Duke Grandfather- The Whole Story

by James Maxstadt

  The young man looked around with wide eyes.

  “Is this…?”

  “Yes,” Duke replied. “It’s my trophy room. Not many have seen it. But if I’m going to be telling you tales, you can at least see some of the items that go with them. Look around, but don’t touch anything! Some of these things are dangerous.”

  The young man explored the room, and stopped in front of a shelf that held a wanted notice for a goblin.

  “Did you keep all of the notices you took off the Board?” he asked.

  Duke picked up the notice with a slight smile on his face.

  “No, hardly any of them. But there wasn’t much else with this one to remember it by. Well, except for one thing, of course.”

  “What was that?”

  “Let’s go back down, and I’ll tell you.”

  When they were settled into their chairs, the young man took out his stylus and tablet.

  “What are you doing?” Duke asked.

  “Getting ready to take notes.”

  “I have no ale. Telling tales is thirsty work, and besides, it’s one of the three conditions.”

  Sighing, the young man got up, got the mug of ale for his grandfather and returned. Comfortably seated and with ale in hand, the old man began his story.

  UNCONCEIVED

  I usually didn’t take goblins off the Nuisance Board any more. They were entry level and not only not worth my time, but I preferred to leave them for guys starting out. I remembered my first couple of cases, and had no problem helping the next generation of Nuisance Men. But something about the one on the Board that day caught my eye.

  “Hey Sarge?” I said.

  “What do you want, Duke?”

  Sarge was a large man, always working the desk in the watchhouse. He had been with the Watch ever since he was young, and grew up in it. He’d seen more Nuisance Men come and go over the years then he could count, and didn’t think much of any of our chances to live to see old age.

  “What’s the story with this goblin, Brindlestiff Swelldrinker?” I asked.

  “Kind of small fry for the mighty Duke Grandfather, isn’t it?”

  “Well, yeah, usually. But there’s something about this one…”

  Sarge plodded over and looked at the posting I was considering.

  “Nothing special that I know of,” he said with a shrug. “Some goblin, running a con on some locals.”

  “Did you check him out?”

  Sarge looked at me askance. He wasn’t real keen on this new habit of mine of actually asking questions about the cases I took. It offended his sense of order in the world.

  Nowadays, I’m more selective about who I take off the Board. I ask questions. I’ll find out if that orc really is bullying your nephew, or does it turn out that you owe him some money for whitewashing your house and don’t want to pay. If it’s the former, off he goes. If it’s the latter, then you and I will have a very unpleasant talk. I won’t pull out the gun on you, but any Nuisance Man who totally depends on one weapon and skill isn’t worth the name. In other words, I have other ways of hurting people. Sometimes, lessons demand a little pain to sink in.

  That’s how I run my business now, and I’m not alone in this. I’ve talked to some of the other Nuisance Men, and had some of them agree with me, but more that think I’m turning soft. Some have had the same sort of wakeup call paid to them that I did. Some had that call, chose to ignore it and haven’t been seen again.

  “As much as we ever do,” Sarge finally answered me. “He’s a goblin, Duke. What more do you need to know?”

  He stomped back over to his stool behind the desk.

  There was a lot more that I needed to know. First of all, was he really running a con? And if he was, maybe the folks he was conning should have been smarter. I don’t know that bilking a few silver ingols from some lame brain was worth a metal ball between the eyes. Not anymore, anyway.

  “I’m taking this one, Sarge,”

  I took the posting off the Board, waved goodbye to Sarge, who grunted at me, in what I chose to believe was a friendly good bye and wish for good fortune, and headed off.

  According to the post, the complaint was issued by several inhabitants of Goodbody Lane. I didn’t know the street personally, but I knew the area well enough. It was full of lower class working folk, getting by day to day. There was some crime here, sure, but really the people on these streets all tended to be close knit and work together. The fact that the complaint came from several denizens of a single street actually lent a lot of validity to it. These types of people didn’t call in outside help when a well-organized beating could do the trick. There may be more to friend Brindlestiff than I previously thought.

