“So we don't know what happened?” Blood asked as she walked past me, her hat and cloak still gripping in her hands and a raven squawking animatedly on her shoulder.

“No I'm sorry, all we know is Lydia didn’t make it home and I was told her walk home takes her through a dangerous district.” I wasn’t idle either. Whilst Blood was still getting dressed and trying to wolf down a late dinner I had polished my new steel mace head and tucked the aether disruptor into my sleeve.

“If it's one of the bronze districts we’ll have to be careful of our actions and our reputation. They still have some level of watch presence which might have heard of us which would cause some significant difficulties if we demonstrate our magic. If it's an iron or copper one we’ll be free of any worries about the Order finding us but we’ll probably be in even more danger, some of those districts are nearly war zones.” Skull was busy simultaneously checking maps, reading reports and stashing a plethora of small edged weaponry in various hidden pockets.

I watched all this with a strange sense of detachment. I was nervous... really nervous not just because of the danger to Lydia although that was a part of it but mainly because I was lying to my friends. We had agreed long ago, no names no faces. So I’d told them the truth and a lie; that Lydia worked as a maid for house Dutair but that I only knew her vaguely as a friend of a friend of a relative. It may have been the rules, it may have been expected, it may even have been necessary but I still hated lying to my friends.

“Good.” I turned to see Blood hefting a double bladed battle axe that she had produced from somewhere. “I need a fight.”

Skull laughed quietly and held up one of the maps. “This details the likeliest route that Miss Melton took home. We’ll follow it and see if we can pick up her trail.”

I nodded, my movement’s jerky with nerves, Blood noticed and leaning forwards hugged my right arm to her chest, “Hey it's ok Bright,” she said, her tone oddly serious... for her. “She's going to be fine.”

“No doubt about it,” said Skull, sounding for once like the young girl she really is. “We’ll find whatever bar she's in, drag her home and be back in bed before sunrise.”

Blood giggled at that and nodded. “See? You don't need to worry about a thing because your friends are here for you.”

“Just let us do the talking when we find her,” said Skull lightly. “And try not to freeze.”

I reached out and squeezed both their hands… hard. “You’re the best friends I could ever have,” I said crying behind my mask. “Thank you.”

An hour later Skull's finger jabbed the ragged paper surface of our map with an air of finality and satisfaction, “this must be it! The Silver Keys district where house Dutair is based is one of the safest in the city gold ranked and all,” she pointed again, “Judiciary Junction where Miss Melton lives is only ranked iron but it has its own civilian militia....,” Skull drew her finger along the map then look up at the rash of twinkling lights spread out before us. “...So this is the only place left.”

“The docks,” I sighed. “Of course it’s the damn docks.” The four vast docking spurs of Prasus were some of the oldest and roughest areas of the city. Prasus is a trade city after all and trade never sleeps, ships arrive around the clock laden with exotic and expensive products from all across the known world and they need to be unloaded, repaired and resupplied. Just as their cargo needed to be evaluated, distributed and protected and their crew needed to be fed, housed, entertained and replenished. The docks have always been the heart of Prasus, where the lifeblood of the city flowed from, by their nature they were well protected but... trade breeds smuggling, smuggling feeds crime and crime spirals out of control.

To explain the dock spurs one really needs to explain their layout first. In most cities docks simply spring up anywhere that there’s open ocean. They grow slowly to meet the cities needs then basically just tick over like a guard golem on watch and that's basically it, they never really get expanded or improved or even noticed unless there's a really big fire or a naval invasion. But this is Prasus, the jewel of the eastern ocean! We say go big or go home.

