The room flashed behind me as I left, but I didn’t think about it at that time. I learned more about him later. First, it was time to ransack the place.

  I found the vaults easily enough. The doors were all open. They wouldn’t have been, but whatever the robe guy did to the building, wrecked also the charms or whatever were holding the vaults secure. The doors didn’t have real locks, but were supposed to stay closed by just magic. Another example of how stupid wizards are.

  ”I didn’t notice any stairs down when I looked through the place," I say. “I thought I was pretty thorough. How were they hidden?”

  They weren’t. The was a stairwell that had a “Secret Vaults” sign next to it. Yeah, for real. I just said wizards are stupid. They did hide it afterwards. Now there’s a wall there, both bricked and painted over, and a tapestry hung up on top of it. It’s still pretty obvious there’s something hidden back there, but I didn’t tell them that.

  There were rooms and rooms of stuff down there. One had just runes. Slabs of stones carved with symbols that made no sense to me. Those didn’t interest me. The place gave me the creeps, to be honest. It’s almost like the runes were whispering and trying to crawl into my eyes as I looked into the room.

  I was after wands or rings or other stuff like that. Things that would let you blast something or make people think you’re beautiful or would make you invisible or something. Anything I could put in my pocket or bag and walk out, so I kept on going.

  In the next room, I saw the device for the first time. The stakes were next to it, but I didn’t know what it was back then. The name said something about a bomb, but I put it all together only much later. The Janitor amulets and cloaks were there too. There were maybe like 20 of the amulets there. They were pretty heavy, and I didn’t know what they were for, so I took just three. There was a whole chest of the cloaks, but I left all those there. Too much to carry and way too unique to sell. I’ve never seen anything have that many runes. Complicated ones too, not just some simple symbols. I don’t know magic, but I know expensive crap when I see it.

  Those things were way above anything I could get fenced. And they had those just lying around. Lictor told me later that the cloaks were too expensive to use. They went so far with making them that they never could justify taking them out for anything, except for Janitors, because they never use them for real. They are only for Rides, he said.

  It sounds Finna got to spend more time with Lictor than the rest of us, or at least me. Somehow, it makes me jealous. It makes no sense, but it does. Lictor told me nothing but lies and half-truths, put me in situations where I had to kill people, and showed me death and senseless violence just to get me to agree on what he wanted me to do. I still dream of waking up next to the Mountain Ride, him holding on to my wrist. “When did you meet him?” I ask, voice shaking.

  Next morning. I had to spend the night there in that vault, you see. The wards went all back up. Everything went. The doors started humming and locked themselves. I kicked and pushed and tried to slide a knife under them. I unscrewed the hinges, but the door just stayed up. It was pretty unfair.

  Not the first time I was locked in somewhere, mind. I had water with me and a room full of magical crap, so I wasn’t worried. I spent my time going through all the stuff and picking the best ones to grab and the ones I could try to use to get out. At the very least, I could use the wands. They were, of course, empty, but there was also ambrosia in the room so I could fill them up if needed.

  What? You press a button to release the latch and the ambrosia flows from the tank to the… you know what? I’m not going to explain stupid wands to you. Read a book, forest boy.

  Anyway, I decided to play it safe and just wait for a bit. Maybe the wards would go down again and the doors would unlock, or maybe someone would come and check up on the vaults and I could get out when they did.

  I tried to listen to what was going up above me, but no sound carried down there. So after checking out everything, I just napped to pass the time. When I started to get hungry, I would get out, one way or another.

  Didn’t have to wait that long, though. I heard steps from outside of the room and got ready for whatever was needed. If they opened the door, I’d beat them up and get away. If not, I’d scream and bang on the door and then do it when they came to look.

  “Miss Finna,” he called through the door. The voice was muffled. I didn’t know it then, but it was Lictor.

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  Have to admit that spooked me a bit. Not because it was him. That came only later. But because they shouldn’t have known anyone was there, and especially not that I was. It wasn’t a planned heist, so there was no one who could have ratted me out and I was sure I hadn’t been spotted when going in. Wizards could have had something in place to notice an unwanted visitor, but I was pretty sure those would have been down with the rest of the stuff.

  “I won’t open the door because you always hit me with a blackjack, but I’m going to suggest something to you that you will agree to,” he said.

  ”That does sound like Lictor,” Rworg says. “He was wise not to open the door.”

  I would have blackjacked him so hard, yeah. I did say something to him, but he just tutted and continued talking.

