by Ember Lane
Finequill held his paw up. “But!” he declared. “If you tax them, then you’ll get a nice rake off the top, say ten percent.”
“So...” Lincoln scratched his head. “I agree to pay them 10 gold, say, but only give them 9.”
Finequill snapped his paws. “Exactly! And you’d be one gold better off every time you pay them.” The arbiter-cum-steward beamed with a victory smile.
“But if I didn’t pay them at all, I’d still have 10,” Lincoln pointed out, “and we’d all have free ale.”
“Hmmm,” Finequill muttered. “I’m all for free ale, but I’m sure… Perhaps I was hasty. So how do you intend to get your gold?”
Lincoln pointed at Starellion. “I’m kinda hoping that place has some loot in it, but don’t you worry, something’ll come along.” He put his arm around Finequill, pulling him close. “Just you sort out the little details like your sister, Spillwhistle, and demands like hers. Get your feet…paws…under the table, and we’ll talk again.” Lincoln started coaxing a clearly nervous Finequill toward the tavern.
“Speaking of Spillwhistle, she won’t give her stuff away. If you want merchants, you’ll need money. I’m telling you…mark my words.”
“In time, Arthur,” Lincoln said with a smirk. He looked at the apachalant who was now deep in conversation with Crags, and a little light went on in his mind. “Do you know, I think I’ve just thought of a name for the tavern.”
“Really, what?”
“The Swift Half.”
3
Tanglewood
The spread of the oak tree blotted out the afternoon sun. It’s leaves fluttering in the slight breeze. Lincoln and Swift sat, backs against its trunk, like two lifelong friends, yet they’d only known each other a week, tops. If the truth be told, Lincoln had blissfully lost track of time.
They’d skipped on a downstream boat from Sanctuary destined for the meet-up point, and then crossed the forest. Although it was a difficult decision, Lincoln had elected to skirt around Thickwick and traveled straight toward the witch’s lair. He told himself that it would be more efficient that way, that he should just scoop up Pete and Allaise on the way back—give them as little notice as possible to think about it.
He told himself that he wasn’t scared of telling her—telling her that it was his fault that they had to move on again, but he knew he was.
“So…” Lincoln said, but he couldn’t bring himself to say the witch’s name.
“Belzarra Mistprowler.”
“Is she liable to…cause us any trouble? Only…” Lincoln looked up his stat sheet.
Name: Lincoln Hart. Race: Human. Type: Builder.
Age: 46. Alignment: Mandrake. XP: 9845.
Level: 6 Profession: Lord. Un/Al pts: 0.
Reputation: Somebody.
Personal
Health Points: 200/200 Energy: 230/230 Mana: 10/0
HP Regen: 20/Min EN Regen: 23/Min MA Regen: 1/Min
Attributes: (Level, Bonuses)
Vitality: (13, 7), Stamina: (15, 8), Intelligence: (1, 0),
Wisdom: (1, 0), Luck: (12, 0),
Strength: (8, 10) Agility: (7, 10)
Skills: (Level, % to next level, Boosts %, Level Cap)
Divination: (4, 88, 0, 25), Stealth: (4, 22, 0, 8), Commerce: (6, 66, 0, 40), Pickpocketing: (1, 0, 0, 6), Brewing: (14, 1, 0, ∞), Perception: (4, 67, 0, 10), Blades: (12,1 9, 0, 14), Close-Q-fighting: (14, 33, 0, 18), Staff fighting: (12, 46, 0, 26), Swordsmanship: (7, 54, 0, 10), Magic: (1, 0, 0, 3), Concealment: (2, 33, 0, 10), Night vision: (5, 22, 0, 12), Rope law: (4, 60, 0, 8)
Talents: None.
Quests: Cleanse Starellion. Status: Incomplete. Reward: Unknown
“I’m still fairly puny…”
“Level 6—but your skills are those of someone higher.”
“Builder,” Lincoln grunted. “I thought when my levels became directly related to the city’s, well, I thought I’d shoot up as it did, but the progress is grindingly slow, ironically.”
