The Iron Coven

Chapter 3: Knives at the Back

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.