A flask of strong whiskey was produced, and the two of them sat back down to drink and chat. Lucas paid the gang his due. It felt shitty to lose two dragons to a strong-arm tactic like this, but the rep he’d earned as a smart-ass was probably worth almost that much. So, instead of beating himself up over not finding a better way out of this, Lucas simply consoled himself with all the money he’d saved himself in the future by not just bending over. 

Once the pecking order had been established, they seemed like good enough guys. Lucas took a sip of the liquor before passing it on, and found it to be pretty good. He pretended to take a slug of course, but given that he already had one poisonous potion flowing through his body he didn’t want to chance getting drunk. Reactions like that could be… unpredictable. 

There was simply no such thing as the old rule of thumb: liquor after beer, you’re in the clear when it came to little magical vials, and whenever possible, he preferred not to mix them. As near as he could tell, the fact that there was a little poison in almost every alchemical substance was normal. 

Getting that out before one finished a brew was one of the two key components of the craft. Everyone worried about the second one, which was the effect, but making a toxic potion did no one any good. Well, no human anyway, Lucas thought to himself ruefully. He was still surprised that Hura’gh seemed basically fine after the shit he’d made for him in the dungeon. 

So, Lucas abstained from getting his buzz on and instead traded jokes with the warriors while he felt the adrenaline from the fight still buzzing away behind his eyes like ants or cheap crack. After half a dozen veiled accusations that he might be clever, but there was no way he could take so much as a squire in a real fight, Lucas finally took up the challenge while Sir Tristen watched blandly. 

He knew that the Knights of Brass were still looking to get the measure of him by goading him like this, but he didn’t care. That was why he fought again, to get the energy building up inside him out before he said or did something stupid. 

For this second fight he took off Gerwin’s nice pressed shirt and put on a cheap leather jerkin and a helm for just such an occasion. This time, instead of pitting him against a decades old knight, he faced off against a boy who was half a head taller than Lucas. He outweighed him, too, but Lucas wasn’t concerned about that. Right now, it was about the size of the fight in the dog and not the dog in the fight. 

The two of them crossed swords a few times before the boy was convinced that Lucas knew little enough that he could best him easily and fully engaged. That was his mistake. Lucas didn’t have a lot of fancy skills, but right now, he was half again as strong as he usually was, and as soon as it came to trading blow and counterblow, he quickly battered his young opponent’s sword until he was finally disarmed. 

Still, it was good fun, and Lucas offered the other man a hand while he lay in the dirt. While he did so, he was more than a little conscious that if not for the now-fading potion, the fight certainly would have gone the other way. 

“There, now you can tell all your friends,” Lucas boasted when he returned to the group clustered around their leader. “I might not be able to take out your boss in a million years, but I can beat up small children.”

Everyone laughed at that, and Lucas stayed long enough to feel his pulse finally slow down, but eventually, he decided to leave before he’d worn out his welcome. He promised to come by once or twice a month, and when he expressed some genuine interest in learning to get better with a sword, Sir Tristen seemed genuinely pleased. 

“Do that long enough, and maybe one day you and I can have a real dual,” the other man laughed. “Perhaps in twenty years, when I am enfeebled in my dotage, you might even win!”

It was a strange experience, but despite the somewhat adversarial way things had gone, he felt that they’d parted as friends. At least it was better than the way things had gone with the beggars. Those blind bastards had practically kicked him to death in an alley and left him for dead, so the current state of things was a vast improvement. 

Not that there’s any honor among thieves, of course, he reminded himself. The Knights of Brass might claim to have honor, but if they’d since real weakness next month, five dragons would have become ten, and soon enough, he’d be working only for them in some basement somewhere ‘for his own safety.’

It’s just the way the world worked. The strong preyed on the weak, and he was going to have to get stronger if he wanted to keep the wolves at bay as they started to make real money. 

That was what made him decide it was finally time to retrieve his notes before something happened to him. Why not, right? He’d gotten into the city without a hitch. No one seemed to be paying the least bit of attention to him. 

When he stopped by the stables to pick up his mule and was told that the cask hadn’t been returned yet, that was the final straw. “Take your time, I’m going to go grab a bite,” Lucas told the stable boy. 

He might, too, but only after he stopped by his old place in Gray Bottom. It wasn’t far. The foundry district was the next district over, and everything from the smokestacks to the river was technically Gray Bottom. Technically it was a series of tenements that was downwind of the worst polluters, but the truth was worse than that. It was the poorest district of Lordanin and the place where dreams came to die. 

