After you know how to set an ambush, after you've done it to others a hundred times, you can never unsee them. When Shaitaan chose ground for an ambush, it was always a route with only two ways in or out, with elevated ground and dense cover above her prey. Egret walked the dusty ravine threading between two rocky crags the color of sun-bleached wood, easy meat for anyone who might be waiting above.

The Volani, Egret had explained to Shaitaan, were halfling nomads, distrustful of outsiders, and capable bandits. Mostly they waited in places like this, away from the main highways where confederate legionnaires patrolled in thirsty, dull-eyed squads, but close enough that unwary travelers and foolish merchants trying to avoid the traffic of the main road might fall into their small, tight clutches.

"What is a halfling?" She'd asked Egret as they'd descended the arid hills towards the faint smudge that was the Volani encampment in the distance. Shaitaan was still unsure of the racial distinctions between the pale peoples. To her, each was as milky and thin-haired as the last.

"One of the little people," Egret explained, holding out a hand to indicate a height hardly above her waist. "Quiet and private, for the most part. They're mostly harmless, unless you're traveling in small numbers away from the main road."

"They are pygmies?" Shaitaan scoffed. "The little people who live in the jungles, who spit poisoned darts and eat monkeys?"

Egret stared sideways at Shaitaan, a bemused smile on her lips.

"There are no jungles this far north, and certainly no monkeys, but I suspect you have your own breeds of people where you come from. I'd guess they have some things in common with your...pygmies, you called them? Small, nimble, clever people with a talent for subterfuge and ambush. I've never seen them use poisoned darts, but they have nasty little arrows with barbed arrowheads. Getting shot by one wouldn't kill you, not immediately, but you'll wish it had by the end. So they're plenty dangerous, especially if you're not wearing any armor."

She'd smiled knowingly, as if she found it amusing that Shaitaan did not walk around wearing half again her weight in steel plate. She thought herself clever for rattling and scraping along like an empty barrel, happy to sacrifice her stamina and mobility so that she might not fear blades and arrows.

And what will you do when you trip and fall like an upturned turtle, Egret, tell me that!

Shaitaan watched Egret walking below from the shade of an incense bush. She'd covered herself in dust so she appeared to be nothing more than a stone herself.

And when your enemy punches holes in you with picks or wedges little daggers into the seams in that ridiculous shell of yours, will you be smiling at me then?

She crawled like a lizard among the stones, slowly slipping between them with every gust of the dry wind, her movements hidden by the swaying of the bushes and brown grass. It would not have been perfect camouflage, not from the likes of an experienced lookout looking to ambush lone travelers, but Shaitaan was no stranger to the art of ambush herself. She knew the common blunders and blind spots of would-be assassins and bandits.

For example, she knew how blind they could be to all else once they'd seen their approaching victim.

Egret walked even more noisily than usual towards the encampment, though the tents and carts were now hidden from her view down in that ravine.

Egret turned her head as a loose stone clattered down a slope behind. Shaitaan had seen the stone arcing through the air before it had landed, hurled from the hiding place of the decoy Volani Shaitaan knew would be there. When she saw nothing of interest behind her, Egret turned back towards her path through the gorge to see a small man squatting on a stone taller than he.

Clumsy, Shaitaan thought, smirking at the simplicity of the trick. A pygmy below to draw the eye, to demand the toll, while others wait above with bows or slings. But I have hunted pygmies many times, and these pale ones are less formidable and less subtle than the little jungle ghosts I hunted through the river basins of my home.

Below, she could see Egret open her hands in peace, hold up a coin in offering of safe passage. Her voice was lost in the wind, as was the reply of the decoy pygmy on the rock, but it was not so hard to imagine what words were trading back an forth. Greed, after all, was a universal language, and it was spoken in the empire just as fluently, if not more so, than in this wasteland of the north. The coin would buy them time. The Volani would draw out the conversation, try to find out why one such as she would travel with coins. It might mean she was no lone vagabond, but the forward scout or security for a fat merchant's caravan close behind her. That would give Shaitaan plenty of time to find one of the Pygmies still hiding above.

He would not be so difficult to find, not for her. She'd spotted two likely spots for where the hidden bowman might be, and only one of them offered comfortable shade from the afternoon sun. She'd approached the overlook staying just out of sight, counting on Egret's distraction, the gray stones, and patience born from a lifetime of murder to cover her advance.

