by Pavel Kornev
“Sprint”!
The Night Hunter’s skill pushed me forward, squeezing me through the thickened air, then threw me onto the ground within a few feet from the green-skinned caster. The continued momentum of my falling arm resulted in the flamberge hitting the shaman, knocking him off his feet. The force of the blow had very nearly wrenched the weapon out of my hand, but I’d already had some experience handing a two-handed sword. I took advantage of the spin to turn around to face the archers and wipe them out with a “Sweeping Strike”.
Green blood splattered everywhere. The orcs lay writhing on the ground. I staggered as the cooldown overcame me. My knees buckled. My flamberge stuck in the ground was the only thing that saved me from collapsing onto the rotting mulch.
“Uncle John!” Neo rushed over to me.
“It’s all right,” I said. “I’m okay.”
“You’ve got an arrow sticking out of you!”
I pushed the arrow’s shaft through my wounded ankle, then walked around, checking on the orcs lying on the ground. One of the archers was still alive but I didn’t have to finish him off as he soon croaked from blood loss.
“What are we going to do with the idol?” Neo asked when I began inspecting the bodies.
“What do you want with it?”
“We need to destroy it!”
I looked back at the withered tree trunk covered with demonic faces, shrugged and handed the boy an orcish hatchet. “You want it, you go and cut it.”
Neo grabbed the hatchet with both hands and resolutely went toward the idol. I continued collecting the loot. Soon I’d become the proud owner of several gold nuggets and a precious stone — apparently a ruby — which I’d picked out of the shaman’s staff with my bone hook.
The hatchet began hitting the dry tree; I joined Neo and watched his efforts for a while as he continued destroying the idol. Then I shrugged, went back onto the path and carefully looked around.
I didn’t feel like helping the stubborn kid. You never knew what he might come up with the next time. It wasn’t in my job description to cater to his whims.
About five minutes later I heard a crashing sound as the idol collapsed into the adjacent trees, caught up on their dense branches, then slowly slid to the ground.
A happy Neo came running complete with his hatchet.
“Throw it away,” I demanded.
“This is my weapon!” the boy said stubbornly.
“Later we’ll find you something more suitable,” I promised. “Come on, let’s get going!” The sun is setting!
With a wistful sigh, Neo dropped the hatchet onto the grass and ran after me.
Gradually, the path widened. As we walked, we started coming across skulls — some of animals, others of orcs and even humans — which seemed to be lining the way.
They seemed to be saying, “You are not welcome here! Turn back!”
We didn’t. The abandoned temple was located somewhere very close to here. We only had another hour or two. With a little luck, we’d find it before dark.
But luck was what we didn’t have.
4
After we’d left the glade with the idol, the path had meandered around the forest for a while, then took another sharp turn and arrived at the foot of steep cliffs.
“Orcs!” Neo cried out, alarmed.
I grabbed his hand and dragged him back into the bushes.
A precipitous gorge gaped between the cliffs. The passage was blocked by a rickety stockade. Two watchtowers loomed nearby, followed by the roofs of orcish huts covered with reeds.
Orcs were there too, what do you think?
A squat lancer stood guard by the half-opened gate. Two archers hovered on the towers, bored out of their minds. A thin stream of smoke rose to the sky from behind the fence.
“What are we going to do, Uncle John?” Neo whispered. “We’re not turning back, are we? Tell me we aren’t! I have to get to the temple!”
“No, we’re not turning back,” I reassured him. I wasn’t going to change my plans because of three scruffy forest orcs. The Temple of the Silver Phoenix intrigued me, and the longer I thought about it, the more I wanted to give its storerooms a good check.
But ... what about the orcs?
Had I been alone, I would have quietly stolen past the sentries under the cover of night. But with Neo, this trick wasn’t going to work.
Should we battle our way through? And what if the orcs called for reinforcements? This wasn’t the actual settlement: this was only an outpost. The moment the guards sounded the alarm by banging their battle drums or whatever orcs had, the entire horde would come running, and I wasn’t that great a warrior to confront the entire tribe on my own.
Neo tugged at my sleeve again. “So what do we do?”
“We wait,” I replied curtly.
I had the inklings of a plan. And even though it offered little chance of success, I could always revert to manslaughter if it failed.
WHEN THE SUN had sunk behind the rocks and the surrounding area had submerged into the twilight gloom, we headed for the outpost. Now that the bright light had stopped assaulting my eyes, my movements had become remarkably smooth and noticeably more precise and quick. I’d chosen against stealthing up and walked toward the outpost in the open, after telling Neo to stay behind me and keep his head down.
The guards had noticed me halfway. Alarmed, they hurried to lock the gate. Still, they didn’t shoot: they must have believed themselves to be perfectly safe
I walked over to the stockade, removed my mask and said,
“I’m going to enter whether you open the gate or not.”
The invisible “aura of fear” enshrouded us and penetrated the fence, making the orcs freeze and shrink back, immobilized with fear.
How I understood them. I too would have frozen in terror on seeing such a monster.
They might think that humans made a tasty snack and easy dinner. But creatures like me wouldn’t say no to a nice crunchy bit of a careless orc.
