I stepped outside, still grumbling. Would it kill the gods to let me sit down for five minutes? Just five. Maybe six, if I was allowed to be greedy.

  Apparently yes. Every single time I thought I could finally relax something happened.

  Then again. Maybe nothing had happened. Maybe Kuba hadn’t wandered off. Maybe he was just out doing whatever it is carpenters do, like... talking to wood? Asking trees nicely if they'd like to become doors? I didn't actually know what carpenters did, but it did feel like the kind of thing someone who’d want to become a [Carpenter] could be doing.

  I shook my head. Becoming a [Carpenter] was already suspicious. You’d have to be at least a little unhinged to voluntarily pick a class where your entire life revolved around trees. No sane person woke up one morning and thought, you know what sounds fun? Splinters. Forever.

  And sure, yes, you got practical skills, stable income, universally useful crafting abilities, and everyone in every village always needed you. But that was exactly what made it crazy. Who wanted that much responsibility? Who willingly chose a job where people expected you to fix things? Every day? On purpose?

  Only a madman.

  A reasonable, reliable, community-valued madman with guaranteed employment and a respected trade.

  Absolutely deranged behavior.

  I stopped at the edge of the clearing and looked back at the cathedral. Should I have asked Vasil to come along? He'd probably know where Kuba went. Or at least have a better idea than I did about how to find someone in this swamp. I might even get lost myself.

  No. That would be stupid. I never got lost. Well, almost never. I could handle this myself. How hard could it be to find one carpenter?

  I turned back toward the swamp and frowned, looking out at the endless expanse of twisted trees and murky water. Where would he even go? There were plenty of trees around the cathedral—dead ones, living ones, half-dead ones. Kuba could've taken his pick from any of them. We had trees. Lots of trees. Trees everywhere. This should have been heaven for him.

  Apparently none of them were good enough, though. Maybe carpenters were picky about wood. Maybe they needed specific types for specific things. Doors probably required different wood than tables. Or chairs. Or whatever else carpenters made. I wouldn't know. I shot things for a living. I didn't build them. Technically I didn’t do this for a living either. I guess I just shot things. And I was living. Close enough.

  I started walking, circling the cathedral grounds. How did people even find other people without tracking skills? Just wander around hoping to stumble across them? That seemed wildly inefficient. By the time you found someone, they'd probably already be dead.

  Annoyed, I looked down at the ground and spotted a trail of footprints. Deep ones, exactly the kind that a guy wearing armor like Kuba would make in the mud.

  Oh. Well, I guess it wasn't actually that hard to track people here. The ground kept a record of everyone who walked through it. Unless it started raining again. Then I'd be screwed.

  I followed the footprints deeper into the swamp. They were easy enough to see—while Kuba wasn't exactly a big guy, the armor I had graciously provided for him was pretty heavy, and each step had sunk a good inch or two into the soft earth. The trail wound between twisted trees and patches of standing water, leading me further and further from the cathedral.

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  Why would he go all this way? The trees here didn't look any different from the ones closer to home. If anything, they looked worse. Maybe he had some kind of secret [Carpenter] knowledge. Or maybe he just liked taking long walks. People had hobbies. I just hoped getting violently torn apart by a swamp monster wasn’t one of his.

  The footprints kept going and going. I was starting to think Kuba had decided to just leave entirely when the ground started to change. The mud grew wetter, stickier. The reeds grew thicker, tall enough to block my view.

  And then the footprints stopped.

  I stared down at the spot where they'd been. Just gone. Like Kuba had evaporated mid-step.

  Uh oh.

  I looked around. Trees. Reeds. Mud. No Kuba. No convenient signs pointing me in the right direction.

  Okay. So… Kuba probably got eaten by some kind of swamp dragon. It happens. I should probably head back to the cathedral. There was just one small problem. I wasn't lost. I just had no idea where I was, but those were two completely different things.

  Now what?

  Stand around here, wait for the man-eating swamp dragon to return, and ask it for directions?

  Or I could keep going and hope Kuba hadn't been eaten yet.

  Maybe asking Vasil to come along wouldn't have been such a bad idea after all.

  I was about to turn around when I heard singing. Faint, but clear. A soft woman's voice, drifting through the reeds.

  Huh?

  The voice was actually really nice. Beautiful, even. Like professional singer beautiful. What was someone like that doing out here in the middle of a swamp?

  Nothing good, probably. Could dragons sing?

  I followed the sound, parted the reeds, and stepped into a small clearing. There was a pool of dark water here, surrounded by gnarled roots and pale flowers.

  Kuba was kneeling at the water's edge, bent over like he was about to take a drink.

  Why would he come all this way just to drink swamp water? We had a well. A perfectly good well that didn't require hiking through monster territory. Though I guess the cathedral was also monster territory. Just closer.

  The singing came from right in front of him, but it definitely wasn’t him singing. I stepped closer, trying to see whose voice it was.

  There was a woman in the water. Beautiful. Pale skin with a faint bluish tint, like she'd been underwater too long. Very long green hair floating around her, spreading out across the surface like seaweed. She cupped Kuba's face in her hands tenderly, staring into his eyes while she sang. He stared back, completely mesmerized.

  I stopped to assess the situation. They didn’t seem to notice.

  Okay. So... What was the protocol here?

  Should I just shoot her in the face? That seemed like a reasonable response to finding someone holding Kuba while he stared at them like a dead fish. Then again, guys did sometimes get that look when they were staring at you. Or maybe she was simply evil and casting a spell on him. Stealing his soul or something.

  But what if she wasn't evil? What if this was his girlfriend? They did look like they were having a moment. A weird, unsettling, possibly magical moment, but still.

  Maybe he'd be upset if I killed her. People got upset about that kind of thing sometimes.

  She was kind of pretty, too. Very pretty, actually. Maybe they were secret lovers and he'd snuck away to do whatever lovers do. Which would explain why he walked all this way. You probably couldn't have a romantic rendezvous fifty feet from the cathedral without someone noticing. Maybe you could, actually. The place was pretty overgrown.

  Though the whole "holding his face while singing and staring into his eyes" thing seemed a bit odd for a date.

  What to do, what to do? Maybe I should [Soul Index] her just to be sure she wasn’t actually singing the life out of him or something. If that even was a thing.

  So I cast [Soul Index].

  [Rusalka]

  Status: undead

  Rusalka? Never heard of it. Didn’t sound very dangerous or evil. The undead part gave me some pause. But then again, she was very pretty. Who knew what a guy like Kuba was into? The man had willingly become a [Carpenter], for goddess’ sake. Clearly his decision-making was already questionable. Maybe he liked undead women. Maybe that was his type. I wasn't going to judge. Everyone had preferences.

  Now that I thought about it, everything that had tried to kill me had been alive. Maybe the undead were the good guys. I’d only met one undead before and that was Skelly. And he was a stand-up guy. In fact, he was one of the few people that hadn’t tried to kill me!

  Yeah, that made sense. I mean, she was singing! How evil could that be?

  Probably best to start with the polite option.

  I stepped closer and cleared my throat. "I hope I'm not interrupting anything."

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