Underkeeper

It was evening by the time Bernt was finally allowed to go home. Jori had been well out of the useful range of their familiar bond, but he felt her approach as he made his way down toward the docks. Stomach growling, he made a minor detour to stop by a rickety food cart.

The vendor, Cal, used to sneak him day-old loaves in his orphanage days. Back then, Cal had been helping his aging father work the cart. Now that he was running it on his own, Bernt liked to return the favor by giving the cart his business whenever he was in the neighborhood—which was pretty much all the time. Not that Cal needed it—his cart was always busy.

“Evening, Bernt.” he greeted cheerfully. “I’ve got just the thing for you! I developed a new, extra-spicy cabbage pickling recipe! You won’t need a wand to start fires anymore!”

“Three, please,” Bernt said, handing him a palmful copper pieces.

Cal made the money disappear instantly with a practice motion and quickly stuffed three small loaves of bread with deliciously spiced mystery meat and pickled cabbage, handed him the order with a friendly wave, and turned to his next customer. Bernt didn’t realize till he rounded the block that he was holding an extra, unfilled loaf—a day-old. He snorted, and started in on that one first as he walked.

The questions had gone on and on. The investigators separated all of them and asked them about everything—where the now-sealed breach was, how many kobolds there were and what exactly they looked like, what kinds of injuries the prisoners had, how the bolts that they used for traps looked and even which spells the Underkeepers used to fight them. Especially the spells, in fact. The investigator, some Adventurers’ Guild bureaucrat who Bernt had never heard of, seemed first doubtful and then surprised that the Underkeepers were actually competent in basic mage formations and combat spells. Bernt thought that was more than a little condescending.

After an hour of painstaking explanation, the man then started over from the beginning, checking to make sure that he wasn’t leaving anything out. When he finally thought they were done, though, he launched into a new set of questions about the tunnel architecture, how the roof in the kobolds’ chamber was supported and how well finished the walls and floor were.

Bernt had done his best to cooperate. They’d made it clear they were trying to understand the kobold threat, not interrogate him for any kind of crime, but it still felt like he’d done something wrong.

When he’d left, he didn’t see any sign of the others. Either they were already done, or they were being questioned somewhere else. Honestly, Bernt couldn’t imagine Fiora or Kustov allowing anyone to pester them with annoying questions that long, and the family of farmers was probably too traumatized for this kind of treatment. So, maybe he really had held out the longest.

He wolfed the food down as he walked, saving just the bottom few bites of one loaf. This he tossed at a sewer grate, where Jori was now shadowing him. Her tiny, leathery hand reached up through the bars to snatch it out of the air. Jori loved pickled cabbage.

Bernt stopped, staring at his hands. They were still shaking a bit. He couldn’t get the memory of Ed’s impaled form out of his head, and the eye-watering smell of blood, shit, and burnt kobold still tickled as if it were lingering in his nose.

For the first time, Bernt really took note of all the guards walking around him. They were all over the upper city, patrolling, guarding government buildings and gates, and policing public spaces. He’d never considered that they should be keeping track of the sewers—but the sewers were technically a military vulnerability for the city. Not to mention the criminals who occasionally tried to set up shop down there.

There was no reason why one of the many races of the deep places in the earth couldn’t simply break into the city from below. As things stood now, it would be child’s play. They were, in fact, probably very lucky that it was kobolds that had broken through, rather than dark elves or a horde of goblins or whatever else lived down there.

Maybe being an Underkeeper was a lot more dangerous than he’d thought.

***

As it turned out, the guard was supposed to run patrols down in the sewers—they just didn’t do so. Why get their feet wet when there were already a bunch of mages and workers wandering around down there? They’d see it if something came up, right?

Apparently, the magistrate didn’t agree. Bernt showed up to work the next day as he always did, and Ed handed him paperwork for his duties that day, as usual. What wasn’t so usual was what he saw through Jori’s eyes when he walked toward his first stop. Near the city walls, pairs of guards patrolled the sewers, forcing Jori to go around, and to hide in cracks as they passed. The snatches of conversation that he caught through the interference of the bond were invariably filled with venom directed at the damned Underkeepers who had apparently forced this hideous assignment upon them.

Whatever Iriala said, Bernt was fairly certain that Ed did know how to play politics. He clearly had a grudge against Commander Righmond, and pushing the issue now, when the threat was real, had produced results that a simple complaint a week ago could not have. He’d probably been waiting for the right time to bring it up for years.

Bernt avoided the patrolling guards for the next few hours, which was easy, since Jori could find them without being detected. After that, he had to see to a few house calls, which were mostly mundane plumbing issues, except for a noise complaint below the Rusted Boar Inn. When he pried open the sealed sub-basement underneath the Inn’s wine cellar, he found himself looking down into a nicely furnished living room and a very chagrined family of dwarven squatters who had been playing a board game.

Supposedly, they thought the room belonged to a demolished and buried house that someone else had built over, making it no one’s property and free for occupation. Right. Deciding this wasn’t his problem, Bernt suggested to the innkeeper that he negotiate a rental agreement with them and left.

***

He was heading back toward the office, pushing his way through crowds of tired workers pouring out of the Crafters’ District at the end of the workday, when he heard the horns. An alarm was sounding near the eastern wall. Guards rushed past, pushing through the crowds with urgency.