Swift shuffled around, the faintest of smirks tried to get a toehold on his lips, but failed dismally. He ruffled his scruffy hair, looked at Lincoln and then turned away, resuming his study of the valley below.
“You have a whole population to protect you. Why do you need levels? The builder grows steadily, but when the settlement becomes a great city, with pantheons, temples, many academies—then the builder surpasses the warrior and becomes all the more powerful.”
Lincoln scraped his boot heel in the rich soil. “And what if the builder doesn’t want a city?”
“Then he chose the wrong type in the first place, and he deserves to fail. If a warrior despises fighting, he won’t make for a great legend.”
What about you? Lincoln wondered. You didn’t get a choice.
Swift was definitely older than his years. Grimble had told him that apachalants always looked younger than they were and acted older than anyone else. That certainly rang true for Swift, though Shrimp normally had a glint of mischief in his eye. Even with that glint, Lincoln had never seen Shrimp relax, let loose, even enjoy a night in the tavern. What did apachalants do to…take a load off? Swift was worse. He never lightened up. Maybe it was the price of his leadership, but then, the four apachalants appeared to work seamlessly together, with no need for barked orders.
He decided it was a race thing. Apachalants just weren’t suited for laughter. Yet somehow…they slowly became the person you looked out for in a crowd—the one you tried to get closest to. It was trust, Lincoln decided; the apachalants just oozed trust. Swift was already right up there with Aezal, Ozmic, and Grimble: Allaise and Pete too in Lincoln’s estimations. He was a person Lincoln trusted.
“But you’re sure of yourself?” Lincoln eventually asked. “I’ll be okay?”
Swift brushed his hand through his hair again, raking it forward like a curtain. “Sure as sure as I can be, Lincoln, sure as I can be. A level 6.” He shrugged. “Into Tanglewood Forest. It’s a risk; the forest is plenty old enough to have some high-level monsters in there, and we could get quite…bogged down. Or…”
Lincoln wasn’t overly enamored by or, in truth; he wasn’t overly chuffed about high level either, though he was a little excited too—his heart was already thumping hard. Besides, he had his bonuses… Jack had managed to get four stat rings made for him—but only four. That gave him a total of five with the obsidian ring Glenwyth had given him, and they all lent him solid boosts to his vitality, stamina, strength, and agility, but he still felt…weak…
Sure, he could punch his way out of a pile of drunken dwarves and come up smiling. In fact, he was fairly sure those bar fights were part of the reason his close-quarter-fighting skill was a staggering 14. On more than one occasion, he’d woken up with no idea that he’d leveled up. He could win those fights, but could he match up to a mob or a boss a few levels above him?
Let’s hope the witch fights with her fists.
“Or what?” Lincoln asked, focusing back on the relaxed conversation.
“Or, all the rumors might be wrong. There might be a nice, windy path, with bluebells either side, that runs up to a little cottage by a tranquil lake where the smell of cookies baking wafts from open—”
“Enough!” Lincoln said. “Everyone knows witches don’t bake cookies.”
Swift pushed himself up. “What kind of a world do they live in? No cookies?”
He almost smiled!
“Maybe gingerbread men…”
The oak tree they were sitting against stood atop a grassy knoll, which led down to a gurgling brook, which in turn wound through a rocky vale. It then angled down quite steeply until it vanished briefly over a ledge before it reemerged in glimpses as it wove its way through some small foothills and eventually flowed into a circular wood. So, from his vantage point Lincoln had quite the view of the woods, and as Swift ambled down the knoll, he couldn’t help thinking that its trees were a few shades too dark in color. They were hardly green, more a slightly off shade of black. It c
ertainly wasn’t the type of forest you’d go into voluntarily. It also had a strange aura rising up from it, like invisible steam.
Though he knew that it couldn’t quite be so, it looked very much like Tanglewood Forest was completely surrounded by hills. Of course, it couldn’t be because there would be nowhere for all the brook water to drain away. He stood, craning his neck. Nope, all hills and all around; that’s what it looked like, and he was fairly sure that’s what it was.
