Despite myself, over time I started to like the Fflyr.

Sure, they used a whole overcomplicated set of hand gestures to signal social status (apparently that most common folding-down thing was just the tip of the iceberg) when a simple universal bow would have been sufficient, and refused to eat anything that wasn’t spicy enough to be physically painful. And while the coins were clearly the fault of the goddesses, I wasn’t easily going to forgive the insanity that passed for a system of measurements here. I had to recognize, however, that nearly all of what was so horribly and obviously wrong in this country was the sole doing of the people in charge of it, not that of anyone I encountered on the street. Castigating peasants for the dictates of feudalism was pretty futile.

While, in theory, any country can abruptly become a democracy if you rile the serfs enough, I knew very well from my own reading how difficult that is to do, no matter how bad things get. Humans are creatures of pattern and habit who will usually choose to suffer any hardship rather than try to fix their situation if it involves stepping outside the bounds of familiarity. That didn’t reflect well on anyone, but it was also a universal defect for which it began to seem unfair to blame the Fflyr in particular.

What really redeemed this culture in my eyes is how musical it was. Yeah, yeah, I’m a biased creature, but who isn’t? The Fflyr love of books and literature was apparently part of their character as well, or at least Auldmaer claimed it wasn’t as common in other nearby countries, and yeah, that was a positive trait, but it was the music that spoke to me. Every culture loves music; every person loves music, I think, excepting only the tone-deaf and other unfortunates. As with their books, though, the Fflyr took it a step farther.

There was the rondlow, the musical form I’d first observed in the Alley Cat and then in every other brothel I visited which also served as a public house. Singing in taverns was nothing unique, I’m pretty sure that happens everywhere, but rondlow were a type of Fflyr folk song with between two and five melodies, all of which everyone seemed to know. Everyone chimed in on their own vocal part, and not just harmonizing; they actually sang in perfect counterpoint, different parts coming in and out as the specific song required. At their very simplest a rondlow was basically a round, but they never stayed that simple beyond the second melody joining in. Once they built to a climax these things were as complex as any piece of musical theater I’ve ever heard. And sure, people were off-key or off rhythm or missed cues—nobody I’d heard would’ve been destined for Broadway even if there was an equivalent here. But by and large, they pulled it off successfully. Whores and johns did this in taverns, for fun. The working poor in general sang like people who’d been trained to perform.

“Why don’t you guys ever do that?” I asked my bandits once over one of our dinners of dried meat and porridge. Spiced, of course. Even the damn tea.

A round of exchanged glances ensued, along with Aster shooting me a sidelong look.

“Well, I mean, there’s eight of us, Lord Seiji, and that’s assuming you and Miss Aster both wanna join in,” Donon finally said. “That’s, uh, the bare-ass minimum to get a proper rondlow going, and that’s if you’re lucky enough to cover all the parts. It’d still sound awfully thin. Rondlows are mostly for bigger groups.”

“Also,” said Goose, “we’ve got the bad luck to have four baritones and two altos. That’d just sound weird; some of the better songs, the lower parts don’t even cover all the lyrics. Unless…?”

She gave Aster a hopeful look, getting a rueful grimace in response.

“Make that three altos. Sorry.”

“Man, what’re even the odds of that?” Harold wondered.

“You should ask Virya to send us some squeakier recruits,” Sakin said cheerfully. “Anyway, Lord Seiji, you’re a wizard on that guitar of yours; how come we never hear you sing?”

“Hm.” That was actually a worthwhile question. I did play my guitar quite a bit, enjoying its more complex sound than a “proper” instrument from Earth offered. So far, though, I’d been sticking to instrumental music. “Guess I just haven’t felt like it. Also, I suppose, sort of the same problem. My preferred genre requires percussion at absolute minimum, and preferably a keyboard and bass guitar. Rock songs either work really well stripped down to one part, or end up all awkward and weird. Mostly the latter.”

Sakin blinked twice, then looked over at Kasser, who shrugged.

It was Donon who asked the question. “Uh, what the hell is a bass guitar?”

