Only Villains Do That

Over the next hour I learned that Miss Minifrit was a capable administrator, as well as someone who had the respect of her working girls and did her best to look after their interests. One by one, she singled out and brought before me women who needed medical attention of one kind or another, and also one of her bouncers who had taken a kick to the knee recently and was still limping. She did this without interrupting her business, or revealing to any of her clients that there was anything out of the ordinary going on in the back halls. Some were discreetly pulled off the main floor, some collected as they left the private rooms having finished up with clients, all brought brought to me with no disturbance to the Alley Cat’s operations.

Early on, Minifrit asked me pointedly if I needed to see what was amiss in order to heal it. She did this in front of a woman of barely twenty who had nothing obviously wrong with her; Fflyr lowborn was mostly too dark-skinned to visibly blush (at least to my eyes), but the poor girl looked at the floor in clear mortification. I did not, and told her so. After that, I’d say at least half of the women brought to me showed no signs of anything wrong, though a few had patterns of sores along their lips, hairlines, or the backs of their hands. Odd symptoms, but okay. I’d known before coming here what prostitutes in a dump like this would mostly need healing from, and just worked my magic without comment.

There were other things, too. Nobody else had been beaten nearly as badly as Kastrin, but a handful of the women had bruises and scrapes in suggestive places. One had a bad burn on her arm from a kitchen accident; to judge by the way she burst out crying upon being Healed and had to be stopped from hugging me by both Minifrit and Aster, it must have hurt her a lot. Another just had a bad toothache, which seemed almost prosaic given the rest of what I’d seen here but which I knew was a serious matter. In a pre-dentistry society, an untreated infection like that could eventually kill, and it would be a very painful death.

I quickly found that I preferred the suspicion to the gratitude. It was…sensible, even comforting, the way some of them warily watched me for the other shoe to drop, unwilling to believe anyone with this kind of power would do such a thing with no ulterior motive. Mostly, I supposed, because they were right. My ultimate intentions weren’t harmful to them—or at least, I told myself, no more dangerous than the way they were living now—but I was definitely not the selfless saint I was pretending to be here.

Kastrin herself emerged from her room, dressed in one of those short robes, both so Minifrit could show her to other girls as proof of my power and apparently so she herself could stare at me as if she could figure out the mystery of the Healer by sheer force of will.

Minifrit definitely never got over her certainty that I had ulterior motives. I suspected that when she tried to offer me money, it was at least half in an attempt to square any debt so I couldn’t call it in later. I had no intention of doing that anyway, but I naturally refused. In fact, in keeping with my persona and the legend I had come here to build, I declined any and all payment, no matter how mundane. Minifrit did try to bargain me down to accepting drinks or a hot meal, even hinted obliquely at sharing rumors she had acquired concerning the movements of Lady Gray and her cartel. That was the only one which even tempted me, and made me reflect that I’d made a tactical error by mentioning the criminal queen of the slums at all. I turned her down, though, as much as data to fill in the gaps of what Gilder could overhear would have helped me. I was after bigger game.

Minifrit specifically did not offer me free sex, though she didn’t intervene and simply watched my reactions when half a dozen of her employees did. I enjoy getting laid as much as the next guy, but I was not even tempted, and not even because never having sought it in a place like this was a point of pride for me. I’m sure a brothel is plenty of fun if you go there as a client and get the full treatment, but from my position behind the curtain, cleaning up the aftermath, I only found myself alternately sickened and enraged by this whole business.

That was good, I told myself. I had to learn how to channel that, before I could provoke these women to do the same.

When Minifrit decided there was no one else who immediately needed my attention, I had to disengage myself from a small adoring crowd at the back door. Not all of those who’d benefited from my magic participated; I’m sure some just took the benefit and ran back to their business, while quite a few remained wary of my motives. There were enough to make it physically hard to get out of the building, though, tearful and gazing at me as if I were the only beacon of hope in their grim world.

The guilt was crushing. I think it might’ve been worse than when I’d Immolated Larinet.

