Rule 214: Never count on your reward being higher than the bounty on the notice. If they can refuse payment, they will.

- “1001 Rules for Adventuring,” standard issue to all new Adventurer’s Guild initiates.

City Bursar’s Office, Eghem

“Perhaps we misunderstood. We thought you were offering payment for ridding the sewers of dangerous elements. This cult was clearly raising the dead and attempting to brew up some sort of plague, and we stopped them. Were we wrong to expect this to be of value to the great city of Eghem?”

Ugh. Bureaucrats. We’d gotten cleaned up, gathered the rat tails and the ooze core we’d collected, as well as one of the (non-cursed) amulets of Inemis, and headed off to the Eghem City Bursar’s office. They’d been happy to give us our silver for the rats and the slime, but apparently there was no bounty on dealing with a disease-cult. Unless somebody further up the chain of command stepped in, we were out of luck on getting compensation for that bit of the expedition, writ from the priest of Milos be damned.

Didn’t mean I couldn’t try to shame them into coughing up some coin, though. For all the good that it was doing.

“I’m sorry, Miss Arbodor, but as I said, you were hired to hunt dire rats, and anything else on the bounty list we posted. No mention was made of these… cultists, and frankly the only reason we aren’t arresting you for murder is Humble Kaledar’s written testimony in your favor.” He looked down his nose at us, which was impressive given that he was sitting behind his desk and we were standing. “Standard Guild procedure when encountering vagrants in sewers is to withdraw, negotiate passage if necessary, and refer the matter to a local authority. If you had brought their activities to our attention, the Bursar might have placed a bounty on their removal, but since you didn’t and he hasn’t, I’m afraid my hands are tied.”

He glanced pointedly at the purse sitting on the desk in between us. “You have your payment, adventurers. If you expect more, I suggest you seek it elsewhere.”

I scowled, but snatched the bag off the desk and tossed it to Faraday, who started transferring its contents to his own coin pouches. “Fine. We’re due at the Bridge tomorrow, anyway. Don’t think we won’t be informing the Guild about how accommodating you’ve been.” That last was more about saving face than an actual threat - we’d known going in that Eghem was a backwater, with corrupt and pinch-penny bounty offices, so it wasn’t like that was news to the Guild - but I couldn’t very well leave it be.

The desk-jockey just sneered at me. “You do that. I’m sure they’ll take the word of a thief into serious consideration, miss.” My face went stony at that, and Ko let out a hiss in response to my sudden fury, but Faraday’s hand on my elbow kept me from doing or saying something unwise. I gave the man my best cold glare, then turned around and stalked out of the office behind the paladin.

“Fucker,” I muttered under my breath as we left the building. “How many adventurers does he think have clean records, anyway, huh? Not like the Guild cares if we aren’t pure as the driven snow. And it was once! Not like I made a career of it, unlike some I could name.”

Faraday’s hand came to rest on the shoulder that Ko wasn’t occupying, his gravelly tenor voice taking a comforting tone. “Small men find small ways to hurt us. Don’t let your past mistakes cause you to stumble moving forwards.”

I rolled my eyes, but smiled back at him. “Thank you, oh paladin of platitudes.” Looking around, I spotted Cherubix scrubbing the tarnish off of the bronze sculpture in the center of the plaza. We’d learned not to let her into the room when discussing pay - she had a distressing habit of blurting out uncomfortable truths that either annoyed the person we were negotiating with or weakened our position.

Walking towards the statue, I glanced at Faraday. “You’re still cool with it, then? My, er, ‘indiscretion’ before I joined the Guild?” Ko gave me a squeeze with his talons and sent a gentle flow of reassurance, but kept silent. I knew it was insecurity talking, but… well, if I was going to go into harm’s way next to a guy who was theologically obligated to do something about me breaking the law, it made sense to double-check every now and then that we were still seeing eye-to-eye, right? The fact that all throughout my childhood I was raised with the idea that paladins were fundamentally good, and thus if one of them approved of you then that made you somehow better, had nothing to do with it. Absolutely nothing.

He shook his head, keeping pace with me. “Dezi, whatever you did is in the past. Who you are now - as imperfect as that may be - is a person who my own eyes, and those of the Light, can tell is worthy of my aid.” That subtle smile, which started at his eyes and barely twitched the corners of his mouth, appeared again. “You trust me with the group’s funds when you are the better of us at haggling. You go out of your way to help those in need, and stand between innocents and those who would harm them. If I hadn’t already known you were sworn to your own spirits, or just how independent-minded you can be, I would have long ago asked if you wished to join my own order.”

