“Alright everyone,” Jackal said with a grin and satisfied rubbing of the hands. “Here’s how this is going to go.” He looked at the people assembled in the archery field, and Tibs had trouble not being impressed. There had only been eight names on the paper Tandy gave him; he hadn’t realized they were the names of the team leaders, and not just the people interested. Jackal had scratched two of the names, and now six teams were assembled, every one a Runner.
“This is a fight to the last person,” he continued. “You can make alliances, but there aren’t any teams. Pyan reassures me you’ve all been training as teams so this isn’t needed today, and this is more for the fun of it, and anything else, right?”
“Only a fighter would consider a free-for-all fun,” the archer next to Tibs said with a chuckle. She was tall and lanky; Melody, if Tibs remembered right. He hadn’t done any runs with her, but Mez knew her. His archer was standing with Tandy.
“If you end up on your back, you are out,” Jackal said. “I trust you to honor that. Again, this is for fun. There aren’t going to be any winners or losers unless some of you decide to ruin it for the rest of us.”
“There’s always a winner,” Anahita commented with a roll of her eyes. She was an earth sorceress Tibs had done a run with, but he didn’t know her beyond that.
“If you draw blood, you’re out,” Jackal said. “I hate to say it again, but this is to have fun, not hurt others. And before you ask, you break someone’s limbs, I will personally break two of yours. Better be damned sure it’s worth it because we don’t get healed until we’re about to enter the dungeon. So it can be a lot of time in pain, not to say what the others will do to you while you’re weakened. Remember, we’re a vindictive bunch.”
“You know,” the man behind Tibs said, a fighter who was on Melody’s team. “I’d heard the Jackal took over anything he was involved in, but I thought Pyan could stand up to him. She’d the one behind this, after all.”
Tibs snorted. She was only partially responsible. If Jackal hadn’t offered for the two teams to train together, Tibs didn’t think this would have happened.
“Now, does anyone have questions before we start this?” Jackal asked and immediately hands went up. He looked around in dismay. “Anyone have questions I can answer?” Half the hands dropped. There were soft conversations, and more went down.
“Vol,” Jackal said, nodding toward a bulky man in leather armor.
“How did you pull this off?” the man indicated around him. “This is the archery field. They’re only supposed to be used under the supervision of a teacher, and I’m not seeing any of them here.”
“Like they’d let us bash one another.” A woman said, and laugher erupted around her.
“I cashed in a favor,” Jackal said, “and when that wasn’t enough I pointed out that since the guild wants us strong for when the dungeon is going to eat us, fighting among ourselves served them too.”
Tibs wondered how Jackal had convinced Harry to agree; because there was no way this would happen without the guard leader’s approval. Not when he had a strict no-fighting rule.
“Oh, before I forget, if this training exercise spills out of the archery field, you’re on your own dealing with the guards. I got Hard Knuckle to agree a training field is a place where training can happen and that the training looks like fighting to someone who isn’t initiated, but he made it clear that if we dare take this off the field, there are enough cells to throw each of us in one.”
“Doesn’t the no bleeding rule render us archers useless?” someone asked. “Even a blunt tip is going to rip through someone.”
“Then consider this training to fight without arrows,” Geoff said. “Trust me, you’re going to need that on the second floor, there this—”
“I’m going to stop you right there, Geoff,” Jackal said. “There’s still a rule against talking about the dungeon out here. We’re Runners,” he told the assembled people. “We have classes, but we’ve all seen enough in our lives to know we can’t let some title define who we are. We need to learn beyond what the guild teaches us if we want to survive. And I don’t just mean the dungeon. When we leave here, there’s a world out there who isn’t going to care what class we are. Surviving there will require knowing more. This is a nice and safe—someone snorted—environment for you to discover where some of your weaknesses are in all-out fighting.”
“When do we start?” a woman asked.
“Now sounds about good,” Jackal replied.
Tibs dropped as surprise coursed through the crowd. He’d known the fighter would pull something like that. The man just couldn’t help trying to do something unexpected. He kicked the legs out of the man behind him and ran off before that fighter realized he was on his back.
