The priest had offered Elrick a meal and some wine, which he’d eaten alone. The priest had gone to his quarters, and Elrick assumed he’d likely be sleeping for some time after resurrecting Elise and him back-to-back. He’d told the priest that he was a Coppersmith, and the priest had sent an apprentice to send word to the guild.

As soon as the apprentice was gone, Elrick snuck out, stuffing as much food into his face as possible before leaving.

His robe was basically a burlap sack. It had no pockets, and it scraped against his skin as he moved.

He didn’t want the guild to find him. The priest in Antia had told him he could be free in this new city, but how could he trust her? Why had the priest notified the guild before Elrick had even had a chance to finish eating? He didn’t want to wait around to find out.

He made it about ten steps beyond the door of the cathedral before collapsing. His legs just gave out, and when he tried to get back up, they didn’t work. He wasn’t paralyzed, but there just wasn’t enough strength in his body to get himself back up.

Passers-by eyed him, but no one bothered to help him. He tried getting up again, but it wasn’t happening.

Tiredness hit him like a wave, and he fell flat on his back. The sun was bright, and much hotter than it had been in Antia. The air was dry, and the sweat barely had time to form on his brow before evaporating under the raging sun. As he passed in and out of sleep, a shadow covered him, jolting him back to full consciousness.

“This him?”

Elrick squinted up to see a man with arms like tree trunks scowling down at him.

“There you are!” the Priest’s voice shouted from the direction of the cathedral.

“Aleksy,” the big man grunted. “This one?”

The priest, Aleksy, laughed nervously. “Gatha, thank you for coming so quickly—”

“I came quickly because I heard I was getting a skilled smith from Antia. This one looks like he’s got scurvy from the ride over.”

“I resurrected him,” Aleksy said. “Not long ago. It was an...emergency job. His weakness is temporary, and entirely my fault. He’ll regain his strength soon enough.”

Gatha kicked Elrick’s shins. “You strong, boy? How good can you smith?”

He almost answered with “76.8” but thought better of it.

“I can cast bronze,” he said. “I’ve made some fine swords. I still need to learn armor and shields, but—”

“If you can cast a sword without me holding your hand,” Gatha said, “Then I’ll take you.”

“I won’t be a slave,” Elrick said, which sounded very pathetic coming from a man sprawled out on the ground with snot and bile crusted to his face.

“It’s a job offer, boy,” Gatha said. “You don’t have to join if you don’t want to.”

* * *

It took over a week before Elrick could walk again, and another week on top of that before he could show Gatha, and the rest of the guild, his skill.

The city he was in was called Rakote. Antia was located on a large, landlocked sea, and Rakote was on the other end of that same sea. From what Elrick had heard, however, travelling from Antia to Rakote by land took over a year of travel, and even well-provisioned groups often didn’t survive the journey. Rakote was on the furthest reaches of the Antian empire, and its well-established road system did not reach Rakote, which was on the other side of a nearly impenetrable mountain range with only two very dangerous passes.

The other main option for reaching Rakote was by sea. This only took a month or two, depending on the winds. The survival chance was higher, but still not great. Gatha said that somewhere between two out of ten ships didn’t make it. Skilled captains and crews, and a skilled mage could up those chances, but that increased the cost of the voyage too.

Sending desperate ghosts to Rakote was the best option, Gatha had explained. It was difficult even for a ghost to make the journey, as Elrick had discovered on his own, but if a ghost didn’t make it, well, they had already died anyway.

It had taken him about as long as it had in Owen’s shop, but Elrick placed his finished sword onto the table. The full process of creating it had increased his skill to 77.3. The high-ranking guild members each examined it in turn.

The Miners’ and Coppersmiths’ guild in Rakote was one single entity, whereas in Antia there had been two separate guilds. Elrick didn’t quite understand this merger, but it worked well for him, as he was proficient in both skills.

“And you can mine?” Gatha asked him.

Elrick nodded. His skill in Mining was 72.3.

“Show us,” one said.

* * *

They were “going to go mine.” A much larger group than Elrick had expected gathered by the river outside of the guildhouse. Of the guildmasters, only Gatha was coming, but there were two other miners in addition to Elrick, and four people in bronze armor. All of the armored men wielded hammers. There was also a robed woman in light leather, she had no weapon, but Elrick had seen her stash a spellbook into her bag.

All nine of them went onto the dock and boarded a large, flat raft. It was made of dozens of logs lashed together, but it felt sturdier than Elrick had expected before boarding. One of the miners even walked a packhorse onto the raft. It yawned and lied down as soon as it got on the raft, as if it had made this trip hundreds of times before and thought nothing of it.

One of the armored men undid the rope tying the raft to the dock, then pushed them off with a large oar. It felt as if the city was moving rather than the raft.

