by Eric Ugland
A young dwarf rolled out a cart filled with glass jars that clinked softly as they bumped each other. Inside each jar was a head. I figured I’d recognize some, or all of them, except I could only see the backs of the heads.
“Being as some of us are leaving upon sunrise,” The Master continued, “it falls to me to pick a new vessel to journey within. Unfortunately, it would hardly be prudent to exist as either you or Nikolai. Though I do appreciate his hair.”
Delicately, he bent over and peered at each jar, tutting and tsking as he moved along. I counted twelve jars.
A second cart was brought out, with another twelve jars.
Then a third.
“Enough,” The Master said, and his followers slunk away. “You will notice they are all on their best behavior tonight. They all hope to be the next one.”
“Next one what?”
“One I leave.”
“I still don’t understand why you are doing all this.”
The Master stood up and looked over at me with his stupid smile on Nikolai’s face.
“It is not easy to converse with you,” he finally said. “Normally, I would just need to insinuate certain elements, and my opponent would put the rest together. You need so much spelled out for you. It is taxing.”
“Maybe that’s why Nikolai was so thin.”
The Master looked down at his body and shrugged. “Perhaps. When I depart, one of my followers, the lucky one, will be brought within the fold of my kind. Will become one of, well, me. And they will grow their own group of followers here, just as was done in Osterstadt. And, well, you get the idea. When the time is right, we will return to our rightful place as the rulers of all these overconfident livestock.”
“Seems like we livestock beat you at least once.”
“You have beaten nothing, Montana of Coggeshall. You were placed ever so delicately on a throne to rule over land someone else stole.”
“That’s a bit reductionist.”
“You do not disagree, telling. Regardless of your misconceptions, we will rise again. Even on the exceedingly rare chance I fail here, or in my next destination, the die has been cast and the countdown begun. You have already lost! You just—”
“—don’t know it yet. I’ve heard that before.”
“And how did it turn out?”
“Wrong.”
“Huh.”
He picked up a bottle and turned it to face me.
Emeline.
“The problem with you,” The Master began, “is that you just have no idea what is happening around you. In any capacity. I have outplayed you for months, and it is not even beginning to dawn on you.”
“When were you her?”
“When I wanted to be.”
“When?”
“Long enough for you to do quite a bit of my bidding, Montana. To have helped me reach this moment, when I will eat you and move on. Vampires and my kind do not often get along. In this case, some of my followers had managed to get pulled into a vampiric embrace, and I needed to find a means of coming here unnoticed. So I recruited you.”
“You recruited me to kill you?”
“Oh, I knew you would never reach me. I guided you exactly as I needed. Much as I did when I arrived. And it took little to orchestrate all this,” he gestured at the room and the chains and whatnot. “You are remarkably predictable, almost painfully so. And thus, here you are. My tasty treat.”
“Great,” I said.
“For one of us,” he said with a smile. “I am unused to speaking with my meals so long, but you are a little, well, complicated to prepare. As we’ve already seen, you’re more than capable of killing my followers with your bare hands. So do bear with us, pardon the pun, while we facilitate a little weakening.”
“Wait,” I said.
But The Master was done speaking to me. I watched him pick up a jar that held a woman’s head — at least I guessed it was a woman based on the hair.
“Place this in my quarters,” Nikolai-The Master said, holding it out until a follower rushed over. A follower I recognized as one of the women I’d saved from the Master Vampire in Osterstadt. Once again, I felt like a tool who’d been so perfectly used…
I looked up at the ceiling and willed things to happen faster.
“You know,” I said, “there are people coming for me.”
“Nonsense,” The Master said without looking at me. He started to disrobe. “You operate on your own, to your perpetual detriment. Your people constantly urge you to ask for assistance. Plead with you to use them. Yet you, perhaps thinking you are being generous, or helpful, continue to do everything yourself. Which I, for one, appreciate. It has made this all the easier.”
Nikolai was naked now. Or, at least, the thing that was pretending to be Nikolai was naked. He rolled his head around on his neck and stretched out his arms, shaking his muscles like a swimmer prepping for a race. He started to walk around, moving carefully, delicately. I could see his muscles rippling. Not in a natural way, more like there was something under the skin, moving around. Big things, causing ripples to move up and down his limbs.
I held back an instinctual urge to vomit. To look away. There was something so fundamentally wrong that my brain was having trouble processing what I saw.
Unable to stop myself, I closed my eyes.
Reaching out with tremorsense, I could still feel The Master. It seemed like I could feel the ripples from his body running through the floor to me.
Above, salvation neared.
Below, though, it seemed my time was up.
80
The followers spoke in hushed tones.
I could feel the change.
When I opened my eyes, I saw a horror of flesh in front of me.
