For some reason I’ve been having serious writer’s block these past few weeks and simply cannot get my ideas onto the page… it’s very frustrating as I know exactly what I want to write but I can’t make it get out of my head and become Written Word.

Harumph.

Chapter Two – A Journey Begins

As it transpired I’d signed a pair of contracts. The first pledged me to join Rudi’s adventuring group for a year and a day while the second was a financing agreement which meant I’d give over all my allowance to the funding of the group. I asked Rudi why he’d done this and he laughed.

                “Two reasons, first you were an easy mark: rich, naïve and full of bluster. Second you look like you can handle yourself when necessary and I’m a man down since Boris got eaten by a troll.”

                “But how did you know we’d meet again?”

                “I didn’t! Not for sure anyway, sometimes I know what’s going to happen with complete clarity, most times I couldn’t tell if there’s backside or breakfast round the next corner.”

                “You’re a precognistor?”

                “I wouldn’t go that far, lad… like I said, it’s only accurate a very small amount of the time and even then I get no indication when things will happen.” He tapped the right hand side of his bald head where there was a mass of scar tissue covering a misshapen lump. “Got this last time the Orcs marched on Hemdyall and I reckon it’s what allows me to See.”

                Assuming, in my naivety, that Rudi was actually becoming a friend I reeled off some comment about how Orc women like to play rough, his response was a punch to the stomach which knocked me to the ground

                “Don’t try to be clever, boy.” He stalked off muttering to himself and Harald came scuttling over.

                “You’ll have to forgive my cousin,” he said as he helped me to my feet, “he used to be an officer in the Imperial Militia and knows the value of being friendly to people he doesn’t know to get them on his side… but whatever you do don’t mistake it for actual friendship until he says so.”

                I thanked him for the warning but he just brushed it off, “It’s no trouble, to be honest I think that head wound might have scrambled his mind somewhat. He can be a bit erratic at times.”

 

                The rest of that day went by in a blur, they plundered my purse and bank account and used the money to buy horses and various other sundries they felt they needed, then we travelled to my family’s estate and I explained to my father what had happened (leaving out the apparent drugging), needless to say he was not pleased.

 

                “You have done <I>what</I>?” he roared before resuming his pace around the room.

                “I-I have agreed to become and adventurer, father.”

                He turned to his personal scribe who was minutely examining the contracts, “is there anyway we can put a stop to this.”

                “I’m afraid not,” the scribe replied in his piercing nasal voice, “the contracts are written up in such a way as to obey the laws of not only the Confederacy, but also Bütonia, the Western Empire and even Aridia. I’m afraid there is no way to break it without subjecting ourselves to intense legal scrutiny.”

                “And what of the money?”

                “That one is easier to deal with, simply stop giving Gustav an allowance. It simply states that all money which comes into his possession belongs to the adventuring party, it doesn’t specify where that money has to come from.”

                My father turned to me and spoke in a way which hadn’t scared me since I was a child. “You have always been a stain on this family’s honour. Even Pieter had the decency to marry the bitch he left with child but you…” he clenched his fists and for a moment I thought he was going to undo his belt and thrash me with it. “Get out of my house! All of you! Before I call the guards and have you removed.”

                I wanted to plead, to beg, to tell him that I’d work off any legal fees resulting from breaking the contract but I never got the chance. As Rudi dragged me away I heard my father’s voice for what would prove to be the last time: “let the family records show that Gustav Berthold Ferdinand is no longer a member of this household, I disown him.” I think I let out an anguished wail at this point but can’t be sure, my head was spinning and before we’d even reached the entrance hall I’d fallen into a dead faint.

 

                When I awoke it was late evening and we were in a forest clearing. Harald was spooning some sort of stew into bowls.

                “You’re awake then,” Rudi said disdainfully, “get some food down you. Rich or not, you’re no good to me starved.”

                Harald handed me a bowl of stew and a hunk of dry black bread. It was peasant food, and certainly not the kind of thing I was used to but after the day I’d had it was like a feast. Once I’d finished and could feel the warmth of the food filling my stomach I turned to Rudi.

                “What are we going to do? Without my father’s money I’m as poor as the rest of you.”

                Rudi took a swig of ale from a large tankard and fished a piece of meat from between two of his teeth, “well, the first thing we need to do is train you. Like you said we’ve not got the money any more but the other contract is all nice and legal and I’m a man of my word. If you don’t know how to fight you’ll be a dead weight, and I’m not going to kill you in cold blood.”

                There was a sound of oiled steel being drawn out of a scabbard, Rudi looked sharply at Magpie, “Neither are you Mags. Save your blade for those as deserve it.” Although I couldn’t tell under his hood it almost seemed like Magpie was sulking.

