I did my best to keep moving forward. My accent and looks could sell the idea that I was new to the city, new to the job, but I didn't want to seem entirely naive. Though the Ward appeared high-class, there was no telling what its inhabitants were actually like, and naievity tended to get interpreted as weakness. Of course, if the inhabitants were all Pure like I suspected they were, anything would seem weak to them.
Everyone I'd seen go into the Ward had come out. It couldn't be that bad.
"Un," I heard a voice exclaim, "bhanyanak agandh kyan hai?"
I turned to face the speaker: An old woman, seated at her porch. She was the first person I'd seen outside other than the patrolling guard. I wasn't sure if that was because the other houses were abandoned or if everyone preferred to avoid meeting outsiders.
"Fish delivery, ma'am." I said. "For 22 Crescent." Each of the houses had clearly marked addresses on them, and I'd been taught the Hidna words for the phases of the moon.
"Oh I hope not!" she said. "That's me, if you can't read the address. I can tell Trade's your first language."
"Yes ma'am." I said.
"Of course, nobody speaking Hidna's going to be smelling like that!" She cackled. "Still, it's nice of Kruthina to think of me, even if she does have questionable taste in fishmongers. It could be salvageable. Take it around to the back, I'll be there shortly."
I could tell it wasn't easy for her to stand, but I couldn't help her with my hands full of fish. I walked around the side of the house to its backyard. A firepit had been dug, lined with stone, and a metal platform set up above, presumably for grilling. It was the sort of thing I'd have used to cook with in the desert, though obviously more permanent. A quick glance to the sides showed me the neighbors had nothing like it. I set the fish atop the metal and turned around to help retrieve the old lady, but she'd already hobbled her way halfway to me.
"Did you set it on the grill?" She asked. She was clearly within sight of it, but I supposed her sight might not be as good as mine.
"Yes ma'am." I replied.
"So polite." She said absently, continuing on her course. I stepped aside to stop her from running into me. "Not the casual blasphemy, which is nice."
"Casual blasphemy?" I said.
She chuckled. "Yes, people today take the names of the Lords and Ladies in vain. Not how I was raised. You're new to the city, aren't you?"
"Yes ma'am." Politeness seemed to be working.
"From your accent, I'd say you're from one of the jewels. Onyx? Sapphire?"
"Opal, ma'am." I said. "Just arrived in town a week or so ago."
"Ah, Opal. I've always wanted to go, me and the desert would get on well, for obvious reasons. But..." she gestured vaguely to the walls.
"The trip's not expensive," I said, playing up the naivety now that I was fairly sure I was safe.
She laughed again, this time more sadly. "You're new. You don't know better. I'm here because of this."
The woman gestured at the firepit, and it was suddenly full of flame. She hadn't even put any fuel in it. I didn't have to pretend to be startled.
Now her laugh was nearly a cackle. "Ah, it never gets old. I don't imagine a city like Opal has many like me. I'm a Pure, you see."
I'd gathered that. "Not any in Opal, not that I know."
She turned to me. "I doubt that. We spring up, from time to time, no matter the place. I imagine the ones where you're from are just smart enough to stay hidden. Else they'd end up... somewhere like this."
I remembered what I'd once knew about the history of the pure. The last one to go public in Opal had been kidnapped and counter-kidnapped repeatedly. "What is this place?" I asked finally.
"It's the Ward." She said, emphasizing the last word. "It keeps them safe from us, and vice versa."
I looked around; it continued to just be us in the backyard. No other residents had shown themselves, and the guard would be on patrol a bit longer before coming back. "It looks more like they just keep you all here."
"Ward," she replied, "Warden. Not as similar in my language, but still. Similar purpose. You're right, though it's a comfortable jail."
I was eager to ask more but made sure to keep hold of my persona, even if she couldn't read my mind. "Can't you just... go? 'And theirs was power like unto a city', as the scriptures say, right?" I'd finally remembered the verse.
"A city's more than it was." She said. "Though I imagine you're right. These walls couldn't hold any of us if we were truly determined, but it's not the walls that do the work. I tried once, you know. Melted my way out, cut a swath through any that tried to stop me." She was grinning, and I wasn't sure I liked the way she looked when she spoke like that. Her milky eyes were staring at the fire she'd started in the pit. "But then I woke. All an illusion. All lies. That's the way of it, here. Even the half-breeds are a match for us."
She was probably used to saying things like that and not having people understand her. I suspected I knew what she was referring to, and I couldn't let on. Bishop had reported one of the enforcer halflings had been an Illusionist, and now I knew exactly what they were enforcing.
"And you can't ever leave?" I asked.
The woman shook her head. "We can," she said sadly. "There's a cost to staying, and there's a cost to leaving. Stay, and the Doctor visits once a month and uses his magic to make sure you can't bear a child. Can't have more Pure or half-breeds turn up, after all. Leave, and you have to leave married to a commoner. Someone who won't breed Pure."
The Doctor, I assumed, was the Witchdoctor that Bishop had tried to capture. Birth control via magic was an unreliable method at best, but if anyone could pull it off a Witchdoctor could. They had that much control over the mind-body connection.
A Witchdoctor would, due to that same power, be able to keep themselves alive for nearly as long as a Pure Mind could. But if the enforcers were the children of my target that put them well below this woman's age.
"Was it always this way?" I asked in a somewhat hushed whisper, trying to re-gather the youthful innocence I'd been playing at.
"No, it used to be worse." She answered. "Or better, depending on who asked. There was another way out, decades ago. You just had to make a deal with the devil."
