Shopping in Loshev

Synopsis

The knock came at dawn, and Koa opened the door on a road-worn man in a green traveling cloak with an unstrung bow, a fresh untreated scar down his face and a bandaged wrist. Dwayne had been sent by Torgun Kurvroc to guide them to the ruins and to keep a tally of whatever they recovered there. He was polite, plainly capable, and kept finding reasons the party might leave a little later. He was not shirking. He was hurt, and he did not want to walk back into the woods without sleeping first.

So they gave it three days. Hinta wanted the time anyway to reshape the horses’ barding, hammering it to fit one animal at a time; Dwayne wanted supplies, a ledger and rest. The party wanted something else (a guide who liked them enough to look the other way if a crystal never made the tally), and set about earning it. He repaid the courtesy at once by repacking their badly balanced loads and offering to teach Koa how to make a torch out of what the woods provide.

Aldo sold the Haudh-Gwenn gems to Yullen Gemsmith for rather more than they were worth, and slipped a river pearl in on top for Maearla. Gemsmith approved of the empty seat in Koa’s greatsword: Hinta had left it open deliberately, so almost any cut of stone can be set there later and swapped out again. He pressed Mikhail to keep sending him whatever legends and books the keeps give up, and Mikhail agreed.

Most of the three days went on furniture. The Loshev house had stood empty since they took it, and they filled it: a worn couch and armchairs, curtains, a bookshelf funded by the others so Mikhail could stop stacking his books on the floor, a roll-top desk he was quietly delighted by, a bed Koa bought with a wedding in mind, and a brand-new four-poster for Aldo, on credit. The last chair came in on the morning they rode out.

Mikhail spent his three days on a purple volume of the Mól Encyclopædia (Foreign Affairs), and broke it. The Mól had traded with the gnomes of Ustos on cordial and contemptuous terms, certain the gnomes could not follow the complexities of magic and pricing accordingly. More useful still was what he learned about the writing itself: the whole set is the work of one Peren hand, flowery and flattering on its surface, and underneath the flattery a sustained mockery of the empire that commissioned it. Having heard the voice once, he will hear it faster next time.

They rode northeast with five animals. The nights were bad in a way nobody could point at: Mikhail saw movement on first watch and could not find it again, and each of the others felt watched without being able to say by what. By the second day Koa noticed fewer birds ahead of them than behind, and the gap widened as they went. Around the fires Dwayne opened up. He had been the only man to walk away from a crew wiped out at a Mól keep north of Ridh (Wraithblade, by Mikhail’s reckoning of the maps), where the goblins carried spears and hatchets and moved wrongly for goblins. His blunt opinion was that nobody should be out here doing this.

Four hours of trackless woods brought them to the stone slabs, and the slabs were covered in the dead. Five bodies where they lay, and supplies for eleven. The vines had cut them badly, but the vines had not made the round punctures set among the gashes, and neither Dwayne nor anyone else could say what had. A hidden excavation kit sewn into one of the packs (brushes, chisels, a glass) named them for what they were: treasure-hunters, come for the same ruin. The worst of it was underfoot. The bodies had been dragged up onto the stone, and there was blood on the rock, but not a blade of grass was bent or wet, and the dead were nearly empty.

They took the coin and the kit, argued about burning or burying, and left them. Dwayne, badly shaken, said these places are candy, put out to draw people in. Deeper in they found another patch of stone, the collapsed rubble of the ruined town’s gatehouse, where the ivy only resembles the thing that kills. It was the safest ground they had stood on all day, and they camped there, and saw, a little way off, one more body with its pack still on.