Only Villains Do That

It took us most of a day’s hike to get into position along the main trade road where it led to Gwyllthean from the surviving northern landbridge. The khora forest encroached onto civilized territory in the northern reaches of the island, not quite pressing against the central highway but with an arm coming close and islands of it on the eastern side, which I was told only happened up north. The eastern half of Dount was all agricultural land, of which there was a little west of the road but mostly khora plantations and then the forest itself. I also learned, in our trek across the wild north of Dount, that it wasn’t all farms and khora; this place had other biomes that didn’t appear on Earth.

We passed an area where the ground had been carved into numerous shallow canyons by a combination of erosion and burrowing animals, which now had a ceiling of matted vines forming a porous carpet over the tops and had soil built up in places from which more plants sprouted, their roots hanging into the shadowed channels below along with intermittent shafts of sunlight. From what I could see into the tunnels as we passed by, it was quite pretty, but my followers warned me to stay out of there. Such areas were apparently inhabited by dangerous predators, goblins, and bandit gangs.

There were also the bladegrass groves we passed. They reminded me of bamboo forests, except instead of round shafts, the narrow, vertically-growing leaves, two or three stories tall on average, had serrated edges sharp enough to cut flesh. I needed no warning to refrain from getting too close to that. Apparently they spread annoyingly fast and cutting them back when they got too near inhabited land was a nightmare which always necessitated adventurers or other Blessed.

We got there, though, reaching an arm of the khora forest positioned on an overlook not too distant from the main highway; I suspected the only reason this didn’t see more frequent use by bandits was it was within view (with my spyglass, anyway) of the Fflyr border fortress positioned near the northern edge of the island. Well-repaired, fully garrisoned and flying colorful banners, it was a glimpse at what North Watch must have looked like in its heyday.

We’d pushed it to get here, and were in time to observe the Crown Rose Company caravan wending its way past the border fort toward the heart of the island; it wouldn’t be long before they had to stop for the night. I was all set to follow them from a distance, waiting for an opportunity when other nearby traffic was light to unleash fire slimes and wipe out their precious cargo, when Sakin just had to open his mouth. It was worse than when Donon opened his mouth, because Sakin was correct.

“So, we’re going to perform a surgical strike on this caravan whose failure only benefits exactly one person? I guess if we leave no traces nobody can prove the Auldmaer Company is behind this, but let’s face it, proof doesn’t matter all that much. Of course, a big mercantile outfit like Crown Rose doesn’t even need to bribe magistrates to retaliate against a little player like Auldmaer. I thought your plan was to make use of this guy in the longer term, Lord Seiji. For that, wouldn’t he need to still be alive a month from now?”

That was not what I wanted to hear, mostly because it was accurate. In order to pull this off, I realized it couldn’t look like an attack with a specific, motivated target. That meant I had to include a lot of the one thing I most wanted to avoid: collateral damage.

So we shifted position, following the caravan toward the rest area where they would stop for the night now that they were safely in Fflyr territory, and I stewed in my ever-increasing, impotent fury the entire way.

While the Crown Rose wagon train got themselves settled in for the night at the highway waystation surrounding a crossroads, we positioned ourselves at the nearest point to it which was sheltered by a patch of wild khora forest. Since the waystation was surrounded by a well-maintained empty field on all sides specifically to discourage what we’d come here to do—bandit attacks—that put us at enough of a distance that we’d have no hope of crossing the grounds unseen on foot even in the dead of night, and no conventional weapon would reach the waystation accurately, if at all.

Fortunately, these defenses hadn’t been made with me in mind. All I needed was a view of my target, and thanks to the ever-valuable spyglass, I could hit the Crown Rose wagons directly from our chosen vantage.

There was a Kingsguard post, though it was tiny and according to my crew the soldiers there were only interested in collecting the King’s tariffs and “the King’s tariffs” (bribes), not enforcing the peace. The inn had its own bouncers and bigger caravans would always travel with dedicated guards, so that was it for defenses. Disorganized and likely to scatter to their own interests in a crisis, but still not something I wanted to take on with my pitiful handful of social rejects, so we needed to avoid being noticed. The inn was a sizable structure made of two huge pieces of curved purple khora shell arranged to form a sort of half-dome with bricks and planks making up the remaining wall, while the Kingsguard barracks, little more than a rickety-looking watchtower with a modest office attached, was built of the same blue-gray-green akorthist blocks as North Watch. Aside from that the grounds where wagons were to park were nothing but a wide area around the crossroads trampled permanently flat by use, with no discrete boundary between it and the surrounding field of grass. There was a natural spring on the grounds, now with a structure built over it positioned against the side of the inn which provided water to outdoor ducts and the building’s kitchen. From that, a stream (muddy from the waystation’s refuse) trickled away through the field.

