Alexia raced in from the left and bent over the rapidly dying Fighter with a grin. I took an extra three seconds to reload my arbalest, then ordered the Archer to follow me off the back of the cart. Selene joined me as I stepped around the horses to confront the last survivor.

The Trapper was squirming under the Swordsman’s boot as I approached. A vicious slash across his outer thigh colored the grass beneath him with a steady stream of blood. I waved off the Swordsman and leveled my crossbow at the fallen adventurer’s face. He stared up at me in horror as he tried to stem the flow of scarlet.

“What do you want?” he stammered. “Are you going to kill me?”

“We should,” Selene said. “He knows about Lexie.”

I shook my head. “No, he’s more useful alive.”

“Yes, I’m useful. I swear I’ll do anything you ask.”

I raised an eyebrow and glanced at Selene. “See?”

“He’s hardly in a position to argue,” she muttered.

“Anything, anything at all,” he blabbered, “please, just let me live.”

“That’s a nasty cut on your leg there, friend,” I said. “You’ll bleed out in a hurry if you don’t get it seen to. So here’s my proposition. You go to your guildmaster, and tell him a companion farmer named Caleb is offering high-quality homunculi for 150 silver coins a head.”

“You said 100,” the Trapper choked.

“Gods, you’d think he’d have a list of priorities,” I said to Selene.

She shook her head and clicked her tongue. “adventurers. Purse strings tighter than a virgin on her first night of marriage.”

“You won’t go to the Commission, of course,” I told the Trapper. “Because you and your people are little better than highway bandits with guild colors. I assure you they’ll take my word over yours. So the only person you talk to about any of this is your guildmaster.”

“Tell the guildmaster,” the Trapper gasped. “Yes, yes, I will.”

“Go to anyone else, and Selene will unbalance your mind until you can’t tell your ass from your head.” I gestured to Tystian’s corpse. “And then Alexia will boil you from the inside out. It won’t be slow, and the results won’t be pretty. Do you understand me?”

“I understand,” he whimpered. “Gods, please let me go. I’ll leave. I’ll do it right now.”

“Give me your knives and I’ll send you on your way.”

I lowered my arbalest and watched the Trapper stagger to his feet. He unsheathed the dual daggers, dropped them at my feet, and limped toward one of the horses. It took half a minute for him to get into the saddle and bolt away from the cart. I watched him leave to make absolutely sure he was gone.

“That might not have been wise,” Selene mused.

“Word will reach the guild within a day,” I pointed out. “We’ll play it carefully. The guild hasn’t the first idea where we live, and I have a small army of homunculi around the farm in any case. Where’s Alexia?”

“Here!” called the blood mage.

Alexia stepped away from Berred’s corpse with a face of absolute concentration. Blood swirled around her in strange streamers of energy. She tried to bring her hands together, but the energy dissipated and scarlet splattered over her clothes. Selene touched her shoulder with a warm smile and kissed her forehead.

“You’re getting better,” Selene said. “It just takes time.”

“Why didn’t you want me to help?” Alexia asked me. “You could’ve kept your homunculi alive and killed them twice as quickly.”

“Yeah, but their gear would be ruined and we’d lose decent ingredients. You’re my trump card, Alexia. Your power is incredible, but it’s a little overkill. I’m sure there’ll be a time when we’ll need you to cut loose.”

The elf nodded. “I’m sorry I killed him. I don’t know what came over me.”

“They were bastard highwaymen,” Selene said, “and they were insulting you. They also threw the first blow against Caleb’s Slammer. They had it coming.”

“Besides,” I said, “we’ve profited from it.”

I directed my Swordsman and Archer to drag the bodies to the back of the cart. I started to unlatch the armor from the fallen homunculi and took a closer look at the quality of the gear. The leather was worn, scarred, and needed a good oiling, but it was still a valuable addition to my growing army of companions. I stripped the homunculi down and assembled their weapons in a neat row on the back of the wagon. The crossbow I’d snatched up was smaller than the arbalest, but had a faster action despite its rusted mechanism. I placed the weapon and its accompanying quiver on the driver’s seat.

Selene smirked. “I see you’re downsizing.”

“It’s not about the size, it’s about how you use it,” I chuckled. “Besides, sometimes, two is better than one. Didn’t you learn that in the Mage Academy?”

She rolled her eyes as I turned back to the other homunculi’s weapons. The Slammer’s tower shield was a welcome addition to my collection. I offered Selene the arming sword. She unsheathed it and examined the blade.

