The thing about vengeance is the “best served cold” part; there’s a lot of fiddly, detail-oriented and frankly boring prep work before you can get to the grand catharsis of seeing your enemies kneeling broken at your feet.

Which is why, at the end of the week, I found myself leading a small team through the pitch-black khora forest at the end of a long day’s hike, trying not to trip or give away our position. Thanks to Sakin’s coaching we were doing okay, so far. Walking silently through khora was both easier and harder than sneaking through a tree forest would have been. Easier because there was very little underfoot that would rustle or crunch, given that khora didn’t tend to drop brittle detritus and plants didn’t grow well underneath them, with the exceptions of some spiky bushes that were easy to spot and avoid even in the darkness. Harder because there was practically no flat ground on which to step—once you were off a path worn by generations of animals and beastfolk, it was all hard little outcroppings of shell and those twisting thorny vine-like things that could be as thin as a finger or too big to easily climb over, or anywhere in between. The ground was all irregular rounded surfaces with holes in between, perfect terrain to break your ankle in the dark.

The trick was to put each foot down carefully and slowly, making sure you’d found a surface that would hold your weight before moving forward. It took forever. But hey, we weren’t having much trouble with the “quiet” part, at least.

“Almost there,” Biribo murmured, hovering right next to my ear. “Should be able to see the lookout up ahead. That one shape there…look, she moved.”

I nodded in silence, then looked past him to my right. In the darkness, Kastrin also nodded, indicating she’d heard and seen. She raised the tiny one-handed crossbow, taking aim. Most of the team were some meters behind us; for this advance I’d brought Kastrin for her sharp-shooting skills and Aster to back me up if this went sour and we had to just slaughter everybody.

What with my spells and artifacts, I was not concerned about the danger this group of bandits posed. Failure, here, would be having to kill them all without extracting the intelligence I needed.

Kastrin was still aiming after a few seconds, and I just waited; she knew what she was about and this was a shot we could not afford to miss. That tiny thing—a “stinger,” Sakin had called it—couldn’t be terribly accurate to begin with. It also had basically nothing in the way of stopping power, being useful only to deliver poisoned darts.

Even the twang of it was quiet when she finally released, probably not even audible to its target several meters away. The vague shape I could only tell was a person because it had moved emitted a strangled sound—a soft one, thankfully—staggered for a moment, then slumped downward.

“Biribo,” I whispered.

“On it.” He buzzed off into the night.

I patted Kastrin on the shoulder, getting a pleased grin in response. She always responded so well to praise; I definitely wasn’t going to tell her I was mostly just relieved this harebrained scheme had worked. I had been skeptical, due to the fact that tranquilizer darts (at least for humans) are Hollywood bullshit. Anesthesia is far too complicated and the margins of error punishingly tiny. Deliver slightly too little juice and the target won’t go under and might not even be inhibited that much; a hair too much and they just die. It probably wouldn’t be a problem if we’d killed the lookout, but the other outcome…

Of course, Kastrin’s stinger darts were dipped in a concoction provided by my goblin allies, and as far as I could tell, the difference between alchemy and chemistry was that in the case of the former the underlying scientific principle was “fuck you, magic.” I was very curious how this played into the goddesses’ system of artifacts and spells and whatnot, but the only alchemist I knew was Youda, who (I suspected under orders from his boss) became uncharacteristically tight-lipped whenever I asked about it. I guess the mysterious Miss Sneppit valued my business too much to risk me not needing her anymore.

Biribo returned moments later with his report. “Success! Lookout’s fully under, nobody else on watch and the rest of the gang are asleep.”

“Perfect.” I wetted my finger in my mouth and held it up to the air, testing the direction of the breeze. “We need to get upwind. This way.”

Next came more silent picking through the dark khora. A lot more of it, as we had to swing wide around the bandit encampment, with Biribo guiding our hesitant steps through the darkness. This took longer than our initial approach by far; I was placing a lot of trust in Youda’s sedative. Supposedly one dart’s worth would keep a human-sized target down for an hour. If the lookout woke up too soon, we were screwed.

No outcry was raised by the time we finally reached a point at the northwestern edge of the camp, practically opposite its entrance, which would put the prevailing breeze behind us. It wasn’t much of a breeze, but considering what we were about to set off, we couldn’t risk having it blow into our faces. Biribo did another quick check to make sure everyone was still out, and then Aster began carefully making her way up the slope alongside us.

This gang had built their camp inside a bowl-shaped shell which had once been one of those domelike khora that resembled brain coral. It had been a huge specimen, bigger than any of the ones I’d seen on the khora plantations where they were cultivated; dead, the lower remains of its broken shell provided a nifty little nook in which to hide, with one single crack big enough for a person to walk through serving as its entrance.

