Seeker of Secrets Read online

  “The clue’s in the name. Brigand.”

  “Words change meaning. We better see what’s up.”

  When they got close enough to see the basket, they saw that there was indeed a baby in it. Only, the baby was green.

  It was an ambush. It was a classic trick; leave a child or a damsel in distress in the middle of the road and wait for a well-meaning passerby to help them. While they were distracted, swarm them from the sides.

  Joshua’s stomach twisted. “Not brigands,” he said.

  “Goblins,” answered Benjen, pulling a banana-shaped sword from his sheath. “Pull your sword.”

  “This one?” said Joshua, carefully drawing the marrow-shaped weapon Benjen had given him as a birthday present.

  “The goblins out here aren’t tough,” said Benjen. “A couple of hits will scare them off. They don’t want anything to do with things that fight back.”

  Joshua appreciated the calmness of Benjen’s tone, but he wished he shared his best friend’s confidence. Joshua was a passable fist-knuckle fighter, but only when he was drunk, and only when fighting one-on-one with someone his age and his size. Against a marauding gang of goblin ambushers? He wouldn’t be so handy.

  Despite it all, though, he knew he’d fight. The lads had a dream, and Joshua and Benjen would always be at each other’s sides no matter the odds, and if they needed to fight then they’d fight together, and if they ran, they’d only do that together, too.

  But no goblins came. There were no bushes at the side of the road where the creatures could hide. There was no sign of a clan in the distance, no sight of little green shapes sneaking toward them.

  It was dark, though. Night was starting to settle and the wind was picking up. In the distance, wolves howled. And the little goblin baby in the middle of the road cried loudly enough to draw the attention of a dozen hungry packs

  “Well, we can’t just leave it here,” said Benjen. “The wolves will get it.”

  “And if we take it to the village, they’ll kill it.”

  Benjen nodded. He knew Joshua was right. Attitudes toward anything non-human out here in the west were backward, and a long, bloody history of human -goblin skirmishes had left a sour taste. The villages and towns here hadn’t developed the progressive attitude of the settlements in the east.

  The problem went both ways, though. Since humans didn’t trust goblins out here, goblins held a healthy distrust of humans, too. When they met on the road, both sides reached for their weapons first, and it made Joshua a little ashamed to realize that had been his own first reaction, too. He hadn’t planned to kill any, though. Like Benjen said, a few non-lethal blows were all it would have taken. Nobody needed to die.

  Now, of course, that left them with a problem. They were four hundred miles from their guildhall, from their dream, and a little goblin baby stood between them and it.

  “We’ll take it with us a while,” Joshua said. “Keep a look out for a clan. As long as we keep calm and show them we don’t mean any harm, they won’t attack. Then then can have their baby back, and we’ll be on our way.”

  “Of course,” said Benjen, “If we don’t see any goblin clans looking for a baby, we’re pretty stuck.”

  Joshua shrugged. “Then we’ll hand it in to the nearest goblin friendly town.”

  “I’m not so sure there are any within a few hundred miles.”

  “Don’t worry. We’ll find the clan before that even becomes a problem.”

  “I hope so. I don’t want to have to adopt a goblin baby.”

  “It won’t come to that.”

  And that was how Benjen and Joshua, on their way to their new guildhall, didn’t find a single goblin clan on the four-hundred-mile journey, and temporarily adopted a goblin baby.

  Chapter Three

  “You hold it,” said Benjen, holding the basket as far away from himself he as he could, as if it contained not a baby goblin but dynamite covered in cow dung and ready to explode into his beard.

  Joshua gripped the reins of his horse tight, even though the animal was standing still and lazily chewing on tufts of grass while it waited for a command. He held them so tight, in fact, that his knuckles were white.

  He knew how this must have looked, but he’d never have described himself as a coward, or even as easily scared. Case in point – he’d left his home village against the advice of almost everyone in it, to go and restore an old guild house.

