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9,794 words. And there’s a novel in there, too.
The hell of it was, it didn’t make any sense to just run away, either. He didn’t know where he was, really, and he didn’t think he was better at sneaking through the woods than bandits were. He was shadowing the road, which at least gave him a chance to hear any bandits first, but they’d be better armed and armored in any confrontation. He couldn’t stay and he couldn’t flee.
You could give the caravan up, he reminded himself. It’d be a horrible thing to do, but what’s one more horrible thing in this world? They’ll let you live if you do. They might even let you go.
No, they won’t, he told himself. Best case, they’ll make me stay to be a bandit, and then a couple months later I’d be just like them. If I wanted that, I’d have done it years ago. Gregor didn’t think he was better than everybody else, but he didn’t want to be worse than regular people, either.
I’m being an idiot, Gregor told/argued with himself. Then he paused. Maybe I am being an idiot. What am I good at, again?
Getting to a stopping point! …Yeah, there’s a book in there.
Two nights later
The dream was familiar and strange at the same time, like it had happened before, but he hadn’t kept the memory.
He was in the forest again, right back at the hole in the ground. No sun or moon in the sky, but he could see from the light coming from underground. It wasn’t a bad light — it was green, but the honest green of leaves and living things, not sorcery and chaos — but it wasn’t natural, either. Or at least something else didn’t want it there. The wind itself hissed at the presence of this bright trespasser, and Gregor did not like the way that the light pulsed back. He’d heard of light being ‘angry,’ but thought it was just a saying. At least in the confines of this dream, it was far too real.
At least the light wasn’t angry at him. The wind, though? No, the wind was definitely not on his side, from the way that it was plucking at his limbs and raising the stink of distant mucks in his nostrils —
Gregor jerked awake, to find Seamstress grabbing his arm with one hand, and shushing him with the other. “Quiet!” she murmured, not quite hissing. “Michael needs you.” She swallowed once. “Bandits.”
Amulet!
“Yeah. About that.” Michael peered at his chest. “That amulet you’re wearing. It’s gold. Why did the guard give it back to you?”
“I honestly have no idea, good Trader. I suppose he felt some guilt for stealing it?” Gregor essayed a smile, trying not to think about how, no, he really did have no idea why the guard gave it back. Or why it was apparently around his neck now. “I have never felt any power from it. Which at least means it can’t be cursed!”
“Sure, sure. But maybe it’s uncanny anyway.” Michael squinted at Gregor’s chest. “It’s got a tree carved on it. What does that mean? Some new god?” He directed the squint at Gregor’s book. “Or some old one?”
Gregor smiled, inside where it didn’t show. “I can tell you that it is of no new god, Trader Michael. But you guessed this already.” That’s even the truth, Gregor thought. I mean, the guard wasn’t dying from a thief-curse, after all. “As for the lost gods, from a better time?” He sighed, and offered a small smile. “I ma… cannot speak to that.” He reached for the clasp of the amulet, ready to take it off. “But I will understand if you find my amulet worrisome. Would you care to keep it? Or should I simply leave it here, suspended from a tree branch?”
Exposition!
Michael’s ‘place’ was a warehouse, currently full of traders, busily packing. They were almost finished, in fact. That alone would have been good news for Gregor; the trade caravans were a profitable way to travel, for a man like him.
What worried him was how they all just assumed he was coming along for the ride. Apparently this ‘Scary Robb’ was nobody to mess with. “He’s been snapping up all the other gangs in Camiron,” the sewer told him as she fixed the cut in his robe. “They say he started right after the priests cut each other to ribbons. Now he’s got the whole gray market in his pockets.”
“A problem for the traders, then?” Gregor asked as he watched the young lady work. She made as tight a stitch on his silk as she had made on his shoulder, earlier, and had even had a little magic to make it not hurt so much. “Too many rules, Seamstress?” You didn’t ask a mage to give her name.
Fighting!
It unsurprisingly hurt like a son of a bitch. Any pleasure that the bravo might have had from his opponent’s shout of pain was probably cut short when Gregor’s staff cruelly slammed up and into the man’s groin, though. Another vicious jerk (this time, sideways), and suddenly the bravo was on the ground, howling in his turn while clutching himself.
Gregor absolutely meant to cave the bastard’s skull in, at that point. He absolutely did — but his would-be coup de grace instead ended up solidly in the pit of the bravo’s stomach. His opponent stopped howling and started wheezing, instead; Gregor decided he didn’t care, and whirled to see if anybody else was up for a fight.