Her bandaged arm and hand throbbed as she slid along on her belly, but she'd hunted through the pain before.

She found him, what she was sure was the pygmy lying in ambush above. He was nearly invisible, appearing to be nothing but a clump of brown, dry grass in a gorge overgrown with the stubborn plant, but she saw enough. She could see this clump of grass didn't sway in the wind, and that it perked up as though in interest when Egret showed her coin.

Let's see Egret do this wearing all that armor!

She was as silent as death. Like the giant salamanders that stalked fish in the rocky pools near her home, she wormed closer until she was within reach of the—

"Aack!"

A thorn the length of her thumb sank into the flesh between her fingers, and she cried out in surprise.

The clump of grass turned, suddenly a small man with a craggy face and a pockmarked nose.

"Oh!" he blurted, apparently off-balance at seeing the form of a dust-caked woman creeping through the rocks, now only a stride distant from him.

It was luck that he hadn't the presence of mind to cry out properly. Luck, and perhaps the sour tang of rough wine Shaitaan could smell from his breathy pronouncement. Like many lookouts, this one had been drinking while on the job, and his slowed comprehension and reflexes were Shaitaan's saving grace.

Forgetting the thorn still lodged between her fingers, she shot out her hand to clamp it over his mouth before good sense could find purchase on the slippery slope of his wits. Now she held the little man's face in a stonecutter's grip that he could not hope to slip away from. His eyes went wide, and the muffled cry of warning never escaped her bruising purchase over his jaw.

She could see that the pygmy had a short bow in one hand, and she was surprised to see he didn't drop it to grab at her wrist. Instead, his empty hand shot behind him to grab something at the small of his back. A knife? No, an arrow! He intended to shoot her, even with her hand locked to his face! She'd seen pygmies fight like this before, using their small size and nimble fingers to do what no full-grown fighter could ever hope at close range. She could see the barbed tip of that arrow, and she did not relish the thought of what it might do if plunged into her guts.

Her other hand darted out. She had to catch his wrist before that arrow could get knocked in that little bow!

"Aaahk, REKT!" she cried out! The word was the nastiest, foulest curse she knew in her natural tongue. It was the sort of language that marked one as the foulest sort of lowlife, or perhaps the most disgustingly, decadently rich and powerful. The habits of the low-born become the eccentricities of the assuredly privileged.

Such language in that moment was appropriate, given the barbed arrowhead that had just erupted from the back of her hand. Instead of trying to knock the arrow, the pygmy had tried to stab her with it. She'd caught his fist, but the arrow now transfixed her hand, sprouting from her tendons and torn skin like a bloody growth on a spring branch.

The rage was taking her now, and all thought of restraint and sensibility had nearly fled her swaying consciousness. Her unbandaged hand, previously the healthier of the two, now burned with white-hot pain that rose all the way to the backs of her eyes and into the base of her skull. Somehow, she tightened her fingers around the half-man's fist. She would not give him the chance to rip the arrow back, making the injury ten times worse.

She did not even think, did not even choose to pull the pygmy close and roll over him like the crocodilian predators of the river basin. At the end of the roll, she had the pygmy in an almost romantic embrace from behind, her pierced fist still gripping his, her bandaged forearm pressed against his windpipe.

Something inside of her, something feral, bloodthirsty, and cold had nearly taken control of her, was moving her limbs without her permission. She managed to wrestle control of herself away from the thing inside, but not before the creature could utter a single sentence with her own lips into the pygmy's ear.

"Struggle more, and I will feed you your own wife and children!"

Bleeding hearts, she had not wanted to say that. It was ugly, cruel, and brutal in the extreme. It was also entirely true.

The pygmy seemed to understand the meaning well enough, though she had hissed the words in Xoactali, and she felt him give up the struggle.

She had done it. Just as she and Egret planned, she had subdued a lookout without causing him severe injury. The other pygmies below would be far more willing to negotiate with them now as equals with such a bargaining trip. She stood from her hiding place on the cliff, her captive clutched in her arms.

Below, the pygmy perched on the rock stared up at her in shock while Egret spoke softly, calmly, their voices lost in the wind long before they reached Shaitaan.