A series of rustling sounds came from behind the stockade. A disheveled head covered in shamanic tattoos appeared above the edge. The old shaman began chanting exorcism spells but the moment I gave him my sinister Cheshire-cat grin, he lost the plot and stopped..
A grin? More like a scowl, really.
“Open the gate,” I offered him the deal, “and I won’t touch any of you. Or I can go in by myself, in which case I’ll kill everyone ...
“What do you want?” the shaman asked, overcoming his fear.
“I want to go through.”
“Where to?”
“That’s none of your business!” I growled. “I need to go to the mountains!”
A maxed-out “Aura of Fear” syphoned off the internal energy surprisingly quickly. It wasn’t in my interests to drag the negotiations out. “Well?”
The bolt creaked. The doors parted slightly. I pushed the gate open and glared at the shaman who shrank back to a reed hut.
“I have your word!” he reminded me.
I put the mask back on and kept walking along the trail. Neo ran after me.
The old orc noticed the boy and shouted after him:
“Leave him to us!”
“He’s my food!” I growled, then snapped at the bewildered kid: “Come on, chop chop!”
Neo dashed after me as fast as he could.
“You were only joking, Uncle John, weren’t you?” he asked as he caught up with me.
I just snorted.
THE GORGE was damp, dark and narrow. Its moss-covered walls rose up steeply, as if the rocks had been cleft by the blow of a giant sword. There was nowhere to turn off here, nowhere to hide. We had to hurry!
When we’d cleared the gorge, Neo drew me toward some wide steps cut into the cliff. “It’s over here, Uncle John!”
“Come on, go up,” I said. “I’ll catch up with you in a moment.”
I stood next to the gorge mouth and studied the orcs settlement. I could see low huts peeking from
behind the trees in a small valley below. There were at least a couple dozen of them.
If all of the tribe’s warriors came out to face us, we’d never come out of this alive.
Suddenly I heard the sound of bare feet on the rock. I stealthed up and took cover in the shadows. A young orc archer from the outpost came running after me. He squeaked briefly when he stumbled upon my fist. He flew across the gorge and collapsed onto the rocks. I fell upon him and squeezed his scrawny neck with my clawed fingers. Orc even stopped breathing.
“So what kind of game is this?” I hissed into his face.
The archer made some unintelligible sound. I loosened my grip and demanded:
“Either you forget you’ve ever seen me or I’ll kill you all and use your bones to make flutes. Do you understand?”
The orc nodded warily. I let go of his neck, took his bow, broke it in two, then handed it to the guard. “Get out of here!”
The archer darted back toward the outpost as if the devil himself was after him. I wasn’t. I just stood there. I just hoped that my little lesson would work and that those green-skinned idiots wouldn’t trouble us anymore.
I shook off the stupor and hurried up the stone steps. Soon I caught up with the panting boy. I slowed down and walked behind him, studying the view which opened from this height. The orc houses down in the valley were even more numerous than it had seemed at first. Directly below us, a perfectly round lake glistened it’s dark, deep waters water.
“Uncle John?” Neo called to me.
“Coming!” I replied and hurried on.
The boy leapt up onto the next step like a gymnast. The stone slab gave and tilted to one side, sending him down into the abyss. Neo threw his hands in the air and began to fall from the cliff. I grabbed the boy by the wrist and jerked him up towards me.
Had this happened in the real world, we would both have dropped into the lake. As it was, the momentum swung me round as the boy had landed on the step next to mine.
“Thank you, Uncle John!”
I cussed. “I’ll walk first now.”
Had I been alive, my heart would have jumped out of my chest. But as it was, I hadn’t even broken into a cold sweat.
All this was just part of a program code. Just part of the code, nothing else.
But every time I repeated the mantra, it seemed to work less. I shrugged off my irritation and continued to climb.
Program code my ass!
BY THE TIME we’d reached the top of the rocky ridge, we’d come across three more traps. Every time that I sensed the stone slab growing loose underfoot, I stopped without actually stepping upon it. Then I’d check the next step, stepped onto it and helped the boy to cross the dangerous spot.
Much to my relief, Neo had stopped complaining of hunger and fatigue. He just ran after me without lagging behind. He was one hardy kid.
That was good news. Still, I was very pleased when I finally saw the stone dome of the temple loom in the night sky. It was shaped like an astronomy observatory, with no windows in its blank walls. The tall fence around it had for the most part survived. Only one of the side towers had collapsed, as had the bridge built across a deep crevice with a rapid stream raging along its bed.
We had to cross the crevice along a pine tree trunk that lay across it. Somehow I doubted the tree had fallen so successfully by itself; someone must have dragged it to the top of the cliff and laid it to rest against the stone pillars of the bridge.
“Wait here,” I said as I warily stepped onto the tree trunk.
It hadn’t even budged under my weight. I spread my hands to my sides and crossed to the other side. Those weren’t the most pleasant seconds of my life, I tell you. I didn’t fear the height that much but the roaring of the rapids below sounded a bit too ominous for comfort.
“Can I?” Neo shouted.
