Seeker of Secrets

by Deck Davis

  Some were harder than others, and some definitely took longer than others. Earning the ornithologist class, for instance, required the would-be bird expert to purchase the Hammel’s Guide to Birds and Fowl book, and travel Fortuna ticking off every single bird species listed.

  Benjen had gotten the book as a present from his racist grandpa when he was eight, and around the village he’d ticked off maybe 28 out of 550 bird species. And that was just 1 skill needed in getting the ornithologist class.

  That was why most people stuck to maybe two or three things and spent their lives mastering them. Or, they picked a bunch of low-requirement classes and collected them like they were coins, swapping and changing their 1 primary class and 5 secondary classes whenever they felt like it.

  Benjen was like a magpie, and classes were the shiny things glimmering in his eyes. He could put so much energy into things that Joshua admired him immensely, but his energy came with a problem…he lacked long-term focus.

  No sooner had he ticked one skill of a class sheet, then another class made him salivate. Benjen’s only long-term goal was to restore the guild, and he never, ever wavered on this.

  Focusing back on Benjen as he struck the chert rock against the fire striker, the clanging sound accompanied by a spark and then a whoosh of flame as the kerosene took hold, Joshua realized how dark and cold it was getting, and how much time they’d lost already thanks to their green-skinned diversion.

  This diversion hadn’t stopped crying for an hour now. Honestly, Joshua wondered how it even had the lung power to keep it up. He had to do something. If they were going to have to travel and then make camp with this little creature, they needed it to be quiet.

  “Can you shine that over here?” he said, nodding at the torch.

  Benjen turned Firemane in a practiced trot, bringing the flame torch a little closer. Joshua could faintly feel the heat on his cheeks. The orange and yellow glowed on the goblin’s face, shining back at Joshua in its wide black eyes. Was it cute in a way? Maybe. More of an annoyance right now, though.

  He carefully turned the baby’s cheek. There it was. There, stuck in the swollen part of its face, was a hornet stinger maybe half an inch long. Seeing it made him wince.

  It didn’t take having the full medic class to know that a stinger wedged in skin could still be pumping trace amounts of venom.

  He lightly grabbed the edge of the stinger.

  “This is going to hurt. Be brave,” he said.

  Benjen turned away. That was another one of his things; he hated to see anything going in or out of the human body. When the village elder needed to blood-let him one time, Benjen almost passed out.

  Joshua decided that sharp and fast was the way to go here. The stinger wasn’t too deep, after all, and it didn’t look barbed.

  He pulled it out. The baby let out one great cry, an echo of pain that must have been heard a mile away. Fireman snorted. Roebuck, the lazy horse, did nothing.

  The crying stopped.

  And that left Joshua and Benjen, only 8 miles from home, with another 392 to go, and with a goblin baby to take care of along the way.

  “We better get going,” he said. “It’s going to be a long night.”

  Chapter Four

  Two hundred and sixty-three miles. Joshua knew that was how far they travelled before seeing signs of civilization, because he counted them all as well as he could. It seemed that his father’s teachings had rubbed off on him, and he never really realized it before as clearly as he did during their journey, but he counted everything.

  In his head he held all the numbers that were important to them – how many days’ worth of food they had, how many refills their waterskins would take before fraying and then bursting, how many times the sun rose and set, how many storms rained down on them.

  The numbers told a sorry story. Two young lads, one goblin baby, a hundred and thirty-seven miles left to travel, four days behind schedule. Dwindling supplies, aching heads.

  He counted how many bottle of beer Benjen drank each day; three bottles swigged lazily up until mid-afternoon, and then he picked up the pace a little, drinking enough beer that Joshua would have been falling off his horse if he tried to keep up. Benjen had always been able to handle his alcohol better, being much bigger and built from sturdier stuff.

  Despite their aching limbs and depleting supplies, 263 miles in the saddle had been good for one thing; his control skill in his horserider class had gone from novice 3/10 to 6/10, and the incremental skill improvements meant he was sitting straight in the saddle now and holding the reins in a surer way, and that calmness transferred down to Roebuck, who now seemed happier.

