Duke Grandfather- The Whole Story

by James Maxstadt

  “Mr. Grandfather,” she said, in fluent common. “We want to thank you for your work yesterday.”

  That took me aback. I was being thanked by a member of the family of someone who I killed the day before. She noticed the look on my face and smiled.

  “Valuster was my brother, and I loved him, as we all did. But he chose a very dark path and brought shame to himself and to us. We begged him to stop, to return home and let us care for him, but the forces that had him wouldn’t let him go. Death was a mercy. So thank you.”

  “Oh,” I said, embarrassed. This was a first for me. “No problem. I mean, I’m sorry it came to that.”

  I trailed off, really not sure where to go from here.

  “Now,” she said, taking it out of my hands, “Regalish said that you wanted to ask some questions about my grandfather’s death?”

  “Yes, if I could. I’d really like to speak to whoever discovered him yesterday.”

  “That would be me. I took him his morning tea as I always did. When I came into the room, he was as I found him. Dead.”

  Her eyes welled with unshed tears and I felt like a heel for bringing the memory back up again.

  “I am sorry for your loss,” I said. “But I’m wondering if you saw anything else in the room. Anything strange, or out of the ordinary?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like anyone that didn’t belong there.”

  She paused, and then took me by the arm and we walked out into the hallway.

  “There was something else, Mr. Grandfather. I haven’t said anything to anyone because I wasn’t sure how it would sound. When I first went into the room, there was a man there.”

  “A man? Are you sure it was a man and not a young boy?”

  As well as she spoke common, I wanted to be sure that there was no mix up due to a language barrier.

  “No,” she replied. “I mean a man. A young, human man. But what was so strange was that I could see through him. I could clearly see my grandfather lying dead in his bead, even though the man stood between us. Then, he looked at me and walked away, right through the wall.”

  I put my head down. My hunch was right. The ghost did have something to do with the deaths, but there was more than one of them. There were at least two so far.

  “One more question, if you don’t mind,” I said. “When the ghost looked at you, how did he do it?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean,”

  “Did he look at you like he was angry, or happy, or…”

  “No, none of that. As far as I can tell with humans, he looked incredibly sad.”

  Now I was stumped. The motives of ghosts or others who have passed on from this good earth are beyond me. I supposed they were beyond anyone who was still alive. As I walked back to the watchhouse, it occurred to me that I was becoming too embroiled in this. I wasn’t a detective, I was a Nuisance Man. This wasn’t my problem.

  Still, I tried to be a good citizen of Capital City, which meant that I should at least bring it to the attention of someone who should care. Even if he was a little slow on the uptake at times, Sarge was good people, and he’d at least know who should be told about this.

  “Sarge,” I said, as I walked into the watchhouse, “we’ve got a problem.”

  “What’s new, Duke? We’ve always got a problem when you show up. It’s one of the ways we know.”

  “Mean, Sarge. What’d I ever do to you?”

  “I ain’t got time to list all the grievances. What do you need now?”

  I told him what I found out. I told him about the ghostly boy that I saw when I found Brindlestiff already dead and about what the orc told me when she found her grandfather.

  “So,” I said, when I finished telling my tale, “I wanted to let you guys know so that you could put someone on it.”

  Sarge gave me the fish-eye.

  “Seems like you’ve been busy. Take a load off, Duke. I think someone is going to want to talk to you.”

  “Can’t today, Sarge. I’ve got some business of my own to take care of.”

  Said business was meeting up with Jessup. We had plans to get a good afternoon’s head start on an evening of drinking.

  “Maybe you didn’t hear me, Duke,” Sarge said, smiling at me with no real humor. “I said, ‘take a load off, Duke.’ It may have sounded like a polite invitation, but really, I mean, ‘sit down and stay put, Duke, or we’ll drag you back here.’”

  I swallowed. It wasn’t like Sarge to be aggressive, at least not to me. We always got along well, so something told me not to push this one.

  “You know what?” I said. “I think I’ll stretch out on the comfy looking bench over there.”

  Sarge grunted and stomped off through the door leading into the inner reaches of the watchhouse.

  I cooled my heels for on the bench, looking around the watchhouse from a new perspective. It didn’t do much to change it, but I was trying to find that silver lining. In truth, I felt like a little kid who had been sent to the corner.

  Finally, Sarge came back out, looked over at me and waved his hand for me to follow him. Interesting. In all my years as a Nuisance Man, I had never been further than the front room of the watchhouse.

  Sarge led me down a corridor with offices and holding cells lining it. The holding cells were for those non-serious type crimes, like getting too drunk in public and pissing someone off. The real criminals were sent to the big lock-up, a scary, dark, huge stone building that everyone simply called the Lock-ups. Sometimes, like Orc Town, the name just has to fit.

  We got to the end of the hallway and came to the top of a stairway. It must have delved fairly deep into the earth, because I couldn’t see the bottom of it. At the top, Sarge stopped.

  “Far as I go, Duke. That’s a whole lot of steps to come back up and I ain’t up for it. Head on down, and knock on the door at the bottom. They’ll let you in.”

  “Who?” I asked, but Sarge was already moving back down the hallway.

