by D. Rus
"They're with me!" I pointed at the freshly-baked priests. Then my eye happened on a heap of scrap metal as high as I was tall. The heap gleamed purple, promising great returns once it was smelted down. Good dogs! Not only had they got hold of the moon silver: they'd retrieved it and somehow dragged it back to the Temple.
"Where's the pack's leader? Call her for me, please."
"Aww, puppies!" Lena squeaked behind me and rushed fearlessly toward the guarded nursery.
I winced, closing one eye, expecting the dog to lunge and the girl to scream, followed by the thud of a tombstone against the marble floor.
But apparently, the girl wasn't as simple as she looked. The Hound stifled a yelp, snatching back a trodden-on paw, then froze again in a Sphinx-like pose as the girl got busy cuddling the pups. Cryl and I exchanged glances, breathing a sigh of relief. What was it the Fallen One had said about her phenomenal immersion? Looked like it. At least the hounds seemed to have accepted her.
Then the Temple's reverential silence was disturbed by the screeching of metal. Claws scratched against the paving stones. I heard some familiar grumbling. A weird procession opened up to our eyes.
My good old Hound friend headed the group. I'd have recognized her anywhere after our combined stretch in the pokey. In actual fact, I think it was my new absolute memory that fixed the unique combination of the dog's features, from the shape of her scars to the pattern of her irises. Actually, I wasn't so sure any more. The idea of absolute memory had started to erode somewhat. Talking about her irises, I wasn't at all sure that I'd be able to draw an identical picture of them if you asked me to. To a degree, it sounded logical and even soothing: it meant we remained human with all our weaknesses, not some cyborg types with their memory crystals stored behind their belly armor panels.
A zombie dwarf was shuffling his feet behind her. He was pulling an improvised sledge loaded with mithril junk. The zombie didn't really look like an undead, more like a dwarf in exile who'd spent the last ten years in the mountains. A shabby cloak concealed a kit of full armor. A bandana covered signs of recent burns on his hairless skull. A beardless dwarf, now that was an oxymoron. Struggling under his heavy load, he grumbled almost voicelessly,
"According to the Haroun Convention, Article 6, Clause 4, the use of prisoner of war labor by private individuals is considered a third-degree crime and is punishable by..."
I didn't get the chance to hear the rest as one of the convoy hounds growled, driving the absent-minded lawyer forward.
The procession drew level with us and stopped, obeying a commanding bark. I gave them a friendly nod and turned to the chief bitch. "Great to see you again. It looks like the new lands are abundant with prey?"
Indeed, she seemed to have gained weight since I'd seen her last. Her once-dull armor gleamed with a mirror-like finish.
"Greetings, O Dark One," the Hound lowered her head. "We thank you for your permission to settle in these lands. Not an hour passes that we don't sing a song of joy. I don't remember ever having such an easy and glorious hunt! Our pups are bloated like the lazy gastropods in the Lord of Fire's own herds. They refuse to eat bones and cartilage, all they care for is freshly-killed meat!"
To show their agreement, the whole pack raised their heads and howled like some mad orchestra of chainsaws when they hit some hard gnarly bits. Their voices hit the supersonic waves that sent shivers up your spine.
I fenced myself off with my hands. "That's great! I'm so happy you like it! I can see you haven't wasted your time. Does it mean you've cleared the cellars and done what I asked you to?" I nodded at the mithril heap that was calling my name.
"We have, Priest. We've mopped up the cellars destroying over four hundred beings who believed the place to be their own. Many of them were indeed dangerous. But not many can still stand after my pack finished with them!" a note of smug boasting rang in her voice. "At first I thought you'd been mistaken. For a long time we couldn't smell a single crumb of the cursed metal. Then we discovered a whole heap of it piled up in one of the dead-end corridors. There we found this zombie, greedy as a dragon, crawling on top of it."
"I'm not a zombie!" the dwarf objected. "I am Durin the Smart, the Master of the Mithril Smithy, one of the defenders of these lands which suffered the steel invaders' ire. I was saved by the Element of Metal which I'd served all my life and which didn't let me die the final death."
