The zinc-covered counter of the Alchemists' Association reeked of sulfur and old blood. The clerk, a pale man with thick glasses, pushed a heavy dyed-leather sack across the payment table. The sound of thirty large silver coins and five royal gold pieces clattered against the wood.

  Brog scooped up the leather with an eager, calloused hand.

  No one in the lobby asked how the troupe had demolished twelve iron-class mutant abominations without any losses or severed limbs. No one in Orynth asked questions when secondary contract chests were successfully delivered, let alone questions about two ragged boys hidden beneath the silent shadow of the walled dwarf leading the delivery.

  They exited through the association's heavy door into the gray rain of that dark afternoon. The fetid street air felt almost clean after the Catacombs.

  Brog tied the heavy leather sack to his wide steel belt. He turned to the team's structure under the rotting awning of an empty tavern.

  "The contract split is done. The twenty percent for the stinking bait's role is fair," Brog stated to the trash all around without beating around the bush. He looked at Miren, rubbed his singed beard, and gestured with his head toward the tiny boy, shivering from the cold. "Keep an eye on the map kid. Make sure his weak heart doesn't stop from the cold."

  Miren didn't even argue. The healer crossed her heavy potion belts tight underneath her thick rain cloak.

  "Two in the afternoon at the tinkers' crossing in the Bronze District. Don't be late." That was all Miren said before she started walking down the opposite alley, Nasir dragging his tiny steps to keep up with her in mutual, practical obedience.

  Malik watched the two disappear into the thick fog, before Brog's thick arm slammed into his shoulder like a pirate ship's anchor, launching him onto the opposite rainy street, dragging him toward the mercenary metallic docks.

  ***

  The forge in Burned Alley wasn't showy, nor did it belong to the Official Guilds. It was just a grimy hole dug into the side of an abandoned boiler in the Copper Districts.

  The heat there melted the calluses off your hands.

  Grenn, a grizzled blacksmith with ears disfigured by burns and a face scarred by old ash, hammered a bright straight blade on the anvil. Brog leaned over the stone counter and placed three silver coins there, buying the man's silence before even saying good morning. The smell of basalt dust was nauseating.

  "I've never seen your beard drag brats to my smithy, Boulder," Grenn murmured, drying his chin with a dingy rag. He looked Malik up and down with a blind, hollowed-out eye. "Has the standard for carcass sweepers fallen?"

  Brog scoffed, inspecting a spiked leather boot on the shelf, ignoring the insult.

  "The bait survives under the arc of my iron now." The dwarf picked up the rusty machete Malik had been using and tossed it noisily under the furnace. The useless street cleaver sank among the coal splinters. The boy didn't protest. "Arm this idiot. Something that won't break when it scrapes an exoskeleton or a dying street rat's ribs."

  The old blacksmith widened his one good eye, laughing gutterally. It wasn't every day that a stingy dwarf threw his own money around to arm a rookie, much less a beggar from the ghetto's gutter.

  After long, hard minutes of tugging and adjusting buckles, Malik ended up wearing a hardened leather doublet—pliable but thick, braided over his shoulders. It was the first real protection of his life. But the real drastic change occurred at his hip.

  Brog tossed a short, thick-spined knife onto the dark counter. The steel was matte, heavy, practical, and devoid of useless adornments—it didn't shine to betray ambushes. A groove on the side of the blade made it perfect for cutting tendons, agile and lethal for blind thrusts into the cracks of armored targets.

  Malik unsheathed the matte steel, testing the thick hilt lined with tanned cloth. The blade seemed to be born naturally from the knuckles of his skinny fingers, so accustomed only to cowardly dodges and slips on the docks. The weight of the metal ran up the boy's arm with a lethal promise for the fears resting on his shoulders.

  "Too long, it'll drag in the trash on the ground. Too short, it won't slice heads to save me... I paid a lot for this knife, idiot bait." Brog turned around, dragging his heavy iron boots toward the smoky staircase, wrapped in his scowling aura. "If you lose the edge playing around, or drop it from your waist crying... I'll break it over your leg."

  Malik sheathed the iron in the damp leather. The metallic click sounded pleasant tapping against the chest of his new doublet. He didn't grumble or offer any flattering "thank you" like a weak boy. Respect in Orynth was proven with footprints and sweat, never with long speeches from grateful children. They didn't intend to die and disappoint the pack in the blind trenches again.

  This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  ***

  On the other side of the drenched slum, the basements of the Bronze District housed the "Ochre Tea," a rustic establishment discreetly isolated from the Guard's attention.

  In a corner swathed in smoke, where independent hunters rested from the fetid winter, Miren placed two mugs on the hot, potholed plywood of the wooden table.

  The dark, milky liquid rose in steam, warming Nasir’s blurry face. It was a grain flavored with spices that loosened ruined throats. Miren lit another of her routine cigarettes on the opposite side of the wall bench.

