by Rachel Ford
So Jack gave them that he had no strong evidence to support his claim. “But you’ve spent long enough in my company to know what kind of person I am.”
They admitted that they had adventured together long enough to take stock of him. “But,” Karag said, “some men are skilled in the art of deceptions. There are entire schools, entire orders, devoted to it. Like the masters of the Obsidian Isles.”
“And the facts don’t lie, Jack. The fact is, you’re here with us: in the dirt, with the rest of the swine. So you may as well drop the high and mighty pretense, now that we know what you are: one of us.”
Eventually, he realized he’d achieve nothing except wasting more time. And he had much bigger problems than what a low-level criminal or even a master assassin might think of him. He was stuck in prison. Wellington had been heading to the guard station to see about their release. But now she was a block of stone; and they were still behind locked doors. The guards reacted to the sudden freezing of their colleagues and charges with the sort of lackluster display of interest that only a videogame can manage: they’d drawn their swords and prowled the room for the first thirty seconds, wondering aloud what had happened. By now, though, everyone had sheathed their blades and returned to their regularly scheduled programming. Only now, that involved walking around statues that had once been their friends.
Jack tried to get their attention, but they ignored his calls like they’d been doing since he arrived. The next order of business, then, had to be removing the shackles. Wellington had handed him the key to his restraints, and now he used it. The shackles fell away first from his wrists, and then from Arath’s and Karag’s.
Jack had been about to kick the ranger out of his party, to replace him with Marsha. But now? Now Marsha had turned to stone – Marsha, and Ceinwen and Er’c and even Migli. The game had stuck him with Arath and Karag. He didn’t mind the latter particularly. Sure, he’d been a cutthroat. But sometimes it paid to have a cutthroat on your team.
As for Arath? Well, the man was a good archer, though he couldn’t be relied on when danger got too near. In that respect, he mirrored Migli – a coward. Plus, he was a thief and a lowlife. If pressed, Jack wouldn’t have been able to give a reason why he actually wanted the ranger on his team. He wasn’t sure he did. But his alternative to having two vagabonds working with him, was working alone.
And he didn’t want that. So he forgot the other men’s indiscretions – the throat cutting and theft, and general sleaziness of Arath. Now, he focused on how to free them all.
Unfortunately, he didn’t have much in the way of inspiration. Their hands might be free, but they remained locked in an iron bar box – the damp stone of the prison walls behind them, and solid iron before them.
Just to be safe, he tried the key for their shackles in the door. It didn’t work, so he slipped it into his pocket. When – if – they found a way to reverse the curse, he’d need to be able to free his companions.
In the meantime, he set to work hammering on the bars and shouting for release. Which did exactly nothing to draw the guard’s attention. They went on milling about the prison as before, exchanging meaningless snippets of conversation and repeating the same bits of news.
One time it would be, “Sad business about the mayor.”
“You’re telling me.”
The next it might be, “Sad business about the mayor.”
And the response would be, “No doubt about it,” or, “That’s what my brother says,” or even, “No skin off my nose.”
Sometimes one of the guards would ask, “Did you hear about the scam that a band of wanderers pulled at the Red Fox?”
And his companion would reply, “No respect for the law these days. That’s what’s wrong with the world.” Or, “No skin off my nose.” Or even, weirdly, “No doubt about it.” Which as far as Jack could tell made no sense at all in context.
One of the patrolling guards would ask the same question every time he passed his stationary colleague: “You coming to dinner Sunday? Jennie’s making pot roast.”
Sometimes, the other lawman would say, “Wouldn’t miss it,” or, “No doubt about it.” Other times, he’d shrug. “Got nothing better to do.” Occasionally, he’d shake his head and declare, “I’d sooner chew horse leather.”