I sighed heavily and picked at my food.

Another Fflyr musical form I saw around Cat Alley, which impressed me even more than the rondlow, were what I’d been told were called ffradlew. These were…well, basically rap battles, but an order of magnitude more awesome.

These things were fully extemporaneous and amazingly complex. Performers who practiced the art would apparently roam the streets when they were busiest, and when they encountered one another, the ffradlew would begin. The actual back and forth could be hostile or agreeable to one another, depending on the relationship of the individual singers, but there was always an element of competitive one-upmanship. They’d spew rhymes off the cuff—but not just rhymes. These things were metered and melodic; contestants were apparently judged by the quality of their singing and the originality of the tunes they created for each ffradlew. They went at and played off each other, competing on lyrics, melody, and vocal quality, and the best part was the audience participation.

This might not work in other cultures, but as rondlows demonstrated, the Fflyr were a deeply musical people. Apparently the winner of a ffradlew was the singer who got more of the audience to back them up—keeping the beat with hands and feet, but also humming in complex harmony, picking up whatever repeating chorus they laid down, and joining in with instruments if they had them.

It was insane, and amazing. And frankly, these performers had nothing but respect from me. I couldn’t have pulled off one of these things, and I don’t lightly admit defeat. One of the great frustrations of my trips through Cat Alley (frustrations, not traumas, which were a whole other thing) was that the Healer’s persona didn’t allow me to stop and participate in these. I enjoyed the hell out of them whenever I could in passing, though.

And those were just the styles of the lowborn.

My weekly trips into the city to meet with Auldmaer did occasionally end up in the upper ring, to which I gained entrance by virtue of my nice clothes, foreign features, and big bag of money. Mostly out of curiosity, though I was always carefully on the lookout for anything I could use in my campaign. Nothing really came up; getting in with nobles or the very rich required the introduction of an established member of high society.

Mostly, it was just for the benefit of the better shopping, pleasant environment, and occasionally having someone talk to me entirely in obscure literary references like those teenagers from my first day in town. According to Aster, all highborn did that to one extent or another, but when they started loading their sentences up with memes and allusions to the point that they were literally not comprehensible if you’d not read the same books, that was their polite way of saying “fuck off, lowborn and/or foreigner.”

But the upper ring did introduce me to sianadh, so I forgave them.

It was by accident; I was passing by outside one of the structures whose purpose wasn’t apparent to me because their organic, khora-based architecture tended to obscure the nature of buildings unless they had a sign out front. On that day, it was being used for choir rehearsal, and the sound made me come to a halt and stand there listening. There were several pedestrians lingering outside in the same place, just soaking in the voices which flowed from the open windows.

I learned later that it was called sianadh and it was a traditional musical style practiced exclusively by noblewomen—one of the things with which they filled their time, since aristocrats are not actually useful to society as a rule. Frankly, given my opinions on nobility in general and my ever-spicier view of Fflyr nobles in particular, I kind of resented being made to feel positively about anything they did, but sianadh was breathtaking.

They sang with a distinct nasal quality, creating dark tones that were as close to the drone of a sitar as the human voice could produce. Thanks to my own vocal training I recognized what they were doing, singing clear up in their sinuses like that, and to describe it you’d think it would be the most obnoxious noise imaginable—which it is, if you do that attempting any musical style not meant for it. The complete form of sianadh, though, was eerie and ethereal, consisting of long-held notes fading in and out as the singers transitioned from grand pauses into gradually more complex harmonies as each voice joined in, then dropped off one by one to ebb away in the same fashion. The music swelled and receded like tides which none of these women had ever seen, modulating often between major and minor keys and frequently moving through tritones, dissonant harmonies and other disconcerting effects before resolving them. There were no lyrics, just music. The human voice as pure instrument, untempered by language.

It was…unsettling. Achingly beautiful, but it left me with an inexplicable sense of loss, and a strange wonder at the sheer mystery of the universe.

Music can do that to you. Even a cynic like me is not above the power of song. I think, at least in part, that’s why I love it so.