We made it down the boardwalk one building’s distance, just out of easy earshot from the Alley Cat’s backdoor bouncer, when Minifrit finally asserted her authority and ushered everyone back inside and back to their tasks. Then, I finally had to stop to breathe, and gather myself.

“Seems like that woman could’ve been more grateful,” Aster muttered, stepping close so I could hear her voice even muffled by the scarf. “There are kings who’ll never get that kind of treatment.”

“Some people are just ingrates,” I said. “Around here, though, I figure everybody’s got reason to be suspicious of a free lunch.”

“True enough.”

“Biribo, any insight?”

He poked his triangular head out of my collar. One benefit of this cloak-and-longcoat ensemble was that, unlike the open nobleman’s coat I normally wore (for some reason the style for well-to-do men was being unable to button their damn coats, in a country which tended on the cool side of temperate), was that I could keep my familiar close enough to whisper info to me as he found a need.

“Only a couple Blessed among the patrons, boss, and they were just there to screw. No sign anybody was interested in or even aware of you. Except for one of the girls you healed—that tall number with the long nose, mid-twenties, scar on her left forearm? Blessed with Might. Probably a washed-up former adventurer.”

“Adventurers can end up working in brothels?” I demanded in muted disbelief.

“It’s not an easy life,” Aster said quietly. “Very dependent on luck. If you don’t get the right rewards from Spirits or dungeons, you can find yourself unable to pay bills or Guild dues, much less rent. Success grants equipment and breeds reputation, which means opportunities. Lack of it’s a cycle going the other way.”

“Shit,” he muttered, then drew in a steadying breath and let it back out. “Okay, that’s enough lollygagging. On to the next place.”

I had not come here expecting to enjoy my jaunt through the sordid underbelly of the blue light district. I’m not an idiot. And yet, once again, it seemed I had underestimated the real horror of which Ephemera was capable. I had not expected this night’s work to be the most harrowing thing I’d yet experienced on this world. Eventually, surely, my expectations had to get low enough that I couldn’t keep being shocked. Surely?

One after another, we went to every brothel in Cat Alley that we could reach in the course of one night.

Our reception wasn’t the same everywhere, of course. A few places told me to fuck off entirely; those were honestly a relief. Everyone greeted me and my gifts with suspicion, varying only by how quickly and how much it abated once I got to Healing and not accepting any payment. I just told them all, time and again, “the price has been paid.” Hopefully after this night’s work it wouldn’t take long for that little meme to get around. Whatever else I was doing, I had to be starting rumors.

In the course of the night, I learned some surprising things about the sex work industry in Gwyllthean.

For one thing, every single one of the brothel owners was a woman. That surprised me the most; given the way women seemed to be treated in this country, I had expected female business owners like Minifrit to be the exception, not the rule. Evidently this whole industry was, itself, an exception. Was it the law, or something about the Sanorite religion, that prevented men from going into this line of work? I didn’t find a single male prostitute, either, and I knew human nature well enough to know a demand for them existed. Unfortunately asking questions like that, while it wouldn’t exactly have blown my cover, did not fit with the image I was carefully crafting, so I had to stew in my ignorance for the time being.

Obviously, not every madame ran her business or treated her employees the same way. It turned out starting my tour of Cat Alley at the Alley Cat had been the best way to ease myself into this nightmare—none of places I subsequently visited was as well-run, nor their workers as well looked after. And to think I had started out privately condemning Minifrit for what she’d allowed to happen to the girls under her care. I quickly learned how painfully wrong I’d been: to manage as well as she had, Miss Minifrit was more a saint than I was pretending to be, and I suspected, more of a leader.

The better places were clustered near the center of Yrshith Street—actually, the Alley Cat was as close to being the physical center of the blue light district as it apparently was its cultural epicenter. There, I mostly found the places clean, the women in relatively good health, and the business model built around cultivating a boisterously upbeat atmosphere. They seemed like they were designed to be fun places to pass the time, sex work aside, at least as long as you weren’t in the back rooms fixing what this life did to the women who had to live it. There were several traits the successful, centrally located brothels had in common that made them stand apart from the rest of the street.

