The Pit Wakes Up

Aelion had been three weeks in Aristonia, keeping a scribe's desk in the public records office in the Civic Quarter and copying documents for a few silver a week to fund his own study of the magic slowly returning to the world. A little after lunch one day the gnomish clerk across from him, Bilgby, made idle conversation about ancient machines buried under the eastern boroughs — been humming, people are saying. After work Aelion walked east on the strength of it, out of the marble and into Little Pandemonium, a rough tiefling neighbourhood near the old east wall. There he watched an unlikely assortment of strangers ducking through a small doorway with a fist chalked above it, and slipped in after them.

A few houses over, Flint lay in a rented room on the second storey after a day's work treating the city's water, thinking about the clan and the homeland he had lost. An orange tabby appeared at his window with a whole fish in its mouth. Flint tried to coax it into sharing; the cat took the head off and left it for him instead, then tossed the head out the window and chased after it, holding his eye until he followed. He traded pleasantries with his infernal landlord, Ravina, on the way down, and the cat led him to the same chalked doorway Aelion had just gone through.

Below was a fighting pit, packed with people from nearly every caste in the city, standing on wooden risers and laying bets. Among them Biz, an elven man, lifted the loose purse of a wealthy merchant whose attention was on the blows being traded below, and handed it straight off to Worm, a young man who worked with him. Biz then found the pit's promoter, Corvin Slate, who tipped him that the underdog in the next bout — a farmer with a bad knee and old military tattoos — was carrying more martial history than his humble appearance let on.

The bell rang. The farmer, a middle-aged man named Randy, lost the first round badly, then let out a guttural yell and knocked the daylights out of his opponent. Winnings were paid out. The five of them had drifted, without meaning to, against the same back wall.

Then the wall came apart. Steel wrecking balls swung through the stone into a room packed with people, and the crowd jammed the narrow stair trying to get out. The five of them turned and fought it where they stood, without having exchanged a word beforehand, and brought it down without much trouble — and then two more came through, considerably worse. A couple of them went down before it was over. They finished it standing.

A noblewoman who had stayed behind through all of it came to them afterward with a proposition: find the criminal known as the Fixer, and find out what had happened to her late husband, who had scrawled The Fixe in his last moments and got no further. She gave her name as Maren Ashveil and an address where she could be reached. They took the work.

Biz and Worm put Corvin against a wall about the construct. He gave it up: a hooded woman with curly red hair and green eyes had paid him well for access to the locked door at the back of the pit.

Only then did the five of them introduce themselves to one another, briefly and without ceremony, and go through the broken wall to see what was behind it. It was a staging chamber of a former age — charging conduits for the machines they had just put down, and a workbench with a circular tool missing from its place.

Biz led them from there to the Sunken Anchor, a dingy tavern in the canal district south of Little Pandemonium and a known hideout of the Black Blades. Randy, Flint, and Aelion took beers and brown liquor from a surly barkeep while Biz and Worm approached four Black Blades at the back. Three of them shifted to take up positions — two at the front, one behind — while the matter of the Fixer was discussed. Thirty-five gold bought an answer: the Emerald Diamond, in the entertainment district.

Then the one in charge asked how much more gold they were carrying, and drew a knife to find out. "On second thought, why don't I just take all the cash you have? Maybe the Fixer will pay me a handsome reward for keeping the dogs at bay."