Mystery Of Merrie Part 1

The bar was, to put it kindly, a dump. Still — it was the only one Merrie had, and a city with only one bar tends to treat it like scripture. Piccaron took a stool and signaled the bartender.
“A glass of sterin. Please.”
“Coming right up.”
He drank it with something close to reverence.
“Sterin, no sweets to chase it, no sweet wine to soften it.” The bartender studied him. “You’re a southerner.”
“Only passed through, once.” Piccaron didn’t look up from the glass.
“Southern bastards.” The bartender said it without much heat. “Always did have a taste for bitter things.”
“Sterin suits this place.” Piccaron turned the glass, watched the light catch it. “Bitter. Suffocating. Feels honest.”
“Heh. No different from the south, then.”
“Which tells me you already know what I’m here for.” Piccaron dropped twenty-one silver coins and five gold ones onto the bar, unhurried, like a man settling a bet rather than buying a service.
“Protection, is it.” The bartender didn’t ask so much as confirm. “Fine.”
He took a knife from beneath the bar and sliced a small piece from the hem of Piccaron’s cloak — quick, practiced, almost surgical.
“Seven days. You’re covered — flesh and magic both — so long as you don’t strike first outside what’s fair.”
“Seven days is enough.” Piccaron’s eyes drifted to the door as it swung open. Seven men from the Timurr army walked in like they already owned the floor beneath them.
Arrogant — but that was standard fare for men who fancied themselves conquerors. All except one: a small woman near the back, silent, her face carved into something between contempt and disgust.
One of the soldiers spat on the floorboards without a second thought and started barking for a drink.
“I wouldn’t spit carelessly in here.” Piccaron didn’t raise his voice. “They can curse you through it. Dark magic needs less than you’d think.”
“Watch your mouth, little bastard.” The soldier ignored him entirely, waving the bartender over.
“Piccaron. Baum Goldenir.” He offered it plainly, no flourish — a name meant to be recognized, not admired.
The soldier’s eyes narrowed, then something like amusement crossed his face. “Alone? I’ve heard Baum Goldenir’s reputation. Impressive, supposedly.” He leaned back. “But one man? We don’t need your kind of help. Pine. Captain of this unit. There’s a few hundred more of us waiting outside if you were wondering.”
“Captain. You should know something.” Piccaron’s voice stayed level, almost bored. “What’s kept this city standing isn’t the soldiers guarding it. It’s the magic underneath it. You Timurr men never learn that lesson — which is exactly why you keep bleeding men here for nothing. Even Marina couldn’t crack this place open.”
“Save your fairy tales.” Pine turned his back on him.
A few minutes passed. A ragged man appeared from nowhere, scraped up what was left of Pine’s spit from the floorboards, and vanished back into the crowd without a word. Pine didn’t even glance his way.
Pine and Piccaron stepped out of the bar together. The scene outside was chaos dressed up as an ordinary street — but the air itself felt wrong, thick with something the eye couldn’t name. The mystic pressure here was staggering, a weight settled into the bones of the place itself.
To the city’s own people, the two of them looked like outsiders wearing borrowed skins. Stranger still: the sight of Timurr’s conquering soldiers barely registered with the locals at all. No fear. No deference. Nothing. As if there was nothing worth noticing — or as if the city itself was setting a trap for men too arrogant to see it coming.
Piccaron pulled out tobacco and paper, rolled it with unhurried fingers, lit it, and drew the smoke in slow and even.
Even I need to tread carefully here, he thought. No room for recklessness. Not in this place.
Timurr held the city on paper, but its people didn’t seem to care one way or another. They’d already decided the occupiers would be gone within the week — Marina had tried the same conquest before, and lasted exactly that long before pulling out. Whatever wrongness lived in Merrie’s foundations had been enough to break even a kingdom’s patience. Enough that Marina’s own army couldn’t stomach staying.
Piccaron understood, watching it all, that taking this city required more than soldiers marching through its gates. What it needed was absolute submission — people and army both bent all the way to the ground. Military force alone wouldn’t do it. Whole companies had vanished into this place, swallowed whole. That was the story he’d heard, at least, and stories like that rarely came from nothing.
He fell in alongside the Timurr soldiers for a while, cataloguing their arrogance one man at a time.
“You’re not needed here. Go on, wander off.” A woman — Serena, by the sound of the name tossed around camp — waved him off without so much as looking at him twice.
Piccaron only huffed, low and quiet, and did exactly that. He walked the streets slow, cataloguing the city the way he’d catalogue an enemy camp — not with his eyes alone, but with everything else too. The air here sat wrong in his lungs, heavier than it had any right to be for a place with no smoke, no swamp, nothing to explain it. Doors closed a beat too fast when he passed. Windows that should have held curtains held boards instead, nailed flat, some of them warped with age like they’d been sealed shut for years rather than months. Children weren’t playing in the streets. He noticed that before he noticed anything else — no shouting, no chasing, no scraped knees. Just the low murmur of adults moving with their heads down, eyes fixed somewhere just past the next doorway, never quite meeting his.
