Draka

“So, that went pretty well,” I said to Herald as we stepped inside the rough wooden house. Then I stopped and looked around.

“Is something wrong?” Herald looked at me with concern.

Nothing was. Not really. The house, being the biggest one in the village, probably belonged to the chief or mayor or headman or whatever they had here. It wasn’t big, but it was big enough. The wood was rough, and the goblins had cleared out the main room to make space for their loot, but there was a fire burning in the fireplace and the place was pleasantly warm. Being inside and cosy like this, smelling the smoke from the fireplace, it was almost enough to make me feel human again.

“Are you alright?”

“I’m fine,” I told her, not really sure how I felt. “Let’s ask our questions and find your family.”

There were a handful of goblins inside, and Nallekka, their leader, fired off a few quick sentences that led to three of them appearing from another room, bringing chairs. The one that approached me looked at me uncertainly, then decided that this was beyond his pay grade. He went around me and put the chair down. Job done, he backed away, and I sat on the floor while Herald and Nallekka sat on their chairs.

It all felt very civilised, really. The effect of the chairs, the fire, and the two clearly separated parties was spoiled a little by the pile on the floor, made up of clothes, rugs, cutlery, candlesticks, tools, and everything else the goblins had gotten their hands on, but you can’t have everything.

“Please,” Nallekka said, “ask questions. Speak easy, please. Not so good with trade tongue.”

“What’re you doing here?” I blurted.

Nallekka frowned. “Village break deal. Do not pay tribute at agreed time. We take ourselves.”

“You had a deal with the village?”

“Yes. We leave them alone, watch for monsters, warn them. They pay tribute. Every moon, one goat, one roll cloth. Good deal! Half moon ago, they all leave. We wonder, but we do not care. They can go. But they do not come back, do not pay tribute at agreed time!”

“Where did they go?” Herald asked.

Nallekka shrugged. It didn’t look natural, and I wondered if she’d learned it like a part of the language. “Do not know. Go up valley along stream, toward mountain. We do not follow after they go in territory of Wandering Goat tribe.”

“Did you see any other humans come here after they left?” Herald continued.

“Yes! Scouts watch village after humans leave. First three humans of village come. They leave again. Some days ago three other humans come. Not of village. They look much. Spot scouts, try talk. We not interested. Too much bother. They stay two days, then leave.”

“In the same direction as the villagers?” Herald asked, leaning forward.

“Yes!” Nellakka confirmed. “Humans of village leave tracks. New humans follow, I think. We watch them until they go in territory of Wandering Goat tribe. Then, do not know.”

“Just to be sure,” I said, wanting to head off any disappointment. “The three humans who were not from the village, they were a woman and two men? The woman was short?”

“Small female, two male, yes.”

“Two of them dark, like my friend?”

“Like you say, yes.”

“Sounds like them, alright,” I said to Herald.

“Let’s go, then!” Herald said, standing up. She was almost vibrating with excitement.

“You don’t want to wait out the rain?” I asked. I was getting comfortable here. A dry, warmish floor, a crackling fire. It even smelled kind of nice. Besides the wood smoke, I'd noticed a vaguely pleasant earthy scent coming off the goblins. They still smelled wet and dirty, but still.

“How can you suggest that? Every minute might count!” Herald said, interrupting my musings. The look of betrayal in her eyes was too much for me to bear, and I folded without a fight.

“Yeah, nah, you’re right,” I said, feeling a little ashamed under her gaze. “Let’s go. Nallekka, you, uh… thanks. Enjoy the village, I guess. Peace?”

“Peace, yes!” the goblin said happily with a wide, wide grin.

“You trust them?” I asked Herald outside as she mounted poor Melon.

“I do,” she said. “Makanna and Lalia both agree that the goblins do not break deals unless in truly desperate straits, or if they feel that the other party has already violated the terms. As long as we do no harm to them, they should leave us alone.”

“Alright. In that case, will you be okay to ride alone for a while? I want to stretch my wings and scout ahead.”

“Can you fly in this rain? I do not mean to doubt you, but…”

“No, fair, fair. I honestly don’t know. Just now was fine but that was only a few seconds. Good time to find out, though.” Meaning, better than trying it from my cave, which was above a couple hundred metres’ drop.

So Herald started riding up the valley, along the stream. The tracks were long gone, but there was a trail of mud in the grass that might have been it before the rain. As for me, I flew.