No blood meant no knives, so this would be about his wits and nimbleness. The arrow in the ground before him brought him to a stop, and he threw himself sideways before the ground erupted where he’d stood. That had been lucky. He needed to practice feeling the essence around him being moved, so he could better determine what it would do.
“That was cheating,” the sorceress said as Tibs rolled to his feet.
“Rogue,” Tibs replied, looking for the archer. “It’s kind of what we do.”
“Well, this is what I do.” The woman let out a breath and moved her hands, tracing essence with her fingertips. Tibs would love to see the result and ask if tracing was something sorcerers learned early or if it was turning out that every teacher had a certain disregard for the guild’s teaching methods.
But he didn’t get to see the results. The archer swept her bow under the sorceress’s feet, disrupting the tracing. The woman landed on her back with an exhale of breath and a disbelieving expression.
“But you were helping me.”
“Just long enough for you to turn your back on me,” the archer replied. “The kid was a good distraction. You’re out, by the way, so put the hands down.”
“That is so unfair.”
“It’s every woman for herself in—” she yelled as Tibs barreled in the back of her knees.
“You shouldn’t let your wins distract you from the fight,” he said, rolling away.
“Serves you right,” the sorceress said.
Tibs moved. He didn’t expect to be the last one. Brawls weren’t his place. Fighting wasn’t his thing, but the practices had been good. Still, he did better if his opponent wasn’t expecting him, and soon, only those expecting an attack from any side would be left fighting.
He ducked as he felt the essence shift, air, forming a cylinder at head height. Too many people had picked air for him to determine who this was. Or even locate the person. Everyone moved so his sense of the essence in them was difficult to keep track of. Another thing to add to his exercises.
The click-clack of wood against wood caught his attention, and he saw Khumdar block a bow strike with his staff before the next one caught him in the knees and he went down. Tibs changed direction.
The cleric was out, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t exact retribution for his teammate.
Geoff whirled and swung his bow like a staff, and nearly took Tibs’s head off. “You’re not as sneaky as you like to think.”
“I don’t think I’m all that sneaky in the day,” Tibs replied. “I thought you were distracted.”
“There’s a lot crystal lets me do.”
Tibs nodded. Essence let many people do a lot of things. It was all about how it was used. Which sucked for him because he had too little of the essences he could be taught with, and what he had a lot of, there was no one to teach him. The only thing he knew he could do, he wasn’t willing to try on someone since Jackal and Carina had described it as him taking a golem down to rubble, and that only happened when one of them was ‘killed’.
He dodged the next two swings.
“You can’t win against me, Tibs.”
“I know.” Tibs ran off as fast as he could, ignoring the archer’s yell for him to come back.
He used the distraction of people fighting to kick the legs out of two other combatants. And was feeling better about his odds to be among the lasts standing when his foot was yanked out from under him and he landed face-first in the grass. He rolled on his back, ready to fight.
“And you’re out,” the man said, approaching as he coiled a rope around an arm.
“Radklif?” Tibs looked at his leg. The end of the rope was around his ankle. He tried to recall seeing anything on the ground he might have stepped on, but he was sure there had been nothing there. If there had, he would have known better than to set foot close to it.
“I hope this isn’t going to make you hate me more.” The other Rogue crouched and pulled the loop of rope around Tibs’s ankle loose and then out from around the foot.
“I don’t hate you. I was just angry, and you were convenient.”
Radklif sat next to him. “I’m glad to hear that. I wish I hadn’t been so full of myself and showed off.”
Tibs shrugged. “Someone else would have died. It’s what the dungeon does. Aren’t you going to keep fighting?”
Radklif shook his head. “There’s no way I’ll win, it’s going to be either a fighter or a sorcerer. I saw you running around, darting and taking people out, and figured if I managed to take you out, I’d call it my personal win and be happy with it.”
“What’s that?” Tibs indicated the rope.
