“We don’t h-have any treasure. Hup.”
“Then why would you assume we’re looking for it?”
His voice suddenly rose from a hiss to an angry squawk. “We don’t f-friggin’ know! We—hup—have adventurer clots down h-here every f-friggin’ week—hup—looking for treasure we don’t f-friggin’ have, hup. They think it just g-grows down here or something.”
He sounded very put-upon. “Can we just get out of your way?” I asked.
“Wh-who are you—hup—looking for, anyway?”
“The Magic Resistance.”
It was like dropping the local cat’s name at a mouse festival. The crowd of underground dwellers collectively gasped, like five-year-olds responding to the sound of mum’s favorite vase smashing to the floor. I’d become accustomed enough to the dark to see that the elder me was staring so hard his eyeballs were about to plop out and bounce off my face.
The little grasping hands rapidly pulled me to my feet and withdrew. I felt a couple of them return to hastily dust down my robe.
“W-well, it would be re-remiss of us to not—hup—point you in the right direction,” said the leader. “Less said, soonest mended. S-sorry about handling you like th-that and—hup—
accusing you of . . . w-would you like to kick me in the stomach a few times to m-make up for it?”
—
The elder and his associates gently led us back through the darkened streets to the junction where we’d made what had turned out to be the wrong decision. I summoned another small fireball, and they jumped back with little surprised yelps.
“J-just head along th-this way and follow the—hup—signs,” said the elder, his pointing finger the only visible part of him.
“Where’s Thaddeus?” asked Meryl.
There was some frantic whispering in the dark. “W-would it be okay if we—hup—hung onto him for a while? Apparently he’s telling us some really—hup—intriguing th-things about our relationsh-ship with the LORD.”
“Yes,” I said immediately. “Hold onto him for as long as you want.”
“Y-you’re too kind, sir. Hup. Good luck.”
He attempted to scrabble away from us, but there was some more urgent whispering from his fellows and he was pushed back into conversation with us. “S-sorry,” he said. “W-we just need to know. Hup. On the s-surface. The infusion of-of immortality. Hup. Is it s-still going on?”
“Er, yeah.”
His glowing eyes disappeared for a moment as he hung his head in sorrow. “Okay.” He turned. “B-back ins-side, everyone. Hup. We’ll give it an-nother ten years.”
The scuttling sound scuttled away. I glanced at Meryl, then opted to start along the underground street before she leapt on the opportunity to say something stupid. We barely made twenty feet.
“Hey,” she said. “Do you think those guys are scared of the Magic Resistance?”
I didn’t look at her. “I wonder how you got that impression.”
“It was the way—”
“RHETORICAL. That was a rhetorical statement.”
She was only able to shut up for a few yards. “I do feel bad about Thaddeus. Maybe we should think about rescuing him later.”
“He’s useless.”
“That’s so cold. Would you just abandon me if I was useless?” A pause. “What’s that look for?”
Before long we happened upon what I presumed were the signs the leader albino had mentioned. “TURN BACK” was the most direct of them. Others included “HORRENDOUS DANGER” and “TRESPASSERS WILL UNDERGO THE TORMENTS OF ALL THE DAMNED.”
The further we advanced, the more urgent and tightly packed the signs became, until finally they all rather ominously disappeared and the narrow underground street opened out into a large plaza too vast for my fireball to fully illuminate. We were soon alone in a circle of yellow light, no walls to be seen.
I suddenly became aware that I was hearing not two, but three sets of footfalls. The third one was trying as hard as it could to sync up with mine. I stopped, and heard a faint stumble as they were caught off guard.
“Who’s there?” I called.
“It’s me,” said Meryl. “Meryl. Hi.”
“I meant . . .”
Suddenly, a cold breath of wind swept by, ruffling my sleeve. I spun around, and my fireball deformed madly and disappeared, as if some great and terrible magic force had simply absorbed it. Meryl grabbed my shoulder.
