They gave Reema the short of it.
Stump stammered details of how they'd acquired the cask, while Morg offered the occasional qualifier to dull the edges of the plausible dangers. She listened, hands on hips, lips tight, eyes moving sharply from dwarf to goblin, and said nothing.
At the end of it Jin leaned back in his chair and folded his massive arms. He looked up at her with a shrug. "It is a keg of Jailburn, Reem."
She considered this with no less of a pinched glare, but her tapping foot suggested she was already tallying their potential sales. Because she was an innkeeper, first and foremost.
And they had much work to do.
The haphazard sign was a group effort.
Stump took up the task of painting the words, while Reema added the colour and flourish to make it stand out. Jin hammered the plank onto a post and drove it into the ground outside the inn, and Morg gazed on it approvingly from down the road.
"I can see it from here!" he shouted back.
The words, coloured gold on a blue background and ringed by more gold read, "JAILBURN ALE SOLD HERE: ONE NIGHT ONLY." Beneath it, in a smaller, delicate font stated, "a copper a beer." Under both in an unintentionally threatening red said, "sponsored by THE NOBODIES," which Stump hadn't realized until looking at the sign sounded somewhat unhelpful.
The four of them stood in the muddy curve of the road and gazed at the sunset-baked inn and its freshly painted sign out front.
"You think they'll come?" said Reema.
Jin rested an arm over her small shoulders. "They always do," he grumbled.
She lowered her head and bit her lip. "Not like with pa," she whispered, almost too quiet to hear.
Morg scratched his beard thoughtfully. "Maybe more of 'em signs throughout Grimsgate? Could do ye well."
Stump shuffled over to Reema and gently tugged her apron. "Morg's right. If we do that, they'll come."
The rest of the day was spent in a frenzy fixing up the place.
The Jailburn cask was twice the size of any of their other offerings, but held more than five times the value of all their barrels combined. Jin had no issue with rolling them down the steps to Stump's office and fitting the single momentous keg behind the bar for the night.
Reema fretted with finding planks of wood to slot into the holes peppered throughout the floor, while Morg dealt with the rafters rotted through with rainwater. Stump's sole focus was spent feeding Bubbles enough pork to knock him out cold.
A number of usual patrons showed up for a midday drink, only to be shooed away. Reema played up the excitement in her voice as she turned them around and guided them out the door, sure to remind them to return after the markets close and to bring a full purse and all of their friends. Jin headed out to stock up on ingredients and flagons and to stake hastily cobbled copies of their advertisement all along Crooked Cranny and Backalley Bend, and came back hours later with a wheelbarrow spilling over with supplies.
Rags wiped, brooms swept, hammers hammered, and soon the inn breathed anew, its ceiling stable, its holes plugged, its feral guardian in a gluttonous coma, and its tenants watching the door, waiting for the first guests to arrive.
 

 
The door creaked open. Crisp evening air spilled into the inn.
The first four guests were regulars, a group of smiths down Withers Way. Reema greeted them at the door. "Welcome, welcome," she said, and began pulling out chairs and barrels around the table they frequented. "So nice to see you all this evening."
Jin had already started his work in back, and the smell of garlic and butter wafted through the doorway and settled beneath the nostrils of their patrons.
"I'll have whatever yer man's got back there," said one of them.
"That sign out there tellin' true?" chimed another. "Ye got the Jailburn?"
Reema, quick as ever, had already doubled back to the bar, scooped up a tower of cups and a pitcher, and homed in on the table.
"You saw it right, Uggan. One night only," she said, placing each cup in turn and setting the pitcher between them. "Happens you'll be the first tasters if you're inclined."
The four of them briefly met eyes in what reminded Stump of the wordless nods goblins often shared when they stumbled on a trove of plunder.
"Aye," said one of them, speaking for all.
Four flagons of Jailburn were in their hands no sooner than two more guests ducked through the threshold. Reema was on them again like a bee, stinging with her hospitality.
"Welcome to the Knight Inn," she said, directing them to a smaller table by an open window, where the sleepy glow of evening angled through. "Always nice to see new faces," she added, then flashed Stump a hopeful smile.
He returned the smile from a corner table. His pint of Jailburn sat in front of him, untouched except for the foamy collar, which he had licked off. Morg occupied the space across from him. Flecks of booze glistened in his tangled beard.
"Good start to the night, eh?" he said. His cup was already half empty. "Maybe a few more 'n ye can start making rounds and letting 'em know who y'are."
Stump fiddled with his fingers. "Right.”
Morg regarded the goblin with a cocked eyebrow. "Ye nervous?" he said, with a twang of disbelief.
"No."
