Avatar of Light

by Dmitry Bilik

  My worst reservations proved ungrounded. It looked like this was indeed the last resting place of the demonic top brass. Only five of the Kabirids didn’t have any sulfur in their heads. Even so, they did have some but it was so filthy and mixed with decaying bones that there was no way we could use it. But all the others had yielded a gram or two each which brought our diabolical pickings up to sixteen grams — more than we needed.

  Arts walked over to me. “What about the protection artifact?” he asked quietly.

  “Why, what about it?”

  I sensed something within me that protested against me talking with her. I wanted to hide my divine stones away from prying eyes so that I never had to show them to anyone, let alone talk about them.

  “Did you take it?” she insisted.

  “Doesn’t matter, does it?” a stranger within me said, using my voice. “We need to go, anyway. We’ve found everything there was to find.”

  I tried not to look her in the eye. It felt awful. On one hand, they were my friends. With certain reservations, but still. On the other, I had seen their eyes when I’d shown Arthall to them: their greedy, envious eyes. All of them had wanted to have it for themselves, each and every one of them.

  Arts kept her gaze firmly on me but I pretended not to notice. Soon Litius and Kaf joined us, and we set off on our return journey. If the truth were known, I would have never found my way back in this maze of tunnels, but both Arts and Litius had the Map-Making skill which proved crucial in this situation. No idea how it worked but according to my friends, we were moving in the right direction.

  Then Litius stopped dead in his tracks, pricking his ears. “Switch off the lights,” he raised a warning hand. “All of them!”

  Arts’ flashlight went out. I disabled Light. A tense Archalus was rustling his wings behind me. Litius drew in the air, sniffed like an indignant cat and went quiet again. He kept silent for a good minute, then said grimly,

  “Humans. Coming from the same direction as we came. Two of them.”

  Arts cringed. “Probably, gendarmes. The night guard must have seen the door open and called them. Shame we only have one exit. And they have guns.”

  “I wish Harph was with us. He could have gone and found out.”

  “A rat!” the girl all but screamed but Litius covered her mouth just in time.

  Just look at her! She was one hell of an experienced Player and a fighter to match, riding flying dragons before breakfast, and she was scared of the most primitive of rodents!

  That’s when it dawned on me. “Most primitive” was the key word.

  I checked my mana level and heaved a sigh of relief. It had partially restored already. It was a good job I’d only cast Light twice! As a result, I had enough for my purposes.

  Slowly so as not to scare the little rodent away, I reached out to it and cast Talking With Lower Animals. Nothing happened, if you didn’t count the light whiff of green smoke escaping my fingertips.

  Your Sorcery skill has increased to level 1.

  The green trail promptly dissolved in the air. Did it work or it didn’t? Never mind. Let’s try it.

  “Do you understand me?”

  “Yes,” the rat’s voice was thin like that of a little girl.

  “There’s a small passage further down this tunnel. It leads to a big hall. That’s how we came here. There’re some people there,” I tried to speak in simple, choppy sentences. “I want you to find out where they are and what they’re doing. Think you can do that?”

  The rat swished its tail by way of answer, then scurried off in the right direction. My comrades stared at me like some wild African tribe staring at a spacesuited astronaut who’d just landed.

  Finally, Arts removed Litius’ hand from her mouth. “What the hell was that now?”

  “Nothing. I was telling the rat to go do some recon.”

  “You what?” the girl’s eyes filled with silent astonishment.

  “Just something I got from some good Samaritan the other day. It’s called Talking With Lower Animals. Now I can understand the language of all sorts of little critters. So I just tried it out. Shame there’s no such spell for understanding human beings.”

  “You should teach me,” Arts’ eye lit up like two big gas hobs. “Once we’re back, I want you to buy the Mentoring skill…”

  She didn’t get the chance to finish because my little furry protégé came scurrying back. He rose to his hind legs as if mimicking human manner and reported,

  “Two of them… standing with their backs to me… by a tall, lean stone… light coming out of their hands… they’re looking at it…”

  “A ‘tall, lean stone’ is probably a column,” I said. “Thank you very much. You can go now.”

  I repeated the rat’s report to the others.

  “What could they be looking at? Litius asked.

  “Does it matter?” Arts whispered. “The main thing is, they’re standing with their backs to the exit. We really should use this opportunity. Wait here. I’ll call you.”

  Without waiting for an answer, she darted off into the darkness. We didn’t even get the chance to say anything. I could rewind time, of course, but by then, I wasn’t really sure. Was it worth it? Arts seemed to know what she was doing. Should I just leave her to it?

  A crashing noise came from the passage, making me doubt the wisdom of my decision. A cloud of stone dust showered us from above, threatening us with a rockfall. Luckily, it didn’t come to that; and after a while, I heard Arts’ voice from a distance,

  “Come quick! They’re flat out!”

  The three of us hurried toward her. I tried to cast Light. As if! My mana was at zero.

