“You failed the trial, though you paid the price in blood, and it will count. You may continue on,” the familiar voice announced with no emotion whatsoever.
The blade slid back into the wall, leaving Lane to sink down to his knees and then collapse on his side. I knelt down next to him and cradled his head.
“Oh, Gods, it was so simple. That’s what you need the guile for. Do you see? If you let your attention wander for just a second, you lose. So simple,” Lane coughed. “So simple.”
Could player potions work on him? I thought. Deciding to give it a try, I dumped out all the potions I had in my bag.
“Here take these,” I said, thrusting them into his arms. “Drink them all; they may help.”
“Just keep going,” Lane replied, pushing me away. “I may die or I may not, but you’re no doctor. You can’t help. If you finish this, come back and get me; if not, I’ll probably die here anyway. Don’t waste time; I probably don’t have much left.”
I leaned him up against the wall, headed toward the door hiding the last trial, and pushed it open.
You used the Key of Wisdom.
Darkness met me right at the doorway. I glanced back at Lane to see him pulling a rag out from under his collar, apparently hoping to stop the blood. He wasn’t paying me a lick of attention as he sat there wheezing.
I sighed and stepped into the darkness.
It didn’t last for long. As soon as I was inside and the door closed behind me, a blinding light hit me with the power of two or three suns. It slammed into my eyes, which I instinctively covered with my hand.
“What?” a familiar voice said. “Magic, and it’s just as good as any electric searchlight, no?”
“Certainly,” I muttered. “It’s blindingly good; I can’t see a thing. You think that’s fair?”
“Oh, come on,” the voice answered. “You’re looking for things to be fair after you broke into someone else’s temple. You want to leave with a treasure stored here for centuries, and you say it’s not fair?”
“It’s a game,” was all I could mumble. “So you can take your moralizing somewhere else.”
“A game, not a game, whatever. That doesn’t change the concepts human society has developed throughout history. So, you’re saying it’s fine to break into temples and steal so long as you’re playing a game?”
“Of course. And if you’re playing a thief, that’s how you have to do it. It’s the only way you can level-up your class abilities.”
“Just a bunch of sophistry,” the voice replied. “Though there’s something to it, I won’t deny that. Light!”
I heard a clap, and the blinding light dimmed to something more reasonable. My eyes no longer in danger, I pulled my hand away from them and, for the first time, saw the person I was speaking to standing a few steps away from me. Looking at me with a smile and a wink was an incredibly familiar face. And why not familiar? I was looking at myself.
“Mmm?” I spun around in front of me. “Surprised?”
“What’s there to be surprised about?” I grunted. “If you’d have told me you were my father, sure, but this…”
“It would have been plagiarism if I’d said that,” the second me said. “This is more a non-trivial turn of events.”
“A predictable and worn-out trope,” I replied with a shrug. “It’s happened a hundred times, in the movies and in books, too.”
“How am I supposed to know what’s in your books, not to mention movies I’ve never even heard of?” he shot back. “They haven’t been invented here yet.”
“You know about ‘I’m your father,’ but not about literature?” I was having a hard time believing me. “You’ve obviously been digging around in my head; that wasn’t hard to guess, seeing as how you’re in my skin. So, the rules of the genre say that you’re supposed to know everything. You’re lying if you say anything else. That’s how it goes.”
“So what if it does?” I replied cantankerously. “What’s the problem? I’ll do what I want.”
“Okay, this isn’t going anywhere.” There was no point getting into an argument with myself while Lane lay wounded on the other side of the door. “What do you need? Or, maybe, what do you want?”
“That’s a strange question,” my twin said with a grunt. “I don’t want you to have what’s in there.”
The other me’s hand gestured toward a small cabinet in the corner of the room.
