Inch by Inch

It was strange to start a task in the city. To Jay, Lauchia’s gates were where tasks finished, not started. As you passed through that arched tunnel, you entered into safety, relinquishing your burdens, occasionally physical in the case of knobs, but mostly that mental pressure that accompanied each patrol. The city was safe. Nothing could breach those towering walls. The shadow they cast was comfortable, cooling that sweat that gathered on your brow and dripped down your back. Outside the walls, the world was harsh. Dangerous.

Jay had never felt this way in Kavakar. His hometown had walls, but they’d always felt more for show. Those gates hung open all day, and might even go unwatched on occasion when a guard was skiving off and a captain wasn’t nearby. There you could see the sky over the walls without having to crane your neck. Traffic was always passing through the gates. It was the same here, but it felt like a sizable portion of Lauchia’s population had never left the city in their lives. In Kavakar, a week didn’t go by without someone taking a trip out, if even just to see the Big Bush.

Yet.

The farmhouses in Kavakar had the same palisades as those around Lauchia. Stories of attacks weren’t unknown. Some days, David and his family would miss deliveries that weren’t safe to make. There was a use for Break in those outlying holdings. It made him wonder how much he hadn’t seen back home. How much had he been protected from?

“Are we nearby?” Ana asked. She carried her spear in one hand and her helmet in the other. It was sensible, but not something Ana was comfortable with. The tips of her fingers thrashed at the leather and wood, fighting back the urge to fidget that she couldn’t fulfill.

Jay looked at Kane, scanning his face for signs of dozing. It was a source of chagrin to both Ana and him that their teammate was the best at navigation in the city. Jay liked to think that this was because of the issues that accompanied Kane’s navigation, but he knew himself well enough to note his preference for control.

The tall swordsman had an unerring sense of direction for streets that twisted every other way but the way you wanted to go. He could plot a course through the city better than a steady hand with a map — Ana and Jay had both tested that. When Kane was aware, that is. When he wasn’t... problems occurred.

“It’s nearby,” Kane said. His eyes curled at the corners as a flicker of amusement crossed his stoic face.

Jay relaxed despite the fact he knew Kane was nearly always aware during tasks. It was an old worry that felt too ancient and set in for one only a few weeks old.

He wasn’t alone. Ana’s fingers slowed their descent into madness. “Good. I-” She paused, steps slowing at the same time. Three steps and 179.07cm later, she continued. “-kind of want it over with? It’s not Slow Keeping, you know?”

“The tailmouth was-” Jay started to reassure Ana, but she cut him off.

“No, not that. I-” She made a face, scrunching up her nose. “-I don’t want it over with, I want it started? I know it’s not going to be the same, but I don’t know how.”

They walked a few more steps.

“I don’t like that,” she said with an air of finality to it.

Jay nodded in relief and sympathy. “The task is for a simple delivery. It should be fine. Cole said the notice pops up every now and again.”

“Then why doesn’t it say what the delivery is, or where it’s going, or even give a proper time?” Ana let out a frustrated grumble.

Kane hummed his agreement. “It is strange, but it is our best option.” While he spoke in favor of ‘his’ task, being the one to find the notice on the board, Jay didn’t think Kane was being biased. It was a statement leveled in a straight tone as usual. He seemed to be able to act professionally with ease, remaining detached from all suggestions after offering them. It was a display of control that Jay envied.

“Besides, it is time to find out.” Kane indicated to a wide, flat building ahead. Above the door, a logo and name were etched into the off-white, gray stone. A chisel formed a cross with a saw of some kind. The name on the storefront, Cold Carvers, matched the one on the notice.

Jay took a breath and inspected himself and then his team. Bar donning the awkward-looking helmets, they were ready. “Let’s go.”

The store entrance room was rectangular, running the length of the building but only a fraction of the depth. There were no customers waiting, but a dark stone bench sat against the outer wall for when they were present. Three meters and thirty-three centimeters across from the bench, leaving enough space for heavy goods to be moved, was a long counter taller than the usual. It was also thin, and Jay suspected that there was a lower section for clerks and shopkeepers to use on the other side. Two doors led away behind the counter, one wide double set, one short. That was it. Aside from the bench and counter, the room was empty. The only other adornment was the bell that twinkled as the front door opened.

“Hello,” he called. It was likely unnecessary with the bell, but Jay was very aware that he was carrying a spear into a shop. He’d worked the front desk back home long enough to know how disastrously this encounter could go. Jay had no desire to find himself behind bars tonight for robbery.

