She had one hand on the door and the other on a dagger hilt at her hip. The square room was carved into the natural stone and shaped with brick. There were two levels. The lower level which the woman was on was empty and the old stone stairs that had once gone up on the left were filled in with rocks and a rough kind of mortar. The only way up to the second level was a ladder behind her. On the second level, sacks of earth made rough cover for the three boys crouched behind them, two with old hunting crossbows and one with a bow that he probably made. Behind the grimy hard-eyed triplet, I could see lamplight flicker on the ceiling of the second level. I put my hands in the air to make them feel better.

“Don’t bother with that. They worry about me too much. Come in.” She said.

She motioned me in and closed the door. I looked at the boys and reached in my jacket as she worked the locks. One of them white knuckled his bow and yelled at me.

“Easy you!”

The girl turned behind me as I pulled out my pipe. I packed it as she moved past me and flashed a smile.

“Larsen, keep your fingers off the trigger. I'm down here too.” She spoke like a mother who kept the threat of beatings on hand, and her voice rolled over it softly like a brook with a sword in its stones. I’d seen setups like this before, women who keep young boys old enough to slit a throat or shoot a bow, but too young to turn on her. By the time they got old enough to she had already taken up in their mind. Ten years ago, one out of any five thugs working the streets of the north city had been brought up by Mother Bear.

The boy moved his fingers off the lever and she climbed up the ladder. I let her get to the top before I followed her with my pipe in my mouth.

The second floor was half common room and half battle station. The battlements now occupied by the three boys were strewn with blankets, piled rocks, barrels of bolts, and various spears and purpose made pole weapons. She probably let them at it for the same reason she let them point their bows at me. To pump up their ego so she could grab them by it. If any serious door kickers under the purple had a mind to come in here, and knew where it was, the lot of it would have been worth less than a doorstop. The best defense this place had was a hidden escape route buried in the walls.

The part of the room that wasn’t a play fort was laid out like a living room, which intensified the childlike qualities of the defenses. They seemed like the toys of children strewn on the floor of a family den. She walked past the couches, low tables, and mattresses, all sharing the ground with empty bottles and pipe ash, and led me to one of the doors in the far wall. The boys stood watching us, and as we went through the door one tried to follow. He looked to be the oldest one.

“Stay and man the defenses, Claus. He may have been followed.” She said. The boy nodded seriously but even I could hear the playfulness in her voice. I smiled at him as I grabbed the door and his jaw came unstuck. I slammed the door on whatever he was preparing to say.

We were on a sort of landing, and through the doorway in front of us there was a spiral staircase. She had picked up a lamp in the living room and it lit up her features as she turned up the stairs.

She had a face that told you she was familiar with evil and you might enjoy watching her practice it. She held her smile on her mouth like one might hold an ember pouch on a winter walk, always ready to light up into a flame. Her long black hair maintained its darkness against the lamplight and its shine reminded me of the dark waters outside. Her steel eyes stayed cold despite the fire reflected in them.

“I didn’t get your name.” I said as we moved up the stairs.

“Not yet. Wait till my chamber.”

The next landing above was larger than the one before and there were three doors each at right angles to each other. She hung her lamp on a hook and I heard her unlock at least three locks in the center door before she let me through. I glanced at the door as I passed. I didn’t see any keyholes but it was covered in wrought iron knotwork.

Inside the room felt like a pit, if a well-furnished pit. The recessed floor was an oval-shaped ring of red carpet and we stood at one end of it. The floor at the center was sunk in about two feet and reached by small steps at the four sides. There were two slim doorways covered by sheets to the right and left, and a ladder going up to a second level that was mostly hidden in darkness and may have just been a walkway. The roof was ancient smoke-stained wood beams that must have been brought in a century ago.

The walls were covered in shelves with books and bindings of all kinds packed with small paper labels sticking out of the pages. Most of them on the bottom shelves were the kind of pagebooks you would see students with, cheap paper bound together in a cloth cover. They were notes of some kind but none of the symbols or writing on the spines meant anything to me. The words I could read just added to the strangeness. “Castle of Chemistry” “Whorehouse three” “Green Gang”

“I'm a curator of information, as you can see.” She sat down in a large high-backed chair with a few thick blankets and cushions thrown on it. She pulled her feet up to herself and looked like a cat perched there. She motioned to a more reserved chair across from her and I sat down.

“Do you know where Liana is?” I said.

She reacted to the name, and it seemed like she had prepared not to and failed. She smiled to cover it and pointed her chin at me.

“I might, but I need to know everything about you before I tell you one way or the other.”

“Is that why you brought me all this way, to ask me about myself? You could have done that in the dream. You could have done it anywhere.”

“I don’t have to explain myself to you. I’m holding all the cards here.” She spoke without any feeling, as if she was already tired of talking to me.

“Yea, it’s your game all right. If you wanna waste your time asking about my past that’s your choice.”

“Yes, it is, and I do.” She said, smiling all the while.

“All right then. There’s not much to me, really. I grew up in a river town, joined the army after school, and they sent me to Novera. I was there a few years and came back here, got a job guarding gangsters, met Liana, now I’m looking for her.”

