This town is disappointing, Jay sent.

  Agensyx hummed in return. What were you expecting? Some pinnacle of civilization?

  Kind of? It feels like my first example of a surviving town in a world with magic should more than this. He pushed some of his memories of cities over. Even a couple of small towns.

  None of them compared to this. He hadn’t been expecting roads or skyscrapers, but most of the buildings he could see didn’t even have glass in their windows. Or stone. Or seemingly multiple rooms, based on their size.

  It all just looked like someone had slapped a bunch of tree trunks on top of one another and slathered the whole thing in dark mud. Jay did admire the grass growing across their roofs, though. That seemed very efficient. Some of the structures even had animals on their roofs. Goats seemed most prevalent, with some sheep here and there.

  Even before Blight formed, this was not a populous area of the Empire, Jay. Now? It’s a wonder there’s anything left of it at all.

  The guard finally wandered back into his seat on the other side of the town’s log boundary, idly tapping the wood as he did. He didn’t look at Jay. He very pointedly didn’t so much as move his head in the direction of Jay.

  It didn’t take long for Jay to get tired of that.

  “Am I able to go in or not?”

  The guard started as he spoke. “Huh?”

  “The town. Am I able to go in?”

  “Why wouldn’t you be able to? You have two legs. You can walk. Walked all this way down here, didn’t you?”

  “Why wouldn’t – what do you mean, why wouldn’t I be able to? You had to go ask. That’s what you said. Half. An. Hour. Ago.”

  “Oh. Did I say that?” The guard’s face didn’t twitch into a smile or a smirk as if he was being sarcastic. He seemed to legitimately have forgotten. Or he was really determined to pretend that he had. “You can go in. Anyone can, really. Not like our little wall is keeping anyone out.” He patted the horizontal log he was sitting behind as he said the last part.

  Jay’s fists clenched. So he’d been standing there for nothing? He bit back the words that came to mind first – the guard may have been lazy and a liar but his pike looked sharp enough – and stepped over the logs.

  *

  The view from outside of the town had been a little bit deceptive, Jay discovered. There was more activity than he’d been able to see from the outer ring, including a market packed full of people. For all that it looked like it had more people there than the rest of the town should have been able to fit, it was nearly silent in the hexagonal space.

  There were only six stalls but each had a crowd of people around it, most gesturing occasionally with no audible cue. They looked like they were raising their hands the slightest amount; each time one made the motion, the shopkeeper behind the stall’s counter would look at them briefly, then away as the next one made the motion. Jay tried walking up and making the same motion, but the stallkeeper’s eyes never even flicked to him. All he got was a brief System window:

  That seemed like a terrible way to do a market like this – not to mention being far too literal of a take on the label of silent auction – but if no one else thought it was weird, Jay was just going to have to roll with it.

  Out of curiosity, he selected the balance option, expecting it to come up with absolutely nothing. He was pleasantly surprised.

  How did he have money?

  Jay rifled through the pockets on the outside of the jacket. Nothing. There were no pockets on the shirt beneath, so nothing there. Nothing where his hands instinctively went for pants-based pockets. So where?

  He bent over to pat where cargo pockets would be in case the linen pants had those for some bizarre reason and felt something dig into his side from within the jacket. He straightened, patted the inside of his jacket until he felt something that wasn’t fabric. A button. How had he not noticed an interior pocket with a shockingly hard button on the jacket he’d now been wearing for a week straight?

  Probably the mind control. Jay chose to chalk it up to that regardless of whether or not it was true.

  He undid the buttonhole and flipped up the top of the pocket as discreetly as he could, given that he was digging in his jacket. Sure enough, there were 10 coins inside, each a dull metallic yellow that was presumably bronze, each with a book on one side and a scale on the other.

  Jay didn’t think he’d be digging too far into where they’d come from. He made the choice then and there to keep thinking of it as something that just happened. “If anything, they owe me more on top of that,” he muttered.

  A bell began to ring from one side of the town and everyone – literally everyone, there was not a single exception other than him – looked toward it at once. The bidding on the auctions slowly ended and the town’s inhabitants began trickling off in the direction of the bell. Eventually it was only Jay and the shopkeepers.

