Magium

by Chris Michael Wilson

  Before going to sleep, Hadrik insisted that we all join him in another card game that he learned from dwarven taverns. While I managed to use my notebook research as an excuse to not participate, the others weren’t so lucky. It seemed that the ones he wanted the most to participate in the game were Kate and Melindra, because they both tried to refuse him several times, but Hadrik would have none of it.

  It was pretty obvious what he was trying to do. His true purpose was likely to create a scenario in which Kate and Melindra would be forced to interact with each other, in the hopes that they would start to get along better. Everyone probably knew this fact as well as I did, but Hadrik is pretty hard to refuse once he sets his mind to do something, so they all had to reluctantly agree to join his game, eventually.

  After about fifteen minutes of sitting on the grass, reading from my notebook, I suddenly see a blue message floating in front of my eyes.

  “Still busy with your notebook?” Leila writes.

  “Yeah,” I say, as I raise my eyes to look at her. “Those loopholes aren’t going to find themselves. Weren’t you playing Hadrik’s card game just now?”

  “I was,” Leila writes, “but the game requires us to call out the names of the cards as fast as we can, and my written messages don’t form themselves instantly, so I had too much of a disadvantage, compared to the others. May I have a seat?”

  “Of course,” I tell her, as Leila sits herself on the grass, next to me.

  “So, how do you like our little group, so far?” I say.

  “It’s not bad,” Leila writes, while smiling. “Hadrik’s cheerfulness can get a little exhausting at times, and Daren can be a little too stern in certain situations, but they’re all good folk, and I’m enjoying their company.”

  “Yeah, they can be pretty fun to hang around with,” I say. “Don’t worry, you’ll get used to their quirks after a while. Hell, I even managed to get used to Arraka, and you’ve seen what she’s like. I guess this is what happens when you travel with the same people for a longer period of time, and face many hardships together with them. Before you know it, you become a part of a tight-knit group, and you almost start to think of them as family. By the way, how have things been going with Kate, lately? I saw that you two have been talking a lot these past two days.”

  “They’ve been going… better than I expected,” Leila writes. “Kate and I didn’t really talk much during our time at the Beacon, so I didn’t think she’d actually consider me her friend. I’m glad to know that I was mistaken.”

  “Yeah, I was also surprised to see how much she’s opened up to you these past two days,” I say. “Kate is usually the silent type, and she rarely comes out of her shell, so it was nice to see this other side of her, for a change.”

  “She wasn’t always like this…” Leila writes. “She used to talk a lot more while we were at the Beacon, especially with her friend, Diane. Maybe she’s starting to go back to the way she used to be, now that she finally has some people she can trust.”

  “You’re right,” I say. “I think that this is the first time in at least ten years when she managed to become part of a group that she can actually rely on, without fearing that she’ll get stabbed in the back.”

  “Do you think I could do it too, someday?” Leila writes.

  “Do what?” I say.

  “Become a part of your group…” Leila writes.

  “What are you talking about?” I say. “You’re already a part of our group!”

  Leila shakes her head.

  “Only temporarily,” Leila writes. “Once you’ll all be done with your business in Ollendor, I will stay behind with my father, and the rest of you will be leaving the city, to go on your next adventure.”

  “Yes, but it’s not like we’ll be doing this forever, either,” I say. “Eventually, the tournament will be over, and our group will disband, but that doesn’t mean that we won’t be meeting each other again, later. And when we do, you’ll be welcome to join us.”

  “I’m… not sure how easy it will be for us to meet again, after you leave Varathia,” Leila writes.

  “Well, I heard that citizens of Varathia can invite outsiders,” I say, “so I don’t think it should be that much of a problem, if you write an official invitation for us.”

  “I’m not sure how well that would work,” Leila writes, “given that my father and I are both wanted criminals. There’s also the fact that Ollendor is a rogue kingdom, so the other kingdoms would never approve such an invitation, even if I weren’t considered a criminal.”

  “Yes, but you are forgetting that our goal in Ollendor is to assassinate their king,” I say. “Things will most certainly not stay the same after this happens. And your criminal record might get erased in the future, with a little help from Golmyck. I think he made it pretty clear that he’s on your side, so I’m certain that he’ll find a way to aid you once he’s gained a little more influence in his city. Think positive!”

  “Perhaps you are right…” Leila writes. “At the very least, something tells me that Hadrik would never leave Varathia without having a final celebration, regardless of who will actually win the tournament in the end, so we’ll be sure to meet at least one more time before you leave.”

  “See? What did I tell you?” I say. “You already understand how our group works, and you’ve barely travelled with us for more than two days. You’re practically an official member of the team, by now!”

  “Then I will make sure to work hard to be worthy of this title,” Leila writes, smiling.

  “Hey, Leila!” Hadrik shouts. “I know that I’m asking for a lot, here, but could you please come and help us keep the scores with those handy floating texts of yours? Maybe we could change the rules a bit, so you can play with us on equal terms.”

  “It appears that my talents are needed elsewhere,” Leila writes to me, as she gets up from the grass. “Good luck with your notebook, Barry. It was fun chatting with you!”

