Seeker of Secrets

by Deck Davis

  Sadler stood above them. “I’ve failed you both. This is a job, you shouldn’t come here wonderin’ if you’ll get home safe. Maybe it’s time I used my old class again. Got meself a few sentry demons to keep guard.”

  “That’s not legal,” said Keate, who was the calmest and most unaffected of them all, save the stains of blue loneeye blood on him. “Section eight of the demonic summoning act.”

  “Well, I’ll think of somethin’. I’m not gonna explain to her parents why their girl came here to work and almost died.”

  “At least she’s okay.”

  Sadler looked at Joshua. “Thank you for checking on her. And for everything, I suppose. If the stalkers had hit us without you here, I wouldn’t have known what we were dealing with.”

  “That’s kind of the point, really. They shouldn’t have been here, since they’re native to the west. It gets too cold for them out here.”

  “All the same they were here, and we were lucky to have you and Keate. Keate, consider your bar tab completely paid off.”

  “All three of them?”

  “As far as I’m concerned you’ll drink for free here…within reason. And you, lad, I don’t even know how to thank you.”

  Joshua was about to tell him that his words of thanks were enough, but he remembered Beula’s words to him as she gave him the thrip honey for saving her field - that heroes’ guilds charged for their work.

  She was right, and until now he’d still been too idealistic about things, about guilds and heroes and the world in general.

  But with what happened to Benjen…if he was going to do this, then he needed cold, hard practicality. He needed to drag his head from the clouds and stay sober about it all, because later, when he hired heroes, he owed it to them that he thought with the logical side of his brain and not his ideals.

  “If you don’t know how to thank me,” he said to Sadler, “Then a gold or two will suffice. And some dried foodstuffs would help too. I’m opening the heroes’ guild as soon as I get a few heroes on the roster, and I want to be able to feed and pay them.”

  “You’re the one who bought the guild?”

  “That’s me.”

  Sadler looked confused. He scratched his chin.

  “Something wrong?” asked Joshua.

  “Well, I…uh…I heard that the new owner of the guild killed a dragon outside it.”

  “Is that how these rumors spread? We didn’t kill her. Strange as it sounds, we made a deal with her.”

  “After tonight,” said Sadler, “I can see how much we need a place to help with things like this. Here, I’ll give you three gold, and a box of dried meat and some wheat. You can take anything you like from lost property, too. There’s a bunch of coats and armor and stuff that people have left here over the years. If they were goin’ to claim them, they’d have done it already.”

  Joshua shook Sadler’s hand. “This will really help. I can’t thank you enough.”

  “Same goes to you.”

  He heard the twang of a lute, and the bard stood by the now-cold hearth and he strummed the instrument and cleared his throat.

  “T’was an autumn night,

  With ‘nare a walker,

  When a visitor came to the tavern,

  T’was a loneeye stalker…”

  As the bard made up a song on the spot to commemorate the night, Joshua was reminded about how the runto players had loathed the bard singing when they were trying to play.

  He found the players at the far end of the tavern. The satyr woman and the scarred man were standing up, and the wickerman was sitting on a chair. His wood skin was scorched, but he was alive.

  “Are you okay?” Joshua said.

  The wickerman didn’t speak; his eyes looked glassy, and Joshua guessed he was in shock. His satyr friend let green light glow in her hand, and she gently rubbed it on his face.

  “He’ll live,” she said. “Thank you for your help.”

  “We could have handled it ourselves,” grumbled the scarred man. “Bunch of overgrown spiders…”

  “I’m opening the heroes’ guild east of Ardglass,” said Joshua. “A group like you, we could use help if you ever feel like it. Come by if you need a bed, and I might have work for you in the future.”

  The satyr nodded, and then turned her attention back to her friend. It was getting late and Joshua needed to get back to Ardglass before the library closed, because he knew what he needed to do now. Not just today, but tomorrow, too. There was something important that he hadn’t been able to face, but meeting Keate and fighting the stalkers had made him realize that he couldn’t put it off.

