“Zuggog?” The Goblin grabbed the paper and read eagerly.
“He say, ‘Is it truth?’” added the translator.
“Aye. Apparently Zurthraka needs more guards for the burial stones. He figured having one of the heroes who retrieved the stones on the brigade will be inspiring to them.”
“Nub’gub dibarg’hest.”
“He say, ‘I not a professional hero.’”
“Aye, lad. Not a professional. Just a hero.”
The Goblin’s giant amber eyes misted up. He choked out a speech in hurried Shadowtongue.
“He say that he very grateful—”
“Ye don’t have to tell me,” said Gorm. “I know what he’s sayin’.”
It would be an understatement to say that the Heroes’ Guild was important to Haertswood. It would be far more accurate to say that Haertswood was important to the guild; the entire town was more like an extended campus for the massive guildhall at its center. The houses and shops clumped around the great stone building like toadstools around an old stump. The streets were filled with arbiters, clerks, and assistants, all wearing smart navy-blue suits and lapel pins that bore the guild’s sword and sorcery insignia.
There were also heroes—hordes of them. Crowds of warriors in ornate armor languidly patrolled the streets, glowing blades slung over their shoulders. Shadowy assassins and mysterious rogues lurked in every alley. The shrines overflowed with clerics and paladins, meditating over flaming warhammers and other instruments of divine wrath. Enough mages to fill a small academy sat in the taverns and teahouses, poring over spell books and scrolls. The air thrummed with the magic of countless enchanted armaments.
“Must be a big job comin’ through here soon,” said Gorm.
“Or the rumor of one,” said Kaitha. “Good quests are scarce these days.”
“Well then, we’d best put in our claim fast,” Gorm muttered. The Ashen Tower was still filled with the loot the heroes couldn’t carry, and until they filed the hoard with the guild, it was still technically up for grabs.
The Heroes’ Guild crouched at the center of Haertswood, a massive spider among a web of roads that drew in visitors. Underneath the towering spires and flapping sapphire banners, beyond the granite façade carved with images of heroic battles, paper pumped through its red-tape veins. It inhaled unknown men and breathed out heroes with the documents to prove it.
Gorm and the heroes waited in a long line of heroes and prospective clients for their turn at one of the tiny windows at the back of the main hall. Behind the glass sat a thin, balding, and slightly unhappy-looking clerk, the Human equivalent of mashed porridge. When he smiled at them for a fraction of a second, it was the kind of smile that says, regulation dictates that I must smile at you now.
“Greetings,” said Niln. “My party and I—”
“Names!” demanded the clerk. A glimmer of recognition lit up his beady eyes as Niln introduced the party, and he was already leafing through a stack of paperwork before the high scribe finished. “You were expected,” the clerk told them, peering at a memo through his thick bifocals. “You are to meet with Arbiter Thorpe. Office three-seventeen. Third floor, on the left after the stairs. Next!”
“How did they expect us?” Heraldin wondered aloud as they made their way up the stairs.
“Must have got word from Bloodroot,” said Gorm.
Arbiter Thorpe reminded Gorm of the deadly Dire Walruses of the Icegale Sea, though more pink and shriveled, and far more docile. The old man was slumped behind the mahogany desk at the back of his spacious office, his mustache swaying gently as he snored. He burst into a fit of snorting and coughing when Niln gently prodded him awake.
“Hey, yes! Who? What? Hey?” said the arbiter, his spectacles dangling from his face as he peered wildly about the room.
“Niln of the Al’Matrans, sir. And these are Gorm Ingerson, Kaitha of House Tyrieth, Heraldin—”
“All right, all right, I know who you are,” grumbled Arbiter Thorpe. “The Al’Matrans, right? Mission for King Handor, long live His Majesty, yes? Hey? Hey.”
“Yes,” said Niln.
“Good! Good! And I am Arbiter Thorpe, hey. Now, you were after the wossnames … the Goblin stones. The Gnome rocks.”
“The Elven Marbles,” said Gorm.
“That’s the one. I would have got there eventually, hey?” The old man cleaned his spectacles. “Good. And you have them with you?”
“No, sir.”
“What? What are you doing here then, hey?”