A swish and metallic chop echoed out from the back of the building. It was enough of a familiar sound that Jay tightened his grip on his spear and glanced towards the sword hanging at Kane’s waist. It seemed the comparison wasn’t lost on Kane either, and his teammate’s dark brows furrowed together as he stared past the wall.

A second passed, and Kane’s eyes widened into a blink. Then he let slip an aborted laugh.

That got Ana’s attention. Kane did not laugh often.

“What is it?” Jay whispered, switching between watching his teammate and the doors warily.

Kane pressed his lips together and shook his head, but there was mirth dancing in his eyes.

Chance for further interrogation was lost as the right door slid open. A man strode out, brushing a faint powder off his hands. Jay was instantly less worried about a robbery misunderstanding. The man was bulky. He had arms the size of Jay’s legs and a tunic that struggled to contain his barrel chest. There was muscle there, muscle built for strength and endurance, not speed. It was all covered under a layer of soft fat, but a thin one given how smooth the man was with his steps.

“Delivery task?” The man asked with a quiet voice that didn’t match his size.

Jay nodded. “We’re ready to go.”

The man nodded and clapped his hands once more. It was loud in the empty room and the motion threw more faint dust to the floor. At the sight, the shopkeeper winced, and bent to inspect the floor, which, now that Jay looked at it, was quite clean. No easy feat in a shop. After shaking his head, the shopkeeper looked back at them. “I’m waiting on the runner. You can sit.”

With that said at a volume that would be less than a whisper outside the walls of the shop, the man disappeared back into his shop.

Ana looked at Jay. Jay looked at Kane. Kane looked past them both. No answers were spoken.

“I guess we wait?”

Minutes ticked by, accompanied by the drum of Ana’s fingers and a quieter murmur from the streets outside. The fidgeting got to Kane, disturbing him from his thoughts or dozing. When Ana noticed Kane’s perturbed looks, she would stop, embarrassed, but the habit would crop up again before long. The shopkeeper never returned. No customers arrived.

Jay found himself hoping for that bell to twinkle, fighting the urge to get up and stretch again or go looking. The stone bench was just as comfortable as it looked, which was not at all after ten minutes. Patience, he told himself.

When the bell finally sounded, he leapt to his feet in relief.

The woman kicked her feet against the porch before stepping inside. She was in the middle of tying up her hair, gathering great swaths of the frizzy strands up and bundling them tightly behind her head. She gave them a quick nod, sending a bead of sweat that had gathered at the tip of her nose off on a long trajectory.

“The runner?” Jay asked.

The woman smiled, but didn’t pause her steps. “Yep.” Then she was through the right door and gone.

Jay and his team deflated. He eyed that stone bench again with dismay. Perhaps it would be easier this time. You could not feel discomfort through numbness, but Jay doubted it.

Before he settled his debate, the wide double doors opened in a flash, the shopkeeper backing up through them to protect his package. They swung closed behind him as the shopkeeper set his burden down. The package came in two parts, one polished wooden section below and a larger, rougher box above. Its base was ten centimeters tall, one hundred centimeters wide, and one hundred and twenty centimeters long. The box above was 42 cm tall, but left a fifteen centimeter gap between the edges of the base the whole way around.

It was bigger than Jay expected for a twenty to forty kilogram delivery. He looked from the pallet the shopkeeper had hefted with ease to his team. Not one of them would be able to carry it like that.

“Have anything we can use to lift that?”

The bulky man grunted and bent over to pull some rods out of the side of the pallet. He only pulled two out on one side, but now that he’d revealed the mechanism, Jay could see where two rods folded out on the opposite side. Two people would be able to lift and carry it a distance without much issue.

“Where is it going?” Ana asked, curiosity written all over her posture as she was unable to hold the question back.

The man hesitated. He brushed at his hands idly, sending more faint dust to the ground. “Do you have a map?”

Jay nodded. He passed his spear to Ana, who took it reluctantly, and dug the map out to hand it over. From this distance, it was impossible not to get a faint odor from the busy man, but to Jay’s surprise, it was a pleasant one. The shopkeeper carried the scent of spices. Pepper and smoke. It only left him with more questions.

“Here.” The man jabbed a heavy finger at the mana border to the north-west. “Get here and flags should lead the way. Don’t go too far from the border. Someone will be waiting or will find you.” He placed a hand on the delivery. “Don’t drop or damage this.” The shopkeeper didn’t wait long after receiving confirmation that Jay understood. They got one final nod before the man turned and sped through the smaller right door again.

Left with questions, Jay inspected the powder left by the man’s finger on the map. It was white and faint. There was no smell. He had the urge to taste it, but fought that back.

“How are you going to carry that?” Ana asked, distancing herself from the task quickly.

