Sicilian Defense

by Andrey Vasilyev

  “The car?” I took a drink of coffee and crunched into the toast. “Who’s driving you?”

  “A Raidion driver. Eliza said,” Vika started, pursing her lips and actually looking a lot like Valbetovna, “You shouldn’t be running around in the metro. Why do you think we have a whole fleet of cars?’ And why not? If they’re offering, there’s no harm in accepting.”

  “Agreed,” I replied. “Better a poor ride than a good walk.”

  “Okay, milord, I have to go. I’ll be expecting you at…when should I expect you?”

  “I’ll be there by five,” I said after thinking about it for a second. “And tell those arthropods not to get the same amount of vodka and cognac, otherwise we’ll mix them like we did last time. And give them some money—if I know that Yushkov, he’ll just go out and get a bunch of the cheap stuff.”

  “Helen’s taking care of it,” Vika said sarcastically. “Let her know what you want.”

  “Really?” I scratched my neck. “I’ll have to call her.”

  “No need,” Vika replied quickly. “I’ll take care of it. You go play your game—that’s why you’re up this early, isn’t it?”

  As soon as I logged in, a notification popped up in the interface.

  Cold Caves

  These enormous caves located under the Western Reaches have long tempted travelers and adventure-seekers. However, the Evil that arrived here long ago forced them to abandon their hopes of finding the endless riches of the dwarves said to be somewhere in the vicinity. The caves stretch…

  I skipped the message, having stopped reading them long ago. Wherever you went, there was bound to be some ancient evil, a plateau wrapped in legend, or a boundless river.

  Progress made on In the Depths: You have been in two of the ten large caves scattered across Fayroll.

  That made things a bit better.

  “You’re late, kid,” Steve, the old Northerner I was relieving, said reproachfully. “I’ve been waiting for you!”

  “Oh, come on, what do you mean? The sun’s barely up!”

  Steve looked up at the dome above us, laughed, and went below.

  The Cold Caves really were beautiful. There were tall arches, stones sticking out of the water that our helmsman was masterfully dodging, some holes in the walls, and, from time to time, half-ruined staircases leading up out of the water. Gorgeous.

  “Keep a weather eye out,” I heard Max van Fain say. “Anything goes here.”

  “What are those staircases? And are those ruins up there?” I asked him.

  “Old dwarf settlements.” Max sneezed, wiped his nose, and continued. “Dwarves used to live here, but that was a long time ago. Then the drogters and their kind came. The dwarves fought them long and hard, though they were eventually forced out of the caves. Their outposts and cities, needless to say, started to fall apart without anyone to take care of them. It didn’t happen overnight, though—dwarves built all that up there, and you know how they are. Time does take its toll, however…”

  “Got it, thanks,” I replied. Max walked off.

  There must be so much loot around here. I wonder why there aren’t any players hanging out?

  “Ooph.” The mayor’s nephew stumbled out of the salon. His clothes were a mess and he looked about as annoyed as someone can look. His friend stepped out behind him, calmly smoking his pipe.

  The nephew saw me and snarled.

  “Ah, you’re here, too! Getting thrown on here is exactly what you deserve. You didn’t have to eat the mushrooms if you didn’t want to, but why did you rat me out to my uncle?”

  I didn’t say anything. Dvaly took matters into his own hands and flopped down on the deck next to me.

  “Now you have to sail with us, and I’m going to make life miserable for you where you’re going. Snoldy, tell him.”

  The short dwarf let out a cloud of smoke and spat over the side.

  “No doubt about it.”

  Dvaly stopped there and began busily looking around. What, does he think he can find some of his magic mushrooms around here?

  I wasn’t sure if he ended up finding any mushrooms, though we didn’t have any problems getting through the caves—and I couldn’t have been happier about that. My six hours on watch went by smoothly and quietly, the banks were empty, nobody had to touch their weapons, there wasn’t any yelling, and I didn’t see a single torpedo. There weren’t even any bats.