 

                For the next few weeks we trained hard whenever we stopped, Rudi taught me how to fight with fists and improvised weapons and Magpie gave me tuition in knife work. Both of them showed me how to fight with a sword, not the formal displays my tutors had drummed into my but real life-and-death kill-the-other-before-he-kills-you fighting. Unfortunately this still didn’t prepare me for my first real fight.

                We were travelling through the pine forests of Bütonia en route to The Desolation as Hemdyall was known by then (although even back then it was something of an inaccuracy, it had been nearly 15 years since the Last Orc War and slowly but surely Hemdyall was pulling itself up by its bootstraps) when the bandits attacked. Rudi was laying about him with a large sword while Magpie ducked and wove and stabbed. Even Harald held his own, bashing any that got too close with a short staff. As for me, I ran, I hid and I sobbed like a baby. It was nearly two hours before the others found me and despite the anger in his eyes Rudi was surprising sympathetic.

                “The first fight’s always the worst, boy. I’ve seen grown men shit their braies and cry for their mothers at the sight of an Orc charge. We’ll keep on training you and maybe one day you’ll actually do something useful. However, if you run away like that again I’ll kick you so hard your grandmother will feel it.”

                He hauled me up by the arm and offered me a flask of evil smelling alcohol.

                “Get some of that down you, it’ll get rid of your shakes and raise your spirits no end. After that it’s on to Hemdyall and, if we’re lucky, a slice of glory.”

Interlude – A Timely Exit

When morning came I hauled myself off the penny hanger and vowed never to sleep like that again, even a mould-ridden straw pallet would have been a luxury at that point. The rest of the party was already awake, Rudi was sharpening his sword while attempting to negotiate a free breakfast, Harald was poring over some book or other and Ælfgif was carefully rolling bandages. Magpie was nowhere to be seen but that merely served to indicate that he’d already found some poor soul to fleece at dice. Once the proprietor had left grumbling about coercion and eating him out of house and home Rudi unrolled the map and used a charcoal stick to mark where we were and drew a curved line to our destination.

                “Right, it looks like we’ve only got another two days travel ‘til we get to the castle. From what people here have told me it’s pretty much undefended although there’s rumours of bandits and possibly even hobgoblins camped in and around the place,” he spat into the corner, “with any luck they don’t know about the vaults or what’s supposed to be down there.” 

     I took the charcoal stick and turned the map towards me. “Surely if we went this way,” I drew a straight line to the castle, “we’d cut the journey time by as much as half.” I grinned, sure that I’d at last made a valid contribution. Instead Rudi cuffed me on the back of the head.

               “Idiot! That route takes us straight over Greymoor.”

                “What’s so bad about Greymoor?” I asked incredulously, “I know it can be boggy at this time of year but if we’re careful it shouldn’t be much of a problem.”

                “Barrows, lad! The place is riddled with them!” 

               Before I’d even opened my mouth he’d anticipated the question. “Just because there’ve been no reported attacks these past hundred years, it doesn’t mean there’s nothing there. I appreciate your trying to help, but I don’t want to take the risk.” 

               It was at this point that Magpie came in, breathing hard and clutching a leather purse.

                “Much as I ‘ate to break up yer party, I fink we’d best be runnin’.”

Chapter One – A Wayward Child

As I dangled from the penny hanger I began, for the first time since leaving home, to muse upon my former life and how it had amounted to dangling by my armpits on a rope in the back room of a stinking inn in some filthy backwater town. It was also at this time that I began to consider writing my memoirs, if nothing else as a warning against those who believe adventuring to be full of romance and glory. And so, dear reader, this is my life.

 

My name is Gustav Berthold Ferdinand, and I am (or rather was, we’ll come to my disownment later in the tale) the youngest child and third son of the Ferdinand Merchantile House. I was born, I have been told, on a winter morning with a blizzard ravaging the estate with my mother cursing the day she decided to let a man into her bed (though apparently she did this with all of her five children) and my father drinking himself silly in the library (likewise). As you may surmise from my name the family originated in Bütonia and thus are in general a dour lot, which of course made my childhood a crushing bore.

Leopold, my eldest brother, was due to inherit the estate, the fortune and the right to trade in the family name. Pieter got himself married to some vulgar woman from one of the lesser Merchantile Houses after a night of indiscretion which led to the first of her many pregnancies, and not all Pieter’s I might add. My sisters, Clothilde and Gretl, are both empty-headed and were married off to the sons of good families as soon as they were old enough for it not to be considered monstrous.

And finally we have me, Little Gus as I was called until I was old enough to wield a sword. As the youngest of the lot my future prospects were grim, I stood to inherit precisely nothing and my career prospects amounted to clerk, military service or the priesthood, none of which appealed to me.