  “Just knock,” he said, in way of an answer, which was really no answer at all.

  I looked down at my gun, slung on my left hip, but there was no help there. For one, I had no idea what to set it to, and for two, I wasn’t about to pick a fight with the Watch in their own house. There was nothing for it but to go down the stairs and see what happened.

  At the bottom of the not-at-all creepy stairs there was a heavy wooden door. I stepped up to it, and pounded with my fist. The noise was deadened in the still air and it sounded like ineffectual thuds, rather than the sharp rap I intended. Still, after a moment the door opened.

  I stepped through to find a hooded and cloaked figure waiting for me, which again, was not at all creepy. It motioned for me to follow, and when I turned to look the door was swinging shut by itself. A cold feeling stole over me as I started to suspect exactly where I was.

  If I was right, I was visiting the necromancers, a thought which brought a chill to my spine. These guys were the heavy hitters of the Watch. They were summoned to deal with the real hard cases and those that killed Watch members. The rumors about what they could do to you here, and in the great beyond, were many, and none of them were pleasant.

  I followed my silent guide until it stopped near a closed door, which it rapped on, and stood back. I was waiting for a dramatic show of magic aptitude, to see the door disintegrate, or turn clear, or anything.

  Instead, a calm, feminine voice from inside called out, “Come in.”

  The door opened, my guide indicated that I should enter, and walked away. There was a lot of that going on today.

  I entered the room, not quite sure what to expect, but what I found was a young woman, seated behind a desk, regarding me.

  “Mr. Grandfather,” she said, “thank you for coming all the way down here.”

  Not that I had much choice, but I thought it better to keep the discussion civil.

  “No problem. What can I do for you?”

  “Sarge tells us that you may have some inform
ation regarding the recent spate of unusual corpses that we’re finding. I’d like to hear if from you.”

  I related the same story to her that I told Sarge. I told her of the ghostly boy I saw, and what the orc told me. She listened, asking a few questions and sat quietly.

  “Interesting,” she said. “I find it most interesting that out of the three cases that we know of, you’ve been near two of them.”

  “Hey look,” I said, shifting uncomfortably. “I didn’t have anything to do with them.”

  “I’m not accusing you, Mr. Grandfather. I find it interesting. That’s all.”

  I wasn’t so sure about that, but there was something about her demeanor that did make me think that perhaps she was giving it to me straight. But when I thought of a necromancer, this isn’t what came to mind. I always assumed they were skeletal old guys or gals, pale from only coming out at night and probably pretty smelly from being around the dead all the time.

  This one could pass for a normal, everyday person on the street. She had long, blondish hair, which spilled over the back of the red robes that she wore. She was pretty in an unassuming kind of way, and smelled more like lilacs than corpses.

  “Okay,” she said after a moment, “let’s go.”

  “Where?” I asked, surprised by this sudden announcement.

  “Back upstairs. You’re going to pick another nuisance to dispose of, and I’m going with you. By the way, my name is Lilly.”

  This was new, and to my knowledge, unheard of. A necromancer was going to accompany me, on a nuisance removal? And telling me her name at that?

  She noticed my obvious surprise and hesitation.

  “Let’s go, Grandfather!” she snapped. “We’ve got work to do!”

  Ah. That was more what I was expecting. I got going.

  I selected an imp off the Nuisance Board this time. Imps are weird, little demonic creatures, usually summoned up by some wizard with more talent than brains. They are 100% evil and delight in making mischief and causing harm where they can. Usually, the summoner has lost control of it, and puts it on the Board as a method of fixing their own mistake. Since imps are magic also, they can be a real pain in the behind, sometimes literally. You can get good money for one though, so I thought that having a spell-caster of any sort along with me made it a good opportunity to go after it.

  Sure enough, the complainant was a wizard, very low grade but with hopes of working his way up. He didn’t weather Lilly’s glare too well, and offered a large amount of money for the removal of his error.

  “I should keep you with me,” I said to her when we left. “You’re good for negotiating.”

  Lilly glanced at me, but kept on walking. I’m not sure I saw a hint of a smile on her face, but it could have been there. Maybe.

  We located the imp without too much trouble. He was flitting around in the air near an old abandoned building, looking for a good place to light a fire I assumed. The sign on the building stated that it was owned by the Royal Academy, which meant it was due to be renovated into yet another school. If the imp had his way, it was going to be turned into a pile of ashes instead.

  I took out my gun, said “Imp”, and the metal ball inside was ready to seriously hurt even the demonic. I aimed, but before I could squeeze the trigger, Lilly put her hand on my arm.

  “Wait,” she whispered, her eyes locked on the imp.

  I looked myself and sure enough, the ghost appeared. It came up out of the street, directly under the imp, and its arms went around the little demon like it was trying to hug it. The imp froze, and his eyes opened widely. He didn’t struggle, but his mouth gaped like a fish caught on a hook. Then, he started to shrivel. His skin became slack and hung loosely on him, then started to dry out and shrink. It was as if the life itself was being sucked out of him and it was turning him into a mummy before our eyes.

  “Fascinating,” Lilly murmured beside me.

