Kerra was beginning to give up on finding Milyen’s. They had spent more than an hour of walking up and down the empty riverfront past endless rows of red brick storehouses, twice. It was almost silent if not for the calls of porters laughing and joking with each other as they worked and the splashing of riverboat oars in the water. It was almost romantic watching the boats’ small flames dance across the river turned silver ribbon by the Big Sister’s light.

  “How do you not know where we are going?” asked Niles.

  “I was told the docks,” Kerra answered.

  The two of them sat on the low floodwall, looking back at a solid facade of dark warehouses. They must have looked like lovers out for a walk in the warm spring evening, because none of the few passers by seemed to pay them any mind. Kerra watched as a tall man wrapped in a dark cloak slipped down an alleyway between two of the low brick buildings.

  “We’ve been up and down the docks,” said Niles. “And we don’t have anything to show for it.”

  “You’re not being helpful,” said Kerra.

  “It’s such a beautiful night, Kerra.” Niles was getting that damned twinkle in his eye. “It’d be a shame to waste it watching some stupid storehouses.”

  Whenever he got that twinkle, it meant he wanted some trouble. He’d had it on the first night they’d met when he’d swept her up into the night and they’d tried to steal a baron’s ring off his finger. If Niles had his way, they’d be sneaking into Aldrimar’s castle to rearrange their furniture and liberate a few valuables. Either that or he was going to kiss her.

  Two men walking past grew quiet when they noticed Niles and Kerra standing there. They made a direct line for one of the storehouses and disappeared down one of the alleyways. Was that the same one the man in the coat had slipped down?

  “Just be patient,” said Kerra. “If we find what we’re looking for, there’s going to be plenty of trouble.”

  Niles pushed his lower lip into a pout, somehow looking like a big, bearded child.

  “But Kerra,” he whined. “Your kind of trouble is never any fun. Besides, you know I’m not a patient man.”

  Two raggedy boys came running out of the alley and along the riverfront. Neither could have been older than ten.

  “Then I have good news for you,” she said. “I think I know where we’re going.”

  She lept off the brick wall and headed towards the alleyway between storehouses. He caught up while she stopped and adjusted to the alley’s darkness.

  “This way,” she said, taking off without giving him a chance to keep up.

  “Wait!” said Niles.

  The alleyway turned, first right then left in quick succession, and she could see light leaking out of a doorframe ahead. Then she heard a thud, and the sound of Niles cursing.

  “You couldn’t have warned me about that?” he asked.

  “Quiet,” she hissed, crouched low, her ear pressed to the door. Muffled voices echoed through the cold wood. "There’s definitely people inside.”

  Niles rapped his fingers against the wood, surprising Kerra and knocking both of them to the ground.

  “Damn it!” Kerra said. “What are you doing?”

  Before he had a chance to respond, the door swung open and bathed them in warm torchlight. A large bellied man was silhouetted in the doorway, glaring at them.

  “Wuts you doin?” the big man grumbled as they picked themselves up. “Yous comin’ in or na?”

  He allowed Kerra to pass with no issue, but stopped Niles with a meaty fist to the chest.

  “Da sword stay wit me,” said the big man with a thick Goric accent. He certainly looked the part of a recently civilized barbarian.

  Niles arched an eyebrow. “Is that so?”

  “Niles! Don’t!”

  Kerra’s words fell on deaf ears. Behind her, the back of the warehouse was chaos, a hidden bazar. Men milled about down rows of stalls arranged in a maze, haggling with the pelders for goods of ill repute. Soon the dagger in her pocket would be set out on one of those stalls, no longer her problem.

  “Tis da rule,” the big man said. “No sword. No hammer. No spear. You gon git it back when you go.”

  Niles snorted. Though his hands hadn’t moved, his eyes were already boring into the big man, planning his moves. Kerra was starting to think she would have been better off alone.

  “Oi!” came a voice from behind her. “Is that DuErden? Thu let him in!”

  The big man turned to the voice. “He got a sword Mil.”

  “And you couldn’t take it from him if you wanted to,” said Mil. He was a dark haired man dressed in a rich purple robe, his fingers adorned with golden rings, and followed by at least three other men. “He’ll be fine, let him in.”

  Niles made a point to check Thu as he walked past.

  “Thanks stranger,” said Niles. “I came lookin’ for a good deal, not trouble.”

  The man laughed. “Well you’ve come to the right place for either one, and plenty else. What’s your pleasure DuErden?” He clasped an arm around Niles’ shoulder and began leading him away. “Who’s your friend?”