“It’s a lasso. It’s a tool, back home, that’s used to catch animals so we can bring them back and sell them. If I hadn’t been the greedy kid I was, I’d be living by catching and selling them.”
“You didn’t have that during the run.”
“I couldn’t afford it then. And there isn’t much to catch in there. This gave me a chance to practice.”
“What were you greedy about?”
The other Rogue shrugged. “Money, same as most people. I didn’t need it, but I thought it would be easy to make some that way. And it was, at first. I was an okay thief, but I got overconfident. Was caught. Do they chop off your hand for thievery where you’re from?” Tibs nodded. “Yeah, that was going to be the death of me. Can’t lasso with only one hand.”
“You got the dungeon instead.”
“And fire. Your eyes are still brown.”
“Still too young,” Tibs answered, the lie being natural at this point.
Radklif chuckled. “You’ve survived this long with barely any essence. I’m not worried about you, Tibs.”
Tibs smiled. “I have a good team, I’m not too worried myself.” He noticed the Rogue’s expression. “Your team’s not so good?”
“We’re okay, but we threw ourselves together out of desperation after the rules were set. It was that or not do runs until some other team lost a member and pick one of us. We figured this wouldn’t be too bad.” He sighed. “There’s a lot of arguing and screaming. We barely survived our first run on the second floor. When I almost got crushed in that first room, they were talking about just leaving me there. We don’t get along like you and your team does. Like most of the teams that managed to form before the dungeon closed do.”
Someone sat on Tibs’s other side.
“Tandy,” Radklif greeted her before Tibs turned.
“Radi, Tibs, how were you taken out?”
“He took both of us out,” Tibs said, indicating the other rogue.
She chuckled. “I think that if you fall while bringing someone down, you can keep fighting.”
“I just didn’t see a point. How about you?” Radklif indicated the red mark across her forehead.
She sighed. “Felled by my own teammate.”
“Geoff?” Tibs thought the mark could be from the bow.
“Amid. I didn’t realize he could make wood grow out of the ground. He tripped me and I fell on another branch he had ready.” She touched her forehead. “He was beet red in embarrassment. If I hadn’t been out, I would have taken advantage of the situation and deal with him while he apologized.”
“Who do you think will win?” Radklif asked.
“One of the fighters,” she answered just before a thunderclap sounded.
“Do not ignore me!” Carina yelled in the following silence, glaring at a man on the ground.
“We have a winner,” Tibs said, grinning.
“Not who I’d have expected,” Tandy said in awe.
Carina looked around and noticed she was the only one left standing. Seemed embarrassed about it instead of happy.
Tibs stood.
“Is there going to be a round two?” Radklif asked.
“Who’s ready for round two!” Jackal yelled, jumping to his feet.
“I think that’s a yes,” Tandy said.
Tibs realized no one had established how long this was going to last. He suspected that if Jackal had his way either this would go on until the sunset, or until Harry took him away.
* * * * *
Tibs followed the woman. He’d rather be in bed. He was still sore a few days after the free-for-all, but his own training needed to continue. Today he was going to follow without being seen.
She rounded on him. “Can I help you kid?” she had the leather tube across her shoulder. He’d picked her because that meant she was from out of town, so she wouldn’t know to be careful around him. “Well?”
“What are you carrying?” since he’d been caught, he might as well satisfy some of his curiosity.
“Why do you want to know?”
“I’m a kid. I’m curious.”
She looked him over, took in his armor, and smirked. “You’re a Runner, not a kid.”
He smiled. “You called me that first.”
She sighed. “I don’t know what I’m carrying, and if I did know I couldn’t tell you. It’s in the contract.”
“Contract?”
She looked up, located the sun, and sighed. “If I answer, will it satisfy you or are you going to just have more questions for me?”
“Probably more questions. I don’t know a lot and I’m trying to fix that.”
“There are more important things for you to learn out there than what I do.”
He smiled. “But you’re here, those things aren’t.”
She rubbed the bridge of her nose. “How many people have you driven to distraction with your questions?”
