by James Hunter
The trek up the North Road took us twice as long as it should have since I still had the crippling pain from Death’s Sting to deal with. I had to stop, rest, and eat every mile or so, otherwise my legs would simply give out and refuse to work. I’d be limping along okay one minute, only to find myself facedown on the gritty road the next. On the plus side, by the time we did finally trudge up to the gates of the Rowanheath, Death’s Sting had worn off, taking the godawful pain with it. I still sported the debuffs from Death’s Curse for another four hours, but so long as I could walk and fight, I considered it a win.
Rowanheath’s fortified defensive wall—an enormous thing, which formed a giant horseshoe across the front of the city proper—gave me a small pause though. For a long beat, I just stood there staring up at the giant Keep looming high above the city, framed in by a series of treacherous mountain peaks. The place was a hulking monstrosity: all hard lines, gray stone, high walls, and domineering circular turrets carved directly into the mountain face itself. It wasn’t a place designed for beauty, it was a place designed for war. Designed to repel enemies and withstand a prolonged siege.
By sunset tomorrow, I was going to try and storm it. The cold flutter of butterfly wings in my belly sent shivers along my arms. Cutter nudged me hard in the ribs, breaking me away from my dark thoughts.
“Ready to do this, friend?” he asked, stealing a sly sidelong glance at a quartet of mean-looking NPC Legionaries standing at the gate. They all wore Roman-looking lorica armor—segmented, overlapping leather plates in dark reds and blacks—and crested helms, and each carried a gleaming halberd. According to Cutter, only those with the highest levels of Stealth and a Master’s level proficiency or higher in both the Whisper Step and Silent Master abilities could successfully sneak past gate guards. Apparently, not even Cutter could slip past the hard-chargers on post.
But with our new faction ability, Dignitary, he could cast Anonymous and walk right on in.
Theoretically, at least. Assuming everything went right.
I, on the other hand, couldn’t use the Anonymous ability on account of being an “Exalted Enemy” of the empire. Still, I had a few tricks up my sleeve. I watched nervously from the shadows, the hood of my cloak pulled up around my face, as Cutter activated Dignitary and strutted forward like a man without a care in the world. He walked tall, back straight, chin raised, confidence oozing off him in waves. The guards stopped him at the gate, of course, but after a few tense minutes, they broke out in affable smiles and waved him through, before turning their hard gazes back to the road.
I watched Cutter shuffle into a dark alley, well away from the sentries, then took a deep calming breath and triggered my Shadow Stride ability.
A flash of dark power, a swirl of purple shadow, exploded out of me, and suddenly I found myself in the monochromatic Shadowverse with everyone frozen around me. I had thirty seconds on the clock. With a nervous grin, I stole from my hiding spot and scrambled toward the gate, irrationally expecting the guards to somehow spring to life and apprehend me, despite the fact that I was currently strolling through a different dimension. My worries were misplaced, though, and I managed to walk right by without a hitch.
They just stood there, stupid and still like a bunch of statues, as I breached the city’s defenses.
I found myself silently thanking God above for my class—maybe I wasn’t the most powerful warrior on the planet, but damn did the Shadowmancer Kit have some cool perks.
With the countdown timer rushing toward zero, I hastily made my way into the alley, past Cutter, who was pressed against one wall, then stepped back into reality from the Shadowverse. Cutter jumped a little, startled by my abrupt reappearance, but no one else seemed to notice.
“I’ve got to admit,” he said, giving me a once-over, “I wasn’t sure that was going to work. Good plan. Maybe you’re more useful than I give you credit for,” he offered before heading out onto the street, only lightly packed with foot traffic at such a late hour. “Now”—he glanced at me over one shoulder—“all we have to do is get to the Broken Dagger in one piece. The residents shouldn’t take any notice of you, not unless they’re very, very patriotic—and this lot isn’t—but if you see guard patrols, duck and cover. Got it?”
“Loud and clear,” I said. “Lead the way.” I waved toward the cobblestone street beyond.
We made our way through a chaotic warren of twisting streets and dirty alleys, careful to keep our hoods up and our faces down. It was probably just my overactive imagination, but it sure seemed like all of the olive-skinned, robe-wearing Viridians were staring at us, even though they said nothing. Just nerves, I suppose.
