《The Iron Coven》


 Chapter 1: The Death of a Hero

    She opened her eyes.She was used to sleeping in the mud, always camping beside the road in bad weather, but not like this. She was wearing her armor. In the mud. That was bad for the steel. A battle, then? Oh, yes. That was it. There had been a club, a gnarled, knobbly twist of fire-hardened wood swinging through the air, and it had hit her in the head. Her helmet had saved her life, it seemed, but only for a moment. That moment of salvation would be worthless if she just lay there for what would come next.


    She rolled to her back, and she saw the creature standing over her, the ugly club still in its fist. It grinned down at her with black eyes and a mouth full of teeth like broken tombstones. It raised the club above its misshapen head, ready to finish what it started with her. It''s lips pulled back from it''s ruin of a mouth and it squealed like a charging boar, bits of mud and ropes of pond scum drool erupting from the reeking hole.


    God''s teeth, she thought,if the club doesn''t kill me, the breath will.


    The weapon descended on her, the bulbous head of it fit to crack skulls, to crack steel helmets, even.


    Her shield came up just in time. It caught the club as it fell, stopped it from splitting her head open. The steel shield rang like a gong, sending waves of buzzing pain through her fist and up her arm. In her other fist, she felt the reassuring weight of her mace. Steel. Reliable, predictable, dependable. She swung the mace sideways into the creature''s knees, sweeping it off its feet and into the mud beside her with a howl of pain.


    She was already lurching to her feet, the world reeling, a wave of throbbing dizziness making her want to puke, her head throbbing, her breastplate weighing her down. Armor. As hard and bright as the words of the Blessed Mother, as much a protection against evil as any prayer or miracle. It was a miracle. Her steel armor had saved her life. It had kept her alive. Her steel weapon had humbled her enemy and laid it at her feet.


    Down in the mud, the creature writhed and retched like an injured pig, clawing pointlessly at her steel greaves with its filthy nails. Had her leg been unarmored, those jagged nails could have torn through her clothes and skin like cobwebs, but they were nothing against steel. The steel always wins.


    She raised her shield high, and with a cry of fury and fear both, she brought the rim of it down onto her enemy. There was a crunch, and the thing went limp, it''s flailing arms flopping into the mud, becoming mud that dissolved in the rain and mingled with the soggy earth under her feet. Soon there was little sign the creature had ever been there, just some broken stones, dead moss, and a patch of mud in a muddy field.


    She breathed, feeling the icy mud drip from her sodden armor, and looked at the carnage around her.


    She realized she might be the only one left alive. The ranger had been the first one to fall. In the narrow, twisting tunnels, his bow was worse than useless. When it was time to run, he''d tripped over it and fallen behind, soon swallowed up by the dark and the chittering creatures in the hungry shadows. The sorcerer went next. His spells and hexes had cleared a path for them to reach the outside, but magic soon proved weak protection against the claws and teeth and blades of their enemies. The bard died too, swinging his lute like a club at the end. And the swordsman fell trying to save him, his masterwork needle-like swords now lost among the marshy grass and the slurried earth. And the barbarian...what had happened to him? Something grabbed her and spun her around, and she brought up her shield on an instinct, her teeth bared in a fighting snarl.


    "Whoa, girl! It''s only me." It was the barbarian. Koth was his name? Or was it Groth? Or Grog? Or Kogoth? He stood with his hands open to her, like he was approaching a skittish horse.


    "Best not hit me with that mace," he growled. She realized she''d raised the mace above her head to hit him when she turned, and it was still there. She relaxed her arm. It was shaking from the effort of gripping the haft so hard.


    Satisfied she wouldn''t hit him, he nodded and reached to the bearded ax leaning against his leg. He shrugged his round, wooden shield off his back and strapped it back onto his arm. She could see the painted wood had some new scars on it, so much of the paint gouged away she could scarcely make out the faded image of the phoenix anymore. The ax she saw was notched and caked in flaking mud.


    "I''m surprised you''re still alive," he grunted in a heavy northern accent.


    She nodded. "The steel always wins," she recited, raising her shield. It was true, and she believed it to her very bones. Steel had kept her alive that day. Her companions had fallen one by one to the creatures, but her armor, her weapon, her shield had kept her safe. Unlike them, the steel had done its job. She would have some new bruises, for sure, but she was relatively unscathed.


    The barbarian could not say as much for himself. He had a dozen fresh cuts along his arms and legs. There was a leaking cut along his graying scalp, and his chest was striped with claw marks that stained the rainwater pink as it ran off him. It was his own fault for going into battle without even a chain mail shirt. The barbarian had little trust in armor, trusting instead to his own rugged vigor to protect him. Nonsense, of course. Being as muscled as an ox is all well and good, but all that strength wouldn''t stop a blade.


    "You should take care of those," she said, waving her mace at his wounds. She realized she''d pretty much pointed at all of him.


    "Can''t you take care of it? Ain''t you a healer?"


    She shrugged. "I''m not a cleric." That wasn''t entirely true. She was not so much a weeping nun as she was an armored killer who remembered to say her prayers, but she''d been taught the blessed miracles that knitted flesh and stopped the blood. Even so, she had no desire to waste the prayers on this fool. He didn''t even wear armor. It was ridiculous, she thought, and even sacrilegious, to stride into a battle practically naked and then to beg the gods for their help when you got cut.


    He scowled at her and looked as though he had something to say, but a sound rang out across the marsh, a sort of chortling squeal.


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    "There are more coming," he grunted, raising his ax so it rested on his shoulder.


    She very well knew they were coming. She''d heard the things just as well as he did. Honestly, this barbarian fool made the most infuriating travel companion. He spent most of the time in brooding silence, staring off into lonesome hills and gray crags like a dead soul wandering purgatory, and then when he did speak, it was only to say things painfully obvious to everyone else.


    "Yes," she sighed. "They are coming."


    "We should leave, then, aye?" Again, the grim herald of the obvious.


    She didn''t bother answering. She turned and started jogging towards the pass.


    The broken ground was riddled with twisting roots and cracked boulders half buried in mud and moss. She and Kogoth (or was it Korgan?) were nimble enough to not trap and twist an ankle, but it slowed them down. It was treacherous terrain for horses or footmen alike. But their pursuers were neither of those things.


    She looked behind her, and through the drizzling gloom she could make out their phantom shapes in the darkness, misshapen, hunched, knotted with cruel muscle. They scrabbled over the broken stones and gnarled roots like horses across the grasslands, at home among the ankle-breaking forest floor.


    On either side of her, the sheer cliffs loomed out of the haze, stony walls of such sheer slope they would prove a barrier even for such creatures as these. They only needed to make it a little further to where the cliffs nearly touched, a pass no wider than three men abreast, and they could hold their ground there, make the creatures'' numbers count for nothing. The pass was so close, but these things moved so quickly. They were close already, so close she could hear them panting like dogs. She could smell them in the damp air, like old animal carcasses and mud.


    Suddenly, the ground changed. The broken stones became gravel beneath her feet, and the stone walls loomed so close she could nearly touch them with both arms if she stretched out her mace. She turned and crouched behind her shield, her breath boiling out of her in clouds of steam in the chill. She tightened the muscles in her back leg, trying to become a pillar of steel behind her shield, bracing for the impact of the creatures'' bodies against the metal...But the impact never came. Korgan (Gorgut, maybe?) was airborne. He''d reached the cliff wall, bounded off it, turning and leaping at the scuttling horde with his ax in the air. He was buying her time, if only a moment or two, by charging straight into them. It was damnably heroic, she had to admit.


    She thought she could feel the earth tremble with his landing. He met the shuddering gravel in a fighter''s crouch, sweeping his bearded ax in a deadly arc that nearly encircled him. The blade swept into the creatures, through them, like a farmer''s scythe through wheat. And again. And again. Their bodies, which a moment before seemed nearly human, albeit with green skin, stringy, knotted sinews, and pointed faces, suddenly spattered against the crooked trees in clumps of root-tangled mud, dripping frogspawn, and rotten branches. They were born from the earth, and back unto the earth they returned with alarming speed, though it wasn''t all that surprising if you considered the steel ax head cleaving them like undercooked pudding. That much sharp metal traveling that fast could send any man back to the mud double-quick.


    But as fast as they died, they came on even faster. The barbarian dispatched a dozen of them in a blink, but he was surrounded by twice as many just as fast. Soon they were behind him, and though he moved that ax with impressive speed, it couldn''t be everywhere at once. He was nimble enough to avoid most of their clubs, much like the one that had nearly brained her earlier, and those few blows that connected he shrugged off with a mild disdain. But the knives were different. Poorly forged from crude iron, more jagged than sharp, and many of them with a coating of rust, they still left a mark when thrust hard enough. They poked, slashed, gouged, and tore at him, leaving stringy webs of blood across his skin and their twisted hands.


    She could have helped him. He''d done it for her, after all. She could have raised her shield and chanted the miracles of Saint Scythus as she charged into that tide of twisted flesh and fury. She could have died with Kalidan (no, that was a pie vendor in Ditch, the worst damn pies she ever had), but her death would have done little to serve the Blessed Mother, and no matter the barbarian''s vigor, he was lost as memory. Heroism was useless here. The ranger and the sorcerer and the swordsman, even the stupid bard, were all heroes, and they proved the point.


    The mace was heavy in her hand, but she summoned enough strength to raise it above her head until it pointed directly at the roiling sky. Her lips, cracked and rough from the thirst of long fighting, fluttered with the words of the miracle as she recited them. It was the psalm of Saint Viadris, the widow who prayed for divine light from heaven to split the rock that sealed the tomb of her martyred husband. She could feel the warmth of divine power filling her limbs as she wove the divine power into a weapon, a shining beacon of white fire on the head of her mace.


    The barbarian gave up a final cry of pain, his bearded ax now forgotten on the stony ground beneath the feet of the misshapen creatures. She thought she could still see through the tangle of limbs and rusted iron weapons his face near the ground, a single eye rolling in up in pain as the creatures drew out their terrible work. Soon they would tire of him, and that tide of crooked teeth and knives would find her next.


    It has to be now!


    She thrust the head of her mace once more to the clouds above, which parted as though pushed by a lodestone. A shaft of golden fire fell through the parted sky and struck the ground where the barbarian fell, consuming flesh and iron and stone in blinding heat. Creatures died before they could scream.


    When the light finally died, the hoard crouched and skittered around a crater of molten glass that completely blocked the narrow pass. Their armored prey was nowhere to be seen.


    She watched from a weed infested hillside beyond the pass as the creatures lost interest of pursuit and disappeared once again into the boggy fields of Wastewater. Her travel companions were all still there, unburied and left to the mercy of things with lots of teeth and few scruples about the source of their meat. These were people with whom she''d traveled many leagues, shared meals, sat around campfires, and slept on the stony ground. She''d heard their jokes, their boasts, and their hopes for the future. They''d saved her life more than once. And now they were dead.


    "Damn heroes." Her curse turned to pale fog in the cold air. It wasn''t that she felt nothing for them, but she sure as all hells didn''t have time to dwell on the dead.


    Now she could not complete her mission. If she didn''t want to return to Father Gilgameal empty-handed, she would need new companions. Faegate was a city teeming with blades-for-hire, a well-known drinking hole for champions in search for a worthy quest, but it was leagues away, and worse still, on the other side of Wastewater. She''d need to cross the bogs alone to reach it, so it might as well be on one of the moons.


    The ghostly dawn cast the hills around in a gray light. A smudge on the landscape emerged as though from the mist as the morning seeped into the valleys, a small town. She knew it. Ditch, home of the most gods-awful pie vendor.


    She hitched her mace onto her belt and slung her shield across her back. She wanted to reach that town before the sun braised her in her own breastplate. She wanted to clean her armor, eat a hot meal, trim her blisters, and sleep.


    But what she needed was to complete her mission for Father Gilgameal, and that meant finding more heroes. As her feet tramped over weeds and thistles towards Ditch, she wondered if she might find anything there more helpful to her than soggy pies.


    Probably not.

 Chapter 2: The Whisper of Swords

    Shaitaan frowned down at her eggs. The formless yellow lumps frowned back from the scarred wooden plate, bland and soft as moldy mud, and she grimaced to think of how low she''d condescended if this were the only meal left to her.


    She hated eggs. Always had. When she''d been in Xoactl, every meal seemed a banquet. She''d regularly dined in the halls of governors and merchant lords, and their tables had been overflowing with delicacies from the breadth of the empire. Roasted sage chickens stuffed with yellow peppers and rice, baked fern apples filled with cinnamon cream, flat breads crusted with ivory nuts and dried cherries and drizzled with honey, and river deer tenderloins wrapped in bacon and stewed in spiced curry.


    But all that was in Xoactl, and she was not. She was exiled north to the cold, gray, muddy frontier lands, beyond the borders of her homeland. This was home to milk-skinned mongrels and degenerates and their tasteless, formless food. These eggs were as much a part of her punishment as the bad weather and the ravenous wolves that stalked just beyond the torchlight of this backwater town.


    She''d not wanted the eggs, but they were all she could get. She''d tried to hunt deer. She''d made her own bow from what wood grew in these rocky hills, and she''d stayed awake all night on a cliff above a well-traveled game trail until the creatures appeared like ghosts in the foggy dawn. But when she drew the bow, she''d fumbled the string. The arrow had flown straight into the trunk of a nearby tree, and the deer had bolted into the cover of the forest. Shaitaan really was a poor hunter...of deer, anyhow.


    She never got another chance that day, and hunger had driven her back to the town, where she sold her blanket¡ªone of her very last Xoactali possessions besides the sash around her waist and the sword wrapped in rags on her back¡ªfor enough coin for a meal. The trader had been stingy, claiming he would hardly be able to sell her foreign rags for more than a few copper beggars, even though the blanket had originally been a gift from a Xoactali merchant''s wife and worth more than this milk-skinned trader''s stocked wagon. She would miss that blanket, if not for it''s sentimental, cultural, or monetary value, than for it''s warmth on frequent chilly nights.


    The few copper beggars were barely enough to pay the innkeeper, who she was sure had overcharged her for the eggs because she was foreign. He''d given her a plate but no fork, as though it were some scathing insult to make her eat with her fingers. It didn''t surprise Shaitaan these milk-skinned heathens needed tools to help them eat; no one in this place seemed to ever wash their hands.


    But Shaitaan had hardly the chance to take even a small piece of the already cold, mushy eggs when a shadow crept over her table. She looked up into the face of, if not the ugliest man she''d ever seen, then certainly the ugliest she''d seen all morning. It was like the gods were trying to sculpt a dog''s rear end out of a human face.


    "Don''t you think you ought to be eating outside, Darkie?" He growled around a mouth full of brown teeth. Sores clung to the underside of his double-chin like bats in a cavern, and his eye patch was so badly skewed she could still quite clearly see into the cavity that had once held a piggy eye to match the other.


    "You def, Darkie?" Ugly prodded again. He grabbed Shaitaan''s plate of eggs and held them under her nose. "YOUR KIND EAT OUTSIDE!" He blurted each word, pausing between them as though making a heroic effort to frighten her or make her understand...or perhaps to simply speak his mind. He tossed her plate towards the shabby door to the muddy street outside, and it bounced and flipped, showering a couple of oddly-dressed women with bouncing flecks of yellow egg.


    "Oh, come on!" cried one of them in frustration. She swept a tall pointed hat off her head to brush bits of yellow off it. "You never get the DEX save when you really need it."


    Shaitaan didn''t understand this odd statement, and so she ignored it. She had other pressing matters in front of her.


    The whole inn fell quiet, the usual cacophony of hushed conversations and lecherous laughter dying as quickly as if it had been stabbed. The eyes of forty men, cutthroats and criminals, smugglers and fur-traders, deserters and drunkards, all fell on Shaitaan and Ugly, who seemed pleased with the audience he''d drawn to their little drama. The only people in the room who didn''t seem interested in what might happen next were the women near the door, who were still complaining about the bits of egg they were picking out of their hair and clothes.


    As Ugly tried his best to loom over her, Shaitaan mentally explored her options. She could do nothing, of course, but Ugly might take her passivity as permission to heap more abuse on her. She could walk away, but she knew this would label her as a coward in a place where any sign of weakness was as good as a death sentence.


    And then, there was always the option to fight. This idea seemed to almost come to her like a suggestion, as though the bright, curved metal of the sword on her back had whispered to her. Give me your hand, it seemed to say, and I will teach these barbarians etiquette, I will make them scream apologies, I will carve your name into their backs as they run, just as I had in sweeter days past.


    She actually felt her hand twitch in sympathy with that whisper. Her fingers flexed and her palm itched to be filled with a familiar grip, but she shook the dark suggestion off her. It was not for to pity for the milk-skinned fool sneering down at her. If the gods were just, she would see him spending the last few minutes of his life prying his own teeth from the dirty, spit-slick wooden floor boards with broken fingers. But if Shaitaan were to make a new life for herself, one in which she wasn''t hunted like an animal, she would have to do things differently than she had in the past, and that meant leaving this fool alive, and probably with his teeth in his head, though to continue living with such teeth was perhaps punishment enough. If her past was to remain behind her, she would have to leave it behind her.


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    The sword laughed, as though it knew better.


    She ignored it. She could handle this on her own, and she didn''t need her blade to make her answer a strong one. She would have to make an example of Ugly, lest she lose more than her eggs that morning.


    She stood and threw the table aside. It flipped end over end and bowled over some chairs before stopping at the base of another table. Several patrons stood out of the way of the clattering furniture, their hands suddenly full of plates and tankards with a dexterity not apparent before the morning''s curiosities began. She was now only inches away from Ugly, closer, even. Close enough she could have kissed him. Where he''d loomed over her before while she sat, she now loomed over him, her mouth even with his remaining eye.


    To his credit, Ugly seemed unfazed. He didn''t flinch at her speed, at her height, or even at her war braids or the medallions and bones woven into them. He might have been provoking her to do just this, Shaitaan realized. He''d shown boldness in facing her alone, even if she was a woman, and fools like this were never that bold. They always wanted help close at hand, which meant the men standing closest to him were likely in on the fun, his closest friends. He wanted her to pull steel. If she did, she could see his pungent friends standing nearby with pig stickers of their own. She could kill them all, it was a certainty. In the blink of an eye, she could fill her hands with Xoactali bronze and send these pale idiots back to their ancestors in so many pieces, but the last thing she needed right now was a pile of corpses at her feet. Not again.


    Of course, Ugly and his friends had no idea what kind of hornet''s nest they were kicking when they provoked her. They figured if they pushed her far enough, she would draw a weapon, and they would have all the excuse they needed to poke her full of holes and dump her in an unmarked grave at a crossroads. But she was wise to this clumsy provocation. Had she not weathered the plots and political maneuverings of imperial statesman and generals? This awkward groping for violence was like an overeager suitor impatient for passion from a reluctant virgin, unsubtle and distasteful. But Shaitaan had experience with suitors as well, with their panting, sour breath and their fat fingers. They were all the same, all just as predictable, as easily frustrated, as simple to break. Ugly lacked the imagination to predict what she would do next.


    Shaitaan reached forward with both hands and gripped Ugly by the fat of his hips. His eye went wide and his mouth formed a silent squeal as her fingers dug in. He screamed when she lifted his bulk into the air and walked him three strides to the bar. She pressed his back into the rough-edged wood and twisted her grip, eliciting another wail from him like a baby torn away from a breast. His feet dangled above the floor and kicked like a man drowning.


    Then she opened her mouth into a monstrous snarl. His eye, still level with her lips, saw glittering white teeth capped with gold. The yellow metal transformed her incisors into fangs fit for a wolf, and he gave out a shriek of both pain and fear as the mouth gaped before his face.


    "THOSE WERE MY EGGS!" She roared into his terrified face. She realized she''d shouted at him in Xoactali, but she figured he got the gist of her message. Pain was, of course, the universal language.


    He screamed until his voice broke, until what escaped his throat was nothing more than a hoarse, breathy croak. When she finally released him, he slumped to the floor, rigid with agony, and tipped over until his head rested on the grimy wood floor. There he wept, his arms folded into his chest like a dying insect. As he lay trembling and weeping on the filthy boards, Shaitaan glimpsed the flesh where she''d grabbed him. Angry red welts blossomed where her fingers had dug in, welts that would turn black and then green in the coming days. She''d seen more than enough injuries like this in her life.


    The atmosphere in that smoky inn had changed once again. Where there had once been a silent interest and anticipation hanging in the air, dozens of men eager to see sport at this dark-skinned outlander''s expense, now there was a mute uncertainty. Hands hovered near knives, and eyes shifted from her to the exits as nearly forty men realized they had greatly underestimated the foreigner. Shaitaan had elevated herself from plaything to threat, and these folk seemed less than pleased with her promotion.


    Three others stepped forward, dirty men in ragged furs and sweat-stained shirts and matted beards. These were the ones she''d correctly assumed were Ugly''s friends. Shaitaan watched them approach, her teeth clenched and bared. She stood still, showing no fear, even if she felt it. Three to one were not great odds on the enemy''s ground, not if you had empty hands. But they seemed as uncertain as she about their odds. Worse for them yet, they had made the first move. They''d come to her in a group, hands on their knives. Even if she was a foreigner, she could carve them into pieces now, and she would be justified.


    And what justification do you need? hissed the sword. Must the wolf justify itself to sheep? Does the jaguar apologize to the monkey? The only justice you need is hunger. That''s all the justice there is.


    Shaitaan reached a hand back over her shoulder, stopping just a hair''s breadth from the grip of her sword. She could feel the warmth of that bronze, even wrapped in rags like it was, causing her palm to itch and her throat to crack with thirst. She ran the tip of her tongue over her teeth, where she could feel the tips of the gold fangs. It would have been so easy, but she wouldn''t. She would not move her hand so far as to touch that blade, not under threat of death or dismemberment. But these idiots didn''t know that.


    Ugly''s friends flinched back as her hand moved, one of them tripping backwards over another patron''s legs, and that seemed to break them. They turned their attention to their whimpering friend, who could not yet be convinced to sit up from where he lay. Shaitaan could see around her that her audience was once again settling into their seats, knowing the morning''s entertainment had come to an end, and not with the conclusion they all preferred. They all glared at her over their bitter drinks and bland, cold food.


    Cowards, then, to the last man. Pranksters. Little more than rowdy children. Not even real threats. But they''d done their damage. Shaitaan had sold her blanket for a plate of eggs that were now scattered across the floorboards and being shaken out of the clothes and hair of the two women who sat by the door. She would get no more service here, not even if she had the coin.


    She would try to find sustenance elsewhere. Perhaps her fingers would be fast enough to steal one of the greasy-looking hand pies from that sweaty pie vendor down the road. If it didn''t make her sick, it might be just enough to keep her going until she figured out what to do next.

 Chapter 3: Knives at the Back

    Balletaria was not what one might call a thief in the strictest definition of the word. She was currently more mercenary than cutpurse, and had been for years, but she never quite lost the soft touch. She kept the skills fresh when she could, even if she didn''t need the money.


    She''d lifted a few coin purses since arriving in Ditch, but not enough to cause trouble. The cracked, stained leather pouches contained little more than a nights drinking money, their owners having lost too little to raise much of a fuss. She''d lived as a thief long enough to know that even small towns like Ditch had cabals that enforced their monopoly on any significant crime within their territories. As laughable as any crime boss of Ditch might be, she still didn''t want to disrupt her short stay in this backwater frontier town.


    But her clutching skills weren''t the only talents Balletaria maintained since her days as a street thief. She also still spoke the Cant.


    She was following the dark-skinned woman from Fat Gilbert''s, the pile of rickety boards that passed for a drinking hole in Ditch. Balletaria wasn''t trying to pick the warrior woman''s pocket (she doubted the woman had any coin worth taking if she was ordering the eggs), but she was curious about where she was going. She''d watched as the woman picked up Truby the Looker by his love handles and made him squeal before making a dramatic exit. She was clearly a fighter of some sort. Balletaria was sure she wasn''t a soldier. Soldiers almost universally spent all their coin on drinks, pleasure company, and gambling. They got drunk and sick in the inns and Fat Gilbert''s. They also tended to start fights when they were in groups and to cower like rats when alone.


    This woman did none of those things. She was clearly an experienced killer. She had the swift, efficient economy of movement of one who knows how to win a blade fight with speed and shock. She had the reflexes, easy aggression, and raw power of someone who spent their life walking from one fight to another. She was used facing down dangerous challengers, drawing a blade, and winning. She looked the sort that should be chasing necromancers and dragon cults in Faegate, not that anyone else in this open sewer would know what someone like that would look like. No one Balletaria knew had any idea why someone like her would be in a place like Ditch. And now, she was strolling aimless past gambling dens and rotting vegetable stalls as though she hoped to find something. Watching her push past the deserters, the pickpockets, and the stardust addicts was like watching a wolf walk through a street of chickens.


