I found Silas as soon as I could "I need advice," I said. Silas was sitting on his boulder, pipe in one hand, scratching something into the cave wall with a bone stylus. He didn't look up. "No you don't." "I got a contract." "You always have contracts. Boring ones." "Not from the Guild." Now he looked. I held out the parchment. He took it, unfolded it with one hand — pipe still in the other — and read it in the flickering torchlight. Then he sniffed the paper. Then he held it up against the light and squinted at the watermark. "Three gold," he said. "For carrying a box." He folded the paper into a tiny square and flicked it back at me. "And you came to me for advice." "Yes." "Interesting. Because I distinctly remember telling you that I am the last person in the world you should ever come to for advice." He pointed with his pipe. "I said that. Those exact words. 'Last person.' 'World.' Very clear." "You didn't say that." "I was thinking it. Loudly." He hopped off the boulder and paced in a small circle, the way he did when something amused him. "All right. I'll tell you a story. Completely unrelated. About a man I knew in Ostermark." He paused, as if to check I was listening. "This man kept goats. Good goats. His goats. Smelly, hairy, horrible creatures. He fed them, milked them, sold the milk. Hard work. Honest work. His." He held up a finger. "One day, a rich man comes to him. Very rich. Says: 'I'll give you a hundred gold. Just graze my goats alongside yours. More goats, more milk, everybody wins.' The goat man thinks — well, goats are goats, aren't they? Took the money." Silas lit his pipe, took a long pull, and blew smoke at the ceiling. "Six months later he has two hundred goats. Can't handle them alone. Hires helpers. Whose money? The rich man's. A year later — four hundred goats, four workers, a big pen, everything beautiful. And not a single goat—" He looked at me. "Not a single worker. Not a single post of that pen. Was his." Silence, except for the crackle of the torch. "Completely unrelated story, obviously," Silas said. He yawned and waved his hand. "Do whatever you want, mate. I just told you about goats." He sat back down on his boulder and picked up his bone stylus. "Now. Stones. Eight out of ten or I'm going to be disappointed. And you do not want to see me disappointed, savvy? I get all..." He made a face. "...moody." I put the parchment back in my coat and picked up a stone. We didn't talk about the contract again. * * * The Delivery South warehouse district. Past midnight. The streets were empty — just a drunk sleeping against a wall and a stray cat watching me from a rooftop. The warehouse was unlocked. Oil lamp hanging from a nail by the door, already lit. Someone had been here recently. Inside — one crate. Sitting on the stone floor in the center of the room, as if placed there specifically for me to find easily. Roughly two feet long, one foot wide. Sealed with lead stamps. No markings. I picked it up. Heavy. Much heavier than it looked, as if the wood were packed with river stones. I shifted the weight to my shoulder and walked. Three miles south on the Thornwood road. Out the city gate — the night watch barely glanced at me, which told me either they'd been paid or they'd been told. Past the last farmsteads. Into the dark where the road narrowed and the trees pressed close. The night was quiet. My boots crunched gravel. The crate sat on my shoulder like a sleeping animal. And then — halfway through the second mile I felt dizzy. After that a flash. No — not a flash. A pulse. Like a heartbeat that wasn't mine. For a fraction of a second, the road vanished and I was somewhere else. —a field. Smoke. Bodies on the ground. Not human bodies. Shapes in armor. Something was screaming — a high, metallic sound, like a blade dragging across stone. Red light across the sky. And I was— —I was running. In my hands was an old cracked sword. And I could feel it in my teeth, in the back of my skull — a hunger, a pull, the need to— The road came back. I was standing still, both hands gripping the crate, breathing hard. My pulse was hammering. The taste in my mouth was iron — blood, or the memory of blood. The crate sat on my shoulder. Silent. Heavy. Just wood and lead and whatever was inside. I stood there for ten breaths. Twenty. The forest was quiet. There was no red light, no screaming, no smoke. Just trees and gravel and the moon. I adjusted the crate and kept walking. * * * The Drop The waypoint was a fork in the Thornwood road, marked by an old boundary stone carved with a direction marker so weathered it was illegible. I set the crate down beside it and waited. Ten minutes. The forest made small sounds — wind through leaves, something small moving through the underbrush. Then a wagon, appearing from the southern fork. One horse. One