The town, by coincidence more than design, had been built on the confluence of four ecosystems. To the northwest lay the Inner Sea which traced its way up Achryn's coast and made for lucrative shipping, and even more lucrative piracy, when the weather was fair. To the north and east, packed dirt roads spread out in a web through Achryn proper and while it would take days of travelling past patchwork farmland to reach anything resembling an urban centre, with enough tenacity a traveller could go as far as the Tyballan border along these roads. To the south lay the desert, stretching out farther than human eyes could see and to the west, the coastal mountains twisted out along the edge of the mainland, creatung a raised hemline between earth and sea.

The town's streets, and many of its buildings' foundations, had been perfunctorily carved out of these mountains, resulting in crooked streets that twisted where the bedrock had been too hard to chip away and groundwork that sloped steeply. Viewed as a whole, it looked like some careless deity had dropped it from the sky with little care for where it was, or in what condition it was in, when it landed. Doku made a silent, only half-joking, prayer that it was the humans' urban Ilithya and not anyone from her own pantheon at fault before nudging her horse into a trot and closing in on the town's gate.

Hela was called 'the beginnings of civilization' by its townsfolk and while Doku knew this to be only human arrogance at its finest, she had to admit that the city skyline, with its implied promise of boiled water and clean pillows, was a welcome sight.

As she drew up, a guardsman jogged out to meet her, grabbing the reins as soon as they were near enough and wrapping them tightly around his wrist. With a human lady, or even just a merchant's wife, this would almost certainly be followed by short bows and mumbled condescensions, so Doku was almost glad when the guardsman tugged the reins and growled, "Get down."

"Bringing any weapons into our fair city?" he asked as she dropped lightly to the ground. A few of his guard friends watched from the post near the wall and though Doku couldn't make out the details from this distance, she knew from experience that some would be grinning now and some scowling, and coins and words of honour would almost certainly be changing hands as small, bored wagers on what was going to happen next.

"Define weapon," Doku said, drawing her lips back in an almost-smile and displaying the two long, hollow fangs on either side of her front teeth. It was a threat -- and a stupid, obvious, petty one at that -- but she had been travelling hard for weeks now and her patience for human bigotry was reed-thin, especially when it was standing between her and a warm bath.

The guardsman took half a step back, hand jumping to the pommel of his sword. Some of his friends started to laugh, but they were cut short as another man in the blue and silver of Achryn's all-too-taxed royal military passed through the gate, took in Doku and the bristling guardsman with a glance, and frowned before striding over. He was younger and crisper looking than the guardsman or his friends and though Doku had only limited experience with soldiers, she knew an officer when she saw one. When he got a little closer, a white, genteel sort of smile now pasted on his face, she amended her assessment: noble officer.

The guardsman, who'd previously been so willing to pick a fight, withdrew without a 'but, sir!' and trudged off to search Doku's horse for shrunken heads or magic powders or any other signs of the heathen going-ons of the desert's Rothelien snake-people.

Most town-dwellers -- which was the same as saying most humans -- along the border between the Sabaku desert and Achryn had met, or knew someone who claimed to have met, the Rotheliens who lived out in the desert, and it was equally common knowledge that these hybrid savages, with their patches of scales and yellow eyes, would rise out of the dunes, when honest town's folk least suspected it, to rip apart any human they spied and sacrifice them to their giant snake god. Doku knew from personal experience that her "giant snake god" was much more interested in establishing trade routes and generally getting the humans to leave them be than he was in a heap of human corpses killed in his name.

She tried very hard to keep that in mind as the officer reached her and flashed his patronizing smile once more. "What brings you to our city," he asked, with only the tiniest of pauses before adding, "ma'am?"

"Business," Doku replied, managing not to trip over the unfamiliar mix of vowels and consonants. The s's hissed out anyway, slithering over her tongue before she could stop them. The officer's eyes narrowed, as much out of reflex as anything, but Doku saw the way his shoulders tightened and knew it for a potential danger. No safe, citybroken Rothelien am I, human, she thought grimly. Does that make you more or less willing to start a fight?

"What manner of business?"

"Not here. North. In Damali." The officer looked unphased -- clearly this explanation was not detailed enough -- and Doku sighed before lying blatantly. "Scouting trade routes for my clan. Great hurry. May I?"

"We don't usually see sna-- people of your persuasion out this way alone," the officer said challengingly, and Doku gave him a wooden stare. Finally, with no real reason to keep her out and a potential angry caravan full of reasons to let her in, he shrugged. "Very well, go on in. But don't cause any trouble, or I'll hear about it."

Doku smiled tightly, snatched her reins from the fuming guardsman, and led her horse to the gates, ignoring the bandied insults from the bored guards, of which snake was by far the most mild. A moment later, they were out of sight and all her senses were filled by Hela. It wasn't until that moment that she knew just how much the officer had been exaggerating.

He'll hear about it? He'd be lucky to hear a cannon blast in all this.

Hela's gates opened up to a forest of houses. Small buildings made of stone and scrounged planks of wood hugged the gate wall tightly, all along its circumference. This first layer of houses had been built right against the wall, so that it would actually form one of the four walls and from there, the houses seemed to grow out of each other, each borrowing a wall from the last until it was almost more a living organism that expanded with each new generation.

This was the poor quarter, as much as a town as small as Hela had room for one. Women with their hair pulled back under kerchiefs gathered around the well in the centre of the wide street and washed their children down with rags and cold buckets of water. Farmhands with dusty faces shuffled home from a day’s labour on some minor lord or merchant-landowner’s field. All around, the chatter of daily life rose and fell while unfriendly faces peered down from open windows. Doku kept her head down and kept moving, although a number of the bolder children trailed after her along the street, offering up necklaces and home-made meat pies for sale or simply matching pace to examine her horse until their frightened parents came to scold them for venturing so near a Rothelien.