"Y’are," Morg insisted, then leaned forward. "How's it work out a little gobby like ye can smuggle a couple barrels o' city beer out from under Dagg's nose, but can't summon the will to talk to strangers in a tavern?"
Stump shrugged. "People scare me when there's more than one of them."
Morg laughed and clanked the bottom of his mug against Stump's, spilling beer over the brim. "You 'n me both," he said. "What ye got there's courage in liquid form. Put it to yer lips and thank me later."This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Stump wrapped his fingers around the cup. A quick sniff twisted his face up. "It's foul," he said.
"It's not the flavour ye drink it for."
The first sip was made with great hesitation. The second with a little less. By the fourth, the corners of the inn looked a little darker and the glowcaps a little brighter. The sixth couldn't rightly be called a sip.
"Yer gonna b'seein' Wasptongue soon, arn't ye?" slurred Morg. Several empty flagons crowded the space between them. "Best bring a suit o' armour. There's a reason she's got the name."
Stump gave an exaggerated shrug, his arm grazing a cup, nearly sending it tumbling. "I don' have a boat, 'n goblins can't swim!" he said, then covered his mouth for a burp that took a detour through his nose. The burn caused tears to well in his eyes.
When Morg frowned, his moustache frowned with him. He said something.
"Wha?" Stump bent forward.
The inn had crowded with another six bodies, and other than the sweaty fog that had formed around them, a cacophony of voices challenged every table to be the loudest in the room.
"I said I'm with ye," Morg repeated, louder. He reached across the table. "I'll ferry y'cross to the Spits."
Stump rearranged the cups to make way for the dwarf's arm, then clasped his hand. "Really? You will?"
" 'Course. After that showin' ye showed Dagg?"
Stump's face was warm, but whether that was Morg's kindness or the beer was impossible to know. "Morg…" he began in a manner that made the dwarf brace for an incoming personal question. "Why d'you keep getting kicked outta comp'nies?"
Morg stiffened. "Who says I get kicked out? Maybe I leave."
"Why?"
"Cause I'm different, that's how." His tone left no further room for inquiry.
But that didn't stop Stump. "We're all different. I'm a dwarf 'n you're a goblin. No, I'm a goblin."
"I'm different different," Morg said, then nodded to the crowd to escape the topic.
Nearly every table was full, the most Stump had ever witnessed at the Knight Inn at one time. Reema was making the rounds, occasionally dipping behind the bar to pour another draught, or into the kitchens to help with the glut of dinner orders. Jin broke with his duties as well, running out front and looking silly waiting tables in his food stained apron.
The door swung open again. Three more stepped in.
"Yerright," said Stump. He slid off his chair, knocking over a flagon, and swaggered off. He sized up the other parties, strategically ascertaining which one he would visit first—at least, that's what he felt like was happening in his head. Time moved slow. But also quick. Why did I stand up again?
Reema darted by. "Welcome, welcome," she said, for the dozenth time. She guided the new arrivals around in a gleeful panic, never having faced the crisis of more guests than tables before, and settled them at the bar. Jin ran downstairs and returned moments later with a couple stools lifted from Stump's office.
"Jin, ye finally ground ol' Dagg down into givin' ye a taste of the Jailburn, eh?" someone called from across the room.
The large oxfolk awkwardly arranged seating for their new guests while tracking the originator of the question. "This one's courtesy of another friend, as it happens," he said, when he spotted Uggan.
"A friend you'd be willin' to part with?" the dwarf teased.
"Part with? No. Share, maybe," said Jin, dusting himself off and accidentally gracing the floor with bits of sautéed vegetables. "I hear they're in the business of sellin' their sword," he added, seeing Stump cross the room.
"Yeh? Who'd that be?"
"Name's Stump," the drunk goblin said, floating over. "Of the Nobodies." He displayed his hand.
Uggan regarded it with mild amusement. "Uggan," he said, accepting the gesture. "Friends call me Ugg. Yer the one behind their fortunes today?"
Normally the quick flicker of ascertaining eyes from a dwarf sitting taller than Stump was standing would have sent him shrinking away, or at least vibrating with the lust of Grumul. "I am," he said. "Courtzy—cor—courtesy o' Daggan himself."
"You bought it from him?" asked another at the table.
"Manner o' speakin'." Stump swallowed an acidic burp. "Wanted to help 'fore I head to the Spits to learn from Wasstongue."
"What, brewin'?"
"I'm a Lumenurgist."
Uggan's eyebrows lifted. "Oh, aye?"
"Oh, aye," Stump said boldly.
A smile drew wrinkles at the corners of Ugg's eyes. "There's a story there, I 'magine," he said.
Stump hiccuped. "If I can remember it," he warned.
