Finder's Bane - Kate Novak [115]
"I would prefer to keep our business out of the public eye," Jedidiah said. "Let's see if we can't find a more private means of excavation than digging in the street."
The four adventurers circled around to the front of the shop. A sign over the front door read, Dits's Books. They entered the front door. There were shelves and shelves of tomes of all sizes. At the moment, the shop was empty of customers.
The proprietor, Bits, was a bariaur, a creature with the body of a mountain sheep and the upper torso of a man, with a ram's horns on his head. He lowered his head and peered at them over the rims of a pair of blue-tinted eyeglasses. "Can I help you?" he inquired.
"Perhaps," Jedidiah said. "We, um, need to dig in your basement. We're willing to pay you for the privilege and for any inconvenience, of course."
"Indeed," the bariaur replied, as if there was nothing very unusual in the man's request. "Why?"
"It's a long story," Joel said.
The bariaur's eyes lit up. "Long stories are my specialty."
Surprisingly, they came to an agreement rather quickly after that. Bits consented to the excavation, provided they paid him a sizable sum of gold and related to him the story behind why they were digging in his basement.
"Why does he need to know the story?" Walinda asked suspiciously. "What difference does it make to him?"
"He's a bookseller," Holly said with a sigh of exasperation. "He probably writes books, too. A good hero's tale is worth a lot of money in Sigil. The populace eats them up, so to speak."
The bariaur led the group down an iron staircase. Jedidiah pulled out a light stone to reveal an empty, windowless basement with walls of fitted stone and a dirt floor. The finder's stone beacon pointed toward the base of the back wall. Just above the beacon was a black granite archway sealed with mortared red brick.
"I don't come down here often," Bits declared. "It's too damp to store books. Tried renting it to some Anarchists, but they said it was haunted and moved out. Never saw a ghost myself, though I sat here for a few nights waiting for one. Very disappointing."
"We'll need some tools to break through this wall," Jedidiah said.
"I can arrange that," Holly said.
"I will go with you," Walinda added.
"That's all right. I don't need any help," the paladin replied.
"But I need to be sure you are not mustering your hedonist friends to attack us and steal the Hand of Bane for yourself," Walinda retorted.
"Fine," Jedidiah said. "Go. Joel, you can start paying this man by telling him our story."
"What will you be doing?" Joel asked.
"Thinking," the older man replied.
Holly, Walinda, Joel, and Dits climbed back up to the ground-floor level. After Walinda and Holly left the shop, the bariaur led Joel into a back room. The shopkeeper settled himself in a nest of pillows in front of a low writing desk, lifted a quill pen, and poised it over a huge roll of parchment. "Whenever you're ready," he said.
Joel began his tale in Berdusk, explaining how he'd met and become friends with Jedidiah, how he'd become a priest of Finder, and how he'd started out on his pilgrimage to the Lost Vale. He ended with his arrival in Sigil, his reunion with Holly, and their tracking of the Hand of Bane to Dits's basement.
Dits recorded Joel's story word for word, with an amazingly quick hand and in a fluid script. When he'd caught up with Joel's last words, he stopped and sat back. "There's something missing," Dits said. "Something you're not telling me. I can sense these things."
Joel started. He had, of course, deliberately left out the secret of Jedidiah's true identity and how the half of the finder's stone he now held possessed all the god's remaining powers.
"There are things I can't talk about," the young bard admitted.
"But the story isn't true without them," Dits objected in an annoyed tone. "And it's not finished, either."
"Not yet," Joel agreed.
The bariaur