Jethro had been very patient while I read up on compacts, contracts, and vows but I could tell he was itching to know what I’d discussed with the Mayor.
Jethro had changed since we got to Moonstone. He was consumed with curiosity in a way that he just hadn’t been before. I wondered if it was something to do with the Fever. Had it hijacked the curiosity that he would have applied to the Fever, and directed it elsewhere?
I swore him to secrecy on the matter of the job. When we touched hands I felt a weird tingly sensation in my hand as the magic of the vow took hold. It felt very different to being on the other end of it.
I heard the soft ‘ding’ sound of an achievement but I didn’t check what it was right away. I’d already made Jethro wait long enough to find out what the mystery job was.
When I’d finished explaining, Jethro hugged me.
“Does this mean you want to join me then?” I said.
“Of course it does. Even if all we find is the extra coin from your SEARCH ability, and some good quality wood for whittling, it will still be worth it just for the experience. Adventuring was never part of my career plan but that doesn’t mean that I didn’t dream about it when I was a kid. This way I have a legitimate way to try it out without having to worry about any Murder Hobos.”
#
There weren’t any Murder Hobos but that didn’t mean there was no danger.
#
The Mayor sent us to an address on one of the narrow side streets of the Citadel. Tall, old houses crowded the pavement, leaning towards each other.
The one we were looking for was slightly further back from the road than the others. The pavement there was wider. Perhaps that meant that it was older, from a time when the architects of the city were concerned less with maximising internal space and more about the aesthetic.
It had been a very handsome house once. Now the upper windows were dark and hollow and the lower ones were boarded up. The original door had been replaced with an ugly new one that was padlocked shut. Looking up at the roof I could see that the gutters were blocked and there were slates missing. It smelled of damp and rot and rodents.
I unlocked the padlock and we went inside.
The floor immediately behind the door was hidden beneath layers of damp leaves and unwanted post. The leaves must have been blown in at some point. Presumably the front door had been broken for a while before they replaced it with the ugly one. The post must have been old too since there was no letterbox in the new door.
I did not enjoy how the leaves felt under my bare feet. Something like the leaf mulch of the forest but treacherous underfoot. It felt like the leaf litter was waiting for my attention to be elsewhere before sliding sideways as a single mass.
Our instructions were to look for the wine cellar. So we went in search of the kitchen.
“It’s probably at the back,” I said.
“Probably,” said Jethro. “I bet all the food got delivered to the back so they didn’t have the kitchen staff carrying raw meat through the grand rooms.”
I realised that we were whispering, as if trying not to disturb the peace of the house.
“Ok, first decent payout we get, I’m buying boots,” I said, trying to speak more loudly.
Jethro looked down at the damp floor and the slimy drift of paper and leaves. He grimaced in sympathy. “Agreed,” He said. “Everything else can wait. It’s safety equipment, really.”
At the end of the hallway was a door. It was the same size as the other doors off the hall but it was much plainer, much cheaper. I tried to open it but the damp had got to it and it had swelled and jammed in place. We tried to force it but Jethro ended up using his felling axe on it.
Damp chips of wood flew everywhere as he made short work of it.
“Where the hell is all the moisture coming from?” I said. “We’re under a dome.”
“The domes are semi-permeable,” said Jethro. “That’s why they have that iridescent shimmer. They keep the worst of the clouds out but they let the moisture bead on the surface and drip through. When there’s rain higher up that goes straight through too. They slow the wind down though.”
“How do you know all this?” I said.
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
“You’ve been busy. I had to amuse myself somehow. I’ve been in the Central Library chatting up one of the Assistant Librarians in the Local History section. We’re going out for a drink at the weekend.”
“Arkadia has weekends?” I said. “Why did nobody mention that before?”
“No weekends in the woods,” said Jethro. “You work when the work needs doing, and rest when you’re tired.”
Once Jethro had demolished the door we gained access to the kitchen. It was crowded with broken furniture and the air was heavy with the stench of rotted food.
It took us longer than I expected to find the wine cellar. We had no idea what the door would look like and wasted a lot of time looking for a hatch in the floor. Eventually we found a flight of stairs descending into darkness behind a door that I’d expected to lead to a cold storage cupboard.
We each had a small lantern that we clipped to our pack straps, and my eyes could see well in low light, so in theory there was no problem with walking down the stairs into the pitch black wine cellar. It still gave me pause though. A literal pause on the top step.
