Description

A broke adventuring party. A furious giant. A succubus who is definitely not who you think she is.

When a blizzard traps the Order of the Crowned Tankard in a mountain tavern, the last thing they need is a giant kicking down the door and demanding to know who slept with his wife. Rolan, the party’s self-proclaimed paladin and most likely suspect, volunteers to lead the investigation. This goes about as well as expected.

With a ticking clock, a tavern full of liars, and a succubus who could literally explode from too much emotional baggage, the party has to solve the mystery before midnight. Their only tools: one rogue who is actually competent, a barbarian who writes poetry, a gnome who rates fires on a ten-point scale, and a paladin whose speeches make everything worse.

The Succubus of the Singing Stone is Book 1 in the Commonly Known as the Rusty Tankard series.

Themes

• Comedy fantasy with mystery structure
• Found family under pressure
• Grief, desire, and emotional control
• Tavern intrigue and social deception
• Chaos party dynamics with real stakes

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• Amazon listing: The Succubus of the Singing Stone

Chapter 1: The Singing Stone

The Singing Stone Tavern did not sing so much as it grumbled. It was a squat, belligerent building of gray slate and dark timber, hunched in the armpit of the Dragon’s Tooth Pass like a toad that had given up on ambition and decided to focus instead on not being blown off a mountain. The kind of establishment that did not attract customers so much as collect survivors, people who had been aiming for somewhere better and had been mugged by geography on the way.

Outside, the storm had opinions. It was not merely snowing; the sky was engaged in a sustained campaign of atmospheric hostility, hurling ice and wind at the landscape with the focused rage of a deity going through a messy divorce. The wind did not howl so much as it shrieked, a sound like a banshee stubbing her toe on the furniture of the world, and snow battered the shutters with the dogged persistence of a door-to-door salesman who had seen you through the window and knew you were home.

Inside, the air was a warm, damp soup of woodsmoke, stale ale, and the collective regret of travelers who had looked at a mountain pass in winter and thought, “How bad could it be?” The answer, for anyone keeping score, was very. Very bad.

Rolan the Paladin (self-proclaimed, paperwork pending, references available upon request) stood with his shoulder braced against the heavy oak door, his boots sliding on the wet flagstones as another gust hit the timber hard enough to rattle his teeth inside his helmet.

“The elements are rude today!” Rolan shouted over the gale, his voice carrying that wounded tone of a man who expected the universe to have manners. “They lack decorum! A proper storm should arrive with notice! Perhaps a letter! ‘Dear occupants, please expect sustained violence from the sky. Regards, Winter.’ Is that so much to ask?”

“It’s a blizzard, Rolan, not a dinner guest.” The voice came from the corner table, where Nyx was conducting an audit of the tavern’s silverware with the silent efficiency of an accountant who had been raised by wolves. She had already determined that the forks were plated tin pretending to be pewter, the spoons were dented copper pretending to be silver, and the knives were sharp enough to butter bread but dull enough to be insulting if you tried to stab anyone with them. The whole collection was worth approximately four copper pieces and a hard stare. She was keeping notes. “Just latch the deadbolt and sit down.”

“The deadbolt is frozen!” Rolan grunted, his armor clanking against the door frame with the musical enthusiasm of a kitchen drawer tumbling down a flight of stairs. “I am engaged in a contest of wills! Man against Nature! Conviction against the raw, howling indifference of the cosmos!”

“I can warm it up,” chirped a voice from under the nearest table.

Fizzle, the gnome pyromancer, popped her head up between the legs of a chair. Her hat was smoking slightly. Her hat was always smoking slightly. It existed in a state of perpetual thermal ambiguity, hovering somewhere between “accessory” and “warning sign.” Her goggles were pushed up on her forehead, and her eyes were the kind of bright that made innkeepers reach for their insurance policies.

“I have a spell for Rapid Thermal Aggression,” she announced, already wiggling her fingers. Small sparks danced between them like excited fireflies. “It’s specifically designed for frozen mechanisms! It usually works on locks. Sometimes it removes the door entirely. Once, and this was really more of a learning experience than a failure, it removed the wall. But the draft was gone! So, technically, mission accomplished.”

“No fire,” Nyx said, without looking up from the cutlery.

“It’s not fire, it’s focused thermal-”

“No focused thermal. No rapid aggression. No anything that involves your fingers glowing.” Nyx finally looked up, fixing Fizzle with a stare that could have frozen the door more effectively than the weather. “The innkeeper is already watching you. He saw what you did to the cat.”

“The cat was cold! I merely provided a localized heat source! A public service!”

“You set its tail on fire, Fizzle.”

“It was a very small fire. Barely a flicker. Decorative, almost. The cat overreacted.”

“The cat is hiding under the kitchen stove and will not come out.”

“Some creatures do not appreciate innovation.” Fizzle retreated under the table with the wounded dignity of a misunderstood genius. “I gave that fire a four out of ten. Compact. Elegant. Good color. The cat should be grateful.”