Tibs considered it, ignored everyone from his team, or from the inn, or Bardik, Harry, and the guards he’d approached. “My teacher liked that I’m curious.”
“Teachers do. It’s their job.” She sighed. “Come on. I want to sit for this, and you’re paying for the ale.”
The tavern she picked was the Broken Tankard, and Tibs bought them each an ale.
“Do you know what a contract is?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Only that it’s something the guild uses, and maybe town elders. The sorceress on my team knows something about them.”
“Then why aren’t you asking her?”
“If I give her the chance, she’s going to use that as an opportunity to force me to learn more letters.” He looked at her. “How hard was it for you to learn your letters?”
“I started learning them a lot younger than you. Everyone in my family reads and writes, so it’s just natural, but you’re going to need to know how to do that if you’re going to deal with contracts. It’s what explains what you have to do. In my case, that I have to take this.” She patted the leather tube she had resting against her. “To a specific location. That I can’t open it or discuss the content with anyone. And that once I’ve delivered it, I am to take the receipt token back to the office where I started.”
“Where are you taking it?”
She thought about it. “A store called the Caravan Garden, it’s in—”
“Merchant Row,” Tibs said. “I know it. They sell a lot of different things.”
“And this is how they get some of them.”
“You came from the transport platform. I thought those were expensive to use.”
“Haven’t you used them yourself?”
Tibs nodded. “They let us out when the dungeon closed, but they gave us bracelets and we didn’t have to pay.”
“I don’t have to pay either. I have a Messenger token I show them and they take me where I need to.”
“Can I see it?”
She shook her head. “Sorry, kid. That’s something else my contract prevents me from talking about.”
Tibs nodded and let himself sense her essence. She didn’t have any. He expected it since her eyes were a normal brown. He couldn’t feel anything from her, but the leather tube was imbued. He could see air and earth, but other essences made out the bulk of it.
“What happens if you don’t respect the contract?”
“I’m going to lose my job, for one thing. If I do it to steal what I’m carrying, I’m going to be hunted down like the thief I’d be. If I do something small, like divulge information, then I’ll probably just have to pay some form of reparation.”
“How would they find out? Is there some sort of magic that would tell them?”
She chuckled. “I’m sure there is such a thing, but someone will tell them. There’s always someone out there willing to rat you out for a few coins.”
“Is the contract magic?”
She laughed. “No. Not with essence or anything like that. It’s just words on paper, but the people enforcing them are powerful. Rich enough to pay for adventurers if they want to. That’s where their power is. Their wealth.”
“Nobles,” Tibs grumbled.
“Businesses,” she said. “Some are owned by nobles, but not all of them. The Messengers are owned by a large group of merchants. It’s why most of what we do is get things to merchants.”
“Other people than nobles have wealth?”
“Of course. The merchants in this town, they have wealth, I doubt many of them are nobles.”
“But they don’t go around acting like they’re better than me; like they own the town.”
“Not all nobles do that,” she said, “but I’ll grant you they’re the exception. Noble is a title, it comes with wealth, but wealth doesn’t have to come with the title. It can come with hard work. The people who have to work for their wealth are usually more sensible about other people not having it.”
So he couldn’t just go by how wealthy a house was to decide if someone was a noble? He thought every new person who’d moved into the town had been a noble, but now he remembered the archer trainer mentioning how his students weren’t nobles, but still had had enough coins to pay to be a Runner. He rubbed his temple.
“I take it I’ve satisfied your curiosity?” she asked with a chuckle.
“No,” Tibs answered, “but I think I’ve learned enough new things for now. I keep thinking finding out things will make everything easier, but it only seems to make them tougher.”
“It only seems like that. It’s the pain of stretching your mind.”
Tibs reflexively touched his head to make sure it wasn’t getting larger before realizing it was a figure of speech.
“Thank you for the ale, kid.”
“My name is Tibs.”
“Then we are well met. I’m Anjika. Keep stretching your mind, Tibs,” she said as she stood, putting the tube’s strap over her shoulder. “It does make everything simpler; once it’s large enough.”
That, or his mind was just going to explode.