  “How is it?” Jan Renye, my replacement, asked. He was a good-looking guy who had to have plenty of success with the ladies. “Everything quiet?”

  “Completely,” I replied happily. “Maybe those were just stories they tried to scare us with? Maybe–”

  “Maybe not.” Renye adjusted the sword hanging from his back and checked to see that it slid easily out of its scabbard. “I missed the last three trips after getting jumped right around here. Only four guards made it back to Malakh-Targak, not counting me with my busted-up side.”

  “You look like you’re feeling better now, thank the gods,” I said sympathetically. “Lightning doesn’t strike twice, though.”

  Jan twirled a finger around his temple and spat into the water.

  “Don’t jinx us! They say the last Great Dragon had his lair right here in these caves.”

  “Really?” That caught my attention. “And what happened?”

  “We’re on watch, warrior,” Jan interrupted me. “If you still want to hear later, I’ll tell you.”

  I made a mental note to ask him, let Max know that I was done with my shift, and logged out.

  ***

  I’m not Vika, so I took the metro to the office. Once there, I was pleasantly surprised to see the well-laden table where my team was waiting for me. Everyone had dressed up: Shelestova’s cleavage was out for the world to see, Vika in her usual suit wasn’t thrilled about that, and even Tasha had put on some kind of colorful vest and nice-looking boots.

  “Harriton, you’re here!” Marietta said, fluttering over to me. “We weren’t going to start without you!”

  The pimple on her forehead had migrated to her chin, though it was just as crimson as before.

  “You shouldn’t have,” I replied reproachfully. “No point waiting for stragglers—you should all be a few drinks in.”

  “I told you the boss wouldn’t mind if we got started,” yelled Yushkov. “That’s the kind of guy he is!”

  “Oh, come on, how could we start without him? That’s just wrong.” Shelestova stepped toward me, overwhelming me with a cloud of her perfume. “The boss is the boss, no?”

  “It would have been better than standing around drooling,” I replied, choking back the hormones she was kicking up. “Anyway, I’m here, and the vodka’s getting warm.”

  “The vodka is for everyone else.” Shelestova smiled caustically. “You get a special delivery, just like you wanted.”

  She rustled around in a bag under the table, bending over far enough to give me lockjaw, and pulled out a bottle full of a cloudy liquid.

  “Hey, there’s no point poisoning me just yet,” I said.

  “I bought exactly what you ordered,” she purred.

  The label was askew on the bottle, clearly in an attempt to give it an old Russian feel—“Excellent Traditional Village Moonshine.”

  “Oh, and one more thing.” Shelestova bent over again, and I heard Stroynikov swallow.

  She’d decided to pull out all the stops. The three-liter jar she pulled out flaunted a hand-written inscription. Not a label; an inscription. “Barrel-salted pickles, perfect for moonshine.”

  Ah, why didn’t I say something about cognac? She remembered, the snake…

  “Hey boss, will you pour me a glass? I want to try it, too.” Yushkov was eying the bottle in my hand greedily. He couldn’t have cared less about Shelestova.

  “Sure,” I replied with a sinking feeling.

  “How long are we going to be here?” Tasha asked out of the blue. “It’s just that I have a package from Korea being delivered to
day.”

  “Now I don’t know, Tasha,” I replied gloomily. “Now I don’t know…”

  From the eighth edition of the Fayroll Times:

  From the editor

  …as you’ve already noticed, our paper is now a few pages thicker. On behalf of the entire staff here, I hope you enjoy the change…

  Abandoned Cities of the East: a Short Excursion

  ...and it’s the sands of the East that are home to the most lost cities, the ones even high-level players talk about with awe. Tot-Sakar, Mirron, Al-Bukhar, those are the names that remind them of raids that brought them glory and loot—or give them a taste of how it will feel when they walk in the footsteps of the legends that went before them.