They were effectively pubs, for one. They sold food and drink in a front common room, and the better ones had a musician on staff—or rather, I observed, owned a guitar which passed between various working girls who knew how to play. The method of conducting sex work seemed to be that the prostitutes would hang out and socialize with potential customers in the public area, drinking and generally carousing, and a john could hire one of the girls from there for a private room. It was a solid system, in that the house made money from more than just prostitution and the workers seemed to have some say in who they took to a room.

As one traveled up and down the street from the Cat, with the exception of a few more boisterous places at the entrances, the brothels got less and less cheerful. Service dwindled from full public house to just cheap liquor to nothing; in the smaller and dingier places there was no singing, but just rows of bored-looking young women behind thin akorshil bars from whom clients could pick—or in the cheapest ones, just sitting along benches lining the walls. In the dankest little holes where the service was at its lowest point, the “public room” was just the madame or a bouncer in the foyer, who would take money and assign you a girl. Those were the hardest to convince I was giving out free healing and not trying to pull something over on them.

I never pressed when told to leave; over future visits, I knew, I’d build a reputation which would make me more welcome here.

Another interesting point was that the better establishments had character which set them apart from one another even when they had a rough parity of overall quality, and always seemed to be inherited from the large personalities of their madames. Miss Minifrit conducted herself like an expensive courtesan who far outclassed Cat Alley, and by extension her place was considered the safest, cleanest, and generally nicest. I also met Gannit, a gray-haired woman who looked like she was pushing seventy but moved and spoke like a spry young adventurer (especially after I Healed her touch of arthritis); she was as immediately suspicious of my agenda as Minifrit, but much quicker to decide my services were welcome as long as I behaved, and tried to ply me with booze, food, and/or a night with any two of her best girls. Gannit had a cheerful, braying cackle which she deployed liberally and her place, the Jostled Jugs, was equally loud and bawdy. The Simmer was run by Adinet, the first overweight person I’d seen here apart from Yoshi, who affected a motherly persona, preferred a quieter atmosphere in the place, and apparently served the best food in Cat Alley. The Simmer was basically a decent restaurant where you could rent the services of your waitress. I was most confused by Fanfare, whose employees were by far the most sexually aggressive, and not in a playful, teasing way like the girls at the Jugs. I swear those women practically climbed my leg, and only got more eager to get under my cloak when they understood what I was there for. I could not square that with its madame, Miss Idrit, who wore a stiff heavy robe like a nun and the stiff heavy expression of a schoolteacher who was disappointed in your work. She spoke to customers (and me) entirely in clipped, curt phrases, ordered her workers about with a drill sergeant’s bark, and baldly offered Aster a job. Fortunately, that was the only time all night the greatsword came out of its sheath, and even more fortunately nothing more came of it.

Interesting and identifying features became less of both as the establishments got poorer, to the point that the last dingy holes in the wall all seemed to be run by carbon copies of the same dour, dissipated middle-aged woman trying unsuccessfully to look more sexy than exhausted. Few of those places even had names.

If only that was the worst of it.

The quality of these brothels correlated directly with the quality of life of those working in them. Minifrit and Gannit’s places were the only ones that had workers well into their thirties; it seemed that on average, a Gwyllthean prostitute’s lifespan topped out at twenty-five. It diminished all the way down to the worst establishments, in some of which I saw nothing but teenagers who looked like they’d endured at least thirty years of beating and deprivation. I didn’t want to know what happened to the women after age and use wrung every last spark of profitable life out of them. Unfortunately for me, I got to learn that anyway.

No fewer than five times I cast Heal on a woman clearly breathing her last rattling gasps, lying outside the rear door of her place of work, because at least her madame had the good taste to wait until she was dead before tipping her into the canal. I got to learn that was the designated final resting place of a dead whore thanks to the four cases I was too late to help. The rats and crawns—literal rats, not Gilder’s fellow orphans—didn’t always wait till they were dead to start scavenging.

It was ironic that after living through the aftermath of lethal fights with bandits and nobles alike, it was by providing basic medical care to prostitutes that I learned the limits of my supposedly world-changing Heal spell.

