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.

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  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!"