Short Story – “It was no Ordinary Bear!”
There was no doubt about it; the three men were dead — the claw marks could account for as much. The how of the situation was what was bothering Inviss, though — like how an animal could tackle three men in a dark alley at the centre of a large town like Badger Bridge without a seemingly single witness to the attack. It was boggling for a gumshoe of his calibre, but he wouldn’t get bent out of shape that easily. Something wasn’t adding up, and it had nothing to do with the fact that Inviss couldn’t add up very well. In times like these, the goblin liked to trust his gut, and his gut told him it was time to ask some questions.
His investigation started at the Porcelain Parrot — the closest tavern to the alley where the three men, humans, had been seen. Inviss didn’t drink but made sure he got some water with a few drops of cow’s blood before putting the screws to the barman. Jasper Willton, if that was indeed his name, had seen some out-of-towners matching the descriptions of the three who had been found dead in the alley only the previous night. That had to be more than a coincidence. There had actually been a fourth; he told the inquisitive goblin. The barman described them as a sour-looking human who had pushed the other three into drinking games. With the moon still in sight, they had stumbled out of the tavern and were gone up the street.
Inviss took a few draws of his water. The barman pointed him in the direction of a few others who had been in the night before. Walter Dannor, a grisly older chap, seemed a little nervous around Inviss. The goblin made sure to note that. Turns out he had a little bit more to add to the story. Walter had heard the conversation from the next table over, although he had been drunk when he did. Humans are stupid when they drink. They had been discussing a remarkable feat, Walter told him, that they had managed to bring down a dire bear in the forest. Impressive, those things are maybe three to four times the size of a regular bear. The three had sold the beast’s hide and meat to a local butcher before coming to the Porcelain Parrot to celebrate.
The goblin tipped his hat towards the gentleman, grateful for his time. As he turned to leave, however, the old chap called him back. There was a little more. He didn’t know if it was useful, but there was a fourth to the party. That one had joined the three victims later in the evening — about an hour into their festivities. Inviss took the description: sour-faced, long dark hair, pale complexion, and missing a finger. The same character as was described by the barman. That made it a fact. Thankfully, not a hard person to notice if you could find them. He took his leave before he overstayed his welcome.
The butchers were still open when he arrived. The jingle of the bell announced his presence, and a spot-covered face turned to greet him. Hargaret Mallen — a woman who, if he could guess correctly, had contracted something. Inviss wasted no time in asking his questions but kept his distance. Human diseases aren’t worth catching. The woman was sweet but tired. Each answer came with the dulcet tone of drowsiness. She remembered the men coming in, carrying the gargantuan bear on a cart. A pretty coin had exchanged hands for it. Inviss asked how many men there were. The answer was three, corroborating the other stories he had heard so far.
Upon request, Inviss was taken into the back of the shop. No work had been done on the bear just yet, which was ideal. She told him they were going to get to it in the morning. The goblin withdrew from his waxy coat a strange instrument the gnomes called a biggening glass and inspected the beast. There were no signs of day-old blood beneath the claws – this bear hadn’t gotten up and attacked the men then, but a creature of similar size and strength had. This mystery was getting a little deeper. There was something else about the bear that struck the keen mind of the investigating goblin. It had been socked with an iron arrowhead (well, four, actually) — the shafts were still in the creature’s body when the goblin yanked one out. Normally, steel is the preferred option for hunters, and he knew that from personal experience.
The bear was a good clue, but ultimately a dead end. Jasper, the barman, had described the three victims as being out-of-towners—a typical, rural slang for adventurers or travellers. There were three entrances into Badger Bridge. Two of them crossed rivers, but one led out into a crude road that cut through a forest. Inviss went there first. As was typical in Ankland, the towns were built with walls surrounding them and guards to man them at all times in case of a sudden orc attack. Inviss found his way into one of the guard’s towers, where he began to ask his questions.
Inviss didn’t know what time the hunters had arrived in the town but was told only one guard currently on duty had been working throughout the previous day before the moon came out. About the time the victims were in the tavern. Inviss sought him out. Ulisse Thander was tending to the horses in the stable. As he walked in, he was almost trampled underneath by a horse that didn’t seem at all too happy to be there. Ulisse, who quickly calmed the horse, told the goblin it had been like this all day and had even managed to crack one of its front hooves. The beast, for some reason, kept trying to run off into the forest, so they had to chain up its leg. Inviss tried his best to ignore the cruel practice. Horses are stupid and too big to ride.
