Into the Hells

by Christopher Johns

  “Maebe’s going to be here soon as well, possibly tomorrow at the latest, so we have that to look forward to as well,” I advised the others, and they smiled. It would be good for her to be back.

  Vrawn tapped the table as we were getting ready to move on about our business of sleep and rest. “Please, do not mention this to the villagers. I am going to tell the guard, then Captain Zhavron, but the village would panic if they knew. Tell who you believe may need to know, but until the wall is set, wait.”

  “You got it, and thanks for tonight. You’re a hell of a fighter.” I smiled at her, relaxed and genuine. It was the truth.

  She blushed as she left but nodded her thanks to us and fled to spread the word.

  The rest of the night passed without incident, though I slept restlessly. Breakfast was interesting, for sure. Though they knew how things had ended, my friends still wanted to give me shit about having Vrawn alone with me for so long .

  The assholes had smarmy looks on their faces all through the meal, even after I said that nothing happened. Oh, I’d get my vengeance; their time would come. Rest assured.

  They’d never see it coming. It’ll be like, so surprising. We’ll just be hanging out and then BAM!

  A platinum Dragon nukes the area and everyone dies. The end.

  Nah, it wouldn’t be that disastrous—but it would be mightily inconvenient.

  I walked back to Vilmas’s new room still chewing a mouthful of bacon and carrying a mug of some kind of local nut and berry tea the chef’s wife swore by. I hadn’t tried it yet, but it did smell decidedly earthy, so I’d let it cool a little. I also carried a plate of food for the enchanter. I didn’t know what she liked, but I got her a little of everything. I’d take orders if needed.

  I knocked on the door lightly, and the small woman peeked out the doorway. She didn’t look like she had gotten any sleep; her eyes were red, and she had tiny little bags under them.

  “Is it morning already?” she asked before stifling a yawn.

  I passed her the plate of food and walked in after she opened the door a little wider. I found Vrawn sleeping awkwardly on the bed with her feet hanging off the end. She snored softly, her mouth hanging open just enough to show her teeth and tusks. I saw a shimmer on the side of her jaw closest to us and noted that it was drool. Oh, this was like all the anime… I clearly never watched.

  Stop judging me, damnit.

  “Was she why you look like you’ve been awake all night?” I asked with concern. I know that Vilmas was new to the whole friend thing, and her previous lifestyle of solitude may have meant she was uncomfortable having someone sleep in the same room, let alone the same bed.

  “Vrawn? No!” she whispered as she eyed the Orc. “She stayed up with me to make sure I was okay after she returned from your midnight stroll. Seemed that she didn’t want to be alone either. She lasted well into the morning while I was working on the designs and notes, but she passed out eventually. It’s like living with my eight brothers and sisters all over. I missed it—but I need my space to perfect my craft. Sacrifices, eh?”

  I won’t lie. The number of siblings she had was impressive. Nine kids? Damn. That’s a clan of their own, alright.

  “So it took that long to come up with a suitable design and notes on the intent needed to make this wall a viable defense?”

  “I’m a bit of a perfectionist.” Vilmas blushed a little. “Never did like to go into a job with little information. Remember—it never hurts to do a little research on the active and passive effects you want to enchant into an item.”

  I saluted with my now empty hand. I took a sip of the mug in my other hand and damned near died. It tasted amazing. The bitter, earthy base set the tone for the drink with a slightly peanut-like bouquet, but the berries offered a slight, sweet highlight to the drink that gave it a perky note. The best part of all that?

  I no longer felt groggy. I felt alert and aware.

  “Vilmas, drink some of this,” I offered her the cup, and she looked at it oddly.

  “I don’t like to drink after people,” she began. I gave her a hard stare, and she took it. “If I get sick, I wi–”

  “Drink it!” I barked the order a little louder than I meant.

  I heard a creak and groan from the bed, and Vrawn was suddenly standing in front of me with a wickedly curved blade at my throat. Her eyes weren’t focused, but her normally serene and friendly demeanor was gone. The only thing I felt from her at that moment was a sense of bloodlust and murderous intent.

