Spellscribed: Conviction (9 page)

He was able to find a tannery where, after some more convincing and another gold tab, he obtained access to their stores of treatment materials and a large fire pit. Carefully, he set the trough up over their fire pit and filled it just shy of full with water.

Twenty minutes of careful drilling later, Joven had been able to drill a hole from the top into the core of the bone. Though the smell was quite pungent, he managed to clear out the marrow from the inside, a channel that was about as thick as his thumb.

The whole time he worked, the tanners watched with amazement as he worked on a bone far larger than any they had ever seen before. Someone had the presence of mind to provide a tray for the marrow, which was whisked away immediately. One of the tanners gave him a jar of powder they used for cleaning bones, and Joven poured most of it into the trough as the water heated up.

When the water was bubbling, he carefully lowered the bone in and watched. The bone sank like a stone to the bottom, slowly rattling under the currents of boiling water, but otherwise staying submerged. Joven stepped back and sat down with a sigh. One of the men held a tankard out to him, and Joven took it. It smelled of ale, and he took a swig and nodded his thanks. In silence, the tanners went back to their business, occasionally checking on the barbarian as he waited patiently

The two men waited for him just outside, where it was cooler. While it wasn't anywhere near the year-round snowfall that Balator went through, it was still chilly enough that the outside was a refreshing change from the radiating heat of the fire. Sweat beaded at Joven's brow as he waited. The size of the bone and the density of flesh and fat adhering to the bone would determine how long it would take to clean. He suspected he would be there for a few hours at best.

He settled to wait. He looked around, thinking. He still had a few parts of the hydra that he could use...

"Hey," he said to one of the apprentice tanners, who stared at him wide-eyed and nodded. "Get your master craftsman." he ordered. The young man ran off quickly.

Minutes later, an elder craftsman approached. Unlike his apprentice and journeymen workers, the senior tanner wore clean white clothes and an unblemished work apron. Most of his hair had fallen out, and his eyes were slightly squinted as he peered at the barbarian unafraid.

"You asked for me?" the elder said, waving the apprentice back to his task.

"Yes." Joven said. "I am Joven."

"Maurice."

Joven dug in his pack and pulled out a roll of the hydra hide he had taken from Endrance's kill. It was roughly a six foot square patch of intact hide from the flank where he had salvaged most of the meat. Joven and Bridget has scraped everything off the inside of the hide, and it had dried quite nicely over the last few days. He had a few of the harder, large head scales, but he was keeping those.

He held out the hide, and the man took it. His eyes widened when he examined the hide with knobby hands, permanently stained from years of work.

"This is from the same beast whose bone you're cleaning?" the man asked.

Joven nodded.

The man seemed to approve of the hide, holding it out to the barbarian. Joven held up a hand stopping him. "I want to trade." Joven said. "I will give you this hide, if you will do something for me."

"What is it?" he asked.

Joven pointed to the trough, where the solution boiled with the bone in it. "I am making a staff." he said. "I want something I can wrap the handle with, that is as good as the bone I'm working with."

The craftsman nodded, considering the material. "Did you want to use the hide?" he asked.

Joven shrugged. "It would take too long to cure, and I need to be on my way tomorrow morning. Do you have anything of quality worth the trade?" he asked.

Maurice nodded. "I'll check my wares." he said, leaving. He came back minutes later, holding a strip of black material that looked almost like silk.

He handed it over to Joven to let him examine it. The strip was three feet long and only four inches wide. As he held it, it had weight, but was as smooth and slinky as a thin strip of silk cloth. Looking closely, he could see no threads, but a strange striation to the treated hide that looked almost like there were little lines of silver shot through it that resembled lightning. As he rubbed it between his thumb and fingers, he discovered it was slightly elastic.

"What is this?" Joven asked. "It doesn't feel like leather."

Maurice smiled. "When I inherited this place, my master tells me a story. In this story, over a hundred years ago, a great bat came to live in a cave high up in the mountains nearby. It was big enough to carry sheep off into the night, and strong enough to bite through steel. It's skin crackled with lightning, and thunder boomed when it called. It had become a threat to the city, and the Iron King sent thirty trained men to slay it. Only the archers, who wore no metal, returned from the expedition. They had managed to mortally wound it with arrows, but it had shocked the rest of the men to death."

Joven nodded. "We've had folk tales of creatures like that. We call them storm bats."

Maurice snorted. "Sounds like a good name to me. Well, the men considered the job done, but the original owner of this place, he wanted to see what kind of leather he could make with a creature like that. So he set out with his son and his brother, out to the mountain, and eventually he found it. But it had been nearly four days, and they had to work quickly. They only managed to salvage the webbing between the wings, which you hold a bit of right there. Even decades later, the treatment they performed has kept it in pristine condition."

Joven scowled, holding it out to him. "I can't take this. It is more valuable than what I brought." he said.

Maurice snorted again. "That's the thing." he replied, making no action to take it. "What you gave me is far more valuable. Over the years, I've sold small amounts of the material to special tailoring jobs, one of which was for the High King himself. That's honestly just the scraps that have been left behind. I have looked at that strip of leather for decades, and could never find a use for it."

Joven looked uncertain, staring down at the black strip again.

"Besides." Maurice said, gesturing to the simmering bone. "If this project is so important that you're going to use a dragon's bone for the base, then a storm bat could be the only thing that I can think of that would be suitable for this."

Joven nodded, finally rolling the leather up and pocketing it. "I'll use it. You have my thanks, old man." he said.

Maurice rolled his eyes. "Of course." he said. "So, tell me something. Is this for a mage?" he asked.

