Bernt woke to a quiet whimpering was mostly dark, with just a bit of light ing in through one of the open windows. He blinked and rubbed at his eyes, trying to get his bearings.

  He was in his new home in the Uy. The low light was filtering in through the windows from the tunnel’s lumi flora.

  The sound came again, a quickly cast a torch spell to give him some light. It didn't feel quite right, but it worked. Jori was curled up on her bed – Bernt had mao shape a rough stone bench with a slight depression in the middle for her, and she’d loaded her bedding material into it st night. She wasn’t sleeping easily. Her wings twitched and she hissed, batting at the air with one cwed hand. Then she flinched and whimpered again.

  “Jori?” Bernt got up and reached over to nudge her shoulder. Her eyes popped wide open and she flinched back, looking wildly all around.

  “Agh! Wha–?” Her eyes locked o and she sagged with relief.

  “What were you dreaming about?” he asked curiously. Jori didn’t usually have nightmares. For that matter, she didn’t sleep very much. Most days, she was out hunting before he even woke up. “Was it the fight yesterday?”

  The little imp had suffered horrific burns and other injuries. Sure, they’d healed almost instantly, but he couldn’t imagihat kind eion came without any kind of cost.

  Jori shook her head.

  “No, it was the other pce. We were being hunted. It was the fiends..." She was breathing a little too fast, and her eyes darted around the room. "They always went after the spawnlings, because we were the smallest. They would stalk our entire pad pick us off, one by one.”

  Jori stopped, staring at nothing for a sed. “When I awhere were hundreds of us. Now… I don’t know. When I ulled over here it was maybe fifty.” She looked up at him, seeming… smaller, somehow, than normal. “Do you think I’m the only o?”

  Bernt blinked. Jori had never really talked about the hells at all, much less mentioned anything like friends or family. He had no idea that imps lived in herds or packs. He wasn’t even sure that the warlocks knew. Demons didn’t have a sense of unity or collective – it was one of the first and only things he’d ever been taught about them back at the Academy. He wao ask more about it, but this didn't seem like the time for it. Maybe he could ask Josie.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But you’re safe now, and you’re not small or weak anymore. I don’t think anyone just casually hunt you like they did when you were a spawnling.”

  Jori looked up at Bernt, her face firming. “I’m going to find them, someday. I will.”

  Bernt o her encingly. “Okay, good. Are you alright?” He held out a bit of spicy rat jerky to her. She grabbed it and nodded.

  “Yes. I'm alright. Let’s go to work.”

  Only as Bernt got dressed did he realize what it meant that his spell had worked almost normally. His ha a little odd – sort of a low, electrigle in his palm, but nothing like the day before. He breathed a quiet sigh of relief – it wasn’t perfect, but he was rec from the injury he’d suffered the day before. He’d have to try a harder spell ter.

  –--------

  Wheepped out into the street, Bernt found the pce transformed. He’d noticed that more of the homes were occupied when they came home st night – there had been lights on in many of the gaping windows, and more traffic down in the market area. Now, in the m, the street outside was alive with people going about their business.

  Hammering echoed from across the street, where a dwarven carpenter was using a plumb lio adjust the same door frame that he’d watched his new goblin neighbors try to install by themselves two days before. As he watched, the green-skinned woman leaned out of the unshuttered window to hand the dwarf a cup of something hot to drink.

  In fact, the dwarf was looking quite popur in the new neighborhood. Anoblin was talking to him as he worked, and a few others stood nearby along with an unfortable-looking gnome.

  Bernt was a little surprised to see a gnome here, but he supposed he shouldn’t have been. Looking around at the trickle of traffic moving briskly along the street in front of his home, he realized that the neighborhood really wasn’t quite as homogeneously gobliric as he’d thought. There were a handful of nomes walking around, some heavily tattooed humans who Bernt assumed might be adherents of some kind of shamanistic practice, and a weather-beaten dwarf who was either w here or who wao defy expectations by moving into the goblin quarter. He even saw a gnoll pulling along a cart full of boxes, probably about to move in somewhere down the way.

  And all of them still needed doors. Who would have thought that a new underground district full of stone dwellings would be so good for the city’s carpenters?

  Bernt hoped that his oenter would get around to fitting his doors and windows soon. He’d had to pay in advance, and the prices were quite a bit higher than he’d been expeg. He was almost pletely out of for the first time in years. His pay day was over a week away, but the casteln still owed him a few silver marks for his twice-weekly teag gig at the orphanage.

  It would be enough. Probably. There was no sense in w about it now.

  “Hey there, neighbors!” a voice called from behind him. Bernt turo find a goblin in a gray guard uniform approag him. He was thin and tall foblin, nearly reag to Bernt’s shoulder.

  “Uh, hi,” Bernt said in reply. He'd seen him before, but couldn't quite remember his name. “Are you heading in to work?”

  “Yup!” the goblin said cheerfully and started walking alongside them. “I’m relieving my dad over in the Underworks. He was on night patrol."

