by Eric Ugland
“Right again,” Matthew said. “Maybe you’re picking some of this up. Now, why might we not?”
“Because the other treasure we found will be taken because it rightfully belongs to the lord’s family?”
“Outside chance of that happening. Doubt we’ve got any heirlooms in there, but you never know. Not the problem I was thinking of, has more to do with your proposed line of life.”
“Some gang runs these pits?”
“Go on.”
“So they probably know who killed the lord in question and okayed it. Which means that they don’t want anyone to know the lord was put to pasture in the particular pit.”
“They just didn’t know what kind of pit beast was in here, or that this queen was getting regular meals from her workers working the pit itself. And that her kind and gold aren’t on the same digestive list.”
“So we don’t turn in the ring. Keep the gang happy.”
“And yet, if you turn the ring in, you will gain an ally in the noble family.”
“An ally?”
“They will be in your debt, as they will then know what happened to their patriarch, and can begin exacting revenge.”
“Yeah, but you piss off the gang that runs this place.”
“That’s a possibility.”
“Is this some, like, learning opportunity for me?”
“Aren’t they all?”
“You’re going to make me choose, aren’t you?”
“Look at all these right answers you’re pulling from your butt tonight.”
He tossed the ring up in the air in my general direction, and I scrambled to catch it before it hit the brick and bounced away.
I didn’t.
The ring hit the brick and bounced away.
Fortunately, not all the way into the pit. Though, in retrospect, that would have made the decision much easier.
39
I tucked the ring away while I thought and worked. Despite the excitement of the day, we still had to get the pit cleaned out. While Nadya was out bringing wagons back, I went into the pit and grabbed the shovel. The holes in the wall had been cleared, thankfully, so it was really just getting all the muck out and making sure the bottom of the pit was down to a hard surface.
It was back-breaking work, shoveling the muck. Just filling the big ol’ buckets over and over and over again. There really wasn’t a whole lot of time for work breaks because Matthew’s part of the job was so much quicker than mine; hence, there was always the other bucket to fill. And bucket might not be the right word here. Tub? They were enormous, basically like one of those old-school cedar hot tubs. And I’d have to fill that using what was essentially a heavy-duty snow-shovel.
But because the back-breaking horrible sort of work was also mechanical in nature needing exactly zero percent of my brainpower, I discovered something I could do. I could cycle my mana, and I could cast the self-healing spell. And it took a little experimentation, but I could do that, I found something new.
Look at that. You discovered a spell: Stamina Regeneration.
Stamina regeneration allows you to channel mana and regenerate stamina. Hence the name of the spell. This spell is able to be channeled, remaining in place indefinitely, draining mana until either the spell is canceled or there is no mana remaining.
That was something of a game-changer. I was getting more than one mana per second thanks to my Efficient Mana ability, so I could perpetually regenerate stamina at a rate where I could work almost indefinitely. The slightest break, like waiting for one bucket to drop while the other was lifted from the pit, was enough for a full recharge. I started to feel a little like a superhero.
So I started working harder, pushing myself, seeing just how far I could take my body. And I pushed the spell harder. And my own mana harder. I was working like a madman, and I was keeping that frantic pace up. It felt a bit like I was sprinting through a marathon.
And it was enjoyable because it was like a game. I was playing with the systems, seeing what they could do, and I was making progress. Sure, the progress was because of grinding the hell out of the day, but sometimes that’s what needs to happen, especially in the RPG-like world of Vuldranni.
The sky was darkening when I started scraping the bottom with the shovel, and that was the first time I really stopped to look around. I’d been so focused on the sprint and the cycling I’d lost track of what I was doing. Which was fine in this respect, I wasn’t in danger.
Annoyance crept up on me, though, because Nadya had to have come back by now, and in my estimation, she should have been down in the pit with me. Ideally, she’d have taken over the muck shoveling, but just working with me would have been pretty stellar. Still, I wasn’t going to complain out loud. I’d complain to myself. Or to my cat. If I had a cat. I felt like I wanted a pet of some kind. My father had always forbidden animals as a kid, so the closest I ever got to having a pet was when I had a horribly co-dependent girlfriend in junior year. That and the kindergarten class hamster until Bryant Hudson killed it during an elaborate science experiment gone wrong.
I shoved those emotions to the side, and I kept doing my thing. And finally started debating the ring. I felt like I needed to give it to the authorities. At least, that was my initial instinct. Sure, I’d been a thief back home, but when I found something, I always tried to find the owner. And sometimes I’d return it to the owner. More often, I’d decide the owner was an asshole, and I’d keep whatever I found. But I tried to find the owner, that had to count for something. I could definitely just sell it to Gideon, let him decide how to use it. I could leave the city, travel far enough in the Empire that I could pass myself off as the lord in question, just long enough to buy a bunch of stuff, then leave the country and set up life as a rich man somewhere distant. Traveling was fun, in theory. I hadn’t exactly done much traveling in either of my lives, so I might not like it. Did I want to piss off the gang here? Maybe. I wasn’t sure I liked gangs. I mean, I knew I didn’t back on Earth. But here, I was angling to be part of that side of the tracks, and I knew I already had one enemy, the Iron Silents. Maybe it wasn’t super wise to add another to that list, especially if it was a gang that had the power to hold a territory that had to be valuable like the Pits. Maybe the gang wasn’t that bad. Maybe they were friendly criminals who just didn’t like the prevailing system of governance and were trying to incite change for the better. I figured the best course of action was to delay making a decision and ask Matthew a few questions about things. Perfect.