  Instead, Litius summoned some kind of glowing sphere which he hung in mid-air. Now we could make out the gendarmes lying on the floor as well as Arts who looked utterly pleased with herself.

  “Did you kill them?!”

  “Nah,” she shrugged. “I just cast an advanced Telekinesis.”

  “Think you can teach me?”

  She shook her head. “It requires level 40 Mysticism. It’s easier to buy a basic one in any shop.”

  “Hey, how ab-b-bout we g-g-get out of here first and you d-d-discuss your nonsense later?”

  “Our Whiskas-loving friend has a point, I’m afraid. Let’s get moving,” Arts said, heading for the exit.

  “What makes you think I like Whiskas? What kind of insinuation is that?” Litius protested as he trotted after her.

  Kaf and I had to hurry to keep up with those two blabbermouths. Admittedly, I felt relieved to leave the claustrophobic underground dungeons behind. It was as if I could finally breathe freely. Even my head went round as if it had been constricted for a long time.

  “Ne bougez pas! La police arrivera bientôt! ”

  A slightly overweight man of about forty-five years old — the night guard, most likely, — was standing by the gendarmes’ van which was flashing a full set of rooftop lights. It was a good job they hadn’t activated the siren: how would that have been for a street show!

  “What did he say?” I asked Litius. French wasn’t on my Linguistics skill list.

  “He says, we should stay where we are. The police are coming.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “One thing we won’t do is wait for them to arrive,” Arts said, stretching her hands in front of herself, palms pointing outwards.

  A sudden gust of wind hit our accidental eyewitness, lifting him in the air, and sending him flying a good ten yards, swirling him in the air like a limp ragdoll. The night guard landed on his side spreading his arms wide in an awkward, very childlike gesture. His head hit the curb, and he went limp.

  Arts ran over to him, felt his pulse and reached into her bag for a vial filled with an oily golden liquid. She gently opened the man’s mouth and poured down the elixir.

  I walked over to her. “What’s that?”

  “Judging by its color and consistency, this is Old Man’s Curse,” Litius replied
instead. “It’ll make him forget everything that had happened to him in the last five minutes before he drank it.”

  “It can be very useful against a Player’s exposure to commoners,” Arts added, putting the vial away.

  “Won’t we have problems with Gatekeepers?”

  “The gendarmes didn’t see me. I attacked them from behind. This guy has already forgotten everything he’s seen. And don’t forget we haven’t killed anyone, either. So no, I don’t think Gatekeepers will be a problem… that’s it, all done. We can go now. I suggest we walk a couple of blocks and hail a cab.”

  Litius seemed to know the city better than any of us. Earlier, he’d taken a good look at the interactive map, so now he could probably qualify as a professional guide. For that reason, we let him lead us. Despite his limp, Kaf tried to stick close to him. He also apparently wanted to get as far away from here as possible. As we walked, Arts cast a couple of anxious glances at the night guard, but she showed no intention of hanging around the “crime scene”, either.

  But me, I had a momentary lapse of attention. Or rather, my phone had distracted me. Luckily, I’d switched it to vibrate. So when it went off in my pocket, I mechanically pulled it out.

  It was a message from Julia,

  Will we see each other soon?

  Where did she think she was going so early? To school? Today, I typed as I walked.

  As I did so, I stumbled. The phone went flying from my hand and hit the tarmac. Fortunately, it didn’t break because it landed on its back, even the screen was spared.

  But as I bent over to pick it up, I glimpsed the figure of a man behind me, lurking in the shadow of one of the houses.

  I stood up and turned to face him. A shiver ran down my spine. It was the same stranger whom we’d seen on our way here flying in the opposite direction. From Paris to London. You just couldn’t mistake the white hair and slightly contemptuous gaze. Why had he come back to this city? Why the hell was he either following me or one of my friends? And at the end of the day, who was he?

  I had a shedload of questions to ask him — but I somehow doubted that this white-haired guy would be happy to answer any of them.

  “Hey, what’s keeping you?” Arts shouted as she reached the crossroads.

  “Coming,” I said. And when I turned round, all I saw was the man’s back. He must have decided that I’d had enough of him for today. What a strange unpleasant individual.

  All of a sudden, I was worried. What if he reported us to the Gatekeepers? As far as I or Litius was concerned, we had nothing to fear. But Arts?..

  As I plodded along on rubbery legs, I tried to figure out what the consequences for her might be for attacking commoners. Did Gatekeepers even understand the concept of a suspended sentence? I really didn’t want her name to appear one fine day on the bulletin board under a death sentence.

  Stop it, I said to myself. I was really winding myself up, imagining things. First of all, I needed to speak to her.

