“Troublesome. I thought about smoking the badger out, but with dwarven stonework, there is bound to be a flue pipe somewhere.”
Will shook his head at the inconvenience, though he had no intention of turning back.
A subterranean squatter hardly warranted second thoughts.
He drew his steel, working a thin layer of beast tallow over the flats.
After striking flint to kindle a scrap of oil-soaked burlap tied around a pine branch, he tapped the glass phial tucked inside his doublet, filled his lungs, and gently eased the trapdoor open.
The tunnel shaft ran low and cramped.
He dropped down without a scrape of boot leather, bending nearly double as the torchlight carved a yellow slice through the damp gloom.
Curiously, no tripping cords or deadfalls crossed his boots.
Ahead, the clusters of emerald vitality rested dead still.
Why hadn’t the scavengers rushed the mouth?
He reached the end of the gallery before the answer came.
The orange flare illuminated a clutter of stone chisels atop a bench, backed by a stout cell of forged iron bars.
Inside huddled three ghouls, iron shackles pinning their wrists and ankles to the rock floor, their gray, slobbering jaws bound shut with heavy trace chains.
The torch startled the beasts, driving them to shrink against the far wall with muffled, wet hisses.
On a cot across the chamber, a dwarven youth lay curled beneath a woolen blanket, snoring heavily.
The wretch had clearly worked himself raw the night before.
Will let out a quiet sigh.
All that stealth, and the target was sleeping like a hog in a pen.
Stepping over a crude string rigged with iron bells, he lifted a smith’s hammer from the crate, laid three inches of naked steel against the sleeping dwarf’s throat, and stood waiting.
A minute dragged past.
Will’s eyebrow twitched with mounting irritation.
The lad’s chest hitched and his breath rattled unevenly; did the fool think playing deaf would make the blade vanish?
“How long do you plan to play dead? I haven’t got all morning.”
The dwarf’s eyelids shot wide.
With a strangled squeak, he scrambled backward into the rock corner, eyes round with pure terror as he took in the blade and Will’s golden irises.
A dwarf’s years were easy enough to guess by his whiskers; once the braid reached the belt, a clansman was pushing fifty winters or more.
The knotting patterns also marked their mining house.
The youth shivering against the masonry barely had a beard brushing his collarbone.
“Your name, friend.”
“V… Visco.”
“Well, Visco, lift your paws and tell me where you dredged up those corpse-eaters.”
“The old slaughterfields along the Yaruga! I saw dozens of them when I came down from Mahakam. Look, on the table, the satchel has a parchment map and all my coin. Take the lot! Just spare my skin. Witchers don’t butcher men, right?”
Visco dropped to his knees atop the straw pallet, hands clasped in frantic prayer.
“Generous offer, but I am no witcher. Next time, open those pea-sized peepers and look properly.”
Will drove a fist into the youth’s jaw, dropping him like a sack of turnips.
What was with folk mistaking his golden eyes for cat slits?
The glow was round and pale, not vertical slits.
He worked with clinical efficiency, stuffing a rag into the boy’s teeth and winding hemp rope around his elbows and ankles until the knots sat snug as a hog prepped for slaughter.
Whatever bad blood ran between the lad and Bowen was none of his concern. The source of this chapter is g.com.
He tucked the map and the velvet purse into his tunic, hooked the smith’s hammer to his belt, and tossed the remaining scrap iron into the corner.
Stepping up to the iron grate, he drove his longsword through the gaps, taking the three ghouls cleanly through their necks.
He sheared off the blackened, venomous claws, tying them into an oiled rag before knotting them to his pack.
[Experience +45]
He turned to leave, then paused, his gaze lingering on the severed carrion heads.
He lopped them off with a quick hack and strung them through the ears by a bit of twine.
The local bailiff might pay a bounty for the meat.
Will tossed his burnt-out brand into the silt and climbed the ladder, hauling the rope behind him.
Scrape…
thud.
Will marched along the dirt track, towing Visco behind him like an uncooperative sled, the boy’s nose plowing a clean furrow through the dust.
He had left his mount tied back at the lane; if a stray ghoul nipped his horse’s hocks, he wasn’t about to get reimbursed.
Realizing the young human had no intention of slitting his gullet, Visco recovered his breath and began to mumble through the cloth.
“You’re an independent bounty taker, aye? Old Bowen put you up to this?”
“Listen to reason, lad! I have crowns, sacks of crowns! My kin hold halls in Mahakam. What do you need?”
“Iron ore? Steel blades? High-grade silver ingots?”
Will halted.
Visco’s eyes lit up with desperate hope as the tall youth turned and strode back toward him.
Will pulled a fresh length of hemp from his pouch and knelt.
If the idiot hadn’t started wheezing like a bellows, Will would never have loosened the original gag.
“Wait, you don’t understand! Bowen is my own flesh and blood, he’s my father… mmph… mmmph!”
Even the Prophet Lebioda descending from the clouds wouldn’t have slowed Will’s hands.
He shoved the rag back between the boy’s molars.
