Chapter 1

Neana Tacey shouldered through the swinging double doors and into a wall of noise and light. The main room of the Guard's Rest was packed tonight, filled past capacity with rowdy sailors. The crowd around the bar was thick and disorderly with men jostling one another to gain the attention of the inn's one barkeep. A dozen people waved to her as she came in, but she barely inclined her head in recognition. She had bigger fish to gut.

It took her five minutes to locate a serving girl – Janis, she thought her name was; the freckled one with the breasts – and another five minutes to get her attention. Not for the first time in her life Neana wished she could make her voice loud enough to be heard above the crowd – above any crowd – but a Valaes Tairn knife had ruined any chance of that decades ago. The best she could manage on most days was a raspy whisper. Neana absentmindedly stroked the ring of scar tissue that encircled her throat as she pushed her way through the crowd. She reached Janis in the center of a knot of sailors and grabbed the waitress's arm with one steel-gauntled fist. Janis squeaked, and cringed away from her.

Idiot.

"Hot water," Neana whispered. "Bath."

"Err... yes, ma'am." She gave Neana a fearful look. "Right away, ma'am."

"Thank you," Neana croaked, but Janis had already fled. Stupid girl. There were much more frightening things in this world than a hoarse voice.

With that taken care of, she had a little time to spare. The Guard's Rest was only a moderate-sized inn, built to succor the sailors of Seaside in between voyages, but it knew how to please its customers. It boasted a common room twice the size of anyone else in town, with long tables and benches to seat hungry sailors, and it also had plenty of shadowy corner booths to conduct illicit business in. Seaside, like every major settlement along Kraken Bay, was a smuggler's haven first and foremost; that meant wine, women, and gambling. The air was full of the smell of roasted meat and pipe smoke, a sickly sweet combination. With her pointed ears, she picked out the clatter of dozens of dice hitting tabletops, and the disappointed groans of sailors saying goodbye to their hard earned pay. Neana might only be half an elf, but she had damn good hearing.

Neither food nor drink nor women appealed to Neana at the moment; nothing did, except ridding her skin of a month's worth of dirt and crusted sea salt. She headed for the least crowded corner of the bar, to kill time until her bath was drawn, and found what she was looking for immediately; officers. There were nearly a dozen of them, the command watch of two heavy dromonds. They had scooted together a pair of tables and dealt out three packs of cards; a game of Knights and Dragons, it looked like. In the far corner a tall, stern-looking man with chocolate-colored skin was playing a game of Conquerer against a thin, tanned woman with sandy blonde hair. The two were bent over the worn wooden board with bowed heads, contemplating the game pieces while they both gossiped like old maids. The man was the captain of the ship Mother Bear, and the woman was Alexia ir'Arth, the captain of the Dire Kitten and Neana's immediate superior.

At the card table a tall female Kalashtar with violet eyes pulled out a chair for Neana. "Lieutenant Tacey: sit," Chandrasitar said. "I'll deal you in."

That was shocking. Chandra may have been one of Neana's shipmates, but she hardly ever spoke to anyone, and had never made any friendly overtures before. Usually the beautiful bronze-skinned woman held herself totally aloof from the rest of the crew, preferring to spend her time in meditation or contemplating the sheaf of maps she kept locked in a great waterproof tube in her cabin. The friendly offer was so unexpected that Neana, though she didn't really care for card games, started to sit down automatically.

Then the Kalashtar reached into her mind.

There are no words adequate to describe the feeling of someone else's thoughts worming their way into your brain, but Neana instinctively knew that 'worming' was in the right direction; it felt like having slimy leeches press and writhe and squirm across the skin of her forehead. In a way that she couldn't understand, something alien and cold was probing through her skull. Words appeared, in Chandra's voice, without bothering to pass through Neana's ears. "Wonderful! These fools are dancing at the chance to part with their money. The half-orc alone has more tells than I have fingers! I only need a partner to collude with, to begin taking their money in earnest. Join me and we'll draw a month's pay each before the night is over. We can coordinate our hands without anyone ever knowing."

Neana winced, and shook her head. "Don't do that!" she thought back, as hard as she could. "Stop!"

Chandra blinked and the feeling of having tendrils pressed against her head subsided, but not completely. "I apologize. I sometimes forget that others find mental communication uncomfortable. I will not repeat my mistake." Chandra inclined her head a quarter inch, the smallest and most circumspect bow her culture recognized Out loud she said, "Lieutenant? Would you like me to deal you a hand?"

"No," Neana croaked. Her head was still reeling, and she pressed a fist to her temples. Smug psychic bitch. She shoved the proffered chair back with a kick and walked away from the table.

She was overreacting to the mind touch, she knew, but it had been so... Cold. Invasive. Alien. You heard about telepathy, and you assumed that it was just like speaking, only not out loud, but that had been a whole other order of sensation altogether. Perhaps it merely mirrored the nature of the initiator's thoughts, perhaps the probe had felt cold and alien because Chandra was a cold and alien woman. It would go a long way towards explaining why Neana and Chandrasitar had never gotten along. Not that Neana got along with much of anyone; she could number her friends on one hand.

