“I suppose that makes sense,” John replied. “I mean, he’s a really shitty person, but his motivations make sense. But as for this H guy, and I understand if you don’t really want to talk about it, can you tell us what he’s all about? What’s his deal? What does he want from us? What did he want from you guys?”
Lorenza took a moment to consider John’s questions. “Initially he gave the three of us a series of tasks to complete: Go out into the village on the hillside and collect this, go to this town and talk to so-and-so, get this information for me, and so on. We always complied. We always held the hope of going back home in the backs of our minds…” Lorenza stared blankly down the road as her voice trailed off.
Rialta sat up straighter, concerned. Lorenza had stopped speaking, leaving them all with nothing but the sound of wind rushing through the trees and the constant whisper of raindrops falling in the street. “You don’t have to keep going,” Rialta said. “We can—”
“No, I’d like to finish, if that’s all right,” Lorenza said. Her voice was clear and steady, but she continued to stare down at the road as she spoke.
“Of course it is,” Rialta said, taken aback. “Please continue, I meant no offense.”
“None taken,” Lorenza replied. And to Rialta’s relief, Lorenza offered her a gracious smile. She took a deep breath before she continued. “Anyway, we were nearly done with everything he wanted us to do when he had us venture to this abandoned temple up in the mountains – a terrible place perpetually covered with ice and snow. H had even warned us that this particular task might be difficult in his final note to us, but we thought we were powerful enough to handle it. Sera had an affinity for ice magic, and being up in the outlands in all that snow, we figured we might have an advantage.”
Nivin cleared his throat and looked down at the ground.
“We failed our mission,” Lorenza said. “Sera died in battle. Nivin and I just barely managed to escape back to the Chasm. And that was the end of it. We never heard from H ever again.”
At this, Nivin stood up and faced away from the rest of them. He walked just outside the protection of Rialta’s shield so that the rain began to drench him once more. He solemnly removed his hood, and his hair and cloak began to flutter like they’d been caught in a strong breeze as he stared off into the distance.
“Wait, how’s he doing that? Remmy asked as he watched Nivin’s cloak flutter about. “There’s no wind.”
“Oh, Nivin’s descended from an ancient society of mages. Their magic died out as the lineage carried on,” Lorenza said. “His only remaining magical talent is the ability to make his hair and clothes appear to drift in the wind for dramatic emphasis.”
Remmy laughed awkwardly, but Lorenza continued to stare at him without so much as a smile.
“Oh,” Remmy muttered bashfully. “Uh. Anyway, how long ago was it that you er—failed your quest, as you put it?” he asked.
“Nearly five years now. Nivin and I have more or less settled here. We live in the Chasm and take work where we can find it. We’ve made good friends with the locals.”
Rialta felt a terrible dread crash through her at the thought of being stranded for five years, but as soon as she felt the rising tension within her, a thought struck. “Wait, why did you assume we have something to do with H if you have not heard from him in five years?” she asked.
“Well, it’s an obvious connection, ain’t it?” Lorenza said. “Three adventurers—all of them apparently appearing from absolutely nowhere—the relative rarity of a mage among them, mind you—barge into the town without the slightest bit of tact or sense of direction? It’s nearly identical to what happened to Sera, Nivin, and me.”
“So we arrived in similar circumstances, fine, but how do we fit into this equation?” Remmy asked.
“I was about to ask the same thing,” Lorenza said. “How did you end up on Tyntala? How did you get tangled up with H?”
Rialta explained everything, starting with her meeting Remmy, their fruitless efforts to find a decent quest, being duped by Jack, learning about H, their trek through the hillsides, their fight with the sheepstalkers, and their stay at the inn.
“So you didn’t even know these two until yesterday, and you just went and followed them onto some seedy stranger’s ship all on the promise of some gold?” Lorenza asked Rialta incredulously.
“Correct,” Rialta said, feeling herself go red at admitting to her extraordinary lack of caution.
Lorenza shrugged. “Well, I guess you had your reasons.”
