Chapter 93: Truth

The lumber region was on the south side of the river, in the eastern parts of the delta, furthest from the city. Jason had long been refining his long-distance running style that employed the weight-reducing power of his cloak. It was really more like a series of floating, horizontal hops over whatever surface he was crossing, be it land or water.

He’d been through enough of the delta that he had most of it mapped out and he could save time by taking direct routes instead of following the embankment roads. He could walk on water and teleport past obstacles, so while he might not match the speed of airboat travel, his straight-line navigation outpaced an ordinary mount. It required occasional replenishment from mana and stamina potions, but Jory’s low-cost options were easily worth it. Their moderate effects might not have the kick required for intense combat, but they were perfect for Jason’s travel needs.

The days were growing shorter as summer moved into autumn, and the sun had just set as Jason arrived in the town of Leust. It was one of the largest and richest towns in the delta, with paved roads and stone instead of mud-brick for the buildings. Mostly it was the cheaper, yellow desert stone, but there were green stone buildings as well.

The interior coolness produced by the water affinity of green stone was appreciated by everyone who could afford it. In the muggy heat of the delta, it was often the difference between a good night’s rest and a sweaty, sleepless night. For that reason, Jason selected a large, green stone inn to stay the night. Pausing outside the door, Jason stopped to put on his game face.

His posture shifted and tightened, face and shoulders both scrunched up in annoyance. He threw open the door and marched inside, face full of aggravation. Striding across the room, he parked himself angrily on a barstool.

“Drink,” he demanded of the barman. “Best you have, and same for food, after.”

The barman reached for a bottle of amber spirits behind the bar.

“Not that bitter crap,” Jason said. “Do you have any Norwich Blue?”

“Uh, yes sir, we use it to make blue juice-jumpers.”

“Blue juice jumpers?”

“It’s a mixed drink, sir, but…

The barman leaned in close.

“…usually we serve to our female patrons.”

“If someone has a problem with what I’m drinking then I’ll be happy to clean them off my sword.”

Jason was in full adventuring gear, weapons at his hip and bandolier of throwing darts on his torso. He turned and took in the busy common room at a glance, no one willing to meet his gaze.

"That's what I thought," he said, turning back to the bar.

“If I may ask, sir,” the barman said as he made the drink, “are you an adventurer?”

“That’s what the badge says,” Jason grumbled. “Some bloody adventure they’ve sent me on, though. Do you know how many people they sent out before me after this imaginary frigging monster? Eight! I’m the ninth, and I’ll be the last, one way or another. You can believe that. If this monster isn’t out here this time, I’ll personally see to it that the prick sending out these notices gets black marked. A fergax that doesn’t kill anyone or break anything? What a load of crap.”

“That would be the Lindover Lumber Mill you’ll be heading out to, then?” The barman asked.

“Probably,” Jason said. “They gave me a map; I don’t care what the place is bloody-well called.”

Jason had trouble grumbling through what turned out to be a delicious drink and a quite excellent dinner, but he did it anyway, resisting his normal urge to seek out the recipe. He retired angrily to his room, performing a simple ritual to shield himself from surveillance magic before dropping the act.

The next morning he left the inn, as irritably as he arrived and set out for the lumber mills. The lumber region was more solid ground than marsh, like most of the delta, but not dry and hard or dead and empty like the desert. It was like walking through a forestry reserve, with straight, earthen roads passing between trees lined up in neat rows. Sometimes it was akin to a natural, if neatly-arranged forest. Other times he was walking past a sea of saplings or the devastation of a recently deforested field. Wagons went past on a regular basis, wheeling loads of lumber to Leust.

Jason passed several large, wooden archways with signage declaring the name of the lumber mill the road behind them led to. When he reached the one labelled Lindover, he walked through it. He followed the road through the trees to a large lumber mill, but it was still and devoid of people. Jason kept going past the mill and up to a sizeable farmhouse.

Knocking on the door, he was met by the most lumberjack-looking man Jason had ever seen and they made introductions. Kyle Lindover was a leonid even larger than Gary, with a red plaid shirt, tough worker’s pants and huge, thick boots. He looked like he could knock down trees by punching them.

"If I was a tree and saw you coming my way," Jason said, "I think I'd just surrender. Do you like pressing wildflowers?"

“No,” Kyle said. “Why do you ask?”

“Just something I heard about lumberjacks,” Jason said.

Kyle showed Jason around. Kyle had shut down the mill after the repeated fergax sightings, not wanting his workers to get hurt. His business was lucrative enough to sustain the downtime for a while, but his reserves were falling short and most of his workers had taken up with other operations, having their own families to feed.

