by Phil Tucker
I made a face and looked away. “Fine. That sounds impressive and all, but that doesn’t make it OK.”
“Yeah, I know. We’ve argued about that a lot – my tech friends and I.” Falkon crossed his arms. “But you know what? The basic principle behind it is that these changes follow decisions made in-game. You act evil, or acquire cursed items? You pay for it. And there’s been no sign these changes are permanent. They’re felt in-game, but fade away once people log out. I’ve read the reports, people saying it felt like a dream, or being under the influence of a drug or booze. In fact, it’s one of the primary appeals for a lot of gamers. Allows them to actually feel, to actually be somebody they’re not.”
“Come on, Falkon,” I said. “You know it’s not that simple. We’re all still making memories here. Even if Euphoria undoes the neurological changes it’s imposed, we’ll still remember enjoying doing dark stuff if that’s the road we’ve chosen.”
“Yeah, true, but look at the word you just used: chosen.” He raised his hands. “I admit, it’s complex stuff, but it’s all there in the small print and people are free to log out at any time if they don’t like it. Well. Except for Death Marchers, that is.”
“I’m just saying. I don’t like the implications.”
“You’re not the only one. Maybe I’m being a little too defensive because I work for Euphoria, but yeah. I hear you. It’s… unsettling.”
We stood in silence, watching Lotharia for a beat, until Falkon turned to me. “Guess what? I leveled up! Level ten, baby!”
“Yeah? Same here. Level five.” I snorted in amusement. “Get anything good?”
“Nothing crazy. My wisdom went up for some reason – maybe ‘cause I’m mentoring you two? Survival hit level four, and Engineering hit level three. I’ve now got sixty-nine XP to spend, but I’m saving it for Behemoth Blow. A whopping one hundred XP, but it allows me to triple the power of any single attack at the expense of leaving me weakened right after. You?”
“I’m holding on to my XP, too. I’m shooting for a new spell called Shared Darkness. It’ll allow me to take a friend with me when I Shadow Step.”
Falkon raised his eyebrows. “Nice. You’d be able to move me around the battlefield, dropping me off in advantageous positions. I approve.”
I laughed. “Right. Because my talents and spells are all about augmenting your effectiveness.”
“As they should be.” He gave me a light punch on the shoulder. “Things are looking good. I was going to argue in favor of attacking this evening, but with Lotharia in rough shape I think we should wait till tomorrow. Which will give me time to put my finishing touches on the ballista. You and I can then carry down the barrels of pitch—”
“Black fire mud,” I corrected.
“Black fire mud down to the front door here in preparation for moving them into place once the ogres head out. With a little luck, Lotharia can weaken the stakes, and we can launch our attack at dawn.”
I felt an uneasy combination of excitement and dread. “You really think we can pull this off?”
“Against four level thirty-plus ogres? Sure!” He punched me in the shoulder again, harder this time. “What could possibly go wrong?”
I rubbed my shoulder. “You know you’re not supposed to say that out loud.”
“Yeah, yeah. You ready to tackle those barrels? I want to roll one into the revolving trap on the third floor and see if it doesn’t clear the room for us. Jumping over those flame jets is getting really old.”
“Sure. Just one thing: my XP window told me I earned thirty-five XP for evading the Dread Lord’s ambush.” I watched Falkon’s face carefully. “That wasn’t a random attack. I could have sworn a skeletal champion that walked past us earlier on had seen us, but when it kept walking I convinced myself it hadn’t. Now I think it went to report to the Dread Lord, who sent the others to help it capture us.”
Falkon rubbed his chin with his thumb. “Weird.”
“Yeah. And they didn’t ever actually try to hurt us. They grabbed Lotharia by the wrists, and tried to do the same to me. When I freed Lotharia from the champion, it had been carrying her deeper into Feldgrau, toward the broken tower.”
“Weird and unnerving,” said Falkon. “What does the Dread Lord want with you guys?”
