"This is your ride?" Faith asked, as we ehe garage. inally, this room had been added onto our house as a home workshop, with a big ol' door that lifted up and out of the way to move big maes and bulky materials in here. But then Mom lost i iill-primitive mae tools of the day, and they just sat here, gathering dust and rust, before finally being stowed in a Bag of Holding- nobody wahem, due to being too old to be particurly useful without being old enough to be a genuine historical curiosity- so she could put her printing presses in here, and then she gave those away, leaving this room mostly empty for most of my life.

  When I started learning maing, Mom busted those old (as in, three turies old) mae tools out of ste for me in the hopes that I could use them, until, eventually, following the guidebook my mae shop teacher had given me, we melted them back down to cast iron and brass to make new mae tools that weren't hand-made by some poor half-rate journeyman with some out-of-square wooden forms and a lot of hand-filing.

  However, she did have a lot of unused metal stock from those days, and, well. She wasn't using any of it.

  (Yes, I did still steal the brass for Uncle Frederick's wheelchair bushings from school. Just because I'm from a family of means doesn't mean I don't have an aversion to spending money on things.)

  "Beautiful, isn't she?" I said, smirking a little as I ran my hand over the polished frame.

  Bicycles had been around for a while- a tury or so, depending on how you ted. And while the basic pedals--and-sprockets type were quite abundant, and used by plenty of people who o get around town a lot, there were also a lot of ented bicycles, which used magic to drive themselves forward, rather than the rider's own elbow grease- or knee grease, as the case may be.

  The trouble with ented bicycles was that they were either expensive as hell, because an entment that could propel the bicycle with its rider without external output was no small feat, or they were deeply impractical, because they instead used an entment that made the rider supply the magicka for motion, which was only possible for riders who were mages, but mages didn't want those either because they used that magicka! For spellcasting!

  Which brought me to my own ented bicycle- which I called a 'motorcycle,' after Uncle Frederick ed the term. Rather than a statitment to make a wheel spin, I'd instead created a piston-and-k assembly that turned bad-forth linear motion into smooth rotary motion, and on the piston, pced a modified version of an old dwarven entment for bsting hammers. The result was that the motor, as Uncle Frederick termed it, would keep spinning because the piston would throw itself downward with explosive force every time it reached the top of its stroke, and I could harhat motion with some sprockets and s- although I did still need a power crystal to store magicka. Getting this thing started required a pulse of magicka to get it moving, and because I o be able to stop it, too, I needed another entment to do that. It wasn't a fancy power crystal, really. Just a big ol' k of quartz that Mom had made out of a big bag of sand.

  "Did this even start as a bicycle?" Faith asked. "Or did you build it from scratch?"

  That was airely reasonable question. The typical bicycle simply wasn't all that big, and it typically had a raised seat-post to keep the rider sitting upright or even leaning forward on the bike. My bike, though, was bigger, longer, and more substantial- you couldn't see straight through the frame, because it simply wasn't hollow the way a bicycle was- all that room was ed by the motor and all the other vital pos.

  And, after some experimentation, I'd lowered the saddle, so I could sit lower to the ground, and lean back a little in the seat. Whiecessitated ging the angle of the handlebars, and therefore the front fork... Which all bio give me a ride that was uionably not a regur bicycle. It might have a skeleton of steel tubes like a regur bicycle, but after all the carefully-shaped panels I'd put over it to keep the gears from tearing up my legs...

  If any two-wheeled vehicle deserved the eel horse,' it was this one.

  "They lowballed me pretty hard with just a Novice Certificate in Maing," I said with a shrug. Anyhow! Talia, you'll be fine no matter what, but Faith... Would you rather ride in a sidecar, or be forced to hold onto my hips the whole time?"

  "I don't like you that much," Faith said dryly.

  "Side-car it is. Oh, and Talia's sitting in your p."

  "I don't like her that much either, although she is pretty ving..."

  Talia flexed her magid Faith watched in amazement as Talia shifted from an elf into a wolf, yellow eyes glinting in the harsh gre of my home mae shop.

  "How persuasive is she now?" I asked, as I grabbed the sidecar and wheeled it over.

  Our first stop was Magister Brown's office, and boy was he not happy to see me.