Soon the rough thatching was replaced by freestanding stone buildings and finally by the smooth, sand-coloured mortar of wealth. It was in this cushion of prosperity that a marketplace had arisen, creating a convenient crossroad in more-or-less the centre of town from which merchants could assault the rich-folk as they went about whatever activities the human nobility found to occupy their time. Dressed in assorted hues and textures, these merchants competed for customers in every free space the square had to offer. Booksellers piled their stock on the cobbles next to the more established sellers of meat and vegetables. Some were obviously locals, but others had the fair hair and pale skin of northerners.

There was even a Rothelien caravan, staked out in a remote corner, and although Doku made sure she gave them the widest berth possible, she could feel their stares follow her, curious at first and then increasingly hostile as they took in her clothing and adornments and recognized her clan. Suna, she fancied their eyes were saying, Teonanacatl has marked you. You are walking dead. But soon they were overtaken by traders hoping to buy their silks and spices -- and then sell them later for extravagant prices in the northern cities -- and she was able to slip away from their judging eyes.

In the centre of the square, a pile of boards and brick and copper tiles as high as Doku's waist had been hastily organized and then abandoned. These had originally been part of a plan to build a large clock tower in the centre of Hela, but the copper had been brought in from mines out near fairy territory and over the days of travelling in wagons, it had begun to turn green and brittle. Now it was useless as building material, and construction of the clock tower had halted until another load could be purchased, this time from somewhere nearer by. In the meantime, the supplies had been allowed to rest exactly where they had been unloaded, and this obviously struck many of the less established merchants as a poor use of real estate because make-shift stalls had sprung up all around the pile, and more often than not made out of bits of the pile itself. It was here that Doku finally found what she was looking for.

The boy called Fly wasn't particularly large or particularly small or particularly anything really, which was why he was as immensely good at his job as he was. He was also human and while that could mean all sorts of unpleasant things, in this particular situation Doku felt more comfortable dealing with a human than with fairies or Myr'l or, horror of all horrors, other Rotheliens. Not that she had a choice in the matter. As she drew near to the northern end of a stack of logs-cum-jeweller's stall, she looped her horses reins tightly around her wrist to discourage any browsing horse thieves and bent into a crouch to do business with what was probably Fly. This involved ignoring the odd looks she was winning from the jeweller to her left and addressing what she assumed was the head region of a very large pile of rags.

"I am told you know things," she said.

The rags shifted, and a pair of blue eyes looked out at her from a cavern made out of scarves, handkerchiefs, and a floppy, brown hat. "What of it?" replied the rags in a muffled voice.

"I am told for a price I can know things also."

Fly shifted again, this time leaning back to get a better look. "I know things, for thems who can pay, lady. And what I don't know I can find out."

Doku gave a jerk on the reins around her wrist, urging her horse forward until the saddlebag hung right beside her ear. Reaching up, she undid the flap and pulled out a small purse filled with pure, raw gold. Folk tales held that Rotheliens saw more gold in a day than a king could spend in a year and while that was true comparatively -- as in, the average Rothelien would possess more gold than the average human in an average lifetime -- the stories of inexhaustible golden mounds and of tribal leaders who ritually bathed in the stuff were, of course, completely false. But it was Doku's plan to buy Fly's loyalty and if playing to the old stories helped her do that than that was what she would do.

She tossed the purse toward him, and a white hand shot out with surprising agility to catch it. "The first half," she said. "Another half when you give me the name. There are many names. Eventually, I need all. For now, I need one."

He was silent for a while -- busy counting, she assumed -- until finally he asked, "What sort of names?"

"The names of men I have business with." Then, because he was a child and she couldn't keep herself from warning him, she added gravely, "They are rich and dangerous men."

"I've got no love for rich and dangerous men, lady," Fly replied. "And I think it's comin' to me which men you mean. They do a lot of 'business' with your kind, yeah? And it's not the sort of 'business' you yabber about 'round polite folk."

Doku nodded and bit her lip. Trusting Fly was a risky proposition as the men she was searching for were not Fly's usual fare, ie. not the gluttonous merchants, cheating spouses, or corrupt officials that were the bread and butter of the amateur spy trade. The men she needed to find were smart, and the ones who were not smart were already dead, either by her hand or by chance's. With luck those that still lived would be joining their associates soon, but to achieve this goal Doku needed someone who could move without curious eyes following, someone who could watch and know what was suspicious and what was not, and most importantly someone who had contacts in the human world. She needed Fly and as revolting as it was to lure a child into this kind of danger, her priority was, and would always remain, killing the men who had slaughtered her clan.

Besides which, Fly seemed unconcerned. During the time Doku had spent mulling over whether or not to go through with this, the boy had returned to happily counting his gold. A metallic chinking noise was now emanating from somewhere just above his stomach region. Doku sighed and made a decision.

"We have a deal?"

"It's a deal," he agreed without hesitation. "I'll be workin' beside Otha the baker's stall tomorrow. Find me there, and I'll know somethin' to tell."

Doku nodded slowly and with much rustling, Fly clambered to his feet and dashed off towards the western-most road to begin his reconnaissance. Fly's erstwhile neighbour, the jeweller, gave Doku another evil look but as her transaction had rid him of a smelly, dirty urchin boy, he seemed to consider it a win and otherwise let her be. She rose to her feet, gave her horse a pat on the nose, and went off in search of someone who might be able to provide directions. Eventually, when she failed to find anything like a friendly face, she stopped a scholarly-looking passerby and asked where a decent inn could be found. After a moment's thought, he gave her directions to what would mostly likely turn out to be the most battered flophouse in town or an ambush in a dark alley, and Doku was too tired to care which it turned out to be.