Sam

After the library, Will took her southwest to a more spacious section of the city, and pointed to a large, walled-off quarter that covered the sides of a tall hill, with a weathered stone fort standing at its peak.

“That keep there is where the lord stays,” he said, indicating the stone structure. Moving his finger down, he pointed out another large building just below it. “And that one is the militia headquarters. The rest of the men are housed in this fenced-off bit here, and only people personally approved by Lord Brimstone are allowed to go inside. He’s a pretty paranoid fellow.”

Large banners flapped from the keep’s leaning towers, and Sam shuddered when she saw that they depicted a burning man in blood-red on a field of black.

“Yeah, he likes his fire, too,” Will elaborated, noticing Sam’s unease. “He has a habit of burning people who inconvenience him at the stake.”

“But you’re going to stop him, right?”

He threw her a sharp glance and spoke in a low voice. “Don’t talk about that here. Not anywhere except the farm. Understand?”

Sam nodded. “Sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said, much more warmly. He squeezed her hand, and turned them around to head away from the lord’s quarter.

Spotting a large pillar of black smoke rising over the buildings in the distance, Sam pointed it out. “Is that a fire?” she asked.

“Probably. Most of these buildings are made of wood, and they're squeezed pretty tight together, so fires are common. It'll probably be all right, though. The fireman'll get to it sooner or later.”

Sam raised an eyebrow at him. “The fireman?”

“Mmhmm.”

“As in just one?”

“Mmhmm. The guards are technically supposed to deal with fire suppression as well, but they're usually not too keen on putting their hides on the line. Luckily, Sheerhome's one and only volunteer firefighter has them covered for the most part. They call him Captain.”

“Is he a good guy, then?”

Will chuckled. “By Frontier standards, he's a damn saint. I have no idea why he does what he does—I don't think anyone pays him or anything—but he keeps on doing it, and it's not like anyone's about to stop him. He's probably the closest thing Sheerhome has to a real-life hero. I think he might have a couple screws loose, not unlike a certain someone I know.”

He did not need to look in Sam's direction for her to feel called out. “He sounds cool. Do you think we'll ever get to meet him?”

“Maybe, but not today. And before you ask, no, we are not going to stand next to a row of burning buildings just so you can get some other knucklehead's autograph. Now let's go.”

Sam didn't argue. She was feeling exhausted already, so she was overjoyed to learn that he was taking them to a tavern for a bite to eat. It sat on the eastern bank of the river that split the city down the middle; a squat two-story establishment. A signboard above the door read ‘The Lucky Lady’, and had a drawing of a woman with her breasts out crudely painted on it.

I bet Nyx would love this place. Mongrel too, for that matter.

The common room inside was fairly quiet at this time of day, with only a few regulars silently nursing mugs of ale in their own separate corners. It was dark and drab and low-ceilinged—and reeked of smoke besides—but Will’s tired face was creased by a genuine smile as he approached the counter on the right-hand side, manned by a fellow with a bald head and a round belly. The cauldron dominating his Profession symbol marked him as a Cook, just like Will, and seven AP crystals studded his arm.

“What can I get you, sir?” the man asked. Then he looked up, and he let out a sudden laugh that made his rosy cheeks quiver. “Oh! If it isn’t—”

Will shook his head, and the man cut himself off, licking his lips as he glanced about the place. “Ah,” he said in a low, conspiratorial tone. “It’s like that, is it?”

“It’s like that,” Will replied conversationally.

“You’ll be wanting a private room, then?”

“That’s right. And food for two—with bread—and some fruit juice. And… whatever’s for dessert, I guess.” He jerked his head in Sam’s direction. “This one’s a Laborer. You know how it is.”

The fat man laughed. Sam didn’t understand the joke. He looked her way and seemed like he wanted to ask something else, then shook his head and ushered the two of them along instead, taking them through to a back room with a table and several chairs.

Sam breathed a sigh of relief as soon as the door closed behind them and they finally had some privacy away from the crushing throngs of city folk.

