In Service of the Pharaoh (League of Losers Book #2)

by Michael Atamanov

  Why did I do that? I had my reasons. There was no need for the sherkh to know which way we were headed. This prisoner’s vow not to flee didn’t prevent him from pointing out the way for his kin or revealing our position with loud noises, or doing a hundred other things that could lead to our capture. Of course, we could have tied and gagged him. But although it might seem strange and even paradoxical, a squad of sherkhs in the vicinity of the Southern Ruins might actually help us. We could get away from their invisible infantry at speed up on our mounts, whereas the people of the New Pharaohs, who moved on fast raptorhounds, would be harder to escape. But the more enemies that concentrated their forces around the Southern Ruins, the greater the chance that they would fight amongst themselves. The Lamia and the humans. The humans and the sherkhs. The sherkhs and the Lamia. What if it actually worked out?

  Diplomacy skill increased to level seven!

  The Engineer and the Mechanic ran off to saddle the animals, but Margarita didn’t go anywhere.

  “I need to talk to you, Sergeant. Alone.”

  I took the girl off to the side, and Lady Victoria’s former slave girl began her story. The longer she spoke, the higher my eyebrows went. The Pharaoh’s wife was… not human, but a cat?! And she desperately needed the baby Hope, who she’d kidnapped from us. That explained a lot. Now I regretted shouting at the sherkh Huntress — peace with the Pharaoh’s wife was never going to happen anyway. But maybe the life of a little princess, the official daughter of the Pharaoh and Lady Victoria Bastet, was a better fate for little Hope than a journey fraught with danger in the League of Losers?

  And then… No, this was too much even for our Luck! A magical defensive dome suddenly descended over the castle, shimmering green as flashes of lightning danced across its surface.

  “I get the impression that you were about to violate our agreement and leave my castle without permission!” the Minotaur shouted, his mighty roar booming across the courtyard, making me shiver. “You won’t get out now. You won’t be going anywhere until you’ve done everything you promised! Enough chatter! Back to work, slackers!”

  The tone of the castle’s master had definitely changed for the worse. Until now, the Minotaur hadn’t allowed himself to be so rude to the workers he’d invited in. I suspected that it would only get worse from here. I didn’t know when the Minotaur would throw off his last semblance of decorum and attack us, but I could feel the moment coming.

  Chapter 34 [Sergeant]

  Preparation

  THIS TIME, the Minotaur went back to the central hall after all, and I breathed a sigh of relief. The monstrous bull-man had decided not to attack us just yet. The atmosphere among my companions had dropped like a stone. As their leader, I had to wade in and lift their spirits right away. Sure, the Minotaur locked us in his castle. So what? We’re all alive and well, there are many of us, and we have all kinds of specialists. We have snares and traps, strong battle beasts, weapons, tools, materials. We’ll see who’s the victim here! It’s time we all remembered that this monster is the reason we came to the Southern Ruins! This is a time for action, not despair!

  Diplomacy skill increased to level eight!

  It worked, and I didn’t even need Whiskers around to soothe them. Their faces brightened and I heard no more cries along the lines of “AHHHH!!! We’re all going to die!” A second wind swept away their despair and doom, along with a renewed desire to survive and show the whole world that we could do it, even against all the odds. While keeping up appearances by continuing our work on the second half of the gate, we quietly discussed what we had to do.

  The magic defenses prevented us from leaving this place. And that meant that our most important task was to find out how the defenses turned on and off. We had to find the lever or device that operated it, and that was probably in the chambers where the Minotaur spent most of his time. Perhaps even in the central hall where the horned beast slept. It went without saying that the castle’s master wouldn’t like us exploring those places, so this was a job for our stealther.

  After that, we’d need to fashion a safe place in the castle where neither the Minotaur nor the Lamia could get in, a place to hide little Hope, and everyone else if things turned really bad. The second floor of the northern wing was the obvious choice — just remove the staircase leading up to it again and it would take special climbing gear to get up there! Up there were narrow arrowslit windows, and the stone walls were thick and strong. All we would have to do is block off the only entrance with a fence of strong logs and make ourselves some sharpened spears, and the Minotaur would never get in!

