by Robert Bevan
“You are free to dismiss your mount at any time,” said the High Cleric. “It will await your summons from the Celestial Plane in which it resides. Once per day, you may call its name, and it will appear before you ready to serve.”
“What's its name?”
The High Cleric gave him a curious frown. “The New God said you would know.”
“Basil!” said Denise.
Katherine had half a mind to deck her for making such an insensitive joke, but Denise wasn't smiling. Her eyes were wide, focusing on something behind Katherine and Randy.
“Yaaaa Yaaaaaa!”
Katherine and Randy turned around. Basil, or at least a shining silver version of him, stared at them with large, glowing white eyes which fortunately didn't turn them all into stone.
“Basil!” cried Randy joyfully. “You're... okay? Alive?” He scratched his chin. “What are you, exactly?”
“A paladin's mount is no normal animal,” the High Cleric explained. “It is a heavenly beast, selected by a god or goddess for a paladin when he or she deems their servant worthy of the honor. Your love for this creature earned it a place in the heavens, and your devotion to the New God moved him so much that he saw fit to reunite you.”
While everyone else was checking out the new and improved Basil, Katherine held back to reflect on the Tanner thing. She believed Randy's account of what he saw, but it didn't add up with what she was seeing now. Tanner would hopefully be able to fill in some of the gaps when he woke back up, but if his remains were the shit in the jar, then where the hell was Tim?
“Thank you, High Cleric,” she said as sincerely as she could fake. She waved up at the sky. “And thank you, gods.” She nudged Randy. “Help me bag up Tanner. We've got to get back to the Whore's Head.”
Chapter 54
“Maybe Darton swiped it from you,” suggested Julian as he and Stacy drank beer and digested their dinner. He could tell she was still trying to figure out what had happened to the die. “You mentioned that things got a little feely between you and him in his hotel room, if I recall your phrasing correctly.”
Stacy smirked at him. “They didn't get that feely, but it's cute that you're still bothered about it.”
Julian's heartbeat began to quicken. He was onto something. He knew there was a reason beyond petty jealousy he'd gotten a bad vibe from Darton.
“How feely would he really have to get?” he asked Stacy. “Katherine's black elf friend swiped the dice bag from Frank without sexually assaulting him. With a high enough Dexterity score –” Julian remembered Darton barely being able to walk without falling over. He sighed. “Never mind.” Still, it nagged at him. It was the only explanation that even came close to making sense.
“Darton's high on my list of suspects,” said Stacy. “For all we know, those guys who came in and arrested him could have been friends of his, or people he hired to get him away from us after the job was done. But there are a couple of problems with that theory.”
“Which are?”
“Motive, for one. Sure, he must have guessed that the dice were valuable, but you don't go to that kind of effort for something you don't know anything about.”
That sounded like weak reasoning to Julian.
“You might, if the thing is valuable enough. We don't know how much those rich wizards are willing to pay for that kind of bling.”
“I'm pretty sure he didn't swap it out while I was sleeping. Not only would that have been extremely difficult to do without risking a very awkward moment followed by a knee to the nuts, but when would he have had time to get a replica made? We were with him the whole time.”
“He could have sneaked out for a couple of hours. We were on an island of powerful wizards. For the right price, I'm sure it's easy enough to get a guy to conjure up a replica of whatever you want.”
“Why go to all that bother? It would have been half as risky to just swipe the pendant while I was sleeping and make a run for it.”
“That's a good point.” Julian felt like he was on the right path in spite of the number of times it kept seeming to lead to dead ends. Another theory occurred to Julian that would fill in some of the gaps. “What if he was working for Mordred?” He gasped. “What if he was Mordred?”
Stacy shook her head and started counting off on her fingers. “One, Darton didn't come looking for us. We walked into the bar he was already drinking at. Two, Mordred didn't know the dice were missing until just now. Three, even if he did know, he wouldn't have known what kind of jewelry they were mounted in. And four, that still wouldn't explain why he would go to the trouble of making a replica.”
“Wow. You really have put a lot of thought into this.”
Stacy nodded. “And I'm smart as shit.”
Julian rubbed his temples. “So let's step back a bit. If the swap didn't happen while you were sleeping, it had to have happened at the restaurant, right?”
“That seems like the most likely place.”
“This lunch thing was completely orchestrated by Darton.”
