“Well, that was disappointing,” Fridu grumbled as we walked away from the Evaluation Room. “I thought Thomas would be able to tell us why your class is open, but he seemed as puzzled as we are.”

  “Is it really that unusual?” I asked. We were headed in a different direction than how we’d come through the guildhall in the first place. I wondered where we were going.

  “It’s unheard of,” Molly said. “It’s like if, hmm, how do I put this? It’s like if you saw something and couldn’t say if it was a bird, or a fish, or a bumblebee, or a sword, or a plank of wood, or a sex toy, or a mug of ale.”

  “You’re saying I’m part sex toy, part beer?”

  “You wish!” Molly laughed. “The perfect man!”

  Fridu said, “We’re saying we don’t know what you are. It’s fun, though. It’s a mystery.”

  “Whatever you are,” Molly said, “you need to be stronger. Let’s take some missions.” We’d entered through an open doorway into a sizeable hall featuring a posting board as large as a movie theater’s screen. Adventurers of all types were gathered around the board, which was covered by countless pieces of paper.

  “Available missions,” Fridu explained, gesturing to where people were studying the papers, occasionally taking one down and going to a table staffed by a pair of Adventurer’s Guild workers in their green livery, where they could have their missions certified. Other staff members kept hurrying in and out of a different door in an almost constant stream, carrying more papers, adding them to the board. They used ladders to reach the uppermost sections, or else simply flew.

  “The harder missions go to the top,” Fridu said. “And only the guild staff are allowed to use the ladders. That way, it helps weed out the pretenders for the more difficult missions. If you can’t even fly up to look at the missions, you’re likely not qualified to take them.”

  We shouldered our way to the front. Molly and Fridu managed to reach the board but I was stuck behind a man with wings. Every time I tried to move around him, his wings fluttered outward and I’d be blocked. He was nervously reading missions, almost taking them off the board but then muttering and changing his mind. By the time I was able to get past him, Molly and Fridu were ready to go, with three papers in hand.

  “We’ll start small,” Molly said. “I don’t want to overwhelm you. That said, we’ll have to build quickly. We only have . . . well, you only have a month.” She touched my arm where the fox was in view, now appearing entirely like a tattoo rather than a scar. Strangely, the fox was now standing, rather than how it’d been sitting at first. The other two tattoos were the same. Soon, they would begin moving closer, looking to join together. Then, when they did, I’d burn from within, like Salena had done in her apartment, back when I was seven years old.

  “Missions with training wheels,” Fridu told me, handing me the papers. The first was an assignment to eradicate a giant fox that was bothering a farmer, gobbling up swaths of chickens at a time. The second was to escort a noblewoman’s mistress to a secret ball, and the third was to guide a caravan through a territory overrun with gilliands, which Molly explained were small misshapen humanoids. All three missions were of the lowest rank possible.

  We stood in line to get our missions certified. Molly and Fridu displayed their badges. I had to show my certificate, with the parakeet’s inky footprints barely dry. The workers were quick and efficient, and we were soon walking off with our names written in the ledgers and our papers fully stamped.

  “Let’s get to work, shall we?” Molly said, and we all agreed it was time. Once we were outside, though, we stopped for ice cream and to feed frozen bananas to the gathered familiars, the cats and the dogs and the giant spider, which joyfully danced in an almost human fashion and shook our hands in turn, making Fridu laugh. The hairs tickled her, I suppose.

  -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

  The giant fox was no trouble. It came loping across a stretch of open farmland the next night, leaving the cover of the woods just before nightfall, as slinky and sneaky as a fox can be, which is decidedly less than normal if the fox in question is the size of a pickup truck. I hit it with a lightning bolt that nearly separated its head from its body. The fox died instantly, crumbling to the ground, but sheer momentum made the carcass tumble and slide almost thirty feet through the recently harvested beans, pushing up soil and stalks, coming to a rest only a few feet from where we were standing. Letters and numbers rose up, shining in the gathering darkness.

  +167 Experience Points

  “Damn,” Molly whispered as hundreds of tiny electrical arcs dispersed across the carcass’ fur. “We have us another giant killer.”

  “That spell was… more powerful than it should’ve been,” Fridu said, glancing back and forth between the dead fox and my hands, as if looking for answers. The fox was silent. Steam rose from my fingers.

  By then, Gerik was skinning the fox.

  -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

  Her name was Findrell and she was not as beautiful as I’d expected from a professional mistress, but within minutes of meeting her I was almost in love myself. She was one of those people who remind me of dogs, not in any visual sense, but in that manner of simply feeling better when they’re around, like some unknown weight has been lifted from your chest and replaced with helium instead.

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  The mission was simple. Fridu and I rode in an ornate carriage with Findrell, while Molly walked alongside with her axe in one hand, protecting against any attacks. Gerik was . . . somewhere. Likely the rooftops. We could hear him breathing. Fridu had linked our minds so that we could all talk in that strange mental manner, hearing each other’s voices in our minds while remaining silent to all others. It meant that I was not only being treated to the soft sounds of Gerik’s sporadic comments, but occasionally a swirling miasma of his hatred toward ghouls, like flashes of lightning searing through his thoughts, burning hot for the briefest of moments before dispersing as if they’d never been there in the first place. It was a jarring juxtaposition against Molly’s thoughts, which were nothing but a series of nursery rhymes she was reciting in her head, liberally sprinkled with vulgar lyrics for good measure. She was also keeping a running commentary of everyone we passed by on the streets, rating their level of threat.

