by Ramy Vance
Suzuki breathed a sigh of relief.
It was just his best friends acting like idiots: something that he never wanted to stop seeing. Nothing was going to take either of them away from him. It didn’t make sense to worry about either of them dying in battle. Suzuki wasn’t going to let that happen. Just like he wasn’t going to let anything happen to Beth.
They were all going to walk out of this alive.
Then they were going to stop the Dark One.
It was that simple, and Suzuki knew it.
Chapter Six
Suzuki woke to the sound of screaming. It was how he regularly woke up now. At first, he hadn’t been able to tell if it was his own scream or someone else’s. Now he knew where the scream came from. In all honesty, he was relieved to know he was a quiet screamer. He couldn’t think of many more uncomfortable conversation topics than his night terrors.
Even when Suzuki felt that there wasn’t anything to actively be afraid of, the tension from missions and quests assaulted him in his sleep. He envied Sandy and Stew. He knew that they cared as much about Beth as he did. He knew that they were also very aware of the precariousness of their lives. Yet neither one of them seemed too distraught by the situation. Sandy had even talked Suzuki down from being too stressed out a handful of times. Suzuki wished that he was handling everything as well as they were.
Suzuki exited his tent and yawned as he stretched. It felt good to have his body up and moving again. He’d gotten used to the constant walking or riding that being a MERC entailed. Sometimes camping out for the night made him restless. If he didn’t have to worry about being so exhausted, he never would stop to camp. He’d just keep pushing on through the night.
The cavern was dark.
Very little light was making it through the few cracks in the rock. Suzuki wondered what time it was. Probably sometime around sunrise. Even without an alarm, his body woke him up like clockwork when the sun rose. He had hated it at first, but now he saw it as an ideal time to enjoy his solitude.
Suzuki pulled out his hand ax. It was a very modest creation, the sort of thing you would use to cut wood. Yet it had been lovingly crafted. Suzuki had only recently started to carry an ax instead of a sword. It was a welcome change, having one hand free for magic. He still hadn’t quite gotten the hang of casting magic with his off-hand, but he figured he’d eventually catch on.
Sleep continued to drain from Suzuki’s mind, and he felt like he was stepping through a room covered in cobwebs. Mornings like this, he was very glad that he didn’t have to talk to anyone.
Suzuki leaned back against a rock and flipped his ax into the air, catching it, looking at the runes carved into the ax hilt, wondering if they were Nordic or if they had another origin.
No one was around, which meant there was no chance for embarrassment. There were a handful of spells Suzuki had seen Sandy trying that he wanted to give a shot. He always felt awkward casting around Sandy, though. It wasn’t that she ever said anything, but had more to do with the fact that they both had been practicing magic for the same amount of time. Sandy had improved exponentially. Suzuki was proud of her.
Really.
Everyone who met Sandy picked up on how proficient she was at magic, and it only made sense that Diana would have chosen her for a protégé.
Suzuki was another story.
His magic casting skills were so bad that people often assumed that he was a lazy warrior, running around with a hand ax like some crazed lumberjack. The entirety of his magic casting wasn’t too bad. It just didn’t happen to be as flashy as a true mage’s. He had actually gotten quite good at weapon enhancements. One of the reasons he was fighting with such an underwhelming weapon was as an experiment.
Since Suzuki had found the ax in a pile of rubbish at the Red Lion, he’d been drawn to it.
The ax was unassuming. Nothing had really stood out to him and that was perfect. When he took it back to his room, he had gotten started working. The first night, Suzuki had tried a sharpness enhancing spell. The blade hadn’t changed physically, but when Suzuki ran it down the side of a bedpost, the ax had cut a thin strip of wood from the post as if it were fruit.
Anytime Suzuki came across a new enhancement, he added it to the ax. The ax continued to look just as mundane as any other household hand ax. Suzuki really enjoyed the poetic nature. The ax made him really feel like the most Mundane of the Mundanes.
