Deadman's Retinue

by Pavel Kornev

  Having said that, why not? I was a deadman, anyway, so how about becoming Frankenstein’s monster?

  Reluctantly I rose and shuffled back upstairs. Isabella was already waiting for me outside.

  “What the hell do you think you’ve been doing here, kitten?” she demanded grimly, studying the bodies scattered on the ground, the mounds of gray ash and the scorched grass.

  I told her everything as it was.

  “Shit!” she spat. The skull topping her staff clanked its teeth by way of approval. “You were supposed to sit here nice and quiet! All you had to do was build up some XP!”

  “I was sitting here nice and quiet!” I protested. “It just happened!”

  “Famous last words!”

  “Shut up! There must be a way out. Suzerain, for one-”

  “Use your head, kitten!” she snapped. “Even if you turn me into a dark zombie, and even if both Goar and Julian agree to this ridiculous scheme, you still won’t get anywhere near enough XP!”

  She was dead right there: I’d be lucky if I got 25% of all the XP I needed by recruiting those three. “And how about your priestess buddies? Can’t you talk to them?”

  She squinted at me. “Are you raving mad, kitten? No one in their sane minds would ever agree to this! I just don’t have enough gold nor influence to talk them into it!”

  “Okay, okay,” I said. “Never mind. “There’re two more options still.”

  “Okay, spit them out. Get it off your chest.”

  “You could ask the goddess directly…”

  “Impossible,” she interrupted. “The parties of Dark and Light have their own interests, you said so yourself. We’ve no idea who the Chaosites are sided up with now. In the best-case scenario, she’ll simply ignore your request. And in the worst case… she — or whoever is behind her — might bring your character back to zero.”

  I winced. She was right, whether I liked it or not. “Okay, but what about other priestesses? You’re not the only one in the game!”

  She sniffed. “Do you think we have a clan or something? Schedules, appointments, that sort of thing? Please. For some it’s a job, like it is for me. But most simply log in when they have a spare moment. I know none of them.”

  “Can’t you ask your superiors?”

  “You have any idea how long it might take? That’s provided they agree at all. And what if it becomes public? They’ll block our characters, as simple as that. There’s no such thing as an offline quest!”

  “But how about offline clan meetings?”

  “That’s different!”

  “How is it different?” I insisted. “Can’t you just talk to them? It’s no big deal, is it?”

  Her glare was full of hatred. “How on earth did I end up stuck with you?” she hissed, waving her hand to open a portal.

  “Wait!” I hurried. “Can the vampires get in here?”

  “They can’t, unless you bring them yourself,” she stepped into the portal and disappeared.

  Neo abandoned his daggers and walked over to me. “Is it so bad, Uncle John?”

  I chuckled. “I’ll sort it out.”

  “How about your arm?”

  I gave it a look and winced. “I’ll think of something.”

  ‘Think’ being the operative word.

  Time left: 24 days 17:12:58…

  SO HAD I MANAGED to think of something?

  Not really. Nada.

  A strange apathy weighed down on me. I felt like throwing in the towel and just leaving. I hadn’t, of course. I just sat by the watchtower leaning my back against its rough masonry and closed my only eye. I was tired.

  One million XP! I didn’t want it for myself, did I? Was it so much to ask for?

  A paltry million XP! Which one of the game’s gods would be willing to buy my soul? I’d have gladly sold them my body, too — but unfortunately, there were plenty of such hopefuls around. You put the word out, they’d be queueing from here to hell and back.

  True, I’d had a chance to be hired by the Lord of Decay, but he was probably already dead by now, and in any case, my reputation with them had been ruined for good. I was his enemy now — thanks a bunch, Isabella.

  “You sure had some fun here!” Goar’s voice brought me back from my rueful lethargy.

  I opened my eye. “And you missed it. Isn’t that typical?”

  The green-skinned orc paladin sniffed, walking around the undead dwarf. He waved his hand in front of the warrior’s face but he didn’t even blink.

  Goar shook his head in disbelief. “This is spooky.”

  I climbed back to my feet and stared at my severed arm that I was still clutching in my left hand, not knowing what to do with it.

  “Can’t we try to sew it back?” Neo offered, as if reading my thoughts.

  “Won’t work,” Goar said without even turning. “It’s easier to just respawn.”

  “I can’t!” I growled.

  “Why not?”

  I wasn’t in the mood to confide in him. “Just a quest. I still need to do something before I die.”

  Before I die? Oh, yes. That’s exactly how it was. Worse still, if I failed to do what I had in mind, then I’d die a final death with no hope of resurrecting ever.

  “A quest? When did you get it?”

  “Well, if you logged in more often, you might have known,” I snapped back.

  “Compared to you, maybe,” he retorted. “You don’t seem to log out at all!”

