All the optimism in the world, however, couldn’t change the fact that the next morning, when it was time to meet Lilah after breakfast, there could be no more putting off the inevitable. She was going to start training, start learning to commit crime on purpose rather than by accidental compulsion. There had been so many little points of no return over the past couple of days, but this would be the final one. 

Lilah led her to the north side of town right away, quizzing her on street names and landmarks as they went, and finally paused to lean against a seemingly random street corner. “None of the other Dragon pickpockets will be working this area for a bit,” she said, as Ishtal halted beside her. “We have the city divided up into different areas, and there’s a schedule of who works where when, so we all get a chance at the best spots and hours and don’t get too recognizable in any one area. But I’ve marked it down that I’m training you here for the next while. This is one of the easier spots for thieving, but it’s tricky to maneuver in.”

Ishtal thought she could see what Lilah meant. The street in front of them was a market street, with vendors’ booths cheek by jowl along both sides for several blocks, leaving a narrower space for pedestrians to get through. People were crammed closely together and often had to shove at each other to make much headway. None of them would be paying much attention to their pockets or purses.

“All right, then,” Lilah said, gesturing. “Show me how you would move through that. No need to lift anything, mind you, just navigate the crowd for now.”

Taking a deep breath, Ishtal stepped into the street and the crush of people. At first, she tried to simply move with the flow of the crowd, but this quickly proved ineffective, because there was no real flow. The only way anyone was finding a path through this was if they made it themselves.

Carefully, she nudged someone here, squeezed between two people there, ducked through a lucky opening in the nick of time—and then found herself at an impasse. There was a sweets stall all the way to her left, and a baker’s stall directly opposite, and so many people were intent on getting to each one that there was no opening to get any further.

She couldn’t let that stop her. This was the very first thing she’d been asked to do; she couldn’t just stay stuck here like a tree until everybody went home for the night (if in fact they did). She pushed forward, elbowing and shoving and, once, sinking a well-placed claw into a troll’s side, until she finally made it through the worst and could simply nudge and edge her way to the end of the block where Lilah was waiting.

“Not bad,” the halfling commented. “You made it all the way through, which was honestly more than I expected for your first try. If you can handle that, you can probably tackle anywhere in Lozhapad. We’ll have to work on your subtlety, though—all the pushing draws attention to yourself, even in a crowd like that that’s on the aggressive side. You want to try to be unobtrusive if you can, so people don’t have you in mind when they discover their valuables missing later.”

As if on cue, a voice screeched out above the clamor, “THIEF! I’ve been robbed!” 

Ishtal’s ears instantly flattened back, and for a moment she had the wild thought that Berezi had somehow followed her here. “I didn’t!” she automatically protested, and then realized that one of her hands was gripping a gold bangle.

Lilah looked like she didn’t know whether to be impressed or mildly irritated. “I think I see what Mr. Trippingly was talking about,” she said dryly. “You weren’t even trying, were you? Never mind, we can work it out later; right now we just need to get out of here.”

That was one thing they could agree on. Ishtal let the bangle fall to the cobblestones with a clatter, stomped down the instinctual guilt rising up in her chest, and followed Lilah’s lead, darting through a series of alleys until they were well away.

“Where are we going today?”

Lilah had come by the Salamander after breakfast to sweep her away to train in some corner of Lozhapad, like she had every morning, but this particular neighborhood wasn’t one Ishtal recognized. It was in the southeast corner of town, rundown and dingy but not in a dirty shambles, and giving the overall impression that it was maintained as well as it was purely because the people who lived there were too stubborn to let it be otherwise. 

Their destination, judging by Lilah’s focus, was a small, squat building on a street corner up ahead, with large panels in the walls rotated to leave it partially open-air. From the smoke and the clanging sounds coming from it, it was some kind of smithy.

While they were still some distance away, Lilah halted and turned to face Ishtal, brows knitted. 

“The person we’re going to see,” she began, “is the weapons and equipment supplier I mentioned before. We need to get you outfitted; none of our other thieves are Onena, so they won’t have equipment we can borrow that’ll be quite right for your proportions.”

“You mentioned that she didn’t like to be disturbed,” Ishtal remembered. “I won’t be rude or anything, if that’s where this is going.”

“I don’t think you could be rude on purpose if you tried,” Lilah scoffed, and then she sobered again. “That’s not really the problem. Gerda isn’t just our smith on retainer; she’s taught several of us some phrases in Dwarvish for us to use as codes when we’re on a job. It’s come in incredibly handy lots of times, but…well, some dwarven clans are more traditional than others about teaching their language to outsiders, or at least outsiders who haven’t been officially approved. And Gerda’s clan happened to be one of the more traditional ones, and we weren’t exactly approved. They, uh, they cast her out. It’s partly why she agreed to be on retainer for us, because most people won’t hire a disgraced dwarf for much of anything, and she needed the work, and we owed her. But just…don’t comment on it, all right?”

Ishtal wasn’t quite sure she understood, but she nodded. “All right.”

“Great.” Lilah turned and started back down the street. “Come on, she keeps her available consulting hours pretty short, on purpose.”

After a few steps, she paused again. “Oh, and you really shouldn’t touch anything if you can help it.”

