The Adventurers Guild

by Zack Loran Clark

  His father took his seat at the head of the dining room table, where servants had set out silver trays heaped with Brock’s favorite foods: potatoes and chicken and little flatbreads covered in cheese. He showed no interest in interjecting on his son’s behalf.

  “I’m going to fix this,” she said, shifting from fury to grim determination in a heartbeat. “Brock, you leave everything to me. I’ll go down there to that guildhall and I’ll tell that awful woman that you made a mistake. Or I—I’ll petition the king himself.”

  She clasped Brock against her in an embrace, and all at once the traumas of the day washed over him anew. His knees felt weak, but his mom held him, so he knew he wouldn’t fall. For a moment he wondered whether she couldn’t really get him out of this. She would stand up to Quilby. She would do anything to keep him safe.

  And then she said, “It’s all that wretched elf boy’s fault. I told you to stay away from him. I did everything I could.…”

  Brock pulled away from her then. His knees were fine; he could stand on his own. He looked from his mother, dabbing her eyes theatrically, to his father, slathering a roll with butter, and he took great satisfaction when he said, “Actually, Mother, funny story, but it was all Father’s idea.”

  Brock’s father nearly choked on his bread.

  The banner of the Adventurers Guild hung heavy in the still morning air. It was meant to evoke the night sky—a “sea of stars”—but seeing it hang limply in the shadows, Brock couldn’t make out a single point of white against the dark fabric. It looked like a funeral shroud strung up to dry.

  Still, he was certain he had the right place. Everyone in Freestone knew the large, ramshackle wooden structure that the adventurers called home. It was built right up against the town wall, almost leaning against it, as if it were just another pile of stone and not the town’s last line of defense against untold Dangers. Children believed the guildhall was a cursed place, and they dared one another to walk past its darkened windows. Adults knew for a fact that it was cursed, and they gave it a wide berth.

  Brock did not approach the building yet, but stood and watched it from the shadows of a stable a ways down the dirt road. He’d arrived well before dawn, and in all the time it took the sky to gradually lighten, no one entered or exited the guildhall. The milkmaid with her bottles and the postal boy weighed down with parcels and leaflets each made their early-morning rounds without approaching the place.

  Now, with the sun just peeking above the wall, a girl strode down the road, passing Brock without seeing him. Her gaze was stuck upon the slack flag above the guildhall’s entrance. Brock recognized something of his own emotions in the steeliness of her eyes and the rigidness of her jaw. With her dark hair pulled back into a tight ponytail and yesterday’s painted rouge gone from her cheeks, it took Brock a moment to recognize her. She was the young noble, Liza Guerra. His fellow apprentice.

  He was considering calling out to her when he saw Zed come around the corner. Even from a distance, the boy looked miserable. His skin was pallid, his shoulders were hunched. If Brock didn’t know better, he would have said that even his ears were drooping.

  Brock stepped from the stable’s awning and gave a little wave. But rather than cheering Zed up, the sight of Brock made him shrink even more. There was no mistaking the guilt clouding his expression.

  “Tell me the truth,” Brock said lightly, falling into step beside his friend. “You didn’t sleep a wink, did you?”

  Zed frowned and shook his head. “You?”

  “Like a baby,” Brock answered. “A baby who wakes wailing to a full diaper after dreams of sharp, gnashing teeth.”

  Zed’s eyes fell to the ground. “Brock, you didn’t have to…I’ll never be able to—”

  “Stop,” Brock said. “We stick together.” He felt a rush of guilt as Zed looked at him like he’d done something heroic. “I didn’t have the constitution for the Merchants Guild anyway,” he said. “You spend a day cross-referencing crop-rotation ledgers in the royal archive, then you can talk to me about Dangers.” Zed rolled his eyes, but at least that got them off the ground.

  Brock fingered the hidden inner pocket at his hip, where he’d stashed his Merchants Guild token—the one with the strange pattern of webbing on one side. This way it was out of sight, but impossible for him to forget as it pressed up against him.

