Seeker of Secrets

by Deck Davis

“Tricked, persuaded, whatever you like to call it. She has signed herself over to us. She acts like a fearsome dragon who will only let us, the priests of Orogoth, approach her, and in turn we collect protection money from the Ardglass citizens for making sure she doesn’t burn their town to cinders.”

  Binding of the Seeker

  Store of Secrets updated

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

  Seeker knowledge +4

  Seeker Knowledge Level: 1 [43/50]

  “Whatever you three deceitful creatures have had her sign,” said Kordrude, “You do not own her. She will not allow it, not when she knows about your trickery. Nor will I.”

  He crossed his arms now and he stood with his shoulders straight, and the feathers on his face seemed perky and tense. Joshua hadn’t seen even a glimmer of anger from the crowsie until now, but maybe that was what it took to provoke it. When he’d listened to Kordrude and Faron talk, he’d always sensed an awe in Kordrude’s tone when he spoke with dragon-tongue. There seemed to be something of an understanding between them.

  Reben Mudd reached to his side, where a tube of metal was wedged between his trousers and his shirt. He huffed as he pulled it free, and then he held it out in front of him.

  “Perhaps we need to settle this another way.”

  Joshua didn’t see what he meant by that. The tube he held wasn’t a weapon; it was a five-inch long tube, hollow in the middle.

  Reben flicked his wrist side to side. Thin metal rods shot out from each side of the tube. Each rod was sharpened, and end-to-end the device was four feet long. Now, it was most certainly a weapon.

  Benjen marched away and toward the guild, where they’d left their things. With him gone, Reben suddenly stepped back with one leg, adopting the pose of a swordsman, except with his double-ended weapon tensed in his right arm.

  As fight poses went it actually looked good; he was well-balanced, and he’d correctly put his weight onto his back foot so he could strike out. As portly as he was, there was a weird sort of deftness to him.

  “We’re not ones to take lightly,” he said. “The dragon is ours, and we’ll take her. Now…where is she?”

  Joshua stared at them, at Reben with his weapon, at Terry of Yarn with his smug, wrinkled face, and at Miana who, despite her beauty, gave off an air of menace. He felt a stirring inside him. A feeling that rarely came to him, because at heart he was an easy-going guy. It was a faint smoldering of anger.

  Anger that these three con artists had lied to him about Orogoth. That they lied to the citizens of Ardglass and defrauded them into donating for ‘protection.’ He was mad that they’d even been so arrogant as to trick a pregnant, one-eyed, wingless dragon.

  Finally, it was an intense irritation that they were here, on guild grounds, a place where he’d hoped to meet heroes, not tricksters.

  As it was, he wasn’t sure they could take them in a fight. Benjen was the toughest of the three, and yes, he was walking back toward them now with a banana-shaped sword in one hand and a marrow-shaped one in the other, but there was something worrying about Reben and the practiced stance he had adopted.

  Even if they could overpower them, it wouldn’t be a great start to things, spilling blood on guild ground before they’d even opened their doors. A guild was a place for warriors, but it wasn’t a place to fight in, and besides, murder within eyesight of town grounds was a crime in most places.

  The trio of fraudsters wouldn’t care about consequences. It was obvious from the pile of their belongings at the bottom of the hill – they were leaving town.

  The last thing Joshua wanted was to fall foul of the Ardglass officials so early. Even if they didn’t face criminal proceedings, they could be banned from entering town, and perhaps prohibited from trying to recruit heroes there.

  He had to settle this another way.

  The last time, when he’d gone to their church, he’d got the better of them by using lie. Perhaps negotiator would resolve this without any consequences.

  “I think we better put down the weapons and talk about this properly,” he began, letting the tones of lie mix with his normal voice and add weight to his words.

  Terry of Yarn shook his head. “Don’t you think I know when someone is using lie, boy?” he said. “I am a trickster by trade, for God’s sake. You didn’t fool us at the church, and you sure as a cow’s arse aren’t fooling us now. What’s your lie skill? Beginner, at most? And likely not even used in a class where its best suited.”