  That would have been a brave enough thing to do, were it not for the fact that the independent guild industry was in decline. A lot of the more influential guilds had swallowed up the smaller ones, helped along the way by officials representing the three kings of Fortuna.

  The thing was, guild houses were a big business now. They’d originally started out as the opposite; the guilds were just a centre point for like-minded heroes to meet and train together in-between fighting orcs and demons and every other creature with a penchant for killing good men and women.

  Bunkered up together, the heroes would help anyone who came to their doors. Got a rat problem in town? The heroes’ guild will help. A dragon terrorizing your city? The guild will try to help. (Let’s not make promises we can’t deliver.)

  It used to be that the guild would only take a nominal gold payment for their services – just enough to buy more healing mixtures, for a new sword here and there, to get a smithy to pop the dinks out of chest plates, and to fix any structural problems with the guildhouse itself.

  Alas, wherever gold was involved, people found a way to mine as much of it as possible. The larger guilds got investments from wealthy merchants, allowing their heroes to buy better armor and weapons and thus take on tougher creatures, allowing them to level up more and upgrade their skills and classes. In return, the merchants demanded control over the business side of things.

  Quest costs took a hike up a mountain, and soon the smaller towns couldn’t even afford to hire a guild to fix their monster problems. The larger guilds grew and grew, eventually buying up the smaller ones, swallowing them up like a whale gobbling shoals of tiny fish.

  To Joshua, that wasn’t what a hero guild was about. He knew that for Benjen, the glory he’d get from helping people was his main draw. For Joshua, it was the helping itself that was the reward. He wanted to restore a forgotten guild and to give people a way to once again come to heroes with their problems and not be fleeced for it.

  So, was he brave? He wasn’t vain enough to say that, but he was no coward just because horse-riding made him a little nervous. There was no denying that this could all go wrong so easily, and it’d be hard to look at the told you so looks the village elders would give them if they returned as failures.

  It’d be soul-destroying to realize his dream had failed and he’d need to spend his life as an accountant, assuming his father even took him back. No certainty on that front – although his father had wished him good luck, he could see a look in his eyes, a slight streak of sadness that Joshua wouldn’t be following in his footsteps.

  Compared to all of that, riding a horse should have been nothing. And yet, why did it stir up anxiety in his stomach when he had to climb on one? He’d even tried what Benjen called ‘get over it’ therapy, where he’d ridden the meanest stallion in the stablemaster’s possession, with the hope that getting bucked off the wild beast’s back would make him realize that no other horse could possibly be worse.

  Nope. Didn’t work. All he got was a sprained wrist and a bruised eye.

  He had to face it. He’d gained horserider as a secondary class, but he doubted he would ever get past level 1, which was classed as novice.

  Right now, the skills he’d gained in the class were paltry. He checked them.

  Horserider – Level 1 [Novice]

  Control: Novice 3/10

  Burst of Speed: Novice 2/10

  Jump: Novice 1/10

  Calm Animals: Novice 6/10

  Animal Bond [Specialty: Horse]: Novice 3/10

  To satisfy the requirement
s for horserider level 2, which would boost his rank to Competent, he’d need to level at least two of the individual skills all the way through the 10 novice levels, and he could only do this by using them. Of course, tutelage under a level 4 or 5 horserider would increase his rate of progression, but he couldn’t afford to pay for that. If he wanted to get to level 2, he’d have to do it the hard way.

  There was little chance of that. Knowing that the journey to the east of Fortuna was a hell of a trek he’d worked hard to get horserider as a secondary, but the minute the guild house loomed into sight, it was gone. He’d bunk it off and free one of his 5 secondary slots for something else. There were plenty of classes he’d need in his future career.

  So, he might never be a master horse-rider, but at least he did it. Everyone had their fears, he guessed. It wasn’t anything to be ashamed of. Fear only became a bad thing if you let it stop you, and here he was sitting on a horse, so he wasn’t doing too badly.