“I did,” Rialta replied quietly.
“For what it’s worth, Remmy and I aren’t exactly hardened, violent criminals,” John said, rolling his eyes. “It’s not like we were planning on stabbing her and stealing her wand, you know.”
“Never meant to imply nothin’, John. You relax yourself,” said Lorenza.
“I didn’t take offense,” John said.
“Good,” said Lorenza.
“Indeed,” said John.
“All right then,” said Lorenza.
“Okay,” said John, folding his arms.
Rialta cast a glance first at John, then Lorenza. Both appeared equally impassive.
“Getting back to the matter at hand,” Rialta said. “I’m not quite sure how to put this, Lorenza, but do you have any recommendations as to what we should do from here? H said in his note to us that our first task was simply to reach the Chasm. We have done that, but we have not heard anything new from him.”
“So you’re really intent on following H’s orders?” Lorenza said quietly.
“Unless you know of another way we can get back to Ro,” Rialta said.
“I don’t, but you need to listen to me, okay?” Lorenza said, looking very suddenly directly into Rialta’s eyes. Rialta nodded in response.
“You don’t need to pursue this pointless—” Lorenza began to say, but Nivin gripped her by the shoulder. She shook his hand off and turned around to glare at him. “You let me say my piece, Nivin! These folk don’t deserve the same fate we wandered into. I’m going to give them the gift of insight we never had. If they choose to continue—if they choose to do as H says, that’s on them. But I want it to be their choice.”
Nivin relented. He let go of Lorenza’s shoulder and sat back down on the bench.
“I appreciate your wisdom, Lorenza, I truly do. But I think the three of us have agreed that we must follow H’s directives,” Rialta said, looking over to John and Remmy. They both nodded.
“Fair enough,” Lorenza said. “But let’s walk and talk, okay? I’d like to show you around the town a bit as we discuss this.”
“You do not have to do that,” Rialta said.
“No worries. Nivin and I would be happy to do it,” Lorenza said, standing up from the bench. Rialta stood up beside Lorenza, who stopped in the middle of straightening out her cloak to look at Rialta. “By the way, where did you say you were from?” Lorenza asked as she scrutinized Rialta’s appearance.
“I’m from Ro. Why do you ask?” Rialta said—and perhaps she said it a bit too quickly, for Lorenza narrowed her gaze.
“I understand that the three of you came here from Ro, but I’m askin’ where you came from, Rialta,” Lorenza said.
“Ro,” Rialta replied at once. “Born and raised.”
“Uh huh. Well I ain’t never met anyone from Ro, Rialta, but these two,” Lorenza said, jerking her thumb at Remmy and John, “they don’t got funny little accents quite like you got, and they’re from Ro too, aren’t they? Not to mention I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone with them color eyes in my whole life.”
Rialta shrugged, doing her best to look casual. “My mother spoke a different dialect than most on Ro. I just picked up a few bad habits from her that I continue to fall into, I guess.”
Lorenza eyed Rialta with a skeptical frown, but after a moment, her expression softened. “You boys coming?” she asked John and Remmy.
“Why the hell not,” John said, st
anding up and stretching out. Remmy and Nivin got to their feet as well.
“Let’s go,” Lorenza said. “Mind y’all stick close to Rialta and me if you want to stay in this shield and out of the rain.”
Lorenza led the group down the road to a junction which led directly into a wide cobblestone street. Lorenza turned onto the street, and everyone followed. This part of the Chasm was livelier than the parts Remmy, John, and Rialta had seen before. Large storefronts lined either side of the street, and the foot traffic was much heavier. As Rialta looked about the town, she seemed to drift into a trance. The spirit of this place was so nearly identical to her home province on Ro that, for the briefest moment, she had forgotten where she was. The people were the same—she could see it in their faces. Industrial. Driven. Determined. Citizens walked the streets with an acute sense of purpose and zeal. Here and there, even more kiosks had begun to open. The town’s children seemed to mirror the positive energy threefold—they tore through the streets, singing, laughing, dancing, and playing. Everything here was done with a sense of optimistic urgency.
