“So, I won’t be coming in tomorrow. Or ever again,” Jazirqe informed her boss. The common room went silent at her words, overheard by all, and some of the customers cursed. For some of them, the beautiful eighteen year old was the only reason they’d bothered to come that night. There certainly wasn’t anything else in the dingy little common room to attract their attention. “Sorry for the inconvenience. If I liked you, I’d give you a few ren to smooth things over. But I never did like you.”

“Oh? And who are you to be throwing ren about in the first place? You’re the one who came to me begging for work, little miss,” the balding middle aged man reminded her.

“It wasn’t for the coin. You were the only inn with a common room in town, and this is an important crossroads. I figured I’d get some good gossip, which might pan out into some good intel. Unfortunately your beer is so watered down and your beds are so ridden with bedbugs that--”

“Hey! Don’t be insulting me like that.”

“I was insulting your establishment, not you,” She pointed out.

“If you would have done your job keeping up the place--”

“I worked as hard as you paid me to. Screaming obscenities at your employees isn’t giving them legal tender. It motivates them to hate you and slack off, not work harder. Same for pinching their asses, although to be fair you only tried that once before I showed you what a mistake it was. Now, look, the truth is that I could have just vanished on you. Instead I’m just letting you know that I’m leaving town and heading west until I find somewhere else to hide,” she explained.

“Hide? You hiding from the Law?” the bartender asked, his expression turning serious.

“No, my family. The Law and I are fast friends. Sometimes I work with them, sometimes I work for them, and sometimes they work for me,” Jazirqe explained. “Although that’s sort of why my family wants to kill me so badly, and why I have to keep moving.”

“Your family wants to – what sort of family kills their own?” one of the patrons demanded.

“The Anzabos clan does. Actually, in a way, I sort of deserve it. I got a lot of them hanged two years ago. I’m not sorry, though. They were traitors to the Empire,” she explained. “That’s what set off this whole civil war that’s going on.”

“Civil war?” another patron asked. “I haven’t seen no armies.”

“No, it’s not that sort of civil war,” she agreed. “It’s the sort that’s fought in the shadows and the wilds. But there have been terrible casualties nevertheless. They killed all of the pigeons, the fucking things are almost endangered now. And the damn mail is always late because it’s always being intercepted. But that’s just the part that everyone knows. The part that’s being kept from the public is the scary part, but only the empire’s spies and those doing the fighting have the real scope of what’s going on.”

“What, you’re saying that you set off a secret war between spies?” the innkeeper challenged.

“More or less,” She agreed. “And also, not really. The Whisperers had been gathering intel for decades – centuries really – but they didn’t have a good in, or a reason to act. I gave them both. Now every clan or sect with a secret they didn’t want exposed is trying to keep their reputations intact, with many of their leaders trying to keep their heads out of a noose or off the block. Some are aiming to kill me in retribution.”

Jazirqe took a drink from the mug she’d been holding. The innkeeper had thought it was for a customer, and when she flipped him a penny he realized that it was. She’d quit. She was a customer now.

“See, the Anzabos clan was known throughout the Empire as the best information brokers in the empire,” Jaz explained. “You wanted to know a secret? You paid them. You wanted to keep a secret secret? You paid them double. Now, normally the whisperers have no problem with this sort of activity. Trouble was, they weren’t patriots. They were perfectly happy to sell the secrets of the empire, or to protect the secrets of her enemies, so long as the coin was good. And that was all fine and great until I basically gave all of the secrets that they’d been holding on to for centuries over to the Law.”

She laughed bitterly. “You know how many traitors there are alive in the empire? Hundreds, if not thousands, of course. Not talking about petty criminals or men who murder their lovers to keep their wives happy. I’m talking about people who actually undermined the Empire for profit. I’m talking about Treason. But the real funny part is how many of them were paying to cover it up, and the fact that the Anzabos clan used the same five ciphers for almost all of them. They believed they were using their most secure ciphers because it’s the most difficult to translate. But if you have the ciphered document, the key, and know that it’s one of those five, then deciphering it just takes a bit longer than the easier to use ciphers.”

She shook her head bitterly. “And at one point, I was willing to die to protect those secrets, too. To protect those traitors, because they were paying my elders, and my elders had brainwashed me that that was my purpose in life. Now two in five of the Anzabos clan is dead. The ones that the Whisperers could prove knew what was going on, where the money was coming from. Oh, and the money is gone. All the survivors have left is their skills and what they remember from the glory days and their hatred of me.”

She drank the rest of her mug in one go and slammed it on the table nearest her. “Well, I’m not going to make it easy for them. They want a chase? I’ll give them one.”

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

And she leapt out the window.

