Regardless, Garron was right; the service wasn’t bad, so long as you followed the rules and kept your head down. We were paid once every two weeks, there was one day off a week, and you could even use the squad’s stationary portal if you wanted to.
“What do you mean, stationary?” Fattah’s eyebrows shot up.
“Each area has a portal that’s always open and pointed toward the nearest capital,” explained Torn as he hung down from his bunk. “In our case, that’s Maykong, the capital of the South, stronghold of the principalities, and the residence of High Prince of Light Mustail the Second and the Beautiful.”
“I’ve seen him,” giggled Ping. “He’d make for a great boogeyman!”
“He really would!” his brother chimed in, laughing like someone was tickling him.
“Yeah, the prince really is, well, you know…” Mikos agreed more tactfully.
“And he’s just a nasty guy,” Lane said. “A real brute. There’s a snake out in the jungle called a ringhal—it’s beautiful, but if it bites you, just order yourself a casket right then and there. The prince is even worse.”
“Lane’s had his problems with Mustail,” Ping whispered loudly to us. Pong nodded as if to say that, yes, Lane obviously had plenty of problems with the ruler of the South, but the brothers weren’t going to say a word about them.
“And really just anyone can use the portal?” Fattah couldn’t care less what disagreements a hired sword might have with the Prince of Light.
“What do you mean, ‘just anyone?” Torn replied. “Only if you’re serving in the Free Companies, and you have to show your pass to the portal guard.”
I made a mental note—going to see the capital sounded like a good idea.
“Seventh Company, form up!” we heard the goblin squeal, and all of us ran toward the parade ground.
“You don’t get much peace and quiet in the Free Companies,” I said to Fattah once we’d gotten back from a small town besieged by repulsive crab-like creatures that walked on two legs for some reason. We had been sent with the Third Company to push them back into the jungle, and it hadn’t been easy.
“That’s for sure,” he agreed, pulling out a pipe and packing some tobacco into it. “On the other hand, we’re piling up experience. I leveled up.”
“Nice.” I winked at him wearily. “Okay, I’m headed home.”
“Yeah, our five hours is up.” The elf checked the timer on his interface before catching my questioning glance and rolling his eyes. Why does nobody ever read the guides? I could hear him thinking.
“If you don’t want reprimands and want to keep up your reputation with the commanders, you can’t just log into the game every day,” he explained. “You have to spend at least five hours in it. It doesn’t matter if you’re fighting or not, though you should serve out the five hours.”
You’re kidding me. I waved at him and the other warriors, who were getting ready to go to sleep, and logged out of the game.
The next three days were a blur of continuous fighting. We went back to the barracks, took half an hour to recover, and went right back out to save peaceable civilians under attack. There were new villages, towns, and even one new mine. Life was the clash of blades, yelled orders, and monsters, monsters, monsters—toothy, fanged, poisonous, scaled, in shells, with and without horns, gray and raspberry, and pink polka dots. Bosch and his imagination had nothing on the game artists.
I fought and attacked, advanced and fell back. My feet slipped on the slime left by crawling little nasties, and I tripped over the dead bodies of muscular gibbons wearing helmets.
My level jumped to 55, and one of my abilities leveled up as well.
I died a couple times, too. One of my deaths came at the worst possible time when a blade wielded by a one-eyed, bow-legged marauder found a crack in my armor right at the end of a battle I’d fought well in. The bonus I was looking for slipped through my fingers as Lane, who was everywhere, finished off the marauder.
Despite the loss, I was heartened by the fact that I didn’t lose any of the experience I’d previously built up when I died. That was a small compensation the developers had put in place to placate frustrated players. Also, dying on the field of battle meant you could have the company’s armorers fix everything up for you free of charge. So there was a little balance, at least.
A message popped up when I polished off a large turtle that came at us with surprising speed and agility for its kind. It and a few of its friends were trying to make off with a village’s children. I couldn’t pronounce the name of the village.
