“If all goes well, you’ll attract little to no attention on board. Do not keep to yourselves unduly, but also, do not be too sociable. Blend in,” the Archmage advised.

“Xixxy, you’re a mate, but you literally live in an ivory tower. You might not be 100% up to speed with current best practices as regards talking to people,” McKenzie told her, but did so with a smile. “Don’t worry - I know how to get along with folk, I’m a people person.”

Leni looked sharply around at him. “Seriously? I used to be ten feet tall and green, and I was still more socially approachable than you.”

McKenzie glared back. “Fuck off. I can be nice,” he said defensively. “I can even be nice to twats, as long as I know I can eventually punch them.”

“The prosecution rests,” Leni concluded with a sigh.

“Be a little bit nicer,” Xixaxa said, somewhat coldly. “Perhaps get some lessons from Lady Callena, who might choose to not call someone an alienated loner.”

“Oh yeah, Cally’s like the definition of nice,” Leni agreed.

“OK, Xixxy, sorry: you’re not an alienated loner but you definitely rock the whole beautiful-but-deadly-ice-queen vibe and that totally works for you,” McKenzie said.

“Oh, well in that case,” Xixaxa allowed a precisely controlled smile exactly 1.75 seconds of face time.

“And Leni: you’re only saying that about Cally because she’s the only one of us still talking to you,” McKenzie said, turning to Leni.

“You’re talking to me,” Leni pointed out.

“Only because I have to,” McKenzie harrumphed.

“Once again, thanks so much for the self-esteem boost,” Leni snorted.

“On the mission, be sure to at least give the impression that you are getting along,” the Archmage said. “Conflict attracts attention.”

“Pfft,” McKenzie made a dismissive gesture. “It’ll be okay.”

- o O o -

“This is not okay, Weds!” Shaveen hissed.

“Yeah, agreed,” McKenzie nodded, and sighed.

“I said let’s not make our jobs difficult. I’m probably gonna lose mine!” Shaveen hissed. “They’ll ground me at the next airport – no references, probably no pay!”

“I’ll make sure you get paid,” McKenzie assured her.

“Oh yeah, ‘ow you gonna persuade the elves to do that? Bat your eyelashes at them? They’re not as easily impressed as me, which is somethin’ I’m starting to seriously regret!”

Ouch, McKenzie thought. He was standing, with Shaveen, in her boss’s office – Shaveen had come to fetch him on her orders, looking righteously pissed off, saying she’d been told to bring him to the office ‘to discuss appropriate behaviour for servants’ in private.

“How much would you have made off this trip?” McKenzie asked her.

“More than you can afford,” Shaveen shot back.

“You might be surprised on that score,” McKenzie told her. “Look, for what it’s worth, sorry. Didn’t want to get you in trouble. My Guild will compensate you for any lost earnings and provide you with a nice write up saying you’re, I dunno, a highly qualified executive housekeeper or whatevs. You can write it yourself, fuck it.”

Shaveen looked at him narrowly. “There’s a bodyguard’s Guild?”

“I work for the Assassin’s Guild,” McKenzie shrugged.

Shaveen gasped. “Oh fuck!”

“It’s all different now,” McKenzie assured her quickly. “New management, it’s not just stabby-stabby-pay-me any more, we’re diversifying, but we’ve always done security work.”

“Really?” Shaveen asked, looking if not relieved, then at least that relief might be a possibility in the future. “I din’t know that.”

“Yeah, people generally don’t. We’re working on PR and outreach, but it’s still in the planning stage,” McKenzie shrugged. “Well, more of the explaining to people what PR even is stage, to be totes honest. I’ve been saying for ages that word-of-mouth will only get you so far with marketing, but you know what these old organisations are like, it’s inertia bloody central.”

“So you’re not here to kill someone?” Shaveen asked him, in the same tone you might ask a grenade if it’s pin was still firmly in.

“Nah, not my counter, I don’t do Appointments, just Arrangements,” McKenzie said, which he supposed was a bit of a liar-liar-pants-on-fire whopper, but fuck it, he was undercover here.

Shaveen seemed to relax, and smiled slightly. “I suppose I should’ve known something was up, what with you knowing Sherhali so well.”

“Who the hell is Shirley?” McKenzie frowned.

Shaveen whacked him lightly on the arm and laughed. “You are funny, Weds,” she said. “It’s what we’re speaking right now, any time I say something in Sherhali you switch over to using it.”

