by Aaron Crash
Rhee drained her beer, slammed it down, and laughed with a wet chin. “Oh, Cashgrab, if you only knew. Speaking of rumors, I’ve heard of the Mazes, and I’ve heard of the danger, and I think I might have heard of you at some point, though it’s hard to remember much when you’re blind drunk most days. But you, you know everything. This is Axel, and he’s the hero. He needs the concentration ink. And you’re right, this is Finniwigg, but we call her Figg. We have another friend, a Jataksha bitch, but she’s always flying off in a huff. What do you know of the Jataksha?”
Cash didn’t answer her but gave me a long look. “I’m in the presence of greatness. A Foulwater princess, a pirate who is worth a clipper ship of rupas to the Praachi Mariners, and the hero with a dragon in his pocket and the Calcifax staff as a walking stick.”
Rhee burped. “The only thing Axel has in his pocket is his cock. But let’s see... it’s scaly and shoots fire, so maybe dragon would be a better name for it!”
The centaur laughed and drank a stein of beer in a gulp and set it aside. He then sucked meat off the bone in one big pull with big teeth and thick lips. For having the back half of an herbivore, his front half was definitely a carnivore. I wondered how many stomachs he had. From how he was eating and drinking, he had to have several. That would be convenient.
“What about the Jataksha?” I asked. “We think the merfolk are trading them to the Stallion King.”
“Jim Goodgolde is buying something,” Cash agreed. “He has his mines open and running nonstop. He’s sending gold up to Trident and providing the Sylvukor with raw metals in their fight against those demon monkeys. He’s making money, but he spends it just as fast. I, for one, believe the rumors that he’s taken over Dvey’s experiments. Dvey.” He grumped. “Those demon kings had some things right. For example, we have Xiddian because of them. Having one language helps with trade as does the single currency, the rupa. But on the downside, we have the Kankar, which are a pain to merchants and to everyone else. And we have the Gurgaloids, which are thrice the pain. You didn’t hear it from me, but yep, I think Goodgolde is taking those Jataksha and twisting them with magic into the Gurgaloids.”
“Gurgaloids? Do you mean gargoyles?” I asked.
“What’s a gar?” Cash asked, and laughed and laughed. He threw Rhee a long look. “The Dawn Coast Hellion, at my table. Well now, I didn’t expect that when I woke up.”
This was why we were getting the royal treatment and why we were getting so much information.
“The Pentakorr.” I did my best disgusted spit. “Whatever. The continent seems better off without the demon kings. Or that’s what I’ve heard. I’m not from this world. I have journeyed far, from the storied lands of Wyoming.”
“Wyoming?” Cash laughed. “Why not Oming?”
“Old joke.” I was trying to figure out how to ask about the brand. I was trusting Cash to do my concentration ink. However, he’d mentioned there was a price on Rhee’s head. The owner of a big bar in a lawless part of a demon city probably would want to cash in on that kind of action. The beer was not helping me keep my wits about me. I’d have to slow down.
“We saw the emergency archery equipment,” I said. “So those are for the Gurgaloids?”
“They are.” Cash shook his head and changed the subject. “You don’t like Dvey because of that elf in Foulwater. What’s his name? Geyser? Geezer? Wheezy?”
“Geeze,” Figg said. “He raised me. So don’t talk shit.”
“I like you better when you’re joking with me, Figg,” the centaur said a bit sullenly. Then he chuckled at himself and changed the subject again. His mind was quick and slippery. “To go back, Axel, to what you are were asking about before. White liquor. A dry white wine. Olives and bad decisions. Is that called a mahini?”
“Martini,” I said.
He shrugged. “So you have Morbu Forest on the east side of the Dyuvan Mountains. And you have Skor Forest on the west side. Both have the Sylvukor, and they have clear liquor they make from root vegetables.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Sylvukor?”
“Wood dwarves,” Cash said.
Now the thin dwarves in green made sense.
“I’ve thought about expanding my liquor selection,” Cash said. “But at the end of the day, my customers aren’t fancy. Beer and whiskey are fine, and that’s just wheat and love. You might want to go there once you get your concentration ink, free the Jataksha, and let me guess... you want to find Dvey’s lost jalana.”