You reached Bloodletting, Level 2
Gives you a 60% chance of causing bleeding
Bleeding damage done: 11 health per second for 1 minute
Activation cost: 50 mana
Recharge time: 1 minute
Good thing I didn’t go to work today. It was Wednesday, and I was supposed to have been working at the office, though I didn’t want to kick off my service in the company with a reprimand. The bosses wouldn’t mind, I figured, since I was getting a lot out of it—not the least of which was that I had unlocked all kinds of places on my map. Who knew which of them I might need later?
With that in mind, Vika was given complete authority and instructions to email me everything. That morning, I dug around in the material my team had gathered, approving some things, discarding others, and offering plenty of sage wisdom. Then, I dashed off to the barracks.
A quick check of my map told me that I was right on the money. The village we were at was just a two- or three-hour walk from the copse at the center of the red spot. The only problem was that I doubted I’d make it there alone, judging by everything I’d been in the middle of the past four days.
“What are you standing there for, beanpole?” Falk said, interrupting my reverie with his screeching voice. “There’s a general gathering everyone’s supposed to be at.”
The little bastard was doing his best to ruin my life, though most of his efforts were surreptitious. He was constantly telling Grokkh what a terrible soldier I was, he threw sharp jokes my way when we were at attention, and he even shoved me in the back once when our formation was advancing on a mop of fanged creatures with boar heads and crescent-shaped sabers. It was a miracle I was able to dodge one of those sabers aimed at my chest.
“I’m on my way; you don’t have to yell,” I muttered back, ignoring his whining about how disrespectful I was to a Free Company veteran, and heading over to my squad. We hadn’t gotten any replacements, though. Thank God, we hadn’t lost anyone, and so there were still nine of us.
“Thank Tekhosh, tomorrow’s our day off,” Lane said in his perpetually meandering voice as he pulled on his chainmail (from what I could tell, that was the only kind of armor anyone wore in the Borderlands).
“Hey, be careful talking about the Departed Gods like that,” Torn responded softly. “Especially the dark ones. It’s not forbidden, of course, but you should still watch it.”
“Only you all in the West think Tekhosh was a dark god,” Lane replied evenly. “In the Borderlands, we remember him differently. He taught us a lot and showed many of us the way. And what am I supposed to be afraid of? I don’t have anything left to lose. Everything I ever cared about burned up and scattered in the wind.”
Ping and Pong looked at him sympathetically and sniffed. The brothers were incredibly sentimental, though they worked wonders with the pair of curved sabers they each fought with.
I made a mental note to chat with Lane later, both about Tekhosh and to figure out why the warrior was so gloomy all the time. But that was for another time, and in the meantime, I had a different question.
“Day off? For everyone? Do I get one, too? I still haven’t served a full week.”
“Of course,” Torn replied patiently, only too happy to change the subject. “It doesn’t matter how long you’ve served. The company gets the day off, so you do, too.”
That put me in a great mood.
“Lane, wh
ere are you going to go?” Pong asked him.
“Yeah, going anywhere interesting?” Ping chimed in.
“Nowhere,” the tracker replied, his bed squeaking. “I don’t feel like dragging myself anywhere, and I don’t have money anyway.”
No money? That’s good.
“We’re headed to the capital,” Ping said proudly. “Time for some girls!”
“Exactly!” Pong followed suit. “Girls it is!”
Torn looked at them skeptically.
“Just don’t take all your gold with you this time. Otherwise, you’ll come back complaining about how someone got you drunk and robbed you blind again.”
“Nah, we won’t take all of it. Just a little, and that’s it,” Ping responded quickly. Pong nodded.
“I’m not going anywhere either,” boomed Ur. “I want some time to mope around here.”
The Northerner had spent the last three days squeezing me for all the information I had about his homeland, and I told him everything I could remember. His estimation of me had climbed steeply when he heard that I knew König Harald himself. True, when Ur left, Harald’s father was still in charge, though that didn’t change anything. When I told him how I saved the könig’s daughter, Ur stared at me with deep respect.