The Master, in his true form, looked like someone had shoved a lamprey’s mouth into a snail’s foot and super-sized it. Then they painted the whole thing black and dumped a bucket of slime on it. It practically filled all the space available, all the way up to the ceiling, and was easily ten feet across. Five long black claws stuck out at semi-regular intervals around the face side of the thing. Despite it being over on the carpet, I could feel its hot breath wafting over me, the fetid stink of rotting meat overwhelming me.
“You are one ugly fuck,” I said.
Pure black orbs emerged from the snail-like skin. Like the floor below me, they were perfectly glossy and singularly black.
“You would do well to show respect to The Master,” a woman called out to me.
“Go fuck yourself,” I replied.
The woman approached me, coming up to the edge of the shiny floor.
“The Master might have shown you mercy.”
“What, eat me quickly?”
“Kill you prior to eating.”
“Well, fuck him. I hope I give the bastard indigestion.”
I could feel The Master shift his gaze over to me and the woman. The woman shivered, maybe in fear, maybe in excitement. Hard to tell. I wanted to do something, but even the slightest movement, and I could feel myself slipping on the floor. With nothing else to do, I just yanked on the chains as hard as I could, pulling my arms together. I just didn’t have the leverage to do anything.
Three people came around the corner, wearing dark robes with masks over their faces. They each held long poles with sharp pointy bits on the end. Things that looked an awful lot like fifteen-foot-long nightmare needles.
Person one aimed the needle spear thing at me and stabbed.
I tried to move out of the way, but wound up slipping on the floor.
The huge needle missed.
But the second one did not, piercing my thigh.
It hurt deep in my leg, and blood poured out the other end.
I grabbed at the pole, but it was greased, and it just slipped through my hands. I couldn’t get it out of my leg.
Another of the big nightmare needles hit my torso.
A third went into my abdomen.
A fourth into my right leg
.
A fifth.
A sixth.
Blood streamed out of the needles and began collecting in goblets.
It was a bizarre feeling, with so much blood coming out of me that darkness crept into the edges of my vision.
But since I had no way to fight, my body was already doing its best to repair the damage. So even though my HP had dropped to nearly half, it seemed to have found a happy medium, leveling out at that point.
Goblets overflowed and got switched out.
And then those goblets overflowed, and large jars came out.
Buckets.
More of the polearms tipped with giant needles jammed into me. I weakly tried to grab one and remove it, but my hands were barely working.
My HP was dropping now, my regeneration skill unable to keep up.
A tentacle zapped out from the back of the fleshy horror and slammed into the back of the woman who’d been admonishing me. Her eyes went wide, her jaw dropped, and her knees buckled.
The body didn’t move, but the eyes fluttered for a moment before rolling back into their sockets. Blood started to leak from most of her orifices.
“He nears the moment,” the woman said, her voice coming out strangely, as if air had to be pumped through her to make her speak. “Take your places.”
More robed figures emerged, carrying long rods with sharp-looking blades on the ends. Polearms.
The fleshy snail-skinned thing closed its eyes, as did the woman it was puppeting.
Everyone moved as close to the slippery floor as possible, taking up positions at regular intervals along the carpet’s edge.
Blood still seeped out of me, soaking the carpet.
Then something happened. Something tiny, but telling.
Dust fell from the ceiling.
Not enough that The Master or the followers noticed.
But I did.
Because it got in my fucking eye.
But also on one of the needles.
A fine coating of dust.
The followers began to chant something that my blood-starved brain couldn’t understand.
I grabbed the dust-covered needle, and my hand didn’t slip off.
I smiled.
“My turn,” I slurred.
I pulled the nightmare needle out of my arm and jammed it into the crotch of a robed figure.
The Master’s big eyes opened.
More dust fell from the ceiling, coating the floor and the needles.
I pulled out the needles as fast as I could, hoping my HP would recover as fast as I needed it to.
The Master made a noise from his main body, which reverberated through the woman-puppet. Some followers stepped back, out of range. But two of them decided they had weapons, and were going to use them. They brought their long-bladed poles down in a chopping motion.
I pulled the chain to block the first hit in a flash of sparks. The second I took in my ribs. The blade hit my mail and sent rings flying.
The Master surged forward, his big mouth open, teeth flared. The five huge claws reached for me.
As if on cue, a large block of stone dropped from the ceiling, smashing into The Master and pinning most of the fleshy being to the floor.
I stabbed at The Master with the nightmare needles, driving them deep through the snail skin and into the flesh on the other side. The Master tried to move out of the way, but there was the minor issue of being stuck under five tons of granite.
“Your grace,” came Harmut’s call, “you well?”
“I could use some help,” I yelled back.
Dwarves in full plate dropped through the hole up above, carrying small axes.
The followers in robes made a break for it, running full tilt away from the incoming warriors.
Kobolds followed behind the dwarves. It looked like the entire kobold army swarmed in and around me.
In seconds, my people completely surrounded me, all fussing over my health.
“Forget me,” I yelled. “Make sure that fucking thing is dead!”