The bodyguard nodded slightly, looking at the trough. "Yeah." he said, smiling wryly.

The craftsman shrugged, turning away. "Ironsoul's been catering to the appeal of mages since we began. You're going to want to fill the core of that staff, or you're just wasting space."

Joven put thought into that, letting the old man go back to his work. He carefully added water to the trough as it evaporated, and skimmed the organic matter off the top as it rose from the bone. He was worried there would be fat staining, but his diligence was rewarded. Only an hour and a half later, he pulled the bone out to find it completely clean and smooth. The boiling had even cleaned the residual marrow from the inside.

He took the bone back with him to the inn, and left the tanners the iron trough. He was sure they would have a use for it. Either way, he would be able to rest better, now that he had it cleaned.

On the road the next day, Giselle was happy to show off her new clothes to the group several times. Enrique had made her four dresses, three sets of pants, and half a dozen shirts. He had even made her little sandals that would strap onto her feet, despite the difference in anatomy. His work was genius, and everything he made for her looked just as good as if he had been making clothing for wolfmen all his life. She was wearing a pretty red shirt embroidered with orange butterflies and tan pants with a doubly thick cuff that could have the stitches removed and made into longer legs as she grew. She was happy, babbling on in her own language, which Joven was no closer to understanding than when she had first showed up.

Joven had slept better, but was still anxious knowing Endrance wasn't with them. He had been responsible for the man's safety for over a year at this point, and his absence made Joven uneasy. He had much more of Ironsoul to traverse, and he hoped they could push hard to get to the capitol city.

They had barely gotten out of sight of Lakestead, when they rounded a bend of the road and found over two dozen men standing there waiting for them. Dressed in mismatched sets of armor and weapons, the group didn't have the bearing of a military group. They may have looked unprofessional, but each one had a black hand print across their faces.

A man stepped forward as they slowed to a stop, while six men raised crossbows, all of them pointed at Joven.

"Good afternoon, sir." the man said, flashing a broad smile. "It seems you've stumbled across our humble toll stop."

Joven felt a tic tugging at the corner of his mouth. "Oh?" he said, playing dumb.

"Yes, my barbarian friend!" the man continued. "We would be more than happy to let you pass, but there's a tax in these parts for people like yourselves."

"Hey, those girls look pretty." one of the other men said.

"Indeed they do!" the leader replied. "But we're not those sorts of people, are we? We're just running a toll, that's all."

Joven glanced back at Selene and the others. Giselle was nowhere to be found, but she had a habit of disappearing when others were around. Bridget leaned to the side, looking over the group of obvious highway bandits. She made eye contact with one of the men and winked, straightening to look at Joven.

"We've got time." she said with a faint smile.

Joven looked forward at the leader. "Okay." Joven said. "What is it you want?"

"Just some gold." the man replied. "No trouble."

"Damn." Joven exclaimed, dismounting. The men with crossbows kept them trained on him. He turned to his saddlebags as if he were going to root through it. "And here I was hoping you were looking for a fight."

He heard the sudden twang of a bow firing, and one of the crossbowmen rocked backwards, an arrow buried halfway to the feathers in his chest through the breastplate. He grabbed the handle to the Inheritance and hefted it, the axe head gleaming in the sunlight. Tanya, who had been in the back and harder to keep track of, fired a second and third arrow before the crossbowmen even realized what was happening, and brought their weapons to aim at her. Two more men went down, and the other three opened fire, missing, as the Draugnoa deftly twisted off of the saddle, both dismounting and drawing a fourth arrow as crossbow bolts snapped through the air above her.

Bridget and Selene leapt off their horses, weapons flying out of their respective sheaths. The bandits suddenly had a tougher fight on their hands then they had expected.

"Because," Joven continued, adjusting his grip on his axe as he rounded on the bandit leader. "All I've got to give is trouble!"

The leader, who had been keeping his longsword at his side, lifted it and lunged forward, only to catch the pommel of Joven's axe with his face. The man went down, unconscious, and Joven leapt over him and rushed to meet the eight men running up to attack him en masse. Joven had the advantage; he was trained to fight large numbers of men, whereas they lacked the discipline to do so effectively. He cleaved through two men before they even forced him to step back, and the whole while he could hear more screams and shouts as the Draugnoa did their part.

Tanya calmly sidestepped another crossbow bolt and returned with an arrow, hitting the man in the throat and coming clear out the other side. As he dropped, she continued moving, drawing another arrow to fire. There was only one crossbowman left, and she took him down before a pair of bandits got into melee range with her. She quickly batted the first man's sword aside with a flick of her horn bow, drawing a long knife from her hip with her other hand in a motion that had to have been practiced countless times. She efficiently slashed the man's throat open and cracked the second in the temple with her bow as she flowed past the falling first. She left the knife embedded in the chest of the second man as he staggered, drawing an arrow before he could even fall and releasing it at the next man charging her.

Selene had somehow been left untouched after she had killed two men with her chain dagger, all of them had been ten feet away and their throats had been filleted to the bone. Her eyes glowed red and were square pupiled as she licked her lips and taunted the two other combatants, who had decided that survival was a better idea and fled. She sighed in disappointment and set off after them, spinning the dagger on its chain as she ran.

Bridget had managed to hit a man so hard that he went tumbling through the air, his steel breastplate the only reason he wasn't cut in two. Her heavy curved blade moved as nimbly as a kitchen knife in her living wood arm, and her human left used the other with equal proficiency; her strike powering through another man's guard and hammering him into the ground faster than he could fall. She hopped into the fray with two more men, and broke the sword of one with her right arm while she chopped into the knee of another.