As usual, the place was deserted after dark. King’s Guards manned the towers along the wall and patrolled the main streets but largely stayed out of the district’s side streets at night. Anyone with goods of any value hired their own guards to watch the buildings after dark, and everyone else just took their chances. Isolated and sparsely populated, it was the perfect location for more illegal pursuits, including the uglier side to Rassat’s labor market—aptly nicknamed the Slavers’ Market by the common folk.
It could be argued that there was no such thing as a pretty side to a slavers’ market, but there was, at least, a more presentable one. During the day, the people who ran them were merely recruiters for outgoing vessels. The contracts they offered were simple. A man or woman agreed to a certain length of indentured servitude in exchange for transport out of Rassa and the promise of paid work after their debts had been discharged at their new home. What they didn’t tell their recruits was the jobs promised were rarely what they got or where they expected to go, and their treatment once they arrived hinged entirely on the whims of their new masters. Some got lucky, most didn’t. And anyone who left on such vessels was rarely heard from again. Still, to some, it remained preferable to what awaited them back home, and more and more might be seeking this way out as the unrest in Rassa grew. But the night markets were another, even uglier story.
On an ordinary mission, Daks would have sent out notes to his various contacts before he and Shura even left the docks, and he would have received word back within a few hours on where the next night market would be held. His money was always good, and his purchases never returned to tell the tale, so the lowlifes he dealt with thought him an excellent, if picky, client, as trustworthy as any of the other scoundrels who frequented such places.
With the coin they were typically given, he couldn’t afford more than one or two “contracts” each mission, and his instructions were clear: find only the gifted and send them on to the Scholomagi before the Brotherhood got to them. If no one appeared who had a gift, he had to walk away empty-handed, with the haunted, desperate, frightened faces of the rest following him out the door and into his nightmares.
Shura wasn’t wrong. He did lose a little more of his soul every time he went, and the people he saved only brought a little of that soul back. So why did he do it? Because he couldn’t live with himself if he didn’t at least try, for his own sake and for Josel’s.
He grimaced. He shouldn’t be here. He had no money to help anyone. Even if he happened on a market, he’d only be torturing himself with what he couldn’t do. And yet here he stood, searching the shadowed buildings and opening his Sensitivity as wide as possible, hunting for even the slightest tingle of magic from a gifted desperate enough to take the risk.
One advantage Rassa had over anywhere else was the distinct lack of magical “noise” he needed to filter out. At the Scholomagi, the hum of magic was almost overwhelming. Between the raw talent centralized in one city, the bespelled objects and magical amulets, the ancient relics in the vaults below the school, and even the very wall surrounding Scholoveld, a Sensitive was bombarded day and night with it and had to keep his shields up or he’d go insane. The rest of Samebar was better, but still noisy. Any Sambaran who could afford it bought and relied on magical items in their daily lives, and the hum was quieter but nearly as constant along his skin and at the back of his mind even in the remotest villages.
In Rassa, however, the Brotherhood had outlawed any magic beyond that which the sacred Thirty-Six wielded long ago. They’d also spent the intervening centuries culling those with talent out of the population, whether for their own ranks or to simply make them disappear. His trips to Rassat should actually be a relief, if it weren’t for the toll it took on his soul and the very real possibility of being discovered and imprisoned. Luckily, Sensitivity was only a receptive magic. Not even another Sensitive could sense him using it.
Knowing it was probably a mistake, he pushed his gift to its limits but still encountered nothing beyond the usual gentle, almost imperceptible hum of the earth beneath his feet. If there were any magic users nearby, they weren’t active right now.
A wave of guilt immediately followed his surge of relief. Apparently he’d only come out here to soothe his conscience. No gifted meant he wasn’t missing out on saving anyone… but he was. There were still plenty of nonmagical souls who would be shipped off to parts unknown this night, as they were every night, and he wouldn’t be helping any of them.
“You can’t save them all.”
He clenched his jaw and closed his eyes. He shouldn’t have left the inn. He could almost hear Shura’s “duh” in his mind, and it brought a grim smile to his lips. He should go back now, like a good boy, and hopefully Shura would never know he’d left.
As he forced himself away from the rough plank wall he’d been leaning against to head back the way he’d come, the sounds of booted footsteps and hushed voices echoing off nearby buildings made him freeze in his tracks. His rueful smile vanished, and he withdrew into the shadows again, straining to listen past his quickening heartbeat. He recognized one of those voices. And as the two men passed his hiding place and continued down the street, his feet took off