It wasn’t particularly defensible, though; the outer walls sloped upward and were easy enough to climb. These guys were taking a lot on faith by only posting one lookout at the entrance. Aster made it easily up the slope, moving slowly so as to be silent, and at the peak pulled a cantaloupe-sized cloth bundle out of her bulging coat pocket. One-handed, she lobbed it into the camp. Kastrin was our best shot, but this task didn’t call for nearly as much accuracy and Aster had stronger arms.

The little missile landed with a soft thump—soft, but audible even to us out here. Immediately following it came a faint rustle, as of someone moving around, and all of us froze, Aster ducking back down below the broken lip of the shell wall.

Seconds of silence ticked by. Biribo buzzed up to peek over the edge, then swooped back down to me. “We’re golden, boss.”

While Aster climbed gingerly back down, I passed her going up. It wasn’t hard; the rough texture of this particular khora species provided abundant handholds and stepping places. Honestly, the fact that these guys hadn’t been attacked like this before only proved that no one else was trying to. That made sense; if Clan Olumnach was controlling the bandit gangs for their own purposes, they wouldn’t approve of infighting.

It was odd that Lady Gray hadn’t moved on them, though. I knew she knew where this camp was; after accidentally discovering it myself back when we’d set fire to the Crown Rose caravan at the Kingsguard waystation, I had led a few of her people here to get them ambushed by the local bandits, and then let them live to report back to her. Gray worked hard to avoid being put on the defensive, so why hadn’t she cleared out this nest? It wasn’t like her to leave enemies alive and intact. There must be more factors involved in this gang war than I was aware of.

Hopefully I could get some answers about that tonight.

Reaching the lip, I peeked over, letting my eyes adjust to the lesser gloom inside. They had a fire going, burning low with a smokeless asauthec blend that put off just enough light for the occupants to walk without tripping. As before, there were about twenty of them, all bundled up asleep; it was a little cramped with that many plus their various belongings.

It took me just a minute of scanning to spot the bundle Aster had tossed, full of what had become one of our standard weapons. For this one, we hadn’t bothered with the shimmer powder that would disguise it as a rock. I finally spotted the little pile of cloth, lying near the center of the open space.

Perfect.

Spark!

Ignited, the sleeping powder bomb went off with a deep PFOOMP and a huge cloud of dust that enveloped the khora basin. I threw myself back down the slope without waiting to see that, casting a self-Heal to negate the effects of any sleeping powder I might have accidentally inhaled (and the effects of falling onto hard khora outcrops, because ow). There came a few abortive yells from inside the camp, but they ended swiftly.

The ensuing silence told us they were all out. Thoroughly out, now, and would stay that way no matter what we did to them. Perfect.

“All right,” I said with a grin, not bothering to moderate my voice. “Biribo, go fetch the others.”

“You got it, boss!” he chirped, already zooming off into the night.

“C’mon, ladies, let’s go see what we’ve caught.”

I had brought eleven women from North Watch in addition to my sidekicks Aster, Kastrin and Adelly, who were here to do the actual heavy lifting. Adelly had stayed behind to organize the rest while we went ahead to knock everyone out. I’d let her carry the Lightning Staff since Aster and I already had artifact weapons we preferred, even though if anything went even slightly according to plan there would be no need for her to fight. She had the Blessing of Might and it made her happy to have an actual artifact in her hands, since she’d never gotten one during her adventuring career, so I’d already decided to assign her that one whenever she went on a mission.

I wasn’t repeating my first mistake of “letting” Aster keep her Impregnable Chainmail and Greatsword of Mastery, thus effectively making them hers for good. That had worked out in her case, as Aster had proved both trustworthy and competent and those artifacts had belonged to her party in the first place, but I was keeping tighter control over the magical arsenal from here on out. The Lightning Staff would stay in my custody until it was mission time and I would retain it once we returned to base. Our other find from the battle of Cat Alley, the Featherweight Tunic, had been left behind. I could see the utility of it in very specific situations, and all three of us had been training with it, but that fucking thing was a pain in the ass to use, not to mention incompatible with many other artifacts.

The additional women we’d brought were the most skilled of the Alley cats after a week of training; I didn’t plan for them to be using those skills tonight, so their presence here was more of a reward for their efforts. They represented a broad cross-section of the women from multiple brothels, anyway, which perfectly suited my actual purpose for them.

Currently they were binding the sleeping bandits hand and foot. We’d brought along extra-long ropes and were trussing up our victims by hobbling their ankles together and tying their wrists behind their backs, while also keeping them linked together in groups of five or six to further impede their movements once they were awake. Kastrin had another sleeping dart loaded and was keeping watch with her stinger in case there were any early risers.

