"Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves." — attributed to Confucius
Joel crouched next to the newest body and looked at the question. It needed a real check before he buried it.
The young man had died confused. That was the worst and cheapest way to go. The body was still warm when Joel touched the collar to check his system.
’Fate-Bound Legion,’ he thought. ’The kill is seen, the body is whole, and the skill binds what the host defeats in a fight to the death. So the arithmetic says no before ethics even arrive. The skill costs boss-tier souls, and the Wheel has never sold a human at that price.’
Then he ran the full thought experiment anyway, all the way to the end. Someday the Wheel would hand him this choice for real, with the safety off.
The first problem was architecture. Monster souls were simple. A Grave-Stalker was just instinct and hunger in a hard shell, so its instinct made a clean binding surface.
A human soul was a full warehouse of debts, grudges, faces, and unfinished sentences. A bound human would not be a soldier.
It would be an archive full of a grudge. The Mythic skill clause could force obedience, but it could never guarantee peace.
A man who sleeps beside his own shadow should not fill it with other men’s nightmares.
The second problem was jurisdiction. Everyone in Caelmont spoke of the Spire Inquisition in the tone used for deadly weather.
They were the Inner Cities’ soul-crime auditors sent down from Aethelgard when something walked that should be dead.
Stories said they arrived without warning, asked few questions, and left towns smaller. Licensing held the law’s border: beasts bound into service were industry, but bound men were a beacon that could be read from a stratum away.
A beacon in Caelmont would bring the Inquisition right down to the city where Joel was hiding as a Level 1.
’Settled, then,’ Joel thought, standing up. ’The Legion recruits monsters only, and never in town. This rule is now set in stone.’
[Ding!]
[Fate-Bound Legion: no eligible targets present.]
[System Note: the house thanks you for considering its employee benefits program.]
******
Afterward came inventory. Inventory was the one pleasure that followed him across two worlds.
He processed the lane by value. Ferro’s falchion came first. The man had carried true Spire-steel, cleaned, honest, and sharper than anything Joel owned. It went into his satchel for Silas’s counter, where its story would be short and its price high.
[Ding!]
[Item Discovered]
Name: Falchion, Spire-Steel (Well-Worn)
Grade: Fine
Durability: 62/90
Effect: +9 Strength.
[System Note: the house accepts tips.]
Cask’s boarding axe was next, then the purses holding three hundred and forty credits. Joel counted the sum twice.
The Mayor of Caelmont had paid an advance on his own contract, and the money had simply changed pockets.
He gathered the torn chitin ribbons that had disguised his halberd, recovered his antivenin reagents from the slag wall, and left behind only the work.
The work was a message with two addresses. He made the first one for the street.
The Rustward dried its laundry on lines strung across alleys because the smog ceiling made roofs unreliable. Joel spent twenty minutes with those lines and his new Evolution strength, setting up the gallery.
He hung the three Iron Hounds at the mouth of the drying lane, facing morning traffic, at eye level.
Ordinary domesticity was the point. Passersby would see laundry first, and then the third look would arrive and never leave. By the second shift bell, half the district would know.
He left the wounds clear. A falchion and an axe would look like gang crime. The crescent wounds of a polearm read as a signature.
The gate’s archive already held that signature: hooded polearm, Flesh-Guide, Level 1, walking at a stroll. The records would find each other within a day.
Everyone reading the signature would reach the same impossible conclusion: the administration had priced a boy cheap, and the boy had sent the invoice back.
The Hounds could not report a massacre during their own illegal contract, Sterling could not report a failed hit he never ordered, and the garrison would find only dead mercenaries in a district where dead mercenaries were normal weather. The message had three recipients: the gang, the street, and the man at the top of the hill.
Before leaving, Joel gave a two-note relay whistle. Somewhere above the smog, a watcher marked the contract as closed and went home to bed.
******
The second address needed a box, a walk, and three hours of patience. The house does not mail letters from its own street.
He bought a plain courier case from a night stall two districts over, packed the three iron collar tags inside with no note, and addressed the lid to the Sterling Estate on Ministerial Hill. At dawn, he handed the case to the plaza courier office with triple fees.
[Ding!]
[Item Disdiscovered]
Name: Iron Hound Insignia x3
Grade: Trash
Effect: +0 Strength.
[System Note: sentimental value to exactly one man in Caelmont.]
The courier carried the case up the ministerial hill with morning post. It arrived at the breakfast table among ordinary mail, so Sterling opened it standing up by his coffee, rings clicking on wood.
There was no note because none was needed. The Mayor of Caelmont looked down at three iron tags cut from his hired men, returned to sender by an untraceable hand.
The message assembled itself clearly: the nuisance had been handled, and the invoice was forwarded.
Sterling’s hand was steady as he closed the case. He stood by the window looking down the hill toward the smog line where the Rustward began.
Behind him, coffee went cold. In the garden below, fountains ran bright and smokeless on light the city believed he paid for.
Three streets up the cinder slope, Joel slept until noon. The Second Stratum opened at evening bell, and a man about to interview staff in a venomous dark needed his rest.