Alexa Drey- Hero Hunting

by Ember Lane

  “Okay,” I said. “So, what does The Thief need us to do?”

  We’d all decided not to call The Thief “Pog,” though with Lazmador’s description and Cathelina’s assurances, it was quite obvious to me now that they were the same person. I still didn’t get it all. It appeared to me that Cathelina knew a whole lot more than she was giving away, but then I had to accept that this manipulation had started way back in a cave on top of Lincoln’s abandoned castle.

  “The Thief is going to break into The Temple of the One True God. He must steal what he must steal, then make his escape. While we know exactly how he’s going to escape, it appears there is no route planned for Thadius Hawkwind’s escape, and that worries us.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if Thadius dies, it’ll be war—simple and straight. Thadius Hawkwind is Digberts’ mad uncle. The gnome king would never forgive that betrayal.”

  “Hold on, hold on,” said Sedge. “Aren’t the gnomes trapped in this chaos portal?”

  Jade shrugged. “Let’s hope so.” She shivered. “The alternative doesn’t bear thinking about.”

  “Getting back to what The Thief needs from me, and Sedge, and the others.”

  “He needs you to start the diversions so that he can pick the pocket. Lazmador can’t do it, but he can help you. If this all goes wrong, his followers and him still have to scratch around for a living.”

  “A diversion?”

  “Let me show you the route,” Jade said and sprang up, running down the pitch of the roof and jumping across to the next, quickly scaling it and settling on its ridge.

  Sedge looked at me. “You got a jumping skill?”

  “Nope.”

  “Me either. After you.” Sedge grinned.

  I stood, took a breath and ran, instantly engaging my running skill, bounding down the tiles and leaping across. I landed halfway up the other side, flexing my legs, cushioning my landing to silence it, then skipping up to Jade.

  Congratulations! You performed that like a cat pouncing on a wary bird. You are granted Stealth level 5. The more you practice, the faster you’ll advance. From level 5 you can infuse your shadow with mana to blend in better, to blend in faster. You can use shadow mana to become the night.

  I had to try me a bit of that!

  Sedge barely made the roof, but soon crawled up and was beside us.

  “Can we remember that some of us spent a while grinding out skills like swords, knives, and sneak, rather than running. What kind of a world has running as a skill anyway? Might as well have breathing, eating, or peeing—on second thought, that’d be awesome—”

  “Sedge?” I asked.

  His grin was back.

  We ran the roofs all the way to the merchant quarter. You could instantly tell we were in a wealthier area. Each building had its own garden surrounding it, and the roads were perfect circles.

  “The wealthier the merchant, the closer he or she is to the city center,” Jade explained. “We avoided numerous patrols by scooting over the roofs, but for obvious reasons, this is as far as we can go by that method.”

  She loped down the edge of the roof we were on, looked one way and then the other and dropped down to the road below. Sedge scurried down next and then I followed. Like everything in this land, Sedge had fared better the more we jumped until it looked like second nature to him.

  Jade was holding a gate open. She ushered us into a neatly tended back garden. Even in the moonlight, I could see it was tropical, with palms and cacti and lush, long grass. She led us up to the back of the dwelling, then opened a door and disappeared inside.

  The place smelled musty like a library. We filed through a narrow kitchen, no more than a wood countertop, a pail, and a fire pit with a large brick flue. From what I’d seen before it was quite the height of opulence. Past that was a small office with a desk, and shelves of what I assumed were ledgers.

  “It’s Lazmador’s bookstore—at least, that’s what this place masquerades as. In truth, it’s where he sells his…gathered…wares and auctions his favors. Wizards, in particular, don’t like getting called out for their more…lurid…sides.”

  Jade unraveled her mask, took out her sack and stowed the scarf away. She pulled down three sand-colored robes from a row of hooks.

  “Merchantmen’s livery—it’ll be our cover. Most wizards and scholars take their deliveries in the evenings. It displays their dedication to their neighbors. Lazmador’s people should have left us a few packages to spread around. It’ll show you the area you need to disrupt.”

  “And just how am I going to do that?”

  Jade shrugged. “The Thief said you’d come up with something.”

  What? I thought. How in hell’s name am I going to do that?

  “Piece of cake,” Sedge said. “From what I’ve seen, these folk are scared of their own shadows.”

  I looked at Sedge with a newly found love.

  We each donned a cloak, pulled the vast hoods up, then marched through to the shop itself. True to her word, the parcels were on the counter, each with an address scribed on it.

