The Diffident Hero - NaNoWriMo 2012 - Chapter 8, pt. 4

Brendan set another piece down, then turned to listen at the ‘at first.’

“I can’t say exactly what went wrong. I don’t think there was any one specific thing. She got very impatient with what she called my shortcomings, and we began fighting more and more. Finally I guess she’d had enough. She left me behind. I’ve been on my own since, trying to get by with what little she taught me.”

“Wait,” Brandon said. “She left you here? Not back in our part of the world?”

“Not here in this specific part of the world, but yes, she left me without bringing me back home.”

Sorcha was quiet and still; it reminded him a great deal of her behavior while she’d been observing him at the office. Her eyes were fixed intently on Lena, and almost seemed to glow as she took in everything the girl said. He could almost have sworn her ears twitched forward, she was listening so intently.

“The behavior you describe is unusual for one of my kind,” she said at last. “Not unheard of. But rare. Very rare. And to leave you essentially stranded? This is serious, Lena. You don’t know what prompted her to such action?”

“Personality clash? We didn’t exactly see eye-to-eye about how to handle jobs we were on. She seemed to prefer … um … excessive methods.”

Sorcha’s eyebrows rose sharply. “Excessive? What do you mean?”

“Well, take this job for instance. If she’d been here handling it like you did, she’d have chosen the same method. But where you don’t like it and wish there was another way to handle it, I’m certain she would have enjoyed it.”

The Diffident Hero - NaNoWriMo 2012 - Chapter 8, pt. 3

He moved down the stairs and into the cellar proper. It was poorly lit, but he could easily see why it was such a difficult task. The space was filled with barrels and crates and bags, chairs both broken and whole, disassembled tables and so much junk you’d be lucky to ever see a rat, let alone kill it.

“What she really needs is an exterminator,” Lena said. “But since I doubt we could call one out to this place, I was thinking a bunch of traps. Set them up and bait them, let them do their thing, empty them now and then.”

“Could work,” Sorcha said in a tone that suggested otherwise. “It would take a lot of time though, and might not get all of them.”

“I know,” the girl admitted. “In a place like this though, without the ability to gas them, how could you be sure of getting them all? Even if you could stand here and kill them physically one by one, they could be nesting in any of these containers, or even in the walls if there are cracks or holes.” She stared at the sea of clutter and shuddered. “I see why this is such an unpopular task.” she said wryly. “I don’t suppose there’s a standard method?”

He looked at Sorcha, who had a sour look on her face, like she’d tasted something unpleasant. “Yes, there is,” she admitted. “It’s distasteful, but has to be done.” For an instant, it almost looked like she turned green; he blinked, and she looked perfectly fine again.

She reached into an inside pocket of her cloak and pulled out a carefully wrapped package. “We’re going to have to use this,” she said with a twist of her mouth. “It’s a slow-acting poison. We break it up into pieces and scatter it around the darker spots—that ought to be easy enough down here—and every rat that eats some will be dead within a few hours.”

“Why so long? Wouldn’t a faster-acting poison be better? It seems cruel to make them suffer for hours.”

Sorcha nodded. “I wish we could do it that way, but rats are tough to get rid of once they move in to a place, and they’re scavengers, to boot. They make their living eating things that might kill them, and have behaviors that enable them to survive. Slow poisons will let them feel safe enough to eat enough to reach a lethal dose.”

Brendan felt a bit sick; Lena looked okay, though there was a slight hollowness to her eyes that suggested she didn’t particularly like it either. But Sorcha was right, he knew it.

“Let’s not take any more of these jobs, huh?”

“Not if we can help it,” Sorcha said grimly, breaking the poisoned food up into small chunks with gloved hands. “Lena, why are you out here independently? What happened to your guide?”

They set about scattering the food around the place. Now and then a squeak or a rustling in the dark confirmed that yes, the rats were around, just quiet in the presence of so many intruders.

Lena’s face was long, and he got the feeling it wasn’t just the unpleasant task at hand that made it so. “After I was called, my guide helped me through several jobs,” she began. “She was of the People, like you, and we got along well enough at first.”

The Diffident Hero - NaNoWriMo 2012 - Chapter 8, pt. 2

“Hello,” she said in a pleasant tone, tinged with just the slightest hint of sheepishness.

“Hi! You’re the independent?” Sorcha asked. “Having some trouble down here?”

“You might say that,” the girl replied. “I assume you’re from the Hall?”

“You assume correctly. So what’s the story here?”

The girl sighed. “Oh, forgive me—my name is Lena.”

“I’m Sorcha, and I’m guiding Brendan here.”

“Nice to meet you Sorcha, Brendan. Well, the problem is there are too many rats. I’ll … ill-prepared for this. I know exactly how to kill them, but lack the means.”

