The Balance of Risk | Directives of the Tower II

  Commander Nottham had done everything in his power to prepare for this journey. He had calibrated and checked every instrument and performance log, then double-checked and triple-checked. He had drilled the crew as much in the last few days as his support staff would allow, up to the point that any more would begin to harm their efficiency. He knew all of this, yet his hands had remained clenched to the armrests of the captain's chair ever since they had set off.

  Elation had been his initial response when the hire request, bearing the encryption markers of Anvillon's ruling council, had come in. He had set the card in his personal decrypter and, as the machine worked to extract the details from the etched pattern, allowed himself to imagine his fortune skyrocketing - a pilot in demand from the leaders of every nation, with an armada of ships at his call, and maybe even a fledgling empire bearing his name in some distant territory. To not just be noticed but actively sought after by a member of the council was surely a sign that his name, and talk of his clan's services, had begun to reach important ears.
  It was only when looking over the specifics, that had now been printed in a readable form, that the sense of dread had first begun to manifest. Rather than a named destination, the set of distances and bearings described a route directly into the north-eastern region known as the Splintermaze, which then continued to a point well beyond mapped territory. He was already well aware of what this could entail, for the year that Nottham's father had retired, and placed him in control of the fleet, he had been made to rehearse a pilots' rhyme passed down by generation until he could recite every line from memory:

Wander not unbeaten paths, lest bandits find their work,

Venture not around the dens, where beasts and monsters lurk,

But most of all avoid the dark, regardless of the perk,

For in its gloomy, deepest depths, true madness rules the murk.

  Disregarding any of these warnings could result in serious danger not just for him as commander, but for the existance of the fleet as a whole. Nottham's great-grandfather had started their shipping business with the purchase of an old, disarmed warship - part of a lot being sold off to private collectors when the walls of Anvillon had been raised and there was no longer a need to maintain a defensive fleet of that scale. In his father's time as commander, their strength had grown from the singular ship to a trio in order to keep up with requests for increasingly larger shipments. Were Nottham to take a risk resulting in damage to or the loss of a vessel, it would compromise a number of their biggest long-term contracts as a cargo-clan, triggering a costly series of 'failure to deliver' clauses and sending them into a downward spiral.
  On the other hand, refusing a request from the ruling council was not without its own risks. The printed message did not bear any names or markings identifying an individual clan, which meant that Nottham could be dealing with a variety of different individuals along with their respective temperaments. Some, from what he had heard, would not be bothered by a rejection and tended to make their inquiries in bulk before narrowing down to the best candidate. However, certain others were well known for their spite and tyranny, and would not be denied without consequence. More than one clan had been made an example to prove this point, and Nottham certainly had no interest in making his own family the next.

  And so in the end he had accepted, stressing the considerable expenses that the endeavour would require, in the hopes that the additional costs might push one of their rivals forwards. Yet the mystery contact remained unswayed (seemingly unbothered by what Nottham would consider an exorbitant sum under any other circumstances) and, early in the morning of the appointed day, the convoy had duly arrived at the upper levels of the Tower of Anvillon.