    That meant she would be trouble, and the last thing Balletaria needed was someone making this backwater town a more interesting place, at least not while she lived there.


    So Balletaria kept a healthy distance back. She didn''t try to close the distance, and she didn''t watch her, not directly. She kept the woman''s shadow in her sight, the wake of her passing through a herd of sheep. She could see her stopping at Kalidan''s pie cart, where she began a clumsy haggle for his wares.


    Balletaria knew in a moment this must be a ruse, probably to flush out anyone tailing her. No one would bother haggling for Kalidan''s goods.


    Not bad, Killer. You know you''re being watched. But I''m patient.


    Instead of staying in place, a dead giveaway she was following the woman, Balletaria continued to a half-erected market tent where a woman with one hand sold stolen trinkets that wouldn''t sell in the city. It was all trash, cheap metal and colored paste jewels, but Balletaria pretended to be interested in a gaudy ring with a fake pearl that was shedding flecks of white paint. Killer couldn''t keep arguing with Kalidan forever, so Balletaria would could flutter invisibly from stall to stall until the foreigner started walking again.


    That''s when she saw him. He was half concealed in the shadow of The Lady Garden, a brothel so disease-ridden the locals had come to calling it The Widow Maker. He was missing half his nose. She knew him right away, the son of the local gang lord that more or less ran Ditch. He was Verdun, and he was the worst sort of mean, using his father''s position as a free pass to pull the wings off all the local bar flies he liked. He sometimes squeezed the local stall owners and pleasure girls for "protection money" like he must have heard the big city bosses do, but Balletaria knew he had a habit of handing out accidents to those stall owners even when they''d paid him to not have accidents forthcoming.


    Verdun was alone, which was unusual. He was the sort of bold a person became only when they knew they had hired muscle to fight his battles for him. He raised a hand to his chest and spoke the Cant.


    Come with me. Boss wants to see you, his fingers said. To someone who wasn''t one of the Gentry (a title affected by every gang member and throat slasher of the big bosses in the Confederacy), it would have looked little more than like Verdun was scratching himself just above his heart. The Cant was more or less a uniform nonverbal code throughout the Confederacy, with each gang adding their own vocabulary and flourishes like regional accents of a common tongue. Most of the Gentry knew enough signs to identify themselves to each other, to give simple warnings and instructions, or to tell rival gangs to do highly improbable things with their own mothers. Bosses and their lieutenants knew more, and could hold more complex conversations silently across a room. Balletaria herself knew it so fluently she could compose sonnets while picking her fingernails, if she chose.


    I''m busy. I''ll come later. Vicar will understand, she answered back. Her hands signs were woven into finger flourishes that looked to everyone else like she was simply fluttering her new collection of cheap rings.


    Vicar, Verdun''s father and boss of the Ditch Cutters, accepted Balletaria''s generous consideration (a stained leather bag stuffed with coins as a show of good manners) when she''d first arrived in Ditch. The last thing she wanted was offend the local Gentry by making her way in their territory without their permission. She''d proved to Vicar that she was professional and discrete, and that she could lift goods and coins without causing a fuss or making things harder for the rest of his Cutters. Because of this, as well as her good manners, he''d given her the fade, or permission to operate in Ditch without his direct oversight. For example, if he summoned her with anything softer than a squad of gang muscle, she had his permission to come at her earliest convenience, so long as she came.


    This, however, was not what Verdun had in mind.


    Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.


    Not the boss. The BIG boss. Come with me right away.


    So it wasn''t Vicar who sent his son to bring her in. It was someone more important, someone who wouldn''t understand Vicar''s fade for Balletaria. She cast a quick glance at the warrior woman, who''d just thrown up her hands in frustration and was storming away from Kalidan. The pie vendor was visibly shaking as though he''d just received a stay of execution. Maybe he had.


    "Oh hells," she cursed under her breath. She stripped the worthless rings off her fingers and flung them back into the basket from which she''d picked them. "These are crap," she blurted to the cursing one-handed woman as she strode in the direction of the alley.


    Verdun had never been what one could call a handsome man, but since he''d lost half his nose to an desperate pleasure girl''s bodice knife five years ago, he''d been nearly intolerable to look at. Not because he''d become disfigured, but because the bitterness of it had only made him more sneeringly cruel and petulant. He''d had the girl flayed for her act of self-defense, and no one liked looking at that monument of scar tissue any more than they had to. Nearly everyone pretended there was nothing wrong with his face when they were within earshot of him, as they were careful to avoid sharing that pleasure girl''s unpleasant fate.


    Well, nearly everyone.


    "Verdun, what brings you sniffing around these parts?" She leaned against the alley wall with her arms crossed. The words "Widow Maker" were daubed in flaking brown paint behind her. She looked strait into his face, a gentle smirk on her mouth, as though she thought him amusing. He would hate that.


    Verdun had an easy smile when he''d called her over, but it evaporated like morning dew with her greeting.


    "I''m to bring you in," he spat. "It''s not my father who''s asking. It''s one of the big lads, Chapriotti from Hubris. He''s one of the top bosses of¡ª,"


    "I know who Chapriotti is."


    In fact, she knew a lot more about Chapriotti than Verdun ever would. Hubris was a paradise for thieves, and the Gentry ruled it in all but title. Hubris was crawling with criminals like Faegate was drowning in adventurers. The duke of Hubris commanded a city watch and collected taxes, but the real rulers of that crooked kingdom were the big bosses, and Chapriotti, the boss of the Copper Hounds, was the biggest of all. His reach was long, and though Ditch was closer as the crow flies to Faegate, travel to Hubris was faster, making it the practically closest city. That meant Vicar and his Ditch Cutters answered to Chapriotti.


    Balletaria knew all this because she was from Hubris, but neither Vicar nor his slimy offspring knew about that.


    He blinked. "Fine, then. You know. So you know I can''t wait for you to be ready like if my dad called you. Your fade don''t mean nothing to Chapriotti. We got to go now. He''s waiting for ya."


    Verdun held out an open hand as if to say "ladies first," but Balletaria found this odd because she knew the weasel didn''t have the manners of a dog with a brain fever. Still, there he stood, slightly bowed and waiting on her expectantly to lead the way to the Shepherd''s Court, Vicar''s name for former tavern that now served as his shabby lair.


    Balletaria had taken no more than five paces towards the rear exit to the alley when she felt a pressure at the small of her back. She became aware of Verdun''s hot, moist breath on her ear.


    "Why''s it taken so long for us to get a moment together?" he sighed onto her cheek. She could smell the rum on his breath, sour and sharp.


    Suddenly it was sickeningly clear why Verdun came to fetch her without his usual retinue of bodyguards. He wanted to be alone with her so he could include her in his favorite pastime: taking an unwilling girl at knife-point.


    If she was going to get away from this situation in one piece, she was going to have to keep her cool.


    "There isn''t time for this, Verdun. Chapriotti is waiting for me, right?"


    "He don''t know I found you right away. I can say it took me a while to find ya."


    Balletaria smiled, though she knew Verdun was behind her and couldn''t see it, he''d be able to hear it.


    "You''re a brave man to bet on what Chapriotti knows. He usually knows a lot more than you think!" She deliberately said "knows" slowly and clearly so that it sounded like "nose". There was a silent pause after she said it. It meant Verdun noticed her pun.


    "I''d be nice to me, if I were you. We''re about to get real cozy, you and me, right over the edge of that crate over there. So if you don''t want yet another hole back here, I''d recommend you just relax and enjoy yourself."


    The knife prodded her just behind her kidneys, and she shifted away painfully, but his other hand was on her shoulder to keep her nice and close.


    So that was it, then. There''d be no negotiating with him or shaming him into letting her go. She was going to have to make a choice, a choice that would have consequences. She was going to have to put herself in a very uncomfortable position. Sometimes, there just weren''t any choices to make, not if you wanted to survive.


    "I know you won''t know this, Verdun, because your face looks like you tried snorting black powder instead of stardust, but your breath smells like low tide at a distillery."


    The pressure at the small of her back increased, she winced.


    "Think you''re funny? Let''s try bleeding some of those bad manners out of you!"


    And he pushed the dagger into the small of her back.


    When there was a scrape of metal instead of the sigh of a blade into flesh, he balked, staring down at the weapon, which was not at all coated in blood.


    "What?"


    She pushed back into him. The tip of the knife once again scraped off the steel plate sewn into the small of the back of her bodice, doing no more injury than tearing her clothes. The back of her head cracked into his open mouth, and she caught his stabbing hand that was still thrust out by her ribs. She wrapped her own arm around his and caught the hilt of the blade with her other hand. She wrenched down on his wrist until his elbow gave a wet pop, suddenly bent the wrong direction over her forearm.


    Verdun shrieked before her elbow cut him off, slamming straight into the scarred ruin of his nose. He gave a sort of squeaking moan that time before staggering back, his right arm hanging crooked and useless by his side.


    The tears had barely begun to well in the corners of his unfocused eyes when her shin found his groin. He didn''t even have the presence of mind to scream, even if he had the breath. He just bent at the waist and sucked in a lungful of alley dust. He hardly noticed her hand dragging him by the collar until he found his face pressed against rough, uneven wood. She''d hauled him to the crate, the very same as the one he''d ordered her to bend over, and bent him over it.


    "Verdun, are you still conscious?"


    He tried to answer her, to shout at her, but all that bubbled out from between his split lips was pink foam.


    "Verdun, I asked you a question. Answer me so I know you can hear me. I need to know you''re not choking on your own blood. If you are, I''ll need to slash your windpipe and leave you somewhere no one will find you for a few days."


    "Mmm-mmm," he burbled. The blood from his broken half-nose was filling his mouth, making it hard to form words. "Mmm-my fadder..."


    "Your fadderr," she imitated in a deep, slurring speech not unlike his, "will likely not forgive me for this. But that doesn''t matter. What matters is that I''m not done with you. I want to watch you squirm a little while, you little roach. I want you to sip your meals through your crooked, broken jaw knowing that I will come back for you. You won''t know when, or where, but I do. I will find you once I''ve had my fill of your misery, and I''ll finish the job. Do you understand?"


    Verdun was silent for a moment, all but for the sputtering breath that sprayed flecks of bloody spit onto the surface of the wooden crate. It was a silence of not only fear, but of mild confusion.


    "My jaws not broke¡ª," he tried to say, but her elbow cut him off for the second time that day, crushing his jaw against the crate like a smith''s hammer and an anvil. That was the moment Verdun finally lost consciousness.

 Chapter 4: Serious Work for Serious People

    Vicar''s Court tried to be as aristocratic as it sounded, but it failed as spectacularly as one might expect. Vicar tried having his guards and closest attendants wear what approximated to livery, but the fabric was cheap, poorly tailored, and inconsistently colored from man to man. His family colors seemed to span everything from the color of dark wine to a dusty pink. The crest was the only part of the charade that seemed to be well designed, a grinning skeleton in knightly armor grasping a crooked dagger and a hooded lantern. Balletaria knew for a fact it had been ripped off a much older, much nobler crime family that had been wiped out when a duke last attempted wresting control of the city from its many gang lords.


    It had happened nearly seventy-five years ago. The duke, tired of only being a figurehead and jealous of the enormous wealth of the gang lords he could never tax, decided Hubris had been a city of thieves long enough. He''d managed to bring down three families in a coordinated raid. The resulting retaliation of arson, riots, and daring murders by the other families only stopped when the duke was found murdered in his own bed, the deed apparently done by a fearless brothel worker who''d disguised herself as his wife in the dark and laid with him until she accomplished the grisly task. The conflict ended, a new duke was anointed, and the assassin was given command of her own gang and a pleasure house as reward. If the new duke of Hubris took offense at that woman being elevated to such heights of power and wealth for the murder of his predecessor, he kept it to himself and let the gang lords retain their hold on the city.


    Vicar clearly enjoyed pretending he commanded the same lordly obedience as the big bosses from the greater cities, an act that was easy enough to play at in a place as small as Ditch. He might have even received permission from the gang lords of Hubris to use the crest openly, if only because it pleased them to see the banner of a former rival brought so low in Vicar''s poor domain. But now, a real boss was in Ditch, for what reason Balletaria couldn''t imagine, and the Court was the heart of unusual activity and crawling with unusual characters.


    Security was the first thing she noticed. Vicar''s usual guards were about, though in numbers she''d never seen them. They usually slumped in doorways and diced in corners in shifts, their weapons barely remembered resting against their shoulders or weighing down their sagging belts. Today, they all seemed present, and each one at a level of alertness and nervous stress she''d scarcely knew they were capable of. But others were about, skulking in shadows and near beer carts, far more subtle and with weapons neatly stowed out of sight but ready to draw. These were elite muscle, stone cold killers and bruisers of the highest order.


    As she approached the doors to the Court, one of Vicar''s lads challenged her with a hand sign, even though he well knew exactly who she was. She could see the more subtle boys starting to edge closer, ready if she showed the slightest signs of trouble.


    "Are you hear to pedal your wares? I''m afraid we only have an interest in a well aged casque," he recited, giving her the coded challenge phrase.


    She''d been expecting this. The challenge phrase was changed just that morning, before she''d even known Chapriotti was there. She''d figured Verdun, now twitching and moaning in the alley where she''d left him, carefully hidden beneath a bundle of rotting burlap and spare rope, had been given the correct response. It meant Balletaria shouldn''t be able to walk in without him to escort her. But she knew the gaping holes in Vicar''s security, and so she was able to bribe it out of Vicar''s favorite pleasure girl only a few moments ago.


    She gave the correct hand sign response and said, "Don''t turn away what you haven''t yet tasted. The first swallow is free."


    If the guard was surprised to see her unescorted and with the correct pass-phrase, he didn''t say so. She could see the tougher ones relax and return to their own posts as well.


    The inside of the Court was little different from what it had been before it was Vicar''s, a dirty inn with creaking boards. Now tattered and stained banners bearing Vicar''s stolen crest hung from the walls and banisters, mostly showing the stains of having been used by his men to wipe their filthy hands. A tall-backed chair behind a long banquet table laden with food and the day''s accumulated take was the usual place to find Ditch''s only boss, but today he sat beside it in a much more plain dining chair, displaced from his normal place of honor by Chapriotti.


    If Vicar was defined by his pretending at nobility and prestige, Chapriotti stood out for being his complete opposite. Dressed not in livery or robes, nor even any jewelry save a single signet ring, Chapriotti wore a clean, simple business man''s suit with vest. It was cut fine from dark fabric. The simplicity and respectability of it seemed to only enhance his apparent brutality instead of hiding it, much like a sheep''s skin might if draped over a ravenous bear. Chapriotti was a bullish man with a street fighter''s scars and crooked nose and a scalp of peppered stubble. Beside him stood a tall woman in curious robes. He watched her frowning while she seemed to be licking her thumb and attempting to scrub away some yellow stain on a tall, pointed hat in her hands.


    I saw you this morning, in Gilbert''s, she realized. You''re still trying to clean the eggs of your hat.


    "I just got this outfit," she complained, apparently unsatisfied with her efforts. "I mean, I know I''ll probably loot something a little better soon enough, but I wanted this character to start out looking really good!"


    Balletaria had no idea what this girl was on about, and neither, it seemed, did Chapriotti. When he noticed her walking in, he seemed glad to have someone else to demand his attention.


    "Ah, you must be Vicar''s new girl. Come in and have a word." He beckoned her with a thick, iron-hard finger.


    As she approached the table, her head bowed demurely, Vicar looked around the room, looking for someone he expected but apparently didn''t see.


    "Ay, Balli, where''s Verdun? He was supposed to bring you here himself!"


    There was no sense in lying. A good liar always tells as much truth as possible.


    Balletaria shrugged. "I would guess he''s still at The Lady Garden, Your Grace, where I left him."


    Vicar shook his jowled face in frustration and nodded to one of his guards. "I told him not to dawdle. Go and fetch him then. I wanted him to bring her here personally."


    This book''s true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.


    So he''ll know soon enough, she realized. Best be gone before that guard finds Verdun in an alley instead of in a pleasure girl''s bed.


    "Oh, we don''t need your idiot son in here for this, Verdun. In fact, I''d prefer to do this without me having to look at that little pricker. First, I want to thank you for coming in to see me so quickly, girl. This is a matter that requires timely action," he said in a voice that was full of a sort of rough, brutal courtesy. Chapriotti was dangerous enough he didn''t have to spare words on social niceties. The fact he did anyway meant he was secure in his power, unworried with appearing to be hard because everyone present already knew he was.


    He reached to the table and grabbed a bundle of folded fabric. From where she stood, Balletaria could see it was a blanket, faded and travel-worn, but finely stitched from expensive, exotic textile. It was the sort of thing no local would ever own, because they could never afford it. Chapriotti tossed it to her, and she caught it in her open arms. Even in need of a washing, it still might have been the finest fabric she''d ever held.


    "One of your pawn brokers picked this off a vagrant this morning," he said pointing to the blanket. "I think it might belong to someone I''m looking for."


    Balletaria blinked.


    "You got word of a lead on a missing person and you came down here from Hubris this morning?" It was more than incredible. It was impossible to make that journey in less than a few days.


    "Hmm," he grunted, nodding his bullish head. "You''ve got an eye for detail, girl. A sharp wit. That''s good. No, I didn''t come down this morning. I''ve been in the area looking for this mark for two weeks now. It''s a job important enough that I''ve been seeing to it personally, slogging all this way over friggin'' hills and staying in crap-stained places like this."


    Vicar shot Chapriotti a look of incredulous dismay at that, but if the big boss noticed, he didn''t care. Vicar''s ego, it seemed, was too far beneath him to mince words.


    "So when Vicar gets word of a strange woman pawning off strange blankets, he comes and tells me ''cause I ain''t far away, and he knows I want to know right away. So I get here as quick as my fat rump can carry me, and I tell Vicar to bring me the sharpest, most discrete, most professional man he''s got, and that''s you."


    There was a croaking, choking laugh that made them all turn their heads. It was the tall woman, swinging her pointed hat by her knees and chuckling like a fool.


    "It''s funny cuz you''re not a man!" she choked out.


    Chapriotti might have had her beaten for speaking out of turn. She''d seen the big bosses and even Vicar do as much to drunks and dust addicts enough times. But Chapriotti just nodded his head and smiled awkwardly before returning his gaze to Balletaria.


    "I called you here ''cause I need you to kill someone. I need it done quickly, quietly, professionally. Vicar tells me you''re the person for the job, that you''re Gentry through and through. He says you''re smart, you know the Cant better than most bosses. He says you came here not long ago and knew to pay your obeisance and to mind your manners. He says you make an easy living without upsetting things, and that you can handle yourself."


    Balletaria opened her mouth, but struggled to actually fill it with words.


    "Your too kind, your grace¡ª,"


    "No, I''m not. Not even remotely. And don''t call me, ''Your Grace'', I hate that. You call me ''Sir'' or nothing at all. I don''t care which."


    It was then Vicar''s guard returned. He ran straight to his boss, only pausing to spare Balletaria the most curious look. She thought she knew what it meant. You fool, that look meant to say, you had it good here, and you had to ruin everything.


    After the guard whispered a few moment''s in Vicar''s ear, his look turned from consternation to shock, and then again to rage that shook his jowls. He stood from his meager chair, nearly head-butting his man on his way up.


    "You dared to lay hands on my son!" he shrieked. "You beat him, and...and..."


    "Yes, I did!" Balletaria shouted back, suddenly glad that he knew. "And he deserved it! That pricker put a knife to me and told me..."


    "Deserved it? Who the frig cares whether he deserved it?"


    "Shut up, the both of you!" bellowed Chapriotti. "Vicar, your son''s a right pricker, and everyone knows it. Whatever she''s done to him, he deserved it and then some. Shut your hole and put this aside until my business with the girl is done. After, and I mean only after I''ve concluded my business in this cesspit you''re running, do you have my permission to lay a finger on her for what she did to that prick-brained mistake you call your son! Am I clear?"


    The girl in with the pointed hat chortled again, but this time everyone politely ignored her. Vicar simply took his seat again, saying nothing.


    Chapriotti returned his gaze to Balletaria. "You were saying?"


    She nodded her head obediently and tried again.


    "Sir, thank you for your appreciation of my skills, but I''m not a throat slasher."


    "I''m not appreciating your skills, girl. I''m demanding them. I know you''re not a throat slasher, but I know you''re not a pickpocket either. No one with your talents lives in a place like Ditch," he said, stretching out the last word with a country drawl. "You''re someone respectable. You did serious work for serious people somewhere big. Maybe in Faegate or Deadwell. Prick, maybe in Hubris, though I''m curious why I''ve never heard of ya.


    "I''ve got important people looking to me to see this done. A lot of respect riding on this, and a lot of metal. Do this for me, and there''s thirty silver captains in it for ya."


    Every ear in the room turned to listen. That was a lot of money. For thirty silvers, a boss could order more than one serious job done. It was what a highly skilled assassin might make in half a year.


    "More importantly, do this for me, and I won''t bother looking into your personal history. I''ll leave you be, forget I ever saw you. No one like you comes to a place like Ditch, not unless you''re hiding. I don''t know who you offended, who you stole from, who''s wife you laid with, or who you killed. If they find you, it won''t be because I told them. Just do this for me, and I''ll pay you and forget you exist."


    Balletaria stared at the blanket still draped over her arms. She looked at Vicar, who stared daggers at her. If she refused, she probably wouldn''t leave the room alive. If she accepted, she bought herself time to run. But if she didn''t do the job, she''d be running not from Vicar, whose little kingdom couldn''t spare the men to hunt her to every corner of the Confederacy, but from Chapriotti, who could.


    Sometimes there just weren''t any choices, not if you wanted to survive.


    She nodded.


    "Good!" Chapriotti cheered as he clapped his hands with a sharp crack! "And you''ll be taking this one with you." He gestured with a wave to the woman in the pointed hat. "This is Flora, a magus for hire. Your target is very dangerous, and you''ll need every advantage you can get. I hired this one out of Faegate. She''ll see the job done and report back to me regularly."


    Balletaria looked at the magus and cocked her head to the side.


    "Pidgeons?" she guessed, wondering how this one might send her messages.


    The woman was polishing something on her robes, a pair of curious spectacles, the lenses of which seemed to shimmer with the colors of fire, even in the gloom of the Court. She perched them on her nose and grinned.


    "No, something much, much cooler. A girl has her ways!"


    "Oh," added Chapriotti holding up a finger, "your mark has a habit of moving on fast. She''s also dangerous, and that''s me talking. Approach her carefully, or Vicar might not have to avenge his son. Now get a move on."


    The woman named Flora stepped around the table and stood close enough for Balletaria to see her own burning reflection in those strange spectacles.


    "It''s Balli, isn''t it? Let''s get going. I mean, we''ve got the adventure hook already, so there''s no point in hanging around here!"


    Balletaria sighed. She sometimes wished life would give her choices, if only a few.

 Chapter 5: The Price of Meat and Bread

    Hunger is a living thing. That''s what people who''ve never really been truly hungry never really know. Shaitaan knew it now. It grows inside you like a monstrous child, like an infection, like a demonic possession. It claws at your insides and screams in your head, never letting you forget that it rules your life.


    There was a time Shaitaan scarcely felt something as inconsequential as hunger. She had been a champion, born and bred for violence, for battle. Her mother commanded that she be kept lean and vigorous. She was fed by servants that watched her diet as if she were a prized horse. She ate two meals daily, with cooked barley and steamed vegetables in the morning and lean, spicy meats of birds and fish in the evening. She drank watered wines of the finest vintages, and she nibbled at fresh fruits and spiced breads when she felt the whim to indulge herself. Soft custards and candied fruits were a special treat, only allowed her at celebrations. It would not do, after all, for the daughter and anointed blade of the empress to not be seen enjoying wealth and status. The imperial family would not be known for austerity.


    But the world was different for her now. She''d not eaten in days. Hunger was no longer something that commanded Shaitaan''s tongue, but her stomach, her head, and now her hands and feet as well. She felt as though the very air around her was made of viscous honey. Her hands shook, and her vision swayed drunkenly as she stumbled down the road past vendors who wanted nothing to do with her. Those thin women in dirty head shawls and gray men bent over by age guarded their withered apples and fly-ridden root vegetables with their arms and poisonous stares as she walked past. This, it seemed, would be sufficient security to prevent her from easing her hunger with their wares.


    Her stomach cramped into a knot of sick pain. She''d been stabbed in the stomach when she was young, a memory of anguish she thought she''d never be able to forget, but feeling the twisting in her empty guts, she found herself unable to recall that injury being any worse.


