The heat of the day had worn Kuai down. He sat now in a darkened corner of a bar nursing a glass of orange juice. He kept his hand wrapped tight around it and sent the occasional wave of frost through the glass to keep it chill. Even the evening was hot. Tomas sat down heavily next to him with his third enormous litre flagon of beer.

"I think I'm in heaven." He smiled sleepily at Kuai, "We're so close to Prague I can feel it in my bones. I haven't been this close in twenty years."

"Quiet. You're talking very loudly. It's embarrassing."

Tomas took a sip of the beer and frowned. He looked at Kuai's glass misted with the cold.

"Will you chill my beer? Pleeease, Kuai."

"No. Shut up. That's an abuse of a cryomancer's power."

"But you're definitely icing that juice. I can see ice crystals on the glass! Please, Kuai. Only Bi-Han says that's an abuse of power – I think it's your one true heritage – and it's why you are clearly the better brother in every way. Come on-"

"Alright! But only to shut you up! And you have to promise to actually try and find out some information!" Kuai reached over to the flagon when he was sure no one was looking and sent waves of cold through his hand to the mug. The gift was a rare one, he and his brother both shared. Command of ice was still not enough for Kuai to feel comfortable in the landlocked summer temperatures of eastern Europe however.

"I can't talk to anyone here, they all speak Serbian."

"What?" Kuai stared at him, "But I thought we were here to collect information? Now you're telling me you can't even speak the language?"

"I can speak way more languages than you, so you shut up. I'm pretty sure they can speak Russian too but everyone's being really cagey about it."

"What about English?"

"I tried that just now."

"No, you didn't. I heard you. You were speaking Mandarin."

Tomas looked at him hard, then looked at the beer.

"Oh. That explains why that guy was so rude. I suppose he didn't understand all the things I called him when he ignored me then... I'll try again in English." He got up and made his way, with a slight sway to his footstep, toward a harassed client.

Kuai sighed and looked down at his drink. Then he looked up at the clock on the wall. Two hours before they had to find a landline and check in with the Temple. He had nothing to show for the day, they still needed to find a bed to sleep in for the night, it turned out Tomas wasn't fluent in the native language as he had promised and the evening temperature still was not dropping below thirty-six degrees centigrade. His glass made a splitting noise like a Himalayan cornice before an avalanche. He looked down and saw the glass had become so cold and brittle in his grasp that it was cracked with a fine network lines all over it. He stared at it silently until Tomas returned.

Tomas joined him in looking at the glass,

"Too bad," he said, "Anyway I met a guy who told me there's a second hand book shop not far from here with a good lot of literature on history in this area. It's not much to go on, but if you think reading up on this guy is the way to go it might be a good place to start. I told him we're American tourists and that my grasp of local history isn't intended to be offensive, just ignorant."

"A bookshop." Kuai said flatly. "We've wasted a day to hear that they might be a bookshop."

"If you want to try doing the talking then be my guest, Kuai Liang."

"I have to tell Bi-Han that in the first day of our mission we achieved nothing but finding the whereabouts of a bookshop. Oh, and Tomas drank three pots of coffee, four litres of beer, and nearly started a fight with a taxi driver as he pretended to be a Russian oligarch."

"Expat. I wasn't trying to be an oligarch. That would be stupid and dangerous."

Kuai froze the liquid in his glass solid then dropped the whole glass in Tomas' beer. The glass fractured in the warmer fluid and shattered into tiny pieces. A large icecube of orange juice bobbed in the beer.

"You bastard." Tomas said, but without venom in the face of Kuai's anger.

"Pay the bill. We're leaving. I'm finding us a hotel before you cause any more trouble. And don't try to pay in yuan this time."

Author Note: Just a wee short chapter. Will update in a day or two with another. I revel in dropping socially inept Lin Kuei assassins into everyday life. This madness will continue. As always - any comments or support are dearly loved :o