Seeker of Secrets

by Deck Davis

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Joshua joined them downstairs to find Pelo, the harpy boy, hovering outside the door.

  “The boy said he’s got a job for us,” said Kordude.

  “You better come in,” said Joshua.

  “You look bad,” said Pelo, in what Joshua had learned was his trademark lack of tact. “Like you haven’t slept in weeks. And it stinks like dragon dung around here.”

  “This lad’s a delight,” said Keate. “I had a harpy girlfriend once, and she was just like him. Never had such a love-hate relationship with a woman as I did with her.”

  They went into the grand hall, and Pelo fluttered through the doorway, banging his head on the doorframe.

  “Don’t fly around in here,” said Joshua. “You’ll hit the wrong wall in the wrong place and get buried in stone, and your harpy father will come looking for me.”

  “He’s the one who sent me. He’s getting grouchy lately.”

  “What does he need?”

  “We’ve got insects around camp. They’re biting people.”

  Keate drank a shot of firespit. “Don’t tell me it’s more damned loneeyes.”

  “Loneeyes?” said Pelo.

  “These creatures around your camp,” said Joshua. “Are they spiders?”

  “No, they’re flies. Ugly little things that make annoying noises.”

  “Yeah…I can see how that’d be a problem,” said Keate. “Since you’ve cornered the market share of being an ugly little thing who…”

  “And your father sent you here to ask us to get rid of some flies?”

  “Well, they’re not just flies. They’re the size of pumpkins and they buzz around the food and they bite people who get close. Dad and my uncles and cousins are busy getting ready to move camp, so they asked if you would come and get rid of the flies.”

  Joshua had learned his lesson about quests now. “How much are they offering to pay?”

  “He said to come to the camp and take care of them, and we’ll pay you after.”

  Keate shook his head. “Sounds like melaflies. A pain in the arse to be sure, but not deadly. Hardly something a heroes’ guild gets involved with.”

  “Maybe,” said Joshua. “But Benjen and I, we had one rule.”

  “The boys promised they’d never turn someone away from the guild,” said Kordrude. “That was part of their reason for opening it; to help anyone.”

  “Well, principles are a fine thing in my book; I’ve had my share of guildmasters who didn’t have them. Okay, you’re the guildmaster, lad. Give me my orders, and I’ll go.”

  “Great. And I’m coming with you.”

  “A guildmaster doesn’t go out questing.”

  “It’s early days and I want to get a feel for how quests go. It can only help if I have a little experience. Besides, you said that heroes won’t respect a guildmaster who can’t fight. Well, they won’t respect one who never sets foot outside the guildhouse, either.”

  “I told you,” said Kordrude, looking at Keate. “The lad isn’t scared of hard work.”

  Keate smiled. “Let’s get to it, then.”

  Pelo the harpy boy led them away from the guild and along travelers’ road, taking a path that led away from Ardglass and then away from the road itself, until they were going along an expanse of windswept grass. Joshua rode loyal Roebuck, while he let Keate take Firemane. The beast was unsure of him at first, but he relented when Keate fed him an apple and stroked his head.

  “You seemed a little underwhelmed by this quest,” said Joshua.

  Keate had perfect posture on the horse, and he held the reins with one hand in a controlled way. “I was wrong to say that. This is child’s play, yes, but I’m used to big guilds. I’ll have to remember that yours is still growing. Patience was never my strong suit; it’s why I never settled down.”

  “You know, you could earn more gold as a private guard or even in the kings’ army.”

  “I’m too old for the army, and besides, I tried it already. I was in the cavalier unit for five years, a long time ago back when the three kings were still sucking on their mother’s breasts. I tried it – not drinking milk from the queen mother’s breasts. Being in the army, I mean. It wasn’t for me.”

  “Why? You can handle yourself.”

  “There’s rarely any glory in it. Months of training and setting camp here, patrolling there, getting involved in petty land disputes and skirmishes between lords. The pay was enough to live on, but I was hungry for something else.”