He found the streets papered with missing-child notices, dozens of them nailed to a public board, ink already fading in places from age. Some of the papers had gone brittle enough to flake at the corners — years old, not weeks. No one had bothered taking them down. No one had bothered adding new ones recently either, which struck him as its own kind of answer. He stopped at a bread seller’s stall along the road.
“All these children.” He nodded toward the board. “Grieving families. Has anything been done?”
“Well, sir.” The baker didn’t look up from his loaves. “It’s no mystery, not to anyone who’s lived here a while. You’ll understand soon enough why the officials, the soldiers, the whole government keep their heads down and their mouths shut.”
Piccaron studied the board a moment longer, running through the shape of it in his head. Bandits sold what they took — a living child fetched coin somewhere, which meant a trail, however faint, and trails got noticed eventually. This had no trail at all. No ransom notes, no bodies turning up in ditches to at least confirm the worst and let people grieve properly. Just names on paper, going yellow, and a whole city that had apparently stopped expecting different.
“Bandits?” Piccaron turned the possibility over anyway, testing it against what he’d already worked out. “No — too visible, too easy to hunt down. A cult, then. Something built to hide.”
“Sharp mind, sir. Sharp indeed.” The baker’s hands finally stilled. “You’d be right. They’re the ones who really run this city, if you want the truth of it. Strange magic, theirs. Nobody dares cross them.”
Two days had passed in Merrie. That morning, Piccaron rose from his room at the inn and made his way toward the Timurr encampment. He found Pine.
“Anything strange happen?”
“Tch. This backwater town.” Pine didn’t bother masking his contempt. “We sit here until the real army arrives to break this place properly. Strange or not — I couldn’t care less. Guard duty is a waste of my time.”
“I’ve taken cities before. Pulled guard duty under Captain Pine more than once.” Serena leaned against the wall, arms crossed, boredom etched into every line of her posture. “Nothing’s ever been this easy. It’s starting to bore me.”
It didn’t stay easy for long.
A fight broke out — Timurr soldiers against local townsfolk — spilling out from inside the bar and into the street beyond.
“Bastard. Die.” One of the soldiers snarled it, blade already drawn.
The brawl kept spreading, dragging bodies further into the open square, and that was when four locals appeared — draped in purple cloaks, moving with the unhurried certainty of people who’d done this before. They circled the soldier and began chanting something low, something that didn’t sound like any language Piccaron recognized. The soldier’s hands flew to his own skull. He screamed. Agony, real and total.
Captain Pine saw it and moved without thinking — sword drawn, a handful of men falling in behind him, charging the four purple-cloaked figures. One of them simply raised a hand.
Pine dropped where he stood. Both hands clutched at his chest, a strangled groan tearing out of him.
“A curse,” Piccaron murmured to himself. He moved in immediately, watching soldier after soldier collapse around him, hands clamped to their skulls, faces twisted in something past pain.
One of the purple-robed figures turned and raised a hand toward Piccaron.
Nothing happened.
The mage’s eyes narrowed, caught sight of the torn hem on Piccaron’s cloak, and the hand lowered.
“Merrie’s protection. One of you had the sense to buy it.” The mage’s voice was flat, unbothered. “But it only covers one man. I could kill every soldier standing behind you and you couldn’t stop me.”
“I haven’t done anything to offend you or yours.” Piccaron kept his tone level, almost conversational. “But it seems my companions managed to provoke you enough to show yourselves to me. Interesting.” A pause. “I’ll spend my protection now — on myself, and on all of them. Is that permitted?”
“Consider it spent.” The mage’s gaze didn’t waver. “There won’t be a second chance for any of you after this. Tell the bartender — no more protection sold to your kind.”
The purple cloaks turned as one and vanished back into the crowd, leaving the square littered with groaning men.
Pine could finally breathe again — the pain hadn’t vanished, but it had dulled to something survivable.
“Told you.” Piccaron looked over the wreckage of Timurr soldiers still writhing on the ground. “Their magic isn’t like anything you’ve fought before.”
“I didn’t register a single fluctuation. No manifestation, no signature, nothing.” Serena was already running a healing spell over her own hands, then turning it toward Pine — it barely held, only enough to keep him from slipping further. “What is this magic?”
“Honestly? I don’t care if any of you die.” Piccaron said it without malice, the way a man states the weather. “But a contract’s a contract. Mine says I keep you people alive. Tell your commander to raise my fee.” He turned to leave.
“You—“ Pine’s voice was still ragged. “What exactly are you planning?”
Piccaron smiled — the same easy, unbothered smile from the dinner table, from the harbor, from every room he’d ever walked out of alive.
“Taking this city.” He didn’t look back. “I’m interested now. I’ll have it under my hand soon enough.”