As apposed to most other cities I had visited in my lifetime, which challenged you to toil through muck up to one’s shins just to cross the road, I found myself striding across cobbled streets as I climbed the small slope to the harbour lodgings. The sinking sun had already burnt out what fiery passion day’s end had lent it, and I felt it’s warm glow upon my back ebb and fade as it was finally extinguished by the distant waves.

Instead of the inn which Zabi had suggested, I opted for a tavern more to my tastes: pricey, but which looked like it would serve wine worth the few extra silver and a bed that was not yet occupied by lice or several unwashed men. If my two companions ever lived up to their word- a dubious hope since one was a serial liar and the other gave her word on a scrap of discarded hair trimmings- I was sure that they would find me eventually.

I had decided on the short trip to the city that remaining with the others until the Tradesman’s Port would be my best option, since it would give me a final opportunity to try to persuade Finnr to my cause while also bringing us within a short day’s travel to Delrow. The more I assured myself that all would be well, however, the less confident I became.

Probably due to the high prices, I was fortunate to find that there were plenty of vacancies at the inn. Despite this, I paid for two single rooms with the intention of sharing a bed that night- you can’t blame a man for trying- then resigned myself to the bar and however many bottles of wine the last of Finnr’s money could pay for until the others found me, or the morning did, alone and contemplating how my funeral might go.

To my great surprise but greater relief it was the former which was to be my fate. Zabi found me a third of the way through my second bottle (I had been correct in assuming the high quality of wine, I was happy to note), and after grabbing a glass and stealing what remained of it she plonked herself on the stool by my side. She looked like hell… and, more pressingly, alone. A flutter of unease seizing my gut, I cast a searching eye around the room, hoping to find a tall hunched form straddled over some small stool or terrorizing the locals but finding only two tables of tipsy sailors in an otherwise empty room. I felt my muscles tense.

“Where’s Finn?”

“He’s out on the docks, trying to barter for a bigger boat.”

“And you left him alone?” The sinking feeling from earlier had finally dragged me to the deepest levels of despair, and I stared at Zabi with the faintest hope that she was joking. She had to be joking…

At first she was quiet, pausing with her glass hovering beneath her chapped peach-pink lips as her other hand picked splinters from the edge of the bar. I waited in increasing suspense. She took another sip.

“I do not think he plans to leave us.”

“Really?” I realised that I had been waiting for those words, because they had barely been muttered into her glass before I was throwing my arms into the air and tearing the hair from my head, “Are you mad? Of course he does! The only reason he’s taken us this far is because you had a knife to his throat! He’s probably halfway out to sea by now, planning to profit from a juicy bounty for handing over my location. Maybe he already has!”

A flashback to Finnr’s suspiciously lucrative pockets at the docks, and suddenly my feet were firmly on the floor with the intent of running out the door and not stopping until what little muscles I had been blessed with were screaming for mercy. I find that fear is far a superior motivator in galvanising one to action than any master-at-arms or health concerns.

“Do you really believe that?”

“Of course!” I gaped at her in disbelief, but as I stared into her conflicted eyes and I repeated the question in my mind, I knew that I didn’t. My feet did too, or I would have been out of there ten seconds ago, and from the knowing look that Zabi pinned me with I knew I wasn’t fooling anyone. I sighed heavily, turning away as I slouched back onto my seat. She was right. I wouldn’t trust the man with my dirty laundry, but there was something about the bloke… it had almost been as if he had wanted to be captured and dragged along on this hopeless mission of salvation. I couldn’t make any sense from it any way I looked at it, but there it was. Plain as day and utterly undeniable. Again, that growing sense of dread, and I felt the swift urge to change the subject.

“Soo… ah… Zabi-?”

“Zabiem,” She corrected me with that familiar irritation rising with her words, though she appeared much less volatile than she had upon our first meeting and I wondered whether perhaps this was as good-tempered as she was ever going to get, “Only family and friends call me Zabi, and you are nothing of the sort.”

“Come now, I think that’s a bit harsh,” I had known that paying for only two rooms was a long shot, but with my current position I was aiming somewhere beyond the moon, “Especially after you allowed Giggles back there to call you that, and from what I’ve pieced together I’m fairly certain that you wouldn’t exactly call him a ‘friend’, and certainly not ‘family’.”

