It was dark inside Lozar's house, and it stank.
It took his eyes a while to adjust. The light came in through the broken windows in grey slabs, full of drifting smoke. The front room had a stone floor covered in rubbish: bones, rags, broken pots, feathers, and something that might once have been a boot. Through an inner doorway at the back, the ceiling had come down. Slates and charred beams spilled through the gap.
In the middle of the floor, the goblins had made a fire on the bare stones. Over it, on a spit made from an old iron poker, three hens were roasting.
Seth's hens. They were black on one side and raw on the other. The goblins clearly had no Cooking level.
At least somebody's worse at it than me, Tam thought. It didn't make him feel better.
He lifted the spit off the fire, hens and all, and leaned it by the door. He scattered the coals with a broken board, so the house wouldn't burn down a second time. Then he stood looking around.
The walls had been white once. Now they were black with soot to head height and streaked above that. Here and there, nails stuck out of the walls where things had hung. A few of those things were still there. They were pictures, painted on thin boards, curled and blistered by the heat.
He went closer to the biggest one.
Most of the paint had bubbled off, but he could still make out an island in a blue sea. A white city stood on it, with towers and a harbour full of ships. The sun was shining on it.
He knew that island.
Crandor, he thought.
In the game, Crandor was a burnt black rock in the sea south of Port Sarim, the harbour town down the coast. A dragon called Elvarg lived in a cave under its volcano. There had been a city there once, until the dragon burned it. Three wizards had escaped. Each of them kept a piece of the map that led back. Lozar had been one of them.
She had lived here, in this little house on the river, with a painting of her home on the wall. She had looked at it every day, probably, for years.
Next to it hung a smaller board. It showed three people in a row in old-fashioned robes. Her family, he guessed. Their faces had burned away.
Tam stood in front of the pictures. Then he made himself go on.
* * *
The back room was where the roof had come in.
It had been a bedroom. He could see the iron frame of a bed under the fallen slates, and a chest with its lid smashed open and nothing inside. The raiders had taken everything worth taking. In the game, the Guildmaster of the Champions' Guild, the heroes' hall outside Varrock, had said so, in passing: goblin raiders killed her and stole everything. Tam had read it, years ago, and clicked on to the next thing.
In the corner, half under a fallen beam, there were bones.
They were black and brittle, and there weren't many of them. There was enough to see what they had been. A small person, lying on her side, with her knees drawn up.
Tam stood in the doorway and didn't move.
In the game, there had been charred bones in this house. He remembered them now. They had just been a little picture of bones on the floor, which you couldn't pick up or do anything with. If you examined them, the game said: I don't even want to think about what did that... He had walked past them a hundred times on his way to kill goblins for their coins.
She was an old woman, he thought. She ran from a dragon, long ago. She got away. She lived here for years and years. And then some goblins came in the night.
Nobody had buried her. The goblins had just moved in around her. They had roasted hens in the next room.
He went and found a blanket. It was in the rubbish in the front room, an old wool one, scorched along one edge, but whole. He shook it out. Then he knelt in the corner and moved the beam off her, carefully. He gathered up the bones one at a time and laid them on the blanket. He folded it over them and tied the corners together.
It wasn't heavy. That was the worst part.
He didn't put her in the inventory. He couldn't, somehow. He carried her out in his arms and laid her down on the grass outside the door, in the sun.
Then he went back in to look for the dagger.
* * *
In the game, an iron dagger lay on the floor of this house. If you took it, another appeared. Here there would probably be only one, and the raiders had likely taken that too.
He looked anyway. He went through the rubbish in the front room and found nothing but rubbish. He went through the heap of slates in the back room, lifting them off one at a time and stacking them against the wall. His hands got black. He cut a finger on a broken slate.
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Near the bottom of the heap, under a charred beam, something glinted.
It was an iron dagger. It lay where it must have fallen when the roof came in, buried before the goblins saw it. The blade was dark and plain, longer than his bronze one, with a grip of worn leather. It was a good, ordinary dagger. It had probably been Lozar's knife for cutting bread.
Lozar was dead, and her family had probably died on that island long ago. There was nobody left to own it. Tam picked it up.
He held it for a moment. Then he looked at the bundle on the grass outside, through the doorway, and felt like a thief anyway.
"Sorry," he said, to nobody in particular. "I'll take care of it."
* * *
He did the next part down by the river, out of sight of the path, behind a stand of willows.
First he had to get the goblins there. He carried them down one at a time, in his arms, through the long grass. They were small, and they weighed far more than they looked. By the fifth trip his arms shook and his shirt was stiff with what had come off them.
He laid the first goblin on the grass. Then he took out the knife he had bought that morning. He knelt beside the body.
In the game, you never had to do this. A goblin fell over and left a little pile on the ground, and you clicked on it. Nobody had to think about where the bones came from.
Here, the bones were inside the goblin.
Okay, he thought. You've cleaned a fish. Lots of people clean fish. This is just a really big, really ugly fish.
It was nothing like a fish.