Scratching his head, he tried to remember Swift’s exact words. They were something like: the swampy part. Nope, they were a lot like that. Now he’d remembered that, other memories tumbled forward. He was about to enter a bog forest, and if his gaming years had taught him anything it was that those sorts of forests were suited to the more…sinister types of creatures, and that was a truth—in any world.
“No chance of cookies,” he muttered to himself, as he followed Swift down.
The measure of the grin adorning his face now that he was headed to his doom told of his conflicted heart. In any game, there were always two types of players—the one who had to be overpowered to take on a monster, and the one who just enjoyed the fight. While he knew his level was way too low for what lay ahead, now it neared, now it was inevitable, he couldn’t wait.
Time to do some power leveling!
He hurried down the hillock and soon drew alongside Swift. “So, swamp, eh?”
“More an island. It’s an odd place. Shame you’re not apachalant.”
“Why?” Lincoln supposed they’d just run through it quickly or something.
“We could just skip the treetops.”
He’d heard about that from Aezal, heard that it was the norm for apachalants to just scamper up a tree trunk and then jump from tree to tree, he supposed like a squirrel. Appraising Swift for squirreliness, he decided it was nothing to do with the little creatures—probably some skill or another.
“Why?” Lincoln asked. “I mean, who was the first apachalant who looked up at a tree and thought, ‘I know, that’d be faster’?”
“The first one not eaten by a firegator, poisoned by a gobsnake, or stung by a boxabee.”
Lincoln furrowed his brow. “I thought Apachalant was on top of the mountains and sandwiched between Zybond and Kobane.”
“It is. It’s hot, humid, a jungle, and a little patch of paradise where everything wants to kill you, and if you’re not careful, it does.”
Lincoln had heard about places like that back on Earth. Australia sprang to mind.
“A jungle…in the mountains.”
Swift looked at him like he was an idiot. “Where else would you find a jungle? The higher you are, the closer to the sun.”
Lincoln shrugged. “So, firegators eh? What are they like?”
Swift gave him the same look again, so Lincoln busied himself checking his weapons. They strolled on down toward the brook. The pride of them all was the scarletite sword that Thumptwist had made for him. Lincoln liked his swords heavy—not long-sword heavy, or even fantasy-sword heavy, but—heavy. It had to have enough weight to gain a nice momentum on the downward chop. After all, monsters rarely got up after they’d been decapitated.
Currently, his sword was sheathed, and he was walking with the sturdy aid of an oak staff shod on both ends with steel. As his staff-fighting was a full 5 levels above his sword-fighting skill, you would have assumed it was his weapon of choice, but a staff was only really any good against hard bodies and solid entities. Try and slice open a poison sack with a staff, and you’d be out of luck. Try and splat it, and you’d be covered in goo.
Knives: those were Lincoln’s truly favored weapons, and he had five of them. The one on his hip was a particularly nasty one—serrated along some parts of the blade, honed to an impossibly sharp edge on others, with a wicked hook at its point and by the plunge line—it was a truly fearsome weapon which was suited to an arms-length fight where tearing was the game.
When it got up close and personal, he had his stabby, stabby knives—two of them, both nice, simple, steel affairs. The final two were sleek, throwing knives, perfectly symmetrical, perfectly balanced for him, but cheap and easily replicable. In fact, Thumptwist had already forged a few spares.
All in all, he had a mighty fine sword: he was just no good at wielding it, in comparison to his other skills. Oh, and he had his spell, or rather his chaos spell, or to give it its full title, dark chaos spell, the Spell of Slumber. Lincoln hadn’t used it since Digberts had given it to him, mostly because he tended to forget about it—having next to no mana—and because he had no idea exactly what it did or for how long. Though he had been tempted to try it on Cronis, once or twice, but thought it’d probably go unnoticed.
Swift skipped down the rocky bank, stopping where the brook vanished over the ledge. Lincoln knelt and took a sip of ice-cold water, then studied the now closer forest. It was still a black-gray color. The brook still meandered into it, but now he could see it also pooled around it a little. Now that Lincoln could make out the belt of land encompassing the wood, he was a little bemused, mostly because it looked so…swampy, in a dry sense. It looked like it had been a swamp, and now wasn’t.