  My first instinct was to let the beast howling inside me out, the red ring of my vision signaling the beginnings of my transformation into my lycanthrope hybrid form, but every fiber of my being seemed to understand better than I did at that moment that if I made a minute mistake, some kind of hostile motion, she would cut me. So I stood frozen like an angry deer in the headlights.

  “Vrawn, it’s Zeke,” Vilmas’s mousy voice squealed from behind the Orc warrior. “It’s just Zeke!”

  Vrawn blinked a few times then looked at me in confusion. “What time is it?”

  “It’s a couple hours after sunup,” I offered, my body still frozen. “Can you take the knife away from my throat?”

  “Hmm?” She looked at her hand and grunted. “Oh. Yes.”

  “This is amazing!” Vilmas gushed under her breath. “Vrawn! Vrawn—try this.”

  Vrawn sniffed the concoction and shrugged before taking a sip. Her eyebrows shot up, and she ended up finishing the rest of the drink.

  “That was delicious. Where did you get it?” She asked after licking her lips in delight. “Is there more?”

  “The chef’s wife, and I hope so.” I smiled. “Let me go see before we get started. You two stay here. I’ll be right back.”

  I took the mug from Vrawn and smiled reassuringly at Vilmas who still looked a little worried.

  Once I was clear of the room, I heard Vilmas begin speaking to Vrawn, “You know, I’m not too familiar with this whole ‘friendship’ thing, but I don’t know if putting a blade to someone else’s throat is a very friendly thing…”

  Her voice faded, and I came back to myself with a hand around my throat, checking for injuries. There were none, thankfully, but if she had wanted to kill me, I’d have been hard pressed. I needed to work on my reflexes to see if I could not throw myself into those kinds of dissatisfying positions ever again. Having already seen her fight, I wasn’t comforting myself.

  I stepped into the kitchens, a lovely, warm room in the tavern with pots and pans scrubbed thoroughly and hung to dry by the stove. The cook, a portly man with red cheeks, a bulbous nose, and traditional chef garb covering his body, hummed his way around the room as if on a cloud. It was surprising that Yohsuke wasn’t here, but I had a mission.

  “Hey, bud!” I called to the man; he turned and smiled.

  “Ah, Master Zekiel!” His accent was almost as comically and insultingly French as I’d ever heard in my life. Not that there’s anything wrong with the French. Just that it seems like a lot of awesome chefs are French.

  Okay, I was jealous.

  “What can I do for you, my friend!” He bustled toward me. “Ma chère, Vrawn! Welcome, hungry?”

  I looked behind me to see Vrawn standing there sheepishly. Her large looming figure taking up the doorway. “I was coming to see about some food?”

  “Chef’s food is good. Glad Yohsuke learned from you! I was actually here about that tea.” He looked confused, so I elaborated, “You know, the one that your wife made?”

  He was busy piling food on to a platter for Vrawn when he seemed to get what I was saying. He pressed the platter into her hands with a smile and patted on her shoulder before hurrying toward the stove.

  “Ah!” He removed the pot from the stove and moved toward the back door with a sad sigh. “I told her the people here were particular about their drinks. I should have dumped it and served proper tea myself, eh? The poor woman–”

  “If you dump that anywhere other
than a cup, I will throw you out of this kitchen,” I growled. He stopped, clearly taken aback. “It’s amazing! It’s delicious, and it helps get rid of fatigue. Have you tried it? Is there more where that came from?”

  He offered the pot to me with an uncertain smile. “I have not tried it. I am very particular about my tea, but she insisted I at least offer it.”

  “Get more,” I ordered in as friendly a way as I could. I found a mug and poured the man a sip myself before offering it to him. “Try this.”

  He gave it a good sniff. “Eh, smells alright.”

  “It really is wonderful,” Vrawn offered quietly.

  He smiled at her before upending the mug into his mouth and swished the liquid like he was cleaning his teeth.

