Underkeeper

While Jori found a safe place to hunker down in the sewers, Bernt made his way back to the Underkeepers’ headquarters. It was slow going—people were in such a hurry to get away from the attack, they ended up causing traffic jams that were nearly impossible to circumvent.

When he arrived, he found the place empty. Ed, who should have been manning the office at this time, was nowhere to be found.

Bernt sighed, sinking down onto a chair to wait. The healing potions were in Ed’s supply closet, which was locked. Good thing it wasn’t too serious. Still, the wound stung terribly.

He wasn’t sure how long he’d been sitting there when the door burst open, startling him.

Fiora strode in, looking around wildly.

“Is Ed here? What the hells is going on out there?”

Bernt looked at her blankly, mind working to catch up. If Fiora had been on the other side of the city, she might not have heard the alarm. Especially if she was in the sewers at the time.

“It’s a wall breach,” he explained. “Ed’s not here.” Awkwardly, he gestured at his back and his blood-crusted robes. “I ran into a kobold in the sewer. I… it got me with a knife.”

Fiora stepped closer, examining the wound. “Did it get the drop on you? How did it even get you that high up? And why didn’t you take a potion? This is what they’re for!”

“The supply closet is locked. I have to wait for him to get back.” Bernt was trying very hard not to sound whiny, but failing. It hurt a lot.

Fiora snorted a laugh, then stared at him. “You can’t be serious…”

She grabbed her staff. “Wait a second.” She clucked at him and disappeared into Ed’s office. The sharp crack of breaking metal rang out, and then she came back holding a handful of small, cherry-red bottles, one of which she handed to him. The rest went into slots on her belt and a bag that hung from her shoulder.

“You’re an Underkeeper, and this is an emergency. A basic padlock like that is meant to keep out random sticky-fingered visitors, so they’re here when we need them—which is right now. Also, it costs barely two silver to replace. Ed might take it out of your pay, but he probably won’t bother.”

Feeling more than a little sheepish, Bernt drank. The pain lessened immediately, but the low-budget healing potion would take hours to properly heal the damage.

“Now,” Fiora went on. “Where is the breach, exactly?”

Bernt shook his head. “I never reached it. It’s at the eastern wall, a bit north of the gate, I think.”

“Good enough. Stay here. You don’t want to get into a fight while injured if you can help it.”

A moment later, the door slammed and he was alone.

He looked around the room. Now what?

***

In the end, Bernt decided to ignore Fiora and head back toward the breach. His injury didn’t hurt much anymore, even if it was still an inconvenience. More importantly, he wasn’t about to sit around and wait for things to happen around him.

Still, he didn’t have to be stupid about it. Drawing his wand, he followed behind a contingent of guards who were hurrying down the now nearly deserted streets. If an attack was coming, he’d have a nice buffer between himself and the enemy—and plenty of time to cast.

A few minutes later, his wound began to sting again, but he was committed. He would at least see how bad the breach was. If it was well in hand, he could always go home. But if it was bad, every mage might matter. He could make a difference. Besides, an adventurer wouldn’t turn their back on a situation like that, and he damned well wanted to be an adventurer.

In the end, it didn’t matter. By the time they arrived, the battle was over. Bodies littered the streets—mostly kobolds, but also humans, dwarves, a few half-elves, and a single orc in a guard’s uniform. Guards, mages, and a handful of people who looked like adventurers were arranged in a semicircle around a ragged hole where the street had collapsed just inside the walls. Ed and Fiora were both among them, but he couldn’t see any of the other Underkeepers.

As Bernt watched, the mages rained fire, stone, ice, and screaming shadows into the hole.

Not just mages, then, he thought. There was a warlock present.

A moment later, the adventurers jumped in, followed by the guards. There were a few shrill screams, but no further sounds of fighting. Seconds later, all was quiet and people began to emerge from the hole again.

Looking around, Bernt wondered what they would do now. What was supposed to happen at the end of a battle? He’d never really thought about it. Should they cheer? That certainly didn’t feel appropriate.

The guards he’d followed continued advancing on the carnage. An officer who had remained at the lip of the hole flashed them a signal and they stopped. They began checking all of the bodies, looking for survivors and administering potions. Every once in a while, they would draw a weapon to finish off a kobold.

Bernt hadn’t brought any other potions, so there wasn’t much he could do here. Berating himself for the oversight, he joined Ed and Fiora, who were now sitting down and resting against the city wall.

