With the sausages gone, Ray found the F-Rank board offering nothing a bored child couldn’t finish before lunch.
"We have rats in a granary cellar, herbs on the south slope and a lost goat named Biscuit, frankly an insult to my entire professional skill set," he complained, flicking each notice in turn.
Yuzu leaned on the counter beside him, blowing on a chipped mug of guild tea.
"The board trusts F-Rank with nothing sharper than a spoon."
"The board is right about the spoon, but it’s dead wrong about everything else I can do with my hands."
The clerk behind the counter snickered into his ledger, pretending very hard to be counting coppers.
Half-buried under the goat notice, a scrap of paper hung from a rusty fish hook instead of a tack.
[ CONTRACT DETECTED ]
[Job: Dead Fish at the Weirs]
[Threat Grade: F]
[Bounty: Pending]
He peeled it free, "Fish keep dying at the netmen’s weirs with twenty silver to whoever figures out why, beating Biscuit by a solid nineteen silver."
Yuzu set her mug down hard enough that the clerk stopped snickering and started actually counting.
"The wells went violet the same week those fish started dying."
She tapped the notice with one finger, "The council’s men tore every river report off this board at dawn."
"Then the council is hiding something, making a pile of dead fish the only honest witnesses left in Kelford."
"I’m coming, since I need clean samples from above the weirs for eleven patients," she said, already shouldering her satchel.
"Do your patients pay better than Biscuit’s owner, Doc, or am I working for exposure again?"
"My patients pay in turnips, good ones, while you get a walk," she said flatly, buckling the satchel shut.
"Turnips are a garbage currency, but I’ll take the walk as long as I can file a formal complaint with management."
"I am management."
"Then management has a serious morale problem, starting with me."
She was already out the door, leaving him to jog after her with the notice flapping in his fist.
The Whispering River ran north of town through reed beds and willow banks, a noisy channel that never shut up. Today it barely murmured, its surface flat and greasy, with dead fish turning circles in every eddy along the bank.
Ray crouched at the waterline, "Damn, that isn’t a fish kill, that’s a full massacre with fins."
Yuzu knelt beside him, uncorking a glass vial to scoop a sample from the shallows.
She tilted the vial toward the light, "Same taint as the wells, three times stronger, maybe more."
Yuzu corked the vial, scratching a mark into its label with her thumbnail before tucking it away.
"Channel toxicity this high kills the reeds first, then the fish, then whoever drinks downstream."
’If the taint gets stronger as the river climbs, then whoever is cashing this ticket is standing somewhere upstream.’
[ SCAN ]
[Target: River Channel]
[Mana Flow: Disrupted]
[Source: 400 Paces North]
They followed the bank past the netmen’s weirs, where three fishermen stood knee-deep in reeds raking dead trout into baskets. None of them waved, though the oldest spat into the water and grumbled about guild boys arriving a week late.
"A week late is still early for an F-Rank, sir, so you’re very welcome!" he called back cheerfully.
"Hmph, then hurry up before the river finishes off what’s left of my living, guild boy," the old netman shouted, shaking a limp trout at him like a club.
Ray waded a step closer to the weir, "When did the river start going quiet on you, sir?"
"Same week the wells turned... not that anybody from the council cared to come out and ask us."
The old man jerked his chin upstream, toward a bend where the willows leaned low over the water.
"Whatever is killing my trout lives up past that bend, if you’re fool enough to go looking," he muttered, turning back to his baskets.
Yuzu raised an eyebrow, "Do you insult everyone you meet before asking them questions?"
"I insult everyone equally, the only fair business model I’ve ever found."
She snorted into her collar, a sound he decided to count as the first real win of the morning.
"I’d like it on the record that I’m walking into a poisoned river for a sack of turnips."
The path narrowed between the willows, roots crossing it like tripwires that Ray stepped over without looking down.
"Will your metal wands make the thunder noise again if something goes wrong up there?" she asked, eyeing the bulges under his coat.
"They’re pistols, Doc, not wands, though I’ll admit the only noise they make is the sound of me getting paid."
"Then get paid quickly."
Her grip tightened on the satchel strap, her eyes fixed on the dead water sliding past them.
"Two children on Tanner Row are burning with fever, though their mother boils every drop twice."
Ray stopped walking, "Boiling doesn’t fix it?"
"Boiling kills rot, but this taint lives in the water’s mana, where no fire can reach it," she said, not slowing down.
’Two sick kids put a clock on this, turning the fish job into a real job.’