  As well as that, they had twice had to leap across small streams, and they had also had to taking a running jump to clear fallen logs that blocked their way into a valley that they couldn’t divert around.

  Doing that had boosted his horserider jump skill from 1 to 2, and his burst of speed from 2 to 3. He was still a while away from horserider level 2 yet, and he was years away from level 5 mastery, where he’d be able to choose an elite version of horserider, such as dragon-rider or cavalryman.

  Benjen stopped just ahead of him.

  “A town,” he said, pointing at houses in the distance. “See it? Which one is it? Freemantle?”

  “I think Freemantle is ten miles south east,” said Joshua, mentally picturing the map of Fortuna in his head. He’d tried to memorize it, but explorer was a class he didn’t possess. They had a paper map, of course, but they’d been forced to take it out during a storm, and it had gotten sodden and windswept. They tried drying it but the ink ran and the paper tore. Luckily, the guildhouse wasn’t in a hard-to-find place. All they had to do was follow the signs to Yellow Spring, and then cut north after that.

  “Wherever it is, it’s a town. With pubs and shops. And more importantly, no backward attitudes. Someone will know what to do with our little pal.”

  At this, as if it recognized it was being talked about, the goblin baby gurgled. Joshua looked at it with a trace of envy. It seemed crazy, but the little baby already had more facial hair on its puffy cheeks than he could grow. And he’d tried. After Benjen grew his beard out, and after hearing a couple of huntresses in the Quarryman Inn telling Benjen how rugged it made him look, Joshua tried growing a beard of his own. But, like his father, he didn’t have the stuff for it. Beards were never a feature of the Crest family.

  He was glad to see a town, though. Not just to replenish their food, but to get rid of the baby. It sounded harsh to say it like that, but they’d done their duty. They’d saved it from the wolves and doing that had set them back.

  Every time Joshua closed his eyes he saw the guildhouse, he saw it looking cleaned-up and proud, and from there his daydreams would float into different scenes, ones where he’d be in the main hall while townsfolks came in with quests. Dragons that needed to be vanquished, demons that had to be sent back to the underworld.

  He’d look at his roster of heroes and he’d analyze their strengths and he’d assign a hero to each quest, and then he’d sit back and smile, happy in the knowledge that their guild was good and just, and that it was doing a worthwhile thing, that he and Benjen hadn’t been stupid to leave the village after all.

  But the guild was still a long way off, and part of Joshua wished he’d practiced enough to level horserider so he could withstand more than just a brisk gallop while sitting on good old Roebuck.

  Still, the sight of the town made the guild seem just that tiny bit closer, because they could get rid of their little green cargo.

  “Pass me a beer,” he said, feeling a little happier.

  Benjen passed him a brown-tinted bottle and held one of his own, and they clinked them together.

  “Here’s to getting rid of our goblin and getting to the guild!” he said.

  ~

  Town discovered: Dyrewood

  Binding of the Seeker updated

  You have learned something new; the presence of a
town you have never visited.

  Seeker knowledge +5

  Seeker Knowledge Level: 0 [5/25]

  Joshua liked learning new things and seeing new places anyway, but his Seeker binding gave it that extra bit of novelty. He just wished he could hurry it up; he’d have to get his seeker knowledge to 25 before he even hit level 1 of the binding, and when he did that he’d get a skill or ability of some kind. He couldn’t wait to find out what it was.

  It had taken them an hour walking through the streets of Dyrewood, a town filled with grizzled-faced lumberjacks and their wives and their kids who looked stockier than Joshua, until they’d found the civic offices.

  In the office, a crow sat behind a large oak desk. He dipped a feather into an ink pot and wrote on a book in front of him, taking his time with each word as though every letter had to be a masterpiece. When he saw the two lads, he stood up.

  He was taller than both of them, and gangly almost to the point of being a skeleton. His face was crow-like, as large as a human’s but possessing indistinguishable bird qualities, with little black eyes and a sharp, protruding beak.