“Alright everyone,” Jackal said with a grin and satisfied rubbing of the hands. “Here’s how this is going to go.” He looked at the people assembled in the archery field, and Tibs had trouble not being impressed. There had only been eight names on the paper Tandy gave him; he hadn’t realized they were the names of the team leaders, and not just the people interested. Jackal had scratched two of the names, and now six teams were assembled, every one a Runner.
“This is a fight to the last person,” he continued. “You can make alliances, but there aren’t any teams. Pyan reassures me you’ve all been training as teams so this isn’t needed today, and this is more for the fun of it, and anything else, right?”
“Only a fighter would consider a free-for-all fun,” the archer next to Tibs said with a chuckle. She was tall and lanky; Melody, if Tibs remembered right. He hadn’t done any runs with her, but Mez knew her. His archer was standing with Tandy.
“If you end up on your back, you are out,” Jackal said. “I trust you to honor that. Again, this is for fun. There aren’t going to be any winners or losers unless some of you decide to ruin it for the rest of us.”
“There’s always a winner,” Anahita commented with a roll of her eyes. She was an earth sorceress Tibs had done a run with, but he didn’t know her beyond that.
“If you draw blood, you’re out,” Jackal said. “I hate to say it again, but this is to have fun, not hurt others. And before you ask, you break someone’s limbs, I will personally break two of yours. Better be damned sure it’s worth it because we don’t get healed until we’re about to enter the dungeon. So it can be a lot of time in pain, not to say what the others will do to you while you’re weakened. Remember, we’re a vindictive bunch.”
“You know,” the man behind Tibs said, a fighter who was on Melody’s team. “I’d heard the Jackal took over anything he was involved in, but I thought Pyan could stand up to him. She’d the one behind this, after all.”
Tibs snorted. She was only partially responsible. If Jackal hadn’t offered for the two teams to train together, Tibs didn’t think this would have happened.
“Now, does anyone have questions before we start this?” Jackal asked and immediately hands went up. He looked around in dismay. “Anyone have questions I can answer?” Half the hands dropped. There were soft conversations, and more went down.
“Vol,” Jackal said, nodding toward a bulky man in leather armor.
“How did you pull this off?” the man indicated around him. “This is the archery field. They’re only supposed to be used under the supervision of a teacher, and I’m not seeing any of them here.”
“Like they’d let us bash one another.” A woman said, and laugher erupted around her.
“I cashed in a favor,” Jackal said, “and when that wasn’t enough I pointed out that since the guild wants us strong for when the dungeon is going to eat us, fighting among ourselves served them too.”
Tibs wondered how Jackal had convinced Harry to agree; because there was no way this would happen without the guard leader’s approval. Not when he had a strict no-fighting rule.
“Oh, before I forget, if this training exercise spills out of the archery field, you’re on your own dealing with the guards. I got Hard Knuckle to agree a training field is a place where training can happen and that the training looks like fighting to someone who isn’t initiated, but he made it clear that if we dare take this off the field, there are enough cells to throw each of us in one.”
“Doesn’t the no bleeding rule render us archers useless?” someone asked. “Even a blunt tip is going to rip through someone.”
“Then consider this training to fight without arrows,” Geoff said. “Trust me, you’re going to need that on the second floor, there this—”
“I’m going to stop you right there, Geoff,” Jackal said. “There’s still a rule against talking about the dungeon out here. We’re Runners,” he told the assembled people. “We have classes, but we’ve all seen enough in our lives to know we can’t let some title define who we are. We need to learn beyond what the guild teaches us if we want to survive. And I don’t just mean the dungeon. When we leave here, there’s a world out there who isn’t going to care what class we are. Surviving there will require knowing more. This is a nice and safe—someone snorted—environment for you to discover where some of your weaknesses are in all-out fighting.”
“When do we start?” a woman asked.
“Now sounds about good,” Jackal replied.
Tibs dropped as surprise coursed through the crowd. He’d known the fighter would pull something like that. The man just couldn’t help trying to do something unexpected. He kicked the legs out of the man behind him and ran off before that fighter realized he was on his back.
