An Epic Hero Story: Book 2 Chapter 42 (Patreon)

We buried Chak as well as we could, actually managing to give him a full six feet of depth in his grave thanks to Gruin’s hands being, apparently, almost natural shovels in regards to their digging efficiency. He wasn’t even the fastest thing about the whole affair. None of us had many words to say over the dead man’s grave, though most of us tried to mumble a few. My own efforts, I think, were particularly pathetic. I hadn’t half the recollection of him that most everyone else seemed to expect I would. 

He’d just been one of the trainees. 

Among the several talents I genuinely do possess, the one that most benefits my work as a Hero is not my strength, or skill at arms, or my ability to sustain a sprint. Nor is it even my Thaumaturgy. It’s the fact that death has never touched me quite as deeply as it does others. Not other people’s, at least. I felt bad for Chak, and I’d certainly have rather he lived, but there was no fire of vengeance or frost of despair in me after his passing. 

I kept a nice and clear head as we departed, and departed quick. 

Countryside flitted by. Morlo was driving us on faster than I’d ever known him to, clearly moving with a destination in mind but, as usual, keeping his cards held tight to his chest. Looking back on it the paranoia and distrust I’ve enjoyed through my later years was mostly learned from him. 

Not that it’s a bad habit to get into, mind. It’s a sad fact that the more famous you become, the more people want to kill you. As a man who is possibly among the top five most famous figures in history, and undeniably among the top twenty, I can remark that the amount of danger you face just walking down a street when you’ve done as much to shake things up as I have is…annoying. 

Morlo was not quite so well known as I would become, and far better at disguising himself than I am even now, but he certainly grasped the innate threat that applies to people like us. This grasp saw to his ushering us on with more speed than we’d yet employed, conjuring winds at our backs to accelerate us at the cost of his own Thaumaturgical stamina and growling like some feral dog whenever one of us threatened to slow. He even told me to strip my armour and have Gruin carry it, during one rest, which I was understandably reluctant to do.

But not reluctant enough to deny him.

The one positive consequence of this slaver’s march is that it meant we were making almost as good a time as if he’d conjured a set of mules to ride. Except for Gruin, he was probably making considerably better time on account of the fact that he tended to get angry and punch his mounts in the back of the head. 

It wasn’t until another day and a half had passed that I realised where we were actually going, though when I did it filled me with an odd sort of comfort. Whingrham, the nearest town to Sheppleberry, the place my family had taken refuge following the initial undead attacks. 

The place I’d made my accord with Morlo to be whisked away into a life of misery and heroics. 

I recognised the outline of it easily enough, even from a horizon away, but as we neared I couldn’t help but find the place a shade…small. It wasn’t Whingrham that caused this, I knew, but me. I’d seen Arvharest, in all its glory, and Eoryg too. I’d seen a great many towering sights, mountain peaks to rise higher and wider than any city. 

It wasn’t that Whingrham was an unimpressive town, it was just that humanity had not yet figured out how to built any structure at all that measured up to some of the things I’d passed through. The Grynkori architecture of the Foggy Peaks would remain near the top of my list for a good while. 

Granted, as we drew closer I began to feel a new weight settling onto me that was entirely removed from however impressive the town was or was not. 

This was where I’d last seen my father. Where he’d sent me off and expelled me from his house, cutting me out of the inheritance and leaving my life in turmoil. 

Then I remembered that I’d promised myself I’d become rich my own way, and considered how spectacular a failure that’d been. Not entirely my fault of course, I was hardly to blame for Anglyn’s nobility being more or less equal in greed to myself. Still, it would’ve been nice to ride back home on the back of a treasure-laden elephant. Or ten. 

I’d have to make do with Thaumaturgy instead.

Morlo got us all a swift entrance into the town, though Il’vanja and Gruin exacerbated the always-present reluctance any gate guard felt to allow obviously armed strangers inside. It certainly did not help when Gruin, apparently still even angrier than usual, threatened to eat his family. Fortunately our Thaumaturge was more than a match for such social inconveniences as that, and saw us within. 

The place hadn’t changed much, though I noted a distinct emptiness to many of the houses around its outer walls. That, I imagined, was a product of the undead attacks. Maybe they hadn’t stopped quite so fast after my departure.

Certainly, they’d kept bloody going for me. Morlo seemed confident there was a mutable cause to them, something we could track down and reverse. Maybe it was just the deep pessimism I’d acquired over my not-so-glorious career, but something told me that there’d be no resolving this without a full-scale deployment of the Anglysh army.

And even then, the dead outnumbered the living by a lot. 

I was left to ponder that cheery thought while we headed further into the city, attracting all manner of stares from the citizenry. Save for welcoming ones. 

