by Deck Davis
“Not me. I’m a vegetarian. I won’t even eat lamb, let alone hunt one.”
“And as you can see, I am not suited for hunting.”
They both looked at Joshua now. He shook his head. “I don’t have a hunting bone in me. My father’s an accountant, for God’s sake. My classes are horserider, zoologist and negotiator. What makes you think I can hunt?”
“You could learn,” said Benjen. “You still have your primary and two secondary class slots free.”
“Right…so you won’t hunt because of your morals, but it’s fine for me to do it?”
“Correct,” said Benjen, and he flashed his wide grin that always made Joshua think kindly of him, even when he was being an arse. He’d always been that way; it was rare that anyone back home could ever be mad with Benjen.
“I didn’t want to use a sheep as bait for her,” said Joshua, “So I’m not too happy about feeding them to her, either.”
“It’s quite natural in the wild,” said Kordrude. “You mentioned you have the zoologist class. Surely you understand that in nature, this is perfectly fine? It is the way of the world; one beast eats another.”
Damn it, the crowsie was right. Sure, Joshua’s zoology study had been restricted to the vermin around their old village, but he knew perfectly well that when it came to hunting and eating, it wasn’t a moral question for animals. Without it, many species would die.
Still, he hadn’t travelled out here to become a dragon feeder. He couldn’t spend all his time out in the wild, prowling up to sheep and trying to shoot them with a bow and arrow.
“Look, if she needs to eat meat to keep her whelps healthy, I understand. We’ll have to buy meat, or something. We have enough work as it is trying to fix this place up, and we haven’t even been inside yet!”
“That’ll cost a fortune,” said Benjen. “Butchers always charge an arm and a leg. That wasn’t meant to be a joke, by the way.”
“And it wasn’t taken as anything like one,” said Kordrude, with a smile.
“Will she eat vegetables?” said Benjen. “We said we were going to start growing them so we can feed the heroes when they join up.”
“No. No way. You’re not converting a dragon into a carrot eater,” said Joshua.
“A plant-based diet wouldn’t sustain her well enough in pregnancy, anyway,” said Kordrude.
“Then we have a problem, because Benny’s right; we can’t afford to buy meat either. And if I’m wasting all my time sneaking up on cattle, then I might as well have stayed home and learned the hunter class. We just need a way to feed her. Buying the meat is the best way, but the outlay in gold is too much.”
Faron had been watching them the whole time. As much as Joshua knew their human speech pained her, she had listened. Now, it seemed, she had something to say.
In a series of long hisses and guttural growls, she relayed her thoughts to Kordrude.
“She has a solution.”
“Did she call us ‘puny’ again while she told you this solution?” asked Benjen.
“Yes. And much worse…though it isn’t the time to get into that.”
“What’s she suggesting?” asked Joshua.
“Quite an offer, actually. She must like you both, despite her choice of adjectives. Faron will permit you to collect her dragon nails when she chews them off. She will also allow you to collect her scales when she sheds them to grow fresh ones in place.”
That got Joshua’s attention. He didn’t need to have studied dragons to know that dragon nails, and especially scales, were a commodity.
This wasn’t just a good offer; it was fantastic. It would pay for Faron’s food and much, much more besides.
He pictured it now; buying a wooden cart and then having Roebuck and Firemane to pull it into town, while the merchants of Ardglass greedily eyed the dragon treasure in the back. He’d have levelled negotiator by then, and he’d drive up the price of them.
Then, with more gold in their guild coffers and with the guildhouse fixed up, they’d be able to offer salaries to heroes. They’d be able to go to tourneys and mage academies and hero colleges and finally open their guild for businesses.
He couldn’t wait a second longer. They had to get the guildhouse ready.
“Tell her she’s got a deal,” he said.
The guildhouse was calling to him now. In fact, it was actually the sound of the wind blowing through a section of the wall on the extension on the far left, but to Joshua it was like a ghostly voice.
