Helmar hadn’t thought it was possible, but he sped up slightly. He was starting to get dizzy from the endless slight curve of the stairway as it swept around the wall of the tower. But he kept the wall on his left and continued to run. The single-room levels rushed by on his right, illuminated briefly by Carl’s fading torchlight. It was hard running with a broadsword in his right hand, and he knew that if he fell he would probably impale himself, but he couldn’t drop it. If the beast behind him caught up, it would be all he had left.

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Suddenly the chain jerked with a snap, tightening and then relaxing. Helmar jumped, and so did Carl. From somewhere within the pile of smoldering furniture there was a sudden movement. A wardrobe jumped. A table jumped. A chair fell off the table. Still the origin of the movement and the terminus of the chain, which Helmar took to be one and the same, was not visible. The warrior decided not to wait till it was. He began to move toward the door as quietly, calmly, and quickly as he could.

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This is it, Helmar, Helmar said to himself. The door was sturdily built, with no keyhole, just a latch. The boards were old and dry, and looked as hard as rock. Helmar took a deep breath, let it out. Then he lifted the latch carefully with his left hand and pushed the door open as he stepped through.

The room atop the tower was a single space, with a single window. There was a single lit brazier by the window, and a single man standing over the flames with his back to the door. Innumerable objects, such as chests, tables, bookcases, and wardrobes, crowded the edges of the room, crouching in the shadows.

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Up through the levels of the tower they went, moving faster now. Darkness fled before the torchlight and Helmar’s bright sword. Continue reading →

The next room was dark too. And the next. And the next. There were four rooms on the ground floor of the tower, quartering it, and each was dark and empty. In the fourth was an unrailed stone staircase leading up to the next level. The room above seemed dark as well.

When they saw the staircase Helmar and Carl exchanged a glance. Then they proceeded up the staircase tight together, Helmar in the lead with sword ready, Carl just behind with the torch raised high. The torch cleared the second floor just as Helmar’s head did, and he saw an empty room, with a dark doorway. It might have been slightly smaller than the one below it, but otherwise it was identical.

Climbing the rest of the stairs and gathering at the doorway they repeated the cautious approach they had used to explore the rooms on the first floor. Continue reading →

The stars had come out, and in the shadow of the tower it was already getting too dark to see. Helmar put his hand on Carl’s shoulder and shook the burglar. Carl’s head wobbled back and forth where it rested against the wall, but other than that there was no reaction.

“Dragon balls!” said Helmar, rather more loudly than he meant to. He froze and listened for any sound from within the tower. There was none that he could detect. Reaching into the ground-floor room he grabbed the latch and pulled the door quietly shut. Then he cursed again, under his breath this time. Carl snored, and slowly slid down the wall into a more comfortable position. As he slid he bounced a bit with the friction that is inherent in sliding down a rough stone wall, but he still remained asleep.

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Helmar stood outside the gate, his fists on his hips, his head thrown back, his feet set wide. He’d left the moth-eaten peasant’s blanket on the hillside and taken a few minutes to strap on the metal plates of his armor. He’d given the armor and his sword a careful inspection, the blade a lick of the whetstone. He was ready. He made a mental note to pick up the blanket on his way back to the town — there was no sense in wasting a good wool blanket.

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Helmar surveyed the task before him. There was a tall, sheer wall around the tower, with a gate at the mornward side, and a yard within surrounding the tower proper. The gate was made of interlocked steel bars as big around as Helmar’s head. It was lowered. There were no other entrances that he could see, and there was no sign of life. He would have to climb the wall.

Helmar had never relished climbing. He avoided it when he could not because he was afraid of heights, but because he wasn’t very good at getting up to them. He was more likely to fall within ten feet of the ground than to reach any dangerous height. And that was on walls with easy holds. The wall around the tower was sleek and well-crafted, with each huge block of stone fit together very neatly.

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Helmar sat with his forehead on the bar. Being able to relax his neck helped he think. At least that was the reason he’d given himself for putting his head there originally. Now he wasn’t so sure he could lift it off the boards if he wanted to. He’d had a lot to drink, all on the house, ale and wine, none of it high-quality, but apparently good enough to fool the patrons.

The party had mostly died. The still living part of it was a white-haired, scrawny old mountain man with a wild, tangled beard, who was dancing with a woman at least a head taller than him. They were dancing as if they were in a ballroom, going round and round in slow circular patterns, for all they were wearing the unwashed skins of animals and were stepping around unconscious bodies.