“I’ve no idea,” I said. “But I’m thoroughly spooked.”
“As well you should be.” Falkon grimaced. “Well, I don’t know. I guess avoid Feldgrau? Say ‘no’ to Dread Lords and stay in school?”
“Great advice. No wonder you earned that wisdom.”
“Yeah, yeah. Let’s go. After all that screaming and running down below, some carefully controlled explosions in the revolving trap room should prove practically medicinal.”
“Wait!” Dribbler came running up. “I have something to show!”
We both paused. Immediately I thought of squirrel heads or lizard tails or the other kind of stuff my old cat Luffy had been prone to displaying so proudly on our front doormat.
“You do?” I tried to sound open. Tried really hard. “Like what?”
“Come! Very exciting! I work very hard. Boom!” He scampered back into the weird little tent complex. I sighed, got down on all fours, and followed, Falkon right behind me.
I’d never entered their miniature tent city, which proved to be a small labyrinth in its own right, a mass of tunnels made from salvaged canvas, blankets, and stained sheets. Dribbler didn’t need to bend over, and ran ahead till he reached a small tunnel dug straight down into the earth.
“My room! Come! Exciting! Very fun! We have very good time!” He hopped right off the edge and disappeared into the darkness below.
I hesitated for perhaps ten seconds, trying to convince myself to follow Dribbler into the dark, when a flare of orange light lit up what looked like a decent-sized chamber below, chisel marks clearly showing on the raw stone. Dribbler appeared, holding a candle. “Come!”
“Fine, fine,” I said. Being friends with goblins had its responsibilities, I guessed. I sat on the tunnel’s edge then slid down into the chamber, falling into a crouch, and looked around Dribbler’s quarters.
His room was surprisingly awesome. He’d hung all kinds of things on the walls, from dirty rugs to gaudy robes to chunks of mirror embedded in the rock. The far wall was left bare, and there he was carving out a diorama of some kind, with a goblin that might feasibly have been him standing on a throne holding a skull scepter over a mass of kneeling figures.
“The future,” said Dribbler, pointing at the statues that half emerged from the wall. “Not yet, but soon. Now, look!”
He shoved away a little table made of planks propped up on rocks, and revealed six miniature barrels set beside each other, each no larger than an apple. A mess of strings connected them all together.
“That a weapon of some kind?” asked Falkon, crawling forward. “Some kind of six-headed morningstar?”
“No!” Dribbler hurried around his small creation. “You want big bang for ogres, yes? But how? How make all barrels explode at once? Question from beyond the stars! But easy for me. Easy! Fuses. Watch.”
Carefully, he bent down and touched his candle flame to the outermost little rope, which was black with dried pitch. After a few moments it caught fire. The flame quickly ran down the length of the thread, then split as it carried on to six more threads.
“Impressive,” I said. “But—”
“Wait!” Dribbler waved his hands at us. “Wait for boom!”
“Right, we want the boom to come outside, when the fuses light the real barrels—”
Kaboom!
All six little barrels exploded at once, filling the chamber with smoke and percussive force. I yelled and fell onto my ass, arms thrown before my face for protection. Ears ringing, I waved the smoke away to see Dribbler dancing around the sooty spot, leaping from one foot to the
other as he waved his arms overhead.
“Black fire mud and nasty smoke!
Bits of barrel go poke, poke, poke!
Light them up and make them burn!
Kill the ogres one by one!”
The ringing started to go away. I coughed and waved the smoke around some more, then tried to click my jaw to clear away the rest of the ringing. “Dribbler.”
“Yes?” He stopped on his left foot, right held high. “You like the boom-boom shake the room?”
“I— yes.” It took a moment to swallow what I’d been about to say. “Very excellent boom. You, ah, don’t need to show us again in a small enclosed space, but yeah. That was… great.”
“Dribbler,” said Falkon, sounding unamused. “You know you could have just told us about all this? A live demonstration that nearly blew our heads off wasn’t necessary.”
