The Time Master

by Dmitry Bilik

  I walked all the way back to the intersection where I finally found what I was looking for. A decorative pebble path led from the electronic gate to a spacious three-story mansion built with stone slabs. Several neat outbuildings were lined up behind it; a couple of luxury cars were parked in a wide driveway. Nothing too posh or in-your-face — just a modest little shack probably belonging to one of the local administration. Bribery might be a crime but it sure did pay.

  According to Bumpkin, over time even the most beautiful house would fall into decay if it had no house goblin. This edifice must have been here for quite a while but it still looked like new. That meant it must have had a goblin.

  OK. Let’s go get the refreshments.

  The local “supermarket” was just a dilapidated hole in the wall, its dirty windows displaying a messy array of cookies and candy. A thin, fortyish woman was keeping military watch by its single narrow aisle. She looked guardedly at my purchase even though there was nothing of note. Just a bottle of milk, some plastic plates, and a pound of chocolates. If I bought any less, it would look too suspicious.

  I went back to the mansion. Thank God Gorokhovets was only a small town. In my city, there’d be all sorts of cameras installed all around the fence’s perimeter, but here you could do whatever you pleased, particularly since there was no one around. On my whole trip to the store I’d only run into one local denizen.

  The steel fence was nice and strong — another sign of the house goblin's vigilant care, — but its bars were around six inches apart, enough for me to stick my hand through. I set a plastic plate on the ground behind the bars and poured some milk onto it, then lay a chocolate next to it. Looking like a complete imbecile, I started whispering the summoning spell Bumpkin had taught me,

  “House goblin, house goblin, I’ve got something nice if you help me out with your wisest advice.”

  I wouldn’t have been surprised if nothing happened. But a door slammed softly in the house. A fur ball rolled out and headed directly for me. At first I thought it was a cat, but then I made out small hands and feet.

  The local house goblin was stockier than mine. Clearly, he’d had a much better life.

  He beelined for the milk and began lapping it up just like a natural cat before turning his attention to the chocolate. He didn’t look at me until after he’d taken a big bite of it.

  “What do you want, Seeker?”

  “I have business to discuss. What should I call you?”

  “Hush.”

  “Sergei,” I said, offering him my hand.

  The goblin wavered for a split second but shook hands with me anyway.

  “So as I was saying, I have some business to discuss. I heard that a woman died here recently. Mrs. Nikiforov.”

  “I know,” Hush said, nodding.

  “She had a house goblin and a barn hand.”

  “That’s right. One-Eye and Goody.”

  “Well, things are not at all good right now with this Goody, I’m afraid. One-Eye abandoned him and ran off. Now the barn hand is all alone.”

  “Is he really?” Hush said, surprised. “I wondered what was going on. I thought One-Eye was too harsh with him, that’s why he was crying. House goblins take their masters’ deaths hard.”

  “If you heard things like that, why didn’t you check in on him?”

  “One-Eye and I were at loggerheads. When it comes to housework, he’s the best, but he has a crappy personality. You can’t go visit someone else’s house goblin without his permission. It’s not good form.”

  I chose not to dwell on house goblins’ code of good manners. That’s not what I’d come here for. “Well, One-Eye isn’t around anymore. Apparently, he abandoned the place. And the house is no longer his.”

  “That’s what happens,” Hush agreed.

  “And his helper will lose his mind without him.”

  “He will,” the goblin agreed again. “And then he’ll become feral and will do all sorts of mischief.”

  “Not if you take him in...”

  Hush nodded so quickly it was like those were the words he’d been waiting for. “My household is only small. No livestock worth mentioning apart from the dog and turkeys, but it’s better than nothing, I suppose. We need to get back to him fast before the others find out — er, I mean before poor Goody goes completely nuts.”

  Gotcha! That meant that not every house goblin had his own barn hand, and they were prepared to fight tooth and claw for the right to have one. Still, who was I to object? I was getting my cut out of it anyway.

  “Let’s go, then!”

  Hush leapt onto the high fence, shook all over like a cat about to plunge into frigid water, then jumped down to the ground.

  He took a couple of steps and clung fearfully to me. “What are you standing there for? Let’s go. I can’t stay here long.”

  “Why not?” I asked as I set off toward the defunct old lady’s house.

  “We don’t like to leave the house. A house goblin loses his strength when he’s away from his nest. They say that if a house goblin spends a week without his home roof, he’ll forget his name and lose his strength.”

  Hush chattered nonstop. Maybe he was babbling in order to rid himself of his fear of being outside his home, or maybe he was just a motormouth. Most likely he was trying to assuage his fears because the closer we got to our destination and the farther we got from his house, the faster he yapped.

  Finally, we stood in front of the fence.

  “Stay here and don’t go inside if you value your life,” Hush told me. “No matter what happens. You’ll only make it worse.”