His business was finding carrion nests and toxic claws, not sorting out mountain family squabbles.
Dragging his catch back into the lane, Will found half a dozen villagers helping Bowen sift through the smoldering ash of the shop.
At the sight of the youth returning with three dripping ghoul heads strung over his shoulder, the peasants stumbled backward, crossing themselves in terror.
Will dropped the trussed-up Visco into the cabbage patch.
“Here is the mastermind behind your little fire. Claims he’s your boy, too.”
Will folded his arms across his leather doublet, settling in to watch the show.
“What in the burning hells?! Where would I get a whelp like that?”
Bowen bristled, snatching the cloth from the youth’s mouth to study his features.
The jawline and the slope of the brow matched his own with uncomfortable precision, draining the color straight from the old smith’s cheeks.
“Bowen, you treacherous dog!” Visco squirmed in the mud like an angry grub, words tumbling out in a furious spray of common dialect and guttural Mahakam curses.
“You aren’t fit to be called a clansman, let alone a sire!”
“You abandoned my mother and ran from Carbon Mount like a whipped hound! I grew up hearing the elders call me a nameless bastard! Are you pleased with yourself now, you old coward?!”
Bowen shook with fury, his knuckles whitening around his tongs.
“Shut your face, you half-witted mule! I never sired you!”
“Oh? Then you shouldn’t have left your seed in Beth’s bed, should you? Did I force your boots off? By the gods, the sheer gall of you!”
Driven past all patience by the boy’s sneer, Bowen lost the last shred of his composure, roaring so loud the thatch rattled on the eaves:
“That she-devil Beth trapped me like a badger in a snare! She slipped into my quarters, lashed my wrists to the bedposts, rammed a ball of sheep’s wool down my throat, and… and took her pleasure while I lay helpless! You hear me?! I never looked at the hag twice!” The source of this chapter is NovelPing.
Visco’s mouth dropped open, his rage freezing into blank incomprehension.
Along the lane, every whisper died on the wind.
The villagers froze where they stood, pitchforks and brooms hovering in mid-air, jaws hanging slack in utter horror.
Clang.
The hammer slipped from Will’s grip, hitting the flagstones with a dead ring.
Gods above.
Dwarven domestic life was a nightmare beyond reckoning.
The mental images slammed into his skull like a direct psychic assault from an elder curse, raw and uninvited.
Nobody in the temple had warned him that common investigative contracts came with this brand of spiritual torment.
A cold shudder ran down Will’s spine.
He stepped forward quickly, anxious to put an end to the conversation before another revelation broke out.
“Master Bowen. Seeing as your trouble is dealt with…”
Having vented twenty years of bile, the old smith looked as though twenty winters had dropped on his shoulders all at once.
He gave a hollow nod, reached into his tunic, and pressed a worn deerskin pouch into Will’s hand.
Will tested the weight, satisfied that the craftsman had held to his word, then retrieved the iron hammer from the dust and laid it across the bench.
“A smith’s iron is his honor. Give it back to the boy when you untie him.”
A flicker of warmth passed through Bowen’s tired eyes.
He gave a heavy, deliberate nod.
“My thanks, lad. The timber is gone, but the anvil survived the coals. If you ever need a pommel weighted or a blade ground true, come find my bench.” He paused, clearing his throat.
“What was the name again?”
“Will. Out of the Temple of Melitele, in Ellander.”
The lone disappointment of the venture was the local alderman, who refused to pay a single copper for the rotting ghoul heads.
It mattered little; Will had already pocketed what he came for.
Borrowing Bowen’s hearth, he spent the evening concocting three crude incendiary flasks.
The formula was peasant work: pitch, lamp oil, linen strips, and glass vials, paired with touch-paper sticks rolled from scrap parchment and powdered saltpeter.
Working in the damp tunnel had shown him that flint and steel were too slow when beasts closed in; until he unlocked an offensive Sign, quick-burning fuses would have to do the work.
Bowen’s pouch had contained twenty-three silver crowns, while Visco’s yielded twelve.
According to the youth, the coin came from his mother.
Beth was older and ran a profitable clan workshop in the peaks, hoarding substantial wealth.
In truth, common folk rarely understood how dwarven smiths could live in such threadbare poverty during war seasons.
Beyond the realm’s forced levies, the roots lay in ancient clan statutes: labor was held in common, with every apprentice tied to forty years in the deep shafts.
Their wages were paid in mining tokens called drill gold.
The trap lay in the exchange rate.
It took chests of scrip to buy a handful of honest Novigrad gold, an arrangement crafted specifically to keep artisans from fleeing the mountains.
The merchant guilds of the north had learned everything they knew from those mountain elders.
Will passed the night on Bowen’s floorboards.
When the gray light of dawn broke over the sills, Visco was still snoring in his hemp bindings, drool pooling into the dry loam.
Will gathered his kit in silence, led his mount to the village fork, and paused.
Looking back across the sleeping hamlet, he shook the reins and turned south toward the river, leaving the strange little valley behind him.