  “Perfect,” Jade said. “Nicely spread out over a thin corridor. Should give you a good route to muddle.” She passed one to me, one to Sedge, then we walked through the shop.

  As I walked out of the door, Jade’s arm sprang across me and stopped me in my tracks. A column of city guards marched past, six or seven thick, ten deep. Jade grinned at me. “Wait for it…”

  A single bell strike rang out.

  “Did you make the count?” Jade asked.

  “Count?”

  “Those were the periphery guard. It takes them exactly a one hundred count to walk a tenth circle of this outer ring. If you want to time anything exactly, use them. You are due south if the bell hits as they pass. It signifies the need to defend against Slaughtower and Ruse. A count of two hundred and fifty tells you that you are west, and so on.”

  “Got it,” Sedge said.

  I gave him a quick look. His eyes were afire with excitement.

  “Tell you what, Sedge. You work out how this is all gonna play, and I’ll come up with the fireworks.”

  “You got more magic now?”

  “I’ll be able to make something work.”

  “Sweet,” he muttered. “Lead the way, Jade.”

  We walked along the outer road, then ducked up the next. Jade described the roads as a wheel, where all the spokes were interconnected. I still thought of it as a spider’s web and nothing I’d heard about the place had changed my mind. Another curious fact I noticed was that the people walking around became larger and heavier as we moved toward the city center. Jade told me that size was a reflection of wealth here, and that Lord Merran was as big as a fattened hog. The other thing I noticed was the number of taverns. By the time we’d moved a few roads in, they were nearly every other building or at least every forth. There were raucous ones, quiet ones, some had music blaring out, and others had tables on the streets.

  All the while we walked, Sedge’s eyes never stopped roaming. He’d be looking up at the roofs one minute, at the road the next, and scanning across the buildings in a sweeping motion after.

  “Where does all the sewage go?” he suddenly asked, and I instantly thought about it. Merrivale had stunk, certain parts of Zybond had too. But here, the sewage seemed to be figured out.

  “Pipes under the roads. They flow straight into the Gilden Pools, right under the city.”

  “The Gilden Lode?” I asked, and Jade stopped in her tracks.

  “What do you know about The Gilden Lode?”

  “I…was spawned there,” I said.

  “You were born under The Temple of the One True God?”

  There, on that street, now in sight of The Gardens of Reflection, I decided that a lot of these strands I kept coming across must be linked. That this couldn’t all be chance but must be some kind of mess of strands, and if I could just link them all, I might just stand a chance at understanding this game.


  “Can you access The Gilden Lode?”

  Jade shrugged. “Maybe. All I know is that it’s under here, and that the Gilden Pools heat this whole city. Why do you think the lake holds back the snow? Why do you think the temperature is like a summer’s day in Atremeny? The Gilden pumps supply all.”

  Pumps? I thought.

  “You mean to tell us that there’s some form of vast energy source under that tower over there?” Sedge asked.

  “It is told that the Gilden Lode is bountiful, that it spills its mana and that mana lets everything live—the trees, the mountains, the elves, dwarves, demons, and every living creature you see. It is said that if the Gilden Lode fails, all ends.”

  All ends, I thought. That sounded fairly final.

  Jade led us farther toward The Temple of the One True God, but we stopped shy of the Pantheons and delivered our packages to their intended addresses. We moved through the city with ease, no guard nor mauve-flashed wizard even questioning our intent. It was as though we were too lowly to bother with, and not once was my concealment tested, not once did we get more than a cursory look of disdain. After returning to Lazmador’s bookstore, we changed and skipped the roofs, and we were soon back underground, back in Lazmador’s thiefdom. Jade left, anxious to help Sam look after Draylane—apparently the mad wizard took a good few hours to recover from his temporary insanity.

  We were told to report straight back to Lazmador’s elevated hut, but I was in no particular hurry—the man was too bigheaded for me, though I did want to talk with Cathelina. I felt she’d manipulated where the truth would have served just as well. As we made our way through the makeshift town, I was more than relieved when Sedge pulled me toward a ramshackle hut.

  “Recognize a bar in any world, in any game,” he told me as we ducked in.

  Bar was a bit of an overstatement. It had a counter—about ten feet long and cutting across the back of the place, a couple of tables—in the loosest sense of the word—and some stools. An odd-looking creature was leaning on the counter. It had one arm crooked and was resting its shiny cheek on its—hand was a bit of a stretch—more like claw. Two bulbous, black eyes looked like they were made up of shining sheets of honeycomb, and its mouth was constantly moving as though it had a bit of gum stuck on its teeth—if indeed it had any. Two large antennae swept toward us, each with an eye on the end of its stalk. It looked us up and down.