“Where are you?!” I yelled.
“I’m here!”
“Meryl, shut . . .”
Her voice had come from several feet away. The hand on my shoulder belonged to someone considerably closer.
“Erm,” I said, carefully. “Do you know the Magic Resistance?”
Something dark and bag-like was pulled over my eyes, then something long and stick-like whacked me over the head.
doublebill signed in at 22:13PM
doublebill: hey man
doublebill: cant sleep
sunderwonder: I told you to stop trying to talk to me after work
sunderwonder: especially after 10
sunderwonder: that’s my special me-time
doublebill: sorry
doublebill: were you jerknig off
sunderwonder YES
sunderwonder: what do you want
doublebill: are you as concerned abot simon as I am
sunderwonder: in the sense that im concerned hes going to suffocate with all those dicks in his face
doublebill: be serios
doublebill: you think hes been acting wierd lately
doublebill: more than usual
sunderwonder: yeah but since hes not talking as much im not complaining
doublebill: all he does is sit at his desk playin the build takling to that pet npc of his
sunderwonder: yes yes yes we all work in the same office you know
sunderwonder: ive seen him sitting there with his mouth hanging open like a retard
sunderwonder: guess he gave up on making any real friends
doublebill: that’s the thing
doublebill: simon talks abuot barry like hes realy a person
sunderwonder: I know, its creepy
doublebill: no I mean
doublebill: maybe barry IS a person
sunderwonder: ok time for you to shut up and go to bed
doublebill: just listen
doublebill: if barry can converse with smion like a person then that means our ai passes the touring test
sunderwonder: oh wow your right
sunderwonder: what a truly momentous day in the history of technology
sunderwonder: is what I would be saying if AIs hadnt passed the turing test years ago
sunderwonder: weve been over this, passing the turing test doesn’t mean anything
sunderwonder: even if it seems like a person its always just running on preset responses to preset stimuli on more and more complex levels
doublebill: yeah
doublebill: but maybe the human mind is no different
sunderwonder: oh god
sunderwonder: you’ve been watching star trek again havent you
doublebill: no
sunderwonder: you answered too fast
sunderwonder: you totally have
sunderwonder: it always makes you talk like captain picard
doublebill: fyi it was ds9
EIGHT
The bag was yanked roughly from my head and my octopus retinas were immediately dazzled by a spotlight. I was sitting hunched forward with my arms tied behind a backrest and my ankles bound to chair legs. Even had it been a decent size the chair was too hard to come within earshot of comfortable, but it seemed to have been sized for a schoolboy. That fit, because there was an intensity in the room that evoked a meeting with the headmaster.
“Mr. Wonderful?” I hazarded, even though I couldn’t smell the usual pungent mix of metal and sweat-drenched silk that usually marked his presence.
“Who are you?” They
were speaking through a voice disguising spell. Their words sounded like a baritone singer with a sore throat was speaking them into a metal drum at the bottom of a well.
“My name’s Jim.” That didn’t seem like enough. “Don’t look into my eyes, you’ll throw up.”
“I am conditioned to be unaffected by such things.”
“Oh, you liar,” said another voice. It was also disguised but the pitch was higher. “You should have seen him earlier, dear. Your bag came off while you were out and he was hosing down the entire back passage.”
“Why did you have to tell him that?” went the first voice, bravely retaining its dignified, powerful voice. “Do you do it just to get a rise out of me, is that it?”
“I thought you wanted to ask him questions, not me.”
The first voice cleared its throat. It sounded like a sink being unblocked inside a broken church bell. “What is your last name?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s usually just Jim.”
I heard paper rustling. “James Rufus Bottomroach,” said the first voice. “Does that name ring a bell?”
I sighed. “Yes, that’s me.”
“Hey!” came Meryl’s voice from somewhere in the darkness surrounding me. “You said you couldn’t remember your last name!”