Afterward, I wished I hadn’t told him so much. It wasn’t even that I’d told Ur, who was a simple, direct fellow; toward the end, I realized that Fattah had been listening carefully the whole time. And I didn’t like curious, shrewd players. Maybe because that’s the kind of player I am? I hadn’t spilled the beans on any secrets, but still…
“What about you?” I asked Torn.
“I’m heading to Maykong, as well, with Mikos and Garron. I need to drop by the bank to drop off my gold, and I could go for some beer, too.”
Fattah stretched. “I’ll come with you then,” he said to Torn. “I haven’t been to Maykong, and they say it’s beautiful. Are you coming?”
He looked at me.
“No,” I replied, waving them off. “I need a break from all these battles. Plus, you’ll probably be taking off in the morning, and I want to sleep in.”
“True,” confirmed Torn. “We’re leaving around nine.”
The right thing to do would have been to go with the company on Thursday, but I couldn’t completely give up on the paper. I was also tired of all the slaughter, and Vika had told me that Zimin called. When she told him I was in the game, he gave her a quick “all righty then” and hung up.
That had me a little nervous, and I went back and forth between calling him and pretending Vika hadn’t said anything. I decided to go with the latter option since Zimin hadn’t actually given Vika any instructions. My mind more or less at ease, I went to sleep.
***
The next day, when I walked into our wing of the office, the smell of alcohol was nearly overpowering. I carefully studied Yushkov’s face, which had gone from his normally pale pink color to a burgundy scarlet. It had nothing to do with embarrassment, either; he’d been hitting the bottle pretty hard.
“Vadim,” I told him, “you need to stop that. You can’t out drink them over there in the sports section. They’re the best in Moscow and the entire region, with years of practice and competition behind them. You can’t keep up.”
“Yes, I can,” he muttered guiltily. “I certainly did yesterday. The vodka probably wasn’t good, that’s all.”
He took a tuft of black hair hanging over his forehead in his fingers and started playing with it.
“That’s not an argument. I’m serious, if you don’t stop drinking, I’ll have to fire you. Vika!” I barked.
Vika ran over and stood there blinking, doing her best to seem dumber than she actually was.
“This is on you, Vika,” I said to her harshly, a finger jabbing in Yushkov’s direction. “The guy’s turning into a hardcore alcoholic, and you’re letting it go without telling me anything. Why is that?”
“I’ve told him,” Vika replied, her eyes on the floor, “probably a hundred times.”
“She has,” Yushkov confirmed magnanimously. “At least a hundred times.”
“It’s like Ping and Pong in here,” I exclaimed, starting to get frustrated.
“What ping-pong? Again with the ping-pong!” Yushkov looked at me worriedly. “We weren’t the ones who broke the table in the rec room; I told Mammoth that. We were hanging out at Bavaria that night!”
This is ridiculous. He’s even breaking company property now.
“Zimin is here!” Zhanna, Mammoth’s secretary, flew in. “He’s on his way here!”
“Damn it!” I blurted out. “Just what we need. Gennady,” I continued, looking at Stroynikov.
He ran over.
“Open the windows, stuff this one in the far corner, cover the table in folders, and stick some gum in his mouth. Vika, Samoshnikov, look busy. I’ll go buy us a couple minutes.”
It was a good thing we worked in an old building. The corridors were long and wide. I met Zimin as far away from our space as I dared.
“Maxim, what are you doing here?” I tried to look as pleasantly surprised as I could. “Don’t you have meetings every Thursday morning?”
“The old man is away, and we don’t have meetings without him,” Zimin informed me glumly. “And Kit went with him.”
Ah-ha, so that’s why he’s in a lousy mood. Kit was off with the top dog, and he was left alone. It looked like I was screwed.
“Some tea maybe?” I asked, as sincerely as I possibly could. “Like my grandfather always said, there’s no end to the good a nice cup of tea will do you.”
