by Alex Sapegin
Gilwi nestled next to the Rauu. The eternally hungry northerner stuffed his hand into his bag and, grabbing onto a slice of salami, started gnawing away at his reserves. The elves stared at him with wide-open eyes. They were nauseated, and he was chowing down with abandon! The crew, hiding their grins in their beards, glanced askance at the developing scene. Beriem stood next to Hag and awaited the outcome with interest. Licking his fat fingers (the elves swallowed involuntarily and gulped for breath), Gilwi took the flask of home-brewed beer from his belt, which he always carried with him, drank a couple gulps’ worth, and extended it to the nearest elf.
“Want some?”
The Rauu made for the side as fast as they could; their stomachs no longer withstood the torture and needed to be emptied of what was left inside them after the storm. Everyone laughed. The humans’ tension was released. Gilwi took out a piece of jerky.
“Having some fun?” Hag turned to his teacher. The tutor’s eyes were dancing; he found the scene quite amusing indeed. He behaved unceremoniously with the Vikings, unlike the cold “minnows.” Beriem had long-since been himself among the rough company of the northerners and understood better than anyone the need for a way to ease their nervous tension. “You have one more thing to do!”
Hag stopped grinning. If his tutor was speaking in such a tone, he had something serious in mind.
“I’m listening, teacher.”
“In Dalhomburg another three hundred and fifty warriors are waiting for you.” Hag lifted his eyebrows.
“Really?” It was truly a complicated situation. Strange things were happening in the world under the goddesses’ gaze! Together with his personal guard, he would have a total of five hundred men! Honey is sweet, but bees sting. This smelled of blood and death. No one was going to offer him a force like that for free. Oh teacher, teacher! Meanwhile, Beriem went on.
“Take the Vikings with you to Orten. They’ll swear an oath of loyalty—to you personally! They’ll obey only your commands. Selection and hiring were conducted on this basis. The men are prepared to join your clan. Now for you; listen carefully. Before the guard hiring contract is up, you’ll actually be subject to Etran, the rector of the School of Mages. You can forget everything the contract says about obeying the orders of the magistrate; you’re subject to them on paper only.”
Hag led his tutor away from the wheel by the elbow. Helg Kaban would manage by himself, and this was a matter for as few ears as possible.
“Teacher, I don’t want to and will not be made a marionette. Your offer smells of tying me to strings in some political puppet theater! Was Ulmi the Wise not enough for you? You need yourselves yet another sea-king?” Hag asked directly. The Rauu made a face as if he’d just sucked a lemon.
“Ulmi’s an idiot! He’s made a connection with the guard and now thinks he’s involved with the higher-ups. The fool. The ‘shadow dwellers’ and the ‘invisibles’ will use him like the chump he is then throw him out when they’re done with him. The sharks in the secret police have sharp teeth. They have no more reserve about chewing up a northern seal like him than they do about swatting a fly. He’s a sea-king here; there, he’s a small fry.”
“Well what do you need me for? I’m better off as a sea-king here than a captain of the guard there.”
Beriem didn’t answer. The conversation hadn’t been to his liking from the very start. The boy had certainly grown up and had a good head on his shoulders, which was very important. He knew how to use it! He immediately understood the reasons for things and the consequences that would follow. He drew the right conclusions. A fox like him was not easily snared. All the more reason to convince him of the critical nature of the mission.
“You want to speak frankly? I’ll be frank with you.”
“No need. I understand that those who have a stake in it need a third party, a gemstone in their corset, as it were, that won’t raise potential foes’ suspicion. It’s as if the magistrate invited us, but in reality…”
“Stop,” the elf interrupted him. Beriem suddenly became pensive and stood there for a few minutes. “My grandfather has awoken. His Grace wants me to be in Orten. That’s important news,” the Rauu commented, breaking the drawn-out silence. “I’ll go to Orten with you. So will you take hundreds under your command? The portal will be ready the day after tomorrow. And I forgot to say, Ulmi the Wise isn’t your commander.”