“No,” Figg spit out with feigned bitterness. “We don’t want that. Those don’t even exist.”
Cash pointed at the woman’s arm. “So the Vanka Jalana in your concentration ink is just for show? Very nice. I can’t tell you how happy I am to be eating with you three. You are heroes, I know it. If I were a stupider stallion, I would try and double-cross you. Maybe try and steal your dragon. Or I could cast some Vanka magic myself, enter the Flow, call out to the Praachi Mariners, and tell them about Rhee. I could collect the ransom. I could try, but I’m not stupid. You three have destiny’s stink on you. I’m sure this Jataksha girl is the same.” He smacked the table. “What is nacho cheese? As you can see, I like food. I don’t like it when there’s something I’ve not tasted.”
All three of us were silent. I kinda wanted to become best friends with Hannek Cash. In seconds, he’d even silenced Rhee. He had come out and admitted his temptations, but he was smart enough to know not to fuck with us.
I was the first to talk, and I tried to explain about corn mashed into triangles and fried into tortilla chips. Then I talked about jalapeno peppers and Chef-Mate’s Que Bueno Sauce, which was basically cheddar cheese, green chilis, and some more jalapenos.
He licked his lips. “Melted cheese, eh? Peppers. Yes, I can see the appeal, but this corn business. Not sure about corn. Kernels on a cob grown in green? Doesn’t ring a bell.”
Figg lost her patience. “Enough about food! Yes, fine, we are looking for Dvey’s jalana in Sweetleaf. Is it the Uma Jalana or the Ksu Jalana?”
Cash steepled his fingers together. “The demon king’s legacy runs deep, and not just in Sweetleaf, but across all of Xid. Dvey opened the mines on the north side of town. Before that? It’s said that the Sweetleaf Lake was pristine, the freshest water on all of Caranja. It’s said the waters come from the very center of the world, bubbling up from the roots of the Tree of Life itself. Now? We draw water, boil it, and then let the sediment fall to the bottom before we drink it. Or before we put it in the beer. I have to keep my beer good.”
A mine in town? That struck me as lucky. We’d need help mining the diamonds. If there was already that industry here, we might be able to get much-needed help. Hopefully, our mine would do less polluting than the industry in Sweetleaf. The nice thing about Foulwater, though, it was already a stinking, drab place. It wasn’t like we could make it smell any worse.
The centaur kept on talking. “About a month ago, the Gurgaloids came. I’m ninety-eight years old. The typical Wynnym lives two hundred years. We get a good one hundred, and then we falter, and we fade, and it takes a hundred years of decline and sickness to die. And your pinga stops working. I can already feel that happening. My fucking days are almost behind me. Good thing I have my feeding and fueling.”
“Eating and drinking,” I said.
Rhee’s eyes were glassy. “Fueling my drunk! I need another fucking beer, Cashgrab. Hit me with another tankard and don’t stop until I’m puking on your hooves.”
Cash thundered laughter. He snapped his fingers, and the giant barmaids stepped to it. We all got more beer.
“So you have feeding, fueling, and fighting. What’s the fighting?” I asked.
“People drink. People fight. I’ve embraced it. Some people come here to fight, and I don’t mind, as long as they don’t bust up the furniture. I have a wife, though, who insists we should just have people smoke dully. Maybe put a pinch of love magic in it, and then we could change it to fucking. I’ve thought about it. Bu
t to be honest? I like drunk people more than dullied people.”
Rhee nodded. “Axel, make a note, we need to buy some dully.”
Figg was turning purple with rage. “Stop this, Mr. Cash penis, or whatever your nicknames are. We need to know about the jalana!”
The big horse man hooked a thumb at Figg. “This one needs more beer and more dully. But, fine, Princess, I’ll get to my point, but I’ll take the long way. In my long life, I’ve not seen the Gurgaloids come from the sky like this. Is there a cloud city? More like a smoke city. Or is it Dvey’s palace? I don’t know. But we had a clear day about a year ago. I saw something, just a hunk of stone floating up there, not hunks, but cut stone, forming something, a cube. It’s certainly not a city above, and it’s not a palace either. Now, we have more Gurgaloids coming down. Maybe a month ago, when you got your Vanka Jalana, it woke up something. The Pentakorr didn’t exactly die, they faded. If you can fade away, you can fade back.”