    She caught the scent of meat somewhere, a ghost of cooking fat on coals carried by the sour breeze, but even if she could find it, she couldn''t pay for it. The last meal she could afford was scattered across the dirty wooden boards of that tavern where she''d lifted the one-eyed man by his belly fat. That effort cost her the last energy she had, it seemed. If his friends were to find her now, and she suspected they might now the shock of her violence had a few hours to wear off, they would find her much more humble than she was that morning.


    Her feet stumbled, and then stopped. Shaitaan looked around her and discovered she was no longer surrounded by low, shabby buildings and angry stall owners. Now she was on a dirt road, a small herd of goats bumping against her legs. She''d walked all the way out of town and along a path that led into the low hills to the north of Ditch. When had that happened? Her feet no longer answered entirely to her will, and her mind was too tired to fight for its supremacy.


    Her nose was the only sense that seemed to still be doing its job. The phantom smell of cooking meat was there again, stronger than it was before. Somewhere in Shaitaan''s confusion and despair, reason stirred.


    That was the smell of not meat on a vendor''s spit, but of wild game over a campfire. And it wasn''t far away.


    Reserves of strength Shaitaan did not know she had suddenly leaped into her limbs. She felt herself becoming nearly feral, a dog on the scent of irresistible prey. She left the dusty path, crouching among the scrub brush and boulders like a rodent, scurrying towards the smell of relief, of salvation, of life itself. With the training that had allowed her to track men and women through the wilds in the name of the Xoactalli empire, she hunted a new quarry now, a piece of smoking gristled meat.


    She found it with astonishing ease. It wasn''t hidden or guarded, and it sat not far from the road in a shallow gorge, sheltered from both the wind and from the view of travelers by broken stones the size of large cattle. There was a campfire, and above it, suspended on green branches charred black at the edges, were two roasting rabbits. Drops rolled off browned meat and sizzled in the white coals below, giving off an aroma sent by the gods.


    Shaitaan barely acknowledged the neat campsite surrounding that fire or the padding of leather soles on stone. Her hand was fully stretched towards the meat when she heard someone behind her.


    "I do not tolerate thieves in my camp," said a voice. A woman''s voice.


    Shaitaan turned and caught the gleam of sunlight on steel directly into her eyes.


    "I''m not a thief!" Shaitaan hissed back. She realized then that she''d spoken in Xoactalli again, a tongue she new many of the paleblood locals found harsh and threatening. She repeated herself in common, trying this time a softer tone. She also realized she''d instinctively reached for the wrapped sword on her back, but now she pulled her hand away and stood all the way to her feet, trying to shed the impression of the skulking bandit she must have given. "I happened upon your camp by chance. I am not here to steal from you.


    Shaitaan realized just how big of a lie that had been. She''d had every intention of eating the food she''d found there without a thought of payment or even of asking. She winced at that. How far had she fallen if she was now stealing food from travelers like a common footpad.


    The woman in the armor did not seem convinced, and who would be?


    "You have two choices," the woman spoke in a flat, stony voice. "You may run, and I will not chase you. Or you can stay, and I can bring you to repentance."


    Shaitaan now saw the steel mace in the woman''s hand. She was sure it had not been there before. This armored woman, perhaps too well armored to be a caravan guard, had drawn her weapon so smoothly and so subtly that Shaitaan had no doubt she was facing an experienced fighter. In that case, it was an unnecessary risk to face an armed opponent, especially one of unknown skill, over nothing more than a couple of stringy hares on a stick. While Shaitaan was no stranger to challenges and risk, she was not used to fights to the death over so little reward, her ravenous hunger notwithstanding.


    But there was something that niggled at her, something older, harder, and sharper than the hunger that had weakened her over the past few days. It was something that lived in the dark, something that didn''t shout or beg or whine for satisfaction. It hissed and twined and sighed sweet nothings to her, promises of something far sweeter than cooked meet, something that slaked thirst more than cool water. It was a beautiful thing, a thing with teeth, and it tickled at her fingertips and told her to fill her fists with metal.


    "I do not run," purred Shaitaan, a smile spreading, pulling her lips away from gold-capped fangs the color of molten sunlight.


    She didn''t reach for her sword, not yet. Part of her didn''t want to. Part of knew that she''d just lied. Was she not here in the land of the palebloods because she had run? But there was that part of her, the dark, beautiful woman with teeth inside that would never admit to it, that would never let anyone or anything come between her and her desires.


    The armored woman nodded appreciatively. "Admirable. Whenever you are ready." Still, the mace did not move.


    Shaitaan stood half a head taller than she. Her eyes took in her conical helm, A ridge of steel protecting the nose and chain mail hanging from the cheek plates to her neck. Her breastplate seemed solid and thick, with mail at the joints.


    Like an oyster in its shell, the voice inside hissed. One only need slip a blade into the right seam to expose the prize inside!


    Her fingertips brushed the cool bronze of her sword''s pommel, and her eyes went wide.


    When did I reach for it?


    There was a clatter of stones and a harsh whisper of profanity. Someone just out of sight was trying and failing to approach the camp with stealth.


    Shaitaan felt control once again over her own hand, and she wrenched it away from the grip of her weapon.


    Was I about to fight to the death over a few mouthfuls of wild game?


    The woman''s mace was now in the air, and with the same swift grace she had pulled a steel shield from her back.


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    "I should have known you''d have friends nearby," she scoffed, her voice still as flat and cool as bare rock. "You bandits have no honor. But it matters not. I''ll be praying over all your corpses in moments."


    "I''m not a bandit, and I didn''t bring any friends!" Shaitaan hissed, holding up her palm to the woman and lowering herself into a crouch. She''d very nearly said, "and I don''t have any friends," but this was no time to have that discussion with this woman...or herself.


    Shaitaan shuffled to the boulder, behind which she''d heard the others. She allowed herself the smallest glimpse around its edge, just enough to see without being seen. She was aware that the woman''s mace was still raised in the air behind her, and that if she made the wrong move or if this woman simply felt like it, her brains would be painting the boulder a different shade of gray.


    Beyond her stone cover, Shaitaan could see men were coming. There were six of them, all of them dressed in commoner''s clothes, all of them armed with knives or short swords. Some of the blades even looked sharp. The last of them, the slowest and the most clumsy, was a heavy man with a cleaver in his fist and a patch over one eye. He was gingerly walking between the scrubby bushes as though he were nursing some hidden injury that caused him pain when he moved. It was of course Ugly, the one-eyed fool she''d kneaded like dough in the tavern.


    "There are six of them I can see," she whispered. "They''re not here for you. They''re here for me."


    The woman sucked her teeth. "I don''t even know who you are!" she hissed back. But whatever distrust she had of Shaitaan, she finally lowered her weapon and got her own look around the opposite edge of the boulder.


    "If they are here for you, then I should leave you to them. I don''t want any part of your trouble."


    Shaitaan looked at her, perhaps for the first time past the steel of her weapons and armor. There was a woman inside that armor, one whose blue eyes were burning with frustration and indignation to find herself all of a sudden in someone else''s troubles. Her hair, strikingly beautiful curls of gold that caught the sun nearly as much as her helmet, hung from under the chain mail of her helm. A person. Not an enemy, not an obstacle, but a human being, and a fighter, more likely to understand her than most.


    "Please." The word came out thick and strange from her mouth, and it would have been even if she had spoken it in her native tongue. "Please help me fight them. I am too weak to fight this many on my own. Then, if you wish, we can fight, settle our differences."


    I don''t have any friends. All I have is you.


    The woman stared at her, the strangest look on her face. Shaitaan could not tell if it were loathing or pity, or perhaps a little of both.


    "There''s six of them?" she said, breaking what felt like an eternity of strangled silence. "That''s three for each of us. Don''t make me save your life. I probably won''t"


    Shaitaan nodded and grinned. This time, it wasn''t the thing inside her that smiled using her lips, but herself, her real self. Her gold fangs caught the sun and turned her grin to fire.


    She grabbed a stone the size of a human skull and stepped around the edge of the rock.


    "There she is! Grab that frigging cow and bring her here!"


    She could see three of them now, Ugly and two others. The other three had tried circling them and disappeared among the stones. Ugly, still behind the others, pointed his cleaver at her like a general''s sword and sneered with his swamp-water teeth.


    Shaitaan said nothing. She spread her feet into a fighting crouch and hefted the stone in her hand. It felt good to have something.


    One of them, hardly older than a boy and with a downy patch of beard on his face, lunged at her with a boning knife. The point of it caught nothing as she sidestepped the clumsy thrust. She brought up the rock as though to toss it into the air and cracked it into the point of his chin. Her knee caught his groin, bending him over at the waist. She caught a handful of his dirty hair, ready to bring the rock down on his tilted cheek, but another one was coming forward with a short sword. This one had arms as thick as hams and a head as bald as the stone she held.


    Instead of braining the younger one with the rock as she''d planned, she hauled him so he stood between her and the one with the sword. Then she planted a kick into the center of his chest, sending him stumbling backwards. She was sorry to see the bald one moved his sword at the last moment to avoid impaling his younger companion, but they got tangled with each other. The young one had lost his knife, probably when she''d kneed him in the fruits.


    She was about to charge them, off balance and confused as they were, but she was hit by something from her right. Another man had slipped around the stones and surprised her, slashing at her with a farmer''s sickle.


    "Gyaaah!" she cried as the point gouged her arm and drew a line of fire nearly to her elbow. She really was losing her wits. She would never have normally let them catch her so unaware.


    She butted him in the face once, twice, three times. When he stumbled back against a boulder, she threw the stone in her hand. There was a wet crunch where it smashed his knee. The man collapsed sideways onto the stony ground, his moans more full of surprise than pain, but that would soon change.


    The bald one with the sword had come untangled from the adolescent, and he came at her with an overhand swing. She could tell right away he''d no training as a soldier or swordsman of any kind, but that swing could end her all the same. Her balance was all wrong to dodge, her back nearly turned to him, so she did the only thing she could. She curled into a crouch.


    "Wut?" he coughed as the short sword rebounded of the rag-wrapped bundle on her back with a CLANG!


    She stood and grabbed at his sword arm, twisting it round until the sword point found his gut with a snikt!


    "Muh," he mumbled, seeing the steel half buried in his paunch. "Muh, mmuh!" He collapsed, his eyes wide and staring while he coughed wetly onto the gravel beside his slack mouth.


    "Where do you think you''re going?" Ugly shouted at the young man, who seemed to take the impalement of his comrade as the signal to leave. Forgetting his knife lost among the scrub, he took off towards the lip of the gorge, his knees high to help him clear the brush and rocks between him and safety.


    Realizing words were not nearly enough to command his underling to stay, Ugly''s hand holding the cleaver wavered and drooped to his side. He stared at Shaitaan, who found herself free to spend her focus on him alone.


    There was a scream, suddenly cut off, from elsewhere in that maze of stones. The armored woman appeared again, both her shield and her mace now lightly spattered with red.


    Shaitaan jabbed a finger at her bleeding arm. "What happened to three apiece?" she demanded. "You let one get past you to ambush me!" She then noticed that she was also bleeding from a deep cut in the palm of her hand. She must have sliced herself open grabbing the bald one''s short sword.


    The woman shrugged and pointed her mace, a gesture that made Ugly shake as though blasted by a chilling wind.


    "There''s my third. See? Three apiece."


    Shaitaan shook her head incredulously. Her eyes fell on Ugly again, who no longer wished to stay to see what happened next. He turned to run, but he tripped over a grasping scrub and fell forward.


    "Yeeaah!"


    Shaitaan could see as he turned onto his back that he''d fallen on the blade of his own cleaver. He''d given himself a deep gash on his arm. He''d begun to pant a wheeze with panic until a savage kick to his side¡ªprecisely to a patch of fresh bruises from that morning¡ªbrought his attention to the two women suddenly standing above him. Shaitaan crouched over him and gave him a very close view of her teeth.


    "Why did you want to kill me?" she growled.


    The man babbled and sputtered incoherently, at least incoherently to Shaitaan, who was still struggling to master the common language of the palebloods. She slapped him hard on the side of his face, and then again in the opposite direction. The force of it was so hard he''d not had the senses to cry out.


    "Why are you trying to kill me?" she repeated, her teeth bared.


    "Cuh, cuh, Chapriotti! He said to!" Ugly stammered. "He told Vicar, and Vicar told me!"


    She blinked. These names, if they were names, meant nothing to her. She''d made many enemies in her life, and she''d hunted and been hunted by many dangerous enemies, so she''d expected the answers to her question to be more revelatory, but they made no sense. Who was Chapriotti, or Vicar. Were they even people? She could have questioned him more, but what good would that do? What if he simply said more things she didn''t understand, or if he simply didn''t know? What was she supposed to do with that information? And what was she supposed to do with a prisoner who would speak but could say nothing helpful?


    A pain stabbed through her guts as her hunger found her again, and a wave of dizziness bowed her head. She had not the energy to learn more. He was a thug, one who''d targeted her in a tavern for sport, nothing more. She''d wounded him and his pride, and so he''d come to settle the score. No plot. No grand conspiracy.


    You''re not in the empire anymore, she reminded herself. You''re a nobody now. When you find a nameless commoner with a knife in their throat, do you search for a conspiracy, a plot to explain it?


    Of course there was no plot against her. She''d wanted there to be one, because that would mean she was still important, that she still mattered, that someone out here in this backwater forgotten by the gods, someone knew her, and she wouldn''t be alone.


    A savage punch across his jaw silenced him, and he sagged against the stones.


    I don''t have friends, nor do I have enemies. All I have...


    She looked at the armored woman whose golden tresses from beneath her helmet stirred in the breeze. She looked down and saw her own blood dripping from her hand and her other arm, the drops making a tapping sound as they dotted the stones by her feet.


    All I have is you.


    "May I share your food, and¡ª," she tried to say, but the world turned sideways before she could finish, and she felt her body tumble away from her legs.


    Strong arms caught her, and she felt her face press against cool metal.


    "Aye, warrior. We can share my food. And then, I''d like you to consider an offer. I could use someone with your skills."


    Shaitaan could feel her heels scraping along gravel. Someone was moving her, but she couldn''t figure out who or why. Her lips seemed to move on their own, as though moved by the breath of something that lie deep and dreaming inside her.


    "Name thy price. Silver and gold have I none, but show me thine enemies, and I will lay them broken and purified and beautiful at thy feet. Death is my coin, the treasure hoard of kings and empresses, and thou mayest have all thou desireth for some meat and bread." Somewhere in the back of her mind, she knew she was mumbling all this in Xoactalli.


    "I''ll take that as a yes. But before we talk about all that, lets get you food and a healer."

 Chapter 6: The Task at Hand

    Egret had seen all manner of humans and demi-humans in her travels. She''d seen the noblest of them, the Eckthelians, marching tall and proud with lances held high and their gleaming plate shining in the sun, the wind caught in helmet plumes of every color. She''d seen and heard the dwarvish people, Dwylan craftsman, merchants, and mercenaries, their deep voices carrying high over markets churning with foreign investors and traders, haggling and shouting over mountains of ground spices and arms draped with curtains of jewelry and silks. She''d even seen the Muck-rats emerge screeching and biting from their fungal cocoons covered in ooze. She''d seen the very highest and the very lowest of all humankind, all except the elves. Still, Egret considered herself a woman of wide experience, and not easily troubled by the customs and manners of any but the very lowest races.


    That is why she found herself at a loss for words as she watched the savage woman eat.


    She scraped porridge and rabbit meat into her mouth with her fingers, not caring that blood from her cut hand was mingling with her food, turning the paste pink as she ate. She scarfed it with the same urgency that Egret had seen drowning people fight for breath. The fact this woman had not eaten in some time was as obvious as a sword cut to the face.


    But Egret was certain she was no beggar, not until recently anyway. This woman was dressed in rags, but the rags of something that had once been fine, or what passed for fine in the empire to the south. Her arms were bare to the shoulder, and beneath the grime and that day''s blood, she could see corded muscle and lean sinews. Not the muscle of a laborer, but of a fighter. Egret recognized the build of a swordsman, or swordswoman in this case. One of the woman''s hands was wrapped in rags to bandage the cut she got from grabbing that thug''s short sword by the blade, but the other she could see had the calluses that only formed around the grip of a weapon.


    "Were you a mercenary?" Egret asked. She didn''t want to push the woman too far too fast, to make her feel interrogated, so she took out an oil-soaked cloth and began cleaning her mace, as though the answer to her questions were not very important. In truth, they weren''t, but Egret was not about to travel with a complete stranger. Even a few lies would put her more at ease than nothing at all.


    "Mercenary?" the woman repeated around a mouth full of food, as though the word was strange to her. Since her native tongue was obviously not Common Eckthelian, she mightn''t know what it meant at all. But after a moment of a brow furrowed in conversation, she gave the slightest nod.


    "Yes," she said. "A mercenary. I am."


    A lie. It had to be. Egret had offered it to her as an easy answer to explain a fighter with a sword and a brutal disposition wandering the hills, but it was obviously far from the truth. If she were a mercenary, why was she alone? Where was her company? Mercenaries did not often travel alone, and those that did were used to living in the wild. This one had tried (unsuccessfully) to steal from her cook fire.


    And then there were her skills. Egret had watched as this starving woman fought three men with nothing but a stone and her bare hands, and she''d won. She''d never even drawn the sword on her back. A soldier, whether a deserter or lone mercenary, would not have taken such odds. In fact, very few of the mercenaries Egret had met were truly warriors. Cowards and looters, more oft than not, happy to swell the ranks of a larger host and to burn undefended settlements rather than actually hold their ground and fight an armed enemy. Gold, after all, was a poor motivation to fight.


    "A Xoactali mercenary, traveling north looking for work?" she offered again.


    The woman swallowed and nodded again, long, black war braids swaying and her hunter''s eyes meeting Egret''s.


    "Yes. I''m looking for work. You need a fighter? I will go with you."


    No haggling over price, no questions about the job. She was definitely no mercenary. In fact, Egret was certain this woman was on the run. She seemed content to go with her towards any unknown danger because nothing that lay ahead could possibly be as bad as what followed behind.


    That suited Egret just fine. She might not know much about the uninvited guest she''d received in her camp, but she knew enough. She was dangerous, and she was desperate. Many of those she''d traveled with before had been no different.


    She finished polishing her mace and set it on the ground beside her helmet.


    "My name''s Egret bel Sadia. I''m a sworn sister of the All Mother, and I travel in search of help."


    "Help?" a curious expression that looked to Egret almost like regret crossed the woman''s face. The woman put down the bowl, now scraped clean, and stared at her hands. "I am not good at helping people. I''m not a healer. I''m a...fighter."


    For a moment, Egret was sure she was about to say "killer". From what she''d seen, that might have been more accurate.


    "I know you''re a fighter. I saw what you did to those men over there. You''re exactly what I need." She waved her hand towards the hills to the west, beyond which white-capped mountains stabbed at the sky. "I traveled here from the monastery Mon Magog. It''s under siege by bandits. Eighty-seven innocent devotees to the All Mother are trapped inside, awaiting aid. Will you come with me?"


    The woman stared off towards those mountains, her face twisted as though she''d found something foul-tasting in her teeth.


    Those teeth...who caps their incisors with gold to make them fangs?


    "You want my help killing those men? Bandits?" She sucked her teeth and stood from the boulder she''d sat on. "In those mountains? Alright. I''ll go with you."


    Egret could tell she was about to agree, even without some pledge of reward or recompense. This woman really was running from something.


    "Do you have a name?"


    The woman''s eyes tore from the mountains in the distance and bore into her own.


    "Of course I have a name!" she spat. Then, perhaps realizing the edge in her voice, she softened. "Shy."


    Egret blinked. "Your name is Shy? Forgive me, but that sounds...odd...to call a woman like you ''Shy''."


    "Not if you speak Xoactali, fool! What, did you think my parents gave me a name in some foreign, ugly tongue? It means ''river''." She stared at her hands, one of them wrapped in gray rags stained brown by her wounds.


    "We won''t be going anywhere until you''ve seen a healer," said Egret. She stood and began packing away her meager camp into her pack.


    "I don''t need a healer. I''ve healed from much worse."


    Judging from the collection of pale scars across her dark skin, Egret believed it, but she knew better than to let this go. Shy was definitely not a soldier. If she were, if she''d seen what Egret saw when little wounds festered, she''d not be so confident in her own physical constitution. Egret wondered if Shy was used to having others to worry about her health. Was she an officer? A noblewoman duelist?


    "I watched a soldier die from a scratch. Healthy, strong, then one day he slipped while sharpening a spear head. It was only that big." She held her finger and thumb up for Shy to see. The distance between them was not long. "Right on the palm of his hand. He wrapped it himself and said it would be fine. On the march, his hand turned pink, then red, then black. He was screaming by then, begging for death. Eventually, they had to cut his arm off here." She held the edge of her hand up to her shoulder. "He died anyway. So yes, we are going to see a healer. Then we are going to Mon Magog to free my sisters."


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    Shy looked again at her bandaged hand, and then at her shoulder.


    "Fine. A healer."


    **********


    "You''re looking for a tall woman, teeth like fangs, one of those dark-skinned heart-rippers from down south. From what I hear, there''s only one woman fitting that description in the entire region. So finding her''s the easy part."


    It was one of the last things he''d told her before she''d left Vicar''s Court. Balletaria didn''t think it wise to point out she''d already found who he''d wanted her to find, and that she''d had to abandon her tail to answer his summons. One such as her did not have the body armor nor the hired muscle to criticize someone like Chapriotti, not unless she was suddenly tired of all her fingers remaining attached to her hands. Now she had to find this woman all over again.


    And kill her. I''ve become a petty thief, and now an assassin. Bloody piss, what''s happened to me?


    Balletaria scanned the muddy street and its pedestrians for any sign of her mark, but she was no longer there. The only dark faces there were ones covered in soot or mud or bruises.


    "So you''re...what? A witch?" Balletaria turned to look at her companion. The woman was tall, but not willowy. Her figure was wrapped in robes, the like of which Balletaria had never before seen. It was carefully cut, not in the way a noblewoman''s dress was cut, to accentuate strong features and to hide undesirable ones. It was embroidered with a tight script or lines of pictographs or symbols she didn''t recognize. Her hat was most conspicuous of all, with a wide, floppy brim and the top tapering to a wilting point like some sad, wilting plant. "You wouldn''t be able to find our mark with your...er, magic?"


    "A witch? Gods, no. I''m no blood-drinking cultist, and I don''t make pacts with lying devils and eldritch monsters. I am a scholar. My power¡ªor, I guess you''d call it magic¡ªcomes from study and experimentation. Magic is a word used by bumpkins and illusionists peddling their little parlor tricks to the ignorant. I am neither. What I am is a wizard. What I do is arcane science." She raised her hand majestically, as though holding some precious, delicate instrument above her head for Balletaria to admire. Then she smiled, placing a finger coquettishly on her lip, as though admitting to something naughty.


    "Besides," she admitted, "I''m a specialist. I don''t use my sciences to find people."


    Balletaria stared. Was this woman mad? Why would Chapriotti send her to assassinate a dangerous killer with a madwoman as a companion?


    "So, what do your sciences do?"


    The wizard, Flora as Chapriotti had called her, just smiled, a full, wide expression in which her eyes almost disappeared. If that was to reassure Balletaria, it died miserably in the attempt.


    "Well, they don''t find people. However, I''ve already thought of this. I made arrangements."


    Flora waved her hand high above her head to someone, and Balletaria had to turn to look. A tall woman, even taller than Flora, who already stood more than half a head taller than Balletaria, skulked towards them. She seemed to be walking as fast as she could without running, all while using her hands to keep a head wrapping, like a fine silken scarf, secured around her head so that it concealed her hair and face. If her goal was to be inconspicuous, and she suspected that it was, this woman was failing to the degree it was almost comical. She caught the attention of every person she passed, as discrete as a bull hiding behind a fence post. If a lich king, a golden dragon, and a fiery angel stepped from the stories and into the street, Balletaria was sure everyone would have first noticed this hunched, clumsy, shifty-eyed woman with her face bandaged in silk before deciding anything else merited their attention.


    "Amani, over here!" Flora called out, not failing to draw attention to herself as well. "Come meet our rogue!"


    It rather defeats my purposes if you go around announcing me as such to everyone.


    The woman, Amani, turned to stare at the street behind her, where market stall owners, pedestrians, and pleasure girls averted their eyes just a fraction of a second later, just enough so the woman knew they knew she was conspicuous, a sort of collective message that seemed to say, "We all see you, but we don''t care to know you."


    Balletaria had seen this kind of shiftiness before, not a just a little in her past self. She knew the symptoms of someone being followed.


    Flora dropped a hand onto Amani''s shoulder, causing the woman to jump nervously, a skittish stray cat horrified to find a child''s hand on its back.


    "Amani here will find our girl, won''t you Amani?"


