ARCHIVE NOTE
Preserved in the personal papers of an unnamed Karath-district scribe
who came into possession of the documents some decades after the events
described. Certain names have been altered at the descendants' request.
The substance of the account is preserved in full.
SUMMARY
Veros has not worn another man's face in twenty years.
Once he was the Hundred — the unnamed man the merchant houses of Karath paid when they needed a kill no other assassin could deliver. He wore faces the way other men wore coats, and every face he wore cost him days of his own life. Over a career of hundreds, the cost made him old before his time.
On his last contract, he did something he could not afterwards undo. He took a child from a house he had just emptied. He meant to leave her at a temple gate. He did not.
Twenty years later Irela is a scribe's apprentice in Karath's Middle City, and Veros is the father she has always known. They keep a quiet life. A quiet life is what he has spent his remaining years trying to afford her.
Then an investigator begins asking old questions about an old killing. The people who commissioned that killing want a loose end closed before they die. And on a bright afternoon at the noon-bell, Veros sees a face walking through the General Market that cannot, by every measure he knows, still be alive.
The Hundred is a novella of fatherhood, debt, and the specific currency a man pays when the only life he cares about is one he has no right to have built.
A novella of The Archive. Contemporary Karath, Year 375 AD.
- Era: Contemporary Karath, Year 375 AD
- Region: Karath
- Word count: 21,600
- Wiki: Karath, The Anchored, Daily Life in Karath
- Canon: House Tannath, face-alteration manifestation, the aging cost