I blew out a breath. “One thing at a time, Cash. We’ll get the jalanas, I’ll get my ink, and then if the demon kings come back, I’ll sic my dragon on them.”
“You really do have a dragon?” he asked, surprised.
“More than one. Once I work my magic, I can summon hundreds if not thousands of dragons. And these aren’t your destroy-the-town-and-eat-the-virgins type of dragons. These are good dragons, who make sure the assholes in the universe don’t win.”
The smile on his face was soft. “I work with assholes, I serve assholes, hell, there’s an asshole running this whole asshole town. I don’t want them to win. I like this idea of angel dragons keeping things running smoothly.”
He looked at me for a long time. He was thinking hard about whether he could trust me or not. He then nodded. “I don’t think that hunk of stone in the sky means much. If it were me, I’d go to the castle on the western part of town. If Dvey left a jalana, it would there, most likely in the throne room. There’s a big chair there, and I’ve heard that’s where the brand is. Not sure which one it is.”
This was not ideal news.
“So we got unlucky with the brand,” I said. “But we got lucky with you. Now, why do you own a bar when you could be giving random people magical tattoos that give them unimaginable power?”
Cash grinned. “That, my friend, is a long story.”
Chapter Seventeen
RHEE WASN’T ABOUT TO stop drinking, but Figg was getting nervous. She paced even as I sat in a chair near the stand that held Cash’s silver tattoo gun.
He seemed to know what he was doing. He cast a Trick spell from each of the four branches of magic onto a tube of black ink. He then inserted the tube into the back of the device. The ink swirled with a supernatural darkness, growing ever blacker the longer you looked. He had his giantesses move his bed over to the chair.
Rhee sat drinking her umpteenth beer. She refused to go to the bathroom. She said once you went once, you spent the entire night peeing. She’d wait.
We’d agreed on the price, after a little back-and-forth. I was going to get the concentration ink and his time for a hundred rupas. It was a steal. Rhee would cover most of the cost. Figg would chip in. I’d be able to pay them back once we mined the diamonds.
Getting into the throne room wasn’t going to be easy. Worse yet, the Stallion King didn’t like to hold audiences.
First things first—I needed the ink.
Figg walked up and glanced at the first lines Cash had drawn on me.
She scowled. “Black ink? From my classes, it’s important to use one of the ancient metallic colors, from when the first sorcerers on Caranja perfected the concentration ink.”
Cash rumbled with laughter. He wasn’t pausing on the beer drinking either. His hand seemed steady enough, but he was close enough for his belches to be lethal. “The ink is only part of it. It’s more in the process. You work on the flesh as much as the spirit. Others on Caranja, like over on that Rax continent, use Focus rings. I had a few of their scholars in here back a few months. Those rings are a quick solution. The ink works better.”
“We agree on that,” Figg conceded.
I didn’t mind the prickling pain of the needle. What hurt far worse was the growing pain of my atma inside me. Every prick felt like he was sticking pushpins into my soul. I started to sweat.
“Vankaat injit.” Figg reached out with a hand. “I feel the power there, in the ink, in his atma. Will he take the ink? I’ve worked with him for weeks now. He has a special energy in him that I don’t quite understand.”
“Does he ever!” Cash grunted. “He doesn’t own dragons. He is one. I’m seeing into him.”
That made Rhee giggle. I expected some sort of butthole joke. She held her tongue.
“I have to admit it. I’m not exactly human,” I said.
“You’re not human at all,” Cash said. He sat back, balancing his bulk on his horse body while he sipped his beer. “You’re like this one fucker who came in a while back. Three weeks maybe. He was looking for a room. I sent him over to the Crazy Flower. He wasn’t human either.”
I described Eggero Khel. My age. Dark hair. Dark eyes. Smelled like treachery.