“Come on, then,” I shouted back.
The boy deftly ran across without losing his balance once.
I was the first to approach the demolished gate. Warily I looked over the place. There were neither humans nor orcs behind the fence. A huge round temple towered on the opposite side of a small square. A little further on rose the darkened ruins of a watchtower. The fence was lined with collapsed outhouses.
“Let’s go, then,” I called Neo and headed for the tower. I thought I’d noticed an unintelligible inscription on its wall. I walked over to it and read it.
Not good.
Beware, someone had written in a dark brown ink.
Or could it be blood?
Whoever had been here before us remained a mystery, but it was also clear that only players could have left such a warning. Which meant that all the storerooms had long been emptied. I could forget loot. What a shame.
“Wait here,” I muttered, then cautiously walked through the doorway. I studied the empty chests, even checked under the bench and walked back outside with a doomed sigh.
“We must go to the temple!” Neo demanded excitedly.
I tousled his hair. “I can see in the dark but you?”
“Not really,” the boy confessed.
“So what do we need to get first?”
“A torch?”
“Right!”
I could have gone on my own, but Neo was the one with the quest. Some key details may have been available only to him. Which was why we had to check out the long single-story barracks first.
Inside, everything was turned upside down just as it had been in the watchtower. Ditto for the basement which must have housed the storerooms once. Now the spilt contents of the crates heaped up on the ground. The players who’d looted this place hadn’t been interested in monastic robes. I picked up a white cassock and shoved it over to Neo.
“Get changed!”
I got some clothes for myself too, completely filling one of my inventory slots. I could use a change from that unpresentable fisherman’s cape.
I hadn’t found any torches in the basement. I was already on my way to the exit when something clanked underfoot. I felt under the robes strewn on the floor. My fingers closed over a round piece of metal. I couldn’t work out the engravings in the dark so I just climbed back upstairs, pensively playing with its long chain.
Somehow I doubted the looters hadn’t seen the amulet. They’d probably thought it wasn’t worth the trouble. Never mind. Waste not, want not.
I finally located some torches in the ruins of a corner watchtower. All other outbuildings had been either looted or burned. This one hadn’t been touched — apparently because the looters had been too afraid of falling to their deaths into the abyss.
“Now we can go to the temple,” I announced when Neo had lit one of the torches. “No, wait!”
I took out the amulet I’d just found. The picture of a phoenix glinted on its silvery surface. This just had to be some sort of magic artifact but I just couldn’t figure out its purpose.
“May I?” Neo held out his hand.
I placed the amulet into his outstretched palm.
“This is the Silver Phoenix amulet!” he boy announced without hesitation. Then his voice dropped as he added, “It’s only good for the temple disciples.”
Aha. That’s why no one had taken it. “Can you use it?” I asked.
Neo nodded.
“Take it, then.”
“No way? For real?” the boy’s face dissolved into a happy smile. He hurried to put the amulet around his neck. “Thank you, Uncle John!”
“You’re very welcome.”
I approached the open doors of the temple and looked cautiously inside. The floor was strewn with broken fragments of bones and the deformed armor of the order’s guards, all of which sported the image of a phoenix chiseled into the metal. No weapons anywhere though.
Neo followed me. The torchlight cast an uneven glow on the stone walls of a narrow corridor that encircled the main hall. There were no doors to the internal premises, so we set off in search of a passage, moving clockwise.
Here and there w
e came across the evidence of a fierce battle that had once taken place here. Still, the only bodies we’d seen belonged to the temple’s defenders. We still had no idea who’d managed to defeat them — apparently without suffering any losses.
We were already a quarter of the way through when the black mouth of a passage gaped open before us. That must have been the entrance into the main hall. Or so I’d thought at first, but as it turned out, the door led to the next corridor, which encircled the temple just like the first one did.
The builders had faced the inner wall with sheets of polished metal. The torchlight reflected from them, flooding all around with an uneven light.
Something crunched underfoot. I bent down and picked up a skull with an unusually massive jaw. Judging by its flat forehead and long fangs, it used to belong to an orc. There were plenty of other bones lying on the floor, but unlike the previous corridor, there was not one piece of deformed armor which used to belong to the temple defenders.
Was it suspicious? Very.
The light trembled.
“Don’t play with the torch,” I snapped at the boy.
“I’m not.”
He was right. There was nothing wrong with the torchlight. It was its reflection from the polished walls that was quivering and blinking as it was separating into a blinding light and the deep black shadow.
Then one of the shadows flowed away from the wall and lunged at me.
I barely managed to cover myself with my hand, but even so the left half of my body had turned numb and lost all sensitivity. The ghost began spiraling up my forearm, snaking its way toward my neck ...
A ghost?
I shook myself out of my stupor and drew the “Soulkiller” from behind my belt. With a single swing I sliced through the shadow that had entangled my arm. It disappeared in a flash of silver flame as more whiffs of darkness generated by the reflection of our torch, were already leaving the walls and hurrying toward us.
“Put it out!” I shouted as I began to lunge at the shadows. Still, there were too many of them. The ghosts wrapped themselves around me, syphoning my life.