  "Him! Arrest him, this instant! I just know that thieving little jackrabbit stole my statue!" Magister Brown shouted as I approached.

  The Padins guarding his office simply looked at me, a well-dressed elf in a long coat, apanied by another Padin, and then turard Magister Brown with cold, unfeeling visors. Sometimes, there was somethiiful about the Padins and their insisten wearing full metal body armor at all times.

  "First and foremost, Magister, we've beehe question of ownership," I said. "That statue was already stolen property; if there's any dispute over ownership, it's between Napoleon and Frederick Iro, the surviving heirs of the man who issiohe statue to begin with, but they live in the same house, so that dispute doesn't matter. Sedly... Do you think I'm stupid enough to associate with Padins if I had stolen it?"

  "Additionally," the Bahird-grade Knight, leads a squadron of between two and five Squires or lower-rank Knights) on duty began, from behind his helmet, "we do require probable cause in order to arrest people. Your cim that this young elf stole the statue is not enough, especially not when he's already beeized by Page Jones, here. I assume you've got that wolf under trol, by the way?"

  "She's a shapeshifted druid," I said, reag down to pat Talia's head, and scratch behind her ears. "We figured that if we were going to sniff around the crime se, we should have someone sniff properly."

  The Ba grunted and nodded. "Smith, go ih 'em. Don't make a mess, alright?"

  Another Padin saluted, then opehe door to usher us inside.

  "Names?" the Padin- Smith, I suppose- asked.

  "Faith Jones, Page," Faith said, befesturing at me, then Talia. "Joseph Iro, deputized civilian wizard. Talia Jones, deputized civilian druid. No knowioween Faith and Talia, sir."

  "Got it," the Padin said, jotting all that down on their clipboard. "Please alert me and wait for the go-ahead before casting any spells or moving anything."

  I nodded wordlessly to show I aying attention, then patted Talia's shoulder. "Go ahead, girl. Start sniffin'."

  It should be hat, despite our fidealia and I had absolutely no fug idea what we were doing. Sure, I've read plenty of serialized adveories and dime novels, but there, the "iigations" mostly amouo a handful of abstruse logic puzzles structed around whatever stupid trivia the author had mao pick up, which itself only served to break up the monotony of kig ass and taking names, and then going to find the guy to beat up and interrogate.

  That felt like the sort of thing that'd only really make sense in texts where you could, in fact, reasonably expect a guy to know a guy who knows a guy who knows who did the thing. Given that we were reasonably fident the Thieves' Guild was involved in this, however, we actually were in one of those texts. The Thieves' Guild was a hotbed anized crime, after all, and everyone was involved in someone's business. So long as we only seemed like we were gonna ruin someone else's day, I'm sure they'd happily tell us who to bother in exge for not getting their shit ruined.

  "Have you two dohis before?" Faith asked, as Talia put her o the floor, sniffing around.

  "Oh, absolutely not," I said. "I was, in fact, just thinking about how I don't know what I'm doing, and my only knowledge of iigation is from dime novels. Which... Squire Smith, do iigations usually involve beating up a Thieves' Guild member in a back alley until he tells you the name of his fence?"

  "Torture and intimidation are unreliable sources of information," Squire Smith said, shaking his head. "Our interrogations take a long time, so we establish a rapport, and vineohat they do in fact want us to have all the information we o clude our iigation. They walk us through it in boot camp, but it's not a major focus."

  "Huh, how about that," I said, gng at Faith, who resolutely ignored me.

  "I don't know what Casteln Tenpenny is thinking," Smith tinued, also fag Faith. "But holy, I do not think she's doing you a kindness here, Page."

  "I don't know how useful a hound is going to be, here," Faith said, ign the Squire as well. "There've been a lot of people ing in and out of this office, and not all of them are here for Talia to rule them out. We're gon a lot of false leads, here, and whatever the true lead is... well, we're not the only people who've had the thought of using dogs to track thieves. Throwing off a hound is a pretty fual skill ihieves' Guild."

  Talia reared ba her haunches, before shifting bato an elf, leaving her squatting there on the floor, deliberation written all over her face.

  "See?" Faith said, uo see Talia's face from where she was standing. "Talia's given up, too."

  "The guy who did this," Talia began, "was a half-elf with a sick family member."