“The academy won’t find out about you from me,” I said. “I promise.”
“You mean that?”
“Yes.”
“Well…I should bloody hope not!”
“What?” I said.
“Come on, Beno. I have to put on my most weak-sounding voice just to get you to do the right thing? Pah. You dungeon cores…you do the slightest good turn and think that you deserve an eternity of thanks.”
“Well…”
“But nevertheless, you do deserve some gratitude. I appreciate it, Beno. Truly. My powers might be gone, but whatever help I can render in the future, I will.”
“Thank you,” I said.
I wanted to leave, but something kept nagging at me. “Can I ask you a question?”
“What is it?”
“Did it hurt when Dullbright used the scaleedge sword on you?”
“More than I ever thought possible. I most certainly advise you not to try it.”
After I informed Razensen that my proposed solution was not going to work, there was really only one thing that could be done.
I stared at the demented kobolds, bone guys, and shrub bandits. I watched a kobold bare its teeth and lurch forward, biting a chunk from a fellow demented kobold’s ear. It chewed and swallowed, its teeth stained with blood and lips covered in foam.
“Look at them. The witch completely corrupted their minds,” I said. “We’ll have to destroy them. They will still get a lamp of their own in the remembrance chamber. We owe them that much.”
“I will do it,” said Razensen. “They were my unit.”
“And I created them. I won’t give an order that I’m too weak-willed to carry out. Bring them to the alchemy chamber, and we can both destroy them.”
“You do not need to concern yourself with this,” said Razensen. “They were under my watch when this happened. The responsibility is on me.”
“If I had been here instead of delegating dungeon defense to you, this wouldn’t have happened.”
“You doubt my abilities?” said Razensen.
“Not at all. I just mean that I am trained for enemies like this. I would have sensed the witch, and I would have been able to plan accordingly. You didn’t go to the academy. You have rarely fought magic users, and you are more used to physical threats than magic ones.”
“Even so, you must not blame yourself, Stone.”
“This is completely my fault. If I wasn’t spreading myself so thin, I would have been here, and we could have stopped the witch before she infected my dungeon mates. And if we had done that, then we wouldn’t need to…”
“Sometimes a person can try to climb a berg too tall for them,” said Razensen. “And they slip and break their back. You have been trying to climb three at once, Stone.”
When our task was done, I felt strangely empty. Not my usual sensation of being void of feelings, but a different emptiness. A deeper one that I couldn’t quite place. It had been a long, long day.
“Thank you for your help today, Razensen,” I said. “Go and swim in your pool, or whatever it is you like to do.”
“Did I miss anything today, Stone? I hear there was a storm on the surface. It was a shame that I didn’t get to see it. Anything but this blind heat would be a blessing.”
I thought about what we had heard in the chiefs’ meeting. That Duke Smit was traveling with a bogan, who could only be Razensen’s brother.
If I told him, Razensen would leave the dungeon and go tearing across the wasteland. His eyes would burn red with fury and he’d completely lose his senses. Nobody in his path would be safe, and Razensen himself wouldn’t be safe once he reached Duke Smit’s fort. He’d get himself killed trying to storm it alone.
Then again, was it my choice to make, to hold this from him? Was saving him from himself more important?
Damn it. What was it about today and having to make decisions?
“Nothing much happened,” I said. “We employed a weathermage to deter the duke from Yondersun. He’ll be back, but not for a while.”
“A weathermage, eh, Stone? Might be nice if you ask for a blizzard next time you see him. I will go to my pool now.”
CHAPTER 10
Deep within Fort Smiten, Duke Smit stared at the disaster before him, his sense of horror growing by the second.
“Gods, how did I get this so wrong?”
It was a question he just couldn’t answer. He’d followed the recipe, after all, but the splodge of caved-in sponge and hardened jam was less a cake and more a crime against baking.
A man entered, wearing a white apron and whistling to himself.
“Duke Smit,” said Cook Fontaine. “You…are in my kitchen.”