“Why not? It doesn’t belong to you, does it?” I was starting to realize who I was talking to, and I didn’t like it in the least. If I’m right, and I can prove it, I’m going to have to call Zimin as soon as I get out of the game. Does he know what’s going on here? The kind of quest this was meant that the whole thing was closely monitored, and so he probably did, but the whole thing was very odd.
“No, it doesn’t,” the other me said with a smile. “But it doesn’t belong to you either.”
“A-ha-a-a,” I said, waving a finger under that me’s nose. “It may not belong to me but I have a quest for it and I’m supposed to return it to its rightful owner.”
“You think she’s its owner?” I replied indignantly. “She wasn’t even around when it was created.”
“Okay, can we wrap this up? It’s pointless,” I said. “Are you going to give me the gong of your own free will or am I going to have to take it by force?”
“The gong?” I swear by all that is holy, the other me was shocked. “Why the gong?”
“Because that’s what I need! I need the gong!” I was starting to get frustrated.
If I’m actually this dense in real life, and especially if I make that idiotic face, I’m starting to realize why Elvira was always mad at me. And poor Vika… How can she possibly live with me?
“Hmm, the gong… Well, I won’t give you the gong, either.”
“Because I don’t have the right papers?” My frustration was turning to anger.
“No,” my twin answered, his tone overly friendly. “Because you’re a dead man, and dead men don’t need things like that.”
His sword, which at least looked the same as the one I had, lashed out even before he finished talking.
I wasn’t exactly expecting him to attack but I’d gradually been easing my way backward as we talked—and that was what saved my skin. The sword whistled past my stomach and somehow didn’t slice through my face.
“You rat!” I roared at me, pulling out my sword as well.
Steel clashed with steel, our blades swept along each other’s to be stopped by the guards, and two identical faces found themselves staring at each other, teeth grinding.
We pulled our swords back and started to circle each other. A strike I aimed at the lower half of his body was blocked instantly, and he, in turn, incorrectly thought a feint would disguise his intention to cut through my upper half.
“We could be at this for a while,” I noted.
“No, not more than an hour,” my twin answered cold-bloodedly. “That’s when you’ll start to get tired, and I’ll pick that moment to slice open your guts.”
“Well, aren’t we bloodthirsty!”
“It’s justice,” he explained. “I didn’t come after you; you came here to me. We already discussed this. And it’ll be justice for you to die at your own hand.”
I took another two steps backward and, carefully watching his sword, tried to figure out what bothered me about what he’d just said.
Die at your own hand. Why not at his? Maybe he can’t kill me? He couldn’t have had much of a physical body, meaning that killing mortals would have been tricky for him. Also, most of the gods in the myths I’d read weren’t allowed to kill mortals. Unless the mortals themselves…
“You’re right,” I told my twin. “You’re right about everything.”
“What?” My eyes popped out of my head.
“I came to your temple, I tried to take something that belongs to you, I walked all over everything… Go ahead, kill me.”
Wouldn’t it be perfect if h
e up and slammed his sword into my side?
“Ah, damn it,” the second me said, disappointment on his face and his sword clattering to the floor. “You guessed?”
“The trial or who you actually are?” I asked.
“Both.” My double started to melt into the air.
“I guessed the first one almost right away, though the second took me until just now,” I replied honestly.
“Good work. The only problem is that you picked the wrong god to worship.” The other version of me was almost transparent, and my facial features blurred. They took on a grotesque shape before starting to look more and more like a monkey. “Oh, what we could have done if you’d have picked me!”
“Well, I can’t do anything about that now,” I responded with a shrug.
“That’s a tricky question—we’ll discuss it later. Just remember,” the voice said, the form now almost invisible, “that you can’t put too much stock in what the gods or their servants say. For everything they give you, they demand double in return. I do the same thing.”
Bom-m-m. The bell rang out once more.
“You passed the trial and can collect your reward,” the voice called out, as dispassionately as ever.
