Spellcraft

by Andrew Beymer

  We settled into another silence after that. I tried to enjoy the experience of walking through the underground caverns holding Keia’s hand, though worrying about everything we had to do and what might happen when we got to this goblin Chief made it difficult.

  Still, I was experiencing the most immersive and graphically intense videogame ever created by humans. A game that was being pumped directly into my skull cavity via electrical impulses through my ear canal. And, at the end of the day, if we did wind up getting killed in these deep caverns then it would merely be an inconvenience. A heck of an inconvenience, to be sure, but still just a speed bump in the grand scheme of my scheming.

  So I tried not to focus on the negative and instead focused on the feeling of moving deeper and deeper into the earth. Which bothered me a lot less in a video game than it would’ve if I were doing this in the real world.

  This was nice. It reminded me of a world that hadn’t ever really truly existed, but there’d been a version of this underground world once. Walking through this version of it was a thrill.

  I reached out and felt the walls to remind myself that I could. I listened to the subtle sound of things skittering off in the darkness, felt the occasional stab of terror as my hand occasionally moved across a dark opening that told me we were on the verge of an entrance to another passage or underground room, something that was hinted at without actually being shown because the goblins didn’t seem interested in shining their lights into that darkness.

  "What do you think is down there?" Kris asked, peering into the darkness and fingering her warhammer as though she was almost eager to go down into one of those dark holes and figure out what was lurking.

  I had no doubt that Kris would have no issue going down there and doing her best to smack whatever nasty thing was lurking down there over the head repeatedly with that hammer. And probably suffer her own painful demise in the process.

  For all that Kris was fond of blaming me for her habit of dying painful deaths in the game, there was a point where she had to take responsibility for some of those deaths.

  "Nothing good," I said. "Keep in mind we're in a series of caves that are presumably connected to a high level raid dungeon at some point.”

  "So?" Kris asked.

  “So it's probably not a good idea to go knocking on the back door of all the eldritch horrors that live in that dungeon,” I said.

  "Good idea," one of our goblin captors said. "Nasty things lurk in the dark. Even nastier things lurk in the deeps.”

  I blinked. In the deeps? It already felt like we were well under the game world. If this goblin was hinting at depths that went beyond that then that was worth a shiver.

  "And yet we’re walking right past the entrance like it’s nothing?” Kris asked. "What happens if one of those nasty things reaches into this hall and grabs you or something?"

  The goblin shrugged. "Bad things, I would presume. Best not to think about that if you live down here.”

  Kris rolled her eyes. "Fucking great," she said. "Not only are we stuck in a deep dark cavern where we’re probably going to get killed by a bunch of goblins once they get a chance to interrogate us, but there are also nasty horrible things lurking in the darkness that would love to grab us with their mind flaying tentacles and kill us.”

  “That’s not the worst thing something with tentacles could do,” Keia muttered.

  “Yeah, don’t want to run into a tentacle creature that wants senpai to teach it a few things,” I said, elbowing Kris in the ribs.

  She glowered at me. Meanwhile the goblin shrugged a fatalistic shrug. The kind of shrug that said he was used to living in an environment where a very painful and unpleasant death could come at any moment.

  "Don't wander so close to the shadows," it said, as though it was the simplest thing in the world.

  “Best to listen to that advice,” Rezzik muttered, peering into the darkness behind us and shivering, then making that strange he’d made that first day when we met in the forest.

  "Right," Kris said, still fingering her hammer and looking behind us to where the latest hole in the wall had long since disappeared. "I'll keep that in mind."

  "At least you have that hammer," the goblin said with a grin.

  "Really?" Kris asked, standing a little taller and hefting the thing. "You think I’d be able to kick some ass with this baby?”

  "No," the goblin said. "But whatever killed you would be able to use the handle to pick out whatever bits of you got stuck in its teeth."

  The goblin threw its head back and cackled, and even Rezzik laughed for all that he seemed annoyed by his companions. I couldn't help but let out a chuckle of my own. Keia broke into a giggling fit. It was a pretty good joke.

  Kris didn't look the least bit amused at the goblin’s humor. Maybe she couldn't appreciate it because she was the butt of the joke or something.

  Not that she had long to be the butt of the joke. No, all the laughter abruptly stopped as we stepped into a massive city-sized cavern that took my breath away.

  64

  Blackreach on Steroids

  “It’s like Blackreach on steroids,” Kris murmured, looking at the vast cavern in astonishment.

  I was inclined to agree wit her assessment. I’d heard of fantasy authors with a little more imagination than practicality talking about entire cities being built into the side of massive caves. I’d always thought that seemed just a touch ridiculous considering some of the engineering considerations that would go along with digging an entire city out of a cavern.

  Only this was a video game. The kind of place where things were cobbled together out of ones and zeros. The kind of place where if a developer wished it to be so then it was merely a matter of the code monkeys creating something the art monkeys could hang on all the ones and zeros they'd put together for their digital playground.

  And the playground they’d put together in this instance was nothing short of breathtaking.

