The Town Finds Out, a Deal in the Dark, and a Trap Door

The man who brought the news about Umbrage Hill did not stay to answer questions. He shouted it into the common room and went back out the door, and the inn came apart behind him.

It was most of the village in there. Everyone talked at once and nobody listened, and the noise of it went up and over the party like weather. Only Hamish could hold any of it. He stood still in the middle of it and picked the threads out one at a time.

How did we not know about this before.

Why were we kept in the dark.

I only heard about the dragon yesterday.

And then, from somewhere off to the side, the one that mattered.

Did Harbin know?

Thom got them all pointed at the door and out into the street, where a person could hear. Hamish told them what he had heard. Nobody had to work out what it meant — Harbin knew, and Harbin had spent the time since paying them to warn the two or three people he cared about and nobody else.

Sage said he had been happy enough to leave the town he lives in sitting in the dark.

Somebody remembered that the scary lady at the Miner’s Exchange had known about the dragon too. The one with all the people. The one with the pin — and the pin, Hamish said, was the Zhentarim’s.

Harbin had said he would have something for them in the morning. They decided the morning was too far away, and that they had better reach him before the rest of the town did.

---

Halfway there, three of them saw the figure.

It was dark out and the man was dressed for it, moving up the lane away from the inn toward the Miner’s Exchange, taking the shadows where there were shadows. Dax saw him. Hamish saw him. Barnaby saw him. Sage, Thom, Bean and Rut walked on none the wiser, and got their explanation over somebody’s shoulder — a man going to tell somebody about the dragon attack — from three people who were already moving after him.

The party split on the spot. Dax, Hamish and Barnaby peeled off after the man. The rest went on to Harbin’s door.

---

He darted in and out of the alleys the whole way, keeping off the open lane, and ducked around the back of the Miner’s Exchange. A door opened and closed.

The building was shut for the night. The windows on the back wall were set too high to see through, there was nothing in the yard to stand on, and Dax’s position was that they had been at crossbow-point in this building once already, that the arrangement with the guildmaster was information for coin, and that they had no information tonight the whole town did not already have.

So Barnaby put Hamish on his shoulders.

Inside there was a single candle burning on the guildmaster’s desk and two people leaning into the light of it. One was the man they had followed. The other was sitting where Holia Thornton sits, and Hamish could not make out her face, only the fact that she was in her chair, in a building long since shut for the day.

Dax kept the yard. There was nothing in it but owls and rats.

---

Thom banged on the door of Harbin Wester’s house and told him to get off the toilet.

The bolts took a while, as they always do. Harbin got the door open and found four of them on his step and started explaining that he had told them the morning.

“Cats out of the bag,” Thom said. “People know that you knew about a dragon and didn’t say anything.”

Then Umbrage Hill.

He had not known. Whatever else the party had decided about him in the street outside the inn, they watched the news land on him for the first time — his eyes going wide, then the thought arriving behind them that Adabra Gwynn was sitting in this town instead of that windmill.

I guess Adabra got out of there in the nick of time, huh.

He rubbed his beard and stopped talking for a while.

What came out of him after that was more than he had ever given them at once. He had wanted to avoid the panic and the emptying of the town. Phandalin cannot defend itself and he has known it for some time. He has been planning for a dragon and the planning has not produced anything. And the jobs — every job, the gnomes, the midwife, the dwarves, all of it — had been him sending them out to look for a weapon that would kill the thing.

They had found nothing. He said so himself.

Sage told him the townspeople seemed like they might be angry at him. Harbin wanted to know how they had found out at all, and was told about the man who ran in, screamed it, and ran back out. Then he wanted to know how they knew he had been keeping it from them, and had to be told that too.

“So who else knew about the dragon?”

He narrowed his eyes and started thinking, and Thom — who had by then decided this was a conversation that required tradecraft — attempted to name Holia Thornton without naming her.

“I’m pretty sure that the lady that you know, that we know, that, you know, she knows, and I know, and you know.”

Who are you referring to, Thom?

“You know who I’m talking about.”

We’re talking about Holia, right?

Yes. Holia. And Thom thought she had sent somebody out to spread it.

Harbin looked left and looked right and said he might as well tell them. He thinks she is up to no good. He thinks she is angling for townmaster. He is the banker as well as the master of the town, which means the money is in his house and the influence is in his hands, and both would move to her. He wondered aloud whether the rumor had been hers to start.