“It came back a while ago, back at Dreadgrave’s,” I said, miserably. “I was hoping if I ignored it it would go away again.”
“Member of the Bottomroach family of pig farmers in Borrigarde, Garethy. Ran away from home in defiance of your father’s desire that you follow his trade. Enrolled at St. Gordon’s Magical College, and completed one year of a beginner’s degree in applied combat magic. Killed at the age of twenty-three by an invading force of warrior students from Stragonoff, which event led to the warrior school in question being closed down by the legal action of several bereaved parents.”
“Including my parents?”
The paper rustled again. “No. Your parents couldn’t even afford to have your body returned to Borrigarde. It was anonymously interred in a cemetery in Goodsoil County. That was sixty-five years ago.”
“Sounds like you’ve had it pretty rough, poor duck,” said the other voice. “Mind you, I hope I look as good as you when I’m eighty-eight. Only with a nose.”
“The details of your life are mere trivia,” continued the first voice. “The interesting part is the fact that a young man who met a sticky end sixty-five years ago is currently sitting before us, fully capable of movement, thought, and articulate conversation.”
“Always takes you so long to get to the point, doesn’t it. It’s like you can’t get enough of the sound of your own voice.”
“If you weren’t my wife, woman . . .”
“And now you’ve given away that we’re married. Now he could take that information, figure out our identities and do something devious with them.”
“Well, it was pretty obvious,” pointed out Meryl.
“You were returned to life by one Brutus Dreadgrave,” continued the husband testily. “A privately funded necromancer who seized control of Goodsoil County apparently in order to experiment with the raising of individuals who died before the Infusion. Apparently his success was even greater than any of us could have anticipated.”
“How do you know all this?” I said.
“It is simply the business of the Magic Resistance to know everything that interests us. How we gather our information is of no consequence.”
“Oh, typical,” said the wife. “This is just because we got all this from MY intelligence network. I bet if we’d found it out from that gaggle of drunks you call spies you wouldn’t miss an opportunity to blow their trumpet.”
“If we could return to the point . . .”
“Oh, you should have seen him, dear. When my girls dug up your death certificate, he went off and sulked in the attic with his silly train set for three hours.”
“IT IS NOT SI—” The husband stopped himself and took a few calming breaths. “What we need to know is how Dreadgrave succeeded in resurrecting pre-Infusion fatalities with their souls intact.”
“Why do you need to know that?” I asked. “Aren’t there enough suicidal immortals around?”
“We don’t intend to use it to resurrect our very own undead horde, if that’s what concerns you. But Dreadgrave did what we had long thought impossible. He altered the status quo. He found a way to inflict the Infusion upon those previously unaffected. If we can reverse-engineer his methods, perhaps we can also find a way to remove the Infusion’s effect.”
“I don’t know how he did it,” I confessed. “He didn’t tell us any of that. I just did guard duty, ran the rat pit and sometimes managed the heads on spikes.”
“I know how he did it.”
I stared at Meryl. Or rather, since I was still blinded from the spotlight, I looked vaguely in the direction her voice was coming from. A subtle movement of blurry shapes behind the light indicated that our two interrogators were doing the same.
“I was his first success. Worked as his lab assistant for a while. He didn’t realize I had free will until after he raised all you guys in that cemetery. I was just easy-going and he seemed so pleased with himself I didn’t have the heart to say anything.”
“You know his method?” went the husband.
“Well, okay, I don’t KNOW-know. But I know that it had something to do with Syndrome victims. He was always sending his men out to round them up from the big adventure towns. Then he’d make me chop them up and pick out the bits he wanted. That’s how I learned anatomy.”
“You knew about the Syndrome back then?” I asked, flabbergasted.
“All I knew was that we had to find attractive people in armor who ran everywhere in really straight lines and didn’t talk much. And that he wanted me to cut out their eyes and brains.”
“Hey, he was probably after those things you found,” said the wife.