    Amani, like a child mortified to find her parents had just volunteered her to sing or perform a trick in the presence of company, stared wide-eyed at Flora.


    "You did the thing, right?" Flora prodded. "You know, the thing with the bug?"


    "Oh! Yes, well..." stammered Amani.


    "Wait," Balletaria interrupted, holding up her hands. She scanned the street around them, an old habit of a city-dweller used to guarding secrets in a street full of ears. She gestured to the others to follow her into the shadow of a nearby alley, unable to keep the look of consternation from her face. Soon the three of them were huddled in the gloom between a pawn shop and a butcher''s that smelled so foul it made their eyes water.


    "I''m sorry, but who are you?"


    "I''m, well..." but the tall woman seemed unable to finish. Her voice was high and thin, and carried with all the force of a sparrow''s fart in a hurricane.


    "This is Amani of Ayad," Flora explained when Amani seemed unable. "Don''t worry, I can vouch for her."


    "I don''t even know who you are!" Balletaria protested in a hushed voice, more than a little flabbergasted that Flora seemed determined to carry on this discussion as publicly as possible.


    "Amani" was a strange enough name, but Amani of Ayad? Was that a surname? Balletaria had known many nobles and blue bloods, but she''d never heard a family name preceded by "of". Between that and the odd quality of her clothing, a sort of travelers cloak over pantaloons and loose shirt, she could only assume this woman was another foreigner, but from where? Her accent, clipped and precise, was unfamiliar to her and of no help.


    Stranger still was that this woman was armed. A long bow of curious design stood unstrung in a soft case on the woman''s back, along with a quiver of arrows. Balletaria was not partial to long bows herself, and had only handled them on a few occasions. She was far more proficient with crossbows, the compact designs the Gentry called streetbows that were lethal within fifteen strides but not much further. But even with her limited experience with the taller, more elegant weapons, she could tell this one was of strange design, with a forked branch curving away from the bow nock, masterfully carved from what may have been animal horn. Even with most of the bow hidden in it''s case, Balletaria could tell it was an unusual make.


    All of this unsettled her, convinced her that this woman''s arrival was complicating her situation beyond the tolerable.


    "Look," she tried again, staring directly at Flora, praying silently to gods she did not believe in to be understood by this madwoman as clearly as possible, "Our mutual friend gave me a task, and a serious one." It wouldn''t do to say Chapriotti''s name out loud, not even in a place as small as Ditch.


    Flora smiled and nodded, as though trying to show Balletaria how attentive she was being.


    "We have to find this woman, a dangerous, foreign assassin, if I''m not mistaken, and stick her without getting stuck in turn, right?"


    Another nod.


    "And we have to do this. I mean, failure is not really an option, not unless I want our mutual friend to stuff me into a dead horse and sink it in a swamp. That means if we want to survive our mark and our mutual friend, we need to be discrete. You and Amani are the opposite of discrete. I''m stuck with you, but I''m not obligated to bring her. So, while I applaud your rather...er, high degree of personal initiative in this enterprise, I have to insist we do not involve anyone else, especially someone who''s not one of the Gentle Folk. Unless your friend is a seasoned throat-slasher from one of the more prominent slum-gangs of Hubris, she should probably stay uninvolved, and we should be getting to work."


    "Ah," interrupted Flora, holding up a slender finger that Balletaria could see was twisted with tattoos like budding, climbing vines, "but we have no idea where this woman might be. But Amani does. Don''t you, Amani?"


    The scarf-wrapped head gave a tiny nod. "She''s left town. She was starving, so she tried stealing some food, but she got caught. She got into a fight with some men, and then she ate. Now she travels with a woman in armor. They''re looking for a healer."


    Balletaria stared. "How could you possibly know that?"


    "I told you, the bug!" chirped Flora. "The bug that Amani told to follow the woman!"


    Balletaria realized she would get no answer from the wizard that didn''t sound like absolute drivel, so she silently turned her gaze to Amani.


    "Oh, yes, the bug," she confirmed, as though Balletaria simply needed the drivel to be repeated in order to make sense.


    When no additional explanation was forthcoming, Balletaria balled up her fists in front of her eyes and squeezed, as though she were trying to press the answers she needed from thin air like wine from grapes.


    "WHAT BUG?" she nearly screamed.

 Chapter 7: A Little Lost Sheep

    Shaitaan swatted at the beetle buzzing near her ear. In her homeland, there were swamps and marshes crawling with creatures that were drawn to wounds. There were tiny fish that would nip and bite at an open cut, and flies that laid eggs in any break of the skin they could find. Shaitaan had seen pilgrims with necrotizing flesh at the corners of their eyes and mouths, the sores nearly bursting with squirming larvae. Shaitaan wasn''t squeamish about much, but parasitic insects made her want to scream inside. She didn''t think there were such things this far north, not in these cold, dry hills, but still.


    The little black beetle continued to follow her, as though trying to land on her back.


    "There''s a Volani caravan just down there," Egret said, pointing a finger down into a valley between gray hills. "Maybe we can bargain for a healer''s services."


    Her helmet was off, hanging by a strap on her travel pack. Her tight, golden curls were a billowing cloud of sunshine that wreathed her face, a far more delicate face than Shaitaan would have thought could be beneath that steel helm. She was hardly more than a girl.


    "Bargain," Shaitaan repeated, swatting again at the beetle she was certain was showing entirely too much interest in her. "I have nothing to bargain with."


    Egret shrugged and turned to look at her companion, her light eyes resting on the pommel of the rag-wrapped bundle on Shaitaan''s back.


    "There''s your weapon. You don''t seem to use it."


    Shaitaan bared her teeth, not at Egret, perhaps to no one in particular, but she imagined it must have looked a savage gesture.


    "That is not possible," she said, trying to soften the edges of her voice. It might have been easier to sound softer if she didn''t know she was telling the literal truth. "My weapon is not for trade."


    Egret raised a single thin eyebrow, clearly not convinced, but she looked away.


    "That doesn''t matter. I have coin enough for the both of us."


    It was Shaitaan''s turn to glare suspiciously.


    "That is generous of you." She didn''t mean a word of it. In Shaitaan''s experience, generosity was an illusion, a pretty thing to flutter in the eyes of the gullible, or a phantom chased by the delusional. In Shaitaan''s experience, pretty things usually concealed a pit. And she''d seen men die horrible deaths inside pits. She''d made sure of it.


    "Not at all," Egret returned, apparently not bothered by Shaitaan''s tone. "It''s just part of your pay. You fight for me, I take care of you. That''s all."


    Without looking at Shaitaan, she started the slow, meandering walk down the boulder-strewn hill into the valley, where Shaitaan saw a cluster of wagons and tents that nearly disappeared into the gray crags and scrubby brushland.


    "These Volani, are they friendly?"


    Egret looked over her shoulder. There was a smile on her face.


    "Not even slightly. Is that a problem?"


    Shaitaan''s hand shot out and snatched the beetle from the air. She examined the creature between her fingers with mild interest before smashing it and tossing it away.


    "Not even slightly."


    **********


    Amani of Ayad winced as the beetle died. She didn''t feel its pain, not really, nor did she think it''s final thoughts or share the panic it felt as it was obliterated between the dark woman''s fingertips. But she did get impressions, images, snatches of whispered thought-forms that lingered like echoes of a faint voice in a cavern.


    She opened her eyes to see her companions staring at her.


    "Is something wrong?" asked the woman called Balli.


    "What?"


    "You cried out, and then stopped walking, and you stood there with your eyes shut for a bit." Balli shrugged. "Is something wrong?"


    Amani was still not sure to make of this woman. Flora had vouched for her, said she was "the rogue every party needs", whatever that meant. But Amani was still not sure about Flora either. She knew mortalfolk tended to be strange, and her mother had warned her they were inconstant, mentally frail, and prone to diseases of insanity, some worse than others. Judging by the way Balli reacted to the curious things Flora said from time to time, Amani suspected Flora might be one of these. If so, accepting her help was a terrible mistake.


    "I...lost sight of the Southerner," she stammered. She thought better of explaining the tragic loss of her beetle. It had been with her since she''d left her woodland home, and it had proved as loyal a friend as an insect could be. And then, like so many living things out in the badlands, it was gone, snatched away in a single brutal moment. But her companions could never understand what it was to have a bond with something so small, so honest, and to have a memory so lasting. It was one of the main failings of all mortalfolk, to forget so easily, and to be blind to things so small, or to be so casual concerning the yawning void of death. So she decided to say nothing about it. It made her feel more alone than ever.


    "And the last you saw...?"


    "Still headed west," Amani managed to say. She could still hear the echoes of the beetle''s last moments. "They''ve found some people out there. Not a town. Just people living in tents and wagons."


    "Hmmm, Volani caravan, maybe. Still looking for a healer?"


    Amani shrugged, shifting the masterwork bow on her back. "I think so."


    They were marching along one of the dusty, hard-packed roads that led away from Ditch. Amani had not known where they were going when they first left the marketplace, and Flora''s explanation had not helped.


    "The gang lord Chapriotti put out a hit on some southern barbarian woman. He didn''t trust the job to any local thugs, or even to his own people. But he knew Balli probably used to be a big earner for one of the big gangs, so he''s going to try giving the job to her. Balli doesn''t want him looking into her past, so she took the job. We''ll probably get some backstory dump to explain that later, probably in act 3."


    It made no sense to Amani, who''d never heard of Chapriotti, gang lords, or even what a hit was. She''s certainly no idea where a place called "act 3" might be. But she''d no one else to turn to. Flora seemed to be the only person happy to help her without needing an explanation of who she was or why she was staying at The Lady Garden in Ditch.


    Amani had been renting a room in the brothel for nearly a month. The rooms were cheap, though she''d found the frequent comings and goings of the other girls and their gentleman visitors quite curious. By the time she''d realized what manner of place she''d been staying in, she''d already spent too much of her dwindling funds to afford to stay anywhere else. Besides, the other girls had been kind to her, mostly treating her with an odd mixture of pity, bemusement, and sisterly care. More than a few of them had told her she reminded them of their sisters, though where their sisters were and why they no longer seemed to live with them, none of them would say. A past seemed a luxury none of these girls could possibly afford to own.


    Eventually, the coin had run out, and Lady Brendicoff, a painted old woman with cracking red paste caked on her lips, had run out of patience. She''d had a large man with watery eyes and a squeaking voice escort her out of the brothel, and it was there on the front steps, while she was still pleading for just a few more nights in the room, when she''d seen Flora, who''d just sauntered up to Lady Brendicoff and paid for rooms for the both of them. The Lady, though reluctant to accept yet another tenant who would likely not be paying for what she called "additional services and fine company", finally accepted the coins and waved the big man with the squeaking voice away.


    When Amani asked why she helped, Flora had just answered, "My wisdom stats are low, and I think we''ll need another ranged fighter." She''d said it with perfect confidence, as though the truth of those words were so self-evident they barely needed saying at all.


    Since then, only two nights past, Amani had simply started following Flora wherever she went. She''d quickly gotten used to just doing as she suggested, even if she didn''t know the reason. Flora''s reasons, she''d found, were not so good at answering questions as raising them. So when Flora had waved Amani over to meet Balli, she''d simply done as she was told. When they''d gone to Balli''s rented room above Fat Gilbert''s, Amani followed and watched as the shorter woman pried up floorboards and extracted a pack and a sheathed sword in a leather harness. It was easier to simply go along with it all, to simply become a bewildered observer in her own life.


    This was the very thing she''d been trained for her whole life, after all. It was also the very thing she''d been trying to run away from.


    Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.


    Despite having the shorter legs, Balli walked the fastest, and Amani had to keep readjusting the scarf that covered her face and head as she struggled to keep up. Soon Balli turned off the path, her gait slowing as her eyes scanned the ground.


    "There''s a blood trail here," she said, perhaps to no one. Balli walked hunched over now, her head swaying from side to side, looking for and finding signs in the dusty ground. She reminded Amani of her mother''s hunting hounds.


    "You did say she needed a healer, right?" asked Flora, who was kneeling down beside what Amani could see was a dark brown spatter on the gray stones. "Maybe she was hurt here."


    "Yeah, but hurt by what?"


    Amani stumbled twice over the stones as she followed the other two deeper into the boulder-strewn brushland until they descended into a ravine. That was where they found the bodies.


    Two of them lay face down in the dust. Each had an arm or leg bent wrong, as though struck there by something heavy. Each had their heads broken, their dried blood now mingling brown with the gray.


    "A mace," said Balli, poking at their wounds with a finger like Amani had once prodded the rising bread dough in the kitchens. It made her want to vomit, but she clamped her jaw shut and tried to focus on her breathing. Slowly she forced down her gorge and slowed her pulse. This wasn''t her first time seeing a dead body, and she was starting to get better at it.


    The third body they found had a sword in its guts. That was when Amani lost hers.


    She''d barely had time to pull down her scarf before retching onto a shrub. Her scant breakfast now clung in strings of brown pearls to the branches.


    She felt a hand pat her on the back.


    "Tossed your cookies, huh?" Flora chuckled. The woman had a way of laughing, deep, guttural, almost choking, that seemed nearly obscene. Her mother would certainly never have tolerated such a laugh.


    Amani tried coughing as politely as she could, but failed to contain it, nearly sending the remnants in her mouth strait into her nose. She quickly replaced the scarf to cover her face again. She could feel the sweat in the cloth clinging to her lips and chin. It was suffocating.


    "Thank you, Flora. I''m fine."


    Balli, apparently uninterested in Amani''s lack of composure, squatted by the stabbed man. He''d died with his back against a rock. Had it not been for the steel protruding from his sagging paunch, he might''ve been just like any drunk Amani had seen slouching against the walls of The Lady Garden.


    "He was stabbed by his own blade. That''s nice."


    "How can you tell?" asked Flora. She''d left Amani to stand beside the dead man, and Amani was greatful. She wanted to be alone if she retched again.


    "Because it''s still in him. If she''d won, and if it was hers, she would have taken it with her. You got to wonder, did she do it without drawing her own weapon? You''ve seen it, right? Big bastard of a thing on her back? If she''d killed him with that, we''d have seen it." Balli made a gesture with her hands, putting them together as though in a prayer, then splaying them apart, as though an object split in half. Amani didn''t like that gesture. It made her feel unsteady.


    Balli shook her head. "This job is getting worse all the time. If this job was so important, why didn''t Chapriotti send one of his own boys to do her in? He has the muscle, some of the best in the underworld, but he sent me. He wanted the job done. He said he had powerful people looking to him to see it done. But he didn''t want this connected to him, maybe?"


    Flora left Amani and strolled around the boulder where the dead man lay. There she found the remains of a campfire and ground swept clear of loose stones.


    "You said our mark tried stealing food, right?" Flora asked as she stooped to pick up a branch as long as her forearm still smoking at the end.


    Amani had to swallow before answering. It was more difficult than she imagined it could be to swallow her own spit. "Yes, she was. From another woman in armor."


    "And these thugs stopped her? Why?" Balli looked up from the corpse of the man with the sword in him. Amani tried not to think about that she was sure she''d just seen Balli''s fingers in the wound.


    "I don''t think they did try to stop her. I think they wanted to kill her, and the armored woman helped her kill some of them."


    "What? Why?"


    Amani shook her head. There was only so much her beetle friend could see or hear, and the little it did still didn''t make much sense to her. "I don''t know."


    Flora still had the smoking stick. She cupped her hand around the end, as though sheltering it from the wind while she gently coaxed the ember to life with her breath.


    "What are you doing?" Balli asked as she washed blood from her hands with dust.


    "Chapriotti wanted regular reports on our progress," Flora said with a smile, as though this explained her curious behavior. "I''m sending him my report."


    Still cupping her hand around the now smoking branch, Flora pursed her lips as though to kiss it. Amani only barely managed to hold back her cry of surprise and fear that Flora might be trying to sear her own lips. But Flora didn''t kiss the glowing ember. Instead, she audibly sucked in the gray smoke curling from it, as though she were drawing noisily from a pipe. Once Amani was sure her lungs must burst, Flora closed her lips and dropped the stick to where she''d plucked it from the remains of the campfire.


    Flora then closed her eyes and began to speak, her hands extended before her with her palms to the sky. Her voice was low and seemed to hiss and echo as the smoke poured from between her lips. The gray tendrils were no longer light, but heavy and fluid, twining down her chin and dripping into a pool at her feet. The words Amani could not understand were now a gray thing of living, twisting, writhing smoke that began to slip and slither between the rocks back in the direction of Ditch until it was lost to sight.


    "Gods'' teeth," cried Balli. "What the prick was that?"


    Flora gave the unconvincing shrug of the the smug.


    "That was nothing. It was just a little soot spirit. I gave it a message to deliver to Chapriotti."


    "Are you going to be doing that often?"


    "That? No. Well, I could. It''s just a cantrip. It doesn''t use a spell slot or anything. It''s not even properly magic, per se. Not mine, anyway. It''s just a little spirit that lives in fire. All I did was speak to it and give it a job to do. And it''s only one way I know of to send a message." She looked at Balli, who was staring at her in what Amani could only read as disgust, and her smug smile burst into a mischievous grin. "Oh, if you liked that, just wait until I really get started."


    Balli held up a hand as if to stop her. "Just, just...prick, I don''t know, warn me before you do things like that, alright?"


    If Flora did agree to such an accommodation, Amani didn''t hear her say so. She simply grinned and turned back towards the fire.


    There was a dry moan that seemed to reach out across the boulders and gray sage brush, followed by grunts and shuffling. Balli seemed displeased enough to hear it that she drew the sword from its sheath at her hip, a length of steel no wider than an inch. It was like a needle meant to stitch people rather than cloth, and Balli had drawn it and turned with no more sound than the sigh of the dust under her soft boots.


    There was a man who''d been hidden by the rocky landscape not twenty strides from where they''d been examining the corpse. This man, who''d apparently been unconscious as Amani and the others talked, was now painfully awake and was stumbling drunkenly back towards the road while cradling a badly injured arm.


    "Truby?" said Balli, who did not re-sheath her sword. "Looker, is that you?"


    Amani could see he was an unlovely man with a patch over one eye. Why call someone looker if they didn''t fit either definition of the word?


    Balli seemed to prance between the rocks and shrubs until she''d caught up to the man, who''d tripped and fallen again. Balli stood over him and lowered her blade to his throat. Amani couldn''t hear what words traded between them, and she wasn''t sure she wanted to.


    Amani jumped with fright as she saw that Flora was now standing beside her again.


    "Wow, Amani, take a breath. You seem a little tense. Are you alright?"


    She shook her head, no longer able to hold back her tears. "No! I''m not alright! Why am I here, Flora? What am I doing here? I''m grateful to you, I really am, for getting me out of trouble with..with..."


    "Lady Brendicoff?" Flora offered helpfully.


    "Yes! Her! Thank you for that, Flora. I really mean that. But I don''t know what is going on here. I was happy to follow you because you''ve done so much for me, but I''ve just lost the only friend I had left, I saw three dead men, and now I''m starting to think I''ve somehow got involved in an insane adventure that will end in the murder of a woman I don''t know!"


    "Four," corrected Flora.


    "What?"


    "You''ve seen four dead men," she explained, pointing her finger.


    Amani turned to look just in time to see Balli plunge her sword down into the one-eyed man on the ground. There was a gurgling cry, and then silence.


    "Oh, Earth-mother!" she managed to groan before another wave of nausea crumbled her abdomen and sent the last remnants of her poor breakfast cascading past her teeth and into the dust.


    This time, she didn''t have the presence of mind to move the scarf.


    Balli returned, her forehead knit in consternation as she wiped the blade on a rag that might have once been part of Truby the Looker''s ragged garments.


    "This just got more complicated. Verdun''s sending his boys after our mark. He wants the take for himself, and he wants Chapriotti to wave the protection he''s given me until the job is done. What a pricker!"


    "So if Verdun kills the woman before you do..." Flora started, but she was cut off by Balli''s humorless laugh.


    "Verdun? Kill her?" She sheathed the sword and waved her hands to the corpses decorating the dry hillside. "Not a chance in nine hells. But he''s already tipped off our mark. She knows she''s being hunted now, and her knives will be out, her back against the wall. That''s bad for us. And now she has help, for whatever reason."


    "The woman in the armor," Flora mused, her finger once again pressed against her lip.


    "Yeah. Whoever she is. Amani said she was looking for a healer and that she''d found a caravan. Maybe Volani. But if they were headed west, the only thing out there is Wastewater. Maybe she''s trying to lose her pursuers in the waste, maybe trying to take the short way to Faegate. But maybe we can catch her before she does."


    "You want to ambush her?"


    "A fighter like that? Prick, no. I want to talk to her. Maybe if she''s accepting help from people, we can convince her we can help. You know, girls looking out for girls."


    Flora tapped the side of her nose. "Tricky," she observed with a grin.


    Amani stumbled back to her feet, realizing too late her scarf was no longer a suitable face covering. She sputtered when she felt the damp cloth touch her face, tearing it away and throwing it to the ground.


    "Oh, I think Amani had something she was trying to say."


    This was it, then. It was time to put her foot down. She was no longer the obedient daughter cowering before her mother. She did not escape from home, concealing her identity and smuggling herself into the lands of the mortalfolk all so she could continue to be a bleating sheep led by every shepherd that crossed her path.


    "I cannot..." she began, but her great moment of defiance, her act of honest self-preservation long overdue, lay stillborn in her throat.


    Balli was staring. Her mouth hung open in disbelief or horror or some other breed of surprise. Flora looked elated, and she bounced up and down, rapidly clapping her hands as if with glee. Balli didn''t clap. She extended a single finger that pointed to something she saw on Amani''s head.


    She knew without her scarf, her dark red hair, a rare and treasured trait among her own people, would be tumbling over her shoulders and in tangles across her face. But she knew it was not her hair, like a curtain of blood shining in the sun, that alarmed Balli so. It was what the hair, and previously the scarf, failed to conceal. It was her ears, pale and pointed as dagger tips, stabbing out from under her tresses.


    "Oh, nine hells!" cursed Balli. "You''re an elf!"

 Chapter 8: The Hurt that Heals

    After you know how to set an ambush, after you''ve done it to others a hundred times, you can never unsee them. When Shaitaan chose ground for an ambush, it was always a route with only two ways in or out, with elevated ground and dense cover above her prey. Egret walked the dusty ravine threading between two rocky crags the color of sun-bleached wood, easy meat for anyone who might be waiting above.


    The Volani, Egret had explained to Shaitaan, were halfling nomads, distrustful of outsiders, and capable bandits. Mostly they waited in places like this, away from the main highways where confederate legionnaires patrolled in thirsty, dull-eyed squads, but close enough that unwary travelers and foolish merchants trying to avoid the traffic of the main road might fall into their small, tight clutches.


    "What is a halfling?" She''d asked Egret as they''d descended the arid hills towards the faint smudge that was the Volani encampment in the distance. Shaitaan was still unsure of the racial distinctions between the pale peoples. To her, each was as milky and thin-haired as the last.


    "One of the little people," Egret explained, holding out a hand to indicate a height hardly above her waist. "Quiet and private, for the most part. They''re mostly harmless, unless you''re traveling in small numbers away from the main road."


    "They are pygmies?" Shaitaan scoffed. "The little people who live in the jungles, who spit poisoned darts and eat monkeys?"


    Egret stared sideways at Shaitaan, a bemused smile on her lips.


    "There are no jungles this far north, and certainly no monkeys, but I suspect you have your own breeds of people where you come from. I''d guess they have some things in common with your...pygmies, you called them? Small, nimble, clever people with a talent for subterfuge and ambush. I''ve never seen them use poisoned darts, but they have nasty little arrows with barbed arrowheads. Getting shot by one wouldn''t kill you, not immediately, but you''ll wish it had by the end. So they''re plenty dangerous, especially if you''re not wearing any armor."


    She''d smiled knowingly, as if she found it amusing that Shaitaan did not walk around wearing half again her weight in steel plate. She thought herself clever for rattling and scraping along like an empty barrel, happy to sacrifice her stamina and mobility so that she might not fear blades and arrows.


    And what will you do when you trip and fall like an upturned turtle, Egret, tell me that!


    Shaitaan watched Egret walking below from the shade of an incense bush. She''d covered herself in dust so she appeared to be nothing more than a stone herself.


    And when your enemy punches holes in you with picks or wedges little daggers into the seams in that ridiculous shell of yours, will you be smiling at me then?


    She crawled like a lizard among the stones, slowly slipping between them with every gust of the dry wind, her movements hidden by the swaying of the bushes and brown grass. It would not have been perfect camouflage, not from the likes of an experienced lookout looking to ambush lone travelers, but Shaitaan was no stranger to the art of ambush herself. She knew the common blunders and blind spots of would-be assassins and bandits.