The rest of the patrons in the little village inn didn’t know quite what to make of that, but after a few moments, they all went back to their drinks.

~~~~~~~~~~

“A crossbow? Really? That was the plan? Just shoot me from hiding when I left through the front door?”

The voice came from behind Rena, so close that it could have been whispering in her ear. Jerking by surprise, she pulled the trigger, and the bolt laced with Surmago extract flew into the side of the inn. Rena dropped the crossbow, useless now that she’d wasted the draw, and spun, pulling her blades from her leather jerkin.

Jaz was ready for her, buckler and short sword instead of the double daggers she had grown up using. She had ripped off the serving apron she had worn during her shift and was dressed in a plain red tunic. The weapons were one of many she had stashed in the event that one of her protectors gave the signal she had been found and needed to make an immediate escape. She was supposed to go west – the very direction she had said she was heading – to meet up with one of those very protectors.

But when she had seen it was Rena who had found her, she had changed the plan.

“It worked when you shot me!” Rena challenged, slashing at her cousin, only for Jaz to block easily. She wasn’t even fighting like an Anzabos anymore! Who had taught her to move like that? With her feet firmly planted and her buckler instead of a second blade, Jazirqe easily blocked all of Rena’s furious attacks and parried the few that made it past the shield.

“It’s just that the irony is a little much, isn’t it?” Jaz asked. “Anyway, I was shooting to disable, not to kill. Even in the dark I knew how to do that.”

“You turned your back on the clan! On your family!” Rena screamed.

“On the traitors, yes,” Jazirqe admitted. She saw the opportunity and took it, slashing a narrow cut on her cousin’s forearm with her blade. “After they exiled me. Excommunicated me, over a single failure.”

Drawing first blood was not enough. The two cousins had learned to fight together, and they knew each other’s rhythms, although it was clear that someone had taught Jazirqe some new moves.

Which is why she noticed the bomues poison taking effect in her cousin first. Counting on the slowing agent to give her an advantage, she opened a slight hole in her defense, and slashed at the other forearm, scoring another narrow slash.

It was enough. The slowing agent of the concentrated poison – far more potent than what she had used on Baturya in order to get through Rena’s built up tolerance – soon became more noticeable. A third slash delivered enough of the poison to cause Rena to lose her grip on her blades and fall to the ground.

“Traitor,” Rena gasped, struggling to stand and resume the fight. “We will catch you and punish you for --”

“I was banished by the clan. Outcast, no longer bound by any of the oaths I had taken. I am no traitor, I was betrayed,” Jazirqe answered. “I hold no shame for what I did, Rena. I am sorry you suffered for what was done to you, both as a result of my actions and the actions of others, but I will not apologize for bringing the dark truths of the Anzabos clan into the light.”

“Lies,” Rena gasped. “Everything, it was all lies. They picked us at random. It was terrible, never knowing who was next to go to the gallows. And they made us watch. Told us ‘this is what happens to traitors. Only confession will save you.’”

“It was never random. They just made it seem like it was to scare the rest of you into confessing. And what they said about confession was true,” Jaz agreed. “Confession saved you. And it saved my mother, and it saved everyone else who caved to the pressure of being interrogated by someone who actually knew what they were doing. The Whisperers, they were lenient. They could have hunted us all down, wiped our bloodline from the face of the earth, sparing not even the babes. Instead, they only hanged a few traitors among us, sparing those who acted in ignorance and loyalty.”

Jazirqe sighed, sheathing her blade. “About an hour before you can move again. I’ll be heading east, you know. Was supposed to lead you west if I could, but that wasn’t the real plan. Rena, if you ever want to know the truth of this world, if you ever want to know just how sheltered we are, find a camp of one of the Martial Orders and enlist. Tell them you want to be a whisperer, if you want. Or not. You’re Awakened, so they’ll take you in a heartbeat in any capacity they can have you in. But don’t tell them that your name is anything other than Rena Anzabos. If you do, they’ll stretch your neck.”

“What are you talking about?” Rena asked, her voice heavy as the paralytic poison made it hard for her to breathe.

“There’s a whole world we’re not allowed to see, Rena. Not until we pass the sixth Reformation,” Jaz said. “Parts of the maps which are wilds that aren’t really wilds. There’s an Empire within the Empire. I’ve said before that the Empire is a garden, and we’re the spiders. Well, the citizens are just the grass. The cultivators are the flowers, but there are also bushes and the trees. Who is the garden for? Who built it, and who keeps it neat and trim?”

She spat, her mouth still tasting of the vile watered down beer she’d had in the inn. “If you want to know why the Anzabos clan was purged, join the Orders. Tell the other survivors to do the same. If nothing else, they’ll make you stronger. Teach you how to fight, how to be more than just a blade in the dark. How to kill with more than just poison.”

She sighed. “So many things we were proud of, turns out they were holding us back. On purpose. Our secret cultivation techniques? They were garbage, meant to slow us down and keep us from building the right foundations. That’s why so few of us ever passed the fourth Reformation. It was easy to reach the third, but hard to reach the fourth, and almost impossible to reach the fifth without almost starting over. And it wasn’t just us. Only the Orders had unfettered access to real power. And that was because they needed it. Because the Empire has enemies, Rena. And our enemies have power too.”

Finished with her monologue, Jaz walked away, heading east, Leaving Rena behind. Rena had recognized the familiar burn of bomues poison in her veins immediately, but although she had tried to burn it out of her system, it was a particularly potent and effective formulation. Because like many things in the version of the empire that she knew, the bomues poison that the Anzabos Clan had commonly used was a watered down impostor compared to the formulation which disabled her. She should have been immune. Instead, the three simple cuts left her disabled for three hours, long enough for Jazirqe to lay a false trail and double back to travel west, to meet up with her protectors.

They would understand the delay. They had likely been expecting it. It takes much to catch one of the Whisperers by surprise.