Aliza put a steadying hand against the tree trunk and watched the proceedings with disgust from her perch in the thick branches of an old oak tree. The spring rains had come and gone and, with the help of the meltwater from further up the mountains, had overflowed the river a week prior and washed a fresh layer of silt onto the floodplains, which had absorbed and retained much of the water that would have otherwise threatened the towns downstream. It hadn't yet been warm or dry enough to bake off much of the moisture in the soil, leaving large swaths of land on either side of the river as unmarked mires, made all the more treacherous by the green grasses that, fed by the rich soil, had already begun pushing through the muck and reaching for the sun, disguising just how unsuited the land was for travel to those who did not know it.
The merchant whose wagon had become stuck in the mire evidently did not know the land or else he would have known that the convenient ford that bypassed the toll bridge downstream also did not contain the flooding, letting out more water into the floodplains around it and kept the mud around it too saturated for anything but foot travel. And while this might be forgiven had he been an outlander, unused to traveling this river, how he was going about getting his wagon unstuck painted him as a fool. The mules had been unhitched from the wagon and tied off where they could drink from the river, the two guards had found a rock large and flat enough for them to sit comfortably out of the mud and play cards, and the merchant himself was sitting in the wagon shouting at the only one among them doing any work.
When the goddess of True Sight had spoken to Aliza in a dream and bade her to locate a particularly ancient golem, she did not question it. How could she? To be spoken to by the goddess was a blessing itself and to be directly given a divine mission was a mark of faith few could claim. This was also not the first time she had asked Aliza to retrieve a relic of great power; she and her sisters frequently received such tasks between their usual scouting duties. They were used to being told to find all manner of artifacts, from the extravagant to the innocuous. What the goddess needed such items for, it was not their place to ask or to know, so never did they question. Almost never. When Aliza had been told she would be seeking a golem, she imagined a great hulking brute of stone, like the pictures in the monastery archives. When the goddess had described a short slip of a girl, she doubted. It was momentary, but she had doubted.
:Why do you doubt me, Aliza?: she had asked quietly. Even as she slept, Aliza had felt the shiver run down her spine at the tone. She had witnessed first-hand the goddess's wrath and it was not fire and storm. It was the piercing bite of winter, the whisper of wing and blade in the night. Aliza did not know if she could answer back in the dream-speech, but she had dared not try. She only cast her eyes down and vowed, silently, to not question the knowledge of She Whose Eye Watches from Darkness. After all, Aliza had only been two days' ride away from the last sighting of a merchant in whose company a girl matching the golem's description had been seen. How could she have known Aliza would be the closest Sister to the object of her desire were she not tracking its progress?
And, as ever, the goddess had been right. Standing ankle deep in the mud, its feet planted firmly as it hauled on a rope tied to the hitch of the wagon, was the golem, its appearance exactly as the goddess had described. It couldn't be anything else, given the impossible feat of strength it was performing. The wagon did not move much every time it threw its weight against the rope, but it did move, and there were a pair of waterlogged furrows in the mud behind the cart to show how far it had come. Unfortunately for Aliza, though, it still had further yet to go, and its progress, however steady, was glacial, and the goddess preferred her prizes delivered sooner rather than later. And since it seemed no one else was willing to help the golem get the wagon moving again, Aliza would have to. However, she was reluctant to give up the advantage of surprise her position, unseen in the thick treetops, afforded her against the men who would no doubt object to her taking their servant.
Settling her balance on the branch and taking her bow in her hand, she gently drew a pair of arrows from her quiver, distinct from the others for the yellow dye that edged their fletching. The fine steel fieldheads of the arrows were marred by a sickly brown rippling, residue from the poison they had bathed in while they had sat in the quiver. Careful not to let them rub across her bare skin, she knocked the arrows, drew the bow string, and called upon the True Sight.
The True Sight was a gift from the goddess to all Sisters of the Sightless Eye, one that was vital to their work and equally difficult to describe succinctly. For Aliza, it was as if her senses transcended the limitations of her mortal shell. The True Sight brightened dark places and dimmed blinding light, identified ambushes, traps, and other dangers, marked trails and tracks, pierced veils, and revealed active magics. It sorted sounds and scents, determined truths and falsehoods with a reasonable degree of confidence, and guided the hand to where it needed to strike. Without the True Sight, many of the feats the Sisters were famed for would be impossible, and a fight against three-to-one odds would be something to be avoided.
With a Sight-guided turn of her wrist, she loosed the two arrows. The three men were so engrossed in their diversions they did not hear the snap of the bowstring. A pair of screams went up from the guards moments later as the arrows punched through their simple armor and lodged in their flesh, sending their hands of cards fluttering into the mud. The cries immediately had the merchant jumping to stand on his seat and peeking over the top of the wagon's canopy to see what had caused it. As he did, Aliza dropped out of the tree, rolled, and popped up on the far side of the wagon from the merchant. Moving swiftly and silently through saturated mud was an ordeal when one didn't have a suitable distraction, but the labored breathing and pained grunting of the guards was loud enough to mask the slopping of Aliza's feet as she padded lightly around the wagon and behind the merchant's back. Boosting herself up on a spoke of the banded wooden wheel, she siezed the merchant by the collar of his tunic and hauled him off the driver's bench, sending him into a sprawl in the mud. She followed him down, drawing her dagger with her other hand and landing astride him with the dagger pressed against the pulse in his neck. She held him there as the paralytic poison took hold of the guards and their gasping faded into feeble wheezing.
"Now," she said at last, when everything had gone quiet save for the golem's tenacious continuance of its task. "We are going to do this properly."
"A-anything, anything you want," the merchant stammered, raising his hands in surrender.
"Good. You are going to turn over control of your golem to me and then we are all going to get out of here alive."