It was a truly miserable experience. The rain made my wings heavy and even with my extra eyelids I still had to blink constantly to be able to see. And when I craned my neck forward the water got under my scales, which… ech. Not a nice feeling. Like wearing a damp shirt. But it got me up the valley fast enough. Soon enough there wasn’t even the mud track to follow, but I knew roughly what I was looking for, and as awful as flying was right then, it got me around fast. It must have taken an hour, but I found what I suspected that I would.

Many smaller valleys cut into and joined the larger one we were following, and in one of them I found a straight-sided cut-out much like the one I’d found near the gremlin mine. I landed nearby to check it out, and sure enough I saw the lines, the magical glow that marked a gate in the stone. This one was much more worn, but it was impossible to mistake. Satisfied I returned to Herald.

“I found it!” I told her as soon as I landed, skidding in the mud. I had to shout to be heard over the combined noise of the rain and the stream.

“Found what?” she shouted back.

“A gate, like… ah, shit! I’m so sorry. I never told you! I got so caught up in the bandits, and then there was the whole thing with Lalia, and this…” I would have smacked myself if I still had a proper forehead.

“I found a gate. Magical,” I tried to explain, getting closer so I wouldn’t have to shout. “Near the mine. I followed some tracks from the mine into the mountains and I found this gate. And there’s one here too! Bet you anything that’s where everybody went!”

Herald matched my excitement, smiling despite the rain running down her face. “A secret gate? Lead on! Why do you say it’s magical?”

“It just looks like it,” I said. “It’s got this glow, yeah? Like when Makanna uses magic. You know?”

Herald looked at me with wonder. “I have no idea. You can see magic?”

“Yeah?”

“That… is not a thing that I have ever heard of before.”

“Oh.”

I'd say it took an hour and a half to reach the gate by foot. It made me appreciate the speed I could fly at, and the strength and endurance of my flight muscles, my 'extra pecs', all over again. That and the magic that must be involved. I was no biologist but I knew something about how much wing you needed to lift something. Birds had hollow, fragile bones. I definitely did not, considering the abuse I'd survived. And my wings, while big, were not that big.

We didn't talk that whole time. We were good at comfortable silences. Herald was a thoughtful young woman, and I had a newfound ability to not think and just be, thanks to the dragon. She did keep looking at me as though she was going to say something, but she kept her thoughts to herself, which was fine with me. When she had something to say, she would.

“Is that it?” Herald asked when the cut stone surrounding the gate came into view in the distance.

“That’s it,” I confirmed, and she urged Melon on, pulling far ahead of me, eager to get there.

I plodded along at the same pace I’d kept up the whole way here. When I arrived Herald had dismounted and was searching the area around the trough, and as I got close she held up something small and green.

“A garron stone!” she shouted in triumph. “Tam loves them! They must have been here!”

When I got closer she came up to me and I saw that the thing was, in fact, not a stone-stone but a fruit stone, like from a fist-sized plum.

“Come on!” she said. “Show me this gate!”

“It’s right here,” I said, leading her up to the smooth stone surface at the end of the trough. It was set about half a metre into the stone, about two and a half metres tall and three wide.

“This is just a wall,” Herald said sceptically, some of her excitement fading. “Cut stone, yes, but…” Then she looked close, and approached the wall. “Wait,” she said. “Here! Look! And there, where the big chunk is missing! That is not just a pit, it is a hole!”

She’s been running her finger along the centre line of the gate, right where I saw a magical line. Unlike the gate near the mine this one was chipped and pitted, and if you looked closely you could see the individual doors outlined by damage. And she was completely correct in that at the top, one whole corner of the left door had been broken off, leaving a hole bigger than my head into the pitch dark beyond.

“Mak, Tam and Val must have come here and gotten inside somehow!” Herald said, still inspecting the doors. “It is the only explanation! Why else would they not have come back?”

I could think of some reasons, but they were not anything I wanted to share with Herald. She would have thought of the same things, and what she needed was hope.

“Yeah, probably,” I agreed. “Now how do we get this thing open? I don’t see any handles or levers. Not even a keyhole.”

Herald looked at me, bit her top lip, then looked at the damaged corner of the door.

“Draka,” she said thoughtfully, “how small do you think you can get?”

It was still early in the afternoon, and despite the heavy clouds it was far too bright for me to try anything. Herald had jumped up, grabbed the edges of the hole, and pulled herself up to look inside, declaring angrily that it was “too gods-damned dark to see a gods-damned thing.” We huddled up, Melon included, in the shallow alcove in front of the gate. Thankfully the rain was falling from the closed side, and we could stay out of the rain while we waited.