Over the following weeks, my continued visits to Yrshith Street progressively bore fruit. By the time a month of the Healer’s presence had passed, the effects were downright transformative.

At that point, every brothel had opened its doors to the Healer, which was the benchmark I’d been shooting for and which now made me start to get antsy as the next development on which I’d been counting failed to materialize. Not everybody was free of suspicion, but it seemed even those who remained skeptical of my motives were glad enough to see me for the benefits I brought, and for the vast majority of the women working in Cat Alley, I was a hero.

I’ll admit, it was nice being greeted like a rock star everywhere I went. Would’ve been nice to earn that as an actual rock star, as I’d always dreamed, but if I was being honest, this work was objectively more important. Ulterior motives and all.

As everyone warmed up to me, and seemed to warm up in general now that disease had been effectively eradicated from the brothels and their injuries were remedied on a weekly basis, I had the opportunity to actually get to know some of the women. Some were shy around me (or still suspicious), and often the press of squealing bodies was too much in any one particular place for a meaningful conversation to occur, but in places like the better brothels clustered around the Alley Cat near the center, the madams were better about enforcing order and I often got a chance to talk a bit with the people I was healing. More and more, as they relaxed enough around me, I got to hear their stories.

Not one of them was pleasant. People either fell into this life or were forced into it; amazingly, young girls in Fflyr Dlemathlys did not spend their childhoods dreaming of one day being worked to death before they were thirty on their backs under a succession of the sorriest goons Gwyllthean had to offer.

“Actually, I knew a girl like that,” Madyn once said to me. She was a twentysomething employee of Fanfare, who seemed to have a hilarious and/or alarming story for any conversation. “Rich kid, brown-haired, I think she may’ve actually been lower nobility. No idea where her family were, but she deliberately sought out a job here in the Alley. Craziest bitch I ever met, I swear. Took the worst customers the place had; she actually got off on it. Yeah, she’s dead now.”

Madyn was a born storyteller and enjoyed ending her tales on a mood-altering twist like that, but…way too many of the stories in Cat Alley ended that way.

A lot of the women took up prostitution out of desperation after ending up alone; in Fflyr Dlemathlys, a woman without family had few other options, save the King’s Guild and the Radiant Convocation, and neither of those would take just anybody off the street. That had been the fate of Adelly, who was Blessed with Might but had never managed to get her hands on an artifact before falling into debt and washing out of the King’s Guild. She was actually proud of having ended up whoring rather than stealing, despite her talents being better suited to banditry, and I honestly had to respect that. Once you’ve lost everything else, clinging to your integrity becomes a lot harder, and a lot more meaningful if you manage it.

Others, though…many others…had been forced into this life. By parents who decided they needed a whore’s price more than they needed another mouth to feed, or by relatives who ended up with custody of a new orphan and who didn’t even consider that a dilemma. Sometimes, just because they caught the eye of some noble and then weren’t considered good enough for anything else after he got bored.

“Chattel slavery is specifically illegal in Fflyr Dlemathlys,” Miss Minifrit explained to me once when I asked about these cases, pausing as she so often did to consider her words along with a long drag from her omnipresent pipe. “It’s rather a big deal. Long ago, the elves who now rule this country were slaves of the previous overlords, and after their successful uprising swore there would be no more of that evil in their land. Of course, they immediately set to committing every crime that was ever perpetrated on them, each under a new name and with a spiffy coat of fresh paint.”

“Wait. Is that why you people have all these hand motions instead of bowing?”

“You catch on,” she said, smirking and exhaling streamers of smoke through her nose. “Yes, Fflyr culture is full of things like that. Bowing is associated with slavery and thus forbidden—so instead there’s a whole system of etiquette which sorts people much more unforgivingly by rank and station. Likewise, there is no slavery in Fflyr Dlemathlys. But there is indentured servitude.”

I remained silent while she took another drag, shifting her gaze to stare at some infinite point through the wall behind me.