This was a bug, obviously. Someone had forgot to set response flags on the NPC’s – the sort of things that would maintain consistency between positive and negative responses, for instance. The same guard had changed his mind about Sunday dinner dozens of times in Jack’s hearing in the last half hour alone. Which shouldn’t have happened. Neither, for that matter, should the first guard have asked the same question that many times. He should have been cycling through conversation topics, rather than just repeating the first one in his list. Jack’s guess was, someone forgot to mark completed conversations as done – so the NPC’s never got past that lone topic, because they never recognized that that conversation already took place.
Yes, there were definitely problems here. And if he was still testing – and not trying to escape the game with his life – he would make a note of them and bubble them up to the dev team.
Right now, though, he didn’t care, except that the bugs were annoying. Incredibly annoying. “If I have to hear about the mayor or his dinner plans one more time, I’m going to strangle him…”
Arath laughed at that. “As I say: you’re in the dirt, with the rest of the swine.”
Jack ignored the jab. “How are we going to get out of here? We need to move, and fast; and they are just ignoring us.”
“We can wait until the changing of the guard. Someone’s going to have to take charge, and check in on the prisoners,” Karag said. “Presumably.”
The ranger snorted. “I wouldn’t count on much from these yokels. We’ll be lucky if they remember to feed us three times a day.”
“We don’t have time, anyway,” Jack said. “We need to find the dwarves, and maybe figure out a way to reverse this curse. We can’t sit in a prison cell while Kalbidor is marching on Ivaldi’s Hall.”
Karag nodded, and Arath shrugged. “It really doesn’t seem like our fight, boss.”
“I could look for weak spots in the wall,” the giant suggested. “See if there’s anything I can knock out of place, to make an opening for us.”
Jack glanced at the building around him – at the sagging roof, and the old stone and its crumbling mortar. He didn’t doubt that Karag could knock holes in the place. But he half feared that doing so might bring the entire building down on top of them.
He nodded slowly. “Maybe. But…there’s got to be another way. They wouldn’t just lock us in here with no way to get out.”
The they he meant were the game developers, of course. But his companions stared at him. “So how familiar are you with the concept of ‘prison,’ boss?” Arath asked.
Jack ignored him again. “Let’s look around first, Karag, before you do anything. Let’s see if we can find – I don’t know: a key, or a secret door, or…something.” That’s usually how it went in videogames.
“That would be a remarkable coincidence,” Karag said.
“Bloody unlikely,” the ranger agreed.
“Just check…”
So they did. Arath made a point of loudly declaring his failures as he went. “Nope. No secret passage here. Ope, what’s this? Oh, right: nothing. Nothing here, just dirty hay. Look, no passages here either.”
Karag kept his complaints to himself, but he clearly regarded the exercise as a waste of time. He wore a deeply skeptical expression and seemed not to throw himself into the search with much effort.
The guards went on patrolling, apparently oblivious to their sudden spurt of activity.
“Sad business about the mayor,” one of them said as he passed their cell.
“No skin off my nose,” his companion responded.
Jack gritted his teeth and went on looking. He pressed the rocks of the wall one by one, hoping that he might fin
d a bit of foundation that would move.
Another patrol came by. “You coming to dinner Sunday? Jennie’s making pot roast.”
He rolled his eyes as the other man replied, “Got nothing better to do.” But he kept up his search. Unless he’d uncovered one heck of a bug, there had to be a way out of here – a way out besides Karag, tearing the building down. The game’s companion system assigned followers based on player actions, which meant that, had Jack initially played differently, he might have ended up with some other companion. So his escape from prison couldn’t hinge on Karag’s brute strength, because there was no guarantee Karag would be there.
The giant gave up after a few minutes of fruitless activity. Arath didn’t last much longer – and, Jack was sure, he persisted only to narrate the failure of his efforts. In the end, he switched his narration to Jack’s failure. “Guess that wasn’t the right rock.”
“Look, nothing doing there.”
“I’m surprised. I was sure that one would have been the enchanted portal.”
On and on he went, until even Karag – despite his skeptical view of the endeavor – resorted to threatening the ranger if he didn’t shut his mouth.