As Lucas approached it, he could see the bleakness radiating from the place as clearly as he could see the brick buildings or the rising smoke. The place was a maze, but that had made it perfect for his purposes. It was exactly the right place to be when you wanted to make sure your comings and going were untraceable. 

He knew the whole area like the back of his hand anyway. He had to. The building he’d lived in for the last few months was on a street that didn’t even have a name. It was just a winding path through a burned-out lot that had once been a factory. 

Lucas approached his neighborhood with caution but saw nothing suspicious. The same bums begged on the same thoroughfares as usual, and the same old women looked out of the same glassless windows they always sat at, adding to the aura of despair. 

He grew even more cautious when he approached the tenements that he lived in, but again, it was just his paranoia. There was nothing there. 

“Hah, nothing was right,” he chuckled as he found the door to his one-room apartment and found the place stripped pretty much bare. Not that he’d expected anything less. People were vultures, and desperate people were doubly so. 

Normally, his glassware was safe when he left the place for a day of herb hunting because he mixed it in with his crockery and cook pots and hid small articles under clothes and behind furniture. That strategy worked less well when everything was stone, right down to the match sticks, making Lucas laugh to himself as he took in the sheer emptiness of the place. 

Someone had definitely ransacked it, though it was hard to say that it was the authorities since his things weren’t just smashed and lying across the floor. Instead, they were just gone. 

Most of his meager possessions had probably disappeared into his neighbor’s homes, and a few of them were probably still available in the flea markets that popped up at random in the minor squares of the city. Only a few mugs, a smashed volumetric flask, an overturned chair, and a pair of pants still lay scattered around the room. 

“It’s about what I expected,” he said to himself as he walked over to the window and opened up the shutters to look out at the back alley that ran behind his building. “There’s probably somebody drinking cheap bear out of a boiling flask right now.”

It was an amusing thought, but he genuinely hoped that he’d remember to clean the things first. Some of the ingredients he mixed up could be downright dangerous. 

Still, there didn’t seem to be any signs that anyone had dug up his real treasures, so no real harm was done. Lucas walked to the hearth and used his dagger to start pulling up the largest stone in front of it. The floor of the place was pounded earth, which was pretty much the opposite of fancy, but it did give him a great hiding place for small things, especially if he kept a small fire burning when he went out to discourage a more thorough search. 

The large, flat stone was heavy and stuck in the ground pretty firmly. However, with a little gouging and a little prying, he soon worked it free. 

Though his apprehension continued to mount, as soon as he saw the cover of the old ledger he used to take notes on, he relaxed. Lucas quickly shoved the coin purse in with the other one in his shoulder pouch. The notes would be a little harder. 

The book that he used to store his collected alchemical knowledge to date was thick and falling apart. More than half of it were bits of scrap papers that he’d stuck between the sheets of the book that had originally been a cobblers ledger before it fell into his hands. There, amidst the patterns for shoes and the order quantities sorted by month and year, were notes about ingredient incompatibility and the various minor synergies he’d discovered over the years. 

Lucas flipped through them, stopping on a page with specialized healing potion information. For +50% effectiveness to eye ailments, including near and farsightedness, maiden slip roots could be added. If you wanted a healing salve that would have increased effectiveness on skin problems, you could add bear grease or a white clay suspension. The former would—

As Lucas reviewed the book and felt the joy that he wasn’t going to have to rediscover all of this from scratch, he paused and looked up as he heard a humming sound. No, heard was the wrong word. He felt a strange hum going right through him. 

That was the first and only sign that something strange was happening. “Magic,” he spat, closing the book and hopping to his feet. 

Lucas darted for the door, but only made it a step out into the dark hallway before he saw a glint of something metallic and hastily jumped back. Before he could slam the door shut, it was there, floating in the air in front of him. A dagger. 

No, he corrected himself. His dagger. The one he’d had on him when he’d gotten arrested. 

To locate you he’d heard mages needed something that belonged to their target, and apparently when they’d found it, they’d used it like a compass needle to point right to him. Well, it did more than point. It was chasing him, and apparently ready to run him through. 

Lucas scrambled back as the thing came at him like an angry steel hornet hovering in midair. He moved for the window, but the thing cut him off, forcing him to back closer and closer to the fireplace. He had a knife on him, but if he’d had a shield or a sword, he might have been able to parry it when it finally darted at him. 

It didn’t, though. Even as some part of him realized that this spell actually had to have a pretty short range for it to have happened here, and not simply when he walked into the city this morning. It was also definitely guided by an intelligent mind by the way it was content to menace him rather than moving toward its target until it was embedded in his chest. So, he wasn’t the least bit surprised when he heard the sound of footsteps approaching the door.