“Now as I was saying, I get your predicament,” said Lorenza. “You want to go back home. I understand more than you can possibly imagine. We all wanted nothing more than to go back home when we first arrived here. But you don’t need to go hurrying to follow H’s demands in the desperate hope that you might get to go back to where you belong. Nivin and I don’t trust him in the slightest, not after what he did to us. So let me just preface my advice by letting you three know that you’ve got another option. You can simply accept the fact that you’ve been stranded here. Accept your fate. Make a new life in Tyntala, like we did.”
“We—we’ve made up our minds,” Rialta said, but she could not help but stutter as she looked around the Chasm.
“…Yeah,” said Remmy softly, eyeing a little boutique selling blessed relics and garments.
“Just food for thought is all,” Lorenza said with a grin. “Anyway, you’d asked what I would do in your situation, right? If I wanted to be silly and chase after H’s little quest?”
Rialta nodded, glad that Lorenza was apparently willing accept that they didn’t want to start a life on Tyntala and return to the subject of their previous conversation.
Lorenza nodded in return. “To answer your question, my advice to you would be to just wait for H to contact you, and to make yourself useful in the meantime. Earn some money for room and board, get some better gear, and prepare yourself as best you can for any challenge you can possibly imagine. But most importantly of all, don’t you dare forget that we lost one of our own trying to obey H.”
“You think we should just wait?” John asked. “What if there’s something we’re supposed to do to prompt H to get in contact with us?”
“Listen, John, I know how the man operates. I promise you, you’re going to hear from him within a day or two,” Lorenza said.
With that, the five of them fell silent.
As they proceeded along, Rialta found herself fascinated by the workings of what was clearly a small family-operated business, run from a large wooden cart with a huge stone oven fastened to its back. A bulky, well-muscled man fed a row of metal trays into the blazing oven as his wife managed the till and took orders from a small crowd forming around the cart. Their two young children prepared an assortment of biscuits, cakes, and pies before loading them onto the trays, which they then took to their father one by one. The cycle repeated seemingly without end. They were all extraordinarily busy, but all of them wore satisfied smiles on their faces. Rialta smiled in kind, thinking of when her life had been as simple—when she too was just a humble cook, firing out one order after another to feed hungry customers until her shift was over.
“Hey Lorenza, what kind of festival is this supposed to be advertising?” Remmy’s question jolted Rialta from her thoughts. He was pointing to a small flyer nailed to a post that they were approaching.
“The autumn equinox and harvest festival,” Lorenza replied. “It’s coming up next week,”
“Autumn?” Rialta said, stunned. “But it’s summertime.”
Lorenza smirked. “Perhaps on Ro it was,” she said, “but here, we’re just now going into fall.”
Rialta frowned as she considered this new information. Thinking about it, however, she was stunned that she had not considered this possibility up until now. The air on Tyntala stung with a light but pervasive chill. The harsh heat she had always associated with summer had been completely absent here. She recalled the weather the day before, when they had first arrived on Tyntala. She had initially written off the weather as that of an unusually cool summer day, but upon further reflection, it really should have been obvious that this world was in the midst of an entirely different season.
Rialta shook her head as she brought herself back to the present. I could die here. No time to worry about losing out on a bit of summer fun.
“So you two have really just been living here ever since? In this little town? You’ve never tried to go back home?” John asked as they passed by a blacksmith’s workshop.
“We have been livin’ here, yes, but you ain’t giving us any credit, are you?” Lorenza said. “As far as we know, there isn’t a way of getting back home, at least beyond the empty promises H was throwin’ at us. We’ve done plenty of research in the interim, mind you, but we never found a way to get home—at least nothing the two of us were capable of. In the meantime, we’ve made a decent living here. We rent the lower half of a little cottage in the Chasm for cheap, and we make more than enough money to live comfortably by doing little odds and ends for the townsfolk around here.”
