“Treston Mox.” From across the game court, Lady Talagast tilts her head as she pondered the name. I catch the distraction as her control on the racket floating in front of her slows for a second and take the opportunity to spike a ball past her and into the net behind her. She tuts, blocking the second ball that follows the first and hitting it back at me.

  The two of us stand on a court of blue clay built in an open-roof section of her palatial estate in the city. The court itself is built as a hexagon of white lines painted onto the blue clay with a net of thin rope strung across. It is a large space, nearly eighty feet across, and built for a game played in Faeth called netball. Every place I go seems to have its own unique games.

  The game itself is rather simple: try to keep a bouncing ball made of rubber in flight by hitting it with a racket. Letting the ball hit the ground on your side of the court more than once or allowing it to connect with the retaining net behind you is a point for your opponent. Typically, the game is played with three players on either side, but Lady Talagast and I play in a slightly altered manner. The crimson and gold glow of my presence suffuses my half of the court; three rackets injected with black dust hover in the air, smacking rubber balls back toward the Lady on the other side of the net. Lady Talagast also wields three rackets of her own, though hers are enchanted to allow her to control them from a distance with nothing but her will. Currently, we are up to juggling five of the balls back and forth across the net, each racket slamming into them hard enough that they could do some real damage if either of us didn’t have considerable resistance to being smacked with hurtling rubber balls.

  Since my second conversation with the woman, when she gave me the history of humanity as she understood it, I have found myself visiting her on occasion. Rather than be annoyed, she genuinely seems to enjoy our visits. I know that I do.

  “He actually approached you?” Lady Talagast says over the sound of pinging rubber balls.

  “He did. I figured that you might know him since you did the judging at the academy together,” I say. Controlling the five rackets at once is good exercise for practicing my control, and carrying on with conversation is good for practicing splitting my attention. “I found myself not liking him much.”

  “You have good instincts then,” Lady Talagast says. She gestures to the side, and a construct with a long barrel whirls up before firing a rubber ball right at my head. Like all the previous ones, I deflect it with a racket and add the new sixth ball to the chaotic flow. “Treston Mox is what would generously be referred to as an unsavory figure.”

  “And if you were feeling less generous?”

  “He is a boil on the ass of this city,” she says.

  The sudden shift in the Lady’s words nearly makes me miss returning a ball she aims right for my leg. Yes, hitting your opponent with a ball is, for some reason, a third way to score a point. Why anyone would make that a rule, I have no clue. I manage to deflect it in time, sending it into a high lob that she spikes back at me to no avail. Over the course of our match, it has become clear that despite the impressive enchantments she has on her own rackets and her experience with the game, I have the edge on speed, and not by a little bit. The contested ball is added once more to the controlled chaos of our back-and-forth exchanges. Across the court, Lady Talagast clicks her tongue.

  “What exactly makes him a boil?” I ask.

  “The usual things,” she says. “Lechery, debauchery, and the like. He works with low-level criminals to guard his great houses of gambling and to extort those foolish enough to purchase property near him. His thugs are also responsible for what has to be a good third of the smuggling that comes in and out of the city.”

  “He didn’t strike me as a criminal.”

  “Did he strike you as a wealthy businessman?”

  I manage to catch two balls on a single racket at once and send them spiraling at her. To my dismay, a fourth racket rises from the ground next to her to defend against my attack. I don’t call her out for using more tools, and merely snag another from the wall by sending a cloud of dust that way.

  “That was the impression he was trying to portray,” I admit.

  “Well, it is an accurate one. Unfortunately, there are only three ways to become wealthy in business: be born into it, cheat at it, and by being genuinely brilliant in the game. That is also the order of how likely an individual is to acquire their wealth.”

  I consider that a moment as the game continues between us. Mr. Mox is a half-elven man in Faethian city, so being born to wealth is unlikely. “Still, a criminal. Are you just guessing or do you know for certain?”

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  Lady Talagast smiles, and the four rackets she is mentally juggling slowly sink toward the clay ground of the court. Balls bounce and soar past her, scoring for my side as she abruptly ends the game. Her blase attitude is a bit irksome, but I was already winning by four points, so I let it go. Together we approach the net while one of the Lady’s servants rushes over with a silver tray topped with monikered hand towels and two glasses of sparkling wine that she lies and says are the traditional post-game drinks for netball. We toast as she uses her other hand to wipe sweat from her brow.

  “The man owns half of the high-class casinos in Sadisport, and it is well known what illicit materials one can acquire there. No one has produced anything concrete to show that he is the backer and supplier of such things, but you likely wouldn’t have to look all that deeply into it if you really wanted to prove it,” she says.

