Khaseem Bai watched the execution without much interest before turning back to his two prisoners. His eyes were dark and intelligent and had a pragmatic cruelty about them as he measured each of them.

"Well one of the two of you looks fearsome enough to have given the Thieves Guild pause," he declared. Anya relaxed ever so slightly. It would be better to die fighting than to be killed in chains but it seemed that the bandit lord had other plans for them, else he would scarcely bother to keep them alive.

"As it happens without Ibn-vakir I will require someone to guide me to my treasure, perhaps..." he drew a long knife from his belt and tossed it into the dirt between the two prisoners, "the survivor would be interested in such a position?" 

Anya glanced sidelong at the priest, perhaps she could kill him before he could employ his arts, perhaps not, but either way it seemed of little matter. By herself it would be difficult, perhaps impossible to overcome Khaseem Bai and his men, and much as she hated to admit it, Abelard could be an ally to her in that.

"Lord," she said in his own tongue, with which she had a passing familiarity from time spent as a pirate up in Villayet, "I could cut this whelps throat as you ask, but what if Ibn-vakir told lies to all of us, perhaps together we have enough of the truth to pass the traps he described and reach the Opal." Kasseem frowned, arching a dark eyebrow.

"Traps?" he asked, it wasn't clear if he believed the Aesir woman, but there was enough uncertainty in his voice that she knew she had him.

"There are three traps Lord," she proclaimed, confident for all that these traps existed, so far as she knew entirely in her imagination.

"Fool!" Abelard broke in, "There are five traps each more fiendish than the last! I learned of them in my study and I make Ibn-vakir tell me what he knew of them!"