"You're obviously hurt."
"I'm fine."
Blood-Sense told a different story. There was a wound in her side, old but spreading, cold in a way that living flesh shouldn't be cold. Magic that rotted instead of healed; the kind of curse that eats you from the inside while you're still walking around pretending everything is normal.
She stumbled again and caught herself on the wall.
"You have a cursed wound. That must hurt like shit."
"Observant." She laughed, but there wasn't any humor in it.
"Three days ago. Assassin with a poisoned blade. Withering curse, the old kind... pre-empire magic that nobody's supposed to know how to use anymore."
"How long do you have?"
"Twelve hours. Maybe eighteen if I'm lucky." She pushed herself off the wall and kept walking as if her stubbornness could keep her upright. "That's why I hired you. Someone needs to finish this investigation, and I'm running out of time to be picky about who."
"I don't get paid if you die."
"Exactly. So surely you are properly motivated."
She made it two more steps before her legs gave out entirely.
I caught her before she hit the stone floor. She was heavier than she looked; all that muscle and armor adding up to someone I had to actually work to hold upright.
"This is embarrassing," she muttered into my shoulder.
"You're dying. That takes priority over embarrassment."
I lifted her properly and started walking. She didn't argue, which told me more about how bad she was feeling than anything else could have.
"Saving your investment," Malgrin observed from inside my head. "Your pretty, tall, muscular investment. I approve."
“Shut up.”
“Huh?” Nyssara looked at me startled.I bit my lip till I swallowed blood.
Raubtier Speed.
The sump never looked that good before. I stood at the precipice, jumping down into the underbelly of Zetun; a suffocating expanse of bruised violet mists and skeletal mangroves that looked less like a landscape and more like a festering wound in the world’s flesh. Kind of pretty if you ask me.I jumped from roof to roof effortlessly.
The Forbidden Apothecary sat in the deepest part of it, in a building that looked abandoned but very much wasn't. Brass pipes leaked something that smelled like burnt copper. The windows were shuttered with metal that had been welded shut. The door was marked with symbols that made my eyes water if I looked at them too long.
I kicked it.
A voice came from inside, sounding like someone had taught a grinding gear how to speak.
"We’re closed."
"I have a dying woman and money."
"How much money?"
"Enough."
The door opened wider.
Vekros was worse than the rumors, and the rumors were already pretty bad.
The right side of his body was brass. Not armor; the metal had somehow become his skin, calcified and permanent, with joints that clicked softly whenever he moved. Through a glass panel set into his chest I could see a mechanical heart ticking away, each beat precise and measured and utterly inhuman.
His left eye was still flesh. His right eye was a lens that whirred and clicked as it focused on me, adjusting through what must have been a dozen different magnifications.
"That's commitment," Malgrin breathed. "I respect that level of self-modification."
"Put her on the table." Vekros gestured with his brass hand; the fingers moved smoothly, almost gracefully, like he'd had centuries to get used to them. Maybe he had.
I laid Nyssara down as gently as I could manage. She was barely breathing now, each inhale shallow and wet.
Vekros examined the wound with those brass fingers, pressing and probing with a delicacy that seemed impossible given the material. "Withering curse. Advanced stage. Pre-empire construction, if I'm not mistaken... and I'm rarely mistaken." His lens clicked through several settings. "Interesting. Very interesting. I haven't seen work this clean in decades."
"Can you cure it?"
"Oh, certainly." He said it the way someone might confirm they could make toast. Simple. Obvious. "The question is whether you can afford it."
"Price?"
"Eight hundred silver."
I had three hundred seventy-five in my pocket. Nowhere close.
"What if I could...."
"No bargaining." He held up one brass finger, and the gesture was almost playful. "I don't haggle, young man. It's beneath both of us. Eight hundred silver, or she dies on my table and you carry her out the same way you carried her in. Those are your options."
She was running out of time, and I was running out of ways to make money. No one in this city would lend it to me. No options that made any kind of sense.
"I can steal something," I said. "Whatever you need. I'm good at acquiring things that don't belong to me."