Will took off his head bandage and threw it on the table before taking a seat. He scratched aggressively at his bad eye as though he had worked up a debt of itchiness while keeping it covered.

Sam took the chair opposite. “Did you know that man?” she asked, looking back at the closed door.

“Yep. That was Joe Crag. He’s one of the only people in this city who doesn’t hate my guts.”

“So he’s a friend?”

“Yeah—a good friend. We can trust him.”

Sam smiled. “Okay!”

Someday, she really needed to find out why people hated Will so much. It didn’t make any sense to her. Well, he was a bit of a know-it-all, and he could be rude sometimes, but anyone who talked to him for more than five minutes could tell that he was a sweet little guy under it all.

The room had no windows, which gave them more privacy, but also meant that it was only lit by a fire crackling on the hearth set into one wall. With the mild weather outside, the fire made the room feel hot. “Have they not made any lightbulbs here yet?” Sam asked, realizing she hadn’t seen any thus far.

“Sadly not,” Will replied. “Electricity works differently here than it does on Earth. It’s unpredictable, and doesn’t like to play nice. No one’s been able to produce any electrical technology so far—it’s kind of the holy grail of Artisans everywhere. On the bright side, we do have guns.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, although they’re pretty rare. I own a rifle myself, actually.”

“Really?”

“Mmhmm.”

“Sweeeeet. You’ll have to show it off sometime.”

The fat tavern keeper returned maybe twenty minutes later, carrying a pair of platters with puffy chicken pies and big mugs of juice and little honey-glazed cakes. Sam dug right in, eating to dispel some of the nervous tension she had built up while traversing the city.

It was good. Not quite as special as Will’s cooking, but it was clearly made by someone who knew what they were doing. Will didn’t want his pastry, so Sam was happy to dispose of it for him.

Joe Crag pulled out a chair for himself and stayed to talk with Will as they ate. Sam was too busy with her food to pay attention to most of it, but their conversation seemed to be of a light, friendly nature, so she didn't mind having him there. Sam only perked up when the topic turned to her.

“Where’d you pick this one up, then?” Joe asked, jerking a thumb toward Sam. “Fish her out yourself?”

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“You could say that,” Will replied, sounding a little cagey. Maybe he didn’t trust this Joe Crag quite as much as he claimed.

“What are you going to do with her?”

“Oh, she’s just an extra set of hands for the farm right now. There’s always work to be done around there, and when she’s got some levels on her she’ll be good security for expeditions and such.” He tapped his Profession symbol significantly, which had a miniature version of the Explorer’s compass encroaching on a corner of the Cook's cauldron. “Haven’t gotten to travel much yet after branching into Explorer, so I might be able to mine a couple of levels there out of that.”

Joe let out a boisterous laugh. He seemed to laugh a lot. “You sure have your sights set high! What level are you going to stop, exactly?”

Will shrugged. “Thirty, I guess.”

“You’re mad!”

“Thanks.”

“So, how come you’re here on the sly?”

“I don’t want Brimstone to catch wind of my new hire just yet.”

Joe glanced between Will and Sam through small eyes trapped between walls of fat. “It’s not too healthy to keep secrets from our good leader—you know that, right?”

Will leaned back in his chair, doing a fair job at looking unconcerned. “It's all in hand.”

Joe shook his head. He turned his attention to Sam and said: “Girl, do you know what he’s getting you into here?”

“No idea,” Sam replied.

“That’s not very fair of him. Doing anything that might displease Brimstone is dangerous.”

“He did actually mention that.”

“Lethally dangerous, girl. I can’t overstate it. The flames cooked what was left of his brain years ago—there's only madness inside that ugly noggin now.”

“I don’t care about that.”

Joe blinked.

Sam met his gaze firmly, even though it was a struggle to keep her swollen left eye open. “I’m going to help Will however I can. I don’t need details to know that.”

“Some loyalty,” the Cook said, whistling through fleshy lips. “Girls go crazy for that evil eye of yours, eh?”

“Well,” Will replied vaguely, what sounded like the start of a sentence tapering off into nothing.

