“It’s pretty bad, m’lord.” Olyc didn’t beat around the bush. “Seems like Lady Gray’s pulled almost her whole organization to focus on Cat Alley. Gotta be near every gang operating in the Gutters is hanging around there, either right in it or just outside. Me and the lads can still get in and out to check on things, being that we know all the subtle routes and have plenty of friends in there, but it’s been a close thing already and it won’t be long before one of us slips up.”

“What are the gangs doing, exactly?” I dreaded hearing the answer, but obviously I needed to know.

“Applying pressure,” he said flatly, meeting my gaze. “Every kind they can. There’s been no more outright seizures like they tried with the Cat, and Gray hasn’t tried to actually take over and run it as a business since all the employees scarpered, but they’ve trashed the place something awful. I’m just glad Miss Minifrit ain’t around to see it. During night hours they hassle johns and anybody else coming into the street, all but shutting down business. The girls and bouncers who’ll still talk to us said Gray’s people have taken aside the lower-rent madams, probably just to give her orders that the Healer’s not to be allowed on the premises. With nobody but gangsters coming through… They’re breaking stuff, hurting people. Helping themselves to…freebies.” Olyc tightened both hands into fists as he spoke, and Thwyn’s jaw clenched so hard it looked painful. “Rough-like, even more than that needs to be.”

For a second, I could barely breathe. I felt sick. All of this was my fault.

I wanted to charge right down there and… What, exactly? Aster and I could maybe take on Gray’s organization. Well…part of them. I was apparently a pretty powerful sorcerer and her artifacts were nothing to sneeze at, but we were both only human. How many enemies could we tackle before simple numbers won out? And that was assuming Lady Gray herself didn’t take to the field with that invisibility dagger and whatever other bullshit she was hiding, which Jadrin and Jakkin both said she definitely would.

“I thought Gray kept her hands off in Cat Alley as a rule,” said Aster while I struggled for self-control. “Doesn’t she make money from the businesses there? This has to be hurting her own interests.”

“That’s always been the way,” Olyc agreed, nodding at her, “but apparently she’s changed her mind. Right now it looks like Lady Gray’s done caring about money. What they’re doing… She’s just punishing the Alley cats for supporting the Healer. That’s the only thing that makes sense.”

“And trying to draw…him out,” Thwyn added, glancing between me and Aster.

In hindsight, my mistake was obvious. I’d assumed once Maugro spilled the beans about my plan to move on festival night, with the likelihood of the outer gangs attacking at the same time, Gray would prepare her defenses to meet the threat. But she hadn’t attained her position and kept it for years by thinking defensively. She meant to have all this settled before that night came so she could use it to take down any gangs that tried to attack her then. Either by luring out the Healer and dealing with him—with me—or by inflicting such damage on Cat Alley that if I failed to show up, the women there who’d been the victims of my scheming would never trust me again.

“Listen, my lord,” Olyc said carefully, now also looking pointedly at Aster. “I know you’re—”

“We haven’t met before,” I interrupted sharply.

He hesitated, clenched his jaw, then nodded once. “Of course, m’lord. My mistake.”

God, it really was transparent, wasn’t it? There were exactly two people with Japanese accents on this island—on this world—and only one was followed around by a woman with a huge sword. Norovena had glanced at her exactly the same way when the subject of the Healer came up. We could obscure the details, but the disguise was at best paper-thin. It only worked at all because relatively few people in Gwyllthean knew Lord Seiji. Enough did; too many, in fact. Hell, I’d just personally set Rhydion on a course to figure it out (assuming he hadn’t already), which was more than enough to make this good and disturbing, but—

Suddenly I felt as if I’d been dunked in ice water.

Uncle Gently knew about Lord Seiji. It was necessary for my use of his Rats to gather information. And Uncle Gently reported directly to Lady Gray.

My god, how could I have been so stupid?

