by Eric Ugland
Item Class: One-handed Melee
Material: Steel, Leather, sapphire
Damage: 50-60 (Slashing)
Durability: 850/900
Weight: 5 lbs
Requirements: none
Description: a straight-bladed sword having a cruciform hilt with a grip for one-handed use with a large uncut sapphire mounted in the pommel. The Charged Blade of Chaos unleashes balls of chain lightening with successful critical hits. All living and metallic creatures are valid targets for the chain lightning.
There were some pretty impressive weapons there. The mace was certainly powerful, but making automatic enemies of fairies just seemed like a stupid move. It was the first thing in the sell pile. The sword wasn’t something I’d want to use, it seemed more suited for wanton damage. So I put that in the sell pile with the mace. The daggers I kept. I wasn’t planning on much underwater combat, but the tooth was just so cool looking. I figured I could start my own little collection, and the first thing on the wall would be the KrakenTooth. And the silent dagger, that was just too cool. And useful. Because there was no minimum damage required for it to work. I wouldn’t necessarily need to kill anyone. Or even hurt someone badly. I wondered if I could use it on myself, make myself absolutely silent for five minutes. Did the dagger work that way? Did it mean I couldn’t ring a bell or just that I couldn’t talk… questions.
The two lockboxes held coins, and not as many as I was expecting. One of the sets of coins had a woman’s head on them.
“These are different,” I said.
Gideon took one of the coins, looked briefly, then nodded.
“They are from the country of Mahrduhm. If you wish, we can exchange them for Imperial gold.”
“Sure,” I said. I wasn’t planning on leaving the city soon, no reason to keep foreign currency. I knew Gideon’d probably screw me on the exchange rate, but this was, quite literally, found money, so whatever.
The first pouch, a very small one, had jewels in it. I tossed that on the sell pile. The next had a small skeleton in it. Of a bird, or something that looked like a bird.
“Any idea what this is?” I asked.
“Are you asking for us to identify this?” He replied.
“Sure.” I was a little annoyed, why’d he have to charge me for this, especially since I was offering to sell him so much cool stuff he was going to underpay me for.
He put one of his hands out, and I tried to really pay attention to what was happening, and I felt the magic flow from his hand to the object. Gideon nodded and looked at me.
“It is a magical construct,” he said. “With the appropriate command word, it will become a bird of your choice and will feed off your mana to exist until you dismiss the bird or you run out of mana. Judging your mana, you would be able to maintain the construct for between four and eight seconds.”
“So not that useful to me,” I said.
“Perhaps it is fairer to say there is room for you to grow before it might be of use. It is quite the artifact, however, so it has quite the value.”
I waffled for a second, trying to figure out if it was something I might make use of, but, ultimately, I figured having the cash on hand would be better. It’s not like a skeleton bird would be discrete.
“Sell,” I said.
The last pouch was just keys. About a hundred keys of various shapes and sizes.
I took it. Might be fun.
“Ah,” Gideon said, “about that last pouch, one, would you like to purchase the pouch itself from us?”
“Oh, uh, yes. If you don’t mind.”
He nodded discreetly, then said: “If you might allow us to mention a potential connection.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
A figure dashed out from behind him and brought out the familiar chest of spell and skill books. The figure thunked the chest down on the counter. Gideon opened it and ran his finger across the book spines, finally pulling one out and putting it on the counter in front of me.
“Zeddington’s Infinite Key,” he said.
“What does it do?”
“It alters the shape of a key to fit a lock you would like it to unlock. Very useful if you are wont to carry around many keys.”
“How much?”
“One thousand gold.”
“Do I have that much with all this stuff for sale?”
“Yes. And more.”
“I’ll take it.”
He slid the spellbook closer to me.
I picked it up, opened it, and went through the unpleasant process of learning the spell.
Look at that, you’ve learned the spell: Zeddington’s Infinite Key
Zeddington’s Infinite Key alters a key to fit any lock. Said key is destroyed after used to open one lock.
All the chests disappeared quite quickly, as did the items I agreed to sell. The little mystery hooded figures swarmed for a moment, and then it was still in the store again.
“Are you wishing to buy from us?” Gideon asked.
“I need a sword,” I said.
“Magical?”
“I mean, that might be better, but I’m just looking for something good.”
“Size?”
“Uh, like a long sword?”
“Preferred material?”
“I know nothing about metals.”
He nodded. Again, the figures swarmed, and then there were 10 swords laid out on the counter.
“Base iron long sword on our left,” he said. “Twenty gold.”
“And on the other end?”
“A magical artifact of celestium. Twenty-seven thousand gold.”
“Can I afford that one?”
“How much gold have you brought with you?”
“I’m not exactly sure,” I replied, looking into my money pouch.
“You cannot contain the gold you need in that pouch.”
“Ah.”
Without saying anything, the little figures came out and removed six of the swords.
“You have something in, uh, steel? Maybe silver?” I asked.
