Chapter 4
Dustwalker
Two months in, Cyan knew the guild better than most people who actually
belonged to it.
That was the thing about being invisible in a place. You learned its
rhythms without anyone ever deciding to teach you. The loading dock had
its own schedule that ran parallel to the official contract board —
which crews were going out, which were coming back, who was between jobs
and spending that time drinking at the back table in the common hall,
who owed who what. Cyan moved through it all with a crate on his
shoulder and his mouth shut and his eyes open.
The Dustwalker Guild was mid-tier. They weren't prestigious like the
Crown-contracted outfits in the noble quarter, and they weren't
desperate like the scrape-together crews that worked the shallow rifts
for barely enough to cover their own healing costs. They were steady.
Reliable. The kind of guild that corporate merchants hired to clear
product-route dungeons and noble estates hired to handle the
inconvenient rifts that opened in their basements every decade or so.
It was a living. For the people who had ranks, it was a decent one.
Cyan learned who to avoid and who was worth watching. The avoidance list
was longer. Most of the ranked runners tolerated him the way you
tolerated useful furniture — present, functional, not really there. A
few were worse than that, the kind of people who felt that having a rank
entitled them to fill whatever space they wanted including the space
someone else was standing in.
He'd had a crate knocked off his shoulder twice in the first week.
Accident, both times, technically. He'd picked it up both times without
saying anything and gone about his route.
The worth-watching list was shorter. A Silver-rank woman named Corris
who ran the early morning dungeon assessments and had a habit of
narrating exactly what she was doing and why when she thought no one
else was listening. A Bronze-rank kid from the Reaches named Pell who
was maybe seventeen and had a directness about the way dungeon mechanics
worked that made Cyan realize how much he didn't know. An older
Iron-rank man named Hess who did maintenance on the guild's mana
equipment and had clearly forgotten more about how the rank system
actually functioned than most Silver students ever learned.
Cyan listened to all of them. He never asked questions. Questions drew
attention, and attention led to who are you and what's your rank and oh,
right, and then you were furniture again.
He was good at listening. He'd been practicing his whole life.
What he learned, mostly, was the shape of the gap between him and
everyone else.
He'd understood it abstractly before. You couldn't grow up in a kingdom
that ran on mana and not understand the basic arithmetic: ranks meant
ability, ability meant guild access, guild access meant earnings and
contracts and the kind of life where you didn't count your remaining
coins at the end of every week. No rank meant none of that. Simple
equation. He'd always known it.
What he hadn't felt before — not really, not in his chest — was watching
a Bronze-rank runner earn in one dungeon contract what he made in a
month of carrying crates, and knowing that the difference wasn't effort.
The Bronze runner worked hard. So did Cyan. The difference was something
Cyan hadn't been given and couldn't purchase.
He filed that too.
His filing system was almost entirely full.
On the forty-third day of his employment with the Dustwalker Guild, Seff
called him over during the morning assignment.
'Crew Four needs a pack carrier for a standard run this afternoon,' she
said. 'Bronze-rated dungeon, four-hour clearance estimate. You'd carry
the extraction materials in and the yield out. Day rate plus a flat
bonus on successful extraction.'
Cyan waited.
'You're not a guild member,' she said, which he knew. 'Officially I'm
hiring you as a contract laborer attached to the crew, not as a runner.
The crew takes liability. You follow their lead, you stay behind the
front line, you don't touch anything mana-active without permission.'
'Understood,' Cyan said.
'It's not a safe job,' Seff said. 'None of these are. I'm telling you so
you can say no if you want.'
He didn't say no.
He went back to his morning route to finish it before the afternoon run,
carrying crates from the dock to the storage room and back, and he
thought about the fact that he was about to go underground for the first
time.
He thought about it with something that wasn't quite excitement and
wasn't quite fear.
He thought about the thing his skin did near mana discharge — that faint
catching sensation, like thirst that couldn't quite be quenched.
He filed that thought under: wait and see.