“I thought I told you to stay put,” Fiora said.

Bernt shrugged. It seemed stupid now to say that he came to help. They’d had it in hand.

“What happened?” he asked, hoping they’d drop it.

“The kobolds tunneled under the wall and into the sewer,” Ed said tiredly, “probably just trying to create another access point, like they had before. I doubt they were actually planning to attack right now, or there would have been more of them.” He frowned thoughtfully, then shrugged. “Anyway, they must have damaged something important, because the road collapsed. The wall’s damaged too.”

He was right. There were long cracks through the mortar running all the way up the wall. It might not fall over right away, but Bernt couldn’t imagine it standing up to any kind of siege magic. They would have to tear down the entire section, rebuild it and layer fresh enchantments over it. Not that it mattered right now.

It was over. It was a relief on the one hand, but on the other… coming out here had been pointless. And the wound in his back was bleeding again. He sighed.

“Fiora, do you have another one of those potions on you?”

***

“Bernt!”

Bernt stopped, sighing quietly. The door to his room was just three steps away. He’d almost made it.

He turned around, pasting a professionally polite expression on his face for Rina, his landlady. The woman frowned at him from the other end of the hallway, deep lines creasing her prematurely aged face. While the small apartments were almost cozy, the hallway had a certain prisonlike quality—dark, stark, and grimy in a way that suggested it was swept but never, ever properly cleaned.

“How can I help you, ma’am?” His shoulder still ached and he felt exhausted. He wanted nothing more than to get inside and lick his wounds until morning. He knew Jori was already waiting at the window to do the same.

“I’m getting complaints about the smell again,” Rina said, drawing herself up. “You’re not an alchemist, and there isn’t a long list of other reasons why people would be smelling sulfur when they walk by your door.”

Bernt sniffed at the air, and then frowned right back at her. “I’m not a warlock. It smells like I need to throw out some eggs. Why does everybody think that just because I’m a mage, everything has to have a magical cause?”

She shook a finger at him. “I’m not an idiot, boy! And I’m not going to warn you again! Next time, I’ll just change the lock.”

With that, she disappeared back around the corner.

Bernt cursed under his breath. He didn’t want to move. Everywhere else was more expensive, and he actually liked it here. The neighbors didn’t come around asking questions—though apparently they did file complaints.

Letting himself in, he first opened the window for Jori, then moved over to the dark corner back behind the stove.

The smell really wasn’t that strong, but it was noticeable. Grabbing a trowel, he then began sifting through the box of sand and extracting the little black lumps, depositing them in a glass jar he kept for that purpose.

When he was done, he cast a basic water manipulation cantrip, drawing the moisture out and sending it through the open window to splash onto the small strip of grass outside. He would have to remember to clean the litter box more often to make sure that whatever busybody neighbor had complained didn’t notice anything in the future.

He certainly wasn’t going to make Jori relieve herself in the sewers. Demons didn’t produce a lot of waste, but what came out made for incredible fuel when dried. Blacksmiths used it in their forges when they could get their hands on it. It would be a great way to make some extra money. Unfortunately, Bernt had no good explanation for why he would have any, so he just used it to save on firewood in the winter.

He sealed the jar and put it back in its place, washed his hands in the basin, and started collecting ingredients for dinner—potatoes, an onion, a half-wilted bundle of greens and some eggs.

He was slicing the onion when Jori climbed out of the freshly cleaned litter box and began chittering at him.

Bernt didn’t understand her vocalizations, but he could get some of her meaning through their bond. She was trying to tell him about what happened in the tunnels with that kobold. The scaly rat-thing was bad. It had hurt Bernt, and that was wrong. Its blood tasted good, and it deserved worse.

Bernt looked at her curiously. That was probably the most abstract thing she had ever communicated to him.

“What did you do to it?” he asked.

She hissed, showing her teeth, and then clicked them together. The scaly rat-thing deserved punishment. It was food.

Bernt frowned. She hadn’t eaten the kobold itself. What she’d done, he’d never seen before, of course, but he could guess. Demons famously fed on souls, after all.

But what did that mean for an imp? And why now? How much of the soul would be left in a corpse?

He considered trying to ask her, but she was done with the conversation. The little demon scampered up his robes and perched on his shoulder like a bird. It was over now, and she was hungry.

Handing her a bit of spicy dried rat meat, he got back to work on his own dinner.