++There are few ways safe to imbibe in the stuff of mana. The human Class of Worker is of course among them; as are properly prepared potions. The latter, though, is a danger in itself. Many have been corrupted by greed upon touching powers not natural to them.++

  Chapter 6

  “Relax,” a soothing voice rang out. Soothing voices were what predators used to lure their prey out of readiness, and so Reggie’s response of rolling over, squatting up onto his feet and moving to a combative stance was entirely appropriate. Unfortunately, while the spirit was paranoid, the body was spongey and oozing. More categorically similar to a drunkenly assembled jigsaw puzzle than a living thing’s corpus.

  He fell, landed hard and…was fine. No cobbles under him to crack his skull against. Soft, yielding floorboards, practically a pillow. Reggie groaned where he lay there, trembling with pain as he looked up to the voice’s source.

  “I was about to warn you,” the voice resumed, “you’re too hurt to move well, even after healing.”

  Healing? Reggie’s memory was a beaten up and twisted thing, but it came back to him slowly. He recalled being turned into a sack of mulched-up dogfood and then…

  Vision clearing, his eyes finally focused on the stranger’s face.

  “You,” he croaked.

  “Oh good, so you can recognise faces.” She sounded rather apathetic about the whole thing, and looked it too. Seated down on a squat table at the edge of Reggie’s room. “I’m glad to see the potion did its work.”

  Reggie took a second to register that. “Potion…?”

  He knew about potions of course, one of the more magical elements of alchemy. But any potion of significance was expensive as shit. If he’d had one of those then…yes, testing it now Reggie could feel his body move without much more than stiffness and aches. No broken bones, no bleeding, no risk of death.

  But what kind of debt had he incurred by guzzling the thing that healed him? Cheaper to drink molten silver.

  “Don’t worry about paying me back,” the stranger added, “just call it a favour owed.”

  “Deal, thanks, no take-backs,” Reggie said instantly, recognising a good thing when it fell down at his feet. The woman smiled.

  “Then I’d like to call my favour in and have a look at your basement, if you don’t mind.”

  Shit. Was Reggie stupid? Maybe right now, with the headache. How did he say no to this without arousing suspicion?

  “I know you have a lot of questionable and valuable things down there,” the woman added abruptly, “believe me I don’t care to interfere. I’m just curious.”

  Huh. That was…weird, Reggie got the sudden feeling that this one was inside his head. Stupid of course, humans couldn’t do that sort of thing. Lifting heavy things and running fast was about the extent of a Worker’s ability. And this woman was no elf.

  That was beside the point though, because Reggie could hardly trust someone just because they weren’t a mind-reader. Correction, he couldn’t trust someone period. So could he bank on this one not having a reason to fuck him over?

  Yes, actually. His disappeared injuries were a testament to the fact that she was rich enough not to blink at the contents of his cellar, not with that kind of casual potion-wastage. And it wasn’t like his basement was protected enough to keep her out if she just wanted to force it. There wasn’t anything Reggie could afford that would deny a powerful Worker and a lumber axe for more than half an hour.

  “Sure,” he said, “feel free.” Well if he couldn’t say no, might as well at least enjoy the aesthetics of pretending to say yes. Besides, if he unlocked his door then he’d be spared from buying a new one when it was kicked down anyway.

  Reggie hadn’t shown another person his lab before, not anyone. Not even Ludvich. He felt a weird mix of anticipatory feelings as he led the woman down into it. Pride, anxiety, paranoid fear. What if she just started smashing things?

  I have money, now, I can replace them. Ludvich really had changed things with that payment for the grimwoods, but today that money didn’t come into play.

  “This is extraordinary,” the woman breathed as she looked around, “did you set it all up yourself?”

  [She’s mocking you, she wants to embarrass you.]

  Shut up, demonic voice that lives in my head.

  “I did,” Reggie didn’t meet her eye as he answered.

  “How did you learn all this? From the townspeople here I’ve been given the impression that nobody wants to give you a job, let alone have you apprentice under them.”

  Reggie bristled. “I read books and remember what I read.” Stolen books, usually, but she didn’t need to know that. She didn’t seem to care enough to ask, either.

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  He expected suspicion, scorn, any number of other things. Instead the woman just started slowly shaking her head, looking…sad.

  “The world has been cruel to you, hasn’t it?”

  Reggie felt something squirm in his guts, a tremble ran through him. “Get out,” he spat. Wasn’t sure why his whole body suddenly felt like it was aflame, wasn’t sure why this woman suddenly struck him as the most infuriating thing he’d ever seen.

  She met his eye, nodded, and started for the door.

  “Things are going to get hard for you,” she said as she left, “harder than they already are, I mean. Stay strong. Live.” She was gone before he could reply.

  Stay strong and live? Reggie punched a wall. He was not sure why he did this, it was stupid. Just a momentary spasm of impulsive anger that his body had no place for. The stone broke his knuckles as easily as a delicate hand being smashed into something hard by an idiot, and Reggie was left nursing the ruined fist.