  I went to Goodbody Lane and spoke to several of the people who registered the complaint. As I thought, the goblin was bad news. He wasn’t only conning folks, as Sarge suggested. He was actually shaking down some of the smaller inhabitants, like the kids, and stealing their money. He also threatened that a couple of homes might disappear in mysterious fires if he didn’t get paid. Finally, he kidnapped Mrs. Grundlyfoot’s cat, and held it until he was paid a 10 ruble ransom. Not only was that amount a ridiculous amount for a cat, but the poor thing was half starved and traumatized when it turned up again.

  Like all goblins, Brindlestiff had a knack for disappearing when the pursuit got too close. Goblins can blend in with their surroundings and stand so perfectly still that if you’re not careful, you’ll run right past them. Plus, they have an innate sense of danger, so they’ll feel you coming a mile away, unless they’re distracted and get careless. Thankfully, that’s another defining characteristic of a goblin. They’re not very bright, so it’s pretty common for them to get distracted, a fact that’s helped many a Nuisance Man get paid, and one I was counting on this time too.

  Brindlestiff was mostly seen coming up from the Stews. That’s the informal name for the area of Capital City that has been settled by several of the other races. As a human, it can be disconcerting to walk around there. But look, it turns out that most of the other races are like us. They want to work, and live in peace to raise their families. The fact that there are some bad apples shouldn’t reflect on all of them. There are plenty of bad humans around too, and no one is condemning the whole race because of that.

  Sometimes I surprise myself with my new outlook. Life was a lot easier when I saw it in black and white.

  Anyway, I walked on down to the Stews and started asking around. It turned out that Brindlestiff wasn’t any more well-liked down here than he was up on Goodbody Lane. He must be a piece of work if everyone I talked to was willing to point me in the same direction. Soon enough, I was outside his door, which was really a ratty old blanket, stretched over a hole in a wall. The wall itself was part of an abandoned building that had seen better days. Brindlestiff may have been earning some illicit money, but he certainly wasn’t spending it on his living quarters.

  I pulled out the gun, made sure I said “goblin”, to get the right kind of metal ball set to fire, and burst through the curtain. I kept my eyes peeled sharp, looking to the walls and even the floor carefully. There are tell-tale signs when a goblin is hiding, and I was ready to look for those. I was hoping that since he was home, and would be feeling safe in his lair, he wouldn’t have sensed me coming, but I was prepared anyway.

  It turned out that I needn’t have bothered. Brindlestiff was in plain sight, in the middle of the floor. What’s more, someone else was already there. It was a small child, bent over the goblin, who lay stiff on the floor in front of him. I could tell this, because strangely, I could see right through the child.

  The child turned and looked at me, and I don’t know that I’ve ever seen such a look of sadness in my life. He was a young boy, maybe 6 or 7 years old, dressed very oddly. I’m no fashion icon, but the kid’s clothes were seriously out of date, by decades. He stared back at me for a moment, glanced back at Brindlestiff, and walked away. When he reached the back wall of the ro
om, he kept going, as if the wall was no obstacle.

  I realized that I saw a ghost. In all of my cases I never saw one before, or for that matter, did I ever talk to another Nuisance Man who did. I’m not sure what it was doing here, visiting a goblin, but who can really account for what dead people find amusing.

  Moving over to examine Brindlestiff, I noticed another very strange thing. He wasn’t just dead. He was all shriveled and dried up, like a perch that’s been hung on a hook to cure in a fishmonger’s stall. His skin was leathery and wrinkled, his lips pulled back from his sharp teeth and his eyelids pulled up so that he seemed to stare wide-eyed at the ceiling. His limbs were thin to the point of looking like sticks that could be broken into kindling with ease.

