Balletaria was not what one might call a thief in the strictest definition of the word. She was currently more mercenary than cutpurse, and had been for years, but she never quite lost the soft touch. She kept the skills fresh when she could, even if she didn't need the money. 

She'd lifted a few coin purses since arriving in Ditch, but not enough to cause trouble. The cracked, stained leather pouches contained little more than a nights drinking money, their owners having lost too little to raise much of a fuss. She'd lived as a thief long enough to know that even small towns like Ditch had cabals that enforced their monopoly on any significant crime within their territories. As laughable as any crime boss of Ditch might be, she still didn't want to disrupt her short stay in this backwater frontier town.

But her clutching skills weren't the only talents Balletaria maintained since her days as a street thief. She also still spoke the Cant.

She was following the dark-skinned woman from Fat Gilbert's, the pile of rickety boards that passed for a drinking hole in Ditch. Balletaria wasn't trying to pick the warrior woman's pocket (she doubted the woman had any coin worth taking if she was ordering the eggs), but she was curious about where she was going. She'd watched as the woman picked up Truby the Looker by his love handles and made him squeal before making a dramatic exit. She was clearly a fighter of some sort. Balletaria was sure she wasn't a soldier. Soldiers almost universally spent all their coin on drinks, pleasure company, and gambling. They got drunk and sick in the inns and Fat Gilbert's. They also tended to start fights when they were in groups and to cower like rats when alone.

This woman did none of those things. She was clearly an experienced killer. She had the swift, efficient economy of movement of one who knows how to win a blade fight with speed and shock. She had the reflexes, easy aggression, and raw power of someone who spent their life walking from one fight to another. She was used facing down dangerous challengers, drawing a blade, and winning. She looked the sort that should be chasing necromancers and dragon cults in Faegate, not that anyone else in this open sewer would know what someone like that would look like. No one Balletaria knew had any idea why someone like her would be in a place like Ditch. And now, she was strolling aimless past gambling dens and rotting vegetable stalls as though she hoped to find something. Watching her push past the deserters, the pickpockets, and the stardust addicts was like watching a wolf walk through a street of chickens.

That meant she would be trouble, and the last thing Balletaria needed was someone making this backwater town a more interesting place, at least not while she lived there.

So Balletaria kept a healthy distance back. She didn't try to close the distance, and she didn't watch her, not directly. She kept the woman's shadow in her sight, the wake of her passing through a herd of sheep. She could see her stopping at Kalidan's pie cart, where she began a clumsy haggle for his wares.

Balletaria knew in a moment this must be a ruse, probably to flush out anyone tailing her. No one would bother haggling for Kalidan's goods.

Not bad, Killer. You know you're being watched. But I'm patient.

Instead of staying in place, a dead giveaway she was following the woman, Balletaria continued to a half-erected market tent where a woman with one hand sold stolen trinkets that wouldn't sell in the city. It was all trash, cheap metal and colored paste jewels, but Balletaria pretended to be interested in a gaudy ring with a fake pearl that was shedding flecks of white paint. Killer couldn't keep arguing with Kalidan forever, so Balletaria would could flutter invisibly from stall to stall until the foreigner started walking again.

That's when she saw him. He was half concealed in the shadow of The Lady Garden, a brothel so disease-ridden the locals had come to calling it The Widow Maker. He was missing half his nose. She knew him right away, the son of the local gang lord that more or less ran Ditch. He was Verdun, and he was the worst sort of mean, using his father's position as a free pass to pull the wings off all the local bar flies he liked. He sometimes squeezed the local stall owners and pleasure girls for "protection money" like he must have heard the big city bosses do, but Balletaria knew he had a habit of handing out accidents to those stall owners even when they'd paid him to not have accidents forthcoming.

Verdun was alone, which was unusual. He was the sort of bold a person became only when they knew they had hired muscle to fight his battles for him. He raised a hand to his chest and spoke the Cant.

