It’s difficult to project your voice through a layer of muffling fabric; I can only imagine how difficult it would be for someone who hadn’t had formal vocal training from middle school through university, and also spent much of his free time during that period screaming his soul out at rock venues and band practice. Me? I managed.

“I am only here to heal.”

Life on Ephemera had taught me that my body had suffered all the atrophy a mostly sedentary twenty-first century life can inflict, but my diaphragm was still as potent as a major leaguer’s pitching arm. Mask or no mask, my voice projected with a force that belied my deliberately calm, controlled tone, reaching everyone on this segment of the street.

“Sure, of course,” said the first thug, still grinning at me. “Nobody says you can’t. But you can also spare some time to talk with Lady Gray, I’m sure.”

“Everybody can spare Lady Gray whatever time she needs, trust me,” added the second. These guys must have worked as a pair often; they spoke in tandem almost as if they’d rehearsed it.

“Talk…about what?”

“Why, that’s between you and her, stranger.”

“Ain’t for the likes of us to ask Lady Gray her business.”

“She points, we go.”

“And she’s pointed at you, friend. So…shall we go?”

Still smiling and amiable, despite their deliberately rough appearance and overtly displayed weapons. I was starting to like these guys a little bit. They shared my appreciation for theatricality.

Slowly, drawing out the moment, I tilted my head to one side, just enough to make the motion apparent even with the heavy cowl.

“This…Lady Gray,” I finally said, enunciating carefully. “Has she paid the price?”

Tweedledee and Tweedledum looked at each other in clear uncertainty. The onlooking crowd shifted, the muttering from nearby swelling to nearly overwhelming the laughter and shouts from farther up and down the street.

“Dunno how she could’ve, friend, seeing as you’ve not met just yet.”

“Lady Gray doesn’t lack for means, after all. Whatever coin you need… If you’re worth it, she can pay it.”

I shook my head, ponderously, watching their eyes track the darkness under my hood as it shifted back and forth.

“Money. Coins will not cover the price, only…impose it. I’ve no business with those whose business is only money.”

Not strictly a lie, so long as you considered the Healer a distinct identity.

“Well, now, here in the Gutters we’re adaptable folk,” the gap-toothed fellow assured me, his apparent good humor undiminished by his growing uncertainty.

“And Lady Gray is the Gutters, for all intents and purposes.”

“Favors, commodities… Pick your poison, stranger.”

“But you should really ask the Lady herself for your price. We’re just the messengers, after all.”

I deliberately widened my stance, as if bracing my feet for action. My hands hung loose at my sides, fingers flexed and ready. Amid the surrounding muted hubbub, I heard the scrape of boots on akorthist as Aster adjusted her feet; I couldn’t see her with the damn hood blocking my peripheral vision, but I assumed she’d reached up to grasp the handle of her sword, from the way both toughs shifted their eyes to her.

“I have come here to heal,” I said, loud but calm. “Unless you wish to pay the price, you are in my way.”

I could almost feel the indrawn breath of dozens of onlookers. Lady Gray’s two thugs looked at each other again, seeming to communicate something silently with just their eyes. I flexed my hands—not because I needed them to cast magic, but just for effect.

Now the spectacle I’d planned would begin in earnest.

“Well, all right then,” said the first thug, folding down his hands at me. “The request stands, Healer.”

Wait. What?

“We’ll just check back with you later, shall we?” Thug #2 added. “When you change your mind, let us know.”

“Have a safe night, now. It’s a rough sort of neighborhood.”

“Not that you look like you’ll have any trouble.” He winked at Aster. And with no more ado, the two of them turned and strolled off up the street, cool and collected as you please.

But…but my showtime!

I had spent the last week on this plan, going over and over in my head all the ways a crime lord’s minions might attempt to subdue me, planning for every contingency I could think of. I’d freely indulged myself with ever more fanciful outcomes, just to make sure I had all possible events covered, reasoning that even if the majority of these ideas were implausible, just being prepared for numerous possible twists of fate would leave me better able to adapt if they sprung some new trick I’d somehow failed to anticipate.

Except, as it turned out, if they politely backed down. That one I had not seen coming, and now it left me standing there posed for my well-planned show, and no longer having any path to executing it.

This fucking world. Even when it gave me an optimal outcome, it managed to be in a way that wrecked all my planning. It was an entire planet whose every feature was meticulously crafted to piss me off.

It had been a good ten seconds and I was still standing there, legs braced, while the onlookers muttered uncertainly at me. Cool, instead of the dramatic addition to the Healer’s legend I had carefully set up, now I’d just stood here looking silly while my brain caught up with reality. Perfect. Unable to think of anything better, I just went back to what I’d been doing previously. I turned and glided across the street, Aster trailing silently along behind me, to the next brothel on my list.