Still, I made sure not to make eye contact with any of them, instead turning my attention to the cityscape around us. Most of the buildings stood two or three stories tall and were built in a sporadic, haphazard fashion, many leaning drunkenly to one side or the other. The place was a patchwork of homes and shops—some smooth stone, others rough wood, a few built from pasty white plaster—which reflected a wide array of backgrounds. I hadn’t traveled very widely in V.G.O., but after spending so much time in-game, it was easy to see the slapdash elements of the various game cultures:
The hard edges and intricately designed Celtic artwork, which seemed to adorn every Wode building. The clean lines and elegant tooled script, which was a hallmark of the Dawn Elves. The plain but meticulous craftsmanship of the Dwarves was easy to spot, even at a distance. Only the Murk Elves and the bird-winged Accipiter seemed underrepresented.
Cutter led us down the main thoroughfare for a few minutes before slipping into a narrow alley, which connected to a smaller side street of dirt and gravel. We trudged on while a handful of hardworking hawkers cried their wares—meat pies, knives, skill training, potions, and just about everything else under the sun—though there were far fewer vendors out and about than the first time I’d come through here. Probably because we were creeping up on 1 AM—this might’ve been a game in theory, but it mimicked real life, and even the NPCs needed rest. One man, a lanky-limbed Wode with greasy hair and a potbelly, tried to stop Cutter and sell him a dagger.
One hard look from the thief sent the seller on his way, and that was the last time the vendors bothered us.
After a few more minutes, we hooked right, cutting through a claustrophobic cross street, which dumped us onto a wider boulevard of paved stone worn from hard use, but almost empty at this hour. This, I’d come to learn, was Porter’s Road—the main thoroughfare for coaches, carts, and caravans. The road was also home to a good chunk of the cities mid-end businesses. Nothing too fancy here, but a traveler could find just about anything they needed: there were tailors, weavers, apothecaries, grocers, fletchers, bakers, and blacksmiths. Wooden signs, decorated with pictures displaying each shop’s purpose, hung above rough doorways.
An anvil and hammer on one. A pair of scissors and a bolt of fabric adorned another. A potter’s wheel a little further on.
We hastily made our way up the road, before darting into the mouth of yet another alley—this one cloaked in deep shadow—and heading for an unmarked three-story building of plaster with an unassuming black door, devoid of any kind of markings. The Broken Dagger. A members-only tavern and inn, which also happened to be home to the Rowanheath Thieves’ Guild. Or union, as Cutter insisted, since guild was too formal a term.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” a voice hissed at us from a deep pool of black as Cutter reached for the door handle. A second later, a whip-thin man, maybe 5'10", garbed in dark leathers with a pair of daggers tucked into his belt, materialized in front of our eyes. I didn’t know his name, but I vaguely recognized him from my first visit to the Broken Dagger. He’d been guarding the door that sectioned off the training facilities and Guild barracks from the rest of the inn.
“Neriah, you dirty sod,” Cutter said with a grin, striding forward and embracing the man in a rough hug. “Good to bloody see you, mate.”
“You too.”
The man gave Cutter a thump on the back. “Who’s the outsider?” he asked, nodding to me.
Cutter glanced at me. “No worries, he’s a friend. Not a thief, but I’ll vouch for him.”
“Good ’nough for me,” Neriah replied with a sniff. “You dropped off the face of the map for a while, there,” he said to Cutter, “but for once I’m glad. Things have been …” He trailed off, furtively glancing this way and that as though the night itself might have ears. “Well, odd, mate. Very odd. Best if we talk about it elsewhere, well away from here, if you take my meaning.”
“Of course,” Cutter replied, thumbing his nose conspiratorially.
Silently, we edged away from the Broken Dagger, moving from shadow to shadow, sticking mostly to back alleys as we made our way into a different section of town. The streets, here, were poorly maintained and lined with garbage and grime of all sorts, not to mention the snoring bodies tucked under thick blankets. Apparently, even in Eldgard homelessness was a real problem—though whether the sleepers were travelers or NPCs, I couldn’t say. The buildings were shoddy more often than not, the roofs thatch instead of wooden slats or ceramic tile.
