Free Fable: Blood of Heroes by Jim C. Hines Page B

stone.”
    “Aren’t hammers and chisels easier?” asked Winter.
    “Sure, but this is tradition. It’s all for our protection, don’t you know. See, as long as Grayrock’s been cutting stone, we’ve had a fire-setter. And in all that time, not a single worker has been eaten by dragons!”
    “They say dragons are all but extinct,” said Shroud.
    “That’s what they say, but why take chances?”
    “Did any of the victims say they had actually seen the ghost?” Glory asked, trying to drag the interrogation back on topic.
    “Well, no. Not exactly.” He poked one of the fires, sending up a geyser of sparks. “It’s not really the kind of thing one talks about. More of a private experience, if you know what I mean. Like those feelings you get around a really good-looking cousin.”
    Good-looking cousins. Well, that would certainly explain a lot about these people. Glory looked around for another worker to question. Any other worker. She pointed to a man hitching a pair of mules to a cart stacked with cut stone. “You. Can you tell us where this ghost came from?”
    “Nobody knows.” He leaned against one of the mules. “They call her the Smoking Huntress.”
    “Why?” asked Sterling. “Is she a huntress who smokes a pipe or cigar, or is she literally on fire?”
    The man stared blankly. Behind him, another worker looked up from the stone he was shaping with hammer and chisel. “Her true name is the White Ghost of the Sky. I saw her myself as she was flying over Grayrock not three days ago.”
    “You were drunk, and that was a cloud,” snapped his partner.
    “A ghost cloud!”
    A young man, barely more than a boy, said, “I heard she rose up from Founder’s Hill to kill us all. I call her Lady Death.”
    “Why Lady Death?” asked Glory. “If you’re looking to give her a scary name, why not just Death? If the ghost was a man, would you feel compelled to call him Mister Death?”
    The boy stammered something unintelligible, then hunched his shoulders and turned back to his work.
    Glory raised her voice. “Has anyone here actually seen or spoken with the Ghost of Grayrock?”
    They murmured uncomfortably to one another, but nobody answered. The man who had dubbed her the “White Ghost of the Sky” started to raise his hand, but his partner punched him in the shoulder, and he lowered it again.
    Glory tried again. “Forget the ghost. What can you tell us about the man who died yesterday?”
    “Good worker,” said the fire-setter after a long pause. “Showed up every day, did his job, didn’t complain.”
    A woman sharpening chisels looked up. “That’s not true. Billy walked off the job yesterday. I bumped into him on the way home after finishing my shift. He said he couldn’t work for the Mayor’s new foreman anymore—”
    “The Mayor hired a new foreman?” Glory jumped down and made her way to the woman.
    “Oh, yes. The Mayor took a team of twenty men off the quarry. Something about an exciting new business prospect. We haven’t seen any of them since, except for Billy, and he was only back for a day before his tragic death.”
    Glory glanced at the other Heroes. The Mayor had told them the ghost was here on business. “When the Mayor talked about this new prospect, did he happen to mention a partner?”
    The woman shook her head.
    “What about the foreman? Where can we find him?”
    “Dunno.” She sighed. “Will said Big Rob was right.”
    “Big Rob?” asked Sterling.
    “Another victim of the White Ghost of the Sky,” said the man with the hammer and chisel. “Poor fellow shot himself.”
    “How exactly did he do that?” Glory asked.
    “With a longbow.”
    She folded her arms, waiting.
    “Indulge my curiosity, my good chap,” Sterling said slowly. “We were told only that these men had killed themselves and we weren’t allowed to see the bodies. Where, precisely, did the arrow strike Big Rob?”
    “The first one—”
    “He shot himself more than once?” Glory