In fact, the owner of the Jostled Jugs herself was standing just outside her doorway, watching the prematurely aborted show with her arms folded.

“Gannit,” I greeted the old woman in a much less projected voice as I approached. “I hope all’s been well since—”

“Yeah, yeah, get your shady ass in here, boy.” She seized my arm in an amazingly solid grip and all but bodily dragged me into the brothel. I let her, and apparently Aster decided not to intervene—in fact, I could just picture the amused grin she must be hiding behind that scarf. Gannit was amazingly spry for someone pushing seventy, but she was in no condition to haul me around unless I chose to go, and I wasn’t interested in knocking down an old lady, especially one running a business with whose employees I was trying to get in good.

She tugged me all the way through the common room to the kitchen in the back, a short journey on which I had to endure a lot of catcalling. Yeah, yeah, a woman dragging a man through a brothel usually means one thing, and it’s funny when it’s a grandma and the mysterious magic Healer, I get it. Hilarious.

“Do you have any idea the shit you just did?” Gannit demanded upon releasing me, once we were safely in the kitchen away from her guests and employees. Aside from the ones cooking, who watched the spectacle with open amusement but somehow didn’t slow down in their work.

“Very little, it seemed.”

“Oh, and you put a lot of trust in appearances, do you?” She gave my all-concealing outfit a very pointed once-over.

“How’s the arthritis?”

Gannit cracked a grin at that and flexed one skinny arm like a bodybuilder. “Hah! Not a twinge. You got some serious mojo, Healer. Too bad you don’t have the sense to go with it. Now sit your ass down and listen, it’s time you got a rundown on how things work in Cat Alley.”

“What’s to know?” I asked, not moving toward the indicated stool.

“Sit.” The old woman folded her arms and looked imperious until I finally sat down, then nodded in satisfaction. “All right, it’s story time. You’ve been up and down the street once, I’m sure you noticed it’s only women who run brothels in this town.”

“That did strike me as odd,” I admitted. “This country seems even more hostile to women than it is to everyone else.”

“Too right,” she grinned. “Fflyr Dlemathlys has always been that way, but Cat Alley has only been this way the last thirty years or so. Whoring’s good money—for the people who own the business, that is, not so much the ones doing the work. So naturally it was the men who owned it. At least, till some uppity whores managed to start a big flap among the Radiant Convocation and get themselves cast out of polite society.”

“That, ah, sounds like quite a tale.”

“Oh, that it is,” she said with relish. “A long and complicated one, and I may tell you the whole version someday, but right now we got more pressing matters. Point is, in this country, it ain’t strictly against the law for men to be involved in prostitution, but it’s firmly against Convocation doctrine, and you don’t spit right in the Convocation’s eye like that. They’ve got ways of putting down people they don’t approve of. And the best part is we did that!” She slapped her own chest just below the collarbone. “That’s what we do here, boy. The game’s rigged against the likes of us, so we took their own crooked rules and spun ‘em to carve out our own place. Just takes some cleverness, a little work, and a willingness to bleed for what matters. You men like to think you’re all big and tough, and you may be at that, but there’s not a woman born who’s shy about bleeding.”

“I’m impressed,” I said, meaning it. “Someday I would like to hear the full version. I don’t understand what it has to do with me, though.”

“It’s more what you have to do with it,” Gannit retorted, snatching a ladle right out of the hand of an exasperated cook to wag it at me. Droplets of soup scattered across the floor. “Cos we’re right in the middle of another drug-out kerfuffle no less serious than the Liberation of the Whores, and you have just swished your spooky cloak right the hell into the middle of it. Lemme put it this way: the whole status quo in Cat Alley rests on our hard-won almost-law that only women in the business get to control the business. Well, last ten years or so, the Gutters have a woman who moved up through the street gangs until she got the whole lot of ‘em tied together under her control. And just you guess where she came up from!”

“…ah.”

“Ah, he says,” Gannit snorted. “Here’s how it is, boy: there’s still more madames who own their own places than not, but Lady Gray’s moving in. Slowly, and starting with the cheap joints at the far ends of the street, but moving nonetheless. There’s more brothels she doesn’t own outright but has some kinda hold on the madame. Now, we’re not helpless. The bigger places like Minifrit’s and mine, we’ve got our own muscle…not to mention other means of getting things done that you don’t need to concern yourself with. But that doesn’t mean we’ve got enough muscle to flex. This is delicate, healer. It’s back-alley politics. Lady Gray’s got enough force to move in here and force us all out in one night. She won’t, because that would ruin all the businesses she’s trying to take over, and probably scatter the trade far and wide across the Gutters rather than keep Cat Alley in one profitable concentration. We’ve got enough coin and bouncers to push back…here and there, within reason, strategically. Gray’s bullyboys still get to throw their weight around way more’n any of us likes, because anybody who stands up to her is inviting a confrontation that ends with her taking over that business.”

