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—and its proportional risk—ahead 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?veté.

  "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.

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  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—er...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—Shy, was it?—was 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.