The grizzled old tradesmen wedged him into their circle. They bent over the sole glowcap that lit their huddle and listened to his story. It was a jagged telling, interrupted here and there by an eruption of laughter from another table, or a cool gust sweeping through the doorway as more and more filled the inn.
He talked of the raid and the wagon and the magical book. He recalled the Iron Fleece and Garron the knight in his smoking armour. There was the trial, and the matrons, and the steam hissing from Thrung's fiery wounds. And there was Yeza, too, but that was a sadder tale. They listened, enraptured, and for an unknowable swath of time the night promised to never end.
"Ye did all that on yer first job?" one of Uggan's friends asked after Stump finished telling of his evening espionage at the Cantankerous Tankard.
"Wait 'til you hear 'bout my second job," said Stump.
"What's yer second?" asked Ugg, whose cheeks had turned beet red.
"I'm waitin' for one o' you to give it to me," Stump said to raucous laughter. Maybe beer wasn't so bad. Words came easy, spending no time in his skull before they rolled off his tongue, even if some of them splattered on the floor.
" 'Nother round for us all, gents?" Ugg said, and started to rise.
Stump pressed him back into his seat with surprising force. "Allow me," he offered, and turned to shuffle his way through the crowd.
He slipped through a stiff wall of bodies. When did so many people get here? He blinked and for a moment thought he was in the tank. I can't even see the walls.
Reema pushed through with a tray in her hands, and nearly tripped over him. The tray clattered to the ground.
"Sorry," said Stump. He bent to pick it up, but she grabbed his shoulders and kneeled to face him.
Her eyes were aglow and her apron smelled of beer. "I'm so stressed I think I might pass out!" she yelled over the din. Strangely, she was grinning. "It's so busy!" She leaned forward and planted a long kiss on his forehead.
Before he could gather himself for a reply she had whisked up the tray and was gone again, absorbed by the crowd.
He navigated his way to the bar only to find Morg behind the counter. The dwarf wasn't very tall, but his presence was towering. He spun back and forth, exchanging overflowing tankards of Jailburn for copper.
"Tell yer friends 'bout the Nobodies for all yer questin' needs," he said to one patron. "Jailburn's for one night only, but the Nobodies are from 'ere on out!" he said to another. "Tell yer friends 'bout—" he came face to face with Stump. Morg's bearded cheeks lit up. "Can ye believe it? You’d think the whole o' Grimsgate's within our walls, t'night!"
Stump staggered and steadied himself against the countertop. He'd forgotten why he came all this way. "I think I need beer," he said.
Clank. Foam trickled enticingly down the side of the flagon Morg had placed on the counter. "On the 'ouse, on account o' what we done to acquire it," he said. "I'll send Reem o'er to yer table for Ugg and 'is crew."
Stump shuffled gingerly back through the crowd, sipping on the foam. It really is busy, he realized as he shouldered between thighs, losing precious liquid in small spatters. But it needs a little something more.
He looked at the ceiling. A lumen appeared. He spent a point on Sustain, and commanded the orb through a dazzling array of reds and purples, then blue and green. A number of heads turned. Gasps swelled up from the crowd. Cheers and hoots followed, and the inn was bathed in light and colour, and breathed a rainbow into the evening gloom.
"The Nobodies!" someone yelled.
"The Nobodies!" echoed several others.
Cups were raised like soldierly banners in front of the bar, and a throng of drunken workmen joined their voices as one. "Morg!" they called. "Morg! Morg! Morg!"
Like a wave the gesture rolled through the inn—cups, flagons and tankards speared the air, flashing blue, orange and purple. "Morg! Morg! Morg!" they yelled.
Upon reaching his friends, Stump saw Uggan and his crew had knocked back their chairs and stood as well. One of them was on the table, hunched beneath the ceiling. "Stump! Stump! Stump!"
He only had a moment to rest his cup down before a pair of arms slipped under his shoulders. He kicked at first, uncertain what was happening. His heart skipped faster, beating irregularly as if tumbling down a flight of stairs—the bloodlust and drunkenness was a strange pairing.
"Stump! Stump! Stump!"
He was hauled above the crowd, and found a number of hands holding him aloft. They're cheering my name, he realized.
There he floated on an undulating bed of fingers, amidst the raised chalices of the Knight Inn, dizzy with Jailburn and shuddering with bloodlust. But this time he didn't fight it. His breath quickened and his heart raced, but he closed his eyes and watched the faint flashes of colour through his eyelids. He listened to the crowd.
Death, death, death, his tribe had told him.
"STUMP! STUMP! STUMP!" The Downs replied.
Tenet of Lumensa Fulfilled - Virtue +1 (6/6)