by Eric Ugland
All of a sudden, practicing with the anguids seemed pleasant.
I brought the sword across in front of me, backhand, cutting into the ooze’s oozearm. But the ooze had done something to itself, at least where I was trying to cut it, because though the sword bit into the ooze, it didn’t go nearly as deeply through it, and the ooze just grabbed onto the sword and sucked it into itself.
Now I faced the ooze unarmed.
And there were definitely more pseudopods coming for me, a veritable forest of them.
I had to move, but there was really nowhere for me to go, except run away.
But I hated running away. And if I left, the yellow ooze was just going to go back to the hole it’d eaten into the building and then finish off the people who were still standing in there watching me try and fight their attacker.
Balls.
Time to use magic.
I cast shadow step.
The world shifted into smoke, and I darted around to the other side of the ooze. I pulled two daggers out of my belt, picked the longer one, and I pushed myself out of the shadow realm.
On the opposite side, pseudopods flailed about trying to find where I’d gone.
Meanwhile, I carved a big ol’ chunk from the ooze.
Mr. Ooze was not happy with losing a piece of himself, and he spun his attention, and a ton of pseudopods, my new way, but I was already moving, hoping, perhaps, ooze wasn’t super keen with vision.
Wrong.
He tracked my every movement, and he was sending out tentacles of ooze to catch me. I darted under one, had to quickly hurdle another, and then slid in my best approximation of little league to avoid two ooze-tacles coming together to smash me into paste. And the two pseudopods collided with enough force that I could feel it.
Again, I was getting encircled. This brainless, spineless asshole was beating me!
With no choice, I cast shadow step again. I ran around the creature and was about to pop back into reality when I realized that the bit of ooze I’d cut off was now crawling after me. It had a damn mind of its own. I looked around a bit frantically trying to hit upon a strategy. All my weapons were cutting or slashing weapons, and when I realized that my biggest weapon was currently in the middle of the yellow ooze, I only had two cutting weapons. Clearly, they weren’t going to do the trick.
I popped back into reality with a moment to breath as the creature tried to figure out where I’d disappeared to, and I looked into the shop. The family was still huddled there, lit by their fire.
Fire.
Couldn’t hurt to try.
I ran to the shop, vaulting through the damaged front facade, slipped past the table full of desserts, the pie looked delicious, and I grabbed the longest piece of wood from the fire. It was burning brightly.
“Mind if I borrow this?” I asked the family.
They just stared at me.
“Take that as a yes,” I replied to their silence, “back in a jiffy.”
I had to shadow step because the ooze was almost inside the home, and having already burned three of my uses, I was definitely a bit worried I’d only have one remaining. I had to do a jump and a skip through the window with my flaming bit of wood, which looked doubly freaky in the shadow realm and popped into the real world sliding to a stop on the mucous slicked road.
Where I suddenly had little to no traction.
I swung the branch over my head, the fire crackling in the wind, and brought it down on the ooze as hard as I could.
There was an immense cloud of steam and something that sounded like a scream coming from the ooze.
Fire definitely hurt the ooze. Way more than slicing it apart had. And it appeared that hurting the ooze was a good way to make it mad because it redoubled its efforts to come after me, bringing pseudopods my way with a stunning swiftness.
But now I had an edge, fire on the end of a stick! The fire gave me a slight ability to parry the creature’s attacks away from me: each time I got the flame on the ooze’s skin as much as I could, causing a puff of steam and a rough black patch to appear. A black patch that hindered the ooze, because it couldn’t do anything with the black patches. It couldn’t grow anything out of those spots, and it didn’t seem like it was able to move them around as well. Or to move around them. The black patches messed the ooze up something serious.
Even still, it had me on my back foot. I was defending as well as I could, but with my feet barely able to keep me up, I knew I’d lose my footing and go down in a second. I held my last shadow step close, knowing that if I fell, I’d have to use it.
I tripped on the far curb, but at the same time, I heard yells and a whistle and the tromping of boots.