At least I had the benefit of expert advice: Sakin, as it turned out, had experience as an arsonist. None of the other bandits had known this, but absolutely no one was surprised.

“The rule of thumb for a discreet job,” he lectured quietly as we all peered across the meadow in the falling darkness, “is to make it look natural. That means the fire has to start not only at a place where fire can, but where it most likely would in an accident. You also want to only use materials already found on the site; anything you bring in to enhance the fire is a clue to its cause. Now, we’re a little handicapped in that regard due to the means at your disposal of fire starting, but we’ll still want to focus on a plausible target to begin with.”

“Amazingly detailed,” I said. “Actually, I’m really surprised to learn the Kingsguard investigate fires that diligently. From what everybody’s told me, it sounds like the difference between them and the likes of us is we don’t have fancy uniforms.”

“Oh, not in the least. The Kingsguard won’t even bother asking questions unless there’s a whole series of fires that are incredibly obviously arson, and that only if the assets of someone important are affected. Even then, they most likely ‘solve’ the crime by arresting whatever random known criminal they get their hands on first. I don’t think Fflyr Dlemathlys even employs any alchemists equipped for that kind of investigation.”

I lowered the spyglass, staring vacantly at the sky above the distant horizon. Rationally, I knew it didn’t matter and would be a waste of time, but…fuck it, I had to ask.

“Why, then, do you go to so much effort to make yours untraceable?”

“Lord Seiji!” Sakin turned to me, putting on a wounded expression in the dimness. “A man has to take pride in his work. Where’s the satisfaction in standing over the ash and ruin of your enemy’s hopes and dreams if you know, in your heart of hearts, that you half-assed it?”

Slowly, I shifted my head to meet his eyes.

“You will either be the first to betray me, or my last loyal servant by my side as we charge into the jaws of Hell.”

“Right?!” He grinned in sheer delight. “I don’t know about you, my lord, but I’m excited to find out which! We’re going places, you and I.”

“First things first. Biribo, what’s the situation with Blessed down there?”

“I count thirteen, boss,” he reported, “among about two hundred fifty people around the buildings and encampments. I can get a more accurate headcount, but I’d have to get closer.”

“Shouldn’t matter. Anything we should watch for from the Blessed?”

“Seven Blessed with Magic, six with Might. I can’t actually see what spells a sorcerer has unless they use ‘em in front of me, but none of the artifacts I’ve glimpsed from back here look like they have any application in fire suppression. Spells for that do exist, and some of those sorcerers are caravan guards which is a job where that can be relevant, so…maybe? There are also combat spells using water, ice, and wind that can be applied to firefighting.”

“Oh, we can only hope some idiot tries to fight fire with a combat wind spell,” Sakin chortled. “That’s likely to get everything short of the surrounding khora burned to ash. Now that’s a show!”

Heads shifted in the dark as everyone turned to stare at him. He didn’t seem to notice.

“All right, for our opening move. Lord Seiji, see that little annex sticking out from the back of the inn? Look for marks painted on it in yellow.”

I trained the spyglass where he indicated, squinting. “It’s dark down there, man, I don’t know how—oh, wait, yeah. There’s something painted on the outside wall. A cross in a triangle.”

“And that’s why they’re painted in bright yellow, so it’s visible in low light. That’s their asauthec storage.”

“Aha.”

Asauthec, or “three oils,” was one of the more interesting things I’d discovered about life on Ephemera. Lacking wood to burn, and with no fossil fuels because they refused to dig, Ephemerans had devised another means of controlling fire: three blends of oils, made by alchemists from (of course) khora byproducts. The three were asaulend (slow oil), asausee (hot oil), and asaukhad (bright oil). As the names suggested, asaulend would burn for far longer than should be possible, and so would anything soaked in it; asausee produced a dimmer flame with incredible heat; and asaukhad did the opposite, burning at low temperature but putting off intense light. All of the asauthec oils could be blended together in different proportions; by mixing and matching, the Ephemerans could—using only bundled reed torches and fern fronds piled in fireplaces—control the duration, temperature, and luminosity of fire with a degree of precision wildly beyond Earth societies at a comparable state of development. All of what passed for their technology was based on this.