Then he asked whether they would stay the night and guard his home from angry townspeople.

Bean said no. Bean said it might be different for a fee.

“We have our best agents finding out information on her as we speak,” Thom said.

What Harbin wanted, in the end, was files. Anything of hers, anything about what she was planning, anything at all. He offered ninety gold for it. He was told he was not in a position to negotiate.

The price went to a hundred. Nothing has been brought to him, and nothing has been paid.

---

Barnaby put Hamish up a second time.

The two inside were still talking, and the candle had come round far enough to catch Holia’s face properly. She was grinning. Whatever she was being told, she was delighted with it, and neither of them looked anywhere near the window.

Then a second man in the same dark clothes came around the side of the building, looking everywhere, working his way toward them.

Hamish said someone was coming and climbed down Barnaby’s scales, and the three of them broke for the corner. Two of them went quietly.

Dax’s chain mail did not. The man’s head came up and fixed on the sound and he came straight at it, and Dax stopped, waved the other two on, and stood in the open to wait for him.

Hey. What are you doing?

Dax said there was a commotion down at the inn and they were rounding people up to make sure everyone had heard the news, and that he wasn’t from around here and was still finding his way around in the dark.

The man did not believe a word of it. He looked closer.

Wait a minute. I have seen you before. You’re that sellsword.

“That’s me,” Dax said. “You got a job for me?”

He mentioned that he had done work for the guildmaster, and that he had information.

Yeah. I’m sure she’d love to talk to you.

He took Dax by the arm and walked him around to the front of the building. Hamish and Barnaby he never saw at all.

---

Thom had a cantrip nobody had seen him use: a whisper he could put directly into somebody’s ear from a hundred and twenty feet away, through walls, around corners, with no limit on the words and nothing to spend. It did not need line of sight. All it needed was to know whose ear.

He aimed it at Dax.

Dax, you guys still good? We told Harbin you guys were trying to find some information.

Dax, being led toward a door by a man who had a hand on his arm, answered under his breath without moving his head.

“Miner’s Guild. Stand by. Negotiations happening.”

Nobody else heard a word of it.

Rut turned into a weasel. Sage, coming up the lane with him, saw two figures disappear into the Miner’s Exchange and the door shut behind them. She whistled the panther in out of the dark, nodded him toward the building, and told him to circle wide and watch their backs — that their friends were in there going after somebody, that she did not know who, and that there would be enemies and friends both.

He went. He came back a few minutes later having found Barnaby and Hamish crouched in the dark where they had gone to ground, and announced the discovery by walking into Hamish hard enough to put him flat.

“Phantom. No — this is a friend.”

It was the first time she had called him anything.

---

Inside there was one candle and four people, and only one of them was sitting down.

Well, if it isn’t my favorite sellsword. What are you doing lurking around at night?

“Evening, Holia. Have you heard the news?”

Are you talking about our lovely visit from our reptile friend?

She was smiling before he finished. She had all of it already, and she said so plainly: if the attack on Umbrage Hill was everything he had brought, he was too late, and she would not be paying a premium for it.

Dax did not argue the price. He changed what was for sale.

“How about news not on a dragon, but on some orcs?”

Orcs. I’m listening.

He put the terms up before he put up a word of the substance. The dragon news was a freebie, thrown in on top, if the two of them could strike a deal on the orcs.

I like you. You’re smart.

Only then did he spend it, and he made sure she understood the shape of what she was getting. The party had been at Umbrage Hill that day. They had stood in Adabra Gwynn’s yard and talked her into leaving, and walked her back to Phandalin, and the hill had been destroyed while they were still getting their boots off. The thing had covered that ground in an evening.

Your luck is with you tonight.

And then, working it through: the dragon was close. Very close. A short flight from Phandalin.

Well. I appreciate the freebie. What about this orc information? Let’s see how much it’s worth tonight.

Thom’s voice arrived in his head while she was saying it. Harbin was paying a hundred gold for anything about what Holia was planning, Harbin thought she was after his job, and if Dax happened to be standing in front of her he ought to keep that in mind.

Dax kept it in mind, and did not answer her question yet.

“So what are you willing to pay for information? Are you just paying gold, or do we trade information?”

That sounds like an amicable arrangement to me.

With that settled he spent his first question before he spent anything else. What was there to know about Harbin Wester? The party had done work for the man and knew nothing about him past talk.

