by Hugo Huesca
“Klek—” Ed started.
“That was a long time ago, though,” Klek said. He lifted his head, and Ed saw that the confident grin was back. “Now I’ve a part to play. I’m the cloud’s protector, and their link with the outside world. And, as far as I’m concerned, you and everyone in the Haunt are part of my cloud, so it’s my duty to grow as strong as I can to protect you, too. It’s what Virp would’ve wanted. I know I’m not much, but that’s why I must work harder than everyone.”
“You know what?” asked Lavy softly. “I don’t mind losing another fingernail.”
“Yeah, me neither,” said Alder.
Ed cleaned a bit of dust that had gotten in his eye. “And here I was thinking that protecting you was my duty. Turns out that you’ve been protecting us all along, right, Klek?” he asked.
“Right,” Klek said, and gave him a thumbs up. “Your part is just to hang by your Seat and look scary. I’ll handle the rest.”
Your Attributes have increased: Brawn +1.
Due to starting specialized training, your untrained combat skill has transformed to Melee (basic) I. Congratulations!
Your Athletics have increased by 2 ranks.
Your Leadership skill has increased by 1 rank. Your Ancient Lord aura’s energy drain has been reduced accordingly.
12
Chapter Twelve
Ask Them
The alleyway was dark and humid and filled with menacing shapes that swayed with the salty wind. The clouded sky was barely visible above the stone and concrete walls of Undercity’s buildings: taverns and whorehouses, the industrial warehouses of the big merchant companies, and the nameless shops of rare—and mostly illegal—ingredients that refused all clientele who didn’t know the secret password.
Undercity had thousands of alleys just like this one. Clement Candler had slept in many, which other beggars considered suicide, or at the very least, asking for trouble.
Thanks to a streak of luck, Clement had avoided all the usual trouble that befell others in his situation. The slavers had passed him by, as did the Heiligian navy recruiters. The unregistered Warlocks had taken his friends into their underground labs, and the vampire coven had murdered everyone in the whorehouse in front of his refuge a month ago, but missed him.
Although, as his mother used to say back in Heiliges… No luck lasts forever, my dear. Give it time.
As he ran for his life through the trash-strewn alley, he mused that enough time must’ve clearly passed, since he was now shit out of luck.
The shadowy shapes that had loomed over him for most of his life were now a new shade of menacing. The sounds of the rats—some of them as big as cats—scuttling in and out of holes in the walls appeared, to him, as the hooves of cockroach-shaped monsters lurking in the shadows, waiting for him to stop running so they could devour him.
If only he could reach the safety of the Imperial District. A watchman squad could help him, too, but watchmen never wandered deep into Stormbreaker Harbor’s bad spots, for fear of disappearing themselves.
The salt in the air was overwhelming, and it burned his throat as he ran. His ragged clothing flapped against his skin, crusty with sweat and saltwater.
Clement was almost upon the Galleon’s Folly. It was the kind of tavern he avoided like the plague for fear of the sort of people it attracted, but now he’d welcome those ruffians because they just might scare the creature away…
A metallic crash exploded behind him. He turned without stopping to see a rat smash its way out of the sewer’s half-open manhole and climb the walls of the alley like Murmur himself chased after it.
When Clement’s gaze returned to the front a second later, a shapeless creature covered in shadows was standing right in front of the alley’s exit into the Galleon’s Folly plaza.
Not fair! Clement thought. I was so close…
“My heartfelt apologies, friend beggar,” said the creature. Clement noted that it spoke using the “friend” colloquialism of Starevos’ countryfolk, but its speech affectation was of the higher class. “I should have brought you in with minimal fuss, but alas, this is not one of my best nights.”
“Please,” Clement begged, “let me go, I haven’t seen your face…”
The creature stepped forward, and the trick of the moonlight revealed a man instead of the abomination that Clement had feared. Just a man; Starevosian, powerfully built and with a face that in any other circumstance Clement would’ve found attractive. But the cruel way those pale lips twitched around that trimmed goatee…
The creature I saw wasn’t a trick, Clement thought, as febrile fear took hold of his brain, this form is the trick!
