The understreet lanterns are dim, and a violent, eye-straining yellow, turning everything stark and ill. In the steam tunnels beneath the Grease Market, they find a lookout in a chamber tangled with many kinds and diameters of pipe, around a steaming sump in the middle of the floor; bone-thin and draped against a rattling tube, a leg-length toothy wrench propped beneath an elbow, idly chewing a wad of something. He looks them over with goggled eyes as Ryssa calmly gives the words and counter-words that the elf patiently ferreted out.
"Looking for a wizard, aye?" he says, and spits to the side. "Funny."
"Funny?" The paladin cocks her head. "Why?"
"You can put on any clothes you like, you ain't any steamworkers," the man says, and lifts his arm so that the wrench's handle, as it starts to topple, lands in his palm. "And two foreigners like you have been meeting with the guard. Funny for you to be sniffing round our way after that, aye?"
"The guard wished to speak with us," Ryssa says, amiably, holding herself in a way that could be mistaken for relaxation. "I imagine they wish to speak with people down here, often enough, too. There's nothing strange there, to my mind."
"You look like spies," the lookout says, slowly drumming his foot against the pipe. "That or bluecoats. We don't like either."
The scuff of moving limbs against pipes, and the soft fall of feet, come from all sides; figures in goggles, with kerchiefs tied across their faces. Few weapons; but between them, a good showing of threateningly-held wrenches, hammers, hooks and cutters.
"Easy," Ryssa murmurs low, even as she casts a warrior's eye over the room.
The elf hisses back at her through her teeth. "What trouble do you seek here?" she challenges loudly.
"You're seeking," the lookout says, sneers and spits again. "You want a wizard? That'd be handing ourselves direct to the law, unless you show us that's not what you are."
"Show?" Ryssa says, deceptively gentle.
"We'll take one suspicious foreigner to a wizard." He shows a gleam of lamplight-yellowed teeth. "You can show us by reducing your number to one between yourselves."
Ryssa glances behind her, at the exit, blocked by circling figures. "Do I understand you aright," she says, softly and clear, "to mean that you expect us to murder each other?"
"More than a life's worth, to be the one a guardsman arrests for knowing of an unlicensed wizard. So show us it's worth yours."
"Do I appear equipped to kill someone?" the paladin spreads her empty hands.
"You look hardy enough." He jerks his head towards the water-filled sump. "Foreigners and drowning, aye? The Stormand cliché."
They glance around at the shifting circle of watchers, and at one another. The elf presses her lips together; Ryssa shrugs a little.
"You know I hate—" the elf begins, quiet as breath.
"I'm not drowning you," the paladin breathes back.
"Fuck." The elf darts her eyes angrily from side to side, assessing.
"Or watch them bash my head in with a hammer, thinking we're spies." Ryssa quirks her the ghost of a smile, and very deliberately begins to roll up her ragged sleeves.
"Fuck!" the elf says again, louder, cat-angry, eyes on the paladin's bared forearms, and then Ryssa curls her fists and takes a step toward her, and she can only react by dancing away, hands coming up ready, and they flow easily into familiar motion.
It must look real enough to the onlookers; they don't know Ryssa. Her fists swing like sledgehammers, punishing, heavy, slow; and the elf throws herself out of their way, spinning dizzyingly in the paladin's orbit, throwing quick, light blows, dozens to Ryssa's handful. The circle around them jeer and yell and hammer their tools against the pipes.
This is not how Ryssa fights; it lacks the relentlessness, the never-ending pressure that drives mere mortals to breathlessness and panic for its totality. The elf rages, ducking a punch and showering her own fists into Ryssa's side, below her ribs, half of the strikes harmlessly blunted by the lazy dip of a shielding elbow. Drunk on fury at the pantomime, and at what Ryssa asks of her, the elf doesn't even see the sudden and thunderbolt-quick foot that lifts her entirely off the floor; she is simply, suddenly, flying, all the breath beaten from her in a instant of vision-spotting pain.
Trained reflexes see her twist and land feet-first, ready to flow into recovery; instead, one sole follows a quick, slick, uncontrolled path on oily tiles. She comes down hard on one shoulder, rolls, and runs out of floor in an ignominious flailing plunge into the sump.
The paladin is nearly on her by the time she plants her feet on the pool's floor. There is no time; she lunges up even as Ryssa swoops, uncoiling into a stiff floor-braced line that introduces her fist just below the paladin's diaphragm, and she catches one of the arms grabbing for her and pivots the paladin's weight, the speed of own her arrival doing the rest of the work to pinwheel her over the elf's head, crashing hard into the greasy water. There's a moment of confused struggle, water churned to foam around them; and then the elf has one of Ryssa's arms pinned high behind her back, the other slapping useless at the surface, groping for the sump's rim, just out of reach.
For a second, it seems as if the elf is perched on the paladin's back like a precarious rider on a bucking bull; and then her knee viciously, repeatedly strikes where her fists formerly failed to land, slamming a rush of churning bubbles out of the paladin, and she presses her body down until the waves from their struggle still around them.
The yells and heckling have, at some point, likewise stilled.
The elf forces her fingers to unclench; first on the hand sandwiched between herself and the paladin's currently-unbreathing back, where their fingers are laced desperately together; then the hand which the onlookers can see, on the back of Ryssa's neck. She slithers out of the sump-water, rising to her feet in a slow, aching, sodden threat display, testing the range of motion in her shoulder, her blood cold venom coiling within every inch of her.
"There had better be a wizard," she promises, in a low, dark voice, advancing on the lookout where he stands in the enclosing human perimeter, looking at her now with some dose of fear; "or you'll beg me to finish you so kindly."
"He's another level down," the man says, licking his lips. "I'll show you the way there, and then we're square, that's what you were promised."
"Lead me," the elf says, and keeps cold, malevolent eyes on him, staying two paces behind as he threads his way between the pipes and into a narrow passageway behind them.
She does not permit herself to look back at Ryssa for any sign of her inevitable stir.