No blood meant no knives, so this would be about his wits and nimbleness. The arrow in the ground before him brought him to a stop, and he threw himself sideways before the ground erupted where he’d stood. That had been lucky. He needed to practice feeling the essence around him being moved, so he could better determine what it would do.
“That was cheating,” the sorceress said as Tibs rolled to his feet.
“Rogue,” Tibs replied, looking for the archer. “It’s kind of what we do.”
“Well, this is what I do.” The woman let out a breath and moved her hands, tracing essence with her fingertips. Tibs would love to see the result and ask if tracing was something sorcerers learned early or if it was turning out that every teacher had a certain disregard for the guild’s teaching methods.
But he didn’t get to see the results. The archer swept her bow under the sorceress’s feet, disrupting the tracing. The woman landed on her back with an exhale of breath and a disbelieving expression.
“But you were helping me.”
“Just long enough for you to turn your back on me,” the archer replied. “The kid was a good distraction. You’re out, by the way, so put the hands down.”
“That is so unfair.”
“It’s every woman for herself in—” she yelled as Tibs barreled in the back of her knees.
“You shouldn’t let your wins distract you from the fight,” he said, rolling away.
“Serves you right,” the sorceress said.
Tibs moved. He didn’t expect to be the last one. Brawls weren’t his place. Fighting wasn’t his thing, but the practices had been good. Still, he did better if his opponent wasn’t expecting him, and soon, only those expecting an attack from any side would be left fighting.
He ducked as he felt the essence shift, air, forming a cylinder at head height. Too many people had picked air for him to determine who this was. Or even locate the person. Everyone moved so his sense of the essence in them was difficult to keep track of. Another thing to add to his exercises.
The click-clack of wood against wood caught his attention, and he saw Khumdar block a bow strike with his staff before the next one caught him in the knees and he went down. Tibs changed direction.
The cleric was out, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t exact retribution for his teammate.
Geoff whirled and swung his bow like a staff, and nearly took Tibs’s head off. “You’re not as sneaky as you like to think.”
“I don’t think I’m all that sneaky in the day,” Tibs replied. “I thought you were distracted.”
“There’s a lot crystal lets me do.”
Tibs nodded. Essence let many people do a lot of things. It was all about how it was used. Which sucked for him because he had too little of the essences he could be taught with, and what he had a lot of, there was no one to teach him. The only thing he knew he could do, he wasn’t willing to try on someone since Jackal and Carina had described it as him taking a golem down to rubble, and that only happened when one of them was ‘killed’.
He dodged the next two swings.
“You can’t win against me, Tibs.”
“I know.” Tibs ran off as fast as he could, ignoring the archer’s yell for him to come back.
He used the distraction of people fighting to kick the legs out of two other combatants. And was feeling better about his odds to be among the lasts standing when his foot was yanked out from under him and he landed face-first in the grass. He rolled on his back, ready to fight.
“And you’re out,” the man said, approaching as he coiled a rope around an arm.
“Radklif?” Tibs looked at his leg. The end of the rope was around his ankle. He tried to recall seeing anything on the ground he might have stepped on, but he was sure there had been nothing there. If there had, he would have known better than to set foot close to it.
“I hope this isn’t going to make you hate me more.” The other Rogue crouched and pulled the loop of rope around Tibs’s ankle loose and then out from around the foot.
“I don’t hate you. I was just angry, and you were convenient.”
Radklif sat next to him. “I’m glad to hear that. I wish I hadn’t been so full of myself and showed off.”
Tibs shrugged. “Someone else would have died. It’s what the dungeon does. Aren’t you going to keep fighting?”
Radklif shook his head. “There’s no way I’ll win, it’s going to be either a fighter or a sorcerer. I saw you running around, darting and taking people out, and figured if I managed to take you out, I’d call it my personal win and be happy with it.”
“What’s that?” Tibs indicated the rope.