Decision averted.
We finally finished the clean-up past midnight. The last bit was the worst because it required a lot more moving around. And apparently, there was a lot more stuff that needed sorting up top. I also found out that I was a minor asshole because Nadya had been toiling away up top with Matthew most of the day and evening. My performance boost wound up making more work for Matthew, and he was falling behind until Nadya returned.
I climbed out of the pit, and I felt a sense of exhaustion creeping over me. Like I’d really pushed myself beyond whatever limits I’d had, and it was all about to hit. I really wanted to sleep. And yet, I also felt kinda really refreshed. And dirty. I was covered in mud, head to toe. It had dried a bit on my upper body, and my face, and my hair. Matthew was covered in dried mud as well. Nadya, on the other hand, looked remarkably good. She’d taken off her oil slick coveralls to go and talk to Wildingham, and apparently she’d put on a clean set when she came back to work, and since she’d been at the top of the pit, it didn’t seem like she’d had even the slightest accident with the mud since then. And her hair was big, wavy, and perfect.
I blinked a few times to stop staring at her.
She looked away from me.
And I felt kind of awkward, so I shot my eyes around, trying to find something else to look at. I had a notification. Perfect.
Look at you, a bastion of self-improvement. Through sheer hard work verging on the impossible, you have gained +3 Strength and +3 C
onstitution.
“Good day today,” Matthew said, closing the cover on the last of the tub-wagons. “Didn’t mean for it to go so late. But, well, things happened.”
“That’s all?” I asked. “Things happened?”
“You were here, you know what happened, why do you need me to go through it all again?”
“Seemed like you were trying to sum it up.”
“I was trying to thank you for the hard work today, you dingus.”
“Oh, thank you.”
“I say thank you, you say you’re welcome.”
“You’re welcome,” Nadya said.
“See,” Matthew said, pointing at the girl. “Like what she just did.”
“You’re welcome,” I said, surly and petulant like a teenager.
“I’ll take it,” he said. “You two feel comfortable getting home?”
“Yeah,” I said, “why not?”
He frowned at me.
“You want him to walk you home?” Matthew asked Nadya.
She looked over at me, one eyebrow up as she judged me.
“I’ll be fine,” she said as she slipped out of her coveralls.
I peeled mine off, and it looked like I hadn’t even worn a pair, mud had seeped down my suit all day. Especially when I was wallowing in the stuff while cavorting with the queen.
“Might want a rinse before you go home,” Matthew said, giving me the look that I was absolutely disgusting.
I gave him a smile.
He pointed to a barrel of water.
I sighed and went over to it. The thing about Glaton, it gets damn cold at night. Sure, it was summer, and the days were warm, but at night, the wind came blowing down off the mountains, and it chilled things right off. So the water in the barrel was frigid. And I guess Matthew thought I was a little too timid rinsing myself because after I’d been there a moment, he picked me up and shoved me in the barrel.
I flipped around underwater, then came out head first, sputtering and gasping for breath.
He was laughing, his curled mustache jumping up and down with each chuckle.
I splashed him.
He laughed harder.
I shook my head, tried to get out of the barrel, misjudged my balance, and sent the barrel of water crashing over to the side.
Where it started to roll.
Towards the pit.
I scrambled out as quickly as I could, then jumped after the barrel, grabbing it just as it reached the edge.
Behind me came peels of laughter. I looked over my shoulder, and Matthew was on the ground, unable to remain standing.
I frowned. This was my mentor…?
40
“You’re a fool,” Matthew said, about ten minutes later, when he’d gotten control of himself again.
We were in the cottage, and I was pulling on a spare set of clothes Matthew had that sort of almost fit me. Mine were trashed and fit to be burned, Matthew’d insisted on putting them in the outgoing bin of garbage. A bin that would just be taken to a different pit with a different pit beast who would happily eat all that garbage. I still had a serious funk about my person, but the cottage lacked anything resembling proper showering facilities.
“Why is that?” I asked, rolling the sleeves up so it looked less like I was dressing up in my father’s clothes.
“That girl clearly wanted to talk to you.”
“She’s the one who said she didn’t need to be walked home,” I countered.
“Because you looked about as interested as a eunuch in a brothel and smelled about as good as the ass end of a food-poisoned musk ox.”
“Not much I could have done about that then.”
“You could have asked her to wait till you washed off.”
“Bah, nothing to talk to her about.”
“That’s why you’re a fool.”
“Did you bring her here because you think I need a love interest?”
“I think everyone needs a love interest, but I brought her here because she needs the coin and we needed an extra set of hands.”