The man smiled as if to confirm Clement’s suspicions. He took another step forward.
“Please!” Clement hollered. “Please! Somebody, help me! I am being murdered!” He reconsidered. No one would face a killer for a stranger. Not in Undercity. “Fire! There’s a fire about! Fire!”
“Clever man!” his pursuer exclaimed. He wasn’t being sarcastic—Clement’s stratagem clearly pleased him. “The last two tried the ‘murderer’ cry, and it didn’t work well for them. Sadly—”
More figures appeared behind the man. At first, hope flared in Clement’s chest, but then he realized the figures stood deferentially to the man with the goatee. They wore red cloaks that swayed wildly with the wind.
“—there’s a storm coming to Undercity,” the man said. “Everyone who can do so has taken refuge already. Everyone, of course, but us.”
Muscles shifted under the man’s skin. Clement saw the flash of teeth hiding in a part of a human body that had no place—no place—for a mouth. Then the monster was upon him.
Clement’s screams were drowned by the downpour, and the streams of rainwater washed away the streaks of blood and carried them into the sewers.
Blood mixed with water and tinted Nicolai’s warm bath of pink. He passed a porous rock across his body to scrub all the little bits and chunks away. Then he made sure to clear his nostrils and pass a perfumed cloth across his nose. It was an action that would’ve gotten him laughed at when he was younger, but otherwise the stench of blood would stay with him for weeks.
He lowered his body into the water, which covered him up to his shoulders. The tip of his knees broke the surface and Nicolai wrapped his arms around them in a half embrace. Steam rose out of the bath and engulfed the room.
For a long time, Nicolai didn’t move. Rolim had been right, leading the hunt tonight had done Nicolai good. It had distracted him from his own mind, a welcome oblivion. It didn’t last long, however, and now in the silence he could almost hear Lyndis’ laughter.
Nicolai extended his arm to the copper tray by a side of the bath and poured himself a glass of tzuika. He liked it warm. He made sure to fill the glass all the way and took a long swig out of it, enjoying the sweet, burning sensation of the drink as it passed through his throat.
He had fallen in love with her when they were young, long before the rebellion, long before the recruiters from Galtia had come for his brother and father to lead them to brutal deaths deep inside Starevosian countryside.
She had been dancing a Spriveska during the harvest festival, bells singing in her toes, silk ribbons tied to her hair—she had it long in those days—swinging to her rhythm, jumping up and down with every step. The way her chest rose to the compass of her waist had ensnared Nicolai.
Twenty experience points.
He had come to her during a lull in the Spriveska, a lanky young man—barely a man, in truth—with two left feet and less grace than a drunk horse. For a long time after that night, he had wondered why she bothered to share that dance with him instead of one of her many suitors. Years later, when she was lying by his bedside, he had asked her.
“You looked so grim and sad,” Lyndis had told him with her laugh like silver. “Everyone was having a good time, but you only wanted to be somewhere else. And yet, you came to me. How could I resist? The challenge of putting a smi
le on those sad lips did me in. Even today it is one of my guilty pleasures. Although you still have two left feet.”
He had smiled with her back then. Now he suspected he’d not smile again.
There were increasingly fewer reasons left to smile anymore. Not long after that Spriveska dance, the Starevosian army had come to his village and taken his father and brother. Nicolai’s breastplate was the only memory he had left of his brother—he had taken it from his brother’s broken corpse before burying him a few feet away from the devastated battlefield, seeded with death, that had been all that was left of Starevos’ war with Heiliges.
Nicolai had never found his father’s body.
Twenty points. Twenty people.