He knew the signal—wall breach. Mages were required to integrate into the realm’s military at need, so military communications were part of the required curriculum at the Mages’ Academy.

The breach wasn’t that close to where the kobold tunnel had been… but it was along the same wall… Cautioning Jori to stay well behind and out of sight through their bond, Bernt followed behind the guards, drawing his pyromancer’s wand. He wasn’t technically required to respond to this signal if he wasn’t formally drafted first, but could be a real opportunity. As he’d recently learned first hand, he could fight. And if the rest of the city saw what the Underkeepers were really capable of, maybe they would adjust their attitudes toward them. Plus, he might learn something. Adventurers should run toward trouble, not away from it, right? He heard thunder in the distance, followed by the rumble of a collapsing building. Then screams began to fill the street as dust rose and the crowd realized that something was seriously wrong. They were starting to stampede.

Thinking quickly, Bernt ducked into an alley. From there, he crossed over to a smaller residential street—it was nearly empty, but also a dead end. That didn’t matter. A few seconds later, he reached his goal: a sewer access shaft.

Skipping the ladder, he splashed directly down into the sludge and hurried through a small access tunnel back toward the main that led to the wall.

Turning a corner just moments later, he ran into his first kobold, literally. Being significantly larger, he bowled the little creature over, which likely saved his life. The scaled monster jumped up almost instantly and dove at him, claws flashing. By that time, though, Bernt had already raised a basic force shield.

He wasn’t very good with force spells, so he only had a few seconds. Whipping his wand over the top of the shield in panic, he pushed mana into it without guiding or shaping it in any way. Fire gushed out, filling the tunnel in front of him with a dull roar, followed by a squeal of pain.

When he stopped and the shield dropped, the kobold was shrieking, trying to put its clothes out. It had been a terrible spell, and horribly inefficient. Even a weak fireball would have done more damage, and required him to channel less mana besides. He’d practiced his pyromancy spells daily for years, but when he really needed to use one, he’d choked.

Disgusted with himself, he wove mana into a fire dart, a more compact version of a fireball that was safer to use in enclosed spaces—he didn’t want to raise the temperature down here any further. As he cast it, his shield dropped, having run out of power.

The kobold snarled and sprang up at him, taking the spell on its leg. Sharp claws dug into his right shoulder, and something sharp sliced down his neck and back. Bernt reeled, grabbed the little monster and flung it away. It struck the wall hard and fell down, dazed, still limply holding a knife in its right hand.

Since when had it had a weapon?

Before it could recover, he advanced on it, kicking it in the stomach, then the head. It squawked and then gurgled, no longer fighting back. Bernt put another fire dart through the top of its head and it went still.

His back felt like it was on fire. Hot blood trickled down, wetting his robes. He needed to get moving. Had to see what was going on at the wall.

But then Jori arrived. He hadn’t noticed, but she’d started coming for him the moment the fight started. Flashing past him with an enraged chitter, she sank her sharp needle teeth into the fresh corpse’s neck, easily piercing the soft scales there.

He tried to calm her down through the bond, but it didn’t work. She released the kobold’s neck only to scratch at its dead eyes as she chittered and hissed vitriolic imp curses. As she hopped onto its head, jumping up and down on its skull, Bernt saw that her eyes were glowing a demonic red. Then, as if she’d caught a surprising scent, she suddenly stopped and cocked her head.

Huh. That had never happened before.

That was when it got truly weird. Hissing loudly, Jori drove her clawed hand down onto the body’s chest. Her tiny claws didn’t penetrate the much tougher scales there, but the kobold jerked violently as if it were being stabbed—uh, as if it were alive and being stabbed. But it wasn’t. Bernt was sure.

Pretty sure, anyway.

Then a thin wisp of silver mist, lit by its own unearthly glow, rose out of the creature’s mouth and just hung in the air.

Before he could examine it more closely, Jori grabbed it and pulled it to her mouth, slurping it down like a physical object.

Bernt gaped. What in all the hells was that? As far as he could tell up until now, Jori had absolutely no magical abilities—a rarity for imps and one of the reasons he could afford to cast a familiar bond on her. It was a simple bonding spell, the type used for animal familiars. That meant there was no dark pact involved, and no risk of being branded as a warlock. On the other hand, there was a reason people normally bound demons with a proper demonic pact. It didn’t just give a warlock access to the demon’s infernal magics; it also gave them far more control of the bound demon.

If Jori had powers he didn’t know about, was the regular familiar bond even enough to keep her on a leash? Demons weren’t exactly known for their pro-social natures.

What other secrets might she be keeping?

Jori looked up at him, eyes wide, then back at the dead kobold. The red glow was fading now, and he sensed confusion from her. No, she wasn’t keeping secrets. He doubted she was even intelligent enough to do so, really.

Not yet, anyway.

They needed to get out of here. He was bleeding, and his back hurt like hell every time he tried to move his arms now that the adrenaline was wearing off. That damn thing had gashed him right down his back.

He shuddered at the thought. If it hadn’t had such terrible aim, it might have sunk that knife right into his neck. Bernt had almost been killed by a single kobold with a knife. How humiliating.

He’d been wrong. Setting a room full of kobolds on fire as part of a team was not the same thing as fighting something right to its face. If he was really going to become an adventurer, he needed to learn how to fight properly. Otherwise, his career would be painfully short.