Published at 24th of February 2024 10:33 am

Chapter Book 2, Chapter 5

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I landed in what appeared to be some sort of child-sized nest of ragged cloth scraps. It made my own clothes seem clean by comparison, and I quickly disentangled myself from what I assumed was some homeless kid’s bed. Thankfully, Derro didn’t seem to believe in one-room buildings like my birth village did, so there was no one around to see my entry.

I’d known that before I came in, of course. I could feel the mana in the kids gathered in the building, though admittedly the overall lack of it made it more difficult. Without any wards or advanced techniques to shield their mana from detection, they were easy to spot. It was always possible that there was someone in the other room who had that kind of skill, but I doubted anyone capable of pulling off a feat like properly shielding their core would be hanging around here.

Just like I’d expected, the thieves had piled up their spoils in a stone pit in the center of the adjacent room and most of them were huddled around it. One of the older ones, maybe nine or ten years old, was sorting through it and handing out a piece to each of the children. Once they got their food, each child scampered off somewhere to sit on a chunk of stone from the collapsed roof or to crouch down in an empty spot and eat it.

I felt an unfamiliar pang of sympathy. It was easy to picture myself among their numbers, half-starved and willing to do anything to fix that problem. It had happened more than once in my first life. My mother had provided me with shelter and not much else. Most of her whoring money went to her yamma weed addiction, and it was a rare occasion that she brought food back with her when she did go out.

At least the city I’d grown up in wasn’t in the middle of a desert. Food was plentiful for those who knew how to find it and didn’t mind a little risky work. Here, everyone was thin and malnourished, even the working adults. Finding anyone with some fat on their frame was an oddity. These kids were worse off than I’d been in a lot of ways.

One of the kids turned from the center pile and gave a squeak of surprise when she saw me. There was a flurry of motion, mostly kids scrambling to get away from me, and the one I’d pegged as the leader leaped forward with a rusty old knife brandished in my general direction.

“Who’re you?” the kid demanded. “You’re not part of our crew. Where are you from?”

“That’s him,” another kid said. I recognized this one. He was the boy who’d tried to grab me. “The kid who was walking down the street when we started. Remember? I said to wait for him to get farther away. He’s not from here.”

“Don’t mean nothing,” the kid with the knife said. “Just ‘cause he was coming back into the city when we ran into him don’t mean he’s not working for Blue Rat or the Diggers. We should kill him now before he can tell anyone we’re here.”

I rolled my eyes and ripped the knife out of his clutches with a minor telekinesis spell. The entire gaggle of kids watched it arc through the air to land on the ground at my feet, where I casually kicked it behind me. That drew a collective gasp of panic, but no one moved. There was only one real exit from the room they were gathered in, and I was standing in it. Anyone who wanted to leave would either need magic or they’d have to get past me.

“I’m not working for anyone,” I said. “I’ve been in Derro for all of ten minutes and I’m mostly just annoyed about getting dragged into all of this. I’m not going to report you to any authorities; I don’t even know who would care if I told them about this building, but I’m sure that by the time anyone shows up, you’d all be long gone.”

“Let’s say we believe you,” the older one said, his eyes resting on the knife on the ground behind me for a moment before he shifted them to meet my gaze. “Why are you here then? You want an apology or something?”

I snorted. “Would you mean it if you gave me one?”

“Nah,” the kid said, his teeth flashing in a grin. “Just something stupid grown ups make you do sometimes. Maybe gets you out of being clobbered if you offer it up without being told.”

I had a sudden flash of memory, a priest catching me trying to steal from the church’s larder in the middle of the night and demanding I offer up sincere repentance, then beating me when his magic told him I wasn’t being honest.

I’d burned that church to the ground two weeks later, and I’d made sure that priest was inside when I barred the doors. My first kill. My first dozen kills, actually. At the time, I hadn’t cared about the others who’d died. Looking back on it now, it was easy to see that as the first step I’d taken on the path to become the kind of monster that nations would mobilize armies to put down.

“You’re not getting any of this food, if that’s what you’re after,” the kid said. “We stole it fair and square. And we need it.”

“Nevin, come on. He only got caught up in it because of us. Least we can do is give him a parafta or something,” the kid who’d tried to touch me said.

“No way,” Nevin said. “We risked our necks to get this food. What’d he do to help?”

“I don’t want your damn food,” I said, cutting off the argument before it could get started. Truthfully, I could do with a meal, but I wasn’t going to take it from these kids, not when it meant taking food out of their mouths. The pile wasn’t that big, and less than half of them had anything to eat. Even if everyone got a single piece, that probably wasn’t going to leave anyone feeling full.

“Then why are you here?” one of the other kids asked. Nevin shot him a nasty glare and he flinched back.

