by Dante King
Amelia raised her mug and eyed the layer of foam on top of her beer suspiciously. She brought it to her face and sniffed it. I stifled a laugh. Veronica didn’t stifle hers.
I held up my beer, as did Veronica.
“To your health,” I said.
“To your health,” Veronica said. We clinked our mugs together.
Amelia clinked hers against ours as well. “To you, William. The last Ink Mage,” she said.
Veronica smiled. “To being an Ink Mage.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“To being a Rune Sorcerer,” Amelia said, and she winked coyly at Veronica.
“May you prosper and bring us success in battle,” Veronica added, a little bashfully given Amelia’s toast.
I hadn’t heard that one before, but it sounded good to me.
We each raised our beers and took a good swallow. I got a face full of foam before getting a mouthful of beer. The Dragon’s Breath Ale was delicious. The flavor was full-bodied without being overly fruity. It was fresh and soothing on my dry throat.
Veronica and I both looked at Amelia as she lowered her mug. She wiped the beer mustache away from her top lip.
“Well, do you like it?” Veronica asked me. She looked eager, as if she were asking about something she’d prepared herself.
“It’s excellent,” I answered. “Exactly to my taste.”
Veronica looked pleased and met my eyes again as she took another deep draught from her mug. “And how’s yours, Amelia, the… what was it called?”
“Mount Agony Stream,” said Amelia with satisfaction. “I do like it, very much, actually. It tastes amazing. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting to. I’ve never really drunk beer before. There wasn’t much opportunity for that kind of thing back in Astros.” She raised her glass and took another long swallow. “I’m glad that Brightwater ale is my first experience of beer.”
“I second that,” I said. “The beer in Brightwater is incredible.”
“Now you see why the folk here raised a temple to it,” Veronica said.
We all laughed.
A chorus of angry curses came from the booth near us, and I looked over as Jacques half rose from the table, pocketing a pile of coins as he did so.
His companions were an ugly, angry-looking lot. There were three of them, and all showed signs of being too used to fighting. One wore an eyepatch, and one had a red nose which looked as if it had been broken more times than was healthy. The leader had a strange hairstyle, a spiked mohawk rising from an otherwise clean-shaved head. They were dressed in dirty work clothes and heavy boots, and a glance told me that they were all already much the worse for drink.
“Why don’t we leave it there for a few minutes, boys?” Jacques suggested to them. “A quick intermission for refreshments.” He sounded as suave and supercilious as ever.
“Refreshments?” said the man with the mohawk. “We don’t have any coin to buy beer; you took it all from us!”
“Easy,” Jacques said as he raised his hands to calm the men. “How about I shout you all a round before we go again? I know you have more coins.”
The men grumbled among each other.
The one who’d spoken before sneered at Jacques. “You get us the beer, and we’ll see if we can scrounge up something to bet with.”
“Excellent,” my old friend said as he plucked three coins from his bulging purse and slapped them on the table. “That should be more than enough to cover your beers. I’m glad you’ve decided to play another round. I really think you lads might be in for a stroke of luck. After all, you can’t win if you don’t play the game.” He winked at the men before he got up and walked over to our table, his half-full mug of beer in his hand.
The three men headed toward the bar, giving Jacques dirty looks as they went. I assumed they wanted to get out of Jacques’s earshot before discussing where they would get more coins.
Jacques took a seat across from me, beside Veronica. Either he had something to hide, or he felt the cold strongly. I couldn’t see why else he would have kept his cloak on instead of leaving it at the door.
“I must say, William,” he said once he’d settled himself, “it is fine to see you again here. My, my, you’ve got yourself some more of those tattoos, I see.” He looked askance at my forearms. “You never were one to pay any heed to your appearance. But I never judge. I did wonder what had become of you, and I’ve missed our adventures terribly.”
Jacques’ voice had a melodic quality to it when he wasn’t hollering obscenities. I could imagine him charming the toughest of merchants out of their wares for far less than their value.
“It’s good to see you again too, Jacques,” I said. “Whatever made you leave Aranor without so much as saying goodbye?”
“Oh that.” Jacques waved his hand dismissively. “A long and tedious story I wouldn’t dream of boring you with. But I see you have made the acquaintance of two lovely ladies.”
I wasn’t blind to his attempt to distract me, but I knew from experience I wouldn’t get any answers out of him if he didn’t want to give them.
“That’s right, Jacques. Allow me to introduce Amelia, a scholar from the Royal Library in Astros. I believe you’ve already gotten to know Veronica.”
Jacques reached out a hand to Amelia and shook hers. “A pleasure, I’m sure.” He looked at me. “I have indeed got to know Veronica, but I hasten to add that it was only in the sense of making her acquaintance. You needn’t fear in that department.”
Veronica went red. “William and I aren’t ... we’re not...”
“Never fear, my dear Veronica. I would never dream of insinuating anything that might harm your unblemished reputation. What you choose to do behind closed doors with my good friend William is your business.”
Veronica huffed and went silent. I assumed she was familiar with such behavior from Jacques.
He leaned in toward Amelia with a hand beside his mouth, conspiratorially. “You see, William need have no concerns in that department in general.”
