I learned several things in rather quick succession following that introduction, and was not entirely sure what to think about any of them. The most notable, of course, was that Gruin and I had had our names getting out ahead of us. This much took us both entirely by surprise.

  Gruin responded to it quite differently than me, and for rather understandable reasons. As I said before, humans don’t tend to like Grynkori. Back then, it was a whole lot worse. They were seen as untrustworthy, violent, dangerous—some even believed they were more animal or insect than person, and a lukewarm reception was about the best they could hope for.

  However uncomfortable I felt about the prospect of being recognised before I’d even set foot somewhere or opened my mouth, Gruin had a far greater cause. It was tangibly dangerous to him. Lots of folk will go out of their way to kill a man for no reason other than he’s different, and that goes double when they hear word of him before his arrival.

  “Isn’t this brilliant?” I grinned to him, entirely heedless of this at the time and already focusing most of my brain on imagining how I might exploit this new situation for money. It wasn’t hard to come up with the obvious ideas of course—rights to songs and stories and such.

  Oh, if I could twist this around and spend the rest of my life coasting off some misunderstood reputation and the resulting intellectual property then my entire fortune would have turned in a single stroke. I was so enthused by the idea, so intoxicated, that my focus lapsed entirely away from the present for a moment.

  Fortunately, I came to in time to see that we were now being approached once more. This time it was by a group of actual adults, and a few large looking men alongside them. The sorts I might have found intimidating a few months ago, but had lost the ability to fear sometime around my third near-death fight.

  The leader was more worrying, if only because they had the authority to deny us entry and shelter in the village. That, there, would be a death sentence in all likelihood. If the blackmists came, they ate whatever wasn’t safely hidden behind light and stone. Even children knew that much.

  As terrifying as the thought of being left to that fate was, it also improved my odds of actually being granted shelter tonight. There were not, after all, so many people who’d condemn another person to such a fate for no reason other than his being an outsider. Or so I hoped at least.

  “Welcome to our town, travellers,” the leader began. An older man, he had a kindly way about him. All bullshit of course, plenty of older men had exactly that same manner until it was convenient to pick up another. But he was being polite enough, so I politely went along with it.

  “Thank you sir, I’ve just got here but it seems a lovely place to me.” It was a blatant lie and blatant flattery, but I didn’t really care to try a more subtle one. The point was that he saw me making an effort to be nice, to play along with his rules and respect his word, while not showing any active contempt.

  It seemed to be working, at least in the minor ways I’d hoped it would. There’s no easy way to win over a total stranger but people generally like it when others are nice to them. Shocker, I know. Maybe you can use that sliver of Heroic wisdom to do something other than defraud the entire human race. You’d have one up on me at least.

  “And who exactly are you, sir, to be approaching our village?” the man got right to the meat of things, which I actually appreciated given how close we were to night and, by extension, the threat of savaging and killing via the denizens of the mists. I returned the favour and spoke directly myself.

  “You have my name, and the name of my companion,” I began, “we’re just travellers, passing through and, unfortunately, caught outside as the blackmists approach. We need shelter or…Well.” The rest didn’t need saying. Wasn’t a man in Anglyn, I thought, who didn’t know what happened when the blackmists got you.

  I had hoped to see some sort of shiver from this one at that, or at least the vague recognition that he was speaking to someone in need of shelter from the worst fate a person might experience in this world. I saw neither. The man was as unflinching as if I’d said I feared stubbing my toe.

  “This is quite the decision to inflict on us with such short notice,” he replied icily. I was taken aback at that, not knowing where the sudden frost came from and not knowing why exactly it was all being directed at me.

  Gruin, rather less used to friendliness, took it on his chin a lot better.

  “What’s with the questioning, human?” I stared in growing horror as the Grynkori kept talking, watching my life flash before my eyes as every word brought us closer and closer to being hurled out past the walls and forced to perish in agony surrounded by blackmist monstrosities.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  “Where I come from, people who ask so many questions tend to do so because they have something in their head they’re already worried about. So what is it you’re checking for?”

  I didn’t miss the way his fingers moved fractionally towards the haft of his hammer, I couldn’t have missed that if I’d tried.

  Gruin wasn’t as impulsively violent as I’d first feared when I met him, I knew that by now, but I also knew that if he got it into his head we were being manipulated or lured into a trap, he’d be more likely to deal with it physically than anything else. It was for that reason that the stranger’s response made me just about shit myself.