Ulisse had indeed seen the three gentlemen that the goblin described. Good. They had arrived at noon the previous day, carrying a large bear. There had been three of them in total, just as Inviss had suspected, and they only asked to be directed to a fair butcher. Ulisse had given them directions to the centre of the town, to the shop of Hargaret, where he did his own shopping for freshly cut meats. Not much more than I didn’t already know. The goblin asked if there had been any other visitors to the town and described the sour-faced man with the missing digit.
There was no luck in that regard; he hadn’t seen anyone like that enter the town on this side. Inviss asked if he’d seen anything strange instead. Always worth asking that. Turns out that Ulisse had seen someone, or rather something strange, enter the town. When asked, he told the goblin that he had seen an unaccompanied dog enter through the gate— which didn’t happen very often. It had been a rough-looking, shaggy creature that he had mistaken for a wolf from the distance. It didn’t do anything beyond simply stepping into the town. Ulisse hadn’t stopped it. There had been no need. There’s no law against dogs entering Badger Bridge. Inviss asked which direction it had headed, and Ulisse pointed the goblin up the road. A dog wouldn’t be able to do the damage afflicted on the three victims.
A tip of the hat and the goblin was off. He checked with the other gates and guards — none had seen the sour-faced stranger. With that in mind, he retreated to the barracks in order to think. The other guards and investigators regarded him with something of indifference, and he paid them no mind. Humans don’t like goblins, no matter how smart they are. Inviss took a seat on his overly tall chair and began to ponder. Some of the other investigators here tell a person that the criminal always returns to the crime scene, but Inviss believed that this saying is stupid. Criminals always tried to get as far away as they could from the scene of the crime. Keeping that in mind, Inviss tried to put himself into the mind of, what he was sure, was the killer. All signs pointed to an animal, but his gut told him that this was a murder.
I kill people and most likely eat their eyeballs as appetisers for their brains. Nothing. Not a single idea came to him about where this killer might head now. So, he started thinking about the more interesting parts of the information he had gathered — mainly the iron arrow. An unusual choice, but it must have been made deliberately. Iron arrows weren’t cheaper and didn’t offer much over steel, except they killed slower. I don’t know a lot about iron arrows. The goblin got to work and left the comfort of his desk.
The librarian, Shontarr, was a sweetheart. She was an overweight scale-covered dragonblood with the most charming eyes a person could stare into. Today she had chosen to wear her blue dress, which was Inviss’s favourite. The goblin approached her counter — hopping up on a stool — and she eagerly asked what he needed. He wanted to know why a hunter might prefer an iron arrow over a steel one. Shontarr returned with a few books minutes later and began reading them for him. Inviss couldn’t read himself — not really something he was very interested in doing.
An iron arrow, he learned, could be used to disrupt the natural magics of the world. Inviss knew there were three kinds of magic. Divine magic, which came from the Gods. Arcane magic, which was mysterious and had secret origins. Then Natural magic, which came from the world around them and was utilised by creatures more at home in forests and woods. There was a lot an iron arrow could do, but it was primarily used by hunters seeking to undermine the power nature bestowed upon their prey. The three victims used these arrows to slay the bear — it must have been magical in some way. Inviss’s mind was racing now, but only with questions.
Inviss decided to take a closer look at the victims’ belongings and found the items in one of the locked cupboards beneath the barracks. Taken in for evidence. More weapons cast in iron, but amongst belongings was something a little more intriguing. It was a piece of a larger staff wrapped up in a blanket and squirrelled away inside one of the bags. Inviss couldn’t read the writing, but he didn’t need to. It was druidic — the language of the druids. Things were all starting to come together now. Inviss marched upstairs and managed to find six guards to reluctantly accompany him to his next destination.
Ulisse didn’t half look surprised when Inviss showed up with six guards — each of which was armed and well-armoured. The young man seemed to think they were here for him but soon breathed a sigh of relief when Inviss asked a few questions about the horse. Or, more accurately, the horse’s restraints. As the goblin could clearly see that they were iron. With a serious face, the goblin told the guards to bring the horse with them to their next destination and to keep the beast chained with iron.