Brendan looked her over again, puzzled. She looked well prepared to him. She had a knife at her belt and a stout stick that looked plenty deadly to any rat he’d ever seen. “You seem well-armed enough to me,” he said.

The girl smiled. “It’s not so much a matter of arms as of speed. Fighting isn’t really my specialty. I thought rats would be easy enough, but they’re such a small target and they move so quickly, I haven’t managed to kill a single one of them, and …”

“… and you tired yourself out trying, didn’t you?”

Lena hesitated, then gave a wry smile. “Yes. You caught me resting up for another go, though at this point I’m just as glad to see someone else. Maybe the job will actually be done before I have to go upstairs again, even if I’m not the one who did it.”

“You said fighting’s not your specialty? What is?” Brandon asked.

“My Call came because of my blogging, actually,” she said, rather matter of factly. Brandon blinked.

“You can get Called for that?”

Sorcha nodded. “You can be Called for many reasons. Journalists and writers aren’t exactly common,” she admitted, “but they’re not unknown. Do you mind telling your story, Lena?”

“Well, basically I write a lifestyle blog, and sometimes I get into relevant political commentary type stuff, too. Plus I’ve got a fair following on the bigger social media sites, mostly Twitter.

“I’d been following a few military/political stories on the Middle East because they impacted on the lives of some friends of mine on a trip over there, and after posting several of them, I put up a blog post that was my own take on the situation, a sort of synthesis of points that I’d seen discussed before, but only in isolation.

“I put the post up live on my site, and spread it through my social networks. It got reasonably decent traffic, nothing really special, and I didn’t think any more of it. I just went on following newer developments.

“That changed a few days later. I got my Call. Turns out my friends had been following my blog, and my synthesized insight into the bombing patterns actually saved a few lives. It was nothing the military analysts over there couldn’t come up with too, and they did,” she added quickly, “but my post got around first. Luck of the draw.”

Sorcha grinned. “Some would say luck had nothing to do with it. I’m betting someone did, if you got the Call.”

Lena nodded her agreement seriously. “Almost word for word, yes.”

A distinct lack of sound attracted Brendan’s attention. The sounds of the common room above were ongoing, but he couldn’t hear the rats. He’d expect them to avoid coming too close to them, but not to be so silent about it.

The Diffident Hero - NaNoWriMo 2012 - Chapter 8, pt. 1

They were soaked by the time they got to the village, or at least Brandon was; Sorcha still somehow seemed to be immune to the rain’s aim. The village was small, no more than two dozen buildings in the central cluster, plus various outlaying farms and mills. The streets were empty, the windows all bright with firelight and the chimneys smoking in the dark.

The homes were constructed largely of fieldstone and wood with thatched roofs, with some of the larger buildings having stone or clay shingles. It was to one of those larger buildings that Sorcha lead him. A sign out front read ‘The Creaky Door.’

“They’re good people,” she said, “if not the most imaginative in the world.” She opened the door, which Brandon noticed was actually pretty quiet, and lead him inside and out of the rain.

It looked like something out of a movie. In fact, it looked a lot like the tavern in Bree from The Fellowship of the Ring. Not precisely, of course. The layout was different, it wasn’t nearly as packed with various peoples, there were no hobbits, and certainly no ring wraiths attacking the place, but it had exactly the sort feel that Brandon associated with that scene. It was a pool of welcome light against the dark outside, with ale and a warm bed waiting after a hard day on the road.

Sorcha marched straight up to the bar, which a wizened old woman tended with a rag in one hand and a watchful eye on the patronage, which was sparse but looked to be coarse local folk taking a break from the day’s work. She slammed something down on the bar top. The old woman glanced down at it a moment and frowned thoughtfully.

“You’re from the Hall,” she said. “Had someone else come in not two hours ago to deal with the rats, but the job ain’t done yet. You’re welcome to go see what the holdup is.” She resumed her hawk-like scan of the common room.

Sorcha narrowed her eyes. “Someone else from the Hall came here before us?”

“Nope, not from the Hall,” the woman said, polishing the bar with her rag slowly. “Just someone lookin’ for work, an independent.”

“Independent? You can do that?” Brandon asked.

“It’s not too uncommon, but it is pretty rare for independents to go after low-level grunt work like this.” She turned her attention back to the barkeep, who glanced back at her indifferently. “Okay, we’ll go check it out. Thanks.”

“Not at all. Cellar’s down back, door’s off to the side, behind the bar.”

The followed the bar around to the side of the room and headed further back, finding an old rickety door. It opened easily, but with an ear-splitting creak, putting aside all question in Brandon’s mind where the place had gotten its name.

Light spilled up from downstairs. Someone had lit candles, and indeed, someone was still down there, seated on the steps and looking back up at them. She didn’t seem surprised to see them, nor did she seem to be at all anxious or startled.

