He left before dawn.
Lolo stayed in the wagon. He rubbed the middle head and told her, “Guard the wagon.” All three heads lowered at once. Six eyes glimmered in the darkness, then went out.
The marsh at night was quiet—unnaturally quiet. The marsh bugs that buzzed all day had vanished, and even the occasional bubbling along the slime bands had stopped. There was only one scent left in the air: wet, stifling, and that thing he had smelled on the injured people, lurking beneath the sourness.
The smell of singed feathers.
It was faint, like a thread woven through the scents of marsh gas and rotting leaves. An ordinary person wouldn’t have noticed it. But he wasn’t ordinary. He was a cat. His nose could peel the smells from the air apart layer by layer, like peeling an onion, until he found the innermost one.
He followed the eastern edge of town, went around the mayor’s round building, and headed deeper into the marsh. The slime bands grew thin here. In some places, they broke apart, exposing the black mud beneath. His paws sank into it, the pads sticking for a moment before coming free with a dull squelch. With every step, the singed scent grew stronger, as if someone ahead were holding an invisible thread and slowly drawing him deeper in.
Moonlight leaked through gaps in the clouds and shone across the marsh, turning the standing water into a field of shattered mirrors. His shadow fell across the mud, faint and almost invisible—the color of his cloak was too close to the night.
After walking for roughly half an hour, he stopped.
There was a feather on the ground.
It was black and long, longer than his forearm. It stood embedded in the marsh mud like a slender sword driven into the earth. A paper-thin sheen of oil coated its tip, gleaming purple in the moonlight.
He crouched down without touching it. He smelled it first.
Sour. Exactly the same as on the injured people. But stronger, fresher, as if it had just fallen from some living creature.
He pulled a glass rod from his leather satchel and touched the base of the feather. White vapor immediately rose, far more violently than it had on the injured people. Fine bubbles fizzed from the tip of the glass rod in the moonlight.
“The source,” he murmured.
He held the glass rod beneath his nose and smelled it again. Beneath the sourness, the scent of oil and keratin was unmistakable—not the smell of any creature in the marsh. It belonged to a warm-blooded animal, one with feathers, and a fairly large one at that.
He rose and looked around. Under the moonlight, the marsh resembled a vast black mirror. Nothing was clear. But he wasn’t searching with his eyes.
He closed them and rotated his ears twice.
His left ear turned first, sweeping across the west and north—wind, water, and the sound of a marsh frog turning over in the distance. Then his right ear turned, sweeping across the east and south. The wind was coming from the southeast, carrying the scents of marsh gas and rotting leaves. But beneath those smells ran a very thin thread—warm, carrying the scent of oil and keratin. The scent of living creatures. And there was more than one.
Two. Their breathing rhythms were different: one deep and slow, the other shallow and fast.
He opened his eyes and headed southeast.
He had walked fewer than two hundred steps when he saw them.
At the edge of the marsh stood a gigantic dead tree. Its trunk was hollow, like a doorless tower. The top had broken off, and several thick branches had been laid across the opening to form a crude platform. Two black figures crouched on it.
They weren’t beasts. They were people.
Beastfolk. They had human bodies, but their hands were not human—they were crow’s claws, with three forward-facing talons and one hooked backward, the tips covered in black keratin. Their feet were thick bird claws as well. They wore no shoes, and their talons gripped the branches as securely as iron nails. Broad black wings grew from their backs, and each had a bundle of black tail feathers trailing behind them. They made no effort to hide them; the feathers hung openly outside their clothes, swaying gently in the night wind. Their faces had the contours of crows—sharp beaks and cold golden eyes. Feathers covered their shoulders and forearms, a black so deep it nearly swallowed all light beneath the moon. They wore dark short tunics, but below the ankles was nothing but bare black keratin. One of them was grooming the flight feathers on its wing with a clawtip, moving slowly, like someone polishing a weapon.
The black cat merchant stood beneath the tree and looked up at them.
His ears flattened briefly, then rose again. Beneath his cloak, one tail moved, but he pinned it down with another.
He made no attempt to hide.
“You dropped a feather,” he said. His voice wasn’t loud, but it carried a long way through the silent marsh. “It’s stuck in the mud and covered in acid. Not very professional.”
The movement in the tree stopped.
Both beastfolk lowered their heads to look at him. Four golden eyes, like four copper nails driven into a black curtain.
The silence lasted several seconds. Moonlight shone between them, stretching the dead tree’s shadow until it covered the black cat merchant’s feet.
Then one of them laughed. The beastfolk’s laughter was forced out through its beak like stone scraping across glass.
“Little kitty. Nice nose.”
That beastfolk jumped down from the platform. It didn’t fly—it jumped. When it landed, marsh mud splashed in a ring around it. Its thick talons sank deep into the mud, the three forward toes spreading to brace against the ground, yet its body remained as steady as a nail. It stood half a head taller than the other, broad and powerfully built. Its wings folded behind it like a black cloak, while the bundle of pitch-black tail feathers swung once from the force of the landing before drooping again. Its feathers were darker, its beak longer, and the gold of its eyes colder. Its clawed hands hung at its sides, the keratin tips catching a dim glint in the moonlight.
Raisa.
He straightened, standing half a head taller than the black cat merchant. His wings spread slightly, letting moonlight slip through the gaps in the feathers and cast a fractured shadow across the ground.
