Professional to the last, the Smiling Men record a great deal about each assassination target. Preparing a detailed biogaphy is part of the preparation for each assignment.
After the kill, they also detail the nature of the murder. Upon the victim’s burial, the record is bound along with some trinket from the victim, and sent to this cliffside tower in the Grey Mountains. The library is a room suspended from a beam that comes out of the tower’s peak and projects over the cliff.
The plan was that if the tower were ever compromised, the beam could be cut and the records lost far below, rather than fall into enemy hands.
The Smiling Men do permit the occasional brave sage to consult the biographies. The researcher does have to fetch the record himself or herself - balancing on the beam and dropping into the library, a wooden cube suspended from a rusty chain.
At this moment, a band of Smiling Men are advancing on the tower. It has been locked from inside by a rogue Smiling Man - their best killer. The man, Adon, was consulting the library when he noticed his own name on the spine of a book. He realised that he had been killed and then returned from the dead to further some scheme of a lead Smiling Man.
Cursing them all, he slew every Man in the tower. He knows that the library is precious enough that the Smiling Men will keep advancing while there is hope of saving the records.
A mild sage is now holed up in the tower with Adon. She has not even had the courage to advance across the tower’s beam to the library, so she is truly cursing her luck.
Connections
- The Sealed Library is another suspended library.
Hooks
- Who was the Smiling Man who arranged for Adon’s death?
- Who was Adon before he died?
- who is the sage researching, and for what purpose?
- Why is the library precious to the Smiling Men? Do they simply care about the world’s store of knowledge or does it serve some other purpose?