Now that was frankness!
“Teacher, you’re worse than a shark. You’re an ancient kraken. You could eat a shark like it eats seals. I’ll take them.”
Orten. The Orten School of Magic. Andy, also known as Kerrovitarr…
The old Rauu didn’t show up the next day. As he studied the documents, Andy hoped to hear scuffling steps or Miduel’s creaky voice. He had hundreds of questions swirling in his mind that required answers. The elf never came. Andy had brought the kran for nothing. He scanned the room around him with his true vision and walked around the halls sniffing the walls. All for nothing, there was no trace of him, not even a bio-energy gleam. Well, it hadn’t been a dream, after all! He hadn’t eaten or sniffed any special mushrooms; no one had sprinkled mountain lily dust on him. The Rauu wasn’t a mirage. Giving up his search for the vanished Miduel, Andy concentrated on his work.
The spies were absent again. The Forest guests were more important than an archivist boy. In the few days the Lordship’s daughter’s posse had been in Orten, they’d managed to get noticed through several serious scandals and attract the attention of high society and the guards. The “punishing mages” stepped up security measures at the School. One thing remained a mystery is that either they were guarding the wood elves from the students, or it was the other way around. In any case, the gray gowns with black trim were seen in every corner of the School. The lack of a leader—an assistant and adviser—could have been seen in his archives work immediately and not in a good way. Andy was used to have his assistants fulfill his every order without a word, but now he had to run back and forth fetching things. They had separate rooms for reading and book storage. Soon he grew sick and tired of rushing back and forth with archive folders. He disregarded all conventions and shoved one of the office tables into the archives, among the shelves, to read there. Now that’s more like it!
He had already selected the main material as per Rector Etran’s request and annotated it with special colored bookmarks and footnotes. He just needed to finish up a few things so the job would be complete. He could say without exaggerating that he was now the single most highly informed person on the topic of “the siege” four hundred years ago. In searching for dirt on the elves, he became immersed in metaphorical dumps of man-made garbage. It was no surprise the papers had been hidden away behind thick walls and dubbed “classified.” He’d been obligated to take a solemn vow of secrecy. Some ancient manuscripts, if used properly today, could even now have an effect no less than an atomic bomb in terms of trampling an entire people’s good name in the mud.
So there he was, unwinding the sealing cord of another archival folder, and not expecting to find anything more appealing than a pile of manure. There were account statements, invoices, bills, and deeds. There were notes and seals belonging to elves, orcs, and the royal treasury of Olli I. There were contracts for loans from the bank. And there were more account statements, promissory notes, and income/expenses books. There were lists of goods, food stuffs and weapons for sale. There were income and expenses books containing the net balances for a certain time period. There was a folder for a trading house called “Torrinos” and a file on the Patskoi merchants of the first guild.
The trading house “Torrinos” was one of the best-known in modern Alatar, and four hundred years ago, it was nothing to sneeze at either. According to the papers in the folder, such obscene amounts of money flowed through the merchant house, it would leave you dumbfounded. Someone had carried out a titanic effort, collecting all these papers into one folder. Andy tried to remember what he knew on economics and acco
unting. Back on Earth his mother used to take jobs on the side keeping people’s books and records of their account balances, sitting for hours on end in front of the computer and sometimes explaining details to curious Andy along the way. Thus, he learned to create a simple ledger at the age of eleven or twelve.
Setting the promissory notes, account records, and other papers aside, he began to compare the numbers from the income/expense books and waybills. An hour later, he had formed an unsightly picture of the business activities of the trading house “Torrinos.” It wasn’t all clear, but what Andy had just dug up was more than enough.
No one could say the Patskoi merchants weren’t clever. They had enough greed to last a lifetime, too, which they satisfied through their trickiness. They “pumped” elven gold through “Torrinos” which was directed towards supporting rebel lords. It also provided weapons to those lords and food products to the hordes of “greenies.” The hundred-thousand-fold horde needed to be fed, everything was plundered for two leagues around. The merchants couldn’t leave them to die, could they?! The orcs paid the merchants with the same stolen valuables. Just you try keeping a city under siege for a year without any grub.