The guard had arrived.
And there I was, butt on the sidewalk.
The guard didn’t hesitate, they charged forward with clubs and hammers and maces, and started wailing on the ooze from all sides. The creature didn’t know what to do, didn’t know how to attack more than one opponent. It decided a retreat was in order and tried to make a break for the sewer opening it had come through, but the guard had that blocked.
And then they brought out buckets of oil and started dousing the creature in it.
The torch came a heartbeat later, and all of a sudden, it wasn’t such a dark night any longer, and I took that as my cue to exit. Plenty of people had definitely seen me do some magic, and I didn’t want to stick around and get nabbed for trying to help a family.
I had to get to work, anyway.
Chapter 35
I was late.
There’s really no way around that. I wasn’t, like, super late. Just kind of late. Mostly late. But I was also running. Jogging, honestly, but it’s more than a walk. I wasn’t slacking off, I was just late.
And in a move that made me feel just a little warm and fuzzy, my mentor was standing at the gates looking out into the night. Almost as if he was about to set out and find me.
“You’re late,” Gallifrey called out to me.
“I know,” I said as I slowed to a regular walk, letting my stamina bar fill back up while my breathing returned to something more normal. I was definitely in the best shape of my life. Er, of either of my lives. But a jog across a third of a city is still a pretty long haul.
“Something happen?” he asked while opening the gate for me.
“Crashed a little birthday party,” I said.
“You did what?”
I sighed and explained about the ooze.
“And you killed it?” he asked.
“Not really,” I replied. “The Guard showed up, and they did the finishing off. I just didn’t have the right weapons.”
“Shame you missed out the XP. Guessing the ooze got your sword, did it?”
“Yep.”
“Short swords offer more mobility in tight spaces, but you lose reach. And often, reach is more useful.”
“Still would have grabbed the sword and eaten it.”
“That is true,” he said, walking over to the cottage. “I hadn’t really thought about oozes as potential foes, but that’s my fault. Not like they’re rare in your proposed line of life.”
“I’m going to be working in the sewers?”
“Rogues and sewers have a long and inglorious history together. And before you ask, yes: the sewers are full of the disgusting things.”
“This one was twenty feet wide, at least.”
“So you met a medium-sized one.”
“How big do they get?”
“As big as you can imagine, they’re probably a bit bigger.”
“And they come out of the sewers often?”
“Not that often. My thinking, something pushed that out of the sewers there. If’n I was in charge, might want to send some folk down in the muck to poke around and see what might make a twenty-foot yellow ooze flee.”
“Are you suggesting I do that?”
“Don’t be daft, you’d die. You couldn’t take on the yellow ooze. Whatever made it scared would eat you fo
r a snack. Or worse.”
“Is that girl here?”
“Your new coworker? Yeah, she’s in the cottage. We were waiting for you. Didn’t want you to miss any of the fun.”
“I wanted to talk to you about that thing we worked on last night.”
“You mean, this morning?”
“Yeah, sorry,”
“S’okay, days get a bit confusing when you’re working long shifts. What’s the question?”
“I learned a new, uh, thing—”
He held up a finger, then leaned close and whispered: “You learned a new spell?”
“Already knew it, just hadn’t used it until tonight.”
“What is it?”
“Shadow step.”
His face looked like he smelled a bad fart.
“Involves the shadow realm at all?”
“Maybe.”
“Gods, boy, what are you doing?”
“I don’t know, trying to use—”
“Stop there. Don’t get too far down that line while we’re out here. Shadow Realm is nothing to be trucked with. There’s more there than you think, kid.”
“What do you mean? There’s nothing there.”
“It’s another realm, another phase of being. Of course there are things there. But nothing good has ever come out of the Shadows. It’s a realm of monsters and boogeymen, and the more you touch it or play with it, the greater chance something nasty is going to notice you and come looking. Get curious who’s traipsing in and out, and everything, and I mean everything, that isn’t on this plane with us, seems to want to be here. So they’ll use you to get here.”
