Seeker of Secrets

by Deck Davis

  He wondered who these old warriors were, and he hoped there was a guild ledger hidden somewhere that detailed their quests, but he doubted it. The building had been empty so long that nothing valuable would have survived.

  There were some things that he was going to change about the place, but he and Benjen had already decided, in one of their many drunken chats in the tavern back home, that they would try to preserve history as much as possible.

  After all, they weren’t making something new here; hero guilds were an old tradition, maybe one of the oldest in Fortuna, and they wanted to honor the deeds of the heroes who’d lived here before them.

  The stone steps were something he wouldn’t change. It would have been expensive to re-lay them anyway, since quarry masters charged a fortune for durable stone, but it wasn’t just for that reason.

  He liked the way the steps were worn down. He looked at the slight dip in the middle of all the steps and he could almost hear the heroes’ boots as they walked down them with their armor on and their swords strapped to their backs, ready to head out to a quest.

  Or maybe they’d be returning from one, and they’d take off their heavy armor and carry it in their aching arms, and they’d be so tired they felt like they couldn’t even make it upstairs to the dorm.

  Yes, this place might have looked like a dump, but there was a legacy in its old lice-ridden walls and its scuffed floors. Joshua and Benjen would protect it and carry it forward. They’d preserve history.

  Or at least, he’d thought he would.

  When he reached the landing upstirs, he headed straight toward a room that he remembered from the plans. It was a room that would be his, one that he’d pictured for years now.

  The old guildmaster’s room.

  It was the furthest room in the hallway that sprung right, away from the staircase. The door was black and curved at the top, with a small pane of frosted glass in the centre of it.

  His heart beating with the culmination of years of day dreams, Joshua opened the guildmaster’s door and he stepped into the room.

  And he saw nothing.

  No furniture. No bed. No rugs on the floors, no bookcases, no desk. Just a window on the north wall that looked out over the guildhouse hill, beyond which was the east of Fortuna with Ardglass a few miles away, and a city in the distance, so far away it looked more like an anthill.

  Well, he’d expected that the old owners would have sold anything worthwhile, and that looters would have taken the rest. But…there was one thing.

  On the west wall to his left, there was a fireplace. That must have been a perk of the guildmaster, having his own fireplace in his bedroom. Above it, though, was something strange.

  He didn’t know what he’d expected to find…but it wasn’t this.

  ~

  Benjen tried to organize himself the way Joshua would. His friend would start at the nearest room and work his way through, taking it step by step in a structured way. He wouldn’t go rushing off to the room that most took his fancy.

  He wanted to do it the way Joshua would…but he couldn’t. There was a problem. He hadn’t said anything when Joshua assigned them part of the guild to check, but a little lump had formed in Benjen’s throat when Joshua mentioned that he’d need to check the basement.

  He knew it was stupid, that a big guy like him was worried about it. It wasn’t the darkness though. It wasn’t the cobwebs or the cramped space. No, it was other things that you usually found in basements and cellars.

  Benjen had never let being scared or nervous or worried stop him doing anything, though. There was a sure-fire way to match fear; you ran at it head on and you slugged it in the face.

  That was why he crossed straight through the armory, briefly noting with a smile that a few cobweb-strewn weapons rested in a weapons rack, and then he headed through the kitchen and to the food larder.

  Wow, the larder was cold. It was a drop in temperature so sudden that Benjen wished he’d worn his coat. There were a few weird lumps on the floor in the corner of the larder, but they were indistinguishable from what they had once been. Maybe they were cuts of lamb or beef, once, but they’d been left here too long.

  He walked through the larder doors. The doorways were getting smaller the deeper into the west wing of the guildhouse he went, and the doorway brushed against his shoulders. From here he walked down a curve-roofed tunnel that was so small that he could have touched the ceiling without much effort.

  Then he found them.

  The basement doors; wooden, set into the floor, and bolted.

  And he heard sounds coming from behind the doors. Sounds that he’d dreaded. The things that he knew loved the darkness and loneliness of basements.

  ~

  Kordrude rushed into the grand hall of the guildhouse. His stomach fluttered with excitement from the wager. He didn’t care what the prize was- in fact, it wasn’t even a prize. The winner got nothing, and the loser had to go down into the well. Kordrude wouldn’t even have minded doing that.

  But he didn’t care. Competition was competition, and like when he played runto with his best friend Janda, Kordrude just wanted to win.

  So, he took stock of the grand hall. It was the largest room in the guildhouse, he guessed. The centre was taken up by a large oak table, and Kordrude couldn’t believe it was still there. Of all the things to leave…a table like this was worth a dozen gold, at least. Once you dusted it and varnished it, maybe more.

  Ah – that was why it hadn’t been taken. The table was held in place by a dozen steel rods driven through the wood and into the stone floor of the guildhouse. He guessed that the table would have been the heart of the guildhouse; heroes would gather around it and discuss their recent adventures, and they’d argue back and forth about whether the guildmaster was correct to give a certain quest to a certain hero. Maybe the ones not on duty would get drunk, and they would brag and try to one-up each other with tales of their glories.