“My kitchen, you’ll find. Since this is my fort.”
“And yet, if I asked you to find me a spoon, you would spend all day rummaging through the drawers.”
Smit couldn’t help but grin. Only Fontaine, who had been the fort’s cook back when Smit’s father was in power, could get away with talking to him like that. Not that Smit was unfriendly with his people. He knew the names of all his soldiers and all his manor staff. But the most he shared with them was a polite “Good morning” and perhaps a smile. It didn’t look well for a leader to be over familiar with his people.
“It took me long enough to find the bloody eggs and flour. Believe it or not, this cake is my third, and best, attempt.”
“If you were hungry, Duke, you need only ask.”
“It’s Marcie’s birthday. Shayna used to bake a cake for her every year.”
“Yes, I remember. She would hog my kitchen all day long! Your wife was well-loved by the staff, Duke. Ah, she is still missed around here.” Fontaine slapped his head. “What am I saying…stupid words. I didn’t mean to be so blunt.”
“I know what you meant, Fontaine. This is Marcie’s first birthday without her mother, and damn it, I will try and make it as normal as I can. This horror of a cake might have taken me all morning, but I will try again until I have something that at least appears edible.”
“For a new baker, settling for something that does not poison the whole fort is acceptable,” grinned Fontaine.
For a second, just a brief second, Duke Smit laughed, and that one laugh cleared his mind of his debts, his grief, his failures.
And then the door opened.
Berneen, his clerk, was in the doorway. She looked worried. “Duke, there is a visitor. Lord Dryden.”
Smit tried his best to put a brave face on it. “Thank you, Berneen. How close to an apoplectic stroke does he look this morning?”
“His temple veins are throbbing, Duke.”
“Excellent. He can wait just a while longer. Might as well exercise what little power I have, no?”
Leaving Lord Dresden waiting, Duke Smit went to a cellar deep within the fort. There, he walked by a row of cages, inspecting them until he stopped in front of one of them. Inside was a kobold monster, a hideous blend of lizard and wolf.
He unlocked the cage. When the kobold scampered out, Smit grabbed it and bit a hole in its neck and drained it dry.
When he was full of kobold blood, he went back to the kitchen. His belly felt full of the unspent life that he’d drained from the monster. He let this seep out of him as raw time now, watching it settle on his cake and wind back the effects of time, separating each ingredient until it was like they’d never been mixed together at all. Now, there was a mound of flour, a knob of butter, some milk, and some uncracked eggs. This use of his epochian powers wouldn’t affect the world in general, of course, but at least it had unmade his disaster of a cake.
“Let’s see what the Lord wants, and then I’ll try again.”
A demon-spined chair cost ten thousand gold, which was more than most peasants would earn in five years. This one had been a gift to the Smit dukedom from the Fiber family, one of their old vassals that had since been wiped out. It had been in the fort for two hundred and six years, and although wear and tear had driven it
s value down, it was still worth a lot of gold. Smit would be forced to sell it before long, of course, but hoped to avoid peddling family heirlooms for as long as possible.
This particular demon-spined chair was being covered by the spit flying from Lord’s Dresden’s mouth.
“And you will find me the gold, you hear me, Smit?” he yelled. Smit’s manor staff, the guards waiting outside the doors, and the servants milling around in the halls would hear almost every word but would be wise enough to pretend their ears were clogged. “You are so far indebted to me, Smit, that were you suddenly able to crap out gold coins, you would spend the rest of your miserable life crouched above a chamber pot on my estate. Of course, I would need a bigger pot for your flabby arse.”
Smit’s pride stung at the insinuation that his bottom was overly large. He had exercised a lot lately. Shayna dying had been the catalyst for him to get in shape, because he would not allow himself to suffer an attack of the heart like his own father had, and leave his children alone. Having a flabby arse was a charge that could not be leveled at him anymore.
Still, he knew better than to answer Dresden back. It never, ever helped.