Ah-ha! I made it to the end. To be fair, I don’t know what would have happened if it hadn’t hit me that I was talking with Hannuman himself. I’d realized that when I saw the way the second me moved—it was much more monkey-like than human—and the statue on the roof had helped as well. All that was left of the gods was a few rocks they’d touched as well as their deep, hidden temples. Not many could get into them, and you only had a shot if you knew where they were. But you? You have a whole statue, and it’s even made out of gold. That didn’t happen. From there, the logic was simple. But why he was there in the first place was a completely separate matter. Why is he in Fayroll if all the rest departed? That was the question I needed to answer, or at least, I really wanted to.
I walked over to the cabinet the monkey god had pointed at and opened it. It didn’t have a hook, a lock, or anything—just a handle.
There was a selection of items on the shelves inside: crystal shards, a fan, a funny little contraption that looked like a braided bracelet, a necklace made with teeth that looked like they came from an enormous animal, a dog collar, a stone rod covered in runes, a tiny guillotine, a ruby that flashed blood-red in the light, and quite a bit more.
I’m taking it all; it’s mine now, I thought greedily, recognizing that everything in front of me represented both powerful artifacts and my retirement in both the digital and real worlds.
“Yeah, right!” a familiar voice whispered in my ear, mixing sarcasm with threat. “Take your gong, and then I don’t ever want to see you in my temple again. We’ll meet somewhere else later if you want.”
The items in the cabinet shook as if pushed aside by an invisible hand, and I saw the gong perched up against one of the sides. It was small and made from brass, a disk hanging from two rings. I reached out and took it.
You completed a quest: Gong of the Goddess.
You found the Gong of the Goddess.
To receive your reward, talk to Idrissa the South.
Ah, that has to be it. I’ll dump it in my bag and get out of here. I hope Lane is still alive.
“And never come back,” the darkness rustled behind me. I couldn’t see him, though I could certainly sense that he was there. Something creaked, I saw the light of the doorway and stepped through it, and just barely missed having the door smack me in the rear end.
“Success?” a pale Lane asked from his spot slumped against the wall. Blood pooled under him.
“Yep, everything’s fine. Did you drink the potions?”
“Oh, they wouldn’t work on me, and I didn’t want to waste them.” Lane held the vials and beakers out to me.
I stashed them in my bag, grabbed him under the arm, and started toward the exit. His body was limp, his legs barely working.
“Don’t worry, buddy,” I said. “We’ll get you back to the base, and the doctor will get you all patched up. Then we’ll go out for a drink—something nice and expensive!”
“Better some Grenwi Vine,” Lane muttered. “Back then, I tried some on a bet in my father’s castle…”
Great, so he’s hallucinating now…
***
Back in the arena, neither the wild man’s body nor Ur’s was anywhere to be seen. It was like they’d evaporated into thin air.
“I hope they buried the Northerner with honor,” Lane saying, coming out of his stupor. “He deserved that.”
I didn’t say anything, though I was sure he had been. Hannuman was a rogue’s rogue, though he obviously had an appreciation for people who knew their way around a fight.
“The only problem,” Lane mumbled as we stumbled our way up the corridor, “is that I can’t kill those two bastards. They need it. Can you take care of that yourself?”
“Why not?” I replied. “Although it was actually a good thing they weren’t with us.”
“Yes?” Lane said, surprised.
“Of course,” I informed him confidently. “Just imagine what they would have done in the room with the gold. We never would have gotten out there. The trap was one thing, though I’m sure the gold was cursed.”
“Agreed,” Lane said with a nod. “But they still need to die.”
“If they need to die, they’ll die,” I replied compliantly. “Just as soon as we get out of the temple and back to the base.”
“That’s the exit right up there.” Lane’s voice was getting weaker and weaker.
I took a deep breath of fresh air as we walked out of the temple. This had better be the last time I have to deal with—
“Ah-ha, we’ve been waiting for you,” said an awfully familiar voice that dashed my hopes of getting back to the base undisturbed. “We were starting to get worried, we thought something might have happened to you, my friend.”