  Forget that table, he told himself. He needed things. Things they could use and things they could sell, because he had to win.

  He guessed his competitiveness was brought about by how much his parents doted on his younger warrior brother, and how they always bragged about how big and beautiful his wings were. Kordrude loved his brother, even if the sentiment wasn’t returned, but every child wanted their parents’ affection. It was built into every species, be they goblin, orc, troll, or crowsie.

  That need must have carried forward all of his life, because even now, even as a middle-aged, widowed crowsie, he had this urgent desire to win this wager.

  As much as he wanted to, though, he needed to do something else first. Something vastly more important.

  Something the boys would probably laugh at.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Joshua found himself staring at a giant portrait of the old guildmaster fixed above the fireplace in the bedroom. Its frame was colored gold, but he doubted it was real gold. If it was, there was no a chance a looter – or the old guildmaster himself – would leave it behind.

  Then again, even if it wasn’t gold, it was still worth something. Why, when everything else in the place was old and broken, was a perfectly-good portrait still here?

  The portrait itself wasn’t a pleasure to look at. The old guildmaster, named Jandafar the Red according to a metal plate on the bottom of the frame, was a gnoll. His skin was so creased he must have been older than Fortuna itself. Even by a gnoll’s standards, his face was hard to look at.

  Wow. ‘By a gnoll’s standards?’ I sound like Benjen’s racist grandpa now.

  Nevertheless, it was true – the old guildmaster wasn’t the prettiest of people. Not because of the gnollishness of his face but more the glare he seemed to give from the confines of the portrait. It was a cold stare, and not the kind of expression Joshua had imagined a guildmaster to have.

  If this was going to be his bedroom and office, he didn’t want old Jandafar the Red staring at him. In a weird way, it would be like
the old guildmaster was judging him, like he’d be evaluating all of Joshua’s decisions with the guild and weighing them against his own.

  The fact was, Joshua was going to make mistakes. He was a guy from a remote fishing village that heroes and guilds rarely travelled to. He’d never been a manager of anyone before, except for the rare times he’d been left in charge of the tavern. Managing a roster of heroes was going to be a long learning process.

  He and Benjen would screw up sometimes, no doubt about it. But Joshua always thought it was better to try like hell, mess up, and then come back stronger, than to never try at all. If he’d taken the second option, he’d still be back home right now, back in his old life where his future adventures were nothing but a day dream.

  The painting was going to have to come down. He wouldn’t sell it, since he was sincere in his promise to keep as much of the history of the guild intact. Still, he couldn’t have Jandafar glaring at him day and night – especially not at night. Sleeping under the eyes of gnoll would probably give him nightmares.

  The question remained though as to why nobody had looted it yet. It didn’t make any sense, but maybe it was just one of those fickle circumstances of chance.

  He grabbed the edges of the frame and carefully pulled it at. It didn’t move. He put a little more effort in this time, but the frame wouldn’t budge, and Jandafar the Red seemed to mock him.

  Damn it to the bowels of Fortuna. This thing just did not want to come off. It wasn’t hanging on the wall by a nail or anything, that was for sure. Looking at the edges, he couldn’t see traces of any kind of adhesive, either.

  That left one possibility – that the portrait had a magical seal on it. Certain mages could do that. Mages who practiced the utilitarian class used their magic not for battles or violence, or even for healing. They used them in construction, with the novice utiliarians casting spells of home repair, and the masters of the class aiding the construction of great buildings, like the cathedrals in the Serpal Isles.

  Was Jandafar so arrogant that he wanted his portrait to hang on the walls forever? Or perhaps he just didn’t want it to be stolen and for his likeness to end up in the grubby hands of a looter.

  Either way, it was a problem, since a utiliarian’s spell could only be broken by the caster himself, or a utilarian of a higher level. And Joshua really didn’t think it’d be a good use of their limited guild funds to decorate his room.

  “Looks like we’re sharing a room,” he said. “Two guildmasters in such a cramped space. I snore, sometimes. Especially after a few beers.”

  At that, something happened. The edges of the gold frame glowed. No heat came off them, but a thin, mist-like light ran over the metal, forming a rectangle around the painting.

  Something creaked, and the painting and its frame opened to the side, like a door.

  Was it because he spoke out loud about being a guildmaster? If that were the case, then anyone could have made the painting open just by saying the word. Maybe it was because he was the legal owner of the guildhouse, and the spell somehow recognized that.

  Whatever it was, it seemed that Jandafar’s use of a utiliarian’s spell hadn’t just been to keep his old gnoll face looking down on the room. It was because the portrait was actually a door cut high into the wall of the room.

  It opened onto a tunnel that looked just wide enough for Joshua to crawl through. Benjen would have struggled, since there didn’t look to be much wiggle room at all. Added to that difficulty was the fact that the tunnel was behind the portrait, and as such it was above the fireplace.

  He needed something to stand on. He left the room and rushed down the stone stairs, taking them two and then three steps at a time as the excitement grew in him. He headed into the grand hall, where he saw the long oak table that he’d noticed earlier.

