Work Text:
Goblins and bugbears of the hinterlands, Darcy finds, are rather noisome compared to their urban counterparts—especially so in the stinking, ruined village to which they have extended their ragtag camp.
Why, for instance, tie a gnome to a windmill? Have they no bone dice nor deck of cards? When the fetid worgs leap up and snap their bloody jaws at the poor fellow, several of the goblins roll with laughter. You all could have it so much better, she thinks, if you’d only invest in the gaiety of gambling.
The wriggling worm gives her utter control of the situation. She feels those tall, lithe folk pressing at her mind, eager to discuss the goblin’s cowering compliance, but she’s more focused on finding the brake for the bloody windmill. That’s kin up there, after all.
Kin, indeed—it takes her a moment to place the furrowed brow and thin voice, but that is undoubtedly—“Barcus Wroot?” she says, cutting short his spiel about extortion.
He stammers to a stop. “At your service,” he says hesitantly. A memory darts through her mind, swift and silvery as a fish, and she senses the others watching: Barcus as a small child, cowering behind his mother’s leg. Only his ears, unwieldy then as they are now, poked out from either side. “And you are…”
She gives him a moment, but not a long one. “Darcy.” She continues, in Gnim, “You’re my drim’s sister’s kid1—your mim’s Fryda, right?” He opens his mouth. “No, Edda! That’s right. You lot moved back underground last century or so. What are you doing up here, nudnik?”
He stares at her, blinking twice for good measure, and responds in a clipped, svirfish dialect of Gnim that Darcy associates primarily with her elderly bube, “I’ve lived in Baldur’s Gate for years.”
“So’ve I!” She laughs, a sharp, high cackle. A bit of a fib on her part, though it’s not so dire a deceit in their mother tongue. “Funny I haven’t seen you ’round the city.” She surveys the sticks in which they’ve both found themselves. “Taking a scenic sabbatical?”
His mouth is a thin line, suppressing a laugh or a swear, she imagines. “I’m after a friend. Wulbren Bongle?” He searches her face for recognition, but the name means bupkes to her. “I fear he’s in trouble. I gave this to him years ago, before I left home.” Barcus brandishes a worn amulet cast with the emblem of Gaerdal Ironhand. “I found it around the neck of a Guild gony in the Lower City—speckled with blood, and Wulbren nowhere to be found.”
Darcy sucks her teeth. Clan Ironhand has been exiled from the Gate for—what, a century now? She can imagine a thousand fates that may have befallen Barcus’s friend, none of them pretty.
“I still have hope,” he continues, his voice somehow reedier. “I have reason to believe he’s in the Underdark. Hopefully, I’ll pick up his trail there.” Evidently, Darcy cannot keep a shine of pity out of her dark eyes. Her cousin stands up a little straighter, indignant. “I always help my friends.”
Right, she thinks. Let’s hope there are no bored goblins sitting around windmills in the Underdark, then.