Volume 1, Chapter 53: The Port Has Excellent Customer Service (Patreon)

“You don’t, um, trust the minister?” Bri asked once we were already a few minutes away from his building. The arrival of petitioners had forced us to leave in silence, cutting our earlier conversation short.

Once we were finally outside the ministry however, I decided against taking the first elevator we came across. There would be time enough to get dragged upward inside a wooden box suspended from ropes once I had some idea where those ropes actually led. For now, I wanted to see the port properly. Besides, if I was going to spend the next few week—or months, depending on how cooperative our murderer proved to be—in this city, wandering around completely ignorant of its layout seemed like an excellent way to get robbed, stabbed, arrested, or subjected to some exciting combination of all three. So as we talked, Bri and I walked. Or rather, I walked while she floated comfortably beside my shoulder inside her cage.

“Of course not. As a rule, I try not to trust anyone,” I replied, pausing with one hand on my staff and inclining my head to an elderly human woman who was carrying bundles of goods into a building that looked like a shop.

Almost instinctively, I glanced upward. Sure enough, the daylight that had been pouring down from above earlier had been replaced by something weaker—most likely whatever illuminated the city after the twilight. Night was inevitably approaching, and it showed in the activity around the port, which, as it turned out, wasn’t merely an industrial district.

Numerous tunnels had been carved into the walls of the enormous cavern, leading toward streets that disappeared deeper into the rock, lined with residential buildings. In front of one of them, several boys, apparently after being scolded by their parents, were gathering up toys they had scattered earlier. Farther down the street, some drunk was arguing with his wife, who leaned out of a window and screamed back at him. Clothes hung from lines stretched outside the windows, while ubiquitous gas lamps and braziers filled with glowing coals illuminated the area. The waterfall we had left behind spread more than its exhausting roar through the district. A fine mist of water hung constantly in the air, making both seeing and breathing slightly more difficult.

“Why do you, well, think he’s involved in something illegal?” she asked as I decided to slide my staff between my backpack and my back, freeing both hands. Enough eyes were watching me—and my bag in particular—that I couldn’t afford to keep my hands occupied. I was able to spot pickpockets long before they got close enough to become a problem. Still, if it turned out I had overestimated my abilities, I wanted both hands free to grab whichever one reached too far into my belongings.

“Davin openly said that he doesn’t allow problems to develop, and those guards practically pissed themselves at the sight of him. Hurrin suggested that orcs have to be genuinely intelligent to reach such an advanced… height, so it’s fairly easy to conclude that his longevity comes from knowing how to channel his aggression toward specific targets instead of unleashing it on whoever happens to be nearby.” I adjusted my grip on the staff. “I could be wrong, of course, but the fact that Tower-guy can openly use his magic inside the minister’s office makes me suspect the two of them make money from more than just the official side of their business.”

“Maybe you’re right, um, or maybe that’s simply how things are done here,” Bri replied as we walked near the railing separating us and everyone else from a fall onto the rooftops of buildings growing out of the walls below.

We were already a good three stories above the waterline, and I was steadily losing the impression that anyone had actually planned the construction of this place.

Instead, it looked more and more as though a dozen different architectural visions—cities, towns, and villages built from steel, wood, stone, and fungus—had been dropped here from above and somehow taken root, forcing their dirty tendrils into tunnels carved through the surrounding rock.

Warehouses of pale stone stood directly beside residential buildings made from fungus grown over wooden beams, and wherever the solid rock ended, the inhabitants had extended it with platforms of steel, wood, stone, and sometimes even fungal growth deliberately encouraged to spread along the structure.

All around us, countless ropes carried both cargo and people on elevators of every size. Some of them were nothing more than a few planks nailed together, with a low railing providing little more than the illusion of safety. I was watching one of those rise past us now, carrying more than a dozen barrels stacked one on top of another and a group of people perched on them with their legs dangling over the edge—the way everything had been packed onto the platform—and how blatantly unsafe it looked—reminded me of footage of people in India clinging to the outsides of overcrowded trains and riding that way. Apparently, this city either had a serious overcrowding problem or a terrible public transportation system.

The cranes, meanwhile, worked constantly, most of them operating only a few or a dozen feet beyond the railing marking the edge of the inhabited section and the empty interior of the enormous cylinder we were standing inside.

I studied one of the cranes to understand them better—a ladder ran from the loading floor to an upper scaffold. From there, a narrow wooden walkway crossed above one of the warehouses before meeting a balcony attached to the next building. A suspended cargo net hung nearby, currently empty. Beyond it, iron supports surrounded one of the larger elevator shafts.

The smells changed every dozen steps. River water and wet stone gave way to hot metal near a workshop, then spices near several market stalls, then fish, smoke, sweat, fungus, oil, and something so aggressively rotten that I decided identifying it would add nothing positive to my life.

People crowded around us constantly. Dockworkers shouted to one another while pushing carts through gaps that did not appear large enough for carts. Merchants argued over crates. Sailors carried coils of rope over their shoulders. Somewhere above, someone dropped something metallic, followed almost immediately by a stream of profanity suggesting the object had landed considerably closer to another person's head than intended. I liked the place. It was loud, confusing, badly organized, and full of opportunities.

