Cronenburg appeared, and it didn’t take long to be underwhelmed by the place. It had once been a tiny hamlet, the kind of town where yokels in big hats leaned against barrels in the middle of the street, chewing straws and making filthy cross-eyed looks at anyone who wasn’t the product of rampant inbreeding, but (as Slippery John had told Meryl, who had in turn told me) the Adventure Trail had turned it into a popular traveller’s rest for wandering mercenaries.
We’d passed a lot of those on the way. Barbarians, dwarves, battle mages, elves, healers—the road was permanently serving as an unusually large catwalk for absurd battlewear.
Syndrome sufferers were commonplace and easily spotted; they were the really attractive people who jogged robotically along the road, awkwardly swung weaponry at the endless wandering monsters that adventurers attract, or just stood perfectly still in fixed heroic poses in the middle of the highway, to the immense frustration of their non-afflicted friends and peers. I’d never seen so many of them packed so densely in one place.
“Well, no need to start fretting,” said Meryl. “We’ll just have to check all the inns in turn. You want to take that side of the road and I’ll take this one?”
“How about you take both sides of the road, and I’ll go do something else.”
“Ah. Gotcha.” She tapped her nose. “Reconnaissance.”
“No.” I tapped the place where my nose used to be. “Shopping. I want to find a new robe that isn’t about to rot off with water damage.”
“Fair enough.”
She began poking her head into the inns and I kept walking to the town center. This didn’t take long. Cronenburg only had three streets, which formed a Y around what I would have called a village square had it not been perfectly circular. The Street of Inns was the southerly branch of the Y, and the two arms were the Street of Magic and the Street of Combat. Every single building in Cronenburg appeared to belong to a business of some kind.
The streets were absolutely packed with human traffic, everyone shoving their way through the crowds in hasty pursuit of their individual shopping needs. After being swept relentlessly around the town center for a few laps I made a burst of effort and stumbled out into the comparatively sedate central plaza. I stood on a bench to get a clearer look around.
There evidently had been a bit too much surplus in the town planning committee’s annual budget, and the very air seemed to sparkle with the setting sunlight reflecting off brand new shop frontage and polished cobblestones. The centerpiece of the town was a huge, silvery ornamental fountain depicting a wild-haired barbarian with one furry boot planted on a defeated gnoll. Crystal-clear water ran from its stab wounds. And just to underline the message, a six-foot long plaque at the bottom read CRONENBURG WELCOMES ADVENTURERS in big serifed letters.
They’d certainly taken the message. Adventurers were everywhere. Loitering in the plaza chatting about nonsense, emerging from the shops wearing tacky multicolored armor fresh out of the wrapping. You could tell who had only just arrived, because their outfits were filthy with blood and gnoll guts.
The gore-spattered new arrivals were all queueing up outside a building at the very point where the two northern branches of the Y intersected, a prime position where I’d expect to find a town hall. It was an unadorned building of well-polished black glass that seemed almost embarrassed by the elaborate façades that rubbed its shoulders. The adventurers in the queue were clutching armfuls of dented gnoll equipment and clumps of foul-smelling offal. They would file into the main entrance and emerge moments later, relieved of their gnoll garbage and holding clinking bags of coins.
I shrugged. I was new to the land, and there were no doubt a lot of weird local customs I was unaware of. Maybe gnoll offal was the primary ingredient of some popular local delicacy. I took a deep breath, shouldered my way back into the throng and, after a few more trips around the circle, managed to get onto the Street of Magic.
I quickly found the kind of shop I was after: a pleasant little tailor’s with garish star-patterned fabrics prominently featured in the window. Just outside the door stood an oily teenager in a smart, professional robe. His fixed smile looked like it was becoming painful.
“Drelmere and sons, fine outfitters for the discerning magician!” he was shouting, his voice barely carrying over the hubbub. “Robes! Pointy hats! Beard grooming supplies! Yes, you sir, how can OH GOD HURRAAARRGLAB.”
