by Deck Davis
He picked up a stone from the ground and dropped it.
Tink…tink…tink…tink…tink…smack.
Five tinks and then the stone hit the bottom. How far was that in feet? How deep was this thing?
The question would have to wait. Without a working well, they needed water now, both to scrub themselves back to looking vaguely human, and to drink enough water to replace the sweat they were going to lose in the hard work to come.
For this, Joshua needed to get the lie of the land around the guild. He walked away from the well and to the edge of the hill. Set where it was, the guildhouse was a great vantage point for the area around them.
In their immediate surroundings there was the traveler road over on the opposite side of the hill, the one he and Benjen had taken to get here. Just before it headed in the direction of Ardglass the road forked off in four other directions, toward other towns and cities in the area. That was useful; towns and cities were where they’d recruit their heroes.
Over in the north east were the webbed mountains; giant blocks of earth that at first glance looked like they were made white by a coating of ice. The more you looked, the more apparent it became that actually, it wasn’t ice. It was webbing straight from the arses of giant spiders, ones who dwelled in gloomy caves cut into cracks in the stone.
Rumor had it that actually the arachnids were a nice bunch, and the famous seamstresses of the Highertop Abbey bought all their silk from them. Still, as friendly as they were supposed to be, Benjen would have lost his mind if they even approached the general direction.
Tough as he was, with his long hair and red beard and the well-defined arm muscles that years of being an apprentice blacksmith had given him, if a house spider scurried in his path, Benjen would walk out of his way to avoid it.
He’d admit it, too. He never lied. He was scared of spiders and that was that, and if people laughed at him, so what? Benjen had never cared what people thought about it, and that was one of the things Joshua liked about him.
He needed to forget webbed mountains for now. Forget the other towns and cities. Right now, his desire for just one, measly sip of water was so intense that he’d have sold Roebuck for it.
Well, not really. But it was funny how powerful the human body was. That if you didn’t fulfill its natural needs, it’d nag at you until you relented.
So, where was the stream?
He put his hand to his forehead to block out the morning sun, and he scanned the area.
A forest…a temple out in the distance in the west…a giant maze of thorn bushes and berry plants…some hills with caves cut into them…a bridge…
There! A bridge. He had never pursued the mathematician class, of which logic was a component skill, but it didn’t take the reasoning skills of a genius to know that bridges provided a means for non-water dwelling folk to cross bodies of it.
Wasting no time, his lips drier and more brittle than the oldest book in the oldest library in Fortuna, he grabbed the remaining bucket from the well. Like the other, the rope connecting it to the pulley tore away like webbing.
He carefully walked down the hill, and when he reached the bottom he headed northeast to where the luscious green grass turned into frailer, yellow stalks that came up to his neck, and hummed with the insects that lived within them. He waded through them and finally came to the bridge; a stone construction that must have been decades old and that overlooked a river.
The water was brown with silt, and the fish swimming in it probably didn’t care how drinkable it was to people. There was a faint smell of compost or mulch coming from it. They’d have to boil it or make a crude filtering system.
Even so, it was the most beautiful water he’d ever seen.
He filled his bucket and then headed back, before scaling the hill and taking care not to let water slosh out. When he reached the summit, he headed back to the front of the guildhouse as a triumphant hero, as the Bringer of Water, the Vanquisher of Dehydration, the Wetter of Dry Lips. Maybe not the last one.
But, when he saw that Benjen and Kordrude were awake, and when he saw what they were doing, he stopped still.
They had a leather water skin set on the ground in front of them. Great.
Benjen stretched his arms above his head and yawned. His face was flushed red from the wine he’d gulped the night before, and his fiery beard was messier than usual. His long hair stuck out in tufts, and he looked every inch like a man who’d slept drunkenly on the ground.
Despite that, he wore his usual wide grin. Nothing ever took that smile away from Benjen; not lack of sleep, not hangovers, nothing. He had the constitution of a grizzly bear.
And Kordrude, well…he was one of the strangest things Joshua had ever seen. The crowsie had taken off his coat and he was standing there now in his undershirt, which was a thin cloth with the sleeves cut off. His arms were like a person’s, but they were scrawny. Even more so than Joshua’s. He had the muscle tone of a lifelong bureaucrat. Despite his human, if milky-pale, looking arms, he had a thin coating of feathers on the back, making him look a little like a plucked chicken.
Joshua set his bucket of silt water on the ground and sprinted toward the water skin like his life depended on it.
“Morning!” beamed Benjen.
Kordrude gave a nod, and he held his long fingers against his feathery temples.
Joshua ignored them, consumed with a thirst he’d never felt so strongly before, and he grabbed the water skin and took a long, refreshing gulp, feeling the cold water ice his throat and spread life into his dry cells.
It was glorious, like drinking from a waterfall of the gods. Water dribbled down his chin and onto his shirt, and he gulped and gulped until he felt his stomach bloat.
“Someone’s thirsty,” said Benjen. Then he looked at Kordrude. “Lad can’t handle his wine.”