The kids. Orphans in this medieval hellhole were less valued than livestock, and someone like Lady Gray counted lives and human suffering as nothing but tallies in her ledger, to be stacked up however it best served her interests. She’d already had a couple of days to…

That ice water was drowning me. I felt the real world begin to slough away as an impossible, unclimbable wall of the consequences of what I’d done loomed up on all sides. So much pain, death, destruction… All unleashed because of me. I had to do something. What could I do? What could one person do, even with all the powers of a Dark Lord? I couldn’t breathe. What could I do?

And then a strange thing happened.

It was as if my consciousness was rising up out of itself. Amid the whirling chaos of my own emotions, I floated, suddenly calm. Gazing down from a bird’s eye vantage at the rising torrent of panic, grief, righteous indignation, guilt, and vengeful rage, as if they were things that didn’t truly concern me. More than that, I found I could see the broader situation, unencumbered by the chaos clouding my own mind.

What could I do?

From here, there was not yet a clear path to victory, or even to proper damage control, but suddenly I could plainly see the next steps to be taken.

“Do you have paper in here?” I asked Olyc. He blinked as if startled; I realized I’d been standing silent for a long stretch of seconds, and whatever was on my face must have been rather unnerving.

“Ah…that is, yes, m’lord. Place is kind of a dump, but it’s a Dountol house, after all. There’s always paper.”

“Good. I need you to sketch me a quick map of the districts surrounding Cat Alley. It doesn’t have to be complete; I just need to know the locations nearby from which Lady Gray is staging attacks. If she’s moving people in full-time to pressure the blue light district, she’ll have set up field bases. Show me where they are in relation to the Alley’s landmarks.”

“I…” Olyc glanced at Thwyn, who nodded once and turned to exit the kitchen, hopefully in search of paper. “We don’t know of all of ‘em, obviously, and some of the likely spots are less than certain. I can think of several, though. The other lads may know of more’n I do.”

“That’s fine. It doesn’t have to be perfect, just get me the best starting point you can.”

“We can do that, my lord. Are… You’re going to save the girls, right?”

“I’m going to do what I can,” I said, hearing the inhuman iciness in my own voice and feeling too detached from myself to care. “Maybe I can’t save anyone, but anyone I fail, I will avenge tenfold. Now. In terms of specifics, I need you to be on the lookout for three specific Gutter Rats I’ll describe; they’re allies. Protect them if you can, and rely on them as needed, but don’t place them in further danger. Also, I need you to get a message to Gannit at the Jostled Jugs.” I hesitated, rapidly considering. “Give me a moment to iron out those details. In general, I want you to spread the word to the Alley cats that the Healer is coming. If the gangs hear it… In fact, let them. Let it spread to all of them. Lady Gray wants the Healer, and she tends to get what she wants. This time, she is going to choke on it.”

After leaving the bouncers’ safehouse some minutes later, Aster and I made tracks for our next destination, a deserted spot amid the weed-grown foundations of some long destroyed structure on the periphery of the Gutters with a sheep field visible half a block over. There, we set about doing the absolute last thing I wanted to be doing right then: dithering around.

The arrangement was that the Rats found us. There wasn’t even a dedicated meeting place, and in fact Gilder had made a point that we should pick somewhere different each time. We’d come to town and do whatever other business we had first; Gilder, Benit, and Radon insisted they were always watchful and had ways of finding us once they knew we were in town. So far, they always had, though it involved anything from five minutes to an hour of sitting around somewhere accessible but remote in the Gutters, depending on how closely they were shadowing us. The kids made a game of trying to sneak up on me, which they’d always lost thanks to Biribo.

So there was nothing for it but to sit there and wait for them to show up, simmering in the very real prospect that this would be the time they didn’t. Whatever that preternatural calm from before was, it had dissipated rapidly on the walk over and now I felt like a nervous wreck.

Fortunately, Biribo had a way to distract me from my nervous pacing as soon as we’d settled in.

“So, uh, boss…” He buzzed out of his comfy padded pocked in Aster’s coat to hover in front of me. “This is awkward.”

