Seeker of Secrets

by Deck Davis

  Joshua couldn’t believe what he’d read. He was pleased, in a small way, but also worried.

  “He says that he heard that we were opening the heroes’ guild. As luck would have it…”

  The man grumbled.

  “Well, the opposite of luck. As misfortune would have it, a bunch of chaos-thrips have infested his field. His carrot crop is almost ready to harvest, and the thrips are tearing through it. He tried to drive them away himself, and you can see the result of that.”

  “He wants us to clear his field,” said Benjen.

  Joshua leaned on the table. A wave of empathy hit him for this poor man. He was just a farmer, and everyone in Fortuna knew how tough farmers had it. They spent months cultivating their fields, and they often lived harvest to harvest, barely growing enough produce to support their families. Their whole livelihoods were balanced on a knife edge, and one poor spell of weather, or one infestation of chaos-thrips, could plummet them into poverty.

  “We have to help him,” said Benjen.

  The man made a sound that Joshua guessed was assent.

  Kordrude crossed one gangly leg over the other. “Cleary the man needs assistance, and he’s not wrong in coming to the heroes’ guild. However, as much as it pains me to point this out…you do not currently have any heroes in your roster.”

  Joshua looked at Benjen. He was the only one of them with a fighting class, even though he was only a level two swordsman. They had known that they’d need someone capable of fighting in the early days of restoring the guild, before they recruited heroes, but that wasn’t so they could take quests. It was more to protect them from brigands or from the few roving goblin tribes who hated the three kings’ decree.

  The problem was that since earning his class, Benjen’s view of the world had changed dramatically, to the point that he’d remorsefully told Joshua he didn’t think he could bring himself to use a sword.

  His ideas about the sanctity of life were so strong that he thought everything was worthy of it…and that included thrips

  “Whether we have heroes or not, we can’t turn him away,” said Joshua.

  “Thrips are dangerous,” said Kordrude. “And chaos-thrips especially so. Perhaps not to a hero, but certainly to someone unskilled in swordplay.”

  Benjen slapped the table. “Damn it. You’re right, I know. But…”

  “But we always said we have one rule above others,” said Joshua. “The heroes’ guild never, ever turns anyone away. As unprepared as we are, there’s no way in all the eight Hells that I’ll break the rule the first time it’s tested. What message would that send out? The first thing the people in Ardglass would hear about the guild was that we send people away to fend for themselves.”

  “Can’t the town guards do something?” said Benjen.

  The man shook his head. He mumbled some unintelligible words. Then, exasperated, he picked up the pencil and started writing again.

  Kordrude took the paper this time. “He says Mayor Gossidge is a crook. The mayor requested that all farmers pay an extra tax to ensure town guards could attend to problems on their lands. This fellow, it seems, wouldn’t pay any extra tax on moral grounds.”

  “An extra tax? Town guards are a public service. Their fee should be included in normal taxes.”

  The man pointing at the word he’d written on the paper. This word was written bigger than the others, and he’d underlined it three times. Joshua looked at it, and he saw the word ‘crook.’

  “So, the guard won’t help, and we don’t have any heroes. Still, I won’t turn him away. Kordrude, I don’t suppose you have any kind of fighting class?”

  “A sword might as well be made out of rubber if you put it in my hands.”

  “And Benny, I don’t suppose you could make an exception to your morals in this case?”

  “You know I’ll do anything to help…” began Benjen.

  And Joshua knew that he would, but he couldn’t ask him to. He couldn’t ask his friend to give up his principles.

  He stared at the poor, swollen farmer. He knew it’d have to be him to go to the field. He’d never studied thrips of any sort when learning zoologist, let alone chaos-thrips, but his limited knowledge of other insects might help.

  He might not have been a swordsman either, but that didn’t stop him swinging one; it just meant he wouldn’t have any of the power or finesse of a warrior.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “Let me go fetch a sword, and I’ll take care of this for you.”