Which meant, of course, that every dwelling and structure on this planet contained a hearty stockpile of highly combustible fluids. If they weren’t building from non-flammable khora, every city in the world would be razed to the ground every two weeks. As it was, fires tended not to spread between buildings, but would turn a house into a blast furnace once its stocks of asauthec caught flame.

“So,” I said aloud, “a fire slime by the storage—”

“No, no, no!” Sakin interrupted hastily. “Remember, you want it to look accidental. Taking care around asauthec storage is one of the fundamental pillars of society, Lord Seiji; it’s up there with bringing in the harvest, revering the goddess and not digging into the earth. If a fire is set anywhere near asauthec stocks, it means it was either deliberate or multiple people were implausibly stupid. And that is the feature we’re going to use to create our accident.”

He leaned forward, bracing one hand behind the outcropping of khora shell behind which we were hiding, and squinted at the dim scene before us. Here under the khora we were in the dark, but the view over the field was much better. It was a clear evening; also, it never got truly dark on Ephemera, just really dim. After some consideration I realized sunlight must be filtering through the empty core of the planet, so the illumination didn’t stop when the sun faced the other side of the world, it was just muffled by whatever was down there in the core. Or, hell, maybe the core was that bright. When I’d seen it from orbit I recalled a reddish glow down there.

“We’re in luck,” Sakin said, more intent and focused than I’d ever seen him, “it hasn’t rained in a week. You remember how easily the grass caught during the ambush this morning. Should be the same here. So! What we are doing, Lord Seiji, is telling a story. There must be a believable narrative that ends with the Crown Rose caravan losing their cargo without anyone being personally to blame. Any number of possible things might start a fire in dry grass that tall. What we want to do is set the initial spark far enough from the waystation that it’ll be seen coming and they have an opportunity to muster a response. You’ll want to study the way light shimmers on the grass, see how the wind is progressing, and pick your initial spot somewhere upwind in a position the flames will naturally spread toward the asauthec storage.”

“Which’ll muster everybody to emergency firefighting duty to prevent that, and away from the caravan,” I said, catching on.

“That’s one purpose, an important one,” he nodded. “It also creates witnesses to the fact that this started as a random grass fire. Once it’s underway, you will have to maintain an active control over the scene, Lord Seiji. You must maneuver fire slimes, and summon new ones as needed, to spread the fire in a way that is both believable as a natural spread of flames due to wind and grass, and lead it to the parked caravan. Their defensive actions will concentrate on preventing the asauthec from going up, which you can use to create openings. Shame there’s not a caravan shipping asauthec at the moment, but ah well, can’t have it all. Crown Rose personnel, and probably others, will be using water from the spring to create a firebreak protecting their interests. Ideally you’ll be able to get the fire to that point before they get defenses up, but it’ll depend on how things develop. Whatever happens, you’ll have to get the grass fire as close as possible to the wagons for plausibility. I’ve seen sparks travel an amazing distance on the air, but we’re dealing in what’s believable, not what’s accurate, so the closer the better.”

“It sounds almost like a video game, the way you describe it,” I muttered. “I wouldn’t be surprised to see something like this on the app store.”

He gave me an inquisitive look. “They must have some really interesting games where you’re from, Lord Seiji.”

Actually, planting fire slimes in the Crown Rose caravan would be the easy part. From our current vantage, I had the correct angle to see into about half the wagons, which meant I could put a slime inside them. For the others, they’d have to climb the wheels or something; I decided to place the slimes inside the targets I could and let the bundled fabric within go up before moving on to the others, in the hope that the flames would obscure the sight of burning slimes climbing into the rest. The wagons themselves were made of akorshil, so they wouldn’t burn…though it occurred to me I didn’t know what happened to akorshil if it got too hot. It was made from shells, so probably it’d crack and collapse…could I make use of that?

“Also,” Sakin added, “make sure to set fire to a few other wagons. It’ll still be a skeevy-looking coincidence if the Crown Rose train goes up and none of the rest are even touched.”

I sighed heavily and lowered the spyglass so I could stare across the broad field and the waystation in its center without being able to pick out any details about the people whose night I was about to ruin.

“And here I was letting myself think I could maybe get through this without hurting too many bystanders.”

“Please, they’ve got a sizable water source right there, and grass fires don’t burn that hot. They’re only dangerous if you get overtaken or surrounded by one, which can’t happen on the packed ground of the waystation itself. If anybody gets themselves charbroiled, it’s because they were so stupid they were inevitably gonna die of something before long and you can’t really be blamed for being the one who happened to do it.”