  Kerra shot a glance at Niles. He was going to speak.

  “Alyra,” she said, pulling back her hood to reveal her long dark braid. She gave the stranger a look, and a grin. “You’re Milyen aren’t you?”

  “Beautiful and clever,” sid Milyen with a sly smile that made her skin crawl. Niles quietly clenched a fist. “How did you know?”

  “Lucky guess,” she said.

  “Lucky indeed,” he eyed her skeptically. “Perhaps you’ll be lucky enough to find what you came looking for. As you can see, I have many, many things for sale.”

  “Actually, we came hoping to do the selling.”

  “My my, aren’t you full of surprises.”

  Milyen led them past a row of stalls and through a doorway at the back of the warehouse. The room inside was well furnished in

  “So what do you have for me?” asked Milyen, eyes greedy.

  Kerra pulled the jeweled dagger from her coat and held it up for him to see. All conversation in the room stopped. The whole of the dagger was ornate, from the emerald at the pommel to the wide, slightly curved blade and the faded green sheath wrapped in a crisscrossed helix of golden bands. She could hear murmurs at the edges of the room, but her eyes never left the dark-eyed Milyen, his mouth hanging open.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “Is that...” Milyen slowly stood from his chair and closed the gap to Kerra.

  “Razic? Yes, and it’s yours,” said Kerra as she pulled it back from his grasp. “For five hundred golds.”

  Milyen waved at one of his attendants, who began digging through one of the chests along the back wall. “How did you get this?” Milyen’s gaze was fixed on the dagger, tracking it as she waved the dagger about.

  “It was... liberated from a Goric lord,” said Kerra. “He wore it a bit too proudly and boasted it used to be some old king’s once.”

  That made the man laugh, which made Kerra uncomfortable. A glance at Niles confirmed she wasn’t alone.

  “You’ve done me a great service,” said Milyen. He motioned to his attendant, who placed a bag of coins into his outstretched hand with a clink. “You have a deal.”

  Bag and dagger traded hands, and both parties began to inspect their winnings. Milyen pulled the dagger from it’s sheath, firelight glinting off the blade. His grin was wide, but there was something in it that put Kerra off.

  Kerra pulled back the string on the bag of coins, but as she did she caught the glint of firelight off something metal to her side. She looked up in time to see the blade coming right at her.

  “Niles!” she cried as she hit the floor, her right arm undoing the straps that held her own dagger in place on her left side.

  Metal scraped against metal and men grunted. Kerra knocked her assailant’s feet out from under him with a sweeping kick, and sprung back onto her own feet in one motion. Behind her, Niles was locking blades with another of Milyen’s attendants. More men had drawn blades and were moving in, but Milyen himself was nowhere to be found.

  “Kerra run!” shouted Niles.

  She wasted no time, and threw herself back against the flimsy wooden door. It swung back and she darted down the short hallway. A guard still waited there, and tried to block her way. But he wasn’t fast enough, and Kerra’s dagger left a gash in his chest as she ran by. At the alleyway door she turned, shouted. “Niles!”

  He was still fighting in the other room. Metal clanged and cut and men screamed and swore, then Niles emerged from the room covered in blood, running with sword in hand. “GO!”

  Men chased behind them as they bust from the alleyway onto the riverfront. They looked left, then right. “Try swimming it?” asked Niles as they ran.

  “Hardly,” Kerra shook her head. There was still snow on the ground in the eastern hills and the waters would be too cold. “We’d freeze before we reached the other side.”

  “So which gate is closest then?” he asked.

  “They’ll be shut,” she said. “It’s night.”

  “Damn it. You have any ideas then?”

  “One,” she said, grabbing his arm and pulling him down another alleyway. She didn’t like the idea, but it was the only one she had.

  “Where did they go?” a man shouted behind them.

  “Don’t let them get away!” came another.

  The alleyway twisted and turned its way deeper into the Northriver district. They turned a corner and stopped, face to face with a young girl no older than eight. The dirty girl looked up at them, and for a moment there was only pregnant silence. Kerra hoped this wasn’t one of Milyen’s little spies.

  The girl screamed. The piercing shriek rang out through the night, and she could hear men shouting behind her yelling, heading towards the noise.

  “Damn it,” Niles grumbled and pushed past the girl. Kerra followed. “Where are we going?” Niles asked once they had run a ways from the screaming girl.

  “Allen’s,” said Kerra.