But when one of the passages leading away from the market I had just crossed suddenly turned into a dimly lit stone tunnel, and the crowds thinned out far too quickly, I realized that I might have become one of those opportunities for the local cutthroats.

I turned sharply to look behind me, making sure no one was following.

“Something, um, wrong?” Bri whispered, her flames flaring slightly out of the cage. I felt the heat against my cheek.

“Someone’s following us. I think.” Out of the corner of my eye, I caught movement at the far end of the corridor, back where we had come from.

“I think someone just ducked behind an indentation in the tunnel wall,” I added, looking around.

The corridor stretched another few dozen feet ahead. Apart from several gas lamps protruding from the walls about two feet above my head, and the pipes feeding them—some of which glowed red from the heat—there was nothing particularly remarkable here.

There were maybe a dozen piles of rags scattered along the walls, but none thick enough to hide a person beneath them.

“Following us? Mhm. Do you think they, um, want to hurt us?”

“More likely rob us, but what the hell do I know? I’m basing that on how things worked in a world we’re not in anymore. I mean, I’m not in anymore. Sorry, Bri.”

“No, um, I’m not upset. You know I feel like I’m from our Earth too.” I could already tell she was about to launch into one of her explanations.

“Quiet now,” I told her, pressing a finger to my lips before remembering that, from where she was behind me, she couldn’t see the gesture anyway.

She fell silent immediately.

I stopped and listened. The roar of the waterfall was much weaker here, but in its place came the irregular dripping of water condensing on blades of blue grass growing across the upper portions of some of the walls. Whenever enough moisture collected behind the plants, it spilled free and trickled down the stone.

Beyond that, and the distant shouting somewhere deeper in the city, I could hear feet scraping against the ground. Feet trying not to make noise. Soft steps disturbing the puddles around us. And the sounds were coming from both directions. From where we had come and from where we were going.

“Bri,” I whispered. “I fucked up. We’re trapped. I’m pretty sure we’re about to get jumped.”

“Goodness, um, gracious. Are you, um, sure?”

“Yes. If that happens, can I count on you to help me if it turns into a fight?”

“Lex,” she drawled my name. “You know I don’t want to. Um, I can’t. Please don’t make me.”

“I’m not the one making us do anything. The situation is. So you won’t help even if they’re going to hurt me? Or you?”

“Lex…”

“I understand.”

“You’re angry.”

“It doesn’t matter what I’m feeling right now, Bri. Don’t worry. I’m not going to leave you, even if you’re leaving me to deal with this alone.” The words came out more spitefully than necessary, but her childish way of looking at the world irritated me.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

I felt the warmth coming from her diminish.

I didn’t answer—instead, I took out my lighter and discovered it was almost out of fluid, then checked that the knife was still in its sheath behind my belt. Once I was sure I had something to defend myself with, I started walking back the way we had come. I had no intention of heading farther into the unknown.

As soon as the bandits realized I’d made them and started heading back, three of them stepped out from around the corner. Each carried a long knife. Two were right-handed. One left-handed. All three wore light clothing that covered their bodies almost completely, with hoods or turbans over their heads and scarves wrapped around their noses, mouths, and necks. Loose trousers that wouldn’t restrict movement. Small bags at their belts, light enough that they barely shifted when they moved—so nothing heavy inside. Soft-soled shoes that made little sound against the ground—good for running. They spread out as they approached, keeping enough distance between them that there was no obvious gap for me to slip through. And I had no doubt that roughly the same number of people would appear behind me any moment now, cutting off the other direction as well.

Fighting was out of the question. Even if I managed to stab one of them, the others were close enough to end my life in the blink of an eye. I had no long weapon apart from the crowbar, and I knew that wouldn’t help me much either—I simply wasn’t trained to fight opponents like these.

The only advantages I had were magic and experience from Earth. So I flicked the lighter on, let the flame form, and immediately caught it between two fingers, activating Pyrography.

I began painting a line through the air in front of me and then behind me, drawing a circle of fire around myself. Then I ducked beneath it and continued shaping the flame, letting my Psyche sustain what I had already created while I painted another line stretching from one wall to the other and back again.

By the time I finished, I had enclosed myself inside an oval of fire hanging in the air. The men approaching me slowed and began whispering to one another when they saw the magic. While I was painting, I also spotted two more figures approaching from the opposite direction. The first attacker ignored my fire and came straight at me, clearly trying to force me out of the cage of my own making.

He kept the knife close to his body, around chest level, with the blade pointed toward me. Trying to grab his arm and twist his wrist would probably have cost me a few fingers—maybe the whole hand.

So when he got close enough for me to defend myself, I grabbed my staff and swung it at him. He dropped into a slide beneath the strike, but I had expected that possibility.

As soon as he got close, I let go of the staff and dropped it to the ground. The clang of metal striking hard stone was followed almost immediately by the crunch of bones in the middle of his face as my foot connected with the charging man.

Before he could get back up, I grabbed both the fallen staff and several rags lying near the wall. I threw the rags over Bri’s cage, blocking the light she cast across the corridor.

“Try not to set these on fire, and dim yourself as much as you can.”

“Mhm,” she murmured, disappearing beneath the layers of clothing as I hurriedly tied them around the cage.

While the first attacker scrambled backward across the ground toward his companions, the others stopped trying to take me one at a time. They rushed me together.