  Everyone liked the idea, and it wouldn’t take long to execute, so I ordered the Mechanic and the Engineer to get started. In theory, we could outlast a siege up on the second floor. In practice, we’d run out of food and water fast. So I told Margarita to go and prepare some supplies on the second floor — move our things there, fill up all our available containers with well water and cook all the meat we had left. We were three days in, and some of the meat was already starting to spoil and stink. We had to get it cooked right away. I asked Margarita not to throw away the most rotten pieces, but to give them to me instead. The castle was home to countless rats. We’d chased them away and even tried hunting them, but now I had a better idea. I was a Beast Catcher, after all; I could tame the critters. A pack of saber-toothed rodents could make good reinforcements!

  With a big bag of rotting meat and a bright flashlight in hand, I descended into the castle’s damp, half-ruined cellar. A few corridors led off into the darkness, but they were all covered over with stones or bars. No way through. Lighting my way with the flashlight, I walked into the central chamber. This must have once been a wine cellar and pantry, but all that remained of its former luxury was a few huge withered wine barrels and rusty hooks in the ceiling beams for hanging carcasses and other food.

  There were, however, plenty of rats. Brown, gray, black… From the smallest level one rats to level 70+ graying veterans at least the size of a spaniel. Since the rats somehow didn’t count as pack animals even though they lived in huge families, I had no fear of them at all — my Beast Catcher class abilities kept me safe from their aggression.

  The rats tamed very easily. No doubt that was from my Beast Catcher perks too. Just one small piece of stinking meat was usually enough, sometimes two. It was far harder to pick out the largest and highest-level rats from among the teeming motley mass out of which I was trying to make my army. When another rat grabbed the piece of meat I threw before the rat I wanted to tame, I ordered the pets I’d already tamed to kill the thief, to free up space for more valuable specimens.

  My Beast Catcher still had a limited maximum number of pets, although it was pretty high. To be precise, I could keep control of forty-six pets at a time. My Beast Master skill decided the limit, and with that skill at level sixteen and the Beast Catcher class bonuses (+20 to Beast Master skill), the maximum number of pets my Sergeant had went up to exactly forty-six.

  Taming skill increased to level sixty-five!

  Beast Master skill increased to level seventeen!

  Nice, now the limit it was forty-seven. Whiskers the cat, Marsh Mistress the cruel arachnoscorp, Atlas the giga-komodo, Darkness the chimeric cougar, and Katy and Tick-Tock, the two creeping crocodiles. I filled up all the other free slots with rats. But that wasn’t all! I put the fifteen free skill points I had into the Beast Master skill too, raising it to level thirty-two and my pet limit to sixty-two. Then I used ten Mutation Points to add the Large Pack Alpha mutation to the Beast Master skill, giving me half again as many pets. Ninety-three!

  But I didn’t stop there — now I started giving pets to my allies. Unfortunately, I couldn’t gift pets to the members of our group that weren’t in the castle, but even without them, there were plenty of recipients. Ten tamed rats each to Engineer Max Dubovitsky, Huntress Anita Ur Vaye, Mechanic Edward Samarsky, Gunner Margarita Ovchinnikov and even little baby Hope without a class. The baby hersel
f couldn’t make the conscious decision to accept the gift, but her designated ‘mother’ Anita Ur Vaye did it for her. And that made me think hard.

  How were family ties formed in this world? All Julie and I did was start calling each other brother and sister and behaving accordingly, and the information was officially set in our profiles. I declared Shelly my soul mate, and matched my words with tenderness toward her, along with certain other actions, and then other players knew about our close relationship status right away. So maybe it was enough for a woman to fall in love with someone else’s abandoned baby girl and call that girl a daughter, and that meant the game’s algorithms treated her like the mother? I’d seen the joy on Hope’s face when her pointy-eared mother picked her up, fussed over her and fed her milk from a bottle. Maybe that meant the sherkh Huntress’s claim to motherhood of the human girl was fully justified?

  Intellect increased to 12.