The slave trade, now that was an interesting topic here too. The merchants not only traded in humans, but also in Forest Elves seized by orcs in raids and received rewards on the spot from the elves for their help in buying back fellow tribesmen who’d been taken into slavery. They trafficked contraband into and out of the Forest, and organized spying on a young Olli I. Andy found a record of a sale of three dozen ships and barges (the prices for the river troughs were inflated three times over) to the young king for the purpose of transporting warriors across the Ort, and some other perplexing receipts with giant sums of money.
There’s a Russian saying that goes, “A friendly calf sucks two mothers.” It means those who are friendly with everyone, receive help from everyone. The Patskoi merchants were sucking milk from their herd, and the king’s people were helping them in this endeavor no less than the elves. If the elves were practicing “altruism” and did not suspect the merchants’ human trafficking activities, one thing was evident: across from every name of a king’s official on royal papers, there was a certain sum of money. Andy didn’t know whether it was a one-time bribe or a payment for constantly looking the other way. It didn’t matter.
Choosing a couple defamatory documents belonging to Forest Elves, he slammed the folder shut. Enough! A little more and his hate and contempt for Forest Elves would expand to include humans!
He found the last few things necessary and carefully stitched them to the other material. The rector might be satisfied with the results, but Andy decided not to do this kind of work with the archives any more. There were no more materials, books or manuscripts on attempts to construct inter-world portals. He had combed every shelf. He wasn’t allowed access to the negative two level, where he could rummage through the bins. Andy had read the conditions for canceling his contract as per the guild agreement he signed and knew them quite well. He made up his mind to terminate the hiring contract tomorrow (the Rauu in his group would probably be secretly rejoicing). He became angry and agitated. His brains were simply boiling over what he’d read the past couple days. He wanted to end someone. At the fencing class, Berg was amazed by his student’s progress. Andy just took his wrath and rage out on the fencing dummies and on Brig the Brick. In his seventeen years, he had already been smeared in someone else’s blood. But what was hidden here went beyond all traces of morality. Andy no longer wanted anything to do with it.
Tying up the folder strings for Rector Etran, he walked the halls again, looking at everything with true vision and sniffing to detect the slightest smells. Miduel did not magically turn up. Tomorrow he would come here for the last time and would wait and look for the Rauu until the very end of the day. If he didn’t appear, it wasn’t meant to be. The elf wasn’t fated to find out where he came from and Andy wasn’t fated to uncover certain secrets of the past.
Making up his mind, he grabbed the folder and left the archives. The guard at the main exit took his keys and cast the guarding seals and spells. On the agenda for the rest of the day: visit Rector Etran and tell her about his plans and intentions. The guild’s badge turned out to be a heavy burden. Then his plan was to work out and go out in the city. The School was getting on his nerves phenomenally; he needed to unwind.
*****
“Where exactly are we going?” Rigaud, as always, turned up just like a little devil on one’s shoulder and started walking alongside Andy. Was he waiting in the bushes in ambush or something? “Ooh, you look as if you just sat on a tack! Has life pulled the rug out from under you or something? Why’re you so mad?”
Andy waved his hand helplessly. He didn’t feel like talking. Rage was bubbling inside him, but he couldn’t simply scrape this barnacle off himself. Rigaud kept trying:
“Come clean.” (Silence.) “You look like somethin’ else, you know. I’m afraid to think whose throat you feel like sinking your teeth into right now. Not mine, I hope?”
The attempt yielded only a wry, sidelong glance, and a close examination of his sinewy neck. Rigaud the goose was pronounced too thin; he did not meet the client’s culinary standards.
“I don’t bite nasty things. I’m not especially prone to indigestion,” Andy answered.
“He speaks! That’s a victory. Pull your hair back, or someone will think you’re an elfette, he-he.” Rigaud chuckled disgustingly. Jerk.
