The weaponsmaster was at his heels, cloaked in a silence that said volumes. Heraldin pressed his lips into a thin line and ran on, cutting off any further unspoken conversation. Snow and slush coated the cobblestones, and a chill wind howled through the alleys and stung the bard’s face.
The bard didn’t slow until he reached a shady-looking jeweler’s at the Baseward edge of Sculpin Down. A slate outside the ramshackle window read:
The Ruby Tiger
Fine Jewelry for Every Encounter
Elemental resistances
Spell warding
Martial prowess
Engagements
Weddings
Marital prowess
All sales final. Enchantments not guaranteed.
Heraldin pushed open the door. The small room beyond it was barely large enough for the bard and the weaponsmaster, and featureless save for two black doors on either side of them and a front counter of sorts. It was built more like a small fortress than a storefront. A sheer face of black iron panels and bars extended from the floor to the ceiling, with necklaces and rings barely visible through barred windows. A small hatch was positioned in the middle of the wall, above an empty desk and below a hand-sized panel that slid open as Heraldin and Gaist stepped into the shop. A yellow eye surrounded by gray skin stared out without much enthusiasm. “Yeah?” said a gruff voice with a thick Daellish accent. “What you lookin’ for?”
“I was hoping to have this appraised,” said Heraldin. He pulled a coin from the depths of his pockets and held it up for inspection. One side of the copper coin showed a roaring tiger, and the other had the number “42” etched into its flat face.
“Let’s see.” The hatch above the desk flipped open, then shut again after Heraldin pushed the coin into it. The eye disappeared, and there was a satisfied grunt.
Gaist glanced at Heraldin, but the bard pointedly avoided his eyes.
Erratic and muffled mechanical sounds emanated from behind the iron wall; the turning of tumblers, the clicking of locks, the creak of panels and doors on hinges. “To the left,” grumbled the voice just as the lock of the left door audibly clicked.
Heraldin thanked the shopkeeper and walked into the left chamber of the shop. It was larger than the storefront, though not by much, and better furnished with a wooden table and two small chairs. When the bard locked the door behind Gaist, a panel in the wall dropped to reveal a small cubbyhole. Inside was a long, flat, ironclad box with a plaque on its face with the number “42.” Heraldin’s coin sat atop the chest.
The bard pocketed the coin and set the box on the table. There was a brass lock with a keyhole next to the numbered plaque, but he ignored it and produced a set of lockpicks from his belt. When he caught the weaponsmaster’s quizzical gaze, he explained with some smugness, “I had old Uthgar customize this one for me. I keep the key to this box on my person, and using it will trigger a poison needle trap. In order to get in, you have to pick the real lock.” He inserted a lockpick into the hole of a missing screw and gave it an expert twist, popping a false panel off the back of the box and revealing another, smaller keyhole.
“There’s no key for this one,” Heraldin said as he set to work. “It has to be picked.”
Gaist rolled his eyes.
“No interruptions,” Heraldin hissed, working the picks with the minute precision of a surgeon operating on a pixie. “I must concentrate!”
For over a minute the only sound was the tapping and clicking of the bard’s lockpicks dancing with the tumblers. When the final, sonorous click rang out, the top of the box popped up. Heraldin lifted it to reveal several pots of pigments and unguents, a selection of brushes, a folio of documents, three full coin purses, a small mirror, and an unsettling mass of hair.
“I’ll miss being Heraldin Strummons,” said the bard, rifling through the papers. “It was nice to be myself for a while.”
Gaist said nothing.
“But you need to read the signals,” said the bard. “See which way the gutters are flowing, and get out before it all goes down the drain.” He selected a booklet from the set of papers, a set of NPC documents for a Daellish visitor.
The doppelganger shrugged.
“No, don’t try to talk me out of this.”
Gaist gave him a wry stare.
“You know what I mean. At this point, there are two possibilities.” The bard propped his mirror against the side of the small chest. “First, Gorm could be right: the king may be up to something dastardly, he’s sending us directly into a trap, and this quest is just a well-documented excuse for our deaths. Or the second possibility is that there really is a dragon down there, Johan’s sending us to fight it, and we’re dead anyway.”
Heraldin pulled a false beard and matching mustache from the gray and black mass of hair, dislodging a couple of eyebrows as he did so. “Either way, things are getting… epic.” The bard’s mouth wrinkled at the taste of the word.
Gaist furrowed his brow.
“No, I like to sing epics,” Heraldin corrected. “I like to tell other people about them over a mug of beer. But I don’t want to live in one. One minute it’s all business as usual, and the next the world has gone upside down because of fighting gods or demon lords or ancient prophecies. Few survive that sort of thing, and some that do envy the dead.”
He dabbed some glue from a small pot onto his cheeks, then set about rearranging his face. “Mark my words, we have no idea how this is going to go, except that it’s much, much worse than whatever you’re thinking.”
Gaist leaned against the wall and watched the bard begin to metamorphose into a Daellish merchant. Mid-transformation, Heraldin turned to the weaponsmaster, causing half of the false mustache to sway disconcertingly from his face. “What?” he demanded.
Gaist was as still and solid and blank as the wall he leaned on.
“No, what?” snapped the bard. “If you’re going to nonverbally communicate something, just nonverbally communicate it!”
The weaponsmaster stared back at him.
“Well, it’s not so easy for most of us,” Heraldin grumbled, looking back at his reflection. “And I don’t need to join this quest! I don’t need to help. The city will be fine without me. Or not. It doesn’t…” Heraldin shook his head. “Well, it matters, but why does it fall on us? This is between the king and Gorm, but you and I could leave! We could—”
Gaist remained silent, but his sudden scowl cut Heraldin off as effectively as the loudest shout. The bard fell silent, but only for a moment.
“Haven’t we done enough?” he asked, looking at a reflection trapped halfway between his own face and a new one. “We spent years in the wilderness. We killed a liche. We drove back the undead. We helped the Guz’Varda, and the rest of the Shadowkin, and then saved the city. When is our debt paid? When can we just rest? When can we enjoy what we’ve earned?”