Something moved in her face at the name — a twinkle in the eye, the corner of the mouth going up — and what Dax read there was a woman extremely pleased with herself.

Then he paid his half of it. The band that came up the canyon at the excavation, seven of them, out of the east; all seven dead; and the tracks afterward showing a much larger body moving off west. She wanted to know exactly where, and exactly which way. He told her that too, and she had a small map out on the desk before he finished.

She counted out fifty gold.

Then he collected the other half of the arrangement, and asked about Harbin again.

This time she answered. Harbin was afraid, she said, and had been afraid of this dragon a long while. She said — and this part she seemed to enjoy — that she had to admit he had done her a real service, bringing her news of that dragon.

Then she stopped herself, and started again more carefully.

Well, let’s just say things may be looking up in Phandalin. And Harbin may no longer be a part of it.

Dax had one more thing to sell and one more message to answer, and he did both in the same breath. Out loud, to Holia, he said the party knew roughly how many had gone west, and that things were fine right now, but they were afraid of movement later.

Things are fine. Afraid of moving later. That was for Thom.

She leaned back and looked at him for a moment, appraising.

Your band of adventurers are more resourceful than I gave you credit for.

She wanted maps. He did not have any on him, and said the rest could be arranged another night. She allowed that he had done well, and that she was in a good mood, and then she put the good mood away.

But I want you to understand this. If I catch anyone sniffing around here in the middle of the night again, I know where to find you. I know where Harbin sends you.

And I think I might just start with that gangly wizard.

But for now, everything is going exactly how I want it to go. Anyway, you may go now.

“It was a pleasure doing business with you.”

Pleasure as well. Have a good night, Dax.

“You too.”

---

Rut had found the gap under the front door and gone at it head first.

He got his head through. He got his shoulders through. The rest of the weasel stayed in the street. He could not go forward and he could not go back and he was, in that position, in the best seat anyone in the party had all night. His head was through into the room. He could see everything and hear everything, and he heard the whole of it, every word Dax and Holia said to one another.

Sage watched him thrash and worked out what was going to happen to a weasel wedged under a door at the moment somebody opened that door. So she went to the panther.

“That weasel,” she told him. “He’s a friend.”

The instruction was to wait until the weasel started struggling, then take hold of him — gently, and without eating him — and pull him clear before anybody came out.

Phantom accepted the terms. Sage was fairly sure he was a little disappointed about the eating.

---

Thom found a bush a good distance from the building, far enough that walking over to it later would look like nothing, and put his backpack in it. The emerald went in the bush with the backpack.

Then he cast one spell on both of them at once, and the two of them vanished where they stood.

An hour of it, as long as he held his concentration, and it covered everything they wore and everything they carried. What it did not do was let the two of them see each other. If they let go in that room, neither would have any way of finding the other again — so Thom kept a hand on her and did not take it off.

Sage asked whether they were sure nobody in there could see through it.

“We’re going to find out.”

They waited by the door for it to open.

---

Barnaby and Hamish went back to the window. If Dax came out of that building at a run, they wanted to be looking at it when he did.

The third go was the worst of the three. Hamish came down onto Barnaby’s shoulders sitting rather than standing, and from there he could see nothing but the tops of the heads inside; when he got his hands on the ledge and tried to haul himself higher he had no leverage at all and stayed exactly where he was, stuck, with the crown of his head showing in the window.

Between the two of them they made far too much noise doing it. Inside, the people in the room stopped talking and turned to look at the glass.

“Go, go, go.”

They came down and went, and did not stop until there was a good distance between them and the building.

---

It opened for Dax.

The guard walked him out and stood holding it — his presence forgiven, but not by much — and Thom steered Bean through the gap beside them and into the room they had just emptied. Neither the guard nor anyone in the building heard a thing.

Outside, the same guard turned around and found Sage standing in the lane with a weasel at her feet.

Hey. What are you doing?

Sage told him the truth in the shape of a lie. She had lost track of her friend earlier, she had been looking for him ever since, and she needed him — he had to come with the rest of the band so they could work out what they were doing. Every word of it was true.

He bought it. He picked the weasel up and shoved it at her.

Well. She was looking for you. She found you. You can go on your way now.

“Yeah,” Dax said. “She’s a good tracker. Thank you, sir. We’ll be heading out.”