  Inside the carriage, Findrell was telling Fridu and I a story about discovering and exploring a library of pressed flowers in a nobleman’s private quarters. A collection of seven bookshelves, three of them quite large. The smell of magically-tinged incense that banished all manners of pesky bugs that would’ve otherwise dined on the pages of the books. Findrell had been left purposefully alone in the room. She’d browsed through the books. They’d had tree leaves or flower petals pressed between their pages. Every single page. The books bulged. One book was an anomaly, with butterfly wings between its pages. It was a copy of Jalaad’s Book of Sailing the Master Castle Sea. An odd choice of book for butterfly wings. Findrell had just been putting the book back on the shelves when a bell sounded.

  “My cue,” she told us.

  “Your cue?” I asked.

  “I’d been left in the room for a reason. My patron was a voyeur. At the sound of the bell, I pretended… not too hastily… to chance upon a book of lurid illustrations. Flipping through its pages, I disrobed and masturbated, taking care to change positions and angles, as I wasn’t certain where he was watching from. Likely several observation points, I suppose.” She spoke as if recounting a recipe. I found myself blushing. Fridu used a spell to light the carriage’s interior, so that the two women could be amused by my reactions to Findrell’s story.

  The carriage rode smoothly. Magically so. Not once a bounce. Without the jarring of the cobblestones, the sound of the wheels was almost soporific. Findrell smelled like bourbon. She wouldn’t explain why she needed bodyguards for a trip to a secret ball. The ride was uneventful. Nobody attacked. The most action we encountered was a large brown dog that barked several times at our carriage as we passed, until Molly told the dog to shut the fuck up.

  “Thank you for the escort,” Findrell told us as we stood outside a darkened mansion. A door, a servant’s entrance to the rear, then opened. She went inside. Our job was done. We were twenty gold richer.

  -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

  With Findrell, I gained a fair amount of experience points for a mission that was honestly delightful. We had far less fun with the caravan and the dirty little gilliands, who did indeed turn out to be small, misshapen humans. They also turned out to wield miniature spears, to be very accurate with them, and to stink like a bucket of flaming shit.

  The caravan had eight wagons in all, carrying a variety of spices, furs, and one wagon full of intricate glassware packed in crates stuffed with straw. The first day was cloudy, with rain threatening and a wind much cooler than the surrounding air, which likely meant a storm was strapping on its boots and preparing to stomp across the lands.

  Molly and I walked in front of the caravan, keeping a good but unhurried pace, as the wagons were so overloaded that they’d have broken if the horses notched it up to a trot, which the horses were clearly not inclined to consider. Fridu and Gerik were to the rear of the wagons. Pristilline, who I still hadn’t met, had sent word that she’d been summoned to guard duty on the western frontier. Some sort of orc uprising. She’d be gone for days, or possibly weeks.

  The caravan’s route stretched well over a hundred miles, but our part in the play was only to escort them through gilliand territory, a span of some forty miles. We averaged possibly four miles an hour through the plains, then somewhat less when the terrain evolved into small hills. Fridu often scouted ahead through the air, looking for any and all possible threats. Just because you’ve been hired to defend against gilliands doesn’t mean you turn a blind eye to brigands or stray bears.

  The first day was uneventful, which Molly and I discussed with notes of both pleasure and irritation. It was enjoyable to walk unmolested with nothing more serious than keeping our weapons at the ready whenever other caravans—possible brigands in disguise—passed us in the opposite direction, but at the same time I could hardly prepare myself to face the threat of the blurred man by taking a leisurely stroll across the countryside, unless he was going to challenge me to a power-walking contest, in which case my mighty calf muscles would win the day.

  As we walked, Molly taught me how to be alert to dangers. When we passed through fields of long grass, entire armies could be hidden, hunkered down low. When we passed through open fields I felt the safest, though Molly said to look for any signs of fresh earth, signifying that the gilliands could’ve built trenches, waiting until our guards were down before swarming to the attack. When we passed through wooded areas, anything at all could’ve been hiding within.

  All the while, the storm was brewing, which annoyed Molly because the winds could hide any stray sounds that might’ve otherwise alerted us to an attack, though she added that those same winds could betray the enemy’s position by carrying their scent.

  “You scout with all your senses,” she said. “Don’t only rely on sight. Your ears and your nose are important.”

  I joked, “But I’m thinking that if I can taste the enemy, it’s too late.”

  “Not really,” Fridu told me. We were camping for the night. The wagons were gathered in a circle. Gerik had collected wood. The witch lit the fire by magic, surrounding her fingers with fire and then simply holding a few pieces of wood until they burst into flame. “Nature is a terrible gossip. She’ll tell you everything. Pay attention with your senses, and your sense of taste will expand.”

  “Ah, shit,” Gerik grunted. “She’s going to get philosophical. I’m out.” He walked off, leaving the circle of wagons. We’d camped on a small rise. It meant that anyone could see us for miles around, with our campfire acting as a beacon in the night, but it also meant we had good sight of anyone who approached.

  The rest of the night was filled with talk, mostly between me and Molly and Fridu, though at one point two members of the caravan, a married couple named Starks and Lyssa, came and sat with us, and we all told stories of our past, except me, because I didn’t think anybody—especially people who’d just been telling epic tales of wagons swept away in flash floods or of learning how to best decapitate a lizard man—would be overly impressed by the three times I’ve talked myself out of being marked tardy for class.

  In the morning the tempest finally broke, and the gilliands used the cover of the storm for an attack.