Steele Alchemist

by Deck Davis

  “Sure thing. Faei, where’s Cason?”

  Now her expression changed. The venom drained out. Her skin was pale. What was the look on her face? Fear? He’d never seen her scared before.

  “I think he’s dead,” she said.

  “What? Faei-”

  “Just grab my bow and go and wait.”

  A couple of hours later, the sun made an appearance. Jake greeted it with a sore ass from sitting amongst the bushes a dozen feet away from the camp. Faei welcomed it on the ground with her hands seemingly tied, but with hidden cuts in the rope. He hoped that the bandits met the morning with banging headaches and dry mouths.

  It was the leader who rose first. He got up, walked just two yards from camp, turned and then urinated. When his stream ended, he went back to camp and nudged his friends awake with a soft kick to each of their stomachs.

  As the men groaned and stretched, the leader picked up the pigskin of water.

  “My mouth’s as dry as sand in a priest’s crack,” he said.

  Jake’s heart started to hammer now. He felt a yearning expectation. He knew what was coming, and now he just needed to see it. He found that he had curled his hands into fists, and he was pressing them on the ground.

  The leader unwound the string and opened the pigskin. He sloshed the water around a little, and then he lifted it to his lips. He took large gulps of it, his Adam’s apple rising and falling with each swig. Then, the other two men joined him and each had their turn at the pigskin.

  Now what happened? The dissolve potion had a delayed effect, but what about brittle bone?

  He got to his knees and then adjusted his position so he had one foot in front and one behind, like a sprinter at the blocks. He was ready to charge in at the first sign of the potion taking effect.

  But nothing had happened. The bandits had finished the water, and the leader threw the pigskin to the floor.

  Maybe he’d brewed it wrong. It could have been a bad batch. Or perhaps the bandits had some kind of natural resistance.

  “Let’s get going,” said the leader, in a ridiculously high-pitched voice that didn’t at all fit his grisly jaw and muscly frame.

  “I don’t feel right, boss,” said the smaller bandit, holding his stomach.

  “It’s called a hangover,” said the leader, and laughed.

  He walked over to the smaller man and gave him a friendly pat on the back.

  Suddenly, both men howled in pain.

  The leader held his hand in the air, and Jake saw that his fingers were bent and misshapen. The smaller man fell to the ground. His back had caved in in the middle of his shoulders, as though his bones had snapped in two. As soon as he fell to the floor he hit his face on the ground, and his cheek bones caved in. His inhuman screams were sickening to hear.

  So, this was brittle bone potion in action. Jake almost regretted brewing it. Almost. It was repulsive to watch, but he knew that these men didn’t deserve mercy. Two of them had tried to assault Faei the night before, and who knew what they were planning to do in future? Sell her to a brothel? Force her into slavery? They were scum, and they deserved to have every bone in their body crumbled into dust.

  The third man stared at his friends and watched them writhe in agony.

  “Will you two stop your bloody jesting?” he said. “There’s a merchant wagon leaving Green Pock. If we hurry, we can intercept it by midday.”

  He took a step back. His friends didn’t stop moaning, and his face began to change. He suddenly seemed to notice their broken, misshapen bones.

  Then he turned around, as if to flee.

  Faei got to her feet. In a second, she raised her bow, nocked a bolt, and let it fly.

  At such a small distance it would have killed the man no matter what, but with the brittle bone potion in effect, it ripped through his spine like it was tissue paper.

  He gurgled. He touched the bolt head that now stuck out of his belly. His eyes were wide and white, as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

  He sank to his knees. As his knee caps touched the ground they shattered, and the man screamed in agony.

  Faei marched over to him. She picked up the leader’s sword from the floor. When she was behind the man she tugged his hair and then in one movement she hacked it off.

  As she jerked his head back, the man’s skull shattered, and the light in his eyes disappeared.

  That was it, then. The battle, if you could call it that, was over. After spending hours psyching himself up for the fight, he hadn’t needed to use his dagger at all. Maybe the vial was mightier than the sword. He started to walk toward Faei.

  Somehow, the leader rose to his feet. With one hand, since the other was now a pulp of broken bones, he reached inside his coat and pulled something out of his pocket. He did this as tenderly as possible, having already figured out that even a moderate amount of pressure would break his bones.

  He looked at Faei across from him, and then at Jake.

  “One of you...is…going…to die,” he said, taking sharp intakes of breath every few words as the pain shook him. “If it’s the…last…damn…thing…”

  Evidently, it was too much effort for him to finish the sentence, so he got his point across in another way. He pointed a small crossbow at Jake’s head. It was made of dark wood and not much bigger than his hand, with the frame reaching barely beyond his wrist. One bolt sat atop of it, with the string drawn back tight.

  Faei reached for a bolt. The bandit leader moved his arm delicately until he aimed his bow at her chest.

