Uma had not been left with nothing. She still had the knowledge in her head, and her skills, and she had put both of them to work over the past two and a half years. From the ashes of the fire that her daughter had set, Uma had rebuilt a grand … shadow of what the Anzabos clan had once been. And not the good kind of shadow, which slips unseen into rooms and frightens children and parents alike with its ferocity, but the weak shadow of a child playing at being an adult in the noonday sun.

It wasn’t her fault. She had tried her best. What little funds remained to her she had spent wisely. What secrets she could exploit she had done so expertly. What favors she could call in were – they were rejected with fervent laughter. Nobody in the business wanted to be associated with her or her efforts to rebuild. The rest of her family was likewise shut out. After all, who would trust them with their secrets after such a scandal?

Some of her former friends took pity upon her and simply paid her to never contact them again. Others threatened her with violence for the same effect. Only members of the Clan would associate with her, but they were all in the same situation. Even resorting to blackmail and extortion was a mixed bag, as most of the secrets that were really worth paying to cover up had already been exposed. Even those with the petty secrets of secret mistresses and bastards were largely refusing to pay or even threatening to go to the Law.

The lack of resources had made revenge difficult. Especially when the foe suffered no restrictions and the full authority of the government. Which made this particular opportunity vital to her efforts. The trail was weeks cold by the time she had arrived, but there was no help for it. Not with the damn bird massacre, and then Uma had to ride out to the little crossroads village as well.

Rena had gone over the room Jazirqe had been renting immediately after their battle and had found nothing. She had instructed the landlord not to touch the room until Uma arrived, paying a full two month’s rent. The damn arsehole had taken the money with a smile, then promptly turned around and rented it out to a young bachelor.

Bribing the current resident had cost her nine pennies. The fact that she was counting pennies simply showed how desperate she was. She had haggled for the bribe! And the damn resident had insisted upon being present during the search, so that she “wouldn’t be tempted.” She was tempted to put a dagger in the man’s throat, not to steal his petty junk. Aggravated, she had nonetheless done a slow, thorough search of the room under his watchful eye.

She had found three hidden compartments, all of them empty. The same as Rena had found. The bachelor disapproved of her moving his furniture and belongings and extracted another three pennies from her before the end of the inspection. And she had been forced to move everything back as it was before she left! Furious as she was, there was little she could do about it except swallow her pride.

Defeated yet again by the agent that she had not only trained, but given birth to, Uma left the cottage. Outside, she was confronted by an old woman.

“Are you Uma?” The blue hair asked.

“What?”

“Girl said her mother would come looking for her. Uma Anzabos. Said she’d probably make a huge fuss looking for her but not actually just come right out and ask anybody. Said you’d search the room, that maybe you’d chat us up for a while asking a million different questions about the crops and the weather and geopoloticial stuff. Don’t know what geopoloties is but Jaz said you’d ask about it. So, are you Uma, or did her family send someone else to hunt her down?”

Uma seethed inside. This wasn’t how it was done! “What did she tell you?”

“Oh, everything I suppose. How you brainwashed her from birth to think that she was less important than the family business, how you kicked her to the curb rather than admit that your business was run by anything less than the gods themselves, and how she gave your secrets to your competitors, and now you want to kill her. It was a very sad story, and I’m sure you have a very sad version of it too, but honestly, I don’t care. I’m just supposed to give you a letter if you’re her mother, and a different letter if you’re not.”

“I think she left out the part where she tortured her own cousin for information, and how over a hundred of her clansmen were hanged because of her actions, includ--”

“No, actually, she didn’t leave that out. Tears her up inside that so many traitors share her blood. Not that they hanged, see, but that she was related to them, and the lengths she had to go to to cleanse them from her clan,” the old woman explained. “See, like me, she’s actually loyal to the empire. And every patriot knows the only good traitor is a dead traitor.”

Uma bit her lip, trying not to reach for the dagger on her hip. She tried not to think of Yde, her lover, whom she had watched hanged, along with her cousins and elders. She knew the crimes they were accused of. She even knew that they were guilty. But still she could not let go of her rage.

“The letter?”

“Oh, dear, I’m not silly enough to give it to you in person!” the old woman laughed. “But I’ll tell you where it is. If you’re her mother, head west until you reach a crossroads, then you’ll find the letter under a lucky rock. If you’re not Uma Anzabos, head east and ask the innkeeper at the next village for the pig wine special. He’ll be expecting you. We’ll dispose of whichever method you don’t pick, so don’t think you can trick us.”

