The poor quarter hadn’t always been the poor quarter. Long ago, in a time lost from the memories of the street vendors and market-goers that Anton had talked to, it had been the ruler’s palace. There had been a change of management at some point, or so Anton assumed. The people he talked to weren’t at all interested in history, so all he had gleaned was that the out-of-place walls that stuck up like broken fingers throughout the quarter were part of “the old palace”.

Whoever had destroyed the old palace and taken over the city hadn’t bothered to rebuild from the remains, and instead left it for the poor to pick through. Much of the rubble had been repurposed for other buildings, but there were some remnants left. They tended to be the broken remains of big structures, made of stones too big for the poor to drag away.

One such remnant must have been part of the outer walls of the palace. Thirty feet high, and a hundred yards long, it didn’t run straight. It bent in the middle at about a thirty-degree angle. Once enclosing the wealthy, the remains now served as one of the boundaries of the poorest quarter.

Someone, perhaps tired of constantly making a detour, had tried to tunnel through the wall at one point. Tried and failed. Some of the stones on the inner facing had been removed, and the filler rubble had been no problem, but they had been defeated by the huge stone blocks of the outer facing. They’d tried to tunnel a hole and had almost succeeded, but only by drastically reducing their ambitions.

The hole started about two feet wide on the inner side, but slowly narrowed until it was less than a foot across when it finally emerged on the other side after carving through a yard of rock.

History, at least the history that Anton had heard, does not relate why it stopped there. Perhaps the stone carver gave up or died. Or perhaps some long-dead criminal realised the use of what had been created and “convinced” the man to stop there.

Soraya had heard of the place and planned to use it for the drop-off. Now it had been included in Kelsey’s plan.

“What surprised me was that there was a booking system,” Kelsey said to Anton.

The two of them were sitting in one of the many of what Kelsey had airily referred to as “open-air cafes” that overlooked the clear space in front of the inner hole. All of them were much the same, a few chairs and some shade. That, and a hole in the wall which served small cups of a foul brown sludge that was even worse than the coffee that Anton had been served in the past. He was taking the occasional sniff of his cup, but he had no plans to drink it.

“It makes sense, I suppose,” he mused. “If two gangs show up at the same time, even if they’re not feuding, they’re not going to want the other one to make off with their handover.”

“True, true,” Kelsey agreed. Her gaze swept across the empty square.

The reason there were so many “cafes” was not the coffee they served. There were a lot of criminal factions that wanted an eye kept on this place, and their presence made the area a neutral territory, most of the time.

The wall wasn’t magic. It made for a place where two people could talk to each other, and even hand over goods, without being able to lay hands on the other party. But people had friends, and rich people had hirelings. There was nothing to stop Al-Kadir from sending a squad of mercenaries to the other side of the wall while he made polite conversation.

Nothing except for the sanctity of the square, run by a gang that operated on a strict first-paid, first-served basis. With all the gangs watching, any intruding force would be spotted well before they got near. Depending on the size and nature of the force, they would be seen off… or the criminals would run off, cancelling the meet and no one would get what they wanted.

It seemed a precarious setup to Anton, but he supposed that was how it went in the criminal world. It was even more precarious for the two of them since they couldn’t cancel and run quite so easily. Kelsey had phrased it as them having “assets deployed”, but Anton saw it as having friends in vulnerable positions.

“Oh, here we go,” Kelsey said.

The old man that Kelsey had paid gold to appeared out of a nearby building and made his way over to them.

“It’s time. Two hours. You go,” he said.

“A pleasure doing business with you,” Kelsey said, getting up to leave. She strode off without further pleasantries. Anton followed.

He really shouldn’t be here. If Al-Kadir saw him, the courl would be… very angry. He would also have a lead on where to look for Soraya’s kidnappers, which would be very bad. Nevertheless, Anton felt he had to be there. Aris and Cheia were safe back at the hideout, but the girls out here needed protection if anything went wrong.

He had no illusions about stopping Al-Kadir if it came to that, but there were a lot of contingencies that didn’t involve him. He threw up his hood as they approached the hole, and hung well back, out of sight from the other side.

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“I hope he comes on time,” Kelsey said. “A lot of wasted money if he doesn’t.”

“As if I would risk Soraya’s life by not following instructions,” Al-Kadir’s resonant voice came out of the hole. Despite speaking at a normal volume, his tone promised death.

Kelsey didn’t seem perturbed, though. “I guess not!” she said. “Should we do introductions?”

“I see no need to exchange names with the corpse-puppet of a necromancer,” the courl growled.

“Wow, rude,” Kelsey said. “What makes you say that?”

“I can see enough of you to use my inspection Traits,” Al-Kadir said. “They work on people, and they don’t work on you. So I know that despite looking like a human, you are no such thing.”

“That’s smart thinking,” Kelsey said. “Most people just assume I’m using some magic to block inspection.”

“One of my inspection Traits works,” Al-Kadir told her. “The one that evaluates opponents. It tells me, that should I get my hands on you, you won’t last long.”

“You are a scary one, aren’t you?” Kelsey said. “Let’s get on with it, then. Do you see this rope?”

The rope she held up stretched taut behind her and then up to the top of the wall.

“Of course,” Al-Kadir said.

