Chapter 21. Progress

  His body still ached and throbbed from the beating he’d endured the night before, but Jeremiah’s spirits were higher than they’d been in weeks. Besides the food and rest, Jeremiah had attempted to remove the fish stink from his clothing. But each delicate soap he had found and used had only managed to mix with the fish to create something new and worse.

  Besides the soap and food, the only thing Jeremiah had allowed himself to take from the house was a metal pan he’d spotted in the bin. The inside was thickly laid with the lumpy remains of a blackened dinner, someone had badly burned their meal, then given up the pan as lost. The underside, however, was smooth and flat—perfect to practice enchanting. He was thankful Cutter hadn’t ruined his inscribing hand.

  Bruno would have chided him for getting distracted from the mission, but Jeremiah had thought of an idea last night that he just couldn’t shake. Once he tried it and got it out of his head, then he’d be able to think about the mission.

  Jeremiah joined the throng of Elminians, trying to move through them the way he’d seen Pete do. If anything, he was shoved and jostled more for his impudence. Nevertheless, he managed to make his way to a quiet alley. Then he left and picked another alley several more blocks away from Cutter’s lot, just in case. He arranged himself to be able to see if anyone was coming, and set to work.

  The new diagram took him an hour to complete. As the finishing touch, he lay a length of copper wire within a long trough he had carved. The copper was not just a bridge, but a conduit in itself, and one that Jeremiah hoped would slow the flow of magic considerably.

  Hopefully the diagram read Strengthen…Pause. Functionally, it should have been identical to the Strengthen plate he had made on the way to Elminia, but achieved with much less effort.

  “I am patient,” Jeremiah told himself. “I understand this will likely not work. I am okay with that.”

  Jeremiah placed his hands on the pan, spoke the words, and felt the magic flow from him. The runes glowed briefly. Jeremiah noticed little black flecks on the pan and wondered if they were food, then shook his head to clear the thought. It still surprised him how much more of his focus enchanting required compared to necromancy.

  “Moment of truth, buddy,” he said. Gus looked up from his refuse pile and croaked.

  Jeremiah ran the inscription tool across the surface of the pan, leaving no mar in its wake. The enchantment had worked.

  “Would it have been so hard for you to just tell me that?” Jeremiah grumbled at Thurok in absentia.

  “ It would have been easy to tell you what to do ,” said Thurok in his head, “ but something something, you’re weak and incompetent, something something .”

  Jeremiah looked over his work and realized he had forgotten to feel proud of it. But the feeling never came. It was satisfying that it worked, but worthy of pride? He’d save that for the weapons. And this simpler diagram was one he might actually be able to put on a piece of gear. It lacked all the redundancies that Allison’s armor had, but it was a possibility that hadn’t existed before.

  Of course, a flat plate was one thing. Taking this same diagram and somehow resizing it and wrapping it around the blade of a sword? He had no clue how to do that.

  Gus croaked again and crawled all over the pan, banging his feet on the Strengthen rune.

  “What? You want me to make it stronger?”

  Gus chased a cockroach.

  Jeremiah shrugged and, with considerable effort, pried the copper wire from its housing. The enchantment, now effectively doing nothing, was inert. He was about to start carving another Strengthen rune when he got another flash of inspiration.

  After having been Strengthened once, carving another rune into the pan was onerous. It took Jeremiah the rest of the morning before he was able to sit back and admire his work.

  The diagram now read If Strengthen, Strengthen.

  “There, happy? Now if it’s being strengthened it will strengthen itself. And it will do that until…uhh…I guess it won’t stop.”

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  He placed his hands on the pan and charged it again. Nothing seemed to change. He left no mark with the inscription tool, but that had already been true.

  “Sorry, buddy, I don’t think it—”

  Jeremiah yelped as the pan shattered like glass, disintegrating into thousands of metal shards. He waited, frozen and waiting for something else to happen.

  After several minutes, Jeremiah relaxed. “Okay, that was awesome,” he said, “but not what I meant to do.” He pondered the result. How would he explain what had happened to Delilah if she were here? He set up the enchantment to make the pan harder and harder, until… “Oh, I get it! It became infinitely hard and that made it infinitely brittle…I think.”

  It felt like he had solved a little mystery. Jeremiah wasn’t sure if he could actually do anything with it, but it was certainly something he hadn’t known before. He desperately wanted a new piece of metal to work on.

