The Accidental Necromancer
Rargar Only Pawn in Game of Life

“What do you mean kidnapped?” I asked.

Valeria touched Talos’s brow, and the cut healed.

“Grabbed! Stolen! Taken off with! By a fleabag troll that Gren said could be trusted. She told me to come get you, and I wanted to stay and look for Kathy, but of course with the whole troll village looking, or pretending to look, it wasn’t like I could do much. And you have some sway with them. Abby, you have to get Kathy back.”

Damn straight I needed to get Kathy back. “Val, let’s go. We can get an explanation on the way. Put on your armor and grab your sword. Talos, take a breather, because it’s a walk and we may need all your skills.”

Talos already had armor on. He’d obviously run some in it, too. He’d slow us down because he wasn’t fresh, and it was tempting to leave him behind to guard the mausoleum, but I knew that if I was in his position I wouldn’t want to be left behind.

While Valeria was getting geared up, I revved the line trimmer to try to get Xyla’s attention. She didn’t appear before we were ready to leave, but I assumed she could find us. I locked the door and we set off.

“I’ll never forgive myself,” Talos said.

I wasn’t in a forgiving mood either, but it seemed pointless to say so. “Let’s worry about doing something about it. What happened?”

“Chief Gavabar wanted my opinion on the weapons the trolls have, which frankly could use a lot of improvement, so this other troll, Rargar, said he’d show Kathy around while Gren was catching up with her friend Janeen. Gren said that Rargar was fine and could be trusted, and Kathy was excited to get what she called a different perspective.”

I nodded. I would have thought that Rargar could be trusted, too.

“So a half hour later, I’m looking for Rargar and Kathy, and I find Rargar. No Kathy. He claims he never saw her and then tells me I’m a liar. I may have, uh, punched him out a little as I tried to get him to tell me what he’d done with her, and then some other trolls stopped me. So then there’s a giant search, but no Kathy. Someone says he saw a troll and a hooded figure take a giant sack out of town, but he can’t swear the troll was Rargar. He thought maybe it was. They’re trying to track them, and Gren said to go get you, that you’d know what to do. Do you know what to do?”

“No,” I admitted, touched by Gren’s faith in me. “But we’ll figure out something. We have to.”

“We’ll get her back,” Valeria said, putting her hand on my shoulder.

“What’s up, darling?” Xyla asked, walking out of a tree.

I jumped and reached into my bag for my sword instinctively, before I realized it was just the lovely green dryad. “Kathy’s been kidnapped. By trolls, apparently. No one is back to guard the crypt, so just in case this is all a distraction to get to it…”

“You need me to watch the forest approaches. I will be vigilant, my love. Just one question, not related.”

“Yes?” I asked.

“Have you and Valeria –”

“No,” we both said at once.

Xyla shrugged. “Humans are weird. I wish you much luck in all your endeavors, wife.” And with that she was gone, running through the forest and skipping over the roots and brambles that would have slowed most people, including me, down.

“Wife?” Valeria asked.

“She, um, likes to pull my chain.”

“Chains?” Valeria said, a little more brightly.

“It’s a metaphor. It means she’s teasing me.” That was all it was, surely. “We have bigger problems right now.”

“Yeah,” Talos said. “And women can’t marry women anyway. Everyone knows that.”

“Actually, in my world they can.”

I wondered what Valeria’s little smile at that meant, but we still had bigger problems. Quizzing Talos didn’t help much, however, and it seemed like we needed to hope that the trolls had found out something.

We got to the troll village. The smell of the place was always difficult to deal with after the fresh air of the forest. Gregor was waiting for us, and so was Janeen. The purple-haired beauty was more sedately dressed than when I’d seen her last, raising my suspicion that she’d been wearing so little in an attempt to seduce me. Now, half her thighs were covered and you could only see an inch or two of her blue belly.

“Most of the village is out looking, Abby,” Gregor said. “We’re doing what we can. And we have Rargar tied up in the chief’s hut. He says he didn’t have anything to do with it, and I believe him, but – we don’t wish you to be angry with us, Abby. Trust me, we look after your people as if you were our own. Maybe more.” While he talked, he gave Valeria a looking over, and then gave me the same treatment. The dress was actually the most modest thing I owned, showing some shoulder and a tiny bit of cleavage but covering up the rest of me rather well.

I hoped that perving wasn’t all he meant by ‘looking after.’ “Someone saw a human-sized bag being taken away?”

“Yes. We can’t be sure it’s your human friend, but we’re assuming.”

I glanced at Janeen, to see if she had something to add.

She said, “Gren and I were just talking. She had the most fantastic idea, about a way thousands of people could watch her at once. I had no idea she had so much imagination. But we were distracted. I’m sorry, Abby. If there’s any way I can make it up to you, please ask. Anything at all.”

I was pretty sure that was a proposition, and I ignored it. “Uh, yeah. Where’s Gren?”

“Out searching,” Gregor said. “She’s one of our best trackers, but the ground is well packed. Even two people carrying a heavy load might be hard to follow on the road. If they went off it, it will need a keen eye to spot the crumpling of the grass.”

I was tempted to run down the road after her, but I was sure her tracking skills were better than mine. She had people with her, apparently. I had other talents, and it was time to use them. “Let’s go talk to Rargar.”

“He’s probably in a receptive mood,” Valeria said. “If he’s been tied up all this time.”

“And if he’s not, I’ll break a few more –” Talos began.

“Why don’t you wait outside, Talos. We’ll call you if we need you. But Valeria can handle him if need be, right?”

“I guess,” Talos said, glowering.

Apparently the trolls were not fastidious about having someone watch a bound prisoner, and they didn’t know much about safe rope bondage, either. But Rargar wasn’t going anywhere. They must have used several hundred feet of rope to make sure of that. His limbs couldn’t turn blue because they already were. He was bleeding, and his nose wasn’t the same shape as it was the last time I saw him.