Chapter Seventeen
In which the hero decides he got off easy.
“Who’s that so concerned about us?” Lane croaked.
“Our welcoming party,” I responded gloomily as I looked around at the five players forming a semi-circle twenty steps away from the temple. “Complete with balloons and flowers.”
And it was indeed a warm welcome we received. There were Miurat, who was smiling amiably; a serious-faced Romuil; an archer I didn’t know named Drang; Fattah, who waved when our glances met; and… Ah-ha! That’s who I couldn’t put my finger on in Maykong. Really, it wasn’t much of a surprise that I’d had a hard time recognizing him since we’d only met once. It was Ronin, who I’d cut up skeletons with way back in Gringvort when I was a Thunderbird noob. The same one who hadn’t been let into the clan because he was a poor-tempered rat.
He had apparently found a group that fit him, and it really was quite the group. He’d also found a pretty good clan; over his head, as well as those of the rest of the welcoming party, was the symbol and name of the clan they belonged to. In this case, it was two shields turned toward each other, and the name made it clear for anyone who hadn’t guessed already that they were with the Double Shields.
“Surprised?” Miurat was enjoying the situation. He really was a born actor; his timing was impeccable, he always had an audience, and he performed like he was on stage. Like a little Nemirovich-Danchenko.
“Yep,” I answered. “I didn’t expect this in the least. And, to be honest, I’m a bit surprised by who’s here.”
“How many are there?” Lane asked. He was still leaning heavily on my shoulder, and by that time, he couldn’t even lift his head. Things were looking bad for him. “Can the two of us take them?”
“Oh, I’ll be fine without you, even,” I assured him. “As soon as I send you back to base, I’ll chop them into pieces.”
Ronin guffawed loudly, while sarcastic smiles flitted across the faces of Romuil and Drang.
“Miurat, let me send Lane back to our base. He didn’t do anyth
ing to you, and you won’t get anything from him dying,” I said.
“I heard you got in deep with the NPCs,” Ronin laughed, “but I thought everyone was lying—that does happen. But it turns out it’s true! What a loser.”
There was no point responding to him, and so I kept my gaze fixed on Miurat, who was obviously their leader. The officer symbol above his head next to the clan emblem also pointed to that fact.
“Well, if you don’t mind spending a scroll, then go for it. And really, you’re more than welcome to head back with him—alive and in one piece.”
“If?” I asked the predictable question, expecting an equally predictable answer.
“No ifs,” Miurat said with a smile. “It’s ‘as soon as.’ As soon as you give me what you got from the Temple of Hannuman.”
Huh, he knows whose temple it is. Although… There were plenty of quests tied to the temple, so, on second thought, I realized there wasn’t anything surprising about his admission. Their trap had been laid beautifully, as well, and I thought I knew how they did it, though I wanted to hear from the source if I was right. First, however, there was Lane. He’d lost consciousness as we talked, and I hoped that was all he’d lost. Okay, good, he’s breathing, if weakly. He’s alive.
“I imagine you wouldn’t believe me if I told you I didn’t get anything I could hand over to you?” I asked.
“Of course not,” Miurat confirmed. “But we can talk about that.”
“I’d be happy to, but first let me send my friend to see a doctor. Otherwise, he won’t make it.” Ronin and Drang snorted simultaneously when I referred to Lane as my friend.
“I don’t know how happy you’ll be, but as far as your friend goes,” Miurat said, turning to Fattah and nodding to him, “give your comrade here—or, rather, your former comrade—a scroll so he can send him where he needs to go.”
Fattah walked over and held out his hand. “This isn’t personal,” he said. “I hope you understand…”
“Sure, I do,” I replied, handing him a scroll and dumping Lane, who was still unconscious, onto his shoulder. “Your clan is your clan. I guess you aren’t in the Free Companies anymore?”
Fayroll [04] Gong and Chalice Page 22