Mrs. Delina came on strong, but she was a gentle soul at heart. A gentle soul with a voice that sounded like she gargled chata and who wore enough charms and bone-bangles to make a witch-doctor envious. She tossed Sharp Lia a weathered book as she loaded up her cart - it was a dog-eared and heavily-annotated copy of Spurspar's Compleat Herbarium. Some of the pages were marked with little wooden clips indicating which herbs and flowers she wanted her Scamp assistants to look for. Even as Mrs. Delina harnessed her horse to the cart with practiced ease, and even as Sharp Lia flipped through the herb book with casual interest, the old woman chewed at her lip with worry.

"Lucan still hasn't showed up?" she asked.

Po shook his head. "He hasn't. We thought to look for him today, and even brought some…" he glanced toward Aldo… "friends, I guess, to help." Obviously, he barely knew the three of us, but I probably would have considered anybody willing to help me look for a mate to be a friend, too, if only tentatively.

"Do you have any magic that might help?" Sharp Lia asked.

Mrs. Delina pondered that for a moment before tapping a pouch at her side. "I'll cast some bones when we get to the old graves. It might be they'll point us in a direction. If I'd known he was proper lost, I'd have looked for him on Mendsday." She pushed the door to her downstairs stable ajar with her boot, the light and dust from the street beyond suffusing in, and stroked the snout of the old horse that poked its head out. She frowned back at the five of us. "Well? Unless you plan on running behind the cart, you'd best get on."

With Mrs. Delina at the helm, the cart lurched out onto the road, and soon we were rolling across the Sun's End bridge toward Caravan Island, the accountants, couriers, and other well-heeled denizens of the district glowering at the rickety cart and its ragamuffin passengers as it passed.

Taking the wagon out to the Old City was no doubt faster than even a brisk walk, but it still took us a good twenty minutes to get out there, first trundling past the ostentatious affluence of the Mercantile Quarter, which I'd never actually visited before. I gawped at the buildings, the grand counting houses and mercantile exchanges, their domed roofs gleaming red and gold in the afternoon sun. Many of them rose five or six stories above the smooth marble streets. They were grander than anything I'd seen in Portogarra.

The heart of the Marcantile Quarter in Floria is the home of the Caravan Free Exchange and is quite possibly the most affluent district in the entire hemisphere after the financial district in Gionika's High Estate. Qattrokronos glow like the Largotto and kronettas are considered pocket change. So, naturally, we looked and felt out of place in the burb.

Once past the rarefied streets of Caravan and the other great trading houses, the streets became mundane, the clothes less ostentatious, and the buildings less magnificent. The brass and sandstone of the minor trading houses was nice, but no finer than any number of buildings in and around the Collegium, and even those proud structures soon descended into the stables, foundries, and tenement housing along the outskirts of the old city. The fallen monuments of the old city lay along the gradual slope down to the 'Little Largotto' branch, the olive and fig trees of a dozen small plantations clustered along the shallower slopes of the hills.

Of course, I didn't see most of the scenery on my first time out to the Old City because, as soon as it was clear that the finest parts of the Mercantile Quarter were behind us, I shifted my attentions to the Compleat Herbarium - incidentally, the same book they supply in the Collegium's introductory herbalism class. At the time, I was years away from owning a copy, and it had far more and better illustrations than any of the books in the paltry bunk room 'library'. Mrs. Delina's copy was battered, worn, and so thoroughly used that I doubt there was a single page that didn't have minor water damage and her little scrawled notes in the margins. The little note next to the intricate illustration of augur's thistle noted: 'doesn't work for crap!'

"What doesn't it work for?" I asked Mrs. Delina.

This was about my tenth question in five minutes but, if anything, she seemed a bit chuffed to entertain somebody who appreciated her craft. She glanced down at the illustration and chuckled. "Oh, that? It's supposed to soothe rashes and, um, fix problems with tumescence?"

"What's tumescence?" Mailyn asked. Let it never be said that Collegium students aren't an inquisitive bunch. Quite the opposite.

"It's, um, a state that gentlemen hope to achieve in the bedroom…"

I followed up immediately: "What about ladies?"

"I suppose some ladies hope to achieve it, too," she admitted. For some reason, Mrs. Delina was a lot more skittish about this line of questioning than any previous queries. "Hmm… looks like we're almost here. Do you remember where we were when you were poking about with Lucan the other day?"

Po looked around, nervously nibbling at the tip of his finger before pointing to the northeast. "I reckon it was around there. Last I saw Lucan, he went around one of those mausoleums and didn't come back for a while. I figured he was taking a squat, but then he never came back…"

"You should probably only come 'round these parts with me," Mrs. Delina said. "It's not so safe for children."

"Because of the shamblers," Aldo volunteered.

She shook her head. "Because this place is crawling with types a lot less savory than Collegium kids. Shamblers never bothered anybody beyond a fright… not unless they've got somebody controlling them… which, frankly, isn't worth it."

"Could you control a shambler?" Aldo asked.

"Sure, but I wouldn't want to. Even if it wasn't illegal, why control the dead when you Scamps are cheaper and cleverer?"

"Because we can't work nights or mornings?" Sharp Lia asked.

Mrs. Delina tapped her chin in thought. "Hmm… nah. One stray corpse in the neighborhood and folks are liable break out the torches."