Jay sighed and turned to Kane. “Front or back?”

| i i i ¦ i i i | i i i ¦ i i i |

The package was well balanced, and once they arranged armor, weapons and bags, they made quick time through Lauchia and the city’s gates. Never had Jay been so thankful for an adventurer’s privileges as they sped past the queues. It was one thing to carry the weight while moving, standing still would have been a challenge.

Initially, Jay was too busy watching all directions and running fight scenarios through his mind to consider what he was carrying. After perhaps the hundredth mock fight when he was confident in how best to drop the weight and pick up his spear, which was lying across his two carrying poles, Jay‘s mind turned to the mysterious box. As they passed fields, farmhouses and more fields, his curiosity built.

“What do you think we’re delivering from a stonemason to the wilds?” Jay asked.

Kane snorted.

Jay eyed the back ahead of him suspiciously. From Ana’s expression, the stare did not crack his teammates’ carefully blank facade.

“Tools?” Ana asked.

Jay lifted his side of the weight carefully. The package didn’t make any noise. He would need to shake it to get any kind of hint, but given what the shopkeeper had said, that ran the risk of damaging whatever it was. It wasn’t worth his curiosity. “Maybe. It’s quite big for its weight to be tools though...”

Kane’s shoulders began to tremble.

“Sorry,” Jay apologized. “I’ll keep it steady.”

A grunt was the only answer.

The fields grew smaller as they traveled and the woodlands larger and more bizarre. Every dark corner was an ambush spot. Every flash of color was a possible oddity until the measurements stilled to trees and plants. It felt foolish after their encounter with the tailmouth to leave such hiding spots and block vision in the same swoop, but this was another defense for the city, though it didn’t appear to be so. The most obvious defense was the physical blocker. The jumbled trees and overgrowth would funnel larger Oddities to the roads where it was easier to patrol. However, that was only a small factor. The dense wildwoods were left standing to block the weather.

Few humans could hold back the wind, and none could hold back the wind, rain, lightning, dust, hail, fire and whatever else the world sought to throw at the city each day. It was too large an area, too many possibilities to be countered. Words like that were the stuff of legend and stories. It was more sensible and practical to let the world blunt its own fury, breaking gusts with branches and quelling stray flames with moist leaves. Often the wild weather didn’t breach the mana domain at all, but in some cases, like the expansive blue-gray cloud from the other day, it reached in. The ‘wild’ woods were there to push back.

Jay followed Kane through the battered road to the edge of the mana domain. At the very edge the woods fell away, leaving a scarred plain where only a rare shrub or tree grew. There Kane stopped in his tracks and, with the pallet between them, Jay was forced to do the same. Ana was a few hurried steps behind. She, too, stopped dead. Jay shimmed to the side to see what the fuss was about.

Between the wildwoods and the domain edge, the ground was reminiscent of a forest fire, bare dirt making no attempts to hide the damage wrought on it. Off to the north, a series of flags drew a line away from the road. Jay and his team paid them no attention. They couldn’t tear their eyes off what lay ahead.

The world was dark like river mud after a heavy rain. What light remained was only there to highlight curves and differentiate layers to the cliffs and canyons that stretched into the distance. The earth twisted and turned, baring its depths to the blue sky and taunting the creatures on its surface with high drops and impossible straight lines. In one blink, you felt you could see it all, yet knew that hidden depths lingered in sight.

There was nothing else as far as the eye could see. Jay couldn’t even Measure an end to it, and for once he couldn’t find fault in his word.

“Wow.”

They stood, watching the world fall away and soar back up in a never ending dance.

It wasn’t a frozen instant of death. An occasional river twisted far below, and rare green patches spotted the black and gray. Jay could see dots in the far distance, two to three meters long, that moved ever so slowly.

Unfortunately, gravity cared little about how solemn the moment was for them. The package weighed on Jay, and he had to break the silence.

“Follow the flags,” he said in almost a whisper. Quiet though it was, it broke the cobweb hold over them, and they started walking without any discussion. One eye, however, was kept on the ravines and mountains beside them.

After fifteen minutes of walking, they encountered a problem. The flags stopped. More accurately, the flags led up to the edge of the mana domain, through it and over a cliff.

“What do we do now?” Ana asked.

Jay opened his mouth and closed it when nothing came. He wouldn’t be going over that cliff even without the package.

“I mean...” Ana started to follow the flags out. 4.39m. 3.79m.

“Ana-” Jay began, hands twitching as she got closer to the edge. 2.58m. “-stop moving towards the edge.”

She smirked and took another step.

“Ana!”