  Wow… Until now, I’d only gained Strength, Agility and Physique. I’d thought that Intellect and Perception were just out of my wheelhouse, lost causes. But thinking about complex things like the nature of this world had leveled up even my character’s weak wit. And although I saw no visible changes or any new information on the world around me, I still felt encouraged. Not all was lost — I could level up even my worst stats! Now I had to figure out how to level up Perception, another of my Beast Catcher’s weaknesses.

  I ran out of meat for taming, so I went to see Margarita for more, then I called Darkness down and ordered her to catch the neutral rats. Rats are cannibals by nature, so the unscrupulous rodents ate rat meat too.

  Beast Master skill increased to level thirty-three!

  Not bad, and perfect timing. I sat down on a rickety old chair and looked around at the ocean of life filling up the cellar. It had been a lot of work, but it was worth it! A hundred and thirty-nine tamed saber-toothed rats! A gray chattering cohort patiently awaiting its hour in the basement, ready to stream out at my first signal and sweep away the enemy with their numbers! I even started to feel a bit sorry for the Minotaur and his scaly girlfriend the Lamia. They wouldn’t know what hit them!

  * * *

  The barricade on the second floor was already practically ready. It wasn’t visible from the first floor, and the castle’s owner had no idea of our preparations yet. I even brought the Marsh Mistress up to the second floor and ordered the giant spider to weave a strong sticky web over the passageway in front of our wooden bars, leaving only a small crawlway for our group to pass through. The spiderweb worked both as extra protection and to hide our shelter from untimely detection. I gave the Engineer and the Mechanic a new job — to think about which traps we could use. If the massive horned beast stuck his nose in here, he’d find plenty of surprises!

  In the meantime, it was getting dark. Fearsome stormclouds stretched across the whole sky again, although there was no rain. Our invisible Huntress came back downcast. She hadn’t found a device to switch off the magic defenses, although she’d searched the whole castle from the cellar to the tallest spire. According to the girl, the only place where such a device might be was in the big central hall. A huge natural boulder lay there by one of the walls, apparently hauled in from far away for some reason. No human or sherkh would be able to lift such a weighty stone alone. But the stone had often been moved aside — the many fresh scratches on the old darkened floor made that clear. It had to be one of the Minotaur’s secret hiding places.

  On top of all that, Anita said she’d looked out from a watchtower and seen numerous humans in the castle’s vicinity. At least fifty, most with weapons and riding raptorhounds. The health-burning magical defenses kept them at a distance, and the strangers just circled the castle at from a long way out. The Huntress couldn’t read their character information so far away. But even without that, I felt pretty confident that I knew who they were here for.

  Just as I finished talking to Anita, the Minotaur walked into the courtyard. He stank of wine and smoke, and the beast’s walk was far from steady.

  “You’re taking too long with the gates! Slackers! Leave it, I have another job for you. I need a bed! I must have a bed in the great hall by nightfall!”

  I promised the castle’s master that we’d get right to it. But the bed he wanted would be huge and very heavy. We wouldn’t be able to carry it through the corridors; we’d have to build it in the hall. And that meant saws rasping, hammers striking, builders talking… Could he stand the noise? Maybe it would be better to go for a walk for two or three hours while we completed his order? And by the way, there are some suspicious types hanging around outside the castle… Is that normal? Or would the Minotaur like to chase them away, to keep them out of his domain?

  Diplomacy skill increased to level nine!

  “Thieves again…” the Minotaur grumbled, finishing off his bottle of wine in a gulp and hefting his poleaxe onto his shoulder. “Well, that’s even better. I need humans…” he licked his lips, and I wondered again whether the Cartographer was wrong — maybe the Minotaur really did eat human meat. “I’ll take a stroll through the grounds, teach those troublemakers a lesson. You have three hours to build that bed. If you manage it, then I’ll lower the defenses and let you go in peace, as promised. You are a good man, Sergeant. Smart, useful. So do try to get it done. I don’t want to have to kill you. Or that curly-haired boy. He reminds me of a childhood friend who was just as much a good-for-nothing dumbass. All he has to do is draw some playing cards for me, then he can go wherever his heart desires.”