Each of the city's four vast dock spurs (one for each cardinal direction) was well over a dozen miles long and incorporated four score districts or more, it would take someone hours to walk their entire length and they could accommodate a thousand ships a side without strain or crowding. Literally millions of tons of trade goods could be loaded and unloaded each day and hundreds of thousands of passengers could take ships each tide. The spurs each accommodated inns and eateries, shops and apothecaries, tailors and shipwrights, garrisons of naval troopers and berths for the Prasian Grand Navy (the largest navy on the planet). In many ways each of the four spurs was its own little city joined at the end to Prasus itself. The dock spurs were much wider where they attached to the city and grew thinner as they extended outwards until they ended with rounded ocean breaks that were constantly being moved forwards as the spurs grew to accommodate ever more docks ports and wharfs physically they make the city look rather like a giant stone octopus that had had a severe accident.

Now being so valuable to the city you would expect the spurs to be well protected and they were... or at least the docks were protected. As I said each spur included dozens of districts and each district had a different focus. Now the ones on the seaward edges were all ports obviously and the ports where firmly under the watch’s control and supervision, they were the most valuable part of the docks (and by extension the entire city) and as such a huge amount of money was invested annually in getting well trained, highly motivated and completely unbribable watchmen guarding both them and the very expensive ships in them. The problems started to crop up when you got further away from the docks and into the less profitable (and therefore less vital) regions of the city where the less skilled and less pure guardsmen were dumped. Now to be honest most managed fine, they tended to end up mildly corrupt but generally safe and profitable places to live, but a few districts fell entirely, the watch abandoning them fully (sometimes thanks to spilled coins and sometimes thanks to spilled blood) and leaving the gangs to rule there now.

Some of the gangs weren’t too bad (generally the ones made by people who grew up in the docks). They acted a bit like a cross between armed longshoremen, tax collectors and a civilian militia but the majority were ruthless and dangerous. The worst were into slave and weapon smuggling, protection rackets and drug running in a big way and some didn't draw the line at assassination or sabotage either. In short none of them were people you wanted to run into a lone girl walking home late at night.

Or that's what Skull had told me.

If I'm going to be honest I’d always assumed that the docks were just well.... docks... big flat areas around ships filled with lots of muscular, loud and not particularly bright workers hauling ropes rhythmically whilst singing to make ships... work... somehow. It would probably have been quite the rude awakening for me if I had just stumbled in there obliviously but luckily Skull knew pretty much everything about Prasus, even the grubby bits and she was able to fill in the gaps in my (and as it turned out Bloods) knowledge with ease[64]. But all that still didn't prepare us for the actual entrance.

We were flitting from rooftop to rooftop as usual when we saw it. It stretched across the mouth of the district unmistakable even from a distance, a vast stone wall taller than any of the surrounding buildings and far newer than the district. It was topped with iron spikes the length of spears, armoured crenulations like tiny castles patrolled by archers with huge longbows of expensive imported woods. In its centre was set a single heavy portcullis with practically oozed menace guarded on our side by ten citywatch troopers who stood with swords already drawn. On the other side we could see… nothing save darkness, rubble, crude graffiti and drifts of rotting festering rubbish.

We landed softly on the smooth red rooftop of one of the outer houses of the district just beyond the wall. Sitting up there above the street I remember the soft light of the two sisters, the distant overlapping sounds of talking that echoed through the still night air and I remember the stink. The docks reeked of fish and salt, rust and stone, dust and more abstractly of decay and despair. Landing in an alley next to a wall half covered with fetid green mould, we gingerly crunched our way across pools of broken glass and huddled under an overhang.

“So this is the docks?” said Blood, still unable to bear the sound of silence. “...It sucks.”

“It isn’t... very nice.” I agreed. The understatement of the century obviously but at that point in my life I was still bound consciously or subconsciously by a lot of noble etiquette that I have since joyfully discarded.

“This is even worse than I thought,” said Skull to my utter astonishment, it must have shown because she shrugged. “What? I have agents in the docks. I don't come down here myself... This place is disgusting.”

I looked around at the cold gloom hung with greasy fog and I shuddered. “I quite agree. Let’s not stay any longer than we have to, which way did Lydia go?”

