Naev leaned down and began unlacing Mia`s boots. Mia yelped, tucked them underneath her. The woman reached for the ties on Mia`s shirt, and Mia slapped her hands away, backing off across the bed with her own hands raised.
"Now, look here..."
"She must undress."
"You really picked the wrong girl. And most people offer a drink first."
Naev put her hands on her hips. "She must bathe before she meets the Ministry. If Naev may speak plain, sh reeks of horse and excrement, her hair is greasier than a Liisian sweetbreaad, and she is painted in dried blood. If she wishes to attend her baptism into the Blessed Lady`s congregation looking like a Dweymeri savage, Naev suggest she saves herseда the pain and simply step off the Sky Altar now."
"Wait..." Mia blinked. "Did you say bath?"
"...Naev did."
"With water?" Mia was up on her knees, hands clutched at her breast. "And soap?"
The woman nodded. "Five kinds."
"Maw`s teeth," Mia said, unlacing her shirt. "You picked the right girl after all."

Word failed as the boy looked toward the room`s heart. Mia followed his gaze, saw the statue of a woman, jewels hung like stars on her ebony robe. The figure was colossal, towering forty feet above their heads, carved of gleaming black stone. Small iron rings were embedded in the rock, about head height. In her hands she held a scale and a masive wicked sword, broad as treetrunks, sharp as obsidian. Her face was beautiful. Terrible and cold. Mia felt a chill trickle down her spine, the statue`s eyes following as she walked closer.
"Welcome to the Hall of Eulogies," Mouser said.
"Who is she?"
"The Mother." Mouser touched his eyes, then his lips, then his chest. "The Maw. Our Lady of Blessed Murder. Almighty Niah."
"But... she`s beautiful," Mia breathed. "In the pictures I`ve seen, she`s a monstrosity."
"The Light is full of lies, Acolyte. The Suns serve only to blind us."

Shivs felt something sharp and deathly cold dig into his britches. He glanced down to the stiletto poking his privates, the little fist clutching in tight. Mia had wrapped herself around his waist, pressing her mother`s dagger into the boy`s crotch, the crow on the pommel glaring at Shivs with two amber eyes. Her whisper was soft and deadly.
"Whore, am I?"
Now, if this were a storybook tale, gentlefriend, and Mia the hero within it, Shivs would`ve seen some shadow of the killer she`d become and backed away all a-tremble. But the truth is, the boy stood two feet taller than Mia, and outweighed her by eighty pounds. And looking down at the girl around his waist, he didn`t see the most feared assassin in all the Republic — just a sprat with no real idea how to hold a knife, her face so close to his elbow one good twitch would send her sprawwling.
So Shivs twitched. And Mia wasn`t sent sprawling, so much as flying.
She fell into the mud, clutching a broken nose, blinded by agonizing tears. The younger boy (ever after thought of as Fleas) picked up Dona Corvere`s fallen dagger, eyes wide.

To call her disfigured would be to call a knife to the heart "mildly inconvenient." Naev`s flesh was stretched and twisted into a knot in the place her nose might have been. Her bottom lip sagged like a beaten stepchild, top lip snarled back from her teeth. Five deep runnels were carved into her flesh — as if her face were clay, and someone had grabbed a fistful and squeezed. And yet the hideousness was framed by beautiful curls of strawberry blond.
"What could have done that?"
"I`ve no idea."
"Love," the woman whispered, spit dribbling over mangled lips. "Only love."

"O, aye. He`s as dangerous as a sack of blackmark vipers," Mia nodded. "A right cunt and no mistake."
The boy raised his eyebrows, mouth slightly agape.
Mia met his stare, scowling. "What?"
"...My mother said that`s a filthy word," Tric frowned. "The filthiest. She told me never to say it. Especially in front of a dona."
"Oh, really." The girl took another pull on her cigarillo, eyes narrowed. "And why`s that?"
"I don`t know." Tric found himself mumbling. "It`s just what she said."
Mia shook her head, crooked bangs swaying before her eyes.
"You know, I`ve never understood that. How being named for a woman`s nethers is somehow more grievous than any other insult. Seems to me calling someone after a man`s privates is worse. I mean, what do you picture when you hear a fellow called a cock?"
Tric shrugged, befuddled at the strange turn in conversation.
"You imagine an oaf, don`t you?" Mia continued. Someone so full of wank there`s no room for wits. A slow-minded bastard who struts about full of spunk and piss, completely ignorant of how he looks to others."
An exhalation of clove-sweet gray into the air between them.
"Cock is just another word for 'fool.' But you call someone a cunt, well..." The girl smiled. "You`re implying a sense of malice there. An intent. Malevolent and self-aware. Don`t think I name Consul Scaeva a cunt to gift him insult. Cunts have brains, Don Tric. Cunts have teeth. Someone calls you a cunt, you take it as a compliment. As a sign that folk believe you`re not to be lightly fucked with." A shrug. "I think they call that irony."
Mia sniffed, staring at the wastes laid out below them.
"Truth is, there`s no difference between your nethers and mine. Aside from the obvious, of course. But one doesn`t carry any more weight than the other. Why should what`s between my legs be considered any smarter or stupider, any worse or better? It`s all just meat, Don Tric. In the end, it`s all just food for worms. Just like Duomo, Remus, and Scaeva will be."
The girl sighed gray, crushed her cigarillo out with the boot hill.
Spat into the wind.
And just like that, young Tric was in love.