**********

The Volani, as Shaitaan suspected, were opportunists, not true warriors. No amount of money was worth any of them truly risking themselves. So when Shaitaan had appeared over the lip of the gorge holding one of them hostage, the others felt it was ready to make a deal.

Their leader, the one who greeted Egret from the rock, a man with gray streaks through long, dark hair pulled back into a tail that fell halfway down his back, was immediately ready to start negotiating for the return of his brother-in-law. It was not long before Shaitaan was releasing him in exchange for immunity from further mischief.

"They've given their word. That should be enough for now. Just don't bring anything into that camp you don't want stolen."

Egret herself had stowed her own belongings, along with the rest of her coin, in a hidden cache on the hillside where they'd first spotted the caravan. Shaitaan had thought the precaution heavy-handed at first, but the tide of Volani children, each only the size of an infant to her, changed her mind. They swarmed about her legs, prodding with a thousand fingers at her smoky skin, at her war braids, at her clothing, at her arrow-pierced hand, at the rag-wrapped sword on her back. She was sure that any coin purse, no matter how tightly tied, no matter how prudently hidden, would have been long lifted from her person by those countless, tiny hands. It was the first time she found herself grateful she had nothing to steal. Only when their search of her person seemed complete did those round, cherubic smiles disappear and their laughter cease. As quickly as they appeared, the "playful" children seemed to lose interest and vanish into the bustling camp.

Egret's money was already in the hands of Popini, the leader, passed smoothly into his eager palm before Egret even made her request, a show of good manners and good will alike.

"We need a healer. My friend is hurt."

Popini had an easy smile and eyes that twinkled with humor, as though he were always on the brink of laughing at some private joke.

"I'd say she does. She may have gotten the best of my wife's brother, but I think he gave her worse."

Shaitaan gritted her teeth, exposing her gold-capped fangs as she snapped the fletched end of the arrow shaft and pulled the rest of the arrow through the wound. It wasn't the worst pain she'd ever felt, but it was noteworthy in a life of violence. Her breaths were ragged and harsh, and her eyes glistened with tears.

"Sooner would be better than later," she croaked.

Popini watched her for a moment with his fists on his hips, as though trying to make up his mind about something. Then he broke again into the easy smile and barked a laugh. He waved his hand to some of the other men nearby.

"Take them to Vorga," he commanded, the laugh not quite gone from his voice.

The little men came forward, several of them sniggering, as though they all were sharing a private joke. Shaitaan could not help but worry.

Vorga turned out to be a halfling woman a little past her middle years, though what that age was, Shaitaan didn't know. She knew that dwarves lived longer than mankind, and it was said that the elves were immortal, but she did not know how long the lives of the pygmies were by comparison. This woman, if she aged like the taller milk-skinned folk, might have been a healthy, rugged sixty. Hair like wheat with streaks of silver formed a bushy mane about her angular face, and she gripped her long pipe with what seemed to be all her teeth.

"Gracious gods, girl!" she exclaimed around the pipe. "You're bleeding!"

The men left Shaitaan and Egret standing before a threadbare tent, its owner lounging in a simple chair of bound sticks with her bare, dirty feet up on a stone. Shaitaan stepped forward, wincing as she used her wounded hand to unbind the dressing around her hand and her forearm.

"I found myself on the wrong end of a blade or two," she explained as she held out her injuries for the little woman to see, a merchant displaying bloody merchandise.

"I'll say. If I were you, I'd look into finding a healer." The woman sucked on her pipe contemplatively and stared off into the distance, as though there were something serene or peaceful to see behind Shaitaan and that the tall, bleeding, dark-skinned woman of violence did not obscure the view a whit.

Shaitaan turned to look at Egret, who wore an expression as puzzled as Shaitaan felt.

"You are Vorga?" Egret asked.

"Oh, I see there's no fooling you two," the woman grinned at them. She plucked the pipe from her teeth and waved its tip at them. "You have seen through Popini's clever ruse of introducing you to the very person he spoke of. Very sharp. I see there's no use in hiding my identity any longer!" Then she sucked again on her pipe before issuing a brown cloud from her lips. "Hog's filth! I just can't get the knack of blowing it into rings!"