  Roebuck might have been the oldest, gentlest horse in the stable, and sure he couldn’t really go beyond a brisk trot, but something still churned in Joshua’s gut for the first part of every ride.

  But, where horse-riding was one of Joshua’s fears, Benjen had an even stranger one.

  Babies.

  Human, goblin, puppy, kitten. It didn’t matter. Very young things made him uncomfortable. And here he was holding a basket with a goblin in it.

  “Pass him here, then,” Joshua said.

  He carefully took the basket from Benjen and set it just in front of him on Roebuck’s saddle.

  “This doesn’t look too steady,” he said. “Who’s got the rope?”

  “It’s in bag 4,” said Benjen.

  Bag 4 – out of 12 – was the one with various tools and materials they might need when they started restoring the guildhall. With the money left over from the purchase of the hall, after an estate representative had responded to their message and ridden out to meet them, they bought whatever they might conceivably need to turn what the estate rep had described as ‘decrepit’ into something worthy of housing heroes.

  It would take time, of course. Even longer given that neither of them was adept at carpentry or building, but that was part of the whole point of it all. If they saved up money and then paid someone else to refurbish it, where was the sense of pride? You couldn’t work up a sweat watching other people do your work for you, and Benjen’s father had always told the boys, you can measure a man’s character by the sweat on his forehead at the end of the day.

  Of course, even murderers and robbers presumably sweated in the sun, but Joshua took the point. Benjen’s father might have been rough around the edges, but he was an honest man and he talked sense, and he’d imparted most of his good morals onto his son. Joshua guessed that was what drew him to his best friend in the first place, even when they were younger.

  Joshua took the rope from the leather bag strapped to Roebuck and he threaded it through both handles of the basket until it was secure, and then tied it off against the saddle. The rope was taut enough to hold the basket in place.

  “Problem solved,” he said.

  As soon as he finished speaking, words formed in spiraled wisps in front of him.

  Blessing of the charitable act

  You could have left the goblin child alone and continued your journey without the burden. For your charitable act, you have received:

  - a one-use minor blessing of luck.

  He opened his mouth in amazement, and he knew that he must have had a stupid expression on his face. It was rare that the Gods did anything like this. Everyone knew that the gods were always watching the people of Fortuna, and from time to time that they’d reward, or punish, people for their deeds.

  Nobody knew how many gods there were or where the gods lived, but they could see everything. Joshua always thought that there must have been hundreds if not thousands of deities up there somewhere, if they had to watch every person who lived in the land.

  Everyone got a blessing or curse of some sort over the course of their lives; his father had been given a one-use blessing of increased fortune after he’d donated a dozen hard-earned gold coins to an orphanage. The thing was, most people got their blessings when they were older, and after they’d accomplished something worthy of getting the Gods’ notice.

  All Joshua had done was help an abandoned child, and it wasn’t as if he was going to adopt him. He wanted to get rid of the baby as soon as he found a place where someone else would take care of him. Was this really worth a blessing?

  And did that mean that he’d never get a blessing again? People rarely got more than one, not unless they did something truly great.

  Benjen climbed on atop of his horse, Firemane, named for the shock of ginger hair on its head. Firemane, despite his title, was a gentle giant who’d sooner eat sugar cubes from your hand than snort or try to buck you off or anything like that.

  “Next problem,” said Benjen. “Shutting this thing up before the wolves get here.”

  He was right. The goblin baby’s cries were the kind of noise that had gone on so long that Joshua’s brain had almost tuned it out, relegating it to a kind of annoying background drone.

  The crying itself was just an irritation. An irritation that would grow larger the longer they had to travel with it, to be sure, but it was harmless in itself. It became more than just annoyance when Joshua factored in the wolves.