  I didn’t know what could have possibly done this. There were no races that I knew of that killed someone by drying them out. Magic, possibly. Not being any sort of wizard or adept, I really had no idea what a sorcerer or witch was capable of, but that raised yet another question. What could this low-level thief of a goblin have done to piss off a sorcerer? Those guys didn’t hang out in places like this. They were in demand for all sorts of other things and their talents usually ended up buying them big opulent houses, way up the hill, where they had a front row seat to the palace goings-on.

  Regardless, the nuisance was gone, so the job was done. I had the creeps though, so I got out of there as quick as I could.

  I ended up back in Goodbody Lane, giving the money back to the people who hired me. I didn’t do the job, so it wasn’t right that I get paid for it.

  What the hell is wrong with me? I really should go see someone.

  The next day, I was back at the watchhouse, checking on the Board again. I don’t work all that often, mostly when I need money. I take jobs that will keep me in ale and mutton for a while, pay the rent and let me enjoy life. When I’m short, I take another job, and then laze around. It’s a pretty good gig, if you aren’t trying to become rich doing it. You could, but that’s a lot of work, and I didn’t have the ambition.

  Still, I came here yesterday to get a job because the funds were running low. That hadn’t changed, and since yesterday turned out to be a bust, here I was again.

  “How’d it go with your killer goblin, Duke?” Sarge asked me when I walked in.

  He had a look of slightly malicious glee on his face. I’m sure he assumed that since I was back today, the goblin somehow got away, or otherwise got the better of me. Sarge was always kind of a smart ass too.

  “Not great, Sarge. But he wasn’t a killer goblin. More like a killed one. Dead before I got there.”

  Sarge raised his eyebrow at that. Dead bodies of all types turned up fairly regularly in the city, especially in the poorer areas. Usually though, if someone took the trouble to post a complaint that ended up on the Board, it was because they’d already exhausted taking care of it themselves.

  I filled Sarge in on what I saw, leaving out the part about the ghost. As far as I knew, the boy was curious and visiting the site of a recently deceased goblin. Maybe he helped Brindlestiff cross over.

  “Huh,” Sarge said when I finished. “Well, that’s interesting, Duke.”

  I thought at first he was being sarcastic, but then realized that he was actually looking thoughtful.

  “Why? I figured the little creep ran afoul of a witch.”

  “If he did, he’s not the only one. We got a report of a dried up old geezer up on Silver Tree Road.”

  Wow. Silver Tree Road was most definitely not an area that I was familiar with. If you lived there, you had money, old money. It didn’t just take wealth to live there; it took standing that only came with a long familial relationship with money. They were the type of people that never thought about being rich because they always were, everyone they knew always was, and there was simply no other way to live. If the Watch got called up there, it was serious. There was no petty crime on Silver Tree Road because it would have been in very bad taste.

  Sarge chuckled at the look on my face.

  “Don’t look so surprised, Duke. Believe it or not, bad things happen to hob nobs too.”

  “If you say so Sarge,” I answered, not believing it for one second.

  I walked over to the Board and took a look, but there wasn’t much there. Most of the nuisances from yesterday were cleared off by other Nuisance Men and there weren’t a whole lot of new ones. Sighing, and realizing that now I was probably going to have to work for real, I reached out and took down the one with the picture of an orc on it.

  Orcs by themselves aren’t too dangerous. Although, every now and then you’ll run into one who’s pretty powerful, usually by staying alive long enough to get that way. The real problem with orcs is that they have huge family units, and they stick together. Mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers and various aunts, uncles, cousins and in-laws all live together in a big tribal type unit. They are fiercely loyal to each other and very protective. Most of them tend to be honest, but when you get a bad one, watch out. Usually, that means the whole family has turned to crime and then it gets sticky.

  This one, Valuster Valusterson, was on the Board for selling illegal sniff. Sniff was pretty easy to come by in the city, and several of the finer folks, like those on Silver Tree Road, used it at posh parties as an entertainment. When it was sold on the street though, it was often mixed with other things. Those tended to be bad, and sometimes lethal, combinations. It’s a crappy business, and those mixed up in it don’t tend to have a lot of respect for life, human or otherwise.