Come with me. Boss wants to see you, his fingers said. To someone who wasn't one of the Gentry (a title affected by every gang member and throat slasher of the big bosses in the Confederacy), it would have looked little more than like Verdun was scratching himself just above his heart. The Cant was more or less a uniform nonverbal code throughout the Confederacy, with each gang adding their own vocabulary and flourishes like regional accents of a common tongue. Most of the Gentry knew enough signs to identify themselves to each other, to give simple warnings and instructions, or to tell rival gangs to do highly improbable things with their own mothers. Bosses and their lieutenants knew more, and could hold more complex conversations silently across a room. Balletaria herself knew it so fluently she could compose sonnets while picking her fingernails, if she chose.

I'm busy. I'll come later. Vicar will understand, she answered back. Her hands signs were woven into finger flourishes that looked to everyone else like she was simply fluttering her new collection of cheap rings.

Vicar, Verdun's father and boss of the Ditch Cutters, accepted Balletaria's generous consideration (a stained leather bag stuffed with coins as a show of good manners) when she'd first arrived in Ditch. The last thing she wanted was offend the local Gentry by making her way in their territory without their permission. She'd proved to Vicar that she was professional and discrete, and that she could lift goods and coins without causing a fuss or making things harder for the rest of his Cutters. Because of this, as well as her good manners, he'd given her the fade, or permission to operate in Ditch without his direct oversight. For example, if he summoned her with anything softer than a squad of gang muscle, she had his permission to come at her earliest convenience, so long as she came.

This, however, was not what Verdun had in mind.

Not the boss. The BIG boss. Come with me right away.

So it wasn't Vicar who sent his son to bring her in. It was someone more important, someone who wouldn't understand Vicar's fade for Balletaria. She cast a quick glance at the warrior woman, who'd just thrown up her hands in frustration and was storming away from Kalidan. The pie vendor was visibly shaking as though he'd just received a stay of execution. Maybe he had.

"Oh hells," she cursed under her breath. She stripped the worthless rings off her fingers and flung them back into the basket from which she'd picked them. "These are crap," she blurted to the cursing one-handed woman as she strode in the direction of the alley.

Verdun had never been what one could call a handsome man, but since he'd lost half his nose to an desperate pleasure girl's bodice knife five years ago, he'd been nearly intolerable to look at. Not because he'd become disfigured, but because the bitterness of it had only made him more sneeringly cruel and petulant. He'd had the girl flayed for her act of self-defense, and no one liked looking at that monument of scar tissue any more than they had to. Nearly everyone pretended there was nothing wrong with his face when they were within earshot of him, as they were careful to avoid sharing that pleasure girl's unpleasant fate.

Well, nearly everyone.

"Verdun, what brings you sniffing around these parts?" She leaned against the alley wall with her arms crossed. The words "Widow Maker" were daubed in flaking brown paint behind her. She looked strait into his face, a gentle smirk on her mouth, as though she thought him amusing. He would hate that.

Verdun had an easy smile when he'd called her over, but it evaporated like morning dew with her greeting.

"I'm to bring you in," he spat. "It's not my father who's asking. It's one of the big lads, Chapriotti from Hubris. He's one of the top bosses of—,"

"I know who Chapriotti is."

In fact, she knew a lot more about Chapriotti than Verdun ever would. Hubris was a paradise for thieves, and the Gentry ruled it in all but title. Hubris was crawling with criminals like Faegate was drowning in adventurers. The duke of Hubris commanded a city watch and collected taxes, but the real rulers of that crooked kingdom were the big bosses, and Chapriotti, the boss of the Copper Hounds, was the biggest of all. His reach was long, and though Ditch was closer as the crow flies to Faegate, travel to Hubris was faster, making it the practically closest city. That meant Vicar and his Ditch Cutters answered to Chapriotti.

Balletaria knew all this because she was from Hubris, but neither Vicar nor his slimy offspring knew about that.

He blinked. "Fine, then. You know. So you know I can't wait for you to be ready like if my dad called you. Your fade don't mean nothing to Chapriotti. We got to go now. He's waiting for ya."

Verdun held out an open hand as if to say "ladies first," but Balletaria found this odd because she knew the weasel didn't have the manners of a dog with a brain fever. Still, there he stood, slightly bowed and waiting on her expectantly to lead the way to the Shepherd's Court, Vicar's name for former tavern that now served as his shabby lair.

