Chapter 9: Running from The lobotomy

Kaz did not pause.

Pausing was for amateurs. Pausing was for people who needed to think about what came next,

who hesitated at the edge of their own grand ideas.

Kaz Swindleton, ten years old and comprised of pure audacity, did not need to think.

“Pip!” he called, turning sharply on his heel like he’d rehearsed it.

(He had, but only in his head, which is where the best rehearsals take place.)

Pip blinked up at him, still wide-eyed from the speech.

He looked like a question mark in trousers.

Kaz leaned down, voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper that was only slightly louder than his usual bellow.

“I need you to spread the word. Tell the others, the Cobble Tax is real. Every foot, every step, one button or a carrot.

And don’t be shy about it, eh? People only believe a whisper if you shout it loud enough.”

Pip looked at him like he’d just been handed the keys to the city.

“All of ‘em?”

“All of ‘em,” Kaz confirmed, clapping him on the shoulder.

“Start with the Sweep Boys down by the mill, then swing by the Weeping Maid to catch the Afternoon Criers.

Oh, and the apple cart twins. If they believe it, half the market will be chanting it by sundown.”

He paused, smile widening.

“I’m counting on you, Pip.”

Pip stood a little straighter.

“I, I won’t let you down!”

Kaz nodded with the gravitas of a monarch knighting his first squire.

“I know you won’t. Now go. Quick as you like.”

And Pip went.

He ran like a boy with his soul on fire, legs pumping with more enthusiasm than coordination, but he didn’t stumble.

His breath came in short bursts, fogging up the morning air.

He took the alleys the way only someone who was raised in their shadows could, slipping through cracks that didn’t seem to exist until he was already gone.

If Ferenwyld was a grand orchestra, then the Brindlward was the cymbal crash that nobody expected.

It stretched along the city's eastern veins, a tangle of bridges, canals, and half-sunken streets that had the decency to look apologetic about it.

The waterways crisscrossed like the scribbles of a distracted god, murky and stubborn, carrying everything from merchant ships to whispers that shouldn’t be spoken out loud.

The buildings leaned together like old friends conspiring in the rain, their rooftops so close you could tightrope from one end to the other,

if you were nimble, desperate, or just particularly bad at decision-making.

Stone facades dripped with moss and mana residue, the kind of glow that suggested someone had tried a spell and decided halfway through that they’d rather not.

Beneath the crooked eaves and faded banners lay the Flea Market.

It was the kind of place that insisted on existing despite all logical arguments to the contrary.

Stalls pressed shoulder to shoulder, selling everything from slightly cursed lockets to probably-edible pastries.

The vendors yelled in a dozen dialects, haggling with the ferocity of poets who had never been told 'no.'

There were trinkets that whispered, books that screamed, and one perpetually shivering man who claimed to sell bottled lightning, though it mostly looked like aggressive vinegar.

The Brindlward was also the safest place in the city to use magic, provided you didn’t mind it going wrong in spectacular fashion.

Mages who tried flashy spells found their fireballs turning to snowstorms, or their levitation charms hurling them face-first into the cobblestones.

The waterways acted as natural conduits for mana, fluctuating with every tide and every spell cast from the distant towers of the ports.

Wizards called it "mana turbulence." Locals called it "bloody stupid," and most didn’t attempt anything fancier than a light spell unless they were drunk or dared.

The Brindlward's law enforcement, such as it was, took the form of guards and mages who only bothered with simple spells.

They wore chainmail that clinked with the sighs of failed apprenticeships, wielding charms that lit up like cheap carnival tricks.

Flashier magic was left at the gates;Unless you happened to be a sorcerer of course though that was neither here nor there

For this reason, most disputes in Brindlward were settled the old-fashioned way, with fists, knives, and the occasional enchanted brick.

But for all its grime and grit, the Brindlward thrived.

Children wove through the alleys like practiced thieves, which, to be fair, most of them were.

They pilfered purses from merchant ships and vanished into the flea market before the first shouts of alarm had even left the docks.

Gangs with names like the Mud Larks, the Sweeper Boys, and the laughably optimistic King's Own skittered through the canals, whispering of heists and hideaways nestled within the hollowed bones of derelict barges and the festering ribs of rotting leviathans.

Rivals every day but Sunday, because Sunday was poker and story night at the orphanage, and not even the sharpest knife or the bitterest grudge would dare interrupt a good time.

Kaz Swindleton made certain of it, by royal decree of the gutter prince himself, only buttons could be bet.

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Coins brought trouble. Buttons brought drama.

And drama, as everyone knew, was sacred.

Yet, beneath the pickpockets and crooked deals, there was an honor among the chaos.

A code, unspoken and unbreakable, that even the roughest hands would obey.

Children were off-limits to the real predators.

Food stolen for family was never punished.

And the bridges, the lifeblood of the Brindlward, were always free to cross.

Even thieves had to get home.

Some called it a slum.

Some called it a nest of rats.

