by J D Astra
We didn’t have time for more pleasantries, not here, at least. “Is there somewhere more private we could go?” I asked Tabor and watched as his jaw tightened. His eyes darted to Otto.
“We didn’t think you’d ever come back,” he started.
“I’m not allowed, then?” Otto pulled his dagger from its sheath and laid it on the table.
Tabor stared at it for a long beat, then looked at each of us before his eyes landed again on Otto. “Of course you’re welcome, brother. I’m just not sure how happy everyone else will be to see you.”
“Why?” I butted in, irritated at the lack of context.
Tabor grimaced. “It’s complicated.”
“No,” Otto growled, “it’s simple.” He looked at me, shame coloring his face. “They believe I’m a traitor.”
The Underground
“A TRAITOR?” I ASKED a bit too loud, and eyes in the room glanced my way. Otto and Tabor cringed in unison.
I bit my lip and closed my eyes. “You are, by far, one of the most loyal men I know.” I glanced around, realizing the attioned I’d gained, then quieted to a whisper, “How is it possible they think you are a traitor?”
Otto smirked. “That’s some of the highest praise I think you’ve ever given.”
“Don’t let it get to your head,” I warned.
Tabor cleared his throat. “It would be best to have this conversation with more privacy.”
I became keenly aware of the Imperial eyes that did not wander back to their mead after my mention of the word “traitor.” There were several men in the red garb of a soldier whose eyes hadn’t left our table. One pushed back his chair, gesturing to the men around him and pointing in our direction. Not good.
“Come with me,” Tabor urged as he stood.
We pushed in our chairs and Tabor led us away from the front door to a passage at the back near a set of stairs. As we got closer I remembered the door under the stairs, fairly well hidden and probably a closet. I looked back, checking the entrance of the hall to ensure the Imperials weren’t following us, and we seemed to be in the clear.
Tabor gave a few taps up high on the door, then two down low. There was a sound of scraping metal and the door swung open. Sudden and loud music, laughter, and the frequent tinkling of coins slapped me in the face. Tabor grabbed my shoulders and pushed me into the room, then Otto and Renzik, before hurrying through himself.
The air beyond the tavern was thick with a fragrant smoke that burned my eyes. Tables spread out before us in a space at least twice as large as the restaurant side, but none of them held any food. It was a game room. There was something akin to craps, and another game looking similar to blackjack. How in a town so driven by law was there legal gambling? Unless it wasn’t legal.
None of the powder-covered players seemed disturbed by our entrance, and the business went on as usual. The bouncer pushed the door shut behind me and locked the deadbolt. She was a massive Risi dressed in black leathers embroidered with a red spearhead over the heart.
I’d never seen a female Risi before, but she seemed even larger than Otto. Her facial features were only slightly less masculine, but her tusks were significantly smaller. She had some hair on her head, though less than Tabor, pulled into two tiny ponytails.
“What!” She challenged, thrusting her chest forward as she moved her arms as if to punch at me. I jumped back, and she smirked as she returned to a docile position at the door. Apparently the public politeness laws did not apply back here, and so it was likely the other laws also did not apply.
I pulled my eyes away from her and followed after Renzik, Otto, and Tabor. There was a crash, a deep below of injustice, and the unmistakable meaty slap of someone getting punched in the face. We all turned that way to catch the tail end of the action as an Imperial man moved to drunkenly pummel another man in soldier’s garb.
Another bouncer-like Risi woman picked the offender up by the back of his shirt and tossed him like a rag doll. He hit the wood wall with a thunk and flopped to the floor, motionless. I gasped, but after a second he pushed up onto his hands and shook his head. She pointed a finger, as if to scold a small child, then picked up the downed man in a single fluid motion. The soldier wobbled back to the game table and grabbed his drink with a lopsided grin.
“Gods, I missed this place.” Otto sighed.
Tabor placed a heavy hand on his shoulder. “Welcome home.”