We spent the time talking. I told Herald about growing up with two parents in academia, who turned me off the idea of education by their very existence. Not because of any crushing expectations. There was no nagging or disapproval when I did badly in school, just offers to help me study and a “You’ll do better next time.” But I was a contrarian little shit, and by the time I accepted that, it was way too late for me to want to change. I told her about doing stupid shit with my friends for fun, losing my virginity before I was at all ready because I wanted to be cool, and getting into climbing, which became my life for the next several years.

Herald was amazed at the fact that I had twelve years of schooling, and that both my parents and my brothers were “scholars,” as she called them. This apparently put me on the same level as children of the upper crust, something that Herald and her siblings would never even think to dream of.

When she told me about her own childhood I felt honestly ashamed of how I’d pissed away all my advantages. She remembered very little about her parents. She knew that they had come to Karakan from overseas, a place called Tekeretek, fleeing with Makanna and Tamor to avoid slavery. Her parents had both died when she was very small, her mother in an accident and her father a few years later from some disease. After that Makanna and Tamor, both just kids themselves, did what they could to keep themselves and Herald fed and a shitty roof over their heads. At first they’d made sure that one of them was always at home with Herald, but as the money their father had left ran out and Herald got a little older they’d been forced to leave her home alone while they both worked.

“Tam got work as a runner. Packages and messages, you know? He got a lot of tips, probably because he has always been polite and charming. Oh, that is how he met Val, by the way, years later. Making a delivery from a blacksmith to Val’s inn, I think.”

“Hah, cute,” I said, trying to smile with as few teeth showing as I could. Herald had been helping me practise non-threatening facial expressions. “What about Makanna?”

“Well, she got work in the kitchen at a tavern where Father had known the owner,” she said. “Then, when she got older she started serving, and when she became an adult she became an… entertainer.”

I could see Herald closing herself off. I didn’t want to push, but curiosity made me open my mouth anyway.

“What kind of entertainer?” I asked.

“Oh, singing and dancing,” Herald answered in a rush. I could see her blushing. “She never… She told me she never did anything more, and I believe her.”

“Is it common for singers and dancers to… do more, here?”

“Usually only pretty girls get work as entertainers,” Herald said in a small voice. “And boys, I suppose, sometimes. And usually they do not have much money.” She left the rest unsaid.

I hadn’t heard her sing, but I could see Makanna as a dancer. She was pretty, and I imagined her darker complexion and long, straight hair would make her stand out. Besides that she had a curvy build, and she moved gracefully. I hoped that she’d told the truth about not offering any extras. I wouldn’t judge her for it, it was just… I didn’t like her much, but I also didn’t want to think that she’d felt the need to sell herself because she needed the money to feed her little sister.

God, I’d been so spoiled.

“So how’d you all end up adventuring?” I asked, desperately wanting to change the topic.

“Oh!” Herald said, brightening again. “So, Tam met Val, and it was just, blech, disgusting how much in love they fell. Val was already a fighter doing odd jobs with teams the Guild put together, and he started pushing Tam to learn to fight, too. And then Mak met Lalia, and Garal through her, and Lalia taught Mak a little about how to defend herself. And me, too,” she said proudly. “She, um… I think she saw some patrons mistreat Mak, and she disapproved. I am not sure, and they have not wanted to tell me, really.”

“Uh-huh. So…”

“Yes, so Val and Garal helped Tam learn to fight,” she said, and the rest came in a torrent. “Garal wanted Tam to join the Wolves, of course, but Val convinced him that they could do some easy jobs together, instead. Better money, more freedom, all that. And then by the time Mak got her magic Lalia had taught her to use a dagger or a sword pretty well, so Val and Tam asked if she wanted to join them so they could do more dangerous jobs that paid better. That is when Mak started to learn to use a spear. And, you know, Maglan had been teaching me archery, and Lalia had been taking me into the forest when she could, when the others were away, and she taught me to hunt and use a sword and riding and all kinds of other useful things. So when I became an adult they started taking me along on the safer jobs.”

She smiled ruefully. “It took some work to convince them, though. I had to sneak after them the first two times before they would let me come along. Then they took me, but I had to promise not to sneak after them on the dangerous jobs, so I never went on a hard one. Until the mine, that is.”

She frowned and became silent for a moment. “And now we are back to me not going with them at all, apparently.”

“Don’t worry. We’ll find them, or get them out or whatever, and then they won’t be able to pretend that you can't handle yourself.”

“Do you think so?” Her voice so small, and her eyes filled with such desperate hope that it made my heart ache.

“Yeah. They’re idiots otherwise, and I don’t think that they are. Speaking of finding them, I think it’s dark enough now. Let’s get this thing open.”