  I winced. “Just forget it.”

  He chose not to aggravate the situation even further. “May I?” he reached for my severed arm and winced. “It looks as if it was cut a week ago, not a few hours!”

  “Why, you a surgeon?”

  “Not really. But I did level up surgery for a while.”

  “In-game surgery! Very useful!”

  Without taking offense, he asked me to raise what was left of my arm and studied the wound. “You a deadman, John?” he asked bluntly.

  “Did it take you all this time to work that out?”

  “But how is it possib-”

  “Apparently, not all promo codes are good for you.”

  Without saying a word, he stuck out his fat lower lip and began rummaging through his bag. He mustn’t have found what he’d been looking for because in the end he cussed under his breath. “I’m afraid, we’ll have to wing it.”

  “Go ahead,” I said, sitting back down by the foot of the tower.

  “It’s gonna hurt,” he warned me, crouching next to me.

  It didn’t. Deadmen have no need for anesthetics. I’d been chopped to pieces so many times that patching up an open wound and fitting it with a pin felt like a walk in the park.

  Neo watched Goar’s manipulations open-mouthed, mumbling something under his breath. Even Scarecrow gave his constant screeching a break for a change and perched himself on the boy’s shoulder looking grim and distant.

  The surgery took about a quarter of an hour. Goar laid his hands on the stitched-up wound and murmured a brief prayer. A burst of freezing cold singed my skin; it began to sting, but not much else happened.

  “Well?” Goar stared expectantly at me.

  “Well what?” I sniffed. “It won’t move, will it? I’m afraid you’ve done something wrong, man!”

  “It worked fine on living beings!” he replied, taking offense.

  I heaved a sigh. There could be a gazillion explanations for why it hadn’t worked. I was immune to healing magic, and as for the magic writings that covered my skin now, the stitches were so uneven that the words ended up broken and didn’t make sense. Just my luck.

  He might have sewn my forearm back on but it still didn’t obey me, remaining just a chunk of dead flesh.

  Wait a sec. A chunk of dead flesh?

  And who was the lord of all things dead here?

  The Lord of the Dead!

  For a brief moment, I felt as if I were a complex electronic instrument trying to make contact to some wireless device.

>   The fingers of my right hand closed, making a fist.

  The magic ink under my skin began to leak, connecting the broken words together. The wound began to close. A pale bracelet of scar tissue encircled my elbow.

  Yes! It worked!

  I unclenched the fist, clenched it again, then twisted my hand around. Hell yes! I had my both hands back!

  “Yeeaah!” Neo shouted.

  I was about to join him when a new system message popped up,

  The mobility of your right arm has been restored.

  Penalty to the limb’s Strength: 40%

  Penalty to the limb’s Agility: 30%

  Dammit! My arm was now seriously deficient. I was unlikely to brandish my flamberge with the same ease as before. This was another nail in the coffin of traditional leveling strategies. No amount of magic could rectify this situation, and even if I used the bone hook in my left hand, that wouldn’t change much, either.

  “You see?” Goar flashed me a self-satisfied smile. “It worked!”

  I just shook my head, unwilling to thwart his efforts. Instead, I flung him the bone staff of General Malik. “Take care of the loot, will you?”

  “D’you want me to take it over to Lloyd’s?”

  “Sure. Same as usual.”

  While Goar put the staff away, I began taking all of the trophies out of my inventory. I had no intention of visiting the alchemist’s shop in the foreseeable future.

  With a hoarse squawk, Scarecrow rocketed into the sky.

  Neo was the first to notice a figure striding toward us across the field. “Auntie Bella is coming! And Julian’s with her too!”

  The dark knight appeared rather worse for wear. His blue armor was covered in still-smoldering gaping holes. His fancy pauldrons were completely beaten up and deformed. His hair stood on end as if he'd been hit by lightning.

  Also, I could no longer see any mention of his affiliation with the Spawn of Darkness in his stats.

  “I can see they didn’t let you off lightly?” I said with an acerbic smile. “Did you poach one player too many that the Spawn decided to get even with you?”

  “No, I didn’t,” he quipped.

  “Oh,” I drawled in mock sympathy. “In that case, did they give you a dose of hardcore BDSM?”

  “Don’t push me!” Julian growled.

  Isabella took him by the hand. Immediately Julian calmed down, rooted to the spot.

  Pussy-whipped idiot. Still, I knew better than to say it out loud. My current identity wasn’t really suitable for any altercation with a dark knight. It wouldn’t take him long to send me back to my respawn point.

  “Calm down, Julian,” Isabella cooed. “Kitten is a bit moody today. He’s only just been vivisected!”

  The Prince broke into a grin.

  I hurried to wipe it off his face. “You don’t look any better yourself!”

