Once again, and now not for the last time, the Crucible had bested me. At least if I had died it would have been over.
It was no accident that I had tangled mostly with his opponent’s fighters, or that the demon had tossed me at the Brobnar giant and the goblins. I had, in some twisted sense, been doing Ponderous Url’s work.
“If you had taken a moment to consider,” Ponderous Url said, with another weighty pause, “then you would know demons can’t communicate with your species. Not even in the form of the written letters of a contract.”
Ponderous Url held out his hand to the demon. In a blaze of green fire, the contract I had signed appeared in the demon’s hand.
I said, “You seem to have no trouble communicating with it.”
“Archons are special in that way.” He took the contract. “Among others.”
No doubt now – that was the accent of my home city. I wondered if the others here heard the same thing, or if they heard their own childhood tongues.
If this was how Archons communicated, no wonder even the demon got along with Ponderous Url. “Are you part of what made the Crucible?” I swiped at my eyes, clearing the blurring away. I fought to stabilize my voice. “Are you part of what brought me here?”
He considered that question very carefully. For longer than even usual.
Then he shook his head. “You already know I cannot answer that question.”
My hands trembled. I had never hated anything like I hated Ponderous Url. Never experienced this much rage, not even when I’d thought I was dying. I summoned all of my sense of authority – the voice of the executioner, enforcer, and third niece of the Lord Mayor, and more. “I demand that you tell me.”
But it was a hollow voice for a hollow threat. I had no power to enforce anything. The person I’d been no longer existed. Even if I’d had my prism knife, I was now under no illusions that I would have been allowed to draw it.
Ponderous Url scanned the contract.
The letter of the contract stated that I would try to kill Ponderous Url until either he or I fell. That had seemed much simpler when I’d thought I’d still stood a chance of killing him, and certainly before I knew he intended to resurrect me.
By the contract’s terms, I would be following Ponderous Url forever. Or until he decided to stop raising me.
“Do you mean to enforce that?” By which I meant to ask: are you going to enslave me?
For once, he did not hesitate. “No,” he said, and the contract evaporated in a burst of multi-hued fire.
It happened so quickly that I did not have the time to avoid the ashes as the wind caught them. They stung my eyes.
Relief was, in its own way, more debilitating than pain. For a long time, I could not speak. I did not know what I had done to deserve the awful things that had just happened to me – or to have just been released from the contract.
“Why did you do this?”
“You’re a skilled infiltrator and assassin. I would think that your value in an Archon’s retinue would be obvious. You disabled a Logos titan.”
“You could have asked.”
“You would have said no.”
That was true. I hadn’t quit my old guild just to sign up for another gang. I wasn’t about to be tied down to anything on the Crucible. “You didn’t have the right.”
Silly thing to say, and we both knew it. Ponderous Url did not dignify it with an answer. “It could have gone much worse for you,” he told me. As if for punctuation, he dusted the ashes of the contract off his palm.
“If you’re asking me to thank you, you can–”
“You made a mistake,” Ponderous Url interrupted. “You did not take the time to think through all of the outcomes of accepting a contract with a demon. You only focused on what you wanted.”
“And what do you think I wanted?”
“To give up,” Ponderous Url answered.
I took a long time to answer, and not because I was pondering. The demon was hovering closer.
I said, “Contract or not, I could try to kill you again.”
“Did you expect to be able to?”
Stupid question, and the answer made me feel stupider.
Ponderous Url said, “If you had, by some twist of circumstance, assassinated me, do you think you could have taken your pay and retired?”
That had never remotely been a possibility. If I had somehow, miraculously, killed the Archon, millions of vaultheads would have watched me do it. The rest of whatever life I’d had would have been spent hiding from fans, bookies, and any other unknowable vengeance that would have been coming my way. Even if I had been left alone with just myself, I still could not have found any peace.
“Either outcome would have been the end for you.” Ponderous Url raised a gigantic finger to tap his head. “You people do not take the time to think about why you make the choices that you do.”
“Whatever it was, it should have been my choice,” I said, with a snarl. “You took it from me.”
“If you’re ignorant of both the causes and outcomes of your choices, did you really make one?”
“We can’t help being ‘ignorant.’ We have no idea why anything happens in this place.”
“If that’s what you need to go on,” he said, “then I would give up now.”
He shifted his bulk. With great slowness, he began to rise. I saw, at the back of his waist, a magnetic-suspension holster with a familiar hilt. The prism knife looked outlandishly tiny on his body.
Had he tricked me into this because he wanted my services? Had he been after the prism knife all along? Even now, years after, I couldn’t say.
The other members of his war council were already gone. He was leaving. I was running out of time. I had a thousand questions, but only one that could make it. I hated the way I sounded. “Then what do you think I should do?”
He paused, and once again turned to me.
He said, “The Crucible is the opportunities you’ve been given.” After reflection, he added, “I can tell you that’s as true for me as it is for you.”
I let him walk off. This time, he did not look back. His council of war followed him, and, once I was out of earshot, resumed whatever plans they were hatching.
Like an ironwood tree slipping down a mudslide, I fell to my knees.
