Gregor The Cripple

The township of Schlugel was a very prosperous place, with hundreds of people coming and going on any given day. It occupied the same niche as Waldsgarde, that of a border-town to Der Hexenwald, but to a much more successful degree.

It was situated on the banks of a large river – the slowly flowing Maultier – which stretched all the way from the termination of the Horrel gulf in the south to the northern extent of the wood; a natural channel of commerce which allowed for the swift haul of goods and people along the edge of the forest.

If Gregor were a more cowardly person, he would have kept with his original plan and travelled south to find passage aboard a ship bound for the Maultier. Such a circuitous route would have been a week slower, but much safer.

The goods that Schlugel trafficked did not only come up the river. The town thrived on the alchemical bounty of the wood, which they extracted and distributed to the rest of the world, greatly enriching themselves. Their profits were only limited by the number new workers they could find each day, given that most of them never came back.

It was this town that the group found themselves entering, fresh from the wood.

They found an inn and went about resupplying themselves, though Greta struggled to gather enough powder to feed her gun.

After a quick inquiry, Gregor obtained the address of an alchemical wholesaler operated by the innkeeper’s brother.

It was night by that point, so they slept heavily, enjoying the new-found luxury of not being rudely awoken to stand watch or to kill something that wanted to eat them.

In the morning, they rose to find real food awaiting them on the tables of the inn. Greta and Dieter, who had little experience with this kind of thing, were unaware just how much better a proper meal tasted after surviving on jerky and bread for a few days. They ate heartily, even though the food was average at best.

The group exited out into the street upon finishing their meal, intent on finding their way to the innkeeper’s brother to turn the accumulations of their hard work into hard cash.

They found the roads bustling with industry as people hauled crates and sacks by the cart-load to and from the flat-bottomed river barges, moored in readiness for the morning shipments.

Dieter looked around himself with wide eyes. “Are all cities like this?" He couldn’t wrap his head around the need to distribute so many things. He and Greta must have been from some small village which involved itself in little commerce.

Winding his way though the workers, Briar scoffed, “Kid, this isn’t a city. The world gets much bigger and busier than this.”

“I can’t imagine what Bosch will be like.”

“Loud and odorous.” Stated Gregor. “If I were you, I’d settle in a small town. It will be cheaper and more pleasant.” This rare non-wizardly advice was met with a moment of thoughtful silence.

“I suppose we’ll have to go and have a look.” Chirped a cheerful Greta, who interpreted this genuinely helpful suggestion as a sign of something approaching friendship. It was the first thing that Gregor had said to them which didn’t relate to the task at hand.

In other words, the line separating his professional association with them and his personal association with them was becoming blurred. A positive development, she thought.

Arriving at a storehouse near the docks, they foisted all their herbs onto the wizard, who was currently suffering the abuse of his infirmity. He wasn’t pleased, but understood the necessity.

Gregor was the only one among them who knew what the reagents were worth to an alchemist. If he wasn’t the one to handle the trade, the group was sure to be scammed.

He went in alone, receiving a nod from the burly, blackjack-wielding man at the door.

The interior was large, with rows of labeled crates neatly arranged beside each other, forming aisles. There was a small counter at the front of the room, almost blocking the door.

A thin, greasy man in a leather apron stooped over the side of the counter, scribbling away in a sales manifest.

Hearing the door open, the man glanced up from his work. “You here to buy or sell?” he asked, before really getting a look at his visitor.

“Both.” Was Gregor’s scratchy reply, followed by a cough.

The merchant spied Gregor’s pointy hat and voluminous robes. “A wizard?” He remarked capriciously. “Always happy to see a wizard.”

“Always? Do wizards frequently come here?”

“Well, I wouldn’t say ‘frequently’, but one fellow named Labourd stops by every month or so.”

“I see.”

Following this, Gregor gave him a rough inventory, and dumped what he had on the table. The man was right, he really did have some good stuff. If Gregor weren’t heading to the tower immediately after this, he’d be keeping a lot of it for his own use.

The tower had its own alchemical stores, which he planned to thoroughly plunder.

Giving a whistle of appreciation, the merchant asked, “How deep did you go? Some of these are pretty rare.”

“I accompanied a group travelling from Waldsgarde.”

“… On the other side of the forest? You passed though the centre?”

“Correct.”

“Need work? I can afford to pay very well for someone who’ll reliably take a party of herb-pickers to the centre.”

Gregor shook his head.

“Shame.”