“Hey, hey,” Adelly said sharply, stepping forward and pointing the staff at a woman who had drawn back a fist at the man she was supposed to be tying up. “Not yet.”

“He…this is the one who…”

“I know,” Adelly said more gently, bending to squeeze her shoulder. “He’ll get his, Mierit, Lord Seiji’s promised. But wait. There’s a time and place; you need to follow the plan.”

Mierit took a couple of deep breaths to compose herself, then nodded jerkily and resumed binding his wrists. Probably way too tight, but neither Adelly nor I said anything. From that performance alone we already knew he wouldn’t be needing the use of his hands again.

I spotted a few other sets of bared teeth as they finished binding our new victims, but there were no further delays, the rest being apparently willing to wait for the proper moment. Soon enough, the work was done and my people stepped back, leaving four groups of snoring bandits tied up in neat little rows. They regrouped to stand in a line covering the entrance to the hollow, and I moved to the center. Biribo took his position over my shoulder, Aster and Adelly striding forward to bracket me from a step behind and Kastrin lounged against the wall to one side where she had a clear field of fire over the entire group.

Finally, I extinguished the Orb of Light whose clean white radiance I had been using to let the women go about their work.

There were, all told, twenty-two bandits. I formed the mental weight that was Heal in the forefront of my consciousness, and pushed it constantly, letting my gaze flick to each of the shadowed bundles I saw lying in the darkened camp. Chain-casting it was surprisingly easy, once I’d taught myself how in the aftermath of the battle of Cat Alley. A tiny flick of the eyes and the pink radiance burst around a new target, wiping away the sleeping drug and bringing them to wakefulness. It took no more than three seconds to sweep across the entire group; the lot was done by the time the first were blearily opening their eyes.

In the dimness of their fading campfire, there came outcries, cursing, and increasingly frantic struggles as the bound bandits awakened and began to realize their situation.

There it was: all the preparation for an ice-cold dish, finished. And now came my favorite part.

Showtime.

I held up one hand in the darkness and ignited a Firelight above it. The orange glow revealed myself and our followers to the bandits, prompting more yelling and cursing, but also a fair amount of stunned silence.

“Little lost lambs,” I intoned, projecting powerfully despite the close quarters. “For so long now you have wandered in darkness, but no more. I have come to Heal your confusion, and to weigh your sins. The price shall be paid this night. And when it is done, we shall see who will join the crusade, and who will join Hell’s revels.”

Off to the side, one man in particular began to scream in abject horror. I was in my Healer getup, foregoing the mask but with my dramatic longcoat and hooded cloak over that, leaving my face in shadow. Apparently the look and the voice were enough for him to recognize me, though. No surprise; I recognized him, too, and well remembered having left a lasting impression. His name was Rugin, and he’d shot me with a crossbow.

Then I’d Immolated him.

Rugin tried to get away, which of course was futile; he could move neither his arms nor legs, and his thrashing did nothing but piss off the other men bound to him. Lucky for him they were in no position to bludgeon him silent, either.

As usual, I had to do everything myself.

Windburst.

They were already on the ground, so the spell merely flattened them—as well as flinging every loose object in the camp around, including the embers of the fire which made a merrily burning spray halfway up one wall. Asauthec-soaked fronds such as those weren’t going to stop burning until the oil was fully consumed. Luckily it hadn’t landed on anybody.

“Silence,” I ordered. I was obeyed, for the most part.

“You’re that…guy,” one man said slowly, sitting upright and leaning forward to squint at me. “That crazy preacher. With…” He peered around at my followers, the women still mostly dressed as they had been. Clothes tightened up as much as they could be, but apparently there was an entire language to the details of those robe-like garments Fflyr women wore and a prostitute’s dress was immediately identifiable even if you covered up a bit. “With a bunch of whores? Okay, obviously I’m still dreaming. Would’ve preferred a sexier dream, but hey, I’ll take it. Least it’s not the lions again.”

“Understandable, but no,” I corrected. “Kastrin, pinch him.”

She swiftly unloaded the potioned dart from her stinger, slotted in an untreated one, and shot him in the leg.

“Augh! Motherfucking—you little—I’m gonna—” He swiftly tried several things, including doubling over and pulling the dart out of his leg, none of which worked due to his bindings. Quickly enough, the guy settled for staring up at me with bared teeth, breathing heavily. Without poison, the dart was really just a large akorshil splinter, currently embedded a couple of centimeters in his thigh. Doubtless painful, but it wasn’t going to do him any lasting harm. With the initial shock past, he seemed more annoyed than actually suffering. “All right! Point made. Goddess’s tits, that seems excessive. So, you got us, Mister Healer. What’s the big idea?”

