Invitation

"For me?"

Mr. Fast nodded across the table.

Annan picked up the gilt invitation, valuable in its own right, and absently rubbed its rough gold-dusted surface. Mr. Fast had to remind him again before he thought to open it.

[To: Honorable Sorcerer Annan

We cordially invite you to a banquet at the mayor's residence this evening.

—Mayor Hassander Midkin]

The message itself, though, was written in ordinary ink.

"Why invite me?"

Annan checked that the name before "Honorable Sorcerer" was indeed his.

"Because you're a 'big shot' now, just like us."

Mr. Fast liked Annan. He had a hunger for knowledge, a friendly manner free of prejudice, and he was a Sorcerer. It was only his baffling ignorance of common sense that Mr. Fast couldn't understand...

"Because I'm a Sorcerer?"

Annan really had little sense of what that meant. He had put so little effort into gaining that status. Whether Aunt Susan took him in or he found two jobs, he had only been trying to survive in this world.

The Library and the Warlock's Handbook had repeatedly told Annan that spellcasters were the equals of nobles. Even so, noble privileges and luxurious lives meant little to him. Becoming a Sorcerer so suddenly was like setting out to explore a dungeon and finding the chest meant to be guarded by the boss right at the entrance. Should he keep exploring, or turn back?

"Because you're a Sorcerer."

Mr. Fast nodded. "Mr. Victor is only a Mage Apprentice. Why do you think he can live on a wealthy street and run a Library?"

"Because of his knowledge?"

"Where did that knowledge come from?"

"His status."

"Exactly." Mr. Fast reached out and brushed off Annan's collar. "So even if you dress like a pauper every day and spend your time with paupers, you're still a noble spellcaster. Did you think the Sorcerer Protection Association was made up?"

Annan certainly didn't think so. The Warlock's Handbook explicitly mentioned the Sorcerer Protection Association—a fanatical, obsessive group spanning multiple worlds. If you were a Sorcerer, though, you would absolutely love them.

It was just that Pinglin Town was a small place. Breeze City wasn't much bigger, and even the Rikaner Kingdom was a backwater.

"So should I go?"

Annan meant to ask Mr. Fast for advice.

"Up to you. You can turn them down, too. I can't imagine the banquet will offer anything but praise and attempts to win you over."

Mr. Fast didn't want him to go. The bard thought the opposite.

Annan had never seen true splendor, even though he had been to Breeze City once. Take the taverns the bard complained about endlessly. At the Dawn Tavern, there were just customers and drinking. Nothing else ever happened.

A proper tavern would have people trading information on the side, gangs of every stripe, guests of every race, insults and brawls, a smoky, disreputable second floor, and scantily clad women.

"If you don't understand something, go and learn about it. The price you pay is part of growing up."

The bard's long, slender fingers, almost like a woman's, swept across the strings as he sang of the southern nobles' drunken excess:

"Cut open the lamb and find a suckling pig; cut open the pig and find a white goose; pull apart the goose and find a tuna; slice open its belly and find a duckling; tear open the duckling, and there lies the delicious egg. The nobles throw away the lamb, the pig, the goose, the tuna, and the duckling, all to savor the pearl they carried..."

The bard's song made some of the customers order food.

"Is that true?"

Annan had gained a new appreciation for how wasteful and extravagant nobles could be.

"No."

Then the bard went on. "Just a lamb and an egg? That's an insult to those 'nobles.'"

"Titan meat, Unicorn, Dragon Eggs... Those are the parts they throw away. I kept it simple so common folk could understand."

The farther inland one went in the Southlands, the more extravagance flourished and the more popular the Pantheon of Pleasure became. Some towns had reportedly grown so excessive that even neutral deities like the Goddess of Wealth could no longer stomach them and withdrew their churches. It was only a matter of time before those places fell to corruption.

"And the adventurers just stand by?"

"No. They join in."

The bard made the nobles sound rotten to the core. He offered another example. "Suppose a noble appeared right now. He saw your potential and offered to cover every expense you'd ever have, asking only that you protect his family. Would you agree?"

Yesterday, Annan might have refused. But now that he knew what his expenses would be...

"They coax you, tempt you, marry you into the family, threaten you—use every means to bind you to them. You need worry about nothing except growing stronger. Like... a pig being fattened in a pen. Then, at the very height of the revelry, everything collapses."

Moved by his own reflections, the bard decided on the spot to tell a story that evening:

Five months ago, a city-state in the Southlands had fallen to a rat swarm. It had two towering Mage Towers, hundreds of thousands of noble soldiers and adventurers, and a Legendary Mage who raised a Legendary Barrier over the city. But the terrifying swarm stretched for hundreds of miles. Gaps blasted through it by mage formations filled at once with Ratfolk climbing over their dead. Rats covered the Legendary Barrier, gnawing at it. The swollen, shuddering Mage Towers came crashing down. And the city, home to hundreds of thousands, vanished as quietly as Papyrus caught in a raging storm.

The bard painted such a vivid picture that the customers forgot their drinks and let their food go cold.

"Is that true?"

Annan asked the same question again. The bard said it was, though he didn't know where it had happened or how far away it was.

"Brought to you on the wind again?" Mr. Fast teased. "That must be quite a strong wind."

Most of the customers seemed to agree. The Southlands were too distant to mean much to them; many would never leave their home county in their entire lives.

Annan didn't agree.

The bard had no reason to lie to him. And for a bard, "brought on the wind" meant a revelation from the gods. The story had really happened.

Annan had thought this world was safe enough. Now he saw that it was only safe in the broadest sense. Individual lives and deaths counted for little.

Annan decided to go. Then he ran to the cellar to find Soluman Copperbeard and ask her to melt the invitation into gold grains for him. When he returned to the tavern, he found the bard trying to persuade Mr. Fast to attend the banquet with Annan.

"I hadn't planned to attend a dull gathering..." Mr. Fast sighed and looked over Annan's coarse linen coat. "Go buy formal clothes tomorrow."

"I don't have any money..."

"I'll lend you some."

After the frightening tale of the rat swarm, the bard told an uplifting story to ease the customers' nerves. Annan hadn't been paying attention, but at one point he heard the bard say, "It's the time you spent on your rose that makes your rose important."

Annan turned to look.