“Rusted, nicked, and mostly blunt,” she sighed. “You’d really think that their guild would take better care of their investments, even if it’s for a homunculus.”

I shrugged. “Do you want it?”

“It’s better than nothing.”

Selene sheathed the sword back into its scabbard and buckled it to her belt. I dragged the homunculi corpses to the side of the road. Alexia caught my arm as I rolled the dead Slammer out onto the grass.

“Can’t you use their parts?” she asked. “Make new soldiers?”

I shook my head. “They’re not technically organic, and they don’t carry the necessary life force to create a new homunculus. It’s just dead meat and it’ll weigh down the cart.”

“Oh. So you couldn’t turn me into another homunculus?”

“I wouldn’t even try to,” I assured her. “Come on, I’ve got a present for you.”

Alexia followed me back to the cart. I offered her the Trapper’s daggers. She beamed at me as she took the bone-white hilts and tested the weight. Sunlight caught the slightly curved blades as she spun them in her hands and nodded.

“They’re perfect,” she said.

“See? Capitalize on a bad situation the right way, and along come the rewards.” I kissed her cheek gently and then gestured to the cart. “Come on, you’ll need those. We’re not done yet.”

Alexia and Selene helped me strip down the bodies of Berred and Tystian. Berred’s mace, shield, and armor were huge and terribly maintained, but they would favor a heavier and harder-hitting homunculus once I found the right recipe. I moved over to Tystian’s gear and gave it to the Yeoman Archer. The elfbow was a good deal more valuable than the longbow and I’d heard that the range was better. I stashed the arrows from the Hunter’s horse in the cart beside the Yeoman in case of another attack. Alexia tied off the spare animal’s reins to the back of the wagon.

Then I turned my attention to the corpses of the adventurers themselves. We harvested as much as we could and stowed them in the pickling jars I’d packed earlier in the morning. Selene shook her head at me as I sealed off the last one and placed it into a straw-packed crate.

“Of course you thought to bring half of the workshop with you,” the mage muttered.

“Layers upon layers,” I reminded her as I rolled Tystian’s harvested corpse under the canvas tarpaulin. “It was possible we’d run into trouble, so I thought ahead.”

“Lexie, do some more practice,” Selene instructed as I climbed up to the driver’s seat.

The blond mage joined me at the front as I gave the horses a gentle slap. They started forward at a placid pace. Magic hummed behind us as Alexia tried her best to move through an exercise that Selene had given her out of my earshot.

“Suppose that the little weasel does what you tell him to,” Selene said. “Aren’t you concerned that the guildmaster will brag about his brand-new companion farmer to his rivals? Or that word will get out that you’re in the area?”

“Any sane leader of a guild would want to see how powerful my homunculi are at first,” I said. “If they’re really everything I advertize, the guildmaster won’t want to alert his rivals to the fact that he has premium companions from an exclusive source.”

“You’ve thought this through,” the mage said. “Defenses, preservatives, now playing the guilds? You really are a devious character, Caleb. I knew you were sharp, but this is something else entirely.”

I winked at her. “I’m just getting started.”

The morning sun shifted into afternoon as the draft horses carried us toward the homestead of the Emerald Sage. I took a left fork in the road and steered the cart down a beaten track between two stone fences. Selene slipped back into the cart and began to tutor Alexia in a half-whisper.

A small house awaited us at the end of the track. Smoke drifted cheerily from a stone chimney and a wide rows of unkempt gardens surrounded the front of the house. It was a good deal smaller than my own, but the familiar trileaf hedges and gorequince trees marked the owner of the homestead as a serious alchemist. Thaddeus evidently still kept some of his old habits alive, and a rush of excitement blazed into my bloodstream as we drew closer and closer to his house.

An odd shape like an unstuffed scarecrow hung off the front gate.

It was a man—a dead man.

Intestines spilled out from the body and pooled around the foot of the gate. Blood leaked from a gaping mouth into a white beard and a completely blackened iris stared out uselessly over the road. I caught hold of my arbalest and pulled it up to my shoulder as I cast my eyes back over the corpse.

I couldn’t remember the pitch-black eyeball or the bulging, misshapen nose. But I was barely twelve when Jamin took me to see Thaddeus. And there was no mistaking that bald pate or the pair of withered hands.

Someone had killed the Emerald Sage and hung his body up in his garden.

“Don’t take another step!” a voice howled from the house. “Or I’ll kill you, just like I did the old man!”

I froze. I recognized this voice.