  Before he left the tavern, he joined Keate at the bar, who was already taking advantage of his free drinks.

  “A calm head will serve you well when things get dicey, lad,” said Keate, sipping on an orange liquid. “But I can tell that you can’t use that dagger for shit. You need training.”

  “I’m the guildmaster; I don’t think I’ll need to fight too much when the guild is up and running.”

  “Men don’t respect a leader who can’t handle himself. Even if you’re right and you never fight much from now on, you’ll still need to know how.”

  “I was going to say, Keate. You said you’re down on your luck and you can’t find a guild. Well, there’s a bunch of free beds in our guild. I’d like you to join us, to be our first hero. And even if you don’t want to join, you can still stay and have a roof over your head for a few days.”

  “What’s the pay?”

  “Good question. From what I read before coming out here, hero salaries depend on the size of the guild and your rank in it. We’re tiny right now, so I can’t afford to pay you much.”

  “Lad, I’m as cheap as heroes go, unless you want some fresh-faced kid from the streets who has more spots on his face than hairs on his chest. If you can’t afford me, you damned sure can’t afford anyone else out there.”

  “I know. I wasn’t expecting to recruit so soon, but meeting you by chance, I thought I’d ask. Tell you what; in lieu of a salary, we’ll give you a place to live and food to eat, and I’ll eventually make a training yard for you to hone your skills. As well as that, I’ll pay you on a quest by quest basis, at least at first.”

  “Twenty percent of all loot,” said Keate, without hesitating.

  Joshua smiled. Not just at the prospect of adding the first hero to his guild roster, but because their discussion had entered into his territory – negotiation.

  He let his class feed him Keate’s micro-expressions, and he let his class skills wrap around his words, adding authority and weight to them.

  “Seven percent of quest loot and rewards,” said Joshua.

  “Done.”

  Keate stuck his hand out and Joshua grabbed it, and Joshua felt good. As a swordsman, Keate wasn’t able to resist his negotiator class the way that other people, like Terry of Yarn had.

  Skill Gained: Hero Negotiation

  [The art of negotiating with heroes for their services.]

  Hero Negotiation added to Negotiator class as Novice 1/10.

  Another skill! While earning strategic thinking was good, this was even better. This, surely, was a skill that any heroes’ guildmaster needed, and it made him think that he was a step closer to earning the class now and truly feeling like a guildmaster.

  But now it was getting late, and he had things to do before the buildings and shops in Ardglass shut for the night.

  “Do you have a map?” asked Joshua.

  “No hero worth the name travels without a map.”

  “I’ll mark on the location of our guild. Do you think you can take the armor and stuff that Sadler is giving us? I’ve got things I need to do.”

  Keate gave him the thumbs up. “As you wish, guildmaster,” he said, with a wink.

  “Just one thing,” said Joshua. “You’ll meet a crowsie called Kordrude; just tell him I sent you. And don’t worry about the dragon.”

  He rode Roebuck away from the Ir
on Whip and into Ardglass, where the dark of evening was settling upon the town, and the market vendors were packing away their stalls and the shopkeepers were bringing some of their produce back inside. A group of farmers, their work finished for the day, headed to the boot-shaped tavern.

  Joshua walked toward the Ardglass library. This building was more finely decorated than the houses and shops, with stone gargoyles sitting on ledges and with two pillars outside the door. He tied Roebuck outside and headed in.

  The library smelled strongly of age; a musty smell of dust and old books. Torches were hanging on the walls, far away from the bookshelves, and their flames spread a soft glow across the wide-open room, spreading light over rows and rows of old tomes, and over scholars who were sitting around tables and silently leafing through books and scribbling on paper.

  When Joshua approached the front desk and the librarian turned around, he was surprised. She was a middle-aged crowsie woman, with a beak shorter than Kordrude’s, and with red and grey facial feathers.