Ko’s laughter sounded in the back of my mind, and I felt another pulse of love and reassurance from him as he started to run his beak through my hair in his version of a gentle pat on the head.

I reached up and scratched under the feathers of his neck, looking away from both of them and trying to ignore the heat in my cheeks. “Fine, fine, I am a veritable queen among women, I’ll keep that in mind.” We’d almost reached the statue by this point, so I called out to Cherubix in a blatant change of subject. “Hey, Cheri, you ready to go? We need to go shopping before we hit C’thon.”

She looked up, smiling that adorable-but-creepily-huge grin of hers. “Sure! Just give me another minute, there’s a crease that’s got a lot of pigeon poo built up in it, I wanna clean that out before I go.” So saying, she turned back to the statue and started scrubbing the bit she’d been working on with even more energy.

Faraday seemed content to leave our previous conversation alone, thankfully, and Ko was all-too-happy to receive scritches in exchange for not embarrassing me further. The next two minutes passed in comfortable silence, before Cherubix straightened with a satisfied smile, tucked the rag into her belt, and leaped over to land lightly on Faraday’s shoulder.

“Okay! So, where are we going? That market we went to last time was really dirty, but Walter saw some nice and sparkly mana-gems he wanted me to try. I heard one of the other brownies saying there’s another market up in the big shiny white-stone district, but the stuff there’s supposed to be suuuper pricey. Hey, do you think they sell good floor polish there? I could really use a better wax for floors, mine’s starting to dry up. Oooh, maybe they’ve got a magic wax, and that’s how their floors stay shiny for so long!”

I shook my head fondly as Faraday made seriously-considered responses to her stream-of-consciousness meandering. Though she could enter something akin to a meditative state if she wanted to, while she was awake Cherubix didn’t really have an “off” switch, in my experience. The closest I’d come was to have Ko discreetly make a mess in another room and then ask her to clean it up, but that was a temporary measure, and couldn’t be used repeatedly. The fact that she wasn’t just a brownie, and thus inclined towards tying all your laces together while you were sleeping if you annoyed her, but also a respectable elementalist capable of setting you on fire with a thought and a gesture, made me leery of doing anything too blatant to distract her. I liked my eyebrows unscorched. Fortunately, she seemed quite capable of distracting herself, so it hadn’t come up very often in our two months of working together.

During one of the brief lulls in her monologue, I interrupted and asked Faraday, “So, we’re gonna need some trail rations to refill what we’ve gone through this past week, and I need some more arrows and incense after all that excitement in the sewers. Anything on your list?”

He shrugged. “Nothing I’m aware of, no. They said that the major town on C’thon has catered to adventurers before, so if I do end up needing a reagent we should be able to find it there.” He frowned, thinking. “Perhaps some cold iron weapon coatings, if what the rumors say about aggressive fey is true. We lack tools to deal with a fey resistant to steel, if we end up facing one.”

I grimaced at the thought of how much even a few pinches of the alchemically-treated metal was going to take out of our budget, but didn’t disagree. Fey were frequently able to shrug off blows made with normal weapons, but they were almost universally vulnerable to cold iron, whichever world you found them on. Cold iron weapons were ruinously expensive, though, and few adventurers who weren’t specifically hunting fey invested in them. However, with the right alchemical bath you could change the metal into spongy flakes that could be rubbed onto a blade or arrowhead, allowing the weapon to punch through a fey’s magical flesh for a few blows before the coating fell apart. It was a standard part of adventuring kit when you knew you might be facing fey, but while it might be more affordable than getting a proper weapon made of the stuff it still wasn’t cheap.

“So, at least four satchets of cold iron flakes, just in case. Anything else? You need any more of that awful palm-juice you like so much?”

He shook his head, a flash of guilt going across his face at the mention of his preferred alcohol. Cherubix, having picked up on the fact that we were wrapping up the discussion, turned her head back towards me and let out a “Nope, all good here!” with a cheerful grin.

“Ah well, hopefully we’re not missing anything important,” I sighed. “Let’s get to it, then. I’ll grab the food and ammo, you go get the cold iron. I’ll meet you two back at the inn.”

And let’s all pray that the rumors aren’t understating the danger, and we’re not walking into something we aren’t prepared for… I thought to myself.