  Then the merchants left too. All the things that were set out on the stall counters remained. For an embarrassing moment, the urge to take something reared its head in Jay’s mind. That was a really bad idea and he knew it, but the desire for things was still there. He’d had enough of being broke doing grad school on Earth (an ordeal he’d never gotten to see the payoff to, by the way, which only pissed him off more) to be well acquainted with that feeling.

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  But whatever was dragging those people away, all in the same direction and all at once, was something he wanted to take a look at.

  *

  It was a ship’s arrival. A long, thin ship made of dark wood with an absurd number of sails that were each a bright gold and a name written across the front in the same color: Madcap Wanderer.

  Jay hadn’t even realized this place had a dock, so clearing the last line of buildings and seeing the tops of sails had been a bit of a shock. There were even more people here than there had been at the market somehow and he didn’t know where they were all coming from. Or why there was such an imbalance in ages: heavy on the kids and elderly, but extremely light when it came to everything between the two.

  Thankfully, whatever tradition kept the townspeople silent at their little market wasn’t some permanent vow of silence, so he wouldn’t have to make the discovery of whether Omnilinguist would work on sign language. He’d been worried about that after seeing that many people be that quiet together. Sure, there were other towns he and Agensyx could have made it to if it had come down to it, but it hadn’t.

  And here they all were, a crowd making an appropriate amount of noise for that many people formed mostly out of the children’s excitement and murmurs from the elders. The noise redoubled as a section of the dark wooden railing seemed to collapse in on itself, a gangplank sliding out of the section it left empty to meet the dock. The group fell back from the area where the two met, hesitant to stay too close for reasons Jay didn’t understand.

  The answer came as a plane of translucent gray floated through the gap and down the plank, loaded with flat stones like a flatbed cart ready for a weekend project. The crowd split as it moved through them, watching it as it moved to where the wooden dock ended and descended to the ground to fade away. The stones thumped gently to the ground when it finally vanished completely.

  The attention on the not-flatbed-cart-thing then landed squarely on Jay, who happened to have been watching from right next to where the stones were deposited. The people just kept staring at him as more identical not-carts moved stone into piles next to and on top of the previous ones. Mutters began, mutters that Jay could only catch a little bit of.

  “…must be another passenger…”

  “…no warning…”

  “…skeleton on his arm?”

  “…no clothes I’ve ever seen…”

  Then the guard from the gate spoke up. Though Jay hadn’t seen him, his voice was loud enough that he caught every word. “I let him in a little while ago. From the north.”

  The muttering subsided a little bit, though Jay still caught a few worried comments. Then one voice rose above the others. “Northeners are weird. Don’t be mean.” It was clearly a child’s voice, with all the volume that implied.

  The crowd chuckled almost as a single entity. Their eyes left Jay and turned back to the procession of magical slabs delivering stone. A final pair left, depositing their payloads and dissolving, but Arbon’s people were still staring at the boat. Clearly there was something else coming.

  Jay was forced to rethink that as heavy footsteps rang out from on board the boat. Maybe not something else. Maybe someone, this time. The footsteps multiplied and he revised that further: maybe a lot of someones.

  Five people tramped down the gangplank in a jostling mess.

  One older man with an unkempt beard but a meticulously waxed head who was probably the captain. He walked into the crowd and clasped hands with everyone there in quick succession, seeming to greet each person personally. He did the same to the children, but from the delighted squeals afterwards, those ones had had some bribe included. Candy, maybe.

  One middle-aged woman who looked like she could pick up the entire ship on her shoulders and have room for more. She loomed somewhat, following the older man as he moved through the people. A bodyguard of some sort clearly, or someone who defended the ship in some capacity. Or maybe that was only her duty while on land. What would there be to defend from while sailing?

  One pale man with sunken eyes and hollow cheeks, who moved with a surprising energy despite his apparent emaciation. The kids swarmed him the moment they took their turn shaking hands with the first man, quickly toppling him and then wrestling with him once he was all the way down. The laughter of everyone involved caused its own gap in the crowd from pure volume. Jay had no idea what his role could be on the ship.