“Sakin,” I said patiently, “I get that you’re trying to help, but you need to develop an instinct for when you’re better off keeping your mouth shut.”

“Ah, my apologies, Lord Seiji. Managing Rocco left me with some bad habits; sometimes I forget you don’t need to be managed. How about this, then: Ordinary folks will get themselves and their belongings out of the line of fire, which they’ve got plenty of room to do, the way the station is laid out. Anybody running a big enough caravan that they’ve got substantial assets on the line got those assets but screwing over a bunch of those ordinary folks who were in no position to fight back. Why, Crown Rose alone made their initial fortune burning grain harvests so they could sell their stockpiles at a huge markup.”

“It does help a little, to think of that,” I said, my voice as dry as the grass. “Is it even slightly true?”

He shrugged, grinning cheerfully. “I mean, probably? There’s a fundamental difference in the brain between people who move money around for a living, and people who do something useful to society. A merchant is a bandit with manners. If it tells you anything, I considered going into the merchant trade, but it turns out I don’t have a head for numbers. I am an artist.”

“Well, I think we can call that the clincher.”

I focused my spyglass back on the field, watching the way grass moved in the faint light to track the direction of the wind, and deciding to put off dealing with the observation that Sakin was obviously working out how to “manage” me. At some point I was going to have to seriously decide whether he was too useful to get rid of, and if not, what form that “getting rid of” would take. But, one intolerable dilemma between pragmatism and basic morality at a time. Better concentrate on my current crime against humanity before plotting the next one.

“Summon Fire Slime.”

In the end, it was all too easy, and that wasn’t even the worst part.

After Sakin’s detailed battle plan I had expected it to be extremely hard to manage, but the actual process of setting fire slimes in the field and coaxing the resulting blaze toward the waystation was quite simple. As it turned out, the hardest part was restraint: I had to wait, initially, for my first spark of fire to be noticed and reacted to, since the plan required attention and for the waystation’s inhabitants to be rallied. Also, it turned out I didn’t need to summon as many additional fire slimes as I’d expected. I had gone into this with the supposition that I would have to surreptitiously simulate the entire fire under the noses of the defenders, but in reality fire does spread quite easily, especially through dry grass under a steady wind. Ultimately I only had to fake a few additional sparks to the sides of the rapidly expanding grass fire in order to open up new fronts and divert attention.

No, the worst part was that it was kinda fun.

It was like a video game. It was a challenge that required me to pay attention to an entire field of action, switching my focus rapidly with the demands of the evolving situation and using my extremely limited toolkit of abilities to create the events I needed to unfold to achieve my objective. I quickly found myself entering a state of flow not unlike the sensation of losing myself in a piece of music—partly from just concentrating on a task which engaged multiple centers of my brain simultaneously, but if I was being honest, probably at least in part because that was far more palatable than letting myself think about the ethical implications of what I was doing.

The whole thing went very smoothly, considering that I was literally playing with fire. Two of the Blessed with Magic on site turned out to have water spells; neither were attached to the Crown Rose caravan, but one obligingly turned her focus to the wagons when I conjured fire slimes inside them. I doubted she had any particular attachment to the Crown Rose Company or even knew who they were, it was just that wagons packed with tight rolls of cloth burned a lot higher and hotter than field grass and once that train started going up, sparks began spreading to the point that I actually didn’t have to artificially start more fires among the rest of the wagons.

By the time the grass fire was petering out for lack of anything else to burn at the edge of the hard packed earth under the wagons, most of the load of shimmersatin was ash, and every wagon in the vicinity had been soaked through the efforts of Blessed and people hauling buckets from the spring. I guess once cargo started catching fire, safeguarding it became everyone’s priority. Thanks to their constant dousing, there was only minor damage to the nearby caravans and they managed to save three of the Crown Rose wagons entirely.

I decided to let that go; it was less fabric than Auldmaer had in his shipment, which meant Crown Rose’s bulk discount had gone up in smoke and they wouldn’t be able to undercut him unless they were willing to give up on recouping any of their losses from this disaster. I figured I could count on the money people to choose money. Besides, all the water being thrown around had snuffed out my fire slimes, and thus all evidence that anything fishy had gone on here. From this distance I of course couldn’t be sure no one had seen a fire slime, but they’d have nothing but a half-glimpsed recollection of an odd round shape on fire in the middle of a much bigger fire, so I wasn’t worried about that.

When it was over, I found myself surprisingly exhausted. Not sweating or out of breath, but my whole body had been tense with concentration for close to an hour and my limbs were incredibly stiff when I shakily rose from the position where I’d been crouched.

