“You should have had the good graces to do the same,” Merridack continued. “At least then the city guard wouldn’t be running all over the place looking for the person who killed Lord Naughton!”
“I’m an assassin,” Eric said sarcastically. “What did you expect me to do?”
“I expected you to get something out of it! How do you manage to kill a lord and not have a single copper to show for it?!”
“You killed that guy in the woods and didn’t get anything out of it,” Eric said sullenly.
“Yes, but a whole squadron of city guards didn’t go crawling up my ass because of it, either, now did they? If we even so much as try to cut a single purse, we’ll get our heads lifted off our necks for sure!”
“It’s called thinning the herd,” Eric said contemptuously. “If you’re not a shitty thief, you shouldn’t have anything to fear. Oh, wait – I guess you do have something to fear.”
Eric barely saw the walking staff coming.
The stick swept his feet out from under him, sending him crashing onto his back, his head slamming into the stone floor.
A second later he was staring in panic at the tip of the stiletto just a half inch away from his left eye.
“You little snot – you’re the one who’s made it impossible to conduct business inside Blackstone, and you’re mouthing off to me?!” Merridack roared. “I ought to…”
Merridack paused as Eric waited in terror for the blade to slice through his head.
Then the thief broke into a dark smile. “I ought to make you work outside the city for a while.”
The stiletto suddenly retracted SNIKT! into the staff.
“Get up, you worthless cur. You still have work to do before the sun rises.”
Eric stumbled to his feet, not quite sure why he’d been spared. “What?”
“You’re going to go rob Cythera for me.”
Whispered curses drifted up from the other thieves in the group.
Okay, THAT can’t be a good sign, Eric thought.
“What’s Cythera?” he asked.
“Not what, who,” Merridack said. “She lives outside the city walls, in the woods. You can kill her with complete impunity – no pesky night watch to give you any problems.”
“‘She’?” Eric asked, stunned. “You want me to kill a woman?”
“If you can,” Merridack grinned.
“Why?” Eric demanded, sick to his stomach. Like Daniel, he had suddenly found something in the game that wasn’t fun anymore.
“Well, because if you don’t, she’ll probably kill you first.”
“Why do you want me to rob her? What has she got?”
“A treasure trove of items that’ll command a pretty penny on the black market.”
“What – like poisons?”
“Not exactly,” Merridack said with an enigmatic smile. “Joot and Vrilek will go with you to help haul away the more valuable items.”
“What?” said one of the other thieves, his face turning pale.
“No!” another one pleaded.
Eric was starting to get a bad feeling about this.
“Relax, boys,” Merridack said. “Let the Master Assassin do his work, and then you two can go in and reap the rewards.”
The two thieves looked at each other uncertainly.
“What if somethin’ happens to ‘im?” the first thief asked.
“Then come back here, no harm done,” Merridack said. “Well, to nobody but him. Just make sure he doesn’t run away.”
The two men didn’t look happy, exactly, but they looked less frightened.
A new text box appeared in Eric’s field of vision:
New Quest: Steal items from Cythera’s forest abode.
Challenge Level: Extremely difficult
Reward: Unknown
Punishment for Failure: Death
He noticed that the quest said nothing about killing Cythera.
But he also noticed the ‘extremely difficult’ part, too.
“I won’t run away,” Eric said, annoyed.
The master thief turned and fixed Eric with a piercing stare.
“Good,” Merridack said, his smile curling into something cold and evil. “Good.”
Eric shivered and wondered if maybe he should have stayed with Daniel.
21
Joot and Vrilek led Eric through the sewers by torchlight, then over the fallen tree and across the moat.
By the time they reached the world outside the city walls, dawn must have been breaking – but the thick fog that blanketed the forest made it impossible to tell. Other than a dim illumination that made things half-visible in the gloom, there was no sign of the sun. The grey mist turned everything into an eerie nightmare where trees loomed like the silhouettes of monsters, and sleeping horrors lurked just beyond the drifting tendrils of fog.
Joot and Vrilek said almost nothing the entire time. While they were still in the sewers, Eric asked them about Cythera, but they gave only vague answers, the most common being “You’ll see.”
Despite their reticence, he kept trying to pry information out of them – until they reached the fog-shrouded forest, that is. Then it felt like a single word might draw the attention of some foul apparition or creeping monster, so better to be silent.
They walked for what seemed an eternity through the fog, with only the braaaps of invisible bullfrogs to keep them company.
Finally they came to the first sign of some kind of presence in the woods, human or otherwise. A five-foot-tall stake sat impaled in the ground, with a human skull sitting on top. It was missing its lower jaw. Tied to the skull with pieces of twine were a dead raven, the rotting carcass of a snake, and the skeleton of a rat, picked clean by maggots and birds.
The two thieves immediately drew daggers and peered nervously into the mist.
Eric drew one of his own blades, figuring his companions knew something he didn’t.
“I’m guessing we’re close,” he whispered.
“Shh.”
They walked on, though the thieves moved half as fast.
Within another hundred feet, a low, squat shape began to take form in the gloom. It was a house of some kind – or rather, a rough earthen structure, made of mud packed in amongst a tangle of tree limbs and brush.