  He inclined his head toward Liza, who now stood before the guildhall, watching them approach. “So what’s her story?” he said under his breath. She struck a formidable pose, with her chin held high and her fists at her hips, immaculately dressed in brand-new hunting leathers, with two shining daggers sheathed at her thighs. But Brock thought she looked less like an adventurer and more like a thespian portraying one onstage.

  “Don’t ask me,” Zed answered. “She and I don’t exactly run in the same circles.”

  “That,” said Brock, slapping his arm around Zed’s shoulders, “is about to change.”

  The girl nodded a greeting as they joined her, but she didn’t relax her pose. Brock saw her eyes go to Zed’s ears. “You’re the sorcerer,” she said to him.

  “His name is Zed, actually,” Brock said.

  “Uh, glad to meet you,” Zed said. He went predictably pink and started a curtsy, but Brock caught his arm. “Nuh-uh,” he said, pulling him up. “We’re all equals now. Isn’t that right?” He held Liza’s eyes like a challenge.

  “That’s right,” she said, not blinking. “So let each be judged solely by their actions.” She gave Zed a small curtsy. “Glad to meet you, Messere.”

  Brock tried to hide his surprise. He’d never seen a noble curtsy to a commoner before—especially not a commoner with pointy ears.

  “Glad to meet you!” Zed blurted, apparently forgetting he’d said so already.

  Brock smirked. “I’m glad everybody’s so glad,” he said.

  There was a great racket of clanging metal, and Jett came barreling around the corner, a huge pack slung over his shoulders. He tottered up to them, red in the face and huffing. “Sorry to cut it so close,” he said. “Short legs.”

  “Surely you’re used to them by now?” Brock said. “They’re not getting shorter?”

  “It looks like you came prepared, though,” Liza said. She tilted her head around him to look at the various implements hanging from his pack. “Is that a masterwork mallet with a bronze-inlaid stone handle? Nice.”

  Jett stared at the girl, opened his mouth to speak, and then began coughing uncontrollably. Brock went to slap him on the back, but he couldn’t reach it for all the gear.

  And then the door to the guildhall burst open, just as the first morning bell began to chime in the distance and a wave of warm, sour air rolled out into the chill morning. In the doorway stood Alabasel Frond, the puckered scars along her face glistening in the dawn. “Well,” she said stonily. “Look at what the wyvern dragged in.” And she stepped back into the gloom of the entryway.

  Zed looked at Brock. Brock looked at Jett. Liza threw her shoulders back and stepped forward.

  The boys followed her.

  The hall was a close, dark space that reminded Brock of a tavern—a lowborn tavern his parents would never set foot in. The air was musty, and all the windows were covered with heavy drapes that let in little light and kept in the stench of unwashed women and men. The hearth was cold, the long wooden table at the room’s center was mostly obscured by filthy dishes, and an unsettling statue stood at the far end of the room—a figure of a boy, one hand clenched in a fist, the other held out before him as if warning them all to stay away.

  Their new guildmates had gathered to watch their arrival. Some glared, leaning back against the walls; others sat at the table and picked meat from the bones of yesterday’s meal, seemingly uninterested. Brock remembered Quilby’s complaint of the day before: Between the guild’s alleged mortality rate and the fact that the their ranks were occasionally bolstered by the guildless outside of the formal Guildculling, no one in Freestone seemed t
o know just how many adventurers there were at any given moment.

  Brock counted off two dozen men and women, and filed that information away for later.

  At the merchants’ hall this morning, there would be a magnificent five-course feast, with gifts exchanged and speeches of welcome from all the city’s most successful and respected citizens. Here, Alabasel Frond brought them to attention by spitting a wad of mucus in the general direction of a battered spittoon.

  Brock angled his shoulder so that Liza was forced to make room for him at the front of their group. He could sense Zed trembling just behind him, either out of fear or anger at the woman who had snatched his dream away. He slipped his arm back to grip his friend’s hand.

  “Adventurers die,” the woman said without preamble, then allowed a silence to settle for several long, uncomfortable seconds. Brock’s throat was dry, and he fought to keep his face impassive as her eyes swept across them. “They die horrible and useless deaths,” she continued at last. “Let the fair folk of Freestone call us whatever they like. ‘Adventurers,’ if it eases their conscience. But make no mistake: You are soldiers. Do you know the difference?”