Minutes later, still feeling the vibrations of his footsteps in my bones, I stood. His retinue had finished their healing rounds. They were already striking camp.
I had no guild to return to. I was persona non grata in Hub City. If any one of my guild’s numerous spies found me – not even I could avoid them all – they would report me to my old boss. My life would be over. She would kill me.
If I followed Ponderous Url, I could wait for an opportunity to steal my knife back. But even if I succeeded, my life would still be over. I would have been, at best, back where I started. More likely, I would have just been dead.
Not a life worth continuing.
Ponderous Url chose his words very carefully. No matter what I did, I would have given in, or given up, to something. I couldn’t keep trying to be who I’d been before. That had been taken from me. It was never coming back.
There are no right choices, not in a place like the one where I’d ended up. The hardest thing I ever had to do was force myself to make this one.
Once I’d come to the Crucible, no path I took was going to end with me keeping my life – whether I was alive in body or not.
What I chose shouldn’t be any great mystery. I’m still here to tell you about it, aren’t I?
I had to run hard to catch up to Ponderous Url and his retinue.
I’ve learned a few more things since I joined him. He was wrong about at least one thing – the Crucible is more than a sum of its opportunities. Much, much more. But the opportunities are a good place to start.
I had to let go of the smallness of everything I’d been, to seize what I’d been given.
And so do you.
Welcome to the Crucible
, outsider.
The Apprentice
Cath Lauria
“Who built this thing?” Roz muttered, as she jammed a finger down into the depths of the jetpack, feeling for the catch-release that should be there. Every jetpack came with a catch-release for the æmber tanks – if something went wrong with the firing system, you needed to be able to cut the fuel loose so you didn’t end up strapped to a fireball. But try as she might, she couldn’t feel anything remotely like a switch down there.
Maybe the goblin who wore it was a lefty, maybe it was on the other side. Roz turned the pack over and looked for a likely spot. Nothing. Perhaps it was remote-controlled? But what goblin trusted a remote control over his own sturdy hands? They were often brilliant engineers – sometimes crazy ones too – but they liked being able to feel what they were working with.
Roz checked her tool belt for her telescoping extension light. Nothing.
“Arg.” She was already ensconced in her workstation – a half-dome of flickering holoscreens, work tables, and fail-safes she could trigger at a moment’s notice if a client failed to mention a little “enhancement” that turned out to be dangerous. Roz glanced at the nearest screen thoughtfully. If she activated Grizl’s Deep-Down scanner, she could get a three-dimensional image of the jetpack and find what she was looking for. But the Deep-Down scanner used a lot more power, and that meant spending more æmber.
Every job was a balancing act: to turn a decent profit, you had to spend around half as much on the repairs as you charged. Grizl Crustic was a popular mechanic because he offered flat rates for most fixes, but when the problem turned out to be complicated, that could mean taking the ledger from black to red in the quest to solve it. Every time Roz did that, Grizl took the difference out of her pay. Never mind that she’d been doing this for almost eight years now, twice the length of the normal goblin’s apprenticeship, and could handle jobs that even her master preferred to avoid.
Honestly, Grizl preferred to avoid most jobs these days, letting Roz handle the shop while he spent his days betting on his favorite Archons or reliving famous matches at the local Shrine-O-Vault stadium.
Roz sighed and blew a strand of dirty blond hair out of her face. “TRIS,” she called out, “can you bring me my extension light? I think I left it on the table by the door.”
She heard her old guardian robot creak into action, slowly levering herself up from where she slumped on the floor and shambling over to the door. Roz bit her lip, trying not to feel guilty about making TRIS get up. The robot liked to be active, after all, despite how hard it was for her these days. TRIS was a treasure bot, designed to be able to follow explorers anywhere on the Crucible their journeys took them and protect whatever marvels they discovered. Once, TRIS had been top-of-the-line, and Roz remembered riding safe in TRIS’s internal treasure vault as they followed her parents over mountains, across deserts, and into dilapidated ruins.
TRIS was the only reason she was alive, already tucked away safe when her parents accidentally triggered an ancient Wrathtar booby trap. A wave of radioactive fire had burst forth from a sacred temple, destroying everything – and everyone – in its path. TRIS had encapsulated Roz, curling around her and absorbing all the damage as they were thrown violently from the ruins. It had taken hours for TRIS’s exoskeleton to cool enough to let Roz out, and all Roz saw when she emerged was the wreckage of everything she knew and loved. Her life as an explorer’s child was over, but at least she still had TRIS.
Every extra bit of æmber Roz earned went to repairing TRIS. Right now, the bot was worth more for her valuable vault parts than she was for her ability as an actual, functioning treasure robot, but that would change. As soon as TRIS was fully fixed, Roz would become an explorer herself and leave all the mess, mire and noise of Hub City behind. It was her dream, and with TRIS’s help it would become a reality.
But first she had to figure out how to fix this dang jetpack.
The tip of her extension light poked through one of the holoscreens, momentarily blurring it. Roz could just make out TRIS’s glowing yellow eyelights beyond it. “Thank you,” she said, taking the light, then reaching out and laying her hand on the side of TRIS’s arm. TRIS hummed a brief, fractured version of an old lullaby she used to sing for Roz as a child before lumbering back to the wall and sliding down with another noisy creak. Roz winced. Next on her robot repair list: æmber-vescent shocks.
