by Logan Jacobs
“So, they don’t like strangers,” I whispered. “Those three wouldn’t even talk to me.”
“I know,” Aerin replied. “I even offered the man I was talking to some silver, and he just told me to go back to the city. At least Maruk seems to be getting somewhere.”
“No.” I shook my head. “He’s talking about wool.”
“So what’s next?” Aerin asked. “Do we go knocking on doors?”
“I don’t think that’ll make anyone like us better,” I replied with a glance over to the bar where Dehn had still only succeeded in speaking to the bartender. “Maybe we should tell them we’re with the Mage Academy. You know, pull rank.”
“I don’t think these people care about the Mage Academy’s authority enough for that to work.” The healer drummed her fingers thoughtfully on the warped wooden tabletop. “They’re farmers, not mages. I bet the only mages they even see around here are from guilds.”
As another patron gave Lena the cold shoulder, the alchemist stood and came over to the table where Aerin and I sat.
“No luck?” Aerin asked when the golden-haired elf plopped down with a despondent sigh.
“No,” Lena replied. Then she frowned. “You know, I think an enchantment that makes sheep glow in the dark would be very useful. You wouldn’t lose them at night, and then the wool--”
“About the curse, Lena,” Aerin interrupted. “Or any important magical items.”
“Oh.” Lena sighed again. “No, no one would tell me anything about that, either.”
There came a low, knowing chuckle from the table behind us.
“Nah, you won’t get a word out from these folks about that curse,” came a gravelly voice, and I turned to see an old ladona man with a sun-weathered face and heavy-looking horns like a ram’s curling around his ears. Smoke trailed from the narrow pipe he held, and it clicked against his teeth as he placed it in his mouth again. It was obvious that he wasn’t from around here. He had a pack on the chair next to him that looked just as old as he was, and a scabbard at his hip.
“You know about the curse?” I turned in my seat to face him better.
“I know about the curse.” The ladona man dipped his head in a nod and smiled around his pipe. “And I know that the locals won’t say a word about it. They think it’s bad luck even to mention it, and they don’t take kindly to strangers.”
“We can tell,” Aerin said. “What do you know about it? Do you know how it started?”
“Just that anyone that dies here comes back,” the man replied, “unless you chop ‘em up or burn ‘em. Started about fifty years ago, if the rumors are true.”
“We were hoping for more than rumors,” I said.
“Well, there’s only one person alive who can tell you the truth,” the ladona man said, and he blew out a ring of blue-tinged smoke. “Only one who was alive when it started. He’s a fellow by the name of Greeves. He lives down the road a ways, at the cottage with the red door. He won’t be any more welcoming of visitors than any of this lot, though.”
“We’ll convince him,” I replied. “Thank you for your help.”
“I used to be like you,” the old man said with a smile. “I’m just paying forward the kindness an old adventurer paid me. You do the same if you get to be my age, and we’re even.” He let out a hoarse chuckle. “Besides, old Greeves still owes me for a job I did for him back in the day. He could do for a bit of bother.”
I clicked my tongue to call Merlin, and we rounded up Maruk and Dehn before we started for Greeves’ house. Just as the old adventurer had said, it was only about a mile down the road from the tavern, and the red door was as clear as day. I stopped on the side of the street and turned to the others.
“We need some kind of plan. He won’t want to talk to us, so we need to find a way to convince him that it’s important.”
“Maybe if we say we’re trying to stop the curse, he’ll want to help us,” Maruk suggested.
“We could pay him,” Lena said.
“I like Maruk’s idea,” Aerin replied.
“That could backfire, though,” I countered.
“We could threaten to knock his teeth in if he doesn’t tell us what he knows,” Dehn put in.
“How on earth did you become a guard?” Maruk asked. “Aren’t you supposed to protect and serve?”
“I’m a city guard,” Dehn answered. “And we’re not in the city.”