His human eye studied me with sudden interest while his mechanical eye whirred through another adjustment.
"Hmm." He tapped his brass fingers against the table, click click click, like he was working through calculations in his head. Then he smiled, and it was the strangest thing I'd ever seen; half his face moved normally while the other half stayed frozen in metal. "I find myself in need of something from the Imperial Palace.
A gemstone called the Tear of the First Emperor. You've heard of it, I assume."
Silence.
"Oh no," Malgrin whispered. "Oh no no no."
"That's impossible," I said.
Vekros tilted his head, and the lens in his eye caught the light in a way that made it look almost amused. "You're a pact-bearer. I can see the black veins under your sleeves; void magic, unless I miss my guess. You can do things that normal thieves cannot even dream of."
"The Tear is guarded by....."
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"I know precisely what guards it.." He spread his hands, brass and flesh, in a gesture of perfect unconcern. "The question isn't whether it's difficult. The question is whether you want her to live badly enough to try."
I looked at Nyssara on the table. The black handprint of the curse had spread past her ribs now, crawling toward her heart with visible hunger.
"She'll die before I can steal it."
I stared at the vial. At Nyssara dying by inches. At Vekros and his half-brass smile and his mechanical heart ticking away behind glass.
Everything was transactional. That was the lesson I'd learned in the arena, the one truth that had never failed me. Everything had a price, and the only question was whether you could afford to pay it.
"I want it in writing," I said.
"Smart boy." Vekros actually looked pleased. "I do appreciate dealing with professionals."
He pulled out parchment and began writing in a hand that was surprisingly elegant given that half of it was metal.
I, Yozi, agree to deliver the Tear of the First Emperor to Vekros Malthir within 72 hours. In exchange: cure for Nyssara's curse, information on current conspiracies affecting the empire, and one Blood Ring (cursed artifact, minor). Failure to deliver = body and soul become Vekros' property in perpetuity.
He slid the contract across the table with that half-smile still on his face.
I read it. Slowly. Word by word, because contracts with people like Vekros were the kind of thing you wanted to understand completely before you put your name on them.
"Don't sign that," Malgrin warned. "That's a terrible deal; he's basically buying your soul on layaway…."
I picked up the pen. Crossed out eight words. Wrote in new ones.
to deliver the Tear of the First Emperor.
that Vekros has claim to the Tear of the First Emperor.
Vekros raised his human eyebrow. The brass side of his face couldn't move, but somehow I got the impression it would have raised too if it could. "Clever. Very clever."
"You get a claim to the artifact. Not possession. Not delivery. A claim."
"That's a significant legal difference."
"I know. That's the deal I'm offering."
He looked at me for a long moment, that mechanical eye whirring softly as it studied my face. I wondered what he was seeing. Wondered what all those lenses could tell him about the person standing in front of him.
Then he laughed. It was a strange sound; half of it came out normal, half of it came out with a metallic resonance that shouldn't have been possible from a human throat. "I like you. I genuinely do. Most people who come through that door are too frightened or too stupid to read what they're signing, much less negotiate the terms." He picked up his own pen and signed with a flourish. "Very well. A claim it is."
The ink glowed for a moment. Something shifted in the air, something heavy and binding. Contract sealed.
"Blood Ring." He tossed me a band of black metal with red runes crawling across its surface like living things.
I caught it. The metal felt wrong against my palm; not cold exactly, but... hungry. Like it wanted something from me that I shouldn't be willing to give.
"What does it do?"
"Controls blood at a distance. Makes people cooperative when they'd rather not be." His human eye twinkled in a way that might have been friendly if it weren't attached to someone who had just casually mentioned owning my soul as a backup option. "I think you'll find it useful in your line of work."
Vekros worked quickly once the contract was signed.
He poured the golden liquid down Nyssara's throat and drew symbols on her skin with something that smoked and hissed where it touched her. Then he pressed his brass hand against the wound, and I could feel something happening; magic moving, resisting, fighting back against whatever he was doing.
The black handprint pulsed once. Twice. Then it stopped spreading.