"What are their names?" he asked quietly.
"Pim is six and Etta is eight, with both of them convinced I’m too strict about bedtimes."
"Then Pim and Etta just became my clients, so somebody upstream is about to get a very ugly invoice."
Yuzu looked at him sideways, finding no trace of the grin, then nodded once and walked faster.
Four hundred paces upstream, the river bent around a jutting shelf of rock and went completely silent.
A spike of iron thick as a fence post stood mid-channel, driven deep into the riverbed below the shelf. Runes crawled up its length like burning worms, pulsing violet while the water around it lay dead and still.
[ OBJECT SCAN ]
[Object: Siphon Spike]
[Origin: Demonic]
[Status: Drawing]
[Target: Whispering River Mana Artery]
[Draw Rate: Severe]
"Is that what’s poisoning our wells?" Yuzu breathed, her hand drifting to the crystal rapier at her hip.
"It isn’t poisoning the river so much as drinking it dry, leaving the poison behind like a lousy tip."
"How can you tell that from the bank?"
"I’ve seen enough people bled dry to know the pattern, which is why I’d ask you to... trust me on this one."
Ray squinted at the iron, "That’s easily forty pounds of forged spike, which would fetch... maybe eight silver as scrap if I could yank it loose."
"You are not selling the evidence," she said, folding her arms.
He stepped off the shelf into knee-deep water, testing each footing on the slick riverbed below.
"Don’t touch that thing with your bare hands," she warned, sliding her rapier free.
"Relax, I’m only going to stare at it really hard, though staring has never counted as touching anywhere I’ve worked."
Up close, the iron hummed against his teeth, a drone he felt more than heard, like hornets inside a wall. A pull answered it from deep under the riverbed, the channel leaning toward the spike like bathwater toward a drain.
’Somebody drove a straw into this river’s main vein right where it hurts most, making this a hit instead of an accident.’
"Whoever planted this knew exactly where to stab," he called over his shoulder, "like a real professional with a client list."
"You say that like you admire him."
"I admire his technique, but I’m still going to ruin his whole month once I track down—"
Yuzu cut him off with a raised hand, studying the bend around them with her rapier held low.
"There are no frogs here and no birds either, with every nest in the reeds sitting empty."
’A bend this quiet means something bigger cleaned out the neighborhood and probably still lives here.’
Twenty paces downstream, the shallows bulged upward as though the riverbed itself were taking a breath.
The water around his knees went warm as a bath, the heat crawling up through his trousers.
"Yuzu, get back on the rock and stay there!" he barked, already turning toward the swell.
Two drakes burst up in a spray of mud, each as long as a cart and crusted with crystal. Violet shards jutted from their scales in jagged clusters, glowing with the sick light that pulsed along the spike.
[ HOSTILES ]
[Type: Crystal Drake x2]
[Threat Grade: E]
[Mutation: Siphon-Fed]
"Oh, come on, the notice said dead fish without saying one shit about lizards the size of a wagon, which means I want hazard pay!"
The nearer drake lunged with its jaws wide, faster than anything that size had any right to move.
He slipped left instead of back, slamming his forearm into its jaw hinge as the teeth snapped shut on nothing. The crust sliced his sleeve, drawing a thin line of blood, but the drake reeled away with its head ringing.
"Gah, that was a perfectly good sleeve, you overgrown handbag!"
The second drake ignored him completely, scrambling up the rocks toward the only person standing on dry ground.
"Hey, ugly, I’m the one standing in the water, which makes me the—"
The crash drowned him out as the drake slammed into Yuzu’s Veil, a dome of light that flexed but held.
"It’s ramming my Veil like a bull at a gate, so whatever you’re planning, plan it faster!" she shouted, bracing her rapier inside the glow.
Ray drew both pistols in one smooth motion, the runes along each slide waking blue in the gray morning light. The grin drained off his face, the whole bend narrowing to two drakes, one shelf and eleven paces of water.
On the shelf Yuzu reset her grip on the rapier, the warm morning turning cellar-cold at her back.
’I have sixty-one rounds against two armored lizards, which is plenty as long as every round goes where the crystal isn’t.’
The first drake shook off the blow, then stopped dead, its head sinking as if something larger entered its river. Even the drake at the Veil checked its next charge for one heartbeat, its claws scraping uncertainly on the rock.
"Nobody in this whole town knows what these things are," he said softly, settling both sights on the nearer drake.
"Let’s give the river its first gunfight."