  She nodded at him. Joshua half-expected her to offer him the crowsie greeting of nibbling his finger, but she didn’t.

  “We’re closing soon,” she said. “And the library is for members only.”

  “I’d like to join.”

  “Hmm. I haven’t seen you in Ardglass before.”

  “I just moved here,” said Joshua.

  “Well, I’m sorry, but we’ve had to tighten our membership regulations. We were a little laxer before, since the library decree was always that knowledge should be available to all. But a few unscrupulous people took advantage of that and stole books.”

  “You’re telling me that I can’t join?”

  “You’ll need a town sponsor if you’re new here. Someone who can vouch for you.”

  Joshua let his negotiator class work now, drenching his words with added weight. “Beula will vouch for me,” he said. “The orc lady who fosters children. I helped her with her field.”

  “I heard about that. That was you?”

  “Yes. Me and my friend.”

  The crowsie scratched her feathery chin. “I’ll need to check with her…”

  He tried again, he tried to really feel his class make his words hit home. “She’ll vouch for me. I promise you. I don’t want to borrow a book, yet; just to look at a few.”

  “Go on, then. A friend of Beula’s is a friend of mine. I’ll need to ask her before I let you take books out, but until then you can still take a look.”

  “Thank you. Where are your class reference guides?”

  “At the far end, in the reference section. Be quiet when you walk passed the scholars; they can get grouchy. They spend so long with their head in their books that they’ve forgotten how to talk to people without being testy.”

  Joshua walked through the library until he found the class reference guides. This was a long shelf of books with tomes on all manner of classes, from farmer to lumberjack to alchemist. He walked along until he found the ‘g’ section, where there were class reference books for gardener, guardsman, gambler…but nothing for guildmaster.

  Damn it. It wasn’t there. Maybe somebody else had borrowed it or something. To make sure, he went back to the front desk and asked the crowsie librarian. She checked her paper records, and then shook her head.

  “I told you. Unscrupulous characters. We did have a guildmaster book, but it hasn’t been taken out. If nobody borrowed it…then it was stolen.”

  “Thanks for looking.”

  Feeling a little downcast, he went outside and untied Roebuck, and he headed back out of Ardglass and to the traveler road that led to the guild.

  It was nighttime now, and he heard owls hoot in the distance, and nocturnal insects chirped and croaked to each other. It felt like it had been a long day, and without a guildmaster reference book, he had nothing to show for it.

  Then again, was that true? In fact, the more he thought about it, he actually had a hell of a lot to show for the day. He’d learned two new skills, earned some gold from Sadler, and he had managed to do one of the things he’d dreamed about for so long – he’d recruited his first hero.

  Sure, Keate might have been old, but he was fit and experienced and he could swing his sword harder than anyone Joshua had ever seen. He was going to be invaluable, since Joshua could ask him to go on quests now.

  At that thought warmth burst through him, because he realized something; he could officially open the guild! He hadn’t earned the guildmaster class yet, but that didn’t stop him accepting quests.

  There was one thing bothering him, though. Beula had mentioned that strange creatures had been spotted around Ardglass, and when she told him that, the Strange Happenings Around Ardglass secret had been added to his seeker binding.

  The loneeye stalkers were part of that, but he just couldn’t work out why.

  When he got back to the guild he found Kordrude and Keate sitting at the oak table in the grand hall with a bottle of firespit, a bottle of wine, and several glasses around them. On the other side of the table Keate had piled the few leather breastplates, greaves, and a few swords and daggers that Sadler had let them take from his unclaimed lost and found collection.

  Kordrude stood up. “Joshua! Keate and I were getting acquainted the old-fashioned way,” he said, his words a little slurred. “He told me what happened; I’m impressed. Are you alright?”

  “Didn’t even get a scratch,” said Joshua.

  Kordrude nodded to a couple of ceramic bowls on the table. “Beula sent her goblin boy over with some stews. She said we needed some home cooking.”

