It seemed like an age since the previous morning, when an unnamed man had stood waiting outside his door with a file of paperwork, and aeroplane ticket and a ride to the airport. The ride took Jacopo as far as Naples, where he caught a plane to Paris and found another ride waiting to take him across to Versailles. On the plane, Jacopo studied his information packs. There wasn't a lot. One sheet described the world of Shaman; a second was his cover story for going there; and the third, final sheet described the target in such lack of detail that he could only presume the client wasn't sure exactly what the target looked like. The paper identified the target as male, in his early teens, and living at the castle under the care of the king. It also gave a name: Thoth. Jacopo burnt the papers at the airport with his lighter before getting into the car to Versailles.
Pretty much from the moment the driver left him at Versailles, it got weird. The information pack had told Jacopo he had to walk through a mirror to get to the magic land. Riiight. Once he found the mirror in question and passed through it, he would then appear in any part of the rural planet and had to find his way to some village and locate a woman called Morgana who would give him the keys to his new place. It took almost an entire day to trek across the terrain, following confusing directions from the locals, and by the time he managed to unlock the door of the house and go inside he was too tired to do anything more than collapse on the bed. So it wasn't until the next day that Jacopo actually got a chance to look around the place he would be calling home indefinitely.
It was... sort of... cute. A wooden cottage with a thatched roof built higgeldy-piggeldy around a bunch of trees, as if whoever had constructed it didn't want to hack down the forest in order to make room for a house. It was a detached, but he had neighbours with low hedges on either side, which he didn't much like. Still, he probably wouldn't be spending too much time in the garden. The house was simple and simply furnished: it had a kitchen, an open diner-living room, and a single bedroom upstairs with a double bed just squeezed in. The wardrobe (which was in the hallway because there was no room in the bedroom) contained his gardener's uniform, which the file had told him he would need for his new job at the castle. Once he'd explored the house (which didn't take long), Jacopo sat in front of the window behind the net curtains in his diner-living room, alternating between watching the world outside, praying to Gwythr, and wondering what the hell he was doing here.
Evening was approaching and he was just beginning to doze off when something – a sixth sense – jolted him awake. Jacopo glared around the room to find nothing unchanged, before glancing out of the window to discover that some woman was tramping around his new garden. Jacopo had never had a garden before. He'd always lived in city flats, even back when he used to earn a good, honest wage. Feeling a burst of irritation, he stood up and stomped across the room and through the hallway, whereupon he flung open the front door.
“Oi!” He yelled across the yard. “What the hell are you doing? Esci!” |