  He said the words with as much confidence as he could muster but didn’t feel them deep inside. Then again, he guessed that it was the mark of a hero to face what scared you. That sounded right, didn’t it? Surely even heroes were worried, sometimes.

  Well, he sure as hell wasn’t a hero, but he’d at least try to give the appearance of one.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Joshua placed three rusty weapons on the table in the grand hall, and he stared at them as if they were demonic tools ready to possess him at the slightest touch. There was a falchion sword, a hatchet, and a halberd; three instruments of death that, in his unpracticed hands, might as well have been actual musical instruments, for all the damage he could do.

  Lacking a fighting skill, Joshua was at a loss to pit the strengths and weaknesses of each weapon against the others so that he could choose one, and instead had to dredge out dim memories of seeing Sulruk and Jimmie – the head hunters back in the village – head to the woods to deal with bloat-bee nests.

  Which weapons would they have taken? Would they have carried swords? Maybe. But no, the more he thought about it, the dimmer the image grew. He’d just never paid enough attention to the hunters when he was growing up.

  As well as hazy memories, he had his zoologist skill. Now, he’d never studied thrips, because they didn’t live in the lands around his village. To earn level 1 in zoology he’d needed to both read about creatures and study them in person, so thrips hadn’t been an option.

  Even so, he knew they were of the Vespidae family from the scant information he’d learned from the swollen farmer, who right now was whining to himself in pity while Kordude tried to make a salve paste from crushed acorns and silt water.

  If thrips were in the Vespidae family, which their ability to fly and power to sting the hell out of poor farmers suggested, then Joshua could relate them to some of the blue-back wasps he’d studied in the marsh near his old village. They wouldn’t be exactly the same, but it was all he had to go on.

  Okay. Wasps. What do I know about them?

  First, their venom was painful, but it wasn’t usually dangerous unless you had an allergy to them, or you got stung enough times. So, if he was going to face the thrips, then he needed to know how many stings he could realistically take before getting close to something he really wanted to avoid - death.

  He turned to face the farmer, who had a blob of brown paste on a swollen part of his cheek now. Kordude was leaning back on the table, staring at him.

  “We’ll see how your skin reacts to that,” Kordrude said. “Too much might make it worse if your immune system kicks up a fuss.”

  The farmer mumbled something that could have been gratitude or could have been an insult.

  “How many times did you actually get stung?” said Joshua.

  The man picked up the pencil in his stubby fingers. It slipped out of his grasp, so he pounded the table with his fist, and then picked it up again. He wrote the number ‘2’.

  Joshua felt a momentary cold shock in his chest. “Twice? And it did this? Are you allergic?”

  The man shook his head. He wrote on the paper. ‘Not until now.’

  “Are you sure you want to do this, Joshy?” asked Benjen, his voice edged with concern.

  That was a great question. Joshua had to consider the factors. Did he, a man who definitely wasn’t a warrior, want to go to a field and deal with an infestation of chaos-thrips?

  No, not really.

  Did he, a guy who was u
sed to discomfort but didn’t have much experience with pain, want to risk swelling up like a man made of sausage meat?

  He couldn’t say that it appealed to him.

  Then again, this was what life was about, wasn’t it? Everything so far, the saving up all of his wages for years to buy the guildhouse and then travelling hundreds of miles to get here, he hadn’t done all of that so that he took the easy option when the tough choices came his way. His thousands of fantasies about guild life had never involved him taking the coward’s option.

  He had to remember the rule he and Benjen had sworn on (over a couple of pints of ale, of course): The Heroes’ Guild never, ever turns someone away.

  It was great to have principles like that in practice, but then again, if the farmer had rushed over here with nail marks across his face and telling them a couple of brown bears were running amok on his field, would Joshua be so brave about the rule?

  Looking deep within himself, he had to say probably not. Everyone had their limits. That was why he wasn’t a hero, he decided. Heroes had a higher limit than most people, a willingness to walk toward danger most people couldn’t face, and Joshua fell short of that.