Skull looked down at her map, then held it up, then spun around on the spot. “I can't quite see the ma...” Before she finished speaking light exploded into existence with that sucking rushing sound fire makes when it flares. Turning we saw Blood stood behind us, her upraised hand engulfed in crimson flame. She nodded at us and essayed a mocking wave[65] as she spoke, “in your own time ladies.”

Skull tutted slightly but quickly doubled over the map again. “About three districts seawards is the Trade Winds District which according to her brother is the first dock district she goes through on her route home[66]. That’s the best place to try and pick up a trail.”

“Right, let's climb.” I matched my words to actions and levelled my mace at the rooftop then fired my grapnel. I had gotten pretty good with it and now it hardly ever got stuck on statuary. A moment later Skull drew a set of climbing spikes from her pockets and began to quickly scale the wall behind me. Blood for her part just signed at the both of us and ran straight up the brickwork as easily as I can run along a street.

I had started to feel noticeably safer on rooftops (and still do to this day) so I stopped on the lip of the new building to take a deep calming breath. The air up there was much nicer than in the alley away from the stinking rubbish and rotten wood, it was cold and crisp and had a reassuringly familiar tang of salt on the breeze (obviously all Prasus air is sea air but some is more sea-y) as I stood still there for a moment I tried desperately to steady my nerves. As I was doing this Blood appeared next to me in the soundless way she does (she's a lot like a cat in that regard one second she's not there and then *bam* she's judging you...).

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“How are you doing Bright?”Asked Blood, looking at me with a strange tilt to her mask.

“I'm... I'm fine.” I lied, in truth I was worried, I was worried about Lydia, about my friends, about wandering around the disgusting, dark docks at night. I mean for Koth's sake I’m a damn noblewoman! For a second I questioned why I was even there.

Blood looked at me for a long moment and I got the disturbing feeling she was seeing everything I was thinking and the even more disturbing feeling that the reason she could was because she’d thought it once herself, “we’re here for you Bright,” she said quietly. “And we always will be.”

“That's right,” said Skull, her hand dropping onto my shoulder. “We’re a team.”

I smiled down at my chest that's why I thought as I nodded at the two of them. “Right, sorry it's just...”

“This is a depressing place we get it,” said Blood gesturing. “Now let’s find Trade Winds.”

It didn't take us long since we were moving as the crow flew (sometimes literally). It was a relatively large district covering a few dry docks and some huge warehouses as well as a great number of normal homes and a few service buildings (like inns... mainly inns actually). Unfortunately we did know where in the district Lydia might be. Her brother had only been able to tell us the district names that she had to pass through, not the street numbers, so we made up for lack of knowledge with sheer speed.

Under the moonlight we skimmed from rooftop to rooftop as fast as we could. We peered down alleys, checked gutters and ditches, threw bricks at piles of refuse, darted over the deep canals and sent flocks of ravens scouting ahead as we combed over what seemed like the entire sleeping city.

In the end it was Skull who found it (not much of a surprise there). At the time we were standing on the rooftop of an old smeltery, its huge furnaces long dead and cold, its valuable ore sold or stolen, the smelter’s roof was unusually high for Prasian architecture (to accommodate the vast slag pots below it) so we were using it as a lookout point to plan our next move. I think I was facing west but I'm not entirely sure. What I do remember is a hiss of indrawn breath from Skull that got the both of us spinning to face her.

She scrambled down the walls like a spider and dashed along the ground to stand next to the overflowing gutters below us (I climbed down at a more sedate pace behind her, Blood literally just stepped off the roof and worried about the ground when it met her... somehow that works for her). As we approached we saw Skull draw her sabre and, using its point, push aside a mound of filth and detritus. Half buried underneath was a scarf; long and light yellow with orange thread edging. She held it up draped over her blade.

“A lace knitted scarf of Agoritian breed wool if I'm any judge. They’re a fairly rare primitive sheep breed that lives only on a few of the eastern islands and that thread's orange dyed, not natural. This is not something people in this district could afford.”