I waited patiently for him to finish decorating the pavement with his stomach contents. “Sorry,” he said, bent double and gulping. Impressively, he immediately continued his sales pitch from that position. “Looking for a new robe?”
“Yes, this one’s starting to whiff a bit.”
“Yes, I . . . gathered that, sir.” He took a few deep, groaning breaths into a star-patterned hanky and seemed to gather himself. “What sort of price range were you OH GOD YOUR EYES HURRAAARRGLAB.”
I tapped my now bile-sodden foot. “Shall I come back later?”
“No!” he said very quickly, straightening up. “No, it’s fine. We have a lovely selection of robes for a discerning . . . person, from as little as 49 talans.”
“What’s a talan?”
He chuckled condescendingly. It would probably have been more effective without the sick all down his front. “The currency of Lolede, sir.” When I didn’t reply for a moment he added, “You need them to buy things.”
I resisted the urge to put on a show of searching my pockets, because I was afraid of what was currently living in them. “Excuse me a moment,” I said. “I left my wallet in my carriage.”
I drifted back towards the village square, considering options. I didn’t even know what a talan looked like. Most of the rural communities in Garethy got by on the barter system, and the closest thing to currency there was the turnip. And then, of course, as part of Dreadgrave’s horde I’d gotten used to the “give us all your worldly goods or we’ll set fire to you” system of economics.
Slippery John would probably have some money, I thought. If he was reluctant to part with it I could always stand within smelling range until he changed his mind.
“Name,” said a voice.
I turned. An elven hunter was staring at a point just to the side of my head with the unmoving intensity of an obvious Syndrome victim. Absolutely nothing about his manner indicated that he was addressing me, so I attempted to walk away before we caught something horrible from each other.
He wasn’t to be dissuaded. He burst momentarily into a dramatic sprint until he’d closed the four yards between us and pressed his nose against my forehead. “Name,” he said again.
“Jim,” I admitted. I’d made the mistake of getting backed into the fountain, and now there was no path of escape. “How do you do?”
“Job.”
His voice had no emotion or intelligence behind it. It was less like communication and more like expressionless throat noise that coincidentally formed words, like a dog saying “roof.” “Freelance,” I said eventually. “If I could just get out of your way, I’m a little bit freaked out . . .”
“Quests?” An ever-so-slight upturning of pitch towards the end of the statement led me to conclude that it was a question.
My gaze immediately swung over to a nearby sign that I’d noticed earlier and been somewhat baffled by. It read, NON-ADVENTURERS WITHOUT QUESTS ARE ADVISED TO NOT STAND IN ONE PLACE FOR LONG PERIODS.
Now that I knew what to look for, I saw them dotted throughout the crowd. Questgivers. Armored knights in the pay of lords and barons stood around the areas of highest traffic, soliciting cheap muscle for dirty jobs, shoulder to shoulder with farm workers looking for someone to shoo the gnolls off the pumpkin patches. I’d stumbled into some kind of quest exchange.
My first thought was to shrug him off and leave, which was backed up by my second, third and fourth thought. But it was my fifth thought that somehow got control of my voice.
“Yes, I have a quest for you,” I said, placing two fingertips on his sternum
and gently pushing him out of my personal space. “Lend me fifty talans.”
Our gaze met for a few seconds, or rather, I looked into his eyes and he focused vaguely on something behind my head. Then he produced an understated but roomy purse from his britches, shook out five freshly-minted coins, and thrust them forwards.
“Your quest is complete,” I announced, jingling them in my palm. “Well done. You are truly a hero.”
The tiniest glimmer of understanding flashed momentarily in the center of his dead eyes, then he turned a smooth 180 degrees and jogged off into the crowd, swinging his hips.
Fifteen minutes later I emerged from the tailor in an inexpensive but hard-wearing outdoor robe intended for long-distance trekking and battle magic. My old robe had already been peeled off, wadded up into a foul-smelling blob and dropped down the deepest storm drain the tailor’s assistant could find. With my own personal quest completed, I headed back towards the Street of Inns.