  "My name’s Nirlig.” He added a sed ter with a little wink, correctly interpreti's squinty greeting. He looked down at Jori and pressed his hands together in some kind of greeting or salute. “You’re the demon that got into that crazy firefight with the duergar warlock yesterday, right? Dhzori?”

  He pronou slightly differently, overemphasizing the first sonant.

  “Uh… Yes? What are the ‘Underworks’?” Jori asked, eg Bernt’s own thoughts.

  The goblin beamed at her as if he'd been hoping she would ask exactly that.

  “It’s what the dwarves are calling their new little crafting quarter! Many of the dwarven crafters are moving in, even ing directly from the crafter’s district. They just like it better underground, I guess. Dwarves, you know? I hope we get a troll or two to move here now. They’re not very sociable, but their shamans do some incredible things with stone.”

  Bernt hummed skeptically. “I don’t think any trolls are going to move into Halfbridge… they’re not protected by the treaty. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Adventurer’s Guild issued a quest to kill any that tried.”

  The goblin shrugged, uned. “Laws ge. You humans gave up on fighting us, and trolls have a lot to offer. At least as long as you’re respectful.”

  “I guess.” Bernt allowed. “But what do you mean about troll shamans? Do you mean they get spirits to help them work stone? And if that’s right, why wouldn’t a goblin be able to do that?”

  Nirlig shrugged. “Goblins are forest people, so we speak to forest spirits. The trolls are oh the mountains, so their shamans speak to the mountain spirits. I ’t hear whatever spirits wander around iunnels here, or up iy. It should work here, though, with so many of us. We’ll o develop the enviro for a little while before we get any of ours to e down.

  What? Bernt did a double take. “You’re a shaman?” He looked like any oblin. Then again, so did Grixit. Now that he sidered it, he’d always just assumed that shamans would wear some kind of distinctive clothing, like priests es. But if they were also crafters and enters and the like, he supposed that might not be how it worked at all.

  “Me? No.” Nirlig ughed. “I wouldn’t join the guard if I had that kind of influence. Besides, figuring out proper rituals and stuff to get their help is way too hard. I just chat with them sometimes. Kind of weird that humans don’t really ever seem to. They don’t bite or anything. Usually. As long as you’re polite.”

  Bernt looked over at Jori. She was barely paying attention, skipping and spreading her wings to slow her dest as they walked when there was enough space to do so.

  “Uh… I didn’t know we could. I don’t think most people do.”

  “It’s not a secret.” Nirlig ughed. “They just don’t care. You don’t have any shamans, and we’re just savages who live in holes in the ground out in the forest, right?”

  The goblin said the words lightly, like a joke, but Bernt heard the bitter uo was too close to the truth to be funny.

  “I don’t know.” Bernt said, matg the goblin’s tone. “I found out retly that you guys use spirits to ent armor and such. I’d love to know more about that. I mean, who wouldn’t?”

  Nirlig gri him. “I guess you met Grixit? That guy’s a genius. I mean, almost any shaman get items infused, sure, but he get you practically anything.”

  “Uh. I thought you just get a spirit to do it…”

  “Sure. Just. It sounds simple enough, I guess, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. The really tricky thing with infusing stuff is unig what you want to an incorporeal being whose entire existence is a refle of some kind of natural phenomenon. And which is immortal – at least in the ventional se take a shaman years to finally get a spirit to grasp what they actually want, and they have to make sure to be patient and polite about it, too. And it’s not like they all agree on what's polite and what isn’t. I guess you could think of it like expining color to a blind god and then asking them to make you something mauve.”

  Bernt’s estimation of Grixit went up a notch. “So, he’s like a spirit-whisperer?”

  Nirlig rolled his eyes. “What do you think a regur shaman is? No, Grixit’s a genius because he bsp;uand them better than anyone else. If you grasp how they think, you work out how to unicate with them for all kinds of purposes, and how to trade for things.” The goblin gave him a slightly patronizing gnce. “Well, you ’t unicate with them, but the rest of us would be able to – goblins, I mean.”

  Bernt sidered that for a moment. Sure, he had no talents in that dire, but that wasn’t true of everyone. But he didn’t mention what he’d learned about bards – that some humans clearly could unicate with spirits, and that they did so successfully enough to create their own ented – or “iools. He didn’t really know how all that worked and besides, it wasn’t his secret to tell. Bbbing to anyone about guild secrets was never a good idea.

  He sidered asking about it further, but they emerged into the Uy Market which was already ing to life with stalls from goblins, gnomes, dwarves and humans looking to capitalize oraffic that streamed from the new neighborhoods through the market and up into the city, where most of them still worked – for now.

  “You know. It’s fine.” Bernt said, casting a torch spell over one raised hand. “We don’t have shamans, but goblins don’t really have mages. We’re all here now – think of what we do together!”

  Nirlig’s seemingly inexhaustible smile widened.