  Julian stopped grinning. Noticing Neo’s quizzical look, he explained,

  “They asked me to do them one last favor and help them storm the Tower of Decay. I barely got out by the skin of my teeth.”

  “They didn’t make it, did they?” Goar asked.

  “As if!” Julian heaved a regretful sigh. “I get the impression that the Lord of Decay becomes stronger with our every attack! They start making noises about forming an alliance but until now, it’s just a lot of hot air. There’s a rumor that the only way to seize the tower is by completing a global quest whose conditions haven’t yet been made public. So everybody’s waiting.”

  I chuckled. It was pretty clear that the game developers didn’t want the most powerful of the Dark clans to become even stronger. It took away the intrigue and could dampen interest in the game. The devs had allowed them to conquer the Kingdom of the Dead — but as for the Tower of Decay, seizing it wouldn’t be quite so easy. They might have to come to some sort of agreement, paying off some allies and sharing with others. Alternatively, the only other way would be to create a broader coalition uniting all the forces of the Dark to call up a super-elite raid against the Lord of Decay.

  A game can’t be static. Something has to happen all the time, otherwise it gets boring and tiresome and might force players to seek entertainment in the enemy camp. You’ve gotta keep moving or you die.

  “So you got stuck, then,” I said pensively. It wasn’t aimed at him personally but he did take offense.

  “No, I didn’t!” he snapped. “I’m not in the clan anymore!”

  “Well done!” I said mechanically. “Good boy!”

  Immediately I reconsidered and hurried to take my words back. “Wait. I’m sorry. It’s just that I could help you defeat the Lord of Decay.”

  Isabella didn’t believe her ears. “What are you playing at, kitten?”

  I replied with a look full of indignant anger. “What am I playing at? And what do you think I’m playing at? I need XP! Can you imagine how much we might receive for the Lord of Decay?”

  “This I can imagine,” she squinted. “What I can’t imagine is how you intend to defeat him.”

  “I’m not going to. What I can do is help the Spawn do it.”

  Julian guffawed and slapped me on the shoulder. “Nice joke! Top job!”

  I could have taken offense but I decided against acting out any injured innocence. “Who opened you a portal to the Kingdom of the Dead?” I reminded him.

  “We could have gotten along quite well without you,” he retorted.

  “Yeah right! Even with my help, you very nearly didn’t make it. The Lighties were right on your heels!”

  “We could have handled them without you,” he said stubbornly.

  “Stop repeating yourself!” I exploded. “We could have, we could have — you’re like a parrot! You couldn’t have done jack! You still can’t capture the Tower of Decay even now! Didn’t we offer you to use my services as a scout? But no — you were too proud, weren’t you?”

  “Kitten,” Isabella purred, “did you ever hear about an eye for an eye?”

  “Tell me all about it!” I tapped my mask where my right eye slit had been welded shut.

  “Move to something more concrete, will you?” she said. “What we need are constructive suggestions.”

  “Constructive, you said?” I laughed, camouflaging my anxiety and insecurity behind a fake bravado. “I’ve got plenty of that! I could burn off all of the Lord’s mana.”

  Julian’s reaction wasn’t long in coming. “Bullshit,” he said without even stopping to think. ‘Think’ being the operative word.

  Having said that, the others all looked at me in similar disbelief. Neo alone didn’t show any reaction to what I’d just said: the boy was too busy playing fetch with Scarecrow, throwing him rocks which he’d found somewhere.

  “I can burn off any sorcerer’s mana,” I repeated. “I have this spell that’s called Trump Up My Sleeve.”

  The Prince froze, apparently searching for it in the glossary. When he finally stirred again, he gave a contemptuous snigger. “It’s not listed.”

  “What do you know of the magic of the dead?” I demanded, indignant, as I removed the mask. “Did you forget who you’re talking to?”

  Goar shuddered with the sight. Julian shivered. Isabella shook a disapproving head.

  “Let’s suppose,” Julian began slowly, “just suppose that you could indeed do that. How on earth are you going to approach the Lord of Decay?”

  “How about neutrality?” I said, returning the mask to my face.

  Neo froze open-mouthed. I glared at him warningly. He didn’t say a word. Clever boy.

  This time Julian fell deep in thought. Still, my words didn’t seem to have convinced him entirely.

  “No,” he shook his head. “I can’t go back to the clan with this. I need some proof. A demonstration. Because I can smell a rat from a mile away.”

  Isabella smiled as if she could see right through me. That didn’t baffle me at all. I took advantage of Garth’s recent tip, cut out a section of the logs and forwarded it t
o Julian, followed by the spell’s description.

  The Prince studied the progress of my battle with General Malik and frowned. Then, once he’d read the spell’s description, he laughed.