Rakote was divided just about equally on either side of the river, which was called “the Strach.” There were several bridges, but those bridges were far apart enough that the river truly felt like a dividing line rather than a mere inconvenience. Elrick had spent some time walking the city while gathering his strength. He’d asked around about Elise, but no one he’d spoken to had seen her. The city was much smaller than Antia, but Rakote was by no means small.

No one in Antium seemed to speak of population numbers, and it was very difficult for Elrick to compare the size of a city like Pittsburgh or Philadelphia to Antia or Rakote. Still, if Antia felt like New York City: One of the largest metropolitan areas on Earth, then Rakote felt much more like Pittsburgh, where Elrick had grown up. Both cities had bustling agoras, but Rakote’s was just not on the same scale as Antia’s. The geography also gave Rakote more room to spread itself out. The mountains, sea, and infested forest surrounding Antia meant it had to pack itself in, whereas Rakote’s only real limitation seemed to be proximity to the river and the desert beyond. The city never strayed too far from the lifeline the river offered, meaning it sprawled North and South rather than East and West. Crossing Rakote East to West on foot might only take an hour—assuming your route took you on a straight line over a bridge—whereas traversing the city North to South could take more than a full day.

“First time leaving the city?” Jocha, one of the armed men asked him. He had a topknot and a long ponytail that went down past his broad shoulders.

Elrick nodded.

“Once we get further out, you gotta keep your eye out for dune rats,” he grunted. “If you spot one, tell her.” He nodded to the mage.

The mage was lying down, her head resting on a burlap sack.

“Even if I wake her up?” he asked.

“She’s just saving her strength. Once we’re clear of the city, she won’t be asleep.”

“How big are dune rats?” Elrick asked, keeping his voice down to not disturb the mage.

Jocha laughed. “That’s just what we call ‘em. They’re as big as you and me. The guilds gave them a chance to submit, but they refused.”

“They’re people?” Elrick asked.

Jocha’s face strained, as if he had to think really hard about it. “Best not to think of them as such. They raid our supply lines, steal our loot, kill our people. We conquered their land, and they know they can’t ever kick us out of here, so they decided just to just keep kicking us in the balls instead.”

“They call themselves the Kalhu, not Dune Rats. The Kalhu don’t usually hit us on the Strach,” the Mage said, not bothering to open her eyes. “At least not since the mage guilds sent a few dozens mages to Rakote.”

“They hit us when we’re weakest,” Jocha said. “They have no honor.”

“Cuts into our profit margins,” Gatha grunted. “We can’t have an army escort the goods on every step of their journey. That would guarantee we never lost anything to the rats, but we’d spend so much protecting the supply lines that we’d lose money with each trip. So we keep the rats off guard—or try to—they’re crafty little bastards.”

They all laid down and rested as the raft slowly drifted down the Strach, taking them further and further out of Rakote. Elrick couldn’t sleep, mostly because he was worried he’d somehow roll off the raft. The group all seemed to wake right around the same time, wordlessly and with no clear signal, the way he used to wake up just before his bus stop.

Jocha removed a crossbow from a large satchel, then handed another over to Reagus, another of the fighters.

“Probably won’t need ‘em,” Jocha said, loading a bolt into his bow, “But just in case.”

After many tedious hours, Jocha handed the bow to Elrick.

“I’ve never used a crossbow.”

“You point and shoot,” Jocha said, yawning. “Remind me to get some practice in with you when we’re back at the guildhouse.”

Elrick had checked Jocha’s crossbow skill when he’d cocked it. It was only 39.3. He doubted Jocha would be able to teach him much about the bow. Maybe the bow was more a show of strength than something anyone ever actually used. An obviously armed raft would be less likely to get selected as a target.

Rakote was gone now. They passed long strips of farmland, which was kept fertile by the flooding of the Strach. Beyond the farms were occasionally small groups of sandstone houses, painted in vibrant cobalt or electric red hues, but usually there was nothing but rolling dunes or mountains far out on the horizon, as that far from the shore, the Strach’s lifegiving reach had long faded.

The thing that Elrick was supposed to keep his eyes on was the forest. Coming from Antia, it could barely be called a forest. It was more like a thin strip of trees that ran all along the river. They weren’t especially thick or tall trees, but they did create cover. According to Jocha, this is where the Dune Rats would lie in wait for ambushes. Elrick was to keep his bow pointed at the forest.

It was tiring to watch the trees and try to pick shapes out of them, but it at least gave him something to do as the raft lazily moved with the slow flow of the water.

“There we are,” Gatha said. “That’s the mine.”

Elrick had dozed off a bit, the crossbow still in hand. He jolted awake and looked out into the distance, seeing nothing of note but a rocky crag jutting out of the sand just off the shore.