“I’ll take awkward,” I said wearily. “What’s on your mind?”

“Well, you just unlocked a new Wisdom power.”

I blinked, twice. “I did? When?”

“Just back there. It’s, uh… It re-purposes traumatic dissociation. Any time you experience something so emotionally painful your consciousness would shut down in self-defense, instead of actually shutting down it puts you in a highly lucid state from which you can think coherently at the cost of being, uh…emotionally detached to a pathological degree.”

Aster winced and avoided my eyes.

I just blinked twice more at Biribo. Then a third time. Then rubbed at the bridge of my nose with both hands, squeezing my eyes shut.

“Great. That’s…handy. Thanks for keeping me in the loop, Biribo. This is never to be spoken of to another living soul, is that completely clear?”

“Crystal, Lord Seiji.”

“You got it, boss!”

I didn’t exactly know how my enemies might turn that against me, though undoubtedly somebody could find a way; my immediate thought was to be more concerned about my allies. It was far too easy to imagine Sakin “helping” me strategize by slitting Junko’s throat in front of me.

Biribo hovered around, on guard for anyone approaching, while Aster stood patiently with her sword drawn. I found myself pacing. Wearing out my legs right before I needed to walk halfway across the island back to North Watch wasn’t exactly a solid tactical decision, but I needed to do something. I had to move, since I couldn’t yet make any moves that were actually useful.

“I dunno how we could’ve handled it differently,” I said suddenly, “but I keep remembering how we took out those thugs in the barn. That was…”

“That was pretty bad, yeah,” Aster agreed softly. “It’d be weird if you weren’t seeing that whenever you tried to sleep.”

“You too, huh?”

“I know Fflyr Dlemathlys is more violent than where you come from, but I don’t commonly execute a dozen people in a night for purely pragmatic reasons. Most people don’t.”

I nodded. “Yeah. Seems…unfair.”

Aster let out a little bark of incredulous laughter. “Unfair! Yeah, that’s a word.”

“I know, I know. Kind of underwhelming. It’s what I keep circling back to, though. Unfair, and hypocritical. I mean, hell, my first big Dark Lord speech when I arrived was about how people end up as bandits. How they slipped through the cracks of a society that failed them. It’s not like that’s any less true of the people working for Lady Gray, they just ended up positioned against me in circumstances where it’s not as convenient for me to recruit them. And look at the ones we did get. Enough of the girls vouched for Jadrin that I’m kind of optimistic about her, but that Jakkin guy…”

“Is basically Donon again,” she said wryly, “but not as loyal or useful?”

“Yeah, basically. Or as funny. That was objectively a really fucked up thing we did.” I sighed and stopped pacing. “I can’t think of anything we could’ve done that would’ve worked better, is the thing. And you know what? I’m not losing sleep over it, and that’s the part that I find disturbing. I am bothered that I’m not more bothered.”

“Boss, I don’t mean to diminish what you’re going through, but that’s super common,” said Biribo. “It’s part of the process of getting used violence. Everybody goes through that. It’ll pass.”

“I’m not sure that helps,” I muttered. “If it passes, then what the hell does that make me?”

“One step closer.”

In that moment I really, really wanted to smack him.

“While you’re probably not wrong about the unfortunate circumstances that led all those people to their situations,” said Aster, “that’s also true of the Cat Alley girls, and our own people back at the castle. To be frank, Lord Seiji, if I thought what we did in that barn was your idea of carrying out justice, I’d be severely disturbed. What I thought was that we were at war, and that was the action that was strategically necessary in that moment. That doesn’t make it any less a loss of life, but… Look, I’m no historian, but war is pretty much a process of slaughtering a bunch of people you don’t really have any argument with, for no reason except they’re between you and the person you actually need to kill.”

“As someone who’s witnessed a lot of history firsthand, that’s actually a really spot-on description,” said Biribo.

