“Were they really physickers—” Brother Qown looked behind him, but Ninavis tugged on his sleeve to keep him focused.

“Don’t be stupid.” She sighed and led him down a back alley. Someone had piled up some boxes and nailed together wood to look like rubbish. Instead, it acted as a ladder. She showed him the way up, which scraps supported weight and which to avoid. Finally, they emerged on a ragged shanty roof. Brother Qown swooned as he realized how close they stood to the edge of the bridge, with an endless drop below them as water poured over Demon Falls.

“Careful now,” she said, taking his arm.

“Where are we going?”

“Just sit here awhile.” She made herself comfortable on the roof, leaning against what might very well have been an impromptu chimney.

Even as she said the words, Brother Qown heard a commotion down on the streets below. A large crowd with torches began to surge through the streets. Conversations drifted their way, including words like healer and he can’t have gone far.

A search party was looking for him.

“Would you like to know the secret of the Diraxon?” Ninavis asked softly.

Qown blinked in surprise. “I … what?”

She must have taken that as a yes, because she continued speaking, her voice so soft that if Qown had been a foot farther away, he’d have heard nothing. “The secret of the Diraxon is that we don’t exist. Not really. We are a clan made up of the rejects and outcasts of every clan. The Diraxon take in the people no one else wants. The babies with cleft palates or ill-omened birthmarks, too many fingers or not enough, club legs or bent spines. Marakori know if they don’t want to keep a babe, they can leave it by the edge of the Kulma Swamp and that child will just … vanish. Claimed by the Diraxon, the ghosts of the Kulma, who raise their foundlings on a steady diet of darkness, death, and vengeance.”

“Oh,” Qown said. He felt a mixture of sadness and revulsion. Sadness for the abandoned children; revulsion for the people who had left them to die. “And then you’re trained to be killers.”

“Yes. Hated, feared, and always, always in high demand.” Ninavis’s gaze was far away. “I left before the Lonezh Hellmarch. I was done with killing. I lost my taste for it. Unfortunately”—she waved a finger at the slums—“these people haven’t figured out what I did: that the rest of the world wants us feuding and fighting. And the Hellmarch just made it worse.”

“I don’t understand, though. The Hellmarch has been over for years.”