The Bad Guys Chronicles Box Set

by Eric Ugland

  Faster than I could see, he had me up against a stack of crates and had a naked blade up against my throat.

  “You make a noise, and I will gut you like a pig,” he said, his sharp breath going almost entirely up my nose.

  “Easy there,” I said, swallowing that bitter twinge of fear. “No reason to get all handsy.”

  “Are you smiling? Handsy?” He didn’t seem to quite know how to take my reaction.

  “I mean, you are all up on me. Maybe take me out for dinner next time?”

  “What?”

  “Just do what you need to do.”

  “What did you do to Etta?” he said in that sort of quiet whisper threat way.

  “Nothing,” I replied, “she told me the passphrase and told me to come in here and talk to you.”

  “How do I know you didn’t beat it out of her?”

  “Defeats the whole purpose of the phrase if you don’t believe anyone who comes in here and tells it to you.”

  “I, uh, well—”

  “So, you know, good job you on that one.”

  “Etta is fine?”

  “She is, she sent me here.”

  He stepped back and slid his dagger into a sheath on his belt. I rearranged my collar and stretched my neck out.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Concerned about her is all.”

  “You two are friends?”

  “I might say we are, pretty sure she would disagree. She is,” he stopped talking and seemed to search for the right words.

  “Severe?” I offered.

  “She can be, yes,” he said with the hint of a smile, “but I was going to say distant. Refuses to get close to anyone.”

  “I haven’t known her for very long, but I get that feeling.”

  “But I still consider her a friend,” the bartender said.

  He gave me one final look, then took a few steps over to a large stack of kegs. With his back to me, he did something, and then pulled two of the four barrels open, revealing a ladder.

  “Up you scurry,” he said.

  I walked over to the ladder, looked down, darkness, and up, a tiny bit of light.

  “What is this?” I asked.

  “A ladder,” he said.

  I looked over my shoulder at him, and he was perched on a crate, a small book out and already reading.

  “Up,” the bartender said once more.

  “You’re staying here?”

  “Have to keep the illusion going,” he said, not looking up from the book once.

  I sighed and looked at the ladder once more. It wasn’t a big ladder or a well-made ladder. It looked like, well, calling it amateur carpentry would be kind. Most kind.

  “Upward and onward,” I said to myself.

  Chapter 13

  The ladder creaked as I climbed up, but it held. Nothing broke. One flight up, and I was in a tiny space. Like a closet. Or a wardrobe. There was a little peephole that let me look into an apartment that was being used for furniture storage, and another ladder leading up. I took that ladder up. And up. It was a much longer climb than the first, and there was no stop-off point along the way. At the top, I slid a small piece of wood out of the way, revealing clothes hanging in a closet. I pushed my way through the clothes, then edged the door open ever so slowly, peeking out and around.

  No one was there.

  Stuff was there, but no living things I could see.

  It was just an apartment. Some furniture, it didn’t exactly match, but I had the distinct feeling interior design was not a technology that had been heavily researched yet in Vuldranni. The apartment was an open layout, which was a bit anachronistic. To me, at least. I didn’t exactly know that much about interior architecture, but I felt open floor plans were a thing of the modern age. I suppose, as I was a thing of the modern era, it made sense that I liked it. The whole place was super functional, everything had a home, everything had a purpose, and seeing how the apartment had been put together gave me a real feeling of comfort having Etta as something like a mentor. She seemed to have her stuff together, and that boosted my confidence.

  A workbench took up one wall, and spread out across it were bits and pieces to disparate projects. Nothing I could figure out in the short amount of time I had in the place though. The bartender had a point, we had an illusion going, that we were both in the back trying to find a bottle of sarsaparilla, and I had to make it seem like it wasn’t an impossibly large backroom. Time was ticking.

  Etta had given me the basics of what I needed to find, her go-bag, which was stored in her third secret stash. She didn’t tell me where the first two were because that wasn’t the information I needed. But before I could get to the stash, I needed to undo the trap with a mechanism in her kitchen counters. Notably, her counters were on top of what looked like modern cabinets, which had to be custom. But I had to keep rule number one in mind, this was Vuldranni, and maybe cabinetry had a different timeline here.

  The first step was going to the bed and getting beneath it. I slid under and saw a few daggers stuck under there, in sheathes. I pulled the third dagger out. It had a very peculiar shape to the blade; basically, it was a key. A long key. I took the dagger key, and I inserted it into the knothole on the third floorboard under the bed, all the way in. I turned it three times clockwise, pulled it out until I heard a very slight click, and turned it once more counter-clockwise. Then, it was over to the cabinets, two to the left from the sink. Open it up, pry up the floor of the cabinet, and push aside the fake purse of coins to pull up the floorboards there.

  And that was the secret stash I was after. A small backpack and a ring on a short string. I pulled both items out, slid the pack on, and tied the string with the ring around my wrist. I closed up the cabinet and reversed the steps with the dagger until I’d returned the apartment to its previous set-up. It was beyond overkill as far as I could tell, but maybe something was going on in Glaton that made paranoia pay off. One more thing to add to the list of crap I didn’t know.