Roz activated the light and stuck it down into the depths of the jetpack’s harness. Where, where, where…ah. What the – who even put a catch-release so close to the openings of the engines? The goblin who owned this thing must wear asbestos gloves. Roz reached up beside the heat-tarnished mouth of the right engine and triggered the catch-release. The æmber tank fell onto her work table. “Now we’re getting somewhere,” she murmured with a nod.
Servicing the jetpack took all morning, and Roz barely got it done in time for its owner to pick it up. A delay would have meant giving a discount, though, and she’d be darned if she was going to take yet another cut to her pay when she was so close to affording the next round of parts for TRIS. “Just a couple more years,” she said to herself after the goblin who owned the jetpack departed, a dubious look on his face. Yeah, yeah, little human girl fixed your jetpack. Why don’t you try it before figuring me for a fraud?
Honestly, Roz knew enough at this point to open her own shop if she wanted, but she needed Grizl’s reputation to bring in customers. Goblins were some of the best in the business – why go to a human mechanic when you could get cutthroat prices from someone like Grizl? And speaking of Grizl…
Roz blinked in surprise as the master mechanic himself sidled in through the front door of their little shop. What was he doing back so early? He usually didn’t return to the shop until well after close. Was he checking up on her?
“I got the full fifteen æmbits for the jetpack job,” she said before he could start complaining. “And I’m going to start on the gasket repairs for the elf’s hovercar next. It should be finished before the end of the day.”
Grizl shut the door behind him. “Uh… Roz…”
“And I don’t want to hear another lecture from you about how to prioritize my workload,” Roz continued. “I’m not kicking your friends’ jobs to the head of the queue, no matter how much they beg.”
Grizl took his leather hat off, a shock of bright orange hair expanding like a flower around his head. He wrung the hat in his long-fingered hands. “Roz, look–”
“They never pay on time either, have you noticed that? The next guy I have to threaten into turning over the æmbits just because he thinks he can take advantage of a human, I’m gonna–”
“Rozelyn!”
Roz stopped speaking, shutting her mouth so fast she nearly caught the tip of her tongue in her teeth. Grizl never called her by her actual name. He hardly ever used Roz, either – it was always “kid” or “girl” or “newbie,” even though she’d been his apprentice for almost half her life. Him resorting to using her first name could only mean one thing: trouble.
“What happened?” she asked as calmly as she could.
Grizl looked down at the ground, his purple skin flushed darker than usual around his sharp cheekbones. He was… embarrassed? Nervous? Ashamed?
“I, uh… look, maybe we should talk over a drink, do you want a–”
“Just. Tell. Me.”
Grizl sighed. “I made a bad bet today. Shoulda been a sure thing, I mean, Argus has won the last five rounds and the rosters haven’t even changed!” Roz recognized the name of Grizl’s favorite Archon to watch. “Sure, some of his guys might have taken a drubbing last time, but they were rated as fully healed! But they, uh… they didn’t do as well as they should have.”
Roz pursed her lips. “So you made a bet and you lost.”
Grizl winced. “Something like that.”
“What did you wager?” Anger began to flare in Roz’s chest. “You didn’t wager my work contract, did you? Because that’s a
gainst the rules, and I know you don’t care about them all that much, but I’m not going to go work for a, a Shadow or a Whispered Walker and help them commit crimes while you–”
“No, no!” Grizl held his hands out placatingly. “No, it’s nothing like that!”
Roz pushed to her feet. She was short for a human, but still taller than Grizl, and right now she felt like she needed every advantage she could get. “Then what is it?”
“I kind of… maybe… promised ’em… your bot.”
Roz’s anger cooled into icy dread in the space of a heartbeat. “No,” she breathed. “She’s mine.”
Grizl sighed. “Technically she’s mine, actually. You don’t own anything other than the clothes you’re wearing, kid.”
“No, no, because – because she came here with me! You found her with me, she’s mine, she belonged to my family!”
“The rules of an apprenticeship state that everything the apprentice brings with them becomes the property of the master, as collateral against the money the master outlays for their upkeep, until they move on,” Grizl said quietly.
Roz’s eyes filled with tears. “But I earn you money!”
“You do, but that’s a side-effect of your training.”
“What are you…? I’m the only person here earning money!” She pointed around the grimy little front office. “You haven’t taken an appointment here in weeks. What will the guild say if they learn that I’m doing all your work for you?”
“They’ll probably congratulate me, honestly.” Grizl shook his head as Roz growled. “I’m not sayin’ it’s fair, kid. I know it’s not fair, but that’s the system. It was either lose the bot, or lose the shop. You want both of us to be out on the street?”
Roz clenched her fists so hard it felt like her knuckles were going to pop right through the skin. “Or you could just not bet at all.”
“Nah,” Grizl said, sounding a little sad. “I never know when to quit. And now it’s too late, and I’m sorry for this, Roz, I really am, but there’s no way out of it. A bet’s a bet.”
Tales From the Crucible Page 3