Looking back on things, I was certainly enjoying the lowest levels of hostility. Il’vanja and Gruin, of course, were getting the worst, and coped with the fact with total indifference and murderous anger respectively. Devyne shrunk back somewhat, clearly not accustomed to unfriendly eyes. Poor sod. 

Morlo didn’t seem to even notice, so absorbed was he in whatever mission we’d come here for. He just kept striding through the streets like a man with his destination long decided, and with nowhere else to go but his wake the rest of us followed sharply after. We weren’t long in arriving.

I’d been expecting a palace, or something. Which was stupid of course. A palace, at least of the merchants of Eoryg were anything to go by, would’ve consumed as much resources as any quarter of the town combined. Not the sort of structure you expect to find in a place like this. What did surprise me more, though, was that the house we entered was not even especially big. It seemed well made compared to most of the surrounding architecture, but still a more fitting home for a pauper than a king. Inside, also, it smelled.

And that was a good tone setter for my meeting with Morlo’s friend.

Countless things littered our way into the building. Chips of stone and workings of metal or glass, some clearly instruments of science and study, others, as far as I could tell, serving no purpose at all save for an artistic one. An intellectual man might have appreciated all of them for the novelty of their forms and the clear skill required to make them.

I accidentally stepped on one and snapped it at its base. 

“Bugger.” I mumbled under my breath, pausing to gently nudge it under a table and moving on without a spare thought for the ruination. 

Deeper in we finally found the man Morlo had been in such a hurry to see. He was, as I might have expected, a Thaumaturge. Short and rotund, and older by far than even most of his aged order. He had whiskers like the tusks of some Tirkish war-elephant and eyes like moist glass beads. I could hear him breathing like there was a rattle in his lungs.

It did not seem, to me, like he had very long at all to live. But he remained more alert in the final years of his life than most ever manage to be in the first half-decade of manhood.

“Morlo,” he began, “have you come to kill me?”

Morlo smiled.

“I’d have just blown your house up from outside if I had,” he pointed out.

The two Thaumaturges eyed each other in silence for a moment, then the stranger nodded sharply.

“I see. So you’re not blaming me for the undead?”

“Don’t treat me like one of those idiots at the order,” Morlo scoffed, “if they knew about half the things nine tenths of us do there wouldn’t be a Thaumaturge in Anglyn who hadn’t been expelled. Maybe they do know, at that. It’s certainly more convenient for them to pretend otherwise if they do.”

The two of them grinned at that. It was the special grin I’d seen before on Morlo, though never reciprocated. That mad Thaumaturge’s sneer they always got when they thought of how much danger they were putting the world into. I’ve never met a breed even half so demented or misanthropic as the Thaumaturges, let me tell you.

Wait, no, I have. One. The writers of this world are worse by half. But I digress.

“You’ve come to make a study of the undead then,” the stranger guessed, then continued once Morlo confirmed his shot in the dark with a nod, “about bloody time.”

“You want to hear me admit you were right?” Morlo sighed.

“Yes!” the man snapped.

“Very well then, you were correct about everything, I was wrong to doubt you, and the rest of our order are fools to have dismissed you. The Great and Mighty Gandai saw farther than any of us and predicted this danger long before even its infancy.”

He delivered the words with such a sublime deadpan that I almost mistook them for truth, despite hearing the previous exchange. The other Thaumaturge, apparently named Gandai, was apparently satisfied. 

“This is going to remake my reputation,” he growled, “show all those stupid bastards at the order not to trifle with me. Mark my words, I’ll be a Master by the end of this year and I’ll spend the rest of my life on some beach island surrounded by dark women covered with—”

—”we do have a rising undead apocalypse to concern ourselves with,” Morlo cut in, interrupting the dirty old man’s mounting fantasies and seeming to make him start as he did. Gandai coughed.

“Right, yes. Won’t be licking anything off of anyone if we don’t sort that out first, eh?”

Morlo nodded without saying much. I got the distinct impression of disgust from him, and rather enjoyed the novelty of it. His face was level and polite, however. Gandai’s eyes turned to the rest of us next.

“Quite a menagerie you have here,” he remarked.

“My protectors and assistants,” Morlo explained with a gesture to all but two of us, “and my two apprentices.” 

Gandai looked approvingly enough at me, but I saw him blink in rapid confusion as he turned to Vara.

“A woman?!”

“Yes.”

“You can’t teach a woman Thaumaturgy, Morlo, they’re insane!”

“Nonetheless, I have. Undead?”

Gandai barely seemed able to be distracted by the growing danger, now, but allowed it after only a few moments of grumbled discontent.