Andy hadn’t noticed that the tie he used to hold back his pony-tail had fallen off. His hair went down loose around his shoulders for a moment. What the….?? Why you…! Stupid warrior ponytail!! Scissors time! I’ll actually shave my head bald! Rigaud wasn’t laughing any more as he observed Andy’s emotions and heard his muttering. He was holding his stomach, his face turned red, and he was wheezing slightly. He looked as if he could drop dead in a second. Noticing the angry glance Andy cast at him, Rigaud stepped to the side and held out his hands defensively.
“Hold on! I didn’t do anything. You’re the one who… Ggg…!”
You’re right, cur. A decade ago, a new mentor appeared in Berg’s school, a female mentor, to be exact. Ilnyrgu the Wolf. A warrior of at least the tenth or eleventh generation, from the female military elite of the eastern orcs, the local version of G.I. Jane, a gray Amazon lady… do they have Amazons here? But he couldn’t think of any other epithet for a tall, stately female with small (not orcish) fangs and an attractive oval-shaped face. He couldn’t very well just say she’s got ba… um, a nerve. If I called her a woman with you-know-what, I could lose my own! Ilnyrgu was beautiful but dangerous, as dangerous as a panther on the hunt. She-wolves could kill from the time they were four years old, and she alone had finished “school” out of five or seven girls; the rest had left the specialized educational institution due to “damages” not compatible with life. Besides her pretty face with large gray eyes, Il had an athletic figure, strong muscular arms and toned legs, a small chest, and a long braid down to her thighs, which she could use in battle no worse than an elf, maybe better. Sharp cutting objects woven into her braid were an extra weapon that could be used when you least expected it and could bring much misfortune to her enemies. Students wishing to learn how to fight with this extra feature had to grow out a long ponytail, the length of which varied from mid-thigh to the knees. Andy was interested. What if the Rauu with one of those feminine adornments suddenly challenged him? He wanted to know the strengths and weaknesses it brought a warrior. Rigaud and Timur decided to bide their time—what was the hurry? Berg was already stretching them to the limit! And they would get to see what Kerr looked like with long hair for now.
Andy’s hair grew out in one evening. Life magic is a powerful thing. There was, he had to admit, one unpleasant side effect of the spell—a monstrous appetite. When he would return after working in the archives, the long-haired guy was HUNGRY. First, he ate everything he had at home, then he ate ever
ything in Rigaud and Timur’s living quarters, then he headed to the School cafe, where the owner buzzed around Andy like a busy bee. He heaped food onto his plate, poured glass after glass of drink, buttered his bread and served more beverages. Puffing and panting from his feast to quench his famine, the client left half a golden coin on the table, a fitting reward for the attentive service. The owner asked him to come by more often.
“You poor, poor knights and would-be suitors for Rapunzel! How many of you perished in vain!” A nasty thought then occurred to Andy: “If my appetite’s gone haywire, I mean off the charts because of this hair—can you imagine what she felt like?? The first five knights or so she must’ve swallowed whole, along with their armor and white boots! The most clever one apparently wiggled like a worm and crawled into the tower with a sack of food on his back; otherwise, we never would’ve gotten that happy ending!”
The next morning, Andy realized what he’d gotten himself into. Through the night, his hair got tangled and turned into one big mat. Combs were powerless against it. Andy could see scissors clicking away on the horizon. His morning workout wouldn’t work out at all because of the ordeal. Guffawing without pause, Rigaud ran for help, while Andy sat across from Timur who was giggling disgustingly. He commented poisonously on each attempt to comb the mane. Marika, who came to their aid, laughed no less disgustingly than Timur when she saw such a scene. She chased Andy into the shower and told him to wash his hair thoroughly. Forty-five minutes later, his wet hair was combed, then dried and braided into a tight braid. It didn’t all happen without punching and shouting. Marika told him to be patient and rewarded him with a smack on the ear for each little movement he made.