Though it was primitive, it was large – almost sixty feet across. There must have been some sort of chimney, because out of the top of the hut drifted thin wisps of smoke, a slightly darker grey against the fog.
“Go on,” one of the thieves whispered.
“You’re not coming with me?” Eric asked.
The thief held his knife to Eric’s throat. “Go.”
Eric backed away slowly, then continued his walk towards the hut, his heart pounding in his chest.
There was a rough door in the front – a swinging gate made of sticks bound together with twine. Eric paused outside it for the longest time, trying to identify any stirrings within – but there was nothing except the occasional crackle of a fire.
He finally screwed up all the courage inside him and pulled open the door.
He edged just inside the entrance and stood there for a long moment, allowing his eyes to grow accustomed to the dark. There was the glow of embers and a few small flames in a hearth at the far end of the room, but not much else.
Second by second, the shapes in the room became clearer – because that’s what it was: one massive room. Several large stone pillars supported ‘rafters’ of crisscrossed branches thatched with mud and straw. The walls were made of stone, though the floor was dirt. Dried bundles of flowers and plants hung from the ceiling, and the smell of herbs and smoke mingled in the air.
There was rough-hewn furniture everywhere he looked – benches and tables, even a sort of reclined chair covered with animal pelts. There was a stone hearth with a cauldron simmering over the banked fire. And over in the corner was a bed, basically a collection of rags atop a latticework of branches and straw. No one was lying in it – and no one was in the
hut, as far as he could see.
What was in the hut were strange artifacts crowding every available surface. Brass pots with strange symbols etched into the metal. Jars filled with liquid in which floated the bodies of small animals – lizards, bats, snakes. Dried, gnarled birds’ claws. Glass jars of ground herbs and powders. Individual bones – fingers and skulls predominantly – many of them human, some not. Wands, feathers, knives crusted with dried blood. And a dozen or more books, bound in leather and secured by metal clasps and locks embedded in the covers.
The largest – and the one with the biggest clasp on it, a blackened dial that looked like a scowling monster’s head with tiny rubies for eyes – had a cover that resembled leather, but lighter in color. He touched it. Despite the patterns embossed in its surface and the discoloration of age, it was soft.
Like human skin.
Eric shuddered but was drawn to it all the same, as though by some unnamable longing. As his fingers traced the book’s cover, it was as though someone gradually turned up the volume on something he hadn’t been able to hear before: a dozen whispering voices surrounding him in the hut, speaking languages he didn’t recognize. They were so quiet he could barely make them out – but he knew they were there. They were not his imagination.
He drew his hand away as though he’d touched a hot stove. Immediately the voices ceased.
“Holy shit,” he breathed out.
A witch.
That’s who Merridack wanted him to rob, and why the men were so scared of her.
Bastards – they might have TOLD me…
He looked around the hut again. The witch obviously wasn’t here, so he should take some things and get out while he still could –
Suddenly there was a cry from outside the hut.
Eric rushed over to the door and peered out the gap.
One of the thieves was visible in the gloom – but clawed hands made of dirt had sprouted from the forest floor and were dragging him down into the earth.
He was the one who was screaming.
The other thief was running directly towards Eric, his eyes wild and panicked.
“HELP!” he shouted. “HELP – ”
And then his cries were cut short as his lower jaw melted off his face.
One side detached first as his skin stretched like used chewing gum. The other side hung on so that the mandible oozed away from his skull and dangled sideways onto his chest. His tongue went with it, wiggling obscenely like a large, pink worm.
He was still screaming, but the hole that had been his windpipe began to gurgle as it filled with liquefied flesh, until it was completely stopped up.
His eyes went wide with terror. His features were already melting like wax, revealing the sockets around the eyeballs.
The thief took another step, but his leg suddenly shortened – like his knee had disconnected, and his femur had punched through gelatinous muscle and slipped down into his calf.
He went sprawling onto the ground, where his forearms gouged through the melting sacks of bone and skin that used to be his wrists. He looked up in terror at Eric, lifting up one beseeching arm – and the hand sloughed off like a piece of roasted meat falling off the bone.
He was still struggling to reach Eric when he collapsed into a puddle of liquid skin and bone.
Eric stepped back in horror, then looked up.
Out of the fog strode a thin figure in a dark cloak, a hood pulled over its head. As it walked past the other thief, now halfway submerged in the ground, the figure lifted one delicate hand in the air –
And a raging blast of fire obliterated the thief’s face.
His mouth was still open in a silent scream, his head a charred ruin, as the earthen hands pulled him all the way under the forest floor.
The figure stopped in front of the hut and raised both hands towards Eric, as though about to unleash the most horrible death imaginable.
His reaction was immediate and instinctual:
He fell on his knees and stretched his hands high in the air in surrender.
“Teach me,” he whispered. “Please… teach me how to do what you just did.”
22
The dark figure paused, as though confused. Its hands lowered slightly… then lifted up and pushed back the hood from its owner’s face.