Jocha fetched the oar and started steering them toward the shore. As they brushed up against the sandy shore, everyone started jumping off. Gatha goaded the packhorse forward, and with some effort got it to risk jumping off the raft and onto the shore. Elrick followed.

“Pull!” Jocha shouted.

Everyone crouched down and grabbed a log, pulling as best they could. Elrick followed their lead, his back muscles burning as he pulled the weight of the raft ashore.

They grabbed the straps from the packhorse’s satchel, tied them around the horse’s saddle, and attached them to the raft. The packhorse hauled the raft all the way out of the water, and then much further than Elrick thought necessary.

“Tide will take it otherwise,” Gatha said, reading the question on Elrick’s face.

The entrance to the mine wasn’t as far as Elrick had thought. It was well before the mountain, and it was marked by a series of tents and a few permanent structures as well. There were several forges with bellows, smelting pits, and four pack horses resting by a trough of water. A handful of people came out to greet Elrick’s party. Most stayed at their tasks, hammering away or pumping bellows.

“Took you long enough,” one of the women grunted at Gatha over the noise of the forges. She was big, with arms thicker than Elrick’s.

Gatha shrugged. “The Strach moves at its own pace. You off then, I assume?”

She grinned.

“We work in shifts,” Gatha said to Elrick. “We’ll be here for a week or so. This crew is going to go back to Rakote tomorrow with everything they mined and smelted, then in a few days another raft will come out from Rakote and relieve us. We’ll take back everything we mined and smelted, and—well—you get the idea. No work tonight though. We’ll get a good night’s sleep—the sun only has a few hours left—and then we’ll get working hard at dawn.”

Elrick nodded, just glad he’d get to sleep on solid ground rather than the raft.

He’d meant to meet some of the people from the previous shift, but when he laid down on his cot to rest his eyes, he went out cold, not waking until the sound of metal on metal jolted him awake.

“Wake up you lazy shits!” Gatha bellowed. “It’s time to get your asses into that mine! We’re going to mine some slippery bronze!”

“What’s slippery bronze?” Elrick asked Jocha, who was strapping his armor on.

“Rakotan bronze,” Jocha said.

Elrick shook his head, still not understanding.

“You know how us Antians took Rakote?” He didn’t leave enough of a pause for Elrick to answer. “He sent twice as many ships full of soldiers than he thought he’d need, knowing that half of them likely wouldn’t make it. It was a slave army. A lot of res slaves were given the offer: take Rakote, earn your freedom—the Emperor and the guilds pay your debts. He didn’t send a lot of skilled fighters, and he sent almost no mages or anything fancy. Nothing that would make anyone shed a tear if they sank into the sea. So the slave army arrived right as the dune rats were fighting each other, pissing on each others’ dunes in some slap fight—the Emperor knew that, of course, and he knew this was the time to strike. So the slave army wasn’t even spotted by the dune rats. It just unloaded right into the city, and those slaves were hungry for freedom. They slaughtered everyone, and Rakote fell in hours.”

“So most of them are dead?” Elrick asked.

Jocha shrugged. “According to the Emperor, all the fertile land along the Strach’s banks is ours now. And I’ve been here long enough to see that’s mostly true.”

“But…” Elrick said.

“But, travel a half day off the river and into the dunes, and you probably won’t come back.” He leaned in closer to Elrick as he put on his breastplate. His voice became a whisper. “Don’t tell anyone I said this, but I think we didn’t slaughter so many of them. I think almost all of them are still out there, and they’re going to take back what’s theirs. It’s only a matter of time.”

“What about the slippery bronze?” Elrick asked.

“Oh,” Jocha said, whipping his topknot over his shoulder, “I got caught up in the story. So like I said, we took the cities with spears and swords, and a few decades back, the Emperor started sending some mages over to reinforce our hold on the area. The mages who fought against dune rats noticed something. Their magic just never seemed to hit. You’d get a red mage’s lava lance veering off like a wet arrow, or a violet artillery squad just missing shot after shot, even though they were only a few dozen stadia out. Yaraka told me she once saw a Red Mage summon a sand golem that refused to walk within ten paces of a single rat armed with nothing but one of their spears.”

“So it’s the bronze?” Elrick asked. “Slippery bronze.”

Jocha nodded. “We weren’t mining copper here before that. This mine--as you saw--is pretty far out from Rakote, and the rats controlled the mine. Infested it you could say. Once we learned what this bronze could do, we decided it was suddenly worth all this trouble. This is the only known slippery bronze mine. It was a hell of a time to flush the dune rats out of here, but the mine is ours now. Well, we took this mine when I was just a wee lad, so I don’t remember it happening, but the older guys told me about it--”

“Jocha! Elrick!” Gatha shouted.

Jocha hit Elrick on the arm with a meaty fist. “Let’s go!”