General Cracked Hammer's Arc

Chapter 4 of 6

Cracked Hammer stepped through the guild house doors with the ore heavy in his coat. The hall was loud. Artisans crossed the floor with tool rolls under their arms. A clerk stood behind a tall counter, a halfling with ink on his sleeves and a sour set to his mouth. Cracked Hammer laid out his need in plain words. He wanted a reading on nether-tone ore, and he wanted it soon. The clerk did not look up from his ledger. "Shorthanded," he said. "Three on the board for that kind of work. Take it or come back in a month." He pointed a stubby finger at a chalkboard standing against the wall. Three names ran down it in careful hand. Felix, a dwarven nullifier out of Burrowmar and the Crystal Shear mines, trained in dark artifact lore and trap-breaking. Elletrix, a steampunk glyph reforger from the Mount Coal Artificer's College, versed in fixed glyphs and cartography. Rānġôôn Elşwyr, a Fe'łiion mana-blast expert schooled in mystic explosives and field medicine. Cracked Hammer read each column twice. He set coin on the counter for a demonstration fee. The clerk swept it into a drawer and pulled a brass tube down from a bracket. "Felix. Elle. Rangoon. Demo," he said into it, and waved Cracked Hammer toward a side table stacked with cakes and cider. He did not sit. He stood by the table and watched the yard through a narrow window. The three artificers set out their rigs on an open stone court divided into three bays. Felix arranged wards and iron picks around a chained box. Elletrix wheeled out a workstation crowded with mana-ink tubes, brass compasses, and scroll racks. Rānġôôn laid a row of small glass charges along a scored line. A bell rang. The clerk nodded him out. Felix went first. He cracked the chained box without setting off its ward, then held up a black stone gone dead in his palm. Rānġôôn followed. She lit her charges in sequence and split a boulder into clean wedges without scorching the grass around it. Elletrix took her turn last. She held the ore sample Cracked Hammer surrendered at the gate, laid it on her plate, and traced a glyph over it in glowing ink. The glyph pulsed twice, then held steady in a soft green ring. She named the vein, the depth range, and the tone. She did not flinch at the nether note. She named that too. Cracked Hammer stepped down to her bay. He asked what she knew of old seals set in soil. She said she read glyphs and she reforged them, and she did not lie about work she had not done. That answer settled him. They spoke terms in low voices by her desk. She would travel. She would carry her rig. She would not ask what he meant to forge. Inside, the clerk drew a contract and set out a black quill fitted with jack-o'-lantern vials of orange and green ink. Cracked Hammer signed first. Elletrix signed under him. The ink held. The clerk stamped the sheet and slid a copy across. Cracked Hammer folded it into his coat beside the ore. He had an artificer now, and a road back to the seal.