Something was going on in the town square. The elf I’d “hired” for my “quest” was being interrogated by a small throng of adventurers. I wondered if I should be concerned until the elf saw me and removed all doubt by pointing a stiff, accusing finger in my direction.
The head of the little group, a blonde dwarf, bore down on me with anger bristling to the ends of his absurd mustache. “Are you the one who OH GOD YOUR EYES HURRAAARRGLAB.” He picked some half-digested morsels out of his beard and tried again. “Are you the one who gave Erick the ‘lend fifty talans’ quest?”
“Er . . . I have a condition,” I tried.
The dwarf’s eyes narrowed. “You didn’t sign his quest log.” He snatched a little black book from Erick’s unresisting hands and pushed the latest page under my nose. It read, in an impossibly neat hand, Quest 127815, Undead Minion, Cronenburg: Lend me fifty talans.
“You . . . what?” I stammered.
“You didn’t sign it off, genius! How’s he going to register it at the Guild if it’s not verified?”
The rest of the page was filled with a small grid of little boxes to fill in. One for a signature, one underneath that was headed points awarded, and another reading performance: adequate / good / outstanding. A pen was pressed into my hand and I decided that rolling with it was the safest option.
“Right,” said the dwarf, when I’d finished writing. “Pink copy’s yours.” He made to give me the receipt, then something fired in his head and he snatched it back. “Holy iron, did you just give him 100 points for that?”
“Er, yeah.” I’d flipped back over a couple of pages and it seemed like an average amount. “I was impressed by the speedy service.”
Now my receipt was being passed around the gathering crowd of adventurers and creating excited murmurs in its wake. I could feel the hot breath of incoming disaster on my neck. “I wanna do this quest too,” announced the dwarf, digging out his own dog-eared quest journal and wallet. “Fifty talans, right?”
“Here’s my 50 talans!” came a female voice, probably belonging to the slender fist that hung overhead, spilling coins.
“I do money quest,” droned a Syndrome-afflicted mage.
Somehow I’d gotten backed up against the fountain again. I displayed my rotten palms in futile protection from the coins being thrown in my face. “Whoa!” I yelled over the developing hubbub. “I don’t need any more! I needed fifty talans and he was convenient! It was a one time thing!”
The many fists that clutched money and quest logs went away sadly. Then the fists rematerialized clutching swords and battleaxes.
“Well okay then,” I said. “Can I get that pen back?”
—
“Where the hell have you been?” said Meryl, when I caught up with her in the Street of Inns at about three in the morning. “Where did you get that huge bag of money?”
I dumped it on the pavement, sick of hefting the weight around. “Is there a word for the exact opposite of a mugging?”
“You’ve got a coin in your nose hole.” She pulled it out helpfully and inspected it. “What happened, exactly?”
I told her.
“So wait, they all gave you fifty talans each just so you’d sign a piece of paper and write down ‘100 points’?”
“Exactly.”
“How does that even work?”
I held my hands out. “I don’t know! They wouldn’t stop giving me money! And I was actually holding out hope that this continent would be slightly less insane than the last one. This isn’t very encouraging.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, you look devastated. That’s a nice new hat, by the way. Gold leaf?”
“No, Elfweave. Looks like gold leaf, about three times the price.” I adjusted the brim. “Give me a break, I’ve been rotting on a beach for weeks, I’m cheering myself up. Invested in a couple of new mage spells, too.”
“Oh really? Such as?”
She promptly vanished in a burst of glittery particles. In her place sat a stunned little black-and-white bunny rabbit, twitching its nose in adorable wonder for a few seconds before the transformation reversed. There was a brief surreal in-between moment when the rabbit momentarily had breasts and a head four times too large, then there was the crack of a universe falling back into line and Meryl returned.
“The rabbit spell,” she said, bored. “Yeah, it was a funny prank the first ten or twelve times I fell for it at Dreadgrave’s.”
“It is not a prank. It’s a combat control strategy that also happens to be incredibly hilarious.”