The jar shattered on the creature`s beak, broken glass and fine red powder spraying deep into the horror`s gullet. Mia rolled off Bastard`s back to avoid another blow, scrabbling across the dust as an agonized shriek split the air. The kraken released the stallion, pawing, scratching, scraping at its mouth. Tric gave another halfhearted stab, but the beast had forgotten its quarry entirely, great eyes rolling as it flipped over and over, dragging its bulk back below the sand, howling like a dog who`s just returned home from a hard turn`s work to find another hound in his kennel, smoking his cigarillos and in bed with his wife.
Mia dragged herself to her feet, sand churning as the kraken burrowed away. Flipping the sweat-soaked bangs from her eyes, she grinned like a madwoman. Tric stood slack-jawed, bloody scimitar dangling from his hand, face caked in dust.
"What was that?" he breathed.
"Well, technically they`re not cephalopods—"
"I mean what did you throw in its mouth?"
Mia shrugged. "A jar of Fat Daniio`s widowmaker."
Tric blinked. Several times.
"You just thrashed a horror of the Whisperwastes with a jar of chili powder?"
Mia nodded. "Shame, really. It`s good stuff. I only stole the one jar."

Though referred to by the few scholars mad enough to study them as "sand kraken," the apex predators of the Ashkahi wastes aren`t actually cephalopods. They swim in sand as easily as their sea-bound "kin" swim in water, filtering oxygen from the earth through specialized gills. They eat anything not possessed of an above-average running speed, and are renowned for temperaments most would describe as "uncooperative."
The undisputed expert in their study, Loresman Carlo Ribisi, theorized they are a kind of desert worm, mutated by magikal pollutants from the ruins of the Ashkahi Empire. Ribisi postulated the beasts are possessed of canine-level intelligence, and to prove his theorem, captured an infant sand kraken, brought it back to the Grand Collegium in Godsgrave, and attempted to train it in simple tasks.
Ribisi constructed stone mazes, filled them with earth, and set the beast (whom he named "Alfi" after a much-beloved familia pet) loose inside them. Alfi would be rewarded with food if he successfully traversed the labyrinth. Ribis introduced more complex patterns as Alfi grew in size (six feet long at his last recorded measurement), also incorporating simple devices such as latches and doors to prove the beast`s growing intelligence. Sadly, Alfi utilized the knowledge one nevernight in escaping his enclosure, murdering the better part of the zoology faculty, including a rather disappointed Ribisi, before he was dispatched by a cadre of baffled Luminatii.
Ordinances about the keeping of wildlife within college grounds were tightened considerably after this affair.

Mercurio named these trials "trasure hunts," and though they varied in difficulty and danger to life and limb, they almost always began wtih Mia awakening with a mild slumberweed headache in unfamiliar surroundings. Once, after a lesson in the principles of magnetism, she`d awoken in the pitch-black of Godsgrave`s sewers with nothing but an iron hairpin and piece of chalk to help find her way out. After six months of lessons in the tongue of Old Ashkah, she`d awoken five miles into the Godsgrave necropolis with half a skin of water and directions to exit written in Ashkahi script.
Of course, while Mercurio called them "treasure hunts," the only "treasure" to be found at the end of these exercises was "continued existence." Still, they did make for a singularly dedicated student.

"What the 'byss is going on in that tower?" Tric whispered.
"Mishap," Mia replied.
"...What?"
"Three dried buds of Liisian loganberry, a third of a cup of molasses essence, and a pinch of dried cordwood root." She shrugged. "Mishap. You might know it as 'P.ubmer`s Bane.'"
Tric blinked. "You poisoned the entire garrison?"
"Well, technically Fat Daniio poisoned them. He served the evemeal. I just added the spice." Mia smiled. "It`s not lethal. They`re just suffering a touch of... intestinal distress."