Rocky steppes and open grassland, painted with the brush of dawn, stretched to the west and east. The terrain, as it ran north, grew rippled, like calm water getting progressively more agitated, then came to a rolling boil in a furrowed range of foothills. In the farther distance, mountains rose, ancient, worn by eons of storms. Around their bases they were shawled in evergreens: while sharp, bare flanks and peaks rose against the yellow sky and red clouds of sunrise. In the middle-distance, amidst the foothills, the mouth of a cave yawned darkly, crudely framed with thick timber beams which were nothing but denuded tree trunks (the carpenters had not even bothered to remove a sizable branch extending from the horizontal cross-piece between the vertical pillars; curled, dry leaves rattled in a constant breeze off the grassland.) 

A tremor ran through the ground, making small stones jump and jitter like morsels on a hot pan. The tremor grew. The mountains seemed, for an instant, to blur; startled birds scattered from trees; a muffled crash broke over the foothills, though nothing had visibly shifted or collapsed. The vast, indifferent tremor ended, even as a shrill, plaintive cry echoed through the dawnlit mists, and a plume of gritty dust arose from inside the cave-mouth. It dissipated in the open air, washing away in the breeze. When it was gone, and the woebegone cries had ceased, it was as if nothing had happened. 


•••


Breakaleg Goodchap snapped out of a walking reverie, drawn from his thoughts by a nearby commotion. He drew his hand from his pocket, ceasing to fidget with the concealed gold nugget he carried, and focused on his surroundings. He saw a small group gathering near a brick wall to the side of a decrepit archway. A ruckus of excited voices drew more passersby to elbow their way up towards the wall and steal a glance at something at their feet. The narrow street was becoming impassable, as the gawkers grew numerous enough to spill off the sidewalk. The cobbles were overcrowded and an approaching carriage was forced to rattle to a stop, the striking gray mares that drew it snorting and hoofing the pavers anxiously. The driver stood on the carriage platform, giving the crowd a sour look.

“Clear the way!” he shouted impatiently, thrashing the air with the thin horsewhip he held, but save for a few grubby fists in frayed gloves shaken in his direction, his injunction fell on indifferent ears. The crowd was totally absorbed by the sight of the wall; or more specifically, whatever was lying at the base of it.

“What can it mean?” one woman demanded aloud. Then more frantically, “What does this mean?”  There was an edge of panic in her voice, cutting through the dull murmurs and furtive whispers that hung in the sweltering air. Breakaleg moved down the tight confines of the street, between huddled buildings, shoving and jostling through the growing crowd towards the graffitied wall. As human shirts and cloaks cleared away from the Dwarf’s eye-level, the subject of all the hubbub came into view. 

A single coin rested on the sidewalk, at the meeting between ground and wall. It appeared to have been dropped carelessly by some passerby, and perhaps knocked skittering along by passing feet, until it came to lie where it could skitter no farther and was finally noticed. There was absolutely nothing remarkable about its position; everything was remarkable about the dark, grayish, roughly-textured metal from which the hexagonal coin was made.

“Is that iron?” Breakaleg asked aloud, squinting at the coin. No one replied directly, because everyone wondered the same thing, and no one had an answer. There were markings cast on the surface of the metal; scrutinizing them, however, would mean moving closer to the coin, or perhaps even picking it up—something no one was willing to do. Arms were stretched out, people in the group holding each other back, everyone terrified by the thought of someone else getting too close and disturbing the iron which at least right then seemed to be, thankfully, inert. The mood amongst the gathered people of Kingsholm ranged from mutely fascinated to talkative and overexcited, expecting some ill-defined calamity to befall them at any moment. Breakaleg exchanged a glance with a mustachioed Human to his right. The man was a perfect stranger, but at that moment their thoughts were in sympathy, and they readily understood the arch of each other’s eyebrows and the pursing of their respective mouths. 

A shrill whistle stabbed Breakaleg’s eardrums; a few disreputable figures departed at once from the fringe of the group and shrank into nearby alleys and doorways, but the bulk of the crowd loitered long enough to be manhandled out of the way by a duo of advancing Watchmen. One of the two placed his fingers in his mouth, and there was a second sharp whistle.

“Very good, very good,” the Watchmen called. “That’s enough. You’ve seen all there is to see, now move along.” The crowd began to disperse. Breakaleg turned and followed the general flow of pedestrians down the cobbled street, raising a hand to deliver a somber gesture of blessing to the Human Watchmen. They bowed their heads as the Dwarf cleric went by, about as high off the ground as their ribcages. Before turning down an alley and losing sight of the strange scene, Breakaleg glanced over his shoulder and saw the Watchmen pulling heavy leather masks onto their heads. The inconvenienced carriage resumed its progress, and pulled up directly beside the two Watchmen; the driver sprang down and began to unload curious supplies from the passenger compartment. That must be an unmarked Watch carriage, Breakaleg thought. Glass goggles and polished copper canisters flashed in bright sunlight.

What are they doing—preparing to acid-wash the pavement?

The cleric continued down the alley and left the question unanswered behind him.


