While the Watcher's Eyes Are Shut

Two weeks after she left, I was stuck running the tavern after hours. The interior looked exactly the same as it did all the other days, with the exception of the sloppily rendered portrait of some guy I've never heard of, nor could I be bothered to remember his name, scratched onto the far wall near the entrance in a half-hearted attempt to cover up five or six previous portraits of similar people.

“Was this the man we were supposed to pay tribute to this year?”

If he was, nothing about him read to me like I needed to care about that. If the portrait did him any justice, he looked to be about 40 years of age, with a distinctly rugged Islander look. If only I could have been bothered to remember his name. Oh well… Names and faces changed much too often for me to care about any of them. These days, the only authority here came from whoever could sweet talk the villagers well enough.

A quintet of elves decided they wanted to get in as many rounds of harata as they could before they were too drunk to even move. I thought they might have been regulars, but even if they visited the tavern every day, I cared not to remember their names. In any case, the elves were just like any other customer; they came in, they drank their problems away, they stuttered their way out the door. Rinse and repeat.

It was the tallest elf's turn.

“I'm betting 600 debi of gold I can get my pawn to the final square this turn,” he told the other elves.

“600?!” the smallest elf was barely able to say, sounding like he was already out of breath. “You've lost your mind!”

“Youuu fool!” the middle elf protested, wobbly and already starting to waver in his speech. “Youuu need to… to… roll two twenties to doooo that!”

“You got a deal…!” a fourth elf replied, offering a handshake.

“Just watch me,” the tallest elf said with all the bravado in the world. “I happen to be a harata expert.”

He rolled his pair of dice. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted one of the elves mutter something to himself, a spell perhaps. In any case, the die rolls resulted in a 16 and a 17, quite short of the finish line.

“Noooooo!” the tallest elf cried as he realized his defeat.

“Hand over the money,” the fourth elf told him.

“Sorry, I don't conduct business with cheaters.”

“You what?!”

The two elves at once started grappling each other. I lost track of what the group were all shouting at each other, something about money and cheating and harata and magic. What started out as a simple disagreement quickly devolved into a full scale brawl. Fists and magic flew all over the place in a drunken frenzy. Nobody in the brawl had any clear control over their magic. Not my problem.

“Sparks!”

“Ice Shard!”

“Sudden Wind!”

Some of their magic spilled out into the nearby streets, nearly harming innocent passersby. One of the elves even got slammed through the harata table, which would make for one expensive bill in the morning.

Once an elf set fire to the tavern floor, I could not just stand there and watch anymore. I leaped over the bar table to land a right hook into the jaw of the fire starter. Though I was at least mildly concerned that such a move would hurt me more than him, it did the job as well as it needed to. As my attention turned towards the fire, the other elves laughed me off.

“Oh, look,” the tallest elf scoffed. “The human thinks he can play with the elves.”

He pushed me down to the floor before revealing a bow. “Enough!” he shouted, silencing the entire tavern.

After initially aiming it right at me, perhaps to tease me a little more, he aimed the bow at the elf he accused of cheating. It took but one shot. In no time, that elf had been pinned to the far wall behind the bar table, dead.

The archer brandished his bow some more, asking everyone, “Does anyone else want some of this?”

Silence.

“No? Good.”

As he walked out the door, the archer made one last snide remark at the dead elf, “All magic beckons a cost, they say. Looks like you paid yours.”

No law was coming for him, for the rare night when the Watcher shut his eyes to the world had come. Even the Watcher had left us to fend for ourselves. The scene that remained reminded me of a saying we learned while in the army.

The weak are meat, and the strong must eat.

Not a single person, human or elf, dared to move a muscle until the archer was sure to be gone. One by one, the remaining elves decided enough was enough and went on their way. I alone was to clean up the mess they made. First, I had to deal with that elf corpse… As it was late at night, I thought it no trouble at all to take the body to the village dump, a simple in-and-out job.

Not willing to deal with the expensive replacement of the harata table, I went upstairs… into Hilami’s room… I had the idea to see if any of her weird magic scrolls could yield any helpful secrets. Never before had I thought to step foot in there; we respected each other’s boundaries for the most part.

She clearly had the sense to keep her room tidy. Every scroll had its place, neatly arranged in alphabetical order, though she did not possess quite as many as I imagined. Just a simple repair magic scroll sufficed, yet finding one proved more difficult than expected.

Over by the window, I spotted a tablet of lead nailed to the wall. Marked on it was a strange inscription, which carried a magic I had never seen Hilami use before.

“I hereby bind Haran, the tavernkeeper down the street, and the shop of the one-eyed man, and of Eenti the goldsmith and Movat, her brother. Of these, may their bodies and shops be bound by mine curse. I hereby bind Arad the merchant and his sister, and her slave Sumya. Of these, may their bodies be utterly destroyed by mine curse. May the Watcher find their hearts lacking in the necessary weight to enter the seventh heaven for their wickedness, for they have besmirched the good name of this village, Andawas, and committed fraud against its people.”

It appeared I did not know Hilami as well as I thought if she wrote such things as curses. At least she applied this dark magic to people who had wronged her and the other villagers. I recalled a vague memory of someone named Arad, who claimed to arrive from the distant Islands Beyond the Shore and sell various wares thereof. He and Hilami had gotten into a disagreement that caused him to lose his hair, though I could not recall much else.

Nearby on a side table was a scroll, perfectly rolled up, and yet looking out of place all the same. It lacked a title, which all her other scrolls had. Instead, I found my name, my real name, written on it.

Opening it revealed a note, written with considerable haste, perhaps right before she left.

Halliyah,

If this note finds you, then I may yet have found something that might be of some help to you. I dare not say what I found, for fear of being intercepted by them, but I can give you a rough location. The Dorns, near where the salt mines are having that boundary dispute with the moisture farms. I’ve only read about something like this in the ancient scrolls, but I cannot say much more about it.

The gods be with you,

Hilami.

That crazy old woman… The Dorns weren’t too far from the village, but neither the climate nor the workers bore any good will towards travelers. With as long as she had been gone, she was unlikely to still be alive. Still… it would not have hurt to see what she had found. I remembered the last words she had spoken to me:

“Your sword is in the back, by the way…”

The faint echoes of metal clashing with metal… My hands began to tremble out of nowhere. Through the echoes, I barely made out the sound of someone knocking at the door. Those same echoes ceased soon after, leaving me to wonder if I had imagined the whole thing.

The knocking at the door continued. Who could it have possibly been at this hour?