  He wore a long gown that split into two at the bottom, where it met his boots. There were two holes on his back, and a minute set of wings sprouted out, the plumage black like ink, the size completely off-kilter with his humanoid body. With human hands and a crow face, he made for an interesting mix.

  Race discovered: Crowsie

  Binding of the Seeker updated

  You have met a member of the crowsie race for the first time.

  Seeker knowledge +10

  Seeker Knowledge Level: 0 [15/25]

  The bird-man – crowsie, Joshua repeated in his head now that he knew what the race was called, smiled at them. It was a small smile, since his beak wouldn’t allow him to smile wide, but his eyes didn’t look beady or bird-like anymore, and instead they looked alive.

  “Ah, gentlemen. Welcome. I’m Kordrude. How can I help you? Are you looking for tourist information? Dyrewood has a number of taverns and inns depending on your preferences.”

  “Well…” said Benjen.

  Joshua nudged him. He held up the basket, in which was a dozing goblin baby. “We were hoping there was somewhere…how can I put this…somewhere we can leave…him.”

  “It’s not our baby,” added Benjen.

  “No, I can see that,” said Kordrude, pressing the long fingers on each hand together. “Take a seat.”

  Joshua and Benjen sat in the chairs in front of the desk, while Kordrude perched in one behind it. The back of his chair was sunken a little, presumably custom-made to make his wings comfortable.

  Feeling a little awkward about the goblin, Joshua set the basket on the floor beside him. Then, realizing it wasn’t a prop, he set it on the desk, where he could see him and make sure he was okay.

  “May I get you gentlemen a cup of tea? I have ratroot and kenthistle…”

  “Don’t suppose you have anything stronger?” said Benjen. “Something that’ll blast away the ice a little? The storms round here don’t mess around.”

  “We’re having something of a cold spell,” said Kordrude. “I’m afraid tea is all I have.”

  Benjen took a bottle out of the leather bag on his shoulder. He plonked it on the table. “Well, then,” he said, “In our village, we’re never ones to be outdone on hospitality. How about you get your beak around this, Kordrude?”

  Joshua saw the bottle and the label stuck to it, and he grinned. He knew what it was. This was one of Benjen’s special beers. It was one Benjen had brewed himself, after learning some of the craft from the innkeeper. He’d experimented on a few different batches, adding cocoa powder here, chili there, a pinch of nutmeg, a twist of lime, before settling on a recipe he loved.

  The only problem? It tasted horrendous. Benjen had made him try each and every batch, and he just didn’t like it. But, Benjen had been so proud of it that Joshua forced himself to finish the bottle of every batch Benjen urged him to try. That was one of the prices of friendship, he guessed; having to drink beer that tasted too strongly of honey and parsnips.

  Then again, Benjen would do the same for him. Joshua had a brief spell when he was fourteen where he’d wanted to become a bard. He’d saved up enough gold to buy a used lute, and he’d practiced until he unlocked the lute and songwriting skills.

  Despite never getting beyond level 1 – novice – he started composing his own ballads about heroes and battle and men and women pursuing glorious deeds (the heroes were often named some variant of Joshua.)

  Benjen, as much as he liked a laugh and a joke, had listened to each ballad in as thoughtful a way as he could, and even found a point or two to praise Joshua on without betraying the truth that the music was god-awful. Thankfully, that phase of Joshua’s had passed.

  Benjen pushed the bottle forward. “A gift to you, Kordrude,” he said.

  The crow tentatively twisted the bottle and looked at the label, on which was a crude drawing of Benjen himself, but made to look like some kind of mighty, barrel-chested warrior. “I couldn’t possibly…I mean, I’m at work. Although, I suppose technically my hours are finished. You’re lucky you caught me at all, actually.”

  Benjen grinned. “Go on, Kordrude, my lad.”

  “Oh, what the hell? It won’t kill me, will it!”

  “Well…” said Joshua.

  Benjen nudged him.

