The Jade Lotus was a Hightown tea parlour owned by the Taorin. Its name was a cheap play on words – that a flower could last forever. Yvir knew it never could though, just like the women that served there, pretty things that would be booted out as soon as their beauty wilted.

A man fiddled a single-stringed instrument, a hiu, its sweet melody in harmony with a woman’s voice, her frantic song a tale of love and loss. Bouquets of fragrant lotuses were placed perfectly on each patrons’ linen covered table, men in form fitting robes, women in fine silk dresses. Some ate and drank. Some openly fucked right there on their chairs. Tea and sweetwine mixed an arousing aroma, foretelling more pleasures to be found upstairs. Yvir felt like a lump of turd sitting in the middle of it all.

She sat beside one other man, the bookkeeper of the Headsman himself: Gobin. Yvir had learned to judge a person’s nature from a glance. She had to be in such a place like Lowtown, where quick smiles turned to quicker blows. Judging this man, she did not know much, but she knew this. He wore a cloak of calmness round his shoulders that matched his dead-eyed stare under the sheen of his spectacles. A man that locked away any filth under his fingernails and let it rot in the confines of his mind. He had killed before, had killed many, and never lost a night of sleep from it.

“Do you speak Cadish?” the man asked in her father’s tongue.

“Yes,” Yvir said, hiding her surprise from his indistinguishable accent.

“Where did you learn the western speak?”

“There was a holyman that stayed in a Cadric outpost near my village after its garrison left. He taught me Cadish.”

“You know how to write Cadish glyphs?”

“Yes.”

Gobin nodded. “The holyman was your father.”

“No.”

“In a sense.”

Yvir felt the corner of her mouth twist; cursing herself for showing a hint of weakness. A man like Gobin wouldn’t ignore such signs.

The Jinn questioned, “What happened to the holyman?”

“He was hanged by the village.”

She remembered it well, having snuck out to witness his body strung up in the village square. There was no one to see something changed in her that day, a child robbed of innocence, replaced with sullen hate.

The bookkeeper produced a pencil, jotting down on a small notebook. Such things Yvir never saw in Lowtown; symbols in place of glyphs, knives in place of pencils, blood in place of books. Blood was all of Lowtown’s worth, sweat and toil until your skin shriveled and your bones ground to dust, and she knew if you tried to leave you’d be bled dry.

Gobin was a leech, and he would take everything Yvir loved if she didn't give him her blood without question – her life, or her mother’s. In all the months she’d worked for the Taorin, they’d never asked her for a personal job. She wondered what purpose they needed her for now.

“Who was your blood father?” he questioned, again.

“He was a soldier who lived in the outpost. I was born after he went back to Cadria.”

She didn't know her father, and didn't plan to. The bastard left them, and it was better that way, Yvir reasoned. Still, she would have liked to see him, just to give the same level of hurt he'd left her.

“Your father’s heritage,” Gobin said, “will serve you well. You will work as a guard of a Cadric diplomat. With your abilities you will be accepted. You're to gain the trust of this woman. By noon of every seventh day, we shall meet here. You'll tell me this woman's secrets and what her Empire seeks from the Dynasty.”

“I thought you were gangsters, interested in money, not politics,” Yvir said.

Gobin paused and leaned forward. Yvir held her blank expression despite wanting to cringe away and leave the inn, leave the city, as far away as possible with her mother.

“Money is what makes the world go round,” he murmured, reaching for the teapot to refill his cup. Liquid leaked from the pot’s spout onto the tablecloth. “Politics is what launders it. And unnecessary questions lead to unnecessary blood spilled. Understood?”

She nodded. His words weren’t an outright threat, but from such a man they didn’t need to be. Her mother’s fate was a certainty in his judgment.

“When do I start work?”

“Today. You meet with keeper Wu, he’ll outfit you and bring you to the embassy.”

Yvir knew there was a deeper plot in it all, like a blade glinting in the dark, beckoning one’s sharp end – and she was running towards it.