“Your grandfather?” Zimin looked at me, a thought flashing across his face. “That’s good. But I’ll do without the tea. We have to talk.”
“Your call.” I quickly switched to a more business-like tone. “Shall we step into my office?”
Good thing I didn’t just kick everyone out. It was chilly in the office, though the smell of alcohol was almost gone at least. We could see the crown of Yushkov’s head, and everyone else scurried around in a buzz of feigned activity.
Zimin greeted everyone with a nod as he walked into my office. I winked at Vika and followed him.
“Okay, Kif,” he said, sitting down at my desk and staring at me. “You disappointed me, and pretty seriously, too.”
I was taken aback. Wait, I did? I’m doing the quest, we’re publishing the paper… Could it be that I wasn’t in the office yesterday? No, that shouldn’t be it, since the dryad quest is more important than the paper. The Free Companies? Doubtful…
“Not sure what I’m talking about?” Zimin narrowed his eyes, which remained fixed on me.
“Nope.” I sat up and met his gaze.
“Why didn’t you tell me who was with you in the Great Fomor’s palace? You didn’t think I should know that another player took part in the event?”
Oh, damn. It was true—the whole thing had slipped my mind, and I’d neglected to tell the boss who’d helped me take out the witch.
“I forgot,” I told Zimin in all honesty. “I really did. Well, it’s more that I didn’t even think about it, I’ll admit.”
“He forgot,” muttered Zimin. “You know, I can’t just follow you everywhere you go. You forgot, and I didn’t find out right away…”
“But what’s the problem? He doesn’t have anything to do with Fomor,” I said in surprise. “All he wanted was the witch. He was there with a pair of NPCs—Gorrdy, and I don’t remember the name of the second one.”
“Grim Gram.” Zimin’s fingers drummed on the table. “One more character unaccounted for.”
Well, that’s interesting. I never would have thought an NPC could be unaccounted for.
“Ah,” Zimin sighed. “I should smack you upside the head, so you start thinking, but I won’t. For some reason, I really like you. And you can think when you want to—nice work figuring out how to get to the South. But you’d better keep me in the loop from now on, got it?”
“You can
be sure I will,” I assured him. “It won’t happen again. You can count on me.”
“I know you didn’t do it on purpose. If I thought you had, I wouldn’t be the one having this conversation with you, and it wouldn’t be happening here.” Zimin’s face curved into a smile.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to know where his colleagues would have been having that nice little chat with me.
“There is one thing you should know,” I said confidentially. “Someone else found out what I do. I mean, here at the paper. Someone in the game.”
“What a day,” Zimin complained. “Who? And how?”
“You won’t believe it, but my clan leader, Elina the Wise. It’s crazy, but she’s actually Vika’s sister in real life.” My eyes bulged. “She recognized me when we had her over for dinner—I didn’t change how I look for the game. Coincidences happen, I guess, not much you can do there.”
“Not like that they don’t,” Zimin replied, his eyes squinting. “I know that much for sure. It shouldn’t be a problem, though we’ll have to visit her and see if she actually is as wise as her name says—in the game, obviously.”
I surmised that the concern I had for Elmira’s health and well-being must have flashed across my face, causing him to add that last bit.
“It would have been nice if you’d changed the way you look in the game, but it’s too late for that. You are who you are.”
“Agreed,” I nodded. “The knights know me, I have my reputation in the North…plus, I’m used to how I look.”
“Okay,” Zimin said, standing up. “I’m off. You can let your team know they’re getting paid today. I’m sure they’ll be happy to hear that.”
“That’s great!” I rubbed my hands together.
“Oh, come on,” Zimin grunted. “You just got enough from our bet to last you to winter. Ah, that reminds me… Marina asks me about you all the time.”
“What Marina?”
“Vezhleva. Come on, Kif!” He shook a finger at me. “All these girls are going to be the death of you. But you know what I was thinking, you should invite her to dinner. Next Wednesday would be perfect.”
Fayroll [04] Gong and Chalice Page 4