    For example, she knew how blind they could be to all else once they''d seen their approaching victim.


    Egret walked even more noisily than usual towards the encampment, though the tents and carts were now hidden from her view down in that ravine.


    Egret turned her head as a loose stone clattered down a slope behind. Shaitaan had seen the stone arcing through the air before it had landed, hurled from the hiding place of the decoy Volani Shaitaan knew would be there. When she saw nothing of interest behind her, Egret turned back towards her path through the gorge to see a small man squatting on a stone taller than he.


    Clumsy, Shaitaan thought, smirking at the simplicity of the trick. A pygmy below to draw the eye, to demand the toll, while others wait above with bows or slings. But I have hunted pygmies many times, and these pale ones are less formidable and less subtle than the little jungle ghosts I hunted through the river basins of my home.


    Below, she could see Egret open her hands in peace, hold up a coin in offering of safe passage. Her voice was lost in the wind, as was the reply of the decoy pygmy on the rock, but it was not so hard to imagine what words were trading back an forth. Greed, after all, was a universal language, and it was spoken in the empire just as fluently, if not more so, than in this wasteland of the north. The coin would buy them time. The Volani would draw out the conversation, try to find out why one such as she would travel with coins. It might mean she was no lone vagabond, but the forward scout or security for a fat merchant''s caravan close behind her. That would give Shaitaan plenty of time to find one of the Pygmies still hiding above.


    He would not be so difficult to find, not for her. She''d spotted two likely spots for where the hidden bowman might be, and only one of them offered comfortable shade from the afternoon sun. She''d approached the overlook staying just out of sight, counting on Egret''s distraction, the gray stones, and patience born from a lifetime of murder to cover her advance.


    Her bandaged arm and hand throbbed as she slid along on her belly, but she''d hunted through the pain before.


    She found him, what she was sure was the pygmy lying in ambush above. He was nearly invisible, appearing to be nothing but a clump of brown, dry grass in a gorge overgrown with the stubborn plant, but she saw enough. She could see this clump of grass didn''t sway in the wind, and that it perked up as though in interest when Egret showed her coin.


    Let''s see Egret do this wearing all that armor!


    She was as silent as death. Like the giant salamanders that stalked fish in the rocky pools near her home, she wormed closer until she was within reach of the¡ª


    "Aack!"


    A thorn the length of her thumb sank into the flesh between her fingers, and she cried out in surprise.


    The clump of grass turned, suddenly a small man with a craggy face and a pockmarked nose.


    "Oh!" he blurted, apparently off-balance at seeing the form of a dust-caked woman creeping through the rocks, now only a stride distant from him.


    It was luck that he hadn''t the presence of mind to cry out properly. Luck, and perhaps the sour tang of rough wine Shaitaan could smell from his breathy pronouncement. Like many lookouts, this one had been drinking while on the job, and his slowed comprehension and reflexes were Shaitaan''s saving grace.


    Forgetting the thorn still lodged between her fingers, she shot out her hand to clamp it over his mouth before good sense could find purchase on the slippery slope of his wits. Now she held the little man''s face in a stonecutter''s grip that he could not hope to slip away from. His eyes went wide, and the muffled cry of warning never escaped her bruising purchase over his jaw.


    She could see that the pygmy had a short bow in one hand, and she was surprised to see he didn''t drop it to grab at her wrist. Instead, his empty hand shot behind him to grab something at the small of his back. A knife? No, an arrow! He intended to shoot her, even with her hand locked to his face! She''d seen pygmies fight like this before, using their small size and nimble fingers to do what no full-grown fighter could ever hope at close range. She could see the barbed tip of that arrow, and she did not relish the thought of what it might do if plunged into her guts.


    Her other hand darted out. She had to catch his wrist before that arrow could get knocked in that little bow!


    "Aaahk, REKT!" she cried out! The word was the nastiest, foulest curse she knew in her natural tongue. It was the sort of language that marked one as the foulest sort of lowlife, or perhaps the most disgustingly, decadently rich and powerful. The habits of the low-born become the eccentricities of the assuredly privileged.


    Such language in that moment was appropriate, given the barbed arrowhead that had just erupted from the back of her hand. Instead of trying to knock the arrow, the pygmy had tried to stab her with it. She''d caught his fist, but the arrow now transfixed her hand, sprouting from her tendons and torn skin like a bloody growth on a spring branch.


    The rage was taking her now, and all thought of restraint and sensibility had nearly fled her swaying consciousness. Her unbandaged hand, previously the healthier of the two, now burned with white-hot pain that rose all the way to the backs of her eyes and into the base of her skull. Somehow, she tightened her fingers around the half-man''s fist. She would not give him the chance to rip the arrow back, making the injury ten times worse.


    She did not even think, did not even choose to pull the pygmy close and roll over him like the crocodilian predators of the river basin. At the end of the roll, she had the pygmy in an almost romantic embrace from behind, her pierced fist still gripping his, her bandaged forearm pressed against his windpipe.


    Something inside of her, something feral, bloodthirsty, and cold had nearly taken control of her, was moving her limbs without her permission. She managed to wrestle control of herself away from the thing inside, but not before the creature could utter a single sentence with her own lips into the pygmy''s ear.


    "Struggle more, and I will feed you your own wife and children!"


    Bleeding hearts, she had not wanted to say that. It was ugly, cruel, and brutal in the extreme. It was also entirely true.


    The pygmy seemed to understand the meaning well enough, though she had hissed the words in Xoactali, and she felt him give up the struggle.


    She had done it. Just as she and Egret planned, she had subdued a lookout without causing him severe injury. The other pygmies below would be far more willing to negotiate with them now as equals with such a bargaining trip. She stood from her hiding place on the cliff, her captive clutched in her arms.


    Below, the pygmy perched on the rock stared up at her in shock while Egret spoke softly, calmly, their voices lost in the wind long before they reached Shaitaan.


    You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.


    **********


    The Volani, as Shaitaan suspected, were opportunists, not true warriors. No amount of money was worth any of them truly risking themselves. So when Shaitaan had appeared over the lip of the gorge holding one of them hostage, the others felt it was ready to make a deal.


    Their leader, the one who greeted Egret from the rock, a man with gray streaks through long, dark hair pulled back into a tail that fell halfway down his back, was immediately ready to start negotiating for the return of his brother-in-law. It was not long before Shaitaan was releasing him in exchange for immunity from further mischief.


    "They''ve given their word. That should be enough for now. Just don''t bring anything into that camp you don''t want stolen."


    Egret herself had stowed her own belongings, along with the rest of her coin, in a hidden cache on the hillside where they''d first spotted the caravan. Shaitaan had thought the precaution heavy-handed at first, but the tide of Volani children, each only the size of an infant to her, changed her mind. They swarmed about her legs, prodding with a thousand fingers at her smoky skin, at her war braids, at her clothing, at her arrow-pierced hand, at the rag-wrapped sword on her back. She was sure that any coin purse, no matter how tightly tied, no matter how prudently hidden, would have been long lifted from her person by those countless, tiny hands. It was the first time she found herself grateful she had nothing to steal. Only when their search of her person seemed complete did those round, cherubic smiles disappear and their laughter cease. As quickly as they appeared, the "playful" children seemed to lose interest and vanish into the bustling camp.


    Egret''s money was already in the hands of Popini, the leader, passed smoothly into his eager palm before Egret even made her request, a show of good manners and good will alike.


    "We need a healer. My friend is hurt."


    Popini had an easy smile and eyes that twinkled with humor, as though he were always on the brink of laughing at some private joke.


    "I''d say she does. She may have gotten the best of my wife''s brother, but I think he gave her worse."


    Shaitaan gritted her teeth, exposing her gold-capped fangs as she snapped the fletched end of the arrow shaft and pulled the rest of the arrow through the wound. It wasn''t the worst pain she''d ever felt, but it was noteworthy in a life of violence. Her breaths were ragged and harsh, and her eyes glistened with tears.


    "Sooner would be better than later," she croaked.


    Popini watched her for a moment with his fists on his hips, as though trying to make up his mind about something. Then he broke again into the easy smile and barked a laugh. He waved his hand to some of the other men nearby.


    "Take them to Vorga," he commanded, the laugh not quite gone from his voice.


    The little men came forward, several of them sniggering, as though they all were sharing a private joke. Shaitaan could not help but worry.


    Vorga turned out to be a halfling woman a little past her middle years, though what that age was, Shaitaan didn''t know. She knew that dwarves lived longer than mankind, and it was said that the elves were immortal, but she did not know how long the lives of the pygmies were by comparison. This woman, if she aged like the taller milk-skinned folk, might have been a healthy, rugged sixty. Hair like wheat with streaks of silver formed a bushy mane about her angular face, and she gripped her long pipe with what seemed to be all her teeth.


    "Gracious gods, girl!" she exclaimed around the pipe. "You''re bleeding!"


    The men left Shaitaan and Egret standing before a threadbare tent, its owner lounging in a simple chair of bound sticks with her bare, dirty feet up on a stone. Shaitaan stepped forward, wincing as she used her wounded hand to unbind the dressing around her hand and her forearm.


    "I found myself on the wrong end of a blade or two," she explained as she held out her injuries for the little woman to see, a merchant displaying bloody merchandise.


    "I''ll say. If I were you, I''d look into finding a healer." The woman sucked on her pipe contemplatively and stared off into the distance, as though there were something serene or peaceful to see behind Shaitaan and that the tall, bleeding, dark-skinned woman of violence did not obscure the view a whit.


    Shaitaan turned to look at Egret, who wore an expression as puzzled as Shaitaan felt.


    "You are Vorga?" Egret asked.


    "Oh, I see there''s no fooling you two," the woman grinned at them. She plucked the pipe from her teeth and waved its tip at them. "You have seen through Popini''s clever ruse of introducing you to the very person he spoke of. Very sharp. I see there''s no use in hiding my identity any longer!" Then she sucked again on her pipe before issuing a brown cloud from her lips. "Hog''s filth! I just can''t get the knack of blowing it into rings!"


    Shaitaan''s hands now hung by her sides. She was stuck between wanting to wring the pygmy woman''s neck for frustration and the unexpected urge to fall to her knees and cry for despair. It had been a long, long time since she''d shed a tear of any kind, but today had been especially bad. She''d been trained long ago to mask her pain and to find reserves deep within of strength and purposeful action. Still, she felt herself scraping the bottom of that particular reserve.


    "You are Vorga, the healer? Can you help¡ª"


    "I am Vorga Lagrond, and I am the only healer in this here caravan. I am a divine initiate of the Lady-Most-Wise, gracious Severaka, She-Who-Knits-The-Flesh, She-Who-Clots-The-Blood, the Great Gardener of the Womb." A beatific smile broke out on her lips as she recited the words. "May she keep my scalpels sharp and my dressings white. May she bless me with steady hands and clear eyes. Or rather, clear eye, d''ya ken?" She laughed and turned the left side of her face towards them, pointing towards her eye with the tip of her pipe. The eye was milky white where the other was hazel, and a shiny, pale scar the shape of a crescent moon hung beneath the lower lid like an ornament.


    "I didn''t think the Volani held with the Quorum," said Egret.


    Shaitaan knew little of the gods of the milk-skinned barbarians in the north. She''d been schooled by the best tutors in Xoactl, but she''d found little interesting about the theology of the uncivilized. All she could remember was that the "Quorum" was their name for their pantheon of gods, formed from a hundred or more little religions that united into a gods-damned mess when the Confederacy was formed. The Quorum seemed to stand as a monument to compromise and idiotic optimism, especially compared to the pure, undiluted gods of her home.


    "The Volani don''t, as it happens. These stinking heathens don''t believe in much more than themselves, though sometimes they''ll get brown-trousered drunk and swear they saw fire spirits and wish-granting imps in the middle of nowhere."


    "You''re not Volani?"


    "Me?" Vorga touched her fingers lightly to her throat, a passable imitation of a high-born lady who''d just been offended. "Not on your life! I''m a daughter of the River Fellows. I only joined these idiots a few years ago when my feet began to itch for wandering."


    She tried again to blow a ring of smoke from her pipe. Shaitaan thought it looked more like a rabbit, though that might have been her returning hunger and the loss of blood making merry with her perception.


    "My friend here is very hurt," Egret tried again, perhaps noticing the unfocused quality of Shaitaan''s eyes. "She needs your blessing."


    Vorga sat up, her good eye suddenly very wide and bright.


    "Ay, she does! And now, the only missing factor in this equation is motive. Why should I condescend to acquiesce your humble entreaty? Why don''t you do it? Are you not also a vessel for divine grace?"


    Shaitaan was surprised to see what might have been a look of shame on Egret''s face. She looked for a moment as though she might shout at Vorga, but her eyes sank to the ground, much how Shaitaan though her whole body might in moments.


    "I cannot. I have little skill at binding flesh. Most of my training is in skill at arms. That includes my monastic training." She reached behind her neck and plucked out a small coin purse hidden in her hair. "Please. Accept this offering for the blessing of Severaka Most Wise."


    Vorga shrugged.


    "I''d be offending the most gracious Lady by accepting blood money from bandits."


    "We''re not bandits," croaked Shaitaan. Gods'' teeth, it really was getting hard to see straight. "We are trying to save a monastery under siege."


    "A monastery? Out here?" Her voice sounded dismissive, like one might speak of unchanging weather or the price of sheep. But was that a glint in her good eye? A spark of interest?


    "Not here," Shaitaan continued, no longer able to keep her eyes up from the ground at her feet. "Out west." She felt a firm pressure against her bottom. She was sitting on a flat rock. When had she done that?


    "Out west?" Vorga scoffed. "Nothing out west of here but Wastewater."


    "In the mountains," she managed to say before a wave of nausea cramped her guts like a fist. She could not say more.


    "In the mountains," chuckled Vorga. "Next, you''ll be telling me it''s Mon Magog you''re traveling to."


    Shaitaan looked up just enough to see Egret, her face rigid and tight-lipped. Was her monastery fictional? Why would she recruit Shaitaan to save a monastery other people seemed to treat like a fantasy?


    A small, strong hand gripped Shaitaan''s and sent a small needle of pain up her arm. Vorga had stood from her chair, her pipe still smoking on the stone where she''d rested her feet. She was strong, Shaitaan noted, much stronger than she looked. Her grip was iron.


    "Take it easy for a moment. I need you to prepare yourself."


    "Prepare for wha¡ª"


    Vorga''s thumb pressed into the hole the arrow had made. Sharp, dizzying, sickening pain split her skull between her eyes and sent her mind reeling. Before she knew what she was doing, her other hand, sliced as badly as it was, was rising to grasp the blade on her back.


    "Oh, no, no, no," Vorga wispered. "I wouldn''t do that if I were you. You don''t want to interfere with my process."


    Shaitaan could feel a cold point below her chin. The pygmy woman had drawn a blade, small and razor-sharp, and pressed it gently below Shaitaan''s chin.


    Shaitaan lowered her hand from the sword and brought it down to her lap slowly, but Vorga''s grip didn''t ease. White-hot agony made Shaitaan tremble and grind her teeth together. Her eyes nearly rolled up in her skull. She could see Egret looking alarmed, her hand to the haft of her bladed mace.


    "What do you think you''re doing?" she demanded.


    "What you asked me to," Vorga answered cheerily. "I''m healing your friend!"


    Shaitaan was gripping the wrist of her trapped hand now. Blood was oozing from the wound, seeping around the thumb pressed into it.


    "It hurts!" she squeaked.


    "Oh, aye?" Vorga laughed. "Do you suppose it''s me sticking my hand into your open wound that''s causing it?"


    "That''s not necessary," Egret growled, drawing the mace and stepping closer.


    Vorga rolled her eyes. "And how exactly would you know, miss skill-at-arms? What do you know of healing, or how pain figures into it?"


    Vorga pulled hard on Shaitaan''s hand, and she was powerless to resist it. The halfling leaned close, as though to share a saucy secret of the most scandalous gossip.


    "It''s the hurt that heals, d''ya ken? You see those scholam-trained physicas, the clerics of the great temples, they wave their hands and say pretty words, and the skin melds together as smooth as melted sugar, no scar to ever betray there was ever a blemish or flaw. Fat load of codswallop, that is. Trickery. Illusion. Mummery paid for by the high-born so they can have porcelain skin and thick, dark hair."


    Vorga snorted with disgust, as though at a memory. Shaitaan could only see red fading to black as the pain squeezed her eyes.


    "I once saw a noblewoman''s flesh rot off her face from such healing. It was only skin deep, you see. Swift, gentle, painless...and lethal. Now real healing, that''s in the bones, and in the sinews, and in the muscle. It''s with fire and ice. It''s breaking the bones so they knit proper. It''s burning out the rot. It''s tearing the muscle to mend the tendons. It''s pain."


    Then Vorga''s words changed. They were not common words, Shaitaan was almost sure, though it was hard to be sure of anything through that veil of agony. She thought the words became heat, and the heat burned in her hand, and her hand twisted so the bones ground together and her muscles stretched to the limits of anguish.


    Then she was free. Vorga''s hand released hers, and Shaitaan cradled it to her chest like a baby. She was only then aware she''d been crying out, and she felt her voice fall flat and dead as she caressed the tender flesh of her palm.


    "You are soft, tall woman. Soft as pig fat. If you''re going to rescue your imaginary monastery in the mountains, you''d better get some iron in your blood."


    The flesh of her palm was whole. She flexed her fingers, made a fist. It was strong. Only a pale circle of scar tissue remained where Poppini''s brother-in-law had stabbed it through.


    "Scars are memory," Vorga said softly, touching a finger to the pale moon below her milky eye. "May your memory be long."


    Egret was frozen in place as though by magic. She stared at the pale mark on Shaitaan''s palm, then warily at the halfling. She suddenly remembered her hand still gripped her mace, and she returned the weapon to her harness.


    Vorga took up her pipe again and returned it to her lips.


    "You two are on a journey," she slurred around the stem. "I have a feeling you''ll be needing the services of a competent healer."


    Egret looked on the edge of protesting, but Shaitaan stopped her with a look.


    "Bring her," she said as she kept flexing her hand and staring at the scar. Her voice had nearly broken during the healing, and the words came out hoarse and dry.


    "What? Why?"


    "Because she doesn''t lie."


    Vorga watched both women, a knowing smile around her grip of the pipe.


    "I travel light. When do we leave?"

 Chapter 9: The Slow Knife

    Balletaria considered how her life had led to this very moment. She''d been no saint, that was for sure. Her own mother had told her she''d been a difficult child. Actually, her mother had said from the moment she''d somehow squeezed Balletaria''s enormous head out of her tortured body, her daughter had been nothing but a curse straight from the gods for her mother''s sin of pride. But didn''t all mothers say that?


    Still, Balletaria considered herself a good person, or at least not a bad one, or at least no worse than the people she was forced to live among.


    So why then would gods Balletaria didn''t believe in but certainly didn''t antagonize see fit to punish her with her present predicament?


    She lay on her back in a patch of nettles. She hadn''t known they were nettles when she''d first decided to lay there, but that''s the wilds for you. She was used to the city life, to the cover of crowds and the vantage of rooftops and second-story windows. This nettle patch grew on a lip of loose shale that on reflection made too much noise underfoot to be a very good watching post. Balletaria fished a sharp-edged shard of the stuff out of the small of her back and wished she was doing this from the comfort of an abandoned shop window or a fire-ravaged factory roof, like she''d done back when she lived in the city.


    A few paces away, Flora lounged, her back propped against her travel pack and bedroll. She seemed bewilderingly at ease in the dust and weeds, like a noble lady luxuriating in a bathhouse. Her fingers danced in the air while she hummed, as though she were conducting a choir no one could see or hear but her. Then her hand darted out, her fingers forming a loose cage around the gray moth flying nearby.


    Balletaria watched as Flora brought the moth close to her lips cupped in both hands, sure for a moment the sorceress was about to eat it. Instead, her lips fluttered with mumbled words Balletaria could not understand. After a few moments, Flora lifted her hands and opened her fingers, as though releasing the insect into the afternoon sky. The moth fluttered lamely above the weeds before falling into the dust, perhaps too injured from Flora''s mishandling to fly right.


    "Aw," she moaned, apparently disappointed. "I thought that would work."


    She was a liability. Not only was she mad, but she reported directly to the very man who would see her dead if she didn''t finish this cursed job.


    If Flora wasn''t bad enough, there was also the elf.


    Amani of Ayad, as she''d introduced herself, sat with her arms around her knees in the shadow of a rocky overhang. Her hair and ears were once again bound and hidden beneath the head scarf she''d worn when Balletaria first met her, but there was no unseeing those spear-tip ears. They clearly and unequivocally marked this woman as an enemy, even if an unwitting one.


    The confederacy had been at war with the elvish baronies for half a century. Balletaria had seen the levies raised, hundreds of men, thousands even, conscripted from the cities and farmsteads and formed into loose, sloppy ranks, outfitted with thin, rusty chain mail and spears sent to the borders to reclaim the tombs of the Eckthelian kings. To recapture the tombs was a pious duty of the Confederacy, reclaiming those sacred mounds in the name of the gods being a state obligation of the highest order. The fact that those tombs were nestled firmly in the eastern valleys, rich in precious metals and the gateway to the fertile Ficta River Basin was a coincidence and of little importance, she was sure.


    Soldiers who went to those distant battlefields came back with haunted stories of phantom elves that disappeared in the shadows of the trees, of arrows that pierced steel plate like skewers through meat, of forest creatures suddenly turning on human hunters as though possessed by devils. The immortal elves, it was said, could fight the vast armies of the Confederacy to a standstill in the wooded mountain passes with nothing more than a handful of warriors.


    These were the stories they brought back, if they came back at all. Many that did come back left parts of themselves behind, be it pounds of their flesh or fragments of their sanity. Those honored veterans haunted the alleys and rotting gambling dens of Hubris, many of them so saturated with grape spirits and stardust they resembled the buildings they squatted in: too rotten to save, too worthless even to put out of their misery.


    Balletaria had known many of them, drank with them, sang the old battle hymns with them. She pitied them and raised a toast whenever they sang their songs remembering one battle or another, smiling and belting the rhyming lies to badly tuned lutes, but she also made sure she never came between one and their next score of dust. Many of them still kept their poignards as clean and sharp as they kept themselves filthy and dull.


    The elves had reduced them to human debris, an enemy so brutal and merciless their behavior defied mortal understanding. And here was one of them, sitting not three strides from Balletaria.


    She had bought the act at first. Amani seemed so naive and demure, you wouldn''t think this weak-stomached waif could possibly be a threat to anyone. But she was a consummate actress. Balletaria had even dismissed the threat of the bow she carried on her back. Even so fiercely armed, Balletaria had assumed she was just lost and afraid, but now she knew the truth of her, she knew what she really was.


    Amani was an assassin. Chapriotti had already sent a sorceress to keep him informed of Balletaria''s progress, and he''d sent the elf to make sure the job was done...or to express his disappointment should Balletaria try to run from her responsibilities.


    Her choices were now painfully clear to her: do the sticking, or get stuck herself. It was a choice that more or less made itself under normal circumstances, but she was starting to realize the magnitude of the task¡ªand its proportional risk¡ªahead of her. Her mark was not only dangerous, a trained killer in her own right, but important. Hubris''s biggest gang lords didn''t hire wizards and elvish scalp collectors for unimportant nobodies.


    Amani raised her head from her knees, her face a paragon of innocent na?vet¨¦.


    "Balli, how long do we wait here?"


    Flora looked up from her crippled moth still flapping lamely in the dust.


    Balletaria tried not to let her disgust show.


    Act the air-headed child all you like, killer. I''m on to your game.


    "I really couldn''t say. If the Volani don''t kill them, and if they keep heading towards Wastewater, they''ll need to go through this pass, right below us. They really could be along any minute."


    She wished she were as confident or as competent as she tried to make herself sound. The bit about them needing to use the pass was pure horse piss, a hopeful guess she''d made using a cheap map that was likely as much fiction as it was fact. It was one of the new sort, the mass-produced copies made at a printing press rather than the hand-copied sort of higher accuracy from a cartographer''s office. Like all things mass-produced nowadays, Balletaria suspected it to be of dubious quality. She stared down at the printer''s mark at the bottom corner of the map, the crest of Kal Kataar''s Cafe and Printing House stamped proudly in dark ink, as though a printer''s mark might signify any of the sort of quality or reliability one needed from a map maker.


    If it could be believed, anyone wanting to cross into wastewater could only do so through a narrow canyon, unless of course they wanted to march another forty miles southwest through sodden bogs. That was assuming rather boldly there were no other less reputable trails to the wastes, like an old goat path or a mining road. But the only way anyone could know to put it on a map was if they''d traveled through Wastewater themselves, and as far as she knew, no one traveled through it, much less the respectable printers of Kal Kataar''s.