“Do you know who you’re talking to?”
“The Night Crow tribe,” the black cat merchant said, his tone as flat as before. “The ones who specialize in gray-market business.”
Raisa’s eyes narrowed. “You know quite a bit.”
“I’m a merchant.” The black cat merchant slowly put the glass rod back into his leather satchel, as if showing the other party that he had no intention of attacking. “A merchant’s job is knowing where things come from. The acid in your crop is secreted from your gizzard, right? Of all the crowfolk, only the Night Crows can produce corrosive crop fluid. A very rare constitution.”
He paused, and his ears turned slightly to confirm that the one in the tree hadn’t moved.
“Your crop fluid also has one distinctive trait. When it evaporates, it carries the scorched smell of keratin protein. It smells like singed feathers. All three injured people had that smell on them.”
Raisa said nothing. His wings folded back, but both claws tightened at his sides, the keratin tips digging into his own palms.
“Who hired you?” the black cat merchant asked.
“You think I’d tell you?”
“No.” The black cat merchant said, “But I think you’ll tell her.”
He tilted his head slightly toward the town.
“The mayor was the injured people’s neighbor, and she’s this town’s protector. You hurt her residents.” He paused. “And you used two different methods. The two you splashed from the outside were warnings. The one that seeped inside was meant to kill. Whoever paid you—what were they offering to make you go this far?”
Raisa’s beak clicked softly, as if he were grinding his teeth.
“You’re sticking your nose into too much, little kitty.”
He moved.
He was fast. The beastfolk’s body became a black line beneath the moonlight, his right claw slashing toward the black cat merchant’s face. The three forward talons spread like blades, their keratin tips coated in a sheen of oil—crop fluid, the same kind that had been splashed onto the slimes.
The black cat merchant leaned backward.
The clawtips swept past the tip of his nose, bringing a wave of sourness with them. The edge of his cloak was grazed, and the fabric immediately began to hiss, sending up a wisp of white smoke. The acid’s heat traveled from the cloth to his skin, like the light touch of a red-hot needle.
He didn’t strike back. He retreated three steps, his hand reaching into his leather satchel.
Raisa gave him no time. The second attack followed at once, this time with his wings. The spread wings came sweeping in like a black wall, the wind they stirred carrying a fine mist of acid droplets. The droplets landed on the mud in front of him, and the surface immediately erupted in a patch of tiny white bubbles with a hissing sound.
The black cat merchant ducked and slid beneath the wings. His paw pads stepped across the wet mud without slipping—cat’s paws were naturally designed for ground like this. His hand came out of the leather satchel, pinching something very small: a dark brown pill the size of a bean.
He crushed it between his fingers.
The powder didn’t fall. Instead, it formed a cloud of extremely fine dust around his fingertips, the color of rust.
Raisa’s third attack came. This time it was his beak, stabbing straight for the throat.
The black cat merchant turned aside from the beak’s tip, raised his left hand, palm forward, and pushed the rust-colored dust cloud out.
The dust struck the base of Raisa’s right wing.
There was no sound. No explosion. The dust simply clung to him, like a thin layer of ash settling on his feathers.
Raisa paused and looked down at his wing. The dust was seeping between the feathers, slowly but with unmistakable direction—along the feather shafts, toward the joint at the wing root.
“What is this?” His voice changed for the first time.
The black cat merchant backed away five paces and stopped. His breathing was slightly quick, and the acid had burned three holes in his cloak. The edges still gave off wisps of fine white smoke. A little acid had splashed onto the cuff of his left sleeve, and a small patch of red had risen on his skin like a burn. But his eyes were bright—far too bright for someone who had just been attacked.
“Bone-eating powder,” he said. “It acts specifically on keratin and cartilage. Your crop fluid can dissolve the slimes’ bodily fluids. My powder can dissolve the joints of your wing bones.”
Raisa’s golden eyes contracted sharply.
He tried to flap his right wing. It moved, but by a much smaller range than before. A faint creaking came from the wing root, like a dry branch bending.
“You—”
“It’s only reached the surface for now.” The black cat merchant’s voice was calm, but every word was clear. “The penetration rate of bone-eating powder is proportional to the area of contact. When you flapped your wings just now, you worked it deeper.”
He paused.
“If you stop moving now, you have about half an hour. The more you move, the faster it spreads.”
The other beastfolk in the tree moved, spreading its wings in preparation to dive down.
“Don’t move.” The black cat merchant didn’t look at it, keeping his eyes on Raisa. “I have a second dose.”
He raised his right hand. Another dark brown pill was indeed pinched between his fingertips.
The marsh fell silent. Even the wind stopped for a moment, as if the entire marsh were holding its breath.
Raisa stood in the mud, his right wing drooping slightly, golden eyes fixed on the black cat merchant. That look wasn’t fear. It was something more dangerous than fear—the seething hatred of someone who had been humiliated. A crow whose wing had been crippled by a cat’s powder.
“Do you know what you’re doing?” His voice was very low.
“I’m protecting the people you hurt,” the black cat merchant said.
Moonlight shone across the mud between them. The white smoke from the acid burns had not yet dispersed, and the air was laced with the smell of rust and singed feathers.
Raisa’s right wing drooped a little farther.
The creaking grew louder.