Rule 86: When you have a chance to take a prisoner and ask them questions, do so. The knowledge to be gained from a creature - about its home, about its allies, about its treasures - can be incredibly useful in fulfilling a bounty. However, when doing so, there are three things you must always remember: it is never as well-restrained as you think it is, it will always try to fuck you over, and it may not actually know as much as you think it does.

Rule 87: When taking prisoners, always think about what you’re going to do with them afterward. “Cleaning up a loose end” can be a valid choice once they’ve outlived their usefulness, but killing a prisoner just because you can’t afford to leave them alive behind you is a choice you should make when you first capture them, not after.

- “1001 Rules for Adventuring,” standard issue to all new Adventurer’s Guild initiates.

The Goodfruit Grove

Nuglubs weren’t quite the ugliest critter I’d ever seen, but they were definitely in the running. This one would have stood about a foot and a half tall, if we’d let it go, and its body was hunched, the head slung in front of the shoulders on a spine that was bowed forward like a question mark. Its arms and legs were out of proportion, with gnarled hands as big as its head that sported a set of ragged claw-like nails. Its face was oddly horselike, long and protruding forward from the skull, with a mane of greasy black hair going from its head to the middle of its back. The bulging, pupil-less sapphire eyes and jagged snaggleteeth only underlined how malformed it looked.

Fortunately, the cussing had stopped after Faraday had shaken it up a bit and it’d realized how screwed it was. Now the trick would be to get it to talk.

“So, my little friend - do you have a name?” I was starting off polite, at least. Though I doubted it’d stay that way, gremlins being what they were.

“F- Fuck off!” it screeched, tiny drops of spittle flying as it spoke.

“I see, I see. In that case, we shall dub you as ‘Fugoff,’ first and last of your name.” I looked at it, my brows drawing together in an expression that I hoped gave off a “slightly concerned” vibe. “We would ask you questions, and I expect you to answer them. If you cannot be of use…” I pointed at the corpses of its compatriots that we’d made a small pile of. “Well, there are other uses we can put you to, yes?”

Its face wilted, the bulging eyes darting between the corpses, us, and back, before finally blurting out, “N-n-no hurt! Y-you da boss. No hurt!”

“Good, good,” I smiled at it, not enjoying the process but determined to see it through. Any information we could get from this thing that might save us or the town some trouble down the road would make this kind of interrogation worthwhile, but that didn’t mean that I enjoyed bullying it, no matter how disgusting and evil it might be.

“First, how many more of you are there?”

It looked a bit confused. “L-lots, boss. Boss Sulbrug, dey gots lots.” It paused a moment, before going on. “Boss Spite, she gots even more.”

Oho, we have some names!

“And where are these bosses?” I asked. “Here, or in the big forest?”

“Sulbrug, dey in hill,” the creature pointed deeper into the grove. “Spite, she in treehouse.” At that it waved vaguely northward, which I took to mean in the forest north of Bridgetown.

“Mm-hm. And why are you and Boss Sulbrug here?” I asked, gesturing around at the trees surrounding us.

“Eh… why?” It tilted its head, like it didn’t understand what I was asking. “We follow boss Sulbrug. Sulbrug say we go, we go, or dey hit until we go.” It winced, remembering something unpleasant.

Well, this Sulbrug sounded like a lovely, ah, person to work for. Just served to underline that gremlins were perfectly awful to everything, including each other.

“And do you know why Sulbrug decided to set up shop here?” I asked.

“Dey… dey not like Boss Spite.” It didn’t seem to want to keep talking, but I made a ‘go on’ gesture and it decided not to push my good graces. “She nasty - too pretty, too cold, too… much. All de other Nugs, dey scared of her, but Sulbrug say ‘she not true grem, she fake.’ So dey say go, and we go. We get hungry, see deer, chase it, find Old One trees. Old Ones not scare us, we pee on dem! So we go in, eat fruit, find hill.”

I raised a brow at the mention of “Old Ones,” and looked up at Ladybird and Faraday. Did the gremlins know something about the haunting, here?

“These Old Ones, who are they?” Ladybird asked.

The gremlin looked like it should’ve broke its misshapen neck turning to face her, held in place as it was. “Dey make tree house and stuff. Dey make trap, sometime, but we grems break it!” Gods, watching it grin was disturbing. Those teeth were awful, even tiny as it was. “Sometime nasty stone grems come out of Old One houses, and dey run and chase us, but we grems break dem too! We pee on dem!”