In the darkest corner of the room, and this was a room with substantial competition in the darkness category, a massive shape shifted on a bench that creaked under the burden of having to support it. Bash, the half-orc barbarian, sat hunched over a scrap of parchment, his enormous body folded into a space designed for someone approximately half his size. A quill that looked like a toothpick in his massive green fingers scratched delicately across the page. He paused. He tilted his head toward the frosted window. He listened to the wind for a long moment, the way a sommelier might listen to a wine, if wines screamed.

“The wind has teeth,” Bash murmured. His voice was deep enough to vibrate the ale in tankards three tables away. A sound like a mountain clearing its throat. “It bites the stone. The stone does not bleed. It only waits.” He nodded, satisfied with the imagery, and wrote it down. “Haiku.”

“Bless you,” Rolan said, finally managing to jam a chair under the door handle with a triumphant shove. He stepped back, dusting snow from his pauldrons in a shower of ice crystals that hit the floor and immediately became somebody else’s problem. “There! The fortress is secure! We shall wait out this tempest in comfort, dignity, and moderate warmth!”

The tavern’s other occupants, a collection of merchants, travelers, and one extremely nervous bard who had been tuning the same lute string for twenty minutes, watched this performance with the glazed expressions of people who had been trapped indoors too long and were beginning to develop opinions about their fellow prisoners.

Nyx scanned them the way she scanned every room: exits first, threats second, valuables third, and people a distant fourth. Two merchants at the bar, drinking steadily and arguing about wool futures in a way that suggested the wool market was more exciting than it had any right to be. A miller at a side table, nursing a tankard the size of his head. The bard in the corner, whose mustache looked like it had been applied with charcoal and a prayer. A farmer by the fire, doing absolutely nothing suspicious, which in Nyx’s experience was the most suspicious thing a person could do.

“So,” Nyx said, stacking three forks in a neat pile. “We have no money, no job, and no way out until the storm breaks. Anyone want to discuss our retirement plan, or should we just skip straight to the part where we starve?”

“We have resources!” Rolan protested, settling onto a bench that groaned under his armor. “We have skills! We have reputation!”

“We burned through our reputation at the last village. Literally. Fizzle set their flagpole on fire.”

“It was a signal fire!” Fizzle called from under the table. “For rescue!”

“We were the rescue, Fizzle. They called us to solve a rat problem.”

“And the rats are gone! You’re welcome!”

“So is the flagpole. And the town hall. And the mayor’s eyebrows.”

Bash looked up from his parchment. “The mayor’s eyebrows will grow back,” he offered, his voice resonant with a calm that suggested he had thought deeply about this. “Eyebrows are persistent. Like weeds. Or regret.”

Rolan opened his mouth to deliver what was clearly going to be an inspiring speech about resilience and the indomitable spirit of adventurers, when the tavern door exploded inward.

The chair disintegrated. The door hit the wall with a crack that shook dust from the rafters. Rolan, who had been standing approximately four feet from it, was caught by the blast of frigid air and snow, spun on his heel in a pirouette that would have been graceful if it had been intentional, and landed face-first in a bowl of stew at the nearest occupied table. The stew was beef. It was also, judging by the consistency, at least three days old.

The wind screamed into the room, carrying a swirl of ice and snow and fury, and behind it, filling the doorway like a landslide that had learned to walk, was a man.

He was enormous. Not tall in the way that Bash was tall, which was a kind of resigned, apologetic largeness, the bigness of someone who knew he took up too much space and felt bad about it. This was aggressive height. Hostile width. A body that looked like it had been assembled from boulders by someone who was angry at architecture. He wore furs that appeared to still be resentful about the skinning, and his beard could have housed a family of badgers and probably did.

He was holding a hammer. It was not a carpentry hammer. It was not a masonry hammer. It was the kind of hammer that existed solely to make a philosophical argument about the nature of skull integrity, and it was currently making that argument very loudly by virtue of being raised above his head.

“WHICH ONE OF YOU,” the newcomer bellowed, his voice shaking snow from the rafters and rattling every tankard on every table, “SLEPT WITH MY WIFE?!”

The tavern went silent. Not the comfortable silence of a room at rest, but the sudden, brittle silence of a room that had just heard something it desperately wished it could unhear. Even the fire seemed to pause mid-crackle, as if considering whether it wanted to be involved in this.

At the bar, a merchant froze with his tankard halfway to his lips.

In the corner, the bard’s lute string snapped with a twang that sounded like a small scream.

By the hearth, the innkeeper slowly, very slowly, lowered the rag he had been using to wipe a glass and began calculating the cost of structural repairs.

And from the floor, wiping beef stew from his eyes and fishing a chunk of potato from his ear, Rolan gulped.

It was a loud gulp. The kind of gulp that had its own echo. The kind of gulp that, in a court of law, would have been entered as Exhibit A.

Nyx looked at him. Her eyes, which had been casually surveying the room, locked onto him like arrows finding a target.

“Rolan,” she whispered. “Why did you gulp?”

“I am shocked!” Rolan whispered back, scrambling to his feet and attempting to project innocence despite the gravy dripping from his breastplate and the carrot lodged in a joint of his pauldron. “Shocked, I say! By the accusation! The sheer impropriety! The violence against doors!”

