Inch by Inch

Jay scooted back, awkwardly juggling his spear between four heavy bags as he moved out of the way of two workers carrying a massive crate between them.

They’d made it.

Lauchia’s city walls towered behind him, taller than even the caravan’s massive wagons. They looked almost cliff-like, bands of stone wrapping around the city and changing with each layer. It was the sheer variety of color in the layers that made it clear the structure was man made. They were famous, these walls. Lauchia was known for having the tallest defenses on the continent, a feat made possible by their Wonder. Said Wonder was hidden from view by those same walls currently, but he was looking forward to seeing it.

The caravan had stopped in front of a humongous gate set into the city’s walls, but today that entrance remained closed. The wagons were not lodging inside. Lauchia was only a short stopover on the caravan’s journey through the city states. All goods destined for here would need to be unloaded by hand. What this meant was that once again, the wagons had descended into a state of chaos.

Jay felt a little anxious watching all the sweaty brows without doing anything to help. It was a tick, a constant sense that burrowed in his mind. When news of their arrival had spread through the caravan yesterday, he’d approached Tasia for his assignment. Technically, he was only employed ‘until we reach Lauchia’, but it was polite to offer. The wagon and caravan had been good to them. He wanted to help.

Tasia had laughed at him. She told him that he was part of the cargo, and unloading himself would save her the trouble of doing it. He still wasn’t sure if that’d been a joke or a threat. So now, he stood listening to labored panting and waited, trying not to get in anyone’s way. His team’s attempt to make it to the city wall had failed abruptly. Ana and he stood with the bags while the stream of workers returning to the wagon absorbed Kane into their flow.

Jay’s tall and martially skilled teammate had forgotten both his hard leather armor and some of his clothes in their cabin. Kane had only realized when Ana asked him why his bag was so droopy and empty. It was a small delay, but left them stranded in the sea of movement. Waiting. Not helping.

Ana disappeared not long after Kane left, seeing a hand waving from the wagon and rushing off to say some missed goodbyes.

Another incoming stream of cargo forced Jay forward. He narrowly avoided legs jutting off a weird piece of furniture twice as long as Kane was tall and two centimeters wider than Ana’s shoulders. The man carrying the furniture gave him a smile and shifted his grip, lifting until the ass-end of the table seat stuck in the air. The offending legs waved goodbye from above the rows of bobbing heads, and Jay idly wondered if the man had a Word like his own mother. Mika always moved things around like that. Effortlessly. Like it became an illusion as soon as it entered her hands. He turned to watch the man go, the stretched furniture appearing so much smaller as it crossed from sky into the shadow of the massive walls.

“Jay! Are you all set then?”

Jay turned, smiling before he caught sight of Vasily. He hadn’t been sure if the caravan master would have a chance to see him before he left. There was a lot of work for the caravan to do during its short stopover at Lauchia, and Jay had tried and failed to contact him yesterday.

The unassuming caravan master walked casually towards Jay, streams of people shifting away from his path and flowing into his wake. His hands were clasped behind his back and a faint smile to match Jay’s own sat on his face. It was an imposing display and if Jay didn’t know Vasily so well he might have been intimidated.

Jay nodded his head back at the wagon that’d carried him here from Kavakar. “A few forgotten items, but we should be fine.” He paused. “Thanks for taking us on Vasily. ”

Vasily’s faint smile didn’t grow, but it seemed to deepen. He stepped closer and put a hand on Jay’s shoulder fondly. “I’d tell you that you were of no bother, but I’m very honest.”

Jay must have made a face as Vasily began chuckling. He patted Jay on the shoulder twice. “Your team kept things interesting for the wagon, I hear. Very entertaining.”

“I’m sor-”

Jay had to drop their bags as Vasily pulled him down for a hug.

“Don’t worry so much. It’s a good thing. You are all welcome back to the caravan.” Pushing Jay back, he raised an eyebrow. “Perhaps after you are registered, with a few expeditions under your belts.”

Jay mastered his expression and gave an amiable smile back. “Thanks Vasily. I’ll give you a good rate.”

Now Vasily laughed. This time, he slapped Jay’s shoulder. “Now that’s the Jay I know. As cheeky as your father, but with your mother’s charm.” The caravan master wagged a finger in Jay’s face. “You’ll have to work on your bargain face though - you can’t only wear it behind the shop counter.”

