Underkeeper

Bernt limped out of the tunnel and into the sewers as guards streamed past to secure it against the pursuing kobolds. While the traps that riddled the tunnels had mostly been disabled, they’d been harried by pursuers almost the entire way back and lost several adventurers along the way.

There were many injuries, and while they had healers, they couldn’t afford to stop for risk of being bogged down by hundreds of kobolds. Once they had some time to organize a response, kobolds could be terrifying enemies. There were just so many of them.

Nobody said it out loud, but Bernt doubted that Worov’s group would make it out.

That wasn’t to say Bernt had been injured fighting—no, he managed to hurt himself without help, by stepping on a nail. Why there was a nail in a position to be stepped on in a stone corridor was a mystery that would likely never be solved.

Following the crowd, he climbed out of the sewers and up into the street. Just a few days earlier, he’d watched the City Guard push back a kobold incursion here with the help of Ed, Fiora, and a number of other spellcasters and adventurers. He trudged away from the group a few steps, found a dry spot, and plopped himself on the ground bonelessly. He’d made it—and he was exhausted.

Jori, he noticed, was a few blocks over, down in the sewers. She’d snuck through the crowd down below and made herself scarce. That was for the best. The last thing either of them needed was for the City Guard to get a hold of her.

Over to his right, he saw the geomancer speaking earnestly to Ed, still looking very out of sorts. That was to be expected, all things considered—he’d just watched several of his closest friends die. The elf, the prime party’s healer, hadn’t said a word since they’d met him. He sat on the ground, staring at nothing. He’d been no help at all during their retreat, and Bernt wondered if he would ever recover.

Luckily for him, Ed wasn’t looking his way. He wasn’t ready to explain himself to his boss yet. That was when he caught sight of another gray-robed figure coming right at him, waving urgently.

“Bernt! You look worse’n Kustov’s beard after a double shift on the shit patrol! What are you doing here?” Dayle asked, taking in the scene. “You alright?”

Bernt didn’t answer right away, wrongfooted by the mixture of relief and apprehension he felt at seeing Dayle’s familiar face. To his rising horror, he felt tears gathering at the corners of his eyes, but he blinked them away—hopefully before anyone could see.

“Gods dammit, you little shit,” Dayle said, clearly misinterpreting Bernt’s silence. “What did you do?

“We snuck in.” Bernt answered. “But it’s fine! We made it out.”

‘Who’s we?” Dayle asked,

“No one!” Bernt said. “Nobody you need to worry about. It was my own fault.”

“Wow, Bernt,” came Elyn’s tired voice from behind him, tinged with a note of sarcasm. “I can’t believe you’d disavow us like that!”

“And to think,” Therion added, “after taking on half the dungeon to break us all out of a dragon’s own prison!”

Bernt flushed as his party settled down around him in silent support—even Syrah, though she still wouldn’t look at him.

He protested, “That’s not what happened! You’re making it sound like I fought a dragon.”

“True enough,” Oren chimed in, “that mind sorcerer practically had you. Without your pet demon, you would have gotten stuck in a cell just like the rest of us.”

“Don’t be jealous,” Elyn said to the thief. “He made it, and that’s what counts. You’re the one who tripped at the last hurdle.”

“And I lost my shadow-corrupted manticore spike doing it. Thanks for the reminder,” he said morosely.

Dayle had been watching the exchange with some amusement. When Oren mentioned Jori, though, all traces of humor vanished from his face.

He stared at Bernt thoughtfully for a moment. Then, making a decision, he held out his hand.

“Boy, I think you ought to come with me back to the office. You could use a potion for that limp, and Ed is going to want to debrief you when he hears you were in there.” He didn’t say anything about a demon—but he didn’t need to. Bernt had known it would be a problem, but he still cursed Oren inwardly for bringing Jori up so soon.

Sighing quietly to himself, he took Dayle’s proffered hand and heaved himself up to his feet. How was he going to talk his way—and Jori’s—out of this? If he could have just had a good night’s sleep first…

***

Sensing Bernt’s mood, Dayle kept the conversation light on the way back to the office. He complained about dungeon guard duty and regaled him with the fine details of the latest outrageous illegal dumping citations—alchemists all over the city were competing to find new ways to make the Underkeepers’ lives harder. Most likely, they were throwing a collective tantrum over Bernt’s own actions regarding Julian’s illegal potion dumping a few weeks earlier.

In one notable case, all the debris and developing clogs downstream of a particular alchemist’s shop had been petrified. It took Kustov days to find and clear it all, and since no one but the Underkeepers were inconvenienced, there was no risk of consequences for the alchemist in question.

Fiora was manning the desk in Ed’s office when they arrived. Somehow, she’d found the time to organize Ed’s paperwork, and the small bucket where Ed usually kept weeks’ worth of old tobacco ashes was nowhere in evidence. The whole place looked… a lot more professional. The woman herself sat straight-backed in sharp, uncreased gray robes, filling out paperwork in a quick, precise hand.

Bernt was impressed. Maybe Fiora should be running the place. When they came in, she raised an eyebrow at the pair, then focused on Bernt in his torn, dirty and bloody robes.

“Bernt? I thought you had today off…”

It was strange to realize he hadn’t been missed. That had been the point, of course, but it felt like he’d been gone for weeks. Realizing that most people here in the city still thought everything was normal was… weird. The prospect of telling his entire story from the beginning suddenly seemed daunting. He tried to think of a way to avoid the conversation that wouldn’t require him to lie, but failed. He looked away uncomfortably.

