Sicilian Defense

by Andrey Vasilyev

  “Good people—I know them. Okay, I hear you.” Dorn scratched his bulbous nose. “You know what, Mr. Slick, if you decide to start your own clan, don’t forget to give me a whistle. I’d be game.”

  Well, hello. I asked for it, and there it is on a platter. I’m just not sure if it’s a sign or a warning.

  “Okay, I’ll remember that. You have my word, and you’ll be the first person I invite if I ever get that far,” I promised. “I swear it by the gods.”

  Noted, a woman’s voice whispered in my left ear. Confirmed, a masculine bass boomed in my right ear. Do you have nothing better to do? a melodious, girlish voice said in what was more of a hiss.

  “Whoa!” I nearly staggered from the shock.

  “What?” The dwarf looked at his empty beer mug in distress.

  “Oh, nothing,” I replied. “Hey, go easy on that—we’re going to be heading out soon. Oh, and remember: as far as anyone else is concerned, you and I will be spending the whole week down there in the mines.”

  “Yep, got it,” Dorn said with a dismissive wave.

  Back in my room, I pulled my pet scroll out of my chest, and then, after some thought, decided to dump the tablet and runes into the chest after all. Discretion is the better part of valor—I knew I’d be kicking myself if I lost them.

  Miurat and Dorn had been joined at our table by three more Double Shields by the time I got back. I knew one of them: as promised, Fattah was there, and I noticed that he’d been doing some serious leveling-up. I’d never seen the other two before. One was named Jax, the other Treville, and they were both melee fighters in advance of Level 100.

  “Well, do they look good to you?” Miurat asked with a triumphant smile. “I think this is going to be less a battle than a field trip.”

  “Probably,” I said, extending a hand to Jax. “Hagen.”

  Neither of the two turned out to be snobs; they shook my hand and told me their names. Fattah, in the meantime, was waiting with interest to see what I would do when I got to him, and I think he was even surprised when I offered him my hand. Still, he shook it.

  “So we’re good?”

  “Absolutely,” I assured him. “It’s just a game—what’s there to get annoyed about? Well, I mean, sure, I have no love lost for that idiot Ronin, and I’m not a huge fan of our friend Miurat, but I don’t have anything against you.”

  “What did they do?” Fattah asked.

  “They stole my runes, some scrolls, and a bunch of gold,” I explained. “Although, from what I remember, we’d agreed that they would return everything.”

  “Oh, right, the gold and scrolls,” Miurat said, jumping in. “The runes are different, and I know you already got them back, though you don’t have to say anything about that. The gold and scrolls, though…Ronin is a pig, that’s for sure.”

  Miurat shook his head in disappointment, letting me know that he didn’t approve of what Ronin had done. I decided against yanking the tiger by the tail—it wasn’t worth asking him what kind of leader he was if his warriors could get away with whatever they wanted. We were playing our little game, and it wasn’t the right time to flip the board.

  “I told you that from the very beginning,” Fattah said gloatingly.

  “How much did he take from you?” Miurat asked me, his voice all business. “Give me the amount.”

  “Oh, about twenty thousand,” I said with a scratch of my head. “I don’t really remember. And there were maybe fifteen portal scrolls.”

  “Open your exchange,” Miurat ordered. “Here. I’m sending you a little something extra compliments of our clan leader, so consider this a hello from him.”

  Forty thousand gold and a rune piled into my bag. I sure wasn’t expecting that!

  Laguz Rune

  One of a set of runes the gods are said to have created in ancient times.

  As long as the rune is in the player’s inventory, the player gains a +5% chance of seeing what is hidden from sight, such as secret doors or hiding places, and an extra +2% to mental resistance when playing in a group.

  Check the appropriate table to see the bonuses this rune gives when combined with other runes.

  Class limitation: none

  Minimum level for use: 45

  That was well done by Miurat. It had been perfectly thought out—bravo to him. He knew that I knew it was all a show, but it was still well done. You have to respect even bastards like him when they’ve made their tricks an art form: villainous acrobatics.