•••


Breakaleg navigated narrow alleyways, low enough to the ground not to be troubled (much) by the profusion of laundry which hung on lines across the space. He turned at a shallow archway, descended a set of stone steps, and rapped his knuckles on a wooden door in a staccato pattern. The knock went on just slightly too long, and contained too many deliberate pauses, for anyone who heard it to doubt it was code. After a short pause, a lock rattled. The door opened a crack, and Breakaleg, without being greeted or greeting anyone himself, briskly slipped into the building. The door closed with a thud.

To a Dwarf, the darkness of the room made no difference. Eyes adjusting quickly to the lack of light, Breakaleg looked around his familiar surroundings, grimacing thoughtfully. Two narrow tables ran parallel to each other along the rectangular space, leaving only enough floor open for workers to sit and walk around them. Gold, silver, and copper coins littered the tabletops, some strewn, some neatly stacked, as the workers quickly, methodically counted them. They occasionally called out running totals, their declarations too clipped and riddled with shorthand for anyone not familiar with their cant to follow. A worker seated on a stool at the far end of the room, holding a wooden tally-stick in one hand and a copper knife in the other, occasionally cut a quick series of notches to keep precise track of the ongoing count. Breakaleg turned towards the supervisor who had let him through the door. Like all the seated workers, the supervisor was naked—starkly limiting the possibilities for them to embezzle coins from the treasure they were supposed to be tallying, with no pockets or hems in which to smuggle anything.

“How are things here?” Breakaleg asked, making a vague gesture around the confined room.

“Nothing out of the ordinary, your piety,” the naked supervisor assured him, bowing his head.

“Good,” Breakaleg said, favoring the supervisor with a tight-lipped smile. “Is the Rector here?”

“He’s upstairs, your piety,” the supervisor said, nodding. He pointed unnecessarily at the egress across the room, where a couple broad steps led off of the sunken counting floor, to an open doorway in the wall—wood framing a narrow ascending staircase touched by candlelight. Breakaleg made a quick gesture of blessing over the head of the supervisor, and proceeded towards the stairs up to the Church of Alithia, Goddess of Honesty, Patience, And Trustworthiness…

“I suppose it began when I learned, in my youth, what wealth truly meant,” Breakaleg said, leaning back in his seat. “It has less to do with material comforts than it does with power. As a youngin, nothing could have appealed to me more. It still can’t. And power is neutral. Wherever it stems from, it can do anything, including good.” The toasty aroma of the coffee Breakaleg held in his hand was piquant and comforting in the raw, damp afternoon. Conversation droned all around. Cups chirped against saucers; a few odd pieces of flatware clattered, as cultivated patrons denied themselves the facility of their fingers in eating sweetmeats and pastries. The smart atmosphere of the patio outside Breakaleg’s favorite restaurant was always conducive to philosophy. Talking with a business associate there, as it often did, had led the conversation in a more abstract direction than was strictly necessary.

“And the neutrality of power,” Breakaleg went on, “is why I’m not bothered with what other people call ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ Power is power. You see, I simply do not subscribe to an idealistic view of the world. An idealistic viewpoint makes one’s life into an anxiety dream. I am a pragmatist, with no energy for those kinds of ethical anxieties.” 

Breakaleg’s associate leaned back in his seat, unconsciously or not mirroring the cleric’s posture. A grin broke out across his slightly crooked mouth. “Alls I asked, piety, was ‘ow come a holy person like yourself was involved in this line of work,” he said. “If ye cannae answer straight, it’s no skin off my nose.”

Breakaleg chuckled. The grubby-faced adolescent was the oldest of his employees; his long limbs and the little thickets of umber hair on his upper lip and chin testified thusly. He’d been in Breakaleg’s employ for quite a while; in fact, Marcos Barbosa had been at Breakaleg’s waist when first the cleric and the urchin reached an arrangement whereby the former indefinitely secured the latter’s services. Now the Human was the Dwarf’s equal in height, on his way to surpassing him. 

“The latest goods are all ready for the Fence, then?” Breakaleg asked, setting his cup and saucer down on the table between them, spooning in a bit more faintly shining mushroom-sugar.

“Aye, piety,” Barbosa said. “The crew is back from trawling, and they’ve all got their stuff turned in; it’s shipshape.” The urchin looked at Breakaleg seriously, the smile fading from his face. “But I can handle gettin’ a haul to the Fence on me own,” he said, “that’s not why I came ‘ere looking for ye. And I didn’t come just to have ye buy me coffee, neither; though I ain’t complainin’ on that score.” The urchin raised his cup to toast the cleric, then took a sip. With his forefinger and thumb, he wiped milk froth and cinnamon from his modestly whiskered upper lip.

“What is it you came to discuss?” Breakaleg asked, sipping his own coffee.

“Ye know Bru Jardim? That prop’r virtuoso?” Barbosa leaned forward confidentially, his voice falling lower.

“The brown haired boy, isn’t he? Cheeks as pink as a cherub?”