Niln relayed the story of their adventure, with occasional interjections from the other heroes.
“What? The Orcs?” said Admiral Thorpe. “Most irregular! Most irregular! Loot must be processed. It must be divided by an arbiter of the Heroes’ Guild. And we don’t just go handing national treasures to Shadowkin, believe you me. Hey? On what authority—hey!—on whose authority did you think you were acting?”
“King Handor’s,” said Niln, holding up the King’s Commission.
“What? Hey? And you have proof? Let me see that.”
Arbiter Thorpe reviewed the documents carefully, his mustache bobbing up and down as he scanned every page of the King’s Commission and the Al’Matran Contract, and even the maroon binder on the Elven Marbles. “Very well then,” he said eventually. “Highly irregular, but in order.”
“So, are we done now?” asked Niln.
“Good heavens, no. Ha ha! Now we’re ready to start.”
Gorm had always found tallying the loot and points to be the most tedious part of professional heroics. Thorpe personally counted, catalogued, and indexed every piece of loot down to the last copper before placing them in a great iron strongbox. Niln filled out a claim on the remaining loot within Ashen Tower, while the heroes filed kill reports to account for every creature and FOE dispatched.
“I’ve got enough points on my license to gain a rank,” said Laruna, as she finished tallying her points.
“That you have, hey!” said the arbiter, taking a momentary break from counting to look over the forms. “And, it looks like your wizard has gained three. Congratulations, m’boy!”
Jynn forced a polite smile and resumed his paperwork.
Gorm resumed his own paperwork. He had an extra file to complete, as he was requesting the restoration of his old ranks and certifications. His hands shook as he wrote out the request: ten ranks of warrior, a certificate of master axe proficiency, ten ranks of berserker … The tally of his old qualifications was long, but if facing a liche in the direct service of the king of Andarun, wasn’t enough to get his ranks back, he didn’t know what would be.
The sun was casting long shadows through the office windows when the last of the paperwork was finally settled. Arbiter Thorpe collected the loot catalogues, kill reports, the rank requests, the King’s Commission, the folio on the Elven Marbles, and every other scrap associated with the quest and assembled them in a thick manila envelope. “The papers will remain in my office until arbitration,” he said, sealing the envelope with a dribble of wax. “All loot will remain in the strongbox until said appointment, at which point we’ll dispense it according to all applicable claims and contracts, hey?”
“When will that be?” Gorm asked.
“Oh, not long. Not long. Two, three days at the most,” Arbiter Thorpe assured them. “Just enough time for representatives of the Temple of Tandos and the Crown to come in from Aberreth.”
He handed Niln a small slip of paper. “The guild has arranged for your stay at Kaedna’s Rest, hey! Fine little inn. You’ll be comfortable there. I’ll send word when we can start arbitration.”
“And our ranks?” asked Gorm.
“Hey? Should be processed by then, yes. Can’t see why not. Maybe a day or two more.”
A few days. Less than a week from regaining his lost status. He’d send a petition to the Dwarven Embassy at Andarun first thing. He could be back within the halls of Khazad’im within a month. They’d call him Pyrebeard once
more.
“We did it,” Kaitha whispered to him as they walked from the Arbiter’s office.
“Aye,” said Gorm. “Soon, everything’s going to be different.”
The man introduced as Arbiter Thorpe watched the Seven Heroes of Destiny leave the office. His smile disappeared the moment the door shut behind them, and he sprang into motion at a decidedly un-Thorpe like speed.
He took a thin black case from a drawer and placed it on his desk. It snapped open when he touched a silver latch, revealing several pairs of tiny crystals arranged in neat rows. Each pair had a small silver plaque between it, engraved with a name or location. As he pressed the crystals with a fingertip, they illuminated with a faint emerald light from within if they were above the plaque, and a warm ruby glow if below. Niln of the Al’Matrans, green. Haertswood, green. The Elven Marbles, red. The Baetwolds, green. The Mask, green.
The man snapped the case shut. He opened the door of a small closet at the back of his office and wheeled out a maid’s cart, a dress draped across its top. He placed the black case on the second shelf of the cart, and then hefted the strongbox of loot onto the shelf next to it. It took only a quick reshuffling of the towels, doilies, and dusters on the cart to effectively conceal its illicit cargo.
