“I’m fine. Seriously, I can take care of myself. I’m just fine!”

Irritably, I tried to bat away Faith’s and Ash’s hands so I could sneak off and make my own way to Crow’s Foot. If I could just reach his home, Bazso would make everything all better. He’d answer the door, take one look at me, and help me inside. Then he’d sit beside me while Sawbones patched me up, holding my hand and chatting matter-of-factly about Lampblack business to take my mind off the pain. Best of all, he would never, ever embarrass me by fussing over my injuries.

However, he might feel a lot less inclined to help if I popped up on his doorstep with a complete stranger – plus Faith. Even if his address were an open secret in Crow’s Foot, that didn’t mean I could just hand it out at will.

“I can get to a doctor by myself,” I insisted. “I’m perfectly fine!”

“No, you really aren’t. You can’t even stand up on your own,” Ash pointed out, kneeling on my left and slinging one of my arms over his shoulders.

“Of course she’s perfectly all right,” objected Faith with a saccharine smile, taking my other side. On Ash’s count of three, they stood, hoisting me to my feet. A little yelp escaped my lips when they jostled my legs, and Faith practically radiated earnest belief. “She’s just staggering and swaying and slipping in pools of her own blood. I’ve never seen her better!”

Well, no one said I needed to walk all the way to Crow’s Foot. I could crawl if I had to.

Overriding my protests, the two flagged down a cab, carefully maneuvered me into it, climbed in after me, and then stared at me expectantly. With a sigh, I gave the driver the address of Bazso’s townhouse.

“Crow’s Foot, miss?” asked the cabbie, sounding a little alarmed.

“It’s the nicer part of Crow’s Foot,” I snapped, in no mood to coddle him. Despite their best efforts, Ash and Faith had banged one of my legs into the bench and that hurt.

“What my dear friend means to say,” explained Faith innocently, “is that there are the murderous parts of Crow’s Foot, and then there are the slightly less murderous parts of Crow’s Foot, and we’re going to the slightly less murderous part even if we have to pass through the murderous part to get there, but regardless you don’t have to worry because you probably won’t be murdered!”

It might have been more convincing if she hadn’t phrased it quite that way.

“Plus we’ll pay extra – but only if you hurry,” added Ash, which probably contributed a lot more to the cabbie’s decision to whip his goat into motion.

As we rattled down the streets of Six Towers, I could swear that I felt every single pothole and every last cobblestone. Somewhere during that drive, I must have passed out, because the next thing I knew, I was dangling between my crewmates on a familiar doorstep and Faith was declaiming loudly enough to wake the whole district, “Disaster and tragedy have struck! Isha has been gravely injured. I’m afraid that scars will mar her beauty forever!”

With an effort, I tilted my head upward and met Bazso’s startled look. He was still wearing his shirt and trousers, so at least we hadn’t rousted him out of bed. “I told them I’m fine,” I sighed. “They insisted on coming.”

Assessing me from head to toe with a professional air, Bazso didn’t even bother to dignify that with a response. He immediately moved out of the doorway and pointed at what passed for a parlor in his bachelor pad. “Bring her in here,” he directed Ash and Faith, then called over his shoulder at an urchin dozing nearby, “Bug, get Sawbones.”

Of course it had to be Bug. The boy glowered at me as if it were all my fault that he was losing precious beauty sleep, but he did bound lightly to his feet and disappear into the fog.

“What happened?” Bazso demanded as Faith and Ash carefully lowered me onto the sofa and arranged me lengthwise along it.

Straightening and shaking out her skirts, Faith launched gleefully into a dramatic tale worthy of a Spiregarden production. “Well, you see, we were ambushed – ambushed, I tell you! – on the streets of Six Towers by five thugs in black gowns. They had us surrounded! They had us cornered! It would have been the end of us, but Isha was there! Isha wasn’t frightened at all! Oh no, she drew her sword with a bloodcurdling war cry and charged right at them! Ash and I stood back and watched in awe as she dispatched every last ruffian on her own.”

Taking a little too much interest in her theatrics, Ash reminded her drily, “Don’t forget the tentacled demon.”

“Ah yes! The tentacled demon! How could I have forgotten the tentacled demon? It came out of nowhere and was thiiiiiiis big – ”

If she kept talking, I was going to track down the nearest tentacled demon and feed her to it. One limb at a time. Everything below my waist felt as if it were on fire, and my head pounded harder with every word she uttered.

“We killed Ronia Helker,” I stated flatly.

Startled, Ash jerked a little and stared down at me. Is this a good idea? he hand-signed incredulously. Do you trust him this much?