  “I hope we don’t have any other material sticking points between us?” Miurat asked.

  “None whatsoever,” I assured him. “I bow to your leader and I’ll be sure to thank him next week in person. Here’s the scroll, by the way. I don’t mind giving it to you to look at, but I’m not supposed to give or sell it to anyone.”

  Miurat and Fattah spent a while studying it.

  “Interesting, if not all that useful. Actually, no, put it this way: it takes too much of an investment,” Miurat said finally. “At Level 60, you’d get a Level 15 pet to guard you, and that’s nothing. Then you have to start leveling it up. It takes your experience, and it levels up faster than you do, obviously, but still, that’s a lot of time… Though if you buy into the idea, you might end up with something really good. By the time you got to Level 120, you’d really have something.”

  “Level 140,” Fattah contradicted. “On the other hand, though, it has that unique ability—I wonder what it is. That could very well be the key to the whole thing. It might be great against enemies even at a lower level, and then you’d have one of Alexander the Great’s war elephants when it levels-up. Or not—it’s fifty-fifty, I guess.”

  “Yeah, hard to say.” Miurat pouted. “It’s a shame you can’t sell the scroll. I’d buy it from you just to experiment with it.”

  “It wouldn’t work for you,” Fattah said, contradicting him once again. “It’s a good option until you get to maybe Level 70, then you’d have more problems than it would be worth. Although…not necessarily.”

  “What are you talking about?” Miurat stared at him.

  “You’re high-level, and the bots you get are the same. The pet would be down at Level 15. It wouldn’t even have time to accumulate experience, since it’d be killed faster than you could protect it. Though that’s only if it’s there to attack. If you can train it to behave differently…”

  “Here we go again,” Jax sighed.

  Fattah stopped himself. “Well, it’s true: you can’t sell it, regardless.”

  “Well, it doesn’t say anything about gifting it.” Miurat screwed up one eye. “Want to try?”

  “You’ll just lose the scroll,” Dorn coughed. “I guarantee it. When it talks about giving it to someone else, that includes all the different options—I’ve tried it. Including death. A few months ago Rone and I tried to do that with a scroll we got from a hidden quest. We said we were gifting it and went ahead.”

  “And?” Miurat was intrigued.

  “The scroll left, but all we got were lumps of paper. And it was a good scroll, too, for an ability…”

  “Well, it was worth a try,” Miurat said, rubbing his hands together. “Anyway, we’re going to the Neilozh Mines to find this fine dwarf’s things. Where exactly are they?”

  “By the Salt Lake,” Dorn replied, rubbing his much larger hands together. “On the left bank.”

  “Is that where the worms are?” I guess Treville has been there.

  “Yep,” Dorn replied. “Big, nasty ones.”

  “More hardy than nasty,” Treville clarified. “If any of you haven’t gotten that quest, you should get it before we head out. We’ll have to kill all the worms anyway, so there’s no point wasting the opportunity.”

  “Agreed,” I quickly replied, only too happy to get on board with a great idea like that. Experience, a reward, and all for free—what’s not to like?

  “I’m in. Where do you get it?” Fattah apparently hadn’t gotten the quest either.

&n
bsp; “From an old guy in Driugg, a mining village not far from the mines. I’m not forgetting anything, am I, dwarf?” Treville looked at Dorn, the latter nodding his head and finishing his beer.

  ***

  Driugg turned out to be your usual dark mining town. The plain buildings were gray, the sky was gray, there were sudden gusts of wind that knocked around the signs on the few buildings…in a word, it wasn’t the kind of place you visited to lift your spirits. Dorn, on the other hand, seemed excited to be back.

  “All right, whoever hasn’t gotten the quest, come with me,” he said.

  The old man had a silver head of hair, and he told us the whole sad history of the village in a hollow voice. Once upon a time, it had been home to quite a few people. Most had left already, at first because the coal had just about run out, and later because the Great Evil had taken up residence in the last veins.