None of them were, except maybe the former victim; he was getting to his feet, and glaring at the three groaning figures on the ground. “My thanks, stranger,” he told Gregor, the strain in his voice obvious. Or maybe it was age; the guy had more white than brown in his beard. “But we need to go. No!” he said with well-controlled panic as Gregor started to stoop over one bravo. “No time to cut purses, or throats. More of their friends will be coming.”
Gregor may have made a bit of a mistake.
Not bad, he decided as he left the squalid little shop behind him. That little performance probably got me the from-around-here rate. Or at least the not-worth-robbing rate. A lot of places in the Twenty Realms saw solitary travelers as easy meat, and the worst ones meant that literally. Camiron didn’t feel that bad, but there was no sense in looking for trouble —
A shout from an alleyway ahead of him, followed shortly by a scream, reminded Gregor that trouble didn’t actually need to be searched for. Sometimes, it was going to show up, right in front of you.
Gregor was very good at calculating odds, and he worked them through as he ran to the alleyway. There probably wouldn’t be more than two attackers, this wasn’t a town so rich that the bravos wore chainmail, and he had a staff. If he was wrong about the first two considerations, he could always run. If he wasn’t, they probably had stuff in their pockets. Nobody minded when you robbed a cutthroat. It was funny!
A part of him still seemed a little taken back about actually involving himself in a fight, but Gregor ignored that. Sometimes you had to play the odds a little. Bet bigger, win bigger.
Guards! Guards!
The guard squinted at his amulet. “That’s a pretty little thing,” he mentioned, not even remotely casually. “God-touched?”
“Not that I know of, watchman,” Gregor replied immediately, trying not to wince at how this conversation was likely to end. “It is but a keepsake of my travels through these fair lands of ours. If it has powers or virtues, they are unknown to me. I say this for all to hear.”
Sometimes hinting that a valuable item might be cursed if stolen kept people from stealing. From the way the first guard laughed, this wasn’t one of those times. “Well, Traveler,” he snickered, “it’ll have one virtue; letting you in. Wall tax, you understand.”
“I do,” Gregor agreed, unfastening the clasp. Easy come, easy go, he thought, letting a little mournfulness show at the sight of a week’s rations and lodging being placed in the guard’s grubby hand. “Is there a token I might show to prove that I have paid my tax?”
“Sure,” the guard snickered again. “You won’t have my foot up your arse as you walk down the street. Now get! You’re holding up the line.”
Back to it!
Gregor looked at the amulet again. It was golden – no, it was gold. He could barely make out on its central disc the outlines of a budding tree, just like from the altar, which made sense. What he wasn’t feeling was any kind of power. God-items had a greasy feel to them, no matter the god. Besides, if you got close enough to one, you could feel its regard. The priests all said that the gods were always watching through their special items, and Gregor had been an onlooker to enough bad experiences to half-believe it.
There was nothing like that here. The gold was warm to the touch, but there was no queasiness, or half-tangible reek of curdled regard. He breathed in. No smell at all, in fact. Certainly there wasn’t anything godly to block out the simple fragrance of sun and wind, filtered through the leaves of a living forest. Maybe it’s not god-touched, he thought. Or it once was, and when the god died, nothing was left behind. That thought was oddly sad, but Gregor shrugged it off. Dead gods weren’t his problem. Making a living was.
He looked over at the pile of books he had pulled from the temple. On quick glance they looked like scriptures and hymns, which is why he had grabbed them. Gods never minded if you walked off with those. Gregor thought that they’d be worth reselling, since they were in the Old Speech and thus snooty, but now he had another idea. One that might prove more than a little profitable.
It wasn’t even his fault!
Things had been going well, up to then. The shrine didn’t have any weapons besides the staves, but it did have a spool of fishing line. More Great Realm stuff, dwarf-made and good for snares, too. Once he’d gotten far enough away from the hole in the ground, the animals had started coming back, only they weren’t used to humans. He’d been able to snag a couple of squirrels for his breakfast, which was very good news.
Staves, spare clothes (that could be sold), fishing line, bits of traveling gear — if you didn’t mind not having any food, or any local animals within half a day’s walk, that hole in the ground had been a great place to find. If only he hadn’t somehow taken an amulet along for the ride! That was a god-item, and everybody knew the gods were unreasonable about having their personal things taken. Often terminally so.
Only, nothing was happening.