“Interesting.” Ladybird looked up at the rest of us, and continued in Common. “It’s likely talking about the elves who lived in the forest, but I’ve no idea what the ‘stone gremlin’ it’s talking about is. Perhaps a stone golem?” She shook her head. “Regardless, if they’re not worried about the haunting then maybe we don’t have be, either.”

“Well then,” I said, looking back at our new “friend” and switching back into Sylvan. “This boss, Sulbrug - exactly how many gremlins are in that hill with it, hm?”

It looked up at me, and I could see the calculation in its eyes, whether it could manage to get away with lying or if that was going to end up with it on the pile of corpses. I saw the moment when it gave up, slumping in Faraday’s grasp, and I could feel the grin slipping across my face.

Time to get a proper handle on what we were walking into.

“Alte’il, Madru, adamai tha berenh…”

The drone of the spell echoed in my ears, along with the whispering of the spirits as I bid them to their task.

The gremlin was hogtied in a circle of pebbles we’d set up. Its actual name was apparently “Kudscru,” and the laugh I had at learning that was almost enough to make us even for it and its buddies trying to kill us. Even learning how unfortunately it’d been named hadn’t made me sympathetic enough to just let it go while we trekked deeper into the grove, though, and while I might enjoy teasing Faraday about getting a new pet I wasn’t actually crazy enough to try to take the thing with us. So, we were going to ensure that the little monster stayed as far from us - and the people in Bridgetown - as possible.

I flicked a drop of purple blood from my knife onto the last stone, and tendrils of silver smoke burst out of it and the twelve other pebbles, streaming in a silent cyclone towards the quivering little gremlin in the middle of the circle. It jerked violently for a moment as the smoke sunk into the cut on its forehead and disappeared, but soon enough it was blinking and looking around with its bulbous eyes, glancing at me and then at Cherubix, who was still glowering at it. Meanwhile, I closed my eyes, and could still see the little bugger in front of me, lit up in silver through my eyelids.

Looked like it hadn’t managed to resist, so that sprig of sacred rowan that I’d burned to cast the spell hadn’t gone to waste.

“Now then, friend Kudscru,” I said in the coldest, most matter-of-fact voice I could manage, and gods but it was still hard to keep from laughing when I said that. “That spell will stick for a year and a day. If you come close to me in that time, I will know. If you come close to any of the other tallfolk villages, I will know. And if I sense you out there, I will kill you.” I jabbed the knife under its nose with every sentence. “Do. You. Understand?”

It nodded jerkily. “No hurt! Me go. Stay far from tallfolk.” It looked at Cherubix again, quailing under her death-glare, before quietly whining “Me go now?”

I rolled my eyes - its version of puppy-dog eyes was just sad, rather than pitiful - and undid the knots, letting it go. It stood up and shook itself off, and then cautiously walked away from us, keeping its eyes on me and Cherubix at all times. About halfway between us and the underbrush, it finally realized that we weren’t going to chase it, and made a mad dash for cover. I could hear it crashing through the brush for a good minute before the sound of its passage grew too faint, and then closed my eyes to watch the speck of silver light keep moving away.

“So…” Ladybird started, before trailing off. “Is that… normal?”

Faraday snorted from where he was busy cleaning and inspecting his sword, checking for any damage that might have happened during the fight. “Which part? The gremlin cocooned in rope, the tracking ritual, the death threats?”

“I just… didn’t expect you to let it go, is all.”

I hooked a thumb behind me in Faraday’s direction, still watching the white speck diminishing in the distance through my eyelids. “Paladin, remember? I might’ve argued for burying the little bugger after we were done with him, and Cheri probably would’ve been happy to do it, but there’re some rules of engagement we can’t really bend.” I turned around to look at her as I finished talking, satisfied for the moment that our little friend wasn’t going to turn around and try to follow us.

Faraday looked up at me, raising an eyebrow. “And would you have done it, if I’d not been here?”

I winked at him. “Won’t have to find out, so long as you stick with us, eh?”

“Ah... at any rate,” Ladybird said, glancing between us. “What kind of spell was that? Some kind of mark? I think I understood the refrain, but the primary verse escaped me.”

“Oh, yeah. It’s a lesser version of the Fugitive’s Mark; I usually use it to follow vermin back to their nest. I lied about the duration, though - it won’t last more than a week, and the range isn’t more than a mile or so under normal conditions. Still, if the little bugger gets close to me then I’ll be able to sense and track it, barring magical interference.”