“Neither can this bureaucrat,” said Kordrude. “If Janda could see me now…”
Joshua set the water skin, now a quarter full, on the grass. He felt alive again. Well, almost. There was still an ebbing of hangover in his head; that slight, annoying headache that would have turned into a migraine had he not filled his belly with water.
He took the paper list from his pocket. In just half an hour, he’d already added enough jobs to keep them going for days.
“We’ve got a lot of work to do, boys,” he said. “The place is a wreck. I mean, I knew we’d have a lot to do, but still…”
“Can a guy have a little breakfast first?” said Benjen. “Wine brings out a hunger in me. It’s time like this, the only times, that a nice pork chop seems like a good idea. Pass me some carrots before I turn carnivorous again.”
“You don’t eat meat?” asked Kordrude.
“I gave it up. Hey – you should be happy. I crossed chicken off my grocery list years ago.”
Kordrude glared at him. “I am not part of the poultry family,” he said.
“We’ll eat,” said Joshua, feeling hunger now that his thirst was satisfied, “and then we better get to work. I have jobs for each of us. You too, Kordrude, if you’re staying?”
“Yeah,” said Benjen. “I was meaning to ask. What are you doing here, anyway? Not that we weren’t unbelievably grateful to see you.”
“When you left my office, I had the strangest feeling. Something I haven’t felt in a long time. A stirring, you might call it, to see a little of the lands outside Dyrewood.”
“You’re welcome to stay with us,” said Benjen.
“My thanks. I assume we won’t spend every night on the grass, though?”
Joshua nodded. “There’s a lot to fix up, and I suppose we better check out the guildhouse and see which rooms are habitable. If the walls are anything to go by, I’m expecting giant holes in the ceilings. Come on – we better eat, and then get to it.”
He wasn’t just hungry now. It was back, the feeling, the need to get started, to work until sweat poured from him. He might have been a little hungover, his stomach was empty, and
his new guildhouse was one strong gust away from falling apart, but it didn’t matter.
They were here. This was it. The dream. Or, the start of it.
Kordrude picked up his long coat, which was crumpled as though he’d been using it as a pillow, and he briskly walked to the edge of the hill, where it looked down onto the traveler roads.
“Breakfast might have to wait,” he said. “We have visitors.”
“It had better not be Pelo, the harpy boy,” said Benjen. “A lovely lad, but a little too much for me to handle this time in the morning.”
“No, they aren’t harpies.”
“They?” said Joshua.
Kordrude pointed. “Three of them walking down the road. They look like they are heading here. A rather chubby man, a woman with green hair, and a man with a rather long nose.”
Chapter Ten
Benjen stretched his arms above his head and felt his joints crack, and with the crack came a trace of nausea. When you loved beer and wine and all of the lovely alcoholic creations on the green isle of Futuna, you got used to waking up with a queasy stomach. It’d be gone soon enough, but Benjen still wished that his magical breastplate could help him build up a resistance to hangovers.
He should have been sensible last night, like Joshua. Instead, after his pal had tried to get some sleep, he’d stayed up and had a few more cups of wine with Kordrude.
What a man he was. Well, crow-man. So interesting. Benjen had hardly spoken a word while they drank, instead listening to Kordrude tell him all sorts of stories about his life; from growing up back in his home town with his warrior brother, who sounded like he had an attitude problem, to his travels across Fortuna with a theatre troupe.
Who would have thought it? The old bureaucrat was a wild one when he was younger, he said. In between playing Helgar the crowsie sorcerer in a play about the rise of the three kings, he’d drunk lots of wine and lots of beer and he’d met lots of lovely crowsie ladies. He’d settled down and gotten boring after his twenties, but still, from his stories he made it sound like he’d seen more of Fortuna than anyone Benjen had ever met.
The problem was, he was lying.
Benjen had realized this halfway through one of Kordrude’s stories. It wasn’t because he could tell by the way he said things; Benjen wasn’t as perceptive as Joshua, and definitely not as clever. But he did read a lot when he was younger. He read piles and piles of books about heroes and travelers and adventures. Maybe that was what had set the travelling bug in him.
That was how he knew Kordrude was telling tales. See, Benjen had read a book called Felix the Bard, about a thief who went on the run and joined a theatre troupe. Now that he’d realized it, Kordrude’s stories began to sound an awful lot like Felix’s.
But Benjen didn’t want to embarrass Kordrude, because he didn’t pick up on any malice in him. In fact, it sounded more like Kordrude was telling him about things he wished he had done, and Benjen was happy to listen, even if it was all a story.
That was why he was here, after all. Sure, he wanted to make the guild a place for people in need to turn to, but he wasn’t quite as idealistic as Joshua. Benjen most looked forward to all the heroes they’d meet. Hearing their stories, their adventures, seeing them use their swords and their spells. He couldn’t wait.
He had had a mind to write a book about it one day. Course, he’d probably have to twist Joshua’s arm into actually writing it, since Joshua was much better with words. But when the stories were set on paper Benjen would use his calligraphy to make a beautiful book, one where the spiral print was every bit as fascinating as the heroic tales within it.