  Her eyes again swept over the group. Brock was unsure whether she expected an answer or merely paused for effect, but Liza spoke up: “Discipline,” she said.

  The muscles of Alabasel’s scarred face tightened in a sour smile. “Discipline, yes. You will know a chain of command. You will follow orders at all times, in all things. But the key difference is this: Soldiers die, too. But they die with purpose. Their deaths mean something.”

  “So much to look forward to.” Brock said it without really intending to, but he wasn’t sorry. He didn’t much care for the woman’s scare tactics.

  And he wasn’t planning on being here long enough to get himself killed, meaningfully or not.

  Alabasel regarded him coldly, and he felt the look mirrored in Liza’s sideways glance, but the other guild members gave no indication they were even paying attention, instead murmuring to one another or else looking on indifferently from their benches. All except for one girl, standing by the hearth, who wrung her hands as she watched them. She didn’t look much older than the apprentices, and she wore a silver charm around her neck—a crescent moon. Brock marked her immediately as the young wizard who had been drafted the previous year.

  “Tell me, Apprentice Dunderfel,” Frond said, bringing Brock’s attention back to her steely eyes. “What does this guild’s sigil represent?”

  Brock wasn’t entirely sure what to make of the question. “A sea of stars?”

  “But why? What do the stars stand for?”

  Brock had never really thought of it, but the longer he groped for an answer, the longer Frond would fix him with her uncanny stare. “Us?” he suggested. “The bright new recruits lighting the way to glory.”

  A bearded man at the table chuckled into his flagon.

  “A pretty sentiment,” Frond said, and she pulled several objects from her belt—flat, metallic circles with protruding blades. Throwing stars. “And like most pretty things, false.” She turned on her heel, tore a starred banner from the wall, and draped it across the table, knocking over a pewter stein without a care. The mutterings inside the hall came to an abrupt stop.

  “Freestone,” she said, and she stabbed one of her throwing stars into one star of the flag, pinning it to the table. “Llethanyl,” she said, and stabbed a second star in the same manner. “Dragnacht. Vloegstan. Everglen.” She stabbed the three remaining stars. “Points of light in the darkness.” She looked back up at them. “So far as we know, that’s all that’s left. Every other city, town, or cottage—every other person—fallen to Dangers. Swallowed whole.”

  Zed’s sweaty hand slipped from Brock’s grip.

  “We keep it from getting worse,” Frond added. “Glory be cursed.” And she walked away.

  “Um,” Brock said in a low voice. “Do we follow her, or…?”

  Liza huffed and stepped away from the group, following in Frond’s wake. Brock looked back at his friends, shrugged, and joined her as she wove through the crowded space, slipping past the men and women who now watched them in silence. Brock sensed their scrutiny, and he suddenly felt awkward, unsure what to do with his hands. Behind him he could hear Jett’s muttered apologies as he clashed and clanged his way through the crowd. The wizard girl looked right past Brock, and he knew her gaze was on Zed, while Brock caught the eye of a sneering man whose ruined bottom lip had been torn or cut and healed poorly.

  Frond led them to the dark doorway at the very end of the hall, and as they passed the statue, Jett let out a low whistle. “Extraordinary work. Dwarven, no doubt.”

  Brock peered past the stone figure’s outstretched arm and saw the look of terror on its face, and he agreed he’d seen nothing else like it. It surpassed even the carvings of the Four Champions in the town square.

  “That was a recruit from a few years ago,” Frond said. “Started out as a Stone Son, ironically enough.”

  “A knight carved this?” Jett said with undisguised awe.

  “You misunderstand,” Frond answered. “That is the recruit. He was petrified in the field. Took three men to drag him back.”

  Jett’s jaw hung open, and Brock felt his stomach drop. He took an involuntary step closer to Zed as low chuckles came from the men seated nearby.

  Feet dragging, they followed Frond through the doorway and down an uneven stairwell. “Barracks are upstairs,” she told them. “But there’s no sense getting comfortable until you’ve been initiated.”