He could see her reflection in the dark red of his glass. Like in a dream, he rotated the glass to take a better look at her. Half her face was torn away from her, and her skull was visible. That was the thing with the fireball spell—it produced no flame. It carried pure kinetic energy, the same kind a punch to the face used to deal damage, only in higher quantities. But in close range, and at a certain angle, kinetic energy could burn just the same as fire. Burn and tear. At least Lyndis died instantly and hadn’t lived long enough to realize the state of her face.
Another swig and Nicolai placed the empty glass back on the tray. Footsteps hit the warehouse’s stone floor, distant at first, then closer. Only one man had footsteps as heavy as that, so unless a giant bear had infiltrated Undercity…
“Rolim,” greeted Nicolai, “my friend, who comes with news. Hopefully good, yes? The gods know I could use some good news.”
Rolim glanced at Nicolai’s almost-empty bottle and the glass next to it. “You’re drunk, Nicolai.”
“Ah, but it never lasts,” said Nicolai. He patted sadly at his stomach. “There’s a price to power, my friend. All for the cause, but in the end it’s the living who wind up paying more.”
We get to live while others don’t, and I can’t even get drunk for more than an hour.”
“The Diviner is here,” said Rolim. The news didn’t bring the barbed pleasure that Nicolai would have expected, only a bitter taste to his throat as his heart raced. His vengeance was near.
“Let’s not keep him waiting. Making the trip here in the middle of a storm can’t be a pleasant experience.”
Rolim handed him a towel, and Nicolai stepped out of the bath, then went to his clothes, which waited for him neatly folded on a bench.
“We caught five beggars today, even with the storm,” Rolim told him. “Thanks to your efforts, we are almost done hunting.”
Nicolai nodded. Outside the room, he could hear the distant wails of the wounded. Chains rattled, iron bars shook, and men cried—to no avail. They were the living dead. That made Nicolai a Necromancer, in a way.
“What about our friend Torst?” he asked with scorn.
“Still haunting the catacombs, just as you predicted. Without his daughter’s blood, he’s only slightly smarter than a common zombie.”
Yes, Nicolai knew of wraiths. He knew of them just as much as Ioan had known about Sephar’s Bane. After all, Starevos wasn’t only Spriveska dances and harvest festivals; it was also the stories whispered in the middle of the night, those that the foreign Bards never got to hear. Stories that served as warnings to children and adults alike, about the dangers of dying with an unfulfilled oath, or under the effects of a curse.
The armor he was fitting himself with had belonged to his brother. Its engraved pattern was that of the now defunct Starevosian army; the coat-of-arms at its center belonged to Duke Fynnal’s elite guard. Few seemed to recognize it, nowadays. Even if everyone had forgotten… he planned to make them remember.
“Very well,” he said. He fitted his breastplate over a thick cotton shirt and pulled its straps so that the plate snapped tight to his body. “Let him stay there until we have need of him. What about his dear daughter, gutsy Katalyn?”
Rolim handed him a green surcoat and a furred jacket stained with scorch marks and patches all over. “Brondan is searching for her. Says he’ll find her soon.” Judging from the way Rolim’s upper lip rose with disdain, Nicolai judged that his friend cared little for the Thief’s word. “We can’t trust him, Nicolai. He isn’t married to the cause like we are. Thieves like him love only what they can carry in their pockets,” Rolim said with a sneer. “For the right price, he’ll sell us out.”
Nicolai patted his friend on the back. “That’s a good man’s way of thinking. You don’t trust him because he’s obsessed with material riches, but that’s the exact reason I do trust him. All there is to know about Brondan is right there in the open: we know what he’ll do for the cause, and we know in what circumstances he would betray us. A person you can perfectly predict is not a man, Rolim, but a tool, and if a knife you’re wielding cuts your hand it’s not the knife’s fault, but yours. When we’re done with our tool, we’ll discard it.”