That made rather more sense. Ishtal stuffed her hands deep into her pockets. This seemed satisfactory, and Lilah led her the rest of the way down the block and into the smithy.

“Gerda!” she called out as they entered. “I need a consultation. We have a new thief and I don’t have the tools for her.”

Ishtal didn’t see the person thus addressed right away. Her attention was caught by the room itself, which was so crowded with such a variety of things that it almost bordered on cluttered, except that everything had clearly been meticulously organized and arranged. An area in the far corner, close to the forge, was evidently for materials, various kinds of metal stacked by type and by sheet or ingot. There was a tool bench near that, and both the top of it and the rack against the wall above it had carefully drawn outlines showing where each item was supposed to go. Ishtal wondered if she would find the same system continued if she were to open the drawers—not that she dared to.

Closer to the front, there were racks and shelves of finished items, swords and knives and spearheads and bolas and others that even Ishtal didn’t know the name of, and a wider variety still of objects whose purposes she could only guess at. Without her really making a conscious decision, her hand slipped out of her pocket and reached for one of the mystery items, a perfect cube of steel etched with runes and showing no discernible opening.

Lilah’s sharp elbow nudged her hip, and Ishtal remembered herself, yanking her hand back just in time.

Through the smoke clouded around the forge, a gruff voice presumably belonging to Gerda called back, “Again? Haven’t you got at least one of every People on your team by now? The new person should have someone they can share with for the time being; now get out and quit trying to interrupt me.”

“Can’t,” Lilah retorted cheerfully. “I haven’t had any Onena thieves before; this is my first one.” She paused, then added slowly, “Of course, I could probably just outfit her with extra stuff from one of the humans or part-humans, but…”

At that, the gruff-voiced speaker strode out of the smoke, huffing. Like most of the dwarves Ishtal had seen so far, she was stocky and densely-muscled, with powerful hands slightly too big for the rest of her body and a pale complexion that suggested she wasn’t often outdoors. Unlike any other dwarf Ishtal had seen, her light yellow hair was shoved into a careless knot at the back of her head, rather than meticulously braided, and she was beardless, with traces of chemical burns along her jawline that indicated this wasn’t a temporary fashion statement.

“Bizarra,” she breathed. She’d read, of course, about punitive dwarven shaving, during a period in her teen years when she’d had a morbid fascination with other Peoples’ banishment customs, but she hadn’t realized it was meant to be permanent.

Fortunately, nobody noticed her reaction, and she didn’t get the opportunity to put her foot in it any further, as Gerda leveled a glare at Lilah and thrust a callused finger into her face. “I know what you’re trying to do, you shameless brat. Fine, have it your way. You know very well I can’t stand by and let someone go using ill-fitting tools.”

Lilah grinned. “Excellent. Ishtal, meet Gerda, our personal master of all things metal and mechanical. Gerda, this is Ishtal, our newest recruit.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Ishtal started to say, but Gerda brushed her off and strode over to the workbench, gathering an apparently random assortment of items. “Um, not that I don’t appreciate all the trouble, but what’s wrong with me using normal human-sized tools, at least at first? I mean, I can see why Lilah’s wouldn’t work for me…” Lilah’s entire hand was only slightly larger than Ishtal’s palm.

Gerda scoffed, offended. “You might be roughly as tall as a human, but your hands alone are going to be completely different. Longer, thinner fingers, probably more grip strength, definitely ten times the dexterity—” She marched back over with her arms full, and dumped the lot onto a scuffed wooden stool. “Now let’s see, we can dispense with the crampons and spike-gloves—”

“The what?”

Lilah fished in her pockets for a moment, producing a leather glove that did indeed have small, sharp spikes along the palm and fingers, and a similarly spiked web of metal vaguely shaped like a shoe. “For climbing,” she explained. “I’ll show you later, you’ll love it. You won’t need these, though, since you’ve got claws.”

“But you’ll need a file, wire cutters, a collapsible knife, and lockpicks,” Gerda continued. “Now stand still and let me measure you.”

What followed was a blur of activity, as Gerda produced a tape and measured Ishtal’s outstretched hands in every conceivable way and a few more besides, and then ran her through a seemingly random battery of tests—gripping, squeezing, twisting, rapidly braiding a set of cords together, lifting heavy objects and holding them above her head, and finally arm-wrestling Gerda.

Ishtal lost that one, in what was perhaps a foregone conclusion, but Gerda seemed chiefly interested in noting down the nine seconds her victory had taken.

“All right,” she said at last, “go away and don’t bother me for a week, and I’ll have the equipment delivered to the Salamander at the end of it. A basic setup like this is covered by the salary Akiba pays me, but don’t go breaking it or you’ll have to shell out for the replacements.”

They hurried away and left her to it, Ishtal relieved to be back in the relatively fresh air. “That was…interesting,” she finally commented a few blocks later.

“That’s a good way to describe Gerda,” Lilah agreed. “Also ‘intense’. But she does the best work in Lozhapad; her clan were idiots to kick her out.”

A week later, when the commissioned tools were delivered, Ishtal had to concur. She wasn’t familiar with how to use any of them, but they still felt exactly right in her hands, almost like an extension of her. The sensation only intensified the first time she got a practice lock to click open, and looked up to see Lilah beaming triumphantly at her.