“It’s a lasso. It’s a tool, back home, that’s used to catch animals so we can bring them back and sell them. If I hadn’t been the greedy kid I was, I’d be living by catching and selling them.”
“You didn’t have that during the run.”
“I couldn’t afford it then. And there isn’t much to catch in there. This gave me a chance to practice.”
“What were you greedy about?”
The other Rogue shrugged. “Money, same as most people. I didn’t need it, but I thought it would be easy to make some that way. And it was, at first. I was an okay thief, but I got overconfident. Was caught. Do they chop off your hand for thievery where you’re from?” Tibs nodded. “Yeah, that was going to be the death of me. Can’t lasso with only one hand.”
“You got the dungeon instead.”
“And fire. Your eyes are still brown.”
“Still too young,” Tibs answered, the lie being natural at this point.
Radklif chuckled. “You’ve survived this long with barely any essence. I’m not worried about you, Tibs.”
Tibs smiled. “I have a good team, I’m not too worried myself.” He noticed the Rogue’s expression. “Your team’s not so good?”
“We’re okay, but we threw ourselves together out of desperation after the rules were set. It was that or not do runs until some other team lost a member and pick one of us. We figured this wouldn’t be too bad.” He sighed. “There’s a lot of arguing and screaming. We barely survived our first run on the second floor. When I almost got crushed in that first room, they were talking about just leaving me there. We don’t get along like you and your team does. Like most of the teams that managed to form before the dungeon closed do.”
Someone sat on Tibs’s other side.
“Tandy,” Radklif greeted her before Tibs turned.
“Radi, Tibs, how were you taken out?”
“He took both of us out,” Tibs said, indicating the other rogue.
She chuckled. “I think that if you fall while bringing someone down, you can keep fighting.”
“I just didn’t see a point. How about you?” Radklif indicated the red mark across her forehead.
She sighed. “Felled by my own teammate.”
“Geoff?” Tibs thought the mark could be from the bow.
“Amid. I didn’t realize he could make wood grow out of the ground. He tripped me and I fell on another branch he had ready.” She touched her forehead. “He was beet red in embarrassment. If I hadn’t been out, I would have taken advantage of the situation and deal with him while he apologized.”
“Who do you think will win?” Radklif asked.
“One of the fighters,” she answered just before a thunderclap sounded.
“Do not ignore me!” Carina yelled in the following silence, glaring at a man on the ground.
“We have a winner,” Tibs said, grinning.
“Not who I’d have expected,” Tandy said in awe.
Carina looked around and noticed she was the only one left standing. Seemed embarrassed about it instead of happy.
Tibs stood.
“Is there going to be a round two?” Radklif asked.
“Who’s ready for round two!” Jackal yelled, jumping to his feet.
“I think that’s a yes,” Tandy said.
Tibs realized no one had established how long this was going to last. He suspected that if Jackal had his way either this would go on until the sunset, or until Harry took him away.
* * * * *
Tibs followed the woman. He’d rather be in bed. He was still sore a few days after the free-for-all, but his own training needed to continue. Today he was going to follow without being seen.
She rounded on him. “Can I help you kid?” she had the leather tube across her shoulder. He’d picked her because that meant she was from out of town, so she wouldn’t know to be careful around him. “Well?”
“What are you carrying?” since he’d been caught, he might as well satisfy some of his curiosity.
“Why do you want to know?”
“I’m a kid. I’m curious.”
She looked him over, took in his armor, and smirked. “You’re a Runner, not a kid.”
He smiled. “You called me that first.”
She sighed. “I don’t know what I’m carrying, and if I did know I couldn’t tell you. It’s in the contract.”
“Contract?”
She looked up, located the sun, and sighed. “If I answer, will it satisfy you or are you going to just have more questions for me?”
“Probably more questions. I don’t know a lot and I’m trying to fix that.”
“There are more important things for you to learn out there than what I do.”
He smiled. “But you’re here, those things aren’t.”
She rubbed the bridge of her nose. “How many people have you driven to distraction with your questions?”