“I do?” McKenzie asked her. “Oh, yeah, I do,” he said, as he remembered he was a linguistic genius. “’Course I do. Are you, uh, a Shirleyan then?”

“Sherhalese,” Shaveen corrected him. “Well, second generation, now, it was my gran and grandad what moved to Vyrinios. Ow’d you learn it anyway? I only know it ‘cos gran taught me, my brother never bothered with it.”

“Oh, yeah. People have to learn languages,” McKenzie said, then unleashed yet more lies. “Had a Shirleyese mate, a while back, on a job.”

Unlike Cally, whom he’d unwittingly (it was almost always unwittingly) copied the ability from early on in his tenure on this world, he often didn’t even know he was speaking fluent elvish, or Izmodeian, or in this case a language he’d never even heard of.

“I think my cabin’s empty right now, once Frowny-face is done bollocking us,” Shaveen hinted.

McKenzie grinned, but then the door opened, and Frowny-face herself walked in – looking like a particularly annoyed thundercloud, of course. Her mood did not appear to be improved by the fact that McKenzie had been leaning on her desk. He stood up. Shaveen’s smile abruptly disappeared.

Frowny-face sat down behind her desk – there were no chairs for Shaveen or McKenzie in the tiny room, which suffered from extreme hull curvature, being at the bottom of the ship on the port side. This fact was making McKenzie a little nervous: the deck creaked and flexed underfoot a little alarmingly.

Frowny-face didn’t waste any time on formalities: “As per company policy, disciplinary proceedings are carried out in private.”

She took a small jewel out of her pocket, placed it on the desk and touched it. McKenzie felt a shimmer of magic, the bulkheads of the cabin became slightly blurred, and the background creaking of the ship’s timbers was muted. The same type of privacy charm as the Archmage had provided: although to McKenzie it didn’t feel anywhere near as powerful, and lacked the, well, clean feeling that the Archmage’s magic always had.

“Your conduct,” Frowny-face addressed them both, “has fallen short of the high standards expected of servants here.”

“Very sorry, ma’am,” Shaveen said apologetically.

“Fine – but it’s on me,” McKenzie said, slightly less apologetically although he genuinely didn’t want to get Shaveen in trouble: the hungry trolls looming at journey’s end was more than enough hassle, no need to add in career stress for her too. “I talked her into it, she didn’t want to do it, I’ll take responsibility.”

“I will decide who is responsible,” Frowny-face said sharply. “However, if you are truthful and co-operative with me now, then the repercussions for you will be less severe. If you are not, then you will be dismissed. Are we clear on that?”

Shaveen nodded, McKenzie gave a very slight affirmatory tilt of his head.

“I have some questions for you,” Frowny-face went on, after a few moments of preparatory glaring.

“Yes ma’am,” Shaveen said.

“Will there be a written test?” McKenzie asked.

Frowny-face just carried on glaring. “Wednesday, have you told anyone about our conversation yesterday?”

McKenzie furrowed his eyebrows. “We had a conversation yesterday?”

“Indeed,” Frowny-face confirmed. “You may recall that you threatened me?”

“Sorry, I threaten, like, a lot of people. Could you be more specific?” McKenzie asked her.

Frowny-face sniffed, then turned to Shaveen. “Has he told you about our conversation?”

“No, ma’am,” Shaveen replied. “I didn’t know you’d spoke. I really didn’t know he’d threatened you.” She shot McKenzie a glare of her own.

“Weeell, it wasn’t what you’d call a proper threat. Lacked specificity, wasn’t very graphic – not one of my better ones, I’ve got to be honest,” McKenzie admitted, rocking his hand from side to side in an uncertain gesture.

“So you do recall,” Frowny-face said.

“Yeah, the details of our cosy little chat’ve come flooding back to me now,” McKenzie replied flatly. “Not being funny, but you could do with working on your social skills.”

“This attitude will not help your case, I can assure you,” the elf woman responded darkly.

McKenzie sighed, and told himself to rein it in, then abruptly decided not to. “Thank you for the clarification on that very important point I care precisely and exactly nothing about.”

“Have you told anyone?” Frowny-face demanded, and slammed her hand down on her desk, her icy composure suddenly breaking.

As recently as a few weeks ago, McKenzie’s response to this would have been to shout back, or make a sarcastic comment along the lines of ‘temper, temper’ – and indeed a couple of snide responses cued themselves up, ready for launch, and his own temper tried to flare.