We were in the slums.
“So what the hell is going on?” Cutter asked as we walked, his voice just above a whisper.
“It’s Georgie,” Neriah said. “He’s been wonky ever since he came back from the business trip a week ago. There’s something wrong with him. He ain’t right in the head.” He tapped a thin finger against his temple. “Not anymore. Worse, all the higher-ups, why they’ve gone just as bleeding mad in the noggin. Believe it or not, but you’re now our highest ranked member—at least the highest ranked member still playing with all his chips.” He shook his head. “Our whole operation is bollocks now. Complete bollocks. Can’t get a thing done. And the smugglers are in a damned pickle.”
“The smugglers?” Cutter asked, confusion in his voice. “What do they have to do with this? They run their own show.”
“Right on the nose,” the man replied as we cut through a claustrophobic alley which dead-ended at a giant hole, covered with a rusted metal grate. “But Georgie and his crew of loonies moved into the sewers. Well, technically, they’re holed up in the Plague Tunnels, but it’s wreaking havoc for the smugglers. Anyone they send down there goes missing”—he snapped his fingers—“gone in a blink. One sorry bloke made it back topside. Raving mad, he was. Blathering on about monsters, demons, torture, experimentation. Well, we can’t get a damn thing done, and since Georgie is one of our own, we have to handle it in-house.”
Cutter’s eyes touched on the sewer grate, then flicked back over to his friend. He groaned, finally putting two and two together. “Gods, Neriah. You want me to go down there?” He hooked a thumb toward the sewer. “And not just there, but into the Plague Tunnels.”
The man grimaced, then nodded. “Sorry, mate, but it’s your obligation as highest ranking member to handle it, but more than that: if you want help from the smugglers, you’ll need to fix this first. No way around it. So, what do you say?”
“Bollocks,” Cutter muttered before turning to me. “I need to do this one way or the other, friend, but this is your show, so if you don’t want to come, I’ll understand. What say you?”
A quest update flashed before me.
<<<>>>
Quest Update: Imposter Georgie
Gentleman Georgie has been acting strange, and it’s likely a black priest of Serth-Rog has replaced him and his top lieutenants with doppelgangers. Now, Gentleman Georgie has moved his operation into the Plague Tunnels deep beneath Rowanheath, preventing the Smugglers from accessing the sewer ways. Get to the bottom of Gentleman Georgie’s strange shift in personality.
Quest Class: Unique, Personal
Quest Difficulty: Hard
Success: Help Cutter get to the bottom of the mystery surrounding Gentleman Georgie’s sudden personality change and clear out the cultists obstructing the sewer ways.
Failure: Refuse to help Cutter or allow him to die before the mission is complete.
Reward: In gratitude, the Smugglers will agree to guide you and your men through the exterior mining shafts, located outside of Rowanheath, and into the sewers free of charge.
Accept: Yes/No?
<<<>>>
I wasn’t too keen on tromping through a bunch of smelly sludge, and the Plague Tunnels sounded pretty horrific, but this was the only way, so reluctantly I accepted.
TWENTY-FIVE: The Weaponeer
Cutter and I skirted along the narrow catwalks lining either side of the sewer way. In between us ran a river of mucky slime with a terrible odor like an old porta-john left to sit too long in the noonday sun. It was a bit strange actually, since I hadn’t run across a single toilet anywhere in Eldgard and no one—players or NPCs alike—actually seemed to have any need for the bathroom. Yet, here, flowing beneath Rowanheath like a sludgy, disgusting river, was actual sewage. Rancid crap, to be precise. And despite the obvious discrepancy, Cutter just took it in stride like every other wonky thing in V.G.O.
I chalked it up as an oddity—like Bags of Holding or a hundred other completely improbable RPG features—and refused to ask Cutter about it. That wasn’t a conversation I wanted to have.
Despite the unfortunate smell, the sewers were surprisingly easy to navigate and hadn’t posed much of a challenge so far. The tunnels were laid out in an orderly grid, wall-mounted torches—presumably used by the local smugglers—illuminated everything, and the few mobs present, all [Sewer Rats], went down without a fight. A flick of Cutter’s blade or a twirl of my warhammer saw them off in a blink. As a gamer, I was guessing this zone was probably a lowbie starting area. Most MMO cities had locations like this, which always seemed to be the scene of clear-out-the-rat-infestation type quests assigned by NPCs of all sorts.