  Nasir hugged the mug. The thick, spiced heat soothed his throat and warmed the bones of his stomach. It proved to him that he was alive, after so many deadly roulettes in the sewers. No coughing blood onto the sheets in a dirty alley corner.

  "Refinement-less magic is blind. Magic taught in the Academies requires the chest to possess intact, active, and strong mana valves straight from the cradle..." Miren began dryly through her cigarette smoke, her static gray eyes fixed on the quiet and brilliant child across the counter. "But for someone with a chest sealed like a tomb to be able to map the external ethereal signature in a raw environment so cleanly, the way you read the spores on the walls in the ruins... that is bizarre, boy."

  Nasir stopped the mug at his lip. He carefully observed the experienced mage dissecting him and boxing him in.

  Miren staunched severe hemorrhages and cast threads of pure, cutting vacuum without blinking in the dark depths to shred beasts; however, sitting there, he noticed that the lethal tutor feared the intuition budding innocently from the pale eyes of the invalid boy.

  "The blockages in my internal pathways don't give me mana to channel, but I'm not deaf," Nasir whispered softly, his white, unbreathing hands wrapping around the rustic hot drink. "When I use the remnants of alchemical stimulants, they burn inside me against the ruptured channels. They try to force the failed tunnels. It’s pure pain. But I see the shape of these crushing biological walls blocked in clean flashes in pain... And from the sewer of the failed half-open wounds inside me to the smoke of where we were fighting in the docks outside my body, it wasn't different. It just extended from the dirty side like friction, a blind static beam matching my hearing to the dust exhausting from the scouts' shells. Aether resonates without me needing to shoot spells from my fists, Miren... If you taught me..."

  Miren tipped her pale cigarette butt and crushed it abruptly into the dust.

  "Teaching doesn't change sealed flows. Your crushed chest doesn't blow things up with fire. Casting spells requires the power of oxygen rushing through pure veins; it asphyxiates weak mages even with perfect arteries... Your ruined breath wouldn't withstand it against the raw mold of magic for fractions of a second before your flesh paralyzed..." she cut in a dark, lethal, focused tone. "...And if the Academy finds out that the dead meat thrown to the gutter and rejected by everyone reads the vital signatures and scents of free-flowing space like an old, blood-trained scholar, they'll use you as a guinea pig and carve you up alive on a slab, you weak little runt with intelligence forbidden to outsiders like them."

  The boy sank his defenses tightly into the dirt under his fingernails. The veiled, affectionate, and protective brutality of Miren's words weighed on Nasir. The unspoken message was obvious and locked in: to keep him invisible from the world's shrapnel far above them so they wouldn't be noticed or quartered outside their safe, dark trenches.

  ***

  In the late afternoon, at the fetid misty crossroads in the Bronze District, Miren pulled Nasir by the collar out of the foggy alley.

  Brog emerged from the smoky furnace tunnels of the opposite alley, walking shoulder-to-shoulder with Malik. Nasir nodded silently upon seeing his brother's safe silhouette. The new doublet hugged Malik's back without loose fabric to catch on. The short knife rested strapped to his leg, silent and lethal, ready to be drawn. Malik didn't look like scared bait anymore; he looked like a street hunter.

  The four grouped up on the stone stairs of the public courtyard, without fuss or bravado. They had survived their first contract together. The pack was forged in sweat, blood on their boots, and silver in their pockets.

  A metallic clink cut through the noise of the rain.

  A fine silver coin rolled across the moldy brick until it fell perfectly against the tip of Brog's iron boot, stopping in a shallow puddle.

  All four stopped simultaneously. The courtyard fell into a sepulchral silence. That single, finely-minted coin dropped in the sewer was worth triple the entire frantic contract they had just closed with the alchemical carcasses.

  On the floor above, in the shadows beneath the long brick awning, a dark leather overcoat hid a silent observer.

  "Perfect kills. Executed amidst the disorder and shallow despair of this city... I must admit I admire your selective instinct, Brog," the voice resounded softly, yet dry and clean through the cold rain. "What a beautiful, practical use for mediocre bait. And still veiled by a tactical plant of a rare mind."

  Brog slowly reached for the handle of his warhammer.

  "Who the hell are you?"

  "Someone who pays far more than the Alchemists' Guild." The observer subtly shifted backward, swallowed up again by the shadows of the filthy roof. "Does this invisible new group have an owner? Would you accept the blood of far more dangerous targets, paying out the risk cleanly? I want an answer tomorrow, in the shadows of the Black Arches."

  The silence of the alley returned.

  Brog instinctively tensed his thick arm at Malik's chest level, pushing the boy behind his own shoulder in a total barrier stance, covering Nasir as well from the dangerous stairs.

  There was something much worse than raw beasts in the dark. A suited monster smelling a contact from his clean nest down into the muddy docks to hire them under the table. Miren's gaze met Brog's silent surprise.

  Those "dangerous targets" were the doors to the real assassin blades of Orynth opening up before them.