“Just don’t get her killed, man.”

“I won’t. Besides, she’s too tough to let a little thing like dying keep her down.”

Sam hid a blush behind her mug, draining the rest of her juice in one long draught.

After finishing their late lunch, Sam felt a little more prepared to handle the city again. Will donned his disguise and took them west, over one of the arched bridges that bore traffic back and forth across the river. Pointing in the northward direction, he explained that the entertainment district known as Darkside was that way, where gaming houses and brothels and fighting pits could be found. Once he was finished with his deliveries, Mongrel would almost certainly find his way there. Sam was intrigued by the mention of fighting pits, but Will firmly maintained that they didn’t want to go there.

“I’d like to avoid either of us getting stabbed today, if I can,” he grumbled in conclusion, and would not discuss the matter further.

Instead they turned off to the south until they hit the sharp rock face that tumbled precipitously down into the slate-gray ocean over a hundred feet below. They began to descend a set of steep switchbacks cut from the stone that led down and down, past buildings that jutted out from the slope, clinging desperately to dubious moorings like ticks on the side of a dog’s belly.

This part of the city was aptly named Cliffside, connected by stairs and walkways and rope bridges and cargo pulleys in a mess of habitation even more confusing than the Outside slum, if not quite as squalid.

Sam did not feel too sure about stepping off the switchback—she was reasonably confident that the stone would not give out underfoot, but she did not have the same faith in the slapdash wood-and-hemp craftsmanship that held the district barely lashed together. But Will wanted her to see something, and pulled her along until she was tiptoeing carefully on creaking walkways and scurrying over swaying rope bridges, apologizing at every hard-eyed stranger she nearly bumped into.

The buildings ended up wrapping all the way around the cliff-face and into the deep gorge that the river had dug into the rock, which split the raised earth all the way to the sea. It was dark beneath those narrow walls, with only a sliver of blue sky overhead. The web of schizophrenic habitation became a bit more orderly here, houses cut deep into the rock with doors of solid metal. Most of them were banks, Will informed her. Apparently they had those in the Frontier.

“It’s a precarious business since thieving crews can use Demolish to break through most defenses a banker might throw up,” Will explained, “but thick walls are at least better than thin ones, and those hoping for an easy mark will find that the security personnel inside are rather enthusiastic in their duties.”

“Oh.”

“I’ve got some money here myself. In…” He pointed to an establishment with a sign hanging from its stone facade that read ‘Watson, Watson, and Watson’. “That one. None of them are named Watson, so I don’t know where they got the name from. Maybe they just tried to think of something a fancy Earth bank should be called.”

Sam clung to the worryingly flimsy railing. “How much money do you have?” she asked, trying hard to keep her knees from knocking together.

“Enough.”

“So you’re rich.”

“Well.”

“You are, right?”

“Relatively speaking, I suppose.”

“In that case, I will be expecting some expensive gifts in the future.” The manufactured haughtiness in her voice was somewhat undercut by the shivering terror of suddenly plunging a hundred feet down, leading to a watery death by drowning or a quicker one by dashing her skull open on the rocks.

“What’s up with this writing, by the way?” she asked, looking around at the signs advertising the various establishments around her. “It doesn’t look like English, and somehow it doesn’t feel like I’m speaking English, either. Ever since I signed that contract…”

Will nodded. “Your instincts are correct. When you get access to the Concord, it scrubs away whatever languages you knew before and implants you with a new one, standard across the whole Frontier so that everyone can understand each other, wherever they came from originally. The One Tongue, it’s called. You get speaking and writing for free, but if you want the hand-talk version, you’ve got to learn it the hard way.”

Sam groaned, rubbing at her head. “That’s so trippy. Why’s this place always got to find new ways of weirding me out?”

Blessedly, Will soon took them out of the dangling financial area, and they continued down the Cliffside district until they reached sea level, where large wooden platforms and jetties had been built into the narrow strip of land to make space for moored ships that bobbed on the water—their furled sails a forest of vertical poles dressed in many colors—as well as warehouses and cargo depots and many little stalls where vendors hawked a variety of goods in loud, grating voices. This part of the city was, of course, named Seaside.