  Still, this wasn’t about bears, was it? It was a bunch of chaos-thrips, and Joshua wouldn’t break his most important guild rule for a bunch of annoying needles on wings.

  “I have to do it,” he said. “But if two stings made me a swollen mess…” he said, but then caught the farmer starting at him. “No offence, of course.”

  The farmer mumbled.

  Joshua continued. “If getting stung has that kind of impact, then I can’t rush head-on.”

  “What are you thinking?” asked Benjen. “We don’t have any bows and arrows.”

  “And if we did, I couldn’t even hit a giant if he was leaning toward my face, let alone thrips flying all over the place. No, I need something else.”

  The puzzle was laid out then, with all the pieces in his mind and waiting for him to put them together. He couldn’t shoot the thrips from afar, but he couldn’t get close enough to hit them with a weapon without getting stung.

  He eyed the halberd on the table. A halberd was a long pole weapon slightly shorter than a spear in length, and with a large, axe-like blade on the end. It wasn’t as weighty as an axe head, since combined with the long pole it would have been an impossible weapon to handle otherwise.

  This meant the metal was lighter than a sword or axe, and in a battle, it’d probably be more useful in knocking riders off their horses than meeting head first in a metal-on-metal duel to the death.

  He grabbed the halberd. He hadn’t expected it to be so heavy or cumbersome, and he had to grip it with both hands to keep it steady.

  “Going for the pole, huh?” said Benjen.

  “I don’t want to get close to them.”

  The farmer mumbled.

  “Sorry?” said Joshua.

  He wrote on the last blank space on the last sheet of paper. His eyes were narrow in concentration and his face, now almost completely covered in Kordrude’s brown paste, was a little less swollen.

  Joshua read his words.

  ‘Be careful; the buggers are angry. They’ll attack on sight.’

  “Thanks. It looks like halberd or not, I’m not going to be able take them all out without them attacking me.”

  “True, but the last thing you want is to end up like this guy,” said Benjen, jerking his thumb at the farmer.

  “I have a plan.”

  “Oh?”

  “Benny, please could you fetch me every item of clothing that you own?”

  “Oh.”

  Half an hour later, Joshua rode away from the guildhouse feeling more uncomfortable than he ever had in his life. Wearing three layers of clothing – which included having to raid Benjen’s collection of beer-stained shirts – Joshua felt hot and clumsy.

  As well as the shirts, Benjen had also asked Joshua to wear his magical breastplate so that if the thrips stung him, the armor would earn damage resistance to them. At first Joshua had thought the armor wouldn’t fit him, but when Benjen fastened it to him, the leather grew to fit around the layers of clothing he was wearing.

  All of this just to avoid getting stung. His body balance was way off kilter, and even Roebuck’s gentle trot seemed like it would throw him off the saddle. Still, better this than ending up a bloated mess like the farmer.

  Roebuck, for his part, had eyed Joshua as he approached, like some lumbering troll made from shirts and trousers, and he’d lazily chewed on grass, and Joshua could tell the old horse was thinking ‘what the hell kind of owner have I ended up with?’

  Good question, Joshua thought.

  The discomfort wasn’t just from the layers of clothing, though. At least those had a definable purpose; his layers were thick enough that a thrip stinger couldn’t get through, even if it meant sacrificing agility.

  No, his other discomfort stemmed from the idea Joshua had in his head of people watching him do this. He’d never used a halberd in his life, and he imagined the farmer’s wife and his children watching from the sidelines as a man wrapped in two wardrobe’s worth of clothes huffed and puffed through a field, jabbing at angry insects with a rusted halberd. Maybe even some folks from Ardglass would come and watch, and this would be their first sight of the new guildmaster.

  There was a lot riding on this. Even if nobody watched, the farmer’s family were sure to tell everyone what happened. Joshua needed the first rumors of the heroes’ guild to be good ones, ones where people spoke about how the guild had dropped everything to go help, and how they’d flushed the insect pests from the field.