“We're just going around in circles now, Julian,” said Stacy. “I know you want it to be Darton. And frankly, you're starting to get kind of weirdly obsessive about him. The more I think back on it, the more I see him as kind of a loser, stumbling directionless through life like he stumbled through his hotel room. He tried to pass himself off as suave and successful, but I could see a certain sad desperation in his eyes. And I had a similar feeling when he kissed me. It felt like –”
“Stop!”
“Sorry. I shouldn't have mentioned –”
“Seriously,” said Julian. “Shut up for a second. I think I've got something.” His mind was thinking about things that made him uncomfortable, but he couldn't afford to shut down those thoughts. He didn't have all the pieces of the puzzle yet, but there was one glaring problem that he could bring to the surface right now. He reached into his pocket, grabbed the silver coin Darton had thrown at him in the restaurant, and slapped it down on the bar.
Stacy frowned down at it. “Is that a tip?”
“Darton threw this at my head from halfway across the restaurant.”
“Please tell me that's not what's fueling your vindictive obsession. I was really hoping that had more to do with me.”
Julian smiled in spite of where the evidence was leading. “He threw this across the room with pinpoint accuracy. That would require a pretty high Dexterity score, wouldn't you think?”
Stacy took a moment to think. “So you're suggesting the whole clumsy thing was just an act? To what end?”
“He didn't swap pendants with you. He swapped them with me.” Julian pounded his fist on the bar. “It was out of my sight for less than a second.”
“What are you talking about, Julian?”
“When I took the pendant to Aleric of Whitewood's table, he asked if he could hold it. I allowed him to on the condition that he let me hold his cane. That son of a bitch was in on it. He passed it to Darton, who came over to join us, and Darton dropped it below the table. It was meant to look clumsy, but it was a Sleight of Hand trick. Those smug bastards told me I had a cheap reproduction while they were actually handing me a cheap reproduction.”
Stacy sighed. “And a few minutes after that, Darton got arrested.”
“It gets worse.”
“How could it?”
“Who do we know with a high Dexterity, who would jizz his pants at being able to give you a sad and desperate kiss, and who has the brains and motive to fake his own death?”
Stacy gasped. “Oh no.”
The front door burst open with some sort of groaning howl that sounded like Chewbacca with a cold.
A giant silver dinosaur head with glowing white eyes continued its terrifying cry.
“SHIT!” cried Tony the Elf. “It's Mordred! He's come for us!” He grabbed a bow from under the bar like he'd been waiting for this opportunity for quite some time, nocked an arrow, then fired it into the magical creature's neck.
&n
bsp; “Dismiss!” said a familiar voice from beyond the door. The silver dinosaur vanished like one of Julian's horses. Then Randy walked in, followed by Katherine.
Katherine took a knee and reached into her Bag of Holding. She pulled out Butterbean, her black half-elf friend who was naked, and Denise. They all lay on the floor gasping for air.
“Katherine,” said Julian. She looked kind of pissed off, so he was hesitant to bring up such a touchy subject, but he had to know. “Did you have any luck getting Tim brought back to life?”
“No. In fact, I've got a shitload of questions. I'm not even sure Tim is dead.”
Julian and Stacy glanced at each other.
Julian took a deep breath. “We've got a working theory on that.”
Chapter 55
Sitting in a steel cage in the sewer for multiple days was surprisingly exhausting. Dave guessed that was mostly due to him going apeshit in rat-monster form. He didn't have any memory of that time, but he was pretty sure he didn't spend it sleeping. One minute, he'd be having convulsions as his body started to change, and the next thing he knew he was sore and out of breath. Rat Dave was clearly not as chill in his confinement as Dwarf Dave.
Aside from the fact that they were keeping him locked in a cage in a sewer, his captors didn't seem particularly cruel. They didn't beat him or torture him for information, and they kept him fed with some kind of gray sludge that tasted like spoiled yogurt textured with minced assholes. Now that he thought about it, he might have had too low a bar for how he defined non-cruelty.
“He's in here,” said one of the female wererats from just outside the secret door hidden in the wall. She was the one Dave was starting to develop a Stockholm Syndrome crush on. “I don't know what you want with him. I know our numbers are down since that crazed half-orc slaughtered so many of us, but this one strikes me as one of the least interesting or special people I've ever interacted with.”
Ouch.
“I would like to speak with him alone,” said a voice that sounded both familiar and peculiarly unfamiliar at once. It reminded Dave of a high school theater student trying to mimic an old man's voice in a play.
