“Tell the foreman he can expect three more Lowgold guards by sundown tomorrow,” Jai Long said. A single guard would be a great help in protecting the mining crew from dreadbeasts; three was perhaps too many. But this was a race, and he intended to win.

Kral might balk and committing so many of his Sandvipers to what he saw as a slave duty, but Jai Long would talk him around.

The messenger boy stood there mouthing words, awkwardly committing Jai Long’s message to memory. When he’d finished, he straightened again.

“There was a message from the Jai clan too, sir. A Lowgold stranger showed up at the gates today, and she had a Copper with her.”

“Her son?”

The boy shook his head, and his smile had a bit of a sneer to it. “Grenn saw the Copper himself. Said he looked even older than the Lowgold.”

That happened sometimes—a child was born with a tragically weak spirit, or had it crippled in some accident before he could advance further. Those unfortunates deserved pity, not ridicule.

But whatever they deserved, this one had earned not a whit of Jai Long’s attention. “If you deliver me a message every time an outsider shows up at the gates, you’ll walk your feet off.”

“No, that’s not…the Copper’s just strange, sir. Not important. The important thing is that she beat Sandviper Resh in the middle of her squad, and then walked away with one of the Jai clan.”

“Ah.” Now Jai Long understood why the message had mentioned the Copper. If he, as a representative of the Sandviper sect, wanted to avenge Resh’s humiliation, he couldn’t punish a Lowgold under Jai protection. He’d have to target the Copper instead.

“Where are they now?” Jai Long asked, dipping his brush to write a letter to his former clan.

“Uh, they were taken to a Jai clan inn, but it looks like they snuck out. Grenn said he was supposed to tell you that nobody could find them.”

Jai Long’s suffering had begun when he first advanced to Gold. In the heat of battle, he’d been forced to adopt a strange Remnant instead of the one his family had planned for him. Instead of the Goldsign borne by most on the Path of the Stellar Spear—hair as sturdy as a helmet, and rigid as iron—he was cursed with a face that…a face that he didn’t like to think about.

There had been a few other consequences of that Goldsign. His voice hadn’t changed, but his laugh…

It rang out of him, wild and crazy, like the cackling of a deranged murderer. His usual voice was cool and composed, but when he laughed, he sounded like a blood-drunk killer. The messenger boy paled and took a step backwards.

Jai Long swallowed the last chuckles, but a smile still stretched the edges of his cloth mask. “They lost her. The Jai clan can’t find their new recruit, so they turn to me.”

Technically they had turned to the Sandvipers to help, but there was no real difference. He handled most of the day-to-day workings of the sect, and whichever of his relatives had sent this message must have known where it would end up.

Surely, that knowledge had burned them.

“I think so, sir…” the boy said hesitantly.

“I’m amending my previous message. Tell the foreman he will have to wait for his three Lowgold guards. Then go to Sandviper Tern, get three of his best, and tell him the story you just told me. They’re to retrieve the Copper for the mines. Do not kill his protector, but don’t retrieve her for the Jai clan either.”

His clan had handed him a razor-sharp opportunity. In one move, he could regain the standing the Sandvipers had lost at the hands of this stranger, show her that she couldn’t treat their sect lightly, and reinforce to the clan that Jai Long was their servant no longer. And he would gain a miner. Only a Copper, but enough single scales could eventually pile up into a fortune.

The messenger boy was standing in place with brows furrowed, repeating words silently to himself.

“What will you say to the foreman?” Jai Long snapped, and he forced the boy to repeat each message until they were all perfect. One day, he was going to have to train better messengers. Maybe he could purchase a few speaking constructs from the Fishers. Through a proxy, of course.

When the boy finally finished, Jai Long picked his brush back up and dipped it into the inkwell. “Is there anything else?” he asked, by way of dismissal.

“Nothing special,” the boy said, fidgeting in place. Clearly there was something he wanted to say, but not an official message.

“Did you hear something?” Jai Long asked, his attention on the paper in front of him.

“It’s just a rumor. Some of the Cloud Hammers were talking about it, and I only heard them because I was sitting behind a fence and they didn’t know I was there, because one of them asked the other one if he was sure, and then he said…”

Jai Long let the boy ramble on excitedly as he worked. Eventually, a point would emerge.

“…after he’d stopped, he said—I mean not him, the first one—said they’d have to speed up, because Arelius would take everything when he got here. So the second one kind of laughed, but not a funny laugh—”

When the boy’s words registered, Jai Long stood up so quickly that he upended his inkwell, sending it splattering off the edge of the table. Part of his mind noticed with relief that it hadn’t ruined any of his maps, but the majority of his consciousness was taken up by sheer panic. He seized the boy by the shoulders, and it was only a last-minute awareness that prevented him from accidentally ripping the boy’s arms off.

“The Arelius family is coming here?”

The boy’s eyes were so wide that they seemed to take up most of his head, and he looked too scared even to struggle. “I don’t know, brother Jai Long. Please, brother, they just said Arelius. I don’t know what it means, I don’t know…”

That same calm part of his mind noted that the Sandvipers only called him “brother” when they wanted something from him.

Meanwhile, his panic was quickly transforming into fury. After all his work, all his meticulous effort, now a faction from the Empire was just going to step in and take the rewards.

Jai Long didn’t tend to raise his voice. It showed a lack of discipline. Instead, he lowered his tone until he was very quiet indeed. Quiet like the slow rasp of a drawn blade.

“Why,” he said, “didn’t you tell me this earlier?”

Tears had come to the boy’s eyes, and he blubbered incoherently. Jai Long released him, disgusted with himself. He wasn’t the sort of weakling who took his frustrations out on children. This boy couldn’t be older than twelve; he was even younger than Jai Long’s own sister.

Jai Long bowed deeply to the messenger, fists pressed together, as he would bow to a superior. “My deepest regrets,” he said, and the fear on the boy’s face almost instantly transformed to shock. “Now. Deliver your messages as instructed, but on your way, grab every messenger the Sandvipers have. Send them all to me.”

The boy bowed and bolted.

Within the tent, the splashing and laughter had stopped. “Kral,” Jai Long said, and the young chief’s head poked out.

“I didn’t hear much of that, but I will die if you don’t tell me the details,” Kral said.

“The Arelius family may be coming here.”