  Damn it. Did that mean lie hadn’t worked back at the church, too? Had he been out-lied by a better and older liar?

  Whatever the answer, he knew that sadly, Terry was right. As a level 1 negotiator, Joshua’s had only learned the novice lie skill. At negotiator level 2 he’d pick up competent lie, and later if he advanced further, he would learn something more extravagant such as story weave. That was a while away, though.

  Fighting wouldn’t resolve this properly. At least not to any desirable outcome. Neither would words. But giving Faron the Wingless to these people wasn’t an option. Not if they were going to hawk her from town to town as if she was their slave, as if the poor, injured dragon was nothing but a scaly prop to help with their deceit.

  Luckily, Kordrude had a glint in his black bird eyes.

  “We all know that the paper you have produced has as much meaning, and as much legal authority, as crap from a sheep’s behind. If Faron wants to travel with you, then she is free to leave, but you won’t force her.”

  “She’s not going with them,” said Joshua. “She’ll do anything for her brood, you know that. She’ll even travel around and be their prop if they’ll feed her enough, I’m guessing.”

  “Then that is her choice to make.”

  “Where is she?” said Terry.

  “In the stables behind the guildhouse.”

  The old man stared at the building. He cupped his hand around his mouth and made a strange sound; a call between a grunt and a below.

  Kordrude shook his head, his beak opened in a smile. “No, no, no,” he said. “You’re making a hash of the pronunciation. You were asking her to come out, yes? Then you need to narrow your intonation. Listen.”

  Kordrude made a similar sound, but his was far more authentic. If Joshua had closed his eyes, he’d have sworn a dragon was standing next to him.

  A rumbling sound came from behind the guild house. Soon, a figure loomed into view, a scaly head with horn-like ears, with one giant white eye open and a green slit in the middle.

  It was Faron, awake and seething with the kind of anger only a dragon could manage. Every breath was a plume of steam twirling up into the air.

  Terry opened his mouth to say something to her, but then looked at Kordrude instead. “Tell her to get a move on. We’re leaving.”

  Kordrude spoke to Faron, who answered back. There was a growing easiness to the way they spoke to each other, Joshua realized, and he guessed that the dragon must have actually enjoyed having someone who could talk in her language.

  It made sense; she apparently wasn’t welcome with her own kin, and with only Terry the pretender to talk to in broken, badly-pronounced dragon-tongue, she must have been lonely.

  While they spoke, Benjen walked over to Joshua and leaned toward him and whispered. “I don’t like these people,” he said, “even though I can tell you’ve got a thing for the girl. But, what are we doing? If they want to take Faron, let them have her. Otherwise, she’s gonna be hanging around here for two years until she pops out her dragon cubs…pups…calves…whatever you call baby dragons.”

  “I think they’re called whelps,” said Joshua. “Think about it. She’s pregnant, and she’d been through the wars. She really isn’t as tough as she looks. Are we heartless enough to let them take her just to get rid of a problem? Is that what this is all about?”

  “I know, but it’d be one less thing to worry about.”

  “Benny, you can’t even eat chicken without feeling
guilty. What do you think they’re going to do once their scam stops working? Think they’ll keep feeding her? They’ll just leave her in the middle of Fortuna somewhere, where she won’t be able to hunt, and where some horrible lycanthropes or manticores size her up and realize that she’s actually not all that strong. Then, she’s in trouble. Remember what we promised before we even set out?”

  “That I’d never get so drunk again that I started singing that song, and you’d never fetch your lute to play along to it.”

  “Not that. We said we’d never turn anyone away who needed help.”

  “Right, but…”

  “And when we said anyone, I think we really meant anything. Any person, any animal, any…dragon.”

  “You’re right. I know you are. Having a conscience really makes things difficult.”

  Kordrude finished speaking to Faron.

  “Well?” said Terry of Yarn.