“Good man’s thinking?” Rolim asked. “You speak like you aren’t one, my friend. With all you’ve sacrificed for the freedom of our homeland, I’d think you’ve earned the name. Do you wish to speak about evil? What about the Lotian? The man who put that… that thing inside of you.” Rolim shuddered, a sight that Nicolai had seen but a handful of times in his life. “If we must call a man evil, it’s him.”
“What I’ve done—what I’ll do—is all because it’s necessary,” said Nicolai. He grabbed the longsword that his friend offered and tied the sheath to his belt. “Not because it makes me good. That’s not my decision to make. Only history can judge me, and I only hope it judges me victorious.”
“My cousin would’ve thought differently,” Rolim said. “She followed you to the very end, and that counts for more than your brooding.”
At the mention of Lyndis, Nicolai scowled like he had been stabbed. Any other man he’d have killed for daring to use her against him. But Rolim meant well. They had grown up together, were brothers in all but blood, and understood the other’s feelings better, sometimes, than their own.
Nicolai finished dressing, laced his boots, and headed for the door. He smacked it open with perhaps a little too much force. The wailing of the damned flooded the room at the same time the vapor rushed out.
The distant cages were barely visible under the shadows of the warehouse.
“Ask them,” Nicolai told Rolim. “Ask them if I’m a good man.”
Like most mages-for-hire, the Diviner wore a colorful tunic that screamed his profession to anyone that looked. Like any good mage-for-hire, he wore chain-mail underneath: Nicolai could see the steel rings insinuating themselves at the tunic’s folds.
“Manfred Paige, at your service,” the Diviner said as Nicolai and Rolim reached him. They were in the warehouse’s office.
“Nicolai.” Unlike Manfred, Nicolai had no need for fake names. His name was common enough in Starevos that anyone looking for him would need at least a surname to scry him.
The office had belonged to the past owner of the warehouse. The recently deceased elf had been a plump, decadent man, whom Undercity’s vices had corrupted away from the elves’ famous holier-than-thou culture. Nicolai had left the office the same as he found it, to remind himself of the dangers of a world degraded by the influence of Heiliges.
He saw how Manfred Paige looked at the hollowed ivory tusk lying over the desk and the gleaming steel needle protruding from one end. The Diviner’s eyes widened with desire, and Nicolai knew he was in the presence of an addict.
Excellent. The best way to control a man was to provide that which he couldn’t live without.
Manfred took a hold of himself, quickly looked away from the tusk, and then gazed to Nicolai’s eyes—to figure out if Nicolai had followed his train of thought, no doubt. Nicolai masked his face of all expressions.
“I presume our contact has already filled you in on what we require of you,” he said.
“The Thief said you wouldn’t mind the extra fees,” said Manfred. The Diviner, as it
seemed, felt that this point wasn’t yet clear enough. “With all due respect, what you’re asking of me is incredibly dangerous.”
Oh, you have no idea, Nicolai thought.
Manfred went on. “Experienced Dungeon Lords have ways to track divinations back to their source and don’t take kindly to being spied on.”
“Trust me, this Dungeon Lord is far from experienced,” Nicolai said. “I saw his character sheet—the entire one, because I was his minion for a couple minutes. It seems like he isn’t from our world, and Lotia hasn’t had time to indoctrinate him into proper defensive enchantments—I doubt the Lotians are even aware of his existence.”
Nicolai tracked the Diviner’s eyes back to the tusk.
“However that may be…” said Manfred. “There’s the risk, anyway. And dungeons are naturally difficult to scry. My materials—”
“All you need will be provided for you,” Nicolai said. He was losing patience for this conversation fast. “Their cost won’t come from your payment.”
This seemed to satisfy Manfred, which to an untrained eye would’ve appeared suspicious: if the Diviner was so afraid of risk, why was he soothed by the mention of money?
Rolim, who was standing by the office’s door, grunted at the Diviner, contempt clear as day in his expression. Manfred ignored him, and Rolim refrained from making any comment—which was all that Nicolai required of him.