It didn’t re-grow anything—I could do nothing for missing teeth. Or fingers, toes, or eyes. Heal didn’t seem to do much for sheer exhaustion, and had no affect on psychological problems at all. If there was any magic that treated PTSD, depression, or simple despair, it was clearly above my pay grade.

I saw…just so many cases of disease. A brothel district was practically a petrie dish, and not just for STDs; anything contagious would tear through such a place like a forest fire, especially when it was a damp and narrow stretch between two fouled canals. I took to casting Heal on both myself and Aster after we exited every brothel, just on general principles. In one dim little hole literally named the Hole, I discovered they catered to a very specialized clientele even though none of the clients were in evidence, simply because every woman working there had an advanced case of gobrot.

Almost none of the many, many injuries I Healed looked accidental. Not only bruises and lacerations, but multiple broken bones, obvious stab wounds, and one case of a clearly cracked skull with evidence of brain damage; the poor girl was barely responsive. I had been afraid even Heal wouldn’t fix that, but she seemed fine after casting it. Evidently if the mental problems were caused by physical neurological damage and not purely psychological effects, they counted and could be remedied. I also discovered that Heal would, by itself and with no further physical help, re-set a dislocated shoulder, which to judge by the scream it prompted hurt just as much as doing it the old-fashioned way, if not for as long. A few times I was afraid my spell was starting to wear out, but no, it turned out that even with the black eyes fixed, those eyes were just too sunken and shadowed to make much of a visible difference.

For some of the men who came here, I guess it was all part of the fun. Visit Cat Alley, fuck the whores, and then beat them.

I was really glad I had modified my original plan from having Gilder show me around to getting the general rundown from him on how this place worked and directions to find it. The choice had been because he accidentally let slip that the Gutter Rats were not liked or welcome in Cat Alley—and I was definitely going to ask about that later—and I didn’t want to alienate the people I’d come here to treat. I knew Gilder had seen some shit, and my ideas of what was child-appropriate had almost no bearing on Fflyr Dlemathlys, but fuck it. I was not going to expose the boy to…this.

One night in this place had wrung me the hell out. I felt physically nauseated anew just by the fact that I knew a spell like Enamor, and several times almost asked Aster to immediately kill me if she ever saw me use it on someone, though each time I refrained from bringing it up.

I consider myself a rational person, but I could feel my objectivity fraying the longer the night wore on. I knew, logically, that sex work didn’t have to be like that. It doesn’t have to be like anything in particular; it’s just like factory work or coal mining, in that it being dangerous and dehumanizing was a result of societal stigma and lack of legal protection, not the inherent nature of the work itself. This horror was not due to prostitution being necessarily wrong, but was just another example of Fflyr Dlemathlys being an utter, irredeemable shithole. I knew that, but nonetheless found myself wanting to Immolate every person who profited from or patronized the business.

Of course, I wasn’t going to do that. The reality was more complicated; many of the people who were complicit were also doing their best to help within a system that went out of its way to make that difficult. People like Minifrit and Gannit, and who knew how many others I hadn’t had occasion to encounter. Also, I was still a conniving asshole who’d come here for personal gain and I needed to use some of the evil fuckers responsible for all that suffering, which meant I needed them alive and not hating me. But still… Fuck.

Dawn found Aster and I having made our departure from Yrshith Street along the rear boardwalk on the other side from the one where we’d started. The pair of us walked in silence, practically aimlessly, until happenstance more than anything brought us to an intersection with one of the main trade highways running in and out of Gwyllthean.

I stopped, and then she stopped. The city was waking up; the gates were open, traffic was already increasing, and vendors had begun hawking breakfast on the go to the passing travelers. We stood in a shady alley’s mouth, watching people go by and saying nothing for a while.

“We’ve got the inn room until noon,” I said finally.

Aster nodded.

“Should probably try to grab some rest. I don’t think either of us has enough energy to make the whole walk back to the fortress from here.”

“I don’t…think…I’ll be able…to sleep.” Her delivery was halting as if she had to grope for every word.