Shaitaan's hands now hung by her sides. She was stuck between wanting to wring the pygmy woman's neck for frustration and the unexpected urge to fall to her knees and cry for despair. It had been a long, long time since she'd shed a tear of any kind, but today had been especially bad. She'd been trained long ago to mask her pain and to find reserves deep within of strength and purposeful action. Still, she felt herself scraping the bottom of that particular reserve.

"You are Vorga, the healer? Can you help—"

"I am Vorga Lagrond, and I am the only healer in this here caravan. I am a divine initiate of the Lady-Most-Wise, gracious Severaka, She-Who-Knits-The-Flesh, She-Who-Clots-The-Blood, the Great Gardener of the Womb." A beatific smile broke out on her lips as she recited the words. "May she keep my scalpels sharp and my dressings white. May she bless me with steady hands and clear eyes. Or rather, clear eye, d'ya ken?" She laughed and turned the left side of her face towards them, pointing towards her eye with the tip of her pipe. The eye was milky white where the other was hazel, and a shiny, pale scar the shape of a crescent moon hung beneath the lower lid like an ornament.

"I didn't think the Volani held with the Quorum," said Egret.

Shaitaan knew little of the gods of the milk-skinned barbarians in the north. She'd been schooled by the best tutors in Xoactl, but she'd found little interesting about the theology of the uncivilized. All she could remember was that the "Quorum" was their name for their pantheon of gods, formed from a hundred or more little religions that united into a gods-damned mess when the Confederacy was formed. The Quorum seemed to stand as a monument to compromise and idiotic optimism, especially compared to the pure, undiluted gods of her home.

"The Volani don't, as it happens. These stinking heathens don't believe in much more than themselves, though sometimes they'll get brown-trousered drunk and swear they saw fire spirits and wish-granting imps in the middle of nowhere."

"You're not Volani?"

"Me?" Vorga touched her fingers lightly to her throat, a passable imitation of a high-born lady who'd just been offended. "Not on your life! I'm a daughter of the River Fellows. I only joined these idiots a few years ago when my feet began to itch for wandering."

She tried again to blow a ring of smoke from her pipe. Shaitaan thought it looked more like a rabbit, though that might have been her returning hunger and the loss of blood making merry with her perception.

"My friend here is very hurt," Egret tried again, perhaps noticing the unfocused quality of Shaitaan's eyes. "She needs your blessing."

Vorga sat up, her good eye suddenly very wide and bright.

"Ay, she does! And now, the only missing factor in this equation is motive. Why should I condescend to acquiesce your humble entreaty? Why don't you do it? Are you not also a vessel for divine grace?"

Shaitaan was surprised to see what might have been a look of shame on Egret's face. She looked for a moment as though she might shout at Vorga, but her eyes sank to the ground, much how Shaitaan though her whole body might in moments.

"I cannot. I have little skill at binding flesh. Most of my training is in skill at arms. That includes my monastic training." She reached behind her neck and plucked out a small coin purse hidden in her hair. "Please. Accept this offering for the blessing of Severaka Most Wise."

Vorga shrugged.

"I'd be offending the most gracious Lady by accepting blood money from bandits."

"We're not bandits," croaked Shaitaan. Gods' teeth, it really was getting hard to see straight. "We are trying to save a monastery under siege."

"A monastery? Out here?" Her voice sounded dismissive, like one might speak of unchanging weather or the price of sheep. But was that a glint in her good eye? A spark of interest?

"Not here," Shaitaan continued, no longer able to keep her eyes up from the ground at her feet. "Out west." She felt a firm pressure against her bottom. She was sitting on a flat rock. When had she done that?

"Out west?" Vorga scoffed. "Nothing out west of here but Wastewater."

"In the mountains," she managed to say before a wave of nausea cramped her guts like a fist. She could not say more.

"In the mountains," chuckled Vorga. "Next, you'll be telling me it's Mon Magog you're traveling to."

Shaitaan looked up just enough to see Egret, her face rigid and tight-lipped. Was her monastery fictional? Why would she recruit Shaitaan to save a monastery other people seemed to treat like a fantasy?