Rialta was primed to ask another question, but a sudden, chilling scream tore her attention away from the conversation.
Chapter 15
A Run-In with Some Less Than Savory Scoundrels
“Get away from me, get away!”
Lorenza halted in place, searching for the source of the voice, and the others stopped behind her. Rialta felt her blood run cold as she observed a lanky, gap-toothed man with a patchy beard chasing down a young woman wearing a flowery dress and a flour-covered apron. Several more similarly wretched men stood together further down the street, all of them whistling and shouting catcalls as they watched the scene in front of them.
“Aww, come back here!” shouted the lanky man chasing the woman. “I ain’t gonna hurt you!”
Rialta was quick to act. “Halt!”
She heard the twang of Nivin’s bow the moment she had cast the spell. Her spell struck the lanky man at the very same moment Nivin’s arrow buried itself deep in the offender’s shoulder. The man howled in pain and flailed through the air. He struck the ground hard, then went silent. The woman he was chasing spared a glance at Rialta and Nivin before bolting into a nearby shop and slamming the door behind her.
“Hey, what the hell?”
The voice had come from someone among the small group of men gathered at the far end of the street, all of whom were now making their way further into the Chasm. All of them wore rough, tattered clothing, and each one was armed with either a rusty, chipped blade or a wooden club. They brandished their weapons menacingly as they made their way up the street toward Rialta and Nivin. All throughout town, shopkeepers hurried to shut their doors and shutter their windows.
A tall, slim young man dressed in a button-down shirt, a tanned leather vest, and wrinkled, baggy trousers made his way to the front of the mob. He held a large club in his right hand. He adopted a cocky smirk as he looked at Rialta and Nivin.
“All right, you two, I’ll forgive that first little transgression against one of my boys, but that’s it. We’re not lookin’ for any real trouble. We just want a quick score from a couple of these inbred hicks,” he said, gesturing around the town with his club. “In and out, no more violence. So just leave now and we won’t have a problem.”
Rialta did not give up any ground. She stared at the outlaw for a moment before turning back to Lorenza.
>
“Don’t you guys have a police force?” Remmy whispered to Lorenza.
“A what force?” Lorenza whispered back.
“Law enforcement!” Remmy hissed.
“We got a sheriff, but he’s on the other side of town,” Lorenza said.
“I said get lost before we kill you!” snarled the bandit leader.
“I’ve had about enough of this,” John muttered. He pushed his way past Nivin and Rialta. “I’m with them, and so are the bard and the cleric,” he called out to the bandits, gesturing to Lorenza and Remmy. “We’re not going to let you cause any trouble, so why don’t you all just call it a day and clear out before something bad happens?”
“Not happening,” said the bandit leader. “Maybe it would be best if you bunch just go on home.”
“Maybe it would be best if you kissed my ass,” John replied, pointing to his ass for emphasis. There was an audible gasp among the bandits.
“Hah!” replied the bandit leader. “You might be a masterful wordsmith, but you’re a fool if you think you can take us on. We outnumber you twofold. If you tried to fight us, you’d be finished.”
“Are you serious?” John roared. “Look at me! My right bicep alone outweighs each of you by a hundred pounds!” he shouted, his eyes becoming wild. The bandit leader took a step back as he better observed the bulking mass of muscle standing in front of him.
“I want to make myself perfectly clear,” John said, his voice low and terrible. “I could kill three of you before I throw my first punch. And I will if I must. Now, I don’t want to have to do that, Mister—uh—Hey, what is your name, anyway?” John asked, dropping his façade completely.
“H-Harold,” replied the bandit leader.
And then it happened before Rialta had a chance to understand what was going on.
Nivin let out a horrible, anguished howl. He shot three arrows at Harold in rapid succession, but his technique was so crazed that two of the arrows missed completely. The third had barely grazed Harold’s cheek, but when Harold touched his hand to his face, his fingers came away wet with blood. “Kill them!” he screamed, and his men charged forward.
A Quest for Chumps (Departed Dimensions Book 1) Page 10