Once Remy had caught a fish with tiny hands. He had been about to throw it back when a passing woman, her face hooded by a dark cloak embroidered with the constellations of summer, bought it from him for thirty pieces of gold. It was that money Remy had used to buy his first short sword, an unadorned blade whose hilt Remy had re-wrapped with wire and leather scavenged from dockside rubbish heaps. He had enough left over for a month of lessons with one of the drillmasters who trained the garrisons of the keep. He had taken to wearing the sword, but not everywhere. Avankil had laws about which of its citizens could be armed and when. Remy had no desire to break them, and no desire to provoke random belligerents who might swagger across his path from the docks or the Ferry Gate.

Despite his discretion, he had crossed swords more than once and had killed a man the year before. A drifting sword for hire, killing time on the Quayside, had seen Remy receive a message and a few coins. Catching up with Remy in one of the twisting alleys between Quayside and the downstream terminus of the Outer Wall, he had left Remy no choice. Since then Remy had moved with more caution through streets he had once thought he owned. When he was a boy, he was just one more boy flitting through the streets of Avankil; as he became a man, he attracted more notice.

Once a year, perhaps, he found some oddity dangling from his hook. Some of them died as soon as he brought them up. Some frightened him enough to drop the whole line into the water. Some were pathetic, freakish, fit only for an afterlife suspended in amber fluid on the top shelf of some distracted alchemist’s study. All of them were mysteries Remy didn’t particularly want to solve.

What’s in the box?

“No,” Remy moaned. “Don’t.”

The vizier had warned him. If you open the box-if you so much as crack the seal that holds it shut-you might not die, but you will wish you had. And if you don’t die from what the box contains, you most certainly will when I find you again. You are a good messenger, Remy. Do not disappoint me in this.