  Excerpts from the Fayroll Chronicle

  Special correspondent Operand reports:

  Players from the Knights of the Crawfish clan went on a raid to the Castle on the Edge of the Abyss, but while they were there, they witnessed and even took part in an incredibly unusual event: the Corridor of Mirrors appeared. What shocked them most was the effect the sorcery had on a player named 999olbaiD, who had his name reversed and the numbers flipped upside down. Nobody was affected more deeply than a player named Kirsan. He had seen the Corridor before, and he was so enraptured by the experience that he spent the next four months joining any group raiding the castle that would take him, all in the hopes of seeing it again.

  A scout named TatiAna was blacklisted with all the rage the Fortune’s Favorites could muster after she pulled off an act of terrorism. She stole a legendary sword called Lady Vivamus from Robby High, the leader of Path of the Brave, a clan that is part of the alliance, and dumped it in the caves under the Rina Mountains. It certainly looks like it has been lost forever, at least judging by what Robby said after he spent a good while brawling his way through the caves. “Screw the sword. I don’t care what you give me, I’m not going back there.” Fayroll’s old hands will remember that this is the scout’s sixth such heist.

  Special correspondent Zukkertort reports:

  …an entertaining bug was found and squished three days ago at a location called the Bakh-Kharmo Snake Nest. In a hopeless attempt to do some kind of damage to the boss, a dwarf player by the name of Crazy Pen hurled an anvil from her smithy kit and hit the boss right on the tip of its tail. The boss froze and died five seconds later, leaving just as many anvils behind. They all had some excellent attributes and had even become elite. The dwarf, showing admirable restraint, let the administration know about the bug, though nobody knows what kind of reward she got. All we’ve heard from the happy dwarf, a 43-year old woman, is that she “always dreamed of having my own village house…in the Canary Islands!”

  Competition

  In the last issue we announced a contest for the funniest screenshot, and we were pleasantly surprised by the sheer amount of them you submitted. You’ll see the five winners in the next issue. Yep, you read that right: there will be five winners, not the three we said there’d be. Raidion met us in the middle and agreed to expand what we could offer.

  We’re thrilled that you, our readers, so enthusiastically picked up on our idea, and so we’re going to start having not one, but three competitions in every issue! Find out what’s coming next week, and especially stay tuned to hear what fantastic prizes are on offer. Don’t miss it!

  In the next edition:

  The Crisna: Everything You Need to Know About the Great River

  Chapter Fourteen

  And now about that time very well spent.

  “What’s that face for? You were the one who wanted to try it!” I stuffed a pickle into Yushkov’s mouth and patted him on the back.

  We Russians really can ruin anything. I wouldn’t have thought that was possible when it came to moonshine. The equipment you need for it couldn’t be simpler, and the recipe for the great, classic drink isn’t too complicated, either. “Excellent” and “traditional,” my foot. The only people who would bite on that were ones like Yushkov who’d grown up in the stone jungle of the city and never had the real thing out in the country.

  The liquid’s light murkiness perturbed me right off the bat—that told me that whoever’d made it had tried to be cutsie with the ingredients or turned the fire up too hot when they were distilling it. Actually, I guess they could have used cabbage—cabbage-based moonshine can get kind of murky like that, though I doubt it. The end product was pungent, really just for people who like that kind of thing. Then I thought it might be because of the galangal, as I’d read on the back of the bottle that they’d added some. Why would you throw in galangal or thyme? Moonshine is great on its own—it doesn’t need additives.

  As soon as I unscrewed the lid (moonshine with a screw-on cap? What, they couldn’t even find any wax?), I realized that the problem had nothing to do with the galangal. The smell gave the whole thing away. Here they’d splashed out for a nice bottle and a creative label, though they hadn’t bothered to learn how to actually make the stuff. It should be great, and they ruined it… Still, I gulped down a shot, as I could tell Shelestova had picked it out especially for me by the way she was staring at me.

