Sicilian Defense

by Andrey Vasilyev

  It was nice being around someone so duty-bound.

  Fifteen minutes later, we’d crested a hill, and Jack looked around.

  “Master Hagen, see those reflections from a fire over there? That’s the hermit’s cave. Looks like he’s home.”

  I peered in that direction and saw reddish flashes about a kilometer below us.

  “Well, are you coming with me or heading back? I can get there by myself, don’t worry about that—I see where to go.” I didn’t see much of a point dragging the knight there with me. If I had to fight it out, I didn’t think he’d make much of a difference. And if it didn’t, why did he need to hear what we were going to be talking about?

  “Just give me an order,” the knight answered quickly.

  “Okay, then you head back. Better yet, get some sleep under a tree so you’re not wandering the mountains in the dark. It’s not the place for that.”

  “Whatever you say, Thane.” Jack nodded his rumpled helmet. “I’ll be nearby, so shout if you need me.”

  “Okay, Knight. Thanks for your help, and I’ll be sure to tell the higher-ups about your heroism if I see them,” I replied, absolutely planning on telling Gunther. That Jack was a good guy: not the brightest, but brave and honorable.

  It took me a while to get down, as I slipped on small rocks, fell onto boulders a couple times, and, right at the end, stumbled over some tree roots and got tangled up in a bush. Near the entrance to the cave, I stopped in confusion. Do I knock? On what? Just shout “it’s me!”?

  “Who’s out there?” a thick bass voice called. “Come on in, already. The night is cold, and the mountains are dangerous. Plus, the mosquitos…”

  I decided to just up and march right in.

  “A blessing on this home,” I said as I looked around the cave.

  It was large and cozy (as cozy as a stony hole in a mountain can be), with a fireplace and furniture. It even had more than one room: from what I could tell, there was a passage to a second cave hiding behind a curtain hanging on the other side of the fireplace. The owner of the quaint little spot was a gray-haired, bearded, and thickset old man wearing a white linen shirt and something similar to harem pants. He was sitting in an enormous oak chair next to the fireplace.

  Additional information for First Thread in the Tangle

  You found Ort Ashen in the Sumaki Mountains.

  “And blessings on you, as well,” I said, bowing to the old man. “I hope I’m not interrupting your leisure time. Uninvited guests and all…”

  “There’s no such thing as an uninvited guest,” he replied. “They’re either wanted or unwanted. And I’m not yet sure which you are.”

  “Believe it or not, I’m not sure either. Maybe we can talk for a while and see which I turn out to be?”

  “Well, talk away.” Ort got up from his chair. “Just tell me your name first—that’s the civil way to go about it.”

  “My apologies, that slipped my mind,” I said with embarrassment on my face. “I’m Hagen, Thane of the Western Reaches.”

  “You’re not lying,” the cave owner replied. “That really is your name. I suppose you already know who I am?”

  “I do,” I said frankly. “Ort Ashen, hermit and old-timer in the local mountains.”

  “And you probably know what they say about me?” Ort smoothed down his beard. “These parts are infamous as it is, and then there’s me.”

  “So what?” I shrugged. “I don’t really spend much time in Fayroll’s better areas. Wherever you go, there’s always some curse or dead guy trying to grab at your legs. And if it’s not that, there’s an exotic animal you have to fight off. But as far as infamous places go, and no offense, I’ve seen much worse than yours. And here I am, alive, well, and chatting with you.”

  “Aren’t you cocky,” the old man said with a wave of his hand. It looked like he was brushing away a fly. “Too brave by half, I imagine?”

  “Nah,” I replied, scrunching up my nose. “Lucky, calculating, and careful—a little of each.”

  “Stupid, too,” the old man’s bass shot back, delivering the bitter truth. “At least, if you’re always getting involved in that kind of thing. You’re doing that right now, it looks like, since you’re here talking to me.”

  “Agreed,” I admitted. “Can’t argue with you there.”