  The next moment he was already sitting astride the fence, turning his head this way and that. Then he hopped down, reached the shed in two feline leaps and slipped inside.

  I listened tensely. A woman passed by, clearly a local, so I hurried away from the house. After about five minutes, I came back, but Hush still hadn’t returned. I just hoped he was out of harm’s way.

  And of course, like always, I jinxed it.

  “One-Eye!” a voice screamed.

  The shed shuddered as though a grenade had exploded inside. My knees shook with the impact.

  My first thought was to get the hell out of there as fast as I could. But nothing happened. I was afraid the neighbors might panic, but they hadn’t.

  A couple of minutes later Hush and Goody emerged.

  The house goblin was leading the barn hand like an invalid dosed up with tranquilizers, holding him gently but firmly by the shoulders. It looked like the creature had accepted his fate, peering under his feet and not even muttering.

  When they got to the fence, Hush hesitated, lifted the helper onto his shoulders like a sack of potatoes, and leapt over, barely making it under the weight.

  I pulled out my mirror. The scene was hilarious. It showed a big fat cat carrying a small, sick kitten by the scruff of its neck. But when you looked at the semiconscious barn hand, the last thing you wanted to do was laugh.

  In this state we reached Hush’s house. The house goblin slid through the bars, pulled Goody after him, and turned to me.

  “Wait here, good man. I’ll be right back.”

  You’ve helped a barnyard keeper find a new home.

  +50 karma points. Current level: +20. You gravitate to the Light Side.

  Whew. Finally, I was in the black. So one barnyard keeper was worth five old ladies crossing the street. Even though there was more profit in this, I’d take the old ladies any day. House goblins’ helpers were rather neurotic.

  Hush returned alone, happily bouncing from foot to foot.

  “Thank you, my good man. Now Goody will get better in no time. I’ll take care of that. Why does any creature get depressed? Because he or she has nothing to do. But if you keep a person or house goblin busy with the smallest task, they might forget their old malaises.”

  No, no matter how you sliced it, Hush was still a chatterbox. I nodded my agreement, all the while wondering what the house go
blin was trying to get at with his speech.

  “I don’t really have any money. But here...”

  Hush reached out his hand which held a small amount of dust. Eyeballing it, I estimated that it was around 10 grams. But before I had a chance to reach out my sticky fingers, something started to happen to the dust. It shriveled up, as though it were alive, and started to quickly solidify, releasing a whitish smoke. Six seconds or so went by, and instead of the little handful of the Game currency, a tiny, bright crystal lay on the house goblin’s palm.

  “This is for you.”

  I took the cold polygon and nearly yelped in fear as it crumbled in my hands. What kind of a joke was this?

  You’ve mastered the Smoke and Mirrors spell.

  “Take care, my good man,” Hush shook my hand and trotted back to the house.

  Smoke and Mirrors, you say? I continued to stand there, still gathering my wits. Well, at least now I understood how spells were passed along. I remembered Harph saying that as soon as I leveled Destroyer up to 70, he’d teach me Thunder from the Sky. What did that mean? Apparently, selling spells wasn’t the vendors’ prerogative: Players could do it too. Of course, it wasn’t an excuse to be overusing and abusing them because these crystals were apparently fashioned out of dust, which made them rather pricey. And something deep inside told me that the coolest spells must cost a lot of dust.

  I opened the interface.

  Smoke and Mirrors (Mysticism) significantly reduces the chances of being spotted.

  Works only on living things.

  Range: 3 yards.

  Cost: 20 mana points.

  Duration: 30 seconds.

  Warning! This spell doesn’t affect the living things whose Mysticism skill is higher than the user’s.

  Well, this wasn’t bad. Like, really not bad. But now it was time to think about more pressing matters. It was already 2:50 pm, and I was sixty miles from home. Not good.

  I turned off Hush’s street and headed toward the center of Gorokhovets, even though the expression “headed toward” was strange in this context: it only took me seven minutes to get there and another couple to Google the local taxi service. Predictably, based on the meter I had to pay four bucks more than what I’d paid to get here.

  I smiled as I pressed “Accept”. One ruble in, two rubles out. Ah, the perks of provincial life.

  My second driver was a mirror image of the first: a swarthy frizzy-haired southerner in a dirty sedan. The radio was blasting while he kept trying to shout over it. Unfortunately for him, I didn’t want to engage, responding with monosyllabic words until I busied myself with my phone. I actually wrote a letter to Julia — the girl whom I’d met near my parents’ house. I needed to follow up on her promise to get together.

  She replied almost immediately along the lines of I always keep my word.

  “When?” was the only thing she asked.

  To that I replied cryptically, “Soon.”

  Feeling perfectly content, I put my phone away, laid my head on the headrest and slept the whole way. I didn’t open my eyes until the sedan jerked for the last time and the driver slapped me on the shoulder.