  “What...ew-w,” said Yushkov, the poor, naïve kid barely able to breath. And that made sense: he’d watched too many movies and threw back practically half a glass of the stuff. And you think you’re a drinker. You can’t touch that kind of stuff in large doses—it isn’t your average vodka, and it takes a bit more fortitude than that. And given how poorly filtered it was, not to mention how it was beet-based…

  “Screw that, you can count me out.” Stroynikov grabbed a bottle of cognac. “That’s way out of my league.”

  “Good choice,” I replied. “It definitely takes some getting used to.”

  “Oh, so you’re picky now? I’ll have you know it took me a long time to find that,” Shelestova said, gesturing at Gennady with her shot glass. “That was the best-looking one, just like in the movies—nice and cloudy. There was one more bottle there, but it was clear. Probably a fake.”

  Probably… She needed to stop watching movies, and just talk to someone at the store. Regardless, I figured I could switch over to vodka after a couple shots. Damn it, though, that’ll be a steep drop in alcohol content—this poison has to be way over 60%. We’ll see.

  Fun was had by all. The group drank, had some food, drank again, and chatted the way it always happens: about everything and nothing. It was par for the course, and I was just glad the sports department wasn’t there. They would have already been working out whose face they’d be beating up later on.

  It was weird, though: everything was just the way it always was at any of the hundreds of newspaper drinking parties I’d been at, though this time it wasn’t as fun for me. I wasn’t in the party mood for some reason. As I tried to figure out what was wrong, I threw back another shot of moonshine.

  Three more shots cleared away the doom and gloom, and things started looking up. It wasn’t perfect, but it was better. Moonshine is similar to drinks like fortified wines in that you had three shots to see if you could cut it. If you make it that far, your taste buds malfunction and everything starts to go down much easier. From there, you either fall fast asleep or make good friends with the toilet.

  “How can you drink that crap?” Vika sat down next to me, picked up my glass, sniffed it, and gagged. “That’s so nasty!”

  “Willpower,” I replied. “And without enjoying it in the least. Want to try?”

  “No, thank you,” she exhaled. “Maybe we should head home? What’s left to do here?”

  “But what about everyone else?” I asked, surprised. “The party’s still going strong.”

  And it really was. Zhilin and the rest had taken up arm wrestling, though not before they promised to rip each other’s arms right out of their sockets. Shelestova and Marietta were lazily arguing, and Tasha was gone after a couple shots. She looked like a lemur: tiny, but with enormous eyes.

  I swallowed another shot and was about to head over when
Vika grabbed me.

  “Don’t ruin it for them,” she asked me. “Sit here with me, instead.”

  “How would I ruin it?” I was indignant, though I didn’t go anywhere. There was a good chance I’d just have gotten beaten if I’d tried to arm wrestle them, after all.

  Zhilin beat them all. To the tune of Shelestova’s applause, he slammed arm after arm down onto the table.

  “Wow,” I said, shaking my head. “That’s a strong dude.”

  “Yep,” Vika agreed. “The champion.”

  “Harriton,” Shelestova’s voice rang out, “what about you?”

  I certainly didn’t want to make myself look bad, though I wasn’t about to hide in the bushes, either…

  “No-o,” Zhilin said with a wave. “Too much of a good thing. Let’s drink, instead!”

  Shelestova picturesquely threw up her arms in frustration that her stunt hadn’t worked. I could tell from the flash in her eye, however, that she wasn’t giving up any time soon.

  Somebody turned on some music, and everyone started dancing between the desks.

  “I’m going to go smoke a cigarette,” I said to Vika before walking out of the office.

  There was a surprise waiting for me when I came back five minutes later. The music had been turned off, the lights had been turned back up, and everyone was putting their coats and boots on. Vika and Marietta were putting the food in the refrigerator.

  “Wait, what?” I asked. “What’s going on?”

  “We decided to head to a club—the music will be louder, and it’ll just be better,” Zhilin explained as he pulled a leather jacket over his powerful shoulders. “And really, what’s the point sitting around here?”

  “You don’t mind that we decided without you, do you?” Shelestova asked sheepishly. “We figured you’d be good with that.”