I’m given orders to silence a voice. I don’t want its echoes ringing in my ears. I want to dwell in a vast and endless space where a landscape will have no impediments. Cascading waterfalls, rivers rushing headlong in spate, a sky rent apart by tissues of lightening, the dull boom of thunder—all this would lead to a disturbance of the mind. My world is uniformly grey, silent with its absence of human voices. My bullets reach swiftly. There are no agonizing cries, no death throes. No echoes. Nothing haunts me. No voices whisper endlessly in my ear. Silence is my only companion. Before a blank wall I see only the image of a single man, blindfolded, hands tied behind his back, standing, face to that wall. I hold the weapon of execution in my hand. I pull the trigger. The machine gun splutters. The body is pitted, pricked out with an indecipherable message. They are the braille marks of the new fictions. People are still so slow to comprehend their meaning. Each indentation fills with crimson, the white page of the shirt suffused with blood. I walk away. The blood does not splatter on me to sully my clothes. The image recurs. The single man. The blank wall. Blindfolds. Hands behind the back. Knotted ropes. We never face each other. Neither of us knows the other’s identity.

Tonight, it’s this man, Nilame, who is my target. We know, my men and I, that he has no bodyguards. He is very confident, perhaps overconfident, of his own strength. He knows he has an enemy but he has underestimated the power of hate and the ruthlessness that goes with ambition. It will all be over shortly after midnight. Every move has been plotted and planned to the minutest detail. Perfect timing is vital. I must not waste time in searching through the maze of rooms in the old walauwa. I’ll deploy my men so that whoever discovers him first will summon me without delay. One utterance.

‘Nilame.’