  “And the authority allows it,” I say. I manage to stop the ignorant follow-up that immediately springs to mind. Sighing, I watch the bubbles floating up through the alcohol. “Here I thought that Faeth might be different since you didn’t have nobles in control of everything.”

  Lady Talagast actually snorts at that, but there is a tinge of sympathy in the look she gives me. “Nobles and politicians attain power in the same way, by tricking everyone else into giving it to them. The only difference is that nobles are born with an edge and that politicians require ambition, but there aren’t many differences beyond that,” she says.

  “Aside from endowment.”

  “Yes, that is another difference,” she admits.

  “So, the reason that a man like Treston Mox can be known to be a criminal and nothing has been done about it, is because he supplies the people with power what they want. These illicit materials that you mentioned?”

  “Oh yes, but more than that. Likely, you have already been told about the faethian love for speculation and gambling? Mox owns several casinos, and if there is one surely secure business in Faeth, it would be houses of chance. More, he also owns an expensive fighting arena where the bored and well-off come to place bets that would bugger the mind of an honest laborer. The well-off anywhere have a perverse fascination with violence, so you can only imagine how the bored elite in a place as safe as Faeth might view bloodsports. The entire affair is very lucrative.”

  “I thought you said he was a cheat. From how you describe it, he might be involved in smuggling, but his businesses sound legitimate.”

  “I suppose that I failed to mention that his little arena is also the largest money laundering operation in the city. Those who wish for their sources of income to remain quiet will go there, place outrageous bets on very long odds, and lose all of their money to the arena. Of course, they also purchase insurance to cover the vast majority of their bets, and are then paid out by the arena itself. It is a rather brilliant business model, one that is highly illegal and wouldn’t work if the comptroller wasn’t in your pocket, but brilliant in those specific circumstances.”

  I can only shake my head before I drain the wine flute in a single gulp. “And here I am killing monsters to make my wealth.”

  Lady Talagast grins. “Not outraged?”

  Thanking the man still standing near us and holding up his tray, I place the emptied flute back upon it and shake my head at the woman. “Why spare the energy? The world is a place where everyone is breaking the rules.”

  “You are so unlike him,” Lady Talagast says, shaking her head.

  “Who, my brother? I would hope so.” It wasn’t hard to guess who she meant. Lady Talagast often found a way to turn the conversation toward Corinth, and her voice would fill with a wispy, melancholy touch when she did.

  “When I knew him during his school years, he was already a jaded young man,” she says. “He took the way the world operated as a personal attack. There was this obsession with justice that he had. It is common for young people, but in him it was like a fire. I don’t see that when we speak. You are a much different creature.”

  “I don’t know if I’m all that different,” I say. I feel my hand twitching and force it to stop before any scratching can think of starting. “I just know that there is no such thing as justice, I guess.”

  “No?”

  “No.” For all my life, Exeter’s divine will had been what was extolled to me as the final arbiter of justice. Feelings about that tend to change when said god literally stamps you flat beneath his foot. “It is just a word, said by the mighty, chanted by the chattel."

  “You are a bit too young to speak like that, I think. You’re trying to be an enchanter, not a poet, right? Don’t throw your life away heading down that path.”

  I can’t help but bark a laugh at that. “Everyone needs hobbies. Are you free to lose another match?”

  Lady Talagast looks back at the rackets lying on the court. “Since what we were doing doesn’t have any official rules, I don’t consider it a loss.”

  “Consider it whatever you want, as long as you recognize that I won.”

  “Who’s to say?” She tosses her hand towel back onto the tray and dismisses her servant. “In any case, I have a busy rest of the day. Though I would love to do this again sometime. Perhaps we might even formalize rules.”

  We say our goodbyes and schedule another meeting. The woman spoils me with food and confections every time we meet and is a wellspring of knowledge and information, though every time I turn the conversation to enchanting, she grows distant.

  I leave her estate while thinking back on our conversations. Corinth and I both came to this city under very different circumstances. He came here because he loved magic; he wanted to dive deeper into its rich soil and dig out the treasures. I’m digging as well, and I do love magic, but my purposes are more practical. I need the power lying in enchanting for a very specific reason.

  Then my mind drifts back to Treston Mox. With what Lady Talagast told me about the man, I am glad that I declined his offer so outright. What I said to the man is true. I am not some thug that he can hire to hurt someone else, but finding out that he has his fingers in darker pies only makes my refusal all the more sensible. This city is magnificent, but it also seems determined to knock me off the course I am trying to walk. Getting pulled into criminal depths would only make my problems worse. Hopefully, I never have to see that man again.

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