  "Holy shit," Keia breathed.

  I looked to Keia. Both because I liked looking at her, and because I figured if there was anyone in our group who might be a little nonplussed by the whole thing it’d be her.

  After all, she'd been through the various mines worked by the goblins. She'd been in the raid dungeon with Horizon Dawn, presumably. If there was anything this impressive in that raid dungeon I figured she would’ve seen it, and maybe this wouldn’t seem nearly as impressive to her.

  Only her mouth was hanging open as well, and she seemed downright speechless.

  "Holy shit is right," Keia said. "Damn. This is way more impressive than anything in the raid dungeon.”

  The two goblins turned and eyed us suspiciously. There were also a couple of goblin guards at the entrance who tightened their grip on some very nasty looking spears when they got a good look at us. Spears that were large for the goblins, but only came up to about my shoulder.

  I had no doubt that should those goblins want to do something with those spears it would be very painful for yours truly even if they only came up to my shoulder.

  I turned my attention away from the spears and back to the underground city sprawling all around us. Best not to think about the weapons that could be used to turn my digital body into a stuck pig.

  Besides, there was plenty to distract me from thoughts of the goblins turning my digital body into a pincushion.

  The city was literally carved into the sides of a massive cavern that stretched off as far as the eye could see in all directions. Lights twinkled on the other side of that cavern and stretched out above in a half circle and down below until they were lost in the darkness. The place was lit with glowing crystals that looked very similar to the ones our goblin “escorts” had been carrying.

  Though if the scale held then the crystals glowing overhead and providing illumination for this massive underground city would have to be equally massive. Even then their light didn’t pierce the darkness below completely.

  I wondered if the cryst
als our escorts carried were actually infused with magical energy via Spellcrafting, or if maybe they’d cut their light crystals off from the glowing crystals that seemed to be natural outgrowths from the rock.

  Even more impressive than all that were the stalactites that thrust down through the middle of the chamber. Stalactites that, at second glance, I realized were glowing not because of any magical energies, but because there were windows in the things. Enough windows that each one of those massive stone structures would’ve been a city unto itself, sort of like naturally sculpted arcologies filled with goblins, and they dropped down into the darkness below until I couldn’t see the lights twinkling as the crystal glow lost out to the deep darkness of a land without the sun.

  As I looked at them I couldn’t even be sure that they were stalactites. They didn’t seem to taper off. No, on second glance they were more like massive columns of rock glowing both with crystals and with the steady light that no doubt meant there were goblins inside those structures going about their business by the light of those crystals.

  I couldn’t even begin to calculate how many goblins must be living down here, but it had to be more than the entire population of goblins and humans combined up on the surface, then multiplied by at least double digits!

  “I think we found where all the goblins have been coming from,” I said.

  Oh hell yes. That meant there was one hell of a workforce lurking down here. All it needed was a wily player to come along and take advantage of it. That familiar tingling was hitting me all over again, and it was more intense than it’d ever been.

  Well, maybe not more intense than when I’d discovered Spellcrafting, but it was close!

  "People live in those things?” I asked Rezzik.

  "Well of course," Rezzik said. "Where else are we supposed to live?

  “Like how many are we talking?”

  “Thousands in the columns,” Rezzik said.

  I looked in either direction. The cavern was sort of like a canyon cut in the middle of the rock, only there was a top over the thing and no bottom we could see. It stretched off into the distance until darkness made it impossible to see more than hazy crystal glow, but those natural looking rock columns also stretched off into the distance horizontally as well as vertically.

  Walkways ran around the edge, cut into the stone along the sides, and massive rock bridges that seemed too thin to hold up the goblins walking across them arched out between the massive columns and to those edges.

  I took a step forward to have a look. There wasn’t a railing at the edge which had my stomach clenching, but I reminded myself it was a game.

  I stared. The darkness went down, and down, and then I realized I was staring not at a bottom, but at darkness and twinkling lights that disappeared down into that darkness until it was too deep to be illuminated by the bright crystals at the top. That hadn’t been an illusion when I was standing back from the edge.

  "Is there a bottom to that?" I asked, turning back to the goblins.

  Rezzik stepped forward and peered over the edge as though it wasn't a huge deal at all, and shrugged.

  "Maybe. Maybe not. We haven't gone down far enough to see,” Rezzik said.

  I stared down into the darkness, wondered what might be waiting down there, and decided I wasn't going to try to find out until I had a full raid behind me that was armed to the teeth.

  “Enough looking around,” one of our goblin escorts said. “You need to go talk to the Chief, and he’ll decide what to do with you. You can ask him any questions, too.”

  There was something about the way he encouraged me to ask that question, something about his tone, that said maybe it wouldn’t b a good idea for me to go asking the wrong sorts of questions. Only I was about to show him I couldn’t be intimidated.

  “Actually a meeting with the Chief would be great!” I said.

  The goblins glanced at each other again. Clearly they were confused. I wasn’t supposed to want to see someone who was supposed to want to kill me, after all.