“Aye, that’s ‘im in a nutshell,” Barbosa confirmed. “He’s a nifty thief, bang up to the elephant. And he’s still always aiming to better ‘imself, that one. Practicing at lifting bricks with one finger, and what have you. Hands as steady as a surgeon. I don’t think there’s a pocket in Kingsholm he can’t pick.”

“Yes, he’s a promising one,” Breakaleg said. “It’s lucky I found him wallowing in that slurry of drain-water. What about him?”

“Well, he nabbed somethin’ pretty exceptional, and I thought it best to tell ye about it before just handin’ it over to the Fence…” Barbosa began, reaching into his threadbare vest. “I told you there’s no pocket he can’t pick,” he went on, “and on his last shift, he got it into his head to pickpocket a Hobgoblin he saw in the Outer Boroughs.”

Breakaleg’s eyes widened. “That’s brazen,” the cleric said. “And very foolish. He must be reprimanded, virtuoso or not.”

“Aye, it was ridiculous,” Barbosa agreed. “But look what he trawled.”

The urchin pulled a glinting object from his vest with a theatrical flourish; he held the small thing towards Breakaleg. The cleric’s eye traced the amorphous outline, quickly realizing what it was. He hastily reached across the table and took the object from Barbosa’s hand, hiding the glint of gold in his tanned fingers. Rotating his sheltering hand to glance at the thing without the possibility of other patrons glimpsing what he held, he drew a sharp breath, despite already knowing what he was about to see. It was a nugget of pure gold. Not fashioned into a coin—not meted precisely from the royal treasury and stamped with the King’s seal. It was raw material, newly smelted, as if freshly drawn from a productive mine.

“You were right to bring this to me,” Breakaleg said, after he had taken a moment to collect his thoughts. Barbosa smiled in self-satisfaction…

A sound snagged Breakaleg’s attention and brought his inwardly-focused mind outward again. The abdominus Rector stifled a second cough in his inner-elbow, eyes fixed on the gold nugget he held in his other hand, the metal glinting warmly in the glow of candles. Standing with Breakaleg at the end of the church, the Rector cast a wary glance down the length of the transept, then reached out to turn Breakaleg towards the large bank of flickering candles near the pulpit so their backs obscured what they were doing from any wandering eye in the pews, sparsely populated as they were by a spattering of Humans and Dwarves.

“Have you been able to discover where this came from?” the Rector asked in a whisper, eyes riveted on the gold nugget.

“To an extent, yes,” Breakaleg said. “I’ve had my urchins canvas the Outer Boroughs for information about this Hobgoblin which was in possession of inexplicable amounts of gold, and I’ve learned that yesterday, it and several Goblins visited a blacksmith and bought a number of new pickaxe heads for their tribe—as well as some daggers for themselves. Since they didn’t know gold can be traded for more than its own weight in bronze, the blacksmith had a very good day. The fact that my pickpocket happened to be there to see what happened was an act of Providence.”

The Rector gave Breakaleg a puzzled look. “Undomesticated Goblins and Hobgoblins don’t visit the fringes of Kingsholm, and if they do, they certainly don’t buy anything.” He glanced at the gold nugget nestled surreptitiously in his hand. “And above all, they don’t have their own productive mines.”

Breakaleg shrugged. “Yet here we are.”

The Rector spasmed, tamping down a cough. “Yes, here we are.” He tugged at his dark beard, gaze angled at the floor. After a pause, he glanced again at Breakaleg, simultaneously slipping the gold nugget into the folds of his vestments. “I happen to know there is a Goblin colony,” the Rector began, “living in the ruins of an Ixian mine in the Seven Hills, northeast of here. I would wager this gold nugget that, if we had been able to follow them, those Goblins would’ve led us straight back there.”

“An Ixian mine?” Breakaleg echoed. “There wouldn’t be any gold left in those ruins which looters haven’t made off with over the centuries. If Goblins settled there, it’s because Goblins settle in any old hole in the ground.”

“And yet…” the Rector said pointedly, giving Breakaleg a stern look. “They bought pickaxes, for Alithia’s sake. I’m not suggesting the prospect of gold made the Goblins settle there in the first place; but it’s possible they’ve bumbled onto a vein of gold which had not previously been discovered in the mine.”

Breakaleg pressed his mouth into a thin line, finding it hard to contain his sudden excitement as he imagined a heretofore untapped vein of gold hidden somewhere in the Sunwaki foothills, with no claim on it—except for one laid by Goblins, which were barely sentient anyway. “Yes,” he said, keeping voice low, “that’s a possibility.”

The Rector nodded energetically, his eyes feverishly bright. “Have you brought anyone else into your confidence about this?”

“Only my own pickpockets,” Breakaleg said.

The Rector nodded again. “Good. We must keep this information secret for now. The moment that blacksmith who was paid in gold nuggets tries to buy anything with one, or knowledge of the gold gets out in some other way, there will be a race to discover the source. We have the jump on every other prospective interested party—most notably the Watch and the Crown. I want you to go to that Ixian mine and see for yourself if the Goblins have discovered a new vein there. Bring whichever one of your urchins would be most useful. No one else. Keep this utterly quiet.”