To my mortification, I physically twitched as a vivid memory of the savagely beaten face of Kastrin flashed across my eyes, followed by a rapid parade of other brutalized women I’d seen and healed. Gannit was still watching me like a hawk, but if she thought anything of the abortive little movement, she didn’t say so.

“And then there’s you. You have already rustled her eggs good and proper, boy. What do you think happens when a bunch of beaten-down, pox-riddled whores are suddenly clean and hale again?”

“They’re clean and hale again,” I said.

“Yeah, yeah, and if that’s all you care about, good on ya. But what their owners care about is how much they’re worth—which is to say, more. A lot more. In a lot of the places you’ve visited, every girl is suddenly of a quality that used to mark their best girl, or better. Now, there’s a few ways that can shake out. They might start bringing in more money—or less, if they raise prices accordingly and the custom goes elsewhere. I dunno how much extra coin you’ve made and cost Lady Gray in the last week, but whether the final tally’s plus or minus, you’ve made yourself a big, fat variable in her record books. And then, then, you went and stood up to her goons. The one thing we are keeping her at bay by carefully not fucking doing.”

Gannit folded her arms, glaring at me. Seizing the opportunity, the cook snatched her ladle back and resumed stirring.

“Well, then,” I said, after a pause. “Thank you for enlightening me, Gannit. I’ll be careful.”

“Son,” she drawled, “I am very slightly concerned about your shifty ass. You need to get it into your head that this ain’t a storybook. Actions have consequences, and around here? They’re a lot more complicated than you might anticipate, and will affect a lot more people than just you. You can’t just swoop in here and save everybody, if that’s what you were trying to do.”

“It wasn’t.”

Her eyes narrowed to slits. “Hnh. Well, guess that’s as good a setup as any for the big question. Whatever you are trying to do—and I know you’ve got an agenda, boy, I ain’t stupid nor blind. Whatever it is you’re planning, is it going to get a lot of working girls who’ve already had it bad enough hurt or worse?”

She stared at me; the two cooks and one passing serving girl stopped what they were doing, turning to look expectantly at me as well.

I inhaled slowly, taking in the smells of food, and let the breath back out. This question, at least, I was prepared for. And not just because I anticipated having to answer it; I’d grappled with it on my own time.

“Yes,” I replied finally. “But no more than the way they live now. And for most, I think, considerably less.”

Gannit squinted at me, slowly working her jaw. The other three went back to their own business, the waitress vanishing through the swinging door into the common room.

“Well, shit,” she said finally. “I owe Minifrit a gold disc. She said you were working a long-term scheme. I figured you were just a melodramatic weirdo with a Blessing and a hero complex.”

“Parts of that are accurate,” I admitted, “but the Hero I am not. I don’t think his help would do you much good, either. I came here to help, Gannit, that I promise you. You’re right, though; complicated situations mean you can’t just help without causing far-reaching consequences. Those who have paid the price are owed healing—that’s the least I can do. What happens next… I will try to protect everyone I can. We’ll see how well the world cooperates.”

“You and your price,” she snorted, shaking her head. “Well, that’s more talking than I got outta you last time. I guess you’re done opening up, then?”

I rose from the stool, and bowed to her. One of the cooks who was sneaking a peek gave me a wide-eyed stare, but Gannit just smirked.

“It has still been paid. Far in advance. I thank you for the warning, Gannit. Now, who here is in need of healing?”

At least the rest of the night went according to plan.

My theory of pacing continued to work. Making our way from one end of Yrshith Street to the other was less exhausting, with a relative reprieve in the “nicer” brothels in the center, followed by ending up at the slightly less dispiriting end of the street. The early progress we’d made continued to be evident, as well, with more of the lower-class brothels open to the Healer, enabling me to heal more women than before. We were making progress.

That was the good news.

There was a whole new layer of tension this time, now that I knew Lady Gray’s eyes were on me. Not being an utter fool, I didn’t believe for a second that her goons had actually given up and gone home after one verbal rejection, especially after Gannit had laid out the political situation for me. I could practically feel the eyes on me as I finished up in the farthest brothels—the ones Gannit had warned might be owned outright by Gray herself.

