We were still on edge as we left the forge and explored the hamlet of Rotveil. We’d agreed that there was no need for stealth but it was so quiet and still that I found myself moving as quietly as possible anyway.
Of the four houses we’d spotted from the edge of the woods one was the smithy, two seemed to be small farmsteads of some kind and one had an extra large chimney that rose from a single story extension. I had that pegged as a bakery. Which made sense given that there was also a mill.
The two farmsteads were at opposite ends of the village. One was next to the ploughed field. Investigating the outhouses we found a plough and a harness that looked like it was meant for a largish horse. Another outhouse turned out to be a stable but it was empty and had been for long enough that there was no smell of manure.
“At some point,” I said, “We’re going to have to go into these houses. We can keep exploring outside if you want but that will just lead to more backtracking in the long run.”
“Fine,” said Jethro, “You go first, but you have to knock.”
“So we don’t startle all the non-existent people inside?” I said.
“It’s only polite. Hospitality goes both ways. You can’t expect people to be happy to see you if you just burst in through the door.” I wasn’t sure if he was genuinely spooked or if this was some kind of wind up.
“I say again. All the non-existent people. Are ghosts a thing here?”
“People tell stories. I’ve never seen one but I’m not going to call anyone a liar over it. I know of at least one haunting that everyone thought was bullshit and turned out to be real but caused by a high level illusion wizard with dementia. Or at least his lawyer claimed he had dementia when the case went to trial.”
“We do not have time for this story just now but I am so angry that you’ve been keeping this story to yourself around the campfire.”
“It’s a pretty widely known story,” said Jethro and at least he sounded calmer.
“Brilliant. Then everyone can tell me. They already think I’m some kind of home-schooled weirdo. It’s not like demanding to hear this is going to change anyone’s opinion of me.”
“Home schooled?”
“Are schools a thing here?” I said.
“For young children and Scholars,” said Jethro. “Children learn to read, write and count and are instructed in the laws and traditions of the country. For everything else they learn it as apprentices, or guild trainees or squires. Unless they take the academic path and become scholars. For them it’s all school.”
“So imagine if instead of going out to school to learn to read and then joining a career path you stayed at home and your mother taught you to read and write because your parents were worried that if you went to school it would ruin you somehow.” I stopped, realising that instead of going inside and investigating I’d been suckered into staying outside and talking. “Never mind. Not important right now.”
I knocked on the door and instantly regretted it because it sounded so hideously loud against the unnatural quiet.
Nothing happened.
I knocked again, this time more firmly and with less cringing at the noise. I called out, “Hello? Anyone home?”
Nothing continued to happen. I turned the door handle, which was pretty fancy door furniture for a place this rural, and pushed the door open slowly.
Dust hung in the air, motes catching the light as they gently drifted on almost imperceptible air currents. Nothing else moved.
The undisturbed drift of dust particles on everything made it clear that no-one had been in here for weeks.
The place was tidy. I’d half expected the old classic of the uneaten meal on the table and the chair knocked over but not picked up. Everything seemed to be in its place until I got to the range. A kettle and a teapot sat on the cooking range. The kettle looked like it had boiled dry. There was a recipe book propped open on the kitchen table. I recognised the recipe. It was a Tier 1 medicinal infusion. A fever tea, meant to bring down a patient's temperature. The sort of thing anyone with a few levels of COOKING would be able to do even if they only had HERBALIST at zero level.
“Looks like someone in the house was ill,” I said, tapping the recipe book.
There was nothing else unusual downstairs but Jethro, who had got over his reluctance to enter at all, was already on the stairs. I followed him up to a cramped upper level consisting entirely of bedrooms. One of the bedrooms clearly belonged to a child, the bed was smaller and there were charcoal drawings pinned up all over the walls.
There was also glass all over the room. The window had been left open, and over the months since the building was abandoned the wind had caught it, and thrown it back and forth until all the small panes were shattered. Yes, glass windows even in an upstairs room. I said it was pretty fancy.
On the floor by the bed there was a large bowl with a wadded up cloth in it. To me it looked like more signs that someone had been sick with a fever. They’d had the window open and someone had been mopping the child’s forehead with a wet cloth.
There were many containers inside the house. I didn’t want to rake around inside them. It seemed like a horrible breach of privacy but I couldn’t see any way around it.
Once I’d persuaded myself to search there was very little of interest. A lot of tools, foodstuffs and coins, all of which I left where I found them, even the higher denomination coins that I suspected had been generated by my SEARCH ability.
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We left the house without exchanging a word and moved onto the house with the big chimney. As I’d expected it was a Baker’s house. It felt wrong to call it a bakery because it was so clearly a private home with a big oven attached. The oven was so big that it was part of an entire extension dedicated to bread. It seemed a bit over the top for such a tiny hamlet. I wondered if it was someone’s retirement hobby or if there had been more people in the area that were somehow invisible to us now.
“Do you think there could have been a lot of seasonal workers in the area? Cause otherwise I don’t understand why anyone would build a bakery this big in a village this small,” I said.
“Maybe, if they were planning to grow something weird in that big ploughed field? There’s some high value crops that have to be harvested by hand. They’d probably need another big field or two to grow the grain for the mill though.” He didn’t look very sure of himself. The longer we looked at this place the less sense it made.
There was nothing else of note in the Baker’s house but outside the mill I suddenly realised that something was missing.
“Where are the sails?” I said.
“The what?” said Jethro.
“The sails. For the Windmill. Actually, how do you get a windmill to work in the middle of a forest?”
“What’s a windmill?” said Jethro.