Presently, we arrived at a hardscrabble patch of old mausoleums, around a hundred of the things arrayed in a little metropolis of the dead. The path before us was dusty with ancient wagon ruts, the remnants of crushed lime and muddy gravel scattered around, but precious little of it still on the road. The mausoleums cast long shadows in the mid-afternoon light, most of them dating from the previous century, now crowded with weeds and climbing vines. Whatever relatives had once tended to these houses of the dead had long since abandoned their charges. Most of the children and grandchildren of the deceased were probably dead, themselves. As I glanced about the place, I spotted a man wandering about the distant meadow between the pale stones of the cemetery. I wondered whether he was one of the unsavory characters Mrs. Delina had mentioned.

"It's a shambler!" Aldo hissed in excitement.

"Don't pay him any mind," the herbalist said. "There used to be a lot more of them, but these days, most folks bind their dead. If I'm not mistaken, we were over yonder the other day." With a click of her tongue, Mrs. Delina led her horse off road and into the patchy weeds.

If you aren't from Floria, you may not be familiar with shamblers. As an educated person, you've no doubt heard of the wretched constructs of necromantic rituals before - zombies, wights, and the like. These can only be 'raised' using soul magic, which is forbidden in much of the civilized world - and for good cause. Whatever sentience the raised dead possess must come from somewhere via some form of psychic exchange. That is to say, soul magic requires the practitioner to trap a portion of a victim's subjugated will in order to give the undead construct some semblance of awareness. This awareness is then bent to the summoner's command. Conversely, shamblers have none of that - the natural magic in certain parts of the world lends itself to raising dead bodies, especially human bodies, but these creatures possess only the vaguest awareness of their surroundings and tend to mindlessly shuffle toward sources of sound, light, and magic, whereupon they… stop. That's literally all that a shambler does - though some necromancers have learned how to transform these empty husks into revenants, which resemble zombies but require no soul sacrifice. Instead, the revenant consumes the flesh of the still-living to maintain its existence.

Fortunately, this was just a harmless, solitary shambler and we hadn't made enough noise to attract the thing. We pulled to a stop atop a shallow hill, nothing but mausoleums, smaller tombs, and the single shambler visible among the weeds and shrubs.

"Right… I suppose I should cast my bones. Have you got something of Lucan's that I can use?" Mrs. Delina hopped from the cart and stretched her back to and fro, popping her vertebrae about half a dozen times. I suspect she was about seventy at the time, though her deeply-furrowed and weather-worn face made it hard to tell.

"I've got a pair of his socks," Po said. He reached into his little satchel and offered them up to the herbalist.

She shot them a disbelieving look but still took the socks. "I did mention that the item ought to have personal importance to the target, did I not?"

"We forgot," Sharp Lia mumbled. "Pretty sure they're his favorite socks. Will they work?"

"We shall see," Mrs. Delina grumbled. With a grunt, she eased herself down to the stoop of a nearby mausoleum and carefully unstrung the rattling leather pouch at her side. When she emptied the contents into her hand, seven bones rattled out - three relatively large tarsals and four small carpals or phalanges. She placed Lucan's socks upon the ground and dropped the bones over them, carefully observing the pattern. "Nothing," she grumbled. She repeated the process. "Nothing again… well… ambiguous, anyway."

"What does an ambiguous result mean?" Po asked worriedly.

"Nothing good… though not necessarily anything bad, either," the herbalist said. Despite the lack of a clear result, I'd felt the pulse of magic when she cast the bones. Mrs. Delina was doing real magic! "I'm going to cast them again…"

She cast them, and then cast again, snorting in pique whenever the bones failed to provide insight. She spent five minutes trying to get a clear result, but never did. I'll give this to Mrs. Delina: she might not have been a master diviner, but she didn't proclaim a result when there wasn't one to be had, which is more than I can say about some Shadows. I was impressed enough at the mere fact that she could do magic…

"You can really do magic," I whispered.

"Don't they teach magic at your Collegium?"

"Not yet," Sharp Lia said.

"We're too young," Po elaborated. The Collegium didn't teach us actual magic until we were Sneaks.

Mrs. Delina frowned. "How old are you? Ten? Eleven?"

"Eight," we all said.

"Babies," she muttered with a shake of her straw hat. "I'm working with babies. Okay, kiddos, how about we find some herbs before it's too dark to see? Then you'll bring me something that means a lot to Lucan tomorrow, and I'll cast my bones again…"

"I'm not sure I can get off of work," I said.

"Work? Work?! Girl, you're eight. What work could you possibly have?" The irony that she regularly employed a trio of eight-year-olds to gather herbs did not escape me.

"I do translations for Mr. Hianchi. I do Kronojic, Classical Turan, Selenic, Mouldevican Slartic, Wext, and obviously Perditalog and Gionian."

"Oh? Is that all?" Mrs. Delina said with a chuckle.

"I'm still learning," I explained.

"Well… no matter. Come when you can and we'll look for herbs in the meanwhile. We'll try a divination around sunset when the magic is strongest… well, second-strongest. Midnight would be stronger, but I'm not gallivanting through a cemetery at midnight with no protection but a squad of eight-year-olds." Her horse neighed. "And you, too, Glimmie. Now… we've got about an hour and a half of good light, so who wants to go herbing?"

I ran my fingers along the binding of Mrs. Delina's well-worn herbarium. "I do!"