“You can’t just sell an inconvenient daughter or niece,” Minifrit continued after a moment. “What you can do, as her guardian, is take out a substantial loan in her name—and then, on her behalf, sign a contract with the lender defaulting upon the principal. The lender can then take this to any judge who can be relied upon not to ask too many probing questions or listen to the girl’s account, and she can be sentenced to servitude at the lender’s discretion until the principal and interest are fully repaid. And of course, these contracts can then be bought and sold.”

“So…there is the possibility of the debt being paid off?”

Minifrit snorted, sending smoke curling toward me. Yeah, I’d pretty much known what to expect when I asked.

“In theory? Certainly. It would simply take a contract holder who bothers to keep track of the servant’s earnings, guards interested in enforcing the proper terms, and a judge willing to hear the case. I invite you to guess how often those stars align.”

“Mm,” I murmured. “Slavery with extra steps, then.”

She let out a little huff of amusement. “Well put. And those cases aren’t even the worst. I doubt there are any judges in Fflyr Dlemathlys who would turn up their noses at an indenture case of that nature; the ones we consider actually corrupt are willing to sentence somebody to servitude with no money having actually changed hands—save from the alleged lender to the judge. Girls ending up in brothels or some noble’s spare bedroom are only one of the more common cases of this. When men get taken, their fate is usually to labor on the farms of whatever Clan snatches them. It’s all very civilized; we are a nation of laws, you see. No kidnappings in the night, just court cases and paperwork. But your back gives out just the same, whether you work bent over a bed frame or in a wheat field.”

I hadn’t known about the farm workers; those would make much better bandits and soldiers than prostitutes. Well, I was committed to this course now, though I resolved to look into that for my next big campaign.

“Have you ever taken in a girl who was falsely contracted this way?”

Minifrit stared at me for a long moment, allowing slow trickles of smoke to stream from her nostrils. “Over the years…several. On occasions when the opportunity arose to intervene before a girl’s contract was sold to an establishment where she’d be treated worse…and I had the liquid capital on hand to buy it out…and also a spot open for another employee at the time. It’s not common for those circumstances to line up so conveniently. Most of my girls I took in from the streets, where they were wandering in confusion, alone and destitute. And someday, Sanora will weigh my soul and I will finally learn whether I’ve done them a kindness, or it would have been kinder to let them freeze in the gutter.” She took a long drag, her eyes somewhere far distant. “We can’t save everyone, Healer. No one can. Not even you.”

“No,” I agreed, “we can’t. But…”

Minifrit eyed me pensively, but the conversation ended there. It wasn’t time for me to reveal what I did intend.

I was the Dark Lord, not the Hero. I couldn’t save all of the innocent; there were just too many victims. But I could sure as hell punish the guilty.

My unease grew as time passed. Slow and steady progress was better than none, but after six weeks had gone by since my deal with the goblins was finalized, I felt I had reached the level of esteem in Cat Alley that I needed to execute the next stage of my plan, yet the impetus I’d been counting on had not arrived.

To an extent, this was a case of me having outsmarted myself yet again. Thanks to the Healer’s expanded notoriety, I found myself left alone far more than you’d think a person who could heal any ailment would be among the desperate and impoverished. Non-prostitutes did approach me in Cat Alley from time to time, but they were all the most crushingly destitute and sick specimens of humanity I had ever encountered. Despite my determination to stay on mission… Well, I’m only human, and my appetite for suffering was constantly exceeded.

Never mind nightmares, I had started having occasional flashes of some of the horrible sicknesses and injuries I’d seen among the brothels while wide awake and otherwise occupied, causing me to freeze and break out in a sweat. If I didn’t know better, I could take these episodes as a symptom of PTSD—but I did know better, and that was just stupid. If these dozens of women could live through this every day, I could fucking well cope with only having to see it once a week.

To the desperate poor, I gave a long moment’s consideration, a pronouncement that the price had been paid, and then healing.

