My arms were pretty tired by the time I found my way to the apartments that Tawny had led me too. While the guild girl was more than happy to help me get established in the sponsored housing, she plum refused to bear my burden.

  Not for free anyway. As much as I considered myself a generous man, ain't no way in hell I was sharin' this bounty.

  "Do you really need all that Mister Roche? You're going to end up choking on your own sick at this rate."

  "Nope," I managed to grunt as every tendril in my mutate arms strained to keep a grip on the full case of expensive whiskey and the fat pack of sealed cigarillos that my two newest benefactors had gifted me.

  Sure from one perspective I'd done sold my soul pretty cheap. If it weren't for the promise of keepin' my secrets and playing nice with the Flock, anyway. I probably could've gotten away with demanding a fat sack of mulah instead, but see, there just wasn't some things money could buy.

  Cigars imported from the homeland and whiskey aged longer than I'd walked the earth?

  Fuckin' priceless.

  "You know what? Who cares? It's your health," Tawny said with a shrug and a little sigh, "as you're upright and taking contracts, you can drink yourself to death for all I care."

  "Good. Cause you don't get a say. I'm done with so many motherfuc- er, folks telling me what I can and can't do."

  Tawny nodded, "Yeah. You were in the back office long enough that I started to worry, Mister Roche. What happened in there anyway?"

  I shrugged, "Just got a lot of questions and then a promotion, a raise and a job to do."

  "And that's all? It's a little odd. Normally when a hunter's been pulled into a meeting like that..."

  "Just a promotion, Tawny," I assure with a red faced smile, damn why were there so many stairs?

  "Fine. Keep your secrets then," she said with a coy smile, "anyway..." she stopped at the top of the stairs and inserted a key into the brass lock on a nondescript door.

  The tenement build was a few minutes walk from the Guild and off the main road, tucked into the network of alleys that seemed to make up so much of Agustus' Hope's Lowtown. The apartments were tall and narrow, with a set of doors facing onto the street and a private stair for each. I felt a little strange being so high off the ground, like I had climbed to the top of a tall tree, could almost feel the world sway with the wind.

  "This is my stop. My apartment is actually four doors down. Take your key," she said, reaching around my burden to drop the small bit of worked metal into my coat, "and this is the spare," she added another key, this one hanging on a thin string. She looped it on the handle of the case, "this is your place. You're officially the most junior ranked member to have a unit in the building. There's a water tank upstairs, a shared toilet and bath house. You can cook in the kitchen inside or go for chow at the Guild. It's cheap for Trailhands and above. The rent is taken out of your monthly payment automatically."

  "Wait, I have to pay for this?" I asked and nearly dropped my loot as I stumble across the threshold into my new home.

  Tawny gave me a deadpan look, "Yes, Mister Roche, you have to pay for this. The guild doesn't just give away apartments. You're lucky. Most Hunters are paying twice as much for inn rooms or roughing it in tents out in the dunes. Dunno why they gave you a private room but-"

  "Because I'm worth it, baby," I said and finally dropped my loot on a table by the door with a relieved sigh, "oh, thank fuckin' gods," I muttered as I flexed my arms and rubbed my sore wrists, "you wouldn't believe the day I've had."

  "No. Probably not," Tawny said watching the strange movement of flesh beneath my gloves, "say... Since we're kind of working together permanently now..."

  "Yeah?" I said, turning to her, "you trying to charm your way into my trousers now that I'm a big man, little lady?" I asked through a tom cat's grin.

  "Oh no. No," she shook her head, "I don't date hunters, Mister Roche. No I mean," she raised her brows and looked pointedly at my arms.

  I knew of course, but you know what they say about takin' shots. Aim for the heart, and if you miss, you might still end up in them guts. I shrugged off the stiffness in my shoulder and spared a quick glance around. The coast was clear, not a soul lurked in the alleys below, no watching eyes spying on two nobodies in the dying afternoon light.

