The amber roof-tiles of Jūrapolis were slick with sea fog, and three inches of lacquered wood were all that kept five crossbow bolts from puncturing my liver. I skidded across the apex, silk robes tucked rudely into my waistband, clutching a steaming wicker lunch basket against my ribs like a mother defending her newborn. Behind me, iron-shod boots crunched across ceramic shingles. "Halt, Vessel!" a voice roared, booming with the resonant timbre of consecrated bronze. "The Sunken Cloister is sealed! Step down and submit to purification!" "Purify your grandmother's chamber pot!" I yelled back, leaping over an ornamental cornice. My boots caught an algae-greased ridge. Gravity, that merciless equalizer, ripped my heels out from beneath me. The leaded glass skylight of a butcher’s drying-loft gave way beneath my rump with a sound like shattering winter ice, and I plunged twenty feet into the pitch-black guts of a dead-end alley. I landed squarely on something living, bony, and violently sharp. The breath blew out of my lungs in a wet wheeze. Beneath me, a body bucked. Before I could even roll off the bruised heap of ribs and wet cloth, a whisper of displaced air hissed past my left earlobe. Steel bit into my collar, slicing a pristine thread from my chantry-issued vestment. The edge was coming for my neck. I reached neither for a blade nor for light magic. I reached into the wicker basket, snatched a piping-hot, saffron-spiced pork bun—steaming with rendered lard, toasted star anise, and caramelized leeks—and shoved it violently into the gaping mouth of my would-be executioner. The knife stopped. The point prickled against the soft hollow beneath my chin, piercing a microscopic bead of red. Silence swallowed the alley, save for the wet, heavy breathing of a predator suddenly choke-gagged by high-end dim sum. "Chew," I commanded, leaning down until my nose nearly brushed his greasy bangs. "Spit it out and I’ll break your fingers. Saffron is four silvers an ounce this season, you ungrateful wretch." A faint trickle of street-lantern luminescence spilled through the broken frame above. It lit a face smeared with gutter sludge, coal dust, and dried blood. Across his eyes ran a ragged linen strip, crusted black with old seepage. His skin was the color of curdled tallow, stretched over razor-sharp cheekbones. My teeth clicked together. I knew this face. I knew the three puncture scars along his collarbone, the way his jaw angled like an unworked wedge of iron, and the blind eyes hidden beneath that rot-tinged rag. In the pages of *The Cinder Prophecy*, this starving pile of discarded butchery was supposed to crawl out of the city's sewer mains three years from now, skin the High Priest alive, and burn Jūrapolis down to its salt foundations. Ignas. The Guild’s blind hunting dog. The future calamity of the continent. Right now, he was sitting on a pile of rotten cabbage, gagging on pork fat. His jaw twitched. His Adam's apple bobbed. He tried to pull the knife across my jugular, but I pressed my full weight down onto his scrawny sternum, using my knees to pin his knife-arm against the cobblestones. His ribs felt like dried kindling. Two good kicks would have snapped them. "Don't you dare waste the crust," I hissed. "That's clarified marrow in the dough." He bit down. A soft, involuntary crunch echoed in his mouth as the crispy pan-fried bottom gave way to the rich, spiced broth trapped inside. His knuckles, white as bleached horn upon the hilt of his trench-knife, shuddered. He chewed. Once. Twice. The sheer biological imperative of a starved body overriding fourteen years of lethal conditioning. A heavy thud rattled the trash heaps behind me as Giedrius landed in a crouch, his black ink-stained scribe’s coat billowing like crow wings. He rose smoothly, adjusting his wire-rimmed spectacles with one hand while drawing a notched paring dagger with the other. "Vakarė, by the seven drownings, what did you hit—" Giedrius froze. The scribe stepped closer, the street lamp catching the exposed collar of the boy pinned beneath me. Circling the starved boy’s jugular was an intricate ring of dark, needle-pricked ink: eight petals folded around a severed needle. The Black Lotus of the Sunless Hand. Giedrius turned gray. His spectacles slid halfway down his nose. "That's... that is an executioner's brand. Third stratum. Vakarė, get away from him. That thing isn't a person. The Hand strips their tongues and blinds them so they don't leave witnesses. When they break, the guild dumps them in the tide-trenches to rot." "Well, they dumped him in my dining room," I said cheerfully, shifting my knees off the boy’s chest and casually seating myself on an overturned crate beside him. The blind boy stayed motionless. He lay flat against the wet stones, the dagger still held loose in his curled fingers, his mouth working mechanically as he swallowed the last savory scrap of pork and broth. A streak of amber oil ran down his pale chin. His sightless face tilted toward the sound of my voice, ears twitching at the minute rustle of my sleeve. "He smells like gutter rot and cheap tallow," I remarked, reaching into the basket and pulling out a second bun. "Terrible table manners, too. But look at those shoulders under all that dirt. Good bone structure. Give him three square meals a day and some braised oxtail, and he’ll be able to snap an inquisitor’s spine with one hand." "Vakarė, he is an assassin from the syndicate I risked my life to flee," Giedrius whispered furiously, sweeping his cloak back to check the alley walls. "He will slit your throat in your sleep simply because he lacks the imagination for anything else!" "Nonsense. Dogs don't bite the hand that feeds them prime pork belly." I waved the fresh bun beneath the blind boy's nose. The aroma of roasted garlic and ginger drifted between us. His nostrils flared. His entire body went rigid, poised between the instinct to butcher me and the screaming void in his belly. "Here," I said, softening my voice into a mock-maternal purr that concealed the cold, calculating tally running in my head. *Keep him fed. Keep him close. Point him at the High Priest when the winter solstice comes.* "Open wide, little calamity. Mama's got plenty of starch for you." He lunged. Not with the knife, but with his mouth, snatching the bun clean from my fingers with terrifying precision, his teeth grazing my knuckles. He barely chewed this time; he simply ripped it in two with savage, desperate jerks of his neck, swallowing chunks whole as if he expected a boot to kick him in the ribs at any second. I patted his greasy, matted hair. He flinched violently at the touch, freezing like an abused cur waiting for the iron rod, yet held fast beneath the warmth of my palm. "Good boy," I murmured. "See, Giedrius? Practically domestic." "You are completely insane," Giedrius muttered, rubbing his temples. "We have thirty minutes before the curfew horn sounds, the Chantry's bloodhounds have our scent, and you've adopted a rabid murder-ferret." Before I could offer a suitably shameless rebuttal, a brilliant flare of blinding, golden light erupted at the mouth of the alley. The shadows were stripped away in an instant, bleached white by the suffocating brilliance of solar magic. Heavy armor clanked against stone, the rhythmic stomp of six disciplined killers marching in tight formation. At the forefront stood High Priest Valdas, his pristine white ceremonial surcoat gleaming without a single speck of city grime. In his right hand, a broad-bladed cruciform sword crackled with white-hot sacred flame, casting long, razor-sharp silhouettes against the damp brick walls. "Found you, false vessel," Valdas said, his voice dripping with righteous disgust as his gaze dropped to the street-filth clinging to my hem. "Step away from the gutter trash, Vakarė. The pyre awaits."

A Meat Bun for the Calamity