As the Crow had carved her way toward triumph in the final match, Cloud had been on his feet, hollering and howling with the rest of the mob. When she’d struck the final blow against the Unfallen, Cloud had danced a jig on the spot, grabbed the nearest comely lass and planted a kiss square on her lips (returned rather enthusiastically), which resulted in an all-in brawl with the lass’s sweetheart, a dozen of his friends, half of Cloud’s crew, and a hundred other punters who simply wanted a good dose of fisticuffs after a hard turn’s carnage. Truthfully, it’d been absolutely marvelous.
But then along came the first dose of the unexpected.
He’d watched it happen in slow motion. The Crow drawing her hidden blade on the victor’s plinth. Slicing the cardinal’s throat clean through. Stabbing the consul in the chest (or so he and half the crowd had imagined, anyway). Blood flowing like cheap plonk at a Liisian wedding. And even though the rest of the crowd fell to wailing, baying, panicking, watching that greasy fucker Duomo go down in a puddle of his own shit and blood, Cloud Corleone had found himself cheering at the top of his lungs.
The next dose of the unexpected had arrived in short order.
It’d taken Cloud almost an hour to shove his way to the bookman’s pits to collect his winnings, still riding high on the sight of the cardinal’s messy end. It was there that the scoundrel was informed by a scowling pack of Itreyan legionaries that because a slave had just topped the fanciest bastards in the whole bloody Republic, all bets were null and void. It wouldn’t do, you see, to profit from the death of the consul and grand cardinal at the hands of human property.
Cloud was tempted to inform the soldiers exactly what flavor of bastard the good cardinal actually was in life, but looking into their eyes, listening to the budding chaos in the city around him, he decided making a fuss would only make for further fuss. And so, with a flip of the knuckles toward the bookman’s shit-eating grin, the captain and his crew headed back to the harbor with tragically empty pockets.
With all the fistfights and fuckarsery and Scaeva’s announcement of his miraculous escape from the assassin’s blade in the forum (Cloud could’ve sworn she’d stabbed him clean), it took another three hours to make it back to the Bloody Maid. And now, in the office of one Attilius Persius, harbormaster of Godsgrave*, the final oddity in Cloud’s eventful turn had arrived in the form of the aforementioned Sister of Tsana.
Cloud had been putting the last touches on the Bloody Maid’s paperwork and giving Attilius a friendly heaping of shit (his wife had recently given birth to their sixth daughter, poor fucker) when the nun had marched into the office, shoved Cloud aside, and slapped a hefty bag of coin down on the countertop.
“I need passage to Ashkah. Swift, if it please you.”
She couldn’t have been more than eighteen, but she looked a few years harder. Dressed all in snow white, a coif of starched cloth and voluminous robes that flowed to the floor. Her cool blue eyes were fixed on the harbormaster, her lips pressed thin. She was Vaanian, tall and fit, what appeared to be blond hair dyed with henna peeking from the edge of her coif. Cloud idly wondered if her carpet matched her curtains.
In the doorway behind her stood a hulking fellow shrouded in dark cloth. A Trinity of Aa (of rather middling quality, Cloud thought) was strung around his neck, several suspiciously sword-shaped bulges were hidden under his robes.
Cloud shivered a little. The office seemed to have gotten cold all of a sudden.
The sister raised an expectant eyebrow at the harbormaster.
“Mi Don?”
Attilius simply stared, his stubbled jowls all awobble. “Apologies, Sister. I just … It’s not often one sees a Sister of the Sorority of Flame outside a convent, let alone in a district as rough as the Nethers.”*
“Ashkah,” she repeated, clanking her coin. “This eve, if possible.”
“We’re headed that way,” Cloud said, leaning against the counter. “Stormwatch first, then Whitekeep. But after that, through the Sea of Swords and on to Ashkah.”
The nun turned to regard him carefully. “Is your ship a swift one?”
“Swifter than my heart beats looking into those pretty eyes of yours, Sister.”
The nun rolled the aforementioned eyes and drummed her fingers on the countertop. “You’re trying to be charming,