  “What’s your game?” the goblin asked.

  “No game,” I said. “I just need to talk to him.”

  Thinly veiled death threats were all well and good, but right now I was far more interested in figuring out how the hell I could get these goblins to work for me. I thought I had an offer the mercantile goblins wouldn't be able to refuse.

  At least I hoped they wouldn’t refuse it. If they did it’d probably mean we were all about to die a messy painful death. Not to mention the goblins would eventually die a messy and painful death at the hands of Horizon Dawn.

  Sure the Horizon Dawn raid might not come in the next few days, but given enough time even those inept assholes would figure out how to get down here, and they’d do some serious damage to the local goblin population when they did.

  "Come on," the goblin escorts said, still eyeing me suspiciously. "We need to get a move on if this is going to happen."

  The goblin seat of government was as ostentatious and over-the-top as I’d expected. It looked like the kind of thing that would make Louis XIV think the decorator had gone too far.

  The walls were lined with pure gold. Gold alcoves contained statues that appeared to me made of goblinsteel. The fact that goblinsteel was being used for the actual statues while the gold was just background decorating gave me an idea of just how valuable that stuff was in the game economy.

  The whole place was the kind of ostentatious display of wealth that was clearly meant to impress, but all the ostentation merely came across as insecurity writ large to me. I figured that could only mean good things if I was going to negotiate a deal with the kind of asshole leader who thought the French monarchy was the height of interior decorating and not a cautionary tale for how not to get your head removed after a few generations of conspicuous consumption.

  It’s good to be the king right up to the moment the crowds show up to take off your head.

  Though, to be fair, I guess these goblins had no way of knowing about the French monarchy or how they’d eventually had a sudden and traumatic height reduction. Shame on whatever hack scenario designer had come up with this place, though.

  "So this is where your leader lives?" I asked.

  "No," one of the goblin guards said. "This is the Chief. Not close to the king."

  “Got it,” I muttered, looking at our surroundings. "If this is where your regent lives then I'd hate to see how ostentatious the king's palace is."

  "It is far more impressive than this," Rezzik said, completely missing the sarcasm. That or he chose to ignore it, but I would've put money on Rezzik not being able to detect sarcasm.

  "So the Chief is running things while the king is trapped in the mines?" Keia asked.

  "The king still rules us," Rezzik said.

  It was a simple statement of fact, though I was willing to bet it wasn't exactly how the goblin government was working right now. No, I was willing to bet that this Chief was the one really running the show while the goblin king was trapped in his dungeon.

  Heck, I wondered if the Chief would even want the goblin king to make a return. If there was one thing an usurper exploiting a power vacuum hated, it was the real power coming back.

  A goblin dressed in an outfit that was just as ostentatious as the decor around us blinked a few times as we approached a set of massive gaudy doors covered in jewels that were probably supposed to be impressive, but it just made the thing look like it’d been bedazzled by a tween.

  “What are you doing here?” the goblin asked, distaste curling its lips into a frown as it took in me, Keia, and Kris.

  “These humans request an audience with the Chief,” one of the goblin guards said, bowing deeply.

  The guard turned and glared at us like we were supposed to be bowing right along with him. I merely crossed my arms and glared at him. I wasn’t bowing and scraping for anybody.

  “This is highly irregular,” the glittery goblin said.

  “The situation calls f
or it,” the guard said.

  “We will speak of this,” Glitter said to our escort, then turned to us. “Come with me.”

  The Chief’s room was even more spectacularly tacky than anything we’d seen so far, which was quite an accomplishment considering what we’d seen so far. It was wall-to-wall gold, and glowing gems lined the walls providing steady illumination that reflected off of that gold in so many directions that it was almost blinding.

  I also noted that some of them weren’t glowing. Odd, that.

  I thought I could almost sense something coming off of some of those gems. A magical pulsing energy that drew me. I walked over to one of the gems rather than going up to present myself to the Chief sitting in a gaudy goblinsteel throne under a massive gem.

  “Conlan?” Keia hissed. "What the hell are you doing? We're supposed to be having a meeting with the big goblin guy."

  "Yeah, give me a minute here," I said, absentmindedly waving a hand at her.

  "You might as well give up," Kris said. "There's no getting around it when he gets this way."

  "Great," Keia said.

  "Excuse me human," the goblin doorman said, not bothering to hide his irritation. "But what do you think you're doing?"

  "Having a look at your crystals," I said. "There's something about these that…"

  I reached out and touched one. Which I probably wasn’t supposed to do. I realized, too late, that touch could totally result in my untimely demise if the goblins really didn’t like me doing that, but whatever. Fortune favored the bold and all that.

  Warmth pulsed inside the crystal that felt similar to the spell infusions I’d put into gems, but it was weaker. It didn’t burn with the rage of, say, a fire infusion that’d been put into the wrong gem. Or even with the power of an infusion put into a proper gem.

  Then a window popped up.

  Fiat Lux!

  Examining the light crystal has unlocked the secret of light infusions!