Empirical Gnollage: Installment 66 [https://squirrel.dogphilosophy.net/Installment066.png]
The three of them went back outside to rejoin the gnoll and donkey. Al took one of his remaining torches from his pack in case they needed more light to see inside, and they led Haunch to the stable building. Al practiced his fire-starting magic with the trick to make his torch light itself, and asked Gruntle to pull the stable door open. It creaked and shuddered on its bent, rusty hinges, but swung open. No immediate danger menaced them. Cautiously holding the torch inside to provide light while Al looked across the ceiling revealed no lurking blood-sucking ferns. Al led the way in carefully. The straw that had been on the floor had long ago rotted away, leaving a crazy crosshatching pattern of black lines in the dirt. The building did at least appear to be solid with no sign of leaking through the roof or failing of the supports or walls. Walking further in, they could all see that everything of any usefulness had been taken away when the place was abandoned, and all of the stalls were empty...or so it seemed, until they reached a point far enough in to see the furthest one. Haunch began to bray in fear and struggled to walk backwards while still attached to the cart. Bote came over to grab the donkey's harness and led Haunch outside, talking quietly to him to try to calm him.
The last stall held the body of a horse, Al realized when he got closer, in an even more extremely emaciated and desiccated state than the deer on their cart. The leathery grey skin was missing much of its hair and showed the bone underneath clearly. Not only many tiny insect-bites decorated the remains, but also numerous shallow, rough, round gouges, each about the size of a coin.
Gruntle stepped up and leaned down to sniff. Before Al could stop him, the gnoll bit into the underside of the long-dead horse's neck, and with some struggle managed to bite free a small tough strip of what had once been meat and skin. He chewed it without any sign of enjoying it, and swallowed.
"Too old to eat," he decided, despite having just eaten it. "No good."
I guess we're not sleeping in here now, if our donkey was uncomfortable about the dead horse with all of its blood sucked out, ripping out its throat isn't going to help.
There didn't seem to be much else to investigate. They found a small hayloft but no hay, miscellaneous wooden pegs that no longer had anything hanging from them, and not much else.
"But of course here the roof is intact and the door actually closes," Al lamented melodramatically to the ceiling before they all vacated it and pushed the door shut again.
After a short discussion, the party decided to spend the night in the ruined tavern. The cart wouldn't fit through the door, but Haunch could. They repurposed the rooms with the baths into places to sleep, clearing out the remains of the one broken tub so they could install Haunch into that room. They moved the contents of the cart inside and propped the front door across the doorway to at least partially block it.
The evening meal ended up being less disgusting than Al had expected. The four of them managed to salvage a substantial amount of stiff grey flesh from the dead deer, throwing it into the cauldron still hanging in the kitchen with enough water from the well outside to cover the meat chunks. Some of the potato and onion from the bag they'd been paid with in Turnipseed went into the pot. Al objected to the addition of some of the glowing vinegar, but Bote assured him that faith would protect them from any poisonous effects.
They took turns watching the stewpot while potential tick infestations were addressed. Bote was put in charge of that given their experience doing healer work.
Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.
"No peeking, perverts!" Wikwocket teased before heading into the bath-room that Bote set up as an impromptu clinic. "I'm only getting naked for legitimate medical reasons!"
After all of the examinations were done, they tallied up how many ticks they'd found. There had been two ticks on Wikwocket's head and one behind her right knee. Wikwocket said she found only one on Bote, in their beard under the right side of their jaw. Al had two - one in a forearm and another attached to his calf inside the damaged boot, and Bote found four on Haunch's legs and face.
Gruntle had eleven. "They were everywhere," a slightly traumatized Bote announced, when it was all done.
All of the ticks were dropped into the half-broken beer stein that Wikwocket had noticed behind the bar earlier, and killed by the small amount of earthshine poured in from Bote's silver flask. Al went digging through the supplies they'd picked up at Gerhardt's apothecary to find a clay crock of ointment, while Bote went to the kitchen to say a prayer for the purification of their unfortunate-deer stew.
"It's supposed to be for fleas," Al explained as he took the lid off of the crock, "but maybe it'll keep ticks and mosquitoes away was well. I'll try just about anything at this point."
"Why did you buy flea ointment?" Wikwocket asked him. Al silently answered with a cocked eyebrow and an obvious meaningful glance towards Gruntle.
"Oh, right," Wikwocket nodded, "with all that fur, it'd be a problem if you got too close to him and gave him fleas."
----------------------------------------
Under the circumstances, their late dinner was tolerably good. The stew lacked salt and even after simmering for more than an hour the meat still resisted chewing, but it was edible. The water from the well outside proved itself clean enough to drink, though it smelled faintly of sulfur and tasted like wet moss. At least they had plenty of actual tables to sit at while they ate. Furthermore, the alchemical fumes from the ointment made them all smell somewhat like pungent minty sheep, but it successfully covered up any off-odors that the stew might have had. Gruntle stopped occasionally to sniff himself, remarking that the ointment was doing a good job of hiding his scent, too.
Bellies full of at-least-not-poisonous food, Al propped the warped door back up against the opening so that it would at least keep anything large from getting in without being noticed.
"It might be a good idea for someone to be awake and watching things out here until we leave. I don't know how much more mental focus I can maintain right now but there are some things I want to do some research on, so I think I can watch for a few hours before I sleep. I can wake someone else up to take over then. We don't have to leave in a hurry in the morning..."
"Yes we do! The longer we wait around here, the more likely someone gets their blood sucked!" Wikwocket objected.
"I mean, we can wait long enough for everyone to get some rest before we head out again."
Bote volunteered to take over for Al, and they decided that Gruntle would take over for Bote. Wikwocket would take the last watch.
"We have three of the bath-rooms to work with, so I suppose we will need to have whoever's coming off of watch take the room from whoever is next," Al considered.
"There is actually room for each of us to have a dedicated space," Bote pointed out,"provided one of us would share space with Haunch. This may help comfort our nervous cart-puller, too. I will do this, unless someone else is willing."
Gruntle grunted and stood, then trudged to the bath-room where Haunch waited. He left the door open, so the sound of him flopping to the floor and groaning with relief at finally being able to rest reverberated clearly through the main room of the incompletely-named tavern. It made Al feel even more tired by contrast, but he concentrated on the matters upon which he wanted to consult the small collection of magic references they were carrying. While Bote and Wikwocket headed off to their chosen rooms and closed their doors, Al retrieved Auswelte Sachen as well as Philosophical Principles of Wizardry for the Novice, and set them on one of the tables to read. As an afterthought, he went back and fetched De Re Praecontatio as well. He began his watch flipping between books to consider what he could find about the contacting and manifesting of spirits into the waking world, and the nature of the possible bonds such a summoned spirit could have with the summoner. When the esoteric concepts finally got too hard to focus on, he switched back to the simpler question of how one might magically manifest raw fire instead. He roused Bote to take over after a few hours and retired. He closed the door, opened the small trapdoor over the obvious drain-hole in the floor and used it for what the smell made clear was one of its purposes. Then he replaced the trapdoor, and settled down into his bedroll. He fell asleep too quickly to be worried about his last muddled conscious thoughts, which were about whether there might be some magical means by which a summoned spirit could suck someone's blood from somewhere beyond the waking world.