“I’ll work on it,” Jay said, fighting the heat in his cheeks as he did. It wasn’t really fair for Vasily to say so, when the caravan master had played games to build that face with him when he was only a child. Vasily knew the location of all the cracks in his mask and plenty of embarrassing stories to break those cracks open. “Any tips for Lauchia?”

“None that will be helpful without sending you astray,” Vasily said with a shake of his head. “I do have a boost for you, though.”

Jay’s eyes widened slightly before he brought them back under control. The chaos flowing neatly around the two of them had not escaped his notice. After spending so long bobbing about the island of calm was obvious. “Are you sure? I know it’s busy here and everything needs to be sorted with the city.”

Vasily was in charge of the entire caravan, and he had to be using his Word heavily right now. Jay didn’t even have a good idea of how many people were affected right now. It was Word use on a scale that could only be appreciated from the top of the city walls. It had to have a cost, though Vasily hid it well. He might not have been able to find his self-appointed uncle yesterday for good reason.

The unassuming caravan master smirked. “Don’t you worry.” He straightened. “Jay, I task you to find yourself a place in the city. Prepare yourself and your team.”

It was said casually, not a note different from their earlier conversation, but Jay felt the change in an instant. He adjusted his spear a little, settling it into his shoulder, where it was more balanced and less likely to slip or bump into anything. It was easier to pick out where Ana was in the crowds. A faint sense pulled at him through the city gates.

“Thank you Vasily. Travel safe.” Jay could nearly feel the flow of the workers and cargo around them, the space open for travel stuck out like someone had painted lines.

“I will Jay. Good luck.”

| i i i ¦ i i i | i i i ¦ i i i |

Jay lost his sense of the other workers inside the city walls, but he still felt light on his feet and guided forward. The crowds were more awkward to navigate given his spear, bow and two bags, but easier than they should have been. It was probably for the best that he slowed under the gate, and hadn’t continued at the same pace as outside the walls. Vasily’s Task did not extend to Ana and Kane, to their dismay. Both had trouble keeping up with him before they’d entered the walls.

This was the first time that Jay had been under Vasily’s influence in a while, and for a proper ‘Task’ task this time rather than some random errand. He couldn’t help but feel the man had been holding back in the past. Right now it was like an extra sense steered him forward. A breeze on his neck, a finger prodding his back, a shape in the corner of his eye, yet none of that. There was nothing physical about the sense, but it was felt all the same.

At the city entrance, the sense had drawn him to the right, to the guard with the paper stack four millimeters shorter. A guard who filled out their admittance in half the time as his coworkers did to the team’s neighbors.

Now the sense drew him to the north.

“Do you know where you’re going?”

“Mostly,” Jay responded, glancing back at his team.

Ana was tightly hugging her bag to her chest with both hands. Along with the smaller bag on her back, she presented a small profile to the crowd, especially given that she was following closely behind Jay. She’d chosen what Jay would call a shopkeeper’s outfit today. Practical with two deep pockets in the thicker, but not rough, dark fabric at the front. Faint patterns in the well cut cream sides gave it a hint of refinement. Her eyes darted side to side, taking in the city.

As usual, Kane’s head was also on a swivel as he stared at their surroundings with childlike fascination. The man had opted to wear his hard leather armor instead of packing it away. The armor wasn’t tied closed, but on top of Kane’s standard plain training outfit, it looked natural. He looked like a young adventurer fresh off a job.

Which, Jay lamented, he himself decidedly did not. Controlling his spear was awkward at the best of times, and Ana’s third bag was a burden too many. Currently, he looked more like a porter than anything else. It didn’t help that he couldn’t stop his nose from twitching as each new odor reached him. The city smelled off, and he wasn’t getting used to it as quickly as he’d like.

Why is it always the bad smells that linger?

“Should we ask someone? Or...” Ana trailed off as her eyes were drawn to Lauchia’s Wonder.

Situated in the center of the city, the Wonder was the only structure taller than the city’s walls. The rock stretched to the sky and, even from this distance, seemed to go on forever. It wasn’t perfectly straight, but the lean only made it more interesting. Scaffolding and netting covered the lower half of the Wonder, faint strands of rope reaching several stories high.

It was an incredible sight, and had stolen the majority of Ana’s glances since they crossed into the city. To be fair, it had stolen the majority of Jay’s too. He, however, had Vasily’s Task to pull his mind away.

“No, I’m pretty sure the adventurer’s bureau is in the north, and the Task is guiding me there too.”

