The Good Guys Chronicles Box Set 2

by Eric Ugland

  She raised her perfect eyebrows ever so much, as if she wasn’t used to being surprised, and certainly not by someone who looked like me.

  “I would offer you my thanks, what would you ask of me?” she asked.

  “Oh,” I said, stalling a moment to think over things. I knew it was foolish of me to look a gift god in the mouth, but it just seemed so odd. And not needed. I didn’t need a big award. Certainly not at the present, not with how my build was going. I felt pretty overpowered, and it just didn’t seem to make sense to help me out when—

  An idea popped into my head.

  “You know,’ I said, “Rebecca is having a baby. Maybe you can just give whatever blessing you might give me onto that kid.”

  The Lady, or whatever her name actually was stared at me.

  “You willingly give away the blessing of a goddess?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I mean, if it will help that kid have a kick-ass life, then for sure I do.”

  Again, more staring.

  Then she blinked.

  “No,” she said. “No. You cannot do this. You cannot be this way.”

  She stomped away from me, yelling and waving her arms. With each wave of the arm, the nice things zipped away, to be replaced by a sort of vague nothing. Her back to me, she raised her arms up and screamed, a blood curdling and loud sort of thing, and, had this been the real world, I’m sure it would have left permanent damage, but as we were in some sort of god-hole, it just hurt momentarily. Not even any ear ringing.

  “You have consorted with the god of monsters, and yet you just give away a blessing from the sixty four? You are a greedy human visitor to these lands. You only put your interests first. How can you simply—”

  “Hold up there, sugartits. Whatever you may think of Typhon, he’s done right by me so far.”

  “Your insolence is almost as profound as your stupidity.”

  “Look, Zothys, I’m probably a bit dim-witted. Never really been a strong suit of mine. But I don’t get why you’re upset about me—”

  “Because it was a test, Montana of Coggeshall. A test you should not have passed. Because it means I must reconsider the full ramifications of what a blessing upon you will do. Because it means—”

  “I am not who you thought I was.”

  “Yes,” she said sharply. “And I do not like being incorrect.”

  “Neither do I, but fuck if I shouldn’t have gotten used to it by now.”

  “You cannot possibly understand the problem I face.”

  “Is this where you look at the gods who’ve blessed me thus far and you’re concerned because they’re not your usual team?”

  “It is rare to meet one such as you, one who has gathered so many of my peers together.”

  “Peers? You mean the other gods?”

  “Yes.”

  “Just a unique man, I guess.”

  “Very much so.”

  She stared at me.

  “You have forced my hand in this,” she said, and placed her hand on me. Which was rather literal of her, but who am I to judge?

  There was an intense flash and some pain, and then I got a handy notification.

  Be aware: You have received Zothys’ Blessing of the Protector. You gain 25 levels in shield and +3 Constitution. Some might look upon this blessing with joy, others with anger. A side has been chosen.

  I looked down, and I saw my new indicium, a shield over my shoulder.

  “Thank you,” I said, “but—”

  “Fear not, I will watch over the child as if it were my own. He will lead a blessed life.”

  “It’s a boy?”

  “He is,” she said with a smile. “I do not enjoy that I must tie my fate to Typhon. Yet, you have done me a great service. And perhaps it is time for a change.”

  “Okay,” I said, trying hard to figure out what exactly she wasn’t telling me. “Mind if I ask you a quick question?”

  “You may.”

  I hesitated because I was going to ask about the whole sides and teams thing, but I remembered that Mister Paul hadn’t been particularly forthcoming, Eona said she wanted to tell me but couldn’t, and Typhon had just shut up. It’d waste the question. Instead, I thought back to the whole reason I was here in Osterstadt again.

  “Any chance you know where the sixth sheek's sixth sheep is located on a tomb?”

  She gave me one hell of a look, almost like I’d just taken a dump on her white suede coat.

  And then I was flying again.

  Chapter 33

  She did not know where that particular tomb might be.

  She didn’t understand why I was asking her, but apparently it was enough of a stupid question that it marked the end of our conversation.

  Instead, I was bodily thrown out the little room so that I sprawled across the floor underneath the alter.

  The priests all stopped their drinking and story-telling to look at me.

  “You amused her,” the priest who’d spoken to me before said.

  “Glad I could be of service,” I replied.

  “It is rare she is,” he searched for the word while another of his compatriots helped me to my feet, “challenged, and I thank you for doing so.”

  “It doesn’t bother you?”

  “Not in the slightest,” he said.

  “Also, how do you know—”

  “The Lady speaks to me regularly, and she warned me you were about to come through the door. At speed.”

  I brushed myself off.

  There was a bottle in front of me, and smiling face behind it. One of the other priests was offering me a drink.

  I took it.

  It wasn’t piss.

  Not much higher on the list of liquids, however.

  “Thanks, but, uh, I have something I’m trying to do tonight,” I said.

  “She did mention that I was to assist you if I am able,” the priest said.

  “I’m looking for a mausoleum here, one that belongs to, uh, the Sheek family.”

  “It is here?” my priest asked.

  “I’m quite sure of it,” I said.