  ?

  “Spare a copper, sir? Ma’am? Spare a copper?” In Jeremiah’s mind, the act of begging was something he would resort to when all else had failed. He had not anticipated that his breaking point would be so soon into his mission. It had been a week since Prim’s and he didn’t dare return there, or to any business within a ten street radius of Cutter’s lot. He found himself back on the treadmill of trying to feed himself before he could manage anything else.

  The supper with Pete was a memory he revisited often, though he despaired at how quickly the hunger had returned. Within a day, his ungrateful body was demanding more food. Part of him hoped Pete would reappear to repeat their exchange of help now for ephemeral future favors.

  The crowds rushed by at such a pace that Jeremiah was barely noticeable to passers-by. How many such people had Jeremiah ignored, back when he’d had somewhere to go? When he’d had coin in his pocket and bread under his arm?

  Jeremiah forced his thoughts back to his present situation. Fantasizing about meals he’d had was fine for helping him pass the time between guard patrols all night, but it didn’t actually get him any closer to his goal. Which was food.

  No! Jeremiah reminded himself. The goal was to infiltrate a criminal underworld, uncover a sadistic cult, and return information to the empress. All this to help his friends, who were being targeted because of something he did. Jeremiah forced himself to dwell on that guilt for a minute. It dismayed him how quickly the needs of the moment overrode what he actually needed to do here.

  An elven woman appeared in front of him. “Now why should I give you money that I worked for when you’ve done no work at all?”

  Jeremiah was used to this kind of question by now. The only reason anyone ever stopped was to berate him. Sometimes, he stuck up for himself, tried to explain the challenges he faced, but it never actually resulted in a coin, so most times he didn’t bother. He offered the woman a bland smile. She harrumphed with satisfaction and went on her way.

  “Spare a copper? No? How about you, sir? Of course not.” Jeremiah glanced in all directions in case Cutter’s men were nearby, and drew his feet up closer to keep them from getting crushed under the wheels of a passing carriage.

  There was an undeniable urgency in the air. Over the past week, Jeremiah had begun to recognize it from Bruno’s description. He saw it in the way people rushed from place to place, never talking to one another. Fights were frequent, even in the middle of the day and between people who were sober.

  Then there were the things that were just strange. Jeremiah didn’t have any other way to categorize them. Like the man holding a knife in the crowd, he saw incidents that were somehow wrong. A business woman dressed in finery devouring raw beef hearts outside the butcher. A suicide by a guard immolating himself in the gutter with a bottle of lamp oil. A roofer who had suddenly turned and gouged out the eyes of his colleague in the middle of the street.

  Finally, there were the dreams, or rather the lack thereof. At first, Jeremiah thought he simply wasn’t getting the chance to sleep deep enough to dream, but he was starting to suspect he was indeed dreaming, and forgetting. He awoke each morning as though from a nightmare, his heart racing and sweat on his skin, searching wildly for…something. He could never remember what, but he was certain it had just fled.

  Jeremiah glanced around again, just in case. He felt exposed out here, visible on the street. Cutter’s men could be anywhere, he had no idea how far their territory reached. He was in no hurry to meet the other gangs that may be around either, not after what had happened. Bruno had warned him that a man with no friends on the streets was a dead man, but Jeremiah couldn’t see a way to make friends without risking becoming a victim again.

  There was the Pit, of course. Bruno had warned him to stay away from the Pit without a crew to back him up, but he couldn’t stay up here either. Surely the Pit gangs couldn’t be worse than Cutter’s, right? His thumb throbbed, and he shuddered at the thought.

  He needed an in, and it all came back to Pete. Pete would know how to get him into the Pit. But how to get him to share what he knew, especially without owing him more favors? There was a danger to Pete that he couldn’t quite understand, but he knew that Pete was not really his friend. Helpful, perhaps, if Jeremiah could play his cards right, but never safe.

  Besides, Jeremiah had no idea how to even find Pete. He supposed he could just start asking around, but that seemed like a good way to attract the wrong kind of attention.

  Jeremiah climbed to his feet. He had wasted enough hours sitting here and feeling sorry for himself. If he hurried, maybe he could scavenge some decent scraps from behind the bake house.

  He just stepped into the flow of traffic when a hair-raising shriek pierced the din.