  His eyes closed, and he made a noise low in his throat before swallowing the drink. He blinked slowly, and his cheeks seemed to glow a deeper red than before.

  “That was…magnificent,” he whispered. “I shall order more. It will become a staple in my kitchen.”

  I thanked him for the pot and poured four cups—two for me and one each for the ladies. I put the drinks on a small tray and headed back toward Vilmas’s room.

  Vrawn stood waiting in the hallway. “I’m sorry for attacking you like that, then being so nonchalant about it. I know that you are a warrior, a protector, and that having someone do those things around you probably made you upset.”

  “Turnabout is fair play.” The guilt of yesterday was playing havoc on my heart and mind. “I shouldn’t have just up and taken off like that. I did everything I could to justify it to myself, and it sounded good at the moment, but it was really just me being awkward and stupid. I’m sorry, Vrawn. You know, you and I have a lot in common, but we’re so vastly different as well. You’re so honest and forthcoming and such a great fighter. It’s awesome. You’ve been nothing if not honest with me, and if I’m being honest with you, I don’t know how to be able to do the same without feeling like a dirtbag.”

  “Because of your Queen, I understand, and I find your loyalty a discerning quality.” Her features seemed sad, slightly, a small pout on her full lips. “But I don’t fault you for it. It has been so long since I have felt so strongly for someone that I don’t know how to be subtle about it. Then again, I am an Orc—we are not known for our subtlety.”

  That last bit made me laugh, and that brought a chuckle to her throat as well. I looked up at her. “Can you forgive me for being an insensitive asshole?”

  Her nod was kind, and she asked in return, “Can you forgive me for attacking you? You’re sure you aren’t mad?”

  “Mad?! That was incredible!” I gushed, almost spilling the tea. “And you had done it while protecting Vilmas. I made a promise to her clan head that she would be safe here, and I have to admit that knowing you have her back too puts me at ease.”

  “I am happy to know that I can help you both.” She led me toward the room, and before we entered together, she stopped me. “She does not know of last night, with the undead. I didn’t want to worry her.”

  I nodded, and we walked in.

  Vilmas grabbed her cup eagerly, and they both drank furtively, glancing over their cups at me. Both women looked like they felt better. I set the tray on a clear portion of the bed and looked back at them.

  “So, what’s the plan for this wall?” I clapped my hands together before lifting my own cup to my lips in my palms. I took a deep drink from it, the warm cup heating my palms nicely, the delicious warmth radiating throughout my body so soothing. For a moment, I just basked in the feeling the drink elicited in me. I sighed contentedly.

  “Yes, I finished the intent—translated into common for you—as well as the design I have in mind. You’ll be able to mimic it once I show it to you.” She pulled out a sheet of parchment with a scrawling script printed on it. “Before all that, though, I need to clear the nails of your mana. Do you have them?”

  I looked at Vrawn, who pulled a bucket out of her inventory and sat it before Vilmas.

  “Why do you have a bucket?” My brow furrowed at the Orc woman.

  “Sometimes my recruits seem to think that waking up for morning training is optional.” Her tusks flashed as she bared her teeth. “It is not, and cold water is a great motivator.”

  I shrugged. Solid answer. Don’t know what else I could have possibly expected.

  Vilmas looked a few of them over, then nodded to herself. “They will do. They are a slight bit brittle, but they will work. Here, this will help.”

  She closed her eyes and rubbed a thumb over the side of the bucket in front of her, and a few engraved lines remained where her thumb had been. I watched a single nail appear on it, followed by a line circling it with a kind of shining portion in the center. She added her mana to the engraving, and there was a muted pop and flash.

  When I looked back at the bucket of nails, each nail was shining like it had been polished, and none of them looked bad at all.

  “Now, none of them will be brittle, and we can use them without worry,” Vilmas explained. Once she saw my curious glance, she offered more information, “The nail itself was the focus of the enchantment, so I put it there, in the middle. I wanted the nails inside the bucket to be perfect, so, I put the shining star. Then I only want the effect to work on the nails that were contained in the bucket, so I encircled it. With my intent focused the same as with the engraving, I added my mana—and here we are.”