driver. The man who climbed down was utterly ordinary — middle-aged, bald, a well-made travelling coat. He could have been a grain merchant or a minor clerk. He moved like someone who had done this many times. He checked the lead seals without touching the crate itself. Nodded. Then lifted it into the wagon bed with a grunt — so he felt the weight too. He reached into his coat and held out a leather purse. "Three, as agreed." I took it. The coins were real. The man covered the crate with a canvas tarp. Then, adjusting his gloves: "Greyve said you were reliable. I see he wasn't wrong." After a short pause. "There'll be another shipment in about a week. Four gold. If you're interested — Greyve knows how to reach you." He climbed back onto the wagon, clicked his tongue at the horse, and rode off down the southern fork. The sound of hooves faded. The forest settled. I stood at the crossroads with three gold coins in my pocket and the taste of someone else's blood still fading from my mouth. * * * The Walk Back The night air was cool. Middle of Autumn. Somewhere in the trees, an owl was hunting. Three gold pieces. The entire delivery had taken two hours. I hadn't fought anything, hadn't even broken a sweat beyond the weight of the crate. Two hours and a walk. I thought about the goat farmer. He didn't notice when it happened. That was the trick. The money was real. The goats were real. The work was real. Everything was real except the part that he didn't own anything. And here I am, walking home with three gold coins I earned by carrying a box, for people whose names I don't know. The goat farmer's mistake wasn't taking the money. It was thinking the money was the point. The money is never the point. The point is the second delivery. And the third. And the one after that. Until I wake up one morning and realize I haven't taken a Guild contract in a month, because why would I? Forty-five coppers when someone's offering gold? Golden chains are still chains. But they don't chafe. That's the design. I walked. The owl called again. I didn't throw away the coins. What happened with the crate — the flash, the field, the hunger — I filed it away. Not now. Not here. Something to think about in Silas's cave, maybe. Or never. Some doors open once. Some doors you pretend are walls. * * * Morning I made it back to the barracks an hour before dawn. Slept through the first bell. Woke up to the second one, heavy-eyed. The mess hall was half-full. Renn was sitting at our usual spot, eating porridge and running his spoon along the edge of one of his short swords in slow, rhythmic strokes — his idea of maintenance. Terro, across from him, was watching this with the expression of a man who had asked him to stop doing that exactly forty-seven times. I sat down. Took a bowl. Ate. "You look rough," Renn said, not looking up from his blade-stroking. "Slept badly." "Hmm." Stroke. Stroke. "Saw some decent bracers at the armorer's yesterday. Leather, copper rivets. Nice ones." Stroke. "Then I saw the price." He smirked. "Changed my mind." Terro said nothing. He ate his porridge and watched Renn's spoon scrape the flat of the blade with the patience of a man measuring rope. "Contracts today?" I asked. Renn shrugged. "Wall patrol. South section. Fifty coppers, six hours standing in the sun." He pointed at me with the spoon. "The glamorous life." I finished my porridge, rinsed the bowl, and left. Later that morning, I went to the market. I bought one thing: a skinning knife with a thin, flexible blade. Good steel. Seven silver — I'd broken one of the gold coins at a money changer's near the east gate, in small batches, mixing it with my legitimate earnings. The remaining two gold pieces went into the gap behind the loose stone under my cot. The skinning knife was practical. I needed it for the bone spider plates, and for crawler hides, if I was going to start harvesting seriously. Anyone who asked would hear the same answer: sold materials from the mine contract. But no one asked. I went to wall patrol. Stood in the sun for six hours. Earned fifty coppers. That night, lying on my cot, I listened to the barracks breathe. Someone was snoring. Renn was telling Pol a story about a woman in a tavern — the details were almost certainly invented. Terro was already asleep. I stared at the ceiling. The flash from the road — the field, the smoke, the bodies in wrong armor, the hunger — played behind my eyes like a coal that wouldn't die. It wasn't a dream. Dreams are vague. This had edges. It had the weight of memory. Whose memory? I turned on my side. The contract from Greyve's man echoed in my head. Four gold. One week. The goat farmer got four hundred goats and owned none. I closed my eyes. I still had the three gold. I still hadn't said no to the fourth.

Chapter 20: Golden Chains