Working with methodical efficiency, he selected a small carmine vial from the various cleaning solutions and soaps on top of the cart. He grabbed the manila envelope that contained the Seven Heroes’ paperwork from the desk as he passed. His mustache twitched upward with an elusive smile as he dropped the envelope into the metal waste bin.
“Tell Damrod I said hello,” he muttered. Squeezing his eyes shut, he poured a single drop of red liquid into the bin.
With a blinding flash and a whiff of sulfur, the sealed envelope—along with its contracts, commissions, and other pieces of crucial paperwork—was reduced to a sad pile of ashes around a few drops of hissing wax, which the man emptied into a larger trash can on the cart. A dirty teacup, still laced with traces of sleeproot, was tossed into the trash as well.
The man’s leathery skin rippled and smoothed. His rolls of fat wobbled and receded back into his body, so that his clothes slid from him as he walked across the office. His mustache receded into his lip, and his complexion shifted from a rosy pink to ash gray as he opened the door to the water closet. By the time he had dragged the nude, but otherwise comfortably dozing, Arbiter Thorpe from the water closet, the Mask had returned to his original form. The doppelganger re-dressed the prone Arbiter with considerable effort, and then rolled him back into position behind the desk.
A short time later, a maid walked out of Arbiter Thorpe’s office, leaving the old man comfortably napping. She pushed her cart out of the servant’s entrance, turned down a side alley, and was never seen again.
Kaedna’s Rest was a small, pleasant inn just outside Haertswood’s walls. A stocky house covered in forest-green shingles, the slate above the door depicted the Wandering Goddess relaxing by a peaceful stream. The beer was cold, and the meat still pink in the middle, and the beds were free of lice. It was everything a Dwarf could want in a tall-folk inn.
Gorm awoke from the best night of sleep he’d enjoyed in a long while, looking forward to a few days of relative peace before the loot was divided and points were awarded. The best start to any day was a plate of runny eggs and chewy bacon with a slab of oat bread and a pot of coffee to wash it down. He was halfway through the greasy, glistening platter of breakfast when Niln found him.
The high scribe bade him good morning as he took the seat Gorm offered, but politely declined to order breakfast. “I’ve packed some biscuits for the road,” Niln explained.
“The road?” Gorm looked up fast enough to launch tiny globules of egg from the tips of his whiskers. “Where are ye going?”
“I have decided to return to Andarun as soon as possible. Back to the temple.”
Gorm’s mind raced. He wasn’t sure he could technically complete the quest without Niln, and he didn’t wish to find out. They’d come too far to lose everything on a technicality. “But the loot?”
“I’ve taken vows of poverty, Mr. Ingerson. The Temple of Al’Matra was always to have my share.”
“But you’re the Seventh—”
“You have never humored me before,” said Niln. “Don’t start now that I can finally admit the truth. I am not the Seventh Hero.”
Gorm grunted, but nodded in assent.
The high scribe seemed to sense the source of the Dwarf’s anxiety. “I will talk to the Temple of Tandos about how best to release you from service, but you have fulfilled your contract. I will see that all of you are compensated.”
“And what will ye do?”
“I will resume my life as a scribe. And I will be available to advise you on the prophecy as you strive to fulfill it.”
“But ye just said ye were through with this prophecy nonsense.”
“No!” said Niln with sudden urgency. He gripped Gorm’s arm with a strength he didn’t look capable of and stared into the Dwarf’s eyes with uncharacteristic fierceness. “I said that I am not the Seventh Hero. I was to gather the Heroes of Destiny, and I assumed that made me the Seventh. I wanted to be, Gorm. I wanted it to the point of blindness.
“But even if I failed to see my role for what it was, that doesn’t change your part to play. You have been chosen, Gorm. As have Kaitha, Laruna and Jynn, Gaist, and even Heraldin, though the goddess alone knows why. You are the Heroes of Destiny.”