“You left a lot out.” She said.

“If I did, it’s because it’s a lot of waiting around.”

“Why are you looking for her?”

“I’ve got feelings for her.” She threw her head back and laughed.

“What a romantic! Got feelings for her!” I was sick of it already. She was coming from some other angle I couldn’t see and it was setting her off. I tried to bring things back around.

“Yea, and I’d do anything to find her. So what-”

“Anything?” Her eyes flashed.

I didn’t repeat myself. She looked at me some more then took a drink from a skin hanging off the back of the chair. I hadn’t lit my pipe yet and couldn’t be bothered. I put it back in my coat like I planned to be buried with it.

“How did you know her?” I asked. She had been working on what she was going to say next and I put her off.

“How did I know her?” she was almost laughing again now. Disgust dripped off her words before she could stop herself. So it was like that.

They must have been together for some time, probably even at the same time we were seeing each other. It might have been her name Ethelyn was coming to give me. Liana had never mentioned her, so the split must have been bad. This girl seemed like the type that hooks in, seeing how her teenage militia jumped at her smallest movement. I was getting the idea that she had no idea where Liana was and I felt sick.

“Why don’t you tell me how you know her?” She said. The words were measured steel.

“We met at a tavern a few months ago.”

“Just that?”

“No, we’ve been meeting regularly since then.”

“For what?”

I didn’t answer that. I just looked at her. She smiled with her teeth on her lip.

“So, you fell so madly in love with her in just a few months that you would slither down here into my little web just to find her?”

“That’s right. I know you could snuff me out now if you wanted to. You said you could help me, and you said you loved her, so I came anyway. At the time I thought you were talking about Ethelyn, but you seemed to mean it, and that-“

“I did mean it.” She said and hit the last two words like knife blows. “But the question is, do you mean it?” Her voice had turned back to cold smooth water by the end.

“Why would I be here if I didn’t?” I asked.

“Because you think you’re smarter than me, smarter than her, you and the rest of them. You think we’re just dumb little girls playing with toys, easy to be played, but you’re wrong.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I prepared to move to the door if she got out a knife. She was working herself up about something and I would bet money one of her little killers was looking through a slit in a bookcase with a bolt nocked. It really was a bad spot.

“You know what I’m talking about, you arrogant man. You stick your dull, clumsy little head in something you could never understand, thinking you’ll figure it out as you go, just like you figured everything else out in your sad life, with blind brute force!”

I let her talk. I looked away, like it was hard to look her in the eye, and tried to see if I could find any dangerous-looking gaps in the shelves. She rose half out of her chair and drew my gaze back.

“But I watched you crawl around like an infant, your mind open for any sweeper or snake to waltz right in and turn your memories into dull noise!”

“I said I was out of my element. I already admitted you’re in control here, so what do you-“

“Admitted?!! As if I needed you to tell me that! I know why you came here.”

“I came here to find Liana.” I said. She was getting hysterical and I still hadn’t found that arrow slit.

“You think we’re stupid? You think I’d believe you were some hidden lover, after all we’ve been through together? Or did you think my girlish jealousy would get the better of me, and I’d let you in just to find out how I’d been betrayed?”

“If that’s the case we were both betrayed. She never mentioned you.”

She stood up and threw something at me and I put my hands up reflexively. The glass shattered on my knee. My eyes darted around the room again. I was sure that kid has his fingers on the lever again and all she would have to do is point.

“Will you stop looking around the room you idiot! You think I need men hiding in the shadows to protect myself?” She had a knife in her hand. I hadn’t seen her grab it. I would have seen her grab it or else I would have died a million times from other things I would have missed in my line of work. Either it wasn’t really there now or It had been there all along. Both possiblities made my blood cold.

“I'm going to give you one chance, just one chance, god dammit, to tell me who you are and what you thought to get out of coming here. Then maybe I’ll let you live.”

“I told you who I am.“

“You think you can lie to me? Do you know who I am? I can turn your mind inside out. Every bit of your fucking life will be laid out before me like a cadaver. Do you want to talk more shit or do you want to tell me who you are right now and save me from having to cut you open!”

“Do it then.” I said.

“What? You think I’m bluffing, you-”

“Go ahead. Look in my mind. If that’s what it takes, so be it. I can’t waste another day, not for her. You're the only person left who might know where she is. You’re my only chance.”

She stared at me, her eyes wide and her mouth half sob half snarl. She gripped the knife so hard it shook. Tears were coming out of my eyes. I tried to blink them back without too much display.

She straightened up and looked at me like I was a dog that decided to talk.

“If you hide anything, I'll rip you apart. You know that?”

“I don’t know how to do that. I don’t want to either. I just want to find her. I’m sick of being useless at this.” I didn’t know why I was doing it, but It had seemed the obvious thing to do when I thought of it. If she was lying and didn’t know where Liana was then I’d be right where I had been anyway, with nothing. If she did know and she saw everything I’d done to find her, I didn’t think there she would turn me away. As hysterical as she was, I felt a passion in her. She did love Liana.

“You will do exactly as I say. You will think about what I tell you. As much as you can focus that weak little mind on what I tell you to. All right?!”

“All right.”