"My wife and kids are staying with her parents in Greenstone," Kyle said. "I've been maintaining things here, but every time I look at starting back up, the monster appears again. I keep getting adventurers out here, but they don't find anything. I'm afraid I'm going to be black-listed."

“We’ll have to see what we can do about that. I’d like to start by seeing all the places the monster was spotted.”

Kyle did exactly as asked, taking Jason all around the property.  There was the lumber mill, the farmhouse, and a dormitory for the people working the mill. There was also a small farm, producing food for Kyle, his family and the workers. Kyle was doing his best to keep everything in order, but he was clearly getting overwhelmed.

Jason said he wanted to look around for himself, leaving Kyle to go back to the farmhouse. Jason made his way around the property until his map ability had fully unveiled everything. Afterwards, he sat down with Kyle at the farmhouse, enjoying some fruit punch Kyle made while Jason was roaming about.

“This is really good,” Jason said. “Can I get the recipe?”

Looking over his map, Jason marked out the areas the fergax had been spotted. He could just tap a finger to the map and set a marker, or drag his finger to mark a whole zone. Kyle watched curiously as, from his perspective, Jason was waggling his finger in empty air.

“Invisible magic map,” Jason told him, not looking up.

“I figured it was something of the like,” Kyle said.

Looking at the map, the general area the monster was coming from was quite clear. Jason marked out a grid pattern to search, then left the farmhouse to get to work. He took out the watering can Jory lent him, complete with extra-dimensional water storage, and started sprinkling it over the area marked on his map. Kyle looked on with curiosity.

“What exactly are you doing?” Kyle asked.

“Looking for salt,” Jason said. He kept moving from spot to spot, sprinkling little bits of water as he went.

“Salt?” Kyle asked.

"That's right," Jason said. "When you use an essence ability to summon a monster, the first step is to make a summoning circle. It isn't complicated, but you do need to use the right material. I have some friends who use obsidian dust and iron filings, but exotic materials like that are generally for the fancy summons. Most people just need a circle of good-old salt, including people who summon a fergax. I'm betting the summoner just kicked it into the dirt, after, rather than collect it up."

“You think someone is summoning the monster?”

“I do,” Jason said.

“You think someone is trying to drive me off my land?”

“I do,” Jason said.

Kyle hung his head.

“Why us?” he wondered aloud.

“You’re independent,” Jason said. “You don’t have a backer in Greenstone to push back with.”

“How am I meant to prove what’s going on?”

“You’re not,” Jason said. “I am. Adventure Society, at your service.”

“I’ve had the Adventure Society out here before,” Kyle said. “How are you going to prove any of what you’re talking about? We don’t even know who’s behind it.”

“Sure we do,” Jason said. “This investigation is taking a two-pronged approach. Best of both worlds, you might say. What we’re doing here is using some local ingenuity to follow the magic. That’s one prong. The other is a method we use where I come from called following the money.”

White smoke started rising from where Jason had just sprinkled water.

“That’s our first hit,” Jason said.

Jason took out a metal stake with a bright red ribbon tied to it and shoved it into the ground. Then he went back to moving through his grid pattern, sprinkling more water.

"There isn't a lot of business regulation, locally," Jason said. "That's what happens when the people who make the rules are the ones who own the businesses. When I took this contract, however, I discovered the lumber industry is a notable exception. The industry and its attendant land rights are very regulated.”

“That’s why I’m in danger of losing my land,” Kyle said. “There are production requirements for landholders, and we haven’t been producing since this monster started showing up.”

“Well, good news,” Jason said. “Since investigation here seems to consist of finding the first guy that can throw fireballs and asking him to take a look, no one seems to have invented shell companies. I found where all the records were kept, spent a few hours to poke around and found everything I needed. With a little help from a bribed official.”

“You bribed a city official?”

“Not to do anything illegal,” Jason said. “Just to help me navigate a less-than-helpful records system. That’s how I know who’s behind all this and why.”

“You already know?”

“Yep,” Jason said. “Now I just need some corroborating evidence, by which I mean whoever they’re actually paying to come out here and summon the monster. I get that person to talk and we can get you back up and running.”

“You think they will?”

“Maybe,” Jason said. “Even if they don’t, we’ll get something we can use.”

Jason searched out his whole grid, putting down a stake each time Jory’s water-potion mix found high salt content. When he was done, Jason took stock. His stakes with the eye-catching ribbons were clustered in a small area.

“About what I thought,” he said. “I checked the whole area to make sure, but it looks like our summoner comes out here and summons his monster in more-or-less the same spot, every time. Then he has it wander about until you see it. I take it you never chased the creature.”

“A huge aggressive monster?” Kyle asked. “No, I didn’t.”

“Eminently sensible,” Jason said. “When was the last time you saw it?”