    It was, therefore, of the most uncharacteristic luck for Balletaria to see three people appear on the scarcely distinguishable road from beyond the shadowy crags to the east.


    Well would you look at that. Perhaps things are finally starting to look up for Balletaria Bel Sadia.


    She reached for her hip pack, accidentally rolled onto her own hand, pinching one of her fingers painfully on a stone, and finally retrieved a mariner''s glass. Through the smudged lens she could just make out a woman in armor, what might have been a child carrying a staff, and a tall woman with her wild hair bound in knotted braids and skin the color of smoke. She could even make out that big bastard of a weapon on her back, the grip standing menacingly behind the woman''s shoulder.


    "That''s them, I bet."


    Flora had just appeared to her right, stretched onto her stomach and resting her chin on her fingers like a young lady on a cushion.


    "What do we do now?"


    Balletaria snapped the glass shut and looked to her companions. She smiled, a gambler bluffing her way out of the worst hand of her life.


    Time to make my move. For this to work, I''ll need to be a good deal closer.


    The crooked way she took down to the road was more broken and treacherous than she had hoped. Loose, flat stones slid under her boots, and thorny shrubs blocked her way at nearly every turn. She''d quite lost sight of her companions as they all skulked through the low, dense cover, and she suddenly realized just how ridiculous she would feel going through all this effort just to be caught because of them. Though, if she were being completely honest with herself, she constantly felt just about to stumble and slide down the steep hillside, so precarious was her footing.


    A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.


    There was a time Balletaria lived in the shadows, a wraith made of whispers and mist who haunted the alleys and gambling dens of Hubris. She did her work with a soft step and an even softer touch, and her name had been less than a rumor, even among the gentry. That anonymity she wore like armor, better even than armor. After all, armor had a tendency to weigh you down and to be thin at your back.


    But out here in the backwaters and the wilderness, she was terribly exposed. Her own subtlety had outed her as a person of interest, and she''d lost the tight, winding streets that hid her so well in the past. Out here, there were no familiar cobblestones or hanging laundry she could count on. Out here, being in plain sight meant, well, being in plain sight.


    A dry, twisted plant root betrayed her by crunching under her foot. Balletaria crouched until her rump was nearly in the dust and held her breath, listening hard for the shouts of surprise or the shriek of drawn blades that would tell her she''d been discovered, but she heard nothing. Only croaking crows seemed to have anything to say about her misstep, their big, black bodies casting shadows over her face as they clawed their way into the afternoon sky.


    She had to be close to the path by now, though she couldn''t see it crouched as she was. It was so hard to tell distances in this maze of dry undergrowth. Should she start moving again? If she did too soon, she might stand up right in front of her mark, but if she waited too long they might pass her by. Should she stay low and move at a crawl, or did she need to risk standing upright to move more swiftly? So many choices to make, each one with the chance of tipping the situation between success and failure, the latter almost certainly carrying the penalty of death.


    But, like always, there were never any real choices for her to make. The gods she did not believe in simply would not allow it.


    "Reach for your blade, and I will take your hand as a trophy."


    The whisper was dark and full of gravel, and heavily accented.


    Balletaria instinctively twitched her hand towards her belt, where she''d concealed no less than three daggers, a punching knife, twelve steel needles, a leather cosh, and her thin sword, but all were out of reach. A hand from behind had softly encircled her wrist in a grip like a blacksmith''s, so gently done she''d barely noticed it until she was already caught. Her mark, she was willing to wager, the woman whose life was worth a hefty weight of silver to Chapriotti, who warranted the services of an unconnected cutthroat, a wizard, and an elvish assassin to track down and eliminate her.


    "Make another move, and I will bleed you, you understand?"


    Balletaria nodded, suddenly unable to remove from her mind the image of being savagely bisected from behind by that big weapon she carried on her back. She suddenly realized she had no idea what it was. A sword? An axe? Whatever it was hidden beneath those rags, she wagered it was as sharp and as deadly as its owner.


    "What have you got there, Shy? Did you catch yourself a little rabbit for the stew pot?"


    The person she''d mistaken for a child through her mariner''s glass stepped from around a pile of tangled undergrowth. It was a halfling. One of the Volani? The shrub might only have reached Balletaria''s mid-thigh, but this half-woman had been comfortably concealed by it only a moment ago. She was mature, but not yet what anyone might think old, at least for the appearance of a human woman. She had a pile of bushy, brown hair bouncing in the warm breeze and one milky eye, below which hung a crescent moon-shaped scar. She''d known some halflings among the gentry of hubris, who skulked about as well as anyone could hope and kept their heads down even better than their height would suggest. But this halfling neither skulked nor cringed like alley scum, but bounced on the balls of her feet, swaying gently from side to side with a staff across the back of her shoulders.


    "She''s been waiting for us," said the accented woman behind. "She slipped down from that bluff over there, tried to conceal herself by the path ahead of us."


    "That''s the second time you''ve made friends with someone hidden in the hills," the halfling chuckled.


    "It''s been a busy day. Now tell me who you are, or I''ll gut you and leave you for the¡ªer...rekt!"


    "Wolves?" the halfling offered helpfully.


    "Yes! Them. Who are you?"


    Balletaria considered her situation. Here she was, caught from behind, partially restrained, and with her hands empty. She knew her mark¡ªShy, was it?¡ªwas deadly and had her cold. She probably had little mercy in her. The corpses just outside of Ditch told her that. Now she could see one of this southern woman''s companions, a halfling, but she nothing about her or what threat she posed. The armored woman had yet to make an appearance, but she doubted she was very far away.


    Balletaria was surrounded, uncertain, unarmed, and completely at the dubious compassion of her enemies.


    I''ve got you right where I want you!


    Slowly, calmly, affecting an air of casual smugness she by no means felt, Balletaria raised her free hand, fingers relaxed, palm out.


    "I bring greetings from Chapriotti of Hubris." Then, unsure whether this southern woman was familiar with the great and good of the underworld, she added, "he is one of the great gang lords of the Confederacy. I am his emissary. I''m here to give you his warm regards and an offer."


    When her lie wasn''t immediately answered with a blade between her shoulders, she risked standing to her feet and turning slowly until she looked her mark in the eye.


    The woman was, in every way that Balletaria could think of, a savage. Her dusky skin was adorned in road dust and drying sweat, the sour smell of which had begun to be noticeable. Her hair was shaved high on the sides, with the rest in long, ropy braids entwining charms, bits of bone, and even exotic coins. Her clothing was nearly rags, except for a sash of travel-worn but finely woven blue silk. Her eyes were hard and bright as gemstones, and they locked Balletaria in a stare of spiteful suspicion.


    What struck her strangest of all was what the savage held in her hand, not the one that still detained her wrist, but the other. It wasn''t a blade, but a pitted stone the size of a human skull, much like the countless other such stones that littered the hillsides for miles around. The weapon was still where Balletaria had seen it before, wrapped in rags, strapped to the woman''s back with the grip visible above her broad, sinewy shoulders. She''d seen men killed with objects much less threatening than stones, but if this southerner had a blade, why not draw it?


    "Do you mind if I take this back?" she said, smiling at the savage as though the grip on her wrist were no more a threat to her than an awkward handshake. When the southerner released her frightening grip, Balletaria resisted the urge to rub her skin where the rough fingers had pressed her to the point of bruising. Instead, she slowly reached into the satchel hanging by her hip. The woman didn''t like that, giving a serpentine hiss and baring her teeth. They''d been capped in gold, Balletaria could see, and elongated into a set of fangs. But she kept her disquiet from her face, and instead produced a bundle of fine, exotically embroidered cloth from her bag.


    "Wait," the woman said, her expression softening but a fraction, "that''s..."


    "It''s yours, isn''t it?" Balletaria offered it to her. After a moment of distrustful silence, the woman took it, her hand darting out and snatching it from Balletaria as quickly as she might from the open mouth of a bear. Balletaria smiled as though this rude paranoia were the kindest courtesy.


    The woman finally took her eyes from Balletaria to stare down at the blanket, a curious look of anguish crossing her face. In her other hand, she still gripped the stone, though it hung just a bit lower than it had.


    Tough audience, I see. Not very trusting, though that''s hardly a surprise. Your defenses are good, but not unbreakable. There''s sentiment there, a crack I can work at. A lot of trust would be great, but a little will do.


    "It''s Shy, isn''t it?" she tried. People usually loved hearing their own name, but as far as Balletaria could figure, it earned her nothing more than another look at those bared teeth. "A fitting name. I''m not very trusting of people either."


    That was true. A good liar always uses as much truth as possible.


    "Why are you here?" Shy asked, shaking the blanket at Balletaria as though it might be evidence of some heinous crime.


    "I''ve been sent to help you," she tried again.


    "Why?" Shy demanded. "I don''t know you."


    Balletaria shrugged. "I don''t know why Chapriotti wants to help you. You must be important to someone, someone the big boss wants to deal with, or maybe your enemies are his enemies. It doesn''t matter much to me."


    Shy looked at the halfling, her teeth now hidden behind a deep frown.


    "A lot of people have been offering to help me today," she said.


    The half-woman grinned up at her companion.


    "It must be you kindly smile and sweet disposition. That''s what won me over."


    That broke the frown into a ghost of a bemused smile, if only for a moment. Shy fixed Balletaria with another hard stare as she hefted the stone in her hand, as though she were considering the trajectory for a throw.


    "A lot of people have tried to kill me today, as well. How do I know you aren''t one of them?"


    Balletaria gave her best sly smile, a gambler suggesting to her opponents the hand of a lifetime.


    "I''ve had you at dagger reach for more than a minute. If I wanted you dead, you''d be a crow feast by now."


    That brought a feral grin to Shy''s lips, a monstrous expression. Balletaria got the impression of a feral animal peaking for just a moment from behind a curtain.


    "I am not convinced."


    That was no bluff. You are not an idiot, and you''re not even a little intimidated by threat of violence.


    Balletaria shrugged again, as though being believed were not the hinge on which her survival of this very encounter turned.


    "Why would you be? I know I''m not very threatening considered as an individual, but I have both a wizard and an assassin hidden nearby..."


    "Aw, she gave us away!" whined Flora, who stood from behind a boulder that was no more than three strides away. "What a waste of a good stealth roll!"


    "What do you say I was?" came Amani, who emerged from the underbrush even closer. She wrapped her arms around herself, as though cold or anxious.


    Keep playing the naive waif if you must, but we all know what you are now, don''t we? How long will you keep up the charade?


    Shy''s eyes seemed to bore holes in Flora, the feral grin never wavering.


    "I''ve killed sorcerers before," she growled. "Put some steel in them, and they die as easily as the rest of us."


    Balletaria believed her. She looked from the southerner to the wizard. Flora had a grin of her own, and her fingers flexed like an archer preparing to reach for the quiver. Balletaria started wondering if things were about to become violent and very, very uncertain for her.


    The halfling stared at Amani and leaned forward on her staff, her eyes full of thoughtful interest.


    "If I don''t miss my guess," she said nodding to the elf, "and I rarely do, we are in the presence of an immortal."


    "What?" asked Shy, apparently unfamiliar with the term.


    Amani, however, began to look very uncomfortable. Her hands fussed with her headscarf, and her eyes darted between everyone present, as though expecting someone to seize her at any moment.


    "I...I don''t," she stammered.


    "Who are all of you?" came a voice from the trail ahead. Balletaria turned to see the armored woman, sun glinting off steel plate, chainmail, and mace, all of them polished bright and well-used.


    "New friends!" answered the halfling. "What a merry band we''ve become!"


    Flora seemed to forget the looming confrontation with Shy, and she clapped her hands rapidly, grinning like a fool.


    "Yay! Friends!"


    Balletaria stepped toward the woman in armor, her hand held up in a cordial greeting between travelers.


    "We''re here to help. Shy here has powerful friends, and they want her protected. I don''t know where you''re headed or what task you''re about, but I''d like to offer you our services, at least as long as my employer orders it."


    Or at least as long as it takes you all to fall asleep, for me to bury a dagger in that southern savage, and for me to slip away, hopefully leaving the wizard and the elf to deal with the aftermath. Then my employment with Chapriotti will be done, and I can disappear to another backwater, middle-of-nowhere town, this time wise enough to remain undiscovered.


    Balletaria displayed her most trustworthy, amiable smile. It wasn''t a complete lie. She was pleased. Things were finally starting to go her way on this job. Sure, the savage woman was still alive and aware of Balletaria''s presence, but time would present her with the right moment to do her work.


    After all, it is the slow knife that cuts deepest.

 Chapter 10: Whispers of the Earth-born

    Shaitaan pulled the blanket tighter around her shoulders. Though she''d been nearly overwhelmed by relief at the sight of it in Balli''s hands, that nostalgic warmth was quickly fading as she wished for something warmer. That blanket had kept her plenty warm and dry in the misty mornings of her homeland, but up here in what her people called the high valleys, it gave little insulation against the windy chill.


    Another ghostly wail pierced the gray dawn. Shaitaan hated the sound. She bared her teeth, gold capped fangs nearly black in the poor light. It was a meaningless gesture, and she knew it. The spirits were not afraid of the living, and no amount of posturing would persuade them otherwise, should they come for her blood. Still, it wasn''t in her nature to do nothing in the face of danger. She wasn''t one of the sheep that plodded slowly towards their own deaths. She was a predator, like the river dragons and the shadowed tree lions of her beloved jungles. Her teeth and her violence were her only response to her enemies. So, even though it accomplished nothing, even though the ghostly wailing would continue regardless, Shaitaan''s lips peeled back into a silent snarl while her breath billowed and faded into the dawn.


    "Oh, fearsome. Does something out here have you spooked?"


    Bloody steps, she was quiet, Shaitaan had to give her that. She was wrapped in a gray blanket nearly the same color as the sky. She carried her needle-like sword in its sheath in one hand, setting it gingerly on the rocky ground beside her as she sat beside Shaitaan. She was smiling. What was there to smile about out here?


    Another high wail floated above the dark trees, like the final cry of a dying woman. Her eyes followed the sound as it soared from peak to peak, echoing in a chorus of misery. Shaitaan had seen many women die. She''d listened to their screams. Was this one of them returned? Did it follow her all the way to the high valleys? Was it here to grant her an ignominious death far from home to be witnessed by no one but these uncivilized killers and liars? If it did, it would be no more than she deserved.


    "That sound. Can you hear it too?"


    The quiet woman''s eyes searched the dark, trying to understand.


    "What, the elk? Yes, I hear it."


    Shaitaan had not heard that word before.


    "We call them the secko, the dry spirits. They are the vengeful dead, and they hunt the living to drink of their blood."


    The woman laughed, a sound Shaitaan hated.


    "A spirit? No! That is an elk, I''m sure. It''s a large deer. I mean, I''m no country girl, but even I know that sound. They call out for mates, or to challenge each other, I forget which. They''re harmless. Well, I guess they''re not harmless, not if you tried grabbing one with your bare hands. But they''re nothing to worry about. In fact, we might try hunting one, if any of us knows how. We needn''t be afraid."


    Shaitaan narrowed her eyes at the woman.


    "I did not say I was afraid."


    Did her smile falter for just a moment? Did the mask of her benign helpfulness slip just a little?


    "I hear these hills can play tricks on you. It all seems so much more haunting at night. Are you sure you don''t want me to take over? I could take watch while you sleep an hour or two. We''ll make better time if you''re well rested. Go on, I''ll take over the watch. After all, I''m here to watch over you. Chapriotti would never forgive me if you dropped dead from exhaustion out here."


    In fact, Shaitaan was exhausted. The fatigue of a day of fighting and walking would have been enough to wear anyone down, but her injuries and her brutal healing at the hands of Vorga had taken their toll as well. She was tired in her bones, and she could sleep like the dead, if she allowed herself.


    But there was danger here, one she dreaded more than the secko, a threat hiding behind smiling eyes. She''d appeared from nowhere the day before with an offer of help from someone Shaitaan had never heard of. She traveled with a sorceress and an elf, and Shaitaan trusted neither of them. Both Egret and Vorga seemed confused by the newcomers, but not alarmed to be joined by them. Shaitaan figured she was desperate enough to save her monastery that she would not turn away a few more fighters for her cause, however dubious their motives. Vorga seemed unconcerned altogether, and Shaitaan didn''t know whether this made her wise beyond caring or foolish beyond sense.


    But the smiling woman wasn''t interested in Vorga or Egret. She was there for Shaitaan, and Shaitaan had only ever been sought by anyone for two reasons: they either wanted someone dead by her hand, or they wanted her dead at their feet.


    Shaitaan looked the woman in the eye. Were those shadows bags under her eyes? Were they always there, or had this woman been awake all night, only pretending to sleep?


    "I don''t need rest," she lied. There was no way she would close her eyes while this woman was near, not until she was certain of her motives.


    "As it please you," she said with a friendly nod. She picked up her sword and returned to the circle of sleeping bodies, where the sounds of soft breathing and rumbling snores disturbed the gloom.


    Shaitaan watched as the woman returned to her bedroll. Soon her heavy breathing joined the others, the sounds of sleep. But was she really asleep? Were any of them?


    The day had just been far too strange, and her new acquaintances even stranger. Could that woman Balli, or any of them for that matter, really be trusted? Perhaps not. Maybe they were all after her, each one competing with the others to be the first to claim her corpse. Shaitaan, the Black Maw, dead at last. It was no more than she deserved.


    But Shaitaan felt a strange comfort at that thought. If they were all her enemies, none of them could betray her. She''d always done best when she knew who her enemy was, and now she knew.


    A feral grin spread across her face as she watched the sleeping forms of her companions. Her teeth gleamed white in the dark, except for the ones capped with gold. So they wanted to watch her through the night? Fine. Let them. She would do her own watching, her own waiting. Time would reveal their true intentions, and she would be ready when it happened.


    But the minutes crawled by, and her smile faded, and the warmth of her anger began to leave her. Soon, she was shivering beneath her thin blanket.


    The problem with watching and waiting was that she would miss sleeping, and she would miss it soon.


    **********


    She could not believe she''d let herself fall asleep. Balletaria opened her eyes only to squeeze them shut again against the searing light of the mid-morning. The sour taste in her mouth was more than her breath. It was the bitter disappointment that she''d stayed awake the entire night watching her mark, waiting for the perfect moment to cut her throat and make a swift exit, only to finally succumb to exhaustion as the first rays of sun kissed the horizon.


    She blinked, and the world swam into focus. Not the familiar grimy brick and shadowed alleys of Hubris, but dust and stone and scrubby evergreens drying out under a weakening sun.


    "Shy told us you''d had a long night," said a shadow above her. It was Egret, the armored woman. Her head was bare, her golden curls stirring in the breeze, but her breastplate and mail were fastened in place. "We let you sleep away the morning, but it''s time for us to go."


    It took a moment for Balletaria to work enough spit around her mouth to form words.


    "Shy told you?" She could see the night-skinned woman crouched by the dead campfire. She was busy wiping her fingers around a small iron cooking pot, sucking the last morsels from them with joyless necessity.


    "Yes. Said the elk calling kept you up, so we let you sleep," said Egret. She dropped a wooden bowl onto the gritty soil by Balletaria''s hand. "We saved you some, but it''s cold now." She turned away and returned to her own business, tying down her bedroll onto her small travel pack and checking the rest of her gear.


    "Too kind," Balletaria muttered under her breath. She stole another glance at Shy, and was almost sure she''d been watching her, but there was no sign of it now.


    Was Shy onto her? Was the comment about the elk a jab at her, a little prod to let her know she knew Balletaria was watching her, or maybe to let Balletaria know she was being watched in turn?


    "What a pricker of a job," she muttered. She threw off her blanket and snatched up the bowl of congealed porridge. She was hungry enough to choke it down without much effort, and the others had been kind enough to leave her a generous portion, but still there was a growing pit in her stomach. What if her mark knew? Losing the element of surprise was enough to get you killed on any job, and this one was more dangerous than most. How long did she have to try before it became safer to risk the displeasure of Chapriotti and his Copper Hounds? After all, every step she took on this mad venture gave her more and more a head start on him and his goons.


    Well, most of them, she supposed. Only a few strides away, she could see the tall magus Flora trying to pick burrs from her blanket. Hovering near her shoulder was the elf. Amani looked for all the world like a lost girl here in the wild, the consummate actress as always. If Balletaria decided to cut her losses, could she outrun them? That was, she supposed, the point of Chapriotti sending them in the first place.


    The meal was brief and tasteless, but Balletaria had a feeling she''d be missing the sensation of filling her belly soon enough. There were no stalls out here, no carts of hand pies or sticks of roasted meat of dubious origin. No spotted fruit, the virtues and purity of which being extolled by city-born stallholders who''d never seen a patch of farmland in their life. No bread, no beer, no stew to be smelled or tasted for miles in any direction, and if she didn''t miss her guess, Balletaria figured they wouldn''t be coming any closer to any such consumables for some time, judging by the direction in which they seemed to be headed.


    She fiddled with her brigandine, the only piece of real armor she had, fumbling with twisted leather thongs as she found the apparent leader of their little trek. Perhaps if she could get a whiff of where she was taking Shy and why, she could plan a proper ambush for her and, more importantly, an escape plan.


    "Egret, did you say we were in search of a temple?" she asked, trying to remember the scant details she gleaned the day before.


    Egret was lacing her sabatons to her well-worn boots.


    "The monastery of my order, yes. My sisters and I are regularly waylaid by bandits in the area, and we believe a raid of our shrine is imminent. Shy accepted my request for aid."


    Balletaria nodded her head as though listening intently. She put on a particularly concerned look on her face, the tight-knitted brow that spoke of compassionate empathy, of sisterly concern. She''d practiced it in a mirror for weeks to gain the trust of a mark some years ago, and she never let herself lose the knack of it. It was particularly helpful when trying to earn the trust of these altruistic, would-be heroes.


    "That''s awful," she said brimming with sincerity. "Let''s hope you and Shy arrive in time. Let''s pray the two of you will be enough to help them."


    Egret stopped fidgeting with her boots and stood to her full height, and then she stared at Balletaria for what felt like a long moment. If Balletaria didn''t know any better, she would have been sure she was being measured up, that Egret was choosing her next words carefully. Balletaria didn''t like the feeling, not of being on this side of a piercing gaze like that. Then she shook off the feeling. It was just paranoia, was all.


    This job is getting to me. I need to be done with all this.


    The author''s narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.


    "You say you''re here to escort Shy to safety, yes?" asked Egret.


    Balletaria nodded in feigned humility.


    "Those are the orders of my boss, Chapriotti. Protect Shy at all costs."


    Egret nodded, as though coming to a decision.


    "Come with us. All the way to the monastery. We go towards certain danger, and you could fulfill your duty and help my sisters at the same time. You seem to have skill at arms, you and your associates. We could use you. Our order would be forever grateful."


    What idiot would say yes to such a venture? Oh, you''re out here risking your life for a stranger? Well, from the goodness of your heart, would you mind doing it some more? Reward? There''s nothing quite like gratitude and the love of the gods as reward, don''t you find? Sympathetic drivel.


    "Of course we will," answered Balletaria, nodding reverently. "Anything for a sister in need."


    Egret stared at her in silence again, and once again, Balletaria had the uncomfortable feeling of being measured, but she shook it off when Egret spoke again.


    "Thank you," she said. She turned and pointed to hazy mountain peaks in the distance. "Then we head north towards Gloamingreach. It''s the nearest civilization to our destination. There we can resupply and make the climb."


    Balletaria was liking this less and less. If she wanted to spare herself a grueling hike up a mountain if she survived the span of Wastewater, she''d better slit that barbaric woman''s throat and be quit of all this business.


    "Sounds like quite an adventure," she forced herself to say with an idiot''s optimistic grin. "But how can you be sure of the way? This is Wastewater. No one knows these lands. Not really."


    "I know the way," Egret assured her. "It''s how I came. I''ll keep you safe."


    Balletaria did not feel reassured.


    **********


    The strange, mismatched group had been moving for some time, their figures small against a vast, increasingly alien backdrop. The monotoned, dust colored landscape was mutating into something increasingly stranger with every footstep. Steam rose in ghostly plumes from fissures in the earth, painting the air in shifting hues of sulfur yellow and bruised purple. The ground itself was a patchwork of cracked mud flats and bubbling pools, like some monstrous, festering wound. The air carried a strange, metallic tang, and the distant rumble of geysers echoed like the groans of some sleeping beast.


    Egret, her eyes hard as they read the nearly invisible track through the unquiet ground, led the way, her armored form a glinting beacon in the light of day. Vorga, her pipe clenched between her teeth, seemed utterly at ease, her gaze darting from one bizarre formation to another, seemingly taking delight in the strangeness of it all.


    "Just think, if we''d all stayed where we''re from, we''d never get to see sights such as these!" she slurred around the pipe.


