“Masks on,” Fie ordered, unhitching hers from her pack. “From here on out, keep your mouths shut and your eyes sharp, ken me?”

Tavin glanced sidelong at her. It was one of his many-sided looks, saying we’re walking into trouble, saying none of us are ready, saying none of us can walk away.

But what won this time was “Yes, chief.”

Fie strode to the post and rang the bell. The Hawk guard leaned out from the platform long enough to give her a curt nod. A whistle pierced the air as the plague beacon sputtered out.

A man strolled through the gate in Gerbanyar’s plain stone wall. He matched his city well enough: his face was the grayish sort of brown, and the painted stripes of his hide vest matched the stripes of granite and basalt stacked into nearby house walls. Those stripes marked him for a Pigeon and a courier; the twitch of his gaze marked him for a man Fie wouldn’t trust at her back anytime soon.

“This way,” he announced, a smirk tugging at his lips.

For a moment, Fie couldn’t make her feet work. It reeked of a trap.

“Right behind you,” Tavin said under his breath.

“I said mouths shut,” she mumbled, and headed for the gate.

The Pigeon courier led them down the main road, where mismatched stones sank into usurping moss. Gerbanyar was nowhere near as large as Cheparok, and though it too spilled across a hillside, the gray stack-stone houses jutted up as they pleased.

But the messenger’s path didn’t curve toward the houses. Instead, he took them past an open market, where merchants laid one hand on the purses at their belts; past pens of goats and chickens and cattle and the flint-faced shepherds who stopped to watch; and at last toward a stone-lined channel at the lowest ground within Gerbanyar’s walls.

Fie’s gut sank. “You scummed the sinner,” she said flatly.

“You took too long getting here.” The courier no longer bothered hiding his smirk. “So we took matters into our own hands.”

She strode over to the channel’s edge. Gutter-mouths punctured the rim of a far wall, their contents plopping into murky water padded in yellow algae. Scant paces below Fie, fetid waters lapped sleepily at the breast of a man lying in the waste.

The marks of the Sinner’s Plague burned clear enough on him: lips dark with bloody tracks, skin bruised with the Sinner’s Brand, eyes pasted shut in crusts. Flies clotted his air, crawling in and out of a mouth agape. A dirty sleeping mat carpeted the rough hewn steps nearby. Fie wondered if the sinner had started on the mat and rolled into the cesspool in his fever dreams, or if the scummers had tossed him in, mat and all, not caring where either landed.