A Home Like Ours by Fiona Lowe (feel good books .txt) 📕

a green robe, but it’s cut from a finer material than anyone I have seen yet.

According to Leeha, this is the contract office for mages only, run by the Mages’ Society. She said any job that needed to be done by a mage was required to go through this man. He looks and sounds like a pompous, righteous asshole.

“Well,” I tell him patiently. “Do you pay me before or after the job is done?”

He looks at me shrewdly, but Leeha said that the one thing the Mages’ Society does not accept is cheaters, stealers, and thieves. If the man says he will pay me, he will pay me. No arguments asked.

When I asked if Leeha could get a job also since she is a Water mage, she shook her head and said no, since she isn’t human.

“All right, I might have a job for you,” he finally says with a sigh. “Though I doubt you will succeed since we have had over fifteen mages try it in the last month. Everything from Fire mages to Earth mages. But the city council is starting to get on my ass about it. The pay, if you can do it, is now at 25 gold,” he tells me.

I look at him in surprise. 25 gold? What the hell kind of job is this? I mean, I had been hoping only to be here ‘til the late afternoon, at which point Leeha and I had been expecting to head out after getting some supplies. I try not to look at Leeha, who is standing behind me with her head bowed. She had said to take any job that paid above ten gold. Well, this was above that. Way above that.

Nodding, I say, “I can try.”

“Good,” he says. “Raoul!” he shouts. Out of the back room, through a curtain, comes a young boy of about ten or eleven years of age. He is wearing a white robe, with a stripe of green across his chest.

“Yes, Master Filka?” the boy says, bowing to him.

“Take this mage to the sewer blockage. Explain to him what needs to be done, verify that he was unsuccessful, and return.” He turns back to me, “As you can imagine, we can’t be wasting our day for this, so you have until noon to repair it before it’s considered a failure.”

“Why noon?” I ask him, perplexed.

“What? Because you will have run out of power by then,” he says with a grunt.

“Right,” I tell him, nodding.

Ah, I forgot that my power pool is larger than what most have. So it makes sense that if someone who is a normal mage tried to use their magic to remove whatever this blockage is, they would run out quickly.

The boy Raoul turns to me and bows. “If you will follow me, Master?” he says, asking for my name.

“Alex,” I tell him.

“If you will follow me, Master Alex, I will bring you to where the blockage that Master Filka mentioned is.”

Nodding, I follow the boy as he heads out the front door of the building, where there is a line of other mages waiting to enter. When we first got to the building, there were about six other mages in line, all in different colored robes, and even two who wore normal clothing but had a colored cloth tied on their sleeve, which I guess was meant to denote their Elemental. Now as we exit, the line is longer, with well over fifteen mages waiting.

The boy heads down the road to the left, and I follow him for a good five minutes without saying much, with Leeha following behind me quietly. I look back at her, and she looks up and nods.

I turn back around and look at the boy and ask him, “So, how hard is this job?”

He turns around, walking backwards, and says, “Pretty hard. The last mage who tried it was one of our more powerful ones from the local Society’s office. He figured it would be easy money, but he failed. It was kind of embarrassing, really. He had bragged that he would get it done in minutes. He ended up spending hours trying and tapped himself out,” he finishes with a grin.

“So the chances of getting it done are slim,” I tell him.

Nodding, the boy slows down and begins to walk next to me, to make it easier to talk. “Pretty well, Master Alex. I mean, the thing is, Master Filka doesn’t want to call in someone from the bigger cities, like Balla or Popar, but he might need to. The only thing is it means the cost to fix it will go up. How much is Master Filka paying you? 20 gold?”

“No, he said this job was 25 gold,” I tell him with a raised eyebrow.

“Ah,” he says with a grin, “Well, if he has to call someone from the bigger cities, the cost would be over 100 gold, and he would look bad in the eyes of the Mages’ Society for not being able to do it himself.”

“Good to know,” I tell him. So there are bigger cities than this place, and they have the more powerful mages?

“And here we are,” he says, heading onto a bridge sitting over a canal of water, and stopping in the middle, next to a railing. As we were walking, I had started smelling shit and other things, the stench getting worse the further we went, and now I know the reason. The canal is basically a sewage canal.

I walk over and stand next to Raoul, who points off to the canal wall’s left side, where I now notice a sort of opening in the wall, with a metal grate. In front of the grate is a mound of…I don’t know what.

“So, that is the blockage. We haven’t been able to remove it to let the water flow, so because of that, within a month the water will overflow over the canal walls, and onto the streets. That’s your job. Remove it and clear