The Merchant Adventurer (7 page)

When Boltac awoke, he found himself in his bed. Bright light streamed in through the window and he was, inexplicably, alive. He returned to consciousness slowly and from a great distance. At first he couldn’t remember how he had gotten here, or what had happened. Then, as the memory of it flooded back, he became fearful. Unable, at first, to separate fantastic dream from terrible reality, he flung back the covers. His leg was straight. His shirt was ripped, but the skin underneath was perfect and unscarred. That really had been a
Magic
potion. Hell of a way to find out.

He got out of bed and stretched. Then he went downstairs.

At the foot of the narrow stairs, he found the Farm Boy asleep in a pile of cloaks. Even in his sleep he clutched the sword Boltac had given him. When Boltac nudged him with his boot, the lad awoke with a start.

“Ahh!” screamed the Farm Boy, jumping back. When he saw it was Boltac he said, “I was standing guard. In case those things came back.”

“No kid, that’s
sleeping
guard.” Boltac softened a little. “But, uh, I appreciate it.” He stepped over the boy and brought out a loaf of thick black bread and some butter. “C’mon, breakfast.”

They ate in silence for a time. Finally, Boltac asked, “Do you have a name?”

“In my village, they call me Relan.”

“En-henh,” said Boltac. “I thank you, Relan. You saved my life.”

Relan asked, “What were those things?”

“Evidently, what you killed was an Orc.”

“An Orc?”

“An Orc,” Boltac said with a shrug, to indicate that he wasn’t the guy making the rules.

“So they were bad,” said Relan.

“Yeah, kid, they were definitely bad.”

“Are we going to go get them?”

“We? No. I’m not going to go get them. That’s why I pay taxes.”

“But that Evil Wizard took the woman you Love!”

“Love is a strong word to use, for a pleasant association. Besides, I’m a Merchant, not a fighter.”

“If you’re not in Love with her, why did you charge out of your store to save her?”

“I, uh… hey, look. It’s complicated.”

“And if you’re not a fighter, how did you manage to kill two Orcs?”

“And a wolf,” said Boltac, shaking his head.

“That’s pretty good.”

“That’s only because you suck,” snapped Boltac.

“Suck or not, I’m going after that Wizard. Somebody has to do the right thing.”

“Kid, the right thing to do is almost always to keep your head down and make a buck.”

“That sounds like something a coward would say.”

“Eh-henh. It’s the kind of thing the living says. Get this, I was very stupid. And I am lucky to be alive. So I am not gonna push my luck. Besides, this kind of thing is why I pay taxes. Let the guards deal with this.”

“You’re a coward,” said Relan.

“Whattaya want from me? I’m a Merchant. I ain’t no Hero.”

“Well, why would anybody want to be that?” asked Relan. “If the whole world were Merchants, nobody would have saved your life.”

“If the whole world was Merchants, everybody would buy and sell instead of stab and hack,” snapped Boltac. “Look, I’m grateful for your help. It’s not like I’m not grateful. So, uh, as a reward, take what you like from the store–as much as you can carry without horse or wagon–and then go to your death. Have fun. Me, I’m going to find the Duke and see what he’s gonna do about all this. See if he can get my innkeeper lady friend back.”

Relan shook his head and took another bite of bread.

When Boltac stepped outside, he was greeted by smoke hanging thick in the air. Everywhere, there were signs of carnage. The Bent Eelpout and most of the other side of the street had burned to the ground. Boltac saw the dead wolf and Orcs, but did not linger over them.

He turned and headed north. On his walk, he passed several bodies lying in the street. One was a young girl, maybe nine. Her pretty dress was torn and soaked with blood. Boltac looked away from her corpse and muttered, “Bad for business,” as if the phrase was a charm that could ward off emotion.

As he crossed the bridge to the keep, he expected to see a line of petitioners. But there was no one. Not even a guard at the gate. The court should have been full of angry citizens demanding redress and protection. The walls should have been decorated with Orcs’ heads on pikes. By now, he should have been able to hear wounded members of the Ducal Guard drinking by the stables. Their laughter and the exaggerated stories of their bravery should have carried over the wall. There should have been smoke from the blacksmith, and the sound of weapons being sharpened.

