The bell tinkled above as Mertle let herself into the shop, the front door unlocked, startling Tummy on the other side of the room. He held a shovel and had caked-on snow on his boots and trousers.


    “Was beginning to get worried.” He set the shovel in its place and stomped around to shake loose the clinging snow. “If I’d known they’d keep you this long, I would’ve come get you.”


    “Sorry. They had so many questions for me to answer. The bloody—”


    Tummy took her cloak and gestured with a sharp motion of his hand. “Danger,” it said. “Unsafe”.


    Mertle set down the cask of beer on the pitted counter and gestured back her confusion.


    He pointed up. Someone on the roof or nearby. Eyes and ears on them. Lovely. Just bloody lovely. Mertle felt like screaming her frustration while Tummy unpacked the two containers, and the aroma of strong spices filled the room.


    Couldn’t she at least eat her dinner in peace? Or did it count as breakfast?


    She would pity anyone having to keep watch at this hour in the mounting weather outside. But the memory of Quistis and Rumi snuffed out any sympathy as she poked a hole in the beer casket and took a long swig straight from it. It did not mix well with the grimesh from earlier.


    “All well?” Tummy’s hands asked. “Did you learn what happened with your lady friend?” his voice added.


    “Sil’s… not who I thought she was.” She pitched her voice to carry further, a hint of hysteria on its edges. “She’s wanted by the Storm Guard, Tummy. They want me to call them if I ever see her again. They think she’s connected to Cinder!” Added in a nervous laugh on the tail end, just for dramatic effect.


    He picked up the casket, sighed, drank, and belched.


    “Who’s that?”


    “That sorceress that started the fire in Valen.”


    “Wasn’t she dead? Thought they killed her.”


    “Never found the body. She caused that commotion on the Descent Night. Can you imagine? Sil with that… thing?”


    Meanwhile, their hands talked of different things.


    “Suspicion on me. Watched. Cover safe. Both.”


    “Hurt you?”


    “No. Questions. Tricks. Wasp venom.”


    “Are you alright?” Tummy asked as both conversations reached the same question.


    “I’m just so confused. Sil can’t be what they’re saying. She’s not like that. I know it.” A hint of naivety just as the aelir’matar had trained her. Be meek. Be stupid. Never as competent as they expect you to be. “I’m sure we’ll clear everything up when she comes back.”


    Tummy pointed up.


    “Kill?”


    “No.” She hesitated over the next signal. “Can handle.”


    “Plan continues?”


    “Yes.”


    “Good.”


    At least the food was, as always, spectacular. Lotho had sprinkled on some extra green herbs—rare in winter—and that just made all of it maybe ten times better. Her appetite, venom-enforced, devoured everything right down to the last tubers out of Tummy’s plate. It calmed the shake of her hands and the growling frustration she felt.


    “What’ve you been up to while I was gone?”


    “Snow clearing.” He gestured to the shovel. “Wanted to clear the back alley. Didn’t expect more coming down.”


    “Up to Fe’Ora’s?”


    “Aye.”


    “Think she’ll be thankful?”


    Tummy grunted, “Think I’ll bring it up every time she complains about the noise.”


    They moved to the back of the shop and teased the forge fire to roaring again. Definitely too wound up to sleep, she’d try and get some work done before passing out in exhaustion. Tianna would have a lazy day while she hid away from the snowfall. By the time the storm blew itself out maybe she’d have an idea on how to deal with whoever crept across her rooftop.


    Slitting their throat would make her feel better but would hardly improve the situation overall.


    Tummy waggled a finger, and she shook her head. No, not going back to habits that old.


    Maybe Aliana could help? Rather not go to her for this as she hadn’t known the woman before Sil’s introduction letter. Tallah trusted her but Mertle felt like an intruder on the priestess’s time, someone to be suffered rather than helped in earnest.


    Mertle worked the bellows and watched the fire springing to life while Tummy worked.


    A hangman’s noose caressed her throat, the touch of an old memory that she didn’t cherish. With belly full and exhausted from a sleepless night, she couldn’t help but think of the dangling dead. Memory provided the rest.


    The aelir poisoned and assassinated one another by custom. They hung the lower races and let the corpses rot wherever they fancied administering the punishment. Humans weren’t that much better in this regard, given the hangman forests that lined Vas’s rocky shore. They’d stretched on for days as she and Tummy travelled up the Bistry river, the smell of decay lingering even as far as the Inner Sea.


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    “Go rest.” Tummy’s voice startled her out of the memory and realisation hit that she’d been idle. “Don’t think too much on things. We’ll manage somehow.”


    “I—”


    “Go rest, Mertle. Don’t make me pick you up.”


    “Meanie.”


    But he was right, and she was being ridiculous. Better to rest and get some breathing room. Tianna couldn’t stay gone for more than a couple of days without at least Verti getting suspicious. And if Verti decided that her best patron was in some kind of trouble, she would inform the constabulary or—she dreaded the thought—the Storm Guard.


    Yes, I’ll do it, she’d crooned to Vergil, all too eager to jump in the fray but never thinking things through. Dumb elendine. So desperate for Sil’s approval and recognition that she’d stuck herself in this situation, getting deeper in by the day with no real way out.


    And now she was sulking as she got out of her day’s clothes and slipped beneath the sheet on her straw mattress. They could afford better now but she couldn’t sleep as well on a soft bed as she did on the straw. Some things were ingrained too deep and would remain that way.


    Stupid, stupid elendine, Sarrinare whispered. You ran from me but keep so well to everything I taught you. What would you admit to now, on the venom’s last dregs, if I had never taught you how to refuse its effects?