  I climbed back down the ladders until I got to the bartender and the bar’s storage room.

  The bartender was happily reading, but I noticed there was a brown bottle sitting next to his book now.

  “Found that sarsaparilla,” he said, closing the book and standing up. “You done?”

  “I am.”

  He pushed me to the side and closed up the kegs. A second of work, and even though I knew where to look, I couldn’t tell the casks weren’t real.

  “Come back out front,” he said, “pay me, drink your drink, do your thing. I find you hurt Etta, I hurt you ten times over.”

  “She’s fine,” I repeated, but the bartender didn’t seem to believe me. I walked back into the front portion of the tavern with my bottle of sarsaparilla and drank it while leaning on the counter. It tasted good. Refreshing with a hint of nostalgia. Root beer was a regular beverage for me summers growing up, and sarsaparilla was close enough to give me those similar feelings. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I desperately wanted it to be ice cold, and I found myself wondering if that was a possibility in this world.

  Sitting there, in between sips, I listened idly to some of the other patrons, and I’m not exactly sure what I thought I’d hear, but it was pretty dull. People were talking about the small details of their days. About work, about children, about family members who weren’t behaving correctly. Really, the connection to my old life, to Earth, was undeniable, at least at that present moment.

  “What’s the hammer for?” I asked.

  “Decoration, mainly,” the bartender replied, still into his book.

  “Is there a story behind it?”

  The man looked up from his book at me, then at the hammer, then down at his book.

  “Of sorts.”

  “Care to share?”

  He sighed and set his book down on the counter, spine up, so he didn’t lose his place. “Since you are something like a friend of Etta’s, I suppose I can tell you.”

  “I mean, I’d hate
to interrupt this incredibly busy day behind the bar.”

  “Do you want the story?”

  “Yes, sorry.”

  “Back when this was just town, before it was Old Town, in one of the few times the walls have been breached, that hammer was used to hold back a horde of goblins from pushing their way into the city.”

  “Must be an old hammer.”

  He gave me a sort of smirk, then picked his book back up.

  “You know,” I said, “with all those books you read, you’d think you’d have come up with a better lie.”

  For the first time, I got a genuine smile out of the guy.

  “You knew?” he asked.

  “One. You skipped over any details. Needs to be your great-great-uncle. And that brave ancestor of yours held that door over there with this hammer as the princess huddled in this bar through the invasion, and she gave him the prize of this very building. Two. The hammer is too new and has just enough rust on to show me that you aren’t fond of cleaning at heights.”

  “Maybe you should write a story for me.”

  “I get a moment, maybe I will.”

  “You do it, I’ll get your next bottle on the house.”

  “Deal,” I said.

  He gave a silent laugh, shook his head, and went back to his book.

  When I tipped the last of the sweet, bubbly beverage down my throat, I dug into my coin pouch and put a silver coin on the counter.

  The bartender smiled and took the coin.

  “Many thanks,” he said.

  “See you around,” I shot over my shoulder as I walked out.

  Chapter 14

  I worked on walking with nonchalance. I wanted to be imminently forgettable. Etta warned me there would be people watching the place, and I needed to slip away unnoticed, so I could meet up with Etta anonymously. I moseyed down the street, taking my time. I paused every now and again to look at a stall or peek in a store window. The stalls along the road were principally food-based, offering up small snacks or light meals. Nothing overly filling or crazy. Meat pies were a common theme. As far as stores go, it was the standard urban affair. Corner markets selling produce and various goods, a book store with a host of tomes, leather-bound and otherwise, a cobbler with virtually no difference in his shoes other than sizes. When I reached the end of the street, I took a right, and then another right, and then a left, and then I very quickly stopped and sat down on a stoop and let the world pass by for a solid ten minutes.

  Getting to my feet, I crossed the street, popped over to a stall, and bought the meat pie on special.

  The woman working the stall looked human, middle-aged, and she gave me a big smile when I told her to keep the change from the silver piece. She handed me a paper-wrapped pastry, and it was pleasantly hot in my hands. I found a slice of shade to lean in and unwrapped one end of my pie thing. Tasty flaky pastry around spiced meat, and as I ate it, I did my very best to see if anyone was watching me.

  Nope.

  Not that I saw.

  So I followed Etta’s next set of instructions, heading back to the wall of Old Town, following that to the gatehouse entrance. I was to wait there for five minutes before going through, heading northeast three blocks until I saw the Mourning Light, a painter specializing in portraits of the deceased.

  Outside Old Town, things were quickly different. I understood more about the area’s history now, so it made a little more sense. This was the neighborhood settled after the first expansion, so I imagined it was initially the upper-middle-class area. And they probably felt safe. Hence, wider streets and more elaborate architecture. The buildings were almost modern looking in some cases. Wood and plaster, less stone. Big windows looked into quaint shops, buildings sported balconies on the regular, and there was actually some green space. Yards behind buildings with grass and trees. Squares with statues and benches.