But there was nothing.

In the courtyard, he passed the royal carriage standing all alone. It looked like someone had abandoned it in haste. From the stable, he heard the whinny of a horse.

Boltac pushed his way through the half-opened door and into the keep. There was no one in the antechamber. There was no one anywhere. Every room he checked was empty. It was as if all the people had simply vanished. He cried out, but only the echo of his own hello answered.

When he reached the empty throne room the penny dropped. Mostly, it was the tapestry flapping in a wind that shouldn’t have been blowing. Behind the heavy, musty, overly stylized scene of a Heroic battle that had never happened, Boltac found a secret door. Behind the door was a staircase.

He followed it down and down again, through narrow stone passageways until he emerged at a set of docks hidden in a high-walled cove on the north side of the island. From this island in the middle of the river Swift, he could see that all the boats were gone. Discarded items were strewn everywhere. Over there was a guard’s helmet; at his feet was a chest of silks. He could almost see the scene as it had happened:

A woman, clamoring, shrieking for her handmaiden or a guard to bring the chest of rich silks onto the boats. But, of course, there is no room for such things. Someone knocking the chest to the docks. Throwing the woman into a boat. Jumping in after her and pushing the craft out into the current.

The water would have taken them south quickly. If they survived the uncomfortable ride through the rapids, they would already be out of the grey, mist-covered mountains of Robrecht and enjoying a leisurely ride to Shatnapur, the northernmost city in the Southron Kingdoms. Odds were they were all free and clear, floating down a river with the sun in their faces.

The guards would know how close they came, but the nobles–the soft and careless ones who claimed privilege to rule–would be thinking only of what Southron delicacies they might feast upon in a few days’ time. Rare tropical fruits. The brains of monkeys. Anything delectable and procured at great suffering to the peasantry. What they weren’t thinking about, Boltac knew, was the body of a young girl, dead in a gutter.

Boltac spit in the river, then climbed back up the stairs.

Back in the throne room, he tried to wrap his head around it. There was no one. They had
all
gone. At the first sign of danger, the Duke had fled. Boltac walked to the throne and sat down. For a second, he almost took it seriously. Then he laughed at himself.

This wasn’t the chair for him. He was a Merchant. Everyone knew you couldn’t buy a throne. Of course, such a thing could be inherited. But at some point a throne had to be won, with a sword. A sword drenched in blood. An illiterate barbarian could sooner be a King than a fat Merchant. And it had been so long since Robrecht had had a real King. Or anything other than a figurehead installed by a larger, more powerful Kingdom seeking to control the trade routes.

The health of Kingdoms, thought Boltac, depended not on war but on commerce. The opportunity for everyone to conduct their little businesses in peace was what kept people happy and productive. But, for some reason, the only people deemed fit to rule were warriors and their inbred descendants. Something was wrong with this logic. But it was not for him to fix.

Boltac heaved himself off the fancy chair and left the room. Over the wall of the castle, he saw heavy columns of smoke rising from the north end of town. In twos and threes, people fled from the north gate. To the south, the damage was less but there was a larger stream of traffic. People were leaving. Was this the way it was to be? Was this how his town died?

By the time Boltac returned to the store, Relan was gone. Boltac’s shopkeeper’s eye quickly saw what the boy had taken. All the wrong things. The idiot was probably even walking. Walking to his Heroic death.

Boltac thought about opening for business. He thought about barricading the store against looters. Then he looked across the street to the still-smoldering remnants of The Bent Eelpout. He stared for a long time. He stared until a light rain began to fall. He watched the drops turn to steam as soon as they hit the smoldering coals of what used to be an inn. Each drop was infinitesimal. Wasted. A single drop could not put out a fire. But enough water could wash an entire city away. He savored his melancholy and rolled this thought around for a while. Then he turned his back on the window.

Boltac looked around his store. Not only had the kid had taken all the wrong things, he had taken all the wrong things to carry them in. Boltac shook his head. Why travel if you don’t have the luggage you need to enjoy the journey? He had sold a lot of luggage with that line, but that didn’t stop it from being good advice.