“Whoa!”

Kane laughed.

One shout had come from the pallet, the other from behind Ana. Off the cliff.

Ana shrieked and jumped. Thankfully, she leapt towards Jay and Kane and not the other voice.

A head popped over the cliff edge seconds later, and Jay was once again thankful. If Ana had gone with fight instead of flight, and swung her spear...

“You nearly gave me a heart attack,” the head complained, placing a hand down on the surface and pulling up to reveal shoulders. The complaint was ruined by his light tone and the broad, all-too-satisfied grin on his face. “Gudrun is out on holidays, huh?”

They didn’t ask about their task notice or the package. The shopkeeper hadn’t either, but in this case at least it was more obvious.

Ana spun on her heels, shaking her spear at them threateningly. Her earlier fright was replaced by burning red cheeks. “HEART ATTACK? I could have killed you!”

“And death would have terribly upset my heart.” The man finished his climb, ignoring Ana’s spear to turn and reach down under the cliff. He helped another man up. The second man wore a complicated harness covered in loops of rope.

“It would have made my day,” this second man told Ana in a mock whisper. “Please keep it in mind if you come again.”

“Does it count as murder if it’s on the edge?” the first man asked, as if seriously considering it himself.

“Hmm... I think it counts no matter where you do it.” The second man’s face turned solemn. He dipped his head to the short, spluttering woman leveling a spear at them. “It’s best you just give him a good shove with the blunt end. I’ll say he slipped and fell.”

Ana growled and stabbed the blunt end of her spear into the dirt. Without another word, she glared at Jay and walked away from the two.

Which wasn’t fair. What did I do? Jay thought. If she’d listened to him, she wouldn’t have been close enough to get surprised.

Shaking his head, he called out to Kane. “Set it down on three... Two. One.”

“Mighty kind of you,” the first man said, stepping up and almost shooing Kane out of the way.

The second man was more gracious, waiting for Jay to shake out his arms and then move. Instead of lifting the poles with his hands like his partner, the second man slid loops that hung from his shoulders around the poles. “We’ll take it from here, but don’t worry, we’ll be careful. There are a lot of hungry mouths below, and it’s us or the box.”

“Hungry mouths?” Jay repeated. Was that box not a set of tools but food?

Had they just delivered lunch? Why was Kane laughing?

The two men didn’t take any time to get used to the weight, merely turning sideways and walking to the cliff. Even Kane stopped laughing at that. When the first man stepped straight off, it elicited a gasp and a step forward from Jay. His concern was for nought as the man’s foot met something solid. The man gave another laugh, earning a chuckle from the second man, who was doing something with his hands to climb down.

In the space of three minutes, they had arrived, scared Ana, taken the package, ruined the task for Jay and left, but not before giving him a fright.

That was their grand adventure. Their first task outside the mana domain. Delivering lunch to some workers who obviously enjoyed the experience more than they had.

They took a moment to break Kane from a doze. Ana and Jay, certain that their teammate had guessed the contents of their delivery earlier and not told them, made certain to do it as loudly as possible. It was funny, though, that for once Kane was looking down and not up.

As much as he and Ana teased Kane for it, they all took one last look at the rolling world of river-mud stone before setting back on the road.

| i i i ¦ i i i | i i i ¦ i i i |

The dorm room was quiet without Ana and Kane. Emptier.

Jay lasted an hour before springing to his feet and setting out into the city. Today he’d successfully completed a task, but all it amounted to was a lot of walking and carrying a weight. He didn’t feel tired, or even a post workout burn anywhere other than in his arms.

So he wandered the city, enjoying it all the more after the trip out of the mana domain, yet seeing it for the lesser than it was. Jay was careful with the path he took. Any road that led towards Peak tavern was discarded, even if he had to double back.

Ana and Kane had been reluctant, but allowed themselves to be shuffled off to the tavern earlier. They’d had another discussion, but once again, the need for information was worth the risk. Ana carried with her a list of the tasks they had signed up for, and notes on those they’d held back on. Hopefully she’d come back with good or at least useful news.

And Jay was left wandering the streets, learning far too much about how sloppy some builders were with their work.

“Hey!”

It may have been occasionally sloppy, but the city was alive. The streets were full of those living out their lives, stalls, and permanent stone business and houses behind them. The noise was a constant chatter as deals were made, fights broke out, and friends reunited.

“Hey kid!”

It was especially busy at this time of day as merchants struggled to part with the last of their wares and pack up, bargain hunters prowled and the tired sought refuge or entertainment. Jay both loved it and hated it, enjoying the bustle but seeking peace.

“Oy! You there-Jay!”