The swarm turned to The Master, and the kobolds and dwarves seemed to get into a competition of who could stab it the most. Glossy black ichor streamed out of it, and it boiled when it merged with my blood in the carpet.
Just like that, it was over. No big fight for me. No big showdown with The Master. Just asking for help from my people, and my people coming through. Through hundreds of feet of stone, no less.
81
I laid on the floor, staring at the four-by-four-foot hole cut in the ceiling.
GG! You’ve assisted in killing The Master (lvl 51 Abomination).
You’ve earned 3500 xp! What a mighty hero you are.
Congratulations! You’ve completed a QUEST!
Save the City, Save the Girl
You have destroyed the monsters known as The Master.
Reward for success: Unknown. Initial reward no longer available.
ALERT!
A member of your hirð has perished. All members of the hirð save leader gain mood debuff and have increased chance of breaking under pressure.
The notifications poured in, and I just let them roll over me.
Huzzah! Against all odds, you have reached Level 30! A reasonably rare occurrence. You receive 6 attribute points to distribute in the next 36 hours or you lose them. You will be given the chance to pick a new Choice. You will be given the chance to pick your 30th level ability! Dare to believe you can survive and achieve greatness. Or don’t.
People moved around me, marshaling themselves to face whatever horrors awaited in The Master’s lair.
The collection of heads brought about frightening evidence of how deep The Master had managed to get. How close we had been to losing everything.
I felt a great emptiness.
Nikolai was dead.
I wanted to believe he was in a better place, because he’d been so deeply unhappy. I still wasn’t that clear on what happened to people in Vuldranni when they died, but at least he wouldn’t have to suffer prinkies and shiny pebbles any longer. In theory. It would be hilarious if prinkies staffed the afterlife, though I had my doubts.
I smiled a little.
Of all people, Nikolai would yell at me for spending time being melancholy over his death. He’d be the one standing there, yelling at me to get on and do something. To organize my people and make sure Coggeshall could recover from this. He’d want me to find a replacement chancellor, and probably yell at me for all the paperwork he was going to have to do because of this mess. And how a true duke would never have been caught and chained up to be eaten.
I sighed, and got to my feet.
All around me, motion stopped as all eyes turned to me, waiting for me to say something.
“Let’s get this place cleared out, cleaned up, and finish up fucking Fiends’ Night, shall we?” I asked.
That got a few smiles and mild cheers. Then, people got back to work.
Harmut walked up to me, wiping black blood off the head of his mace with a well-used cloth that went right into his back pocket without an ounce of thought.
“This what you were thinkin’ of?” he asked, gesturing up at the hole above me.
“Along those lines,” I said.
“Yer orders caught me a bit by surprise. Ain’t usual for the duke to be askin’ me to do much of anything.”
“I ask you to do stuff all the time.”
“Beggin’ pardon, yer grace, but Nikolai tells me to work. Eliza asks me to work. Lee’ll draw up plans I cannot help but make into reality. But you? When you find a problem, you fix it yourself. Oft to your detriment, even if’n it’s helpin’ the rest of us. I half-thought it were some kind of foolishness until all them kobolds came over ready to show up my dwarves in digging a big fuck-off hole in the middle of MountainHome.”
“Can’t have kobolds showing up dwarves, can we?”
“I admit, yer grace, I was not quite believin’ in your willingness to, well, open our doors to any and all, but these little g
uys work hard. And they more’n love you. Being that I might have some good feelings about you, I suppose we might be workin’ in the same direction.”
I nodded, and a gave him a grim sort of smile.
“Finally learning to delegate a bit,” I said.
“Nikolai’ll be a proud chancellor,” Harmut said.
I opened my mouth to tell Harmut what’d happened, but a lump formed in my throat and I couldn’t speak. I just shook my head.
Harmut’s bushy eyebrows tilted down, then he shook his head.
I nodded.
The dwarven chief looked away from me, over at the ruined remains of the Master. He pulled off his digging helmet, letting out a mess of sweaty hair, and ran his hand over his head a few times.
“Ah, fuck, lad,” Harmut finally said. “Are you—”
“I’m sure,” I said. “It’s, I mean, yeah. I got the notifications, I saw the proof. He’s gone.”
“That thing?”
I nodded slowly, and then I looked away. I didn’t want him to see the tears forming in my eyes. I didn’t want to admit I what I was feeling. And I didn’t want Harmut to see that I was already blaming myself. I could have kept a better watch on Nikolai instead of Emeline. I could have forced Nikolai to have guards around. But I didn’t. I thought the guy was immortal, and I was wrong.
I was wrong, but Nikolai paid the price.
“Let me know what I can do,” Harmut said. “If’n there be something that can be done, that is.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I have a feeling our winter just got a whole lot harder.”
“Aye,” he said softly.
“Actually,” I said, “I did think of something you could do for me. Can you get these fucking chains off?”
82
The short answer was no.