But to those who lived there, it was something else.

It was home.

Pip ran through that home with the speed and grace of a rabid squirrel, which is to say: remarkably fast, almost entirely by accident, and accompanied by the sort of frantic energy that suggested he might explode at any moment.

His legs pinwheeled with more enthusiasm than precision, but the streets of Brindlward bent for him, opened up for him.

Pip was Brindlward’s child, and the cobblestones knew better than to trip him.

Every few steps, his pace would flicker oddly.

One second, he was a blur, tearing through alleys like the city itself was spitting him out;

the next, he’d stumble forward as if the very notion of speed had been confiscated mid-stride.

It was the magic, of course, an old spell whispered by a hedge witch who’d had one too many sips of honey wine.

“Wind on the heel, fleet on the toe, let me be faster than anyone knows,” she’d chanted before passing out into a pile of turnips.

Pip had learned it phonetically, which is why it only sometimes worked,

and sometimes really worked.

Today, it seemed, the spell was feeling charitable.

“COBBLE TAX! ONE BUTTON A FOOT! STRAIGHT FROM THE REGISTRY!” Pip bellowed as he careened down narrow bridges and hopped over puddles that had been there since before Ferenwyld even had a mayor.

Laundry flapped indignantly at his passing, strings of underclothes snapping in protest.

A fruit vendor nearly dropped her apples. “What in the hells are you on about, Pip?” she called after him.

Pip didn’t slow down. He skidded across a slick patch of moss, grabbed the edge of a leaning building to right himself, and kept going.

“Cobble Tax!” he shouted back. “New law! Every step, one button or a carrot! Kaz said so!”

“Since when does Kaz make laws?” she shouted after him.

“Since this morning!” he hollered, already halfway down the next bridge, which creaked beneath him with the kind of noise bridges make when they’ve accepted their fate.

The Brindlward market hummed with the news, whispers trailing in his wake like a spark dancing along a fuse.

Pip wound his way through the Flea Market, dodging vendors hawking slightly cursed jewelry and vials of Definitely Not Rat Oil.

A woman sold something called Pre-Owned Luck, bottled up in tiny glass jars that rattled ominously when you shook them.

The Sweep Boys by the soot stacks laughed so hard they nearly fell off their crates.

“You collectin’ them buttons, Pip?”

Pip grinned.

“I don’t make the laws, I just shout ‘em!”

A man selling clocks that only told you how late you were gave Pip a skeptical look.

“Cobble Tax? Is that one of Kaz’s, or are you just makin’ sport?”

“It’s real!” Pip insisted, voice cracking with righteous enthusiasm.

“Protectin’ the stones! They’re heroes, don’t you know?”

The man scratched his head, examining the cobbles under his feet like they’d just grown fangs. He squinted.

“They don’t look like heroes.”

Pip didn’t slow down.

“That’s the point! Unsung heroes!”

The Apple Cart Twins, who had never been caught but had been accused of everything from thievery to grand larceny of a pig, grinned as he skidded to a stop.

“Cobble Tax?” one of them said, the taller one with the scar that looked suspiciously like the letter M.

“One button a foot,” Pip nodded, hands on his knees as he caught his breath.

“Kaz said it’s the law.”

The shorter twin, who had a knack for pocket watches that didn't belong to him, leaned in conspiratorially.

“And who’s collectin’ it, then? The rats?”

Pip’s grin widened.

“Kaz Swindleton, by order of the city.”

The laughter that followed was loud enough to set a flock of pigeons scattering, but that was good.

Laughter spread faster than fear, and suspicion moved faster than sense.

They laughed, but they repeated it.

And the Brindlward market, being what it was, loved nothing more than a half-baked rumor served with a dash of absurdity.

It rippled through the canals. Bounced off stone walls, slipped into alehouses, and nipped at the heels of dock workers.

Sailors whispered it to each other as they unloaded crates of Possibly Not Cursed artifacts.

A shop keep muttered it under his breath as he overcharged a tourist for a map that only sometimes led where you wanted to go.

And it stuck.

Because things that weren’t quite lies and weren’t quite true were the Brindlward’s favorite flavor of fact.

Pip was already off again, legs still flickering between supernatural speed and the kind of sprint that suggested he was running away from something existential.

He moved with the sort of determination usually reserved for dogs chasing carriages, voice carrying over the murk and moss.

“ONE BUTTON A FOOT! STRAIGHT FROM THE REGISTRY!”

Behind him, the Sweep Boys were already arguing over who was going to be in charge of collections.

One of the mudlarks shouted after Pip, “I’ll pay two buttons if you can outrun The Nails!” and the others howled with laughter.

Pip turned the corner, narrowly avoiding a stack of crates labeled Handle With Regret, and kept going.

“Cobble Tax! Cobble Tax! It’s the law!”

And Brindlward, in its crooked, conspiratorial way, listened.

Because it was too ridiculous not to.

Because sometimes, madness was just the right flavor of truth.