  “Likewise,” I say. “Make sure to work hard, so you can earn your permanent group membership!”

  “I will,” Leila writes to me.

  She then turns away from me, and she starts heading towards the others.

  “I’m coming!” she writes in big blue letters, as she hurries to join the card game once more.

  For the next thirty minutes or so, I focus only on my notebook, trying to ignore the sounds in the background made by Hadrik and the others while playing their game. Unfortunately, simply focusing very hard is not enough for me to make another major breakthrough. Maybe I’m going to need to start taking a different approach than simply going through all of the information that I have available and hoping that I’ll figure something out eventually. But what other approach is there?…

  As I sit there and think, I suddenly hear a familiar voice, speaking loudly through my transceiver.

  “Hello?” I hear Rose’s voice say. “Is this channel still open?”

  Hearing Rose’s voice out of the blue like this makes my heart skip a beat. Seeing that there is no response from my side, the voice calls out to me once more.

  “Are you hearing this?” Rose’s voice says again.

  Calm down, Barry. This isn’t Rose. You know very well who it is. It’s the revenant. The fact that she has access to this channel means that she’s using Daren’s old transceiver. The one that he gave to Rose on the second day of the tournament. I tap the transceiver once, so she can hear me, and then I try to answer her as calmly as possible.

  “What do you want?” I say.

  “So you can hear me, then,” the revenant says. “Good. Make sure to leave this channel open. I will be contacting you again soon. Don’t try to call me. I will be keeping this channel closed on my side until I’ll have a reason to call you. Goodbye.”

  “Damn it, wait!” I say, but it’s no use trying to contact her anymore.

  The channel of communication on her side is now closed.

  After careful consideration, I decide to d
o as the revenant asked, and to keep the channel open on my side. I have no idea what the revenant might be planning, but it couldn’t hurt to at least hear her out.

  “Was that… who I think it was?” Daren asks me, as he and all the others are approaching me.

  “Yes,” I say. “It was the revenant. Apparently she’s still holding on to your old transceiver.”

  “What did she want?” Daren says.

  “She was checking to see if the channel was still open,” I say. “She also said that she’d be contacting me again, later, and that I should keep the channel open, but she didn’t tell me why. I tried to ask her for more details, but she closed the channel on her side.”

  “Huh…” Hadrik says. “Well, I don’t know about the rest of you guys, but this whole thing kind of killed the mood for me. I think I’m going to gather up the cards for now, and we’ll finish the game some other time.”

  After Hadrik and the others were done with their card game, we all went to sleep in our tents, except for Illuna, who took the first shift. This time around, Daren made sure to lend Melindra a tent, so I could get a good night’s sleep, without any more interruptions. It didn’t take me long to fall asleep, and I woke up several hours later, at the sound of Hadrik’s voice, who came to tell me that our night shift was about to begin.

  “Come on, Barry,” Hadrik says. “We’re up next. I hope you’re in the mood for drinking tonight, because I’ve got these dwarven ale bottles with me that are just begging to be emptied.”

  “Sure, I’ll have a few sips,” I say. “But I won’t be drinking a whole bottle. I get drunk too quickly from dwarven ale, and I’d rather stay relatively sober, in case we actually need to fight someone.”

  “Good enough for me,” Hadrik says. “Let’s get going!”

  After getting dressed and grabbing my weapons, I follow Hadrik outside of my tent, and then we both head towards a spot that gives us a good view of all the tents, without being close enough to wake up the others when we talk. The sky is now mostly clear of clouds, so it would seem that we won’t need to worry about another storm today. We both seat ourselves on the trunks of two fallen trees that are facing each other, and then we clink our bottles of dwarven ale.

  “Cheers, Barry!” Hadrik says.

  “Cheers!” I say, as we both start to drink from our bottles.

  “You know,” Hadrik says, “since we’re both drinking tonight, I was thinking that maybe we could play a game or two of Met-Zek, with the original rules, this time around.”

  “You mean the card game that involved bluffing, which required you to drink a sip of ale every time you lost a hand?” I say.

  “That’s the one!” Hadrik says.

  “Sure thing,” I say. “Let’s go for it.”

  We spend the next few minutes arranging the cards, and then we start to play the game. The rules are just as complicated as I remembered them to be. I don’t really understand how this can be a game that’s usually played in taverns. Normally, you’d think that after a certain point, the players would become too drunk to be able to play the game correctly. Or maybe that’s supposed to be part of the game’s charm. Who knows?

  At any rate, there is at least one thing I know for sure, and it’s the fact that I’m not very good at this game. Ever since we started playing, Hadrik has barely lost any hands, and my score is rather terrible. The good news, however, is that Hadrik eventually got bored of waiting to lose a hand in order to take a sip from his bottle, and he began to drink at random time intervals. The drunker he got, the less attention he started paying to his hands, and this has led to a somewhat more even matchup between us, although, with the number of times I’ve had to drink from the ale bottle, it was getting a bit difficult for me to concentrate as well, even if I’ve only been taking small sips, in order to avoid getting too drunk.