A twinge of jealousy twisted my gut. Otto was coming home. He had friends, connections, memories, all the things that I’d had to leave behind to survive Astraea. I straightened as I looked at the strings of code smiling at one another. For all I knew, the game had associated Otto with this group purely for the quest, just written Otto and his memories into the plot for my convenience.
I didn’t take any comfort in those thoughts as I watched Otto and Tabor chuckle together. Otto didn’t know he was code, didn’t know that before a few days ago he didn’t even exist. Ignorance was bliss, and I wouldn’t ruin it for him.
“Are you alright?” Renzik nudged me and I steeled myself.
“Fine,” I shot back and followed as Tabor and Otto led on through the room of game tables.
People cheered, and a few groaned with whispers of defeat, as the dealer of one of the card tables revealed his hand. Coins slid forward to the dealer, then some piles slid back to the players taller than before. With so much money on the tables, I could see Cutter, Jack’s NPC, being very at home here. The thief was a shifty one for sure, nothing like Jack.
We reached another door at the back and Tabor gave another, different knock. The sound of three locks sliding away preceded the door opening, and I realized just how many precautions they’d gone through to secure this place.
“Tabor,” the Wode man on the other side of the door acknowledged as the smaller Risi led the way. Otto stepped through and earned a long look painted with anger from the guard. “Five years wasn’t long enough, I could’ve gone my whole life without ever seeing you again.” The black-bearded guard spat at Otto’s feet. He was a lean Wode, just a few inches taller than me, sporting a colorful tunic top with black pants and dark boots. He held a book in his hand, but I couldn’t read the writing on the spine from my vantage point.
Otto squared his shoulders and opened his mouth, but closed it again without a word and followed Tabor into the dark room. The guard’s brown eyes narrowed on me but I strode on past him with a barely there nod. Anyone who spat at my NPC’s feet deserved little to no recognition from me. Otto was a saint; he’d proven that much to me by willingly selling himself to Naitee for a scroll back to the secret zone to help me, even if it meant his death. These traitor accusations were bullshit.
The room was black as a starless night. Even with the door to the game room open and the light spilling through, even with the guard’s lamp on the table next to him, it was black as a void. The illumination just stopped, halted by some dark shadow three feet past the guard’s post.
The door creaked shut behind us, all of the bolts scraping back into place. I glanced behind as the Wode man returned to reading his book, completely unconcerned with the black mass towering from floor to ceiling with which he shared the room.
“Blackmare.” Renzik’s voice prickled hairs on my neck as he snuck up next to me. “Keen eyes cannot penetrate it, nor can non-magical light.” He whistled as he stuck his hand through the line of shadow and it disappeared. “These are intricate protection spells.”
I cast a fireball, holding it securely in my hand as I moved it through the blackness. The fireball grew faint as it crossed the line, black fog whipping at the red-hot flames as if they were offensive. The dark swirled and stabbed at my spell as if it were trying to extinguish it. It was like watching smoke take shape, all different shapes, trying what it could to put out the light.
“Are you going to stand there all day?” The disembodied voice of Otto snapped me back from the wonders of the Blackmare. His face appeared near my outstretched hand
, the red of my spell barely lighting his features. “Let’s go.” He grinned and disappeared once more.
I took a deep breath, unsure what that stuff would do in my lungs, and stepped through the spell wall. My open eyes were instantly clouded with milky blackness, which distorted everything I could still see. My fireball became a starburst and my barely-there hand nothing more than a smudged chocolate colored oval. The sounds of my soft-soled boots were distant and echoey. I could no longer tell I was in a tavern, or a room that had any basis in human reality.
The air, manipulated by some dark force, seeped through my skin to the bones, chilling my core. It was more than just a coldness on the surface and in my bones—the damp inky mist seemed to soak through my robes, making the garment heavy on my body. Making my body heavy. I slumped forward as the force of the weight pulled my shoulders down a few inches.
My steps became labored, and though I tried to pick up the pace, I felt as though I were trying to walk on the bottom of the ocean. I swallowed hard, my throat burning from a lack of oxygen as I pushed forward through the black. Was I still moving in the right direction? How long had I been walking through this obsidian cloud?