“I didn’t do it, Abby!” he said immediately. “I never even saw her. I heard there were humans in the village, but I was busy repairing a house, and the next thing I know this human in a metal box is pounding my face in, yelling, ‘Where is she you mother – well, he implied that I engaged in coitus with she who gave me birth.”

He sounded sincere, but I didn’t want to waste time.

Charm Person.

“Where is she, Rargar?” I asked. “You know I’m on your side, if you only tell me what I need to know. Valeria here is going to heal your nose, just to show you how much we care about you, but I need to know where Kathy is.”

“I told you I don’t know anything about it, Abby. It’s the truth, it is. I swear it’s the truth. May I be burned alive while a thousand ants bite me, if I lie.”

I wasn’t going to get sidetracked by trying to figure out how the hypothetical ants were surviving the hypothetical fire. I watched as Valeria laid hands on his nose. Getting healed had to feel good. I tried to take advantage of that.

“You sure, Rargar?” I said. “Someone said they saw you leaving the village.”

“It wasn’t me. You can ask where I was. Half a dozen trolls saw me. Uh, Brog, and Wawa, among them.”

“There’s a troll named Wawa?”

“It’s a perfectly ordinary troll name,” Rargar said.

I shrugged. Sure, why not?

I pulled Valeria aside. “I believe him,” I whispered.

“Me too. Especially if you did that thing you did to Talos when he ended up engaging in self gratification. Talos has more willpower than this one, I think, and yet he –”

“Yes.” It wasn’t a moment I was especially proud of.

“Also, I checked, and he’s not evil.”

“Can you pretend you don’t believe him for me?”

She frowned. “As long as I don’t have to actually say so.”

“I’ll handle the lying,” I promised her. I turned back to Rargar. “So,” I said. “I think maybe you’re telling the truth, but this woman here isn’t sure. And Talos is Kathy’s really good friend, if you understand what I mean, and I think he wants to break your nose again. Valeria says she can heal you a dozen times, if that’s what it takes.”

I tried to ignore Valeria’s look of horror, and focus on Rargar’s. I was surprised Enash didn’t make some unwanted approving comment.

“Abby, honestly, I wouldn’t lie to you. Or take a human – well, not one that was a friend of yours anyway.”

“Right.”

“Abby, please believe me.”

“I don’t want to,” I said. “But unfortunately I do.”

“Unfortunately?” Rargar asked.

“Yeah. Because you’re my only lead. Where do I find Brog and Wawa?”

He told us. I left him tied up and told Talos to watch over him – but not damage him.

Brog, it turned out, was out looking for Kathy with the Chief and the others. But I found Wawa, an extra thin, shy troll, and charmed him. He, from the way he kept looking at my chest, did not share Rargar’s aversion to futas. Or maybe he hadn’t been told about my big not-so-secret, but surely news like that traveled fast.

Well, that just meant that Charm Person worked better. Fortunately or not, his story confirmed Rargar’s. Rargar had been working on a house in Wawa’s sight for a couple of hours before Talos came and started yelling at him.

“Well, damn,” I said.

“Damn who?” Valeria asked.

“It wasn’t literal. Just… ugh. How do we find her? Whoever took her is long gone, and unless Gren has some luck, I don’t know what we can do.”

Charming wasn’t a perfect lie detector, as far as I knew. But it should be pretty good at getting people to tell the truth. Similarly, while kidnapping a person was an evil act, I didn’t think Valeria’s spell cleared Rargar completely, either. Good people did evil things sometimes. Neutral people did evil things sometimes. People rationalized and justified, and at one point did that cross the line into evil?

I wasn’t about to build a whole ethical system around Valeria’s spell, and getting philosophical wasn’t going to bring Kathy back.

We set out down the northeast road, to find out if Gren was making any progress. The sun was starting to set, and I realized that I was farther from the crypt than I’d ever been.

I also knew that Kathy needed to be at work by Monday, if she didn’t have an earlier appointment. Getting her back was important, but getting her back on time mattered, too.

The plains turned to rolling hills, still with the same brown prairie grass growing on them. And what passed as a road was just a dead area with packed earth and wagon wheel ruts. If it had rained in the last few days, I suspected it wouldn’t be hard to see tracks on it, but it was dry and it felt hard under my shoes. Normally, if I was going to go someplace more than a few miles, I took my van, and I was conscious of how much I walked already that day. But Valeria, wearing tens of pounds of armor and weapons, didn’t complain, so I couldn’t.

We ran across a group of trolls. They were giving up because it was dark. The second group followed a few minutes later.

“We’ll try again in the morning,” Gavabar said. “But there’s a limit to what we can do now.”

“Where’s Gren?”

“Still looking,” Gavabar said. “Stubborn strumpet.”

I thought that was a little harsh on his own daughter, but then I remembered strumpet was not an insult among trolls.

We found Gren a couple miles later, sitting down by the side of the road. “Abby,” she said. “I knew you’d come. And you brought Val.”

I nodded.

“Any clues to where they took Kathy?”

Gren nodded. “The grass is trampled here. They went off the road, thankfully, because if they’d just continued I don’t know what we could do. But it’s getting too dark to track them, so we’ll have to wait until morning.”

“Does this help?” I pulled out my phone, and turned on the flashlight.

“Your phone does that too?” she asked.

“Heh. And so does yours.” I showed her, and she was excited.

“Okay, then. Let’s go!” she said.

So she led, using the flashlight to look for disturbances in the grass. It was slow going, and I just had to hope that it wasn’t any slower than two people carrying a human in a sack would be, and that Kathy was still alive.

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