Then the guard looked down at the weasel and said what people say about vermin and threw a knife at it.

It missed. It went into the dirt beside him. The weasel held still and stayed a weasel, and the party walked away up the lane.

---

Five of them, and no idea where the other two had gone.

Sage said Thom and Bean had been with them a while and then simply were not, and that she did not know where they went and they had not told anyone. Dax knew slightly more and it did not help: Thom had told him they were up to shenanigans.

“That’s never good,” Sage said.

She also told him which of them the weasel was. Dax put an arm down and let it climb up onto his shoulder.

He tried the sending stone anyway, and got the silence of a thing that will not work again until tomorrow. He could not start a whisper of his own — he could only answer one. If Thom wanted him, Thom would have to call.

Dax told them the rest of it: that she had threatened them, all of them, if anyone was caught sneaking around here again.

So they left where the building could see them leave. Dax and Sage went out up the lane toward the inn, unhurried, Barnaby walking with them and the weasel riding where it was, and then circled back through the town and settled in near the little shrine on the square. Sage came back further than that, splitting the difference, close enough to keep an eye on the Exchange and on Dax at once.

Hamish went a different way and lost anything that might have been following him. He took up a position in one of the burned houses — one of the ones that have been standing open to the weather since the last time something came through Phandalin — and put a broken wall between himself and the street, and watched, and rested as much as a person can rest sitting up in a ruin.

Dax noted, on the way past, that the Lionshield Coster was just around the corner and that he badly needed better armor. They had only ever been there by daylight. Nobody could say what hours it kept, and it was not a night for finding out.

---

Inside, Thom and Bean stood in the middle of the room and let their eyes adjust.

Three guards. Holia at the desk. And behind her, set into the floor beside the desk and standing open, a small trap door with a thin flickering light coming up out of it.

Then she started talking, and they were close enough to hear all of it.

Well done. Well done on your scouting. I am very happy with how tonight went. Soon Harbin will be out and I will be town master. This is exactly how I hoped this would go. Those foolish adventurers have brought me everything I needed.

She turned to one of the guards.

If you catch any of them sniffing around here again, they all die. You understand? I want you to sic our entire troop on them.

Yes ma’am.

I think that’s enough for tonight. Let’s head on back to our recon point. We have a lot of work to do this evening.

She packed up her things and went down through the floor. One guard locked the front door. The other two went round the windows pulling the shutters across, and at the last of them one stopped and looked out into the lane at the party walking away, and squinted at them a moment before he moved on.

Then two of the three followed her down the stairs, and the man who had been at the window was the only one left in the building.

Thom and Bean stood perfectly still while he came around the desk, close enough to touch, and went down the ladder.

Then the trap door closed behind him, and there was a soft click, and the floor was flat.

Not a seam. Not a handle. Nothing to say a door had ever been there. If they had not watched four people walk down through it they would not have known where to stand.

---

They searched the office anyway.

The desk gave up exactly what a mining exchange’s desk should give up: transactions, exchanges, the day-to-day of the business. Gold dust in, small diamonds in, gold paid out. Town names down the margins. There was nothing illegal in any of it.

There was one line Bean read twice. Gold paid out to Dax, for the job Dax did for Holia.

They went over the desk again for false bottoms and hidden drawers and found none. They walked the room feeling for pressure plates and found none. They ran their hands along the wall for a lever or a mechanism or a book that would pull out of a shelf, the way it always works, and there was nothing there either. There were side rooms off the office, and a balcony on the floor above looking down into it, and they had no hour to spare on either.

Thom got a dagger into the seam of the trap door and felt it stop against something — not a lock with a keyhole in it, something more like a bar laid across underneath. It would not shift for a dagger.

Bean had thieves’ tools.

She got them into the gap where the blade had been, thin enough to reach past the edge and work the catch itself, and lifted, and the door came up off the floor with enough of a gap to get fingers under.

Ten minutes gone. Fifty left, and no way to stretch it.

Going back for the others meant crossing the town and crossing it again, and the hour would not wait for them. So they took the smaller version of the idea: down the ladder, far enough to hear a conversation, and not one step past that. Nothing crazy.

“Alright. Let’s do it.”

They went down the ladder into the passage, Thom seeing it perfectly well and Bean seeing nothing at all — and Bean, already on the rungs, asked whether it was too late to get hold of Thom.

It was. Their feet hit the bottom, into cool air and stone.