Me and Blood both boggled at her... before then I’d never boggled at someone but it just comes to you when you need it.

“You saw that from the top of a building?” I was amazed.

“You can seriously tell that a dropped scarf you saw from a ROOFTOP is a rare sheep breed?” Blood said with a mixture of pity and awe in her voice.

Skull shrugged but I could feel the pride boiling off her, she had a right to it after all. “It's just something I picked up.” She replied modestly.

I nodded but stayed silent, taking the scarf from her and balling it up in my hands as Blood and Skull went to work searching the alley. Blood squatted down on her haunches and ran a finger through the oily mud on the floor, Skull leaned towards a wall and, pulling a small magnifier from a pocket, began to scrutinise it intently. After a minute of silence they both stopped as one and looked at each other.

“She was running,” said Blood looking up at the fog. “And chased.”

“She hit this wall and pushed off of it,” Skull gestured at a tiny mark. “Nail polish.” She added by way of explanation.

I nodded at them, setting my hidden face and trying to still my suddenly hammering heart. “Right... So which way do we go... what do we do?”

Skull pointed down the street. “Her trail goes west...”

“Quickly then!” interrupted Blood. “Let’s get going!” and without further ado she quickly married word to action and launched herself forwards and up a wall, Skull and I exchanged long suffering looks before also springing into motion. To her credit Blood was waiting for us when we reached the top of the building.

I don't remember the run, honestly I don't, I was panicking and tired and desperately trying not to think about all those dark thoughts that were bobbing in my head. All I do remember is Blood's hand. When I landed on that roof next to her she took my hand and hauled me along behind her like a child dragging their friend out to play. For a few minutes of memories that's all I remember her reassuring warmth and the wind pulling icy fingers through my hair, then reality and memory snap together as Skull leaps.

She had been keeping a close eye on the road below us, I think she was following some sort of tracks (I am a spoiled pampered noblewomen remember I literally could not see anything... well I could see grime, dirt and scum obviously but nothing useful). When suddenly she stopped dead and leapt from the rooftop her climbing claws screaming as she skidded down the brickwork.

I followed Skull down the smart way whilst Blood again just flung herself off but this time she landed in a pile of rubbish and had to spend a minute or two hopping around and swearing whilst kicking bits of filth off her boots. I saw Skull vanish into an alley and tried to follow her but I could barely walk, my lungs felt like they were on fire.

For a while I just stood there with my hands on my knees as Blood (sword out and shining) walked past me and followed Skull into the alley. I heard a few muffled words being exchanged then they both walked out Skull drawing her sabre again.

“Skull what’s going on did you...?” I tried to stumble forwards into the alley but as I went to move Blood reappeared and bared my path with an outstretched arm.

“You should stay there. Bright I'm perfect but you don't like the sight of blood.”

I nearly fainted, sickness rose into my mouth and my vision seemed to fade. “She's... you mean...”

Blood spun around and grabbed my hand, the effect was incredible, the whole world seemed to snap back into focus the second her gloved fingers touched mine. “No No No! I'm so sorry I just thought it sounded cool and I was worried you’d throw up... no she's not dead. I think she's been injured but that's it.”

I smiled invisibly down at Blood and then leaning forwards rested my forehead against hers and looked into her eye(sockets). “It’s ok let me see.”

The younger girl blushed (I could feel it don't question me) and stepped back letting me into the alley. At the far end the wall was stained at about stomach height with blood a large red smear of the stuff that ran downwards. That alone wasn't too bad but the floor... The floor was awash with an ocean of barely dry blood, like a vast crimson sea.

“By Koth!” I sobbed looking down at the pool, there was no way a human could lose that much blood and survive.

Blood looked at me, then down, then up, then she slapped a palm into her forehead. “Oh of course I forgot, you stupid half blind monkeys, that isn’t her blood.”

“What?” I muttered hope rising.