“Let’s lead with Maruk’s suggestion,” I cut in. “If that doesn’t work, we’ll see if a bribe does.” I gave Dehn a pointed look. “And we will not assault anyone.”
“Yeah, okay,” the halfling muttered. “You’re the boss.”
I led the way up the path to Greeves’ home and knocked on the door. There was some shuffling and muttered cursing from inside, and then the door swung open and a dwarf peered out. His long, dark hair was shot through with strands of gray and pulled into a ponytail, and he’d braided small sections of his beard. Neat little spectacles were perched on the bent bridge of his red nose, and he was wearing what appeared to be a stained nightshirt with a loud pattern that reminded me of a Hawaiian shirt, though from what I could make out, the shapes weren’t hibiscus flowers.
“What do you want?” he asked gruffly.
“Good afternoon, uh, Mister Greeves,” Aerin said cheerfully. “We wanted to ask you about something, could we come in for a minute?”
“No,” the dwarf answered, and he started to swing the door back, but I caught it and earned myself an annoyed glare.
“We know about the curse, and we know people here don’t want to talk about it,” I said quickly, “but we think we might be able to fix it. We just want to ask you a little about it. If you help us, we can help your village.”
“Help the village?” Greeves scoffed. “Now I don’t know why I’d do a thing like that when none of them do anything for me. You know how long my roof has been leaking, boy?”
“Uhh--” I started, but Greeves cut me off.
“Do any of them want to take an afternoon away from their sheep and their ale to pay a visit to their elders? Three months I’ve been working on this book of riddles, and no one in this whole damn village will hear a word about it! And that’s to say nothing about the little bastards that have been stealing my radishes--”
“Did you say a book of riddles?” Lena asked suddenly.
“Every night I hear-- er, yes, I did,” Greeves replied, and he leveled a suspicious look at the alchemist.
“What if you told us one of your riddles, and if we can answer it correctly, you tell us about the curse?” Lena proposed.
I was impressed. That was clever of her to have thought of that. Unfortunately, Greeves was a harder sell.
“Why would you offer?” he demanded. “You think you know them all already, do you? Confident that you’ve heard them all before?”
“We’d accept the best two out of three,” Aerin suggested. “You can have more than one chance to stump us.”
“Oh, I see,” Greeves growled. “You’re just trying to steal them. You just want to hear all my good riddles, and then you’ll run off and publish them in one of your fancy, big-city book shops, huh?”
“No, that’s not--” Aerin started.
“Forget it!” Greeves moved to shut the door again.
“Something different, then,” Lena said. “How about a game of wits?”
The dwarf stopped, and though he still frowned deeply at us, I could tell that he was intrigued despite himself. “What did you have in mind?”
“Let us in, and I’ll explain it,” Lena replied.
The dwarf stared a moment longer, then he stepped back and swung the door open to admit us. His cottage was dim with the curtains pulled over all the windows but one, beneath which was a desk cluttered with papers. That was his riddle book, I supposed. Besides the desk, the only furniture was a squat little bed in one corner, and a rugged wooden table with four chairs near an old furnace in the adjacent corner. We gathered awkwardl
y around the table, and Lena sat down.
“If you could just get two glasses of water,” she said, “I’ll explain how it works.”
“Don’t have any glasses,” the dwarf replied cantankerously. “Hope it still works with tin cups.”
“That will be fine,” Lena assured him.
Greeves brought over the cups, set them down, and filled them with water from a pitcher on the table, then sat in the chair opposite Lena and crossed his arms. “Alright, what’s your game, elf?”
“Close your eyes,” Lena instructed, and for once, the dwarf complied without further prodding.
The alchemist moved the cups over and produced a small vial from her pack. From where I stood behind her and wedged partially between the doorway and Maruk’s shoulder, I couldn’t see exactly what she was doing, but she must have poured the contents of the vial into one of the cups because it was empty when she returned it to her pack. That done, she moved both cups back, one before Greeves, and one before herself.
“You can open your eyes, now,” she said.