  For an hour. Before he could so much as muster up the courage to go out and seek medical help, he found the bones already slowly calming in their pained protests. By the time he realised he’d slipped back into sleep, fatigue catching up with him, he’d been out for another few hours, and the injury felt almost gone. Residual effects of the potion? His heart was beating like a drum one way or the other.

  That stranger had gotten under his skin. Not good, Reggie’s skin was carefully thickened for good reason. He was so very hurtable beneath it.

  But not hurt, not anymore. Those extra few hours of sleep had done more than just re-knit his fist, they’d left the rest of his body’s aches dulled down to almost nothing. Reggie headed out of the building to find Ludvich again, hoping to broach the topic of selling his explosives to the Witchfinder, when he realised that his healing had finally slowed back to normal.

  Well, good things didn’t last forever. He was just happy to still be alive. It only really sunk in as he was walking how close he’d come to death. Would that haunt him?

  Reggie didn’t think so. Not because he was some hard man, or anything. He just couldn’t recall ever not being close to death in one way or another. What was the difference between an abstract danger and a real one?

  Aside from the broken ribs, nothing. And he didn’t have those broken ribs anymore so there basically was no difference. Reggie pondered this as he walked, ending up deep enough in thought that he didn’t quite notice the disturbance in town until he reached its centre.

  There were a great many of Norvhan’s citizenry gathered at the place’s heart, which wasn’t something Reggie had known to happen often. As he’d heard it, the last event of such magnitude had been his parents’ burning.

  Not reassuring, that, but he closed anyway.

  Reggie found out what the fuss was about near-instantly, wading through the crowd with a generous application of misdirection and strong elbows to several livers. He managed to reach the front few rows and saw…elves.

  They didn’t look real, a story come to life. But they were. All of them tall, ears pointed, faces fair and thin, pale, almost fragile in the way of stained glass. As if they were at risk of shattering beneath the weight of their own beauty. Reggie had heard conflicting tales of how elves looked, heard they varied from place to place. The elves of Engyr, it turned out, were pale, tall and pretty. Reggie had heard that, and now he knew that. Because he was looking at them.

  Fuck.

  “We have come on behalf of Warden Erindor,” said their leader. She was among the tallest of the elves, Reggie thought, and practically radiated power in the most literal way. He felt goosebumps rise up along his skin just from being within a dozen paces, as if he were feeling some chill wind run over him.

  For the first time in his life, Reggie found himself fathoming levels of power beyond Ludvich, or a gun, or any of the mundanities he’d grown up around. Circumscribers were as high as Adept Tiers, that much could be read in one of the books he’d borrowed. Adept meant…What, a maximum increase of 40 onto Primary Attributes—the Attributes which a given Class was most specialised in achieving.

  Ludvich was stuck at the mid-20s, and having a natural start of even 10 would put a high level Adept at 50 in total, which meant this elf might well be farther above the old Witchfinder than he was above Reggie. The memory of that bear’s impossible weight being held up over human shoulders swam to mind.

  And it suddenly didn’t seem like anything at all, because the waves of power crashing down from the Circumscriber were more than any animal’s weight.

  Her words didn’t feel significant next to that, but Reggie listened to them anyway. Most of it was what he’d expected to hear, he’d been told ahead of time that Ludvich was sending out a message to bring these elves here after all. That didn’t quite shake the uncanny feeling of actually seeing them though.

  It was Ludvich that ended up catching Reggie’s focus, so much so that he barely heard the last part of the elf’s speech. The important part.

  “We will be carrying out a full investigation of this forest and town, and we will not stop until whatever creature is behind this has been dragged before the light to burn.”

  As someone who’d almost died fighting a bear that the creature in question had contaminated, Reggie thought that sounded like a pretty good idea. More importantly, it sounded like the people who answered to the most powerful person in the region might have a reason to head out into the grimwoods with him.

  He had his eye on Ludvich, and wasted no time in barging through the crowd to reach him.

  “You’re coming with them?” Reggie asked as he finally reached the man, “right? You are? They must need you, you know the grimwoods and stuff.” It was more of a hope than a deduction on Reggie’s part, maybe the elves were more familiar with this region than he knew. Fortunately, that hope turned out nicely.

  “I’m coming with them,” Ludvich confirmed, “but you’re staying here.”

  He could’ve punched Reggie and…well, maybe not failed to cause such a crushing effect, the memory of broken ribs was too fresh for him to humour that, but it still stung. Still burned. “Why?” Reggie snapped, unable to control his voice.

  Ludvich’s face looked like it would twist itself in half, as if he were struggling to speak. Or not to speak. Finally he relented.

  “Because this is more dangerous than you know,” he said at last, “The elves might not be superstitious, but they’re asking for me personally here, a top-class Witchfinder with more experience than all but a few among my order. Think about that.”

  Reggie did think, forcing himself to despite the sudden urge for action and blind anger.

  Ludvich was making sense, damn him. If Reggie headed out with the elves they might run into something that gave even a Circumscriber squad trouble, which, of course, was why that squad was here in the first place. He made a show of sighing, of reluctantly nodding, and watched as the Witchfinder left.

  Then he headed back to his home, because if Reggie could secretly follow the group and leap in to help them when things looked hairy there’d be no limit to the good favour he won.