by Harry Nix
“I... yes, you do matter,” I said.
“Then don’t be like the others. Focus on what’s important and right in front of you,” the cat said before licking his shoulder and bolting away. Down the street, I saw a dwarf swear and stumble as the cat dashed between his legs, nearly knocking him down.
Was this the game talking to me?
“Nice subtlety Lucy,” I said to the sky.
I got a few looks but mostly was ignored. The pressure cooker feeling in the city was increasing by the minute and no one cared about some random madman talking to imaginary creators.
Still, I decided to take the cat’s advice. The first step to here and now was getting the hells out of Bron, which was no easy task. By the time I spotted the gate out, I was inching along in a crowd packed together like we were leaving a stadium.
There was an orc not too far away who had some space around him so I edged my way over there. He was moving marginally faster than the crowd so I trailed along in his wake.
Ahead, at the gates, I could see the telltale flashes of magic coming from outside. Rax’s men reinforcing the outside of the gate. There was a guard up on a platform watching the crowd and I knew he was just waiting for the magical reinforcement to be complete. Then he was going to lock us in.
A few more steps. More bursts of magic from outside. The crowd murmuring in low tones. Something brushed over my boots; rats but dressed, like the rabbits. They were dodging through the crowd.
“Rats deserting the sinking city,” I said to myself.
The orc looked back at me. Both his eyes were blue, no two-faced club. Just an ordinary wooden one braced with iron.
“What do you know?” he growled.
“As soon as they finish welding the back of that gate, they’re locking us in,” I said.
Maybe I threw it off a little glib. The orc looked at the gate before lifting his club and roaring for everyone to get out of his way. We were penned in between buildings but no one wanted to be flattened by an Orc. People crushed into the alleyways on either side to avoid him as he roared once more and started pushing.
In an instant the crowd was like the surging sea. People started screaming as they were shoved. I nearly went down from a kick in the back but managed to stay on my feet. To fall now was a death sentence.
Before I could get crushed to death, I shoved past some people and ran after the Orc in the bubble of space behind him. In a minute flat we were at the gate and the overseeing guard who was now shouting for it to be closed. He yelled at the Orc who swung his club, swatting him off his perch and into the crowd. If it wasn’t dead by the time he hit the ground he soon would be.
There was a rush of heat as a fireball shot by my head, cast by some desperate magic user behind us. Over to the side fighting had broken out. A woman with a long kitchen knife in one hand and a baby in the other was slashing at anyone who came close. The crowd kept surging though, pushed from far down the street and her small space was shrinking.
The gates began to slowly close, pushed from the far side. The orc, already in a panic, charged, crushing people under his feet. I dodged around them as best I could but sometimes I wasn’t standing on cobblestones.
The crowd stuck in the gateway was frantically trying to escape and I saw the guards on the far side had drawn their weapons.
The orc hit this mass and punched his way through, knocking down a row of guards with a single swing of his club. I crashed through the line, casting Bolt at a guard who stepped in my way and then suddenly I was through.
There was space to move, clean cool air.
I ran until I slowed to risk a look behind me. I wasn’t being pursued. The gates were closed and anyone who’d made it out was getting away from Bron as fast as they could. The Orc had veered off to the left and was now a large figure receding into the distance.
I stopped to quickly check myself over. A few singed hairs and bruises but I’d escaped mostly unscathed.
Back at the gate I saw the women with the knife had somehow made it out. She was shouting at the guards, waving her weapon. They were massing up, weapons ready.
She didn’t have her baby with her.
I turned away, bringing up my map. A few hours I’d be back with the spiders. Focus on that and not the pain that seemed lodged in my throat, attempting to expand.
I didn’t look back even when I heard the shouting escalate and the woman scream. I couldn’t stop that evil.
There was a driving evil behind it all. Seeing the gates being welded shut and Rax’s preparations just proved it.
He was the evil.