“Why might that be?” Amelia asked. She was sitting hesitantly, unsure whether to be interested or repulsed.
“Because I have nothing in which to compete with him. The old fellow down there doesn’t work anymore.”
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” Amelia said, her intonation almost questioning. Her cheeks were a bit red.
I sat back, sipped on my beer, and waited for the punchline. I’d heard this story dozens of times before, and it never failed to intrigue me.
“No need for condolences at all,” he said. “I got a pretty good bargain out of the whole arrangement.”
Amelia and Veronica both looked very confused at this. They glanced at me, and I shrugged, gesturing toward Jacques while smiling behind my beer mug. “Don’t look at me,” I said, “I wouldn’t dream of stealing his punchline.”
Jacques inclined his head to me in exaggerated gratitude. “The truth is,” he said, looking ar Amelia, “I gave up my prowess—tremendous though it was, I might add—in exchange for patronage from Loku, the god of good luck.”
“I see,” said Amelia. She was sitting back now, her arms crossed over her chest.
“And now, I get perfect luck in almost any conceivable endeavor. Only downside is, little me down there is totally uninterested in the wenches.” He spread his arms in a resigned gesture and grinned. “I don’t miss it so much really. I was always drawn to the most challenging kinds of women. My reputation as a lover went far and wide, and I was powerless to resist them. I was always getting tangled up in the most undesirable situations. A beautiful woman was my only weakness. Better off without them, really.”
Personally, I figured his ’little fellow’, as he liked to call it, had stopped working for purely mundane reasons, and he wanted to explain why he was totally fine with that. He did have a surprising run of luck, given the crazy escapades he got up to, but there was no reason to believe one of the gods worshipped by superstitious old women in Aranor had an
ything to do with it.
“And what do you do with this perfect ‘luck’, now that you’ve traded your virility for it?” Amelia asked. She enunciated the word luck with more than a hint of skepticism.
“Fleece the workers in Brightwater of all their earnings of course,” Jacques whispered in reply. A wise move, since I could see the three workers he’d been playing with returning to their booth with full mugs of beer. “Not the locals, though,” Jacques continued. “They’re honest, hardworking folk, and I’d never swindle them out of their meager earnings. The kind like those I’m with tonight? They’re ripe pickings for someone as lucky as I am.”
“So, who have you been gambling with?” I nodded at the booth next to us. “You said they were workers; what do they work on?”
“These fine gentlemen are sappers,” Jacques said.
“What’s a sapper?” Amelia asked.
Jacques puffed his chest out. He loved explaining things to people. “Sappers are workers in the mines. They shore up the walls and ceilings of the new shafts and repair the old ones.”
“I’ve heard they aren’t too kind to the slaves that work there,” Veronica said. I could tell she was doing her best to avoid looking at Amelia and I when she said the word ’slaves’.
“No indeed, you are correct.” Jacques waved his beer in the air as he spoke, his flourishes somewhat dramatic. Despite this, he was speaking with a lowered voice. “They have been known to deliberately do shoddy work. They find it comical when the shafts collapse on groups of the slaves as they are collecting the Beast Cores.”
“How awful!” Amelia exclaimed.
“That it is,” Jacques responded. “That is why I have no qualms fleecing them of their earnings.”
I looked over at the sappers at the booth. They had returned with full mugs of beer in their hands, but they did not look happy. I looked closer at them as they clustered at the end of their table that was furthest from ours.
As I had noticed earlier, they were fairly easy to distinguish from one another, despite their clothes. The man with the mohawk seemed to be the leader. The other two, one with a dirty eyepatch and the other with his red and misshapen nose, leaned in close to mohawk and muttered angrily, throwing occasional resentful glances toward Jacques, which he studiously ignored. I figured they were probably plotting to screw Jacques over.
“Keep talking,” I whispered to Amelia, Veronica, and Jacques.
The two women looked at me with confused expressions, but Jacques caught my meaning immediately. I rolled my eyes toward the booth behind us, and Amelia nodded, suddenly realizing what I intended. I wanted to overhear the sappers’ conversation.
“Would you ladies like to know how I met young William here?” Jacques asked the two women at my table.
“Very much,” Amelia said, playing along with an excited nod.
Jacques began a tale that was most definitely not an explanation of how we’d met, and I let his voice fade to the back of my mind as I concentrated on what the sappers were saying.
“He’s already won nearly all our earnings,” the one with the mashed nose said.
“How does he do it?” Mohawk said. “It’s like he can read our cards.”
“That sounds like cheating to me,” Eyepatch said.
I suspected it was more likely that these workers were not the sharpest when it came to card games.
“What are we going to do about it?” said Mohawk.
They were not speaking all that quietly, and I could see a number of other workers in the vicinity pausing in their conversation to listen in. I figured they were pretty drunk and were unable to realize that their whispers were, in fact, shouts.
“We’ll have to go back to the mines and work for another two months to get all that money back again,” said the one with the red nose.
“I don’t know if I like the sound of that,” said Patch. They all looked in our direction.