  While the bandit focused on Faei, Jake slowly reached into his coat pocket. With the utmost care, he grabbed hold of a vial. He slid it out of his pocket and gripped it.

  Please don’t be a health potion, he thought.

  And then he threw it.

  The glass hit the bandit in the face and smashed. The bandit cried out and dropped his crossbow. Glass rained to the floor around him. Purple liquid covered his forehead, eyes nose and mouth, and his nose was shattered from where the vial had hit him.

  He dropped to the floor. His leg bones crunched on impact. He screamed now. Really screamed, not like a man but more akin to a wounded animal. Like a wolf with its paw in the mouth of a bear trap.

  The liquid on his face began to sizzle. Thin streams of smoke rose up as it ate through his flesh and then through the brittle bones of his face. His eyes popped, his lips melted.

  Then, he was silent.

  Jake sat on the floor a second and gathered himself. It had been fifty-fifty on whether he had health potion of dissolving potion in his pocket, but he’d gotten lucky.

  He looked at the man on the ground, with his splintered bones and melted face, with skin hanging off him like globs of glue.

  If this is what luck is like, I’m gonna find the nearest black cat and cross that mother’s path.

  He stood up. Just as he did, Faei cried out.

  He spun round. She clutched her right hand. Small patches of her skin were sizzling.

  She must have gotten caught by some dissolving potion!

  Faei ran over to the logs and searched for water. The pigskin had long-since been emptied, but with the brittle bone potion mixed in it, it would have been no use anyway. She picked up a half-full whiskey bottle. She uncorked it and was about to douse it on her hand.

  Oh no. Possibly the worst idea ever.

  Jake ran over and knocked it out of her hand.

  “That’ll make it worse,” he said.

  “Then do something!” cried Faei, her face turning red.

  He reached into his right pocket, grasped a vial of healing potion, and then tipped it out onto her hand. When the vial was empty, her skin finally stopped sizzling.

  “Is the pain gone any?” he said.

  She winced. She was putting a brave face on it for sure. “Never felt better in all my life.”

  “I’m so sorry,” said Jake. “I thought he was far enough away that it wouldn’t hit us.”

  Faei clut
ched her burned hand close to her chest.

  “It was him or us. He would have put a bolt in my neck if I’d moved. You did the only thing you could.”

  That seemed like small consolation. Jake watched Faei hold her throbbing hand, and he realized something worrying; she’d injured her bow hand.

  Chapter Twenty

  He got full experience points for killing two of the bandits, and a share of the experience for the one who had died due to an unfortunate accident with a bow and the angry woman wielding it. This took him to the dizzying heights of level six, freeing another recipe slot in his book, as well as increasing his HP, stamina and giving him some attribute points to spend. After topping up his intelligence, charisma and luck, he felt better.

  He found another empty pigskin amongst the bandits’ things. He filled it up from a stream nearby, and then gave it to Faei. She took a long, thirsty gulp, and after that she sat on a log with her burned hand soaking in the pigskin, hoping the water would somehow reverse the damage done by the dissolving potion.

  While she did that, Jake got to work looting the bandits. He found twelve gonil coins and four solils, which he and Faei shared. The taller man had leather armor that fit Jake, though most of it was covered in blood. He kept the chest piece and gauntlets with the idea of washing them later. If they hit real trouble he’d put them on, of course, but for now he didn’t want any of the bandit’s blood and sweat anywhere near him. He had a thing about that. Growing up, a bunch of his friends had cut their hands and become blood brothers, but Jake said no. What was wrong with a handshake?

  He finished his looting spree by confiscating the dead leader’s sword. It wasn’t much good to him with his low combat ability, but it looked like it would be worth a gonil or two. In the man’s pocket he found a necklace and a ring. They seemed to be magical judging by the blue light that traced along their outlines, but he couldn’t tell what they did. Maybe the bandit didn’t know either, and that was why he wasn’t wearing them.

  “Cason used to brew a potion of identify when he found stuff,” Faei told him, when she saw him puzzling over the items.

  “Damn. I don’t know the recipe. How’s your hand?”

  “It’s fine.”

  He could tell she was holding it in and trying to act tough.

  “C’mon. Don’t bullshit me.”

  “Okay, it stings like I just stuck it into a nest of angry vispers. I don’t even dare look at it. What if its ruined? I won’t even be able to use my bow.”

  Guilt stabbed in Jake’s stomach. Faei wouldn’t say it, but he knew it was his fault. He’d thrown the potion. Sure, he’d done it to save both their lives, but it still didn’t put a smile on his face. He decided to change the conversation.

  “Are you gonna tell me where you and Cason are going? I don’t get why he didn’t trust me enough in the first place. Why’s it gotta be this big secret?”

