Over there, terrible things awaited. Here, in the barren plains around the far-off forbidden place, the weaker existences cowered and scavenged among the scattered rocks, gnarled bare bushes, and intermittent jets of dark-red flame from the ground. Formless, they slunk away to avoid Al's attention, but lurked nearby, watching.

  A door opened, and something intruded.

  Wait... What door?

  Al opened his eyes and yawned. The sound of something metallic sliding along the floor drew his attention, followed by the scent of sausages. Al sat up. In the dim light of the one lamp they'd left lit when they went to sleep, he could see trays being slid into their luxurious prison cell through a slot in the bottom of the door. A gnollish head eased out from under Al's bed to investigate the enticing breakfast scents.

  "Wake up, Captain will be by to talk to you soon," a gruff, unfamiliar voice in the hall announced before footsteps moved away again.

  "This is somewhat less dignified than last night's dinner," Bote said, already dressed and sitting in a meditative pose on their bed, "but at least it smells like good meat."

  "All right, all right, I'm awake," Wikwocket mumbled as she sleepily wrestled the blankets away from herself. Gruntle pulled himself out from under Al's bed, yawning and stretching.

  "You know, they gave you your own bed," Al said, pointing out the one with the bearskin thrown over it, and a donkey lounging atop that next to Gruntle's pack. A gnollish grunt acknowledged Al's statement, but Gruntle appeared not to believe it to be relevant. He loped over to the trays of sausages on the floor and crouched down to eat.

  "Hey, save me some!" Wikwocket complained. She gave up her struggle against the oversized blanket and half-fell out of bed, dragging it with her and mumbling curses at it as she stumbled to claim a tray of her own. Al shook his head and hurried to do the same. He took up the two unclaimed trays of sausage and the one with a bowl of oats and balanced them as best he could while he brought them back for Bote and Haunch. The donkey stuck his nose in the bowl as soon as Al set it one the bed.

  "Thank you," Bote said, accepting the tray Al offered and reaching down to pull their pack up onto the bed to extract a fork from it. "Assuming Will's questioning doesn't last all day, do you have any tasks you'd like to accomplish before Gruntle is introduced to the public?"

  "As much as I'd like to hurry off to visit the former library, I expect I'll want to stay there for a while to research once I find the information I'm looking for. If feel like I ought to be here when they send Gruntle out there in case anything goes wrong. If there's time, I may visit the Elixir Emporium again and see about that sleep-inducing magic Eric used. It seems like it'd be good to have an option to pacify someone without doing real harm to them. How about you?"

  "I will do whatever the Ineffable Plans require of me, as those needs become apparent. We will see how this morning's interview goes."

  "I want to get a better look around this place, maybe meet some more of the interesting people. HA!" Wikwocket declared, with a final triumphant cry as she snatched the last sausage from her plate before Gruntle could reach for it. The gnoll grumbled as she crammed the whole thing into her mouth and began chewing defiantly.

  "Please don't harass the guards or cause problems. We just got here, it's far too early to be chased out of town by an angry mob."

  "When has that ever happened before? Don't worry, we're delightful!"

  "...Please?"

  "You worry too much! Fine, we'll try to be only a little delightful. For now."

  "Now, I want you to tell me everything."

  The guard-captain - Will - seated himself at the end of the table as far from the gnoll as possible. The guard Diane sat next to him with a small collection of objects. Al's face exposed his worry.

  "When you say everything...?"

  "While I feel like there's a whole lot here that I ought to know, right now I just mean everything about the events around your encounter with Charlie formerly-Smitherton yesterday."

  Al glanced over at the faces of his colleagues. Bote nodded. Wikwocket had an eager grin. Gruntle just yawned.

  "All right then. We left Hell's Bathtub a few hours before sunrise to avoid unwanted attention. I got the impression that some of the people there thought someone walking around gnoll-shaped was in poor taste and we didn't want any of them causing trouble when we left the area."

  "Any people in particular that you would recognize?"

  "No, I don't think so. There seemed to be a few groups who just disapproved of our presence."

  "My impression is that there were some who were uncomfortable about Gruntle's presence for much the same reason one might be upset to see someone bearing a flag of an enemy nation in public," Bote explained.

  "Fair. Continue."