19
The spiders were still arguing over Rax’s offer when Scarlet pulled me into an empty cave. It wasn’t bad, as caves went. Someone, a spider I guess, had installed a crystal pane above, making a fantasy-style skylight.
Since I’d returned she’d been at my side, as though afraid I’d vanish again. The sexy and sultry demoness was appearing in moments but I was seeing a new side that was more like worried girlfriend. I’d given Rax’s offer to the spiders, had received my fifty gold reward from Ebony for rescuing everyone and then I’d told them what I knew. Bron locked down. My suspicions Henry Rax was lying. Now the spiders were arguing a plan.
Scarlet bit my lip as she kissed me, hard enough to draw blood and for a sliver of my health bar to vanish.
“Ouch,” I said, drawing back momentarily.
“You’re wearing too many pants,” Scarlet said, tugging at my clothing.
“How many should I be wearing?”
“Zero pants, no pants, these pants need to go,” Scarlet murmured, kissing my neck.
I was tempted to fall into it but it felt like I had an itch in my brain. I had a pile of gold now, more than enough to settle Augustus and the Moles and part of me was debating just leaving Bron to whatever happened. This was a game, right? I was here to affect it, to test it, that’s all.
Part of the desire to escape was the realism of it all. The hunger, the pain of a torn calf muscle, my hand being detonated off my wrist, falling to my death from a cliff.
The woman and her baby.
I cringed at the memory and this time Scarlet pulled back from me. She had red skin but I could see she was flushed.
“The surroundings not to your liking my Lord? Now that you’ve been to the palace to see the King?” Scarlet said. She was a little annoyed and a touch sexually frustrated.
“He’s not the King,” I said, adjusting my clothing and taking a breath so I could think straight.
“He has the power, he has the army, he’s the King. Plus he has a palace,” she said, counting off her fingers.
Escalate and complicate were the words drifting through my mind. A simple task to collect spider fangs, grinding in the forest had twisted into ending spider slavery and Bron currently on lockdown, the gates welded shut from the outside.
This was a game, this was a game... except the suffering felt real. I could take Scarlet and Ori, find some other city to visit (maybe not Socie with the Red Sorrow plague), drink in bars, buy some cool armor and weapons, go on adventures where the stakes weren’t so damn high. The Lubochenko’s would pull me out of here eventually and who knows if I’d ever come back? Did I want to spend the time I had left getting injured?
“Hello? Are you with me in the here and now?” Scarlet said, snapping her fingers in my face. Her tail was waving dangerously now.
Shut your mouth and hug her. Good advice Dad.
I hugged Scarlet, wrapping my arms around her. She was stiff as a board before letting out a sigh and relaxing. This time when we pulled apart, I made sure to keep touching her, making that connection.
This was the moment. I could tell her we were leaving Bron to its fate or make a plan to defeat Rax.
For some reason the image of the orc kids I’d seen in the shanties over near the mine, playing with a stick, came into my mind. When war came, they’d be there.
“Rax has your friend, Delicia, I’m sure of i
t.”
I told Scarlet about Lel and Gunther appearing to have an internal argument. Lel saying PRISON when I asked where Delicia was.
Scarlet nodded at the information and then reached into the Bag of Holding to pull out the vial of golden pixie dust.
“I was hoping it was just a coincidence. That this was some of her pixie dust bought from a market perhaps. But in my heart, I knew she was there.”
“Pixies sell their dust at markets?” Maybe not the most pressing question but I just blurted it out.
Scarlet stepped closer and stroked her finger down my cheek.
“It’s quite the thing to see actually. They shake their moneymaker and magic dust sparkles out of the air. Then they bottle it up, sell it. The girl has some hips on her.”
Her eyes went far away for a moment and she bit her lip before letting out a breath.
“But enough on that or I’ll go back to trying to take your pants off,” she said.
Scarlet opened the vial and the scent of honeycakes filled the cave. We both breathed in deeply before she closed it up again.