“Not gonna have pleasant dreams,” I agreed in a dull tone. “Better that than collapsing on the road halfway through the khora, though.”

She nodded again. That close, I could see into her hood; her eyes looked utterly shell-shocked. They looked about how I’d felt.

“…you’re going to want to do that again, aren’t you.”

“We are going to do that repeatedly,” I answered.

Slowly, her hood shifted in another nod. “Well. I guess it’s good that somebody does it.”

“Mm.” I was in no mood to dig into my real motives.

“If they can all live that way, we’d be pretty chickenshit to bail out after just having to see it.”

“Yeah.”

“I feel like I owe Miss Minifrit an apology. She’s doing pretty good by her workers.”

“Yeah.”

We stood there for a few minutes longer, then silently turned and headed back into the city.

We managed a couple hours of fitful sleep, dressed in our nicer inner-ring clothes with disguises packed away in bundles, and left well before noon, which was for the best in the interests of getting back to North Watch before midnight.

I didn’t know whether anyone had tried to follow the mysterious Healer and his silent escort tonight, but if my plan to build notoriety succeeded, that would definitely become an issue. I meant to consult with my various sources of local information about ways to deal with that, but for starters had baked a couple of layers of defense into that night’s plan. Our inn could be reached from the rear through a warren of alleys in which I figured it would be easy to lose pursuers, given how readily we got lost before finding our own way back. Most of those who might’ve been in the Gutters and opportunistically followed us out we could ditch simply by getting inside the gates; the guards there were largely on duty for the purpose of keeping out riffraff who clearly didn’t belong in the inner rings.

That description also applied to Aster and I in our ragged disguises, but I solved that problem by handing out coins to the soldiers on duty. God, the law enforcement in this country was a disgrace, but at least it could be disgraceful in my favor, so long as I was careful and had money.

In the interests of making good time, we didn’t stay to eat at the inn, just grabbing some breakfast from the stalls on the way out of town, along with some more easily-carried food for the trip. Once you got used to the spicing, Fflyr street food wasn’t terrible. I very determinedly did not think about the conditions in which it was cooked and had developed a habit of casting a self-Heal after meals, whenever no one was watching. No food poisoning so far.

I still didn’t know these paths, but it seemed Aster had wandered all over Dount during her adventuring years and at my request took us on a different route than before; I figured it couldn’t hurt to vary our paths to and from the city, even if nobody had reason to be stalking us yet. Cautious habits were good ones to get into. My earlier recklessness and how frighteningly close it had brought me to disaster still haunted me at times. Looking back, I had to wonder whether Virya had been somehow pulling strings on my behalf. Realistically, I should’ve gotten my ass killed at least twice in the first three days.

Today’s route had us circumnavigating the outer fringes of the city for a short distance. We walked in the partial shadow of a retaining wall of akorthist blocks which separated the path from an agricultural field on one side, the other consisting of vacant lots mostly full of trash interspersed with dilapidated outbuildings. Unlike the outlying structures closer to the main road, which saw use housing trade goods, these old barns and warehouses seemed abandoned. I wondered as we walked whether Gwyllthean was suffering some kind of economic downturn to result in this, and also noted how extremely useful a variety of unoccupied structures, however rickety, would be to the likes of me, or Clan Olumnach, or Lady Gray.

While this was technically the outskirts of the city, the only “city” in sight was more or less ruins; in contrast to our time in the Gutters, this suburban footpath was as quiet as the countryside. Thus we were both startled into freezing at a sudden growl.

Aster drew her sword, I subconsciously formed the weight of Immolate in my mind, and Biribo buzzed out of Aster’s pocket and up over our heads to gain an eagle-eye view of the battlefield.

A second later he let out a hissing little laugh and descended to rejoin us.

“Relax, guys. I think you can take ‘er.”

I hadn’t seen the source of the growl when it first sounded, but now it moved, a shadow distinguishing itself from the overall dimness in the lee of a broken down wagon someone had ditched here. Not approaching us, but circling to the side, and continuing to make that warning growl.

“Oh,” I said, relaxing. “Wow, I hope nobody saw that.”

