– free extract ‘The Winter Follows’ book 2 the Aberddu Adventures.
Charlie heaved the barrel up through the trap door and lumped it down beside the other two. It was unusually quiet this morning. The Law Temple nine-hour bell had rung long since, and yet there was no noise in the street. He wiped his forehead and hands with his apron and went to the door of the Tavern.
Charlie was used to goblins, some of his best customers were goblins. In fairness he didn’t have many customers that weren’t goblins – which is what happens if you open a bar called ‘The Startling Toad’. Today, however, was suffering from a conspicuous lack of goblins and the sound of no goblins always made Charlie nervous. It usually meant they were up to something. Mind you, goblins were up to something whether you could hear them or not, but if you couldn’t hear them it meant they were up to something organised.
Charlie was still recovering from the chicken rustling plot of 1099ac, he couldn’t live through that again – green-skins, militia, and chicken feathers everywhere and he was still finding grain in places he could have sworn he had cleaned. He tried to rack his brains, what had he heard? One of them had been muttering about the Temple district he thought, and another couple had been mumbling about the Adventurers Guild. He hoped it was the Temple District. It was already a pile of rubble and therefore there wasn’t much more damage they could really do to it.
If it was the Adventurers Guild things were not likely to go so well. The combination of a bunch of self-obsessed hero types and a load of piss-head goblin dock-hands was not something that Charlie wanted to contemplate at this hour of the day.
The Black River Chronicles 