“I’m going to redirect your attention now,” Kelsey said. “When I do, pay close attention to where the other end of the rope is, and don’t do anything stupid.”

There was no response that Anton could hear.

“Take five steps back and look up,” Kelsey continued. “Make sure to stay where I can see you.”

There was a brief pause, and then an angry shout. “You dare!”

“Does that thing where your ears go back mean that you're angry?” Kelsey said. “Just stay calm. I think you’ve figured it out already, but if you try anything, I pull on the rope, and dear Soraya goes flying back on our side of the wall. If she doesn’t choke from the noose, she’ll die when she hits the ground.”

“I have your money, demon,” Al-Kadir growled.

“Great!” Kelsey said. “Here’s the other way it goes. You push the money in the hole, I let go of the rope, and Soraya takes it off her neck. There’s a rope ladder she can climb down, and you can be united with your darling bride. Wait! Show me there’s money in it first.”

There was an angry snarl and a clinking sound. “Satisfied?”

“Absolutely,” Kelsey purred. “Hand it over.”

Another clinking sound as the small chest was pushed through the hole.

“Now,” Kelsey said. “The rope goes slack, can you see her taking the noose off? The rope ladder should come down any—”

A roar of rage interrupted her. “Where did she go!”

Anton, on the other side of the wall, knew the answer. He could see Soraya and Tyla drifting down. Tyla’s spells had turned a nasty fall into a gentle descent.

“I guess some guys can’t take no for an answer,” Kelsey said, unfazed by whatever demonstration of anger was taking place on the other side of the hole.

“I will kill you, Necromancer,” Al-Kadir snarled. “I don’t know why you made an enemy of me and I do not care. I will find a way to trace you back through your puppets and then I will put a sword in your heart. I only hope that you come back to life so I can kill you again.”

“Huh,” Kelsey said. “I guess he can jump that high.” A small device appeared in her hand, one with a single prominent button. She pushed it.

The explosion that rang out from the top of the wall was the biggest one that Kelsey had yet orchestrated. Protected from the worst of it by the shadow of the thick wall, he was still glad that he had hearing protection. Smoke and fire were spreading out in all directions, and an acrid smell filled the air.

“And we’re running!” Kelsey said, grabbing at him to get him moving. Anton jolted into action. This was part of the plan. They raced over to Tyla and Soraya. They’d landed safely but had been stunned by the violence of the blast above. Not waiting for them to recover, Anton scooped up Tyla and headed into the maze of small alleys that was the poor quarter.

Everybody else was running too. The blast had sent bits of wall in all directions. Some of the fragments had been large enough to do serious damage to buildings. Even without that, no one knew where the attack had come from, or why. Staying in the area seemed unwise.

They quickly lost themselves in the crowd. Soraya and Tyla stopped making shocked noises and were able to make their way on their own feet. They stayed in a close group, with Anton pushing the crowd back, and Kelsey leading them unerringly to their destination. Their hideout was in the opposite direction from the one they’d fled, so they had to take the long way around, not leaving the poor quarter until they’d freed themselves from the frightened crowd.

It was a long, silent walk back. The silence seemed natural for Tyla. She had a contemplative look the whole way. Soraya, on the other hand, seemed to be bottling up anger. As soon as the door to the hideout closed, it burst out of her.

“What was that!” she said, not quite yelling.

“A successful operation,” Kelsey said smugly. “Got the gold, got out, no trail.”

“But the— it—” Soraya waved her hands wildly, not able to find the words.

“Explosion?” Aris asked. “That’s something that Kelsey can do.”

“I did tell you we were setting a trap for when Al-Kadir came after us,” Kelsey said reproachfully.

“The trap… it was those boxes?” Soraya asked.

“That’s right,” Kelsey said. “No need for shaped charges, just a big old air-burst. Wall-burst?”

“I was sitting on those boxes!” Soraya exclaimed.

“I, too,” Tyla said. “It is… discomfiting to know that we were treating something so dangerous, so casually.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Kelsey said, waving her hand. “They were perfectly safe to sit on. Kick them, drop them, set them on fire, you’d be fine.”

“Does that mean… Al-Kadir is dead?” Soraya wondered.

“I doubt it,” Kelsey replied. “Someone as tough as he was, you need to concentrate the blast to kill them. Or use fragments.”

She paused and looked wistful. “That would have been nice, but I had to think about the civilian casualties.”

“Like the ones killed by those falling rocks?” Anton asked sourly.

Kelsey shrugged. “I didn’t see anyone definitely killed by those, did you? Some injuries, sure. Sometimes there’s more collateral damage than you expect. Setting off bombs on top of walls is new for me.”

“How safe were we, then?” Tyla asked. “If you’ve never done this before.”

“Pretty safe!” Kelsey said brightly. “You were all close to the wall, which is a bad angle for any blast or fragments. Very unlikely that you’d get injured.”

“Then what happened to Al-Kadir?” Soraya asked. Kelsey shrugged.

“Burned, battered, probably flung halfway into the next quarter,” she said. “He’ll heal up soon enough.”

“I have just one more question, then,” Tyla asked. “Does anything else in this building explode?”

Kelsey gave Tyla a wide smile. “Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to, dear.”