She was dressed in some sort of dark blue travel cloak with the hood pulled back, leaving long, dark hair flowing in waves down her back. Her eyes were still and calm, nearly glowing as she stared upward at them with an odd sort of expectant serenity. Her olive complexion instantly set her apart from any of those they’d seen in the common room upstairs.

The Diffident Hero - NaNoWriMo 2012 - Chapter 7, pt. 2

“Nobody ever wants to do the grunt work, Brandon, but someone has to.”

“Yeah, but it’s so …” He struggled to find the right words to express his displeasure. He’d been stuck with the rats in the tavern cellar job.

“Necessary?”

“I was thinking more ‘mundane.’”

“Oooh, mundane. And here I thought you were having difficulty adjusting to this other side of the world. I guess I can really cut loose and take you to all the really tough spots now!”

“No! No, that’s fine. I just …”

“You wanted something a bit more exciting?”

He thought back to all of the fantasy books he’d read, all the Dungeons and Dragons campaigns he’d played, all of the computer role-playing games he’d gone through. Most of them began with some naive young soon-to-be hero who was in too much of a rush to get out there and do the impossible, the crazy, the brave, the heroic thing. The exciting thing.

“I guess … maybe rats aren’t so bad. But does it really have to be so … so … cliché?”

“Things become cliché for a reason; it’s a commonly heard story. Rats live where people live. That’s true no matter which side of the world you’re on, yours or ours. And that means someone has to deal with them, one way or another. Here, we deal with them this way. And look on the bright side! It’s your ticket to your guild ticket.”

She’d explained the guild system to him after leaving the Hero’s Hall. “You’re not far off, I guess,” she’d explained after he asked if it was like the trade shows he was familiar with from his side. “One part trade show, one part union, I’d say. People pay to join the Hall, and they organize and distribute work to those who are looking. You want jobs, they got jobs. But the better jobs, the type we want, you’ll usually need to have tickets for those.”

The tickets were used to bid on work. The choicer the assignment, the more tickets people were likely to bid on it, so it paid to save them. And of course you had to do jobs to get tickets, so newcomers to the Hall ended up getting those jobs that nobody else wanted to do.

Even for jobs that didn’t require tickets, there was some level of bidding, mostly in the form of bribes and manipulation. Few people wanted to get stuck with the lowest of the low, clearing taverns, inns and the like of rats.

“Don’t you have cats on this side of the world?” he asked. It was something he’d wondered about in every game, every book he’d read where the hero had to start doing some low level menial job like this one.

“Of course we do, but they caught on to it centuries ago. Now only rich places can afford to hire ‘em to keep places clear.”

“You’d think they’d be anxious to take advantage of free food.”

“Oh believe me, they’re better off with this deal, more’s the pity for the rest of us. Most of these jobs clearing them out? Yeah, they’re set up by the cats. You’ll find the bounty’s only paid for full bodies, un-poisoned.”

“You don’t mean—”

“Yes. They pay us to do all that pesky hunting and killing for ‘em. Uh, that’s not common knowledge, by the way, and they prefer it that way. I wouldn’t go spilling it out around town. They have pretty good hearing.”

All he could do was shake his head. “And all this time I thought the mice were the ones in charge.”

“The less said about that, the better,” she replied with an unusually subdued undertone, like she was anxious not to be heard.

“You have got to be kidding.”

“Shhhhhh! I swear, every time one of you comes across with knowledge of that damned book … you wouldn’t believe the messes that it makes. I don’t want you—or me!—to be one of them.”

They’d crossed over several edgings, as she called them, the spaces where one could go from corner to corner around the world if one knew how. They were in a sparsely-populated hill country now, light forest keeping them from seeing too far in any one direction.

The sky was a dull slate gray, pierced by brilliant streaks of lightning now and then, always followed by the hollow boom of distant thunder. The wind gusted in fits and starts, as though unsure whether it should stay or go. When it blew, it was thick with the smell of rain, though they hadn’t seen a drop so far. He expected that to change at any moment; they were getting close to the tavern.

They crested a tall hill at the edge of the woods; Sorcha pointed out the distant glow of window lights on the far side of the shallow valley they stood above. A hamlet stood wearily to either side of the dusty dirt road they trod.

“It’s down there,” she said. As if on cue, the thunder rolled and the first fat drops rained down on them, or at least on Brandon. The drops were huge, and wide-spaced, and Sorcha seemed to have a knack for not being where they landed.

“Well,” he said, “it looks dry and warm, anyway.” They hurried down the hill and up the road toward the beaconing lights.

The Diffident Hero - NaNoWriMo 2012 - Chapter 7, pt. 1

“Well … how does that help us at all then?” Brandon asked, frustrated and soaking wet.

“It gives us a place to start. And a place to go next.”

“And where’s that?”

