Seeker of Secrets

by Deck Davis

  The problem was, he hadn’t even earned his primary class yet. He knew what he wanted it to be, but it was going to take some work.

  “Come on, Joshy,” shouted Benjen, standing atop of the hill in front of the church doors. “Get a move on!”

  Joshua picked up his pace, meeting his friend just as he pushed open the church doors.

  None of Joshua’s imaginings were true, it seemed. This church was nothing like what he’d pictured in his head; there were no robed acolytes quietly pacing its stone floors. Instead, it was a small room made from wooden walls and flooring. While this was the ‘middle finger’ of the church and the roof should have been high above them, someone had erected a low wooden ceiling, giving the place an almost cozy look.

  The priests, if they even were that, were nothing like he imagined. Three of them were sitting around an oak table with a runto-board in front of them, and each had a goblet of wine at various states of fill.

  The priests were a rotund man, a slender, beautiful woman with a green ponytail, and an older man with a bird-like face, except he was completely human and what looked like a beak was just his sharp nose. They each wore the same purple robes with poorly-sewn renditions of a dragon on the backs. It looked nothing at all like Orogoth.

  “Praise be to Orogoth,” said the rotund man, and then hiccupped.

  The bird-like man sipped on his wine. “Praise be.”

  “Huh,” said the woman, and Joshua didn’t known if her noise of disdain was for him and Benjen, or for the dragon greeting that she seemingly couldn’t be bothered to say.

  The rotund man stood up. He was a little unsteady on his feet. His jowls seemed to shake a little when he walked, and he flashed them a beaming smile. “Come for a blessing for the babe?” he said.

  Joshua held up the basket. “Him? Uh, no. No thanks.”

  The bird-like man recoiled a little on seeing the goblin. Then, he seemed to compose himself a little. That kind of reaction was normal, Joshua knew. For all that people preached tolerance for other races after the treaty of the three kings, old prejudices died hard, especially in older minds that had held them for a long time.

  The rotund man left the table and joined Joshua and Benjen, and he gave them yet another customary greeting; he pressed his hands together and gently bowed in each of their directions, even at Gobber.

  “Hello, little one,” he said, and reached forward and tickled Gobber’s chin. The goblin let out a strange giggle.

  “What can I do for you?” said the priest.

  Over his shoulder, the green pony-tailed woman moved a piece on the runto-board, and she called over her shoulder, “No services today. Worship is on Tuesdays.”

  The rotund priest shook his head. “These gentlemen aren’t of our church.”

  Benjen eyed the wine goblets on the table behind the priest, but just about managed to tear his attention away from them. “How do you know we aren’t of the church?”

  “A priest can detect auras,” said the man. “It is one of our skills.”

  “That, and we have eyes and ears,” said the woman. “You’re not from here, are you?”

  “We’ve been getting that a lot lately,” said Benjen.

  “Are you here to purchase a blessing book?” asked the rotund man.

  “No.”

  “A scroll of prayer, perhaps? A sprig of moonleaf to burn on cold nights? I can do you a deal, gentlemen.”

  Something strange had entered his tone of voice now, and Joshua suddenly got the feeling he was haggling with a trader, not meeting a priest. The more he thought about it, the less this seemed like a church at all. There was something not right here.

  It was time to use one of his classes. As well as horse-rider and zoologist level 1, he also had the negotiator class as a secondary class. Of course, he hadn’t traded enough times and with enough people to level it up to 2, the competent rank, but he knew when they set out on their journey that either he or Benjen would need a wry-eye for trading.

  Benjen was so honest that bartering an item’s price down was completely beyond him. To Benjen, offering empty, re-usable beer bottles was as close as he’d ever get to negotiating.

  Negotiator as a class was comprised of several skills, each of which he’d had to learn the basics of. One of them was perception; the art of looking at what was around him and seeing beyond the surface and to what was really there.

  He thought about his class, allowing wisps of writing form in front of him and knowing that only he would be able to see them.