I pointed to the mill with the maximum possible flourish.
“That’s a mill,” said Jethro, “For milling flour, it’s got nothing to do with wind.”
“Then how does it work?” I said, “What’s the power source?”
“Yes,” said Jethro.
“Yes what?”
“It’s powered by the Source,” said Jethro.
“I feel,” I said, “Like I’m missing something. Please explain how the mill works.”
For the second time since he’d known me Jethro looked at me like I’d grown a second head. “Well, when it’s switched on with the correct ritual, the mill extends aura blades that are sensitive to the shifting tides of magical energy generated by the Source. These tides push against the aura blades and because the blades are mounted at one end on an axle the tides can’t push the blades away and instead slides round them which pushes the blade around in a clockwise direction. The axle connects to a vertical shaft,” he pushed open the door to the mill, “And the shaft connects to the top one of a pair of grindstones… Oh!”
Inside the mill, in place of the millstones, we found a strange device. There were grindstones but the top stone had been removed from its mounting and moved to one side. In its place, resting on top of the lower stone, was something built of cogs and gears and metal plates. It looked old but well maintained.
“I have no idea what that is,” said Jethro. “You’re the Scavenger. Don’t you have some machinery sense thing?”
I closed my eyes, concentrating on my career abilities and skills. There it was the SALVAGE skill. I’d bought it at level one and the progression bar looked almost empty. ASSESS, SCAVENGE AND REPAIR ITEMS WITH MACHINERY, TECHNOLOGY AND BUILDING DESCRIPTORS. SYNERGY WITH UPCYCLE.
I opened my eyes and looked at the device. I still had no clue what it was. “Okay, but what is it though?” I said aloud.
I heard a weird rattle noise and a line of the familiar golden yellow text appeared in the corner of my eye. SALVAGE KNOWLEDGE CHECK PASSED. And suddenly I could see what it was. I had a mental image of how it worked, and to someone who grew up in a world with blenders and juicers it should have been obvious.
“It’s a press,” I said. “You put some fruit or vegetable in the top, it gets pulverised by these cogs,” I started pointing, “the skin comes out here, the pulp comes out there, and the juice comes out of the bottom.”
“That explains the glass,” said Jethro.
“What?”
“I thought it was weird, a tiny place like this and everyone has glass in all their windows. They must have been buying glass in bulk so they could bottle or jar whatever comes out of the press. When you buy that much glass you get a discount.”
I thought about it. That would make no sense back home, where everything was mass produced by increasingly specialised factories, but here it might well make sense.
“Still doesn’t tell us what they were growing, though. Or why they’re all gone.”
We searched the rest of the mill and while we did find a stockpile of wide-necked bottles we didn’t find much else of use.
We finally hit the jackpot in the second Farmstead house. This house had a vegetable garden out the front and a large vegetable plot out the back. The outhouses were exclusively for animals. Whoever lived here kept the animals that grazed on the pasture. Inside the kitchen I found a handwritten note with the same fever tea recipe that we’d found in the other Farmstead. Obviously the sickness was here too and they’d been co-operating to fight it.
This house had a small study in a cubby hole off the main living space. There was a tiny desk that barely fit into it. Someone here was a thoughtful forward planner. There was a printed almanac open on the desk. It had detailed annotations that stopped in late spring. Jethro went through it and after a certain amount of counting on his fingers and muttering he declared that the almanac had been unused for 13 months. That pushed the date of abandonment back a lot further than I thought.
Searching through the desk I found the real treasure. A diary. Someone had actually written stuff down. I hurriedly skimmed through it. There was no handy note at the end decrying that the community had been betrayed by X or Y and that the writer was bleeding out as they completed the entry with “Avenge me….” Followed by a long line and an ink splat. I did find out what they’d been growing.
“Ez Radish?” I said.
“I’ve heard of it. Don’t know much about it. It’s a magical root vegetable and supposed to be a nightmare to grow. We can ask Agnes later. Unless you know something. You’re a Herbalist too.”
“I can only learn about an ingredient by consuming it,” I said. “Like a vampire but for plants.”
“I swear you can make anything sound worse,” said Jethro.
“What can I say? It’s a gift.”
Jethro examined the rest of the house while I went over the diary. There had indeed been an outbreak of something the writer referred to as ‘The Fever’. Always with a capital F. All the children were sick. The people of Rotveil pooled their resources as much as possible, they shared remedies, and moved most of the children into this house so they could be cared for together. The one child who had remained in the other Farmstead was the sickest of them all. He’d been so sick that they’d been afraid to move him. His mother, grandmother and eldest brother took it in turns to nurse him so that one of them would always be by his side. The rest of the family tried to keep the farm going but as of the date of the last farming entries they hadn’t planted the Ez Raddish yet and they were running out of time.
I could practically smell the fear of the diary writer as they wrote about the children. Not just the fear that some or all of them would die of this fever. There was another fear that the diary writer was so horrified by that they barely wrote it down at all. Just a series of vague hints about hungry people. The way the diarist wrote made it seem like this was more than people who didn’t have enough food. It felt more like a metaphor or a euphemism.
Before I could spend any more time trying to get to the bottom of it Jethro started shouting my name. I climbed the stairs to see what he wanted and found him in a long room tucked into the roof space and filled with twelve child-sized beds.
I waved the diary at him and said, “According to the diary they moved most of the kids to one room to make it easier to take care of them.”
“Easier to take care of or easier to defend,” he said. He took me over to the windowsill. Another window hanging open, surrounded by broken glass. And on the windowsill deep scores in the wood as if something outside the building had tried to claw its way in.