  Brock didn’t like the sound of that.

  The stairs ended in a cavernous wood-paneled cellar. Despite being underground, the space was far brighter than the dining hall, lit with dozens of lanterns hanging from the rafters. Straw dummies were positioned throughout the room, as well as several mannequins loaded with armor. The long walls on each side were almost entirely obscured by mounted objects. On the left wall was every manner of weapon Brock had ever seen, and many besides that he’d never imagined. On the right, he saw a multitude of stuffed animal heads. He recognized a wolf and a grizzly bear from storybooks, but there were also other, far stranger things. Things he’d never want to bump into in the dark of night.

  Two figures stood among the mannequins. One was a pale-skinned woman, short and curvy, with bands of gold running all along her ears and shining pauldrons strapped to her shoulders. The second was a man, tall and thin, in a heavy hooded robe that obscured his features. Brock could see dark brown skin and a sharp nose, and thin lips set in a salt-and-pepper beard. He wore a belt of interlocking metal rings strung with all manner of keys.

  “Lotte is our quartermaster,” Frond said, gesturing at the woman. “And Hexam is our archivist.”

  Lotte stepped forward and smiled handsomely. Her flowing blond ringlets were a marked contrast to Frond’s close-cropped gray hair. Brock searched her face for scars and, finding none, wondered whether that made her unique among members of the guild. “Greetings, apprentices,” she said. “You’ll be spending a lot of time in this room in the months ahead.”

  While the woman continued a speech that felt much more rehearsed than anything Frond had said, Brock leaned toward Zed, who was fairly squirming in his boots.

  “You all right?” he whispered.

  “That smell,” Zed answered. “What is that?”

  Brock sniffed at the air. It was a bit mustier down here than it had been in the great hall, but he was already growing accustomed to it.

  “Frond’s armpits, I think,” he whispered. Zed didn’t seem put at ease.

  “Choice and maintenance of weapon are among the most important skills you’ll learn here,” the quartermaster was saying. “You may start by choosing one item from our collection, which in addition to anything on your person now, is all you’ll have access to during the test.”

  “Uh, what is the test?” Zed asked, actually raising his hand first.

  Alabasel grinned at her col
leagues as if sharing a private joke.

  “Not knowing is part of it,” Lotte answered.

  “Good thing Jett brought his house with him,” Brock said. He flicked an iron pan with his finger. “Maybe it’s a cooking challenge?”

  Liza actually huffed in annoyance and, surprising no one, stepped forward to make her selection first. But Brock was surprised by her choice. She passed by swords and maces and a miniature lance to take up a large, gleaming shield that came to a point at the bottom. It was enameled dark blue, with five star-shaped patches of silver shining through the paint.

  Jett went immediately for a large maul, which he hefted from its hooks with both hands.

  “Honoring the ancestors?” Brock teased.

  “I’ve been swinging a hammer since I was a pebble in my mam’s boot,” Jett said gruffly. “Just…never swung it at anything that moved.”

  Zed walked slowly along the wall, taking his time, looking at each object he passed. Brock thought his friend might be agonizing over the choice, but when he caught a glimpse of Zed’s face, it was contemplative and calm. He zeroed in on a quarterstaff, considering it carefully. To Brock’s eye, there was nothing exceptional about it—in fact, it looked like a student’s training staff, lacking even the simple leather grip of a weightier staff mounted farther down the wall.

  Brock tapped at the token sewn into his pants. What was he doing here? What was he meant to be seeing? He considered making an inventory of the weapons. Surely that was the sort of thing Quilby would want to know about? The armory was impressive enough, and would be dangerous in the wrong hands.

  He eyed the animal heads again, trophies of past victories over the beasts beyond the city gates. It was a ghastly menagerie. There were lizards of every size and color; a compound-eyed insect with mandibles as big as his hands. And not just heads. There were wings and claws and jaws of serrated teeth mounted on plaques, and a long purple tentacle lined with suckers and barbs. The barbs reminded Brock immediately of the puckered scars along Alabasel Frond’s face and neck.

  “Dunderfel,” Frond said sharply. “You’re up.”