“Definitely fresh. So Rax or Cavan Whatever-the-Hells-his-last-name-is has her. How are we meant to find her with an army in our way?”
“You sneak,” Isabel said, appearing from nowhere.
Bolt hit the wall where she’d been standing as I practically jumped out of my skin and cast on reflex. A fireball hit it a moment later, from Scarlet, searing away some of the spiderwebs.
“You gotta stop doing that,” I said, my heart hammering in my chest.
Isabel was by the far wall now. She’d rolled out of the way and was watching the pair of us with a grin.
“I got tired of the arguing out there and general stupidity so I came in here. Thought I’d have dinner and a show,” she said, pulling a cookie out of her cloak.
Ori came bolting into the cave... and then Ori and another Ori and another. Six in total, diminutive and split apart by his spell. Each had a handful of inkballs, ready to throw.
“What was that?” he squeaked in unison.
“False alarm,” I said, waving him down.
He grumbled something and then reformed, back to a single Ori.
“How did you know something was happening?” I asked.
“Felt it. Demon bond. You are a Summoner, right?”
“We can talk Summoners and who they bond with later,” Scarlet said, saying bond but meaning something else entirely. She turned to Isabel.
“How do we save Delicia?”
Isabel held up a finger while she finished off her cookie. Then she reached into her cloak and pulled out a vial, like the one we had full of pixie dust. It was full of green liquid and instead of a standard cork, it was sealed with glass, with a button that was filled with red.
“I stole this off the Apothecary when I lifted the key. It’s a binary explosive. I’ve seen it before. It’s called very simply Death. Press the red down hard, break the internal seal, the liquids mix and explode. I’m betting if he had some of this on him, that there’s more somewhere in those mines. We take a friendly spider with us, scale the cliff and break our way in from the outside. There was more in that labyrinth of tunnels that what we saw. We find where he was making this, mix it and boom goes the cliff. Rax too.”
“I saw endless carts coming out of the mines... I thought it was ore but it might be this Death?”
“Maybe. This stuff is incredibly rare and expensive and rumored to have shimmershine ore as an ingredient. It’s never been used for war because it’s so rare but if he’s worked out how to manufacture it, he could be using it for war somewhere else. Just another reason to take him out.”
I could see the vague outline of a plan but there were too many moving parts. The mines were sure to be guarded now. There’d be no sneaking down a long empty corridor. Although, there were carts leaving Bron with armed guards so perhaps the security forces were weakening somewhat.
“We need the spiders,” I said, remembering the guards at the palace.
“The spiders haven’t decided yet but they appear to be leaning toward trusting Rax,” Armando said from the entrance of the cave. I managed to stop myself jumping at her sudden appearance. Isabel went over to her and stroked a hand down her side.
“Good sneaking babe,” she said.
Without the spiders there’d be no hope of defeating Rax. Maybe not even with them. The guards in the corridor seemed unaffected by the venom when attacked. Maybe the Apothecary had been dosing everyone with an antivenom.
My gaze drifted across Armando. Even if the guards were immune to poison, the spiders were big enough to cause a lot of damage still. I just had to get them on the side of attack.
“Give me the vial,” I said to Isabel.
“You have about ten seconds after breaking the seal so make sure you’re not holding it by then,” she said, passing it to me.
I left the cave without another word, the others following behind me. The spiders were still arguing, more than half-blinded by the lump of gold promised, the lure of money.
“This is what Rax is making!” I yelled out.
I broke the seal and then threw the vial into the forest. It sailed up and out in a perfect arc before bouncing off a tree and landing in the mud beneath it.
A few seconds later it detonated.
The nearest trees were obliterated in a haze of blue fire, reduced to ash. The wave of flames turned the next circle of trees to splinters. The shockwave flattened more and blew a hole in the ground twenty feet across it. Mud and wood shot up into the air and then came raining down upon us. The heat of the explosion sucked up the ash from the trees, pluming it into a small mushroom cloud that shot ash flakes across the forest.
