Watermark

1.2 Azra

"State your business."

The door to Erthi's shop, if one could call it a shop at all, was open. Azra stood in its center, a shelf of tonics and other black goods to her left and a merchant's counter to her right. The stout woman sitting behind the counter, soft-boned and sallow-faced with some malady or other, could not be Erthi. "I seek the master of this shop," Azra announced. The person she'd exchanged cryptic messages with via carrier crow over the past week had given no indication of sex, but they'd written like a man, all bravado and arrogance.

The woman, hardly able to keep her hands steady from trembling, produced a soiled handkerchief and hacked half a lung into it. Azra narrowed her eyes at the black droplets that stained the cloth when the woman lifted it away. Black rot then, she observed. Half of Venir's slum population was afflicted with it. She frowned. "Wait outside."

She didn't use Moridia's name, didn't want this woman or any other prying ears to catch wind of it, but Moridia knew well enough whom she meant. The girl rolled her eyes but obediently stepped out of the shop.

The woman crumpled the handkerchief and tucked it into her bra. How sanitary, Azra remarked. The woman glared at her, as though she'd heard the silent insult. "He's out," she croaked.

But Azra eyed the curtain at the back of the shop. "Out back, maybe," she grumbled, striding toward the curtain.

"That area is off limits, girl," the woman called after her.

Girl. Azra cringed at that. At nineteen years old, she didn't feel like a girl and hadn't felt like one in eight years, give or take. Moridia was a girl, seventeen years old and half a head shorter than Azra, but Azra was not a girl. Yet, she didn't break her stride to debate semantics. She could think of only one reason why Erthi would be too much of a coward to show his face.

She tore the curtain from the door. The rod it had been hanging from clanged against the ground. "Where is it?" she demanded.

The old man cowered on the floor of what looked like a small potato cellar and smelled like an open grave. He fell onto his face and groveled at her feet. "Please," he pleaded. "My wife is ill. I..."

She ground her heel into his spine and snarled. "Where is it?"

His saliva pooled onto the dirt floor, mixed with snot and sweat. "He offered the better price," he blubbered, groaning beneath the pressure of her foot.

Azra narrowed her eyes. "He...?" She spotted a small velvet purse then, discarded beside a wooden shelf rife with mildewed ingredients. Azra pitied the fool who would visit Erthi's shop to purchase tonics, but the borinth she sought was incorruptible. She snatched up the purse and felt its weight in her hand. Gold. Whomever had beaten her to the borinth had paid for it in gold.

Her eyes widened as she remembered the unmarked palanquin boat from the canal. Pocketing the gold, she turned for the door.

"Please," the old man sputtered behind her, reaching for the purse.

Right. She'd almost forgotten him.

It was gentle and swift. She held his outstretched hand as she drew her dagger across his throat and his gaze as the life faded out of his eyes. She knew the extra seconds would cost her, but no one deserved to die alone. And so she waited until the gurgling stopped, until his body stilled completely, and she laid him down gently.

The woman died of natural shock; one look at Azra's blood-spattered cloak and she toppled from her stool, face frozen in horror. It relieved Azra not to have to slit her throat, not to have to risk contamination. Instead, she checked the woman's pulse and confirmed that she was dead.

As she stepped out into the grimy courtyard that hosted Erthi's shop, Azra reminded herself that she'd planned to kill the man anyway, that his days had been numbered from their first correspondence, and that his death was a necessary sacrifice. She was not a murderer.

No, the real murderers were the royal family of Golaris, and this was war.

She cast her gaze toward the main canal and tried to calculate how far that palanquin boat might have traveled by now. She frowned, realizing it could have taken any number of routes by now, as the floating city of Venir sported an intricate network of canals. She glanced at Moridia, who stood with her back against the shop's outer wall, looking bored. "We need to split up," Azra announced.

Moridia unleashed a feral grin.