Fiora’s nose suddenly wrinkled in disgust, and she reached over to where her staff was leaning against the wall. Bernt felt her cleaning cantrip sanitize his filthy robes as she turned to Dayle.

Huh. Why hadn’t he thought of that?

“Dayle, aren’t you supposed to be on guard duty today?”

He shrugged.

“Bernt there just came stumbling out of the dungeon along with damn near thirty adventurers, plus Janus the Earthshaper and Archdruid Leirin,” he explained. “Both of them look like they drew the short straw at an orcish wedding. The rest of the prime party’s dead—apparently the dragon’s an elder.”

As Dayle talked, he went over to Ed’s potion cabinet and opened it. It wasn’t locked—apparently Ed hadn’t had time to replace the lock yet. It was still well stocked with minor healing potions, and he pulled one out and tossed it to Bernt.

Pulling the cork, he downed it to deal with the wound in his foot. He was starting to feel a little more like himself again, free of that nightmare labyrinth with its traps and ambushes, and the way they were talking about him chafed at him.

“I didn’t stumble,” he corrected the older man irritably. “And I damned well broke them out of the dragon’s dungeon.”

Dayle smiled broadly at Fiora. “Wild, right? I grabbed Bernt here nice and quick, so Ed could talk to him before he gets dragged in front of the guild investigators. They’re going to be all over this.”

Fiora sat back in her chair, eyes wide.

“We’re sitting on top of an elder dragon right now?” She looked around. “What does that mean? Do we evacuate?”

“Doubt it.” Dayle shrugged. “But we’ve got kobolds trying to push out of the dungeon right now. They’re going to wait another few hours to see if anyone else makes it out, then they’re going to containment.”

That was news to Bernt—when had that been decided? Most of the mid-ranked active adventurers in Halfbridge would have gone into the dungeon, and Bernt was certain that was well over a hundred people in total. The majority of them would still be inside. If containment protocol was implemented, they would almost certainly die.

Sinking down onto a bench at the wall, Bernt tuned out Dayle and Fiora’s speculations. He didn’t want to think about the dungeon anymore, or what would happen when Ed got here. He just needed a moment. A second to relax—to actually feel safe in a place surrounded by friends and colleagues.

***

Bernt woke to the smell of pipe smoke. He was lying down, and someone had put something soft under his head—a folded-up blanket. When he opened his eyes, he saw Ed sitting at his desk, smoking up a storm cloud. It couldn’t have been very long. Dayle and Fiora were both still there, and the three of them were talking to each other. And, Bernt realized, he couldn’t hear a thing.

One of them, probably Ed, had cast some sort of privacy spell so he could sleep—not something he’d seen or heard of before. It was a kindness that reassured him a little, but also a pointed reminder that his colleagues were more than they seemed, especially his boss.

He’d known that Ed was an archmage, of course, but how often did one actually see an archmage go all-out in a fight? After seeing that geomancer at work… that hit differently. Now he had to wonder—what was Ed really capable of?

Seeing him move, Ed pulled his pipe out of his mouth for a second and gave it a casual flick, allowing Bernt to hear what Fiora was saying.

“—lost pretty much everyone useful in there. You know what that means. We’re getting pulled in, whether we like it or not. You need to talk to Iriala, the Rangers, maybe the Solicitors. We’re going to need allies. You can’t play in this arena alone.”

“Godsdamned warlocks,” Dayle grumbled. “Do we really have to talk to those slippery evil bastards? If there was a way to smear our reputation, then that would be it.”

“They’re a lot more influential than you might think,” Ed said thoughtfully. “And we might have one of our own in their ranks soon anyway.”

At that, all three of them turned Bernt’s way.

Distinctly uncomfortable, he froze. What was all that about?

“Uh… what?” he said eloquently. Then more forcefully he added, “Hey, I’m not a warlock!”

Ed leaned forward in his chair, eyes boring into Bernt.

“Are you not?” His tone was mild despite his customary scowl. “‘Cause I heard from multiple sources that you were quite the hero down in that dungeon. Specifically, that you were ‘the young Underkeeper warlock with the imp’ who came out of nowhere, slinging hellfire, to break them out of a kobold prison with the help of his contracted demon.”

Bernt began to sweat.

“That was Jori. But I didn’t enter a demonic pact! I don’t even know how to do something like that. I just put a familiar bond on her.”

The three were staring at him now. Ed’s expression was completely unreadable, but Dayle looked incredulous and Fiora let out a breathless chuckle that made it clear that she wasn’t actually amused at all.

“You put a familiar bond on a demon,” Ed repeated, tone flat.

The old man pinched the bridge of his nose, as if trying to combat an oncoming headache.

“Bernt, son. You’re going to start at the beginning. You’re going to tell me everything that led to you getting into that dungeon, what happened in there, and then, most particularly, you’re going to tell me everything that led to you thinking it would be a good idea to bond a demon as a familiar.”

Bernt shifted nervously. He was starting to think he was missing something. Jori had always been reliable, and she hadn’t hurt anyone. He wasn’t going to let anyone hurt her, especially not after what they’d just been through. But… he needed to come clean to someone.

And the only people he trusted who might actually know what was happening to Jori were standing right in front of him.

“Uh… I think I’m going to need to back up a little more than that,” he said hesitantly. “I’ve actually had Jori for nearly two years. She’s been… changing, lately.”

Dayle buried his head in his hands with a groan.