He nodded and pointed to the third sword in the line. It was long and thin. Not quite a rapier, but certainly not a broadsword. Or even a longsword.
“It is made of argentinium, similar mystical properties of silver. The strength of steel, the power of silver.”
“Anything else magical about it?”
“No. It is two thousand gold.”
“Does my account cover that?”
“The bow you are selling will cover it.”
“I’ll take it.”
He nodded, and pulled a simple black leather sheath out from under the counter, and set it next to the sword in question, and then, like magic, the figures came out and disappeared all the other weapons.
“Will you be needing anything else?” he asked.
I shook my head.
He gave me what I think he thought was a nice smile, but he just came off like one very creepy dude.
43
I beat Matthew to the pit. I’d grabbed a small meat pasty from a little cart on the street. A very nice older woman ran it and said she made the pasties fresh every morning. It wasn’t until I sat there, munching on the food, that I realized I’d forgotten the primary reason I went to Gideon’s, to sell the bag of rings and jewels we’d taken out of the queen’s stomach.
Oops.
Nadya was along next. She came down the street, almost like she was walking a catwalk. And I think she knew what she was doing, it didn’t seem like her natural way of walking. She was putting on a show for someone. There was only one other person I saw, a hard-looking man covered in heavy armor and lots of weapons following Nadya at a discrete distance. I don’t think they were together, the man seemed absorbed in his own world, and when Nadya stopped at the gate and looked down at me, he strolled on by heading down the block like was late to something.
“Good morning,” I said.
“Is it now?” She replied, the hint of a smirk.
&n
bsp; “Really? That’s the response?”
She titled her head at me. “That’s what I said.”
“It’s so played out.”
“Played out?”
“Just say good morning. You don’t have to pass judgment on someone else being polite, that’s not edgy or cool, it’s just being a dick.”
“You seem to be on edge.”
“Maybe I am, but I still managed to be nice to you.”
“Perhaps I was making a joke.”
“It was a terrible joke.”
She sat down on the other side of the gate and leaned back against the wall, pretty much mirroring me.
“Sorry,” she said softly.
“Sorry? About the bad joke?”
“No, I mean yes, but that’s not what I was, I mean, I was talking, I wanted to apologize for yesterday. And to thank you.”
“The queen?”
“Yes. The queen. I never had, I thought maybe I was going to be the only survivor again, or not survive, and I just, I ran.”
“Wait, you ran away?”
“Yes. I came back, though.”
“That was nice of you.”
“I didn’t know what to do.”
“Anything. At that point, anything would have been helpful. Throw some mud at the monster. That’d help. Distract her.”
Silence from her.
I finished the pasty and crumbled the wax paper into a tiny ball and shoved it into a pocket of my knapsack. Judging by the trash on the ground nearly everywhere I went, littering was the usual reaction to having something you didn’t want to carry, but I just didn’t want to get into that habit. So I tended to pack my trash until I found a proper receptacle.
Sitting there, I closed my eyes and pushed my mana around my body, making sure everything was going the right way. I did some healing, which was pretty much unnecessary, but why not, and I pushed my stamina on. Doin’ my daily magic. Something I neglected following the assassination attempt and my walkabout the city. I was about to turn my attention to thinking about my signet ring problem when Nadya started talking.
“I like to think I’m brave,” she said, talking quite softly. “But maybe that’s not true.”
“Nah,” I replied, starting to feel a little bad about how I’d spoken to her, “I don’t think that’s how courage works.”
“Easy to say for someone who charged a monster ten times his size without hesitation.”
“Maybe I have a death wish. Thing is, as far as I can tell, courage is not about fear. It’s about accepting fate.”
“That sounds like a bunch of words that don’t mean much.”
“We’re busting down semantics, Nadya. Anything I say is probably going to be a cliche of some sort or another.”
“How do you do it, though?”
“Do what?”
“Be brave.”
“Honestly, I don’t know. Not sure its something describable. A situation like that, or anything dangerous, you either do something, or you don’t.”
“What if what you do is run away?”
“Fight or flight.”
“Flight isn’t wrong?”
“Depends, I guess. I think, and you know, hindsight and all that, if you guys hadn’t been there, I’d have run. I think.”
“Only matters if someone else is in danger?”
“Yeah, I think. For me, at least.”
She thought about for that a moment, then bit her lip in a way that I’m not going to say is cute because it was just hot. I didn’t like her like that, okay?
“Matthew said you fought an ooze. True?”
“True.”
“What was it like?”
“The fight or the ooze?”
“The ooze.”
“Big. Yellow.”
“How big?”
“Twenty feet across? Orbish?”
“Did it, I mean, was there something controlling it?”
“Like a brain?”
“Yes.”
“Not that I could see. It’s definitely weird because there’s nothing inside it but, like, itself. It’s just this translucent yellow goop all the way through, and if you get a light source behind it, you can see through it. Almost. You can get silhouettes through it, but you can’t, like, see perfectly.”
