by Dmitry Bilik
“Are you going to let me in or are we just going to stand here?”
“No, of course not. Please come in.”
I dashed into my room to pull on some jeans and a T-shirt. When I came out, Hunter was sitting in the kitchen. The tea kettle was already heating on the stove. A sheathed knife was lying on the table. Next to it was a folding pocket mirror, the kind women walk around with to use when they put on their warpaint.
“Are you a righty?” Uncle Nick asked.
“Yes.”
As though conjured up by a magician, a few thin leather straps materialized in Hunter’s hands. He threw them over my left shoulder, tightened them, and then fastened the sheath to them handle down.
“Draw it.”
I obeyed. The knife was large and heavy, and the blade was nearly ten inches long. It exuded a certain invisible force.
Flesh cleaver
Moon steel
Enchanted to cause harm to physical beings
Restriction: Players only
But where was the information on damage, weight, and every nick on the blade, like in every other RPG? What a mess.
“I recommend that you wear it just like this. Do you know how to use it?”
“Only to chop up French fries,” I joked. When I noticed the sober look on Hunter’s face, I added, “No, I don’t.”
“Then don’t draw it unless you need to. But hold on to it. A Player without a weapon is like a naked man in a women’s bathhouse. He’s out of his element, if you know what I mean.”
“And what if subway security stop me? Or I run into a police check on the street? How am I gonna explain this?”
“You won’t get stopped. The weapon is enchanted. Only Players can see it. It’s inaccessible to Commoners. Even if someone frisks you, they won’t find anything. All they’ll see is a skinny young man. That’s why you also need a mirror.”
“I have one. It’s in the bathroom.”
“That’s a different kind. This one is old: it’s a true mirror made of a silver alloy. Look into it.”
I obediently pressed a button, opening the miniature mirror. And, as they would have said a hundred years ago, I was rooted to the spot. I was once again looking at the person I’d seen in the mirror my entire life, the one who’d vanished the day before yesterday: Sergei Demidov, a scrawny but good-natured guy.
It turned out that Hunter was right. I definitely couldn’t see the knife strapped to my shoulder in the mirror. I even had to touch myself to be convinced. It was perplexing — I felt it, but I couldn’t see it.
“The silver blocks abilities to some degree,” Hunter explained, “so in mirrors like this one you can see yourself through commoners’ eyes. You can look at things that Players are accustomed to from another perspective.”
“Silver,” I chuckled, “it’s to ward off vampires, isn’t it?”
“Silver doesn’t kill vampires,” Hunter replied in all seriousness. “Those are stupid fairy tales spread by filmmakers. In order to kill a vampire, you need to cut his head off first.”
Did that mean there were still vampires around? Oh great. I might have to keep my eyes peeled walking through dark alleys. But there was something else altogether that I was curious about.
I looked at Hunter. “Why are you helping me?”
“Because I have no choice. Two Players in the same building, virtually next door to each other...” he averted his gaze and shook his head. “If you stupidly attract unwanted attention, they’ll also notice me. So it’s in both our interests to turn you into a typical, ordinary Player as quickly as possible. Someone who isn’t surprised by a flying port or magician using sorcery. The only other option is to move house, but I wouldn’t be able to explain that to my wife. And I don’t think you want to move, either.”
“And what if... you simply killed me?”
“That’s against the rules of the Cesspit. I wouldn’t say that I’m a rule follower deep down, but I’m not excessively bloodthirsty. In the past, I never killed Players just for the sake of my own comfort.”
“What’s this Cesspit?” I asked, remembering that I’d heard that word somewhere before.
Hunter ignored my question. “Are you going to have breakfast or are we leaving?”
“I’ll have a couple of sandwiches and then I’ll be ready.”
“I’ll wait downstairs.”
Ten minutes later, I’d finished my hygiene routine and eaten my poor excuse for breakfast (because my mother wouldn’t consider two pieces of bread and butter a bona-fide meal). I dashed outside, worried that Hunter might have given up on me and left.
But no, he was standing there quibbling with the Professor about something. Not quibbling really: our homebred literati was busy showing off his intellect while the working-class-hero a.k.a. Hunter was unenthusiastically countering his highbrow arguments.
“The most important thing in life is the path of spiritual development,” Mr. Petrov pontificated. “The attainment of the wholeness of your outlook and endeavors with the desires of the soul. Then and only then can you become Godlike not only in appearance but also in substance.”
“Geez, what are you supposed to eat while you’re attaining this wholeness? You’ll die of hunger, man, and then it’s all over.”
This last sentence was so typical of Uncle Nick. It was as though Hunter had never existed and I’d dreamed everything. So! We seemed to have an actor here in bad need of an Oscar. No offense, DiCaprio, but we’re taking away your statuette to give it to someone more worthy.
