The street was empty, oddly so. That squirmy feeling was back between my shoulder blades, and I scowled at the too bright clouds overhead. Why on earth had Lakra sent me here? Cryptic to a fault, that one. Trustworthy? I still wasn’t sure.
I knocked on the wooden door set deep in the stone, my other hand rubbing the filigree of my sword grip. The door flew open and a wrinkled hand shoved a scroll into my chest before it slammed shut again. I scrabbled to hang onto the rolled paper, staring at the worn boards as if they might bite me at any moment. “Hello? Nice to meet you too?”
Nothing but silence answered me, and I stepped back into the street to examine the scroll. “This better be worth it!” I yelled at no one in particular as I unrolled it. Inside were two lines of angular marks and a sketch of a river basin. “Seriously? Hell runes?” I was going to kill Lakra when I saw him again. A simple quest, that’s what I told him. Just for a few golds. And he sent me for hell runes. I made a fist around the scroll, crumpling it irredeemably, and stomped back down the still empty street.
The Word Worker 