He went into the back and opened the chest on the left. He took out all of the small leather bags filled with coin and set them aside. He would need money, of course. After all, it was the most multipurpose substance known to man. But, for Boltac’s purposes, there was something in here more valuable than money.

“Ah HA!” he said as he held up a burlap sack. The sack looked like its only purpose in life was to hold twenty pounds of potatoes. “There you are,” Boltac said to the sack as if to a precious child he had found in a game of hide and seek. Of course, this was a ridiculous analogy–Boltac hated children–but this burlap sack? He couldn’t have been more proud of the sack.

He walked through his well-stocked store finding items he might need for a journey to the depths of some foul, unknowable place. Into the sack’s modest opening he placed five goatskins of water, two of wine, ten stout torches, a few flagons of the finest oil, three daggers, an axe, an ornate and well-jeweled silver mace in a wooden case, a roll of rare tools used for the picking of locks and dismantling of doors and chests, several hundred feet of good rope, an extra pair of boots, two hats, several wool blankets, a lambswool sweater (the depths could be cold) a side of pork cured in salt, five pounds of hard biscuit, and a pound of chocolate.

But that wasn’t all. He flitted here and there among the shelves, adding this, that, and the other–oddments and ointments–anything Boltac thought he might need. Because if Boltac knew one thing about Adventure, it was that you never knew.

The second-to-last thing to go in was the Magic Lantern of Lamptopolis. And very last of all, his thick wool Gauntlets of Magic Negation. Didn’t want to be reaching around in a bag like that with bare hands, that’s for sure.

Through all of this, the bag never bulged or grew heavier than the 17 or 20 pounds that a sack that size, filled with potatoes, could be expected to weigh. The more Boltac stuffed into the sack, the wider he smiled. For a moment, he considered trying to fit EVERYTHING into the sack, just to see if he could. But then he thought better of it. Even a Magic sack had to have its limits. And if it didn’t? That wasn’t the kind of thing Boltac wanted to know.

Boltac hated Magic, but he loved this bag. It was Themistres’ Bag of Holding. One of only a very few known to exist. It was said that it would contain anything the owner could place into it. It never got heavier or bigger. It was, in effect, a bottomless bag.

Themistres, as the story went, made the bag for his wife. She was a large woman who liked to travel heavy. The Wizard had not made many of them, and no Wizard seemed to have been able to duplicate his feat. Wizards seldom married, and the ones who did, generally wound up turning their wives into something that wouldn’t bother them. The Bag of Holding was generally believed to be a myth, a pleasant fiction of overloaded husbands and servants everywhere. But Boltac had found one. And what a wondrous thing it was. Priceless, really.

With this thought of pricing, he remembered the coins he left out in the back. He took out his mittens and put them on. He removed the Magic Lantern from the sack. It did not light as he touched it. Then, he added some gold to the sack. As he did, Boltac wondered: what was the point of holding any in reserve? It wasn’t like he expected to be coming back. And that’s when Boltac realized–told the truth of it to himself–he probably wasn’t going to make it out of this Adventure alive.

He stopped and stood up in the back room of his store. He had worked so hard to build this store into a thriving business. Now, standing among the money he had worked so hard to accumulate, all of it seemed worthless. The heavy weight of the Gauntlets of Magic Negation dragged his hands towards the floor, and his shoulders stooped. For a moment, tears ran down his round, weathered face. He let out one sob. Then sniffed and bent back to the task at hand.

He piled
all
the gold into the sack. Who knew, perhaps he could buy his way out of this trouble? That was what a shrewd Merchant would do.

When he picked up the lamp this time, even though he was still wearing the mittens, a faint light shone out from its depths. Boltac didn’t notice.

Boltac left his store and headed north, for points unknown and unknowable. Yes, it was stupid. But there was nothing else to do. In the end, he had no more choice than a single raindrop falling onto the smoldering remains of a burned building. But that didn’t mean he didn’t have any choices. It had been a mistake to try to fight like a Hero. Boltac could see that now. He wasn’t a Hero. He wasn’t a King either. But he wasn’t powerless. Rather than go off half-cocked, he could use the skills and tools he had. He could do a better job of outfitting himself. And he would be damned if he would be
walking
to his death.