They followed him as he crossed the town, making his way back through the cobblestone streets until he reached the butchers. Hargaret shared that same look of fear with Ulisse, but the goblin didn’t stop. Not when my gut is rumbling. Some guards waited outside to keep an eye on the horse while others followed the goblin in. The fallen bear still had two shafts sticking out of it. Climbing up the enormous, room-filling backside, the goblin took out the first remaining shaft and then quickly trailed that with the second and third.
What happened next was precisely what the goblin had guessed would happen. In a matter of moments, the bear wasn’t a bear anymore. It was a person. A human-looking woman wearing clothes made of bark, leaves, weeds, and typical foliage. She was quite dead — the glazed-over eyes and fact she wasn’t breathing told him as much — but beyond that, there wasn’t much more to her. She was a druid then, a shapeshifter, able to turn herself into an animal. The goblin allowed himself a little smile as he turned around to the confused mass of guards behind him.
They had no choice but the shadow his footsteps as he moved outside again. This time, he approached the horse. Inviss, whose authority was perhaps only a little higher than a typical guard, ordered the iron chains to be removed. When it was done, the horse seemed to calm a little. The guards looked to him for answers. They did this a lot in Badger Bridge. Inviss knew he didn’t seem like much, but his mastery of clues and following them was absolutely high and above the next down closest investigator. This hadn’t even been a hard case to crack.
Inviss told the guards, to their great surprise, that the three victims found in Warble Alley earlier that evening were killed by none other than the horse standing in front of them. The horse whinnied its disapproval. Inviss waited for a round of applause, then quickly realised that would most likely come later.
Weighing the facts, it was the only reasonable answer to the crime. In the tavern, the victims had been seen with a sour-faced gentleman who had been missing a finger. The gentleman was actually a druid who had come to seek revenge for the killing of another druid. The victims weren’t regular hunters, they were druid hunters, and this sour-faced killer had made sure it was them by asking about the bear. He had disguised himself as a dog to get into the town undetected, and then when he’d located the druid hunters that had killed, what Inviss assumed to be his close relative or friend, he had persuaded them to drink and then followed them into a dark alley. From there, he turned himself into a gargantuan bear and ripped them apart.
The guards stood there, enraptured — as well they should be. Inviss continued regardless of the flabbergasted or impressed expressions plastered upon their faces. The killer then tried to escape the town but couldn’t get past the guards. He disguised himself as one of the horses but was mistaken as one belonging to the guards. Desperate, he attempted to flee but was quickly caught and chained in iron. With iron shackling his body, he could no longer transform and so was truly trapped.
A guard asks how he knows it’s this horse, not one of the others. Inviss tells him that it’s because this horse was the only one chained in iron, but there is another clue. The cracked hoof is a dead giveaway, which no doubt mirrors where the missing digit would be on the druid’s human form. The horse is undoubtedly a druid, and druids are to be slain according to the laws of this realm. People don’t trust shapeshifters. Inviss didn’t particularly care about that, though. The goblin was a stickler for the law, but beyond that, he didn’t think much about the reasons behind these laws.
The horse whinnied, neighed, and tried to pull away. The guards held the beast fast with its reins, and eventually, the horse relented. A transformation occurred. Seconds later, a sour-faced gentleman missing a single finger appeared before the goblin, looking a mixture of sheepish and angry. Inviss didn’t much care for how people felt about him, but there was a question he didn’t have the answer to. Why a horse?
The druid explained that he had heard a couple of guards planning to go into the forest to see if there were any more of the giant bears lurking about. Perhaps to hunt them in case they came wandering into the town. They would take horses, so he added himself to the stables. That way, he could lead them into danger and, while they dealt with dangerous animals, he’d slip away. He’d consider turning into a bird and flying over the wall but couldn’t resist the chance to endanger a couple of guards for their prejudice against the druids.
An iron collar was snapped around the druid’s neck, and he was led, with some unkind tugs, back towards the barracks. There he would be locked up in one of the cells to await the morning and then hung in front of a crowd of people. Inviss didn’t think much about that. About whether the druid deserved it or not or whether the hunters had it coming. Although he will say, it was rather cheeky of them to sell a giant bear, when they knew it would turn back into a human the moment the arrow shafts were removed — probably why they left them in. It wasn’t his place to think beyond solving the mystery.
Instead, Inviss went to the Porcelain Parrot and ordered another water with a few drops of cow blood.