    Shaitaan would have been just as happy for it. She would have been just as happy knowing only the misty jungles, the towering stone temples, and the thatched huts of her home. This barbaric north was a barren waste of bad weather, worse food, intolerable people, and this hellscape. It was like the endless underworld described by her priests where the ungodly wandered in death, eyeless, tongueless, heartless for all eternity.


    The first signs they found of human life were not comforting.


    They were winding their way through a narrow pass between blocky cliffs when Shaitaan saw them: ugly scars on the ground, like burns on wood. There was a sort of crater where the grit and gravel of the ground became almost like cracked volcanic glass, as though melted by a fervent heat. An eruption from an old fissure in the rocks, perhaps? Shaitaan didn''t think so. In the center of it, she saw the pitted head of a two-edged battle axe, it''s haft burned to charcoal. Surrounding it were bits of charred human bone, They were shattered to pieces, almost indiscernible from the charred rock around it, but Shaitaan had seen enough bodies burn to know the difference.


    "There was a fight here," she said aloud, and the others stopped to look back at her.


    Shaitaan prodded the charred bone with her fingers and rubbed them together, watching the ash smear on their tips. "This wasn''t long ago. Someone was burned here."


    "Well, thank the gods one of us has high passive perception!" chuckled the tall woman with the pointed hat. Flora, Shaitaan heard the others call her.


    "Bandits, maybe," suggested Egret. "Or unlucky travelers. Either way, there''s no point in stopping."


    "Didn''t you say you traveled this way to get here?" It was Balli, the watching one. For once, Shaitaan was glad to hear her asking the right questions. "How did you miss something like this? How many idiots are there trying to cross the Wastewater?"


    "It''s a big wilderness," Egret answered. "It''s easy to miss things out here. If we don''t want to end up like whoever this was, we''d better get moving."


    The others stared after Egret as she trudged away towards the exit to the canyon. Suddenly, the tight canyon walls felt oppressive and suffocating. Shaitaan''s eyes scanned the rocks and shadows, and she was unhappy with what she saw.


    An ambush, and ambush, an ambush. You couldn''t ask for a better setting.


    "Did anyone else find that unsettling?" This time it was Amani who spoke, her tiny voice almost lost in the dense air. "Did anyone else feel like Egret wasn''t telling us something?"


    "When''s the last time any of us told the truth?" Shaitaan answered, almost chuckling at the irony of it.


    Vorga, oblivious to the tension, stopped abruptly, her good eye gleaming.


    "You all worry to much!" she countered, waving the stem of her pipe at them all. "There''s enough worry in the world as it is. No point in us making more when we could be enjoying the moment!


    Suddenly, Vorga''s eyes went wide, the smirk on her face blossoming into a smile of delight. She ran to where a dead tree leaned decaying against the canyon wall, covered in gray moss. She crouched, her fingers plucking a cluster of dried, brown mushrooms from the base of the rotting trunk. "Charr!" she exclaimed, her voice filled with childish delight. "Nice and dry, the perfect smoke for a leisurely stroll." She stuffed the mushrooms into a pouch at her belt, then proceeded to fill her pipe. The pungent aroma of burning charr filled the air, a strange, earthy scent that mingled with the sulfurous tang of the geysers. Shaitaan didn''t care for it.


    Vorga offered her pipe to Balletaria, who waved her off. "That crap smells like feet," she complained.


    "Oh, not as bad as your feet will by the end of this journey, I dare say!" chuckled the halfling. "If you lot are complaining now, I see a rude awakening on the horizon. You''re all soft as pig fat, grumbling the way you are. We''re but a day on the road and we''ve encountered no more hardship than bit of bone and a burned axe. Get some iron in your blood. This here''s the good part."


    Shaitaan gritted her teeth. It didn''t feel very good.


    **********


    They stopped for a brief meal, pulling dried meat and hard biscuits from their packs. Amani, her face pale, nibbled at a piece of dried fruit, her gaze fixed on the ground. Vorga had caught a rabbit and quickly cleaned it. It dangled from a leather thong on her pack, its black eyes staring into nothing as it bounced against Vorga''s bed roll with every step.


    "He''ll make a lovely little stew with some roots and mushrooms," Vorga mused.


    Amani seemed ill as she watched the little rabbit dangle from its tiny gallows. "I am not used to this," she said quietly to no one in particular.


    Balletaria believed it. Amani looked on the verge of losing her meager breakfast when she watched Vorga empty the creature with deft, red-stained hands.


    A flicker of movement, a flash of sickly green against the gray rocks, caught Balletaria''s eye. Another rabbit? She narrowed her eyes, searching the shadows below the twisted trees and yellow rocks.


    "I saw it too." Shy''s voice was at her shoulder, and she turned to see those gold-capped fangs in front of her eyes. The sudden appearance of that savage woman''s face seized her heart in a sudden grip of panic. She couldn''t suppress her surprised yelp enough to escape the dark woman''s notice. "Jumpy? Maybe we should all be. We are not alone out here."


    The others paused, their gazes following hers. "Just shadows," Balletaria said, with a dismissive wave. "This place plays tricks on the eyes."


    "You know it''s not a trick," Shy growled, her teeth flashing in the afternoon sun. "You know something is out there. You''ve seen it before. Why lie about it?"


    Balletaria would not have believed that she could trust anyone less than she did the savage woman, or that she would have found herself relying on her for answers, and yet, here she was. Suddenly, in this place far from the violence and the lies she understood, she found new danger from directions she did not understand. Now, the dark skinned woman with the golden fangs seemed downright friendly compared to Egret, who seemed with every step into that wasteland to be more and more a danger.


    The others seemed to agree. They all stared at Egret, even Vorga, who''d taken the pipe from between her teeth to scowl. Egret''s eyes darted from face to face, and Balletaria knew they were about to learn that this journey into the acidic wastes of the west was more than they bargained for.


    "I have a sacred charge from my order," she said between clenched teeth, "to bring aid before the bandits realize we have not the strength to repel them. I don''t have time to warn you of every danger, or to fill your heads with rumors of enemies that may never appear. I''ve already wasted too much time and I cannot waste any more!"


    "Who was the dead man?" Shy demanded.


    Balletaria remembered the burned, shattered remains in the blackened crater.


    Egret sighed. "You''re not the only ones I''ve tried to bring. I traveled some days ago with a group of fools who could not fend for themselves, and they brought themselves to ruin."


    Balletaria found she could not keep silent, not that she would have if she could. "They burned themselves to ash in the middle of a rocky canyon?" Balletaria considered herself a superb actress when the occasion demanded it, but she knew even on her best day there''d be no hiding the irony dripping from her lips.


    Egret scoffed, as though the need to explain something so trivial as an immolated corpse was an inconvenienced barely to be tolerated.


    "He wasn''t burned to death. He was already dead when I did that."


    The silence of the whole group was so sudden and so oppressive Balletaria found it difficult to take a breath aloud.


    "This, I believe, would be the part of the conversation where one discloses the cause of death of her previous companions," Vorga chimed in, tapping her pipe against her hip and scattering the ash at her feet.


    They were all tense, Balletaria could sense it. Vorga, for all her careless, unshakable poise, was clearly adjusting her finger''s grip on her staff. Shy''s muscles in her arms and neck were bunching and squirming below her skin, like a great cat preparing for a pounce. Flora had taken a step back, but her lips were moving silently, and Balletaria thought she could feel a pressure in the air, as though lightning were about to strike. Only Amani seemed unprepared for violence, though Balletaria guessed the elves never did until it was all over. Sensing this was the moment things might take a turn for the worse, Balletaria slipped her hand to the grip of her sword, wondering just how she might use such a thin, deft weapon against one so completely covered in steel.


    This looming threat from her travel companions was apparently not lost on Egret. Her hand, which had been resting on the haft of her mace, was suddenly up in front of her, her eyes wide. She looked like someone trying to calm a particularly wild horse.


    "Woah, friends! Please, can we not all just take a breath? I swear I mean none of you any harm!"


    It was then that Balletaria saw it, a set of scrapes along the steel surface of Egret''s breastplate. She''d seen her share of sword cuts, puncture wounds, slashes, and bludgeons from every weapon imaginable, and some from things not meant to be weapons at all. That scar across the steel wasn''t made by any knife, sword, or straight-edged weapon. It almost seemed like claw marks.


    "What''s out here?" she demanded, suddenly out of patience.


    "You wouldn''t believe me if I told you," Egret scoffed.


    "We don''t believe you now!" countered Shy.


    Egret nodded, apparently giving a mighty effort to stifle her mounting frustration.


    "There are things that live here," she tried again. "If we are quick, we should be able to pass without them noticing."


    "Oh, they notice," Vorga corrected her, almost wistful as her eyes scanned the rocky ledges above.


    "It''s the deep-born, the deevim." This time it was Amani who spoke. "The ones born from the earth, made from the earth."


    "The what?" Balletaria asked, not sure she''d heard the elf right.


    "She means goblins," said Vorga.


    It took a moment for Balletaria to process those words. Goblins? Like out of the stories? Was Vorga joking?


    "Oooh, goblins!" Flora cheered, suddenly bouncing up and down. "One third challenge rating! That should be no problem for us, depending on just how many we find, that is..." she trailed off, her voice suddenly full of worry.


    "What is goblin?" asked Shy, suddenly looking as annoyed as she was angry.


    "It''s a monster from children''s stories and the tales of drunk farmers from the frontier," Balletaria explained. "They''re not real."


    Flora''s head turned to stare at Balletaria in shock. "Not real? Stories? No, they are real enough. They are the disquiet spirits of the earth. They are a fever that fights infection, drawn to mortals intruding on sacred ground."


    **********


    Shaitaan had not heard of goblins or deep-born before, but she''d heard stories of the green-skinned children of the forest, the chittering, gnashing creatures that haunted the forbidden valleys. This place was felt like those haunted marshes and jungled lowlands, for like them it did not feel empty. It felt... watched.


    Egret''s walked with her hand tight on her mace. Balli had drawn her needle-like sword, the tip swaying side to side ahead of her as she walked, like the nose of a hound trying to catch the sent of prey.


    They''d left the canyon behind, the land opening to rolling hills of lodgepole pines stretching into the dimming sky. Geysers hissed and spat nearby, sending plumes of scalding steam into the air. The ground was uneven, riddled with cracks and fissures. The air grew thick with the smell of sulfur and the faint, unsettling scent of damp earth and decay. They''d agreed this was a poor place to camp, but the further they traveled, the poorer the ground became. Soon, the light would fade, and they''d either have to traverse the treacherous ground by night or make camp where they were.


    To stop for the night might have seemed the wiser choice but for the scuttling shadows and sounds of chittering voices forever just out of sight. Whether the goblin creatures were children''s stories or no, they certainly weren''t alone in this hissing, spitting place.


    You need me. You always need me. We survive because of me.


    The urge to reach for the grip of the weapon on her back was nearly overpowering. Her palm itched for it. Sweat beaded her forehead. She tried again and again to remind herself that the stones at her feet would do well enough, just as they had when she''d fought ugly so recently. Bleeding steps, had that only been little more than a day ago? She felt like she''d been wandering this place an eternity.


    Suddenly, Egret stopped, her gaze fixed on a dark, gaping hole in the side of a rocky outcropping. It was a tunnel, crudely carved into the earth, and it reeked of dampness and something else, something... foul.


    "What is it?" Balletaria asked, her voice low.


    Egret didn''t answer. She took a step closer, her hand tightening on her mace. The air around the tunnel seemed to shimmer, as if distorted by heat.


    "We should never have come this way!" It was Amani. She was sobbing. "We need to leave!"


    Shaitaan backed away from the hole, turning to the darkening woods behind them. Her feet would not move. There, beneath the lengthening shade of the swaying pines, a hundred glittering eyes watched, shifted, blinked from the darkness.


    "It''s too late for that," she growled, the stones at her feet forgotten. Her hand crept slowly towards the grip above her shoulder. "This is as far as we go."

 Chapter 11: Into the Maw

    There was nothing quite so terrifying, Balletaria realized, as seeing the fear of someone else. Shy was frozen in a feral crouch, her eyes wide, her teeth bared in the rictus snarl of a trapped animal. If there was ever an expression of fear in that savage woman, this was it, and Balletaria found it to be infectious.


    She followed Shy''s gaze to the trees creaking and groaning, even in this soft wind. It was only after she saw the eyes that she realized the creaking wasn''t the trees at all, but them. The noises they made were terrible. A high-pitched chittering, like a thousand dry leaves skittering across stone. The way they moved was even worse, their bodies contorted and twisted, limbs long and spindly. Their eyes, large and black, glittered in the fading light, reflecting the dying ember of the setting sun. They were not flesh and blood, or at least not the same sort of flesh she was, Balletaria realized with a surge of nausea. Their skin, a sickly green, seemed to shimmer and shift, like wet clay drying in the sun. They moved with an unsettling fluidity, their limbs contorting in unnatural ways, their bodies a grotesque parody of human form.


    "Oh, PRICK!" Balletaria cried, whipping her sword and taking a step away from the writhing, skulking tide.


    The sight of her sword only seemed to anger the horde. There was a clattering, thumping din as the creatures beat the ground and the trees around them with weapons of their own. They were crude, fashioned from bone and wood and stone. Animal skulls, tusks, and sweeping antlers shook on their twisting heads and twitching shoulders. Was it armor they wore, or was it simply part of their bodies?


    "Ladies, the best of luck to ya," said Vorga. She''d grabbed the wooden holy symbol at the top of her staff and pulled it away, revealing a keen, glittering spearhead.


    What kind of holy woman is she?


    But that hardly seemed to matter now. Just then, and maybe always in Balletaria''s opinion, a woman with a spear was hells more useful than a woman with prayers.


    Not far away, Amani fumbled the bow from her shoulder, struggled to draw an arrow from her quiver, nearly dropping the thing in the dirt.


    When is she going to drop the act? When she finally fires the first arrow? When enough of us have died?


    A sickening feeling was starting to form in Balletaria''s stomach, or more sickening than what she already felt. What if it wasn''t an act? What if she''d had this elf-maiden pegged all wrong? Balletaria had never been so hopeful to be in the presence of a vicious assassin in all her life.


    Not much more useful was Flora, whose lips once again fluttered noiselessly, still seeming like a mad woman. Her hands were empty, clutching at her robe as though it could shield her against the clubs and spears and arrows of the creatures spitting at them from the trees. She would need more than soot spirits and a pointy hat if she wanted to live out the day. But even as she watched, she thought for a moment she saw the slightest glow about Flora''s skin. There was a pressure in the air, like lightning about to strike, and the slightest shimmer to the air above her head and shoulders.


    The scrape of steel drew her eyes to Egret, who''d unshouldered her shield and gripped her mace in her fist. Balletaria would have been overjoyed to see someone who seemed to be taking the problem seriously, or who seemed appropriately prepared for it, but for the fact she blamed Egret for being in this situation in the first place. Why not tell them about the fates of her former companions? Was she that desperate for help that she would trick them into walking through a death trap?


    Balletaria''s last diappointment stood baring her teeth at the creatures, for some reason refusing to draw the massive weapon wrapped in rags and strapped to her back. Is this just how the savage warriors of the jungle empires fought?


    "Shy!" she hissed through her own clinched teeth. "Do you need a written invitation? Draw your prickin'' weapon!"


    Shy''s head snapped towards her, a growl at her throat. For a moment, Ballitaria was sure Shy was about to draw the thing and use it on her, but she only bent to grab a thick branch the length of her arm from the ground at her feet.


    Balletaria''s exasperated inquiry of what the prick Shy thought she was doing never made it past her lips. That was when they came.


    They spilled from beneath the trees towards them, an avalanche of green flesh and sharpened stones.


    Balletaria heard Flora shout something that sounded like "Caduceus!" A beam of light, quite as if the sun had decided to shine a single ray of brilliance, descended seemingly from nowhere and planted itself in the earth directly in front of the woman. With a satisfied grin on her face, Flora reached forward her hand as though to grab a hold of the light, but instead plucked from it something that gleamed and sparked with tongues of rainbow fire. It was a staff, a rod as long as Balletaria''s rapier, with some kind of bauble on the end that spun with interconnected orbs and rings. No sooner had she appeared to withdraw the staff from the beam that the light extinguished, plunging the writhing forest into the weak light of dusk.


    The creatures were nearly on them now. Balletaria ducked as she heard a snap as something whipped past her head at murderous speed, and then another, cracking against the stones behind her in little shattered shards. They were bones, she realized. The little monsters were using crude leather slings to launch knuckle bones at a deadly velocity.


    Flora was laughing now. She waved the staff above her head and cried out, "lux letalis!" The staff left trails of colored fire as it passed through the air above her head, fire that turned to brilliant white barbs, javelins of the rays of dawn. With a grunt, Flora swung the staff before her, like a child swinging a stick at a ball. The staff made an almighty crack as it smashed into the barbs, sending them scattering in shards into the oncoming army.


    Many of the creatures shrieked, suddenly punched through with smoking holes that sizzled and popped.


    Balletaria did not have time to gawk at the strangeness of it. One of the creatures was on her, it''s fists raising a wooden club edged with animal claws. The tip of her sword darted out, her feet carrying her back away from the reach of that awful piece of wood. The creature smashed the ground where she''d just stood sending clumps of mud and pine needles flying. Then it wavered, gurgled, and dropped its club to clutch its throat with both hands. Balletaria''s deft strike had opened its windpipe to the evening air. Dark fluid seeped between its misshapen fingers, and when it opened it''s mouth, all it could say was dark blood.


    But there was no time to celebrate her victory over the creature, for another had taken its place before the other could sink to its knees. This one''s face was hidden beneath a bleached human skull stitched together with thongs of rawhide. It bashed her with a shield woven from willow branches, and it was her turn to taste blood on her teeth. She crumpled to the ground, nearly cut herself on her own sword as she sprang back up to her feet, and slashed under the rim of the creature''s shield.


    There was no delay before the pain for this one. It howled in agony, forgetting its shield and clutching at its spilling innards with quivering hands. Balletaria watched spellbound. The stuff coming out of it wasn''t guts as she knew them at all. It was mud and sopping moss and frog spawn and slick river stones. The creature squealed much like a bleeding pig, thrashing about on its knees as the detritus of the forest leaked from its insides.


    She realized the same was happening with the one whose throat she''d cut. The dark fluid leaking from between its clutching fingers and flowing over its crooked teeth had the grainy clumpiness of black river silt.


    The disquiet spirits of the earth, Amani had called them. She was wrong, Balletaria realized. They weren''t of the earth. They were the earth. They were brutal, savage nature personified. They were the harshness of the wilderness, the biting cold of the wastes, the merciless fangs of the predators and the scavengers on the scent of the weak.


    In short, they were everything Balletaria hated about being in the gods-damned woods.


    She closed her fist around the grip of her sword, hissed a breath of steeled resolve past her teeth, and darted back into the melee, her blade flashing fire in the setting sun.


    **********


    The battle was a chaotic blur. Balletaria danced through the horde, her rapier a silver blur, parrying blows and repaying in kind with a practiced killer''s grace. Flora, the joy on her face lit by the fire and lightning she unleashed, stood resolute amongst the goblins, giving little ground as she turned their mud-like bodies to smoking soil. Vorga was scarcely to be seen, but Shaitaan had caught glimpses of her scurrying like a rodent between friends and enemies, the tip of her spear darting out with a surgeon''s precision, often turning away disaster by keeping the things from completely surrounding her allies. Egret was an instrument of precise, swift destruction. The reach of her mace described masterful arcs of death that denied any goblin passage with their bodies intact.


    Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.


    They were killers, all. That is, all except one.


    Shaitaan watched Amani tremble as she steadied the bow trembled in her hands, her arrows slipping sideways of its rest, more a danger to the archer now than to any target.


    Shaitaan wrestled a goblin whose limbs were tangled with hers in a mad grapple. The thing scrambled to find a purchase on her face with it''s stone claws and teeth, but she headbutted it and wrenched it''s arm from the shoulder joint with a wet pop. It thrashed and squealed on the ground, its useless arm a flopping fish tangled in a net. Shaitaan''s boot stomped on its jaw, silencing it for good.


    "What are you doing?" she shouted at Amani, the pale, wide-eyed, passive witness to Shaitaan''s struggle. "Why didn''t you stick that thing before it grabbed me? Rekt!"


    If Amani did answer her, Shaitaan did not have a chance to hear it. Another of the monsters leaped at her, bone dagger raised. The weapon seemed fashioned from a deer''s jawbone, teeth still rattling in their sockets. Shaitaan caught it by the wrist, the edge tearing a bloody notch out of the flesh of her hand. Her short kick shattered the goblin''s knee, and her forearm broke its arm at the elbow, wrenching the limb around the wrong way so the dagger tumbled away. The thing had bleached antlers stitched to its head, so Shaitaan grabbed them and twisted hard. Wet pops and the snapping of branches were the sound of its neck giving way, and the thing crumpled into a tangled mess.


    Shaitaan''s arms were slick to the elbows now with the black muck the things seemed to made of. They smelled of fetid swamp mud and rotting hides.


    When she looked up to yell at Amani some more, the girl had gone. A moment later, Shaitaan saw her. She was huddled at the base of a tangle of trees that had grown together, their crooked trunks making a bowl where she curled and whimpered, her bow forgotten at her feet.


    Deadly assassin? Horse piss, you are!


    There was a hollow rattle and a thumping, like the sound of the goblins, but as though coming from a long hallway. Shaitaan turned, an icy feeling forming in her guts, and she remembered the cave.


    The CAVE! We forgot about the rekt cave!


    It smoked and hissed, like a sickly dragon''s mouth open and crusted with yellow stone. From deep inside, the sounds of clicking, grunting, squealing voices was becoming louder and louder, as though rising slowly from a great depth.


    She looked again at the elf, knowing she would be worse than useless here. She searched for the closest ally on which she could possibly rely. The mad woman Flora was closest, giggling as she sent her spears of deadly light burning through the woods.


    "Flora!" Shaitaan shouted, pointing her finger at the opening. "More are coming!"


    Flora nodded, her pointed had bobbing excitedly. She ran to the entrance, and this time Shaitaan could hear the words she muttered, spells of power that made the air grow dense and tremble. Flora pointed her staff at the tunnel opening, the glittering orbs and rings on its end turning and twisting with increased speed.


    "Magnus ignis!" she cried as the first glowing eyes of the goblins began to appear in the depths.


    Shaitaan saw a ball of seething light form at the tip of the staff, one that erupted into a roaring, rushing stream of fire as wide around as an old tree. The air shook with it, and Shaitaan had to hold up a hand and stumble away to keep herself from being singed. The goblin''s screamed, but not for long. Flora''s laugh of pure joy rose above them and the roaring flame, her face lit orange and white to nearly blinding.


    For a moment, Shaitaan began to wonder if her companions might be more of a danger to her than the creatures in this wasteland. Wild animals and bandits were threats she understood, but magic? Shaitaan had killed sorcerers before, but she didn''t relish the memories. If Flora decided to incinerate her where she stood, could she stop her?


    When the flames finally died, Shaitaan suddenly became aware of another sound, a thump of heavy footsteps and a bellow like an angry ox.


    It was bigger than the other ones. Its short, stubby legs somehow supported a heaving bulk that stood a full two heads taller than Shaitaan. Tusks fashioned from the horns of some great grazing animal jutted out from a helm of shaggy rawhide. A knotted, fire-hardened club hung from its meaty fist.


    She tried to cry out, to warn Flora, but perhaps she''d been temporarily blinded by the flames she''d cast into the tunnel. Or perhaps the magic had weakened her. Or maybe she was just crap when it came to fighting. Either way, the big one was on her when she''d scarcely stopped casting the fire.


    "Fuuu¡ªmph!" Flora called out as the tusked goblin swung a meaty fist and knocked her aside. The magus struck the rocky slope by the cave opening and crumpled to the ground, senseless.


    It was nothing more than luck the thing had not struck her with the club. Still, that luck would mean little if she''d been brained against the rocks. But Shaitaan had no time to wonder about the state of the magus. Big Tusk had just hefted his club, and the char-black end was soon swinging towards her, a blow that could crack her open like pottery.


    Shaitaan feet coiled beneath her and launched her forward. She ducked before meeting the tip of the club and slid on her side under the swing. Her hand snatched a stone from the ground as big as a fist, and she turned and hurled it just as she was coming up again to her feet.


    The blow struck Big Tusk just as it was turning to find her again, cracking against the hide-covered bridge between its barely visible eyes. The creature gave a grunt, but the blow achieved little else.


    Shaitaan snatched a branch from the ground to parry the incoming swing of the club, but she timed it badly. The tip of the club snatched the wood from her hand and spun her sideways. She barely had time to regain her balance when the thing backhanded her hard enough to send her tumbling across the forest floor.