We carefully watched out around us, all three. Biribo was hidden under my scarf where he could slither up to whisper in my ear and receive whispered orders from me without being seen. It was a sensation I could’ve done without, but under the circumstances little complaints like that just had to be lived with. His familiar senses were apparently attuned to people and Blessings above all; he could see who was Blessed and with what by looking at them, and seemed able to discern the presence of sapient beings in proximity to us even if he couldn’t see them directly. Unfortunately, we were in a crowded urban area, and the mundane reality of how people hid in crowds was a hard counter to his magic. People were coming and going all around us on all sides; except during the moments when we walked along the rear boardwalks, Biribo couldn’t tell whether anybody might be shadowing us in particular.

That, all things considered, was less emotionally draining than the work of healing prostitutes. The two in conjunction wiped us out. By the end of the night, I was almost irked that it had been for nothing. But so it was: Aster and I found ourselves back on the road, she stopping by a vendor to get us some hot food for the trip home. There hadn’t been so much as another peep out of Lady Gray or anyone purporting to work for her. Nobody had ambushed us, barred our path, or in any way made themselves an inconvenience.

And so it remained until we were a good forty-five minutes out of the city.

“Hey, boss?” Biribo piped up, buzzing out of my cloak to hover in front of me at shoulder height.

“What’s up?”

“I wasn’t sure until we turned onto this side trail,” he said quietly, “but we’re being followed.”

I inhaled deeply and blew the breath back out. “…okay. Not unexpected. Would’ve been nice if they’d tried this back in Cat Alley so I could execute my plan.”

“Yeah, what’s up with enemies not walking helpfully into our traps?” Aster complained. “Foes these days. No respect for tradition, that’s what’s wrong with the world.”

“Are you done?”

“I think that’ll hold me for now,” she said sweetly.

“What’ve we got, Biribo?”

“Three targets. Human, male, lowborn, no Blessed. I’m mostly sure they’re the same three who’ve been behind us all the way from the city, but that was on the main highway during morning traffic, so it was less certain. But they turned onto this back road after us, so…”

“Mm…could still be coincidence, but I’m not gonna gamble on that. How far?”

“Close to a dhil.”

“I’m gonna stab you.”

“Boss, you can keep being performatively upset about the measuring system here or learn it. Which do you think is more useful? They’re just close enough to see if you turned around, but…maybe don’t.”

“Yeah, let’s not give away the game just yet,” I murmured. “Thoughts?”

“If we’re gonna take ‘em out, the sooner the better,” said Aster. “Neither of us are at our freshest and we’ll only get more tired as time goes on.”

“Given that you’ve got me and can keep track of them without revealing you know they’re there, we’ve got dozens of ways of ditching ‘em, especially once we get into the khora,” Biribo suggested.

“Any sign they’re looking to overtake us?” I asked.

“Not so far. That might change, but right now they’re staying way back at the edge of visibility. In my experience, that’s shadowing behavior, not ambushing.”

“So the goal’s not to jump us, but to track us back to our lair,” I murmured. “Still, I can’t figure out Gray’s strategy. Why’d she wait? It would have been much easier to make a move in the Gutters, where she has power. Sending people out into rural Dount is sacrificing the high ground, so to speak. This is Olumnach country and she’s at war with them.”

“Sounds like there’s some stuff going on that we’re not aware of,” said Aster. “As per usual.”

“Okay. Stay alert. Biribo, warn me if they try to speed up; if they wanna make this a confrontation, I mean to hit first.”

“You got it, boss. But if not…?”

“If not… I have an idea. Aster, how’re you doing?”

“Tired. Physically and down to my soul. But I’ve been more tired than this and kept going. The meat pies helped. I repeat that if this is going to come to a fight or a run it’d be better to do it sooner than later, but if your plan just involves walking, I can go for hours.”

“All right. We’re gonna swing north; Biribo can help navigate if you don’t know the way, Aster. We’ll stick to the back roads as much as possible so they don’t get spooked, but our destination is toward the Kingsguard waystation.”

She turned to me, raising her eyebrows. “You wanna set the Kingsguard on ‘em? Ballsy.”

“I don’t see how much good that would do,” I said. “I doubt we look any less shifty and disreputable than they do. Hell, the Kingsguard aren’t much better, from what I hear. Just another gang. But speaking of gangs… Remember when we torched the Crown Rose caravan and Biribo spotted a bunch of bandits hiding in the khora nearby?”

Biribo himself began laughing quietly.

“Ah,” Aster nodded. “And we’ve been told that the outlying gangs on Dount answer to Clan Olumnach…”

“There’s an old saying in my mother’s homeland,” I said, grinning. “’Let’s you and him fight.’”