I shivered. Everyone knew a scary story or two about people selling their souls to the Void in exchange for worldly power. Given that, of late, I'd discovered a great many things I'd assumed stories were actually true, I was entirely prepared to take this statement at face value.
"Have you studied the Ten?" She asked, in the same tone of voice that I'd heard missionaries use.
"It's the Nine in Opal, Ma'am." I said by way of answer. I didn't really want to try to talk my way out of getting converted right now.
She just nodded. "Fair enough, there's no chapter for the Lord of Lies, and who'd believe it if there were? They don't even teach that here, anymore. Want to forget the whole mess. And like I said, how I was raised, you didn't take a name in vain, not even the forgotten one. So we had a nickname for our personal adversary."
I wasn't sure just how metaphorical all of this was. "A nickname?"
"They call me," she said quietly, as though there were someone to overhear us, "the Lady of the Hearth. Because of..." she gestured to the fire. "I'm not one of those that think the Pure are gods reincarnated. I'm not worthy of the title, and so far as I'm concerned neither are any of my kind. He never told us his name, and we wouldn't honor him with even a name as besmirched as Lies, so we gave him a nickname. We called him the Subtle Man."
I suppressed another shiver, and was again relieved that she couldn't read my mind. If it was decades ago, the timeline made sense for this Subtle Man to be the Pure Mind I was seeking now.
"He wasn't very, of course, we called him that because of his power. He was a Mind, you see, but he didn't have to live here. Was in charge of making sure we stayed, just like his bastards do today." The Lady of the Hearth was well into storytelling mode, and didn't appear to observe my discomfort at all. "He was running the place the entire time I lived here, 'till recently. But back then he got this idea. Never said what it was, but he offered to let anyone out who was willing to be his bride."
On one hand, I was outraged, but some part of my mind wondered if that was really any different than the choice I'd offer when I found him. If, in fact, I gave him a choice at all.
"Back then," she continued, "I figured he was some pervert. Was honestly surprised the day someone tried to take advantage hadn't come earlier. But some, they were willing. And some time after that, what do you know, the half-minds pop up. Doesn't take a genius to connect the dots there: Man tried to make his own Dynasty. Must have backfired something hard, though, because the Doctor started making rounds one day and I never saw the Subtle Man after. Good riddance."
No wonder Bishop had been interested in this place. He'd likely found out about the enforcers the same way, possibly through this same woman. And since the enforcers worked for the government, that's where he'd gone next.
"Hey," a heavily accented voice said to me. "She bothering you?"
The guard that had been patrolling had evidently returned. He must have overheard at least some of the conversation, but I doubted it made sense out of context. And he'd asked if she was bothering me, not the other way around. He'd also gone directly to Trade, which indicated his main interest was speaking to me rather than her.
"Nonsense, Srini, I was just having a chat!" She said.
"Ogh," he said, putting his hand over his nose. "You're the delivery boy with the ripe fish?"
I nodded, gestured to the fire. "The delivery was for her, sir." I tried to make my accent stronger, but I'd not done so around the Lady and so couldn't exaggerate it too much.
The guard frowned, or so I gathered from his voice as his hand was still covering most of his face. "Stop living up to your name, Lady, you know you have to be careful with fire."
"It's not my name." She said with a weary tone that indicated she'd lost that particular fight a long time ago.
The guard just gestured at me with his free hand. "Come along, then, I'm sure you've got more deliveries to do."
I went without protest. Once we were a few blocks away, he spoke, his voice still muffled by his hand. "You've got to be careful about her, if you're to be delivering to the ward in the future."
I shrugged. "She seemed nice."
"You've a more forgiving boss than I, in that case. I'd have thought fish delivery would require tighter schedules. Then again, judging by smell, maybe not." He stopped short of the gate to the rest of the city, presumably just out of earshot of the aforementioned boss. "Just try to keep it quick in here, they're not supposed to interact with outsiders. Doesn't do to remind them of what the rest of the city is like."
I nodded, keeping my surface thoughts placid and bored to mask the unease beneath. I couldn't help these people, but it felt wrong to leave them here. Still, the greater mission required it. I just had to hope I'd have an opportunity later to set this right. "Understood, sir." I said.
"Good lad." he commented, then turned and resumed his patrol. I walked to the guardhouse.
The guard I'd first talked to upon entering the ward looked at me and said nothing, but his surface thoughts coalesced into a rapid series of Hidna words that I had no chance of understanding.
"What?" I said, off-balance.
He just nodded. "You're not Pure, then. I know, we just saw you go in, but that's the rule, gotta test everyone." He continued to look unhappy at having to lower himself to my language. "Who was your delivery for?"
It was telling that he hadn't asked me that question on the way in, but of course then I'd had the power of the fish to protect me. "22 Crescent."
The guard grunted. "Lady of the Hearth, huh? Bet you got an earful. Normally this is the part of the exit interview where I ask for a detailed account of your time inside, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you were stuck in a one-sided conversation the entire time, am I correct?"
"Yes, sir." I said.
"All right, get going. Just be quicker about it next time, I don't like having to send Srinivan out to find stragglers."
"Understood, sir." I repeated. He just gestured me away.
I made my way home via a different circuitous route than I'd arrived. I'd managed to investigate the Ward, now all I had to do was infiltrate the Empire's intelligence apparatus to find out more about the enforcers and what had happened to their Pure Mind father.
And, of course, avoid doing whatever my predecessor had done to alert them in the first place. No problem.