That was why I had wanted him here while I decided what to do next. The three of us made for a good mix.
“The first thing I need to find out is who tried to turn the girl into a wraith, and why. As soon as she’s better, I need to talk to her.”
“Her parents won’t let you anywhere near their house. Everyone blames you,” said Gulliver.
“That’s why I’m going to recall Morphant from Hogsfeate.”
“Your mimic?”
“Who else?”
“You need him in Hogsfeate. Isn’t he pretending to be the leader of the heroes guild?”
“Needs must.”
“Why not create new mimic?” said Wylie.
“If this was just an ordinary trick, then sure. But new mimics have a tell, Wylie.”
“Ah. They stink.”
“Exactly. A low-level mimic has a tell that marks them as imperfect copies. People are already alert in Yondersun, and they already think I’m plotting things. If I send a mimic out and he gets rumbled, they’ll go crazy. And the way people are right now, they’d spot a novice mimic instantly. Whereas Morphant is a level 19 mimic. He can do the job without giving himself away. I’ll have him take on a new appearance, tell the girls’ parents that he’s a doctor, and then question her.”
“But what could it be? What horrible creature could turn someone into a wraith?” said Gulliver.
“Certain mages can do it. Demons. There are a few monsters that have the ability. Nothing that should be within a hundred miles of Yondersun.”
“Mages? What about…”
“Riston? I don’t know,” I said. “I’m beginning to sense what kind of mage he is. And I don’t think it involves wraiths.”
“No?”
“He was talking to the insects. Whispering to them. And then, just like that, they turned back. Think about what’s happening in town, too. Everyone’s falling over themselves to kiss his arse. Galatee is letting Riston command her guards. Don’t get me wrong: his beard is impressive, and appearances count for a lot. But not enough to win him this kind of influence.”
“So why not unmask him? Tell everyone what he is?”
“That’s the problem,” I said. “If he uses his spells to influence people, then I can’t just tell them he’s manipulating them. All he’ll do is double down. Use mana to keep them on his side.”
“Ah. You need to show them he’s doing it.”
“Cut his head off!” said Wylie.
“An idea wonderful in theory, useless in practice. We’d just look like murderers. If we ever get the chance to cut his head off, we at least need to show the townsfolk what he is before we do so.”
“The way I see it,” said Gulliver. “He’s got the guards on his side. Practically the whole town. He’s already got them to the point where they’re scared about people going missing. Now, he can show them the girl, use his mana to get them to believe you did it, and that’s it. They’ll run you out of town.”
It sounded bad. The worst thing was, I knew that Gull was right.
“There’s only one way out of this. The girl was in the caverns under the crater. Now, we know that people have been going missing for a while. I’d bet my arse that the rest of them have been turned into wraiths, and that they’re underground. So, I need to go down there and find them. If I can tie it all together with Riston, then all the better.”
“Shadow and Eric?” said Wylie. “How we help?”
“I don’t have anything to bargain to get them out of their cells. I already tried using my core voice to contact Galatee, but she ignored me.”
“We can’t just leave them locked up.”
“Riston will have taken them to a cell. Maybe one near Gary’s.”
An idea hit me.
“…or maybe not. One second.”
I used my core voice.
“Shadow?”
The next few seconds were tense.
There was no answer.
And then a voice spoke.
“Beno?”
It worked!
“One minute, Shadow,” I told her.
I turned my attention back to Gulliver and Wylie. “I can use my core voice to speak to Shadow. That means they’re holding her and Eric in a normal cell. One without any alchemic lining on the walls. Those cells are on the outskirts of town. Wylie, I want you and the boys to tunnel underneath and get Shadow and Eric out.”
“I not a miner anymore!”
“Just grab your pickaxe one last time, buddy. Do it for me.”
“No.”
“Then do it for Shadow.”
Wylie knew full well that I had him by the balls.
Metaphorically, of course. This wasn’t that kind of dungeon.
I’d cornered him because I knew how he felt about Shadow. She had always been nice to Wylie. Even in the beginning when he was just a miner, way before he’d earned his promotions and become the kobold he was today. She’d never treated him with anything but friendship and respect.
Wylie nodded. “I will do it for Shadow.”
“Then get to it. The quicker you dig, the faster we’ll get her out.”
He headed off. Gulliver and I were alone.
“So that’s the plan,” I said. “Wylie and the miners will get Shadow and Eric from their cells. We’ll go back to the caverns under the crater, and we’ll launch a full expedition. Find out what Riston’s up to down there, put a stop to it, expose him to the town, and get back in time for tea.”
“Screw tea. I need a beer or ten,” said Gulliver.
CHAPTER 8
Overseer Bolton
Three wheels clacked again and again as the horses pulled the cart over the wasteland. The fourth wheel made a whining sound. It had done that every few seconds for the last five hundred miles. The sound was slowly driving Overseer Bolton insane, but he couldn’t voice his displeasure.
He couldn’t say anything because Anna had told him to buy oil back in Wheedlestone. Given that Bolton hated being told what to do even more than he hated spending gold, he’d told her no.
“We don’t need to oil the cartwheels. They’ll be fine. Now shut up.”