  “You have been found out and are locked behind a door you can’t open. The council takes breaking into the vaults seriously, but luckily, there is something they need from you. Something only you can do. You are in a position to bargain.”

  It was a weird tactic for a negotiation, but it obviously didn’t matter. Not when he knew exactly how I would react and what I would be willing to accept.

  ”Wait, how long has it been at this point?” I ask. “I still can’t believe someone just gave them the Mountain Ride, but if they did, how long have they had it at this point? What had they been up to?”

  They had been up a lot. Lictor explained it to me afterward. I’ll skip the part where I try to escape and he stops me maybe seven times, because it’s stupid and makes him look cool and me bad. Still, he said he had to spend three weeks to manage to stop my last try to get away, so I’m claiming that as a moral victory. I could have kept trying, but he had showed me enough about what was going on with the border that I sort of started to feel bad about not trying to stop it all. He took me on so many Rides I had no idea how deep I was. That also meant that I couldn’t just keep stabbing him or trying crazy stuff. Would have been too damn embarrassing to break a leg after jumping out a window and it turning out to be real.

  I don’t know how he kept track. Maybe his brain is just weird that way? Anyway, let me think about what he told me after we had got out of the vault. This was pretty soon after, while he was still trying to recruit me.

  “You saw what happened, so I’ll spare you the official version. You’re not to tell anyone about what you saw, but of course I will, hah. Lictor is pretty dumb at times,” he said, approximately. The rest of it was more interesting.

  “Prime Janitor Lark established the Janitorial Order a bit after midnight, after thousands of Rides untangling the threads of the immediate future. Every second he wasn’t touching the artifact, he spent narrating prophecies and instructions for us to follow.”

  “You just let him do that? He was really confused the last I saw him,” I said.

  “Lark was the greatest of us and he gave his life to Tenorsbridge. After his last Ride, only a piece of charcoal was left where he stood.”

  He sounded almost reverent when talking about the guy. It was creepy and weird. “I’m not buying it. The guy was a damn janitor.”

  “Well, fine, he was. But confidence and knowledge can take you far. It helped that everyone important and powerful rushed in to see what had pierced the wards of the seat of power of Tenorsbridge. Lark told me it took him five hundred and thirteen tries to get people to agree the way he wanted. Truly an inspiration.”

  “Great, he sounds even crazier than you.”

  He raised a finger in the air and wagged it at me. “Ah, but that was not all. He also wrote an extremely specific description of what was going to happen for the next few hours, followed by instructions on what should be done, and blackmailed the council to take him seriously. Watch this,” he said, taking out a small paper.

  “That’s dumb. No one could do that,” I said.

  “That’s dumb, no one could do that,” he said, reading from the paper and continuing to read. “Wait, was that… that’s… I finish my sentences and don’t let them… Well, if he’s so clever then how come I haven’t said any of the things and it’s just you talking?”

  After that, he looked at me for a while, ripped the paper in half and let the pieces fall to the floor. They were empty. “That was actually just me. Do you start to understand the power we wield? Time, free will, consequences, they don’t matter. And yet it isn’t enough to stop what is coming. That’s why we need you. This is your chance to matter.”

  I said he was trying to recruit me, but I guess it wasn’t really trying at that point anymore. The bastard knew I would say yes.

  Once I did, he just left me standing in the Ride Hall. I watched everything change every minute. The place was filled with scribes, all of them writing furiously. People teleporting in and out non-stop. Lictor becoming weirder and weirder. He touched the thing and cried and screamed for a second, then touched it again, wiped away the tears, face as stiff as stone. Two hours later, all the scribes took off and squads of guards started coming in. They touched the pyramid once and went out. It looked insane, but at that point Lictor had taken me on enough Rides that I understood that nothing making any sense was how things would work from now on.

  I don’t really know why I’m telling you this. Somehow I sort of miss him and I hate it, you know? I killed him maybe twice, but in the end I just did what he said, unless he really pissed me off. I didn’t hold back a lot, because that was the only way I felt I could decide things on my own? It got better when we started going out together, all of us four. He said there were too many factors, and that Mandollel is too twitchy for him to control things properly. It made him really angry.

  I can’t imagine how angry he was at you for messing up his whole plan, hah. You’re going to get absolutely blasted once we’re back.

  Finna laughs, but we all know it’s for show. Rworg puts a hand on her shoulder and squeezes. He wraps the arm around her and pulls her to his side. He lifts his other arm, waving it at me.

  I slide over and he grabs me, too. He stinks of blood and sweat, but it doesn’t matter.

  So do we all.