“Pretty easy going so far,” I remarked offhandedly.
Another rat—gray, mangy, and about the size of a large cat—skittered around a corner at the noise and lunged at me. I blasted it with Umbra Bolt from a distance, sending its furry corpse to the bottom of the sewage trough. I kept right on walking—that was one body I didn’t intend to loot. Wading through that foul sludge for a rat pelt and a handful of coppers wasn’t worth it.
“Yeah,” Cutter replied, twirling his blade in anxious motion, eyes scanning the waterline, “no one likes coming down here—it’s the smell of piss and shite—but the mobs aren’t nothing to write home about. Most dangerous things around these parts is the occasional Shite-Blob. True story, that’s actually what they’re called. Shite-Blobs. Sometimes, bits of spirit energy from above leaks down and contaminates the waste water, animates it for a bit. Disgusting little buggers. But it won’t be long until we reach the Plague Tunnels, and that’s a whole different story.”
Another rat burst from the muck not two feet away from Cutter, but the thief sliced it down in midair without a moment’s hesitation or worry. His dagger parted the furry rodent’s head cleanly from its neck, and a splatter of fetid blood rained down on the ground.
“So what should I expect to find in the Plague Tunnels?” I asked, purposefully not looking at the bloody rat corpse adorning the walkway.
He held up a wait-a-minute finger as we passed through a gray-stone archway and emerged into a circular hub with new tunnels shooting off like the spokes of a bike wheel. The whole intersection looked oddly out of place. The tunnels we’d traversed so far had been built from rugged yellow brick, but this whole chamber was carved from slabs of ancient gray granite, which featured a host of runic inscriptions and carvings of one variety or another. I couldn’t read any of it, but even at a glance I could tell it was old—far older than the rest of the sewer system.
“What is this?” I asked, spinning slowly as I glanced at the glyphs covering the slab walls.
“This?” Cutter replied. “Used to be part of a temple. Long before Rowanheath was here, before the Wodes came, the Vogthar lived here. Nasty bastards. They ruled over most of Eldg
ard, but they’re dead now. Their cities gone. Razed to the ground. Their people exterminated. Wodes wiped ’em out during the purge—about eight, nine hundred years ago, this was. A few ruins remain along with some of their sacred sites, but there’s not much. Here in the valley, this room and the Plague Tunnels beyond, that’s what’s left. Come on,” he said, bobbing his head toward a tunnel off to the left, “that’s our path.”
Unfortunately, this new section of sewer didn’t have any nifty catwalks, so we had to slog through hazy, knee-deep goop, the slosh, slosh, slosh of our movements echoing off the old stonework and crumbling brick. “For a long, long time, the Plague Tunnels sat abandoned,” Cutter said idly as we trudged along. “But about a hundred years ago, there was a big famine and with it came the Plague.
“The Blood Plague, people called it. Killed lots of folks, but it was a slow process. Real slow. Could take weeks, sometimes even a month or more. And sometimes, those who died wouldn’t stay dead. They’d get right back up and start attacking healthy folks. Least, that’s the way legend has it. The Plague Tunnels have some powerful containment wards—left over from the time of the Vogthar—so the city militia rounded up everyone who was sick or dead and corralled ’em in there. Left ’em to rot down in the dark. An ugly bit of our history, I’ll admit,” he finished with a half-hearted shrug.
He fell silent after that, strangely somber.
We moved on in silence, following the sour waterway for another ten minutes—killing a small platoon of bothersome rats along the way—before finally winding up at a dry section of tunnel, built from more of the ancient gray stone tattooed with glowing runes and ancient script. “Not far at all now,” he whispered at me over one shoulder before dropping into a crouch and vanishing as he embraced Stealth. I followed suit, not knowing what to expect. Cutter froze a minute later as a round of muffled cursing floated to us from up ahead, reverberating off the walls. We weren’t alone down here. It was a man’s voice. A Russian from the sound of him.
