16. Dash
DASH
The tavern stinks of stale mead and goblin sweat.
I walk straight through without stopping. Past the bar where Magnolia first slammed that ivory invitation onto my table. Past the booth with the blood stain on the bench from last Tuesday's knife fight. Past Grix, who opens his mouth to say something and then shuts it when he sees my face.
Smart goblin.
The back stairs are narrow. Built for humans.
My shoulders scrape both walls as I climb, leaving wet streaks on the plaster.
Three flights. The wood groans under my boots.
The door to my apartment is at the end of a hallway that smells like pipe smoke and rat droppings, and I have to duck to clear the frame the same way I duck to clear every frame in this city that was not built for Orcs.
Inside.
The lock clicks behind me. I drop the rucksack. The broadsword hits the floor with a clang that rattles the thin window glass. Water runs off me in sheets, forming a spreading dark pool on the warped floorboards.
The apartment is twelve feet by fourteen.
A cot against one wall. A weapons rack against the other.
A sink. A hotplate. A single chair that I built myself because furniture stores don't stock for my weight class.
The ceiling is low enough that I can press my palm flat against it without straightening my arm.
I've lived here for six years. Taken four hundred and twelve contracts. Completed every single one.
Four hundred and twelve.
Not four hundred and thirteen.
The napkin is still in my vest pocket. I pull it out. Soaked through, the ink bleeding, but I can still read her handwriting. Small and precise, with the loops on her g's curving back too far, like they're reaching for something.
Contract parameters: Attend wedding. Act as boyfriend. Look scary. Three days. No real feelings.
No real feelings.
I stare at the words until the ink blurs. Until the paper goes soft between my fingers and starts to tear. My hand closes into a fist. The napkin compresses into a wet ball smaller than my thumbnail.
No real feelings.
My right arm moves before my brain authorizes it. Pure muscle memory. The same swing I've used to crack ogre skulls and split ironwood shields. Shoulder rotation, hip pivot, full extension.
My fist goes through the wall like it's wet paper.
Plaster explodes. Lath splinters. A cloud of white dust billows out and coats the rain still dripping off my face. My knuckles punch clean through into the next room, which is mercifully empty because Torvin the dwarf drinks until noon on Sundays.
I pull my hand back. Fragments of wall cling to my forearm. My knuckles are split. Green blood wells up in the cracks and drips onto the floor, mixing with the rainwater into something that looks like pond scum.
It’s a dinner plate-sized hole.
Not enough.
I hit the wall again. Same spot. The hole doubles. Now I can see Torvin's unmade bed through the area, his collection of ceramic tankards on the shelf, the portrait of his dead wife he talks to when he's drunk enough to forget she's gone.
The pain is good. Sharp and clean and specific.
I pace. Four steps one direction, four steps back.
The apartment is too small for pacing. Every turn brings me face to face with something.
The cot where I haven't slept because I spent two nights in a country club bed that was also too small but smelled like vanilla and brown sugar and her.
The weapons rack where my armor sits cleaned and oiled, every piece accounted for except the necktie I used to muzzle a griffin on a dark highway while she drove like a woman possessed.
My hands are shaking.
My hands do not shake. I have held a defensive line against a twelve-foot cave troll without a tremor. I have field-dressed my own wounds with a hunting knife and steady fingers. My hands are instruments of contract fulfillment, and they do not shake.
They are shaking now.
I look at the blood on my knuckles. At the hole in the wall. At the sad, wet lump of napkin on the floor.
I need violence. Real violence. The kind that fills the brain with nothing but geometry and timing.
The kind that leaves no room for the memory of flour on her cheekbone or the way she laughed in the walk-in cooler or how she whispered stay against my throat while the rain started on the drive home.
I cross to the weapons rack. Pull down the heavy contract board nailed above it.
Dozens of postings flutter on their pins.
Monster hunts. Bodyguard details. Exterminations.
I scan them with the efficiency of a man drowning, looking for anything with a high enough body count to scour his skull clean.
There.
Bottom left corner, pinned under a rusted nail. Black paper. Red ink. The kind of posting that only goes up when the regular mercenaries have already died.