“So I shouldn’t be using it?”
“You shouldn’t be using anything along those lines if you ask me. But you seem to be pulled in that direction, so I’m trying to be a mentor like you want me to be, and tell you some of the dangers involved with the games you are playing. Now you want to keep dipping your fingers in and around those pies, be my guest, but it won’t be for lack of knowing the perils. The Shadow Realm is not an innocent otherworld, it is a plane of existence that is built upon ours, and, like ours, is filled with things that have their own purposes for being. So beware.”
“That’s really ominous.”
“Well, shit, boy, ominous? I guess I should just get you a cupcake and have a unicorn crap out some rainbows all over it for you so you can just see the world as the perfect vanilla frosted playground you wish it were.”
“No, I think I’m okay on the whole rainbow poop front.”
“Okay then, how about we get to work, and you think about things.”
“Can we talk about, uh, my possible career around the girl?”
“Don’t see why not.”
“Is she, uh, in the same line of work?”
“No, but she’s,” he stopped a minute, and seemed to look skyward to find the words he wanted to use, “she’s got a background like mine. And where you’re headed.”
“Crime.”
“Ehhh, are we calling it crime? She’s from the rougher side of things, and I don’t think she’s got any love for the law or the rich folk who make it.”
He gave me a clap on the shoulder, then opened the door to the stone cottage.
“He’s finally here,” Matthew called in.
A girl walked into view, holding a wooden mug of ale in one hand. She leaned her shoulder against the door jam, and, well, hot damn. Maybe it was just me, maybe it was the world we were in, but I had the definite feeling that people in Vuldranni were more attractive than Earth. This girl, or young woman, was gorgeous. Her hair was dark brown and long. Not quite big, but definitely luxurious. She had a mane. I’d call it a mane at least. I’m not very good with hair. Her face was angular with a sharp but small jawline. Her eyes were piercing, and I felt myself desperately want to take a step back to be out of her steely gaze. She had a petite nose, round with a thin bridge, surrounded by high cheekbones and eyebrows used to arching in mirth. Or disgust. She had pale skin, and I noticed how her milky-white fingers contrasted fiercely with the dark wooden mug. She wasn’t overly thin, not like Etta’d been, she had a little more to her, but it seemed like the fat of youth yet to be burned off by overwork or actual hunger. Naturally, this was all concealed under the truly flattering oilskin coveralls we were all wearing. Nothing sets off a curvy body like a rumpled gross cloth designed to repel liquid poo and semi-solid waste.
She took a surly slug of her ale, and licked the froth from her somehow perfect upper lip with a really pink tongue, and tossed the mug over her shoulder.
“Took him long enough,” she said, and practically sashayed past me.
“Clyde, Nadya,” Matthew said.
Nadya turned and gave me a look over her shoulder.
“Nice to meet you,” I said.
“Hrm,” she replied.
“Glad to see you’re both getting along so swimmingly,” Matthew said, walking over to the pit. “Got two major jobs for the day, shoveling muck and cleaning holes. Who wants what?”
Chapter 36
Nadya said nothing, so I picked the hole gig. Because it made me laugh a bit. The name at least. The actual job was not fun.
Matthew came over to me and handed me a pair of steel gauntlets.
“Use these,” he said.
Then he handed Nadya a big shovel, like a snow shovel.
“And a present for you,” he said.
She smiled sweetly, then stuck her tongue out at him.
Looking around the top area of the pit, I noticed there were some new playthings. Big wagons that looked like huge tanks cut in half. The wheels and axles were up high, and the belly of the tank was almost scraping along the ground. There was also a wooden track around the pit now, a bit like a train track, but smaller. There were two cranes on it, small cranes, but both reached out into the pit. One held a harness and a seat. The other, a big bucket.
“I’m riding on that?” I asked, pointing to the crane.