“Oh, geez, Sergei, are you going to the store? Let’s go, man, I also need to go.”
“Good day,” the Professor tipped his knitted cap in response to my curt nod.
As soon as we were away from the entrance, the Hunter that I knew promptly returned. I didn’t even have a chance to pinpoint when the metamorphosis happened.
“The funniest thing is that that commoner couldn’t be more correct,” he said. “In just two sentences he described the ideal path for a Player.”
“Become Godlike not in appearance but in substance?” I chuckled.
He didn’t reply.
“Wait a sec,” I said. “Does that mean that Players can become Gods?”
“They are the only ones who can,” he answered sharply, “and may you have the good fortune of never crossing their paths. But you’ve already acquired a divine gadget.”
“What’s that?”
“Your Divine Avatar. It’s a unique image. Each particular Avatar can only belong to a single Seeker. It’s a bit like your development branch in that it can also be leveled up. But that’s not quite the right way to put it. It’s more accurate to say that it will allow you to develop and might even endow you with stronger abilities. I confess that I don’t know if there’s a limit to those abilities. By the way, your Avatar already showed up in the Cesspit once, albeit a long time ago — like 2,000 years ago. The Player was named Yahweh, but after he acquired his Divine Avatar, he changed his name to Joshua. The things he did! There was no stopping him.”
I tried to submit all this information to my subcortex as fast as I could. When Hunter stopped talking, I didn’t open my mouth for a while, hoping to hear another revelation. When I finally realized he wasn’t going to say anything else, I ventured another question.
“What’s this Cesspit?”
“That’s what this world is called. It’s hidden at the very edge of the Path in the area free from wars because there’s almost nothing valuable here. To the developed worlds, it’s like the provinces. Or, as the Seekers named it, the Cesspit.”
“That’s not a very appealing name.”
“But it describes it perfectly. Among the Seekers everything is much more straightforward. Except that in order to become one of them, one needs a colossal amount of luck... or misfortune.”
“I don’t get it.”
“How do you think people become Seekers?”
“If I’ve understood everything correctly, you need
to kill a Player.”
“Correct. Most often, one Seeker kills another. That’s not a rare occurrence.”
“But why?”
“Well...” my simple question seemed to have floored him. “When you kill a Player, you can capture their spells, abilities, occasionally even their Avatar. You can change your development branch. There’s also loot... and dust. Last but not least, in a real battle all the skills level up faster.”
I regretted not bringing a tape recorder with me. No, I had no intention of going to the local branch of the FSB[9] looking like a city idiot to report a worldwide (or in our case interworld) conspiracy. I was just afraid of missing something important.
“So being a Player isn’t very safe.”
“That’s putting it mildly. Now listen...”
We’d reached the street and were waiting patiently for the light so we could cross. Just to please, our usually godforsaken roundabout was now packed with rush-hour traffic. The sidewalk was crowded with visibly unhappy people sleepwalking to work.
“In many worlds, commoners hunt Seekers. Those are mere mortals who have somehow found out about us. But that’s in places where people know about us and where there are no protective pillars — or just protectors, as we call them — to conceal us from their eyes. In Cesspit, it’s not like that. But a few of us do get hit with bad luck” — here he looked at me — “and your case is unique in its own way. It’s one thing if you hit a Seeker with a car. But in a fight, on equal terms — something like that is almost impossible. Think about that. I doubt that the blood of your ancestor had anything to do with it.”
“Meaning?”
“Did you look at yourself in the mirror? You’re a Korl. It’s clear that you’re a half blood. But Korl genes are much more powerful than human ones, and that shows in your appearance. When I saw you for the first time, I was on my guard. But it turned out that you were an ordinary commoner. Interracial relationships are quite normal in all worlds. One of your ancestors must have sinned with a being from another world.”
“So one of my grandparents was a Player?”
“Oh, yes. When you get the chance, try to ask your parents if any of their direct relatives ever went missing. Players are forbidden to spend more than one terrestrial life in the same place. That’s rule number one of the Guard of the Cesspit. So they fake their own deaths or just go missing.”
“What’s the ru-”
“Let’s hurry,” Hunter said, pulling me across the street by the arm. “Come on, show me where it was.”
“Over there, I think. Probably. It was dark, you know.”
We lowered ourselves to the bottom of the foundation pit. I started to wander past the scattered trash, strewing it with my feet. Looking for yesterday was a fascinating endeavor. Using the sound of the macaroni crackling under my shoes as a guide, I outlined the approximate area where the scuffle must have occurred. But what was the point? The snow had done a good job powdering everything, concealing any traces of blood.
“There’s nothing here,” I said.
“Over there,” Hunter replied.