It was a sound of the guild and of the people who’d dwelled in it before him, those heroes of old who for one reason or another had been forced to abandon it. The wind voice urged him to stop talking about dragons and scales and sheep and to finally explore the building he had dreamed about for so long.
But he couldn’t yet. Damn it, he couldn’t.
“There’s one more problem,” he said.
“I don’t think those three bozos will be back for a while,” said Benjen.
“Not them. Gobber. What are we supposed to do with him?”
“Ardglass is a large town,” said Kordrude, “It is under the rule of the three kings. As such, the treaty of peace decrees that there be a public office with provisions to take care of orphaned children of any race. Again, I’m sorry I couldn’t help more back in my own office.”
“It wasn’t your fault. I guess I’ll take Gobber into Ardglass in the morning; I don’t want to waste my afternoon making the trip there.”
Benjen rubbed his beard. “You know what? I’ll miss the little fella. Sounds strange, doesn’t it? I’ll really miss the little goblin.”
“Gods, you’re really getting broody, aren’t you?”
“Ah, maybe it’s being away from home. I know how desperate we were to leave, and I love it that we made it here, but I’m a little homesick.”
Bless you and your all-too-innocent honesty, thought Joshua. Benjen had a way of blurting out his feelings, and he didn’t care who heard him or what they thought.
It was a quality that you didn’t see in most people. Joshua was no hypocrite about that; he sometimes bottled up his feelings too much. Now, though, it was time to let one out, just to make his friend feel better.
“I am a little, too. A tiny bit. Not for the village itself, not working for my father or anything like that. More the smells and stuff. Weird things. But, hey, that’s to be expected, isn’t it? I guess even heroes get homesick when they set out on long quests.”
“True. Heruth the Silver Sword cried in the caves of Islillith. He missed his sister. There’s nothing wrong with missing the village a tiny bit, I suppose.”
“We did live there all our lives, after all, and we’re only human.”
“And crowsie,” said Kordrude. “I miss my friend Janda, and it’s only been a few days. Feeling anything - homesick, sad, angry - only means that you have a heart. And although you used the phrase ‘only human’, as if it is just humans that can feel such things, you’re not far off the mark. The cure for any such malady is hard work.”
“Then we better get to it,” said Joshua.
“I would suggest,” said Kordrude, “That I take Gobber to town, however. Bureaucrats can be testy at the best of times, and some of the worse ones like to abuse their power to make themselves feel better. Trust me on that. I’ll take him, and I’ll deal with them one bureaucrat to another.”
Benjen nodded, though his forehead was creased. Joshua put his arm around him. “Cheer up, you big lug. Ardglass isn’t far away. You can go see him every day, if that’s what you want.”
“Right.”
Now, Joshua looked at Kordrude, and he felt a warmth of gratitude toward the old crowsie. “Kordrude, I’m glad to have you with us,” he said. “What with Faron and Gobber and those three fraudsters…we’d be in a mess if you weren’t here.”
“It’s just good to be out in the air, out of my office. There’s something about the air here, if one ignores the stench of the rotting guildhouse wood. As
long as you’re happy for me to spend my holiday here, I’ll serve as best I can.”
Benjen slapped him on the back. “Good, you old bird. What do you say we have a few wines tonight and you can tell me more about that theatre troupe of yours?”
For some reason Kordrude looked a little nervous, but he nodded. “It would be a pleasure.”
Joshua faced the guildhouse doors and he rubbed his hands together. His hangover was gone now, and the fact he’d only had a few hours’ sleep didn’t matter; he felt more alive than ever. “Okay. Let’s see what sorry state they left it in.”
Chapter Twelve
Stepping into the guildhouse properly was like stepping into a dream. A dream that smelled of age and damp and mildew, that was dark and had cobwebs strewn over all of the windows, but a dream nonetheless.
Now that it was here, Joshua paused a little. He stood in the hallway of the guildhouse entrance, almost as if he didn’t want to take another step. Like if he walked any further it would all shatter; the floorboards would crack as if a giant dirt-wyrm was burrowing through them, and the walls would cave in and the roof would collapse.