  “I asked her if she wanted to leave with you. I mentioned the contract you signed.”

  “And?”

  “And she says you can shove it up your puckered arse.”

  Benjen laughed now. Kordrude smiled as pleasantly as possible, even as Reben shifted his stance into a more aggressive one and as faint lines of anger wrinkled Terry’s face further. Miana, on the other hand, seemed to be holding in a smirk.

  Reben twisted his weapon in his hand, whizzing the sharpened ends around and around so quickly it became like a mesmerizing metal windmill. “Forget it, let’s just stick the bearded one in the stomach and take her. The crow won’t put up much of a fight.”

  Benjen handed Joshua his marrow-shaped sword.

  “Two swordsmen versus one chubby spear twirler,” he said.

  Terry crossed his arms. “Swordsmen? You lie worse than your friend. But no. We’ll leave, for now. There are always other scams, ones that don’t involve hunting for cattle to feed to that ugly beast. Remember this though, guildmasters,” he said, making sure the word dripped in sarcasm. “A path crossed once always joins back eventually.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means we’ll meet again one day. Good bye. Good luck with the dragon; I hope you learned to hunt in whatever backward village you came from.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Miana let Reben and Terry walk on ahead of her. They were going in a hurry, Reben gripping his spear-tube and muttering under his breath, while Terry whistled in that annoying way he always did when he was angry but didn’t want to betray the image he liked to project of being a Zen-like old man.

  The traveler road would fork out in a few more miles, and they still hadn’t settled on where to go. The decision had hinged on whether they could get Orogoth to go with them; Terry had told them it would be difficult, but she hadn’t expected the guys to actively stop her.

  What was with those two? There was something about them that nagged at her…maybe it was the annoyingly-strong optimism that seemed to shine from them. Or maybe it was how that big fiery-haired lug smiled all the time, or perhaps the smaller one’s eyes. They were deep eyes, ones that Miana could have stared into for a while.

  Truth be told, Miana was glad Orogoth wasn’t coming. She always felt bad for the poor thing, with her ruined eye and her little bones where her wings should be. She guessed it was because, in a weird way, Orogoth reminded her of her father. They both used to be mighty, powerful warriors, and through injury and age they’d been reduced to shells of themselves, there to be taken advantage of.

  That was how Miana had fallen in with two slithering serpents like Reben and Terry. One of her father’s ‘friends’ had come to the castle with a guard troop, supposedly there to pay tribute. But he must have known that Miana’s father wasn’t as strong as he used to be, and that age had withered his mind, and that the Porter family coffers were so low that he’d released most of their guard staff from duty.

  It was a slaughter, that night. One she could barely remember. Most people wouldn’t have wanted to; they wouldn’t have wanted to see the blood, to hear the screams and the yells of the staff who’d served their family for so many years.

  Miana wasn’t scared of the memory. She badly wanted to remember, but she couldn’t. Whether it was because she’d only been four at the time, or because her brain was protecting her from reliving it, she couldn’t picture what had happened.

  She needed to remember it, because she was the only one who ever would. The only person to escape from the massacre, the only witness to the betrayal. But she hadn’t known the name of the man who called himself a friend to her father. Now, her over protective brain wouldn’t even let her remember his face.

  She didn’t want to remember so she could go on some suicidal revenge mission; she wasn’t that stupid. Her mother had died when Miana was 2 years old, and her father just 2 years after that.

  For Miana to go running into danger in the name of revenge would be an insult to her parents. They’d wouldn’t have wanted that. They’d have wanted her to live a long, happy life.

  She wanted to remember because it was like an itch that wouldn’t leave, except it was inside her mind where she couldn’t scratch it. More than anything, Miana wanted to just settle down somewhere quiet and to live a peaceful life. Get married? Maybe. Maybe not. But certainly to live a life that was worth it.

  You weren’t brought into this world to live a life of revenge and hate and misery.