  “There is one in the older quadrant,” a younger priest said. “It has some exquisite carvings on it, and takes quite a bit of time to clean.”

  My priest looked over at me, and smiled.

  “I can show you then,” he said.

  “Great,” I replied. “Lead on.”

  He gave a big smile, and started down towards the front door. He walked in silence, my footsteps seemed to echo around the whole nave.

  At the last pew, the priest hooked a hard right and led me to another door. His hand on the handle to open it, I stopped him.

  “Uh, father?” I asked.

  “Father?” he replied, quite confused.

  “Do you have, I mean, I was trying to figure out what I should call you.”

  “Nathan.”

  “Oh. You don’t have a title of some kind?”

  “I am a cleric of Zothys, but you may just use my name.”

  “Which is Nathan.”

  “Yes. And you are Montana of Coggeshall.”

  “Nice to meet you.”

  “It is,” he replied with a legitimate smile.

  He opened the door, and there was another strange little room. This one had what seemed like a small armory in it. Long hauberks of dark chainmail were hanging from a series of pegs. There were heavy maces in open boxes on the ground, and a stack of shields took up the wall opposite.

  “Please feel free to use your own weapon if you have one,” he said, pulling some of the chainmail off the wall and wriggling it over his head.

  “I’m sorry?” I asked. “What’s going on?”

  Nathan the cleric looked confused. “We are going into the tombs. You must be armed. And preferably armored.”

  “Wait, there’s—” my brain just wasn’t working right, “what’s down there?”

  “The dead.”

  “So why—”

  “Wherever you fi
nd the dead, you will find those that feast on the dead. Or, sadly quite common, you find the dead will rise again.”

  “Zombies.”

  “Sometimes. This tomb is quite old. More skeletons. Draugr. Aptrganga. Ghouls if we are unlucky.”

  “You find this stuff down there every time you go?”

  “No, not every time.”

  “But that kid, he said he was cleaning.”

  “He was. Cleaning the tomb of the undead and the rest of the vile things who chose to inhabit the tomb.”

  “Okay. This is, uh, I’m—”

  “It is right to feel fear, young one, but I will walk along with you. We will emerge alive. Perhaps not unharmed, but alive.”

  “Is every graveyard like this?”

  “No, but some are. Some argue that is the only reason we clerics have jobs,” he said with a smile. “Though I admit it is one of the more unpleasant aspects of my life here, serving the Lady.”

  He cinched a belt around his waist, plucked a skull cap from the top shelf, and twirled a mace.

  “Shall we go?” he asked.

  He was so damn happy about the whole thing.

  “Sure,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  I grabbed a hauberk and a mace, then slid a shield onto my arm. It felt oddly natural there, and I could tell how I should be using it.

  “One moment,” he said. He closed his eyes, and muttered, almost like he was praying.

  You have been offered a quest Nathan Gideon:

  Cleanse the Crypt

  Clean the crypt of the undead and those that like to feast upon the dead and undead.

  Reward for success: XP and increased standing the church.

  Penalty for failure (or refusal): none

  Yes/No

  “You should have received a quest,” Nathan said.

  “Yeah, thank you.”

  “It is the least I could do.”

  He gave me a smile, and opened the door, then walked down the stairs, still as if he hadn’t a care in the world.

  I hesitated and shook my head. Another side quest. Emeline’s damn quest line was a pain in the butt.

  But, I’d agreed to do it. So I started down the stairs.

  The mausoleum was basically the diametric opposite of the church. Where the church was happy and bright and chill, the tomb was dank, dark, and tense. The ceilings were lower than they should be, there were coffins and entombed bodies on dark stone shelves. Candles of all different heights burned, and I noticed Nathan pulling a candle from a bag, lighting it, and setting it with the others.

  He continued to do so at each grouping of candles we passed, adding one to it. Made a certain sort of sense, you could track how long it had been since someone else had been down here, and provide a measure of illumination. There were, as well, larger chandeliers, and these seemed to have some sort of spell on them which kept them from going out, because Nathan didn’t even give them a glance, and the candles all looked to be at the exact same burn level.

  The tomb was made up of large areas full of ornate sarcophaguses with a ton of cool carvings. Small hallways connected the various larger areas, but even those hallways had lots of bodies and coffins. Being that this was the oldest graveyard in the city, I guess it made sense there were lots of bodies.

  We moved slowly, Nathan leading, shields up, maces out. But as we walked through, we weren’t seeing anything. I was starting to think this was all a big joke, make fun of the new guy.

  Then I saw my first ghoul.

  We were walking out of one of the hallways into a large open space.

  As soon as I was through the door, Nathan about five feet in front of me, something leapt on me.

  I felt the weight, stumbled a bit, but with a strong rotation of my shoulder, I threw the thing on my back onto the ground.

  It was humanoid, just barely. Long limbs, long fingers, a sort of dark blue, purplish coloring to the skin, almost as if it was a human who’d been bruised over their entire body. The tongue snaked out of the mouth, thick and completely round, kind of segmented. Like a worm. Red eyes that glowed slightly, wisps of something that might have been hair at one point, but looked more akin to hay now. Rotted and black. Long claws came off each finger, and I could hear them scraping against the chainmail.