    The forest was spinning. She raised her face from the carpet of pine needles to see Big Tusk tapping the edge of his club against its massive palm. It would reach her before she could stand, she knew. It would stand over her and bring that heavy charred wood down on top of her spine and break her like a child''s toy, that is if one of the smaller, skittering, hissing goblins didn''t stick her in the back first. This was the end of her, the end to Shaitaan the murderess, Shaitaan the hunter of men, Shaitaan the hated. She couldn''t say it wasn''t deserved. Bleeding steps, it was probably deserved ten times over.


    Her only regret was that she hadn''t the courage to do it to herself sooner.


    She was suddenly aware that her hand had something in it, something she''d grabbed as she was still rolling from that last blow. It was the hilt of a sword.


    No.


    She leaped to her feet, quick as a monkey, and tried to throw the thing away, tried to hurl it to the side where it could do no harm, only her fingers would no longer obey her. They wouldn''t let go.


    No, please!


    The rags that had covered it had come loose. They were uncoiling themselves, falling away like the petals of a flower, revealing the gleam of Xoactali hardened copper beneath, a blade as curved and crooked as an acrobat''s spine. It was a hook of beaten metal as long as a canoe paddle, as wide as her hand, as light as moonlight. If that sword could speak it would laugh and boast and sing songs about the many lives it had already taken, and it would whisper sincere promises of what it had yet to do. It was the chosen weapon of the Empress''s deadliest warrior, her champion, The Black Maw.


    "Please don''t kill them!" she pleaded, "Not my friends!"


    But she could not say the words, for her mouth, her tongue, her throat were no longer her own. Icy cold spread through her limbs, which had begun to move on their own.


    "I will kill them all!" her voice answered her, and Shaitaan despaired because she knew it was true.


    **********


    The world was filled with enemies, and that was good. If there was anything she hated, it was waiting. Waiting for a battle to begin, waiting for the enemy to come, waiting to waken and begin her work, it vexed her, infuriated her, filled her with hunger and rage. And yet, as she awoke, here it was, the enemy, strolling towards her with the burned club in its hands, walking as though it was not afraid of her.


    Well, she would cure it of that notion. She would gladly instruct this big bastard in the ways of fear and pain, and finally death. It would be a superb lesson, a master''s class, the only one this big bastard would ever need.


    The club swung sideways, a blow fit to shatter the bones and rupture the guts. An admirable swing, if it could land, but it hit nothing but the wind. That didn''t stop it, she was glad to see. It was persistent. It would try and try again until it or she was dead, and she already knew very well which one of them it would be.


    Come on, you bloodless sack of guts! Give me everything! Give me everything and I will take everything and leave you with nothing but briefest sorrow!


    The thing swung again, but she danced through it and around it, her deft ankles and flowing warbraids flowing like the mighty rivers, swift and strong as typhoon winds, and just as impossible to catch. A big overhand blow this time, and she twirled and laughed as it threw up clods of earth with its impact into the ground.


    Another enemy appeared, a spear in its hand. She flashed it her most dazzling grin, golden fangs framed by white teeth.


    "Dance with me!" she laughed, brimming with the battlejoy now.


    She flicked out her wrist, the curved sword whipping out like liquid fire and slicing her dancing partner from hip to shoulder. Dark ooze sprayed out, flicked from the tip of the blade so it spattered across the eyes of the big tusked one. He bellowed in surprise, clutched at the gore that blinded him, and she laughed to see him thrash about in dismay.


    You cannot see. You wander, lost in the dark. But worry not, child of the earth. I am here. I will set you on the righteous path!


    The sword danced again, with a turn severing the wrist that held the burned club. With another, it opened the big bastard across his heaving stomach and spilled its own insides across its stumbling feet. It''s thrashing arms could not find her, the stump of it''s wrist spraying black muck across her face, her neck, her shoulders, and she delighted in the gift of its life.


    As the tusked one fell, she touched the palm of her hand to the gore that dripped from her cheek. The palm of her hand came back black. It wasn''t blood, not really. She loved blood, the color of it, the coppery taste of it, but this was beautiful too. She opened her mouth, golden fangs parting like the open arms of divine grace. The flat of her tongue pressed against that black, grainy muck, and she licked it completely from the palm of her hand, relishing the earthy flavor.


    There were more of them now. They were angry. That was good. They rattled weapons, screeched threats and oaths of violence. That was good too, very good! That would make them bold, and boldness would bring them to her. For if the Black Maw hated anything, and the Black Maw hated all things, especially all things living, she hated waiting for the good work to begin.


    She turned to face them, a score or more new dance partners, and she gave them her best smile. Behind her golden grin, her tongue and the depths of her mouth were black as pitch, the very jaws of midnight.

 Chapter 12: With Friends Like These

    Balletaria watched in horrified fascination as Shaitaan danced among the goblins, her limbs outstretched in graceful arches and that strange sword aflame with the light of the setting sun. She¡¯d witnessed her open the biggest of the creatures like a roast chicken, smiling, laughing all the while as though the pitched battle were nothing more than the most decadent party among friends.


    The goblins, for all their ferocity, for all their otherworldly savagery, were no match for her graceful cruelty. They were torn apart, their limbs severed, their bodies broken beyond healing. Each thrust of their spears, each slash of their knives, each snap of their jaws was repaid a hundredfold. Her fist smashed jaws, her feet shattered limbs, and her sword¡ªif one could call it that, for it seemed to Balletaria to be the hooked talon of a brazen god of wrath¡ªher sword drew forth their innards and sent their heads and hands dancing through the air. Like a hummingbird flitting from flower to flower, she would dip elegantly now and then, with neck outstretched, to bite the living and the dead. Strings of gore hung from her smiling lips, which glistened black around the golden fangs.


    Balletaria tore her eyes from the horror long enough to spit her sword through one of the things trying to join the focused battle. As soon as Shaitaan had slaughtered the biggest one, the others seemed uninterested in anyone but her.


    Vorga appeared at her side, breathing heavily and leaning on her spear.


    ¡°What in the name of all the gods is she doing?¡± she gasped. She blew at a strand of gray hair that had become plastered across her lips with sweat.


    Balletaria swallowed and flicked her blade with a practiced snap, sending a spray of dark, congealing muck to the earth. The viscous fluid clung stubbornly to the steel.


    ¡°She¡¯s winning,¡± she murmured, though the words tasted wrong in her mouth. Victory was about surviving. It was about living out the day with the enemy far behind you. It was walking away from a fight in one piece. This was none of those things. This was something deeper than mere violence, something raw and unchecked. Balletaria saw no technique, no desire to survive¡ªjust an eruption of fury that had been waiting, festering beneath the surface. Now it was loosed, tearing through the goblin-infested woods in wild, blood-slicked arcs, staining stone and trees alike in its wake.


    Vorga let out a grim chuckle, but it was short-lived. Shy was more than just winning. She was reveling. She drank in the violence, exulted in the carnage. Each movement was a dance of raw, feral beauty¡ªa ritual performed to exactness by the most devoted, fanatic acolyte. The battlefield was her stage, the slain her tribute, and she moved through them like smoke, each strike a perfect, merciless note in a symphony of ruin.


    Balletaria had known killers before, had fought alongside those who killed out of necessity, out of duty, even out of cold pleasure. She''d seen the gang lords of Hubris torture their own men to death over a handful of coppers or the wrong words. But this was worse. It was as if the woman they had traveled with, the warrior they had bled beside, had been little more than a shell, a fragile vessel for the thing that now prowled among the corpses.


    I came here to assassinate...this?


    She clenched her jaw, tightening her grip on her sword. Chapriotti''s task had just become intolerable.


    **********


    A goblin, either braver or more foolish than the rest, lunged. The Maw did not parry, did not dodge. She caught the thing¡¯s wrist mid-strike, like a child taking the hand of a beloved playmate. She twisted, and relished the wet pop of a joint giving way. The goblin shrieked, and its pain was a melody that sang so sweetly to the Maw. The cries of the dying were music, a wild, soaring crescendo to which she danced with unbridled delight.


    Her teeth found its throat. The first bite tore flesh, the second severed something vital. Warmth flooded her mouth, musky and thick. The body spasmed, its life''s rhythm ending in a final, shuddering exhale. The Maw let it drop, exhaling, savoring.


    The others hesitated. They whimpered, their snarls turning to pitiful chittering. Weak. The goblins had already begun to melt away, slinking into the shadows of the trees, their eyes wide with terror. They would not return. She stood, chest rising and falling, tasting the air, feeling the blood cooling on her tongue. The game was ending too soon. Her grip on the sword slackened in disappointment. Her dark eyes flicked across the battlefield, searching, yearning¡ª


    No. Too soon! It¡¯s always over too soon!


    Then she saw her.


    Curled within the twisted hollow of the grown-together trees, she was small, trembling, pressed into the gnarled embrace of the roots like a wounded fawn. The longbow lay abandoned at her side. The painted tips of her ears peeked through smooth braids, and her wide, terrified eyes reflected the carnage as though she were trapped in a nightmare from which she could not wake. Her breath was shallow, her hands clenched against the damp earth, but she did not flee. Spots of dark blood clung to her tunic¡ªnot her own, not yet.


    The girl was a tapestry yet to be woven, an empty canvas yet to receive the first strokes. The Maw would correct that. She would create such art to bring tears to the eye, nourishment to the soul, music the gods themselves would dance to.


    She stepped forward. The girl did not move. That suited the Maw just fine. She did not care if her playthings put up a struggle. Only that they died.


    ¡°Amani¡ª¡± A voice, distant, irrelevant.


    Another step. The sword lifted, eager and insatiable, its wicked edge humming with the echoes of slaughter. It was a lover whispering for another kiss, a hound straining at the leash.


    ¡°Amani, run!¡±


    The pygmy woman with gray hair appeared, her spear in her hand. She stood between the Maw and her prey.


    ¡°That¡¯s enough, girl. You¡¯ve had your fun. Best not get carried away.¡± Meaningless words.


    She took another step.


    The tip of the spear lowered, and the pygmy woman¡¯s eyes narrowed to dangerous slits.


    ¡°Take one more step, and I will poke some manners into you, d¡¯ya ken?¡±


    But the Maw could not be commanded. She could not be bought or bargained with. She smiled wide, let the black void of her mouth stand between them, and took another step. The point of the spear bit into her shoulder, and somewhere far away, in some pit deep inside, a woman screamed in pain, but not the Maw. It only made the music within her swell to a stirring crescendo. Perhaps this pygmy might prove better prey than the trembling waif, after all. The girl could wait.


    ¡°Don¡¯t try it!¡± the pygmy warned, but the sword was already moving.


    **********


    Balletaria watched bewildered as Shy, her shoulder dripping red from walking onto the halfling¡¯s spear, struck down with her sword. Vorga was too quick for it and stepped clear of its path, but her eyes went wide when the blade turned like a leaf in the wind and flew again, this time towards her throat. She just ducked the blow and rolled away, her short feet carrying her out of the range of that terrible hooked blade. But Shy had begun to move, and she was nearly too fast to escape.


    Balletaria had seen men three times Shy¡¯s size go down from a wound half as bad. The bleeding, the shock of it, should have been enough to bring her to her knees, but the savage seemed to barely notice it at all. She smiled and laughed like there was nothing quite so amusing, quite so funny, as the prospect butchering Vorga to pieces.


    Balletaria sprinted to Flora¡¯s side, hauling the magus to her feet. Flora swayed but remained standing, blinking like a dazed owl.


    ¡°Oh good,¡± she slurred. ¡°I didn¡¯t die.¡±


    Balletaria swallowed against the lump in her throat. ¡°Not yet.¡±


    ¡°Not yet,¡± Flora echoed, smiling faintly. She nodded to Shy, who¡¯d just barely missed scything down the halfling from behind. ¡°Classic dungeon boss second phase.¡±


    Balletaria had no idea what that meant, but she didn¡¯t care. She tightened her grip on Flora¡¯s arm, heart hammering against her ribs, feeling utterly helpless as the Maw bore down on Vorga.


    ¡°Can you do anything about this?¡± She was surprised to hear a tinge of pleading in her own voice, but then, who could blame her? The more the evening stretched on, the more desperate things seemed to become. She watched Shy¡¯s speed and mercilessness and wondered if they¡¯d not been safer in the hands of the goblins.


    ¡°Oh, I might have a trick or two,¡± said Flora. She pushed Balletaria away with her hand and brought herself to her full height, though she was still shaking. She gripped the staff in both hands and raised it into the air.


    **********


    Vorga was running, her boots digging into the blood-muddied soil as Shaitaan closed the distance between the two of them. She was smiling. Smiling as Vorga turned just in time to see the sword coming.


    Vorga rolled beneath the cut, springing to her feet with squirrel-like speed, the spear point thrust forward. Her feet adjusted, bracing for the inevitable riposte. ¡°Madwoman,¡± she hissed. ¡°I¡¯ll put you in the dirt if I have to.¡±


    Shy lunged.


    Vorga twisted, trying to sidestep the oncoming sword stroke while keeping her spear where it could do the most damage, , but she was not fast enough. A dark hand with a grip like iron seized the spear¡¯s haft, yanking her forward, off-balance. The next moment, the world lurched sideways as an iron-hard knee slammed into her gut. Breath fled her lungs. She barely had time to register the heel that came up next, cracking against her temple. Stars burst across her vision. She hit the ground hard, rolling, dirt in her teeth.


    Shy was speaking, deep, gutteral growls and hisses. Vorga had never been to the southern empire, but she imagined this was her native tongue. The words were as harsh, as beautiful, and as incomprehensible as the woman herself had become.


    She could see the strange sword catching the red light of the sun setting beyond the trees. It rose into the air, the hand that held it as swift and undeniable as a bolt of lightning. When Vorga had first met Shy, she''d called her soft. Well, she wasn''t now, not un any uncertain terms. The eyes she saw now were hard as a knife edge.


    So this was how she would die, as an old woman with a mouth full of dirt, with her deeds undone and her daughter unavenged. There would be no stopping that sword, and it would part her asunder and leave all her ambitions and plans to the weeds.


    Well, if this is it, then there''s no reason I shouldn''t use it.


    She turned her blind left eye towards her killer, felt the moon-shaped scar beneath it begin to grow hot.


    Damn you, woman, for making me do this now. Not what I intended to use this for, but it''s either now or never.


    But another power, one that was not her own, intervened.


    **********


    Amani¡¯s vision swam, the world sluggish as she tried to focus. She lay sprawled in the mud, her limbs weak, her breath coming in ragged gasps. Her body screamed in protest as she tried to move, tried to will herself upright. The battle raged around her, a swirl of motion and steel. One moment, she''d been facing a horde of goblins, and the next, Shy had stood above her, sword in hand, fanged mouth black as death. Someone had come, had stood between her and certain death, and now she was alone again.


    Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.


    Her foot nudged something hard. It was her bow. It was lying on the ground near her feet. How did that get there? Hadn''t she been holding it a moment ago? She''d remembered holding it, trying to draw the string, to keep the arrow on its rest. She''d killed with it before, hadn''t she? But then the goblins came, and everything that came after was a blur.


    She saw figures darting between the trees, glints of flashing metal, cries of pain, and a shrill, mad laughter that turned her guts to ice. It was Shy, somehow transformed, perhaps not physically, but nevertheless changed. She was now a creature of relentless violence. Gone was the guarded, lonely, intelligent woman she''d met yesterday. In her place was the love of death, personified.


    She was chasing someone. It was Vorga, the halfling. She dodged and rolled as Shy''s evil-looking sword sliced the air around her. Vorga turned to deliver a thrust of her own, but Shy had caught it, turned it aside, and struck the cleric to the ground.


    Amani wanted to do something. She wanted to cry out, to run to them and to stop the senseless murder, to turn back, with her own hands, the hands of time so Shy could go back to being a lonely woman in the company of outcasts, back to when Amani was not so afraid.


    But time, like death, could not be denied or turned aside like a spear thrust or a falling sword. No matter how much Amani willed herself to stand, to speak, to run to those who needed her, she was as fixed to the ground as though she''d been shackled there.


    "Catena dei!" a voice cried.


    There was a searing light, the almost deafening clank of metal, and Shy was thrashing against what seemed to be chains that glowed with fierce, arcane light, chains that encircled her body from chest to ankle.


    Vorga flitted away, her hand pressed to her blind eye.


    Amani barely had time to process the sight before hands grasped her shoulders. She flinched, panic surging, but then she heard a voice¡ªfirm, steady, urgent. "Amani, get up."


    Egret.


    She was kneeling beside her, her face smeared with dirt and sweat, her armor scuffed, scratched, and streaked with the black innards of the creatures, but her eyes were hard. Amani groaned, her limbs trembling as she tried to push herself up. She wasn¡¯t sure she could. The weight of fear pressed down on her heavier than Egret''s weight of steel.


    Egret looped an arm under her and hauled her up. ¡°Lean on me if you have to," she said, her voice as cold as winter, "but you will get moving. You''re not dying here.¡±


    Amani¡¯s legs barely held her, but she clung to Egret, swallowing back a whimper. Then a sound cut through the chaos¡ªa deep, bubbling laugh. It was Shy.


    ¡°Little mageling,¡± she crooned, dark eyes gleaming through the tangle of warbraids matted to her face. ¡°You think your glamour will hold me? Soon I will be free, then you will know the embrace of the Black Maw.¡± Flora knew she was speaking in Xoactali, the harsh tongue of the southern mortal empire, land of fierce warriors with painted faces and priests that plucked organs from sacrificial victims for the pleasure of their gods. She doubted whether any of her other companions could understand her.


    Flora¡¯s voice came sharp, filled with forced bravado. ¡°Well aren''t we chatty? I don''t suppose that was an apology, was it?¡±


    Shy (or was she the Black Maw?) answered with shriek that seemed to come from deep in her guts, in her bones, in her blood. The sigils trembled and flickered. The chains seemed to groan in protest.


    Amani stumbled as Egret left her, sprinting towards the impending disaster, her mace gripped in her fist and her shield slipping from her shoulder.


    "No," groaned Flora, her teeth gritted and her face pinched as though in terrible strain, "you can''t! That shouldn''t be possible!"


    Shy snarled again, long ropes of black gore trailing from a mouth full of vicious teeth. The light flickered again, and the chains squealed. There was a BOOM and the world turned sideways. Light filled every corner of the forest for the briefest moment before the whole thing was plunged again into the long, dark shadows of dusk. Pine needles and dust rained down from the trees above as they swayed with the concussion.


    When Amani found her senses again, she realized the glyphed chains that had bound Shy were gone, and that she stood, swaying, drunken almost, but with the sword still clutched in her gore-soaked hands.


    Flora was on her hands and knees, her staff in shattered pieces just beyond her trembling fingers. The spinning spheres and rings were still now, scattered in pieces around the shards of the shaft. Before, it had seemed made of light made solid. Now, it was crumbling glass, dim and dead.


    A long shadow fell across her, Shy''s. The sword was raised, ready for murder.


    Then Balletaria was there. Steel rang against steel as she intercepted the killing strike. ¡°Snap out of it!¡± she shouted. ¡°This isn¡¯t you!¡±


    Amani saw Shy tilt her head, a cruel smile twisting her lips. ¡°Is it not?¡± she answered in Xoactali.


    Then Balletaria crumpled. Shy, the Black Maw, as she called herself, moved too fast, striking with brutal precision, slipping through the gaps in her guard like water. Amani saw her fall, saw her head snap back as she hit the dirt. She didn¡¯t rise.


    It was then that Amani realized she was standing alone.


    Egret was charging forward, a fighter''s growl in her throat, her bladed mace raised high above her shield.


    Dark, manic eyes saw her coming. Lips curled into a smirk. ¡°Finally, someone worth killing!¡± she said in a tongue no one but Amani could understand.


    Egret didn¡¯t answer Shy''s harsh, clicking, unintelligible taunt. Her lips moved, her mutterings what Amani recognized as holy verse from The Cycle of Seasons, the book of Aethelwyne, the All-mother. Sunlight seemed to blossom on the head of the mace, turning the steel into solid daylight.


    The mace rose and fell, catching nothing but Shy¡¯s thirsty laughter. The sword answered, colliding with the shield with a world-shaking CLANG that sent the armored woman reeling. She found her footing in time to duck a savage blow to her head from the same blade, and her mace swept forward, failing again to harm more than the pine needles falling between them.


    The fight was brutal, relentless. Amani could barely follow the speed of their movements¡ªsteel and fists, blocks and counterstrikes. Egret was strong, but Shy was stronger, faster, tireless. Each time Egret deflected, countered, the Black Maw was already moving again, pressing forward. Amani watched in helpless horror as Egret staggered, as the Maw slipped through her defenses, as something small¡ªtoo small¡ªgave way.


    A single strap of leather, cut clean, the flesh behind it miraculously untouched. But the polished steel cuisse flapped free of Egret¡¯s thigh, hanging useless by her knee.


    The next strike came fast and merciless, driving deep into Egret¡¯s unprotected thigh. Egret gasped, her leg buckling. She fell in a clanking heap as Shy pulled the blade free.


    **********


    The Maw stood over her, blade dripping. She¡¯d laid the armored woman low, maimed her, and now, she would finish the great work on her, then she would start on the others.


    ¡°I shall carve the truth of the world into your flesh,¡± she crooned. ¡°I will write such secrets in you that you will be transformed into holy verse, psalms of blood and flesh and pain that will¡­that will¡­¡±


    Something was wrong. Her fingers felt weak. Her arms were trembling. Her eyes grew heavy and she swayed as though drunk.


    No, she tried to say, but her lips would no longer move. No, no, no, no, NO! It¡¯s too soon! I haven¡¯t had enough time!


    It was never enough time. There had been a time when she never slept, when she could dance and sing and work her glorious work for days at a time. When she and the dreaming woman were nearly one, hardly distinguishable from one another. But now she slept long. She had to satisfy herself with moments of wakefulness, of life, between long droughts of murky dreams.


    No! She tried to protest again, but her body had betrayed her completely now. Her eyes swayed from side to side, to the armored woman, unmoving and bleeding on the ground. To the pointed-eared waif trembling behind her. To the liar, the silver-tongued woman with the needle sword and the pygmy woman gasping as she leaned against a tree. To the sorceress, her staff broken. Her companions. The closest things in the world she had to friends.


    ¡°I will kill you all,¡± was all she could manage to say before darkness took her, before the inky, sticky dreams took her again, suspending her like a mosquito in amber.


    **********


    Silence stretched. Balletaria watched the others, wounded, battered, bleeding, standing around the bodies strewn on the ground.


    Shy stirred, and they all flinched. Balletaria didn¡¯t know whether to run her through with the tip of her blade or to sprint for safety.


    But Shy only writhed on the ground, crying and moaning as though in excruciating pain. She thrashed as though unable to stand, unable to rise to sitting. Her sword lay forgotten just out of hands reach. It still had Egret¡¯s blood on it.


    Amani swallowed, her throat dry. ¡°What do we do with her?¡±


    Balletaria, stirring, breathless, wiped blood from her mouth. ¡°We take Egret and get the hells out of here.¡±


    ¡°And her?¡± Vorga¡¯s voice. It trembled slightly.


    They hesitated.


    Shy cried out, as though in answer. She took in heaving gasps, her limbs moved as though trying to swim through mud. For all that ferocity, for all her deadly speed, it was as though she had acted on borrowed strength, strength that had to be repaid with interest. She lay there, helpless as a baby, moaning and squeaking like one just born.


    ¡°We can¡¯t leave her.¡±


    It was Amani.


    ¡°The hells we can¡¯t,¡± Balletaria corrected her.


    ¡°She saved us from the goblins.¡±


    ¡°She nearly killed all of us!¡±


    Another stretch of silence. Egret stirred weakly. With her wound, she wouldn¡¯t last long. Balletaria¡¯s eyes searched the trees. Was that another eye glittering in the darkness, or was it just a trick of the light?


    ¡°The lass will die if we don¡¯t do something now,¡± gasped Vorga, nudging the butt of her spear towards Egret.


    ¡°Well, that would be the whole point of why you¡¯re here, isn¡¯t it?¡± snapped Balletaria.


    For a moment, Vorga was silent, scowling. ¡°Not here,¡± she answered.


    ¡°Not here,¡± Balletaria repeated. ¡°Then you grab one end, I¡¯ll take the other. We just need to be anywhere but here right now.¡±


    ¡°We can¡¯t leave her!¡± Amani repeated, louder this time. Her eyes glistened as though on the edge of tears.


    Now? Balletaria thought. Now you have something to say? You want to do something? Where was this initiative when all the killing started? When Vorga and Flora and Egret and I all took a beating?


    The question hung between them all.


    Leave her?


    Kill her?


    Or take her with them?