“Otto?” I called with the last of the air in my lungs.
“Keep coming.” His ghostly voice sounded as though it were moving like water. My mind sought connections to the sounds, the feelings, that didn’t have any logical basis in reality. Voices moving like water, what did that even mean?
My outstretched fireball suddenly bloomed in brightness and I stepped through the other side of the black mist. I inhaled sharply and cut off the flame as little stars danced around the edges of my vision. The other side of the room was made of quick-construction wood walls, and two wall lamps flanked a drawing of an arch. It looked to be sketched in the same white stone that was all over the quarry.
I looked back to the black mist and watched as Renzik stumbled through, eyes squinted and hands waving in front of him. He shivered as he cleared the spell. “Nasty stuff.”
Tabor chuckled. “It’s not so bad after the five thousandth time.” He put his hand out to Otto. “Give me your dagger, would you?”
Otto hesitated, then pulled the blade free and spun it once so the handle faced Tabor, who grinned. “Thanks.” He ran the blade of the dagger down his thumb and gave the digit a squeeze. “We’ve made some improvements. I think you’ll be impressed.”
Tabor pressed his bloodied thumb against an empty plank next to the arch then dragged it down. I stepped closer, watching as the smeared blood sizzled and little bubbles of light popped up from underneath, evaporating the red liquid until the mark was gone. A luminous purple line no thicker than a strand of a hair shot toward the drawn arch from the disappeared bloodmark.
I took a step back, watching as second by second the purple light shot around the drawn white lines that looped from floor to ceiling like strings of LEDs following an arbor. They looped and twirled as intricate runic shapes, like soft-flowing scripture drawn with a bamboo brush, appeared between the twisting lines of light.
The spell picked up speed as half of the drawn arch was illuminated, and even finer details began revealing themselves. Tiny symbols within the flowing marks glowed to life, and there, right there, was one that looked just like the burnt ward on Eisen’s wall.
When the light finished its tour, and every chalk-line glimmered with lavender light, it soundlessly erupted in a shower of purple and pink. I sucked in an awed breath at the glowing flakes that trickled down through the air like feathers.
“Incredible,” I sighed as the brilliant light faded, revealing a doorway to a very different looking hall. Roots snaked down from a low, dirt-caked ceiling, and torches blazed the way through the narrow passage that seemed unending. There were no guards on this side of the door, and it looked as though it could’ve been an old deserted tomb passage if not for the lit torches.
Renzik whistled again. “Portal magic. I am glad I did not turn you in, you have powerful friends.”
“When did this get set up?” Otto patted Tabor on the back with two heavy slaps that would’ve floored me.
Tabor grinned. “Three months ago.” His smile faded, something remembered playing across his face. “Let’s go. I know Jukal will want to see you.”
Otto gave a grunt that sounded about as enthusiastic as a man being asked to walk to his own hanging, but followed Tabor into the cavernous hallway. “I was hoping for a moment in the grove.”
“It will have to wait, brother,” Tabor said, his tone grave.
Renzik waved his hand toward the doorway out of an Alice in Wonderland novel, the manufactured wood contrasting starkly against the rooty earthen tunnel. I was apprehensive to follow this Risi we’d just met moments ago through a portal to some rebel hideout, but it wouldn’t be the first dangerous thing I’d done since coming to V.G.O., and I doubted it would be the last.
I stepped through the doorway, running my hand across the wood frame until it sharply changed to the dirt of the cavern beyond the portal. Simply incredible. I looked back to the tavern room with the black mass and the flickering lamps as Renzik passed me. The opening flashed a dull purple, and I shielded my eyes from the accosting light. The flash dimmed, and I lowered my arm.
Just as quickly as it had appeared, the passage to the other place was gone, replaced by a stone slab engraved with spiraling runes and sigils. The shapes thrummed with the purple light once, twice, and then faded away.