“Mark me,” said Dresden, only pausing his rant to swallow air, doing so open-mouthed like a fish. “Mark me, my patience is more worn than a whore in a dockside tavern. You are the only vassal who has been late in paying your tributes. Now, I understand that your peasants’ farmlands were scourged by blight and completely missed a harvest. But the world doesn’t stop to let a man get to his feet, does it? No, the man needs to force his way up! To punch the world in the face, force it back a step, and drag himself upright! You’re wallowing, Smit. Your father wasn’t a wallower. His father wasn’t. So why are you? I mean, come on, man. Shayna died, what, a year ago? It’s time to stop moping around!”
Blood rushed to Smit’s face.
His temples throbbed and he could barely breathe. He felt his fists clenching, found himself staring at Lord Dresden’s face with a terrible intensity.
Lord Dresden. Master of the Aegis province and all the dukes and nobles within it. Not just Smit’s master, but a man who commanded a seat on the king’s council. A man with a reputation for ferocity when called for.
The urge to swing his fist was so tremendous that resisting it made him sick to his stomach.
Think of the children, he told himself. He said it again and again like a mantra, the words repeating in his mind over and over and over.
Air sneaked down his throat. His mind began to unclog. With the utmost relief, he relaxed his fingers.
“What in all hells is the matter with you?” said Dresden. “Are you drunk? You look as though you’re going to pass out.”
Smit took a sip of water. “I’m fine,” he said, his tone barely in control.
Dresden seemed to have taken just a hint of a note of his fury.
“Well, take it from me - you should watch your levels of stress. Now, Smit, I hope you understand the significance of me visiting you personally. The king wants all members of his council to pay a tribute that will go toward the building of a new prison. A voluntary tribute, he says, but one that means grave consequences for any of us who are not feeling generous. As such, I am recalling all bonds forthwith. Smit, I need your debt repaid in full, and much quicker than we discussed.”
“In full? We had a contract.”
“On paper?”
“Yes. Signed in good faith by us both.”
“My copy seems to have been misplaced, Smit. As will yours be…unless you want to make this whole sorry situation any worse.”
Duke Smit spent the evening with his daughters. Though his mind was preoccupied, though he felt sick to the stomach and couldn’t eat his evening meal, he forced himself to be with them and to be as mindfully present as he could manage. He even thought about draining bloodtime from another monster and winding the evening back so he could spend it with them again, but he couldn’t afford to. When his current haul of monsters was gone, he didn’t have the gold to pay for creature catchers to procure more for him.
Only when the maid took his girls to their sleeping chambers did he send for the fort accounts. He puzzled over the ledgers for hours, snipping expenses where he could, trying desperately to dredge gold from places he hadn’t already raided yet.
He could trim back on weapon expenses for the army. Remove some of the men from service, perhaps. Every soldier cost him gold for their salaries, food, weapons, armor, lodging, and training. He could let some of the manor staff go, even though many of them had served the family all their lives.
Damn it, what a sorry, sorry mess.
“Duke!” shouted a voice from outside the manor. “Duke!”
Smit went to the window and saw Nazenfyord in the giant courtyard outside, his ever-orange eyes glowing in the darkness, the shadows of night covering his fur like a cloak. For a second, the sight of the bogan beast made Smit shudder. He supposed he’d never get used to that.
Nazenfyord was stomping around the courtyard. The bloody monster would wake up the whole manor and barracks with that booming voice of his.
Smith opened the window. “What is it?”
“I require…gold, Duke Smit-Smit. Gold for my… for my expenses,” the monster said, slurring his words.
“Well this isn’t the right way to get it. People are trying to sleep!”
“I require…gold…you see, duke. For…”
Damn it. The monster was drunk again.
Shaking his head, Smit could only watch as the monster tottered around the courtyard, before stumbling, falling face-first to the ground, and then snoring. At least that solved the problem for tonight, but he’d have to do something about the bogan soon. Either step forward with his plans to use him in the assault, or part ways with him.
