Seeker of Secrets

by Deck Davis

  Instinctively, he knew what to do. It must have been the seeker ability guiding him, because all he had to do was will a sword of red light to appear in front of him, and there it was.

  Jandafar’s eyes widened.

  Keate turned to look at Joshua. “Lad, how in all the hells did you…”

  Joshua let loose with the sword, and the weapon of red light tore through the air and toward Jandafar. In less than a second it ripped through his throat, and the old gnoll fell face-first onto the ground.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Remembering what Keate had told him about learning to face death, Joshua tried to do just that. They spent the next day cleaning up bodies and bloodstains from heroes’ hill, and he gave Terry, Jandafar, Reben, Carlisle, and Harrie’s bodies over to the Ardglass officials for them to be buried in the town cemetery.

  With that done, he, Keate, and Mina – who he’d agreed to let stay in the guild for a few nights after sharing her story – toiled in the flatlands behind the guildhouse at the bottom of heroes’ hill, and they dug out the boundaries for what Joshua had decided would be the guild’s graveyard of heroes.

  Joshua wrote a letter to Benjen’s parents and to his own father, and he mailed those back to the village. A reply came three days later to a question that he’d asked in it; Benjen’s parents would come straight away, and they’d use their savings to pay for a mage-powered carriage to bring them here in no time. Joshua’s father, unfortunately, was out of the village on business.

  They had a ceremony for Benjen at the top of heroes’ hill in front of the guild, with a bigger crowd than Joshua could have imagined; there was him, Benjen’s parents, Kordrude, Keate, Miana, Razlag and his family, Beula and her children, Sadler, and even Sergeant Nickall.

  After speeches and memories and the formality of a funeral they did what Benjen would have wanted; his parents had brought a barrel of one of his old ale brews, and everyone had a few drinks to toast him.

  Amidst the chatter about Benjen and the memories that were shared – mostly by Joshua and Benjen’s parents, since a lot of the people were there for respect and not because they actually knew him - a bard strummed on a lute.

  It was the brightly-dressed bard from the Iron Whip tavern, and as was bard custom he dressed in even brighter colors than usual for the funeral, and he played a more upbeat version of Benjen’s favorite song, the Ballad of the Crimson Fields.

  It was while the bard was 30 verses into the 51 in the song – he’d added an extra verse especially for Benjen – that a figure climbed heroes’ hill and approached them.

  Joshua couldn’t believe it at first, but there he was; the teenager with his hair brushed into curtains that fell down both sides of his face, the one who’d accompanied Carlisle and Harrie to the fight in Beula’s field that had led to this very moment.

  “He’s got some bloody nerve,” said Beula, rolling up her sleeves to show her arms.

  Joshua wanted to feel the same when he looked at the teenager; after all, he’d joined with Carlisle, at first.

  The teenager walked toward them. He held his hands together in a respectful pose, and he approached Joshua slowly.

  “You better get out of here, Mertin,” said Beula.

  The boy nodded. “I…I know. I just wanted to pay my respects.”

  “Respects? You should have thought of that.”

  Joshua touched her arm. “It’s okay, Beula.”

  “It’s okay?”

  He nodded. “It is.”

  Joshua thought about how it had made him feel when Miana killed Harrie. Empty, mainly. He certainly didn’t enjoy or feel better for it.

  And Mertin, this teenager, well he hadn’t actually done anything wrong. Joshua had persuaded him to leave before the fighting had started, so Benjen’s death had nothing to do with this boy.

  “Go and join the others,” Joshua told him. “There’s a beer in the barrel that might not taste too nice, but it’d mean a lot if you pretended that it did.”

  Mertin nodded. “Thanks.”

  And as the teenager walked passed, text drifted into Joshua’s vision.

  Skill gained: Empathetic Judgement

  [The art of making fair and logical decision despite your own, and other people’s emotions.]

  Guildmaster class learned! You are now a level 1 guildmaster.

  After seeing that, Joshua felt a warmth spread through him, and it wasn’t because Benjen had brewed his beers to be triple strength. He was a guildmaster, finally.

  The next day was spent recovering from hangovers and clearing up. After that, Joshua got to work. With his new guildmaster class, he knew that there was something he had to do; an itch that he needed to scratch.