  "You sure?"

  "Positive."

  "Alright," I breathed and stripped the glove off.

  "Oh," she gasped, "wow," extending a small hand toward the writhing mass of braided tendrils. They actually looked a little thicker since this morning even. I suspected my Cthonic Dexterity Ability had progressed slightly, maybe just from carrying such a heavy load. I used it so often it likely grew all the time.

  "Yeah. Pretty crazy," I said as Tawny reached out and touched one of the coiling, pulsating vines, it curled around her finger of it's own volition, the sensation of strange touch nearly startling us both.

  "Uh," I drew my arm back and replaced my glove, "sorry they're a bit grabby. Don't usually have people touchin' them."

  "No, no it's fine. It was just..."

  "Strange?"

  "A bit, yeah," she said and bit her lip, "hey, um, Mister Roche?"

  "Yeah?"

  Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.

  "Thanks. For, uh, trusting me. I won't tell anyone. I promise."

  I snorted, "No worries. I'd just kill you if you did."

  She glared, "You're an ass, Lorcan."

  I grinned and tipped my hat, "But I'm an honest one, Miss Tawny."

  "Okay. Well enjoy your new pasture. Try not to shit on the floor, I know wild asses aren't much accustomed to living in fancy houses." "she said and closed the door with a heavy thud and a click. I heard her small feet pad away.

  "Fuckin' women," I grumbled seemed to knew less and less about them the longer I was here in the New World. Every attempt at gettin' my pecker wet had gone so poorly. At least this time no one got... Well, murdered by evil snakes, I guess.

  I truly did miss Lottie. Thought for a minute there, down in the Vault's dark that I might have made something out of that. Hurt to think on it, but the whole tragedy was still fresh in my mind thanks to Alexander and Professor Clarke.

  That damn Vault.

  The damn Winter Wyrm. Still seem them teeth, still see it tossin’ Moxie like a sack of grain…

  Temperance and her fucking cult and all these others pullin' me this way and that. Would never admit it to a soul, but here, alone in my own place, the weight of the last couple days settled heavy on me.

  I felt lost, tired, and scared.

  And damn if I wasn't a little homesick too.

  I wondered how mama and pa was. How little was doing now. She'd be twenty-one, a woman in full, no doubted a Vestal to the Apothecary or a Scholar if that dream failed. My sister Alice got all the smarts, so everybody said, and I got the stupid and the mean.

  A little part of me was tempted to write to her. Even if the letter never made it across the sea, I just wanted to put down some of my feelings, some of the hurt. Set to ink and paper and let it go.

  I bit through the wax and pulled off the cork from a bottle and moved about my home.

  It was a single room, a small, brick oven with a pot rack, a table and chair, a small dresser with a wash bowl and mirror. A tiny desk with a slate, an artificed lamp and an empty bookcase. A window, a narrow bed with a closet at one side and a heavy locked chest at the foot. I dropped into the desk chair and found sheafs of cheap paper in the drawer.

  And I wrote.

  I drank, smoked, and I wrote.

  By the time I was done, I hadn't a letter at all.

  Instead, as the morning sun peeked through the cloth curtains, I had a journal, filled to bursting with all the things I couldn't tell the folks back home. Some of it was about me, what I'd done, how I had fun, been cut, bled and almost killed.

  Some of it was about this world. It's dangers and wonders. About the people I'd met, the wonders I'd seen.

  The more I thought on it, the more it reminded me of one of the few texts I ever bothered to read. The traders brought them in every year to sell to the farmin' folk and the city types who'd just rolled in.

  Almanac, they called it. Farmers Almanac for them, but I was no farmer. Not even then.

  I guess I had written something else. A practical guide to this world, my world, and the way I lived in it. How I’d lived it.

  For me though, it was a Gospel. Truth according to a Fool. Maybe somebody would even read it one day.

  Woke up face first in my own sick, a worrying stain on the crotch of my trousers and a funny smell my room. All notions of floating words and advancing powers long forgot.