Despite his innate nature, dislike of subtlety and general contrariness, though, these days McKenzie really was trying, as the Archmage had advised him, to be less of the henchman and more of the, well, ‘evil mastermind’ was probably overplaying both the evil and the mind part, but he certainly was trying to at least stop and think a bit before defaulting to acerbic taunting and violence. He’d never admit this to her, but this often came in the form of WWDD: ‘what would Danandra do?’

Danandra, he knew, was not predisposed to patience with other living beings, a trait he shared – but even so she managed to think in twisty, devious ways that he, as the (nominal, at least) leader of the Assassin’s Guild probably should too.

So, WWDD? Apart from glare back, obviously. She would, McKenzie decided, review what she knew about Frowny-face so far.

She was humourless, controlled, disdainful of humans in general and McKenzie in particular: what had she said? Oh yeah, ‘disgusting, low creature’. She’d been surprised McKenzie understood that – arrogance, thinking that humans shouldn’t know elvish? She hadn’t liked his reply, either, which, he now realised, had probably come through to her in her own language.

But she didn’t seem the sort to be unduly bothered by insults from disgusting low creatures, so what had rattled her about it? Apart from the obvious threat, but McKenzie was starting to think there was more at play here. Thanks, internal Danandra, he thought. You’re welcome, idiot, he also thought. Realism was important, after all.

Well, there was a simple way to find out. Danandra or the Archmage would probably ease their way to this point gradually, but McKenzie wasn’t quite that advanced yet so he just ploughed on in: “Why do you care? You gave me a bollocking, I blew you off, you’re giving me another bollocking. So far, so what?”

“Answer the question!” Frowny-face, who should now, McKenzie realised, be re-christened Furious-face, hissed. He watched her carefully, in case her expression gave anything else away.

It was the fact that he was paying attention that saved his life, or rather, he supposed, Shaveen’s life and a long, boring, guilt-laden walk for him.

Furious-face became, ever so slightly, Worried-face. She had a problem, she wasn’t just angry, she was stressed.

WWDD kicked in: why the secrecy? Why a private meeting? Why not a public telling off in front of your employer?

She’s fucked up, somehow, McKenzie realised, and she’s trying to find out how much, on the quiet.

One of the woman’s hands was clenched in anger on the desk, the other was out of sight, under the desk, reaching for a weapon or-

Creaky, flexible floor. McKenzie grabbed Shaveen’s upper arm with one hand and a beam above his head with the other, fingernails digging into the wood.

“Ow!” Shaveen yelped – McKenzie was gripping hard. “Weds, what the fuck?”

Furious-face did something underneath her desk, and suddenly for McKenzie and Shaveen, there was no underneath, apart from the ground, very far below their feet, past a pair of open trapdoors. The cabin became suddenly windy – not the whirling high-speed tornado of a breach on a fast jet, but loud and blowy nevertheless. The papers on the desk started flapping around.

Shaveen didn’t seem to be the screaming type: “You fucking cow!” She shrieked at the elf.

“Yep – here, kick her arse,” McKenzie grunted, and flung the only thing he had to hand toward Furious-face: Shaveen.

Shaveen gave another yelp as she was swung up and over the desk and into Furious-face, but to her credit she kicked her hard as she barrelled into her.

McKenzie gritted his teeth and swung himself to one side, enough to get a foot onto the deck next to the new, gaping hole. He braced himself between deck and beam and pushed forward towards safety.

Shaveen, it seemed, was the good-in-a-crisis type. When Furious-face got back up and launched a kick at her, Shaveen blocked it and retaliated smoothly with a series of punches that certainly looked like she knew what she was doing.

Furious-face took one and blocked the other two, then shoved away a now-equally-furious Shaveen, towards the curved external bulkhead, rather than the trapdoor. She then reached under her desk. McKenzie half expected more of the deck to suddenly disappear, but instead the woman drew out a pair of long knives.

“Well, that escalated quickly,” McKenzie said, brushing his fingers off on his jacket: his nails now had wood stuck underneath them. “One-time offer: put the knives down and we can discuss this like civilised people. You’re not goin’ to like the way this turns out otherwise, trust me.”

Furious-face wasn’t at home to a reasoned debate, though – she snarled and sprang forward, knives extended toward McKenzie’s chest and throat. McKenzie ignored them and let her stab away to her heart’s content, ignoring the pain as she repeatedly slashed at his throat and stabbed at his stomach. He grabbed a double fistful of white uniform and made to pick her up and slam her onto the desk. Instead there was a ripping noise, and McKenzie was left holding a handful of soft black leather.