He wasn't going to describe it to anyone. His hands cut and pulled in the right places, even with a knife that wasn't sharp enough. They didn't care what they were cutting. Twice he had to stop and walk away to breathe. It took a long time, but the bones came out clean.
A small number rose at the edge of his sight.
+10 Cooking.
He stared at it. Then the warmth went down his arms, and the words came, and he didn't read them. When he checked later, his Cooking had gone up a level.
Cooking, he thought. It would be Cooking. Cutting up a body was kitchen work, apparently, whatever the body was. In the game, gutting a fish with a knife had given about that much experience. It made a horrible kind of sense.
The second went faster. The third, he barely had to stop at all. His hands hadn't changed, but he had, and he didn't like it. He did it anyway.
As he finished each one, he put its bones into his inventory, and anything it had carried that the game would have dropped. Then he dragged what was left down the bank into the river, with its flint-tipped stick or its club and its scraps of brown armour. The current took it all. He didn't want anything lying about if someone came along.
Halfway through the fourth, he thought: a fire. Maybe a fire would work. If he burned a body on a good hot fire, the bones might come out on their own, without any of this. It would take wood and time. It would also make a smell and a column of smoke that half of Lumbridge could see. Not today. But next time, maybe.
When the fifth was done, he dug a hole.
He dug it with his hands and his bronze dagger, in the soft earth under the willows, a little way back from the water. He took the first goblin's bones out of his inventory and laid them in the hole. He pushed the earth over them and watched the edge of his sight.
+4.5 Prayer.
There, he thought. Bones, not bodies. I was right.
He buried the other four, one set at a time. Four more small numbers rose and faded.
He had always thought burying bones for Prayer was a strange rule. Why should it please a god? Now, kneeling in the mud and putting a goblin's bones in the ground, he thought he understood it a little better. Somebody should do it. Even for goblins.
He filled the hole in and stamped it flat.
Then he went through what they'd had on them, taking it out of his inventory a piece at a time.
It wasn't much, about as little as the game gave. Two of them had carried five coins each, in little leather pouches that had gone into the river with them. One had a hammer, stuck through a loop on its belt, a plain iron hammer exactly like the one he had paid a coin for.
One coin, he thought. I could have just killed a goblin.
The big one's spear was the only real weapon among them. It had a bronze head gone green with age and a long shaft of dark wood. Somebody had made it properly, long ago. The goblin must have stolen it from somebody else. He didn't know what he'd do with it yet, but it was his now.
He sat back on his heels and counted.
Ten coins from the pouches. With the nine he already had, that made nineteen. An iron dagger, a spare hammer, a bronze spear, the big goblin's battered pot, and another Cooking level, earned in a way he wouldn't tell anyone about.
He went down to the river and washed his hands for a long time. Then he went back up to the house for Lozar.
* * *
He walked home in the late afternoon with three half-burnt hens on the poker over his shoulder and Lozar in the crook of his other arm.
He left her wrapped in her blanket in a corner of the barn, out of the way, where it was cool and quiet. Then he went to the farmhouse.
The Groats were back from town. Seth was in the yard, splitting kindling with his axe. He looked up as Tam came around the corner of the barn. There was still black in the creases of Tam's hands, and his face was streaked with soot. New pink marks on his arms showed where cuts had closed.
Seth went very still.
"Where have you been?" he said.
Tam slid the three hens off the poker and held them out by the legs.
"I got your hens back," he said. "They're a bit overdone."
Seth didn't look at the hens. He looked at Tam.
"I told you," Seth said quietly. "I told you to stay out of that house. I told you it wasn't the kind of order I joke about."
"I know."
"And you went anyway."
"I know. I'm sorry." Tam made himself keep looking at him. "They're gone, Seth. All of them. There were five. The house is empty."
Seth said nothing. Behind him, Gillie had come out of the farmhouse door and stopped on the step. Jory was behind her, peering around her skirt.
"Five goblins," said Seth. "On your own. With that knife."
"With a dagger. I nearly died," said Tam. He hadn't meant to say it. "The first time. Four of them came at me at once, and I ran away. And then I went back."
Seth's face went hard, then pale. Then he just looked tired, and older than Tam had ever seen him.
Seth took the hens out of his hand and held them for a moment. Then he passed them back over his shoulder without turning around.
"Gillie," he said. "Put those in the pot. They'll do for soup."
Gillie came down the step and took them. She was looking at Tam the whole time.
Seth stood in the yard with his big hands hanging at his sides.
"You'll muck out the cow shed every day for a month," he said at last. "With your own spade. You can buy one."
"Yes, Seth."
"And you'll not do that again without telling me first."
Tam opened his mouth. He thought about promising. He knew he would do it again. There were more goblins in the hills east of the river, rats in the swamp, and worse things beyond that. Sooner or later he would go and meet all of them.
"I'll tell you first," he said. "I promise. Every time."
Seth looked at him. Then he nodded once.
"That'll do," he said, and went back to his kindling.
* * *
That night, after supper, Tam went out to the barn and sat in the cool dark beside the bundle in the scorched blanket. He didn't say anything. He just sat with her, so she wasn't alone.