Once back on dry dock, Vidar marveled at the place from which he’d emerged. It was out in the water. Not far from land, where the Dennerish sailors pulled him out, but still in the actual water. The sea must have risen considerably since the sewer and water system was built. No sane person would have created an entrance underwater. This also meant the actual intake was somewhere out there under the actual sea.

  Once out into the open, the cold snatched most other thoughts from his mind. His clothes were still wet from going under in the water basin and the cold night meant death if he didn’t find some place warm—and found it soon.

  The sailors had been kind enough to give him a blanket to wrap around his shivering self, laughing all the while and smacking Vidar’s back with strong, scarred hands. They wore nothing but thin shirts and pants that ended above the knee. Some of them were even barefoot. Tattoos covered much of their exposed skin with everything from simple lines to much more intricate patterns and depictions of ships and women. It was Vidar’s first time seeing art printed on someone’s skin. Such a strange people.

  He didn’t understand much of their broken language. It sounded similar to his own, but somehow off, kind of like a drunkard’s sloppy mumbling, but the words were just different enough that he barely got more than their most basic meaning. He’d asked for directions to Rat Town and they’d pointed him in a direction through the gate near the dockyard, and off he went to brave the cold. It didn’t take long to find the sketchier parts of Halmstadt. Vidar clutched the knife in his coat pocket, glancing nervously at everyone all around him while ice formed in his wet hair. His shuddering grew worse, to the point Vidar found it difficult to keep the blanket clutched around him, and his toes and fingers quickly began to numb.

  Eventually, he ran out of time for searching the streets randomly and was forced to ask for directions. The women he approached, thinking they’d be the safer bet, all recoiled and hurried away from him without as much as a greeting.

  The first man he dared asked for help drew back and spat on the ground. “You smell like excrement, boy, and not the dung from a pig either.”

  Vidar couldn’t smell it on himself and thought it’d mostly washed off him in the basin. Apparently not. “I’m looking for Andersburg. Is it near here?”

  “Why’re you so smelly, boy?”

  “I fell in a heap of crap! Satisfied?”

  The man, an older, thin fellow with a dark gray hat pulled down so far the rim covered most of his eyes, chuckled. “That’ll do it, boy. That’ll do it!”

  “S-so?” Vidar asked, his teeth chattering. He was starting to feel drowsy and tired, as if he wanted to fall asleep. That couldn’t be a good sign.

  “So?” the man asked back.

  “Andersburg?” Vidar spat. “D-do you know where it is?”

  “Rat Town? Of course I know it!”

  “Where?” Vidar shouted.

  “No need to get cross now, boy.”

  “Please tell me.”

  The old man pointed down the street. “There! Go right and there you are, the road through Andersburg.”

  Vidar hurried away in the direction he’d pointed.

  “Hey, boy!”

  Vidar stopped and turn.

  “Probably best if you head inside, no? Looks like you’re a bit cold.”

  The anger provided some measure of warmth as he trudged down the street and finally recognized some buildings. It wasn’t far. He stoked his anger to keep from collapsing right then and there in the snow. The broken rune, him having to wade through a river of shit, falling down and then making his way up. That fat bastard who’d sicced the guards on him. Vidar’s father with his impossible expectations and his mother just standing by, watching with teary eyes as his father banished him.

  The rising anger shifted to a longing sadness for his home, followed by fear as his memory turned to the basin and the enormous eyes lurking in the dark. To keep all those useless feelings at bay, he focused on the rune and the way it’d broken. It represented everything wrong in his life, and there was much to choose from. Embla bought the damn thing for cheap, but he couldn’t blame her for that.

  Oh, no. The one to blame was the awful merchant she’d bought it from, but the blame did not stop there. From the start, the rune scribe who’d crafted the damn thing was ultimately responsible for Vidar’s odyssey through the dark sewers. He would make that man pay if it was the last thing he ever did.

  Vidar found the urchin dwelling and banged on the door until a confused Erik opened up and let him in. Then he collapsed in a heap on the floor and passed out. The last thing he felt was someone putting a heavy blanket over his trembling form.

  Someone spoke, but he was too far out of it to tell who.

  “He smells like shit.”

  “Shit goblin.”

  They giggled.

  With the many boys crammed into the small space, their combined body heat slowly thawed Vidar’s frozen limbs. The next morning, while it was still dark out, he withdrew the light rune, now once again a flickering mess. His toes and fingers weren’t permanently damaged, as far as he could tell. None of the black spots Ida told him to look for. Vidar’s toes and fingers were pink and healthy looking. It’d been a near thing, but he was restored.