  Kordrude popped the cork from the bottle. As he lifted it to his beak, Benjen leaned forward. His face was a fix of utter concentration as he watched the crow take his first sip. He was practically holding the chair arms with tension.

  Kordrude took a sip…and then a glug. Benjen leaned forward further, anxious for the verdict.

  The crow burped and put his long fingers to his lips. His black eyes widened. “My, that’s an unusual flavor.”

  “Unusual, how?”

  “Is that…hmmm…nutmeg?” he said, licking the edges of his beak with his tongue. “Chili, perhaps?”

  “You like it?”

  “Where did you get such a drink? It’s nothing like they have in the inns around here.”

  “I made it,” said Benjen, proudly.

  “It’s delightful,” said Kordrude. “Do you mind if I…hmm…save the rest for later? Such a treat needs to be enjoyed back at home, in front of the fire. Not in this dusty office.”

  Joshua watched Benjen for his reaction now. He was a little wiser to social graces than his friend, and he guessed that Kordrude had told a well-meant white lie. Would Benjen detect it, though?

  “Go ahead, pal,” said Benjen, beaming. “Glad you like it. If I ever get around to it, I’ll brew some more and send you a crate.”

  Phew. Benjen, as far as Joshua knew, had hardly told any lies all his life, and as such he wasn’t good at spotting them in others. He was a well-meaning guy, always talking from the heart, and he always assumed that others did the same. Joshua was glad that Kordrude, though a stranger, had picked up enough of the clues about the beer that he spared Benjen’s feelings.

  “Now,” said Kordrude, “we have business. Where did you find the goblin child?”

  Joshua told him about finding the baby in the road, and about the attitudes toward such creatures back home, and so how they’d ridden for miles to find somewhere safe to leave him.

  Kordrude nodded throughout, breaking concentration only to pluck an errant feather from his scalp, or to stand up and turn around behind him, where there was a cage. Inside was what looked like a ball of fur lined with spikes. It was a pet of some sort, but it didn’t seem to have a face, or arms, or anything else you would presume a living thing to have. But when Kordrude opened a wooden box on his desk and plucked out a grasshopper, the ball of fur somehow gobbled it up.

  When Joshua was finished, Kordrude nodded sagely. “Yes, I rarely travel – there’s just too much work to do – but I have heard of some of the more…backward attitudes in other parts of Fortuna. The goblin migration hasn’t helped, either. Have
you noticed that the people who complain loudest about goblins taking their jobs, are the ones who haven’t worked a day in their lives?”

  “The migration hasn’t really touched us much,” said Benjen. “Nothing for ‘em to do near our village. We have trouble when they get too close. Fights and stuff. But it’s the humans’ fault as much as the goblins’.”

  “What are you doing all the way out here?” asked Kordrude. “I take it you didn’t come all this way for the goblin?”

  “We’ve bought a guildhall,” said Joshua.

  “Wow. Starting a business, are we? Turning it into a tavern or the like? Somewhere to sell your…uh…delightful brews?”

  Benjen shook his head. “No…we’re opening a guildhall.”

  “A guildhall for innkeepers?”

  “For heroes,” said Joshua.

  Kordrude leaned forward. “Wow. I must say…I thought the days of small guilds were done.”

  “Maybe they were, but we’re going to bring them back,” said Benjen.

  “It sounds like quite an undertaking.”

  “We’ve got time, and we’re not scared of hard work. But we need to get there, first. Which brings us to our little green friend here,” said Joshua.

  Kordrude leaned forward and tickled the goblin baby with his long fingers. The baby gurgled.

  “Can we leave him with you?” said Benjen. “There’s an orphanage here, right? I mean, he might have parents, but we didn’t see any sign of his clan.”

  Kordrude frowned. “We do, but I’m afraid it is full. A rather sad event. You’ve heard of the mythen mines east of here?”

  “We don’t know much about the area.”

  “A mine collapsed, and I’m sorry to say that some of the adult molars inside were crushed, leaving their children alone. Our rooms are full until we unearth a fresh habitat for them.”