“That’s him. He was heading west. He was an asshole.” Cash continued with the ink, and it wasn’t pleasant.
I closed my eyes. I wasn’t going to be able to do much after this. My soul felt tired. Every prick brought more of the burning sensation. I tried to remember if I’d swallowed a campfire or not.
Cash sniffed. “Your smell changed. It’s not body odor, and it’s not your ass. I get a lot of stable butt in here. No, it’s sweet and smoky.”
Rhee giggled, full-on drunk now.
Figg lit up a bidi. “I’m smoking in here. If you don’t like it, you’ll have to kill me.”
Cash rolled his eyes. “It’s a bar. You’re fine. Though you should try some of our town’s dully. Best around, and I don’t even like the stuff. It would mellow you out. And, Figg, you need to be mellowed.”
She didn’t say anything. She did cast another spell, to check on the progress. She scowled. “So far, I see that you are doing a fair job, Mr. Cash. How could you possibly know how to ink into his atma?”
The centaur paused to sip his beer.
That allowed me to sweat more and try and perfect my wincing. The tattooing was fine. The growing pain in my soul wasn’t.
“Well, now, Miss Nightshine,” Cash started. “I promised you a long story. It took me a while, fifty years, to realize that most people in this city don’t give a shit about anything but their own pleasure. Not that it’s a bad thing. It keeps certain businesses in the Mazes busy. My grandfather owned this bar. My father worked it but hated it. He said I should try my hand at the hero game. He said I should become a sorcerer and work for the good of the people. Change things here in Sweetleaf.”
The centaur returned to inking my skin and driving pins into my soul. “You’ve seen that shantytown outside the walls, I’ll bet. Well, mostly it’s women out there. The Wynnym got hit with the Great Disease too, and so our men have their harems. The unruly types and the hard-luck cases—all the leftover women—got pushed out of town. It’s a brutal life out there, worse than the Mazes, and that’s saying something. The Stallion King doesn’t care. He’s an asshole.
“I went to the college here, got my concentration ink, and studied magic hard. Me and some other of my egghead friends figured we’d overthrow the king. They all died. I didn’t. But as we were being seditious together, someone needed to learn how to ink our troops. They couldn’t go to the college because that was being monitored by the king. I did the tattoos for new recruits. Then those recruits died. I had both a marketable skill and a family business to fall back on. I’d let other folks save the world. I’d get them drunk and feed them in the meantime.”
He had a wistful grin on his face, part relief and part survivor’s guilt. He let out a sigh. “And that’s the long story. Every now and again, someone comes looking for my help. It was lucky y
ou found me. Or was it the stink of your destiny, and I’m just adding to the smell?”
That made me think of my vision of Eggero Khel. Did I have a skill tree or a luck tree?
Speaking of which, I pulled up the Five Magics Skill Tree.
The concentration ink was fueling me, both giving me shakti and inching me toward level six. I’d continue on with the Agni branch. Next up was Enchant and then Conjure, or in Sayskritch, that would be Paribru and Yismapana respectively.
A giantess hustled into the room, looking troubled.
“Gurgaloid problems?” Cash asked.
Why did they call the flying nightmares Gurgaloids?
The woman shook her head. “No. It’s quiet so far tonight. You won’t believe this, but we have one of the Stallion King’s guards here. She says she’s off duty, but she’s in armor and she has weapons.”
Rhee was up in a minute. “I bet that’s Broomhelga. I might have to kiss her. I’ve never kissed a giant woman before.”
The big barmaid grunted a laugh. “Good luck with that. It’s the dim one, Cash. The redhead, Broomhelga Hurroom.”
“Friend of yours?” the fat centaur asked with some suspicion.
“No,” Figg said sharply.
“Yes!” Rhee countered.
“I think she’s okay,” I said. “But you’re not breaking the law by giving me the concentration ink, are you?”
Cash looked disgusted. “There are no laws in the Mazes, and so we don’t exactly like it when Jimmy’s guards show up.”
“Jimmy Goodgolde,” I said. “The Stallion King. Look at me, Teach. I’m learning.” Then I winced.
“The needle?” Cash asked.
