Since the sorceress had shown spells-wall-walking and a little telekinesis-Kehrsyn was growing bolder. Not only was the woman staying out of easy reach, but Kehrsyn knew that the spells she'd used were little more than minor cantrips. She'd seen magic-real magic-several times in her life, and the sorceress's offerings were a far cry from those spells. She believed she could parry or dodge whatever telekinetic assault the woman might launch with her dagger, and the studded leather vest Kehrsyn wore beneath her blouse offered her vitals some protection.

She paused as if considering, and studied the woman some more, letting time pass. The sorceress was clearly suffering from some kind of contagious catarrh or grippe. Kehrsyn sucked in her lips and nodded, as if she was indeed deciding to go along with the woman's demands.

She waited until the sorceress cleared her throat again-Kehrsyn well knew how the grippe sapped people's willpower-and coughed to see how suggestible the woman might be.

Very, as it turned out.

No sooner had Kehrsyn cleared her throat than the woman stretched her neck and tried to clear hers. Kehrsyn put the pear to her mouth as if to take a bite and forced a sudden cough around the fruit. That brought a coughing fit upon the unhealthy woman as well. Kehrsyn watched for just a moment while the rasping cough gathered momentum, and just as the woman's eyes started to close with the force of her hacking, Kehrsyn made her move. Pear held in her teeth, Kehrsyn leaped forward, jumped up the wall with one boot clawing for just a bit of traction and stability, and neatly flicked her rapier at the woman's hand. The tip of her rapier caught her dagger just below the hilt and spun it out of the sorceress's helpless fingers. Deftly Kehrsyn caught the dagger by the handle as she landed on the uneven alleyway ground.

"You w-cough!" spluttered the woman, pointing with her newly emptied hand while the other futilely clawed at her collar.

Kehrsyn sheathed her rapier and took the pear from her teeth.

"The only protection I need," said Kehrsyn, "is for you to cover your mouth, so I don't catch my death."

She slung the blood from her dagger, sheathed it, and withdrew.

Kehrsyn hazarded one last glance over her shoulder before she turned a corner in the alleyway to leave the sight of the coughing woman. She caught a glimpse of the woman making mystical passes with her hand once more. Blue motes sparkled around her fingers, and something small and shiny zipped through the air to the woman's hand. Kehrsyn had just an instant to wonder what it might be.

The woman moved her hand to her mouth, and a high-pitched two-tone whistle filled the alley. Kehrsyn recognized it instantly: a constabulary whistle. One long, shrill blow was the signal for riot or assault upon a guard.

The response was immediate. Like feral dogs echoing the baying of the pack, other whistles began calling in the surrounding streets. Kehrsyn staggered, frozen by the abrupt flare of mortal fear, the return of the all-too-familiar feeling of being human prey.

The sorceress fixed Kehrsyn with a look of disgust as she slung the whistle back at the guard's corpse.

"Guess we'll see how good you really are now, won't we, hon?" she called out. Then, at the top of her lungs, she screamed and yelled, "Thief! She killed him!"

Kehrsyn turned and fled as the false witness broke into another fit of coughing. She ran down the twisting back alleys, dodging barrels of refuse and ducking under laundry lines, puffs of steamy breath peeling from the sides of her panicked face. When she'd been pursued as a child, she'd used her small size, fast feet, and knowledge of the terrain to evade pursuit, but she had none of these left to her. She was an adult, somewhat the weaker for chronic hunger, and had only been in Messemprar a few months. Worst of all, she was outnumbered far worse than she'd ever been as a kid. An entire city's worth of guards and deputized mercenaries had become her foes. Her only hope was that they couldn't identify her.

Kehrsyn ran down the haphazard scattering of alleyways, trying to find a way out into the main city streets. The whistles petered out, but she knew they'd sound again if she were spotted. In the meantime, she was certain the sorceress had given the city watch a good description and that the information would leap like sparks from guard to guard.

The thought struck her that carrying a half-eaten pear in her hand was not a wise idea. She almost tossed it away, but her gnawing stomach overcame her fear, so instead she slipped it in into the rear portion of her sash, where her cloak concealed it. The meager camouflage wouldn't pass a close inspection, but she hoped to avoid that possibility.

With her left hand she held her bag against her body, while her right gripped the hem of her cloak and wrapped it around her rapier's scabbard, both securing the blade and thinly concealing its deadly purpose.

Kehrsyn slowed to a jog. Moving adroitly through three thousand years' worth of urban growth proved more than she could handle. She didn't want to run pell-mell into a dead end, or worse, a whip of city constables, but though she slowed her feet, Kehrsyn's heart continued to race. She had never exited the Jackal's Courtyard in that direction before, and she knew neither where she was nor where she should go. On top of that, she wasn't sure whom she should fear more, the Messemprar constabulary, who would obey the law, harsh as it was; or the Zhentarim, of whom the sorceress had spoken in such dark tones. It didn't help that Kehrsyn knew next to nothing about the Zhentarim, and thus her fears had fertile fields in which to grow in the darker recesses of her mind.

The whistles started up again, piping out a rhythm that sent a message to other guards within earshot, followed by the clank and thump of armor and hobnailed boots. The dreadful sound came washing down the alley like a flash flood in a sandstone gully. The guards had come across the sorceress, and with her the guard's dead body. Kehrsyn feared that the mage might have brutalized the body before the guards arrived, making Kehrsyn seem all the more ghoulish.

Casting around for any hope as she trotted along, Kehrsyn found an alley branching away, one that had a wide gutter running down the center, a sluice for rain and sewage. It was a time-honored system for large cities in Unther; thus Kehrsyn surmised that the alley, in some distant past, had been a major thoroughfare, even though at present it was as choked with waste as a fat and aging noble. She took it, hoping it would lead to a main avenue. Even if she didn't recognize the street at the outlet, any major thoroughfare was better than being trapped like a rat in the narrow passages.

Despite its grandiose heritage, little more was left of the humble alleyway than a twisted, narrow warren. Though still somewhat broad in places, it writhed for most of its length among an indiscriminate collection of construction. The homes, huts, and houses jostled each other for living space, crowding into and sometimes completely over the alleyway. Kehrsyn was forced to slow to a fast walk to navigate it. The sound of coarse voices echoed down the alley, so garbled into a mash of random syllables by the irregular architecture that Kehrsyn couldn't even tell if they were speaking Untheric or a foreign language. The incomprehensible noise reminded Kehrsyn of those unhappy moments of her childhood that returned in her nightmares to that day, of hiding in the underbrush while adults hunted for her, speaking angry words at times too complex for her uneducated mind, but the intent of which was all too clear.

The twisting alley, bitter cold, and nightmarish voices threatened to overwhelm Kehrsyn's self-control, but then she saw, quite literally, a ray of hope. Filtered sunlight splashed the walls of the alley ahead of her-an egress into the main city streets. She turned the corner and stumbled into the open street, smiling in spite of her misgivings and feeling as if she could breathe once again. All she had to do was blend into the crowd, walk calmly near a group of people as if she were one of them, find a place far away from the Jackal's Courtyard to hole up for a watch or two, and make sure she spent her single coin slowly, while giving the impression she had a far heavier purse to her name.