  "We weren't far down the road when we seem to have been targeted by a magical summoning. We found Charlie at the other end of it," Al continued, then hesitated.

  "To our knowledge, Charlie has never been instructed in wizardry nor shown any innate talent for it. How was this summoning accomplished?"

  "Well, we weren't there when it started, obviously, so we're not sure. What we saw looked like some sort of ritual. He'd constructed an arcane summoning circle with blood and body parts of goblins. He seemed to be trying to conjure up forces to punish some goblins whose raiding was interfering with whatever he was up to."

  "Leaving aside the matter of how he did it, do you know why he would have brought you all there in particular?"

  "He was..."

  Will squinted suspiciously as Al hesitated again.

  "He was conjuring gnolls, captain. We think Gruntle was just the nearest one, so we all got caught up in it."

  Will exchanged glances with Diane, who had been watching a lit candle and a glass jar of blue smoke. She nodded.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  "Really? Any idea why or how a well-off member of an influential noble family would learn a means to do such a thing in the first place, let alone actually try it?"

  "From what Darius told me, I think there's some sort of cult involved in the appearance of the gnolls."

  "Wait, back up, who's Darius?"

  "Oh, he's the dead elven hero that insisted that I take his sword with me."

  Will lowered his face into his hands and groaned quietly.

  "...Adventurers... forget I asked. Are you saying we've got a dangerous cult in Southwall?"

  "Well, I don't know that, it might be just Charlie for all I know, assuming there actually is one. We don't have a lot of information."

  "What information do you have?"

  "Just speculation, really. If there's an actual cult, I think it's probably dedicated to the demon responsible for gnolls existing. From the rumors, it sounds like gnoll raids have been happening more often up north, but still not constantly. Either the gnolls can only appear in specific situations, or there's some sort of cost that limits their summoning, or maybe there just aren't more than a few cultists out there who can do it."

  "It is also possible there is some more complex plan in motion that requires gnolls to appear and rampage at specific times and places, though if what we know of gnolls suggests anything about the demon, such complexity seems out of character," Bote added.

  "Is there, or is there not, a demon-cult conspiracy in my city," asked Will insistently.

  "No idea," Al admitted, "I don't really even know much of anything about the demon yet. There's some research I came here to do but it's all preliminary stuff."

  "Can you find out anything about this from your gnoll, if it's some sort of gnoll-demon?"

  "Grandma," Gruntle clarified.

  "And... that seems to be about it," Al explained, "he says he's never actually met the demon, he can't say what its actual name is, and I'm pretty sure it's not literally his parent's mother. This seems to be some kind of innate or instinctual knowledge."

  "Let's get back to Charlie, then. What happened after he magicked you to him?"

  "Gruntle got there first. When I arrived Charlie was saying something gnollish to him."

  "He wanted Gruntle to kill goblins," Wikwocket explained, "until we showed up unexpectedly. Then he wanted Gruntle to kill us."

  "Wanted me to kill outsiders," Gruntle offered, "so I did."

  Will cocked an eyebrow at Al. "Your gnoll tried to kill you?"

  "Uh, no. Charlie thought he was going to, though. There didn't seem to be any actual compulsion to obey in whatever magic he used to drag us to him, I think he just assumed that gnolls would happily help him kill anyone he pointed out. To be fair, that might be a reasonable assumption most of the time. We're sort of like a clan, though, and Charlie isn't one of us. I mean, really, it's Charlie's own fault this happened to him. He attacked us."

  "I think he was making a sort of call for a gnollish clan to fight an enemy together," Wikwocket explained. Gruntle grunted in agreement.

  "So, when you said he was saying something gnollish to your gnoll, you mean he was actually speaking in whatever passes for a gnoll language?" Will asked somewhat skeptically.

  "Definitely!" Wikwocket answered. "It doesn't seem to be a very formal language but it seems to be pretty useful for communicating the kinds of things gnolls care about."

  "Are you suggesting that you understand the noises they make?"

  "Well, yeah, somewhat! You don't work closely with other heroic adventurers, facing danger together to defeat evil, without learning a lot about each other!" She made a short animalistic noise at the gnoll, who answered with a grunt. Will watched her face in silence for a few seconds before speaking.