Some sour faces greeted that statement. Neither of his teammates had been happy when they heard they missed Vasily’s parting gift. His Word came up often enough during caravan gossip, all calling it an experience with an annoying twinkle in their eye before refusing to say more. Jay had expected Ana’s reaction, but he was surprised at the sadness on Kane’s face when they heard.

“Come on, the crowds should quiet off the main streets.”

Lauchia was a city made of stone. It was home to a thriving quarrying and masonry industry, the largest in any of the city states, and it showed in every building they passed. Unlike Kavakar, where all structures from the town walls to the wells consisted of wood where possible, here timber was a rarity. Even some doors were made from stone.

Stone in Kavakar was costly, needing to be imported, or a team hired to mine it locally. As such, there was a rule of thumb that the more stone in the building, the wealthier the owner. The rule hadn’t been flipped in Lauchia. Wood was nearly as readily available here too, but out of a sense of local pride or strict regulations, people chose stone.

With every building made from stone, it was the materials used that differentiated them. The nicest buildings shone as the day’s sun reflected off smooth polished stone. The next step down were made from duller rocks. After that came rough materials, untouched since they were hewn from the ground. The poorer areas were instantly identifiable not by the quality of the rock, but by the variety. Buildings were constructed patchwork, taking the offcuts from ten other projects, as the source of the stone disappeared into the ever-changing hinterlands.

It was in one of these poorer areas of patchwork stone that they found the adventurer’s bureau.

The bureau was a diamond in the rough. Swooping arches that were simple yet elegant. High, narrow windows designed to maximize light while preventing entry for attackers or their projectiles. The crowning jewel was the bureau’s walls. They were made of a gleaming cream stone, marked only by the dark shapes that swam within the rock. Petrified creatures, monsters and Oddities of a forgotten era perfectly preserved in the rock. The largest fossil, twenty meters and 42 centimeters tall, protruded from the building’s center, flanked by doors on either side. Its front claws stretched up to the roof. Its rear limbs guarded the entrance alongside the well outfitted adventurers standing at the ready.

The building projected power. It was a display of triumph against the wild, and a warning to any who wanted to walk its halls. It was a marvel.

“This is the adventurer’s bureau?” Ana asked, sounding happily surprised.

“Yeah!” Jay answered, excitement growing. Here they were. This was the start of their journey. This was the center of adventuring he’d always pictured.

But for some reason, something wasn’t right about the building. His eyes slid off it, a niggle pulled Jay away from it.

Kane coughed. “Jay?”

“Yeah?”

“That’s not the adventurer’s bureau.”

He turned to look at his tall teammate.

Kane indicated behind them with a nod, to the structure across the street. Now this building fit into the neighborhood. It was a full story smaller than the cream masterpiece and a complete patchwork. Mostly a light gray, overlapping bands of red, white and green wove through the building. Each band was a mark showing how it’d been expanded over the years. Some of the lower sections of the structure used different designs and colors, traces of when the building had swallowed and repurposed a neighbor. Fossils of a different kind.

Even if there wasn’t a perfect example of construction across the road, the building would have looked like a mess.

“Oh.” A sinking feeling grew in Jay as another pulled him towards the patchwork building.

“Are you sure?” Ana asked, sounding as disappointed as Jay felt.

Kane took a deep breath, frowning at the beautiful architecture that had stolen their attention. “I think that’s the Pono embassy.”

They lingered a moment, waiting for the disappointment to end or a miracle to prove Kane wrong.

The final blow came when a group wearing the same equipment as the embassy’s guards marched down the street. They escorted two men up to the building in perfect step with each other. It was then that Jay realized it wasn’t a guild of adventurers protecting the building; it was a squad of soldiers. A military force.

The beautiful cream walls were no longer so inspiring. Now they only made him question his decisions.

He caught the eye of one of the men being escorted before the group entered the building. They were vaguely familiar, with the same high cheekbones and broad shoulders that were characteristic of Pono.

“Let’s go.”

Sighing, he turned and entered Lauchia’s bureau of adventuring. Ana and Kane followed.

The interior of the bureau was as chaotic as the exterior, especially the entrance hall. It was clear that the hall had been expanded many times in the past as the bureau grew, and each expansion left marks. Tall pillars dotted the hall, scattered unevenly to support interlocking beams above. Furniture was haphazardly placed, and all scarred and stained. It wasn’t a grand entrance hall as much as the supporting structure beneath it.

The whole place was filthy. Jay wouldn’t have sat on one of the chairs by the entrance if you paid him to.