She nodded. “War is ugly. It’d obviously be better if it never happened. But we’re at war because we need to be. It’s the only way to change anything or protect anyone, and we have to see it through to the end. Otherwise everything we’ve done so far was for nothing.”

“Perfect,” I sighed. “All this wasn’t nearly morally fraught enough, let’s discuss what does or doesn’t make a just war.”

Aster cracked a grin at that. “Well, I might just be rationalizing to make myself feel better, but the way I look at it, all the killing is the natural consequence of the mess we’re in. It’s the people you’ve managed to go out of your way to save who’re the extraordinary circumstance in all this, and that’s also on you.”

“I didn’t exactly recruit the North Watch gang out of the goodness of my heart, you know. Or the prostitutes.”

“I know,” she shrugged. “Still saved ‘em, though. For a while, at least. And that’s not nothing.”

“It helped for a while, and that’s not nothing.” I looked up at the oddly purplish sky that I still wasn’t used to. “Man, I really hope that doesn’t end up being the best I can say about what I accomplished on this world.”

“We got incoming, Boss,” Biribo reported. “Two juveniles. I’m pretty sure it’s Benit and Radon.”

I experienced a one-two punch of relief and terror. God, I hoped it really was those two and they were okay. But what about Gilder?

We had to wait only a couple more minutes for at least some of the answers. For once, instead of trying their usual stealthy approach, both kids emerged around a corner a full block distant and came toward us at a run down the narrow space that would have been an alley before half the buildings bordering it had collapsed. I could identify them both well before they reached us.

“Biribo, anybody else?” I asked quietly.

Previously he’d been hidden whenever I talked with the Rats, only muttering messages from inside Aster’s pocket as needed, but this time I had directed him to stay out. A lot of cats were out of their various bags and it was past time for dissembling.

“Nobody pursuing ‘em,” he reported. “Now, at least. I can’t speak as to what happened before they got close, though.”

Both kids were panting with the exertion as they finally reached us, but it didn’t stop Radon from pointing right at Biribo and demanding, “What’s that?”

“This is Biribo,” I said impatiently. “Where’s Gilder?”

“He’s okay, Lord Seiji,” Benit replied. “I hope. He was a little while ago.”

I drew in a steadying breath. “Okay, that’s… Start at the beginning, please.”

“We’ve been gone to ground since last night,” she said, and indeed the poor girl looked exhausted. “Uncle Gently got one of his visits from a couple of the ex-Rats, younger guys in one of Lady Gray’s crews who used to live at the Nest. Soon as they left, next thing he said to Gilder is he wants to talk to you. To Lord Seiji. So we were supposed bring you there soon as we saw you next.”

“And we knew what that meant, cos we ain’t stupid,” Radon interjected.

Benit nodded. “We know how to nod and smile and say yes, so we did, and promised we’d fetch you. All like everything was level. But Uncle Gently’s not stupid either, and Gilder thought… Well, we decided to play it safe. We didn’t sleep at the Nest last night, and we decided not to go back. We been watching for you so we could tell you what’s what, Lord Seiji. Sorry for making you wait, but there was other Rats prowling after us and we had to lose ‘em.”

“Okay,” I said with strained patience, “but where is Gilder?”

“He drew off the others,” Radon answered, his expression far too solemn for such a young child.

“Don’t worry, Gilder’s better than the two squishbutts who was after us,” Benit hastened to assure me. “He can lose ‘em, no problem, it’ll just take some minutes. But Lord Seiji… He told us to link up with you, said to tell you he was gonna keep on watch in the Gutters a couple days more.”

“He what?!”

“There’s a lot going down,” she said, small and wan and earnest. “Lady Gray is losing it, Lord Seiji. She’s gone crawn mad over the Healer and she’s kicking down Cat Alley to get at him. Gilder told us to come to you. He said—he said we should ask you to hide us till all this blows over. But he doesn’t wanna pack it in yet. He said he’s gonna stay your eyes and ears in the Gutters and have fresh news for you when you’re ready to make your move.”