  No one likes a drug dealer, including, apparently, other orcs. Usually, when an orc ends up on the Nuisance Board, there are several of them, all with the same surname. This time, it was Valusterson by himself, a lone wolf criminal orc. The world never ceases to amaze me.

  Not only was this going to be a payday, but it was one of the rare times that it would feel downright satisfying to eliminate this nuisance.

  I took the notice, waved at Sarge and headed off to the neighborhood of the Royal Academy of Learning, Downstreet District. A local school, catering to not only humans, but any of the races that could sit in a chair long enough to learn to count to ten, or however many fingers they had, and read their a-b-c’s in common tongue. These schools, the Royal Academy, were popping up all over the city as part of His Royal Highness’s mandate that all races are welcome in Capital City.

  The head-master of this particular district was the one who put Valusterson on the Board, so it was him that I set out to find, which was easy enough. He was in his office at the Academy, we negotiated my fee, paid out of school discretionary funds, and I was on my way to Orc Town.

  Yeah, this section of the city was actually named Orc Town. Orcs were one of the first races to take advantage of the Kings invitation to move in. Since they stay in such large family groups, they moved in en-masse and most settled down in this one area. Orc Town has become one of the more densely populated areas of Capital City, but it’s safe. At least, as much as any area in any city ever truly is.

  I asked around and found out where the Valusterson compound was. Everyone pointed me in the right direction for once, and soon enough, I arrived.

  Knowing that Valuster himself was an outcast among his own, I was prepared to approach this with a certain amount of tact. It wouldn’t do to simply walk up and announce that I was there to eliminate their offspring. I would have to act sympathetic while I found out where he was exactly.

  Instead, the compound was already grieving. It turned out that early that very morning, they awakened to find that Grandfather Valusterson was dead. He was elderly, from what I gathered, so his death was not unexpected. The grief wasn’t so much that he was gone, but more from the fact that something had killed him. That something left a shriveled husk behind.

  Here was another one. I didn’t feel right about asking about Valuster at this point, so I paid my condolences and left. Other orcs pointed me toward Valuster, most with a sense of justification and almost civic-pride. I f
ound him, eliminated him without thinking twice and went back to the watchhouse.

  “You’re not going to believe this, Sarge,” I said when I entered.

  Sarge looked up from the counter.

  “What do you got, Duke?”

  “I went after that orc on the Board, but before I could find him, I found another one.”

  “Another what?”

  “Another of those shriveled up bodies. In Orc Town this time. That’s three now, right? A goblin, a human and an orc. Weird.”

  Sarge shrugged. He wasn’t big on thought, our Sarge.

  “Sure, Duke,” he said, going back to the morning newssheet he was reading. “Whatever you say.”

  I scowled and left. Sometimes, I have no patience for the inattentiveness of my fellow man.

  After downing a few ales with my pal Jessup at one of the local taverns near my house, I called it a day. It had been a couple of strange ones for sure. The matter of the shriveled-up corpses kept coming to my mind, as well as the ghost child I saw with Brindlestiff. It now seemed to me that there must somehow be a connection. I wondered if anyone at the Valusterson compound saw any ghostly apparitions. It didn’t occur to me to ask at the time, but maybe I’d pay another quick visit there tomorrow.

  The next day, I did exactly that. I worked my way back to Orc Town and the Valusterson family compound. Although orcs are mostly law abiding, it doesn’t mean that they’re not suspicious when a human, especially a fairly well-known Nuisance Man, comes asking questions, so I wasn’t surprised when my greeting was met with indifference, but I finally convinced the large, young male standing guard on the door that I wasn’t after anyone, or anything, other than a little information.

  He led me into a room where several female orcs were busy sewing clothes and chatting away in orc speech. I don’t speak it myself, but then, I’ve never been a quick study when it came to languages. My guide interrupted and said something to them which made them all turn and give me the once over. After inspecting me carefully, one of the females got up and came over.