Blood pointed. “The stuff on the wall is hers but it’s only about a pint, you can survive that... by the Abyss I’ve lost that much blood just blasting doors down before. The stuff on the floor is from about twenty different people, at least five of them not walking away from the fight,” she stopped and shook her head as if to clear it, “and there’s something else in their blood it's... tainted?” she bent down and ran a finger through the dried flakes then raised it to her mask and sniffed. “Not all of them, just the five that bled the most their bloods wrong... it's messed up somehow.”

“How do you mean messed up?” Skull suddenly spoke, the eagerness in her voice bordering on childlike. “Can you detect that magically, is it passive or active, does it drain you in any way?” Skull was obsessed with magic and understanding it. She was an intelligencer after all, gaining knowledge was her job, but her obsession with magic was something else entirely, she had nearly squealed with delight[67] when she found out both me and Blood were mages. Honestly she never went more than a day without creating some kind of experiment or asking us to do some kind of test to figure out how we worked and she pouted if we didn't want to take part. I wish I could see her childlike side more often though it’s really cute[68].

Blood blushed (like I said before don't question me on this I can just tell with her, it’s a best friend thing) and grasped her hands behind her back. Little hellion she may be but she could be surprisingly shy at times. “Uh... it's not... I mean it's not actually my...”

“Can you control the blood in any way, what about if it wasn't dried?” Babbled Skull as she loomed over Blood. “I’ve always wondered if you could actively control blood in another person’s body, how about using someone else’s blood to fuel your fire attacks. If that worked we could...”

Inside me something snapped. “QUIET!” I yelled sharply. The other two fell silent instantly[69] and shuffled their feet.

“Sorry, Bright,” said Skull. “I shouldn't have lost focus.”

“Sorry Bight.” Whispered Blood not looking up.

I took a deep breath and felt myself blushing hotly. Right, a sarcastic voice spoke in my head, snap at your best friends because that's going to help the situation you idiot. “I'm so sorry guys,” I said, sketching a sort of shaky half bow at them. “I shouldn't have lost my composure. I know you’re doing all you can to help, I'm so sorry. Is there anything you can do to find her? Either of you?”

Skull looked around and shook her head but Blood nodded. “I can track her.”

“What?” I gasped, hope surging again. “You’re sure?”

“Of course,” answered Blood, her old swagger back already, “I’m perfect after all. This was only a few hours ago and it’s not like it’s rained.” She gestured up at the sky then looked down thoughtfully. “And she would have been bleeding heavily wherever she went... or was taken. Regardless, I can follow the scent of her blood no problem.”

“The scent...” Skull began to ask before she stopped herself and nodded. “Ok good idea, get going.”

Blood walked into the alley then stopped and turned to look at us. “I'm going to need to get a good breath, turn around please.”

Skull and I looked at each other in that blood soaked alley, the request seemed like the least strange part of our evening so far. We both turned around and stared out across the desolate dull main street then we heard a sound which caused us both to stiffen involuntarily, the familiar symphony of porcelain sliding across skin. We both knew that sound very well. We heard it every time we went home after all.

She's taking off her mask I thought with shocked disbelief. For a second all I wanted in the world was to turn, to see who my best friend really was but I knew she wouldn't want that. So I pushed the thoughts away with difficulty and reined in my (as mentioned) nearly insatiable curiosity. Next to me I assumed that Skull was fighting the same internal battle[70]. After a few seconds we heard a number of deep ragged breaths then the scraping sound again but this time half way through was a dull clatter like someone dropping a large bone onto the floor and a mutter of “bugger” from Blood followed by another minute or so of scraping noises, then I felt a hand land on my shoulder.

“Thank you for waiting,” said Blood, her mask firmly back in place. “I’ve got the scent, let's go.” And without a further word she was off. This time Skull kept pace with me as Blood led the way. The red girl was already a full street length ahead of us when she hit a wall and just ran up it. By the time the two of us had messed around with grapnels and climbing gear she had built up a commanding lead across the rooftops, in fact we only caught up with her when she stopped.