  But I didn’t get the chance until we’d finally entered the local Community. Which admittedly looked nothing like ours. The Parisian Players had bought a large four-story mansion and set up their center in it. The first and second floors were taken up by all sorts of quirky little shops, their long corridors lined with signs offering all kinds of services. A hotel occupied the whole of the third floor. And as for the fourth floor, they’d broken out some of the doors and partitions to set up a restaurant which also served as the Syndicate.

  As opposed to ours, their bulletin board was huge, hung with all kinds of missions. Tiny round tables, waiters in bow ties and tails… and lots of Players, of course.

  "Kaf, you’ve done yourself proud keeping your part of the deal. Here’s your fifty grams and another twenty-five for the return fare.”

  “Thanks a bunch,” the Archalus scooped up the dust and bowed for some reason. “If you don’t need me any further, I’ll be off.”

  “Sure.”

  I looked at our fine-feathered friend as he left, thinking how mistaken I’d been about him. He seemed to be a regular guy.

  “Litius, I’ll pay you off a bit later once we’ve sold the eggs.”

  The beastman nodded.

  “Now,” I said, “I want to tell you about who I just met by the catacombs.”

  The whole thing only took me a couple of minutes, mainly because I knew virtually nothing about the white-haired guy. Judging by my friends’ focused demeanor, they found the information quite important.

  “Could it have been a mugger?” Arts thought out loud.

  “Possible,” Litius replied. “In that case, why didn’t he attack us? The moment was right.”

  “What’s a mugger?” I asked.

  “Muggers are Players who get hired to initiate commoners,” Arts replied. “They capture a Player and take him to a previously arranged place where the commoner’s already waiting to kill him. Alternatively, they kill their victim themselves. Either way, the commoner becomes a Player.”

  “I thought that commoners knew nothing about Players?”

  “They do and they don’t,” Arts scratched her forehead. “Despite the Gatekeepers’ express orders, you can’t hide a pig in a poke. Players have large families and lots of friends, and not all of them can keep their mouths shut. Some muggers prefer to work online, creating websites where they offer super abilities for hire, so their clients often won’t even see them before the actual initiation. They pay by bank transfer. Sometimes they get ripped off but sometimes the mugger actually sticks to his end of the bargain.”

  Litius shook his head. “That’s not a mugger. Muggers only attack weaker players who are alone, preferably newbies. And there were three of us there.”

  “Yes, it’s very strange,” the girl said.

  The awkward silence was broken by a waiter whose prompt arrival surprised us as much as a snow blizzard in January surprises municipal snow removal teams.

  “Have you made your choice?”

  He had a point. We’d been sitting here for the last five minutes without ordering anything.

  Litius shook his head straight away; Arts was so lost in thought he hadn’t even noticed the waiter’s arrival. By contrast, I cheered up.

  “What do you recommend as an aperitif?”

  “If you just want something refreshing, I would recommend a Montrachet, quite a light white wine. If you prefer something stronger, you could take a Pinot de Charente. If there’re any cider lovers amongst you, we have Pommeau de Normandy which is actually a mix of cider and calvados. As far as Armagnacs are concerned, I’d recommend Floc de Gascogne. But if you’d prefer a really strong liqueur, we could arrange a bottle of Grande Chartreuse.”

  “Could you bring us each a small glass of everything, please? On second thoughts, make it a large glass.”

  The waiter sized me up with a knowing expression. Still, he nodded and scurried off.

  “Sergei, it’s not really the right moment to get off our faces,” Arts commented, finally coming out of her trance.

  “You don’t understand. To come to France and not to try any of their famous wines is a crime.”

  Soon the waiter came back and began setting up the bottles in front of me. He’d also brought us some chocolate, grapes, sugar lumps and some kind of crackers.

  “I’d recommend eating a few grapes after the white wine,” he explained. “After the Armagnac, a piece of chocolate… no, wait, it’s too strong. I suggest you start with Montrachet.”

  I tried every single drink, casting ingratiating looks at the water to make sure I was doing it right. From time to time, he nodded or corrected me. I took a tiny sip of everything, literally tasting the flavors on my tongue.

  “Tell us about the liqueur, please. What’s it made from and how do they make it?”

  ‘We don’t call it a liqueur, sir. It’s rather an elixir. Its original recipe was developed in 1605…”

  “Did you really need that flippin’ liqueur?” Arts grumbled once we were outsi
de again.

  “I did. I might try and brew some when I get home. It cost us peanuts, anyway.”

  That was true. The whole tasting session complete with the waiter’s recommendations had only cost us 7 grams of dust. A derisory sum for the pleasure of being introduced to proper culture. And I wasn’t even tipsy.

  “You’d better tell me where the Gatehouse is,” I asked her.

  “Over there,” she pointed at a one-story building.

  Of course. I should have noticed it myself.

  I produced the True Mirror. The Gatekeeper’s lodge was squeezed between the commoners’ houses. This was an old building, clearly part of an historical heritage. Strangely enough, to a commoner’s eye it appeared to have two stories although in reality its roof was not even fifteen feet high.