  Joshua’s stomach rumbled. “I’ll have to thank her. I’m going to go there in the morning, and…you know. Get Benjen.”

  Keate nodded. “Kordrude told me what happened. It’s the right thing to do, lad. Say goodbye.”

  “I know,” said Joshua.

  “Fancy a shot of firespit?”

  “It’s harsh stuff,” said Kordrude, “It set my feathers on edge.”

  “There’s something I need to do. I might join you later.”

  He left them and went upstairs and took a left toward the dorm room. There, he saw Kordrude’s books around his bed, and he also saw that Keate had laid his armor and sword on the bed that he’d claimed as his own.

  He went over to the bed that had been Benjen’s. It was time to go through his things. He’d need to send a letter to Benjen’s parents, and he wanted to see if there was anything of his that he should send back to them.

  He sorted through his friend’s collection of adventure books, where he found one, The Arcane Archer’s Adventures, that had writing scrawled on the inside cover. To Benjen, it read, Happy birthday, love mum and dad.

  He’d send that one back to them, he decided. Next, he dragged Benjen’s leather satchel from under the bed and he opened it. He sifted through a pile of roughly folded clothes and he reached to the bottom of the bag, where he felt something.

  He took it out of the bag and put it on the bed. It was a large leather-bound book, one that Joshua had never seen his friend read. The leather was smooth and looked expensive, and Joshua wondered where Benjen had gotten a book like that from.

  He opened it and he saw writing, in Benjen’s fancy-looking calligraphy, on the inside cover.

  To Joshua, happy birthday. Thought you might like this. B.

  Joshua scratched his head. Benjen hadn’t never given this to him. In fact, for his last birthday he’d put ten silvers behind the bar at the Quarryman’s Inn and told the innkeeper that Joshua’s drinks were paid for that night. Of course, Benjen had taken more advantage of it than Joshua had.

  But maybe it wasn’t for a past birthday. In fact, Joshua’s birthday was two weeks away. Had Benjen prepared this for him in advance?

  His heart swelled a little at the gesture, and he wished Benjen were here to gift him the book himself.

  He turned the page, and as he read through the book, he realized what a gift this truly was.

  Ben
jen had, using his calligrapher class to make the words beautiful, collected and written down the skill requirements for a bunch of classes that they’d need to get the guild up and running. They were ones that they’d talked about in many of their drunken nights in the Quarryman’s Inn, from builder to carpenter to gardener…and guildmaster.

  A surge of adrenaline coursed through him. There it was, listed on its own page, the guildmaster class and which skills were needed for it. Joshua read them, and he saw text appear in front of him.

  Guildmaster Requirements Learned

  Skills needed to achieve level 1:

  Creature Sense

  Empathetic Judgement

  Hero Negotiation

  Strategic thinking

  Perception

  Some of the five skills were ones that Joshua had guessed he’d need, but a couple were surprises. The biggest surprise of all, though, was that he’d already earned four of them. He was so close, and he hadn’t even realized it!

  He’d learned creature sense and perception before getting to the guild, of course; they were components of his zoologist and negotiator classes. And he’d learned the strategic thinking and hero negotiation skills in the Iron Whip tavern, where they’d kept the loneeyes at bay.

  That left just one skill before he earned level 1 of this class; empathetic judgement. But how was he going to earn that skill? He knew that empathy was the ability to understand the feelings of others; it meant taking someone else’s viewpoint and emotions into account rather than just your own. He’d always thought of himself as an empathetic guy anyway, but how did he learn the skill?

  Four louds thumps on the guildhouse front door brought his thoughts away from the book, away from the gift Benjen never got the chance to give him.

  He heard Kordrude and Keate walking across the hallway downstairs, and the door opened, and then he heard voices.

  Finally, a voice called up to him. “Joshua,” said Kordrude, “You had better come down here.”