Anna had given him one of her oh-so-innocent smiles. “You know best, overseer.”
That was why he pretended to ignore the whining sound. He put just as much effort into ignoring it as he did into ignoring the smug grin Anna was shooting in his peripheral vision.
After weeks of traveling Xynnar following one false lead after another, Bolton, Anna, and Utta found themselves back in that sun-drenched arse of nowhere. The hellpit they called the wasteland. Faced with the spread of orange rocks, he couldn’t say he was happy.
Give me a beer. A bath. A woman with a sympathetic ear and playful hands.
Well, it wasn’t to be. Not yet. So Bolton quit daydreaming, and he turned his attention to Anna, who’d stopped grinning.
“Not so tight,” he told her. “Pick up on Ham’s mood. See? He’s tired. Pulling the reins tighter makes him slow down out of spite. When he’s in this kind of mood, you have to ease off.”
Anna pulled the reins tighter out of spite.
“He’s a horse. He doesn’t get to have moods.”
“Anna…what did we say about horses?”
“Treat them like you would a person. Pah. I treat people just as bad!”
That was their problem. He and Anna both hated being told what to do as much as the other. Bolton knew it. That didn’t mean he could do anything about it. He was in the twilight years of his third life in Xynnar, and his behavior was on par with a reject from the Chosen One school.
“You know, if you’d just listen to me,” said Bolton, “you might make something of your life one day. We might knock the stupid out of your head.”
“What do you care? I’m your prisoner.”
“You’re not my prisoner.”
“Um…you won’t allow me to leave. Textbook prisonry, by my reckoning.”
“Prisonry isn’t a word.”
>
“Words are just shapes made of sound. Who made the rules on what shape’s proper and what isn’t? Huh? Someone sat on their fat bum years ago and decided ‘For the rest of time, this is how people are going to speak.’ Well, I ain’t following it. I say whatever words I want.”
“Oh, you’re such a rebel that you don’t even follow the rules of language now, eh?”
“Don’t you forget it!”
Bolton heard shifting from the wagon behind them. It was Utta, waking from his nap. Suffering from intense travel sickness, the only way the boy could get through their journey was to sleep.
“Can you two shut up? I swallowed a doze-root when we left Wheedlestone, and your yammering is cutting through it!”
“Sorry, Utta,” said Anna. She turned to Bolton and whispered. “I say whatever words sound right. And prisonry sounds right.”
Unbelievable.
She’d argue with Bolton about the color of the sky if he said that it was blue. Yet when Utta asked her to be quiet, she whispered. Their friendship was something to behold. Enviable, really. Bolton had lived three lives – two as a human and one as a dungeon core – and he’d never had a friendship as strong as that. He supposed that was what happened when two Chosen Ones were kicked out of the Chosen One School and only had each other.
Bolton spoke at a whisper now, too. He liked Utta. He was a good-natured, hardworking lad who was probably a little too much under Anna’s influence. But because Bolton liked him, he’d respect his need to nap.
“All I’m trying to show you,” he whispered, “is that getting kicked out of the Chosen One School means nothing. If you try, you can still do great things.”
“I didn’t get kicked out. I left. Mutual accord.”
“Right.”
“What do you even care?” said Anna. “I’m not your daughter.”
Bolton said nothing. Just stared.
Three lives, and he’d never had children. Never had a wife.
Course, he couldn’t have had either of those things when he was a dungeon core, so that life didn’t really count. And he’d spent his first human life as a warrior. Killing things and whoring around.
But his third life? The resurrection he’d earned? He’d wasted it teaching at the Dungeon Core Academy. Training a bunch of stupid lumps of rock how to kill stupider sacks of flesh.
So no. Anna wasn’t his daughter. She never could be.
That didn’t mean it didn’t hurt when she spat it out as an insult.
Bolton didn’t say anything back to her.
Anna had never met her father. Supposedly he was a soldier or something. He could be the king of Xynnar, for all the good it did her. If he was never around for her, what did it matter?
Say if she was allowed to pick any father. Like she could point at anyone, declare, “That’s my dad,” and it’d be true. Would she pick an old, bald, guy who worked at the Dungeon Core Academy?
Probably not.
So why did he act like that was what had happened?
And now he was giving her the silent treatment. Great. Like that had ever worked on her. She loved silence.
She gave the reins another tug. Just out of spite. The horses snorted, but Bolton didn’t even flinch.
Wow. She must really have hurt his feelings.
The stupidest thing was, she felt bad. He’d taught her and Utta a bunch of skills while keeping them in prisonry. Real-life, practical skills that you could actually use. Not like the hokum they taught at the Chosen One School.
Now, thanks to the stuff Bolton had taught her, Anna would be of some use when she finally got to join a pirate crew. When she found one worth their salt, anyway. Her last crew had been a bunch of rum-addled chumps.
“Are we going to Yondersun?” she said.
Bolton didn’t answer. He was just staring into the distance.
She refused to show him that she felt bad.
But…
She needed him to talk to her.
So that meant she’d have to say that stupid word people always wanted to hear. She’d say it because she needed Bolton to tell her things. And definitely not because she felt bad.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Excuse me?”