“No, no, very necessary. You not believe Dribbler otherwise! You say, hahaha, stupid goblin, go poke a snake hole with your strangle stick! But now you see, now you believe! Dribbler connect your barrels. Then, when Chris touch main string, all go boom at once!”
I considered. “He’s got a point. I’d probably not have believed him.”
“I guess. Well. Looks like you’re on wiring duty tonight, Dribbler.”
“Yes!” He resumed his leaping dance.
“Black mud fire and nasty smoke!
It not funny, not a joke!
When fire goes boom it clear the room!
Send all ogres to their doom!”
I wasn’t able to sleep. Long after the goblins had disappeared into their tent-city, after Falkon’s light snores filled the tower chamber and Lotharia lain still, I sat on one of the large rocks by the ruptured wall, staring out into the night.
The odds of my dying at dawn were high. I kept saying the words over and over in my mind, till they lost all meaning: tomorrow at dawn I might die. At one point a wave of nausea passed through me, but I clamped my jaw shut and waited for it to pass.
The world outside had never looked so beautiful. The stars glimmered overhead, the mountains and rolling hills were darker shadows against the night sky. The cold made me shiver, but I was strangely glad for it. As if my body welcomed any sign of still being alive, just as my mind drank in every sight as if greedy for life while I still had it.
“Hey.”
I startled, nearly falling off my rock. Lotharia had stepped up beside me, her blanket wrapped around her shoulders.
“Hey,” I said.
“You doing all right? You’ve been sitting there for awhile.”
“I’m—I’m fine. Can’t sleep, is all.”
We stood in companionable silence, both of us staring out into the darkness.
I turned to her. “Could you do me a favor?”
“Anything.”
“If—if I don’t make it through tomorrow—”
“Chris—”
“No, hear me out. If I don’t make it, I need you to get word to my brother. Let him know what happened. I’ll give you my friend Ev’s number, she knows how to reach him in jail.” I studied her face in the gloom. “Could you do that for me?”
“Of course.” She took both my hands in hers. “But you’re going to make it.”
“I plan to try—”
“No.” She squeezed, hard. “You’re going to make it. I’m going to watch your back. I won’t let anything happen to you.”
“Lotharia,” I said. My throat felt tight. “I might not—”
She hugged me tightly, fiercely. Her cheek was smooth against my own, her face buried in my neck. .
We held each other.
Finally she stepped away and wiped the back of her hand across her eyes. “You should get some sleep.”
“Hey.” I felt light headed. “How about when this is all said and done we grab a cup of coffee? In the real world?”
Lotharia smiled. “I’d like that. I’d like that a lot.” She hesitated, then leaned in and kissed my cheek softly. “Good night, Chris.”
I watched as she returned to her sleeping pad. Then, after she’d lain down once more, turned back to stare out into the night.
18
The moment had finally arrived. After hours spent feverishly preparing the bailey in the pre-dawn gloom, I sat hunched atop one of the tiny buildings erected within the castle walls, a dark cloak wrapped around my shoulders as I watched the stables.
The ogres had returned from their hunt just after midnight. They’d been squabbling as always, shoving and insulting each other, but the sight of the bloated deer laid out before the gates had stilled their jibes. For a long moment none of them spoke, and then they laughed. One of them reached down and took the dead deer by the head and dragged it behind them into the stables.
None of them had noticed the noxious green fluid leaking from the wound in the deer’s side. Miraculously, none of them had smelled it either. Barfo had spent an hour pumping his noxious poison into the deer’s corpse after Falkon had delivered it to him, until it sides had swollen to the point of bursting. The ogres, he’d assured us, would consider the smell delightful. And somehow, he’d been right.
That had just been the first trial, however. Upon entering their stables, I was sure they’d notice the flies buzzing and swarming around the back wall. We’d killed the plague corpse and laid it outside the stable, hoping that might mitigate the worst of the smell, but even ogres would have to notice that, wouldn’t they?
