SCREEEOONK!

A screeching, squawking, vaguely metallic noise split the air, seemingly only a moment after she’d dropped onto the bed, and Ishtal leaped clean into the air and stumbled to her feet before she had any clear idea where she was. Disoriented, she shook her head, trying to assess the situation. She was still fully dressed. There were wooden boards under her feet. The walls around her were bare and whitewashed, lacking the colorful woven hangings in her own room.

Her immediate surroundings had whiffs of soap and clean herbs, while scents of dust and garbage and…some creature she couldn’t identify were drifting in through the open window.

Right. She was in Lozhapad. The events of the previous day and evening came rushing back—as did the clearly false promise that she’d be able to sleep in.

The awful noise sounded again, followed by loud barking, and a shrill voice hollering at the top of its lungs, “Hear all about it! City watch arrests five! Falling beef prices on Lang Street! House Buchanan re-entering the social scene!”

Ishtal cautiously stuck her head out the window, just in time to see a large dog, stale-bread-colored and potentially the source of that unknown-creature scent, gallop past with a boy—no, a halfling—on its back. The halfling was alternating between blowing a long metal trumpet, the probable source of the noise that had awakened her, and belting out more apparently random phrases. “Shipping council calling third all-hands meeting this fortnight! Still denying rumors of mismanagement!”

After a few more minutes of this, and a couple more passes up and down the street, the halfling and his dog went away, much to the relief of Ishtal’s nearly-flattened ears. Still, there was no way she was getting any more sleep now. The sun was up and light was coming into the room, anyway—at home, it would have been more than time to be up and about, even if she had had a tiring past few days.

She took a deep breath, shook herself, and used the rags and now-cold basin of water to do a more thorough washing-up than she’d been able to manage the night before. There was nothing to be done about her somewhat travel-grimed clothes, but she could make do. Any further fussing would just be procrastinating on what actually had to be done.

She had to go down and face the situation she’d put herself in.

The public area of the Snarky Salamander was dimly lit when she came down the stairs, with only a small amount of daylight coming in through the windows at the front, and there was only one person present, a stocky figure in plain clothes and a white apron sweeping out a shadowy corner. 

They didn’t appear to notice her at first, although Ishtal was sure she’d made at least a little noise with her feet. She cleared her throat. “Um, excuse me? It’s my first morning here and I’m not sure what to do—I think I’m supposed to talk to Madam Akiba?”

The figure jumped slightly, then propped the broom against the wall and approached—and Ishtal blinked in surprise before she caught herself. In better light, the man was clearly a hornpate, with the deep green skin and the thick, curving horns on either side of his balding head. This was puzzling; she’d been under the impression that all hornpates living among humans would be creeping and furtive and frightened, not smiling broadly and walking as if he owned the place. That was what Father’s books and the previous guardians’ research had suggested, anyway.

“Good morning!” he greeted warmly, his voice deep and solid as bedrock. “You must be Ishtal; Kleev mentioned you’d arrived last night. I’m Temperance, but you might as well call me Tem if you’re going to be one of us.”

Pieces clicked into place in her mind, a memory of something Kleev had said the night before surfacing. Apparently he really did own the place.

“Sorry about the racket earlier,” he continued, his smile turning slightly apologetic. “Usually I pay the subscription fee to make sure Tonn bothers somebody else with his racket, but it must have slipped my mind this week. It should be quieter in the mornings from here on out.”

“It’s all right,” Ishtal said, less because she hadn’t minded and more because she didn’t want to seem rude. “Do you know where I can find Madam Akiba, or maybe Mr. Trippingly? I think they mentioned paperwork I would need to fill out.” She kept the specific detail that she was being hired as a thief bitten back. He probably already knew she was some kind of criminal if he knew anything about her new employers at all, but that didn’t mean she wanted to freely admit to it, like it was something to be casually proud of.

“She’ll be in later,” Tem assured. “Along with a couple of other people you should be introduced to. You ought to have some breakfast in the meantime, though.”

“I’ll be fine,” she said a little stiffly. This wasn’t strictly true, as she was hungry again after the soup the night before, but “I don’t have any way to pay for meals yet.”

Tem blinked as if he were confused. “What does that have to do with it? Your room and board are covered for the first month; it’s part of the deal we have with the Dragons. And you need to eat regardless. Come on, sit at the bar and I’ll bring something.”

He clearly wasn’t going to be dissuaded, so Ishtal did as she was told, and as Tem disappeared into the kitchen, she tried to puzzle out what was going on here. Neither Kleev nor Tem had had any reason to be so warm to her right from the start, or to go out of their way to look after her. She was a stranger to them, and not even the same kind of People as either of them. It didn’t make sense, not according to what she’d been led to expect from the outside world.