A trail of grime and worn stone led the way through the hall, splitting before a series of counters with the larger flow disappearing into a room to the side while a smaller stream flowed straight.

He followed the smaller stream.

There were four others in the queue before the two open counters, which lifted Jay’s sinking spirits. As disappointing as the bureau was, they’d arrived before the rush. In a few days when all the new adventurers arrived, the queue would stretch out the door. Every guild recruiter liked to argue that the queue got longer in their city.

They only waited a couple of minutes before they were seen. The clerk looked up from his paperwork, saw the three of them with all their bags and weapons, and seemed to deflate. He took a moment to wipe his face, hand lingering on the waxy scar tissue down the right side of his face before waving them forward.

“How can I help you today?” The man asked tiredly.

Jay stepped forward. “We’d like to register an adventuring team.”

It took an effort to maintain eye contact with the clerk. The burn scars were bad, continuing down the man’s chin, around his neck and towards his shoulder before disappearing beneath his clothes. The left side of the man’s face wasn’t as badly scarred, but it was pockmarked and suffered from a few splatters of the same burn as his right, the largest of which was 12mm across. This was an adventurer. An adventurer with stories and Jay had so many questions.

The clerk took a slow blink before chewing on something sour. “Guild?”

“None.”

“You know you will be required to complete a number of tasks every month?” The clerk asked, almost hopefully. “An adventurer has duties. It’s not just an excuse for city entry or a cheap way to authorize Word use and carry weapons.”

Jay nodded. “Yes.”

“You understand this is foolish? It’s dangerous.” He waved at his own face. “I didn’t get this sitting behind a desk. Most adventurers aren’t this lucky, especially the independents.”

“Yes,” Jay said, narrowing his eyes at the clerk. He didn’t want a lecture.

“They say two in three independent teams die within the first three months. The numbers are worse than that. People say that because it’s prettier. Less horrifying.”

“We would like to register an adventuring team,” Jay repeated, glaring at the clerk now.

The clerk’s shoulders fell. He reached for a drawer. His desk was nearly completely bare. Aside from the to-be-filed paperwork of the previous queuer, there was only a single object on the flat surface. Jay stared at the dusty, unlit candle in surprise. It was one of those large ones, designed more for scent than anything else. Neither of the neighboring desks had one. Jay couldn’t fathom why the candle would be on the desk of a burn victim, even one who was comfortable enough around their wounds to point them out to strangers.

The clerk slapped a form on his desk and gave Jay and his team one last look. Whatever he was looking for, he didn’t find. With one final sigh, the clerk began to fill in the date and write.

“Names?”

“Jay Tsukain.”

“An-Ana Marier.”

“Kane Hawea.”

As the clerk began to write again, Jay looked back, wincing at how pale Ana looked. He gave her what he hoped was an encouraging smile.

It was clear that she wasn’t used to the scars or the grisly tales and warnings. Her meeting with the guild recruiters might have been the first time she’d spoken to an adventurer in years. He could understand that rush of fear. Kane and he had heard some horrible stories from Kavakar’s guards over the years while they trained. After each story, he believed it’d be the last one to affect him. It never was.

“Entry permits.”

Jay handed them over. He’d had them ready.

“18 bronze each.”

He had that prepared too. It wasn’t a massive dent in their funds, but it was noticeable. Hopefully, it would be quick enough to earn it back.

“Sign.”

Jay looked down at the offered form, back up at his weapons and bags, and then back down at the filthy floor. He might have put the bags down on the dirt outside the city, but there was no way he was setting them down here. Turning, he nodded to Kane.

Ana was still a bit pasty. It was best not to ask her to go first.

Kane passed Jay his bag and stepped forward. After quickly scrawling his signature down, he stepped back and gently took Ana’s bags off her. She stepped forward gingerly and took her time writing, but before long her signature joined Kane’s.

Ana didn’t offer to help with the bags after stepping back, shoving both her hands into the deep pockets on her outfit.

Kane took his own bag and two more off of Jay so he could sign.

He still needed to fight to keep his spear balanced as he signed. The end product was barely legible.

The clerk pulled the form back and reached into another drawer in his desk. He slapped a leather tag on the counter before Jay.

“You’re now Apprentice team I38. You’ll need the tag to register for tasks and claim rewards.” The clerk paused, giving them each one last stare. “Don’t be stupid.”

Jay and his team of three took the cue and stepped away from the desk.

That was it.

He was an adventurer.