So, he let his mind settle, and thought about all of his hopes and his dreams, everything that had led him here to this moment. Working every hour possible in his apprenticeship and at the tavern so he could save up every last coin. All the drunken chats he and Benjen had where they batted their ideas back and forth.
All of it had led to this, and although he felt nervous, it was nice just to breath in the musty air. The air belonged to him and Benjen, and he found himself loving the smell of ancient dust.
Benjen, however, tore through the hallway like a dog let out of its cage, turning his head this way and that as if every centimeter of the guildhouse held hidden treasures.
“After you,” said Kordrude, behind Joshua. “The guildmaster gets to go first.”
Guildmaster. What a sweet word.
But he wasn’t a guildmaster yet, was he? Right now, he was just the owner of an old building. To truly become the guildmaster, he’d have to earn the class. That was what he’d saved his primary class for, and he and Benjen had always agreed on that.
The problem was that Joshua didn’t know the requirements to earn the guildmaster class. Certain classes, the rarer ones, couldn’t just be picked up randomly through doing things. You had to know precisely which skills to become competent in, in order to unlock the class.
Take forager. It was a simple class that anyone could earn. To become a level 1 forager, you had to:
- Pick 25 wild berries, roots, or fungi
That was it. Of course, more advanced foragers needed to study the various benefits and toxins of the things they picked from the ground, and they needed to learn which herbs grew in which areas and in which weather conditions.
The really advanced foragers, the level 5 masters, had to ingest trace amounts of every herb and berry and fungi in Fortuna, including the poisonous ones with nasty effects. There wasn’t a single master forager who hadn’t, at some point, spent a week on the latrine wishing he’d never gone down that class path.
With mastery of foraging came the option for more sophistication; a forager could choose to then advance to the poisoner class if he had a hint of darkness in him. Or maybe he would learn the chef class and combine his knowledge of rare ingredients with a passion for cooking them.
Every class, no matter how simple it started, spun a web of complexity the more you studied it.
“Kordrude,” said Joshua. “You didn’t happen to get involved in issuing class licenses back in Dyrewood, did you?” he said.
The old crowsie shook his head. “There’s not many classes that need one. Only the nasty kinds. We once had someone request a license to learn the necromancy class, but I wasn’t working at the time. I had red-beak and could hardly even eat, as I recall. Why do you ask?”
“Before we set out, we tried finding the class requirements for guildmaster, but nobody in the village knew. I thought you might have an idea.”
“Sorry, lad.”
“Don’t worry about it; I’m sure they’ll have class reference books in the library in Ardglass.”
That was the problem. While it was a straight-forward task to pick up a few mushrooms and berries and gain forager completely by accident, some classes required such specific sets of skills that it’d be a one-in-a-million chance to blunder into them.
Joshua had a vague idea about the guildmaster class; he’d need organizational skills, and he’d need a skill related to management of people. Perhaps knowledge of local geography and creatures, too.
That was part of the reason he’d taken zoologist; he’d be sending heroes out on quests, and most quests involved the removal of hostile wildlife of some sort, whether it was from a dungeon, a town, or maybe a castle. Zoologist, when he advanced to level 2 and 3, would give him better knowledge of what creatures could and couldn’t do, and he’d be able to send the right hero for the right job.
Joshua crossed through the guildhouse hallway and after just a few paces he joined Benjen. Kordrude shuffled behind him, until the three of them were standing at the foot of a wide staircase with stone steps.
The steps themselves were made from a dark kind of stone, uninviting and cold and chipped. A heroes’ guild wasn’t a place for comfort, it seemed.
So, they had the stairs leading to the second floor where, from the floor plan the estate agent had given them, Joshua knew there would be eight rooms. That left six here on the ground floor, as well as an attic, a basement, and the stables.