She stomped towards the inn's bath room, located under the kitchen. Though the bar was crowded, people made way for her instantly. Neana may have been a half-elf, and a short half-elf at that, but what she lacked in height and weight she made up for with bulky armor and a four foot long curved blade strapped to her back.

She was the First Sword on the Dire Kitten, the highest ranked man – or woman, as it were – at-arms. The First Sword was in charge of all the marines, just as the First Bow was in charge of all the archers. She answered only to Captain ir'Arth, and half the men upstairs would jump to attention instinctively if she snapped her fingers. Her superiors had told her once that you would never rise to command: that you can't be an effective bully sergeant if you couldn't raise your voice above a raspy whisper. They were wrong. You could, if you were hateful enough. Neana had just spent two tireless and miserable months whipping sullen recalcitrant pirates and vagabonds – with the way the war was going these days, the Cyran navy was lucky to get those dregs – into a trained crew of boarding marines, and she was exhausted with it. To top it all off, because she had come straight from the ship, after making sure that all her soldiers had stowed away their gear, she was still wearing her armor and blade of office. And more than anything in the world right now she wanted to tear it all off and soak in a steaming tub.

A crude wooden sign hanging from the latch to the bath room read "Ocupied", but when she tested the door, Neana found that it was open. Janis must be filling the tub, she thought. Inside, instead of the barmaid, she discovered a pink skinned and very freshly scrubbed young sailor struggling to put his pants on. It was one of her soldiers. He blushed a roaring shade of red and dropped his drawers: one hand tried to salute, the other tried to cover up his man parts. Neither attempt was very successful.

"Ma'am!"

"Don't mind me, sailor." Neana stripped her gauntlets off and walked past him. The wall was divided up into cubby holes, and she began peeling off pieces of her armor and stowing them. Gloves first – she needed her fingertips free to work some of the tiny clasps – then pauldrons, then belt. With great care and reverence she stripped off her baldric, and laid the long, ornate falchion Sharneth aside: the sword was twice her age, over a century old, and it had seen the beginning of the Last War. With luck, it would see the end of it. In the flickering light of the cellar's candelabra, it shed its own magical illumination, lending a dim blue glow to the cubby-hole she stored it in. With that out of the way, Neana could finally pry herself out of the heavy breastplate. She breathed a sigh of relief as the weight left her shoulders and the bones in her spine popped back into place. They said it was an alloy of mithral and steel, they promised you that it weighed practically nothing compared to full armor, but you try wearing it for eight hours and see how heavy "practically nothing" feels. Free of the confines of her metal cage, Neana discovered that her whole damn body itched. It took her a minute's worth of desperate tugging to pull off her quilted wool gambeson, the heavy padded jacket that kept her breastplate from chafing more than it already did, but she finally managed to expose enough of her skin to the open air to get at the itches. She scratched vigorously beneath the woolen shift, leaving shallow red welts: the pain was still less aggravating than the itching.

"Damn, that feels good."

As she was scratching she heard a strange sound. She looked up. The soldier – Paulo, she finally remembered: young kid, just getting back from his first voyage – was covering his eyes and whimpering. He was having some trouble getting his pants on: Neana noticed that although he was no longer saluting, part of him was still trying to stand at attention. It took a few seconds to break through her exhaustion-addled brain, but Neana finally put two and two together long enough to be embarrassed. Just because she had no interest in men didn't mean that men had no interest in her. Biting her lip to keep from chuckling, she donned her gambeson again. "You can open your eyes now."

"That's okay, ma'am. With respect, I think I'll leave them closed."

"Sorry, sailor. My fault. It's just, on the ship," she tried to explain, "I get used to thinking of myself as one of the boys..."

"Ma'am." Still red as a beet, he furiously tucked all offending parts inside his pants, before stumbling towards the door. She watched him slam it as he left. It was kind of sweet, really. Most of the men under her command would have been leering, trying to memorize every detail. She heard the stories they told about her, when they thought she wasn't listening. Pointed ears had their uses. Why were men so fascinated by the idea of two women...? Forget it.

Neana made sure to close the door before peeling off her greaves, boots, and breeches. She studied the steaming bath tub, anticipating an hour's worth of quiet relaxation. The tubs were the Guard's Rest's pride and joy, imported straight from Sharn. They were magical; somehow, they kept the water inside them perpetually steamy and hot, with no fire or furnace. There were three of them, each in its own little room, with hooks holding fresh towels, big blocks of caustic white soap, and fresh sea sponges to scrape off the grime of a long ocean voyage. Gingerly, Neana lowered herself into a tub and Sighed happily as she sank into the scalding water inch by inch.

Content to float, Neana laid her head back and decided to let the heat work the kinks out of her tired muscles. The water felt so good, and she was so very tired.