“She froze up in the tunnel, almost got us killed.”
“I froze up in the tunnel, almost got us killed.”
“You came around.”
“After you saved me. You, the student, saved me, the teacher.”
“I did what I had to do.”
“I’m trying to say that you shouldn’t have had to do that.”
“What happened?”
“Fear.”
“You were afraid?”
“It happens. Part and parcel of life in the Empire.”
“Wouldn’t you have, I mean, didn’t you—”
“You trying to find a polite way to ask me if I’d been in the Legion for ten years, didn’t I face down so many monsters that this was trivial?”
“Yeah. I guess.”
He sighed, and he sat down in a chair. Almost by magic, his flask was in his hand.
“The Legion,” he said slowly. “Should I assume you know nothing about it?”
“Virtually nothing. I know what you’ve told me. And that I should stay out of LegionHome.”
“You should. The Legion is big. Very big. There were 80 Legions when I was in. Might be more now. Each Legion is over 5000 people strong. 5000 soldiers. That’s what I would fight monsters with. 5000 highly trained, highly disciplined Legionnaires outfitted with full kits of armor and quality weapons. At least, when I was in the thick of it. But I’m not a great fighter, not like that. And my superiors saw I was better with a bow. That I had a good sense of what was around. So I only spent two years as a spearman, just one year as a man-at-arms. After that, I was a scout. Seven years of that. Of sneaking around, and occasionally shooting something with an arrow. Avoiding conflict so I could remain hidden. Of watching things. When I saw something like the queen, my job was to bring the 5000 Legionnaires to it, to watch them fight, not to stand toe-to-toe and go at it. So, yeah, I was in the Legion. I did face down monsters. But not as many as you think. And more often, I got to run away. The little stuff here, the anguids especially, they’re not dangerous. I can take as many of them as want to come at me. But the larger things, I just don’t have the balls-out courage I once did.”
There was a heavy silence between us. Partially because I think he was coming to terms with admitting his actual level of courage, and partly because I had no idea what to say. How to deal with that. Courage was curiously something I seemed to have in spades. At least when I was in the moment. Plenty of anxiety running in my system right up until shit hit the fan, and then, well, once I was in it, no fear. At least, that was true up to that point.
“What changed?” I asked.
“I left the Legion because we were set to police a conquered city. It was coincidence that my re-up was coming along. I did the police action for a month, sneaking through the city and spying on rebels as they planned to kill my fellow Legionnaires. But it also meant that I saw the rebels through their day to day lives. I saw their families and their reasons for wanting to rebel, and I knew that I couldn’t remain in the Legion. Not doing that job. And it’s not like the Legion is keen on letting you switch gigs jus because you feel like it. So I didn’t re-up, and I came back home, to here. And I did the only job I was good at, that I’d been trained for. I snuck around and paid attention to things.”
“You were a spy?”
“I was a rogue who stole information. Primarily. The odd trinket didn’t go by unnoticed.”
“Okay, so what’s the next step in the story?”
“The same thing that gets us all.”
“Age?”
“What?” He looked at me like I was nuts. But then he nodded. “I suppose that’s a good answer as well. Not age. Love. People started to care about me, and I started to care about them, and suddenly the prospect of being deep in the shadow side of the city wasn’t so appealing. I got out. People let me out because I knew all their secrets too. Now I have an honest job. Mostly honest, and I go home at night to peop
le I long to see.”
“And that’s why you’re more afraid now.”
“One reason, sure.”
“So you want me to not give the ring up. Is that what this is leading to?”
“Is that what you got out of this?”
“I mean, that’s not what you were intending?”
“I repeat, you are a fool.”
“So, uh, you want me to turn the ring in?”
He stared at me for a moment, then he shook his head and took a slug from the flask.
“What?” I asked.
“Fool.”
“Okay, I’m a fool. But can the fool ask a question?”
“That is why I am here, to teach, apparently.”
“Yeah, and that’s cool, I’m learning a lot, picked up a new spell today—”
“A new spell?”
“Yeah, stamina regeneration.”
“Is that how you kept working so hard?”
“Yep.”
“Might be interesting to see how that develops.”
“I think so.”
“But that’s not the question. The gang that runs this pit, the ones who might be pissed if I turn the ring in, are they nice?”
“Are they nice?”
“Yeah.”
“The criminals who run a pit where they dispose of bodies? Them? Is that who you’re asking about?”
“Yes.”
“They’re the cuddliest little kitty cats hoping for nothing more than warm milk and a bit of love.”
“They’re cat people?” I asked, really excited about the prospect of meeting some cat people. I had so many questions, like how do they sit down in chairs without breaking their tails? What do they do with pants? Do they purr?
He blinked at me, then just slowly looked away.
“They are criminals, Clyde Hatchett. They kill people. They steal things. They ruin lives to further their own. They are fundamentally bad. Are they the worst people ever? No. There are many worse than them. But in the grand list of people ranked from good to bad, they are well into the bottom. And make no mistake, you are likely to be headed into that range of the list if you continue on this path.”