  Class: Negotiator - Level 1 [Novice]

  - Perception: Novice 6/10

  - Lie: Novice 7/10

  - Calm People: Novice 3/10

  If Joshua ever let someone else see his negotiator class skills, they’d look at his lie skill and how it was higher than the rest, and they’d conclude that he was dishonest. But that wasn’t strictly the case; sure, Joshua had levelled it by telling white lies to the village elders and to his father, but he’d done it for a good reason.

  He knew that they’d need lots of supplies for the guild in order to fix it up, and he knew that they wouldn’t have much gold. He wanted to be able to get the best deals for whatever they needed, and lie was a part of that. A better name for the skill would be bluff, he always thought. Bartering on prices was a kind of bluffing.

  His perception skill, as low-level as it was, helped him now. Because he saw beyond the church façade, beyond the uniform of the ‘priests’. He noticed, over in the corner, a book tucked just out of sight, with the word ‘accounts’ printed on it.

  When he looked at the rotund man, his perception helped him see beyond the solemn expression the man wore, and he noticed something sitting a little deeper, an expression he wore on the inside and must have worked to hide.

  Joshua was only a level 1 negotiator, so the benefits on his perception were slight, but they were still enough for him to detect a pinch of something. Was it greed? It certainly felt like it.

  There was a scam here. He was sure of it. But what game were they playing?

  Class: Negotiator level 1 [Novice]

  Perception skill increased from Novice 6 to 7/10

  Binding of the Seeker updated

  You have used your perception skill to uncover a lie, and a lie always holds hidden knowledge. However, you do not know what the knowledge is, and so only gain +1 to Seeker Knowledge. Since your own perception uncovered the presence of a lie, Seeker Knowledge bonus is doubled.

  Seeker knowledge +2

  Seeker Knowledge Level: 1 [37/50]

  Store of Secrets updated

  [Minor]Secret added: The Scam of the Church of Orogoth

  This gave him a lot to think about, and not much time to do it. Increasing his perception put him a little closer to getting level 2 – competent rank of negotiator, and he couldn’t wait for that.

  Wait, though. There was something else to get excited about here.

  More important than his perception increase was his seeker binding boost. Sure, +2 wasn’t much of a rise, but in that little number and the text that had informed him about it, lay possibilities.

  From what it had said, if he uncovered new knowledge using his perception, then the rewards were greater, and it’d help him level his seeker binding quicker and get more abilities from it.

  Negotiator wasn’t such a dry class after all; in fact, if he figured out a better way to level his perception, it could be amazing.

  He just needed to get his perception to the point that he could see things differently; that he could detect secrets whether they be secrets people kept to themselves, or secret doorways or dungeons or hiding places.

  He needed to become better at seeing what others couldn’t.

  For now, though, he had three priests and a dragon to deal with, and he was going to have to use another his negotiator skills to do that.

  ~

  Kordrude walked up the hill and toward the guildhouse. He couldn’t see the creature yet, since the hill
hid it from view, but he could sense it. His linguist class pricked in his mind, and he thought he could see the shapes of an ancient language in the dim recesses of his brain.

  A language that only a creature like a dragon could produce.

  What was he doing? Had he gone mad? Here he was, walking up a hill with a leather bag on his back, with all his possessions and Furb, his hairy friend, inside it. He didn’t have weapons or potions or spell scrolls. He was utterly defenseless.

  Then again, after decades of war, hadn’t the treaty of the three kings proven that sometimes, words were the most powerful weapons of all?

  Ha – rubbish! A word wouldn’t stand up to the fiery breath of a scaled behemoth.

  Still, Kordrude knew what he would say to this dragon. And he knew that dragons, as lonely as they were, were desperate for conversation, and were often upset that only the rare few in Fortuna could speak to them. That was why they became so enraged when people tried talking to them in anything other than dragon-tongue.