“You still haven’t explained the game,” Greeves said with a sneer as he eyed the cups.
“There’s a truth serum in one of the cups,” Lena explained.
Greeves leaned forward to peer into his own cup and then Lena’s.
“You won’t be able to see it,” the elf told him. “Or smell it, or even taste it. You can drink from either your cup or mine, but then I get to ask you a question. If you win, you’ll be able to tell us whatever you like and laugh to yourself about how much more clever you are than us while we waste our time, but if you lose--”
“Alright, alright, I get it,” the dwarf cut her off. “Let me think.” Greeves crossed his hairy arms over the table and peered at the cups.
Lena sat back patiently while the dwarf glowered at the tin cup on the table before him. He was perfectly still, brow furrowed like a granite statue, for about thirty seconds, but then he sat up suddenly with a proud look, reached across the table and plucked up Lena’s cup, which he downed in one gulp.
“Ask your question, then, elf,” he said with a confident smirk.
“How did the curse start?” Lena asked.
Greeves snorted. “Oh, that’s easy, it--” He broke off suddenly, and his grin slipped away. He bit his lip, eyes wide, but he couldn’t seem to stop himself, and his next words came out in an almost panicked rush. “I was just a boy back then. Some mage went down to the old lord’s castle. It was already in ruins then, so none of us ever bothered with it, but this mage went down there and left something. I don’t know what. People say it was some sort of treasure, but anyone who tried to get it died. The next year, on the same night that the mage had come, the dead began to rise up. In the crypt below the ruins, in the woods, even all the way out here in the village. It never stopped until we started cutting them up into pieces and burning the bones.”
When he’d finished his speech, the dwarf was breathing heavily, and he looked at Lena with wide eyes.
“Thanks for your help, Mr. Greeves,” Lena said brightly, and she reached across the table to shake the dwarf’s hand, and he just stared back numbly at us as we all slipped back outside.
Chapter 7
“So, the truth serum was in your cup the whole time?” Dehn asked when we got outside. “How did you know he would choose that one?”
“I didn’t,” Lena replied with a cheeky grin. “I put it in both cups. It was never part of the rules that I had to drink from either of them, and I don’t make a habit of lying, anyway.”
“That was clever,” I told her. “Nice job.”
“That truth serum worked perfectly,” Aerin added. “Did you see the look on his face? Priceless.”
“You were in on it, Aerin?” Maruk asked.
“Aerin helped me develop it,” Lena explained. “Initially, I was trying to make a potion that would make whoever drank it be able to speak very quickly, but I got stuck and instead it just made the drinker say whatever is on their mind without being able to stop. It was Aerin’s idea to rework it and make it into a truth serum.”
“Well, I’m sure it’ll come in handy again,” I said. “Do you have any more?”
“Not on me, and some of the ingredients are pretty rare, but I think after that test we can be sure that the formula is perfect.”
“Do you think whatever that mage brought down into the ruins could be one of the Shodra, then?” Maruk asked.
“I do,” Aerin answered. “I think that’s why Theira led us here. It must be.”
I hoped so, but even if it wasn’t, it was definitely worth investigating. Maybe we could actually stop the curse, too.
“More importantly, do you think there are still any of those walking corpses hanging around?” Dehn asked. “I’m ready to break in this new sword!”
“Most likely,” I answered. I knew better than to hope otherwise. Maybe the villagers were taking care of their own dead, but I was certain there would be more in the crypt below the ruins that Greeves had mentioned. I wondered if the mage returned to retrieve the artifact and would be there still, somehow clinging to life after all these years, or undead as well.
The ruins were far enough away that we untethered our horses from outside the tavern to ride to them, and the villagers seemed smugly pleased to see us go. I didn’t care about their attitudes as much now that we’d gotten some useful information, but part of me still wanted to point out that we would’ve left a lot sooner if they’d just cooperated with us.