  I’d been delivered safe and sound — but not to my own building: I’d deliberately told him to stop at the neighboring one. First of all, it looked like I was developing a taxi habit — something my nosy neighbors might not appreciate. And secondly, what if the driver could be traced back to me? No, it was best not to take any chances.

  As I watched the car drive away, I mechanically pulled my cigarettes out of my pocket, extracted one and raised it to my lips, then tossed it away. Damn that!

  I strode to my house. It was already dark. The streetlights had already been turned on, their gas discharge bulbs gradually warming up. The cars’ turn signals were blinking. People were hurrying home after having begged off an hour early. Life was good. Now I’d get up to my place, and Bumpkin would undoubtedly have cooked something delicious....

  My serenity vanished in an instant. I was walking past my house along the sidewalk lined with bare, wintry trees, when a Player appeared in front of me. There was nothing wrong with that, had it not been for the text box hovering above his head. It contained a single word that made my blood run cold:

  Seer

  Chapter 14

  IT’S COMMON KNOWLEDGE that misfortune breeds misfortune. If a pipe bursts in the bathroom, the valve to turn off the water is also sure to break. Or you’ll run out of money for your phone. Or the repair man’s van will get a flat tire right after it pulls away. Yep, Murphy’s law in action.

  And that’s just what happened to me at this moment. No sooner did I spot the Seer than I immediately did the only thing I could do.

  [ ∞ ]

  I stepped to the right and hid behind a bare tree which in theory was wide enough, especially seeing as it was dusk now. With only one reservation: the Seer was heading my way.

  And he wasn’t the only one.

  Shuffling along laboriously, the Professor was crossing the street from the other side. He was as drunk as a person could be. But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was, he’d already caught sight of me and clearly intended to engage me in one of his highbrow discussions.

  Oh yeah. Just my luck.

  Staggering, the Professor raised his arms in greeting and opened his mouth to say hello. I thrust out my hand, and, driven by some sort of inner confidence in my powers, cast the Smoke and Mirrors spell.

  Your Mysticism skill has increased to level 1.

  The Professor stumbled and lost his footing. He looked around dimly, and spotting a new target, set off toward the Seer.

  “Excuse me, young man. As fate would have it, I must ask for your help.”

  “Pardon me?” the Seer asked in surprise.

  “I mean,” — hiccup — “the three Moirae, the Greek goddesses of fate who’re forever spinning the thread of human lives...”

  Uh oh. The Professor was on a roll.

  I peeped out from behind the tree. The Seer was standing at an angle to me, an amused smile frozen on his lips. In front of him, the Professor pontificated animatedly, enlightening him on the subtleties of Greek mythology. I knew that he was also well-versed in Roman, Egyptian, Anglo-Norman, and Scandinavian religions — but I didn’t stick around long enough to hear where his speech was headed.

  I surveyed my surroundings again. I was exactly halfway home. I couldn’t take the path in front of me. That meant I’d need to go back — and ideally, make it quick. It was obvious that the Seer didn’t enjoy his patrolling mission because he now directed all his attention at the Professor, patronizingly chuckling at his particularly amusing pearls of wisdom.

  Now.

  I dashed across the lawn — if you could apply that word to the patch of muddy soil next to the sidewalk — threading my way past the trees like a half-crazed rabbit. Only a couple of seconds later, I heard the Seer’s hesitant voice behind me,

  “Hey! Stop!”

  Yeah right. Nothing short of a handgun could stop me. Which was actually quite a possibility. The Seer could have had all sorts of things on him. He could launch a fireball or just fire a real gun at me. You just didn’t know with these guys.

  Luckily, he didn’t. As I took cover behind the corner of a building, I glimpsed the Seer running after me down the sidewalk.

  I froze. What could I do now? I had nowhere to hide. The store was straight ahead; to my left was the foundation pit that I knew so well. Cars were flashing by but no one would stop for me: fights were a common occurrence in these parts. Who really wanted to risk getting involved?

  Should I make a dash toward the foundation pit? I might just as well get down on my knees right now and yell, “Sir, please don’t kill me!”

  I felt some kind of righteous anger well inside me. This was probably what our ancestors used to call valor. The Seer was now expecting his prey to run away, thinking he’d catch up with it. I could do something to alter that plan.

  I pres
sed myself to the wall and listened intently until I heard the approaching clatter of footsteps. My pursuer’s rosy, pudgy face loomed out of the darkness right in front of my eyes.

  Take that!

  The punch came out pretty well, knocking my adversary off balance. Still, it wasn’t quite as I’d expected. No big deal — I could try again.

  [ ∞ ]

  This time I invested all my strength into a right hook. I even thought I heard a crunch.

  Your Hand-to-Hand Fighting skill has increased to level 6.