  I don’t know if I would have gone that far. It was pretty disturbing to me. The bodies weren’t being visited by the ghost, the ghost was actually killing them. I didn’t think they could do that.

  Unfortunately, I had already set my gun to “imp”, so I couldn’t set it to “ghost” and kill this thing, if that was even possible. So far, I hadn’t found a limit to what my weapon could do, but that didn’t mean that it didn’t have one.

  Lilly was under no such restrictions though. She rose from where we were crouched down behind some old boards and started chanting and moving her hands in weird ways. The air around her grew thick with static electricity, her hair standing out from her head, giving her a wild appearance. Around the ghost, a globe of dark green light appeared.

  The ghost looked around at Lilly. It was an older man this time, middle aged maybe, and still dressed in clothes years out of date. He looked at Lilly with that same expression of sadness, and at the globe around him. He smiled a sad sort of smile, and walked right through the globe, through the wall of the building and was gone.

  Lilly stood shocked.

  “That…that shouldn’t have been possible.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “That was a level nine shell that I summoned. It should keep any undead entity trapped. I should have been able to question it, or bring it back to the watchhouse.”

  “Then why didn’t it work?”

  I have no problem admitting that magic continues to confound me.

  “Because,” Lilly said looking carefully to where the ghost walked through the globe, “that wasn’t a ghost.”

  Sure looked like a ghost to me.

  “What was it then?”

  “Something else,” she said softly, touching the ground.

  The next morning, I was roused out of bed by a pounding at my door. Grumbling about the lack of manners of someone disturbing me before noon, I shuffled down to it and opened up.

  Lilly burst in, full of vigor the way only someone who was not in a tavern most of the night could be.

  “Get dressed Grandfather,” she said, without preamble. “I have a theory and we’re going to test it.”

  I groaned.

  “What do you need me for? I wasn’t working today.”

  “You are now. It’s your civic duty. And if you don’t, I’ll set your head on fire.”

  I grudgingly kind of liked Lilly, but I had no doubt she’d do it, so I got dressed, strapped on the gun, and went with her.

  We went back to the watchhouse and picked up a notice from the Nuisance Board. Actually, Lilly picked it up without even looking at it.

  “Here,” she said, thrusting it at me. “Go get him.”

  I looked. It was another goblin, stupid things that they were. They also tended to get dumped on the Board for all sorts of minor things.

  “I don’t know, Lilly. This one may not really deserve to be eliminated.”

  She stopped and looked at me.

  “What do you mean? You’re a Nuisance Man; this is a nuisance from the Board, right? So you kill him.”

  I explained to her that I didn’t work that way anymore. That now, I wanted to know what someone did and was there proof and so on.

  “You’re a funny guy, Grandfather,” she said when I finished. “But I see your point. Pick one you think is worth it then.”

  I was a little surprised at how quickly she accepted what I said. Sarge still thought I was mentally unbalanced when I talked like this.

  I put the goblin back and picked up a gnoll instead. Gnolls are big, vicious, stupid, and love to fight, so they’re used as muscle a lot. Some of them get ideas in their head and start thinking that they can run their own rackets, and usually botch the job pretty badly. This one fit that mold to a tee, so I was fairly certain that it wasn’t going to bother my conscience to put him down.

  Sure enough, with Lilly tagging along, I found out what I needed to. The gnoll was guilty as hell, and left a couple of deaths of his own in his wake. We tracked him down to a run-down inn near the docks, where after a couple of quiet
words from Lilly to the landlord, we found out what room he was in.

  We didn’t bother with the niceties after that, but headed up the stairs and kicked in the door. We were in time to see the gnoll getting the life sucking treatment from the ghost, who this time, looked to be in his teens. By now, I was convinced that it all was the same one, and not several different ghosts.

  Lilly got moving. She started chanting again, and this time the ghost, or whatever it was, took notice. It stopped half way through drying out the gnoll, although it had already done him in, and drew its arms away. It looked at the gnoll in horror, as if seeing it for the first time. Then it turned to Lilly, the expression of sadness that it wore before gone, replaced instead by absolute anguish.

  Lilly walked over to him. She waved her hands and another globe appeared around them both. This time, it was a whitish color. Inside it, Lilly lost a lot of her color, and the ghost gained some, until they both looked like they were the same, washed out hue.

  I could hear her talking to him.

  “It’s alright,” she said to him. “But it’s not your time yet.”

  “It was my time.” His voice was hollow and soft, like it was coming through a hole in the ground.

  “No,” Lilly said. “But sometime, at some point, it will be.”

  “They forgot me. They thought of me, but then didn’t.”

  “All things come when they must. You can’t get here like this. Stealing the lives from others won’t give you one of your own.”

  “They were doomed to die anyway,” the ghost said, “I thought it wouldn’t matter…”

  “They still had time left, which wasn’t yours to take. And even if it was, this won’t bring you here. Go back, wait and be patient, and your time will come. I promise.”

  The ghost looked at her again, nodded his head, and was simply gone. There was no walking away, or fading or anything. He was just suddenly not there.

  Lilly still was however. She motioned with her hand and the globe disappeared, and she walked slowly back to me.

  “What happened?” I said. I felt like I was asking that a lot lately.