“We?”

“You don’t think I work alone? Or did you think I was a native?” the old woman cackled. “I suppose I have been living here a few years, but I had some fun in my youth. I know your game better than you do, dear. Now then, pick. Are you going to go east, or west?”

Uma frowned at the woman and looked around. The woman was old enough to be put out to pasture, and yet she was being used to make contact. It didn’t sit right with Uma’s sensibilities at all. Rather than giving the woman the satisfaction of answering verbally, Uma simply walked off to the west. The woman’s cackling would follow Uma all the way into sleep, although it lasted only a moment or two.

When Uma was out of sight of the village, the old woman simply shook her head. Her wrinkled skin regained its tautness, her hair browned, and her spine straightened out. In a moment the old woman was gone, replaced by an ageless one.

“It’s like pulling teeth,” she muttered to herself. “Shouldn’t be so hard to orchestrate a reunion. Wish I could just throw a bag over her head and be done with it.”

~~~~~~~~~~

The dead drop was easy enough to find. A league outside of the village was a crossroads, just as the old woman had said, and the lucky rock was a head sized stone rolled up to the signpost with the character for ‘Lucky’ carved on it. Whoever had written it had burned the stone itself with ki, Uma noted, making her somewhat nervous. Uma had, in her anger, pushed herself hard in the last two years and managed to enter the fourth reformation. She was confident in her combat ability, but against a team of agents, or a Master on equal or higher ground, she would be exposed.

The letter was not even written in a cipher. It read “Mother, I miss you. I am sorry for the difficulties between us, although I do not regret my part in the tragedy that has befallen our clan. It was not petty revenge which motivated me. Please stop for a moment and look at the evidence, at the roles we were playing in--”

Uma skipped over her wayward daughter’s driveling self-justification for her treachery and searched for clues to her next move. She needn’t have looked so hard, because the closing line was simply “I will be waiting for you in the village of Tharn in the wilds north of Zadai lake. If you come alone, we will meet. If you send anyone – and my friends will recognize anyone you send as your agent on sight – I will vanish, and so will they.”

The temptation to tear the paper to shreds and ignite it with her ki was very strong, but Uma resisted. She needed to give her daughters words a second examination with a cooler head. Not because they deserved consideration, but in preparation for the confrontation.

Her daughter was mad. A traitor. A traitor who had fallen in line with a rogue clan. A rogue clan that had exploited the knowledge that Jazirqe should have taken to the grave with her. Knowledge that the clan had wielded with expert precision. Uma would get vengeance for those who had died in shame and defeat at the hands of the Law. First she would kill her daughter, then she would track down these false Whisperers, and then she would begin assassinating the leaders of the Law itself.

But first, she had a very obvious trap to walk into. Of course, she wasn’t about to do so blind.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

~~~~~~~~~~

In the few weeks since her escape from the tavern, Jazirqe had learned a lot about pigeons. Turns out they weren’t as endangered as she thought; they were being preserved. Also, she’d become intimately familiar with their shit. As punishment for risking her life against her older cousin, she’d been tasked with disposing of it for the foreseeable future. Individually the little bastards didn’t produce much, but a thousand of them together put out a considerable amount. Their pens only needed to be shoveled every week, but with seven pens filled to capacity, it was a lingering daily punishment. She came to enjoy the daily feeding and checking for eggs, but she never could enjoy the shoveling of pigeon shit.

Fortunately, after the initial hell that had been catching up to months of that task unfilled, scraping out the bottom of the walk-in cages did not take very long. She finished quickly, then went to wash as she did every morning.

Dressing in a simple green tunic, she finished her morning routine by examining herself in the reflection of a copper mirror. And, as she did every morning, she tried to boost her confidence.

“You can do this. The talk about recruits dying during training is mostly just to scare off those who aren’t dedicated. To add a level of fear into the mix to make the training more effective,” she reminded herself. “There’s probably nothing beneath any of those gravemarkers at all. Maybe one or two of them died on accident, but surely not all of them.”

With this in mind, she left her quarters and went to join in with the other recruits. She lined up to wait for their instructor. The hidden training compound didn’t looked like what she had expected a training compound to look like. It was far off the beaten path, into an area of the wilds where few ventured. But otherwise it looked like any other village except for the permanent fixtures of the obstacle course which had been set up to welcome her and the other new recruits.