  Here, the Great Evil took on the form of a swarm of blind, powerful, flesh-eating worms.

  You unlocked Worms!

  Task: Destroy the nest of blind worms near Salt Lake.

  Additional quest (not required to complete the main quest): Destroy the Worm Queen.

  Reward:

  1400 experience

  1200 gold

  One weapon from the village armory (random, matching your class)

  +8 to your reputation among the miners in the West

  Completing the additional quest will get you an additional reward:

  900 experience

  Worm Queen’s Left Eye

  Worm Queen Slime

  Random rare item

  Warning: This quest is impossible for you to complete on your own. Try creating a group with three to six friends.

  Accept?

  Well, that was a long description. It was also the first time I’d seen a variable quest nested inside another quest.

  “Is that all the quests there are around here, gentlemen?” Miurat looked around before settling his gaze on Dorn. “We’re heading underground either way, so we might as well see what else we can squeeze out of the trip. You can never get enough experience.”

  “Golden words,” I replied. “They should be engraved in copper on the signs hanging everywhere people live.”

  “Oh, that’s me. I do pop out a good one every once in a while.”

  We wandered around the village a little longer, finding a few quests and giving up on a few others. They were for someone looking to map the mines (you need to go absolutely everywhere, mark the whole thing down, make sure you check every corner, and…wait, where are you going?) and another person who needed teeth from some fire breathing barrog, the latter needing specifically molars from the barrog’s lower jaw. He was a gray-bearded old man wearing a funny hat. In his mouth was a pipe, and he kept repeating how powerful barrog teeth are—no other teeth mattered, he told us with an odd giggle, and he had one last line for us in parting.

  “You’re not going to get them for me? Then run, you fools!”

  On the other hand, I got a quest for collecting five bundles of some plants that grew near the mines, another for orc necklaces, one more that had me filling a container I was given with water from Salt Lake (the northern end, to be precise), and a few other odds and ends I grabbed right before we left the village.

  “Young man!” I didn’t realize that I was the young man in question at first. At the time, I was minding my own business linking to the headstone, happy with life and a bit lighter after a visit to the hotel. I wasn’t about to carry that much gold around with me. I’d also sent a letter to Gedron the Elder, in which I described the trials and tribulations Dorn had been going through as well as my opinion that he would be a great addition to any clan. “Young man! Yes, you.”

  Just in case, I looked around and saw a fairly tall and extremely thin person who was very strangely dressed in a dark-red, or even, I would say, dark-burgundy robe with an odd round hat. There was a wand hanging in a leather loop attached to his belt.

  “Thank heavens, you answered. Hurry, come over here!” He gestured me over.

  I walked toward him, intrigued.

  “Good afternoon,” he said with a bow. “Would you deign to honor me with your name?”

  “Certainly,” I replied. “Hagen of Tronje, Thane of the Western Mark.”

  “So these old eyes were right. You’re a warrior of the Western Mark,” the lanky stranger said, looking at me as though we were brothers. “My name is monsieur Gilles de Blassi, third inquisitor of the Rattermark College of Inquisition’s first circle.”

  “And I’m exactly who you said—a warrior,” I responded with a nod. “What does the good inquisition want with me? I’ll do my best to help.”

  If you agree to help a representative of the inquisition, you can get a number of quests related to the Rattermark College of Inquisition. Building a friendship with them unlocks access to hidden and even epic quests.

  Note that a number of NPC communities are at odds with the Rattermark inquisition. If your friendship with the college reaches +30, you will no longer be able to get quests from representatives of the Order of Druids or the werewolves in the Borderlands.

  “My story is a mournful one,” the inquisitor said, pulling his hat off his head and wrinkling it in his hands. “There were quite a few of us, a whole group marching: me, my students, and some warriors. We were sent by the circle of the High Inquisition to destroy the accursed Supreme Witch, the malicious Gretken. Sadly, our group was ambushed, and then ambushed again, all clearly the work of the accursed witch—both the people and the animals in these parts serve her. As a result, I was the only one who made it to this village. My companions are all either dead or imprisoned by Gretken’s servants. Save them, good Thane, and you will be well rewarded.”

