Caryfell

 Garrett was sitting on a large mushroom despite the complaints of Samara who thought it was unsafe.  Around them the grey-orange walls of the cave rose up to a vaulted ceiling several metres overhead, and it felt like the heat from their campfire was rising up and away from them as well.  Water trickled down the cave walls in thin rivulets and pooled here and there in depressions in the cave floor; green-blue lichen and mould grew wherever it felt like it, and a cold breeze chilled them whenever they weren’t near the fire.  Light came from the fire itself, though before they’d lit it there had been a lessening of the darkness towards one end of the cave.

There were four mushrooms, growing in a cluster that shielded the campfire from the breeze.  Two of them were lumpy and semi-spherical; the other two, growing on thick stems that had found purchase on something below the rock floor of the cave, had flatter tops.  Garrett had claimed one and the other, rejected disdainfully by Samara, was being squatted on by Efimov.

“Tomorrow, we should reach the end of the cave,” said Samara.  Her blue hair, long enough to reach her waist and normally braided to keep it out of her way, was covering her head and the map she was staring at.  The map was drawn on terratta-parchment in fluorescent inks and was easier to see when protected from the light.  “We should come out on the side of the mountain, and then somewhere below us will be Blinton.  I think we should be able to see it from above.”

“More than they can do,” said Efimov.  He was dark-skinned and muscular and had three eyes; the third was set above the other two in his forehead and often looked in a different direction to what Garrett thought of as the ‘regular two’.  His hair was black and kept back from his head by a thin woven band in red and orange; there was a pattern to the weaving but it was hard to discern in the flickering light of the cave.  He sniggered to himself.

“You keep saying that,” said Samara sounding annoyed.  “Are you going to explain yourself before we get there?  I’d like to be prepared for whatever we’re going to find.”

Efimov sniggered again.

“Seriously,” said Garrett.  He was squat and grey-skinned with warts and bulbous tumour-like excretions on his visible skin.  He was half-ogre, though the size and strength of his father had eluded him, replaced instead by the cunning and mercantile drive of his (mostly-human) mother.  “This is a business trip, Efimov.  What gives?”

“Everything is business trip with you, Gar,” said Efimov easily.  His third eye stared off into the darkness, as though hunting for something to watch.  “Even this cave, you managed to find things to sell.”

“He’s got you there,” said Samara.  She tossed her hair back and lifted her head.  The glow of the maps inks persisted for a moment, squiggly lines floating in the darkness, before fading in the light of the campfire.  Her slightly-yellowish skin cast and triangular face made Garrett thing of the large cats that his ogre father had kept for food.

“We got lucky!” he protested.  “I had no idea that people had left things behind when they came through here before.”

“They died,” said Samara.  She’d objected to ‘looting the dead’ while Garrett had been going through the bags that he’d found when he’d bumped into a stalagmite, broken it off and discovered the first corpse.  There had been much that was rotten or water-logged, but in one split-open and disintegrating satchel he’d found a couple of handfuls of uncut gems and a long mahogany stick that Efimov thought was a magical staff.

“People do that,” said Garrett.  “All the time, in fact.  And they don’t have any use for what they leave behind and there’s no-one here to tell us who their inheritors might be.  So that means we get to inherit.”

Samara shook her head, her hair rippling in waves behind and around her.  “Corpse-robbing,” she said softly.

“Did you figure out what the staff does yet, Eff?” said Garrett.  He’d failed to convince Samara of the rule of finders-keepers already and wasn’t in the mood to try again.

Efimov shifted position so that he was sitting cross-legged.  “Is staff of way-finding,” he said.  “Out of charges, obviously.”

“Obviously,” said Garrett, nodding.  “And Blinton?  What’s so funny about that?”

Efimov tilted his head back so that all three eyes stared at the distant ceiling, which even to his magically-acute vision was still mostly shadowed.  “Was there once,” he said.  “They… didn’t like me.”

After the silence had drawn on for several seconds Samara said, “Is that it?  It’s a funny place because they didn’t like you?”

“They offered reward for my capture,” said Efimov.  Garrett shifted uneasily: Efimov’s past was a mystery to both him and Samara, and they’d both done some digging around as discretely as possible.  Having him on the team was undoubtedly a good idea — he was a skilled mage and his appraisal of magical artefacts had been spot-on so far — but knowing so little about him made them both just a little nervous.  “Wanted me dead or deader.”

“Dead or alive, usually,” said Samara who couldn’t accept that Efimov’s accent didn’t mean he didn’t speak Common as well as the rest of them.

“Dead or deader said poster,” said Efimov.  “I can read, Samara.”

“Yes, sorry.”

“Poster said I was to be reported to authorities on sight,” said Efimov.  “So I… arranged things a little so that that was no problem for them.”

Garrett’s eyes widened.  He might not know much about Efimov, but what he’d seen so far suggested that he had a very literal approach to the world.

“Clouds of darkness?” he asked, wondering what spell Efimov had chosen to cast.  “Some kind of permanent night?”

Efimov chuckled now, a deeper, more sincere sounding laughter.  “I had no idea how long I would need to stay,” he said.  “Plus at that time I had not learned much of magics of Bon Amba.  Was little more than sophisticated necromancer and vivimancer.  Skilled vivimancer, naturally, but my talents lay with life and death.  So I took tree pollen, since was Spring, and modified it a touch so that when it got in eyes, it took root and rotted eyes out of head.  Took maybe four weeks before entire town was blind.  Hence new name of town.  Used to be called Caryfell.”

Samara’s gasp was genuine shock and Garrett had to quickly stifle the laughter rising in his chest.  He coughed, and then again.  “That sounds effective,” he said, hoping not to offend Samara.

“You blinded a whole town of people?” She wasn’t shouting but she sounded like she wanted to be.  “A whole town!  So much that they changed the name of the town!”

“Was them or me,” said Efimov, shrugging.  “No-one died and we all along together living happily.  For six months or so, and then I left.”

“You turned them all blind!”

“He didn’t kill them,” said Garrett.  “I think that’s important too.  They wanted to kill him, after all.”

“That’s not the point,” said Samara and then stopped.  Garrett risked looking over at her.  She was staring at Efimov but her hands were braiding her hair; it looked like she wasn’t aware she was doing it.  “I mean, that’s sort of.  Well, that’s not quite.  Damn it, wasn’t there another way?”

“Maybe?” Efimov shrugged. “If we find ourselves in similar situation I’m happy to ask you for alternative solution.”

Samara dropped her hair and seemed to realise she’d been braiding it.  “Well.  That’s good,” she said. “Yes.  We can discuss it.”

Garrett started to relax.

“Can you unblind them now though?  Undo what you did?”

“Maybe,” said Efimov.  “Can probably grow new eyes if I think about it. But have they stopped wanting to kill me?”