  All she had now was Terry and Reben; the psychotic wizard who hid his cruel powers behind an aura of Zen but who never forgot being wronged by someone years ago, and Reben, the old warrior who’d let his body balloon after being discharged from the kings’ elite guard for a suspected assassination attempt.

  The fool had admitted that to Miana one night when he was drunk; that he’d plotted to murder one of the three kings, but had been so stupid that they’d caught him before he could even try. He’d fought his way out and gone on the run, and somehow, he’d met Terry of Yarn, who was able to cast a spell to alter Reben’s face.

  Why they travelled together, Miana didn’t know, because the two men seemed to hate each other at times. But there was something more to it all, she sensed. Something worse than just trying to scam people out of gold. They disguised themselves under an air of being harmless, if morally repugnant, hucksters, but there was more to them.

  It was all a cover, and a pretty perfect one at that. Because if the worst came to worst and they were discovered as scam artists, then people would look at them as gold-greedy criminals, and nothing more. They wouldn’t suspect that something more diabolical lurked beneath the surface than a lust for coin. Sometimes, you had to disguise yourself as a wolf to hide the fact you were a demon.

  Miana had wanted to leave them for months now. Not that she wasn’t grateful; as deceitful as they were, they had taken her in when she was alone and lost in the streets of Sepultra, the capital of the Serpal Isles. But she’d repaid them a hundred times over using the thief skills she’d acquired over the years, and she was within her rights to part company, if she wished.

  She did wish. It was all she thought about sometimes, to get out of the shadow of two horrible men and go and find some good in the world. After all, it was hard to square her desire to live a harmonious life with the one she lived now; a life of lies and of tricking people, and it was that contrast that played on her mind all of the time. She needed to leave this life.

  She couldn’t, though. Not until she confirmed that her suspicions were correct, and that there was more to these brutes than anyone would ever suspect.

  ~

  Joshua had expected problems. Lots of them, in fact, and he’d been ready to work and work at them until he sweated all the water out of his body, he was ready to toil deep into the night until the guildhouse was ready.

  What he hadn’t expected was that the first two pressing problems, the ones preventing him from properly getting started, would be a baby goblin and a pregnant dragon.

  In some of the stories he’d read
about the building of the great cathedrals in the Serpal Isles or the palaces of the three kings, he’d never heard about things getting held up because the foreman had to take care of a bearded beast-child, or because a brooding one-eyed dragon was slumbering on the building site.

  Outside the guildhouse, he and Benjen watched as Kordrude spoke to Faron, who rested her chin lightly on the guild roof. He wanted to ask if she would mind not doing that because it barely looked like it would support even a magpie, but he suspected his human words wouldn’t be a welcome interruption.

  Instead, he listened to the back and forth of grunts, hisses, and deep, bird-like chirps, and he noticed how alive Kordrude’s eyes were. The crow should never have been a bureaucrat. Why had he never taken linguist as a primary class?

  When their discourse ended, Kordrude faced the boys.

  “Faron wants to thank you,” he said.

  “Is that how she phrased it?”

  “Well, her actual words mentioned ‘puny humans’ quite a number of times, and not always in reference to the three fraudsters. But still, she is grateful.”

  “I’m glad,” said Joshua. “I have a feeling we might have stirred up trouble for ourselves, though.”

  “Faron is aware of the nature of her old companions, and she is glad to be rid of them. Especially the older one; his attempts at dragon-tongue were like nails on slate, she says.”

  “Tell her she’s welcome,” said Benjen.

  “As a token of her gratitude, Faron says that she will heat the guildhouse for free. Winters in this part of Fortuna are as fickle as the summers; going from ice to snow to wind that chills your bones. As we all know, coal is expensive. If we can get a few fire-resistant materials we can construct a vent for her to blow into, and this will save you quite a lot of gold when the cold sets in.”

  Joshua smiled. “Tell her we appreciate it.”

  “The problem is going to be feeding her,” said Benjen. “She can’t hunt.”

  “We will have to hunt for her,” said Kordrude.