  You unlocked Save the Inquisitors.

  Task: Save at least five of the inquisitors held prisoner by the witches.

  Reward:

  1500 experience

  1100 gold

  Inquisitor Amulet

  +7 friendship with the Rattermark inquisition

  Accept?

  Why not? I figured it might be on the way, and the inquisition were probably not the least useless people in the game to have on my side. I hadn’t heard of them before, though the third inquisitor of the first circle was right there in front of me waiting for an answer. That meant that there was at least a second circle with all the quests they might have for me. But the quests weren’t all I was interested in. I needed to cozy up to some of the NPC communities—I’d gotten so much use out of the knights, and I assumed the same would be true of the inquisition. I should still check the forums to see what they’re like. Oh, I should read about the druids and werewolves, too.

  “Monsieur de Blassi, is that all you need from me? Is there anything else I can do for our sweet mother the holy inquisition?”

  “Ah, so well said—it warms my heart. Nobody’s ever called us holy,” the clearly flattered inquisitor replied. “If only everyone else looked at us the same way.”

  “Do people not respect the holy inquisition?” I asked. “Can it really be so?”

  “Alas, alas,” he answered, wringing his hands. “The minute you think about burning a witch, out come the advocates and intercessors. She doesn’t conjure, they say; she heals, she’s good, she’s not what you think, she’s just there waiting for the tram… And what’s a ‘tram’? Probably some kind of sorcery—we should burn anyone who even utters the word!”

  One of ours must have stood up for some witch, I realized.

  “So how can I help?” I was trying to hurry the inquisitor along, as I’d noticed out of the corner of my eye that our group had gathered at the gate. They were standing there watching me.

  “Kill a few witches to avenge the deaths of my companions and students. You won’t be able to kill Gretken—you’d need a special rune dagger to release the black blood that gives her life, though it’s impossible to find. It disappeared back in the Dark Centuries. But you can kill her
servants, and that would go a long way toward inconveniencing her and gladdening my heart. They won’t die in the flames, though they’ll at least die.”

  You unlocked Kill Witches, Avenge the Inquisitors.

  Task: Kill at least five witches studying under Supreme Witch Gretken, thereby avenging the deaths of Gilles de Blassi’s students.

  Reward:

  1700 experience

  1500 gold

  Inquisitor Beads

  +10 friendship with the Rattermark inquisition

  Accept?

  “Okay, monsieur Gilles, I’ll try to take care of that,” I assured the gangly inquisitor. “But you’ll have to forgive me, as my friends are about to leave on an expedition. I don’t want to keep them waiting.”

  “May you be blessed by the light.” De Blassi tapped my forehead.

  You were blessed with Faith of an Inquisitor.

  +10% protection from fire

  +10% protection from mental effects

  +10% health restoration speed

  +10% mana restoration speed

  Active for two hours

  It wasn’t much, but I was happy and impressed.

  “What were you chatting with that inquisitor about?” Miurat asked when I got over to the group.

  “He gave me a quest—two, even,” I replied frankly. “I’m supposed to kill some witches and free some of his fellow inquisitors. The reward isn’t that great, but I thought it might be on the way.”

  “Really?” Miurat didn’t want to get left out. “I think I’ll go try my luck.”

  He quickly ran over to the inquisitor, who had just about disappeared behind a building. After spending three minutes talking with him, he came back looking discouraged.

  “No good,” he said. “He told me he doesn’t trust me, that I hadn’t done anything to earn his trust in the West or North. No belief, and no quests.”

  “The inquisitors are all like that—the dryads, too.” Treville clearly knew quite a bit about the game. “They’re odd. Sometimes they give you a series of quests, sometimes they give you a whole lot of nothing.”