“You slept with her.”

“I have slept in many taverns, Nyx! With many people! It is a statistical inevitability! Do you know how many lonely wives appreciate a man in slightly tarnished armor who listens to their problems about the wool trade and the declining quality of turnips? I have a compassionate ear! It is a curse! I am a victim of my own emotional availability!”

“You slept with the big man’s wife.”

“I do not even know which wife! There are many wives! The world is full of wives! I cannot be expected to maintain a comprehensive registry!”

The man, Grom, as they would come to learn, because the universe had a sense of humor about nomenclature, stepped into the room. He had to turn sideways to fit through the doorframe. He slammed the hammer onto the nearest table, and the table did not so much break as surrender, splitting down the middle with a crack that sent splinters across the floor and beer mugs rolling in every direction.

“I KNOW ONE OF YOU IS HERE!” Grom roared, his eyes sweeping the room like searchlights powered by pure marital fury. “SHE’S BEEN HUMMING! SHE FOLDED THE LAUNDRY! SHE SMILED AT ME OVER BREAKFAST LIKE I WAS A PERSON SHE LIKES! IT’S UNNATURAL! SOMEBODY DID SOMETHING TO MY WIFE AND I WANT TO KNOW WHO!”

Three men in the room stood up simultaneously. Not to confront Grom, that would have required a courage that none of them visibly possessed, but to edge toward the exit. Which was, unfortunately, currently blocked by Grom and his hammer and his feelings.

Rolan saw them move. He saw the bard sweating through his charcoal mustache. He saw the miller trembling over his tankard. He saw the farmer by the fire develop a sudden, intense fascination with his own shoes. And he caught his own reflection in a pewter mug and realized, with the sinking certainty of a man watching a noose being tied, that he looked extremely, undeniably, catastrophically guilty.

“Sir!” Rolan stepped forward, puffing out his chest in a way that sent a small cascade of stew droplets to the floor. “You are clearly distressed! A heinous crime against matrimony has been committed! And what you need is not violence, which, I must say, your hammer suggests you are quite good at, but justice!”

Grom glared at him with eyes that could have melted iron. “Justice? I WANT HEADS!”

“Heads are messy!” Rolan said, his voice climbing. “And terribly hard to reattach! What you need is a professional inquiry! A measured, methodical investigation to root out this… this cad! This home-wrecker! This destroyer of domestic tranquility!”

“An investigation?” Grom lowered the hammer. Not much. Maybe an inch. But it was an inch of progress.

“Precisely!” Rolan jabbed a gauntleted finger at his own breastplate with a clang. “We are the Order of the Crowned Tankard! Premier investigators of crimes, mysteries, and things that should not be! We shall interrogate every soul in this tavern until the guilty party is identified, shamed, and presented to you for… whatever it is you do with that hammer!”

Nyx kicked him in the shin. Hard. Her boot connected with the gap between his greaves with the precision of long practice.

“Ow!” Rolan flinched but did not stop. “We are at your service! For a nominal fee! Or, given the weather, perhaps just a warm meal and the assurance that you will not flatten anyone until due process has been observed!”

“Rolan.” Nyx had grabbed the edge of his cape and was pulling him down to her level with the gentle tenderness of someone trying to strangle a particularly stupid swan. “What are you doing?”

“If I lead the investigation,” Rolan whispered, his eyes wild with the particular desperation of a man who had just invented a plan and was deeply committed to it despite its obvious flaws, “I can ensure the evidence points to the bard! Look at him, Nyx! He has a mustache! It practically screams adulterer! No jury in the land would acquit that mustache!”

“You want us to investigate a crime that you may have committed, so that you can frame someone else for it, while standing three feet from a man who could use your skull as a doorstop?”

“I am protecting the team! If he starts swinging that thing indiscriminately, innocent people could get hurt! People like me! Specifically my face!”

“Your face is not innocent. Your face is Exhibit A.”

“All the more reason to control the narrative!”

Grom looked at Rolan. He looked at the hammer. He looked at the terrified room full of men who were all suddenly very interested in being somewhere else.

“Fine,” the giant grunted, the word scraping out of his throat like a boulder being dragged across gravel. “Find him. You have until the storm breaks. But when I find out who it is…” He cracked his knuckles. The sound was like a volley of small-arms fire. “…nobody’s going to need a coffin. Just a mop.”

“Excellent!” Rolan beamed, sweating so profusely that his armor was developing condensation. “Success is absolutely guaranteed! Bash, you’re on notes! Fizzle, interrogation support! Nyx-”

“Try not to steal anything while we work?”

“I was going to say lead the forensic analysis. But fine. Also that.”

“I make no promises about either,” Nyx said. But she was already scanning the room, her mind clicking into the particular gear that engaged when there was a puzzle to solve, even a stupid one. Especially a stupid one. “But if it turns out to be you, Rolan, I’m not saving you. I’m charging admission.”

Bash looked up from his parchment. He had been writing during the entire confrontation.

“The door breaks,” he murmured, his quill scratching a final line. “Love enters screaming. So does the wind.”

He paused, considered the words, and nodded.

“Haiku.”