“Your friendly neighborhood Hero’s Hall, of course,” she said, as if that explained everything. “Trust me,” she added. “You’ll like it. Hero’s Halls have something for everyone, and they mean that literally.”

“If they’ve got a towel, they’re already sounding pretty good to me. How do we get there?”

“Couldn’t be easier. Straight down this hill, around that rock, and slip through the passage.” She suited actions to words, heading down the hill and away from the bugs.

Another reason to like this plan, he thought, even if deep down he found himself fascinated by their use of language. “Sorcha, why did those bugs down there act so much like regular bugs when they’re smart enough to speak?”

She raised an eyebrow at him and grinned. “What an interesting question! When did you become such an expert entymologist? You must know an awful lot about insects to be able to distinguish between ‘regular’ bugs and a species you’ve just encountered and watched for all of twenty minutes!”

“I—”

“You have a thing or two to learn about intelligence though,” she added thoughtfully. “It’s not always a good idea to assume that the ability to speak makes one intelligent, or that the inability to speak makes one stupid. Be very careful about which assumptions you bring with you from your day to day life here, Brandon. Some of them could get you killed.”

He shut his mouth with a snap, startled. “So were they intelligent?”

“As it happens, they were and are,” she said. “You’re a bright fellow yourself, and I’d hate for that to get you in trouble.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time,” he said, and smiled. “So we go around this rock, and—”

And the world abruptly changed again, except that once more, the line was blurred. He blinked his eyes a few times, trying to refocus on what had just appeared around them.

It looked like the same physical spot they’d been in before, but the grass was a darker shade of green, the sky was lead-gray with clouds, there was a faint mist clinging to the air, and there was a monstrous wooden hall in front of him. He could almost believe she’d taken him around the corner gotten them stuck in New Zealand where they’d filmed the great hall scenes of Edoras in Rohan from The Lord of the Rings films.

A long, low hill rose before them, and the hall crowned the top of the hill, itself longer than he could see from below. A great stone foundation held the heavy wooden building, all of carved logs and fine fitted planks, ornately inlaid with iron and steel as both decorative elements and reinforcement.

Stone steps ran down the face of the hill near where they stood. Sorcha started up. Brandon stood and stared.

“C’mon, are you coming or not?”

He looked around. For once, they weren’t the only people around; there were horse ties nearby where several people were caring for their mounts, while other people came and went, climbing up and down the stairs. It seemed to be a fairly well-trafficked area. Nobody paid them any mind.

He started up the steps after her. “What is this place?”

“This is the Hero’s Hall, of course. Weren’t you listening?”

“Well, yes, but I was hoping for a bit more than just what it’s called,” he said. She nodded.

“Naturally. It’s hard to plan when you don’t know everything, isn’t it?” She smiled. “This is where the heroes of the world go to get their assignments.” She bit her lip, looking at the sky. “We’re a bit late in the day, I’m afraid. Most of the good stuff will probably be gone, but we might get lucky.”

“You’re kidding,” he said. It sounded like something out of computer role playing game. “This place hands out assignments to heroes?”

“Well, it’s not like you’re obligated or anything. Nobody’s forcing you to take an assignment. Not even me!” she exclaimed, seeing the look on his face. “There are a bunch of these all over every country of the worked, tucked away in the hidden corners beyond what most of your kind can see. When things need to be done, these places know about it, and they try to match the things with the people who want to do something for the world. But that matching is first come, first served.”

She cast another glance at the sky, looking for the sun. “Yeah, the really useful ones will probably be gone, but I’m sure we can find you something. And I promise, I’ll do my best to make sure it isn’t killing rats in a tavern basement.” She winked at him.

“Tell me they don’t actually have that one,” he said.

“Oh yes, they always have that one.”

By the time they reached the top of the stairs, he was glad he walked to and from work every day. It was a long climb, but he wasn’t as bad off as he could’ve been. They headed inside.

The interior of the hall was even more impressive than the exterior, though it looked seriously out of place, too. It was as though someone had taken a job fair from what he still thought of as the ‘real’ world and stuck it inside this fantasy setting. Many of the booths could have come from the ‘real’ world; he spotted formica and aluminum construction in more than one location, often sitting right next to wooden carts filled with straw and sporting plank signs.

The people milling about the space were just as diverse; maybe more so, in fact. Not all of them were people, or at least not all of them were human.

There were people in business suits talking to guys in loin cloths, and he was pretty sure that in at least one case, the guy in the suit was the hero looking for a job. There were women in practical armor, and a few women in armor that almost made him blush to look at it. Sorcha noticed his glances at them and smirked. “Makes you stop and think, doesn’t it?”

“I have always wondered how any of those outfits protect the wearer.”

“They don’t. That’s why there’re so few of them. These ladies are either stupidly lucky, or they’re protected by something far more effective than just armor.”

It was enough to make his head hurt all over again.