Miles to Go I

Synopsis

The morning began with a debt and a decision not to pay it: Elliot’s horse squared his one gold apiece, and the four Mól coins stayed in the purse as leverage.

The weaponsmith’s shop had two boys working the forge outside and a wall of very good blades within, and Hinta came out of the back hostile and stayed that way for an hour. What thawed her was the goods: a curved dagger, a broadsword hilted for a bugbear’s grip, and the head of a long-spear, all pulled from the mountains. She bit a Mól coin, judged the pieces genuine, and named her fee: the spear, and no argument. Her life’s work is recreating Mól weaponsmithing and she has had exactly one sample to work from before this. She would clean the other two and forge Koa a blade, though she wanted to watch him fight first, so Tony and some friends were hired to provide the fighting. What she handed over afterward was a rapier with a hand-shielding cross-guard and electrum filigree echoing Koa’s cloak, and an armored kilt to go under it.

The lore came with the work. Mól blades run electrum through the steel as a conduit for their magic (not silver, whatever Loshev’s ancient bridge looks like), and the smelting is easy while the Mól way of making it function is lost. Hinta suspects a particular iron as well, and Draazstone is where she would look for it: before it was an autocrat’s mining town it was a mine serving the empire itself.

At the Gemsmith estate the councilman received them from his sickbed. Koa put a shoulder through a stuck window and Mikhail spent ten minutes mending it better than new; Koa treated the illness with balm and was told, warmly, that Yullen wished he had a daughter to give him. On Telvanius’s volumes the old man was no help (he owned one once and traded it years ago), but he pointed them at Torgun Kurvroc, who collects such things. On the Draazstone trade he was willing and deferred to Nathan Fox and the council. He had also, out of long habit, shipped the party’s gems into the bank vault under his own name with transfer rights to them. And his son Cleven was two days from auctioning the contents of the house the town had given them.

The barn held six stalls of unsold goods and an auction visibly rigged: lots already gone out the door on somebody’s word. Among what remained were three of Telvanius’s volumes, with Kurvroc’s bid standing on them, and an Arcane Congress spellbook with Nathan Fox’s hundred gold on that. The party doubled the bids on the books and left the spellbook alone, wanting no part of the Congress. Searching the furniture, Koa found a four-poster leg hollowed out and four rolled scrolls inside it, which Aldo palmed.

The evening at the inn belonged to a flutist. Gerald had come back for another go, Cleven turned out to be his devoted admirer, and Mikhail, apologizing elaborately first, took the stage and out-played him, even after Gerald chose a piece written to make strings sound thin. Gerald walked out forgetting his cloak again. Cleven pressed a sapphire into Mikhail’s palm and went to bed.

Then Aldo went to work. He played drunk so Koa would walk him home, and Elliot, rattled and half-danced out of the estate on his way to a hotel, handed him the last piece of it: a cook had been dismissed that day for roasting a lamb reserved for a diplomatic dinner, having been assured by a charming stranger that the councilman had approved it, and the man was going about cursing Aldo’s name. Aldo put on the cook’s face, picked the warehouse lock, slipped the chains, took the three volumes and the spellbook both, avoided the patrolling guard, and shouted fire me will you through the door in the cook’s voice on his way out, to pin the theft on him. The four scrolls, unrolled later, proved to be Arcane Congress work written in Cànain, worth more on their own than everything the company had bid.