A small, strong hand gripped Shaitaan's and sent a small needle of pain up her arm. Vorga had stood from her chair, her pipe still smoking on the stone where she'd rested her feet. She was strong, Shaitaan noted, much stronger than she looked. Her grip was iron.

"Take it easy for a moment. I need you to prepare yourself."

"Prepare for wha—"

Vorga's thumb pressed into the hole the arrow had made. Sharp, dizzying, sickening pain split her skull between her eyes and sent her mind reeling. Before she knew what she was doing, her other hand, sliced as badly as it was, was rising to grasp the blade on her back.

"Oh, no, no, no," Vorga wispered. "I wouldn't do that if I were you. You don't want to interfere with my process."

Shaitaan could feel a cold point below her chin. The pygmy woman had drawn a blade, small and razor-sharp, and pressed it gently below Shaitaan's chin.

Shaitaan lowered her hand from the sword and brought it down to her lap slowly, but Vorga's grip didn't ease. White-hot agony made Shaitaan tremble and grind her teeth together. Her eyes nearly rolled up in her skull. She could see Egret looking alarmed, her hand to the haft of her bladed mace.

"What do you think you're doing?" she demanded.

"What you asked me to," Vorga answered cheerily. "I'm healing your friend!"

Shaitaan was gripping the wrist of her trapped hand now. Blood was oozing from the wound, seeping around the thumb pressed into it.

"It hurts!" she squeaked.

"Oh, aye?" Vorga laughed. "Do you suppose it's me sticking my hand into your open wound that's causing it?"

"That's not necessary," Egret growled, drawing the mace and stepping closer.

Vorga rolled her eyes. "And how exactly would you know, miss skill-at-arms? What do you know of healing, or how pain figures into it?"

Vorga pulled hard on Shaitaan's hand, and she was powerless to resist it. The halfling leaned close, as though to share a saucy secret of the most scandalous gossip.

"It's the hurt that heals, d'ya ken? You see those scholam-trained physicas, the clerics of the great temples, they wave their hands and say pretty words, and the skin melds together as smooth as melted sugar, no scar to ever betray there was ever a blemish or flaw. Fat load of codswallop, that is. Trickery. Illusion. Mummery paid for by the high-born so they can have porcelain skin and thick, dark hair."

Vorga snorted with disgust, as though at a memory. Shaitaan could only see red fading to black as the pain squeezed her eyes.

"I once saw a noblewoman's flesh rot off her face from such healing. It was only skin deep, you see. Swift, gentle, painless...and lethal. Now real healing, that's in the bones, and in the sinews, and in the muscle. It's with fire and ice. It's breaking the bones so they knit proper. It's burning out the rot. It's tearing the muscle to mend the tendons. It's pain."

Then Vorga's words changed. They were not common words, Shaitaan was almost sure, though it was hard to be sure of anything through that veil of agony. She thought the words became heat, and the heat burned in her hand, and her hand twisted so the bones ground together and her muscles stretched to the limits of anguish.

Then she was free. Vorga's hand released hers, and Shaitaan cradled it to her chest like a baby. She was only then aware she'd been crying out, and she felt her voice fall flat and dead as she caressed the tender flesh of her palm.

"You are soft, tall woman. Soft as pig fat. If you're going to rescue your imaginary monastery in the mountains, you'd better get some iron in your blood."

The flesh of her palm was whole. She flexed her fingers, made a fist. It was strong. Only a pale circle of scar tissue remained where Poppini's brother-in-law had stabbed it through.

"Scars are memory," Vorga said softly, touching a finger to the pale moon below her milky eye. "May your memory be long."

Egret was frozen in place as though by magic. She stared at the pale mark on Shaitaan's palm, then warily at the halfling. She suddenly remembered her hand still gripped her mace, and she returned the weapon to her harness.

Vorga took up her pipe again and returned it to her lips.

"You two are on a journey," she slurred around the stem. "I have a feeling you'll be needing the services of a competent healer."

Egret looked on the edge of protesting, but Shaitaan stopped her with a look.

"Bring her," she said as she kept flexing her hand and staring at the scar. Her voice had nearly broken during the healing, and the words came out hoarse and dry.

"What? Why?"

"Because she doesn't lie."

Vorga watched both women, a knowing smile around her grip of the pipe.

"I travel light. When do we leave?"