Jethro patted me on the shoulder. “You’re the one with the night eyes and the predator nose, if you don’t like what you see or smell then we’re not going down.”
“Nah, it’s not that. It’s just a residual fear of the dark,” I said and took the first step down.
The wine cellar really was just a cellar for keeping wine in. There was rack after rack of bottles, dividing the space up into narrow aisles. There were also a couple of walls of casks, all stacked on their sides, most sealed with a bung but many with taps in place. I knocked on one of the casks with a bung and it sounded full.
“I wonder if the wine is still good?” I said.
“Doesn’t matter,” said Jethro. “That’s rich people stuff. They’d never let you make a profit off it.”
We searched the Wine Cellar until we found the thing the Mayor had sent us here for. A wall where the brick work had been damaged, revealing a void on the other side.
I resisted the urge to make a Cask of Amontillado joke. Only another Outlander would get it. It was wasted on Jethro.
I cleared a few loose bricks and then clambered through.
#
On the other side of the brick wall was a cramped dark space that looked, at first, like a natural cave. As we explored the space I began to feel like the ground was too even to be natural. The surface underfoot somehow didn’t feel hard enough to be natural stone.
I crouched down, scratching at it with my finger claws. “What is this?” I said, out loud, but not really expecting an answer. Yellow letters appeared in the corner of my vision. SCAVENGER KNOWLEDGE CHECK PASSED. And then I knew that this was the sub-floor that an intricate tiled floor had once lain on. If I looked around I would probably find glass or ceramic Tesserae left from the ornate floor.
“Apparently it was a tiled floor,” I said. “Do you think there’s any market for second hand Tesserae?”
“That’s not the question to ask,” said Jethro. “The real question is more like ‘Is there enough of a market for second hand Tesserae for it to be worth the work of scrabbling through the muck with our bare hands to find them and then dragging them back to the surface?’”
“I’m thinking that the answer to that is probably no,” I said.
“Yeah,” said Jethro, “While we’re new at this it’s probably best to stick to the stuff that we know we can sell.”
Searching the once tiled room eventually revealed an area where the edge of the floor had collapsed and we could climb under the exterior wall of the older building.
This took us out into something that once might have been a street, or possibly a colonnade, judging by the number of roughly circular outcrops of pale stone we found.
It was around this point that I started to hear something. I couldn’t make out what it was. The sound was too brief and too quiet. It was just the vaguest impression of movement. Jethro showed no sign of hearing it.
We found nothing of interest in the street/colonnade area but as we walked along it I kept hearing that sound. I was on the point of mentioning it to Jethro when I noticed a faint glow up ahead.
“Is that light?” I said.
Jethro turned off his lantern and I followed suit.
“It looks like sunlight to me,” said Jethro. “But way fainter than I’d expect at this depth.”
As we moved toward the faint glow the roof receded above us and the colonnade opened out into a space that felt like a natural fissure in the rock.
Vines and moss clung to the walls and roots hung down from plants above us, perhaps in the gardens of the abandoned house. The fissure did seem to extend all the way to the surface, letting light in through a tiny crack. There was also water dripping down from above, feeding the various plants that made this area look nothing like the barren colonnade that we’d just come from.
Again I heard that movement noise but this time it didn’t stop. Before it had been the sound of something small darting away from Jethro and I. Now it was the sound of several small things clambering over each other to get a better look at us.
“Do you hear that?” I said, just as Jethro reacted to the sound by reaching for his hatchet.
“There’s something other than us moving around down here,” he confirmed.
My hand dropped to the hilt of my Messer. I realised that I had heard something like this sound before, though not this loud or close, it was the sound of tiny clawed feet against a hard surface.
“It sounds kind of like…” before I could finish the sentence I was cut off by a corgi-sized rodent throwing itself at my face.
“RATS!” said Jethro as the two halves of the one that had attacked me fell to the ground.
“Giant rats,” I said. “How quaint.”
Jethro sliced open the head of one that had charged for his ankles.
“I think it’s traditional or something,” he said. “Novice adventurer is really just a fancy name for a rat catcher.”
Which is the kind of thing that I would have found funny if I hadn’t been worrying about the dozen or so dog sized rats charging at me from out of the tangle of moss, roots and vines at the bottom of the fissure.