“Are your ears just for decoration? If I say it's hard, it's hard. If a School does take you, they'll nail your feet to the ground. They don't want their precious disciples wandering out, taking their secrets with them. That's years, years, stuck in one place by yourself, because you can bet they won't take me in.”
“Then you can leave!” Lindon said, and he regretted saying it even before the words emerged. He tried to control the damage immediately. “Of course, I wish you wouldn't. It's not...I would like you to stay with me, but I wouldn't want to burden you. You're already finished with your promise to me, so there's nothing...”
It was at that point that he realized he was digging himself a deeper grave, and decided to put the shovel down.
She was silent for so long that Lindon started to overheat. He reached for the paper-wrapped bar of gritty soap that he'd brought with him from home. While he scrubbed himself down, he kept one ear open for Yerin's response.
She remained quiet.
Finally, when he'd rinsed himself and begun putting his clothes on—slowly, to give her as much time as possible to respond—Yerin spoke.
“Let's not go charting any courses yet. We'll find somewhere to spend the night first.” The words sounded dead, so Lindon responded with forced cheer.
“Of course! I wasn't planning on making any decisions tonight.”
At that moment a shadow passed in front of his stall, and footsteps came to a halt in the grass.
“Little sister, little brother,” came the voice of the bathhouse attendant, “it would be best if the two of you finished soon. You're welcome to return any time you like, of course, but it seems as though there will be some trouble...”
A smack echoed around the bathhouse grounds, like the slap of wood on wood, and the attendant sighed.
“...very soon. If you don't have ties to either the Fishers or the Sandvipers, I'd recommend you hurry.”
Lindon tugged on the rest of his clothes, slipped the pack onto his back, and pulled on his badge. When he pushed his way out of the bathhouse, Yerin stood in front of him. Her hair hung limp and wet as well, and she was still tightening the thick red rope that served her in place of a belt.
She tied it into a wide bow, then twisted the whole mass around so that the bow hung behind her. All the while, she kept her eyes off her hands and on Lindon.
The silence was painful. He felt as though he should say something, but what he settled on was, “Shall we go see what's happening?”
“I can't recommend that,” the attendant said. “It's a hornet's nest over there.” He scratched at the back of his right hand, and Lindon saw a bright red circle there. A Goldsign. So even the servants in a place like this were stronger than anyone in Sacred Valley.
Yerin met Lindon's gaze and nodded. “Won't be hard to find them, at least.” She turned and walked off without acknowledging the attendant again.
For his part, Lindon bowed to the man with his fists pressed together before he followed Yerin. The Thousand-Mile Cloud trailed after him, dragged along on an invisible leash of thin madra.
The loud noises had been joined by raised voices, with two groups arranged on the road outside of the bathhouse. One group was wearing furs, and each had a bright green lizard-creature attached to one arm. These Remnants, or parasites, or Goldsigns—whatever they were—acted independently from their host, hissing and spitting at the enemies opposite them, though they never left. Maybe they were attached somehow.
The other group must have been the Fishers, based on the attendant's words. Most of them were dressed in clothes that would have been considered poor even in Sacred Valley: threadbare brown robes, sandals on the edge of breaking, woven reed hats with wide brims that would protect against harsh sunlight. Some of them wore them even now, after dark, though a few more had strapped the hats to their backs. Each of them carried the same weapon, which Lindon had noticed before—a wide crescent blade on a hilt, like a sword that had been bent into the shape of a hook.
One of the Sandvipers reached up and pulled another board away from a building. Like most construction in the Five Factions Alliance, this place was slipshod and half-finished, and it looked like it was only one or two boards away from collapsing. Clearly, the man had done this before, judging by the pile of wood next to the half-disassembled building.
“...we're just passing the time as we wait here,” the Sandviper said casually, peeling another board away from the structure. The whole hut groaned. “If we don't have anything to call us away, we might as well stay a while longer.”
A tall woman stepped up as the representative of the Fishers. Unlike the others, she carried two of those bladed hooks, one in her hand and the other on her back. A sneer gave her a twisted, malicious cast. “While you're waiting here, maybe I'll go back home. I made some new friends today, and they have all sorts of interesting stories to tell us about you.”
The lead Sandviper's face contorted until it looked like hers, and he stepped forward himself. In a flicker of motion so fast that Lindon almost didn't catch it, a pair of long knives appeared in each of his hand. Vivid green madra coiled around each blade. “Give me my miners back, and we can let this go here.”
“If you want to give me my brother's eye back, then we can—”
A new voice, quiet and even, sliced through the argument like a razor. “What is this?”
The Sandvipers parted like a crowd of puppies before a wolf. The first detail Lindon could see of this new figure was a spearhead, which gleamed bright even in the light from the smoky torches. The shaft was red, worked with detail that looked like it may have been script, but the weapon hardly attracted attention compared to the man who carried it.
He was roughly as tall as Lindon, but thinner, so that his build matched that of his spear. He wore ordinary dark robes, like more than half the sacred artists Lindon had seen that day, but he wore something they did not: long strips of red cloth, wrapped tightly around his head. It looked as though he'd tried to bandage himself for grievous injuries to the skull, but his wounds had bled through.
Every one of the strips of cloth was covered, without exception, in what was unmistakably script. Even if Lindon had been close enough to make out the script in detail, he likely still wouldn't have been able to tell what it did.
Perhaps it had some intimidating effect on onlookers, because everyone grew quiet at the masked stranger's approach. The Sandvipers shut their mouths like children before a parent, and the Fishers had all reached for their weapons. Even the few handful of bystanders who had stuck by to watch the confrontation, like Lindon, did not dare to utter a word.
Except Yerin. “He's strong,” she said to Lindon, though even she kept her comment to barely above a whisper.
The stranger stopped at the lead Sandviper, who drew himself and saluted over his fists. “Brother Jai Long,” the Sandviper said, “these Fishers captured some of our miners on their return from the Ruins. We wanted to at least recover the scales, in order to save face for the Sandviper sect.”
Another member of the Jai clan, Lindon noted. And once again in the company of Sandvipers. Those men and women at the gate hadn't just been Jai Sen's friends, then; their factions were close allies. He wasn't sure if that fact would be worth anything, but he tucked it away nonetheless.
“For the Sandviper sect,” Jai Long repeated softly. “Who was responsible for the missing mining team?”
“Ah, that is...I was responsible for guarding them, but the Fishers sent too many for me to handle on my own.”