  Kordrude was kneeling in the corner of the room, where he’d set a metal bowl on the floor. In the bowl was brown-tinted water that must have come from the bucket Joshua had filled from the stream, and floating in the water was a green leaf with a brown berry attached to it.

  Kordrude was murmuring to the bowl of water. No, not murmuring…he was singing to it softly, under his breath.

  “What the hell are you…no. No time.”

  He grabbed a wooden chair and pulled it from the table and then, holding it in front of him, ran back upstairs and to the guildmaster’s room.

  Jandafar’s portrait greeted him with a stern stare as he ran in. Joshua put the chair against the fireplace.

  The need to know what the tunnel actually was burned in him. This was why Joshua never played the riddle game back in the village; Benjen loved posing riddles to people, but Joshua refused to play. The reason was simple – questions made him mad.

  No, not questions, exactly. More like mysteries. Joshua was, or hoped he was, one of the most patient people around. He rarely got cross, except when there was a genuine reason to be.

  But mysteries, riddles, anything he couldn’t work out, it was like a challenge to him. Something deep inside him just had to know. And when he couldn’t work it out, he got angry.

  So, when he climbed onto the chair and stared into the tunnel behind the portrait, there was no question that he had to know where it led, right here and now.

  Just one thing, though. One peculiarity that, now that he thought about it, made him dizzy.

  This particular wall was on the right-most side of the guildhouse. It was physically impossible for a tunnel to lead out of the wall, because the guildhouse itself ended behind the wall. The tunnel couldn’t possibly be there.

  His head hurt now. He pictured himself outside the guildhouse and looking up at it. Had he somehow missed the presence of a tunnel extending out from the wall of the second floor? A tunnel that would have sprouted into thin air, unsupported by anything?

  Impossible. It was the sort of thing he’d have remembered.

  The chair set against the wall was high enough that he could climb into the tunnel now. Taking a deep breath, he did so.

  Soon he was inside it, on all fours. The tunnel smelled of damp mud, and he could feel the top of the tunnel brushing against his back. Benjen definitely wouldn’t have fit in here.

  He crawled on until he reached the end of it, and there it took a turn to the left. He followed it, before coming to a space where it widened.

  It was still too low for him to get up from all fours, but it was wide enough that now, there were five doors in front of him. A red door, a yellow, a purple, a blue, and a gold. Each door had a number on it, front 1 to 5, and they all had brass handles.

  Binding of the Seeker updated

  You have found mysterious doors in a secret corridor.

  Seeker knowledge +2

  Seeker Knowledge Level: 1 [45/50]

  Store of Secrets updated

  [Rare] Secret added: Five Secret Doors

  Yet another secret to add to the list. For a guy who got tense when he couldn’t solve a mystery, he was certainly adding a lot of fresh ones to the list. He checked the Store of Secrets on his seeker binding.

  Store of Secrets

  [Major] What do the triops see through their eyes?

  [Minor] The Scam of the Church of Orogoth

  [Minor] Benjen’s Secret Wish

  [Rare] Five Secret Doors

  Maybe it wasn’t as bad as he thought; he’d already solved two secrets, even if they were minor ones. He sensed that his major and rare secrets were going to take some work, but where did he start?

  All he had to go on here was that a secret tunnel led to a bunch of even more secretive doors.

  He tried to place where this tunnel would be, if it were physically possible for it to actually be part of the guildhouse. He’d crawled so far now that he had to be at least thirty feet outside of the guildhouse itself, suspended over the edges of the guildhouse hill. This didn’t make any sense.

  His pulse hammered. Whichever utilarian mage had constructed this for the old guildmaster, he wasn’t just l
evel 1, that was for sure. A novice couldn’t construct a tunnel that defied logic.

  He stared at the doors now, and he had not just one mystery tugging at him, but five. Five doors that shouldn’t exist, and what was behind them?

  He crawled over to the red door, which had ‘1’ etched into it. He grabbed the handle.

  His hands shook now. His pulse was a booming drum in his ears.

  He twisted the handle.

  And it wouldn’t budge.

  Now, where the ‘1’ had been etched, new words carved themselves into the door. They stayed for just a second, and then disappeared.

  Guildmaster class level 1 required.

  ~

  The boy had seen him, Kordrude knew. Why Joshua had come sprinting down here to grab a chair, he had no idea, but he’d been caught in the act, and now he was going to have to explain everything.

  Ah, well, he would have to explain eventually. It was harmless enough, really. Just a metal bowl that he’d taken from the kitchen and filled with water from the bucket, and a brown berry he’d brought with him, because he was aware of the age of the guildhouse and suspected a cleansing might be needed.

  It came from Kordrude’s grandma, all of this. Back in his hometown, her house constantly smelled of a medley of herbs and spices and berries, the aroma so pungent that it made some people swoon.

  Yet, as much as they didn’t like the smell, they always came to visit. They knocked on the door three times, aware of the power of that number, and his grandma would call to them, without getting up.

  What do you want?

  And then she waited for their request. If it was one she could fulfill, and one that she found worthy, she’d let them enter.

  I need a charm to ward imps away from my larder.

  I need to make a girl like me.