  Ahead of him, Benjen pulled Firemane to a stop. The farmer was on his own animal, a mule that had shyly approached Firemane and Roebuck seemingly with the goal of making friends, and Kordude was sitting behind him on the mule, keeping him steady.

  Here, the traveler road went in three directions. To the left it curved toward Ardglass town, while the road straight on lead to other cities in the area. The nearest one, if Joshua remembered correctly, was a place called Trock.

  Kordude pointed to the road to the right. “He wrote that if you follow that road until you reach an oak tree with a rope swing on it, then you will see his farmhouse in the distance.”

  “Got it,” said Joshua. “And you’ll be okay?”

  “I’ll take him to the infirmary in Ardglass,” said Kordude. “The swelling is a little better, but it will be best to get him a more professionally-made salve. Mine was something my grandmother taught me, but healing wasn’t her forte.”

  “Then I guess me and Benjen will head to the fields, and then we’ll see you at the guildhouse.”

  The farmer stared at Joshua now. He said something, but his lips and tongue were still bloated from the thrip venom, and Joshua couldn’t tell what he was saying.

  “I’m sorry. I just don’t understand,” said Joshua.

  “Wacgh ooh fo mah wiigh.”

  “What?”

  The man leaned toward Kordude and whispered every syllable as slowly and clearly as he could.

  Kordrude’s bird eyes looked surprised. “He says to watch out for his wife.”

  “Watch out for her? Why?”

  The farmer spoke again, but it was no good; Joshua couldn’t make any sense from his words.

  “We better go,” said Joshua. “If his wife is alone, then we can’t wait.”

  “Good luck, lads. Be careful. Benjen, stay on the sidelines so that you don’t get hurt. If Joshua gets stung to hell and he’s in agony and he gets paralyzed and perhaps wets himself through involuntarily muscle spasms or even bleeds out of his eyes, then you need to be on hand to get him back to the village.”

  “Thanks, Kordrude,” said Joshua. “I think.”

  ~

  Jandafar left the Isleyarn - the city of ridiculous steel buildings - behind him and he walked the traveler roads. Dressed as a beggar, and with his gnoll appearance, he didn’t have to worry about brigands
or robbers souring his day. His gnoll features, he had been told, reminded most people of a wolf walking on two legs, but with extra ugliness added to the mix and a threat of a snarl always on his lips.

  It would be a brave brigand to approach such a creature, and brave brigands were a rarity. Most of them wanted easy pickings and would ignore a target that might fight back in favor of easier prey.

  Not only that, but his beggar clothes – a tattered old robe that was frayed at the bottom and covered in food and stains and grime from life on the streets – made it clear that even if a brigand was in the mood to tackle a gnoll, then this particular gnoll didn’t possess enough gold to make the scars and the agony worthwhile.

  Then again, what if people saw through the bluff? What if they looked at him and thought, ‘Hang on. That gnoll looks a little too beggarish for my liking. I think he’s a rich guy trying to trick his way safely through the traveler roads. What a nerve he’s got.’

  Perhaps Jandafar should have bought clothes to match the fashion of Isleyarn’s rich courtiers and noblemen. A kind of double-bluff; brigands would see him and think ‘Hmm. A nobleman dressing so brazenly? No – I think he’s a beggar in disguise. Leave him alone.’

  Then again, perhaps a triple bluff…

  He shook his head. Bluffs or not, if a brigand caught him, even Jandafar’s weakest class, his brawler class, would be enough to see him to safety. And if he let his anger get the better of him he could always use a curse, or something even worse.

  Not only that, but he was getting carried away with the twists and turns of consequences. Back in his guildmaster days it had served him well, since the ability to see a few steps into the future, to imagine the consequences of one’s decisions, was the mark of any great guildmaster, be it of the heroes’ guild, or the assassins, the thieves, or even the merchants.

  Luckily, he was always able to tread a little further down the path of future consequences than the other guild masters. That was how he’d stayed ahead of the assassins’ guild, and he’d walked through the trap they had set for him all those years ago and he’d gotten far away from Ardglass, travelling across Fortuna to the remotest village he could find.