Over the last few days, Suzuki had been thinking about something he had heard Diana say. “The only limit to human magic is the imagination of the caster.”
Suzuki had been wondering if that was the case for enchantments as well. There was one that he had been hoping to work on for a while, but he hadn’t been able to manage getting away from everyone to give it a shot.
Suzuki had brought the supplies with him before leaving the Red Lion. They entailed three feathers, a rope, and a lock. Suzuki placed them on the ground next to the ax. Then he sat there. Waiting for something to come to him.
Nothing.
He felt stupid, sitting there in the dark of the cave, trying to write his own spells.
Usually, enchantments came along with a list of supplies, a way to orient them, and an incantation to activate the enchantment. Suzuki hadn’t thought it would be too big a deal to plan his own spell, but now, staring at the incongruity of his ideas, he realized he had been naïve.
“What you got going on at these wee hours of the early morn?” a voice playfully called from the shadows.
Suzuki looked over his shoulder. José and Chipmaster were sitting together on a boulder not too far from him. They weren’t sitting particularly close, probably the same distance that he would have sat from Beth.
“Fun times?” Chip asked.
José rose and bowed slightly to Chip before jumping off the boulder and walking toward where the tents were set up. Chip also jumped off the boulder but toward Suzuki, landing in front of him with uncustomary grace.
“What’s with all the random party favors?” she asked.
Suzuki scooped up the feathers and other items and tried to place them back in his inventory. He was suddenly very embarrassed. It was the kind of embarrassment that a child feels the first time it tries to walk and all of the adults laugh.
“Nothing,” Suzuki muttered as he picked up his enchantment pieces.
“Wait, wait. Hold on, young’un. Are you up to what I think you are? Some good ol’ magic craft?”
Suzuki sighed as he realized that he had been found out. He placed the feathers and the rest of the items back down on the ground. “Enchanting,” Suzuki finally admitted.
Chip’s eyes went wide with interest, becoming shining pearls of curiosity. She had a hungry, determined look on her face. “You don’t say, now do you? How you going about it?”
Suzuki really didn’t want to explain what he had been thinking. Saying it out loud felt like it would condemn him, that it would show his lack of preparation and forethought. Chip would see him for exactly what he felt he was, an amateur.
Chip broke into his train of thought, briefly distracting him from the swelling insecurity. “What are you trying to get set up here for yourself?” she asked.
Suzuki sighed and bit the bullet. He had seen Chip get curious enough times to know that there was no way around it. “I was trying to make a returning ax,” Suzuki explained. “Like Thor’s hammer, you know? Throw it and be able to bring it back.”
“So you got feathers, a rope, and a lock? Hmm, not bad thinking. Feathers to make it fly, rope to tie it to the lock, which you’re planning on hooking up to yourself, am I right?”
“That’s what I was thinking.”
Chip nodded like she was considering something. “So what’s keeping you from getting all magical?”
“Uh…usually, like in the books, there’s a description of how to place or arrange things and then…an incantation. But, I’m kind of freeballing this one…so, I don’t really know what to do for the last part.”
“Your ears been partial to Diana’s words, ain’t they?” Chip asked. “All that, humanity and creativity jimmer-jammer?”
“More or less.”
“Well, she ain’t wrong, I’ll start by telling you that. Want for a hand or two?”
“You mean help? From you?” Suzuki asked.
“Exacto.”
Chip pulled back the hair covering her ears, and he saw that they were slightly pointed. Not as sharp as an elf’s, but definitely not human.
Suzuki tried not to stare. He hadn’t really spoken with any elves since he had gotten to Middang3ard, only chatted in passing. “Are you an elf?” Suzuki asked.
“Only half, not a thing most people know. Ain’t something you ‘xactly brag about out in the bar.”
“Why not?” Suzuki asked. “There’s elves and everything else there. I didn’t think it would be such a big deal.”