“Shft,” went the husband.
“Don’t you shush me. And why are we even keeping up the secrecy thing? They’re obviously the right people.”
“Maybe if you weren’t so quick to trust everyone Carlos and Debbie wouldn’t have been captured.”
“Well maybe if you weren’t so quick to not trust people more of them would want to work for us. I’m just going to turn the lights on.”
“No!”
There was a crackle of magic and a set of lamps snapped on, replacing the spotlight. Now we could see that we had been brought into the main chamber of a vast cathedral, probably dating from around one of the swords layers. A massive stained glass window directly facing us had been broken in by the petrified roots of some massive tree from a slightly less ancient generation. A lot of the rubble and rotting furniture had been cleared away to make room for some magic-powered lighting, workbenches, cabinets, and the two chairs into which Meryl and I had been strapped.
A corpulent woman on the far side of middle age was standing by a lightswitch, wearing a black robe with something of the cult about it and a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles on a chain around her neck. Her husband was sitting on a large, high-backed leather chair just in front of us and had swiftly pulled his hood over his head as the lights had come on. In the shadowed recesses of his face, something was glowing a malevolent red.
“Oh, don’t be such a baby,” said the woman. She smartly stepped over and tugged his hood back down. I yelped and fell backwards in my chair.
“Hey, I know you!” said Meryl. “Dreadgrave had a poster of you in his office.”
It was Baron Civious. He was easily recognizable from the picture of him I’d seen in the Children’s Compendium of Incredibly Traumatizing Bedtime Stories, which had colored many a troublesome childhood night (usually piss yellow). He was close to seven feet tall and had the kind of absurdly slim build that you can only get from a liquid diet. Half his face was covered in an expressionless metal mask, and the other half was so thin that the cheekbone was poking out through the flesh. His eyes
glowed red, as did several veins that crawled visibly beneath his chalk-white skin. Under his black robe, he was wearing what looked like a woolly cardigan in warm autumnal colors.
“Yes, all right, I am Baron Civious,” he said, noting my reaction. “Get up. You will not be harmed while you are potentially useful.”
“He’s all talk, really,” said Mrs. Civious, helping me up.
“Argle barargle,” was all I could manage.
“I thought you were the lord of the Malevolands?” said Meryl. “Dreadgrave was always talking about taking us there on a field trip some day.”
Baron Civious’s face was already like thunder, but her question turned it into a forty-eight-hour deluge with hailstones the size of cowpats. “The Malevolands are now Fortune Valley. I refused to work with the Adventurer’s Guild and they used their influence to displace me. My treacherous minion Wormgob now rules in my place.”
“Now now,” said Mrs. Civious. “You were always the one who said the day Wormgob staked you in the heart would be the day he was ready to inherit your empire.”
“If he’d done it out of his own initiative, I would have been satisfied. But the Guild paid him. He rules now as their puppet. Even then I wouldn’t have minded if he’d had the balls to actually stake me in the heart, but this—early retirement!” He said the last two words in the same way my dad would say “those damn coloreds.”
“Show them the things,” said Mrs. Civious.
Baron Civious stood up from his seat, gathering his robe about him. Even the simplest of his actions was steeped in omen and dread; when he drew himself up to his full height it was like watching someone solemnly raise a flag depicting the end of the universe. He beckoned us towards two of the workbenches, upon which lay two autopsied corpses. One was an albino from the tunnels, his stiffened fingers stuck in horrified claws that were probably something to do with the massive hole in the back of his head. The other was an adventurer. It was human, male, as bronzed as polished copper, and probably handsome before his features had been peeled off his face, so he was obviously a Syndrome victim.
“We already suspected that there was a link between the Syndrome and the Infusion,” said Civious, waving a hand across the body with the same kind of gesture he’d use to send a platoon of skeletal warriors into battle. “It was when we dissected the brains of the victims that we discovered something strange.”
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