  Oops.

  Well, nothing for it.

  Time to start the day. After a wash in the basin and some sloppy laundering of my dusty, thoroughly soiled clothes, I fixed some eggs and salt pork I bought in the market down the way. I was too hung over to much appreciate the quiet, civil, and all around pleasant community I found myself in. The fact that no one bothered me, no one asked me my business, and that no one stared too long, was pearls before drunken swine.

  I ate, shaved, and got dressed. Some humanity returned to me as the noon sun rose and I decided it was time to get off my lazy ass and get to work.

  First order of business was vistin' the Luna clan. I had meant to do it yesterday, as Tom had insisted. But, well, things came up.

  Alexander had provided me with the family's address as well as an official letter of introduction. Guess that was standard when meeting with the rich and powerful, even when one wasn't a socialite. Truth told though, I figured saving young Ernesto Della Luna from the Hartwell gang was worth more than a bit of parchment.

  Still, I would accept the gesture, if only because it came along with the rest. No point in turning down the good will of a monster, a man who could probably wring my neck like a ornery roosters with a thought and a bit of Aura.

  No. Better to keep him close, play nice. Or whatever it was that I tended to do.

  To my surprise the Luna clan did not live in Uptown, that bastion of the cities' elite. Instead they made fairly humbled, if very well guarded, home down near the docks. I could see it from where I stood, at the long stair that joined Lowtown's central road to the more industrial district of Agustus' Hope.

  The stairs were steep, leadin' down a cliff side and then into a wide bay.

  A hundred ships, most flying Imperial yellow and blue flags, bobbed on the clear, calm waters, their masts casting long shadows on the beach. The wharf was alive, the air filled with the caws of seagulls, the cries of the merchants and the roar of industry.

  I watched ashen skinned slaves haul cargo and freight, human and halfling master calling orders and cracking whips. That same rot of power culture, as above, and so below.

  The stink of ocean and burning Leviathan oil was thick, and so too were the spirits here.

  Unlike the spiritual and literal desert town above, mana was rich in the Port District.

  Not the bright, cold light of the Divines, but the deep, thrumming, primordial stuff.

  I saw all manner of ghosts, jellies and water creatures floating through the world below with my Arcane Eye. I wondered if it was a product of all that power drawn out the fat of the ocean's mightiest creatures, or simple proximity to the endless sea. Some scholar, priest or mage might know, but not me.

  My thoughts were elsewhere, as I studied the compound tucked beneath the shelter of a rocky overhang. The Luna estate was one part humble villa, by the standards I'd seen so far anyway, and one part modern fortress. The house low and broad, built in a sort of semi-circle around a central garden.

  Around that though were high walls and guards patrolling atop them. I counted at least a dozen men, armed with rifles and spears, wearing uniforms that looked both practical and expensive. Two arcane canons, thirty-pounders by the look, were mounted in stone towers on either end.

  Only my vantage well above the port afforded me such a view, and even then the gates seemed to loom above all else. The symbol of a dove clutching a leaf between its talons was inscribed in the iron.

  I knew the meaning of course. Peace and prosperity, the symbol of the Luna clan.

  It was a lot, to see their power so plainly on display.

  I guess I had made powerful friends indeed if the scion I had saved was truly their heir.

  "You there! Duster!" shouted a man from the tops of the walls as I finally crossed the cliffside path to the estate's foot.

  I tipped my hat, "Howdy, gentleman. My name is Lorcan Roche, Hunter, Trailhand, and a friend of the Luna clan. Might you permit me entry to parlay with Mister Ernesto Luna? He talked a lot about wanting to meet again." I half hollered so they could hear me over the call of gulls and the crash of the wake.

  There was a pause, and then the voice returned, "A moment sirrah. We need to confirm your words. Please wait near the gate."

  I waited that moment, not expectin' much, but just little longer and I heard something that made my blood run cold.

  Click.