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But the races don’t mix much, if your peepers happen to be lean on that fact. And they most definitely didn’t thirty years ago. Nope, I am a rarity that I find is just as beautiful and hated as it is sparse. Kinda sad, once you start thinking about it. The Dark One’s got forces of all sorts of grisly creatures, and they seem to work together just fine. José asks one half-elf to be in his party, and the whole MERC squad nearly loses whatever shits they got. But that’s history. Ancient, almost. What we got in front of us are the present and the future. Humans might have the luck of being ingenious, but us elves got us our own little tricks. Namely, the trick of tradition.”
“What exactly is that supposed to mean?”
Chip leaned over to get a better look at the ritual pieces that Suzuki had laid out on the ground. “Tech and magic ain’t that much different,” she explained. “Old man Clarke once said that to the reader, it’s all the same whether or not someone dies from getting zappy with a laser or from a magic wand. Little truth in that being everything has systems it works with. Just gotta find the way a system works and whamo. You get techy-tech or magic. So you know the gist of enchantments, righto?”
“Uh…yeah, you need your ingredients, what you want to enchant, and what you want to enchant it with.”
“Bingo. So you got that. Then what?” Chip asked.
“A ritual for setting the enchantment and then an incantation for activating.”
Chip nodded. “So there you go. You know how to enchant.”
“Yeah, but I don’t know the ritual. Or an incantation.”
“Well, that means you gotta write one. Let that human creativity do its job now.”
“What do you mean?”
Suzuki felt like he was missing a vital step, but he couldn’t put his finger on what it was. He stared at Chip for a few seconds, waiting for her to explain the rest to him. After a few moments, Chip sighed and pointed to the pile of ritual ingredients on the ground. “You already got everything all right and ready,” she said. “Now you just need to get the ball rolling. So go on and get it rolling.”
“How?”
“I’d start by ordering your playthings in a stack of importance.”
Suzuki hadn’t thought about which components to the enchantment would be the most important. It was vital that the ax levitated, but maybe not as important as it coming back.
Technically, it didn’t matter if the ax levitated if it was going to return. It could roll on the ground or maybe even reappear. The most important components were the rope and the lock. Suzuki picked up the rope, folded it, and placed it on top of the lock. Then he placed the three feathers on top of the rope.
“There,” he said.
Chip looked it over. “Looks right to me. Next step, incantation. Think of words that spell out your intention or whatever. Spit ‘em out while concentrating. Your familiar will handle the rest. But be specific. Might help to jot ‘em down first. Get all manual. Otherwise, you’ll get an ax that comes back with a vengeance. Might be forgetting which pointy part should come first, if you catch my meaning.”
“Yeah, I got it. You have anything to write on?” Suzuki asked.
Chip pulled out a pen and notebook. She passed it to Suzuki as she crouched down and looked at the pile of enchantment particulars, rocking back and forth on the soles of her feet. “Been a little bit of time since I seen anyone take an interest in enchanting their weapons,” she mused. “Most folks dump on the blacksmith and hope for something shiny and righteous. Nice to see a youth with a keen interest in taking care of his own shite.”
Suzuki looked away from what he was writing to smile weakly. He felt like he was back in school and a teacher was looking over his shoulder. It didn’t really matter how uncomfortable he was, so he turned his attention back to trying to figure out how he wanted to exactly word the incantation.
“Does it matter how I say it?” he asked.
“You mean, does it have to be all high and mighty like the dragon tongue? Nope. Plain ol’ English works fine. Even shorthand. Long as you’re simple and specific.”
Suzuki jotted down a couple of examples of what he wanted the enchantment to do. His first few were far from specific. He could see how they might result in his ax accidentally maiming him. But after a couple more quick drafts, he found something that he thought might be specific enough.
“Tethered to the hand that you will always return home to when desired.”
Suzuki handed the notebook back to Chip, who took the paper and nodded with a satisfied smile.
“That’ll work just perfectly,” she encouraged as she handed the paper back. “Rip that bit off just to drive the point home. Get all magical feeling, whatever you gotta do, and then bingo. You got yourself a spiffy new shine. I’ll avert my eyes for the sake of your privacy.”