“Niln—”
“Please, Gorm.” Niln pulled a bundle wrapped in heavy leather from his satchel and pressed it into Gorm’s hands. “Look. These are the Books of Niln—all of my scriptures—and collected notes on the prophets who came before me. You must take the prophecy and learn the signs, so that you can find the Seventh Hero and stop the Dark Prince.”
Gorm tried to extricate himself from Niln’s prophecy as gently as possible. “Lad, I don’t think any of that is going to happen,” he said, pushing the books back to the high scribe. “I don’t know who your books are talking about, but it ain’t me. Probably ain’t any of us. It definitely ain’t Heraldin,” he added.
“Just take them.” The priest begged. “Take them, and pretend you’ll read them. Say you’ll study them and learn your destiny. For me. Tell yourself it’s the lie that I need to believe.”
Gorm was skeptical. “And that will satisfy ye, even if ye know I’m just going to shove them into me rucksack and never think of them again?”
“Yes, because I don’t think you’ll do that. That’s the lie you need to believe.”
“Perhaps,” Gorm allowed, his lip twitching into a hint of a smile. “Have it your way, lad. I’ll take your books and read about what to do.”
“It’s what to look for,” Niln corrected. “The signs will tell you that your destiny is coming. When it comes, you’ll already know what to do.”
“If ye say so,” said Gorm, stuffing the satchel into his pack. “So, when do ye plan to leave?”
“Now.” Niln stood and lifted his own pack. “I sent a falcon to the Silver Talons yesterday afternoon. A contingent is on its way from their base in Aberreth, and I shall meet them at an inn a day’s ride to the west.”
“Have ye said goodbye to the others?”
The high scribe smiled wistfully at the window. “Last night we drank and laughed and talked about the quest and the future,” he said. “Everybody was happy to see me, and everyone had nothing but kind words. And it was almost like I was the hero I always wanted to be. And perhaps, if you come and ask me for help with the prophecy, it will feel that way again. But until that day, last night is how I’d like to remember you all, and all the more how I’d have you remember me.”
“It was a good night,” said Gorm.
Niln gave him a small smile, but his mismatched eyes were filled with melancholy. “It was a good adventure.”
“A grand one.”
“And when you think about it, it was remarkably
smooth for a quest everyone predicted to be a disaster.”
It suddenly struck Gorm that, all things considered, the boy was right. “Aye…”
“It’s almost enough to make one believe in destiny,” quipped the high scribe, already on his way to the door.
“Don’t push it,” smirked Gorm. “Goodbye, Niln.”
“Goodbye, Gorm.” With a nod and a wave, Niln was gone.
The high scribe’s parting jest about the ease of the quest was meant to be funny, but the fact of it was like an itch that Gorm’s mind couldn’t scratch.
He was reminded of the joke again when he told the other heroes about Niln’s departure, even as they solemnly agreed that Niln’s decision was probably for the best. The remark flitted to mind again as, during a light lunch at a street side cafe, Jynn pointed out that the streets of Haertswood had become conspicuously empty of adventurers. A thoroughfare that had been mobbed with professional heroes the day before was now empty. There wasn’t so much as an idealistic farmhand with his father’s sword.
By the time dinner was served at Kaedna’s Rest, Gorm was still pondering. Why had the quest been so easy? Something in his bones screamed that this was wrong; it just wouldn’t say what.
“Are you all right?” Kaitha asked.
“Just … just thinkin’.”
“It’s just that you’ve still got most of your steak left,” said Laruna. “It isn’t like you.”
“I’m lettin’ it cool before I eat it.”
“Right. It’s not like you at all.”
“Got me there,” said Gorm. He shoved a bite of beef into his mouth for show, but he took no pleasure from it, or not much, anyway.
“So what rank will you be after your paperwork goes through?” Kaitha asked Laruna.
The solamancer broke into a wide grin. “Ninth.”
“Ooh! One more and it’s time to specialize. And I’m sure you’re going to choose pyromancer.”
“That’s a safe bet for anyone who’s seen me trying to weave water or light,” laughed the mage. “Still, I expected it would take at least another five years of adventuring before I could wear the red robes. And that was before I got recruited by the Al’Matrans.”
Orconomics: A Satire (The Dark Profit Saga Book 1) Page 32