  That sounded incredibly… simple. I could probably do that. She seemed to read my expression because she was nodding at me enthusiastically.

  “Okay.” I waved at them. “Now, I’m assuming that we have to cleanse them of your mana too?” A thought struck me, and I looked at her. “If we take your mana away, will they revert?”

  “That is an excellent question!” She picked up a nail and tossed it to me. “See how when we lift it from the bucket, it stays the same? This is because the change that was made was a permanent one. It changes an aspect of the item that was used in the bucket.” I looked confused because I was, and she tried a different tact. “Think about it like meat. You have a skillet over a flame, right? It gets hot until you take it from the fire—the heat. However, if you add something like, say, bacon, to the skillet. The skillet transfers the heat and cooks the bacon. If you take the bacon out of the skillet, it’s still cooked.”

  I thought I had it, so I held a hand up to halt her explanation. “So, in this case, the fire was your mana—and the enchantment—and the bucket was the skillet with the nails acting as bacon? The mana enacted a change on the bucket that permanently altered the state of the bac—nails—is that, right? And the change, once done, is irreversible?”

  “Lady Shellica had the right of it, lad—you do catch on quick.” She smiled at me proudly.

  I heard a deep gurgle and looked over to see Vrawn blushing deeply with a hand over her stomach. She cast her gaze toward the door. “All this talk of bacon has made me hungry.”

  Vilmas and I chuckled as the warrior left the room to hunt down more food. She had a good deal of muscle to feed; it wasn’t anything to be ashamed of, but watching her green cheeks darken as she blushed had been a highlight of the morning.

  “So, if you can enact that kind of change with so simple of an enchantment, would it be possible to do the same with a person? Say, for instance, that I wanted to give a permanent point to someone’s strength? I could do that—right?”

  Vilmas frowned in thought before responding, “Theoretically speaking? Yes. You could, but the amount of mana it would take to make that kind of change on the person would be immense, much more than an average grandmaster would have. For people to give you mana while doing it would be hard as well. That’s why if one finds such items, they are usually objects imparted by the divine.”

  My hopes fell a little, but learning this way was a nice break from the normal way Shellica taught me—which was like doing something with a gun to my head.

  Vilmas reached into her inventory and pulled o
ut an item that looked like a window screen, the little slits attached to a thick wooden frame. She set a clean, white sheet on the ground beneath it, then dumped a handful of nails into the thing and began to shake it.

  As I watched this, a snowfall of green powder began to sprinkle down on to the sheet. Once they looked to be clear, she set them off in a drawer in the desk. Then repeated the process.

  At some point early in the process, Vrawn had returned, then had grown bored enough to leave us alone once more to go for a short run. I swore I would protect her friend, and she left us with a smile.

  The pile of powder was interesting. It was a light coating of glittery green at first, but as she added more nails to the sifter, the pile began to grow. It took a little over an hour to get through half the nails; then we had to dump the powder into a bag that Vilmas produced with sigils sewn into it. Once we did finish completely, she dumped the rest of the powder into the bag.

  “I take it that’s my mana?” I inquired with a gesture to the bag.

  “It is!” She closed it and pulled the drawstring tight. “You can use it as a component to add to your enchanting projects in the future. What level is your enchanting skill now?”

  “Level 34,” I answered simply.

  “Good, about mid-craftsman level. You’ll be able to start using it to augment the depth of your enchantments and add more mana to them at adept. From there, your efficiency to use it increases again at master level.”

  “That’s dope!” I could see that she didn’t understand the word, so I just smiled and snapped my fingers as I remembered something important. “Speaking of components.”

  I reached into my inventory and heaved out the large chunk of green ore. I plopped it on to the bed, and Vilmas was on top of it instantly.

  “Where did you find this?!” She hissed at me.

  “In the lightning mountains. Why?”

  “I’ve never seen it before!” She rounded on me. “We have to take this to Granda and see what it is.”