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When he reached the village Helmar made for the noisiest building. It was also the largest building in town, and the best lit. Most of the structures he passed were little more than rude shacks, and the streets he walked on weren’t streets so much as empty spaces between shacks. It looked and smelled like a trappers’ town, but the lean-tos he saw against the side of most buildings seemed empty, without the stacks of cleaned furs he expected to see.

The building in the center of the town seemed as if it had been hastily and recently expanded. A sort of long house extended from one side, and a round house or yurt from the other, of a squarish building in the center that was by itself little larger than most of the village shacks. There was a single lantern hanging outside the door to the square section. Light, and the noise of a large number of people gathered together, leaked out from around the door, around the few shuttered windows, and through the copious gaps in the construction. Smoke also rose out of a ramshackle chimney above the central section.

Where there was smoke there was fire, and where there was fire there was warmth, so Helmar lifted the latch on the door and pushed his way inside.

Most of the inhabitants of the town seemed to be crammed into the hut. Helmar realized that the walls of the original building had been torn down on two sides to open into the two new structures. The whole composite was stuffed with people, drinking and yelling. Across from the door was a makeshift bar, really just several stout boards held up by two barrels, and behind that a big hearth where spits of meat were being roasted. On the bar barrels were being tapped, and drink was flowing, with a lean man behind the board doing the pouring.

The people certainly supported Helmar’s idea that this was a trapper town. There were hard, dirty, and looked like they had been carved out of the same rock the mountains were made of. Men and women, their ages were all indistinguishable. Some might have been twenty, or sixty. The wind and snow and endless days tramping around the mountains had made all their faces seamed, weathered leatherworkings. Curiously, almost everyone in the place had a bulging purse hanging from his or her belt. Helmar could hear them clinking as people walked by, even over the din of the place. Another oddity was almost every leathery face in the place was split into a gap-toothed grin. Everyone was enjoying themself.

Still carrying the armor sack on his back, Helmar edged his way through the crowd. A few people looked at him with an unfriendly curiousity, but most were too busy making merry to notice. Helmar made it to the bar without issue, and plunked his sack down with a heavy clank. Then he straightened up and took a closer look at the man pouring drinks, and felt his mouth fall open. He knew the man.

“Carl!” Helmar spluttered. “What in the name of the winter gods’ frost-bitten genitals are you doing here?”

The man behind the counter was Carl of Karl, a cat burglar and adventurer, and something of a professional rival of Helmar’s. He was looking at Helmar with one of his trademark smirks. Helmar had heard the man had fallen upon hard times, but he had no idea how he could sink so low as to pour drinks for a town full of rowdy trappers.

“Hello, Helmar my friend,” Carl said. “What can I get for you? Belgravian ale, from the North? Or Sispirit wine, from the South?”

Helmar’s jaw miraculously dropped lower. “You are serving Sispirit?” It was a wine fit for a lord’s palace. Helmar had stolen a bottle only once.

“Only the best for my friends here,” said Carl, and he nodded his head at the room in general, and then winked at Helmar.

Helmar squinted at Carl. “Give me an ale.”

Carl poured from one of the kegs behind the bar, and Helmar drank. He leaned over the counter and lowered his voice.

“This isn’t Belgravi, Carl,” he muttered, wondering what the sly burglar was playing at, “and I bet that isn’t Sispirit either.”

Carl winked and tugged his nose. “Maybe, maybe not. But do you know what the going rate is around here for whatever I just poured you?”

“No,” Helmar growled, sensing a trap. “What is it?”

“Two gold pieces, please. Empire weight.”

Helmar kept his voice down by sheer force of will, out of professional courtesy, but he pounded the bar a little softly with his balled-up fist.

“What are you trying to pull, Carl?” he grated out. “That’s not the going rate in this town.”

“Oh yes it is, Helmar. Did you come here for a treasure, Helmar? Piles of Empire gold, founding vintage? Well, it’s too late, they’ve got it already. This one’s on me.” And he plunked two heavy, ancient gold pieces on the counter next to Helmar’s hand.

Helmar picked one up with trembling fingers, then watched as a smelly old man wearing naught but the skins of animals dropped five identical coins, enough to buy a small house in the city, onto the counter.

“Give me another beer and a slab of meat, man, and be quick about it!” the old man said, burping.

Helmar gaped at all the full, clanking purses in the room, and wondered how a townful of lackwit mountain folk had ended up with a treasure Brixton the Elder said had been locked away in a tower guarded by fell creatures of the demon realm since the founding of the empire.

“The whole situation seems a bit ridiculous when you first run into it, doesn’t it?” asked Carl from behind the bar as he sliced meat off for the old trapper’s slab.