    Tummy worked his forge, and she was thankful for how he put hammer to metal. Consistent noise, one strike, two aftershocks, a breath’s pause. Again. His rhythm normally helped her sleep and ignore the voice.


    You cannot ignore me now, elendine. You’ve chosen this. How will you silence me when you need my help at every turn? Would you like me to tell you every mistake you’ve made today?


    Tossed and turned under the sheet, kicked it off her, pulled it back. Stilled her breathing and counted fruit on an Olden branch. Tried even something Sil had showed her for sound sleeping but it worked much better with her lover’s touch. All of it in vain. She struggled to ignore her imagination and it, in turn, yapped at her ceaselessly.


    You’ve neglected your training and played this stupid character for so long that it’s become your nature. She was not a character.


    How will you get to the Sisters now that they watch you closer than ever? Be better than they are.


    How will you go about fulfilling your mission now? They’ll hang when they come back. Two more nooses swung on the winds of imagination, drawn tight against Tallah and Sil’s necks, lying scrolls pinned to their heads.


    Sloppy work begets death. Have I not taught you that? All too well.


    Did you think it would get less true if you ran from me?


    Maybe she should work. Or pick up the shovel and clear some of the fresh snow, get herself properly sweaty and tired. Tummy would clap her over the ear and send her straight back to her straw and the voice whispering there.


    If she ignored it enough, it would eventually cease. It always did before. Why not tonight? How far must she get from that thrice-damned aelir’matar so she’d finally shut up?


    Something thudded on the roof. At first, she thought it still some trick of her ambitious imagination but then another followed, and dust drifted down. A shrill whistle echoed for a heartbeat and was cut off.


    She was up on her feet by the time another thud sounded, trying to get dressed and stumbling over her feet. Tummy thundered by her, sword in one hand, shield in the other. She caught the belt of knives he threw her in passing and hopped one-booted while she fastened it on.


    Cold and snow erupted inside when Tummy opened the door and burst out.


    “Oy!” he called. “You, there! What d’you think you’re doing?”


    Mertle was on his flank in the next heartbeat, half-dressed but with her aelir dagger in hand. Its weight was a comfort she’d desperately needed all day.


    Shadows. Only shadows in the back alley crossing between shops. Like tar, they clung to walls and swallowed the lamp light that should’ve come in from the other side. Whatever meagre glow spilled out of their workshop got swallowed by that impenetrable dark.


    Snow rolled down in sheets off their roof, already gathered in tall lumps by the wall. Bright red stains glitter in the no man’s land between shadow and light.


    Tummy moved forward, sword point in front, shield up, eyes roaming the immediate surroundings. She protected his flank and back as they advanced.


    “Thought I saw—”


    He fell silent as a woman’s face appeared out of the tar, ghostly pale in the black night. Round glasses covered nearly half of her face but now Mertle could see the cold, calculating gaze behind them. A moment of gazes meeting. Cold fear gripped her spine at the depth of fury she sensed.


    The same woman as before to ignite fresh fear in her.


    A rush climbed gripped her chest. Was this one of Rumi’s people? Had she offended the Guard after all, and they’d come for… for what?


    Tummy advanced. Mertle pressed her thumb to the blade and drew a bead of blood. Runes came alive along the keen edge, burning as they reacted to the illum weaving in the air. A good deal of weave hung unseen in the air going by how her dagger buzzed in warning. Two of them against one channeller—a night-weaver by the looks of her—in a narrow arena. Terrible odds but not impossible to overcome.


    The woman scrunched up her nose, sniffed loudly, and stepped over a body lying in the snow. Shadows moved with her. Tendrils of smoke slithered in the narrow space with terrible intent. A white hand grasped a dagger still dripping fresh blood. Mertle strained to see the second hand, the real danger, but it was well concealed by the dark.


    “I assume I can’t ask you two to pretend you haven’t seen me?” A rough voice, husky and gravelly, pitched low. A heavy smoker by the sound of it. Not a hint of malice in the words.


    “Who are you?” Tummy asked before she could. “Get away from that man.”


    Her shadows gathered tighter around, and the second hand appeared out of the darkness to waggle a finger at Mertle. “Careful how you play with fire, girl. Guard your mouth. Too much work depends on you not messing this up. Next time I won’t ask nicely.”


    “What? I don’t know what you mean.”


    But she was gone. In a blink. She took a step back into her gathered net of tar and puffed to smoke. Light flooded in from the alley mouth and revealed the crumpled body in the snow. Mertle closed the distance to it and turned the man over while Tummy guarded her.


    “Stealth gear,” she called out. “Still alive but barely.”


    “Take him in. We’ll dress the wound.”


    “It’s one of them. He’s been following me.”


    “Bad idea to have a corpse on our hands. Drag him in.” Tummy moved aside and pressed his back to the neighbouring wall, eyes running across their slanted roof.


    She dragged the man up on her shoulder and stumbled to her feet, calves and thighs protesting the effort. Hot blood wet her shirt as she carted him in to set down on their table. Tummy joined a few heartbeats later as she brought out gauze and disinfectant.


    “Get a healer,” Tummy instructed as he cut off the man’s clothes. “I’ll dress the wounds, but I’m not wasting a draught on him.”


    Who to get at this hour?


    The idea was insidious in its simplicity, and she smiled as she pulled on her cloak, the chill of the open door now biting through her. Her knife, bloodied still and active, hung quiet on her belt.


    “Keep him alive,” she instructed as she drew on a shawl. “I’m going to bring his master.”


    A nod from Tummy sealed the idea. She rushed out and set towards the Fortress at a dead run while, above, the sky lit up with the first wisps of morning.