“I told you. I am here to judge your sins.”

His grimace turned into a sneer. “Oh, please. What gives you the right to pass judgment on us?”

I recognized this guy, on closer inspection. He’d been present during my last encounter with this bandit gang. In fact, at the time he was clearly the leader, at least of the small group who’d ambushed Lady Gray’s trackers. To judge by the way everyone else fell silent and let him talk, it seemed he was the boss of the whole operation. Good, probably—at the time he’d impressed me as a fairly level-headed chap, as bandits went.

“The right?” I answered. “Nobody on this broken wreck of a world has any rights. I get to judge you for the same reason you get to beat people up and take their stuff: because nobody I’m doing it to has the power to stop me.”

I let that sink in for a moment. The bandits all stared at me in dread; Rugin was actually whimpering.

“But take heart, my lost little lambs,” I said finally, spreading my hands in benediction. “I am a fair judge, and when I can be, generous. I understand very well the vicissitudes of life that can leave people like you in a place like this. You live in a country where everything is stacked against you from the outset—where one turn of bad luck or the whim of some inbred blonde can rip away what little you have and stomp upon you until you are either crushed or forced through a crack and out of society entirely. Believe me: I know.”

I folded my hands in front of me and bowed my head.

“Each of you has been pushed out of a normal life by the failures of those who would call themselves your betters. You have had to make terrible choices and do terrible things merely to survive, all with no hope of ever making your lives better. I understand. So it is for us all. But.”

Raising my head, I held up one chiding finger.

“Some of you have done much more than survive. There are always a few who grab the opportunity to spread their misery around, and try to make life harder than it needs to be for others. Don’t you worry, little lambs. I will test the weight of your souls, and consider all factors. For many of you, one day you will look back on this night as the moment when your lives finally took a turn for the better.” Pause for effect, beat, beat… “But some of you fuckers are about to have a real bad time.”

The silence stretched out for a few more seconds, and then someone started weeping. Somewhat to my surprise, it wasn’t Rugin.

I really hoped they didn’t all fail the tests I’d prepared; this whole operation was based on my gamble that at least some of these would know the positions of other bandit camps. Maugro wasn’t going to spill the beans, so if I didn’t get some intel out of this group tonight or my next moves suddenly became very uncertain.

The gang’s boss was staring up at me through narrowed eyes, but his expression was intently curious—he seemed neither angry nor frightened, and no longer showed any signs of pain despite the steady trickle of blood making a spreading stain on his leg.

“Who the hell are you?” he asked.

I raised one hand in a languid gesture to indicate Biribo, who was still hovering in place. “Do you know what this is?”

The bandit leader’s eyes shifted to Biribo; he squinted harder, and then shrugged. “I dunno, some kinda weird-ass pet?”

“Oh, look who’s calling who weird,” Biribo shot back, making the guy jerk his head upright in surprise.

“Biribo,” I explained, “is my familiar. The physical sign of my Blessing of Wisdom.”

“Your—wait.” The boss was frowning deeply now. “You’re Blessed with Magic. Aren’t you? I saw you cast spells. We all saw it!”

“Indeed.”

I explained no further than that, just standing there. Waiting.

Due to how rare it apparently was, I expected that not everyone here would even know that the Blessing of Wisdom was a thing. No doubt some others would be too dense to put it together, but even so, I began to hear the hiss of indrawn breath as various bandits proved fully capable of applying the logic. I was not surprised that the leader’s eyes were the first to widen in comprehension.

“It’s the Hero,” a woman’s voice said with an audible quaver. “The Hero’s come to save us!”

“Does it look like we’re bein’ saved, Jenit?” a man near her spat, squirming against his ropes.

“I’m ready to be judged!” Jenit called, trying to struggle forward and earning an angry elbow in the side from the guy next to her. “Lord Hero, I swear—”

I held up one hand, and waited. To my immense satisfaction, my presence proved powerful enough that my wordless command for silence was obeyed. Not instantly, but they did all fall quiet and stop trying to wriggle out of their bindings.

“I am not,” I enunciated, “the Hero.”

Another beat of quiet.

“Oh, shit,” someone whispered into the silence.

“Whuh?” another voice said more loudly. “I don’t get it.”

The guy next to him leaned over and whispered into his ear. His eyes widened and his dark face turned an amusing shade of gray.

“Oh, shit.”

The bandit leader was now staring up at me with the first expression of overt fear I’d gotten from him since he woke up. I took two steps forward till I stood directly in front of him, then crouched on the ground so that we were eye to eye.

I lowered my hood, finally, and smiled. To judge by the twitching of his right eye, he did not find this reassuring.

“So, my little lost lamb. Tell me your tale.”