“Uh, Jacques,” I interrupted him midway through his elaborate—and entirely fabricated—retelling. “Do you happen to have a plan for hanging on to your winnings?”
“Why, of course.” Jacques smiled. He didn’t look too concerned.
“And that plan would be...?” Amelia asked when Jacques didn’t go any further.
“Why, silly me.” he slapped a palm to his forehead. “Did I neglect to explain?”
I nodded. “You did.”
“You are my plan.” He spread his hands to indicate the three of us, a generous, sweeping gesture, as if he’d just offered us a round of drinks.
“Fantastic,” Amelia muttered sarcastically. .
I wasn’t thrilled either, but at the same time, I had been curious to try out our new tattoos. They’d been crafted with the express purpose of fighting in close combat, and I could even think of a few ways to use them that wouldn’t break the tavern’s rules.
I looked over at the sappers again.
“I have a new idea,” announced Red Nose.
“Oh yeah?” Mohawk asked loudly. “What would that be?”
The other workers nearby were all listening. I glanced around me. It looked like at least six or seven other workers might get involved if a fight broke out. And from the way they were all glaring at Jacques, I assumed they wouldn’t side with him. More than likely, they’d also lost much of their earnings on previous nights to Jacques’ unbelievable luck.
“Let’s just take the money off him again,” Red Nose shouted.
The other two cheered and leaped to their feet.
“Here we go,” I said and got to my feet as well, leaving my pack on the bench.
Amelia and Veronica stood to their feet as well.
“You ladies sure you want to defend my friend here?” I asked. “He’s not exactly guiltless.”
“Any friend of yours is a friend of mine,” Amelia said.
“I’ve been meaning to teach these sappers a lesson,” Veronica said.
“Great,” I said with a smile. “This should be fun. Let’s hold off on using our tattoos at first. I want to give them a good fight before we annihilate them.”
I put my hand out and firmly gripped Jacques by the arm. “I’ve only been in town five minutes and you’re already getting me into trouble.”
Jacques rolled his shoulders and flashed me a lopsided grin.
“Just like old times,” he said.
Chapter Thirteen
I stood side by side with my old friend Jacques and my two female companions in the cramped confines of the Sticks and Stones Tavern. Together, the four of us faced down a roomful of angry, drunken miners. They were ready for a brawl, and so were we, but I knew that if things went against us, it could be a perfect opportunity to test our magical abilities.
It would be a short fight if we did. I always believed in a fair fight, and I had the brawling experience from my days in Aranor to hold my own. I’d give them a fighting chance first.
Some of the other men at the surrounding tables got up as well. Most of them fled the tavern, obviously uninterested in the impending brawl. The tables and chairs were emptied, leaving only nine sappers, including Mohawk, Patch, and Red Nose. The additional six came to stand behind the first three. They were wearing the same clothes as the main trio—dirty, sweat-stained leathers which bared their arms almost to the shoulders, and heavy workmen’s boots. From their similar gear and their willingness to join the fight, I guessed that they must also be sappers who worked in the mines with Mohawk and his cronies.
“You stole our money, thief,” Mohawk spat at Jacques.
“You’re a cheating motherfucker,” Red Nose said through gritted teeth.
“Motherfucker,” Patch echoed as he glared with his one uncovered eye.
“If you want to fight Jacques,” I said as I stood between the men and my friend, “you’re going to have to deal with the rest of us too.”
“Ugh,” Amelia said, “I think I can smell their breath.”
The brutish trio turned their attention to me and the
women standing beside me.
“You?” Red Nose spat. “A filthy vagabond? You think those devils’ markings protect you?”
Mohawk ogled Amelia and Veronica next to me. “Well, hello, sweethearts. Don’t you worry, once we’ve dealt with your handler, we’ll give you a good time.”
He made a circle with two of his fingers and stuck the finger of his other hand through the gap, making violent thrusting motions with his pelvis at the same time. The others all burst out in jeers and laughter, sticking their tongues out and making obscene gestures.
“Filthy pig,” Veronica muttered.
Amelia turned to me. “Can we please use our magic to deal with these cretins?”
“Well, if you insist,” I said. “After all, it’s nine against four. I suppose it's fair to even up the odds! But remember the tavern rules: strictly non-lethal.”
“We’re right with you,” Amelia said, and Veronica nodded.
I glanced over my shoulder to Jacques. “Same goes for you.”
“I’ve been doing this long before you got here, young William,” he said. “I’ve perfected the art of avoiding murder.”
It looked like magic was back on the table. So much for my scruples. I couldn’t say I was all that disappointed.
I faced the thugs, who were still caught up in making each other guffaw with their obscene capers and thrusting motions.
“You don’t threaten my friends and get to walk away,” I said to them in a calm voice.
Jacques grabbed a mug and brandished it like a weapon. “I’m looking forward to this.”
A glance over one shoulder showed me that the Mistress was casually leaning on the wall behind the bar, her arms folded over her ample chest. The barmaids had placed themselves on top of the counter, elbows on their knees as they watched us with keen interest.
The sappers’ laughter died down, and their moods turned serious. The prospect of causing violence seemed to sober them up rather quickly.