Worse, with the “game” finished, I had nothing to distract me from the reality of what I’d just done.

Now, standing apart from the rest of my gang under the shade of a big blade of khora whose fringe of gently waving fronds surrounded me like a protective umbrella, I stared down at the waystation, currently still scurrying like a kicked anthill, lost inside my own head. In the near distance I could hear muted voices as the North Watch gang conversed quietly; the only sound close to me was the buzzing of Biribo’s wings as he, for once saying nothing, hovered in his accustomed spot near my shoulder.

Amid the people running about, I couldn’t help staring at the few sitting or standing despondently around the charred remains of the Crown Rose caravan, staring at the sodden ashes of their paychecks. I could comfort myself, as Sakin had tried to, with the idea that the people really being screwed over here were the rich bosses who did shit like squeeze smaller players like Cadimer Auldmaer out of their livelihoods… But the reality I well knew was that in any world, the primary skill of people in power was directing profits to themselves and costs to those below them. It would be hopelessly naive to think you could stick it to the Man and not have the worst of the poking felt by a hundred less important people who actually worked for a living.

I’d known that, and done it anyway. Auldmaer was right: you only found out whether you’d take the devil’s deal once it was offered. If it was my ass on the line as Virya’s plaything or setting fire to a waystation…well, I had made my choice. I was not happy about the side effects I had created. In the same dilemma, though, I’d do it again.

In fact, I was explicitly planning to. That was the whole point of forming a partnership with Auldmaer in the first place.

Boots crunched in the undergrowth as Aster came over to stand beside me. She was silent, just standing there.

I probably would have let the silence hang, not feeling like talking…except for the way she had reached out to me that morning in our short walk across the meadow. It had subtly shifted something between us, and left me feeling a need to be understood.

“In the end, I mostly just think people are selfish. And prone to self-delusion.” My voice was a bit hoarse.

“You really have a speech about how people suck for every situation, don’t you. Does it make this feel better?”

“That isn’t—I mean, yes, I do, but this isn’t that. I don’t think I want it to feel better. What I meant is, I’m not sure I believe in the idea of evil. If you really dig into people’s motivations when they talk about ‘evil,’ they’re basically always referring to whatever isn’t comfortable for them to think about. Something they instinctively don’t like but can’t be arsed to try to understand. If you look at what someone’s thinking when they do something that is clearly wrong, they always have an explanation. A whole story, in fact; some way they’ve worked it around in their heads so that whatever shitty thing they’ve decided to do is actually right and justified. So, yeah. Selfish, deluded…lazy, both intellectually and morally. But evil, I can only comprehend that as a thing that someone fully knows is wrong, won’t excuse even to themselves, and then decides to do anyway. I think…people will usually try to do the right thing. They rarely succeed, because people are selfish and very good at rationalizing why the right thing is to chase whatever animal impulse is flitting across their brain at a given moment. It’s not common that people will just deliberately and purposely do wrong, without offering a pretext that it isn’t.”

Her head shifted in the darkness as she half-turned to look at my face.

“I only just realized I’ve never done anything I have to categorize as evil before this morning,” I murmured. “I’m not a very nice person, Aster. Shut up, I don’t need any of the obvious comebacks right now. I mean, I’ll acknowledge being something of an asshole. But this… This feels different. Categorically different. I don’t…particularly like how it feels.”

She turned back to gaze out over the teeming waystation. “You must come from a very nice place, Lord Seiji. To me it seems like your definition of evil is a lot more common than you seem to think. It’s weird how you can be so generally down on people but at the same time apparently have more faith in their basic decency than even I do.”

“Don’t get me wrong, I think people are more or less garbage. Just…self-centered, stupid garbage, not deliberately malicious. Usually.”

“Can’t say I agree,” she mused, shaking her head, “but maybe that’s for the best. What experience has taught me is that life is hard and to get by you have to do a lot of things you’re ashamed of. It’s just… I think the difference is I’ve never really had any power over anyone. Not like you do, now. Maybe you haven’t, either, if you were just a musician in your own country? Having to make bad choices in order to live another day must be very different when your choices only affect yourself. When you have to create consequences for a lot of people like this…that’s got to be hard. I don’t think I can judge you, except to say I’m glad it’s not me.”

“Hm. Maybe you have a point, there.”

“I’m no philosopher,” she said quietly, “or even a priestess. I’m just someone who’s survived this long and had to accept the necessity of doing some things that still cost me sleep, occasionally. I don’t know the answers, but I’ve figured out the only way to make peace with it in my own mind that makes any sense to me. If…you’re interested.”