He left the window and sat down. The account books waited for him, but he couldn’t face them.
Gold. Every bloody person in Xynnar wanted gold from him. People thought that a duke’s life was easy. That it was all about hunting and owning stables and journeying across Xynnar on fancy holidays. They didn’t know what it was really like. A weight around a man’s neck. A responsibility that couldn’t be shifted, because if it was, what would happen to the manor that had been in his family for centuries? To the fort they had maintained in the name of the monarchs of Xynnar? To the staff of the manor, to the peasants who lived in the Smit lands?
Sometimes he wished he’d been born a peasant and not a duke, but he also knew what an ungrateful thought that was. More to the point, he wasn’t a man to surrender responsibility.
He just needed to get the gold to shut Lord Dresden up. The Yondersun plan had shown promise, but Smit’s luck was so poor that the wasteland had suffered a rare lightning storm when he set out.
He had been prepared to play a long game, to be patient in the way he chose to make his move for the town. Patience was no longer a luxury his family coffers could afford, it seemed. He needed a quicker way.
A knock came at the door.
“Yes?”
“Beg your pardon, Duke, but a wizard is here to see you.”
“A wizard, or a mage?”
“Is there a difference?”
“Yes, in their minds.”
“I…don’t know then, sir.”
“Send him in. It isn’t as if I’ll be sleeping tonight.”
After just thirty minutes of talking with the ragged mage who had visited him unannounced, Duke Smit felt as if his fortunes might be turning.
“And you are a weathermage? I’ve never heard of those.”
“We’re rare, my good duke. Rarer than a lightning storm in the wasteland.”
“Well, you aren’t very rare at all then, are you?”
“Yes, I hear the weather has been unpredictable of late. Having heard what I can do, will you been requiring any sort of service from me, duke, or should I move on like a breeze in the night?”
Smit nodded at the plate on the table. “Would you like so
me sponge cake? I know it looks like fell out of a cow’s arse, but I assure you it tastes approximately like a sweet dessert.”
“I haven’t eaten today. I would be obliged.”
Before the duke could ask a servant to fetch some cutlery, the mage sat down and began eating with his fingers. Uncouth, yes. A dangerous act in the presence of some dukes that Smit knew, but he had never cared for manners as much as his peers.
“Tell me,” he said, “what is your policy on payment?”
“Exhuggh megh?” said the mage. He chewed and then swallowed. “My, this is a great cake! Compliments to your cook.”
“I’ll make sure he gets the message. I like to pay a man after his services have been rendered, not before. Too often a price is charged for a service that does not match up to it.”
The mage grinned, showing cake-covered teeth. “You are a duke. I know where you live. I shan’t worry about you tricking me out of gold.”
“Then perhaps we have a lot to discuss. Why not take a bed in the manor for tonight, and tomorrow, we will talk about something that I would like you to do for me in the wasteland.”
Far, far away from Duke Smit’s fort, there was an encampment of a much smaller scale. A bunch of seafaring pirates gathered around Endliver Pickering. Sitting apart from the group of trustworthy sea urchins were the boy and the girl. Endliver didn’t know why he kept them around, but it was the strangest thing. Whenever he thought about telling them to take their land-dried rumps elsewhere, he found himself instantly changing his mind.
“Alright, you tide-brained bunch of scabs,” he said. He took a swig of rum and fought against the urge to retch. He absolutely hated the stuff but had found out long ago that men like these inexplicably lost respect for a captain who didn’t drink rum. “The good ship Endliver is a week away from being her beautiful best. At that point, I will leave this sun-drenched, dung-filled hovel quicker than a rat fleeing a tavern fire. Until then, my lads, we have to keep ourselves busy. What becomes of an idle mind?”
A chorus answered. “It rots, captain.”
Dungeon Core Academy: Books 1-7 (A LitRPG Series) Page 93