LITMIR.BIZ

      Arlen watched the great square in front of the Messengers’ Guildhouse as men argued with merchants and stocked wagons. Mothers moved about with their chalked slates, witnessing and accounting the transactions. It was a place pulsing with life and activity, and Arlen loved it.

      He glanced at the great clock over the Guildhouse doors, its hands telling the year, month, day, and hour, down to the minute. There was another great clock at the Guildhouse in every Free City, all of them set to the Tender’s Almanac, which gave the times of sunrise and sunset for the coming week that were chalked beneath the clock face. Messengers were taught to live by those clocks. Punctuality, or better yet early arrival, was a point of pride.

      But Curk was always late. Patience had never been one of Arlen’s virtues, but now, with the open road beckoning, the wait seemed interminable. His heart thudded in his chest and his muscles knotted with excitement. It had been years since he last slept unprotected by warded walls, but he had not forgotten what it was like. Air had never tasted so good as it had on the open road, nor had he ever felt so alive. So free.

      At last, there was a weary stomp of booted feet, and Arlen knew from the smell of ale that Curk had arrived before he even turned to the man.

      Messenger Curk was clad in beaten armor of boiled leather, painted with reasonably fresh wards. Not as strong as Arlen’s fluted steel, but a good deal lighter and more flexible. His bald pate was ringed by long blond hair streaked with gray, which fell in greasy gnarls around a weathered face. His beard was thick and roughly cropped, matted like his hair. He had a dented shield strapped to his back and a worn spear in his hand.

      Curk stopped to regard Arlen’s shining new armor and shield, and his eyes took a covetous gleam for an instant. He covered it with a derisive snort.

      ‘Fancy suit for an apprentice.’ He poked his spear into Arlen’s breastplate. ‘Most Messengers need to earn their armor, but not Master Cob’s apprentice, it seems.’

      Arlen batted the speartip aside, but not before he heard it scratch the surface he had spent countless hours polishing. Memories came to him unbidden: the flame demon he struck from his mother’s back as a boy, and the long cold night they spent in the mud of an animal pen as the demons danced about testing the wards for a weakness. Of the night he had accidentally cut the arm from a fifteen-foot tall rock demon, and the enmity it bore him to this day.

      He balled a fist, putting it under Curk’s hooked nose. ‘What I done or not ent your business, Curk. Touch my armor again and the sun as my witness, you’ll be spitting teeth.’

      Curk narrowed his eyes. He was bigger than Arlen, but Arlen was young and strong and sober. Perhaps that was why he stepped back after a moment and nodded an apology. Or perhaps it was because he was more afraid of losing the strong back of an apprentice Messenger when it came time to load and unload the carts.

      ‘Din’t mean nothin’ by it,’ Curk grumbled, ‘but you ent gonna be much of a Messenger if you’re afraid to get your armor scratched. Now lift your feet. Guildmaster wants to see us before we go. Sooner we get that done, sooner we can be on the road.’

      Arlen forgot his irritation in an instant, following Curk into the Guildhouse. A clerk ushered them right into Guildmaster Malcum’s office, a large chamber cluttered with tables, maps, and slates. A former Messenger himself, the guildmaster had lost an eye and part of his face to the corelings, but he continued to Message for years after the injury. His hair was graying now, but he was still a powerfully built man, and not one to cross lightly. A wave of his pen could bring dawn or dusk to a Messenger’s career, or crush the fortune of a great house. The guildmaster was at his desk, signing what seemed an endless stack of forms.

      ‘You’ll have to excuse me if I keep signing while we talk,’ Malcum said. ‘If I stop even for an instant, the pile doubles in size. Have a seat. Drink?’ he gestured to a crystal decanter on the edge of his desk. It was filled with an amber liquid, and there were glasses besides.

      Curk’s eyes lit up. ‘Don’t mind if I do.’ He poured a glass and threw it back, grimacing as he filled another near to the rim before taking his seat.

      ‘Your trip to Duke’s Coal is postponed,’ Malcum said. ‘I have a more pressing assignment for you.’

      Curk looked down at the crystal glass in his hand, and his eyes narrowed. ‘Where to?’

      ‘Count Brayan’s Gold,’ Malcum said, his eyes still on the papers. Arlen’s heart leapt. Brayan’s Gold was the most remote mining town in the duchy. Ten nights’ travel from the city proper, it was the sole mine on the third mountain to the west, and higher up than any other.

      ‘That’s Sandar’s run,’ Curk protested.

      Malcum blotted the ink on a form, turning it over onto a growing stack. His pen darted to dip in the inkwell. ‘It was, but Sandar fell off his ripping horse yesterday. Leg’s broke.’

      ‘Corespawn it,’ Curk muttered. He drank half his glass in one gulp and shook his head. ‘Send someone else. I’m too old to spend weeks on end freezing my arse off and gasping for breath in the thin air.’

      ‘No one else is available on short notice,’ Malcum said, continuing to sign and blot.

      Curk shrugged. ‘Then Count Brayan will have to wait.’

      ‘The count is offering one thousand gold suns for the job,’ Malcum said.

      Both Curk and Arlen gaped. A thousand suns was a fortune for any Message run.

      ‘What’s the claw?’ Curk asked suspiciously. ‘What do they need so badly it can’t wait?’

      Malcum’s hands finally stopped moving, and he looked up. ‘Thundersticks. A cartload.’

      Curk shook his head. ‘Ohhh, no!’ He downed the rest of his glass and thumped it on the guildmaster’s desk.

      Thundersticks, Arlen thought, digesting the word. He had read of them in the Duke’s Library, though the books containing their exact composition had been forbidden. Unlike most other flamework, thundersticks could be set off by impact as well as spark, and in the mountains, an accidental blast could cause an avalanche even if the explosion itself didn’t kill.

      ‘You want a rush job, carrying thundersticks?’ Curk asked incredulously. ‘What’s the corespawned hurry?’

      ‘Spring caravan came back with a message from Baron Talor reporting a new vein; one they need to blast into,’ Malcum said. ‘Brayan’s had his Herb Gatherers working day and night making thundersticks ever since. Every day that vein goes uncracked, Brayan’s clerks tally up the gold he’s losing, and he gets the shakes.’

      ‘So he sends a lone man up trails full of bandits who will do most anything to get their hands on a cartload of thundersticks.’ Curk shook his head. ‘Blown to bits or robbed and left for the corelings. Hardly know which is worse.’

      ‘Nonsense,’ Malcum said. ‘Sandar made thunderstick runs all the

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