits, looking at a black clad man with blond curls.

The man had appeared on his desk. He hadn't appeared to be breathing, until Chainlin tentatively poked him, at which he snorted.

Chainlin made the mistake of poking him once more, and the man's eyes shot open. Chainlin gasped. He didn't believe people actually gasped until he did it himself. The man's eyes were mismatched in the oddest way: one was a strange black glass, the other was an off-white with a pinpoint-sized pupil. The man smiled.

"Hi. My name's Teh-ah-tim-eh. What's yours?" Teh-ah-tim-eh had a high voice, and a frightening knife in his fingertips. And at the same time Teatime was getting up off the desk…

…Susan Sto-Helit was laying the children down to bed. Twyla had been a problem when Susan had taken away the marble, but she was fine now.

Of course, Susan couldn't have the children playing with the eye of Jonathan Teatime, who had haunted her memory since Hogswatch. Something of the figure in stylish black just wouldn't work its way out of Susan's head, and was irritating the Death out of her.

Yes, with Susan's family heritage, she was permitted to say that something irritated the Death out of her. Of course, she would have preferred to say that it irritated the life out of her, but since Hogswatch, she'd been siding with the odd rather than the normal. Constantly forgetting what doorknobs were for and not being able to go to sleep were just the first part of it, and the mild side.

Being a governess was something Susan normally enjoyed, but lately the doorknob bit was a slight inconvenience.

She hadn't noticed that the box containing Mister Teatime's eye had been acting strangely since she put the marble in it. Sapient pearwood was the wood for magical items, but the hinges were coming undone. At the same time Susan was closing the way for bogeymen…

…A slight girl of fourteen with curly blond hair was making her way through the Ankh-Morporkean streets.

Audrey was the type of girl nobody wanted to talk to for fear of getting hurt. She was the line between crime and punishment, between knowledge and power, between Time and Distance, and most people morbidly hated her.

They called her a freak, when unusual was the better word; they called her a psychopath, when, clearly, sociopath was the appropriate term; they called her insane when all she was was humanitarianly challenged.

These didn't bother her, though. No, what was the worst was when they called her Teatime when the correct pronunciation was, quite easily, Teh-ah-tim-eh, and that's what irritated her.

But she was an Assassin, even if she was partially...inconvenienced in the field of livelihood. And she loved every minute of it.

She opened the Guild door. "Downey? I have a proposal for you."