  In spite of all their twists and turns, it seemed like Milyen’s men were gaining on them as they slipped down the narrow alleyway towards the Den. Kerra was surprised at how easily Niles pushed back the false wall and they slipped in.

  Kerra threw open the hatch to the cellar, then went to the stove and lit a candle. “Let’s go.”

  “We’re going to hide here?” asked Niles as he crouched to follow her into the low basement.

  “No,” said Kerra as she stomped her boot into the floor, listening for the hollow stone. When she found it, she set her candle on the floor pulled the loose stone back with a grunt. The sound of running water filled the small basement room. “We’re escaping.”

  Without another word she slipped down through the gap in the floor and landed with a splash. “Grab the candle!” she called up behind her. “I can’t see a thing.”

  Niles mumbled something above, and then hung his feet over the edge, dropping in. “Damn it,” he swore. “I almost dropped the damn candle.”

  “Can you reach the stone?” she asked.

  He reached and shook his head.

  “Never mind, let’s go.”

  Kerra took the candle from Niles. They had only another hour or two left of it, three if they were lucky. She held the candle up, and looked first left, then right and decided to follow the flow of water past her ankles. The tunnel turned and twisted, and soon Kerra had lost all sense of where she was in the city above. She just knew to follow the water.

  “Did you hear that?” Niles stopped.

  Faint voices echoed down the tunnel behind them. Milyen’s men must have known how Allen moved in and out of the city. Kerra cursed under her breath.

  And so they ran. Following the current as it turned left and right, diverting down a side tunnel and leaving larger passages unexplored. Kerra stopped for a second as they came past one of these, staring into the dark and swearing something was watching them.

  Niles almost slammed into her from behind. “Woah, Kerra. Is everything alright? You know where we’re going right?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Of course I do. I’ve been this way before.”

  “You have?” Niles sounded surprised.

  “Once.” She’d meant it to be comforting.

  Before them came the sounds of falling water, and behind came men’s voices. Occassionaly she’d catch a glimpse of an orange glow in the corner of her eye as they turned a corner.

  “Kerra,” Niles whispered.

  She ignored him. The less noise they made, the easier it would be to lose the men behind them.

  “Kerra,” he said again.

  When she didn’t respond he grabbed her wrist. Kerra stopped.

  “Look,” he said over the sound of rushing water. “Your candle. It’s pointing the wrong way.”

  The flame bent forward, pointing deeper into the waterway as if blown by a gentle breeze. She took a few steps forward, and the flame still led instead of following after like it was supposed to.

  Then she saw the gap. Their tunnel emptied itself into a great black void. Leaning out as far as she’d dared, Kerra saw other passageways on the other walls with no way to reach them.

  “So how do we get down?” Niles asked, peering over her shoulder. His sword was drawn and pointed down the hall behind them.

  “I don’t know,” Kerra said. “Maybe there was a ladder last time, but I don’t know. I might not have even come this way at all.”

  “I suppose here is as good as any to make a stand.”

  Kerra looked behind them. The stones on the far wall were glowing with a faint orange.

  “It’s either that or jump.”

  Milyen’s men turned the corner.

  “Finally,” said the red haired man she recognized from Milyen’s wearhouse, his jagged dagger drawn. “Now you got nowhere else to run.” Men sneered behind him, weapons at the ready. Their leader charged.

  Niles met the rushing thug. In the dim light of the candle and the torch, it was hard to make sense of anything. Mens screams echoed into a deafening roar, and Kerra could have swore the water at her feet was growing darker.

  Before her, Niles elbowed the other man’s face into the stonework wall. Milyen’s man slumped into a heap, legs soaking in the water. Niles brought up his sword, ready for the next man, but none came.

  In the darkness, shadows shifted and splashed. Blades swung and men screamed and Kerra thought she could hear snapping bone. It was as if Milyen’s men were tearing themselves apart but no, there was something moving unnaturally among them. Niles saw it too.

  “We need to run,” she said.

  “Where?” asked Niles.

  She remembered the gap behind them where the tunnel ended at open darkness and the water emptied. Could they get around whatever it was tearing those men apart?

  “We’ll have to jump,” Kerra said. “It’s a waterfall, there’s might be some kind of pool at the bottom to break our fall.”

  Niles glanced at her, and then back down the tunnel. Bone snapped and a man screamed, sending shivers down Kerra’s spine. Niles nodded.

  At once, the two of them turned and darted towards the gap. She felt herself step into air, and she heard herself scream