God damn that boy. If I ever saw him alive again I’d wring his scrawny neck.

“He’s good, Lord Seiji,” Benit said, her own fear plain on her face. “But…nobody’s as good as… I mean, Gilder can manage for a couple days, probably. I don’t think… I wouldn’t leave him more than that. That is, if you…”

“Biribo, do you think you can find him?” I asked.

“Track one child who’s not already within range of my senses in a city this size, when he’s already working to evade detection?” Biribo did an agitated little loop-de-loop. “Honestly, boss, these two would probably have a better chance of running him down.”

I didn’t even consider that idea. Gray was after me, and she knew these kids were a connection to me. I needed to get them out of Gwyllthean, immediately. Gilder… Fuck. I just had no way to get to him that wouldn’t also endanger Radon and Benit.

“Seriously,” Radon exclaimed, “what is that? It talks!”

“Right back atcha, kneebiter,” Biribo spat.

“Biribo is my familiar,” I said.

Benit’s eyes widened. Yeah, she was always the one who knew more than she let on and put things together quietly.

“What’s a familiar?” Radon demanded.

“It’s a helper I get from having the Blessing of Wisdom.”

“Wisdom?” he scoffed. “That’s not a real Blessing!”

“Yes, it is,” Benit whispered. “It’s just really rare.”

“Wait,” the younger child said, frowning, “but you’re Blessed with Magic.”

“Yep.” In spite of the dire gravity of this situation, I couldn’t help enjoying this reveal as it played out. I guess showmanship is baked right into my soul.

“Are…are you the Hero, Lord Seiji?” Benit whispered.

I shook my head. “Nope. I’m the Dark Lord.”

Both children stared up at me in pure awe. Then Radon grinned so widely it almost looked painful.

“Awesome!” he breathed.

Well, it was nice to be appreciated.

“Okay, look.” I knelt amid the weeds, bringing my eyes closer to theirs. “Gilder was right. I mean, not about him running off to play tag with Lady Gray’s gangs by himself, that’s the dumbest goddamn thing I’ve ever heard of and I’m gonna box his ears for it when I see him again.” If I see him again. “But about getting you two out of Gwyllthean. I know it’s all you’ve ever known, and it’s scary to leave it, but we have to go, now. I will come back for Gilder as soon as I can, but for now we’ll have to trust that he can look after himself. Since he hasn’t exactly left us with any choice.”

“We can still help you, Lord Seiji!” Radon swore. “We can fight!”

Benit gave him a sidelong look which emphatically disagreed.

“Listen to me.” I reached out and put a hand on each of their shoulders. “I know you’re used to having to work for every scrap you get. It seems normal to you to be used by adults until you’re either used up or survive to be adults yourself. But that is not normal. It’s fucked up, is what it is. Anybody who puts children in danger like this for their own purposes is a complete piece of shit who deserves whatever happens to them. And yes, that includes me. I could tell you a story about how I had no other options and tried my best to look after you, but none of that really matters. What matters is I did it, and it was wrong as hell. And the difference between me and Uncle Gently is I’m going to take responsibility.

“As of right now, you two are retired from Rat work. Understand? When you’re grown, you’ll have to make yourselves useful, just like everybody does. But a child’s job is to study and to play, and that’s what I’m gonna have you get down to as soon as we’re safely back at my castle.”

Both of them swelled up again, Radon until I feared he might burst.

“You have a castle?” he squealed.

“Is it far?” Benit asked, only a trifle less breathlessly.

By contrast to their enthusiasm, the question caused me to deflate. Was it far? I looked the pair of them over critically; they were about nine and six, by my reckoning, and clearly both tired and hungry to begin with. For children in that condition to make a journey like that, on foot…

“Hey, Aster,” I said, turning to look at her over my shoulder. “About how strong would you say you are?”

I’d caught her smiling fondly, no doubt at my little speech, but just like that her expression collapsed into a particularly vivid Aster Look.