As Sancia Grado lay facedown in the mud, stuffed underneath the wooden deck next to the old stone wall, she reflected that this evening was not going to all as she had wanted.

It had started out decently. She'd used her forged identifications to make it onto the Michiel property, and that had gone swimmingly - the guards at the first gates had barely glanced at her.

Then she'd come to the drainage tunnel, and that had gone...less swimmingly. It had worked, she supposed - the drainage tunnel had allowed her to slink below all the interior gates and walls and get close to the Michiel foundry - but her informants had neglected to mention the tunnel's abundance of centipedes, mud adders, and shit, of both the human and equine variety.

Sancia hadn't liked it, but she could handle it. That had not been her first time crawling through human waste.

But the problem with crawling through a river of sewage is that, naturally, you tend to gain a powerful odour. Sancia had tried to stay downwind from the security posts as she crept through the foundry yards. But just when she reached the north gate, some distant guard had cried out, "Oh my god, what is that smell?" and then, to her alarm, dutifully gone looking for the source.

She'd avoided being spotted, but she'd been forced to flee into a dead-end foundry passageway and hide under the crumbling wooden deck, which had likely once been a guard post. But the problem with this hiding place, she'd quickly realised, was it gave her no means of escape: there was nothing in the walled foundry passageway besides the deck, Sancia, and the guard.

Sancia stared at the guard's muddy boots as he paced by the deck, sniffing. She waited until he walked past her, then poked her head out.

He was a big man, wearing a shiny steel cap and a leather cuirass embossed with the loggotipo of the Michiel Body Corporate - the candle flame set in the window - along with leather pauldrons and bracers. Most troublingly, he had a rapier sheathed at his side.

Sancia narrowed her eyes at the rapier. She thought she could hear a whispering in her mind as he walked away, a distant chanting. She'd assumed the blade was scrived, but that faint whispering confirmed it - and she knew a scrived blade could cut her in fall with almost no effort at all.

This was such a damned stupid way to get cornered, she thought as she withdrew. And I've barely even started the job.