Chip turned around and plugged her ears with her fingers as she whistled softly to herself.
A small amount of nervousness settled over Suzuki. He had already done a few enchantments before, a couple of times as he’d been prepping for his current quest while everyone else slept. This was the first time anyone was near him, let alone aware of what he was doing. He tried to swallow his nerves and continue on.
Suzuki placed his ax at the foot of the small pile that he’d built. He closed his eyes and wished that he had something to hold in his hand. He usually used the ring that he had given Beth as a sort of talisman to calm his nerves. That was gone now.
Remembering the feather that Ashegoreth had given him, he reached under his shirt and gripped it in his palm. Then he repeated his incantation as he imagined the magic binding his words, the ax, and his ingredients.
The familiar tugging of mana being released from his body shocked him at first.
Then the ax and the ingredients began to glow.
There was a bright flash of light and when Suzuki could see again, only the ax remained. A few indecipherable runes had been added to the ax. Suzuki picked it up, feeling the weight of the thing in his hand.
Chip nodded her head in approval as she stood up next to Suzuki. “So you gonna give it a try?” she asked.
Suzuki turned and threw the ax through the air. It sank into a rock across the cavern. He mentally imagined the ax returning. Across the room, he heard a soft hum.
The ax flew back at Suzuki.
It was coming so fast that Suzuki instinctually lifted his hand to protect his face. The ax slowed and then stopped, hovering directly in front of his open palm. Suzuki grasped the hilt of the ax. He held it in his hand, impressed with what he had just done.
“Shit, it actually worked,” Suzuki exclaimed. “I can’t believe that worked.”
Chip turned to walk away, still whistling softly, before stopping to turn and look back at Suzuki. “Looks like you worked a charm.” She whistled. “Might have another natural talent, if you stick with it.”
Suzuki gave her a smirk. “You know, you aren’t half bad as a teacher.”
“Oh, you don’t need to get my ears all pointy, I already know. Glad you figured it out eventually.”
Suzuki felt his cheeks flush red from embarrassment. He didn’t realize that his feelings about being mentored by Chip were so apparent. Guilt rushed over him and he tried to shake it off, but there wasn’t anything to feel guilty about. He had just assumed what anyone else probably would have assumed about how the mentorships had been divvied up.
Whatever. Fuck it, he finally said to himself. Just because you were being a dick doesn’t mean you have to keep being one.
The rest of the camp was starting to wake up as Suzuki walked back to his tent. Sandy stepped out of her tent, stretching as she dangled her amulet in front of her. She took a seat by the fire and magicked a tome into existence.
“How’d you sleep last night?” Suzuki asked.
Sandy pointed to Stew, who was stumbling out of the tent, his eyes bright red and bloodshot. “Hardly at all,” she lazily stated as she flipped through the books.
Stew crashed down next to Sandy and yawned loudly. “Fuck, do we have any coffee?” he asked as he found a stick and picked at the fire.
“I think Diana has some of those zip beetles.”
Stew tossed a rock at Suzuki to get his attention. “Hey, I meant to ask you yesterday,” Stew started. “You know how Ashegoreth said that she was married.”
Suzuki flipped his ax up and down as he listened to Stew. He placed the tip of his ax on his finger and tried to balance it. “Yeah,” Suzuki murmured.
“I meant to ask you, do you think they ever…you know?” Stew asked.
Suzuki shrugged. “No, Stew, I do not know.”
“Made the four-winged creature?”
“You are so unbelievably immature.”
“Like was it a giant-ass hawk or something?” Stew asked. “There’s no way it was a regular size one. Like, did she just slip it up in her—”
“Stew!”
Sandy waved away her tome as Diana came over to the fire and conjured a few breakfast supplies. “I don’t think egg-laying creatures fuck like that, Stew,” she explained. “You know, the whole laying eggs thing.”