Furious-face bounced over the desk and towards the open trapdoors. McKenzie lunged forward after her, bashing the desk out of the way, and managed to grab her forearm as she fell. It ended up with Furious-face dangling in mid-air and McKenzie lying down on the deck holding onto her.

And she had changed. Although her features – and ears – remained the same shape (and her face was still furious), she was a mid-grey all over instead of porcelain-pale, and her eyes, which had previously been blue, were now red. She had been blonde: now her hair was a silvery-white colour. The white uniform was gone, replaced with black leather clothing, a portion of which McKenzie had just dropped on the deck when he jumped after her.

This was all very surprising, but McKenzie wasn’t going to let that get in the way of a good gloat.

“Well, well, fuckity well, looks like we’ve got ourselves a good old fashioned tables have turned situation! I bloody love these – seriously, they don’t come around very often. I’m just going to savour the moment for a sec here,” he said, grinning, and paused, breathing in fresh air.

Furious-face gave vent to a sound of pure, unalloyed frustration, and glared at McKenzie. It looked like she would really like to stab him in the arm, and was really close to possibly doing it anyway, and the hell with the consequences.

Shaveen endeared herself quite significantly to McKenzie by appearing beside him with a malicious grin. “Yeah, how’d you like it?” She said, but then got a good look at Furious-face version 2.0. “Wait, what the fuck? What’s happened to her, Weds?”

“Fucked if I know, Shav,” he said. “Let’s ask her: hey, Frowny-face, what’s happened to you?”

“Pull me back in and I might tell you,” Frowny-face replied.

“Okay, let me just consult with my colleague on that matter. Shav, shall we pull her back in?”

“Hmm, I dunno, Weds. Cow did try and drop us out the floor. I take shit like that personally,” Shaveen replied.

“Y’know, gotta say, Shav, you’re taking this really well. A lot of people just freak out,” McKenzie complimented her.

“Aw, babes. You’re so sweet,” she smiled. “I grew up in Shandrill Alleys in Vyrinios, Weds, you don’t reach adulthood there without seein’ some stuff,” Shaveen explained. “This is nuffink.”

“Well done nevertheless,” McKenzie nodded. “Think we should haul her back in though?”

“I suppose your arm might be getting’ tired, so yeah,” Shaveen allowed. “As long as she hands me them blades first, without any bullshit.”

“Yeah, well, that’s a given. Knives, without any bullshit,” McKenzie echoed.

Frowny-face handed up the knife in her free hand, and did not attempt to resist as Shaveen took the other from the hand McKenzie held.

“Take that too,” McKenzie said, indicating the bracelet.

Frowny-face really didn’t like the sound of that. “No!” She shouted. McKenzie wouldn’t have thought jewellery would be a priority when you were dangling fuck-knew how far above the ground.

“Okay, but why?” Shaveen asked.

“It’s magic,” McKenzie explained. “I thought it was just a personal glamour thing, same as her uniform brooch, but apparently not. I’m curious. Actually, while you’re at it, find the brooch, too.” He looked up and over his shoulder, as he suddenly remembered the privacy charm: the bulkheads were still blurred, good. “Also make sure that jewel she touched when she first came in is somewhere safe where it won’t roll out and fall, it’s keeping what we’re doing in here private. Oh, and we’ll need something to tie her up with.”

Shaveen gave McKenzie a level look.

“Please?” He ventured.

“Better,” Shaveen smiled, patted his cheek, and reached for the bracelet.

“No!” The elf woman shrieked. “That’s mine!” She made a fist, which prevented Shaveen from pulling the bracelet off her wrist.

McKenzie gave Frowny-face a slight shake. “Fucking play nice,” he said warningly. “You can do as we tell you, or you can try negotiating with the ground at high speed.”

Frowny-face glared, but relaxed her fingers. No additional transformations happened when Shaveen wrested the bracelet from her wrist, or indeed anything that McKenzie could detect.

“Thank you,” he said, then plastered an evil smirk onto his face that Danandra might have been proud of. “Now if you’d just hang about for a minute while my glamourous assistant finds some rope or something.”

“Well, I’ve found something,” Shaveen announced, re-appearing at McKenzie’s side with an actual pair of handcuffs. They were decidedly old-fashioned looking, like a prop from a western, but handcuffs they certainly were. They were a solid block of iron, with a single keyhole between the cuffs – no chain.

McKenzie gave vent to a snort of laughter. “Blimey, Frowny-face,” he said to the dangling elf-woman, “someone’s got non-standard preferences, haven’t they? What were you planning on doing in here? Or who?”