  “Embla will kill you for ruining that thing,” Erik said from over by the opposite corner. The space was small enough that their feet touched if neither pulled up their legs.

  “Wasn’t my fault,” Vidar mumbled, pulling up his shirt sleeve to inspect his arm. It didn’t feel any different. The numbness was gone without a trace.

  Vidar couldn’t peer into his own chest but his heart beat like usual and the empty area around it that’d threatened to squeeze the life from him was like a distant dream.

  “It’d be nice to have one of those in here,” one of the other boys said, nodding to the flickering rune beside Vidar.

  “Just get a rune scribe to come stay here with us,” Torbjorn said. “I’m sure any one of them would love to. They can take my space. That way, I won’t have the smell of shit in my nose every night.”

  Vidar ignored their teasing and bickering. He’d made it out of that nightmare below the surface. Not just that, he’d made it out with a few coins in his pocket and, more importantly, a weapon. Now he needn’t fear for his life every time he walked the streets of Andersburg.

  This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  The elation didn’t last long. A few hours out of the wet and the cold did not mean his clothes had fully dried. When the door to their little shack was flung open with a bang, revealing the worried faces of Ida and Siv, cold air rushed in and immediately sucked the warmth from Vidar’s bones.

  “Vidar! You’re here!”

  Vidar wrapped his arms around himself and shuddered. “I’m here.”

  “We were so worried about you,” Ida said, turning back to Siv. “Weren’t we, Siv?”

  Siv nodded, looked at Vidar’s head, then frowned.

  Ida followed her gaze and immediately understood what her sister was thinking. “Where’s your hat?”

  Vidar’s fingers went to his tousled, but now dry, hair. “I must’ve lost it when I fell into the water.”

  Ida’s eyes widened. “You fell into the sea?”

  “No. Well, yes. Sort of. I’m sorry for losing the hat, Siv. I really liked it. Promise.”

  Her warm smile helped chase the cold away. A little.

  “We’ll get you a new one,” Ida said as the boys started pushing past Vidar to get out of the shack.

  “You really worried about me?” Vidar asked, walking beside the two sisters.

  “Sure, we were. You’re one of us now, Vidar.”

  A small pang of warmth spread through his chest and he suppressed a stupid smile trying to take over his face.

  “Here,” he said, holding out his hand.

  Ida just looked at him as they walked.

  Vidar sighed. “Hold out your hand.”

  When she did, he let a few of the coins he’d collected down in the sewers drop into her palm. Ida pulled her hand back and held it near her face. She wrinkled her nose at the smell but didn’t comment.

  “Where did you get these? Three copper coins is enough for a big meal!”

  He pointed down at their feet. “In the sewers.”

  “Oh,” she said, disappearing the coins into one of her many layers of clothing. Ida made them slow down a little so they lagged behind the rest of the group.

  She leaned in close and spoke in a hushed whisper. “Do you want to come with us tonight? We’ve found a target.”

  “Target?”

  “A house where both master and servants will be gone tonight. Siv and I have been watching them for a few days now. That’s where we were coming from when we found you in the snow. Tonight, we’re going inside. Well, I’m going inside. Siv is too much of a baby to enter. You’re small enough to come with me. We’ll share the loot.”

  He looked from Ida to Siv. “You guys do this a lot?”

  Siv shook her head, let out a negative-sounding grunt, and threw a worried look at her sister.

  “First time for everything,” Ida said, making a fist in front of her face. “I’m sure we’ll do fine. Usually, we go after people’s pockets, but it’s rare that we get away with something useful. The places we can go without drawing attention, people don’t have much coin on them.”

  “Sounds dangerous. Entering a house like that.”

  She shrugged. “We’re often nearly caught out on the street, too. How are we supposed to get by without taking some risks?”

  Ida held up her fingers near Vidar’s face, showing the many reddish pinpricks. “I’m not sure how much longer I can take sewing all day, every day, just waiting for the years to roll on by.”

  Siv looked down at her feet, clearly uncomfortable with the subject.

  “Why not join the thieves’ guild, then?” Vidar asked.

  They were nearing the barn, where breakfast would be served. Vidar’s hunger caught up with him at the thought of stale bread, and he almost doubled over from a sudden wave of exhaustion. Not to mention the cold.

  “No girls allowed,” Ida said, her tone of voice and facial expression both very telling of what she thought of that little rule. Just before they were to enter the barn, she leaned in and whispered conspiratorially, “Siv and I are going to create our own guild one day. Girls only! Perhaps we’ll make an exception for you, if you play your cards right.”

  She entered first and Vidar allowed Siv to pass him by so she could follow her sister.

  “I’m not very good at cards,” he muttered.