They haggled briefly and half-heatedly, with the merchant letting him collect a very generous price – no doubt trying to win favour with the capable wizard in the unknowably vain hope that he might come back looking for a job.

“You said that you were looking to buy?”

Gregor nodded. “Opium. Do you keep any?”

***

The specie of the region were minted in thin silver and posed a new and wonderful attraction to Greta, who held a fat purse in her two hands. She found the weight and the jingle quite alluring in a way that she had never expected from herself.

“All of it? Ours?” Squawked Dieter, suffering an immediate pang of embarrassment at the lapse in his composure. The other two men in the party seemed to regard the largeness of their cut with nonchalance, so he resolved that he should be the same.

Gregor pressed his own purse into the darkness of his cloak, “The threat of death is the promise of value. This is regular.”

Their business in Schlugel concluded, the party walked athwart the river by bridge, moving away from the forest that had almost killed them, and sought horses.

Now that they had a horse-permitting road ahead of them, and a long journey from Schlugel to the tower and then to Bosch, horses were a vital utility. The group split after brief conversation. Greta and Dieter found a dealer to buy from, while Gregor and Briar, who were far more worldly (unscrupulous), went to visit a hackneyman.

They found him, weather-beaten and sun-bleached, hawking coach fares to passers-by. They accosted him with their needs. For Briar, a small mare or gelding would do. He planned always to travel light and be nimble. For Gregor, two large coach-pullers were necessary; he intended to soon acquire a coach and cargo from the tower.

They each paid the hawker for a week's use of the horses, and made to rendezvous with the younger pair. It goes without saying, but neither man intended to return their new hires. This made them horse thieves, but they were soon to travel beyond the region, and what did a wizard and a bandit care for the law? Gregor held that the hackneyman's loss was his own fault for being stupid enough to trust them, and Briar didn't care enough about the matter to think upon it.

After an hour or so, the party reconvened. Greta and Dieter rode a pair of bay ponies, which would be considerably cheaper by price of full purchase than the horses Gregor and Briar had ‘hired’. It seemed that even after their significant windfall, the pair – or more likely just Greta, who could reasonably be called the pants-wearer between them – were a money conscious entity.

Saddled, rested, and resupplied, the party set out from Schlugel on the road to Bosch. The route was busy and safe, so they were able to travel in appreciable repose and admire the agrarian scenery, which contrasted starkly with their ramble through the hell-forest.

The young couple had eaten their fill of adventuring during those three long days and were quite sure that they never wanted to do anything like that again, which was wise. After this tower business was all settled and their purses were even heavier, they planned to try having a normal life. A life with a house and jobs, and neighbours who own noisy pets. Perhaps children. Certainly, they decided, gambling against death was not for them.

It was for people like Gregor and Briar, who had become addicted to the game, and who knew nothing else. Gregor especially was so good at the game that it would be a shame if he quit – his talent for playing would be wasted in normalcy.

It is widely known that Fate is a cruel bitch who abhors wasted potential, so she would never allow Gregor to quit so easily. She'd draw him back into the game to play until the end, for his ability was clearly too significant to squander.

Greta thought all this, but was not sad, and did not pity the wizard for his future – he was probably going to enjoy it.

"This town near the tower, is it large?"

"It could hardly be called a village. There are twelve buildings, I believe." They were headed toward a quaint little place in the valley below the tower called Schlechtegegend, which Gregor thought to be a rather terrible name. The few families that lived there had only one industry – catering to the needs of the resident wizard, for which they received generous payment and occasional magical favours.

The relationship between Schlechtegegend and the tower more resembled that of a landlord's estate and its serfs than that of neighbours. They farmed the land to put food on the wizard's plate, and travelled near and far to acquire whatever luxuries they could not produce locally. For several generations of tower master, all of the tower's servants and staff had come from the little village at its foot.

Thus, the group planned to visit Schlechtegegend first and the tower second, to collect information about any new occupants.

Along they rode at a relaxed pace, with Briar, Greta, and Dieter making idle conversation while Gregor brooded. The opium paste he now carried was burning a fresh hole in his mind.

It was a necessity, or so he told himself. Something to safeguard his life in the most dire of circumstances. Had Gregor not been languishing in withdrawal, the battles with Labourd and the Kopfbiest would have been far less risky. His mind would have been sharper, his body less feeble, and his endurance far greater.

Though he could feel the effects of withdrawal steadily diminishing, Gregor would still be a cripple in constant discomfort after their departure. Keeping opium on hand allowed him the option of temporarily escaping this condition.