Balletaria had taken no more than five paces towards the rear exit to the alley when she felt a pressure at the small of her back. She became aware of Verdun's hot, moist breath on her ear.

"Why's it taken so long for us to get a moment together?" he sighed onto her cheek. She could smell the rum on his breath, sour and sharp.

Suddenly it was sickeningly clear why Verdun came to fetch her without his usual retinue of bodyguards. He wanted to be alone with her so he could include her in his favorite pastime: taking an unwilling girl at knife-point.

If she was going to get away from this situation in one piece, she was going to have to keep her cool.

"There isn't time for this, Verdun. Chapriotti is waiting for me, right?"

"He don't know I found you right away. I can say it took me a while to find ya."

Balletaria smiled, though she knew Verdun was behind her and couldn't see it, he'd be able to hear it.

"You're a brave man to bet on what Chapriotti knows. He usually knows a lot more than you think!" She deliberately said "knows" slowly and clearly so that it sounded like "nose". There was a silent pause after she said it. It meant Verdun noticed her pun.

"I'd be nice to me, if I were you. We're about to get real cozy, you and me, right over the edge of that crate over there. So if you don't want yet another hole back here, I'd recommend you just relax and enjoy yourself."

The knife prodded her just behind her kidneys, and she shifted away painfully, but his other hand was on her shoulder to keep her nice and close.

So that was it, then. There'd be no negotiating with him or shaming him into letting her go. She was going to have to make a choice, a choice that would have consequences. She was going to have to put herself in a very uncomfortable position. Sometimes, there just weren't any choices to make, not if you wanted to survive.

"I know you won't know this, Verdun, because your face looks like you tried snorting black powder instead of stardust, but your breath smells like low tide at a distillery."

The pressure at the small of her back increased, she winced.

"Think you're funny? Let's try bleeding some of those bad manners out of you!"

And he pushed the dagger into the small of her back.

When there was a scrape of metal instead of the sigh of a blade into flesh, he balked, staring down at the weapon, which was not at all coated in blood.

"What?"

She pushed back into him. The tip of the knife once again scraped off the steel plate sewn into the small of the back of her bodice, doing no more injury than tearing her clothes. The back of her head cracked into his open mouth, and she caught his stabbing hand that was still thrust out by her ribs. She wrapped her own arm around his and caught the hilt of the blade with her other hand. She wrenched down on his wrist until his elbow gave a wet pop, suddenly bent the wrong direction over her forearm.

Verdun shrieked before her elbow cut him off, slamming straight into the scarred ruin of his nose. He gave a sort of squeaking moan that time before staggering back, his right arm hanging crooked and useless by his side.

The tears had barely begun to well in the corners of his unfocused eyes when her shin found his groin. He didn't even have the presence of mind to scream, even if he had the breath. He just bent at the waist and sucked in a lungful of alley dust. He hardly noticed her hand dragging him by the collar until he found his face pressed against rough, uneven wood. She'd hauled him to the crate, the very same as the one he'd ordered her to bend over, and bent him over it.

"Verdun, are you still conscious?"

He tried to answer her, to shout at her, but all that bubbled out from between his split lips was pink foam.

"Verdun, I asked you a question. Answer me so I know you can hear me. I need to know you're not choking on your own blood. If you are, I'll need to slash your windpipe and leave you somewhere no one will find you for a few days."

"Mmm-mmm," he burbled. The blood from his broken half-nose was filling his mouth, making it hard to form words. "Mmm-my fadder..."

"Your fadderr," she imitated in a deep, slurring speech not unlike his, "will likely not forgive me for this. But that doesn't matter. What matters is that I'm not done with you. I want to watch you squirm a little while, you little roach. I want you to sip your meals through your crooked, broken jaw knowing that I will come back for you. You won't know when, or where, but I do. I will find you once I've had my fill of your misery, and I'll finish the job. Do you understand?"

Verdun was silent for a moment, all but for the sputtering breath that sprayed flecks of bloody spit onto the surface of the wooden crate. It was a silence of not only fear, but of mild confusion.

"My jaws not broke—," he tried to say, but her elbow cut him off for the second time that day, crushing his jaw against the crate like a smith's hammer and an anvil. That was the moment Verdun finally lost consciousness.