"The curse is paused," Vekros announced, stepping back to admire his work. "She has two days before it resumes. Possibly three."
"Two days to steal from the Imperial Palace."
"I have every confidence in you." That half-smile again. "You have such interesting eyes. Don’t make me fall in love, kid.."
I didn't respond to that. Just stared at Nyssara on the table, at the wound that had stopped spreading but hadn't healed, and thought about what I'd just signed away.
Then I pulled my knife.
"What are you doing?" Vekros asked; curious rather than alarmed.
I pressed the blade against her wound, right where the curse was thickest, and let the poison seep into the metal. The steel turned black where it touched the infected flesh, drinking in the corruption like water into dry sand.
"The curse," I said. "Can it be weaponized?"
Vekros' human eye lit up with something that looked almost like delight. "Oh. Oh, that's brilliant. Don’t do such HOT things unprompted, I am about to faint…" He leaned closer to watch, fascinated.
"Yes, absolutely. The curse can be transferred through the blade; anyone you cut will begin to rot. Slowly at first, then faster. Quite painful, I'm told."
"Good."
I examined the blade. The poison had stained it permanently; black veins running through the steel like the ones running through my arms. A cursed weapon now, made from someone else's suffering.
"That's dark," Malgrin said. "Even by my standards, that's dark. I love it."
Then I did something that surprised everyone, including myself.
I pulled up my shirt. Found the spot on my own side that matched where Nyssara's wound was, right below the ribs on the left.
And I cut myself with a different knife.
Not deep. Just enough to bleed.
Vekros watched with his head tilted and his lens clicking through adjustments. "What are you doing?"
"Even trade-off.." I pressed a cloth against the wound and watched the blood soak through. "She got cursed while investigating something. I'm profiting from that investigation. Now we're both marked."
"Is that actually honorable?" Malgrin sounded genuinely confused. "I don't understand you at all. You make no sense as a person."
Blood ran down my side, warm and real and mine. The wound wasn't cursed; just bleeding, just painful, just another scar to add to the collection.
But it matched hers.
"Seventy-two hours," Vekros said quietly. Something had changed in his voice; something that might have been respect. "Starting now."
I pocketed the Blood Ring and sheathed my cursed blade. Nyssara's breathing was steadier now, deeper, more like sleep than dying.
She'd wake soon. And when she did, I'd have to explain what I'd signed away to save her life... the impossible theft I'd agreed to attempt, the soul I'd put up as collateral, the matching wound I'd carved into my own flesh for reasons I couldn't fully articulate even to myself.
Everything was transactional. That was still true......
....but promises weighed more than silver, I think.
I sat down against the wall to wait for her to wake up.
Vekros watched me with those mismatched eyes, mechanical and human, and that half-smile never quite left his face.
"You know," he said eventually, "I think this is the beginning of a very interesting relationship."
I didn't answer. Just sat there bleeding and waiting and trying not to think too hard about what I'd gotten myself into.
Seventy-two hours.
The clock was already ticking.
Performance Rating: ????? (4.5/5) Malgrin's Note: "Visceral. Absolutely visceral. The way you didn't flinch when the steel bit your skin? That is showmanship. I admit, Vekros has a certain... oily charisma, though the way he stared at your open vein was positively predatory.."
INVENTORY UPDATE:
- [Cursed Blade]: Acquired. (Status: Active). The blade now pulses with a necrotic heartbeat matching your own.
- [Blood Ring]: Acquired.
- [Fresh Wound]: Your lips have never been fuller. Oh and you have a matching scar with your bestie you found an hour ago. Go bestie go!
NEW CONTRACT LIABILITIES:
- Creditor: Vekros Malthir.
- Terms: Retrieval of the Tear of the First Emperor.
- Collateral: Your physical vessel. (If you fail, he doesn't just take your soul; he wears your skin).
- Note: The air around you now feels colder, as if Vekros is breathing down your neck even when he isn't there.
CORRUPTION: (14%) - The mingling of your blood with his magic has stained your aura.