  The Minotaur leaned down with a groan, pressed his broad palm down into the ash of our fire and the mud beneath it. Then he drew black stripes on his face and chest.

  “Ever seen Commando, with Schwarzenegger?” he asked me. “That’s roughly what’s about to happen. Blood, guts, piles of corpses. Always the way… Ugh, I hate killing humans sober,” the half-bull beast took another bottle of wine out of the apparently bottomless pocket of his leather vest, pulled out the cork with his teeth and drained it in one long swig. “Well, I’m off to tidy up my kingdom. Remember, Sergeant, you have three hours! Unless you want to share their fate.”

  * * *

  Three hours in the absence of the castle’s lord. Plenty of time. We moved into the main hall, work tools in hand. The whole room was filled with garbage, empty bottles and ancient books, most in terrible condition. There really was a shed snakeskin on the floor. Judging by its size, the Lamia was just huge! My eye landed on the large box that the castle’s master had carried inside so carefully. I threw open the lid and scratched my head thoughtfully. Inside was a cradle, painstakingly carved out of light wood. That was a surprise. Did the Minotaur and the Lamia have a child together? Didn’t snakes lay eggs..? Come to think of it, I couldn’t imagine how two creatures so different could reproduce at all, let alone what their offspring might look like.

  “There it is!” Anita said, pointing at the big boulder lying by the far wall. It certainly seemed pretty out of place here in the hall.

  Using some wood we’d brought in as a lever, we raised and moved aside the massive stone.

  ATTENTION! You found the second of the eight hidden areas in the game’s starter zone!

  The rate at which you gain experience and skills has been tripled.

  Duration: 48 hours.

  Wow! There it was! In a shallow niche beneath the floor was a block of green stone with some strange symbols engraved on it. And the symbols glowed!

  Your character does not have enough Intellect to identify this item.

  Despite my recent intellectual progress, my Sergeant was apparently still too dumb. But it didn’t matter! I already knew we’d found exactly what we were looking for. Anyway, our Engineer had enough Intellect to confirm that the stone we’d found was indeed the mobile generator for the fortress’s defenses, and it was active. But it took a special key to enable or disable the magical artifact, a key that we didn’t have. No doubt the Minotaur kept it with him.

  “Mobile d
efense generator?” the Mechanic asked, who had, incidentally, just hit level twenty-five. “Does that mean we can move it and deploy it somewhere else? Then we’ll have the same defenses wherever we build our house!”

  “In theory, yeah,” Max said, “but damn, it’s heavy. Well over four hundred pounds. And…” He looked closer at the valuable object, tried to lift it up before letting go quickly. “Ouch! It’s freezing. So cold it burns your hand.” He showed everyone his palms, where white burn blisters were forming.

  I asked them not to touch the generator for now and to put the boulder back. We couldn’t let the Minotaur know that we’d found his hiding place. It was time to get on with building the huge bed. After all, if there was a chance to solve things with the Minotaur peacefully, then why not use it? True, the Lamia was still a problem. She might want to dine on all the strangers in the castle as soon as she got here. But if the Minotaur could hold back his girlfriend’s bloodthirsty impulses, then maybe things would go fine.

  “Sergeant, a moment…” Max led me off to the side and started whispering to me once we were out of earshot. “I have a great idea for where we can put our traps and loop snares. On that huge bed! I can make it so that the planks move aside under the Minotaur’s weight and cause metal cables to snap down on his arms and legs, binding him where he lies. We can put some mantraps beneath the bed too, to clamp down on his limbs, just to make sure. We’ll build them as strong as possible so that even that mighty beast won’t be able to get out of it or break it. Three hours should be more than enough to make the bed and traps. We’ll probably have time to spare. Then we take the key from the helpless Minotaur, deactivate the defenses and escape the castle!”

  Eh… I had mixed feelings. On the one hand, the Engineer was suggesting a good way to get out of the tough situation we’d gotten into. On the other, despite all his ferocity and obvious danger, the Minotaur hadn’t done anything bad to us yet. Treating him that way would be traitorous.