"His greed didn't let him die," the Hound explained. "His soul couldn't leave his body after it obtained riches beyond the mountain kings' wildest dreams."
"Yes—greed!" the dwarf exploded. "The greed for knowledge! In all these hundreds of years I've studied every inch of the cellars collecting every crumb left by the steel invaders. Do you have any idea how deeply they'd delved into the secrets of metals? Can you fathom all the wisdom and the high secrets concealed in this heap of depleted ore?"
The dwarf boomed louder and louder, his voice reproaching: finally he had a chance to voice all the silent arguments he'd generated in all those lonely years of inner monologues. "You have any idea what this is? You really think it's a rock?"
Untangling himself from his harness, he sank his arms elbow-deep into the heap of junk, producing a smallish egg and shook it in front of my nose. The egg had a very recognizable body complete with a detonator and ring pull.
I shrunk, mechanically pushing Lena behind me, shielding her. "I believe I do," I said in a suddenly hoarse voice. "This is an offensive grenade. Looks remarkably similar to the famous RGD5."
"Pardon me?" the dwarf managed, speechless. "Offensive? Who would want to offend it? Actually, I called it the egg of the fire salamander. Have you ever tried to break one?"
I peered at the unfamiliar markings and fluorescent stripes that coded the grenade's type. "All you need to do is pull on the ring without letting go of the handle."
The dwarf sort of shrank in size. "I shouldn' have let go of it, should I? I didn't know that."
He opened his shabby cloak revealing homemade mithril armor plates peppered with ragged holes.
"Good job you kept your head attached," I sympathized.
"I didn't," he sighed. "Nor my arms. I respawned twenty-four hours later lying on a mithril heap. Your hound has a point. The Moon silver draws me and won't let me leave."
"Don't worry. We're going to melt it into nice neat ingots and lock it in the treasury. Maybe then it'll set you free."
The dwarf shook, hiding the grenade behind his back. I cast a meaningful glance at the empty space where it had just been. "How many of them have you got?"
He hastily shook his head and stepped back, stumbling against the hounds' noses. They growled; the dwarf recoiled, mumbling, "That's the only one! The only thing I have! You're not getting it!"
Greedy guts! He'd make a nice friend for my inner pig. I had to give it some thought.
"Sir Durin, I'm afraid you don't understand," I said. "I'm the Temple's First Priest and the owner of the castle. I have my men here with me and our alliance representatives. We can't allow zombies to roam these corridors unattended, nor can we let them sneak our mithril and ammo. As the castle's owner, I have the right of ownership to everything in these lands."
I almost felt guilty expropriating him. The dwarf was a sorry sight. He started shaking, recoiling this way and that with a haunted look in his eyes, stumbling against the hounds' bared teeth. Finally he froze, scowling like a cornered rat.
I reserved my compassion for the old idiot. It was time to make him an offer he'd find hard to refuse. "You could, however, stay in the castle. You don't even need to part with your treasure."
The dwarf pricked up his ears, looking at me expectantly. I screwed my face into an appropriately official expression. "Durin the Dwarf, Master of the Mithril Smithy, I hereby invite you to join the Children of the Night and accept the post of the clan's steward and treasurer!"
Why not? I didn't have enough people, did I? So I had to think of something pretty quick. At least he wouldn't be a
ble to run off into the real world with our money. Nor would he fritter away the funds to the first so-called friend or honey trap.
"Your job will be to guard and increase the clan's property. Which doesn't mean I'll have to run after you begging you every time I need a nail to drive in the wall! You are the guardian; I'm the owner. You have a minute to consider my offer."
The ex-Master didn't hesitate. I don't think he expected to get a second similar offer from somewhere else. The alternative, however, was sad and unenviable.
He nodded. With a metallic click, he drew his hand from behind his back and offered it to me, palm up. On his thumb hung the pin ring he'd pulled from the grenade.
"Don't move," I said to him calmly. "Show me your other hand, very slowly, and please don't unclench it!"