“Thaddeus is here,” she announced, pointing to the nearest inn, The Good Innvestment, whose shingle was optimistically decorated with the image of an innkeeper waist-deep in coins. “Slippery John went scouting ahead, said he’d be back by sunrise.”
“Did he take Drylda?” I asked as we entered the Good Innvestment.
“Yeah, why?”
“I’m thinking that the only thing that’s going to get scouted is the inside of her bodice.”
“Why don’t you like Slippery John? You seem to spend your whole unlife following him around.”
“He set us on fire.”
“Oh, that was just adventurer stuff. You wouldn’t understand. You shouldn’t take it so seriously.”
Another thing that was difficult to take seriously was the interior of the Good Innvestment. The designers obviously knew what adventurers expected from a wayside inn—scowling battle-scarred innkeeper in eyepatch and apron, unvarnished tables, smoky torchlight and ale served in the biggest flagons your restaurant supplier could find–and they were trying so hard to be that kind of place you could practically hear the walls straining with the effort. The tables had had their varnish sanded off, then scratches and imperfections had been carefully added with a chisel. The flaming torches were normal magic-powered lights with fluttering bits of orange cloth attached. The barman had the eyepatch and apron, but he was thin and permanently beaming, and his battle scars were drawn on with eyebrow pencil.
“How much, exactly, has the priest lightened up?” I asked, as we dodged the innkeeper’s attempts to wish us a nice day.
“Thaddeus? It’s like talking to a different man. I really think you’ll be amazed.”
I’d seen him now, his lanky, gray-skinned form easy to spot among the rippling bronzed musculature of the other clientele. He was sitting by himself at one of the unvarnished tables, arms folded, intently watching a nearby table of dwarves and narrowing his eyes every time any of them started to raise a glass to their lips.
“Hey, Thaddeus,” said Meryl. “Look who I found.”
Thaddeus sneered so hard that his nose became sandwiched between the two halves of his upper lip. “My soul weeps blood to know that your putrescence blights this realm still, suckler of evil’s horny nipple.”
I glared at him, then at Meryl, who shrugged. “Well, Slippery John really seemed to be getting through to him, anyway.”
I sat down and buried my face in my elbows. “Will you please stop going on about Slippery Joh
n?”
“What have you got against him? He’s trying to get along with you, you know.”
“Leaving aside—”
“—Leaving aside the burning thing—”
“Also the fact that he’s an adventurer, and therefore a self-obsessed money-grubbing moron in severe denial about the fact that he’s not the handsome prince in his own personal fairy story?”
A smug little gleam flashed in the glow of Meryl’s eyes. “I know what this is about. You hate adventurers because you were originally killed by them.”
“No I wasn’t. I was killed by students. The adventurers just didn’t help. And anyway, I’ve been killed by lots of things. Jumping off towers, tools in the skull, falling buildings . . .”
“Yeah, but the first time’s special. You never forget it.” She cupped her chin in her hands and her gaze went somewhere else. “I remember mine. I was a burgeoning flower of womanhood. He was the weird kid who kept playing with his switchblade. We were both so nervous, but we figured it out together.” She sighed. “I think they hanged him for it.”
“Anyway,” I said, changing the subject as fast as possible, “why shouldn’t I hate adventurers? I think we’re both entitled to at this point.”
“Are you kidding? They dedicate their lives to helping people. They’re heroes.”
I rolled my eyes. “You have this thing about seeing things in black and white, don’t you? Good and evil. Heroes and villains. Probably comes from that Binny upbringing. Life’s more complex than that. There are no heroes or villains. There’s just people who want money and people who want a bit more money.”
“What about you?”
“What about me?”
“Wouldn’t you say you’re on a heroic quest?”
I looked at her, eyebrow raised. “I wouldn’t call getting myself killed a particularly heroic goal.”
“It’s still a quest. And you’ve already had epic battles and stuff.”
“Having a quest doesn’t mean anything. Everyone’s on a quest. I want to die. You’ve got your Borrigarde thing. And Thaddeus hasn’t alienated everyone in the world yet.”
Mogworld Page 16