  Despite the anxiety in his stomach, despite the chattering of his teeth that made him a little ashamed – and would have made his older warrior brother, Cyrogen laugh – he pushed on up the hill and toward the beast.

  ~

  “A charm of fortune, perhaps?” said the rotund priest. “A bag of quicksilver?”

  “Give it a rest,” said the woman. “Look at them – they hardly have a gold coin between them.”

  The game had gone on for a few minutes now, with the priest offering all manner of strange items to them, and Joshua could see that Benjen’s famous patience was drying up a little. He knew that Benjen would feel a little nervous now. As much as he always gave out an air of cheer, Benjen was more at home in a tavern with a mug of ale in front of him, and social situations outside a tavern made him nervous.

  The priest’s incessant offerings, coupled with the clues his perception had given him, told him enough. Joshua guessed that this wasn’t a church at all. The three people here were traders, that was all, and their scheme somehow involved the dragon currently grazing in the guildhouse gardens.

  He remembered what Jitsog, the innkeeper, had told him. That the priests could somehow get close to Orogoth without getting hurt. Dragons were famously reluctant to let humans near to them and would often become quite annoyed, and this would present itself in a stream of fiery breath. For the priests to get up close, they must have had a way to keep the dragon calm.

  Benjen wandered over to the table. “Mind if I sit down? My legs are killing me.”

  The bird-like man kicked out a chair next to him. “Sit, my friend, and have a little wine.” Although his words were nice, Joshua sensed something behind them; a falseness that lay behind what he’d actually said.

  “Well, I really shouldn’t mix my drinks…but…oh, go on then,” said Benjen.

  Joshua, bracing himself for another assault of wares offered by who he was now convinced was a charlatan priest, prepared to use another skill in the negotiator arsenal. This was a skill prized by any self-respecting negotiator, and it was one that Benjen, with his endearing honesty, could never have learned.

  Facing the rotund man, Joshua spoke using his lie skill. “We work for Mayor Gossidge,” he said. “He’d like the guardsman to check on Orogoth. You know, just have a little look at him-”

  “Her” corrected the priest.

  “Have a little look at her and make sure she’s not likely to leave the guildhouse any time soon. He doesn’t want her near town, you see. Not with the…” he paused now, his negotiator instincts telling him that if he left a hopeful silence, the other man would fill it.

  “Not with the farmer’s fair coming up this Thursday,” said the man. “Yes, I see. But Mayor Gossidge knows that only a priest may approach Orogoth the Heart.”

  “Normally, yes. But just once, he’d feel comfortable if a guardsman could do it. Now, we know that you’re flesh and blood, as holy as you are. You have ways of approaching her and keeping her calm.”

  “The remedies,” said the man.

  Joshua noticed that Benjen was watching him with a smirk on his face.

  “Yes, the remedies,” said Joshua. “We’d like to get some.”

  Class: Negotiator level 1 [Novice]

  Lie skill increased from Novice 7 to 8/10

  The woman faced him now. Her green ponytail was slung over her shoulder, and Joshua noticed that she had a pattern of gemstones set into her cheek. She was human for the most part, but the gems spoke of another race in her blood, but he couldn’t place it. Damn it, there was so much to learn, and he didn’t have time to do it.

  “Wait,” said the woman. “Why, for all that is good with the Heart, would two representatives of Mayor Gossidge be carrying around a goblin child?”

  Benjen piped up now. “He’s an orphan. We’re tasked with finding a place for him to stay.”

  Ah, good old Benjen. He’d come up with an answer, and he hadn’t needed lie to do it. Sometimes, his honesty was much better than the shrewdness negotiator gave Joshua.

  “Well,” said the woman, “I wouldn’t take the babe near Orogoth. She’s expecting a brood of her own, and she’s likely to take the goblin as a morsel to feed herself.”

  Joshua nodded. “Yes, uh, that’s right. We’ll be careful. So…the remedy?”