Impressed by the seriousness in my voice, the dwarf pulled the other hand from behind his back, showing me the primed grenade. I lay my hand over his wizened fingers and squeezed it to prevent him from letting go of the safety clip. Gingerly I removed the ring, pinched the two ends of the split pin in my teeth and rethreaded it into the hole. Breathing a sigh of relief, I much more calmly let go of the clip handle. What a kamikaze. Had he just tried to blow us all up or was he really so clueless? I didn't ask. I motioned him to open his shovel-like hand, caught the deadly pineapple and cautiously put it in my bag.
The dwarf's greedy stare followed the disappearing treasure. "Do you understand the steel invaders' mechanics?"
"Sort of," I mumbled as I scanned the heap for any more hazardous junk. Trust them to unearth some tactical nuke so that this smartass could try to take it apart with a sledgehammer. How was I supposed to rebuild the Temple after that?
I wondered what the Vets would think when they noticed an atomic mushroom on the horizon? Would Dan and Eric immediately think about me? I seemed to be their prime suspect for lots of things.
"And who are you?" the dwarf squinted like a cop and—inconspicuously, so he thought—reached under his cloak. "Are you their servant or something?"
"Don't worry. It's been eight hundred years since anyone heard about them. Few still remember they existed at all. The world has new inhabitants now: the Immortal Ones. Millions are just visitors while hundreds of thousands have settled down here for good. I'm one of them. So please stop searching your pockets for whatever it is you're looking for, just surrender it to our ammo depot. Pointless trying to kill us: I've just told you we're immortal. So are you with us? Here's the invitation."
I selected him as target, crossed my fingers—no clan had ever hired a zombie before—and sent him an invitation to join. The Universe didn't shatter—apparently, the world's mechanics had been sufficiently changed the last time—but our clan counter grew by one.
Now that's a motley crew! Should I invite the Fallen One to join, too? Or Macaria, talking about the devil? Had she already realized she was now sitting on a time bomb? How did she expect her priests to level if she'd pulled them out of the food chain between her worshippers and herself, stripping them of the necessary referral XP? Never mind Eric: I was sure the Vets wouldn't let him down by seeking another priest for their own initiation. Actually, hadn't they invited me to some official 'do or other this coming Saturday? That was in their own interests: the priest's raid tricks and special abilities could add their two cents to the clan's power making it stronger and more competitive. But what was I supposed to do with the other Temple priests? Did I have to pay them for every initiation? Suicidal little cow. First she'd made a real botch of things, then she disappeared and left me to clean up her mess!
I stirred and glanced at the zoned-out zombie who must have been digesting his new status, saying goodbye to his eight hundred years of solitude.
I mentally reached for the Castle-controlling artifact. "Lurch!"
"Yes, Master!"
"What do we have in the way of a treasury? Know any?"
"Three!" AI reported with a note of pride in its voice. "One is official, used as bait for burglars and as decoy for an attacking enemy. Lots of traps and very few real treasures, mainly costume jewelry. The second one is the owner's personal treasury, an artifact strongroom with floating coordinates. It's currently on standby buried deep in the foundations and can be moved closer to your suite at your first request. Finally, the secret vault used to store real treasures. Status: yellow, borderline functional. Unfortunately, the regenerating wave that occurred sixteen hours ago has caused forty-one tons of the vault's contents to mysteriously disappear."
Bam! My virtual greedy pig collapsed, unconscious. I gave him a mental slap on his fat cheeks, wiped his large tears and sighed, "Oh, well. No use crying over spilt milk. Now listen: on my orders, Durin the Dwarf has been appointed castle treasurer. He is granted access to the last treasury you mentioned. His initial task will be to store the mithril ore and other valuables. Notify me of all instances of him carrying out more than 1% of the vault's contents."
With a smile, I turned to the dwarf and slapped his wood-hard shoulder, shrinking as I imagined him crumbling to the floor with my hearty endearment. But by now he was too dry and wizened to fall apart. Good.
"Welcome to our ranks! We are few but we do have potential—a Super Nova castle, the First Temple complete with a priest, and the promise of support from two gods. Potentially we might be looking at a major war but you can't scare a dwarf with a good fight, can you?"