“Yeah,” Matthew said with a smile. “You complained about the ladder so much I figured that’d be easier than listening to you bitch all night.”
My job was to go up and down the walls and clear out each and every hole. Some were empty. Some had mud. Some had other things. Hence the steel gauntlets. I was going to be reaching into a lot of dark holes.
Matthew was staying up top, while Nadya had to go down to the mud strewn bottom. Apparently, while I was jogging across town, they’d received the wagons, lined them up, laid the track, and gotten both cranes in place. It was possible that I had been later to work than I’d realized. At the bottom, Nadya’d used her shovel to load up a big bucket. Matthew would haul the bucket up, rotate the crane so the bucket was over a wagon, and then he’d filter the mud into the wagon. Basically, the mud was excellent fertilizer, so it’d go almost directly out to the farms around the city. But the farmers weren’t keen on all the undigested stuff in the muck, so that had to be removed, and sometimes there’d be valuables in the mud. Like my first bronze short sword. That was still in the muck somewhere. While Matthew got the mud out of the bucket, Nadya would be busy filling up the bucket on the other side of the crane. That way, there was no wasted time. And no rest.
It wasn’t a tough job at first. I hopped onto the seat and swung myself out over the pit, then lowered myself a bit. First few holes, I reached in, and I pulled out nothing beyond mud, letting it drop into the pit below. Lower, there were larger holes, and I found eggs. I didn’t want to cast spells in case Nadya was magic averse, so I didn’t identify them, but I imagined they were cymothoa or anguids. Those, I gently placed in a basket behind the seat.
About halfway down, I found my first living creature. It was a foul mix between an insect, a lizard, and a weasel. It had a bulbous head, a narrow jaw that opened far too wide, and lots of enormous teeth that seemed to somehow fold in on themselves to fit into the mouth. A super long body, relatively speaking, about four feet long with at least two feet of its tail. Hard carapace, a gl
ossy brown that matched the muck. Big beady eyes, pupils that filled the entire orb, or at least that was my impression thereof. It bit my hand as soon I was I put it in the hole, and held on gravely, even as I ripped it out of its home. It wiggled and moved, flexing its surprisingly muscular body, whipping its tail around so fast it practically whistled. I grabbed the tail fast enough that it didn’t cut me, or the ropes holding me aloft, but then, I had no other hands to move up or down.
“Hey, uh, Gallifrey,” I called up. “Got a thing here.”
The thing squirmed some more while Matthew took his sweet time. At the least, though, he didn’t bother looking down, he just operated my crane, hauling me up to top level.
“What’s this you got then?” he asked, holding a lantern in his hands.
I held out the prize creature.
“Whatever this thing is,” I said.
“Nivalis,” Matthew said. “Toss him this way.”
“Toss him?”
“This way,” he repeated, holding his hand out.
Dutifully, I tossed the creature, the nivalis, over to my mentor.
Matthew snagged the nivalis out of the air and took it into the cottage.
I was impressed at his handling of the animal, and pretty surprised he wanted to keep it. When he came out, I was burning with curiosity.
“What is that thing?” I asked. “And what’d you do with it?”
“People like ‘em as pets.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope. They eat all sorts of little critters that’d be biting you. Very popular. Pricey. See if you can find more. Although, if there’s one, there’s probably not two. And if there is, well, there’s a lot of food for the two of them to be eating here. So, you know, good and bad.”
Bad. It turned to be bad.
There seemed to be a never-ending supply of things for the nivalis to eat. All sorts of strange creatures, big spiders, scorpions, rats, insects I couldn’t identify. And all of them focused on biting me and, basically, trying to kill me. Despite the number of things out for my blood, they were mostly minor irritants, and I did a lot of stabby-stabby with my dagger. Quick kills, and then dropping them in the basket, or, more often, tossing them in the general direction of Nadya. To be fair, she started everything by throwing a clump of mud at me, the thick gunk splattering across my back in a stunning moment of malodorous disgustingness.