Back in Balamb, Horatio pushed open the door of the inn they had chosen to stay at, the Rusty Sword, with his shoulder and, still carrying the empty treasure chest in his aching arms, stumbled inside. The others followed him in.

By now it was late evening, and the large common room in which they found themselves was full to the brim with people sat at the round tables drinking flagons of ale, eating plates of stew, chatting, arguing, smoking pipes, playing dice, and generally enjoying themselves in the light of the fire that burned in the hearth.

In one corner of the room a piper was piping a wicked and wandering tune on a long flute, and nearby to him a woman in revealing purple silks and a golden dragon mask was dancing and jiggling for a crowd of men, who clapped and threw coins at her occasionally. Horatio looked away.

Behind a long bar, a Wolf Clan barman (or was it a woman? Horatio could never really tell) pulled drinks for the customers from the barrels that sat behind it. It would seem that this inn also doubled up as the town’s pub, from the amount of people drinking in here, but presumably the Wolf Clanner was also the innkeeper.

They found a spare table—the only one left in the room—and Horatio set down the chest on the floor next to it with a loud thump.

When he did so, several of the drinkers at the nearby tables, mostly men, looked over at him.

‘Hey, what you got there, friend?’ said a middle-aged but well-muscled man with a greying beard and a shaven head.

‘Er, we’ve just—’ began Horatio.

‘Just an old empty chest,’ Primus interrupted him, answering the man. ‘I’ve been having a bit of a clear out lately with the help of my companions here and I’m looking to sell it.’

‘Rubbish!’ spoke up Egea without warning. ‘What he means to say is that the four of us adventurers have just raided the Sealed Cave on the edge of the Mysidian mountains not far from here, and this is what we found inside.’

All of a sudden the whole pub went quiet.

The customers had stopped talking. The piper had stopped piping. The dancer had stopped dancing.

‘What are you doing, Mistress Egea?’ Primus hissed to the trader through gritted teeth.

‘Just trust me, old man,’ Egea whispered back. ‘If you want to fetch the best price possible for this stupid box then play along. I know what I’m doing.’

‘You did what?’ said the bearded man who had asked them the original question, seemingly speaking for the whole pub.

‘You heard me!’ Egea said proudly, putting her fists on her hips and speaking so that everyone could hear. ‘My associates and I have just returned from a successful raid on the Sealed Cave in the Mysidian Mountains. This chest is what we found, and we’re looking to sell it.’

‘The Sealed Cave?’ said a woman who was sitting close to them. ‘But nobody’s ever been able to get through there in living memory!

‘Well,’ said a different man, ‘lotsa people have tried, ain’t they, but no one’s ever either made it all the way to the end or come back to tell the tale!’

The pub-dwellers looked them up and down.

‘How did you lot manage it?’ said the man with the beard. ‘How do we know you’re telling the truth?’

In reply, Egea held out a hand palm up, and out of nowhere a chill wind gusted through the common room, ruffling the hair and coats of the drinkers who sat in it, making the fire in the hearth flicker and dance. She withdrew her hand again, and the gust subsided.

‘As you can see,’ she continued, ‘my associates and I have some natural ability with magic. Together, the four of us were able to successfully infiltrate and make our way through the chamber. And this treasure chest is what we found there.’

‘What’s inside it then?’ said someone by the far wall.

‘Well, unfortunately we haven’t been able to open it. It’s got a tough lock, you see, and we weren’t able to find the key. We don’t have the time to work out how to open it as we’ve got lots to be getting on with on our busy adventuring career, so instead we’re willing to flog it to the highest bidder! Come on now, who wants to buy this chest? Let’s start the bidding at a thousand gold pieces, shall we?’

‘I’ll take that!’ said the bearded man, his hand shooting up.

‘One thousand one hundred!’ said someone else.

More hands went up and more amounts of money were called out.

Horatio felt he should enlighten the pub dwellers that Egea was about to rip off, but he bit his tongue.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

Ceres, however, did not.

‘Egea!’ spoke up the ex-priestess so the whole pub could hear, halting the flow of bids. ‘That is very dishonest of you!’ She turned to address the assembled crowd. ‘Actually, what we found inside was—’

‘Nothing!’ said Primus. ‘There was nothing in the chest! It was empty!’

Silence, filled with quizzical looks.

The bearded man cocked his head at them. ‘So, do you mean to claim that the four of you penetrated the depths of the Sealed Cave, one of the most famous mythical treasure stores in this part of Gard, and that what you have come back with, which you are looking to sell, is an empty chest?’

‘Um…’ said Primus. ‘Yes, I think we do.’

The whole pub burst into loud, raucous laughter.

When the laughter had calmed down, the drinkers and eaters turned back to their drinks and food. The chatter resumed. The piper began to play his tune again, and the dancer began to dance again.

