System of the Beast Slayer [litrpg Adventure]
Copyright© 1999 by CaffeinatedTales
Chapter 234
Near noon, several dark clouds suddenly appeared in the clear sky. They spread swiftly, covering the city of Vizima and blotting out the sun. The weather turned from fair to overcast, and a chill wind began to blow. Before long, fine threads of rain began to fall.
The first rain of autumn.
Even with the season nearing autumn, the air in Temeria was still cold.
Most of the townsfolk huddled beneath their eaves, shivering as they sheltered from the rain.
Yet in the downpour there was a strange sight, three suspicious figures in cloaks striding swiftly across the empty street. Whenever the rain struck their bodies, it was repelled by an invisible film and slid away off them.
But the rain only grew harder, gradually turning into a storm. Soon the world was nothing but the ceaseless hiss of water and a silver curtain stretching from sky to earth, so thick that sight itself was smothered.
In the end, the three suspicious figures could not escape being soaked through like drowned rats. In a sorry state, they ran beneath the eaves of a house on Elm Street in the Temple Quarter to shelter from the rain.
One of them pulled back his hood, shook the water from it, and looked out at the transparent sheet of rain pouring from the roof to the ground.
“This is damned uncanny. Could it be the Arachas itself casting a spell to stop us?”
The downpour had come too suddenly and at the worst possible moment, greatly slowing the progress of their investigation.
“That couple, do they live around here?”
“123 Elm Street...” Orin stared at the house number. “That’s right. Just a few more steps north.”
The Witchers pulled their cloaks back around themselves and pushed on through the pounding rain until they reached an old two-story brick-and-tile house.
It had a spacious yard, with wooden poles set up here and there, clotheslines for hanging laundry and blankets, and great wooden tubs for clothing.
All of it stood empty.
The gray-black wall bricks on the side of the house were covered in moss and scratched by loose stone. There were also a few childish doodles. One of them showed a family of three, father and mother standing on either side with bright red smiling faces, and in the middle a little girl with horn braids, sweetly smiling as she held both their hands.
“That little girl in the middle must be Abigail.”
Then this couple had to be the laundress family that had taken her in. But ever since Adda’s curse had flared up a few days earlier, they had vanished from the world together with Abigail.
To avoid alerting their target, the Witchers did not go through the front door. They scaled the wall straight to the second floor, then slipped in through a half-open window.
The upstairs corridor lay in dim light, with only scattered rays slipping through cracks in the shutters to reveal the mottled, rotting floorboards. Near the window stood a filthy little table, and on it a half-filled oil lamp.
That was the usual condition of poor households. Any family in Vizima with a little money to spare already used magical lamps for light.
The Witchers first stood in the corridor and listened carefully for a while. Silence, dead and complete.
Then they bent low and split up to search.
Orin searched the two upstairs bedrooms. Bedroom was too fine a word for them, really, they were little more than sleeping pallets, a wardrobe, and a dressing table.
Kael and Roy, meanwhile, padded down the old wooden stairs on tiptoe and reached the first floor.
Against the wall in the main room stood a wooden sofa covered by a grimy red blanket. At the center of the room stood a square wooden table with one corner broken off.
Kael’s nose twitched. He caught a faint sour smell in the air. Turning his gaze, he spotted a half-eaten meat pie on the table.
That was highly unusual. Poor folk would never waste such costly food.
The pie had been left there some time already. A cockroach had been drawn in and was feasting on it with its head buried deep in the filling.
Other than that, the room held nothing noteworthy.
The Witchers crossed the sitting room and moved farther in. The ground floor was laid out in the simplest possible fashion. Beyond the sitting room by the door, there was only a place that could barely be called a kitchen.
It was a cramped little cubicle, with an iron pot set over a stone hearth in the middle.
Roy took the ladle by the pot and stirred it. Inside was still half a pot of beet soup, but like the meat pie, it had been sitting there for at least three days and was thoroughly spoiled, giving off a strong sour stench.
“Found anything?”
Orin came in from behind. “Forget people, there wasn’t even a wraith. I only found this.” He casually tossed over a leather-bound book.
On the cover was painted an Arachas crouched within a giant web, along with its names, Black Grebas, Coram Agh Tera.
To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
Log In or
Register for a Free account
(Why register?)
* Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.