A combination of loamy mud, sprigs of grass, and dead reeds encompassed the forest for as far as he could see before the strange land tucked behind the ominous trees. Lincoln couldn’t help but think that from above the whole place must resemble some giant dread flower, with the dried, swampy part as its petals, and the woods being the stigma and stamen. Maybe that was it; maybe the place was one big trap.
Swift slid down a brief scree slope with a dry, grinding noise, and then bounded down the few dozen foothills like they didn’t even exist, and was soon on the edge of the first few yards of stodgy, boggy mud.
“Quiet, isn’t it.”
“A bit too quiet,” Lincoln muttered, catching up.
“Nah, not when you consider her reputation.”
“Belzarra Mistprowler’s?”
“Who else’s? The rumor is no one’s ever made it back out of this swamp—we’re lucky it’s dry at the moment.” He carried on walking as though it was just a brisk trek to the bakers, tavern, or…
“No one? So you’re saying that no adventurer has ever come back from a meet with the witch?”
“And therein lies the problem,” Swift said, wagging his finger.
“You’re damn right it lies there.”
“Exactly,” said Swift, and he sped up, marching with a purpose, his boots beginning to make a sucking noise. “How did they know her house was built on a pile of bones?” Swift stopped. “And not just any old bones. Gleaming white ones, by all accounts—so, at least one person escaped.”
Lincoln stopped in his tracks, briefly wondering if apachalants weren’t just a little mad—supremely confident, but just a little mad.
As they got closer, the charisma of the forest started spilling out. Rather than a black-gray gathering of a whole bunch of trees, Lincoln got the sense that it was one big, living, breathing organism, and that it was…staring him out. “Nah!” he exclaimed out loud, but took a deep breath and tried to rally his courage, and he puffed his chest out just in case it was watching. Then he thought he heard it lick its lips. Scratching his head, he shook each of his feet in turn, trying to get rid of a crawling feeling he had suddenly developed, and some sticky mud. It was as he looked up from that act, that he saw its eyes.
“Swift,” he hissed, but the apachalant just marched on, seemingly oblivious to the threat in front of him.
Blinking, Lincoln snapped his eyes shut and mentally shook his brain to try and clear his mind, opening them, and fully expecting the forest’s eyes to have vanished, but no, they were still there. Clear as day, once you’d seen them, each was a lighter gray than the surroundings with an endless, black dot in their centers—staring straight out.
“Swift!” he whisper-shouted in an effort to be heard, but not heard. His day was beginning to get very confusing. “I think it’s alive!”<
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Swift looked around, his lip curled and his nose screwed up, rather like Lincoln had stepped in something. “It’s a forest; what did you expect?”
“No! No!” Lincoln continued using his whisper-shout. “I think it’s one big organism—like a monster.”
“It is,” Swift whisper-shouted back to Lincoln, and then coughed to try and cover his mistake. He walked up to Lincoln and leaned in. “Its supposedly one-great-big-mushroom-like thing that feeds off the trees and has been known to eat cattle, sheep, hares, goats—anything, really.”
Lincoln leaned in too. “And maybe…I dunno…unsuspecting travelers on their way to visit a certain witch?”
Swift looked him up and down, his mouth finally curling into a rare smile. Wagging his finger again, he said, “No flies on you—Shylan said you had more sense than most. Perhaps we should be careful?”
Nodding, Lincoln rose to his full height and stretched his arms out, staff and all. “Caution,” he said.
“There’s a path about a hundred yards around that corner,” Swift said. “I scouted it while you were dozing this morning.”
It didn’t surprise Lincoln. The apachalant could have scooted straight to the wood, retrieved Belzarra Mistprowler and carried her all the way to Sanctuary before he’d woken up. Which begged the question… Just as he was about to ask it, he realized that Swift probably had negative charisma when it came to persuasion, and would have certainly come back empty-handed.
“Rumor has it,” Swift muttered.
Here we go again with the rumors! Lincoln thought.
“The swamp fills and expands, and/or empties and contracts, depending on the amount of rainfall. Given the amount we’ve had, I’d have thought it would have been quite full. Very strange.”