“Five days ago,” Kyle said.

“Probably too long to track it from the last summoning,” Jason said. “I’ll give it a go, though.”

Jason conducted the ritual Clive had given him at each of the summoning sites he had found. Ghostly images of a bear-like creature appeared briefly, but there wasn’t enough residual magic to imprint the summoner’s aura on a tracking stone.

“Yeah,” Jason said as he kicked the salt he used for the circles into the dirt. “We’re going to need a fresh monster sighting.”

“That last appearance was less than a week ago,” Kyle said. “That could be some wait.”

“No worries, Kyle,” Jason said. “I’ve already laid some groundwork.”

Jason returned to the inn as the sun ducked below the horizon, unhappier than when he left that morning.

“Food and drink, same as before,” he demanded of the barman. “I’m out of here at first light. I’m not staying a moment longer than I have to.”

“No luck?” the barman asked.

“It’s not a matter of luck when some idiot is making things up,” Jason said bitterly. “I swear, if one more report comes in from Lindover, I’m not coming back. I’ll have him black-marked on the spot and let the damn bureaucrats sort it out.”

As promised, Jason departed at first light down the road to Greenstone. He passed through the next town as well to make sure before he cut back cross country to the Lindover Property. The trees made stealth easy on the occasions he saw workers on the properties he passed through.

It was three days before the fergax appeared. With his aura fully restrained, he followed it with a recording crystal active as it roamed around for several hours. Kyle came out and spotted it, running when it roared at him, but it didn’t give chase. It didn’t do anything but roam about until it vanished when the summoning duration expired. All the while, Jason quietly stayed out of its path, watching it as the image was captured by the recording crystal floating over his head.

“The problem is we have bears around here,” Kyle said as he and Jason looked at the tracks left behind by the fergax. “Sometimes they get curious and come in close, and their tracks are pretty much identical. Some of the other adventurers that came out thought I was seeing bears and getting rattled.”

“Well, we have the recording now, so at least we can demonstrate there really is a monster," Jason assured him. "That means a black-mark is off the table, at the very least. Next, we see if we can't do a little better than that."

Using the watering can again, Jason found a large salt reaction and performed the tracking ritual. This time an aura imprint found its way onto his prepared tracking stone. As expected, it led him straight in the direction of the neighbouring Clementson property, which Jason had anticipated before ever arriving.

It was laid out much the same as the Lindover property but was in full operation. There were workers everywhere, and the magically-driven saws could be heard loudly cutting into wood in the mill. The other big difference was the farmhouse. The Lindover farmhouse was large but functional. On the Clementson property, the farmhouse was both larger and more ostentatious.

Jason didn’t bother to hide, striding through the property as if he owned the place. He got a few glances from workers, but the combat robes and the weapons said adventurer, which no one wanted to mess with. A man came out to meet him and was forced to follow along as Jason didn’t slow, letting the tracking stone lead him to his quarry. Where the lumber workers had practical attire like Kyle, this man wore city fashions.

“If you don’t mind me asking,” the man said, “what brings you to my property?”

“Monster hunt,” Jason said, without so much as looking at the man. “You’re Clementson?”

“Eustace Clementson, yes sir. You think there’s a monster on the property?”

“I’m sure you’re familiar with the troubles your neighbour is having,” Jason said. “A monster appeared there several hours ago, and I’ve been tracking it to the source.”

“Tracking it?” Clementson asked, unable to hide the panic in his voice. It might have been at the idea of a monster on his property, but Jason didn’t think so.

“I managed to get an aura imprint. That imprint led me directly to your property.”

Clementson was starting to sweat, his eyes darting nervously in the direction Jason was heading.

“You’ve obviously been working hard,” Clementson said. “Why don’t you let me offer you some hospitality? You can have some refreshment and I can tell you about the property. It might help you find what you’re looking for.”

“This tracking stone is all the help I need,” Jason said, continuing his rapid stride.

“I’ll leave you to your business, then,” Clementson said and started moving ahead of Jason at a half-run.

“Stop,” Jason ordered. His aura came down hard on Clementson, who staggered and stopped.

“Sir?” He asked, feebly.

“I think it would be best if you stayed with me,” Jason said. “For safety.”

Withering under the force of Jason’s aura, Clementson reluctantly nodded, falling in behind Jason as he resumed his path through the property. They quickly came on a building detached from the main residence, made from stone and an indulgent amount of wood. On a porch swing, a man was sitting up, rubbing his eyes as if just having woken up. He gave the approaching pair a bleary-eyed look, focusing on Clementson.

“Eustace,” he said, “what was that aura I just…”

The man trailed off as he realised the source of the aura was standing next to Clementson. Then his gaze locked onto Jason’s face and his eyes went wide.