Frowny-face did not answer, except, of course, to glare.

“Dunno but she’s got a whole massive box of these, plus a load of rope and what looks scarily like gags,” Shaveen reported.

“Thoughtful of her,” McKenzie said. “You find the other stuff?”

“Yep,” Shaveen replied.

“Great, keep it all safe for a minute,” McKenzie said, then turned back to Frowny-face. “Now listen. I am not in the best of moods with you. We are not fucking vibing right now. I can throw you out this hole again and not lose any sleep. So, when I pull you in, you will not fuck about. You will not try and escape. You will not pull a knife out of your boot or whatever and try to stick it in either of us. You can shout all you want, though: your privacy charm’s still active, so there in’t nobody coming to help anyway. I will require you to give your word on this, or I will let the fuck go right now.”

“How do I know you won’t simply kill me anyway?” Frowny-face demanded.

McKenzie raised his eyebrows and gave his lips a slight upward twist. “You don’t.”

Frowny-face looked, for a moment, as if she was going to say nothing, but self-preservation eventually won whatever internal discussion was taking place: “Very well, you have my word.”

McKenzie pulled her up and into the cabin – she allowed Shaveen to click the cuffs into place with grudging acceptance, but displayed a lot less tolerance to having her boots removed (there was another, smaller knife in each), her ankles cuffed, her knees tied together and her arms tied to her sides: all rather efficiently.

“I don’t know whether it’s reassuring or worrying that you’re so good at this,” McKenzie commented. “If I didn’t know better I’d say you did this every day.”

“I’ve done a few different jobs in my time, let’s put it that way,” Shaveen replied. “An’ I don’t want ‘er getting’ loose, Weds – we could be proper in the shit if she goes blabbing to the captain.”

“Fair point,” McKenzie shrugged, setting the desk and chair back on their legs and heaving an indignant Frowny-face into the latter.

“Get your hands off me!” She spat at him. “Foul half-breed!”

McKenzie ignored that, and pulled the trapdoors back up. “Can you see the mechanism under the desk?” He asked Shaveen.

A wooden thunk told him that she could. The wind died down.

“Okay, let’s start with the basics: what the fuck are you?” McKenzie asked Frowny-face.

“Annoyed,” Frowny-face replied.

“Yeah, we didn’t die, did we?” McKenzie replied with fake sympathy. “That must’ve really boiled your piss. ‘Cos now there’s two people still aboard ship that know you fucked up, and you did fuck up, didn’t you?”

“Evidently,” Frowny-face commented, with a expository wriggle to demonstrate she was tied up.

“Do you want to go out the hatch again?” Shaveen asked. “Fuckin’ talk, or I’ll do it myself.”

“No you won’t,” Frowny-face replied. “You are weak, and lack the conviction.”

“Maybe,” McKenzie answered. “But maybe your friends don’t, all I gotta do is report you to the Captain, and they’ll take care of it.”

That got a reaction, albeit a very slight one, just a delay before the next scathing reply: “Then do so, and find out.”

That settled one thing in McKenzie’s mind: Frowny-face was not working alone, whatever it was she was doing, all of the officers were in on it.

“Why’s the bracelet so important?” McKenzie asked, changing tack.

Frowny-face looked at him wide-eyed. “Sentimental value,” she answered flatly.

Which was, self-evidently, more bollocks – but McKenzie didn’t care, he’d already discarded the notion of getting anything of use from Frowny-face. She was right that he wasn’t going to dispose of her ruthlessly, though, and that gave him another problem: he needed to keep her somewhere. At some point, the other officers were going to wonder where she was, and her office would probably be the first place they’d look.

“OK, Shaveen, help me set this cabin back to rights. As tidy as possible. Then we’ll have to move her – probably to Lady E’s cabin,” McKenzie said.

“Weds, maybe we should tell the Captain what happened,” Shaveen said, sounding, for the first time, uncertain. “This is already really weird, I’m not 100% sure I want to throw kidnapping into the mix. I mean, so far stuff has just happened. You’re talking about doing things, things what a magistrate would probably look a bit funny at, if you take my meaning.”

“I do,” McKenzie agreed, “but nah.”

He engaged Danandra-mode again. “See the bracelet and the brooch? All the officers have those – I’ll bet they’re all hiding their true appearance. Whatever the fuck she thought she was doing trying to kill us, it was protecting something, keeping something secret. They’ll react the same way as she did. No, we keep schtum about this, and-”

McKenzie had an idea.