That seemed to have hit a nerve, and I automatically angled my face and tenders in the opposite direction at the loathing radiating my way from her twitching fists, one of which darted suddenly in my direction. I might have uttered a small cry at her abrupt manoeuvre, but when I still hadn’t been assaulted after five seconds I judged it safe enough to peek warily through the fingers which guarded my face. The fist which she had flung towards me was hovering a few inches from my chest, hand flat and palm upturned in a gesture which still seemed threatening.

“Give it to me.” She prompted with a hint of hostility, though she appeared to have reigned in her temper somewhat. I stared at her hand blankly. After another several seconds she thrust her hand at my chest insistently, as though doing so would tell me what her words wouldn’t. I slowly dropped my hands.

“…Lady, I have no idea what-“

“The hairpiece!” She rolled her eyes like I should have somehow known what she was getting at.

“Alright, alright! Bloody hell, I’m not psychic, why don’t you start with that next time?”

I rummaged in my pocket and dropped the piece in her upturned hand, which she immediately withdrew towards her chest. I waited a bit before curiosity got the better of me.

“What is it, anyway? I don’t mean to be nosy-“ A big fat lie if ever I told one, “-but it just looks like… well, I don’t think it would be wise to expand on that, but it doesn’t look like something any other person wouldn’t throw into the gutters at the first opportunity. Is it really a family heirloom? That?”

I had been firmly expecting the battering that I hadn’t received earlier, but to my surprise she smiled. Now more than ever I was certain that I had been duped and that she would toss the thing out the door any second, but as I studied the expression more closely I thought I saw something sad haunting its edges. Suddenly I was more fearful that she was going to burst into tears than I was of getting beaten up, but fortunately she had a strength to her that wasn’t just muscle and which I was not at all surprised by. Still, there was something softer about her now as she gazed sombrely at the piece in her palm, vulnerable even.

“You see these beads?” This time I didn’t flinch as she held her hand out to me, displaying the row of rough red stones swirled upon her palm, “They are soulstone. Found only in the mines of Nagalon, deep beneath the sands- very tricky to collect. The rock contains these special pores, see?” She pointed at one of them with her pinkie finger. I made a noise of agreement. All I saw was a rock, but I went along with it anyway.

“The stone starts off white, but it drinks moisture and will attain the same colour as the solution it is placed in, never losing it. This one contains the blood of my great, great, great grandmother. This one,” She passed her finger over the dimpled surfaces of two more beads, “contains that of her grandfather before her. These pieces of hair are theirs too. You see? It is passed down from generation to generation, mother to daughter to son, on and on...”

“I see.” I was feeling the undeniable urge to scrub my hands raw and burn whatever fabric had touched the thing but, assuming it inconsiderate to do so in front of the woman, I nodded sagely while praying to the Gods that I hadn’t travelled all this way to be struck down by someone’s dead granny and her two-hundred-year-old case of pneumonia, “So, uh… why…?”

“Where I come from, we believe that our ancestors are responsible for our fate in the world, remaining with us and weaving our paths along the way. We have no true Gods as you do, but in a way we believe our ancestors to hold similar sway over the world as your deities do,” She retracted her hand- much to my comfort- and began weaving the string through her lush midnight locks almost mesmerizingly, “We believe that the soulstones retain a link between the ancestors and ourselves through their blood, and so by keeping them with us they will always be there for guidance and protection.”

Her hands dropped loosely from her hair, now laced with beads across her brow. I couldn’t say that I would be too enthusiastic about having my dead grandfather on my shoulder, especially after the way we had left things last what with the murder and all that, but I kept quiet with a gulp from my glass. I had expected that to be all, but something had made her chattier than I had ever suspected her capable of.

“My mother gave it to me.” She murmured, resurfacing from a sullen silence in a tone that suggested the atmosphere could only get more depressing; I wondered dully how many bottles I would have to go through before I could erase this night from my memory, and judged my target to be around five. I flagged down the barkeep and set myself to the challenge immediately.

“It was meant to be for good luck,” She scoffed softly, stealing the bottle I had ordered straight from the barman’s hand and pouring herself a healthy serving, “Turns out it wasn’t me who needed it. But I had thought…” She trailed off. I had hoped that would be the end of it- I’ve never been very good at consoling people, and this line of conversation really wasn’t helping my chances of sharing that room. Though, after the thing about her ancestors, my desire to spend a night with her had become swiftly less with the thought of having a group of ghostly old codgers ogling us all night. Unfortunately, this was the night that taught me that feeding Zabiem a sip of wine after sundown was the equivalent of laxative for her tongue.