Dave stood and picked some dried bits of vomit out of his beard in a weak effort to make himself as presentable as possible. These were going to be the first words anyone had spoken to him in days, and it might be an interview that would determine whether he was going to be assimilated into the group or murdered.
Come on, Dave. You can be interesting. Or at least you can fake it.
An old gnome slipped inside the room. Whether it was his grim expression or the way the flickering torchlight accentuated the creases on his face, something about this little gnome creeped Dave out more than any of his larger companions.
“Howdy!” Dave blurted out with a big stupid grin and an exaggerated wave of his hand. That may have been the worst Diplomacy fail in the history of the game.
The gnome stopped in his tracks with a perplexed look on his face. “And howdy to you as well.”
Dave stopped being creeped out and embarrassed when it dawned on him who this guy was. “I know you!”
“Do you now?” said the gnome.
“You were the guy who freed us from those cages on the Crescent Shadow.”
The gnome put up his hands, palms facing forward. “Guilty as charged.”
“I never got a chance to thank you. Things got kind of hectic after that.”
“And how is it that, hundreds of miles away, I come to find you in a cage once again?”
Dave sighed. “It's a long story.”
The old gnome smiled. “I'm keen to hear it, if you don't have any other plans.”
“I ate a contaminated turkey leg and contracted lycanthropy. Some people I thought were my friends turned on me, and I made a run for it. Then these guys caught me and locked me in here. Now that I say it aloud, I guess it isn't a very long story after all.”
“Friendship can be a fickle institution. I put more value in relationships rooted in common problems and shared goals.”
“That sounds practical, I guess.”
“That's why I think you'll make a good partner in a little project I'm working on.”
Dave didn't like the sound of this at all. It felt like he was being hustled, like his freedom was going to depend on him agreeing to join this guy in some kind of time-share scheme.
“What kind of common problems and shared goals do we have?”
“I'm a wererat, just like you,” said the gnome. “I suppose that counts as a common problem, but it's a manageable one, and I've grown to enjoy some of its benefits. I'm more concerned with the goals we share.”
“What do you know about my goals?”
“I know a lot about you, Dave.”
“How do you know my name?”
“I know you've had a secret crush on Stephanie Whitmore since the third grade. I know you left Rob Ryder's party without telling anyone because you clogged up his toilet and made it overflow your shitwater all over the bathroom floor.” The gnome smiled. “And I know it was you who spilled root beer on Cooper's Xbox.”
Dave had officially reached his threshold of being creeped out. He pressed his back against the wall and hugged his knees. “How do you know that?”
The gnome shrugged. “Because I was sitting right next to you, dumbass.” He reached behind his head and felt around for something in his hair. When he pulled his hand away, his appearance changed suddenly, like the naked people at the end of Michael Jackson's Black or White video.
“Tim?” Dave could barely croak out the word. “I thought... We all saw you... How?”
Tim held up the clip he'd pulled out of his hair when he looked like a gnome. It had a design like a face made out of the halves of two different faces joined together. “This is hands down one of the coolest magic items in the game.”
That was an easy explanation to comprehend, but it begged another question.
“If Mordred didn't kill you, then who did he kill?”
“Jesus Christ, Dave. Mordred didn't kill anybody. I was Mordred.”
Dave took a moment to realign the thoughts in his head. Unless he was mistaken, that just made things worse. “Then you slit someone's throat and kicked them off the platform?”
“Correct.”
Another terrible thought occurred to Dave. “Was he Mordred?”
“No,” said Tim, like he was annoyed at having been asked. “I admit I fucked up when I killed that other Mordred. That was impulsive, and I regret having done it.”
“So who did you kill?”
“That NPC douchebag who was hanging out with Katherine. That reminds me, what happened to her? I noticed she wasn't in her cage when I went down to rescue you.”
“She caught a ride down on a Pegasus.”
Tim nodded. “Sweet.”
“She was going after your dead body to get you brought back to life.”
“Yikes,” said Tim. “That could be awkward. We'll have to get the ball rolling on those shared goals we talked about.” He opened his shirt, exposing his dark coarse chest hair, and the silver chain running through it down either side of his neck. At the end was a silver dragon claw grasping a black twenty-sided die. “What do you say, Dave? You want to help me make this right?”
The End
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Robert Bevan, Critical Failures VI (Caverns and Creatures Book 6)