It was a woman. She was relatively young, in her early 30s at most. She might have been beautiful once upon a time – and half of her still was. But the right side of her face was a twisted mass of scar tissue, as though she had been brutally burned in a fire.
Her hair – what was left of it – was dark and fell in waves down her left shoulder. None remained on the right side of her head.
Both her eyes were intact, though, and she stared at Eric intently. “Who are you, and why are you trespassing on my land?”
Her voice was deeper than most women’s, and unexpectedly sexy – especially when compared with the ravaged side of her face.
“I…”
He hesitated for a second, because it was right then that a text box popped up:
New Quest: Convince Cythera to let you become her apprentice
Challenge Level: Moderate
Reward: Power untold
Punishment for Failure: Death
Power untold.
He liked the sound of that.
But how to convince her?
He reasoned that the truth was best. She would probably be able to spot a lie from a mile away – and might even be able to drag it out of him magically.
Plus, Daniel had done pretty well for himself begging another villain on their first day in the Shattered Lands.
Eric started talking. “I was sent here by a thief named Merridack to rob you – ”
The woman immediately lifted her hands again.
“ – but I don’t want that!” he rushed on, “I want to learn magic, I only worked for Merridack because the mages at the temple rejected me!”
The woman narrowed her eyes. “Why did they reject you?”
Eric’s face darkened in anger at the memory. “An old man there said that power for power’s sake was something only the impure and tainted wanted. Then he said my path lay elsewhere.”
The woman’s face – or at least the half of it that could move – frowned. The rest stayed gruesomely impassive. “Did he say any more than that?”
“Yeah – he called me a Darkling and he banished me from the temple.”
“Why?”
“I, uh… I got mad and kicked over a lamp and started a fire,” Eric admitted.
The normal half of the woman’s face broke out into a smile, and she tilted back her head and laughed – a dark, ominous, alluring sound. Then she finally lowered her arms for good.
“Well, anyone who’s been rejected by the pious hypocrites at the temple is good enough for me. Tell me, ‘Darkling,’” she said mockingly, “if I do decide to teach you, what do I get in return?”
“I’m a thief – I could steal things for you – ”
“Do you really think there is something I need stolen that I couldn’t take by force?” she asked.
“Uh… probably not.”
“Then what else do you have to offer me?”
He racked his brain, trying to come up with an answer – but it eluded him. Finally he simply asked, “What do you want?”
Her eyes roved over him like a hawk eyeing a mouse, and licked her lips. One half of them were plump and red – the other half was just a raw gap where scar tissue ended and her mouth began.
“Perhaps time will tell,” she purred seductively.
Eric’s entire body shuddered in disgust, but he kept quiet.
“Bow down before me, Darkling,” she commanded him. “Pledge your undying allegiance, and I shall teach you all the secrets of the dark.”
He bowed down until his nose touched the dirt – and was very aware of the puddle of skin and bones just a few feet away.
“I promise my undying allegiance, and to do whatever you tea
ch me.”
She walked across the damp leaves, knelt beside him, and put her right hand to his chin. He could feel the rough, scaly flesh of her burned skin as she lifted his face and looked him in the eyes.
She smiled and said, “You may rise… for you are now the apprentice of Cythera.”
23
Daniel
As the fog began to break under the heat of the morning sun, Daniel wandered down the crowded alley called the Questing Market and marveled at everything he saw.
There were thousands of people walking through the street. On second thought, ‘people’ was a bit limited, since it implied humans. More than any other place he’d been in the city so far, there were dozens of different races and types of creatures. Elves, dwarves, orcs, gnomes, goblins, dark elves. Creatures with the faces of bulls, wolves, gorillas, and eagles. Bodies with the grey, blue-veined skin of the undead. Reptilian people covered in scales. Fish-like faces, mouths gaping wide. Characters that looked more like salamanders, weasels, badgers, apes, and assorted aliens from Star Wars.
And they played all sorts of roles. Some strolled along, looking at the shops with interest. Others manned the stalls, hawking their wares: swords, shields, spears, knives, maces, axes, armor, helmets, leather bags, saddles, holsters, clothes, and potions of all kinds. Smiths clanged hammers against anvils. Mountebanks and apothecaries lifted up glass vials of sparkling liquids against the light.
The marketplace felt alive – full of excitement and energy as thousands contemplated their first quest in the Shattered Lands.
For the first time that day, Daniel felt hope.
The morning hadn’t exactly started off that way.
He’d cowered on the roof in the dark for almost an hour after Eric left, trying to figure out what to do. Finally he decided he couldn’t walk around with an ornate scabbard and a bag full of coins and jewels – that would be begging to be robbed. At least Merridack had taught him that much.
So he left his belongings temporarily on the roof, found a couple of discarded burlap bags in an alleyway, and returned to camouflage his haul. He wrapped the sword in one bag and put the leather satchel in the other. Then he found a crevice in the cracked and crumbling roof where he hid both. A casual observer would think someone had stuffed some filthy rags down a hole, maybe to plug up a leak – and hopefully there would be very few casual observers on the roof.
Shattered Lands: A LitRPG Series Page 11