  The pictures in the windows of the Mourning Light were well done if all a little sad. Especially the ones of kids. But I waited there for the requisite five-ish minutes. I was still getting used to telling the time in Vuldranni, what with no longer having access to a phone, but there were usually clocks around, you just needed to know where to look. I made a loop around the block until I saw a beggar with a small green cloth square under his begging cup. That’s where I dropped the ring.

  The beggar, hands and face wrapped in dirty bandages, snatched the cup to his chest, muttered a guttural thank you, then disappeared down the street.

  I shook my head, not sure all this cloak and dagger shit was worth it. But, then again, what did I know? I was still the noob, and maybe there were all sorts of surveillance techniques used by the other rogues/gangs in the area.

  Whatever the case may be, I took one of my silver coins, and I bought some candied nuts from another nice lady, and then I sat down on a stoop, and I listened. I ate the candied nuts with practiced indifference. They tasted good, but not so good that I had to stop and focus all my attention on them.

  Two minotaurs were walking down the sidewalk, basically taking up the whole thing. They were among the people who were heavily armed and armored like they had a plan to do violence. Or prevent violence. It wasn’t exactly clear which direction they leaned. They had swords on their hips and axes across their back. The heavy-looking plate armor had a tabard on top of it, and in the center of the dark green tabard was a peculiar symbol I couldn’t quite place. An animal of some kind stylized in some way, but I couldn’t make head nor tails of the beast. If it was a beast. As the two got closer to me, I heard them murmuring to each other, their voices low in tone and volume, but they weren’t whispering. They were just conversing politely in their own language, something I got confirmed a moment later when I got a fancy little notification:

  Smashing! You’ve learned a new language, Plains Tauran.

  A quiet listen of their conversation elicited some immediate juicy details. First, they were doing the fun thing that people did when they thought no one around them spoke their language, they were making fun of some of the people around them in culturally insensitive ways. As you do. They currently worked as part of the detail for the embassy of Carchedon, and they were busy searching for a bar where they might meet a representative of something called The White Hand.

  Naturally, this made me insanely curious. Problem was, these guys were massive brutes who didn’t seem like they would understand something like curiosity so much as smoosh me into a paste for daring to approach them.

  I tossed one of the last nuts in my mouth, then dumped the rest on the ground next to me where I noticed a small rat-like creature nosing out of a small hole in the concrete. The furry thing scampered out, snatched a candied nut, then scurried back out of sight. Then, I stood up, did a little stretch, and slid in behind the two Minotaurs and continued my eavesdrop. I strolled along like I hadn’t a care in the world, collecting all the pertinent information I could on the White Hand. I had no idea what the White Hand was. Or what country these guys were from. I was impressed that embassies existed in this world, but I suppose I shouldn’t have been. Embassies had been around a long time on Earth, even before the dark ages. Helpfully, both of the men, they seemed like males, were newer in town. One newer than the other. Only one, the guy named Zanphrous whose fur was a tawny brown, had been in the city before, and had only ever heard of this particular detail. The other one, Dabor, was almost as new to Glaton as I was, and didn’t seem to appreciate the city or the Empire. While they didn’t explain who the White Hand was, or what it was, I did get all the various directions and code words I would need if I ever chose to contact the White Hand on my own, so I peeled off and headed back to the stoop I’d been sitting on.

  I noticed something interesting that seemed to happen. As soon as I learned a language, it seemed like it was just totally natural for me to know that language to hear it and speak it to the point that I was even thinking in that language. I had to pause and think before I started speaking out loud because English, Imperial Common, an
d Plains Taruan were all totally natural languages for me to speak, think, and listen in, and I was even having some trouble distinguishing between the sounds of them, even though they were totally different. I wondered what might happen if I stumbled across a language where I had no physical ability to replicate the sounds made by the native speakers. Would I just magically make them? Or would I just have to write it down? Because here’s the other thing I learned, the way the magic worked, when I became fluent in the language, that seemed to include such niceties as reading and writing the language. And I knew the alphabets, how to write them. Not particularly nicely. I didn’t know any flourishes, at least, not innately, but I knew I could write things out, and I could tell, as the two minotaurs walked away, that Dabor had carved some nasty words in the handle of his axe. I did not want to wind up on his bad side.

  Chapter 15

  I’d reset on the stoop with the second bag of candied nuts. They weren’t that good, but it was the look I’d decided on. Plus, a little sugar goes a long way in improving the mood. The nuts themselves were, well, I’m not going to pretend I know the slightest bit about nuts, so, instead, I just sent a little tingle of mana down my fingers and did my identification spell.

  Pecans

  Item Type: Common

  Item Class: Food

  Material: Nuts

  Description: Pecans are a tasty nut high in fat and protein, and make an excellent pie. Also, great for inciting debates about proper pronunciation.

  Okay then. So they had pecans in Vuldranni. Nice to know.

  There was a lull in the pedestrian traffic, something that just seemed natural, but it gave me a moment to realize I had a notification.

  Cool Beans, you’ve unlocked the innate skill Eavesdropping (LVL 18). Now you can listen to others without them knowing about it. Significantly harder to detect while listening to others.