Free The Merchant Adventurer by Patrick E. McLean Page B

and careless ones who claimed privilege to rule–would be thinking only of what Southron delicacies they might feast upon in a few days’ time. Rare tropical fruits. The brains of monkeys. Anything delectable and procured at great suffering to the peasantry. What they weren’t thinking about, Boltac knew, was the body of a young girl, dead in a gutter.
    Boltac spit in the river, then climbed back up the stairs.
    Back in the throne room, he tried to wrap his head around it. There was no one. They had
all
gone. At the first sign of danger, the Duke had fled. Boltac walked to the throne and sat down. For a second, he almost took it seriously. Then he laughed at himself.
    This wasn’t the chair for him. He was a Merchant. Everyone knew you couldn’t buy a throne. Of course, such a thing could be inherited. But at some point a throne had to be won, with a sword. A sword drenched in blood. An illiterate barbarian could sooner be a King than a fat Merchant. And it had been so long since Robrecht had had a real King. Or anything other than a figurehead installed by a larger, more powerful Kingdom seeking to control the trade routes.
    The health of Kingdoms, thought Boltac, depended not on war but on commerce. The opportunity for everyone to conduct their little businesses in peace was what kept people happy and productive. But, for some reason, the only people deemed fit to rule were warriors and their inbred descendants. Something was wrong with this logic. But it was not for him to fix.
    Boltac heaved himself off the fancy chair and left the room. Over the wall of the castle, he saw heavy columns of smoke rising from the north end of town. In twos and threes, people fled from the north gate. To the south, the damage was less but there was a larger stream of traffic. People were leaving. Was this the way it was to be? Was this how his town died?

13
    By the time Boltac returned to the store, Relan was gone. Boltac’s shopkeeper’s eye quickly saw what the boy had taken. All the wrong things. The idiot was probably even walking. Walking to his Heroic death.
    Boltac thought about opening for business. He thought about barricading the store against looters. Then he looked across the street to the still-smoldering remnants of The Bent Eelpout. He stared for a long time. He stared until a light rain began to fall. He watched the drops turn to steam as soon as they hit the smoldering coals of what used to be an inn. Each drop was infinitesimal. Wasted. A single drop could not put out a fire. But enough water could wash an entire city away. He savored his melancholy and rolled this thought around for a while. Then he turned his back on the window.
    Boltac looked around his store. Not only had the kid had taken all the wrong things, he had taken all the wrong things to carry them in. Boltac shook his head. Why travel if you don’t have the luggage you need to enjoy the journey? He had sold a lot of luggage with that line, but that didn’t stop it from being good advice.
    He went into the back and opened the chest on the left. He took out all of the small leather bags filled with coin and set them aside. He would need money, of course. After all, it was the most multipurpose substance known to man. But, for Boltac’s purposes, there was something in here more valuable than money.
    “Ah HA!” he said as he held up a burlap sack. The sack looked like its only purpose in life was to hold twenty pounds of potatoes. “There you are,” Boltac said to the sack as if to a precious child he had found in a game of hide and seek. Of course, this was a ridiculous analogy–Boltac hated children–but this burlap sack? He couldn’t have been more proud of the sack.
    He walked through his well-stocked store finding items he might need for a journey to the depths of some foul, unknowable place. Into the sack’s modest opening he placed five goatskins of water, two of wine, ten stout torches, a few flagons of the finest oil, three daggers, an