CHAPTER 184: MISSION ACCOMPLISHED

The leader flicked two fingers. The rightmost rider began to angle for the JLTV’s exposed flank. Lyra’s arrow arrived in the dirt two inches from his horse’s hoof, quivering like a finger. The horse snorted, danced sideways. The rider grabbed mane to stay aboard.

"Second warning," Lyra said from the trees. "There won’t be a third."

The leader’s smile frayed. "You don’t want to make this—"

"Loud?" Inigo supplied. He drew a smooth breath and palmed a small cylinder from his vest—a flashbang. He held it between forefinger and thumb where every eye could see it. "You like ambushes," he said conversationally. "I like physics."

"What’s that?" one of the brigands asked, curiosity burning through discipline.

"Something bright and disappointing," Inigo said, and lobbed it thirty feet to the side, into a hollow where it would do nothing but hurt.

The world snapped white and kicked like a mule. Horses screamed. Men swore and flinched and clawed at air. The thin leader reeled in the saddle, eyes punched clean of sight for a heartbeat he couldn’t afford. Inigo was already moving, not toward them, but to the JLTV’s cab. He slid in, keyed the ignition, and let the engine wake with a throat-deep growl that made the horses decide the woods were haunted and this road a bad idea.

When the glare faded, the riders found the machine aimed at an angle that suggested it could be anywhere it wanted, and the archer in the trees now had an arrow nocked to a calm draw that said she had chosen where she wanted it to go.

"Third option," Inigo called over the engine. "You back out. We don’t chase. You tell the next man with a pennant that this road belongs to the mountain today."

The thin man blinked, sight resolving. Ego fought survival and—rare miracle—lost. He lifted his empty hand, palm out. "Another day," he said.

"Not if you keep this job," Lyra said.

They backed their horses the way wise men back away from sleeping bears: slow, with respect, not turning their backs until the bend took them. The dust they left behind tasted like salt and relief.

Lyra slid down the bank and took her seat without flourish. "That a new toy?" she asked, chin indicating the flashbang’s memory in the air.

"Old," Inigo said. "New world."

"You warned them," she said.

"I like to give people a story to improve their lives," he said, and eased the JLTV back onto the track. "It’s cheaper."

They kept to cover for another mile, then cut back to the high road where the cliff fell away to a slate-blue world and the wind combed the scrub into orderly waves. The dust behind them did not return. The crates murmured contentedly with every measured rise and fall.

They made the plains before dusk and slept on a low ridge within sight of a farmhouse whose lanterns winked like domestic stars. Inigo checked straps by feel; Lyra checked the sky by habit. The night passed without an audience, which felt like extravagant luck.

Morning took them the rest of the way. Elandra’s towers lifted out of haze, sunlight stippling their faces with the interrupted shadows of the city’s northern poplars as they rolled through the gates. Guards who had seen stranger things still straightened at the sight of the tarp-tied cargo and the line of fatigue in the two faces up front.

"Back from Cindralock?" the sentry with the scar asked.

"Back," Inigo said.

"With all your holes," she observed.

"Same number," Lyra said, then added, deadpan, "as far as we’ve counted."

The Alchemist Guild stood a street over from the great hall, a building that looked like it had been designed by a mason and a nervous man with a ledger—beautiful stone, careful eaves, windows that opened only enough to let out the smell of learning slowly. A clerk in gray met them at the side gate with a clipboard that could have paid a month’s rent if sold for paper weight alone.

"Delivery?" he asked, already ticking a box.

"Red and amber," Inigo said. "Chain of custody," Lyra added, producing the folder with the calm of a woman setting down a loaded crossbow and expecting the world not to shoot itself. Scribes poured in like ants to sugar—two to witness seals, one to photograph sigils with a chalk-rubber, one to lay fresh wool wraps over the crates with an affection that would have been strange if it hadn’t been so human.

Master Halver—bald pate, ink-black beard, sleeves clean in a way that suggested he ruined shirts and replaced them daily—appeared like a stormcloud rolling across a warm day. "You did not jostle," he announced, as if blessing a sacrament. "We can tell."

"We try not to explode before lunch," Inigo said.

Halver’s eyes darted to the straps, to the way the tarp corners had been folded, to the tiny wedges braced against roll. "Competence. How rare." He signed. He sealed. He snapped his fingers and apprentices lifted crates with the reverence of pallbearers and the speed of men who’d been told the ground beneath them might be poison soon. "Take them to the cold room," he intoned. "No heat sources within ten paces. No arguments within twenty."

"Wise rule," Lyra murmured.

The last seal broke under Halver’s hand. The last crate vanished into a door marked with a sigil that looked like a snowflake being strangled. The clerk ticked the last box with a sound that said he loved his job in a way only clerks and certain assassins do.

"Receipts," he said, and handed over two copies. "Payment is remitted to the guild on your behalf."

"In writing," Lyra said.

"In triplicate," he answered, delighted.

They left a small wake of gray-robed apprentices peering after the JLTV like it might do tricks if you whistled. Inigo didn’t mind. Let the city learn new shapes for possible.

They didn’t go to Thorne immediately. They went home, because the promise had been made and keeping small promises made the big ones possible. Rice soaked. Garlic hit oil. Eggs slid into a pan and came out like the sun. Lyra ate with the starved elegance of someone who had watched death try and fail and was grateful for the mundane.

"When we see Thorne," she said around a mouthful, "we tell him about the glass at the cut."

"And the chain," Inigo said. "And the neighborly tax."

"He’ll say he warned us," she said.

"He did," Inigo admitted. "He just didn’t say how."

They carried the receipt copies to the Adventurer’s Guild when the second bell lazed through the city. Elise spotted them near the stairs and lifted a hand in a quiet victory salute. "You look un-exploded," she said.

"High bar," Lyra replied.

Thorne was on his feet before they crossed the threshold, which was his version of clapping. Inigo set the folder on the desk. Lyra set the cliff road in a few spare sentences. Thorne listened, face like mountains do—still until it wasn’t.

"Gray pennants," he said when they finished. "They’re getting bolder."

"They’re getting bored," Inigo corrected gently. "There’s a difference."

Thorne nodded, the kind that files a note for action. He pushed a pouch across the desk. "Hazard bonus, as agreed. And... there will be another job. Not today." His eyes shifted toward the window where the city lay like a cat in a patch of sun. "Let people eat chicken. Let the city pretend the world is simple."

Lyra rose. "We can do that."

Back on the street, the wind carried the smell of frying oil and something sweet. Riko had redone the chalkboard at Mcronald’s with a flourish and a misspelling Inigo found endearing. The line wasn’t long yet. It would be.

They crossed the plaza, shoulders a little lower than yesterday, pockets heavier by a pouch and a piece of paper that said they’d done exactly what they promised. The world would tilt again soon. Cliffs always did. But for the moment the road had been straight, the cargo had been steady, and the dinner they’d promised each other waited at the far side of day like a small, stubborn lantern.

"Breakfast," Lyra said, bumping his shoulder.

"Dinner," Inigo corrected.

"Both," she decided, and he grinned because she was right, and because, for once, neither of them owed anyone an apology for taking two good things in a row.