  One woman about his own age with hair so black it almost looked blue in the sunlight and a tan cloak that clattered with sewn-on bits and bobs. Most of them looked metallic, glinting and glowing, but Jay didn’t think any two of them were the same color. Most of them had intricate patterns or hanging portions that reminded him of windchimes. He didn’t have any clue what she was there for either.

  He wasn’t very familiar with the practical side of boats, really. He could identify the type of boat as if it were a boat on Earth – a clipper – but anything more specific than that and he was lost. Jay only knew that much because of how many times that form of boat had shown up in his textbooks. He didn’t know if he’d have remembered that under normal circumstances, but at least it came in handy.

  A chime rang out over the entire crowd, just on the tolerable side of high pitched, and the older man took something out of his pocket. Its top flipped open, he looked at it, then slammed it shut. Was that a pocketwatch? With an alarm of some sort, too.

  The man extricated himself from his conversations to mount the gangplank again. Halfway up he stopped, turned, and began to speak in a carrying voice that wasn’t quite a shout. “As promised, I have delivered your order. Use it well and remember the crew of the Madcap Wanderer if you need more. We’ll be happy to fulfill.

  “Now, I know none of you mentioned having places you needed to go or messages you needed us to carry when we took that order. But that was months past!” He spread his arms to what was clearly their fullest extent; it was an impressive wingspan. “Bring your letters. Bring your journey-hungry young men and women. For a mere five bronze librae apiece, we will take them where they wish to go! We will remain docked for three hours, then move on to our next destination. With or without any venturing hopefuls.

  “I’ll be waiting.”

  The town’s crowd dispersed. It didn’t seem like anyone was going to take the offer, as the only ones curious were the children, who were quickly corralled by their grandparents. But 5 bronze to sail somewhere else? Somewhere away from the Blight? Away from any potential to run into the man with the giant sword again?

  He had ten. He could spare five. Even if they counted Agensyx as a different person – which he hoped they wouldn’t and would do his best to argue against – he could still pay for it.

  How soon can you get to me? I’ve found a next step for us.

  The draconic familiar hummed. An hour at the most. What have you found?

  A ship. The Madcap Wanderer. Should be quick. You said there was a library on an island out here somewhere.

  I see. I will be there as soon as I can.

  *

  The old man looked at Jay’s hand and shook his head. “That’s not enough.”

  “You said five bronze,” Jay insisted. “That’s five. So take it.”

  “I said five apiece, lad,” the captain said. “Are you or are you not a separate being from your scaly friend over there?”

  “I mean he’s standing over there and I’m standing over here.” Jay gestured back and forth to Agensyx as he spoke. “But he’s my familiar. We’re basically the same person. We should only have to pay once.”

  I told you he wouldn’t agree.

  He hasn’t given me a flat no yet; there’s still a chance.

  “That’s as may be. But you take up two lots of space. You weigh separately. You pay separately.” He crossed his arms. Jay could have sworn he heard the man’s sleeves creak from the probably deliberate flexing as he did so.

  “There has to be something between the two, at least,” Jay wheedled. “Seven?”

  “Eight. Minimum. And if you’re lucky I’ll give you back half the last one in tin when we land. One person and a half.”

  Jay dug the extra three coins out and handed them over.

  “What’s your vice of choice?”

  He didn’t know what that meant and just shrugged.

  “Your destination. Where are you going?”

  Oh. “The Island of Knowledge,” Jay said.

  “That makes it easy enough. The place was going to be our next stop anyway. You’ll have company on the island, if you think they’ll let you on.” The man’s eyes darted toward Agensyx and back again. “You know. With the giant snake.”

  Jay didn’t know what that meant either but the way he said it – and a tiny whisper at the back of his mind – told him that acting confused would be a bad idea, so he nodded. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

  “Fair enough. Welcome aboard, then, lad. We’ll set off soon enough. Doesn’t look like this town has much they need us to carry.” The man stuck his hand out. “Hope you’re ready.”

  Jay shook hands with the man and headed up the gangplank.