“And how did it act?”
“Aggressive?”
“Is that all? Just an eating attacking machine?”
“It tried to get away when it was clear it was outmatched.”
“When was that?”
“Like what had happened?”
“Yeah, what had you done to it?”
“I really just annoyed it for a bit, the City Guard came along and really threw the hammer down on it. And in that case, seemed like fire was the big damage dealer.”
“Oh? Was it flammable?”
“No, but it seemed, I guess, I mean, it used a lot of, uh, pseudopods? Made tentacles out of itself, and that was its primary weapon. But fire seemed to harden the outside of it?”
“It had skin?”
“I guess? Not really? I don’t know.”
She seemed to think on that, and was about to say something, when a familiar figure came walking down the street, surprisingly chipper and whistling a tune I felt like I could almost recognize.
Matthew was finally there.
He looked from me to Nadya and back, a stupid smile on his face. Then he lifted his eyebrows suggestively.
“Seriously?” I asked.
“Good morning,” Nadya said. “You should try being polite, Clyde.”
I frowned.
“A good morning to you too, Nadya,” Matthew said.
This was not turning out to be a great day.
44
It turns out we had non-training type work to do. We got to spend all day moving wagons around. Harnessing teams of horses, and other beasts, to haul all the muck away. Then there were the wagons with the various bits that weren’t muck, and all that had to go away as well. I was definitely getting a bit frustrated with the tedious work. It was neat working with horses, partially because I wasn’t allergic to them anymore. I got a skill:
Cool Beans, you’ve learned the skill Animal Handling (LVL 1). Now you can calm down a domesticated animal, keep a mount from getting spooked, intuit an animal’s intentions, or, if you’re really lucky, tame a wild beast.
So that was always a plus. But this wasn’t the sort of skill that seemed easily transferable to my desired profession.
The day did get easier as we moved the wagons out, there was more room to maneuver, less chance of someone falling into the pit. Where there was nothing to block you from just stepping over the edge.
I kept looking for a chance to talk to Matthew in privacy. I had a lot to chat with him about, but Nadya was always there. And, half the time, there was a teamster or two helping out. I wasn’t particularly worried about the horses overhearing. Though as soon as I thought that to myself, I had to wonder if polymorph was a thing in Vuldranni. Was there appropriate magic to transform your body into a horse? Or something else? That’d be a super useful spell for a thief.
The last wagon left well after lunch, and maybe Matthew felt my desire to talk because he sent Nadya out to grab us some celebratory dinner. She was not pleased, I could tell she wanted to tell him off, that such labor was beneath her. Instead, she gritted her teeth, took his gold, and strode off.
“You think she’s going to spit in your food?” I asked.
He shrugged, “Won’t be the worst thing I’ve eaten.”
“You’re okay with that?”
He shrugged again. “Things are going so well if she wants to do that, she can. Now, what’s got your knickers all bunched up?”
“How about you say what’s got your knickers in a twist?”
“That’s better,” he said. “What is it?”
“Two men tried to kill me last night.”
“You fought them off?”
“No, I did a little trickery, and t
hey thought they killed me.”
“Magic?”
“Yeah.”
“Shadow magic?”
“Yeah.”
“I do have someone who is willing to talk to you about that.”
“Thank you. I just have to survive that long.”
“It would help. I’d feel pretty foolish if I arranged a magical instructor for you and you didn’t show up because of death.”
“I’d hate to disappoint you. These two were massive men. And dumb as rocks.”
“Ugly?”
“Yeah. Hideous.”
“Kinda low voices?”
“Sure, I guess. You know them?”
“Probably not specifically, but if these men were massive nitwits, they might be half-ogres. And if that’s the case, I’d be worried.”
“Are you about to tell me some gang specializes in half-ogre thugs?”
“Not exactly a gang, but there’s a place you can hire all sorts of interesting types willing to walk on the other side of the law for a price.”
“Half-ogres?”
“And more.”
“You think I should go there?”
“No,” he said emphatically. “You need to be invited there. It’s a members-only type of a club.”
“Where you can hire thugs.”
“And others.”
“So how do I figure out who’s trying to kill me?”
“That is a conundrum you are facing.”
“Not helping.”
“Unfortunately, there is a limit to what assistance I might offer. Realistically, you need to talk to some people who are deeper in this game than I am. Better would be those who are still in the game. Have you thought of joining an organization?”
“Like a gang?”
“Gang has such an unsophisticated air. Joining a criminal organization.”
“Like a thieves guild.”
“Sure. Good way of naming it.”
“Is there a thieves guild?”
“No. That’s absurd. Requires far too much in the way of order for thieves to form a guild.”
“But you just— never mind.”
“There is a group that you might, well, that they might find you interesting.”
“And I’d be able to learn from them?”
“They would likely be the best to learn from in the city. If not the Empire.”