The road up to the ruins was nothing more than a dirt track, and the forest grew right up to the edge with no one from the village willing to undertake the task of maintaining it. The trees loomed in close and cast wavering shadows over our backs as we rode, and the morning’s warmth was quickly leached away. Merlin grew strangely agitated, and after climbing all over my lap and shoulders, he managed to curl up against the blanket in my pack.
It didn’t take long, maybe fifteen minutes or so, before the trees thinned enough that I could see the gray stones of a partially collapsed wall on the top of a hill about a mile away. It didn’t look like anything special, but from my experience, that didn’t mean we weren’t about to be elbow-deep in the undead. We tied the horses to an old fence that bordered one of the farms at the bottom of the hill. Even the farm seemed deserted, and the forest had begun to retake the land in the absence of anyone brave enough to work fields so close to the cursed ruins.
The horses were twitchy, and I knew they must have sensed the same dark forces that had made Merlin so agitated. I ran my hand down my mare’s sleek neck while the others dismounted.
The old path up to the ruins was choked with weeds and thorny tangled vines, but Dehn scampered ahead and cut eagerly through the worst of them while he gleefully belted out a song about maiming and disemboweling that I suspected he’d made up himself. Since there wasn’t anyone around but us and the villagers, and since I knew we’d alert whatever still lurked in the ruins when we got to them whether or not the halfling sang on the way up, I didn’t bother to tell him to stop.
I was surprised to see that a decent portion of the fortress still stood, more than had been apparent from afar, anyway. The stones were worn, and the edges of the broken walls rounded by centuries of wind and rain, but I could clearly make out the outline of the structure, and there was almost an entire wall that had been preserved, with neat rectangular holes where the windows had been that now supported a few birds’ nests. The grassy courtyard was studded with clumps of bright wildflowers that swayed in the breeze, and here and there beneath the cracked flagstone floors, more spots of green crept up to reclaim the land. It was sort of pretty in its own way, and if it weren’t for the unearthly chill that settled over the entire place, it didn’t seem the least bit haunted.
“Well?” Dehn shouted as he strode into the center of the abandoned courtyard and raised his twin short swords in a taunting gesture. “Where are all the corpses? That’s what that old dwarf said, right?
”
“They’re probably in the crypts below us,” Maruk answered flatly. “As dead things tend to be. Or, undead, as the case may be.”
“Where’s the entrance to the crypts, then?” the halfling demanded. He stomped in a circle as though he meant to test the ground beneath him for weaknesses.
“You’re seeing everything I’m seeing,” Maruk replied. He shooed Dehn toward the area of the old castle that was the most intact. “Let’s see if we can find a door, perhaps some stairs.”
“You could help, you know,” I told Merlin as I pulled him off my shoulder and set him in the grass. The puca stared at me for a moment with a peeved expression, then trotted up behind the orc and the halfling and wove between their legs into the maze of rubble beyond.
“Hey!” Dehn shouted as he stumbled over the puca. “Watch it!”
Merlin didn’t even bother to look back as he continued through the ruins. He had no trouble jumping over the waist-high mounds of rubble that blocked the path, and the rest of us were left to scramble awkwardly after him. Dehn, naturally, refused offers of help even when he was obviously struggling to get over a collapsed wall that was nearly taller than he was, but after the third time he fell back, Maruk simply hauled him up and over it by the collar of his shirt despite his protests and threats to cut off the orc’s ears.
“As if you could even reach them,” Maruk sighed as he set the halfling down again. “We have a job to do, can’t you just swallow your pride for the moment and save all that aggression for our enemies?”
At the mention of enemies, Dehn calmed down a little.
“Alright, I’ll let it slide this time,” the halfling said. “But I’ll have you know, I’m the--”
“--Tallest in your family,” Maruk and Aerin chimed in as Dehn finished.
“So you’ve said,” Maruk reminded him.
Merlin had stopped a few yards ahead, where a rotten wooden door was still propped up against the stone frame. There was a carving above it, and though a sizeable chunk of it had been broken away, I could tell it was a skull.