I grimaced, turning back towards where I’d last seen the white speck. “And speaking of which… yep, it’s gone. Can’t have gotten more than a quarter-mile. We’ve been here all of six hours and already those wardstones are getting damned annoying.”

I shook my head and walked over to the pile of gremlin corpses. Cherubix had spent a few minutes plucking the eyes out and cutting the ears off while we were interrogating our prisoner, so they were even more grotesque than normal. I was curious about the other variety we were facing, though - I hadn’t had a chance to get a close look at one of these “Redcaps,” and the stories I’d heard about them described them as murderous little men, not the pale stick figures I’d seen when they attacked us.

Where the Nuglubs were squat and hunched, the Redcaps were thin and spindly, and oddly botanical in nature. They looked like someone had taken an overgrown thistle plant, bleached it white, shaped the leaves into something resembling arms and legs, and then dipped the flower petals in blood. Their mouths were vertical gashes in the bulb that made up their head, with the eye-sockets on each side of the mouth and no nose or ears visible. The specimen I was examining had multiple rows of tiny needle-like teeth, which made me very glad that they hadn’t had a chance to bite any of us.

Crouching down, I picked up one of its limp arms and wiggled it a bit. The limbs were oddly vine-like, with no defined joints, more like a gnarled tentacle than actual arms and legs. The “hands” were simply more of the same material shaped into a cluster of smaller finger-tentacles, and the feet were just vaguely foot-like pads of toughened… flesh or wood, whatever. They were bizarre-looking creatures, though not so outlandish as some that I’d run into.

Each had been wielding a crude weapon - a broken scythe blade attached to a stick, multiple crude clubs, and one enterprising critter had actually managed to fashion a stone hammer out of vines and a V-shaped branch. Not terribly dangerous one-on-one, but as Cherubix had found out those crude weapons could still do damage if they got a good shot in.

I grabbed a waxed-cloth bag out of my pack and started sifting through the corpses, trying to find one of each type that was least damaged. If we were going to be sticking around here for long, I was going to want to learn as much as I could about these things - once we got back to town and I had a bit more time to tease out any hidden strengths or weaknesses, of course. We’d have to come back through here to pick up the bag and my prizes, but unless things went very wrong that shouldn’t be a problem.

“Do you think we can deal with over twenty of these things?” Ladybird was asking Faraday behind me as I hung the corpse-filled bag from a branch. “There were only a dozen in that attack, and they almost got Miss Cherubix. And it implied that this Sulbrug character was a lot bigger than the rest of them…”

“If we can catch them by surprise, or at range, we should be set,” Faraday rumbled in reply. “You haven’t had a chance to see Cherubix really shine, yet, and if we can get them when they’re clumped up and unsuspecting she can take quite a few down before they know what’s hit em.”

“Yeah! Just wait, I’ll show you some real fireworks if we have a chance!” It apparently hadn’t taken Cherubix long to shrug off her funk at having to let the gremlin live. “One shot, and BOOM! All the gremlin garbage on fire!”

“Your ability to slow them down if they charge should also tip things further in our favor, Ladybird,” I said, turning around and rejoining the conversation. “Still, catching them by surprise is a big ‘if,’ and I think we need to make some plans for a fighting retreat if we can’t keep them contained.”

Faraday nodded firmly, putting his supplies away and sheathing his sword. “Agreed. Talk as we walk? We’re burning daylight, and our odds go down if we run into them in the dark. Are you feeling ready to go, Cherubix?”

“Yup! Right as rain!” She grinned up at us and flourished Walter, a trail of snowflakes spinning from his blade, before pointing in the direction that Kudscru had said was where we’d find the “hill” that his band was lairing in. “Let’s go clean up some trash!”

I smiled at her, and then looked at Faraday and Ladybird. “You heard the lady. Let’s get moving.”

Faraday grunted and stood up, once more taking point, with Cherubix falling in behind us.

came from above, as Ko glided off into the trees ahead, making me grin and wave up at him, sending a pulse of amusement and gratitude back to him.

With a smile still on my face, I turned and beckoned Ladybird over so we could talk.

“First off, great job. Your timing could have been a hair faster, but you didn’t freeze up and those spells were damned effective, so if you keep that up you can run with us any time you like.”

She gave a shy nod of her head, muttering her thanks, but I just waved them off. She’d earned the compliments, as far as I was concerned, so there wasn’t any reason to be humble about it.

“Now,” I went on, “here’s what I want you to be keeping an eye out for if something like that happens again…”