“First up,” he said, “We better go from room to room and assess the damage. Look for anything structural, because those are the holes we’ve gotta plug. We’re getting to the end of summer now, and like Kordrude said, it’s gonna get cold. While we’re checking the rooms, we may as well inventory anything useful the old owners left behind. We’ll pile it in the grand hall, which if I remember the plan correctly, is just through there,” he said, pointing at a stone archway to his right, with a long room behind it.
“We’re not fixing things up as we go?” said Benjen.
“It sounds stupid since I’ve looked at the floor plan a million times, but I didn’t expect it to be this big. It’s one thing looking at a plan but it’s another thing entirely standing here, and I’m starting to realize just how much work there is. We aren’t going to have enough gold to buy materials to fix up every room, at least not right away. So, we’ll need to prioritize.”
“Heroes need food and beds,” said Benjen. “If they’ve got that, they’re happy. We just need to sort the dorm room and the kitchen.”
“A rusty hero loses his skills,” said Kordrude. “They need a place to train, too. Archery targets, straw dummies, mana shields for mages to fling spells at.”
“You know a lot about it.”
“My brother fought in tourneys, and my father took me there hoping it would rub off on me, too. I used to watch him train.”
“You never wanted to fight?” asked Benjen.
“Too much risk for too little reward.”
“Ah, so it’s a matter of not wanting to get hurt.”
“Not everyone can be a hero,” said Kordrude. “Now, perhaps if I was built like you, Benjen…”
Benjen shrugged. “I learned level 2 swordsman, but I don’t really want to go any further.”
“Why not?”
“Benjen has a new-found respect for life,” said Joshua. “For all life…voles, krolls, anything you can think of.”
“Perhaps he should have been the zoologist,” said Kordrude.
Benjen nodded. “Funny how things turn out.”
“We’ll decide exactly what to prioritize later,” said Joshua. “Right now, I just want to know how much work we have to do before we can start recruiting heroes. Or at least I think I want to know. Maybe when you guys report back and tell me the house is one storm away from total collapse, I won’t be as happy. Let’s split up. Benjen, you take th
e west wing. There’s the armory, the kitchen, and the basement. Kordrude, do you mind taking the east? There’s the grand hall, which you can see through that arch, and then a few storerooms.”
“You’re taking upstairs?” asked Benjen.
“It’s just a few dorm rooms up there, and some of the guild officials’ bedrooms. They’re gonna be mostly empty, but you never know what we’ll find. Right now, anything at all is useful; firewood, old books, any leftover blades we can sharpen. What we can’t fix up and use, we’ll trade in town.”
“Got it,” said Benjen.
Kordrude glanced at them both now. There was a strange look in his bird eyes, something about the way his forehead feathers stuck out. He looked a little mischievous.
“How about we have a little wager?” he said.
“On what?” asked Benjen.
“Whoever collects the best haul of leftover guild tat, wins.”
“And what are we wagering?”
“Whoever loses,” said Joshua, “has to go down the well and work out why it’s dry or blocked.”
Kordrude scratched his beak. “I was thinking more of a few bronze coins, but…”
“A wager it is,” said Benjen. “Let’s go.”
With that, Benjen darted off toward the west wing, where the armory awaited. Joshua doubted that the old owners and whatever looters had breezed through the abandoned guildhouse would have left much, but if they did, Benjen had an advantage in their wager. Old weapons could be sold to a blacksmith to melt down.
“I think you’ll regret the wager, you know. The well is pretty tight from the looks of it. You’re not claustrophobic, are you?” Joshua said to Kordrude.
“What? No. The opposite, in fact. Growing up, I always hated wide, open spaces. Perhaps because my brother used to buzz up all around me and show off his larger wings. I preferred small spaces where he couldn’t fly.”
“Let’s hope you lose the wager then, because you’ll love it in the well. We’ll meet here again when we’ve checked all the rooms.”
Joshua looked at the stone steps as he walked up them. They were all scuffed and worn in the middle from where heroes had walked up and down them over the years.