Yes? No? Maybe?

Bazso, who knew better than to hover, had been standing guard in the parlor doorway, keeping one eye on the front door while half-listening to Faith’s “report.” At my announcement, he went dead still for one split second. Then he whirled around, strode straight across the parlor to his sideboard, and produced a bottle of – yes, excellent whiskey. “This calls for a celebration,” he pronounced with grim satisfaction.

“Oh, no no no,” Faith said hastily, backing away and feigning maidenly distress. “I wasn’t involved at all in any kind of killing whatsoever.”

“Even if you only watched, miss, you get whiskey too,” Bazso informed her.

At that moment, the front door slammed shut, and he practically leaped back across the parlor to accost the newcomer.

“Ronia Helker is dead.” Bazso shoved the bottle at a rumpled-looking Sawbones.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

The good doctor stopped short, blinked in confusion, decided that details were irrelevant when there was good whiskey to be drunk, and took a deep swig instead.

“Which one is the patient?” he asked, eyeing all three of us. Considering how much of my blood stained Faith’s and Ash’s clothing, it was a fair question.

“Isha.” Reclaiming the bottle, Bazso gently eased onto the sofa beside me and shifted my head into his lap.

“Her legs are all sliced up,” Faith supplied helpfully, perching on an ottoman next to the doctor so she could get a better view.

Bending over my legs, Sawbones carefully peeled away my shredded trousers. “I…see,” he agreed absently. “Indeed they are, miss.”

Dried blood had glued fabric to flesh, and I flinched again and again as he pulled it off inch by agonizing inch. Pride kept my jaw clenched, but I grabbed Bazso’s hand and clung to it with all my strength. A veteran of countless triage operations, Bazso put a reassuring arm around my shoulders and held the bottle to my lips. “Drink,” he suggested. So I did, but I still jumped when Sawbones stabbed a needle through my skin.

“This will go faster if you hold still, miss,” he informed me with some asperity.

“Ooh, that looks like it hurt!” exclaimed Faith, bending over so close that Sawbones nearly bumped into her nose. “I haven’t seen a cut that deep since – ”

Surprisingly, rage proved a better painkiller than whiskey, so I gritted my teeth and tallied up all the times I needed to kick her. After my legs healed, of course, so I could deploy the appropriate amount of force.

“Oh, and is that bone I see? Now that’s a nasty gash, if I do say so myself!”

Much more accustomed to good old-fashioned cursing, poor Sawbones looked disconcerted by Faith’s running commentary. “What did this to her, miss, do you know?”

Of all the people to ask!

“Oh, oh, yes, I do know! It was a huuuuuuuuge tentacled demon! It had suckers bigger than my ruffles!” She stopped talking long enough to take stock of her outfit. “Oh, by the way, Isha, you owe me a new dress. I’ll never get the bloodstains out of this one.”

I glared at her.

“It’s okay. You can go shopping with me. After you recover, of course,” she assured me magnanimously.

“So what really happened?” Bazso was asking Ash sotto voce.

“You know I don’t like to go into detail about my other affairs,” Ash reproved him.

“Wait,” I said, jerking up partway and provoking a sharp, “Don’t move!” from Sawbones. Bazso’s arm tightened around my shoulders, and I lay back down obediently, craning my neck awkwardly to look from one to the other. “Wait a minute. Do the two of you know each other already?”

Echoing my shock, Faith gasped, raised a hand to her throat, and swayed on the verge of fainting.

Both men gave me carefully neutral stares.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I demanded, seizing on something else to be angry over.

They exchanged a wary glance before Ash explained vaguely, “We wouldn’t want any life to be wasted when there is profit to be had.”

Yes, yes, I’d heard that all before. I’d witnessed it myself, even, in the carriage with Vhetin Kellis.

Sounding uncharacteristically embarrassed, Bazso pointed out, “It’s kind of like how you don’t like to talk about your sword, Isha.” Or your real name, he didn’t say.

“Yes, but why did both of you keep it a secret from me?” My voice grew more and more shrill, until Faith cringed and clapped her hands over her ears. Served her right if she went deaf. All along I’d known that Bazso didn’t trust me completely, but it still hurt to have it confirmed so obviously and publicly. “I know you, and I know Ash, and both of you know that I know, um, the other.” I fumbled for the right grammar. “So why didn’t either of you tell me that you knew each other? What’s so secret about it?”

“Oh, my!” breathed Faith, teetering on the edge of the ottoman. “What a scandal!”