  "That's interesting to know. All right then, what you're saying is Charlie formerly-Smitherton wanted some goblins killed, so he used some kind of demonic cult ritual to conjure up gnolls to do it. This dragged you there, whereupon he tried to get your gnoll to attack you. What happened then?"

  "He pulled out a pair of silver-treated daggers and moved to attack us, obviously expecting Gruntle to join in and help," Al said. "He didn't look like much of a brawler, and Gruntle hitting him in the back of the head with his flail was clearly shocking to him, but he kept trying to kill us for longer than I'd have expected. He even bit Gruntle, before Gruntle bit him back and ended things."

  "Little Charlie? Bit a gnoll?"

  Gruntle grunted and held out an arm, showing the human teeth-marks still visible there.

  "The apparent affinity for gnolls and an obvious enjoyment of violence would not be unexpected if there truly is a gnoll-related cult involved," Bote pointed out.

  "Did you find anything that might tell us what he was doing there before you interrupted him?"

  "We found out later that he'd gotten a room at the Golden Penance, but he was outside behind the stables to perform his summoning-ritual. There was evidence that he'd been fighting goblins inside the stables as well. I don't know what his original plans were, but the raid by goblins seems to have interrupted it and made him angry enough to call on demonic forces."

  "And after you killed him..."

  "...In self-defense," Al emphasized.

  "...of course. What did you do after that?"

  "We heard people in distress and more of the little green bastards laughing, so we went to help. As far as I know, we managed to keep anyone from dying. Well, besides Charlie and some of the goblins before we drove them off."

  "And then?"

  "Uh, well, then we... um... went back to investigate who Charlie was and what he might have been trying to do, and decide what we should do."

  "Why didn't you stay to ask for a reward?"

  "Look, things were kind of hectic. We had a gnoll with us, which was already going to be difficult to explain. I wasn't really comfortable with the idea of trying to explain how we got there and why some sort of demon-summoning ritual brought us there. It was during the investigation afterwards that we noticed all of the silver he was carrying. Wikwocket went back to the inn to try to gather more information and found out Charlie had been staying there calling himself Smith."

  "He didn't seem to be taking much with him, either," Wikwocket added, "which makes sense if he left Southwall in a hurry to avoid capture by the city guards, or werewolves. Or werewolf guards!"

  "We do not have any werewolves in the city guard. Anything else you'd like to report?"

  "Just that we decided to bring Charlie with us to turn over to you when we got here, and we headed away as quickly as we could. We wanted to get him to the authorities without delay."

  The flame of the candle that Diane had been watching flickered and a thin stream of white smoke rose from it.

  "You wanna try that again?" Diane rasped.

  "It would be helpful if you remained truthful," Will added. Al sighed.

  "Truth is, I wanted us to get moving because there were at least two people who found out there was a gnoll present, one of whom seemed to be terrified. It didn't seem like staying around would be helpful."

  The candle flame settled down and the smoke stopped.

  "So your gnoll did not, in fact, attempt to eat the proprietor of the Golden Penance Inn?"

  Wikwocket laughed while Al tried to explain.

  "Gruntle went with Wikwocket to investigate the inn while we examined Charlie. I think someone there spotted him and made assumptions. Uh, I think if Gruntle had tried to eat someone, they'd at least be missing pieces. Wait, he wasn't missing pieces, was he?"

  "No," Will admitted. "He insisted gnolls tried to eat him twice yesterday, but aside from one guest who said she heard gnolls, the others denied having seen any."

  Will stood up.

  "I think that's enough for today. You seem to be telling the truth so far."

  Diane blew out the candle and began to put away the collection of objects she'd brought with her. Will strode to where the cart had been left against a wall.

  "Do you mind if I take him with me in what you've got him wrapped in? It'd help minimize problems in transport if people can't see him."

  "How many new ones will the reward pay for?" Wikwocket asked in reply.

  "That depends where you buy them," Will answered. "It will more than pay for an equivalent replacement for the one you have him wrapped in now."

  "It's mine anyway, I suppose it's fine," Al said. Will hefted the stiffened corpse over one shoulder with a grunt of effort.

  "We'll take him back and process your reward. We may have questions for you again later, don't leave the city any time soon," he said sternly.

  "We'll be here in Southwall for a while. Thanks, captain."