I had waited, breath held, but no roar of outrage had sounded. Instead, I’d heard more coarse laughter and the sound of tearing flesh as they’d tucked into their dinner.
Amazing.
The wyvern had arrived but an hour before dawn. I’d hissed the alarm, and Lotharia and the goblins, hard at work on the stakes, had frozen as one and stared up into the sky in alarm. But the wyvern had flapped lazily into its nest, and after a tense few minutes my friends had gone back to work.
Now the trap was set. Dawn finally broke over the mountains, and the tension in my guts ratcheted up another notch. Ogres were like college kids. Not strictly nocturnal, but they apparently hated waking up before midday. Now was the hour to strike, right when they were in their deepest sleep.
Lotharia and Falkon emerged from the top of the goblin tower. They crept to the ballista, where Lotharia set to enchanting the first bolt with the hardness of diamond. Any moment now. Finally, Lotharia handed the bolt to Falkon, who slotted it in place. They both looked down at me and gave me the thumbs up.
Show time.
I took a deep breath, rubbed my palms on my thighs, then pulled out a bandana and tied it over my mouth and nose. I checked the live coal in the small metal box at my side, checked that I had my full 10 mana points, then stood.
A moment of stillness. I closed my eyes and centered my thoughts. The time for fear and planning was over. Now was the time to act.
I Shadow Stepped. Darkness enveloped me, held me tight, then released me with a sigh as I emerged behind the stables. The furious buzzing of the flies around the corpse was only rivaled by the pained groans coming from the other side of the wall. A fierce burst of exultation filled me. Didn’t sound like the ogres were feeling all that great. A thick mutter, then a long series of hard burps, followed by another wretched groan.
Perfect.
The barrels were lined up along the back wall. Dribbler’s fuses were laid out before them like rat tails. The stench of the plague corpse made my eyes water. How the hell hadn’t the ogres noticed? Could any creature really be that foul?
No matter. Focus. I knelt and opened my little metal box, held the main fuse to the coal’s white ashen surface, and then blew. A cherry core revealed itself. I kept blowing, patient and gentle, until the pitch-soaked fuse finally caught.
I dropped it and stepped back. The urge to escape immediately was overwhe
lming, but I fought it down. If for any reason the fuse failed, I’d have to relight it.
Mesmerized, I watched the flame race up the main cord, then split into six. Good job, Dribbler! Up the six cords the small blue flame danced, then, just before it blew, I turned and ran around the side of the stable toward the undead ogre’s door.
“Hey!” My shout shattered the morning stillness. “Dead and ugly! Come and get me!”
The dead ogre bounded out of the broad doorway in an instant. It never slept. Never rested. Was always vigilant, and now charged right at me. I stopped in my tracks, heart in my throat, and ran right back toward the stable. The ogres within were grunting in confusion, but no matter – getting the undead ogre close to the blast was the icing on the cake.
I ran right at the broad front doors. I caught a glimpse of the nightmare within – the partially consumed deer corpse charred on a spit over the fireplace, the ogres rousing themselves from their nests, covered in their own puke and looking out of it – and then the barrels blew.
The back wall exploded inward on a tide of smoke and fire. I screamed and I Shadow Stepped before it hit me, racing into the velvety darkness within the stables before it could be banished by the flames.
The nascent explosion was immediately muffled, swallowed by the darkness. There was a second of silence, and then I emerged back atop the small building on which I’d begun, only to be assaulted by the shockwave of the stable’s explosion as it rolled over me.
I fell into a crouch, hands clamped over my ears, and stared wide-eyed at the destruction we’d wrought. The walls of the stables had blown out, sections of the roof rising entirely before collapsing all the way down to the ground. The entire structure was demolished, the back wall taken out by the barrels and the rest undone by gravity. With a rumbling, sliding roar, the walls and roof fell upon the ogres, who rose bellowing in shock and fury.