  “There’s not going to be much glory in my guild. Not for a while, anyway.”

  As Joshua said the words, he realized something; that was a sentence he wouldn’t have uttered just a couple of weeks ago. Back then, all he thought about was glory and helping people, but things were different now. He understood something; dreams had their place, sure, but practicality was what made them a reality.

  “Maybe not, but I can see that you’ve got ideals. Kordrude told me all about it; that crowsie loves what you’re doing, y’know. As long as you’ve got ambition and your priorities are right, I’m content to ride this out and see what you can do. You’ll need more than just me, though. Not every swordsman is the right fit for every quest.”

  “The plan is to expand once I get the guildmaster class and fix the guild up.”

  “You don’t have the class yet?”

  “I’m working on it.”

  “Boy, you really are green behind the ears, aren’t you? Hey, it looks like the harpy is stopping.”

  Pelo fluttered down to the ground until he was standing. Behind him was a wide area of grass where flies buzzed around. The flies’ eyes were huge and their bodies were the size of pumpkins like the harpy boy had told them, but they didn’t look even half as deadly as thrips. On seeing them, Joshua’s seeker binding increased from 67 to 69, leaving him 31 short of level 3.

  “You said these are melaflies?” he said.

  Keate nodded. “Their teeth are tiny, so you’ll barely feel them bite. Worst you might get is if the bite becomes infected, but that’s only if you’re stupid and don’t wash it.”

  “Your father and the others are really too busy to deal with this?” said Joshua.

  Pelo nodded. “Too busy and too lazy. But here they are. The flies live here, and they fly to our camp sometimes. If you kill them and come to camp, dad will pay you. If you don’t die, that is. You don’t look like a hero.”

  Pelo flew away, leaving Joshua and Keate alone in the field. He watched the flies buzzing around, and he was left with a feeling that he hadn’t expected to have whilst on a quest; a complete absence of fear.

  “That harpy kid is going to say the wrong thing to the wrong person someday,” said Keate. “But then, with a harpy family backing him up, he probably doesn’t know the meaning of the word ‘worry.’”

  “I guess we better just kill the flies. Have you fought them before?”

  “Fought them? Lad, I’d hardly call it that. This isn’t worth us coming out for. Your principle of never turning people away might have to change once you start getting real quests. The only danger here is that with your unpracticed blade skill, they might be hard to hit. Me? I’ll cleave three or four at a time. Just do your best and let’s get this over with.”

  Joshua wondered if Keate was right, and if there was any point in this quest. He certainly wasn’t going to learn much. At least it’d spread the reputation of the guild a little further, and who knew, the harpies might have more work for them later.

  He and Keate approached the field of melaflies, Joshua gripping his eclipse dagger, and Keate holding his lion-head hilt sword.

  True to his word, once they reached the middle of the field and began to attack the flies, Keate cleaved a bunch of them at a time. He moved quicker than his age should have allowed, pivoting left and right and using sword techniques that Joshua had never seen before.

  Rather than attack, the flies merely swerved away from the weapons, sometimes bouncing
into one another. Joshua swiped once, twice, and again, each time missing them. Soon he began to get a feel for the way they moved, and he started scoring hits.

  It wasn’t long before sweat drenched his forehead and his arms ached, and even Keate started to tire. Maybe his years had caught up with him, after all.

  Keate rested on his sword, with the pointed tip wedged into the ground. “That’s the last of them. Phew, it’s been a while since I moved like that.”

  “This was all too easy. If Pelo’s harpy clan are leaving anyway, I don’t see why they even bothered getting us out here.”

  “Harpies are a strange folk.”

  The newly-created silence of the field was interrupted when a chorus of buzzing sounded. Joshua looked across the field to see another stream of melaflies heading toward them.

  “Looks like their friends have come for revenge,” said Keate.