“I want… to offer you a job,” I said. “I’m new here. I don’t know what’s what. Where is it safe to go? Where isn’t it? Who’s in charge of what areas? Who can I trust to work with me? Who’ll knife me in the back the first chance they get? Where are the stores? Where are the inns? Where do the mages live? Who’s taking goods in trade and where can I get the best rates?”

“We’re not tour guides!” Nevin protested.

I raised my hand and pointed up at the ceiling. The knife behind me jumped up into the air and came to rest, point first, just above the tip of my finger, where it slowly rotated in place. “Are you sitting so good you can afford to turn down easy work answering some questions?” I asked. “I’d bet you know more than half the answers already.”

“Let’s say we agree,” Nevin said. “Hypertheticly, of course. But let’s say we do, what’s in it for us?”

“More food. A better place to live. Some security, at least. I’m sure I can give you something you need.”

Nevin scoffed. “Stupid kid like you, wasting your mana on stunts like that? Maybe you ain’t working for Blue Rat, but you’re sure not from the streets. What do you know about what we need?”

“More than you’d think,” I said softly, more to myself than to Nevin. I raised my voice and added, “This place is a dump. It’s falling apart. You had to pull up rocks to reach a hole in the back to get in, and I saw those hand holds you carved in the wall to climb back out. Kind of a pain, isn’t it? What if I could get you something better?”

“How you gonna do that? You gonna go kill Blue Rat? Take over his territory? Gonna set yourself up as the east side king of the gutters?” Nevin asked. “Hell, while you’re at it, why not go after Gimkin so we can have north market too?”

“Okay, you’re annoying and unreasonable,” I said. “Is there anybody intelligent in this room I can talk to?”

Nevin took a few steps forward, no doubt intent on menacing me in some way. He was more than a foot taller than me and probably thought he could intimidate me, or maybe he just planned on taking a swing at me. Either way, Nevin was an impediment to my plans to put this group of half-starved children to work.

With the amount of mana he had left in his core, even if Nevin was my equal in knowledge and skills, he wouldn’t be able to threaten me. Given that I suspected his abilities in the mystic arts were nonexistent, I could have just stood there and let him uselessly pummel my shield ward with his fists until he got tired and gave up.

I wasn’t going to do that, of course, but it was mostly because I didn’t believe in just casually wasting mana. A cheap doze spell would be more efficient and save me some time. Besides, I was sick of listening to him talk. He’d wake back up in a few minutes at worst.

Nevin swayed in place as he fought the magic, but within a second, he crumpled to the floor. The spell set off a new round of panic, including a trio of the oldest children trying to scale the back wall to reach the gap in the roof. If the crew had been a bit smarter, they’d have worked to make some handholds so that they could have escaped to the roof, but unfortunately for them, they hadn’t been that prepared for an intrusion in their home.

“What’d you do?” the kid from the cart asked.

“Put him to sleep. He’ll be fine in a bit. Now, let’s talk about what I need, and what you need in return? More food? Better place to hole up? I can’t imagine any of you care about new clothes.”

The kid looked around and, upon seeing no one else willing to step forward, said, “No need to make it complicated. How about this? Every question you ask, we’ll get you an answer, and you give us a tenner. If we already know the answer, we get a tenner. If we have to go find out the answer, we get a tenner.”

“What’s a tenner?” I asked.

“It’s money,” the kid said. “You really aren’t from here, huh? A tenner is worth one tenth of a shard.”

That seemed simple enough, and if cash was all they were really after, I could make that happen. I just needed to see what the money looked like, and I’d transmute a few chips of stone into duplicates of it. I’d been hoping to find an actual economy here. Blighter’s Hole had done everything in trade, and it was a lot harder to transmute that kind of stuff than it was to work with stone or earth into precious metals.

“You got one I can see?” I asked.

The kid looked around at the rest of the crew, but they all shook their heads. “Looks like we aren’t that rich,” he said. “And if you got no money, I don’t think we can help you.”

“I got a halfshard,” one of the kids said. Immediately, every eye in the room was on him.

“The hell you do,” someone else said.

“It’s true,” the first kid insisted. He rooted around inside his shirt for a second, then pulled out a stone the size of a thumb and held it up triumphantly.

“That’s just a dim,” the second kid said. “Those are everywhere. It’s worthless.”

“Wait, are you telling me you use this stuff for money here?” I asked.

“Uh, yeah?”

Of course they did. Now that I thought about it, it made sense. The village had been full of draw stone. It had to have come from somewhere. And where there was draw stone, there was sure to be leech stone too. But what kind of crazy bastard would think it was a good idea to use a rock that devoured mana as money?

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