Tibs considered it, ignored everyone from his team, or from the inn, or Bardik, Harry, and the guards he’d approached. “My teacher liked that I’m curious.”
“Teachers do. It’s their job.” She sighed. “Come on. I want to sit for this, and you’re paying for the ale.”
The tavern she picked was the Broken Tankard, and Tibs bought them each an ale.
“Do you know what a contract is?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Only that it’s something the guild uses, and maybe town elders. The sorceress on my team knows something about them.”
“Then why aren’t you asking her?”
“If I give her the chance, she’s going to use that as an opportunity to force me to learn more letters.” He looked at her. “How hard was it for you to learn your letters?”
“I started learning them a lot younger than you. Everyone in my family reads and writes, so it’s just natural, but you’re going to need to know how to do that if you’re going to deal with contracts. It’s what explains what you have to do. In my case, that I have to take this.” She patted the leather tube she had resting against her. “To a specific location. That I can’t open it or discuss the content with anyone. And that once I’ve delivered it, I am to take the receipt token back to the office where I started.”
“Where are you taking it?”
She thought about it. “A store called the Caravan Garden, it’s in—”
“Merchant Row,” Tibs said. “I know it. They sell a lot of different things.”
“And this is how they get some of them.”
“You came from the transport platform. I thought those were expensive to use.”
“Haven’t you used them yourself?”
Tibs nodded. “They let us out when the dungeon closed, but they gave us bracelets and we didn’t have to pay.”
“I don’t have to pay either. I have a Messenger token I show them and they take me where I need to.”
“Can I see it?”
She shook her head. “Sorry, kid. That’s something else my contract prevents me from talking about.”
Tibs nodded and let himself sense her essence. She didn’t have any. He expected it since her eyes were a normal brown. He couldn’t feel anything from her, but the leather tube was imbued. He could see air and earth, but other essences made out the bulk of it.
“What happens if you don’t respect the contract?”
“I’m going to lose my job, for one thing. If I do it to steal what I’m carrying, I’m going to be hunted down like the thief I’d be. If I do something small, like divulge information, then I’ll probably just have to pay some form of reparation.”
“How would they find out? Is there some sort of magic that would tell them?”
She chuckled. “I’m sure there is such a thing, but someone will tell them. There’s always someone out there willing to rat you out for a few coins.”
“Is the contract magic?”
She laughed. “No. Not with essence or anything like that. It’s just words on paper, but the people enforcing them are powerful. Rich enough to pay for adventurers if they want to. That’s where their power is. Their wealth.”
“Nobles,” Tibs grumbled.
“Businesses,” she said. “Some are owned by nobles, but not all of them. The Messengers are owned by a large group of merchants. It’s why most of what we do is get things to merchants.”
“Other people than nobles have wealth?”
“Of course. The merchants in this town, they have wealth, I doubt many of them are nobles.”
“But they don’t go around acting like they’re better than me; like they own the town.”
“Not all nobles do that,” she said, “but I’ll grant you they’re the exception. Noble is a title, it comes with wealth, but wealth doesn’t have to come with the title. It can come with hard work. The people who have to work for their wealth are usually more sensible about other people not having it.”
So he couldn’t just go by how wealthy a house was to decide if someone was a noble? He thought every new person who’d moved into the town had been a noble, but now he remembered the archer trainer mentioning how his students weren’t nobles, but still had had enough coins to pay to be a Runner. He rubbed his temple.
“I take it I’ve satisfied your curiosity?” she asked with a chuckle.
“No,” Tibs answered, “but I think I’ve learned enough new things for now. I keep thinking finding out things will make everything easier, but it only seems to make them tougher.”
“It only seems like that. It’s the pain of stretching your mind.”
Tibs reflexively touched his head to make sure it wasn’t getting larger before realizing it was a figure of speech.
“Thank you for the ale, kid.”
“My name is Tibs.”
“Then we are well met. I’m Anjika. Keep stretching your mind, Tibs,” she said as she stood, putting the tube’s strap over her shoulder. “It does make everything simpler; once it’s large enough.”
That, or his mind was just going to explode.