  As soon as the ghoul hit the ground, it rolled over and launched itself at me, lower jaw unhinging like a snake to reveal a massive mouth, and that creepy tongue.

  Without thinking, I brought my shield up, and stepped forward into it.

  There was a very loud krrrang and the ghoul was sent back. With a sickening thunk, Nathan buried his mace in the ghoul’s head.

  The ghoul went still.

  Nathan knelt next to the corpse, held his hand over the mess of the things head, and muttered something. A glow of sorts extended from his hand, and spread over the ghoul. The corpse was illuminated for a moment, then Nathan stopped doing whatever it is he was doing, and the light slowly receded into the corpse. Very weird.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  “A blessing from the Lady,” Nathan said. “A forgiveness of sorts for transgressing here.”

  “Do you, I mean—”

  “When I return to the nave, I will send some of my brethren down to collect whatever remains.”

  He got back to his feet, and we resumed our march through the tombs.

  The next large room was even worse. There were skeletons waiting for us, ghouls who leapt over the skeletons to get to us, and something that looked like several corpses combined into one creature. That was the aptrganga. Though larger than the other undead we faced, the aptrganga was slow and uncoordinated. Probably because it was comprised of multiple corpses. Nathan just whacked the big guy in the kneecap, which caused the leg to collapse and then the aptrganga was on the ground and easy prey.

  It wasn’t hard work, it was rather gruesome, and slow going. Nathan had to do his blessing on each corpse that fell, so that took forever. Finally, we got to the last room on this floor, apparently the tomb went down several levels, and that was the spot we were looking for.

  Nathan walked me over to a large mausoleum in the back, and he pointed to it. The Sheek tomb. Sure enough, there were plenty of sheep on it, and, one of them looked rather sickly. I pulled the horn and a little door, about two feet by two feet popped inward on the tomb.

  The cleric’s eyes went wide.

  “What is that?” he asked.

  “Apparently a young thief used to use this as her, uh, storage room.”

  “Now I wonder how she managed that,” Nathan mused, staring around the place. “I was under the impression there was but one entrance into this crypt.”

  Nathan seemed to find something that interested him, so I crawled into the hole to look around.

  There was a surprising amount of crap stuffed inside. I started shoving everything into my bag of holding. Books. Lots and lots and lots of books. Old books. Books of wildly varying sizes. And then a small bag with a very wide mouth. I was just about to shove it in my unfillable knapsack when I stopped. Slowly, I unlaced the small bag, and looked inside. It was the same eerie blankness that I saw when I looked in the unfillable knapsack. It was the bag of holding that she’d hidden the library of the magicians in, which made me stop and think, what the hell were all these other books?

  I decided it was probably a bad idea to store a bag of holding in a bag of holding. In all the games I’d ever played, that sort of tomfoolery would result in a massive implosion. Sort of like making your own personal black hole. I didn’t particularly want to go down that road, so I just tied it to my belt, and then continued removing every thing that was inside the secret chamber.

  “Ah!” came a cry from Nathan.

  Surprised, I smacked my head on the tomb as I rushed out to standing, wincing as I brought my mace up, ready to fight.

  Nathan was standing at a wall, looking up. He pointed, then looked at me.

  “There is a hatch up there,” he said. “Is your he
ad alright?”

  “Fine,” I said.

  “Seems as if your thief found a secret entrance into here and discovered a secret chamber on that sarcophagus. Very interesting. Perhaps you can arrange for her to tell us how she found all this.”

  “It’s not super likely.”

  “Hrm. Pity. We will have to block it off. Might want to mention that to her.”

  “Don’t worry, bub, she’s heading out with me. Shouldn’t be invading your space any more.”

  “Just as well, I suppose. Shall I walk you back?”

  I said goodnight to Nathan at the doors to the church, though he was really trying to convince me to stay and have some more wine with him and his brethren. Maybe if the wine had been a little better, I’d have stayed. Instead, I walked out into the darkness, still wearing the chainmail. The mace and shield were in my bag.

  Getting out of the city was a bit of a pain in the ass. But, being night, I just waited for a guard to nod off a bit, and then I slipped through the partially closed gate. I made it back to our camp just in time for breakfast.

  Chapter 34

  Our group moved out just after first light, most everyone who was able was walking, and the young and old rode in the wagons where we had room. Notably, the battenti made room for anyone who wanted to come along with them, as well as made hot drinks for everyone. This was marginally balancing out the fact that none of the horses wanted to be near the creatures pulling the battenti wagon, the gravlux.

  No one left in the middle of the night, thankfully, and spirits were high. Like me, it seemed like everyone else wanted to get away from Osterstadt. I did catch Emeline staring back for a spell, but I think that had more to do with unanswered questions about her father as opposed to genuine affection for the city.

  The deeper I dug into the city, the more disgusted I became with it. The culture it had developed was lopsided, unfair, and built on a particular type of cruelty. Also, there was a decent chance I had an arrest warrant out on me, and I really didn’t feel like going through the prison again.

  We trundled along the road, going much slower than I’d expected, but it was fine. Moods were high, the sun was shining, and everything seemed hunky-dory.