He grinned in agreement, exposing a row of perfect white teeth marred by a couple of impact gaps. His jaw must have suffered a few quality punches in its time: to the best of my knowledge it took a good horse's kick to make a dent in Dwarven teeth. And not just any kick but a fractal one involving some twists and turns. Dwarves could gnaw on rocks without as much as a toothache.
I was about to send him back to the cellars for a new dose of mithril when I remembered the point at which we were interrupted. "How many grenades did you say you had stashed?"
He tried to play dumb but now it wasn't so difficult to put the squeeze on him. If he were a clan member in an honorary post, he had to get used to discipline and hierarchy. He seemed to have realized it as he mumbled,
"Seven with rings. And two crates without, that's another forty."
Logical. They had to store the grenades without fuses. Finding them was another thing. I told them to go through the place with a fine-tooth comb and deliver the steel invaders' treasure to me personally. And gently, on tiptoe! I couldn't really say that the discovery of the grenades shifted the balance of power, reversing the course of history. How much explosive would they contain in total, a hundred grams? That wouldn't exceed the destructive effect of a level-90 Shooting Star spell. And that's in an ideal world, considering the weird markings. It could be a gas grenade, a signal flare or a thunderflash for all I knew. You tried to use it as a last argument in a critical situation only to discover you'd just lobbed a smoke bomb at the charging enemy. That wouldn't help you bring the world to its knees. Now if I had a whole factory of those, I could in theory give them to any number of zero-level characters, essentially arming them with the equivalent of a near-100 magic. But now all I had was a new tool, a trump card up my sleeve and I needed to make sure I used it promptly.
I turned to the two other clan members. "Lena, do leave the pup alone, will you? His mom can't wait for you to go, you've been treading all over her paws, I'm surprised she hasn't bitten you yet. Let's go outside and check on those ruins. I want to see what those mad goblins have done."
I lay my hands on their shoulders and led them toward the exit to demonstrate the whole grandeur of the Super Nova ruins. We stepped out, blinded by the piercing sun after the Temple's majestic gloom. Then we cried out: I in surprise, Lena in awe. The inner court looked as if it had been worked over by a talented landscape designer. Colored mosaic paths ran amid rich flowerbeds that climbed some of the walls forming hanging gardens. I didn't know any of those billions of flowers and plants that swayed in their pots, each humming its own note that weaved into beautiful
melodies. Fruit trees offered their shade, all in different season: cherries budding and in blossom, and those bearing fruit from pale yellow to deep burgundy, all clinging to the same lace pavilion. Jesus, it was beautiful.
"Lurch?" I whispered into the artifact, unwilling to break the spell of the moment. "Got something to tell me?"
AI was smart enough not to ask me what I meant. "You did allow me to use 1% of all the units generated for my own needs, didn't you? So I thought I'd make myself pretty, the façades at least. Lying in heaps of debris for eight hundred years was intolerable. I used to be a painter once, you know..."
"I don't want to know! What 1% are you talking about? Have you done anything inside at all? I can see at least five gardeners here! Where do you think you got the money from?"
"Sir," Lurch's voice filled with injured dignity.
"Don't sir me! Okay, you can call me Master if you really have to..."
"Master, didn't you authorize me to hire extra staff with the automatic payment option? Indeed, the final version of the design you see now cost a hundred times more than I could afford. But I only paid for the project itself, plus the seeds and the enhanced-growth seedlings. The rest was all done by the staff hired as of your orders."
"Was it?" I didn't like the way he said it. "Who did you hire, then?"
"Ahem," Lurch paused. "Just some gardeners and diggers, a few stonemasons, carpenters and interior decorators, plus a couple handymen here and there..."
"How many?" I groaned.
"A hundred and seventy nine sentient beings," Lurch answered in a sunken voice. "But it's only for twenty four hours! And then I did send you a full expense report!"
"Where is it? Where the f-" I stopped noticing my friends' scared faces. "It's all right. Just the Castle's AI exceeding his authority. I've got to show him who's the boss..."
I finally trawled the message from the depths of my overflowing inbox. I opened it and groaned. "You butthead! You only sent it to me two minutes ago, didn't you? Jesus... An Elf designer, fifteen hundred a day. Total, forty one grand? Lurch?"