  “Well, anyway,” he said, sitting back down and gesturing me toward a bench next to the table, “what’s next? Are we going to waste time on idle chit-chat or are you going to tell me what you need from me?”

  “Let me tell you. It’s getting late, tomorrow’s going to be a tough day for me, and I could use some sleep.”

  “Then out with it!” He clucked at me. “Stop beating around the bush.”

  I decided to start big. “Here’s the deal: I need to get the Gods back to this world—at least, one particular Goddess. Mesmerta.”

  He looked at me without saying anything. I sighed as I returned his gaze.

  “Okay,” he finally said, “what do you need that bitch for? The Gods are pretty much all rats, but she’s awful even by their standards. I mean, you could bring Tiffina back—she was more or less okay—but Mesmerta?”

  “I didn’t pick her,” I replied gloomily. “It just happened that way. First one thing, then another, and in the end, I was saddled with her.”

  “Sorry, but I don’t really get that—what do you mean, you were saddled with her?” He scratched his belly. “You could’ve just told her to go screw herself, spat, and walked away. Are you a warrior or a branch people use to sweep the floor?”

  “Ah, old man,” I said with completely sincere misery in my voice, “if I could’ve, that would’ve been great. But I couldn’t!”

  “I believe it,” the hermit said, not taking his eyes off me. “I’m not sure why, but I believe you. You aren’t lying—it looks like you really were backed into a corner.”

  I smiled crookedly, letting him know that that was putting it lightly.

  “I’ll be honest,” he said with a stretch, “I wouldn’t lift a finger to help you if I there weren’t something in it for me. Three hundred years ago, I would have turned you out on your rear end. I might have even killed you. It would’ve all just depended on my mood.”

  I looked at him and realized that he really would have killed me. A ferocious old guy!

  “So what changed? You need something from Mesmerta?”

  “Oh, what idiotic nonsense!” The hermit threw his arms at me. “I haven’t seen that whore in an age and a half, and I hope it’ll be just as long before I see her again.”

  “Really? A whore?” I asked dubiously. “She seemed like a fine woman, at least from what I saw of her.”

  “Yup, expect that she screwed around on Vitar right there in his own chambers,” Ashen said, his voice younger and his tone racy. “She and Tekhosh were all over each other—the mountains were practically jumping they went at it so hard.”

  Wow, so the Gods can be quite the sinners. He was off fighting his wars, and she…

  “You’re kidding me!” I whistled. “So the Gods are just like people?”

  “Yep,” he laughed. “So no, I don’t want anything to do with her. But there’s something else, something really important. You got lucky, my friend—you came just in the nick of time. I think we can work something out.”

  Great. He’s going to send me off to who-knows-where in search of who-knows-what…

  “Wait a second,” the old man said. He ducked behind the curtain and started to rattle around, cursing quietly to himself. Something fell, rolled away, and crashed into something else. A cloud of dust puffed out around the curtain, and a second later the sneezing hermit walked out. There was a large, wrought metal chest with a patterned lid in his hands.

  “Bingo.” The hermit dropped the case on the table. “Recognize this?”

  “Yeah, it’s a chest.”

  “Exactly,” he replied proudly. “The very one!”

  “You’re kidding!” I said, p
laying along. “The one and only?”

  “You’re telling me,” he assured me. “And if you don’t stop it with your lip, I’ll crack your skull with that staff.”

  I squinted in the direction of the corner and noticed a huge staff with a sharpened tip.

  “Got it,” I replied obediently. “You won’t get any more from me. What’s the chest, and what do you need?”

  The hermit brushed the dust from the chest and tugged on the handle built into the lid.

  “This, my friend, is a chest, and they don’t have its kind in Fayroll anymore,” he said finally. “When that whole pack of Gods got out of here, they left their temples, servants, and beacons scattered around Rattermark. You’re aware, I see?”