  “Insects don’t think that way. They don’t have that kind of brain power.”

  His zoologist knowledge proved right; rather than attack them, the newly-arrived melaflies simply buzzed around the field, threading through the air above their fallen comrades.

  Joshua and Keate dispatched these ones too, but with a stark difference in the way they did it. Their movements were sluggish now, and Keate’s age had truly taken hold of him. The old warrior lost half of his reflex speed, and he grunted in-between thrusts.

  “That’s it. The last of ‘em. Let’s go and get our pay,” he said.

  Joshua nodded. “Where was the harpy camp again?”

  “Just north.”

  “Let’s go.”

  They had only taken ten steps when Joshua heard a noise coming toward them.

  “You have got to be joking with me.”

  “More?”

  Sure enough, yet another stream of pesky flies headed their way and again, they didn’t attack Joshua or Keate.

  “I need a breather before we do this,” said Keate, and he sat on the ground and pulled a flask from a holder on his belt, and he sipped from it.

  Joshua looked around. Something was tugging at his brain, a thought that struggled to surface from beneath the constant buzzing of the melaflies.

  His perception flashed in him, and his gaze was drawn north, where each batch of flies had come from. He started walking toward it.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Something isn’t right about this.”

  Keate followed him. Joshua walked an arc around the melaflies, but he needn’t have bothered; they didn’t pay him the slightest bit of attention. He trampled a quarter of a mile along the field, when he saw a hill in the distance.

  It was a mound of earth ten feet high, but it wasn’t just a hill; there was a hollowed opening in it. From that hollowed opening, a bunch of melaflies flapped away one by one, the buzzes louder than the breeze.

  The melaflies rushed over their heads as they reached the hill. Joshua went inside the opening, where he found something strange.

  There was a small steel box with a red marking on the front of it, and a little hatch at the top. The red marking was a drawing of a melafly.

  “What the hell is this?”

  “This can’t be right,” said Keate, kneeling beside it. He traced his finger over the hatch on the top.

  The red markings glowed, illuminating the drawing of a melafly. A red mist gathered over the steel box, and then the hatch opened.

  With a whoosh of light, a real melafly formed inside the box, and the insect flapped out. It was followed by another and another, until a dozen of the creatures spawned from it and flew out of the hill and to the fields.

  Joshua couldn’t believe was he was seeing. This was magic of some sort, no doubt about that.

  “A cregen,” said Keate. “Well I never…”

  “Cregen?”

  “It’s something the old guilds use to use. Utilarian mages made them, and they used them to create low-level creatures for heroes to train against. They were outlawed years ago; melaflies are one thing, but when you get a utilarian mage a high enough level to make a cregen to create, say, dire bears, you have something dangerous indeed.”

  “Who would have put this here? And why?”

  “I think the answer to that-”

  “…is with the harpies. Got it. I want to know what the hell is going on. Come on; let’s find their camp.”

  And so, they went back to their horses and they rode north to where Pelo had said the harpies were camped. But rather than find their campsite, they instead found a patch of barren land where the grass was flattened from where the harpies tents had once been pitched. There were a few discarded wooden boxes with food in them that had already gone rotten, and there were the charred remnants of camp fires. But, there was no sign of the harpies themselves.

  “They haven’t been here in weeks,” said Keate.

  “Then why would Pelo bring us here? And what was with the cregen? Why leave a contraption lying around that can spawn melaflies? It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “No, it damned sure doesn’t.”

  Joshua felt a stirring in his gut. Something was wrong here, and it wasn’t just the never-ending production line of melaflies in the field they’d left behind.

  None of this was an accident, and it wasn’t a mystery. He understood part of it now; his perception had threaded some of the clues together.

  A shock of worry shook through him.

  “We need to get back to the guild,” he said.

  “You don’t want to look around? They might have moved camp nearby.”