Tem returned after a few minutes with a plate of scrambled eggs, once again with herbs that Ishtal recognized from home. It smelled delicious and tasted even better, and she had already finished by the time Madam Akiba entered a short while later. Ishtal hurriedly shoved her plate away and went to meet her at one of the round tables.

There were two other women accompanying the ezkatatsua this time. One was human, with long fair hair falling loose over her shoulders and back, in a pale green tunic and darker hose and with cosmetics over her face in a fashion Ishtal assumed was attractive to other humans. She didn’t appear to be armed, and sprawled in her chair with the comfortability of a frequent visitor. The other was a halfling, her dark hair teased up into a style that added another handsbreadth to her height, dressed in a close-fitting bodice and leather trousers, who immediately looked Ishtal up and down with bright, assessing eyes. Her fingers drummed against the tabletop.

“So this is the new one?” she said, apparently addressing Madam Akiba. 

“About to be.” Madam Akiba gestured for Ishtal to sit down and join them. “Mr. Trippingly highly recommended her.”

Ishtal suppressed her discomfort at such a remark, and nodded in greeting. “I’m Ishtal. Uh, Inon.”

The halfling woman stuck out her hand, and Ishtal remembered her studies just in time to shake it without an awkward pause. “Lilah Rootfoot, good to meet you. We’ve been needing a new thief since Iago’s been gone. What’s your specialty?”

Filing away her sudden flood of questions about the fate of the absent Iago, Ishtal tried to remember Mr. Trippingly’s comments from the night before. “Um, pickpocketing, and I think I’m supposed to learn burglary? I haven’t stolen anything on purpose before.”

Lilah gave her a funny look. “Well, you must be good, for Mr. Trip to scoop you up anyway. He’s got a sense for that kind of thing. Anyway, I’ll be in charge of you, so I’ll see that you’re properly trained before you start taking on jobs.”

“You’ll be in good hands,” Madam Akiba added, smiling. “Lilah’s been a Dragon for years, and she knows this city and her job like the back of her hand.”

“Better,” Lilah retorted, with evident pride. “There’s not as much to know about the back of my hand, after all.”

Ishtal turned to look at the human. “Are you a Dragon too?” she inquired. It seemed like a logical assumption, since all of them whom she’d met so far seemed to have a predilection for wearing green. 

The human looked puzzled. “No,” she said after a moment. “I’m just here to meet you so I can add you on to the Dragons’ policy with me.” She shook Ishtal’s hand as Lilah had done. “Marcienette DeTourner, at your service. I’m what you might call a bounty-hunter deterrent; if there’s someone looking for you, I misdirect them or get you protection until they go away.”

That seemed like the strangest profession Ishtal had ever heard of. She shook her head. “I don’t think anyone’s going to come looking for me.”

“Well, we’d all like to think so, but you never really know. And with the city watch cracking down lately, it’s better to be safe than sorry.” Marcienette looked at her for a long moment, like she was taking some kind of mental sketch, and then nodded. “But anyway, I cover you Dragons under a bulk rate, but you’re not my only clients. Better for business to stay unaffiliated.”

Ishtal took a moment to process this, then tried to steer the conversation back towards something resembling familiar territory. “Isn’t there paperwork of some kind I need to fill out?” she asked, looking back at Madam Akiba. “I think you mentioned it last night.”

“Quite right.” Her new employer rummaged for a moment in a satchel hanging at her side, and produced three large sheets of paper. “Here we are. Standard contract of at-will employment, a disclaimer to forestall any of your kin coming after us for vengeance in case something happens to you, and the tax paperwork, of course. We won’t list your actual occupation in our records, naturally, but there’s only so much even Marcienette can do to help if we’re caught skipping out on paying taxes at all.”

Marcienette shook her head. “If I told Alik once, I told him a hundred times.”

Still feeling slightly discombobulated, Ishtal leaned forward to scan the papers. She wasn’t necessarily familiar with how such things were normally supposed to look, since they weren’t called for in the smaller Onena communities, but even so, something seemed to be distinctly missing. 

“There’s nothing in here about the consequences for if I leave, or betray you, or something,” she pointed out. “I would’ve thought that would be in the disclaimer, at least.”

Madam Akiba’s facial scales shifted in a near-imperceptible frown. “Well, if you were to turn on us, Kosef would probably deal with it, but that’s assuming you hadn’t already been imprisoned—the head of the city watch isn’t really one to bargain. And it’s never come up before, anyway; we treat our people well. Some have left in the past, but it’s not usually a problem.”

Yet again, it sounded far too good for what she’d been led to expect from ilegabeak. There was probably some trick about it, that would only become apparent later when she was well and truly stuck.

But she didn’t have any more options than she had the night before, so Ishtal took the pen that Madam Akiba had placed on top of the papers, and signed each one at the bottom.

“Excellent.” The ezkatatsua smiled, eyes glinting. “Now I hope you rested up last night, because Lilah will be taking you on a tour of the city to get you oriented.”