  Huh. He was no simple hermit if he could see the marks on me. Maybe he can tell me who’s been stomping around in my soul?

  “Yes, so it was like that. The Demiurges were livid, which makes sense—they’d gone off the reservation, putting their little houses together. Enraged, they sealed the exits, which were the entrances, too, obviously, with the five seals of being, and then they hid the seals.”

  “Why didn’t they just destroy the temples?” I asked. “Wouldn’t that have been easier?”

  “One of them wanted to do just that,” the old man said, scratching under his beard. “But then the rest of them got involved and overruled the first one. You have to play by the rules, they said, and everyone should have their chance. They also mentioned something about the laws of being, about noninterference, and about the principles of the universe. They probably had their reasons—the Demiurges have problems with each other as it is, but they’re nothing if not equals.”

  “And?” I continued. “What happened then?”

  “They agreed not to destroy the seals, and instead, like I said, hide them. They did a good job of it, too. But even their memory isn’t the best, and so they wrote down the hiding places on a piece of parchment and stuck that parchment in a chest. Want to guess which chest that was?”

  “Really?” I looked at the nondescript, if vintage-looking object. “That’s the chest of the Demiurges?”

  “Exactly!” He was practically tapping his foot. “The one and only!”

  “And there’s a scroll in there that can be used to bring the Goddess back into the world?”

  “Right. If you have the power to use it, then sure.” The old man clucked his tongue at me again. “Break the five seals, hold the ritual, name whoever you want to summon, and you’re done.”

  You completed a quest: First Thread in the Tangle.

  Reward:

  5000 experience

  Rare gem

  Random ability scroll

  Ability to unlock the next quest in the series

  My bag jumped, presumably as the reward dropped into it. Obviously, the odd hermit wasn’t going to be giving it to me.

  “But who are you?” I asked.

  “Me?” The old man smiled, and I noticed that his teeth didn’t look his age—they were white, strong, and sharp. “I’m Ort Ashen, keeper of the world’s secrets and agent of the Demiurges. Well, I used to be. If you want, I can tell you about me and even more about them, though you’d only get as far as the entrance to my cave with that information. Want to hear?”

  “No, no,” I replied, waving my hands at him. “I don’t need other people’s secrets; I have more of my own than I know what to do with. I’d rather hear what I’m supposed to do next.”

  “Ah-ha,” Ort said with one index finger upraised. “Good thinking. Productive thinking. Anyway, after all that, they stuck something besides the scroll into the chest, though it’s nothing you need to know about. And I really need it—just absolutely have to have it. So I kept track of where they hid the chest, and three hundred years later, when the Demiurges stopped keeping such close track, I paid a visit to the spot where they hid it.”

  “But what if they’d come back and found out?” I asked, stunned by Ort’s daring.

  “Oh, I would have made something up,” he shrugged. “Or I would have blamed it on someone else—the usual. I wish they’d come back!”

  He was the kind of old guy you didn’t turn your back on when you were at the banya. Or even when you weren’t at the banya.

  “So there you go,” he continued. “They hid the chest on an island, at the top of a huge tree. I headed there and couldn’t believe my luck when I saw that the tree was still standing. And nobody’d taken the chest in all that time! There was the key, beautiful, gold, three pieces. I picked it up.”

  The old man frowned. Not the most pleasant of recollections?

  “And?” I asked, trying to hurry him along.

  “No such luck,” he replied darkly. “The key was cursed, and the three parts scattered all around Rattermark. A Messenger from the Demiurges came, too, and condemned me to permanent exile in this cave for theft on that level. Like I said, it would have been better if they’d come—that way I’d have had a chance to defend myself.”

  “You could talk to the Messenger?” I asked sympathetically.

  “Nope.” He clucked again. “So the different pieces of the key are still off wherever they went, and I have the chest here—the Messenger apparently didn’t have any instructions for what to do with it. They really are idiotic beasts, despite being so dangerous.”

