Chapter 50: The Cursed Sword

  Chastity very carefully, very quietly closed the lid of the box, shielding the cursed blade from view.

  Don’t jump to conclusions, she told herself. But her quickened pulse betrayed her. Here was in fact an unambiguously evil item! What did it mean?

  She peered through the wagon’s interior and out to where the traveling merchant was entertaining his crowd of eager customers. He was showing off a wind-up music box.

  Chastity gnawed her lip.

  Don’t jump to conclusions, Chastity! This could all be a misunderstanding.

  Honeytongue said he had picked the sword specially for her. Did he know it was cursed? How could he? He was just a merchant. He probably bought and sold all kinds of things in ignorance of their underlying spiritual condition… right?

  Chastity slipped away and took the ferry back across the river. She needed time and space to think things through. She paced through the empty village streets.

  Cursed Short Sword of Acedia, she repeated internally. Acedia. I know that word, but forget its meaning.

  “Recall knowledge, religion,” she said.

  The activated ability flooded the corridors of memory. She was back in the Divinity School library, surrounded by monastic sources. The old desert fathers, those weather-beaten fourth-century monks who had catalogued the ailments of the soul with the precision of physicians. Acedia was their great enemy, the so-called ‘noonday demon.’

  Not depression, exactly, though it wore that face sometimes. Not laziness, though it wore that face too. The monks described it as a spiritual torpor, a listlessness of the soul, a dangerous indifference that crept over a person in the quiet hours and made the holy life feel… pointless. Burdensome. Not worth the effort.

  Evagrius Ponticus had written that acedia whispered to a monk that his cell was a prison, that his Rule was a cage, that surely God could be served just as well–better, even–somewhere else. It was the sin that made a person want to put down what they were carrying and simply… stop.

  Something that might make a Paladin set aside their Quests.

  But there was something else–something else making her uneasy, but what? It was like a word on the very tip of her tongue.

  Chastity found Charlie, who was limping around, and considered using Divine Healing on him. But he insisted his foot wasn’t broken, and besides, she needed all the Focus Points she could spare for her plan. With Charlie’s permission, they went into the Underfoot home and Chastity began spamming her Detect Evil II ability on every mundane object she could find.

  Rolling pin? No evil detected. Rocking chair? No evil detected. Embroidery hoop? No evil detected.

  When Chastity ran out of Focus Points, she took the time to pray and meditate, recharging as fast as she was able. Then she got to it again, desperate to find any new objects in the house: tea cup, butter knife, pillow!

  Finally, she received the notification she was waiting for:

  She opened her Paladin Ability Tree and examined the Sense Evil II option available through the Ability Split.

  Sense Evil II, I choose you!

  She was out of Ability Points. She was also out of Focus Points again, now operating at -6 max capacity. Until she leveled up, she would be capped at 24 Focus Points. Not ideal, but she had a reason. Chastity thanked the utterly confused Charlie for indulging her and set off to pray some more.

  ?

  In the late afternoon, the villagers invited Honeytongue to join them for a feting (as they customarily did upon the occasion of his visits) at Roundhenge Tavern. Having already collected most of the village’s coin and goods worth trading, he obliged. The merchant closed up his wagon, leaving his ponies hitched, and crossed the river.

  This was Chastity’s opportunity. She waited until the coast was clear and then manned the ferry raft herself, crossing the river unobserved. As she approached the shuttered wagon the two ponies looked at her with suspicion. One snorted.

  “Easy now…” she said softly. “Don’t mind me.”

  Chastity hated sneaking around; deception was unbecoming of a Paladin. But that pit in her stomach would not go away. She had to be certain of the merchant’s intentions.

  She tried the back door of the wagon–it was unlocked! She carefully opened it and unfolded the steps. The box that held the cursed sword was not where she left it. Hmmm. But… her senses were going haywire. Some thing or things within her passive 30-foot range of detection were pricking her conscience, provoking her spirit.

  There was not just one evil thing (or creature!) here, but perhaps many. And the strongest sense was emanating from the far side of the wagon, behind the drawn velvet curtain. Picking her way carefully through the organized chaos, she drew back the curtain.

  Against the far wall there were several large shapes with rounded tops, draped in canvas. Her senses were pinging wildly. She drew back the canvas to reveal large, gilded cages. They were elegant, ornate. The kind of cage a wealthy person might display in a parlor, housing an exotic bird. The bars were closely spaced, the construction solid. Each had elaborate keylocks.

  Evil bird cages? she wondered, anticlimactically. She looked around and saw several more tinctures and medicaments lining a special shelf near the cages. Also, coils of fine rope. She picked one of the bottles up.

  “Identify.”

  Then it hit her all at once. The THING that had been bothering her. The nagging sensation. The word at the tip of her tongue.

  Fiddlebrook.

  Earlier in the day she had half overheard one of the villagers asking about a letter from his brother, surnamed Fiddlebrook. The very same name she had seen scrawled on the cave wall behind the slave cage!

  Flashes of an earlier conversation with Barkroot and Charlie Cucumber came back to her mind:

  “Many went north looking for work. Drifting off little by little. I figure about half the homes in the village lie empty now.”

  “We know him as Honeytongue. A smooth salesman, that. He could sell a rat trap to a rat!”

  “He is generous, though. He offers free transport north as part of his circuit. Halflings are easy, he says, they don’t take up much room in the wagon!”

  Chastity was filled with a sickening certainty.

  Honeytongue had been luring halflings away from the village with the promise of finding work in the north–possibly for YEARS–and selling them into slavery. Handing them over to the very goblins and orcs who had enslaved Kobelt. Bringing back trifling sums and letters either forged or demanded at knifepoint to maintain the ruse.

  Fiddlebrook’s brother. Charlie’s father. Nearly half the population of Goldenberry.