Certainly, he insisted, opium must be kept for emergencies – and only for emergencies. If the demon were still present, Gregor would rather fight it with the aid of opium than without.

This preparedness was the entire reason for his purchase, or so he told himself.

***

Rolling fields and quaint little farmers’ hamlets abruptly gave way to pine wood and wide valleys, and Gregor knew that he was close. The trees here had long been protected from the loggers and the ever-ballooning agricultural needs of civilisation by healthy superstition and trepidation.

Local rustics feared the craven Schlechtegegenders and their wizard master, and both corporate and government interests in the nearby cities knew better than to direct their greed toward the territory of the tower, which over centuries had grown to be recognised as a functionally independent demesne, though this special status had never actually been ratified by any office.

This landscape of pine valleys in a sea of agriculturalized plots marked the only place that Gregor had ever called home. Despite himself, he felt quite pleased at his return.

As they proceeded, the road grew coarse from being little-used. Half-established wheel ruts criss-crossed the uneven surface, putting the horses at risk of wrong-footing, and thus forcing them to ride single-file between the shallow marks, Gregor at the head of the column.

The main road was well behind them now, and the tower could be seen in the distance – a dark protrusion on the dim horizon.

“At this pace, night will herald our arrival in Schlechtegegend. We’ll make for the tower in the morning.” Gregor spoke for the first time in a while, eye locked on the far-away silhouette. “Certain preparations must be made.”

“Will there be anywhere to stay, or are we sleeping in a barn again?”

“The Alderman will have beds for us.” He felt a cough bubbling up in his throat, but for the first time in weeks it seemed content to stay snug inside.

A few more minutes of travel brought the party to crest a steep ridge, opening up the great valley beyond and below. Ancient buildings were scattered in handfuls along the meandering path of a stream, feeding down to a small lake in the distance.

Scores of pines littered the sheer slope of the walls, but none were to be found on the flat, fertile land that made the bed of the valley. These walls the party descended, navigating a narrow switchback which seemed to receive little maintenance.

Briar studied the path ahead, strewn with branches and collapsing into mudslides in parts, and then as the sun dipped below the valley’s opposite ridge he looked to the village cast in shadow with befuddled eyes. “Have you noticed?” He directed this inquiry toward the wizard.

Gregor nodded. “There are no lights in the windows below, and this route is far too vital to let fall into disrepair.”

Not all was right in Schlechtegegend.

With vigilance they descended, searching the village for signs of obvious disturbance. They found neither anomaly nor normalcy, for the place was deserted. No grandams were wash-boarding laundry in the stream and no smoke rose from chimneys for the evening meal. There was not a single person to be seen, and not a single sign that there had been anybody to see for some months.

Proceeding ever downward and gaining a clearer picture of the situation, they discovered the fields to be weedy and wild, and the animal pens empty.

Upon meeting the floor, the party walked upstream though the shadow of the valley, assisted by a bobbing magelight of Gregor’s conjuring.

They came upon a little thatched cottage with a low stone wall – a small dwelling for maybe one or two people. The door was ajar and noticeably dented, with a fallen metal latch laying a few feet within the threshold.

Horses halted, the whole party looked to Gregor in askance. It was now obvious that the village had been forcibly depopulated, but what did that mean for them? Did it change their plans?

Gregor dismounted without a word. Finding his steps rather more steady than they had been a week ago, the wizard ambled his way through the shattered entrance. His companions followed.

The place was musty and dusty, and the food on the table had spoiled and withered months ago. There were signs of a struggle – things thrown about, chairs overturned – but not much else.

“No bodies at least. That’s good, right?” Greta offered in fain error. The girl, too pleasant for her own good, somehow mistook Gregor for a regular man in possession of regular feelings and made an attempt to soften the event.

Gregor was not nearly so concerned for the safety of the Schlechtegegenders as he was for the fact that they were at one time his people. Whether or not they were still alive had little impact on his offence at the act committed.

“As a matter of course, I would like to kill whoever did this.” He uttered, sole eye roving about in search of culprit-identifying details, and the others took that to be a reasonable response.

None of the buildings held an answer, just more signs of the obvious. None except the last.

***

The Alderman’s manor was a large old thing, particularly ancient and more than a little run-down. The group approached to find the grand oak doors flung from their hinges, laying flat on the floor of a dust-strewn entrance hall.