“About what I said.”
“I didn’t realize you had said anything I’d care about, let alone want an apology for.”
“Good. Because I’m actually not sorry.”
“Can you two shut up?” said Utta.
“You messed up, you know,” whispered Bolton.
Anna lifted the reins. “I know. I know. I won’t hold them so tight when Ham’s in a mood next time.”
“Not that. You were given a great chance, Anna. A poor village girl like you, getting to go to the Chosen One School. You could have become something great, but you ruined it. That’s all I’ll say on the matter.”
Anna had been a star student at the Chosen One School. Until an instructor had sentenced Utta to be whipped as a punishment for stealing. She’d used her mind control powers to stop them doing it, and that meant expulsion. The first rule in Chosen One School was that you did not use your powers on an instructor.
She shrugged. “I never wanted to be a chosen one anyways. I wanted to sail.”
“Ah yes. The choice of either becoming a great figure in history or living on a boat with a bunch of scabby sailors. You know, sometimes people sabotage themselves because the idea of failing is scary.”
“Sometimes old men prattle on because other people’s lives are more interesting than theirs.”
Bolton sighed. “You obstinate, surly, petty-”
Something smashed into the wagon, rolling it onto its side.
Utta yelled something. The horses whinnied. Wood splintered, and the cart rolled once, twice three times. Anna’s world spun around and around. Thud after thud, dirt blasting in her face.
Her head smashed into the ground. The pain was quick and intense. It made her stomach churn.
“Who? Bolton? Where?”
The words spewed out of her mouth. Her lips tasted of iron. Pain sprang from everywhere on her body. Far too many places to pinpoint a single injury.
It took every trace of effort to take a deep breath and close her eyes and enter her mindscape.
She saw dozens of colors flashing in her head. Dozens of blankets whizzing around and around. The blankets represented thoughts and emotions. Their colors told her what the emotions were. The way they flew told her what kind of control she had on them.
Right now, none. They were wrapped up in a tornado, sucked into the vortex.
There were red ones with flames around the edges. The color of pain. Yellow ones that fluttered and shook. The color of fear. There was blue, black, green…
…and then grey. Unmoving. Seeming to watch the rest of them. The color of death.
She wasn’t dying, but death’s specter was in her mind. Maybe as a threat of what might happen if she didn’t act now. Maybe the threat of death for Bolton or Utta. Her mind was telling her to do something. Now.
What the heck had happened?
The blankets refused to settle. No sooner did she have a thought, then it was sucked away.
She was no use to anyone like this.
Using her Chosen One power, she imagined a great big blanket. Big enough to cover all the little ones. She imagined it falling down, making a new layer in her mind. Covering all the other thoughts with one of a single color. Blue. A calming color.
When she opened her eyes, her pain was gone. That didn’t mean her injuries were healed; just that her brain no longer let her feel the pain.
Her fear, her confusion, her stress, they were all gone. She could think clearly.
The first thing she did was check her legs. Getting rid of pain was one thing. But if she tried to stand on broken legs, she’d make everything worse. The gods knew that her lame leg was bad enough as it was. No sense making it worse.
No breaks. A few cuts from where the wood had splintered
and stabbed her. Some blood. But no breaks.
It seemed that the cart had completely smashed when it rolled. She pushed a big plank of wood off her and climbed out of the wreckage.
She took a few steps. Though there was no pain, her steps were uneven. That was nothing to do with the accident; her leg had always been lame. It happened when she was a kid, and Mum couldn’t afford a healer to set it properly.
Looking around, she saw that Bolton and Utta had both been thrown way clear of the cart. Bolton was twenty feet to her left. Utta thirty feet to her right.
And both of them were surrounded by humongous, way-too-big-to-be-real insects. Mosquitos, or something. With horrible bellies that bulged with liquid, and spikes sticking out of their bums.
The insects were going to stab Utta and Bolton!
Anna could maybe use her powers to deter some of them from attacking, but not all of them. She wasn’t strong enough for that.
Maybe if I’d stayed in the Chosen One School and developed my powers…
That was a stray thought escaping from her mind blanket.
The situation was too chaotic for her powers to keep her calm for long.
Bolton and Utta were both looking at her. They were trying to stay completely still and calm so as not to anger the insects. But they were looking at her for help.
She was going to have to choose. Utta or Bolton. Who did she help?
She looked at Bolton. She knew his mission. She knew how important it was, and why it meant he’d kept her and Utta in prisonry, and why he was ceaselessly traveling around Xynnar, even though he was older than a crypt.
Then she looked at Utta, who didn’t have a mission. But he was her best friend. She loved him.
I’m sorry.
Anna used her powers to see inside an insect’s mind.
She saw grey blankets hovering. Death. Lots and lots of it.
Gathering all the mana inside her, she channeled it. She covered the colors of death and replaced them with peace. She did it on one insect after another. As many as she could manage until her mana left her. But the insects were strong. Way too strong. Someone was already controlling their minds, and it took a tremendous effort for Anna to use her powers.
Dungeon Core Academy: Books 1-7 (A LitRPG Series) Page 117