“Don’t get cocky,” Aster said tersely, not putting away her sword. “Just because it’s not a rampaging khorodect doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous. People get killed by stray dogs.”

Our “foe” shifted into the sunlight, affording me a good look. Poor thing was limping and looked starved; some kind of mange-like rash had consumed what looked like half its coat. There was no foam dripping from the bared teeth, but who knew what kind of diseases it might be carrying? The Ephemera version of rabies was probably as gratuitously horrible as everything else on this asinine hell world.

If it had happened on any other morning, I probably would have just scared the dog away and gone about my business. But I was sleep-deprived and coming off a truly nightmare-inducing night of trying to aid the bedraggled and abandoned, and having to live with the reality that what I was doing was more for my own benefit than theirs.

Aster’s advice rang in my ears: do what you have to, but whenever you can, be kind.

“Lord Seiji?” she said incredulously as I stepped forward and knelt on the path. The stray dog bared her fangs at me and let out a furious warning bark.

I held out a hand toward it. “Tame Beast.”

“Oh, yeah, that’s a productive use of your powers,” Biribo complained. I didn’t dignify him with a response, busy taking in this new experience.

Immediately she—the dog was a she, I could intuitively tell that now—relaxed, straightening up. Her ears rose, revealing one was half missing. Hesitantly at first, head lowered, she stepped toward me. Her upraised tail wagged, in a jerky little motion almost as if it had forgotten how.

This was not at all like using that spell on a slime. Those things were basically amoebas; they didn’t seem to be even conscious in any meaningful way. “Taming” them effectively put them under my intuitive mental control. My experience with Auldmaer’s dhawls was another thing still; those were already tame animals which had just needed calming down, their placid dispositions regarding me as just another person once the magical shortcut had caused them to view me as such.

A dog, by contrast, was a sentient creature, pretty smart by animal standards, with a lot of their social instincts bred over millennia specifically for interaction with humans. This one was—or had been—clearly feral. I couldn’t feel her mind in the same way as the slimes, but there was now a…familiarity. Watching her every hesitant movement as she approached me, I could interpret the nuances of her body language as if I’d raised her from a puppy. No—as if I were an expert in canine behavior who had raised and trained her from birth. It wasn’t telepathy or mental control, just…a bond. A shortcut to achieve the same communion.

“Poor girl,” I murmured. Her tail began wagging in earnest as she stepped forward and pressed her nose into my hand. “Just look what a mess you are. Heal.”

Pink light burst; I could tell by the minute shift of her posture that she was startled, but she didn’t jerk away. She knew I’d done it, and trusted me.

It made a world of difference. Gone was the limp; her coat was restored to a much greater plushness, no sign of that mange. The ear didn’t re-grow, and she was still thin, but at least the rejuvenated coat disguised her ribs. She was a sizable dog, bigger than a German Shepherd, her slightly shaggy coat black with gray and brown markings. Unsurprisingly, centuries of evolution on Ephemera had caused some genetic drift from dogs as I knew them; she had a rather bushy tale like a fox, a triangular face that looked almost feline from some angles, and an odd combination of long, lean legs and a bulldog’s burly chest. Altogether a scruffy, awkward-looking creature, even restored to good health.

“Hey, Aster, gimme one of those meat pies.”

“Are you serious?”

“Don’t worry, I’m not gonna feed her your lunch. I’ll just eat when we’re back at the fortress.”

She handed one over without further complaint; in fact, when I glanced up, I caught her smiling.

“Don’t tell me you’re planning on bringing the dog with us,” Biribo exclaimed while she got down to scarfing the meat pie, tail now wagging furiously.

“Dogs are very useful creatures,” I said solemnly. “Aren’t you, Junko?”

“Junko?”

“Well, I have to call her something.”

“That’s a name?” Aster asked uncertainly.

“A common enough girl’s name, where I’m from.” Still kneeling and ruffling Junko’s ears while she ate, I grinned up at Aster and gestured at the lot full of old rubbish amid which the dog had been hiding. “Plus, I found her in the junk.”