  The rotund priest nodded sagely. “Yes. A delicate mix of herbs, incanted by good old Terry over here,” he said, nodding at the bird-faced man behind him. “An expensive blend of weeds and roots. Mayor Gossidge knows that upkeep on the church is a thankless job.”

  “We have to pay you?” said Joshua.

  “I’m sure the mayor’s coffers will compensate your expenses.”

  “Yes, they will,” said Joshua, so wrapped up in his lie that he almost believed it himself. God, lie was effective even as a level 1 negotiator. How good would it be when he reached level 2? “How much does the remedy cost?” he asked.

  “Three golds,” said the rotund man. “A pittance, really.”

  Benjen slammed his glass on the table, wobbling the runto-board. “A pittance? That’s enough to buy a bloody horse!”

  Joshua did the arithmetic in his head. As an accountant’s son, the figures came to him unburdened, though they worried him. Spending three gold on this remedy would leave them short on buying wood and other supplies to fix up the guildhouse. Then again, without it, how would they get rid of the dragon? While that thing was slumming in their guildhouse gardens, they couldn’t get near the place.

  Unless there was another way.

  “How about this?” he said. “The mayor believes that Orogoth’s current location at the guildhouse is a little too close to Ardglass, what with the butcher’s fair coming up.”

  “Farmer’s fair,” corrected the man.

  “Yes. Do you think you three could persuade the dragon to move on for a while?”

  “Of course we can.”

  “That would be a much better solution.”

  “Certainly. Eighteen gold.”

  “What?” said Joshua.

  Benjen stood up from the table. “What?”

  The rotund man shrugged. “It is forbidden to move Orogoth from where she rests. For us to request a holy migration, we would need to create more remedies. The blessings involved to convince her…”

  Joshua tuned him out. His perception was sounding like foghorn, and he knew now that the priests, the religion, all of it was a lie. This was a money-making scheme, nothing more. He didn’t doubt that the priests’ remedy, whatever it was, let them get close to the dragon, but he doubted there was anything holy about it at all.

  No, they were fleecing the town for gold. He didn’t know how they did it, but they must have had ways of manipulating Orogoth. With this realization, words appeared in front of him.

  Class: Negotiator level 1 [Novice]

  Perception skill increased from Novice 6 to 7/10

  He dismissed the text and focused on the problem. He and Benjen didn’t have 18 gol
d to spare. And even if they did, he wouldn’t pay it to them. He was just going to have to buy the remedies to make sure they could approach the dragon safely, and from there they’d come up with something.

  “Fine,” he said. “We’ll take the remedy.”

  Chapter Eight

  “Do you think they really work for the mayor?” said one priest after the strangers had left the church.

  “Not a chance,” answered the woman.

  “Me neither. He almost had me, though. I mean, I knew he was lying, but something about the way he said it almost had me believing him.”

  “That’s a negotiator at work. But a low-level one at that. It’d take a master to fool me.”

  “Well, at least that’s a little gold to make up for a dreadful morning. You know, I think it might be time to move on from here. The townsfolk are donating less and less. We might be better moving Orogoth to the south. People are terrified of dragons down there. Once we set up our church, they’d beg us to keep the terrifying beast at bay.”

  “Terrifying beast. There’s a laugh.”

  “It was just a thought, anyway.”

  “And a good one, but not yet. Let’s see how things play out for a while. You see, I heard those boys have bought the guildhall. Word is, they plan to fix it up. Get it functioning as a guild again.”

  “Hmmm. That isn’t good.

  “No. It really isn’t. The last thing we need is them poking around the guildhouse and finding it.”

  “Finding what?” asked the woman.

  The older man had a dark look on his face now. “Never mind, girl. Don’t you have purses to steal?”

  ~

  After collecting Roebuck and Firemane from the stables and paying the stable boy - a teenager who always had a grass stalk hanging from his mouth - for watching them, they threaded through the single-file alleyway out of Ardglass and away from the town gates.