Except that this village was protected. Traffic was monitored, wanderers were discouraged, and all of the residents were cultivators. Even the children were learning how to sense and cycle their ki. The protections weren’t obvious and many of them weren’t visible to the uninitiated, but Jazirqe was safer here than she’d been anywhere in the Empire since she had betrayed her friends and family.

Most of her cohorts, whom she found waiting for her on the village green, were recruits from the Orders who had shown promise in the various aspects of spycraft. She settled in with them, waiting for their masters to arrive and issue the instructions for the day. She had expected more sparring, but often the competitions were things like “Steal an egg from soandso’s coop without being noticed,” or leaving a message in powdered chalk in an obvious place without anyone in the village noticing. Often, one aspirant was given a task, then asked to leave. Once they were out of earshot, the rest were told to either help or hinder.

It was the hindering which added real danger to the exercises, as open violence to prevent the completion of an objective was tolerated in some instances. Such tactics earned low marks, but when the mission was considered pass or fail, all options were on the table.

Twenty minutes passed before the instructors showed themselves. Being early was expected of the aspirants, but the instructors could come and go as they pleased. It was uncommon to see them on time, normally they kept their students waiting. Jazirqe felt a stone in her stomach as she saw the expression on instructor Qiste’s face.

“Now, you may all have been thinking that we were joking when we told you that this training was life or death,” the woman said sternly. “I assure you that it is not. This village has two graveyards. One for the natural deaths, and one for our trainees who fail to graduate. Today, we’ll be adding another corpse to the second. Possibly more than one. There’s a traitor among you. And it’s today’s assignment to put them in the ground.”

The stone dropped. Jazirqe squeezed her fist until the nails bit into her skin and bled. Traitor? She racked her mind for possibilities, but could only come up with one candidate. Herself.

“You’ll have no assistance from your elders. If you fail the mission, then you all fail. And failure will not be tolerated. You are to capture or kill the traitor, with the preference being capture for interrogation. You may utilize any means necessary in achieving this objective. If you fail, you wash out. You leave the village with the clothes on your back and the whisperers will never contact you again. Trainee Juri?”

The young man – six or so years older than Jaz and already in the third Reformation – stepped forward. “Yes ma’am?”

“We know. We’ve always known.”

Juri turned pale, but did not deny whatever it was he was accused of.

“You get a five minute head start. I suggest you use it.”

Juri leapt away, heading north, deeper into the wilds. The others looked around in confusion.

“What is it that he did?” one of the others asked.

“It doesn’t matter. All that matters to you is that Juri must die. Whether by your hands or the questioners depends on your capacity to capture him for questioning, and whether you all fail or wash out will be determined by whether or not he is allowed to get away.” Instructor Qiste was crisp in her words, cold and ruthless. Nobody else had the courage to challenge her for more information.

The allotted time passed, and Qiste signalled the beginning of the hunt by snapping her fingers. The twelve other candidates raced off. Some in pursuit, others to gather the equipment they believed they would need in order to take Juri down. Whether they intended to do so with lethal or nonlethal weapons and methods was not shared between them; each still saw this as a competition. The fools, Most of them were only recently Awakened, they would have to work together to take Juri down. Jaz doubted it would be a task that she could manage on her own, either, but she had no intention of helping them.

Instead, she simply lay down on the grass and looked up at the clear blue sky. She almost laughed at the childishness of it, but moments like this reminded her of the few happy memories she had of her youth. The ones that weren’t spent training.

She had only a few moments to reflect on those memories when Qiste’s shadow fell over her, and the woman cleared her voice. “Planning on staying there all day, missus?”

“No, just an hour or so,” Jazirqe answered. “I think after this I’ll go and see about tending to my gear. You’ve kept me too busy lately. I haven’t been neglecting it, necessarily, but it could use a more thorough maintenance session.”

“You’re letting Juri get away? After what he’s done?”

“What has he done, exactly?” Jazirqe asked. “Because you were a little vague on that. All I know for certain is that he ran, but you called him a traitor and told everyone else to kill him, so I can’t be that surprised at that.”

“You think this is just another exercise?” Qiste inquired.

“If it is, it’s one that I’m going to sit out. I’ve killed enough traitors to the Empire for the Whisperers to last a lifetime. But I think that if any of us were really suspected of treason, you would send more than a dozen of fresh recruits after them, and you wouldn’t let them escape or get a head start. You’d have snatched him up when he slept and interrogated him thoroughly, and only after announced to the rest of us what had happened, if then.”

