Part 1 of the Homegrown Help series

UG hadn’t gone to Revendreth looking for a servant. He’d gone looking for an extra pair of hands, which was a different thing until Temel explained it wasn’t.

Temel ran the Ember Court the way a man runs toward a burning building he’s personally responsible for having set alight — at full speed, shouting instructions nobody had time to follow, apparently under the impression that volume alone could hold a party together. He was, UG had been mildly startled to learn, a stone fiend himself, the same stock as the two currently squabbling with spiders back at Founder’s Point, which made his particular flavour of chaos feel almost like a family trait UG was seeing from the other side for once.

“Every good herald needs an assistant,” Temel told him, mid-stride, adjusting a candle arrangement that did not visibly need adjusting. “Which is why I have you. But every good herald’s assistant also needs an assistant. I’ve cleared it with the Prince. Go and see Rendle. Dredgewood. He’ll sort you out.”

UG had not asked for any of this, and found himself agreeing to it anyway, on the general principle that a man offered free labour rarely benefited from asking too many follow-up questions.

Rendle turned out to be a small, extremely confident dredger in sunglasses he had no practical need for, holding court over a stretch of muck pools with the air of someone who had once been poor and intended everybody to know exactly how far he’d come since. They called him the Mistermind. UG didn’t ask why. He suspected the answer would take longer than he had patience for.

“Makin’ dredgers ain’t pretty work,” Rendle said, by way of greeting, and set about proving it. The muck came up out of the pool in a slow, wet shape that hadn’t decided what it was yet, and Rendle worked it with the unbothered efficiency of a man who had done this more times than he’d ever admit to counting. UG got to choose the colour. He picked without thinking about it much, the same way he named things — quickly, and with more confidence than the decision strictly deserved.

The shape held. It stood. It looked, for a long moment, unsure what it had been made for at all, which UG found he understood better than he expected to.

Then came the part Rendle called Making a Smarter Dredger, which involved considerably more paperwork than UG had been led to believe muck was capable of generating, a trip to a Broker at the Night Market, and an item called Kaja’Extreme that UG did not ask too closely about the manufacture of. Whatever went into it, it worked. The little dredger’s eyes sharpened. It looked at UG properly for the first time, took in the whole of him — gnome, warlock, a man who had never finished a project without complicating it first — and flinched.

Not from fear exactly. From the sheer weight of expectation, UG thought, watching it happen. The look of something small realising all at once how much bigger the job in front of it was than the maker had let on.

“Flinch,” UG said, before he’d decided to say anything at all, and the name settled onto the little thing like it had always belonged there.

It hasn’t stopped flinching since. UG has come to find this less concerning than he probably should.

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More in the Homegrown Help series

Next: II. A Colour of His Own →