The only good wizard was a dead wizard. Anya Sorensdaughter had lived with those words from her first memories. Years of travel had provided scant contradiction to the old adage. Priest and sorcerers would bable about their arts and the mighty feats they would work, but however mighty they might be Anya had yet to meet one whose belly would repel a sharp blade. Skavi the Black was a wizard, she had sought him out in far of Asgard, retracing her blood soaked steps through Aquillonia and Cummoria to the familiar snowfields of her home. There, in the frozen north, at the head of a vast glacier she had found Skavi's cave and faced the phantoms he conjured to protect it. For all their terrors they too had been bested by the cold steel of her sword, forged under the light of the winter moon and quenched in the Tears of Ymir where the glacial ice had smoked and sizzled around the red hot iron for a day and a night. Such was the craft of Soren Danicson and of his daughter whom men called Anya.

In these lands she was an aberration.  Even here, where men with sharp swords and hard hearts would always find welcome, there were few Aesir, and in all the world, there was only one Anya Sorensdaughter. Among the Aesir, those blond haired and blue eyed reavers of the frozen north, it was not customary for women to go to war, nor to travel beyond the steps of Cummoria and south to the sweltering kingdoms below the desolate hills of that grim country. That Anya had done both spoke much of her unique character. She was short for her kind, though she towered over all but the tallest southerners, with hair of a blond so pale it seemed a snowy white in the sun and picked up the character of the light in all other settings. A mark of Ymir's interest most assuredly, though that was rarely a good or a happy accolade. Ymir was not like the soft gods of the south, to be wheeled with and placated by the endless mouthing of empty prayers. Her beauty too was that of the ice, hard planes and angular bones which no rogue pot could tame. Her body was slender but wound with whipcord tight muscles which gave her the constant and unnerving appearance of a wolf about to pounce. There had been men who had thought she might fetch a fine price on the slavers block. The had regretted their mistake. Briefly.

Kafir was alive on this muggy evening. Citizens bustled about on business or in revel, some animated by they new not what, simply a feeling that this was a time to be alive and doing. Armed men, mercenaries hired by the prince of this sprawling city of adobe houses and high walls of sun bleached stone, patrolled or, more frequently, staggered and caroused according to their wont. These were troubled times, and though the Kolaks and their bands of raiders mounted on wiry southern ponies were always a threat, there was little they could do against steel guarded stone. Perhaps the prince simply felt better with men under arms than in the pay of his enemies, which was a wise enough strategy when plague and disorders stalked the land. A few of them leveled speculative glances at Anya, but the long sword of pale blue steel, the mail of tightly woven links, and the short hafted axe at her belt convinced them to find more congenial targets for whatever entertainment they had planned.

With his dying words Skavi had sent her her, screamed as the ice that had fallen on him slowly crushed the life from his body. The answer to the question of whether the shade of Soren Danicson had entered Valhalla. No. That her father had died in battle she was certain, having held his spear pierced body in her arms, but his shade appeared to her in dreams when the moon was full and the wind was cold, and so she had sought out Skavi the Black and he had told her, through his cracked and bleeding, of the curse that the Vanir shaman had laid upon her father. That such a black rite should exist at all astonished her and she could not abide that the shade of her father should be held by such a trick. The shaman had been slain by a spear of mistletoe fashioned with the blackened bones of Soren Danicson, all that remained was for the blood of the Shaman and the blood of Soren Danicson to be smeared upon the Opal of Vulkur, that Ymir might know that he had been cheated of a soul by base trickery and Soren Danicson might take his place in the halls of Valhalla. For Anya's part, she was eager to be done with the company of shades.

The gem had been lost long ago, stolen by the mighty thief Paven, who had carried it from the crown of the slumbering High King Wulfric in full view of his court. It had passed through many hands since then, but Anya, guided by Skavi the Black's dying words, had come to this place and found the thief who called himself Ibn-vakir. The Iristanian claimed to know where the jewel lay and promised to reveal the information to her in exchange for a fortune in gold. Anya didn't have a fortune in gold, but she suspected that her sword pressed to his genitals would prove equally persuasive. She reached the dockside where they were to meet, nose wrinkling at the smell of human filth and the spicy scent of exotic timbers. This was the thieves quarter of Kafir and she could expect Ibn-vakir to know every bolt hole and back alley. She needed to be quick and clever. As she neared the appointed rendezvous she caught sight of another man, hooded and cloaked. Perhaps she was not the only taker for what the accursed thief was selling.