  The further they got away from the village, the bolder the wolf packs would be. He and Benjen already planned to light torches and carry them as a ward as they rode, and normally that would have been enough to keep the vicious packs away. The cries would be another story. Wolves had predatory instincts, and the sound of a helpless child would stir a hunger in them, it would tell them that vulnerable prey was in the area. That instinct might just be enough for the animals to forget their fear of fire and attack Benjen and Joshua.

  “We better get going,” said Joshua. “I wanted to hit the Forkman’s Pass by nightfall, so we’re behind.”

  “Can you keep that thing quiet in the meantime?”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  Joshua leaned forward and looked at the goblin baby the best the fading light would allow. Its head was misshapen, with a tight curve on its left side but with its right side bumped out, almost like it had been stung by something.

  That solved the mystery of the crying baby, if it was a mystery at all. This little fella had been stung by an insect. Out here, you had wasps, hornets, bees, horbs, kettle-flies. Any of their stings could be harmful if you were allergic.

  “He’s been stung,” he said. “We’re gonna have to get him to a doctor.”

  “You know what’ll happen if we take him to a village around here. What about you, can’t you do anything?”

  Joshua checked his classes. His primary class slot was empty, and just a few of his secondaries were filled in. With a sweep of his mind, almost like turning the page of a mental book, he checked the classes he hadn’t quite earned yet, and the skills needed before he could.

  Class: Field Medic

  Skills Required:

  Herblore

  Diagnosis

  Bone setting

  Blood letting

  Bandaging

  Persuasion & Command

  Field medic was one of the tougher classes to get, even if it was a giant step down from doctor. It made sense – what good was a class if it was easy to get? A 10-year-old kid could go into the woods, pick mushrooms and berries for a day, and he’d earn the forager class. That was because forager wasn’t important. Being a medic and healing people had consequences. Joshua was a long way off being able to do it.

  He couldn’t heal the baby here and now, and really, the howling of the wolves, dozens of beasts from all different clans turning their snouts up at the moon and letting out cries that met in a chilling midnight symphony of hunger, meant they couldn’t hang around.

  They’d have to take the boy – wait, was it a boy
? Yeah, a quick check confirmed that he was. They’d have to take him to one of the more progressive towns in Fortuna, where heads wouldn’t turn at the sight of something green-skinned.

  Benjen took a long wooden torch from a sling hanging on the side of Firemane. He wrapped cloth around the tip, doused it with kerosene, and then took out his fire striker. This was a piece of steel shaped like a horse’s hoof. Benjen had made a bunch of them in the smithy shop.

  He then grabbed a chunk of chert rock, which he’d found at Ecker’s Canyon near the village, using the mineral identification skill, which made up part of the mineralogy class he’d studied for and half-attained.

  As he watched Benjen smack the chert against the fire striker to make a spark, Joshua smiled. It always amused him to wonder what people would think if they saw Benjen’s class sheet written down.

  Most people stuck to one or two areas of practice, and they refined these over their lives. A hunter focused on sneaking, bow and arrows, trapping. Usually, you could tell what kind of person a man or woman was and what job they did by what classes they had and how advanced they were.

  Not so with Benjen. Honestly, Joshua guessed you could ask a dozen strangers to look at Benjen’s classes, and they’d each come out with a different guess as to who he was. His primary was blacksmith of course, since he’d been apprenticed as one for six years.

  Mixed in with that was secondaries such as swordsman, calligrapher, and landscaper, all of which he’d completed the minimum skills for so that he could have them as secondaries. Why Benjen needed to be able to use a blade, and write in (admittedly beautiful) handwriting, and be able to plan a great-looking garden, he had no idea.

  Not only that, though. Those were only the classes Benjen had attained. There were dozens more that he’d gained maybe a few of the skills for but hadn’t quite completed the rest yet. Ornithologist, bard, chef, quarryman.

  Some of these, Benjen would never develop into full classes. Every single class, be it forager or medic, had a list of specific skills a person needed to gain competency in before they could earn it. Kind of like a checklist of abilities to practice and complete.