I’d been expecting far less to be honest but I managed to seize the moment. I turned back to the shocked spiders.
“Rax has been brewing that explosive. It’s called Death. He was sending lumps of infected shimmershine ore out here to destroy you. The gates of Bron are welded shut from the outside on his command. That deal you hold is as worthless as the ash floating up there. I’m going back to use Death to destroy his mine and his palace and to rescue a trapped pixie. I’m going to kill Rax too, but I can’t do it without all of you. If you scale the cliffs and attack, you can have true freedom.”
The tide of disagreement was swept away in an instant. Ebony argued again and this time the dissenters stayed quiet. The awesome power of Rax’s weapon had silenced them.
It wasn’t long before the spiders were in agreement and we were back in a cave, scratching plans in the dirt.
Two days and a false attack to pull the guards away so we could scale the cliffs and find out way back into the mines and the palace. Isabel would be on Death duty and I’d be searching for Delicia.
“Then on dusk of the second day, the real attack. We set off any Death we find and the spiders rush the palace. Our aim is to kill Rax,” I said, tapping a stick on the crude dirt map.
Still a damn lot of unknowns, first being that maybe Rax and the Apothecary weren’t brewing Death.
It wasn’t long before I was on the edge of the spider’s territory, looking at my map. Armando and Isabel were coming with us while a small group of spiders split off to launch a small false attack. Hopefully it would draw any guards away from the cliffs so we could ascend.
As I looked over the map, I saw the quest for Augustus and the Moles again. It wasn’t too far away, maybe half a day. If this game had quick travel I would have gone in a flash, completed the quest and returned. But no quick travel meant to complete it took time I didn’t think we had to spare. That itch in my brain was telling me some greater evil was on the brink of occurring in Bron.
“Let’s go,” I said, swiping away the map.
Cancel Mole Money Mole Problems?
Warning: you will fail the quest and there will be consequences.
The prompt appeared in front of me, glowing red like fire. It looked like the sign at Lady Trang’s. I guess the
system had read my mind.
I had a day but there would have to be some incredible miracle to kill Rax and save Delicia in time to then hustle back to pay the moles.
I hit accept and the quest went blood red before a new heading Failed Quests appeared. Mole Money was now there, throbbing like an infected toe.
I waved it away and then saw Isabel and Armando watching me curiously.
“Swiping at a mosquito there or just nothing?” Isabel asked.
“I can see an unseen world and it had something I didn’t like,” I said, trying not to sound too annoyed.
There was a moment of awkward silence before Armando coughed and tapped a leg on the dirt.
“Just remember that while you and yours are immortal, we’re not,” she said.
She took the lead off into the forest with the rest of us trailing behind. Her words had cut to the core of me. I admit I’d been flexible with the truth. I honestly had nothing more than a hunch that Rax was behind everything. The smiling man I’d met in a dining room seemed genuinely regretful. I was essentially going off a split-minded Orc and a feeling.
I just had to hope I was right.
20
There were six guards gathered at the base of the cliff. Two had swords, two crossbows and the final two were armed with long axes. Above them there were soot marks on the cliff where the spiderwebs had apparently been burned away. There were still a few ropy pieces stuck here and there. Even from a distance we could see the hole in the cliff had been patched up, the new brick and mortar standing out like a fresh wound.
“Improvise and overcome, we can do it!” Isabel said, raising a fist into the air.
“Good motto,” I murmured, thinking through strategies.
“You should have one. Get the team fired up,” Isabel said, jabbing me in the shoulder. She turned to Scarlet. “Do you have one?”
“Be gay, do crimes?” Scarlet said. “Does that work? That’s a motto right?”
“I like Cyfeillach trwy Grwydro,” Ori said. He was passing an inkball from one hand to the other.
“What does that mean?” Scarlet asked.