It took me a moment of staring at her nonplussed expression to realize what I’d said was thwilic, the Fflyr word for “trash.” Fluently speaking a language I had never actually learned caused some weird effects now and then. My brain kept assuming any language I was speaking that wasn’t Japanese must be English, when neither was any use to me here.

“That’s a bilingual pun,” I explained.

“Ah. Impressive.”

“Trust me, if you speak those two languages, that was hilarious.”

“I’m sure it must be, Lord Seiji.”

“You hear how she talks to me?” I complained to Junko. “She thinks I can’t tell when she’s being sarcastic, but I can.”

Junko had finished my meat pie, and now barked at Aster, still wagging her tail furiously. Grinning in spite of herself, Aster leaned forward to scratch the dog’s ears, causing the tail to loudly thump against her own flanks, so hard was she wagging it now.

We had both needed this, after the night we’d had. There’s just something pure about dogs.

Aster looked up at me, her expression growing more thoughtful, and I gestured expansively as I started moving again. Junko fell into step alongside me, followed by Aster and Biribo buzzing along in the rear. “Go ahead and ask, I know you’re dying to.”

She sighed, then nodded. “Why prostitutes, Lord Seiji?”

Oh. That hadn’t been what I thought she was going to ask. Well, still a valid question.

“Looting caravans is all well and good for pocket change,” I said, affecting an airy tone. “If what you really want is to strike a blow at the foundations of society itself…” I turned a grin on her as we walked. “Invent feminism.”

Man, that would’ve been such a good line on which to end the conversation, but Aster had exactly as much patience for my bullshit as usual.

“I really hope you get a lot of entertainment from dropping these arcane references to your old world, Lord Seiji, especially since it’s apparently more important to you than me being able to understand what the hell we’re trying to do.”

I decided not to call her down for sassing me. She never did that in front of the others, and also she wasn’t wrong.

“I need recruits—enough of them to form a sufficiently big force to take on the other bandit gangs.”

“Right, obviously, but… Really, the whores?”

“Are you suggesting women are less valuable than men?” I asked archly.

“Junko, bite him.”

Junko licked my hand.

“It’s not about what they can do now,” I said, wiping my hand on my coat. “Fighting is something you can be taught. I bet Goose and Sakin between them seem to know enough about violence and skulduggery to adequately train whoever I decide to bring home. It’s about finding people who’ve been spat on and mistreated enough that they’ll be willing to not only turn bandit, but actively work to overthrow the whole social order. And that’s a lot of people, Fflyr Dlemathlys being the fucking mess it is. I need, specifically, to do this without drawing the attention that will inevitably come if I start removing a bunch of people from the city—and I do need to recruit a bunch at once rather than building in ones and twos over the course of years. Aside from Virya breathing down my neck, the turf war between Lady Gray and the Olumnachs is my only window of opportunity, and it won’t stay open forever. Someone will notice if I take enough warm bodies to do what needs doing, no matter where I take them from. So I need to recruit those who won’t be missed. I need to make the established powers not take me seriously. Oh, ha ha, look at this idiot Healer, trying to make an army of whores, what a joke. This country’s prejudices against women can be used to bring it down. Any prejudice can; that’s a better argument against prejudice than simple compassion, if you ask me.”

“Huh,” Biribo commented. “Y’know what, that’s actually a good angle. Suss out the situation and find an unconventional way to approach it that increases your power. A real Dark Lord move, boss.”

Aster shook her head. “I think you’re going to find it harder than you expect to motivate them into action, Lord Seiji. Gratitude for the healing is only going to take you so far. Not far enough, I don’t think. Not nearly far enough.”

“That’s only the first step. Next I have to remind them of all the reasons they have to be angry.”

She still didn’t look convinced. “These are women who’ve fallen all the way down the social ladder and been whacked by every rung they passed. All the fight was beaten out of them years ago.”

“Aster,” I said, staring ahead, “it’s me, Seiji. One way or another, if there is one thing I can manage to inspire in people, it is rage.”

“Hm,” she mused after a long moment, “I guess that’s so.”

Hellish as the night had been, as we walked on Junko pressed herself against my leg, and I felt a little bit better.