I watched one of the figures by the remains of the Crown Rose caravan get up and trudge toward the inn. Seconds later, another who’d been poking around the shell of one of the wagons just sat down in the mud.

“I think I’d like to hear it.”

Aster nodded. “You do whatever you have to do, Lord Seiji, and never make excuses or justifications, never pretend you haven’t done what you’re ashamed of. And, every time you have the opportunity, be kind. Take any chance to put some good into the world, in payment of the bad.”

“Do you think that actually balances out?”

“I’m not sure I believe balance is…a thing. How would you even begin calculating the weight of good and evil? Maybe the goddess…sorry, goddesses can do it, but I dunno. I just live with the fact that there’s no real certainty about anything and all I can control is how much of an effort I make. So I try to do good. To be kind.”

“To be kind,” I whispered. “Huh. You know, I’m…not sure I’d know where to begin attempting that. I mostly just try not to deal with people or even think about them if I can avoid it.”

“That astonishes me to hear, Lord Seiji.”

“Up yours.” I hesitated, then went on more quietly. “Can I rely on you to…help? It’s not that I mean ill toward most people, Aster, I just sort of…don’t think about ways or reasons to do nice things.”

“Well, it’s like any habit. Takes some practice to instill it.” It was hard to read her expression in the dimness, especially with her dark complexion, but I distinctly saw the flash of teeth as she smiled. “But, sure. I can help you get started.”

I nodded, then cleared my throat. That was about my tolerance of squishy feely stuff for one day. “Biribo, can you do a quick sweep of our perimeter without getting too far? As much as we’ve stirred up that outpost, I want to make sure we’re not going to blunder into an unexpected group of bystanders when we try to leave.”

“Good idea, boss,” he said. “Gimme just a minute!”

I could barely see the black lizard in the dark at all, but the buzzing rapidly diminished as he shot away among the khora.

“This is never to be repeated in front of the lizard,” I said very quietly, taking a step closer to Aster. “He was assigned to me by Virya and I’m pretty sure his only real loyalty is to her. I’m not doing this shit because I like it, Aster, I’m here because of what she threatened me with if I don’t play along. Virya is the real enemy. I have absolutely no idea how, or even where to start, but my end goal is to stick it to her. I’ve got no quarrel with the Hero or the other goddess and no interest in world domination. We play along until I can figure out a way to turn on her without being summarily destroyed. Can I count on you?”

She nodded once, her eyes gleaming in the faint light. “I’m in, Lord Seiji. I’ve got your back.”

I nodded back, and stepped away toward the rest of my crew without another word, Aster keeping pace alongside me. I’d just reached them and not had time to say anything when the buzzing of oversized wasp wings heralded the return of my familiar.

“Good thing you thought to check, boss, we got movement out there,” he reported. “Not from the waystation, though—looks like a bandit gang. They must be based somewhere close enough to’ve caught wind of the fuss. About twice our numbers from what I saw, but no Blessed among ‘em.”

“Hm,” I muttered. “This close to a Kingsguard outpost? Well, I can see it being a good spot for opportunity, if they’re willing to risk it.”

“The Kingsguard doesn’t patrol in the khora forest, Lord Seiji,” said Goose. “They wouldn’t step foot in here unless a beast tribe tried to move in this close to the waystation. Which one wouldn’t, if there’s a gang camped nearby.”

“All right, change of plans,” I said. “I was going to send you lot back to North Watch while Aster and I make for Gwyllthean, but I don’t want to risk it until we’re out of range of these guys. It’ll be useful to know where they are, but I’m not interested in mixing it up with another gang just yet.”

“Oooh, I like the ‘yet’ in that sentence,” Sakin chirped.

“Biribo, lead us on a course that avoids contact with anybody,” I ordered. “When we’re at a good distance, we’ll split up. I don’t want to risk you lot getting outnumbered unless you’ve got two Blessed here to even the odds.”

“Thanks, Lord Seiji,” Harold piped up.

I turned toward him, raising an eyebrow. “For what?”

“Rocco would’ve just left us all to fend for ourselves,” Kasser answered. “In fact, he did that. Multiple times.”

“Next time it occurs to you to compare me to Rocco, you might want to consider that his first encounter with me ended with his head rolling across the floor. I look after my people, among the multiple things I do that aren’t pants-on-head idiotic. Biribo, lead on. Let’s move out, people. The night is young, and there’s no rest for the wicked.”