  Another spot of warmth did him some good, and the terrible food was perhaps the finest meal he’d ever had the pleasure of eating. Unfortunately, the miniscule portions meant he only chased off the worst of his hunger pangs. He’d need to catch up on the eating somehow. Going through life with a growling stomach was no way to live. Perhaps helping Ida rob those people would be an acceptable risk after all. If there was a house, there’d obviously be food in it. And coin, of course.

  The two silver coins, those meager little bits of currency, would allow him to eat like a king for a few days, but then they’d be gone. Unacceptable. The one guiding truth for Vidar at that moment was the need for wealth. The life of an urchin, always working for nothing, was not one he would submit to. The heavy fists of poverty would pummel him to the grave.

  Deep in thought, he hadn’t realized they were already at their leader’s base of operations. Vidar glanced down at his hand in his coat pocket. His fingers were wrapped around the now dead light rune. It didn’t even flicker. The next few moments promised to be unpleasant.

  Embla glared at him from the moment Vidar stepped into the room, but she said nothing until all the others had cleared out. Ida and Siv were sent off to work in some tavern and the grave-digging boys weren’t needed by the church that day. Instead, Embla sent them off to some storage near a mill where they were supposed to lug barley around all day. Torbjorn was sent off to his usual job, whatever that was, and a lot of the smaller kids would be clearing snow from the road in one of the richer parts of town.

  Once they were all sent off, Embla sighed. “When you didn’t return yesterday, I thought you’d done like your predecessor and disappeared with the rune.”

  “I cleared one of the blockages,” Vidar said, bringing out the now nearly indecipherable map to point at the X where he’d found the corpse.

  Embla glanced at the paper, then up at Vidar, not saying anything.

  “Then I, well, fell.”

  “You fell?” she asked, her voice flat.

  “The rune you gave me was defective,” Vidar said, slamming the wooden disc down on the desk, separating the two of them. “Lost my way in the dark and fell into the water. I almost drowned, then almost froze to death!”

  She picked it up, holding the crack to the light before raising an eyebrow. “Now we have a problem, you and I,” Embla said, placing the piece of wood in Vidar’s hand.

  “We do?”

  “I do not have the funds to replace that rune again, and the ones who tasked us with clearing blockages in the underground system were clear. No extra expenses would be tolerated.”

  “I’m not going back down there in the dark,” Vidar said, swallowing and glancing toward the door. The tension coming off this woman was thick enough to cut with a knife.

  “You found one blockage. How much coin did the man have?”

  “None,” Vidar said. This time, his voice didn’t waver.

  “I find that difficult to believe.”

  Embla knocked on the surface of her desk with her knuckles twice in quick succession. The ceiling beams creaked as shuffling steps made their way through the second story and down the stairs while Vidar once again contemplated escaping out the door. But he still didn’t have anywhere else to go. His situation hadn’t changed. It was too late now, in any case.

  A man wide enough to block the entire hallway showed up. His arms hung well past his hips, huge hands gently swaying back and forth as he peeked out from under an oversized brow.

  “Search the boy for coins, Afte,” Embla said.

  Vidar withdrew the knife and pulled it out of the thin sheath, pointing the edge toward this new arrival. Afte’s laughter boomed through the small room, but his mirth only served to anger Vidar rather than scare him. “You won’t touch me without this blade plunging into your neck.”

  Heat rose in Vidar’s face, but he didn’t care. He was done with taking shit from the world.

  Embla sighed and waved Afte off.

  After the towering giant lumbered off again, she shook her head, a thin smile on her lips. “You’ve got guts, I’ll give you that. Never thought you were capable of holding a knife like you meant to use it. This, however, does not mean our issue is resolved. We need another rune for you to continue with your assigned task.”

  “I’ll get you another rune,” Vidar heard himself promising. “Just give me the name of the merchant you got it from, and I’ll make him exchange the defective rune for one that works properly.”

  She regarded him for a long moment before deciding. “It was procured from a student.”

  “A student? No wonder it didn’t work right. From where does he hawk these substandard runes?”

  A student was a much better target than some hardened rune scribe merchant. The latter would do anything to get out of proper service to a paying customer, but a young student would be pliable.

  “The name of this rune scribes’ guild student is Alvarn. You’ll find him in Fyllinge, where the Halmstadt chapter of the guild has their chapter house. That’ll be your task for the day. Get me another light rune, Vidar.”

  He’d get one, but not for Embla. Like the keys to the underground water and waste system, they would have to pry that rune from his cold, dead hands. Alvarn, the rune scribe student in Fyllinge. That runt was about to receive a visitor.