At the end of a sturdy walkway, a line of folk chained by hand and foot were led up the gangplank of a large vessel by a bullish man wielding a nasty-looking cudgel. Those people were slaves—had to be. Sam swallowed, knowing that she might easily have been one of them.

Will took her off to one side toward a line of warehouses squeezed tight together, and Sam was about to ask where they were going when she suddenly found herself standing next to Mongrel, who was arguing with a merchant and making frequent stabbing gestures toward his goods, trying to convince the man of their superior quality.

The produce he had brought was already gone from the wagon, with only the small crates of healing supplies Will had provided remaining. The chimps were off buying seafood skewers at one of the stalls, and Sam noted with some satisfaction that Nyx was missing entirely.

The two men appeared to reach some kind of understanding, and money changed hands, but neither one looked particularly happy.

“Rotten fucking bastard son of a sow’s squirting anus,” Mongrel muttered under his breath as he stalked away from the other man. He whistled his familiars over so they could begin unloading the supplies. He split his earnings with Will, who tucked the money in his pocket with a nod.

“What happened to Nyx?” Sam asked.

“Ah, who knows,” Mongrel replied, sucking on his discolored teeth. “She just vanished on me all of a sudden. Damn woman. I hope she stays gone.”

The Farmer-Builder was due to fill his now-empty wagon with things for the farm—specialty produce and ingredients for Will’s tinkering that they couldn’t make themselves—so they left him to it and went on their way. Number Five waved to Sam in parting with a sweet little smile, which she returned with a broad grin of her own. Number Three gave her the finger when his master wasn’t looking, which she decided to ignore.

Will took her around the various dockside market stalls. Most of the presented offerings were tacky or of obviously shoddy craftsmanship. More interestingly, further out on the pier, a huge… thing was being hauled out of the water. It might have been a whale, except its body was mailed in pale fish scales that shone iridescent, and its sides were lined with floppy tentacles that still twitched and squirmed despite the creature being quite dead. Multiple thick-hafted harpoons jutted from its streamlined back and bulbous head, and it was being yanked onto land by numerous metal hooks strung through its flesh, teams of bare-chested men heaving the rattling chains attached to them.

“What is that creature?” Sam asked, stopping to gawk. Several others did the same, but most townsfolk did not spare the odious creature a glance as they went about their business.

“I don’t really know,” Will admitted, rubbing his bad eye through the bandage with the heel of his hand. “I’m not too current on my sea beast lore.”

“Why are there so many of them?”

“Monsters, you mean? Well, apparently the Frontier didn’t always have them, although I haven’t been around nearly long enough to know. The story goes that they appeared about twenty-five years ago just after Era’s murder. They’ve been spreading out from the center of the Mainland ever since, pushing us back to the coasts on almost all fronts.

“Some say the monsters are Era’s dying curse on the land, to punish man for our sin. Others claim that the goddess and her angels were holding back the monsters all this time, and that they were allowed to wreak havoc once she was no longer around to protect us. There are as many theories as there are drunken fools in Sheerhome taverns to peddle them.”

“What do you think?” Sam asked.

“I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter. In the end, the goddess is dead and the monsters are strangling the life out of the Frontier. Those are the facts. They breed like rats, and they all harbor a mad hatred for humans, so they’ll wipe us out eventually if we don’t find a way to do the same to them.”

“Are you going to stop them?”

Will smiled tiredly. He looked uncertain for a moment, then slowly nodded. “Yes. Even if no one else thinks it can be done, I’m going to find a way. I’ll make the Frontier a place worth living in.”

Sam grinned. “Good. I’ll be right there with you.” She patted him on the back—a little harder than she’d intended—and sent him stumbling. He rubbed indignantly at his shoulder blades once he found his footing on planks slick with fish guts, but the one-eyed look he gave her held nothing but fondness, and made Sam’s heart beat a little quicker.