                To say that I rebelled would be an understatement. Of course I did all the usual things in my childhood like not turning up to my classes, putting frogs and spiders in places which I sincerely believed would terrify my mother and sisters (the actual result was usually a sound thrashing), but it was when I was well into adolescence that I truly began to see what I could do in the world. The nearest large town was the imaginatively named Marktberg and unfortunately that was a good forty miles away, but there were plenty of villages around and there’s probably many a bastard child born to some buxom farmer’s daughter which shares my curly blond hair and piercing blue eyes. When I did get a chance to go to Marktberg though I grabbed it with both hands and would spend days on end carousing and gambling in the seediest of the high-class establishments, of course there was also the times spend against an alley wall with some whore or other and the night time dashes (sometimes with my breeches still round my ankles) away from the local militia. And it was on one of these jaunts into town that I first met Rudi.

“What’s a pretty boy like you doing in a low class dive like this?” the heavy-set and massively scarred mercenary had growled as I stood at the bar

“Just drinking with my friends,” I replied indicating the rest of the dashing young rakes who were with me, “and we’re only interested in the fairer sex so go find some other poor bastard to violate.”

The man had laughed uproariously, “you think I’d want to bugger some gilded brat when I’ve got the pick of the wenches in this place?” he flashed a wink at the woman behind the bar, who smiled and adjusted her already low-cut kyrtle so she seemed on the very verge of overflowing, “no, my lad, I was merely wondering why people such as yourself would be in a place like the Black Rat… ‘cause you’d best be careful in case you have an accident.”

Naturally I wasn’t standing for any of this and so took the only course of action available to the young and rich in a place like this. I fled with my friends in tow. I honestly expected the man to give chase but instead he simply laughed and assured me that we would meet again. Had I known his prediction would come true I’d never have gone to town again.

It was nearly a year later and I’d almost forgotten my experiences in the Black Rat when I felt a hand on my shoulder while looking out a decent whore or two.

“Hello boy,” the man said before I’d even turned around, “I told you we’d meet again.”

Needless to say I was enraged, being interrupted when I was on the verge of hiring the evening’s fun was bad enough but having this hulking ribald actually touch me was the final straw.

“Unhand me immediately!” I cried, “or, so help me, I’ll–”

“You’ll what?” a voice hissed close to my ear, I felt the point of a blade against the small of my back.

“Now, now, Magpie,” the big mercenary said, “we don’t want to scare the lad, just take him for a drink or two is all.”

I was unceremoniously marched to an apparently abandoned house and shoved into a chair. The men remained silent as they poured some vinegary smelling wine into goblets and sat down opposite me, another man wearing a much patched robe entered from another room and looked at me curiously before joining the others. The large man, who I could only assume was the leader eventually broke the silence.

“Right then, let’s get the introductions out the way. My name’s Rudi and I’m the leader of this merry band. The fellow with the hood is Magpie,” the man who had threatened me in the street nodded, “and the inky here is Harald. What’s your name, boy?”

Of course I resented being called ‘boy’ I was nearly twenty after all and, in my eyes at least, fully a man. “When my father hears about this he’ll have you in gaol faster than you can blink!” was my reply. The man introduced as Magpie went for his dagger, but Rudi held him back. “No need for that,” he said calmly, “we just have a little proposition for you. Why don’t you have a drink to calm your nerves?”

I took the proffered goblet and knocked the sour wine back in one go, it was awful stuff but I had to concede it did have a calming effect. Before I knew it I was chatting merrily with them like they were old friends, I even asked for more wine. I have a vague memory of being given some papers to look at and putting my name to some of them but most of the night went by in a blur and the last thing I remember was being put to bed in the old house’s back room.

It was the smell of the place that really drove home how far I’d fallen, I’d been on the road with the vagabond-adventurers known rather pompously as the Golden Brotherhood for six months now… but this was low even for us. The inn was unnamed, served ale watered down with piss and, while comely enough in a filthy kind of way, the wenches were almost undoubtedly pox-ridden. To this day I don’t know how Rudi found the place and, to be frank I don’t want to know, but at least it offered some respite from the incessant rain which plagues that part of the world for much of the year. Of course when it came to arranging board things got even worse.

“Right then lads,” Rudi said with forced joviality, “let’s count up the clink and see what we can afford.”

We all searched through pouches, stockings and boots to dredge up the last of our ready cash and came up with a total of five-and-one-half pennies.

“C’mon, that can’t be all we’ve got,” growled Rudi before looking sharply at the man we only knew as Magpie, “what about you Mags? You’ve normally got something stashed away.”

Magpie shook out his sleeves and raised his hands, “got nuffink, no’ even a copper farthing.”

“That’s that then, it’s the penny hanger for us tonight.”

I didn’t bother to ask what a penny hanger was, I’d find out soon enough.