Jack tried to ignore them both and focus on his work. But he couldn’t quite ignore the rising worry that followed his successive failures. What if, for all of Arath’s aggravating whining, he was right? What if there was no escape? What if – in addition to forgetting the conversation flags – the developers forgot to program in an exit? What if Jack was supposed to have paid Marsha the first time she appeared? Should his party have already been out of prison by time Iaxiabor’s curse fell?
He didn’t know, and he had no way of knowing. So all he could do was worry and work. And he did both in about equal measures – until at last, about two-thirds of the way through his search, one of the stones moved when he applied pressure. He started at the unexpectedness of it, and had to do a doubletake just to confirm it.
But sure enough, the face of the stone dropped a good two inches. Then a metallic click sounded, and two paces away, a human-sized gap in the rock wall opened.
Jack blinked at it, then laughed. For the first time since he’d started looking, he was aware of silence – blissful silence. Arath had finally shut up. So he turned around with a smug smile. “You were saying?”
The ranger blinked too. Karag raised an eyebrow. “That is…most unusual.”
Arath shook his head. “I take it back, Jack: you were right.” Jack was about to acknowledge this uncharacteristic admission when the other man went on. “You know more about prisons than I do. And I’ve spent a good deal of my life in them.”
Jack snorted. As surprises went, finding out that Arath was a jailbird really didn’t rank up there as a big one. But he had a mission to finish. So he said, “Let’s go.”
Karag, though, stopped him. “There’s one problem, Jack.”
“What?”
The giant gestured to his own frame, and then to the door. And Jack understood at once. The hole in the wall could accommodate any human, and most humanoid races. But not one of the giantfolk. Not even if Karag scrunched himself up into a ball and crawled through. His shoulder span was too wide, and he stood too tall.
No, there would be no getting through that door. “Sugar. There’s got to be another way.”
Karag nodded. “There is. I know exactly what it is?”
“What?”
“You two go through. I’ll be right behind you.”
He would have stayed to find out what, exactly, the other man had in mind, just in case it didn’t work. But Arath scampered for the opening. “You got it, tall boy.”
Jack rolled his eyes and followed. He figured he could duck back inside if the plan, whatever it was, didn’t work, and Karag didn’t follow.
He needn’t have worried, though. A moment after he stepped outside into the dim light of late afternoon, he knew exactly what the giant had in mind – because the entire structure started to creak and moan. Ancient mortar turned to dust and rained down from the spaces between the rocks in a powdery haze. Shingles clattered to the ground in a great cacophony all around, and people screamed in alarm. The walls rocked. The roof swayed.
Then everything collapsed – the walls, the roof, and all the supporting structure in between.
Chapter Seventeen
In one of this videogame-sized miracles, no one died. But they weren’t thrilled by the development, either. The game alerted Jack,
You have lost goodwill with the people of Fox’s Crossing.
You are mistrusted by the people of Fox’s Crossing.
Which, if he was being entirely honest, pissed him off the tiniest bit. He’d gone out of his way to save one of their people. He’d risked life and limb to bring young Andrew home. Had that earned him any boost in goodwill? Not a bit of it.
But demolish a building, and it’s all over.
Which, he had to admit, didn’t sound great when he phrased it like that. But the prison looked like a stiff breeze might knock it down. And they had already settled their debts. There was no reason to keep them locked up like animals.
No, Jack wasn’t happy about it at all. Still, Karag picked himself out of the rubble, and so did all the guards – emerging out of a cloud of no doubt toxic dust, coughing and a little battered, but not too much the worse for wear.
He might have scurried off into the late afternoon had not Arath said, “Come on: let’s get our stuff back before they have the chance to collect themselves.”
Which was a good, but optimistic, point. The entire prison had just collapsed. Would their items really be accessible?