Sewer hydra. Northeast quadrant. Sixteen confirmed casualties. Payment upon proof of kill.
I rip it off the board.
The hydra posting crumples in my fist. Too easy. A sewer job is plumbing work. Dark water, tight corridors, predictable strike patterns. I'd be home by dinner with nothing but wet boots and a clean head for maybe an hour before the vanilla scent crept back in.
I need something worse.
I flip through the remaining postings. Goblin nest clearance.
Escort duty for a merchant caravan. A haunted well in the farming district.
Children's work. Party tricks. I rip them aside until my fingers find the one pinned to the very back of the board, half-hidden behind a layer of older contracts that nobody has touched because nobody has been stupid enough.
Thick vellum. Burned edges. The seal at the bottom belongs to the Slagworkers' Union, which means it's been sitting here for months because the Slagworkers' Union only posts bounties when they've exhausted every other option, including prayer.
VENOMOUS ROCK CRAWLER. Adult female. Approximately 40 feet. Nesting in Sector 7 of the Slag Wastes. Has consumed two extraction crews (14 workers), one rescue team (6 soldiers), and a mage who was reportedly "very confident." Bounty: 200 gold. Paid to next of kin if applicable.
Paid to next of kin.
I don't have next of kin.
I pull it off the board, fold it once, slide it into my vest.
The motorcycle sits chained in the alley behind the tavern.
A Thunderhog Mark IV, rebuilt from a military surplus frame with reinforced axles and suspension designed for Orcish weight.
The tires are knobbed steel-core rubber rated for broken glass and lava rock.
The small coffin-sized engine block I built myself over two winters, hand-forging the exhaust pipes because no manufacturer makes them wide enough for the displacement I need.
Rain hammers the seat as I swing my leg over. The leather creaks. I strap the broadsword across my back, cinch the plate tight over my vest, and kick the engine to life.
It doesn't purr. It detonates. A concussive bark that rattles windows up and down the alley, scatters a pack of feral alley cats, and shakes loose a chunk of brick from the building across the way.
Good.
I twist the throttle and the back tire screams against wet cobblestone before catching. The Thunderhog lunges forward, three hundred and eighty pounds of Orc and seven hundred pounds of machine tearing down the narrow alley at a speed that is objectively inadvisable.
The city blurs. Rain hits my face like gravel. I don't wear a helmet because they don't make helmets for heads my size with tusks, and also because caring about personal safety feels deeply beside the point right now.
The Slag Wastes begin where the city gives up.
No gradual transition. The last row of tenement buildings simply stops, and beyond them the earth turns black and cracked and wrong.
Centuries of magical industrial runoff have cooked the ground into something between glass and charcoal.
Nothing grows. Nothing lives here that doesn't have armor plating and a venom sac.
The road disintegrates within the first half mile. I leave it. The Thunderhog's tires chew through slag crust and spit black gravel in a rooster tail behind me. Geothermal vents hiss sulfur plumes across my path. The air temperature spikes twenty degrees, then thirty. My wet clothes start to steam.
Sector 7 is nine miles in. The terrain gets vertical.
Slag ridges rise like broken teeth, forcing me to thread through gaps barely wider than the handlebars.
Twice I have to muscle the bike over ridges too steep to ride, my boots sliding on glass-slick rock, every muscle in my back and thighs burning with the effort of keeping the Thunderhog from tipping and crushing my legs.
Feels good.
Burns out the other thing. Almost.
Almost.
Five miles in, I find the first carcass.
A Slagworker extraction wagon, the heavy iron frame peeled open like a tin can.
Acid scoring on the metal. Deep gouges in the rock where something massive dragged itself through.
The crew's helmets are scattered in the slag dust. Eight of them.
I count them the way she counted eggs in the country club kitchen, quick and precise, her lips moving silently with each one.
I gun the throttle so hard the front wheel lifts off the ground.
The crawler's territory announces itself at mile seven.
The slag changes. The random cracks organize into a pattern, concentric circles radiating out from a central point.
Burrow marks. The rock here is softer, heated from below by whatever geothermal vent the creature has claimed as her nest. Acid residue glistens on every surface, catching the dull gray light and throwing it back in oily rainbows.
I kill the engine.