At the smithy, Vonn felt too tired to be useful. But right away he ran into Polestar, who'd cleaned up and made a makeshift bed and table in the hangar. "Trouble?" he asked. He now wore a fresh, loose shirt and some saddlebags with the kind of skirt or drape over his back half that many Centaurs liked.

Vonn thought it best to bring him into the shop and repeat the latest news to everybody there. Some of the Baron's crowd had left, so the workplace had plenty of room.

Polestar said, "So you need some way to wall the dungeon off or break it. I didn't see the core while I was down there, but..."

He raised one of his forelegs. For the first time, Vonn noticed numerous scars along it and in spots along his other legs and one arm, from small cuts. "They kept helping themselves to my blood."

Vonn's stomach churned and his tail bristled. "Bad enough that it didn't heal right?"

Tazo scowled. "We can help you heal up, over time. Were they doing it to feed the dungeon regularly?"

"I suppose so. I was too woozy to inquire. But they said it was 'good blood'. Special. Guess I've got more of it than most folks too."

"We'll make them pay," Vonn said. "If blood fed the thing, what if we just stopped going there? After a mission to find what airways we can, and choke them?"

He didn't want to say it aloud in his sister's presence, but... when he'd first arrived in this world, one of the Necromancers had given him an odd look, as though seeing something unusual in him. Vonn told him it was probably just that he'd had a recent near-death experience. Polestar had been through the same sort of soul-disrupting trip between worlds.

Urika the Smith said, "I want our Geomancer's advice so that I will not waste my efforts. Can someone please fetch him?"

"Me," said Polestar, and was out the door.

In his absence, Urika sighed. "He is a good one, but unsettled. He apologized for eating our food, when now we know he's been drained for weeks."

Vonn made a note to buy the man some cookies for his blood donation. "He needs time to calm down and heal. Wish Selen was here to speak with him. She helped calm down someone who'd been through horrible things too."

The Smith looked into his forge's banked fire. "I was not on the front lines, much. But I can understand."

They made tentative plans for a basic watchtower that Vonn could also fiddle with for signaling experiments. Urika was the main source of information here, since he'd helped with similar things in the war.

The Geomancer arrived with Polestar. He was a Human named Ian, dressed in a compromise between a gardener's working clothes and the flashy rune-marked robe of a wizard, in brown and green. He said, "I can build a basic ward like what Baron Kolm had for detecting intruders. Beyond that I'm outside of my experience."

Urika said, "Then it's a chance to earn another level."

"I... I'll try. I saw some of those horrible things that spewed up from the dungeon. I don't know why the Duke isn't taking this more seriously."

Vonn shivered as he thought back to the monsters. Selen's advice from another tough job came to him; he should go see these things from a safe distance, in daylight. Get used to seeing them and become less afraid.

Polestar looked grim. "What I might do in the Duke's place is, start raiding some Kobold border settlements. Use the excuse that I'm searching for the killer. Take three villages, give back two."

"Can he do that?" asked Vonn.

"I used to travel a bit, working for my owner. We're at peace -- the Scaled Nation and this kingdom I mean -- but there's low-level raiding."

"You're a free man now, as much as..." Vonn found himself in a dead end. Not wanting to criticize the present rulers, he said, "as much as anyone can be. I have questions to ask, as you can imagine. But the main one is, what's your specialty?"

The Centaur's ears flicked back. "Already got asked that. The short of it is, I can travel and garden and work. I'm no expert."

Urika muttered, "Spend a few seasons here."

Vonn needed to get him in private. "Well, if you need anything, let me know. Or you can write to Selen."

Polestar used the lull to excuse himself. Did he not want to do battle with an unholy living maze?

#

Vonn heard that the man had gone south to work in the villagers' fields, pulling a cart. His kind weren't great at pulling crops out of the ground but they could shovel and haul. He was earning a meal here and a favor there, like he'd been doing since he got out of the dungeon. From asking around, Vonn heard he'd made no move to build a house yet, as though he might run off.

Vonn and Tazo studied with Ian the Geomancer as he worked on some basic enchantment. "I don't get that guy," Vonn said, as they imitated some careful whittling for stakes their trainer wanted to imbue.

"He hasn't made any trouble. I'd go easy on him, after what he went through."

"But a whole year of living as a near-slave in the Scaled Nation, and he's not out for revenge?"

"Would you be?"

Vonn had in fact seriously considered choosing that life without knowing about the bad starting setup. "I'd have wanted to overthrow the government or run away as soon as possible. Maybe it just took him that long to find a plan or he didn't know it's better here."