‘What did you have to go and do that for, old man?’ Egea said to Primus, taking a seat at their table.

‘You were just going to get us into trouble,’ said Primus, taking his seat along with the others too. ‘They would have found out sooner or later, and then they’d be after us. I don’t need that kind of hassle.’ His countenance soured. ‘I’m starting to get rather fed up with you, young lady. That’s your second offence. One more, and I’m dropping you from this party—I mean it.’

‘Also, it was very dishonest!’ said Ceres, clearly appalled.

‘Exactly,’ said Primus.

Egea grumbled something inaudibly.

Ceres turned her stern gaze on Primus. ‘You are not one to talk so easily, Professor. It was dishonest, but so is telling them there was nothing in it. There wasn’t nothing in it. There was a note from this Alexander person. Why didn’t you let me tell them about that?’

‘Mistress Ceres,’ said Primus, ‘while I commend your desire to tell the truth, I think it is very much in our interests to keep the note to ourselves. Whoever this “Alexander” person is, if he created that tetrachamber then he must be very powerful indeed. We don’t want to go spreading his business around the place—it could come back to haunt us later. Anyway, let’s all calm down now, get ourselves some food so that we can go to bed, then put this episode behind us and keep looking for Olivia tomorrow. Horatio, here’s some coin--go and order us four bowls of whatever they’re serving here tonight and enquire as to whether they have a room for the four of us.’

Horatio had been about to join the conversation to take Ceres’ side, but instead he went to do what Primus asked. The old man was paying him for his services as a hired sword, after all.

There was a small queue at the bar, but when he got to the front of it he ordered four bowls of the night’s venison stew, three flagons of ale and a glass of water (he knew Ceres’ preferences well enough by now).

When asked whether there was a room available for the night, the Wolf Clan barman looked down his shaggy muzzle at him, as if , but what he said was ‘Yeah, we’ve got a free room. Most of these folk are just here to drink. Fifty gold pieces.’

Horatio thanked him and handed over Primus’ money. He gathered up their drinks, holding them all pressed together, and turned to walk back to their table.

‘Hello there, big boy.’

Horatio nearly dropped the drinks.

Standing in front of him was the dancer. She wore a purple silk dress with yellow lining and gloves of the same material. A gaudy golden tiara—fake gold, presumably—in the shape of a dragon sat atop her head above her piercing dark green eyes, fanning out its wings to either side of her head and obscuring the top of it.

A head-dress made of the same purple silk kept her bright red hair in place and trailed down behind her to the floor—it had shimmered and shaken when she had been dancing. The head-dress also came around her chin and mouth to hide the bottom half of her face from her nose downwards, like a half-veil.

What her outfit didn’t hide, however, was the better part of her breasts, which were tanned, round, and very large. To his dismay, Horatio found that his gaze kept being drawn back to them, and again now that she was leaning forwards to whisper to him, showing them to him.

‘Very impressive,’ the woman said in a seductive tone, ‘what you’ve done I mean, making it through the Sealed Cave. It must have taken the strength and courage of a great hero to do something like that. Care to spend the night with me? I’m sure you’ve got lots of coin, as well as lots of the other things that matter...’

Against his will, a stirring made itself known in Horatio’s loins. He had never yet been with a woman in the way that she was inviting him to, and this woman was very attractive, or at least the parts of her that were on display were…

He looked over at Ceres, still engaged in a heated conversation with Primus and Egea at their table. She hadn’t noticed the woman talking to him.

‘Er, sorry, but no,’ Horatio said. ‘I mean, no thank you. I er…don’t have much of my own coin, really, and even if I did I’m…flattered? But I’m not sure that I would…er, no. Thank you. Ahem.’

The woman dropped her alluring smile and her whole demeanour seemed to change, but not for the worse. Instead of fluid and enticing, she suddenly became rigid and serious. ‘Right answer,’ she said. ‘Listen, hero-boy, can you meet me back here in the common room at dawn, to talk about something? Not for sex. It’s about something else. Something important.’

Utterly perplexed and unfamiliar with this situation, Horatio just said ‘Er…sure?’

The woman’s eyes flashed above her face-scarf. ‘Thank you,’ she said, and slipped away, meandering over to another table of men and beginning to the flute-music dance again. The men cheered and whistled at her approach.

Horatio returned to their table and distributed the drinks. He kept the encounter to himself. He didn’t know what to make of it, or what the woman wanted, but the others were still in an argument about the chest, which turned into an argument about what their band name should be, and he didn’t want to tell Ceres about it. The party got on with their meal and their arguments, and afterwards went to bed.

That night in the inn, he dreamed of stone doors that opened onto a room full of treasure chests, a purple dragon leaping out of the one he chose to open, and the cool blue of Ceres’ eyes which became a lake into which he longed to dive.