  “I’ll have no hostility from you, dwarf—

  No sooner had the words left his mouth, than Gruin’s hammer was raising up to waver near his face.

  “Call me that again, lank, and I’ll tear your arm off and make you fucking eat it.”

  As you might expect, that threat changed the tone of our conversation more or less instantly. The several large men who’d accompanied this stranger stepped forwards, I stepped back, and Gruin flicked his gaze between them all, spat, and slowly withdrew his hammer.

  “We don’t like being called ‘dwarfs’,” he said, by way of apology, “we’re not just a variety of human.”

  I moved to salvage the rapidly deteriorating situation as fast as I could, speaking quicker than even my own mind could follow.

  “I beg your pardon for that, sir, as you can see my companion is a shade sensitive, and his temper has been foul ever since we were forced along this road. We beg you no harm and will, as I said, be gone as soon as the blackmists dissipate from this area.”

  At this point I was really just banking on the miserable old fuck deciding that it would be less trouble to give us what we wanted and send us on our way than to try and deny us. I couldn’t tell whether that calculation was going the way I wanted to in the old man’s face, though.

  “You will both be gone at the crack of dawn,” the man growled. I nodded of course, feeling hope bubble up in my chest and almost hating it for the fear that it would prove mistaken. “And you obey my word while within these walls, is that clear?”

  Again, I nodded. Gruin took his time doing the same though.

  “There are some things I won’t do,” he said flatly. I wanted to strangle him, if only his neck were thin enough for me to get my hands around it. Gruin continued while everyone stared, tense. “I won’t harm an innocent, I won’t serve the forces of darkness or touch the stuff of magic. Are we clear on that?”

  Another pause, but there was nothing I could do now. Either the man was willing to accept Gruin’s terms, and let us in anyway, or not. Unless…No, if I distanced myself from Gruin now, I might be able to get in without him even if he was kicked out. Gruin would be furious—might even attack—but if I helped fight and kill him, and he would surely be killed against so many, then it would earn me more favour still.

  Before I could finish my cowardly, conniving plan to betray a man who considered me one of his friends, the stranger spoke again. Fortunately, he was nodding.

  “Very well then, that serves me well enough. The two of you may shelter here from the blackmists, and not a day longer.”

  I was too relieved at the prospect of not being eaten alive to care much how long my safety would last. So long as it was long enough to let me walk out the other end in one piece, that was all that mattered. It’s amazing how much imminent death simplifies things.

  Gruin and I headed for the pub of course, or what passed for one in this village. It seemed the place didn’t get as much passers through as even Sheppleberry, so the closest we were able to find was an inn that gave permission for us both to buy wine off another of the villagers and drink it inside.

  “Don’t like this place,” the Grynkori scowled into his cup. I smiled into mine. There really wasn’t much he could’ve said, short of an actual death threat, which would’ve broken my good mood up. I was only even half-listening at first. Mistake number one.

  “It was hard enough getting past the gate, but it’s not so bad.” Truth be told I actually liked it. The place smelled fresh, compared to the big city and, certainly, the mines I’d been growing accustomed to, and I still considered myself lucky enough to be inside it at all.

  “Maybe not on the surface, but something is off here. I can smell it.”

  “I think that might be you,” I grinned. Truth be told I didn’t smell so good myself. This inn—if it could be called that—had a bath at least, but I wasn’t expecting the luxury a larger town or city could provide. Just as well, I wouldn’t get it.

  Ordinarily Gruin and I would’ve drunk ourselves stupid and headed back upstairs to sleep in a rented room, but not that day. Not a person in the village would be sleeping in beds tonight. We knew a full hour before dusk that the blackmists were coming, and so everyone funelled into the shelter.

  It wasn’t a big one, but then it wasn’t sitting in a big town. Most of the building’s size, what little it had, came from the sheer thickness of its walls. Only rarely would you find constructions of stone back then, but every village as isolated as this one had at least a single one in the form of its blackmist shelter.

  We entombed ourselves behind that thick stone, lit the interior with flickering torches, breathed through shallow grates that allowed just enough hair to circulate that we’d live without making a greater weakness in the structure than was necessary. We stayed as we were, waited.

  And before long, we heard it. The grinding, the scraping, the shifting. Mass without weight, presence without substance. A thousand unknowns and unknowables writhing around outside, circling the shelter, seeking out a vulnerability.

  Each one of those vulnerabilities, the potential ones at least, was already marked by lamp-light. That would slow them, but not stop them.

  So all of us remained on edge as we waited for the dark things to move.

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