It was beginning to be downright eerie how nobody else dared approach me. Lacking a better explanation, I put it down to rumors of the Healer’s powers, which only grew more terrible in the retelling. I’d miscalculated, and made myself an object of far more fear than I had intended. Now that people expected me to smite them with holy fire if they crossed me, I was only approached by those I’d already sought out, the truly desperate, or those who were extremely confident in the purity of their own motives.

Strangely, there didn’t seem to be any of the last category bumming around the whorehouse district.

Also, I was shadowed by obvious thugs now. Lady Gray’s forces were stretched thin dealing with Clan Olumnach’s incursions, but she could spare a few to keep tabs on the Healer. They tended to show up an hour or so after I arrived in Cat Alley and keep their distance. They always made sure to catch my eye, smile and fold hands politely, and display weapons. None came close or spoke to me, though.

Profits were up across the district thanks to my ministrations, which meant I was making Lady Gray money. That didn’t mean she was going to leave me alone—only that for the time being she preferred to let me work under supervision than provoke me into doing something…expensive.

But she was a sword hanging over my head. Sooner or later, somebody would connect the dots, and I needed to have my mission here finished before that happened. There was also the matter of the goblins, who continued to be polite, friendly, professional, and heavily suspicious if not outright aware that I was the Dark Lord. It was both a relief and deeply unsettling that they never mentioned it again.

“That part I really don’t think you need to worry about, boss,” Biribo insisted. “Goblins are competitive with each other, like any Viryan society. Right now, Maugro and Sneppit represent the only factions who know, and I guarantee they’ll sit on that info until it’s valuable. They’re watching to see how you do. If you’re not the real Dark Lord or get killed or something, they’d lose face and resources for having declared you were, and if you are, they’ll wanna get in on the ground floor of your operation, ahead of all their competition. They won’t do anything but watch until you start to really make waves, and then they’ll be eager to throw in with you.”

“Sounds…too easy.”

“Not everything is gonna be an uphill struggle, boss.”

“Biribo, I would like to believe that, but unfortunately I’ve been paying attention.”

“Have you? Well, that’s progress.”

It was six weeks, just when I was starting to scheme ways of breaking out of this rut and pushing my agenda over the hump, when the impetus I’d expected finally arrived.

I was in the back corridors of the Sizzle, healing the last injury—another kitchen burn, this time. There’d been no fresh cases of disease in nearly a month, but johns continued to mistreat the women here, and then sometimes they just had accidents with hot oil, like the poor woman whose badly seared arm I remedied. The sick, sad truth was that the Healer was never going to run out of work in a place like this.

Just as she stepped back, a commotion from the common area occurred, and swiftly burst out of the front room into the hall in which I stood. This was unusual enough; the Sizzle was by far the quietest and most orderly joint in the Alley, as a rule. Adinet kept bouncers on hand to firmly encourage her idea of proper conduct.

When three men burst through the curtain into the back area, though, I could immediately see why the hired muscle hadn’t stopped them. They’d probably been afraid to try.

The two guards were all decked out in some fancy clothes, plus chain armor under their heavily embroidered coats. All of it had that overly-embellished aesthetic of goddess-made artifacts, which the Fflyr nobility liked to emulate in their own tacky style. To my Blessed eyes, there was no giveaway glow; neither of these fellows had actual artifacts. But they were big, muscular, armed with rapiers and daggers, and both clearly rich. That was no shortage of trouble in and of itself.

Their boss was even richer, by the cut of his clothes, but even more important, he was blond and black-eyed. A nobleman of a rank which was rarely if ever seen in these parts.

And he was sick. With sunken cheeks, a grayish pallor, and patterns of lesions along his eyebrows, hairline, and the backs of his hands, he was clearly in the later stages of something I had repeatedly seen in Cat Alley before personally purging it from the district.

“You,” the nobleman rasped, pointing a trembling finger at me. He was sweating and breathing with effort. “You’re the one! The Healer. I demand your services.”

I drew myself up to my full height, breathing in and then out slowly. It seemed rumor of the Healer’s miraculous power had circulated as far as the upper city, drawing the interest of the over-privileged and entitled.

Finally.

“Have you paid the price?”