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.

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