  “And?” I could feel that the story was drawing to a close and leading up to the grand finale.

  “This chest holds what you need and what I need,” the old man said grandly. “My offer is for you to find and assemble the key, and in return you will receive the scroll that will tell you where the seals for the Portal of the Gods are. And I’ll…well, I’ll keep everything else that’s in the chest.”

  Damn, what’s in there? I could have haggled, but he was a funny old guy, and I didn’t want to risk blowing the quest.

  “That works,” I said. “You have yourself a deal!”

  Chapter Twenty

  In which the hero can’t seem to find some time to himself.

  You unlocked Three Parts of the Key.

  This is the second in the The Gods Return to Fayroll series of epic quests.

  Task: Find the three parts of the golden key that were scattered around Fayroll in time immemorial.

  Reward for beating the entire quest:

  15000 experience

  5000 gold

  A random item matching your quest from Ort Ashen’s stores

  An active ability matching your class

  A letter of credence for your choice of Rattermark rulers

  A random crafting recipe

  The next quest in the series

  Additional information: This quest is split into three other quests, one for each part of the key.

  Warning: If you fail any of the three sub-quests, you will fail the main quest.

  Additional information: As you beat the quest, you may receive additional bonus rewards you will be informed of separately. You will also get separate rewards for beating each of the sub-quests.

  Warning: You are not permitted to tell other players about your final objective while you are beating this quest. If you do, you will fail it. You can get help from other players and NPCs.

  Accept?

  I was surprised to see how involved the description was. Obviously, I accepted.

  You unlocked First Part of the Key.

  Task: Find the first part of the key.

  Reward:

  2000 experience

  1000 gold

  +3 to one of your attributes (random)

  A random item from Ort Ashen’s stores

  Note: You need to ask Ort Ashen where the first part of the key might be.

  Accept?

  Oh, I’ll ask all right. What other choice did I have?

  “Excellent,” the old man said with a clap of his hands. “We have us a deal!”

  The old bastard’s awfully excited—there must be something important in there that he really needs. I kind of wondered if
it was something I really needed, too. Although, it was too late for that—we’d already shaken, and there was no going back on that. Did I make a mistake? No, better safe than sorry. I’d picked up quite a few goodies in the past little while, some of which I could put on the auction, with others ticketed for Joker to cash out (I need to have him try to make a payment in real life—the bosses definitely won’t mind, though they might needle me for getting greedy). I had that scroll and the gem in my bag, and I haven’t even checked them out. In a word, I could afford to forget whatever was in the chest.

  “So, gramps,” I started, shooting him a glance worthy of a counterintelligence agent, “where’d the pieces go after the key fell apart? You probably know, so tell me and make my job easier.”

  “I’ll definitely tell you about who has one of them, but all I can give you about the other two are hints—and I won’t even tell you that right now,” Ort replied frankly. “A traveler told me about the first one, he saw it with his own two eyes. But the other two… I did notice which direction they flew off in when the thing exploded.”

  “Seriously?” I squinted at him dubiously. “They just flew off like that?”

  “Absolutely, and fast, too,” he replied gravely. “I was younger then, and my eyes worked better, so I caught where they flew toward. But we’ll come back to those two parts once you got the first one.”

  “Well, and where is it?”

  If it’s somewhere underground, then I… You know, I won’t do it if it is! Terrifying…

  “In the Borderlands.” He scratched the back of his neck. “Right now, Fennor MacLynn, Laird of Morrigot, has it, either on his head or in his clan storehouse. I have no idea how the first MacLynn got it, though there’s no arguing with the facts—he did. The key was magic, which is why even the parts by themselves are pretty powerful. That wild highlander couldn’t have even known what he got his hands on, though grabbed it regardless. Once he realized what good luck it was, he kept it as a talisman. Then his clan took off, so he made it part of his crown. Long story short, you need to go get the crown belonging to the MacLynn clan, far from the weakest in the Borderlands. Good luck, my boy!”