Getting irritated himself, Ash snapped, “You’re certainly welcome to come drinking with us, although you don’t look like you’re capable of it at the moment.”

A horrible thought occurred to me and I blurted out, “Bazso! Do you provide dead – I mean mostly dead – people to Ash for his rituals?”

“No, no, no, nothing like that,” he immediately reassured me, looking taken aback by the accusation. Gang warfare was one thing – but arcane murder?

I thought he might be a little more inclined to talk if I stopped screeching, so I forced myself to relax, cuddled up as best as I could – “Hold still!” Sawbones complained – and batted my eyelashes. “I don’t understand,” I wheedled in an injured tone that was only partially feigned. “I know both of you. Why didn’t either of you tell me that you’re friends too?”

Frowning, Bazso glared down at me for a long moment, silently reminding me that he’d just told me that he didn’t like to discuss certain things and that he didn’t like repeating himself. Then he must have decided that anyone who assassinated Ronia Helker deserved a little leeway, because he began gently, “Well, you know I was born in Lockport, right?”

“Yes, so…?”

“So that…does things to a man.” He paused significantly, as if I should understand what he meant.

I shook my head and stared back at him blankly.

“You suggested that I provide services to Ash, but it’s actually the other way around.”

Now I felt even more confused. What sort of services could Ash possibly provide the head of the Lampblacks?

Bazso hesitated, then spelled it out in a rush: “My internal organs were mutated by the toxic rain in Lockport. Ash’s family specializes healing potions, arcane organs, the like. Ash supplies me with potions to keep me alive.”

About to ask Ash why he’d never mentioned that aspect of his family’s dealings, I stopped short. Bazso, the unflappable head of the Lampblacks, kept alive only by dint of an unbroken supply of arcane potions? Bazso, the fearless fighter, so fragile that if the Slanes or one of his enemies cut off that supply he’d simply die? I couldn’t bear the thought. The man was a legend, an institution. If he died, it would be as if the moon had shattered and left only the glittering stars in the sky.

Giving Bazso’s hand a remorseful squeeze, I muttered, “I’m sorry. I had no idea…. Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.”

Such as kill the Slanes if they tried to extort him.

Bazso must have trusted avaricious part-demon Tycherosi merchants more than I did, because he only replied, “Thank you, Isha, but you don’t exactly specialize in providing functioning pancreases.”

With that, Faith agreed wholeheartedly. “No, she does the opposite.”

“Although,” added Bazso with morbid humor, “if you bring me Mylera’s pancreas….”

I elbowed him as hard as I could.

“Ow,” he complained, not really meaning it.

Faith finally got bored with the entire topic of pancreases, functioning or otherwise. “Hey, Isha,” she sang, planting her elbows on her knees and propping her chin on her hands, “you seem to be really friendly with Mylera. What do you think of her as a person?”

Even though he was the one who’d sent me to spy on Mylera in the first place, Bazso stiffened.

Yep, Faith was going to get kicked sometime in the very near future. Possibly into the closest, carnivorous-eel-filled canal.

With evident relief, the long-suffering Sawbones announced, “Done!” and snipped off the last thread. I wasn’t even sure Bazso heard him through whatever horrible suspicions were filling his mind.

Luckily, Ash intervened before I killed Faith or Bazso killed me right in the parlor. “Perhaps we should start looking for our next score,” he suggested in a total non sequitur. “One can never have too much coin saved up.”

“I may not be able to move for a while,” I pointed out, pulling one arm free from Bazso to gesture meaningfully at my legs.

Packing away his instruments, Sawbones nodded emphatically.

“Ah, well,” shrugged Ash philosophically. “That’s all right. But you can collect the rest of our payment from our clients, right?”

“Yes.” Vaati never missed class, and, as Faith had pointed out to the boys, I could find him and little Jin easily enough if they tried to renege on our deal.

As stone-faced as one of the statues on Bowmore Bridge, Bazso didn’t register our conversation at all.

Off to the side, Sawbones clapped his case shut and looked at his leader expectantly, but there was no reaction. He picked up his bag with exaggerated movements, then sidled towards the doorway. When that still failed to elicit his fee, he hinted, “Bazso, I’m done here.”

At that, Bazso snapped out of his thoughts at last. “Well, if that’s all,” he said, “then I suggest that we all get some rest.”

Easing my head onto a cushion, he stood and gestured the others out of the room. “Night, Isha,” he told me, his eyes softening a little when he caught sight of my reaction. “Rest. You’ve earned it.” Then he switched off the gas lamps and shut the parlor door.