  “You know Cason. He’s got this mysterious guru act he likes to put on show, when he’s not drunk enough that he forgets it. He didn’t even tell me where we were going until we were hours away from the shack.”

  “So, where was it?”

  Faei crossed her legs. The pigskin of water wobbled. “He was going to see some old guy he knew years ago. Some mage, or something. Apparently, he learned some spells that would help with something.”

  “This is worryingly vague.”

  “You know Cason.”

  “Who was this mage?”

  She shrugged. “Some guy who’s been missing for years. Cason said he’d got a lead on him resurfacing somewhere on the island. We went west until we hit the hog swamp, then turned north. I don’t know where the hell we were. Definitely no place on Reaching Crest I’ve ever seen before.”

  “I don’t get it. Where’s Cason now?”

  “We went north until we reached a valley with mountains on all sides. It was covered with waist-high shrubs, so it was hard to see much. Eventually, Cason found a little wooden doorway laying on the ground in the only place where there weren’t any shrubs.”

  “Did you go inside?”

  “Cason opened it. There was a tunnel underneath. He was itching to hurry into it, but my feet were burning. We’d been walking since day break, and my calves felt like molten lava. And course, I was carrying most of our stuff, since Cason has about as much muscle tone as a cricket. It was well into night time, so I said I wanted a few hours of sleep before we pushed on.”

  “So where did it lead?” asked Jake. His real question was ‘where’s Cason?’, but he’d already asked that, and he knew she’d get around to it eventually.

  “This is the thing. Cason was supposed to wake me after a couple of hours. But when I woke up, it was daylight. Next thing I noticed was that there was blood everywhere; all over the ground, in the mouth of the tunnel, splattered over the shrubs. The tunnel was blocked off, as if someone had collapsed it. Though how they did that without waking me, I’ll never know.”

  “Shit. So, is Cason…”

  Faei said nothing. She didn’t need to, because it seemed like the wind did all her talking for her when it let out a loud howl as it blew through the cavities in the hillside behind them. He tried to imagine the tunnel and the blood, and he grasped for other explanations, but there were none. Cason was missing. He’d been taken in a struggle. His odds weren’t great. Or were they?

  “Hang on. If someone had murdered him, they wouldn’t have carried him away, would they?” he said. “And let’s be honest; they’d have killed you too. In your sleep. One quick slice across your throat.”

  “Delightful imagery, Jake. You’re a poet.”

  “I’m right, aren’t I?”

  “As much as I’d like to call you an idiot, you’re probably right.”

  “Any idea where the tunnel went?”

  “It was too dark the night before, and it was blocked off when I woke. There was a massive pile of rocks. It must have been a mage. There’s no way someone could have made the blockade while I was sleeping.”

  “Well, they managed to violently kidnap or kill Cason while you were asleep.”

  Faei glared at him. “What are you trying to say?”

  “Sorry, Faei. I didn’t mean anything by it, it just came out wrong. What happened after that? How’d you end up with these bozos?”

  “I was looking in the tunnel when I heard footsteps behind me. I was just about to turn when something whacked my skull, and I blacked out. When I woke up, I was in the company of our bandit friends.”

  It sounded like she’d had the unluckiest day ever. First Cason was taken, and then she was kidnapped. There was no way this was a coincidence. He had so many questions, but the next he asked was a selfish one.

  “This lead Cason had. The old mage…did it have anything to do with portals?”

  “That’s the impression I got.”

  “And did he tell you anything else about the old wizard guy?”

  “Just that he knew him from way back. Apparently, he got kicked out from mage college for some dark stuff, and then he went missing.”

  “What kind of dark stuff?”

  She shrugged. “Dark stuff that mages do when they get bored. I don’t know, summoning a sex demon? Casting a curse spell on an instructor? Mages are strange. Anyway, not that I’m ungrateful, but why are you here, Jake? Was everything okay at the shack? What have you been doing?”

  Jake thought about the last twenty-four hours. About experimenting with potions, meeting Eric Cratter, killing Eric Cratter, then using Faei’s hair in a follow potion.

  “I made a new friend,” he said. “And I brewed up a few things.”

  He told her everything that had happened with Eric, repeating their conversation as best he could remember it. As he retold the story, a feeling nagged at him. It was a slight tugging in his stomach, a kind of lurching sensation. He guessed it was guilt, but he didn’t understand why. It hadn’t been nice to watch Eric die an agonizing death at the hands of his dissolve potion, but he�
�d had no choice. Eric had rumbled Jake as being from somewhere else, hadn’t he? Eventually, he would have pulled his dagger and tried to kill him.

  As much as his logic seemed sound, it still didn’t completely push the feeling away. He’d killed a man. This wasn’t a cock imp or some other creature, but a person. He could explain it however he liked, but there were no words that adequately made you forget the raspy sounds of a man’s last breath, or the way he grasped with his hands as if reaching out for someone to save him.