  “The harpies are gone. That was the point; they drew us away from the guild. I don’t know why, but the harpies needed to get us away from the guildhouse, and this was all a ruse to do it. Why else keep us swatting a never-ending stream of flies? Kordrude is there alone.”

  They got on their horses and raced away from the field and back toward the guildhouse. By the time they rejoined the travelers’ road Joshua’s veins were flushed with adrenaline, and he couldn’t shake the idea that Kordrude was in trouble. Whatever the harpies needed from the guild, the crowsie would end up being collateral damage, and Joshua wouldn’t allow that.

  The road took them close to Ardglass and here, an idea sparked in Joshua. He pulled roebuck to a stop.

  “You go ahead,” he said. “I just need to do something.”

  “Your friend is alone.”

  “I know, and I need to do something that will help. You ride ahead and I’ll be five or ten minutes behind you, at the most.”

  Keate whipped Firemane’s reins and sped away, leaving a cloud of dirt behind him. Joshua turned right and headed into Ardglass town. He tied Roebuck up at the gates and then threaded through the single-file alleyway and then into the market square.

  The beer festival was dying down now, and the streets were a sorry sight, lined with smashed glass, beer stains, and puddles of what could have been urine or vomit.

  He looked around, scanning the faces of everyone he saw. “Come on…where are you?”

  And then he saw them; walking down the street that led from the library, he spotted the goblin family. He rushed over to them.

  “It’s Joshua!” said Fheth. “How are you, my handsome human friend?”

  “Razlag,” said Joshua, eyeing the athletic-looking goblin standing next to Fheth. “I need a favor. Can you fight?”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Trouble at the guild, and I might need a few people on my side.”

  “Anything you need, you’ll get. Let’s go.”

  “I’m coming too,” said Fheth.

  Joshua looked at her.

  “What? You think a goblin mother can’t fight? You saved my boy. For that, I still owe you.”

  “What about the town guard?” said Razlag. “If there’s trouble…”

  “Trust me; the guard won’t help,” said Joshua.

  “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know for certain, but I’ll explain on the way.�
��

  Joshua, Razlag and Fheth left Ardglass together, and they travelled over the road as fast as they could. All Joshua could think about was the harpies and the stories he’d heard about them; how mean people said they were, and how they held a grudge.

  Whatever their reason for drawing Joshua away from the guildhouse, whatever they wanted, he wouldn’t let them have it.

  He forced himself to calm down, and he mentally prepared to fight the harpies if it came to that. He hoped it wouldn’t, but there was something sinister about this. About the quest, about the melafly-producing cregen machine…it wasn’t right, and it was making him anxious. Roebuck must have sensed it, because he broke into a hurry.

  When Joshua he reached heroes’ hill and dismounted Roebuck and ran up it, he saw that there were no harpies at the guildhouse after all.

  It was someone else.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  In front of the guildhouse were Terry of Yarn, Miana, and rotund Reben. Terry, the bird-like old man, held a gnarled staff with an acorn-shaped piece of metal at the cap, while green-haired Miana had two daggers tucked into her belt, and Reben held his little tube of metal. With a flick of his wrist, two steel rods shot out of each end.

  But it wasn’t just those three; with them were Carlisle, who was wielding his machete, and Carlisle’s friend, the man who had stuck his rapier in Benjen’s belly.

  Keate was standing across from them with his sword held in a practiced fighter’s stance, but there was no sign of Kordrude.

  Joshua couldn’t even begin to think about where the crowsie was. All he could focus on was Benjen’s killer, the man who now held a short sword in his hand. He’d abandoned his murder weapon back in the field of course, and now it was over there, lying amongst the grass with Benjen’s blood dried on the metal.

  Hate burned in his stomach. It turned to bile and he could taste it on his tongue, and a tremendous fire of anger roared in his chest. He felt logic slip away from him, and he realized he was gripping his eclipse dagger so hard that his knuckles had turned white.

  Carlisle pointed at Terry. “You said they’d be gone. You promised this would be easy, old man.”