  He went into his guildmaster bedroom and he crawled through the tunnel until he reached the row of five doors, which only a guildmaster could open. As level 1, he knew that only the red door would open for him.

  He grabbed the handle and he paused, and he felt excitement stir in him. He was going to get answers at last. He pushed open the door and he eagerly looked to see what that answer was.

  And that, it turned out, was a map.

  Store of Secrets Updated:

  [Rare] Five Mysterious doors:

  You have opened one of the five guildmaster doors

  It was a rolled-up sheet of paper with a map of the guild drawn on it in red ink. At first, Joshua was disappointed. All of the mystery with the secret tunnels and the locked doors, for this? Was that right?

  But it was Kordrude who pointed out something important when he looked at it; something that Joshua, for all his improved perception, had missed.

  The tunnels and rooms on this map didn’t exist. At least, some of them didn’t.

  This was a blueprint not just of the guildhouse as it stood, but of all the secret passageways and tunnels and doors that a utilarian mage had wrought on the building, presumably under orders from Jandafar the Red.

  Joshua stayed up all night looking at the map and the secrets it held, and it was in the early hours of the morning when the sun was only just rising that he found the one thing he wanted.

  It was a tunnel that led to a secret room underneath the guild basement, underneath the mana traps and the quarite flooring that were placed there to stop anybody ever getting to it, unless they knew one, key secret.

  That secret was that the well outside the guildhouse was dried up for a reason; because it was a secret tunnel that led underneath the guildhouse itself.

  With a thumping heart and shaking hands, Joshua lowered himself down using the rope and pulley system they manage to put together, sinking deeper and deeper into the darkness until he hit the bottom of the well. Kordrude followed him, and then Keate, followed by Miana, whom Joshua was beginning to grow a little too fond of.

  At the bottom, they lit torches and followed a tunnel through the bowels of Fortuna, heading the way the map told them would lead to the guild basement. They came to a set of double doors covered in dust, and there, they paused.

  “This is it,” said Joshua. “Everything on the hill, it came to this. I wonder if Terry and Jandafar think it was worth dying for?”

  “Open the doors and find out.”

  And he did. Joshua pushed open the doors and he emerged into the room under the guildhouse basement. A spider scurried away from him and retreated into a crevice on the floor. Joshua waved his torch around, and he saw that the room was barely bigger than a garden shed, and there were just two things in it.

  One was a giant book lying on the floor. This was the biggest book he’d ever seen, and it was bound in a deep leather and had strange writing on the front. Kordrude immediately kneeled beside it and opened it, remarking at the strange diagrams and the words he could barely figure out.

  “What is it?” said Joshua.

  “The language isn’t one I know well, but I do know a smattering of it,” said Kordrude. “I’ll have to get a language book and try to translate it.”

  “But what is i
t, generally? It must be important for it to be locked down here.”

  “It appears to be a book of the secrets of Fortuna; of its secret dungeons, its tombs, and its treasures.”

  Secrets. Now that he’d solved two of his biggest, the word sent a flush of excitement through Joshua. He realized that with this book, he wouldn’t just wait for quests to come to him; there were places he would send his heroes to, assuming Kordrude could translate the book.

  “I’m more interested in this,” said Miana.

  She was standing at the far end of the room, by a steel box that was two feet taller than her. There was a hatch on the top of it, and there was a red etching on the front, though it was so dusty that Joshua could hardly make it out.

  “It looks like a cregen,” said Keate. “A bloody big one, by the looks of it. Wonder what kind of creatures it makes?”

  Miana blew on the dust, and then she put her sleeve over her hand and she wiped it away, and the red etching on the front of the cregen revealed itself inch by inch until finally, Joshua stared at it and he felt every last trace of air leave his lungs.

  “Is that…a dragon?”

  Keate approached the machine in amazement, his mouth open. “No. This can’t…something like this. You saw what the melafly cregen did, Joshua.”

  He did, and he knew what he was looking at now; a machine created by a utilarian mage, and one that didn’t just produce annoying insects. This steel contraption could make something much worse if it actually worked.

  Joshua faced the others. “If this thing works, and if anyone else in Fortuna knows that it’s down here, then we’re in more trouble than I thought.”

  Store of Secrets

  [Rare] Secret Completed: What is in the guildhouse basement?

  The end of book 1 – thank you for reading and I hope you stick around for book 2.

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