Arath seemed to think they would, so Jack followed the ranger through a haze of dust and grime. And with a measure of surprise, he stumbled over an evidence locker – turned on its side, but otherwise intact. Arath grabbed his own belongings, and Jack followed suit. As soon as they stepped away, Karag helped himself to his goods too.
Then they scuttled away, leaving the guards wheezing and scratching their heads.
“Strange business, that.”
“No doubt about it.”
“I guess the prisoners probably didn’t make it. Not through that. They must be done for.”
“No doubt about it.”
Jack shook his head and left the NPC’s to repeat themselves ad infinitum. He took some side roads for a ways, staying out of sight until he’d put a good bit of distance between his party and the now demolished prison. But then he hopped back onto the main road. “We need to find a shop.”
“A shop? Shouldn’t we leave, sooner rather than later?”
“Yes. But we need a map.” Marsha Wellington had had one in her possession when she turned to stone, but all of her possessions had frozen with her – clothes and goods alike, as solid as flesh and bone became.
Karag nodded. “Right. But let’s not delay. Sooner or later, they’re going to figure out we escaped.”
“I shouldn’t worry too much,” Arath said. “It’ll take these yokels a year to clear that debris. We’ll be long gone by time they realize it.”
Jack didn’t know how much stock he put in that prediction, but he didn’t plan to put it to the test, either. All he needed was thirty seconds in the first shop he came to, and he’d be on his way.
Or so he thought. The truth proved rather more complicated. Because the first shop Jack came to was a little place called One-Legged Jake’s Emporium. A decorative script under the shop’s name declared it to be, “Your one-stop shop for any and everything you need.” An optimistic categorization, Jack thought, given the size of the building.
But then he stepped inside and saw One-Legged Jake. Or, what he’d become: a solid stone statue of a man. Everything from his scarred visage to his peg leg had turned to rock.
Jack licked his lips and glanced from the statue that had been a man, to the shelves and cupboards and countertops all around – all brimming with items, with no keeper to guard them.
Ara
th crowded in behind him, and then Karag too. The giant made a sympathetic sound. “A lot of good people in this town.”
The ranger made a gleeful sound. “Which means good pickings for us.”
Jack licked his lips again. He wanted to tell Arath off. He wanted to be noble about all this. He couldn’t rob a man who’d been turned to stone, could he?
His eyes roved the shelves, so full that their bounty spilled over in places. It looked like the life’s work of a great adventurer: golden trinkets and shimmering baubles, fine fabrics and magnificent weapons.
“We should look elsewhere,” Karag said. “There are bound to be other shops open. And this fellow will have want of his belongings when we lift the curse.”
Arath just laughed and headed for one of the displays of gold. He scooped bejeweled rings and rich necklaces into his pockets.
Jack felt his fingers itching to join him – and not just there, either. One-Legged Jake had a hell of an impressive collection of alchemic ingredients and potions. He could have outfitted a team of adventurers, just with his stock.
Karag, meanwhile, had begun to threaten the ranger. “Put that back, you miserable thief, or so help me…”
“No,” Jack interrupted, “leave him be, Karag.”
The giant frowned at him. “What?”
“Well…I mean, we’re about to face Iaxiabor. We need to stock up. I’m sure One-Legged Jake here will understand.”
Arath nodded briskly. “Exactly. Listen to the boss. He’s a smart man.”
Karag set his jaw grimly but didn’t argue. Which Jack appreciated. He didn’t want to explain what fighting Iaxiabor had to do with filling his pockets with gold. But that was exactly what he did: he headed to the nearest shelf of precious gems and golden baubles, and scooped them unceremoniously into his inventory.
Arath scrambled to the next tray, with a haste that put Jack’s hackles up. He hadn’t made this a race, but – well, if that’s how the ranger wanted to play, he didn’t mean to lose.
He rushed along the counter, scooping all the precious metals and shimmering gems he could find into his inventory. Then, he pivoted to the spells and potions counter. Arath was only a few steps behind him, so he drew open the mouth of his inventory bag and swept an armful of goods into it.