Qiste considered her logic for a moment, then nodded. “Congratulations. You pass today’s assignment. So far, you and Juri are the only ones to do so.”

“What is it that made Juri turn so pale?” Jazirqe asked, more for the gossip of it than anything else.

“Nothing. Not that I know of, at least. He’s just smart enough to know to play along,” Qiste answered. “Or he just realized that any denial he made would only be taken as proof by the others.”

“Everyone is already so jealous of him and his cultivation, it’s not that surprising that they jumped at the chance to take him down,” Jazirqe agreed. “I assume you have agents following him to make sure that nobody actually dies?”

“Why would we do that? No, Jaz, this assignment really is life or death. We expect to lose at least three or four of the pursuers before the others either back off or start working together. Fools don’t realize how much Juri outclasses them because he’s been taking it easy on them during sparring,” Qiste explained. “He’s a lousy spy, but sometimes you need muscle to open doors. Aside from you, he’s our most valuable aspirant this time around. It would be a shame to lose him at this point in his training, but if he survives it will be a most valuable lesson to him, and the others as well.”

“Which is why you’re putting him through this exercise,” Jazirqe realized. “The others are all just whetstones for him to grind away upon while you sharpen his blade. When are you going to tell them that they failed today’s test?”

“They haven’t yet. Not necessarily, at least. You realized it first, but unless they confront Juri with deadly intentions, the others still have a chance to pass today’s test. Bringing him in for questioning is an acceptable pass condition, although it’s unlikely given his strength compared to the others.”

“So, today’s exercise was to see how we reacted to being fed false information by someone we trusted?” Jazirqe clarified.

“More or less,” Qiste agreed. “And since you saw through it so easily, I’m going to have to give you another assignment for today.”

Jazirqe groaned in frustration. She had been really looking forward to taking a day off. “Fine. What is it?”

“Keep Juri alive, but using only your own strength and without informing the others that they are being misled,” Qiste said, her smile a sadistic snarl.

“Oh, fuck me,” Jaz groaned.

“Look at it on the bright side. After today, you’re off pigeon shit duty,” Qiste informed her.

Despite the change in her day’s plans, Jazirqe didn’t rush after Juri and the others, but rather returned to her home and changed into full combat regalia. She had never trained with buckler and sword before joining the Whisperers, who had sent her to train with the common soldiers of the Orders, but she had found that she preferred having one hand dedicated to defense, and the shield was far more effective than blocking with a knife had been.

Otherwise her gear looked much as Rena’s had when they had met last, leather, with sheathed throwing knives concealed in various seams, as well as pouches filled with vials of poisons, smoke bombs, flash bombs, powdered irritants, and other fulcrums to turn a fight in her favor. She took her time to gear up carefully, knowing that the fighting would be dangerous.

She wasn’t too concerned about the ones who had left first; Juri was a big strong boy with enough combat training to put anyone of the other trainees down in a fair fight. No, Jaz was concerned about the ones who wouldn’t fight fair. She would let Juri handle the ones who came at him directly while she covered the oblique angles.

Strapping on her sword belt, she considered how she would approach catching Juri if he really had been a traitor, and she laughed when she realized that she wouldn’t have really done anything differently. She would have let the others get a head-start, because tracking them would be easier than tracking Juri himself.

So that’s what she did. Send a spider to catch a spider, and send a snake to catch a snake. Today, she was playing mongoose.

Finding the others was easier than she’d thought. They hadn’t tried to hide their trails, and they converged upon the first battleground, where Juri had faced the first of those who had come after him. He had been forced to kill one, she noticed, and six more were badly hurt. With her knowledge that this was just a training exercise, she felt the waste of the death. Not the pain of loss over it, for she barely knew the casualty, but the wasted resources.

Yet who was she to judge? The whisperers were centuries old, and they had their reasons for everything they did. It was for Juri’s sake, being forced to kill a former ally because they had turned upon you was a difficult experience, but one that he had no choice but to make under the situation he had been thrust into. And for the others? Perhaps it would teach them caution, and not to rush into a job without seriously contemplating the implications.

Especially once Juri’s innocence was revealed.

Jaz considered carefully how she would proceed as the snakes carefully put their fangs together, trying to figure out a way to cut their heads off without actually cutting their heads off.