The streets of the brothel district were littered with passed out men slumped against the walls, empty flasks in their laps. Valdo pondered why so many drunks decided to end their night here. These stone sidewalks had just as much piss and grime as the rest in Solun.

 

The man he was currently looking for lived on these streets. Perhaps, he would ask him.

When Balisk gave him the task of finding someone capable of killing both Jemeen and Barog, he had practically jigged right then and there. Not because he wanted them dead, the truth couldn’t be any more the opposite. They were the only two people he still cared for. No, the desire to jig came from an incredible piece of information an informant gave him three wiqs ago (30 days).

In the alley behind two of the least popular brothels in Solun, a vagrant man had set up a small animal skin tent. Such an act was not incredible in of itself. In fact, it was becoming more and more common as the creatures denied entry to Dracon flooded Solun’s gates instead. A sad thing it was, to have no home, nothing to protect you from the pounding sun or the puncturing rain. He told Balisk of the problem, but the Count had waved it away, as if the suffering of these vagrants was something they were meant to endure.

 

Is this just the way of the land, or the way of humans? Another question he knew would go unanswered.

 

Returning to the Vagrant, the events following his occupation of the alley were what currently fueled Valdo’s excited gait through the dark streets. The next night, a group of thugs—or drunks, more likely drunk thugs—threatened the man, claiming the alley as their own. They told the Vagrant he would have to give them everything he owned if he wished to stay.

 

The Vagrant said nothing in response to the threat. He simply lifted up his robe’s sleeve, revealing a bandaged hand and arm. He dug his black fingernails into his forearm, deep into the flesh, until his hand had sunken in entirely. Then, he pulled. From his bloodied arm, he took out a green crystalline sword, the sides of the blade shaped like the currents of the sea. The thugs, Valdo reasoned, made the smartest decision they had likely ever made, and ran for their lives. The Vagrant returned to his tent.

 

The astonishing tale pointed to a conclusion that Valdo, and a few others who had knowledge of the places beyond this land, were capable of making. The man was a Nerodae, one of the Sea-Dwellers. An ancient and forgotten people who lived under the waves and wielded weapons they pulled from their own bodies. Fujus, a widely disliked historian of ages long past, compared them to the Pyre in volume two of his bestiary: “The Nerodae are much like the Pyre, creatures bound by their blood, ever yearning to break free from such chains.” Scholarly circles held the historian in contempt for his notoriously ambiguous statements. In a specificity unlike him, Fujus also claimed the Sea-Dwellers used to inhabit the bone-sea, the closest large body of water to Solun.

 

Upon hearing the story of the Vagrant, and recalling Fujus’s claims, Valdo’s mind raced through a thought-path that explained a number of things. Five wiqs ago (50 days), a blue-skinned woman washed up on the bone-coast. For reasons unknown to Valdo, General Halding was present in the area at this time. The superstitious locals fervently desired to throw the unconscious woman back in the sea. Instead, Halding stuck an icicle through two of their heads and brought her back to be one of his servants. Better the woman had drowned. Three wiqs ago, the Nerodae vagrant settled in Solun. It seemed all but impossible that the woman was not a Nerodae, and that the vagrant was not related to her in some manner.

 

Upon hearing the news of the vagrant, Valdo paid two of his informants quite generously to do what they already did, drink, only he ordered them to do so in the taverns Halding frequented and look for any strange figures consistently following the man. Four days, at four different taverns, they spotted a figure in tattered robes seated alone, flagon still full. The figure’s hands were bandaged.

 

Just as his father and the academy had taught him, Valdo patiently sat on this information, awaiting the perfect moment to put it to use—now.

 

He spotted the chipping green paint of the snake that slithered across the white plaster backdrop of the Serpent’s Tongue Brothel. Next to it, peeling white paint on dark brown wood, the clouds of the Sky Kiss Brothel. Passing two men in tunics stitched together from rotting burlap who pounded on the doors of the Serpent’s tongue, he looked down the alley in between the two brothels. It was difficult to see due to the street lighter neglecting his duties of lighting the lanterns on this street, but he could dimly make out the rough shapings of a brown animal skin tent in the middle of the alley. He marched loudly through the trash-strewn alley, not wishing to sneak up on the Nerodae. Ten steps away, a man in tattered brown robes crawled out from the tent.

 

Valdo ran his hands through his unkempt curled hair and nervously cleared his throat. “As you can see, I am not a thug.”

 

The thick blue wool cloak he wore and its silver emblazoned suns at the bottom made him instantly recognizable as a part of Balisk’s troops—for those who lived in Solun anyway.

 

He continued. “I wish you no harm, but I do have a proposition. I think you will be very interest-”

 

The man turned and began to crawl back into his tent.

 

Valdo shouted. “TO KILL GENERAL HALDING!”

 

He anxiously glanced behind him toward the street. “Shit…I did not intend to say that so loud.”

 

The man rose and faced him again; his bandaged index finger twitched erratically.

 

“That is what you want, is it not?”

 

The vagrant’s hooded head slowly nodded.

 

“I thought so. Here is my proposition. Count Balisk, the ruler of this city, is looking for a warrior, a powerful one, to use in his impending war with the Niven of the Black Forest. I believe it likely he will send this warrior along with General Halding on a…violent mission.”

 

“If you come with me, I can make sure you are a part of this. You will have ample time with Halding, and in the midst of the inevitable shrill screams and spraying blood that will fill this mission, one more dead man is nothing to question. Will you agree to this?”

 

The bandaged finger ceased its restless twitching.

 

In a quiet, guttural voice, the Nerodae spoke. “...yes.”