“Keep up,” Otto barked, and I turned away from the portal. They were a good fifty feet away, so I jogged to catch up as they continued on their way. My NPC’s behavior was becoming irksome, like, what the hell? He’d yelled at me before, been short with me, but after all we’d been through he’d softened. It seemed as though all of that was undone in the presence of Tabor.
“So, what have you been occupying yourself with?” Tabor asked as I finally reached them.
“Jobs here and there, until I met this one.” Otto hooked a thumb at me. “She’s been keeping me on my toes.”
I crossed my arms and raised a brow as I mumbled, “Keeping your coin sack fat too.”
“How did you come to meet Otto?” Tabor talked over his shoulder to me.
I tutted. “Saving his big green ass from being stabbed to death by a pack of goblins—”
“I was doing fine,” Otto interjected.
“Sure you were.” I grinned and gave him a punch, though gently, as not to damage myself on his beefy arm.
“Abby is a Traveler,” Otto went on. “She arrived a few days ago.”
Tabor turned his head further and gave me a quick glance. “I’ve heard of them, but never met one.”
Renzik piped up for the first time in minutes. “I have heard you come from another realm, another plane of existence. Is this true?” He seemed genuinely excited.
I knew the Overminds, the A.I. gods of V.G.O., had programmed some basic knowledge into the NPCs about us, the Travelers, but they were also not supposed to have any interest in that knowledge. Having every human explain to their NPC where they came from and why could get a mite bit uncomfortable, and we’d opted to make the NPCs disinterested in Travelers’ backstories unless a Traveler wanted to tell it.
I hadn’t talked with Otto much about Earth, just that it was going to be destroyed, which was why we came to Eldgard. Letting on any more than that might get the NPCs confused about what we were, or what they were for that matter. If they really were self-aware, telling a computer it was not a fleshy being but a few lines of code executing on a metal server deep underground on a planet, one plane removed from this existence, that was about to be ravaged by an asteroid, well... it just might break them.
I settled on something simple after several seconds of silence. “The world I came from was not like this one.”
The tunnel forked after many hundreds of feet, and we went left. There were two wood planks hanging from stakes driven into the dirt, one with small markings engraved in the shape of
a tent, pointed to the left, and the other a sword sticking out of a mound, pointed right.
Renzik prompted again. “If not like Eldgard, then what was it like?”
“It’s difficult to describe.” I shook my head. I wanted the conversation to end. I didn’t want to be the first person to cause an AI to go haywire. “We can never go back.” My eyes flicked to the quest timer in the corner of my vision, ominously counting down to the moment Astraea would hit Earth. “It will be destroyed soon.”
“I am sorry for that,” Renzik mumbled solemnly.
Otto cast a concerned look over his shoulder at me and I gave him a half-hearted smile. He grimaced and returned to facing front, following Tabor as we took another turn, this time to the right. Two more staked planks marked the way; the one to the right had a tent, and the left, a cauldron. There was another plank on the wall we’d turned from engraved with both an archway and the sword in the mound.
Well, at least their iconography was consistent. If I could memorize the shapes, I’d be able to find my way out. Hopefully the door on this side operated the same as in the tavern, and we could leave if need be.
Voices, of adults and children, drifted through the hall from up ahead. My stomach tightened with nerves. Otto and I had mostly traveled among civilization in cities with guards and rules. The rebels, who literally appeared to live underground, might not have such things. And with Otto in less than stellar standing with the group, who knew what they would want to do with him, with me?
My palms tickled with the sensation of a prepping fireball, the danger instinct shooting off alarms in my head. “Otto,” I whispered, hopefully low enough Tabor couldn’t hear over the growing buzz of conversation ahead of us.
He grunted in response as he glanced over his shoulder. I grabbed his arm and stood on my toes, pulling him back a little further from our guide as I saw the tunnel soon opened up to a larger room. “Are you sure this is a good idea?”
He gave my hand a pat and removed it from his arm. “We’re safe here, don’t worry.”
