You follow your geriatric companion's surprisingly spry spelunking through windows and over rooftops. Your keen senses save your group from being startled a few times. Twice, you come upon other small groups in the ruined canals; but both times, after pausing to observe, your eyes pick out that they are no threat at all; each a duo of peasant salvagers, slinking carefully through buildings to pry up the unrotted boards and joists they can find to sell for lumber, and some of the rotted stuff for firewood. The second group has found a small treasure - a decently carved wooden chair that has survived the rot that claimed so much else. They are carefully lowering it from a window into their tiny, two-man barge which they must stash somewhere inside the weeds before transfering later to a boat on the other side, to sell their pickings in the city. You make eye contact with the one of them; a young woman who looks to be just on the right side of starvation. She observes your heavy armament, and offers a nervous smile when you signal no intention to take the precious chair; then they are on their way. She makes a little hang signal, before she goes; touches the side of her nose with her thumb, touches her eyebrow with her index finger; touches her pinched collection of fingertips to the crown of her head before fanning her fingers suddenly. When you relay it to Cestié, he decodes for you.

"It's thief sign. She said there have been no skaveni that she has seen, but she can't be sure."

And you're the first to spot the fish-skeleton sign Cestié mentioned - he interprets it as a directional sign based on the number of rib bones indicating whether to follow the point of the mouth, or the tail, or neither.

There's only one small, minor-disaster of a fall. As climb up another brick wall, you feel your muscles straining. You're a strong girl; but you haven't done a great deal of climbing in your life... and the last few years of labor on the farm have required much less punishment on your arms and legs than slave life did. As you feel your forearms quiver, having overestimated the how you might scale this particular wall, you recognize how taxing all the extra weight of weapons and armor you carry happens to be. Then you drop, gasping an instinctive breath before you hit the brackish water. It turns out to be not terribly deep - deep enough to break you fall, and so you can fail about and not go completely under. Your pistols have gone under the waterline - the powder in them is certainly wasted, and will need to be cleaned out. But you keep Leonardo above the water, and that's something.

Bella is there at the floor of the building you just left before the failed climb; and as Maso peers down at you with worry from atop your destination, Bella is there to grab your hand and steady you, ready to help you climb out of the water back to the merely damp floor where she kneels, and there to consider how to solve the problem of the climb.

It's there, up to you armpits in swamp water with your blunderbuss held over your head in one hand and your other hand gripped by your best friend trying to help you up, that you hear it: the creak of boards behind Bella by just a few paces. And then your eyes track to the sound, and resolve it: a shadowed, humanoid shape; grotesquely fat and straining the boards as it approaches the blissfully unaware maid of Bella Collina.