They entered expecting to discover nothing new, and were shocked to find the Alderman awaiting them, crumpled and desiccated at the bottom of a staircase.

Briar slunk over to crouch before the corpse, inspecting it in obvious confusion. “What a very odd way to die.” He said, observing its bizarre position and abnormal state of decomposition.

A rune-etched staff of steel with a golden tip was bent and twisted in the grasp of his shattered hand, the whole thing warped from the force of some titanic impact.

His body was also warped, with the path of his spine following the contour of the steps underneath him. Evidently, he had been struck by an inhuman force. The man’s neck bore an ugly gash. There were no signs of rot or decay despite the considerable gulf of time between the present moment and his death, he was just grey, withered, and bloodless.

“Show me the back of his head.” Commanded Gregor as he also approached.

Greta grimaced. The corpses and gore from the witchwood monsters had been fairly disgusting, but this was different. A dead man lay before her and she didn’t know how to feel about it, which troubled her more than a little.

She’d never seen a dead person before, and she was unsettled by the casual way Briar and Gregor were looking it over. The bard was even touching it- him. It was a him.

Greta noticed that she was freaking out a little bit, and looked to Dieter, who seemed calm enough. She knew better – she knew what he was like, she knew how he pretended when he was around her, and she thought it was cute. It was a comfort.

“His soul was extracted, blood too.” Gregor was inspecting a pitch-black section of skin at the base of the Alderman’s skull.

Owing to the massive impact and the qualities of the corpse, it was fairly certain that the killer was some manner of sorcerer, likely the tower’s new master.

What kind of sorcerer had an interest in extracting souls and blood, and no need for the food or willing servants provided by the village?

They had come to Schlechtegegend seeking information from the people, and the people had provided it. The tower’s new occupant was a necromancer, and Gregor was already planning his annihilation.

With the mystery solved, Dieter took it upon himself to give the dead man a dignified burial. Greta was visibly pleased by this noble act, and thus Briar offered the boy a discreet thumbs-up, wrongfully assuming that he was doing it to impress the girl. In the bastard’s mind, there could be no other motive so reasonable or sensible.

Dieter saw this sign of approval and was glad, enjoying his own little misunderstanding.

The remaining three set about situating themselves while he was digging, following their wizard around the unlit dwelling as he navigated by memory and magelight.

Owing to neglect, the place was fairly run-down. Cobwebs crisscrossed the hallways, rot had set in around any window left open and an ugly black mould had begun creeping where it wished.

They found rooms with beds, but Greta declared, “There is absolutely no way I am sleeping on any of those disgusting things.” So they settled for camping in the sitting room near the fireplace, finding that it made for superior accommodation.

“This ‘Alderman’ had a pretty nice place for such a small village.” Posed Briar, reclining in a moth-eaten chair of formerly high quality.

“Schlechtegegend had a lord, at least nominally. You met him downstairs. Once, the villagers were the serfs of his lineage, but the tower eroded the significance of the position. His line still takes care of administrative tasks and enjoys the size of their ancestral home, but nothing more. And no longer, it seems.”

“Why him?” At some point, Greta had obtained Randolph and begun massaging his fuzzy little body to sleep as a means of distracting herself from the corpse and their coming encounter with its creator. “Why was he the only body?”

“Lives are valuable things, they can be put to use in many ways. I expect that the necromancer needed to spend the lives of the Schlechtegegenders elsewhere. That mangled staff was a gift from the tower, with it, the Alderman would have been able to meaningfully threaten the necromancer, so he was killed here, and all remaining value was extracted.”

This answer didn’t seem to bring Greta any satisfaction. “You’re speaking as if they’re all dead.”

“Necromancers use the living as stock to manufacture the dead.”

Gregor was speaking calmly, expression solid as stone, and despite herself, Greta found that she envied his stoicism. All of this dead village business didn’t sit right with her, not one bit. The thought of lives being commodified and spent skeeved her out, made her stomach churn.

She wasn’t made for situations like this and she didn’t want to be. Though she envied Gregor, she would hate to become like him.

Tomorrow, they would visit the evil man in the tower pay him his dues. After that, she planned to take Dieter away from all of this, make a boatload of babies, and avoid wizards for a lifetime. That was the only sensible response to so much horribleness.

She sat there quietly with a blissfully sleeping Randolph in her hands, planning a happier future.

Gregor saw his opportunity. He excused himself and shuffled off to another room, for laudanum was impossible to prepare in the presence of the rat.