Was he doing it for himself, or to impress Joshua? Mainly himself, if he thought about it. He wanted to leave something behind, something his three kids – whenever he had them – would keep and be proud of. But he couldn’t fool himself; part of it was to impress his friend.
That was why he did other things, like when he’d brewed his own beer. He wanted to show Joshua that he wasn’t just an oaf, that he could do other things than hammer swords into shape all day. When Joshua tasted his beer and loved it, that had made Benjen happy.
The book was a way off, yet. A long, long way off. There was still so much to do, and Benjen was ready to do whatever Joshua asked, because Joshua was the planner in all of this.
That was what made them such good friends, he guessed. Back in the village, the kids tended to stick to their own; the hunters’ sons would mess around in the woods with the trappers’ kids, and the trade apprentices like Benjen would hang around with the tailors and the armorers and so on.
But Benjen had never mixed with his own crowd. He’d known he and Joshua would become best friends as soon as he heard him question something that Elder Bubbard had told him off about, and he laughed while Joshua, only six at the time, had somehow won the argument.
Now, while he watched the three con artists climb up the hill and head toward them, Benjen did what he always had; he looked to his best friend and waited to hear how they’d deal with them.
~
“Ah, it’s Mayor Gossidge’s loyal workers,” said the green-haired woman, with less of a hint of sarcasm and more of a punch to the face of it.
The three of them didn’t look like priests this morning. They weren’t wearing their purple robes with dragon embroidery. Instead, the rotund man wore a flannel shirt that he’d obviously had to stretch just to button up.
The woman wore a short dress that ended at her thighs, with figure-hugging long john-style trousers covering her legs. The older man, who was so bird-like in appearance that he was almost Kordrude’s human counterpart, had a long leather coat with sleeves like a wizard’s robe.
Joshua wasn’t too happy that they’d climbed the hill to see them. He felt strangely protective of the guildhouse grounds. He’d only been here a night, but he guessed he’d dreamed about owning it for so long that it was already part of him, rotten walls and all.
The old man, with his sharp nose, was the first to step forward and offer a greeting that wasn’t a sarcastic barb. Joshua looked on as Kordrude strode forward too. Then, amazingly, the older man took Kordrude’s finger and gave it a nibble, in the customary crowsie greeting. Kordrude replied in like, while the older man’s female companion and the larger man next to her looked on in surprise.
“Morning. My name is Kordrude, and I believe you met my friends Joshua and Benjen yesterday.”
“Hmph,” said the woman, and crossed her arms. Though she was sarcastic, a con-merchant, and had some weird, unprovoked disdain for him and Benjen, Joshua couldn’t help but stare at how soft and pale her skin was. For a second, a thought about something other than fixing up the guildhouse flashed in his mind.
The older man nodded at Kordrude. “I am Terry of Yarn,” he said.
Joshua knew where this peculiar naming convention was from – the dock town of Yarn, obviously. Everyone from there was of yarn. Terry of Yarn, Gertrude of Yarn.
“I’m Benjen, of the Heroes’ Guild,” said his friend.
The old man nodded. “This delightful creature to my right is…”
Joshua waited to hear the girl’s name. For some reason, it was a morsel of information he was desperate for.
“…Reben Mudd,” finished the old man.
The ‘delightful creature’ was the rotund man, it seemed.
“And my lady friend here is Miana Porter.”
She gave a wave without lifting her hand, her stare lingering over Joshua for just an achingly-short second. “It’s a pleasure,” she said. “It’s a great way to start to my morning. Getting up super early so we can come out here and see three hungover westerners.”
“How did you even know to come here?” said Joshua.
“Why,” said Terry of Yarn, wrinkling his sharp nose, “when we heard you had bought the guildhouse, the only abandoned guildhouse within miles of Ardglass, it wasn’t too hard to deduce.”
“You heard we’d bought it? From who?”
He shrugged. “Okay. But why are you here?”
“To collect something that belongs to us,” said Reben Mudd, his jowls wobbling with every word.
“This is private property,” said Benjen.
“And yet, not everything on it is yours,” said Terry.
“What exactly did you need to collect?”
“Our dragon.”
“Your dragon?”
“Do all you westerners have mud in your ears?” said Reben. “Yes, our dragon.”
Kordrude clasped his long fingers together. “I believe you are referring to Faron the Wingless, yes?”
“Who?”
Miana nudged her portly friend. “He means Orogoth.” Then she looked at Kordrude. “You can’t just name her whatever you like.”
“That’s true. She chose her name. Contrary to what you think, one cannot own a dragon.”
Terry opened his long coat and reached into it, pulling out a scrap of paper. He unfolded it until it wasn’t just a scrap, but rather a sheet of thin paper so big it hid his face. Lines of writing covered one half of it, and there was a single ink shape on the bottom, what was unmistakably a print of a claw.
“A contract of business, right and proper. Signed by Orogoth herself, as you can see. Of course, although she entered into it as a business proposition through desperation for fresh lamb, she neglected to read the terms. Dragons hate to read our language as much as they despite listening to it. Then, I suppose with only one good eye, she might find reading difficult.”
“What are you saying?” said Benjen. “You tricked her?”