I looked where he was pointing. Nothing. Without waiting for my answer, he approached a tiny mound and began to dig it up with his fingers, showing no disgust.
Finally, he stopped and pulled out a very small leather bag. He shook off tiny clumps of frozen earth and snow, loosened the cord, sniffed, and nodded in satisfaction.
“Dust. Take it,” he said, lobbing the unexpected loot at me.
I caught the purse, then mimicked what Hunter had just done. The dust had a distinctive smell I couldn’t quite put my finger on, reminiscent of cinnamon, chocolate and vanilla. It smelled so good I didn’t want to tear myself away.
“Make sure you don’t start sniffing it,” Hunter said. “Or shooting it up, God forbid. A junkie next door is the last thing I need.”
I hurried to pull the tiny bag away from my nose, drew the strings and weighed the bag in my hand. “How strange. I know exactly how much dust there is in there. Sixty-eight grams.”
“Nothing strange about that. It’s your loot, your money, which is why you know how much there is,” Hunter replied. “Make sure you hide it from prying eyes. There’s not a lot here, but people have been robbed for ten grams even. Not here, of course. But money is money.”
“So what do you think?”
“What can I say? Here we have a Seeker without weapons or magic scrolls, virtually naked, with nothing but a few specks of dust to his name. Killed by a commoner.”
“Maybe he wasn’t very strong?”
“He had the same development branch as you have now, but for some reason he didn’t rewind time. If push had come to shove, he could have activated his Avatar, only he didn’t. I won’t even mention the spells that every Player has in spades. He could have killed you with ordinary Telekinesis if he’d just made a little more effort. And despite all that, he’s dead and you’re still with us. Does it suggest anything to you?”
“It does. That the world has gone crazy. But what difference is that to me? You need to work with what you have.”
“Good point. OK, seeing as we’re finished here,” he looked around the floor of the foundation pit as if he wasn’t just examining the snow-dusted trash, but rather trying to convince himself of something, “we need to go.”
“Where to?”
“Just to do some shopping. We need to make you look at least a little like a real Seeker. Especially now that you have some dust.”
Chapter 5
QUITE A FEW of us must at some point have wished they’d been born to different parents and had nothing to do with their current families whatsoever. For centuries, writers have been bringing up the issue of relationships between fathers and children, describing the parents’ narrow-mindedness and the children’s lack of empathy for their elders. In this respect, I was no exception.
My entire relationship with my dad rested on an interesting dynamic. I was constantly trying to prove that I could live without anyone else’s help, while he was constantly trying to prove that his son was an overgrown dimwit who didn’t understand basic things. The list of these things was rather typical. It goes without saying that neither of us wanted to give in to the other, so not surprisingly, this dynamic had distanced us from each other. He had no leverage over me, and since he was a natural autocrat, this drove him crazy. Over time, I came to understand that no matter what I accomplished in life, it would never live up to my father’s expectations. So I just learned to live with it.
Nevertheless, we still saw each other occasionally. My mom liked to get the whole family together once a month or so. Under our parents’ roof we played the role of happy, contented offspring. And that’s how it would be until the next time.
The incoming message I’d just received from my Mom meant that once again the time to “gather the stones” had come.
“OK, Mom. Tonight at 6. I remembered. I can’t talk. I’m on the bus.... I’m out doing errands. OK, bye.”
As usual, Mom wanted to know everything that was going on in her son’s life, preferably in online mode. Hunter appeared curious too, judging by his pricked-up ears.
“Is it far?” I asked him.
“No.”
The exact location of the “local community,” which was what Uncle Nick had called our destination, was still a mystery. Of course, I’d already pulled up the bus itinerary on my phone. We seem to be traveling either to the center of town or further on, to the old part of the city. The latter possibility seemed much more likely, because the town hall had just flashed by outside the window and Hunter didn’t make a move.
As before, our busy million-strong city seemed different somehow. I’d say that it had aged. The century-old stone houses that once used to belong to rich merchants were now decorated with peculiar stuccowork depicting fantastical monsters. I could tell other half-blood commoners like myself in the crowd. Something clearly bigger than an ordinary bird shot across the sky overhead.
But the most amusing metamorphosis of all were the shop signs. To give you some idea, there was an old, rain-beaten sign on a battered building, reading “Various Ingredients, directly from factory”. My magic mirror just showed a standard removable sidewalk sign advertising a pharmacy. I had a funny feeling that the place traded in items that were somewhat more potent than aspirin.
Finally, Hunter stood up and headed for the door. We got off at the next stop. Just as I’d guessed, we’d come to the old part of the city. I could never remember the name of the street we were on. I didn’t have any special veneration for dilapidated legacies — I’d much rather stroll through a shopping mall with my latest crush.