  “So, Barry,” Hadrik says, as he places a card on the ground, facing up. “I’ve been meaning to ask… What is your opinion on Melindra so far? You’ve had that little episode with her in your tent, and aside from Flower, you seem to be the only other person that she’s talked with, in private. Be honest, do you think that she’ll ever manage to fit in the group?”

  “It’s hard to say,” I tell him, as I place a card on the ground, facing up, as well. “I’ve had a little discussion with her this morning, and she promised me that she would try to antagonize people less from now on, but a lot of harm has already been done. Kate, at least, doesn’t seem to trust her at all. I’m not sure about the others, but it’s pretty clear that aside from Flower, nobody is really trying to be her friend.”

  “I know,” Hadrik says. “That’s why I tried to arrange that card game before we went to sleep. I was hoping that maybe if they all got to talk to each other more, they’d reach some kind of understanding. I haven’t had any luck so far, though.”

  He then looks at his cards, and he gets a confident grin on his face, as he places one of his cards on the ground, facing down. Now, the rules of this game state that you can interrupt any round, at any moment, to ask your adversary to turn all his cards face up. In case his card is bad, his round would be immediately forfeited, and I would gain five times more points than I would have gained, if I waited for the round to be over. However, if I do this, and the card facing down was actually a good card, I would be losing five times the points that I’d lose normally.

  So, the question here is… Did he place down a good card? Or a bad card?

  “Flip your card, Hadrik,” I tell him, eventually.

  Hadrik grins at me, and he turns his card face up. Apparently, the card he placed down was one of the worst cards he could have had in this situation. Not only did he lose the round, but he did so in a spectacular fashion. I’m almost wondering if he wasn’t just looking for an excuse to have another drink from his bottle.

  “Nice call, Barry!” Hadrik says. “I almost thought I had you there, for a second.”

  He then takes another sip from his ale bottle, before shuffling the deck again, and dealing our new cards.

  “So, anyway,” Hadrik says, as we both start to place our cards on the ground, in order to begin a new round. “I was thinking that maybe we could have a discussion with the others about Melindra. I’m not sure if it’s a good idea to leave things like this until we get to Ollendor. It’s bad enough that we’ll need to infiltrate a heavily fortified city on our own. I’d rather not also have us fighting each other every step of the way.”

  “If we’ll have another private conversation without Melindra, we’ll just piss her off even more,” I say. “She’s made it pretty clear today that she has been bothered by all those times when we were excluding her from conversations, because we didn’t trust her. There’s no need for us to twist the knife in the wound even more.”

  “But how are we going to convince them to get along with Melindra otherwise?” Hadrik says.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “But it most certainly won’t be through talking. Let’s be serious, here. If simply having a conversation would have been enough to get this whole situation fixed, we wouldn’t be where we are now. It’s through her actions that Melindra needs to earn the team’s trust, not through words. I doubt that anything you and I could say at this point would make much of a difference.”

  As I finish talking, I take a look towards the cards that I have on the ground, and I suddenly realize that the round was already over, and that I had won it by a fair margin.

  “Congratulations on winning the round, Barry!” Hadrik says, as I can see the sun slowly rising behind him. “Now, I think we should be taking a bit of a break, in order to greet our new guest properly. He will be reaching us shortly.”

  Hadrik is right. I can sense a mage slowly approaching us, and he is making no effort to hide his presence. By the feel of his aura, I’d say that he is most definitely one of the stronger mages that have joined this tournament. Once we get a good look at him, we see that he is a dark-skinned man, in his late fifties, with short, gra
y hair, a muscular physique, and a stern, unforgiving look in his eyes. He is wielding two large swords in his hands, and he is wearing leather armor that appears to be heavily enchanted. The man walks slowly until he reaches Hadrik and me, and then he stops right in front of us, with a rather calm expression on his face.

  “May I ask if this is the camp where Daren, the healer in armor resides?” the man says. “If so, then I would very much like to meet him.”

  “I think you already know the answer to that question,” Hadrik says. “But before we let you go any further, I’m afraid that you’re first going to have to introduce yourself. Tell us… who are you and how do you know Daren?”

  “I am surprised that Daren hasn’t told you about me,” the man says. “We’ve known each other for a long time. We are very old friends.”

  “That still doesn’t answer the question,” Hadrik says.

  The man smiles.

  “Very well,” he says. “In that case, I will introduce myself. My name is Nolderan. I am an ex-sage, a renowned enchanter, and a martial arts master. And also, I am the man who gave Daren his scar.”

  Chapter 10

  “Hey, Kate,” Hadrik says. “Come over here, for a second! We have someone that we’d like you to meet!”

  Kate had only just gotten out of her tent when Hadrik called out to her. It’s now been almost an hour since Daren’s old enchanting master made his appearance before us. As soon as we established that he did not come here with the intention to start a fight, we told him that Daren would wake up shortly, and we invited him to join us in a game of Met-Zek.

  We spent the last hour playing cards, while Nolderan told us various stories from the years that he’s spent teaching Daren martial arts and enchanting magic. The ex-sage agreed to play the game with its original rules, so he’s already managed to empty a bottle of dwarven ale in the short time since he joined us. However, he appears to be holding his liquor about as well as Hadrik, since I’m not yet seeing any signs of him being drunk.