  “Both of you need to use the showers,” it said, and withdrew its inquiring eyes. “And they say us bugs are filthy. You wanting a drink, or you gonna stand there gawking all night? What’s the matter, you never seen a mutated roach before?”

  “Yes and no,” Sedge said, sliding onto a stool and then looking around the bar, presumably for a price list. “What’s your specialty?”

  “Puking on a slab of meat and then letting it ferment for a few days before serving it with a twist of lime. You want one? Did a bottle the day before yesterday.”

  I felt my stomach cramp.

  “How about something a bit more mainstream,” Sedge suggested.

  “Ten-day-old, oak-barreled, juiced leftovers?”

  Silence.

  “Bwah!” said the bug. “Just messin’, you want some whiskey?”

  “Made of?”

  It scratched its mandibles—the sound was horrendous. “The usual.”

  We didn’t ask. It poured a couple of tumblers of some clear, brown liquid, and a huge chitin arm passed them over, gripped in fierce pincers.

  “Want any nuts?”

  We politely declined. Sedge leaned in.

  “What was it with you and the Golden Load place?”

  “Gilden Lode,” I told him, then filled him in on the parts of my start I’d left out.

  “So, what are you thinking?” He took a swig of his drink, clicked his teeth together and squeezed his eyes tightly shut before bellowing “Garrgh! That’s stern stuff. Another couple.” He signaled the bug.

  “It’s The Gilden Lode—it confuses me. I’ve seen it firsthand—at least I’ve seen a bit of it. It’s like a giant cavern with glowing layers of gold lava throughout. There’s a trail that winds down to a luminescent river called Endings.” I paused, took a slurp of my own drink, then tried to hold the top of my head on as my brain nearly exploded. “What is this?” I asked, gasping.

  “You don’t want to know,” the bug told us. We didn’t press the matter.

  “So,” Sedge said, scratching his head. “Again, what are you thinking?”

  But I shook my head. Trouble was, I just didn’t know. It felt like something was wrong, but that was just it. It was just a feeling. Something didn’t sit right about the whole thing—the Endings River in particular. “It’s the slabs,” I said.

  “The slabs?”

  “When you died for the second, did you wake on the exact same slab?”

  Sedge stared past me. “The same slab, yes, I think so. I wasn’t paying much attention, just hopped off as soon as I could and swam back to the surface through the clepsydra thing. What are you getting at?”

  “I took a boat, with a character called Billy Long Thumb. At the time I was a starry-eyed newbie taking in this breathtaking land. I remember the ridges, the alcoves, the individuality of the catacombs—of each slab. Both times I died, I’m sure I ended up on the same slab.”

  “So?”

  I shook my head; my mind was a train of thought that I couldn’t complete. I just didn’t know the end of it. But I knew it was important. It was like the solution you’d been searching for all day, the one that eluded you right up until you were just falling asleep, but in the morning, you just knew you’d solved it, not how. I knew I had the answer in me. I just couldn’t access it.

  I laughed to make a joke of my ramblings, but Sedge didn’t join in.

  “Keep thinking those thoughts,” he muttered. “I think you might have something. For a game that’s supposed to teach us how to survive on the next planet, it sure does delight in making your life hell.” He slugged his drink down. “Anyway, what kind of attack magic have you got? Because if life’s taught me one thing it’s ‘You can only solve what’s in front of you.’ For us, it’s helping your friend Pog. The rest we can address another day.”

  The front of the bar rattled a bit, and the little girl who’d met us at the bottom of the ladder poked her head around its door. “There you are,” she said, and walked up to Sedge with her hand out. “Bronze.”

  “What for?”

  “I’ve got a message from Lazmador.”

  Sedge passed her a coin. “The message?”

  “Lazmador’s heard from The Thief.”

  “And?”

  “Silver.”

  Sedge passed over the coin.

  “He’s ready. It all happens tomorrow at noon.”

  28

  Too Close To Call

  We’d rushed back to Lazmador’s. He had a few other folks there: names that were barked at us by way of introduction, but just didn’t sink in. The Thief had indeed sent them a message, or rather Pog had. I had to remember it was little Pog, and not this persona that appeared to be running the whole show. He needed to escape from the Tower of the One True God and wanted details of our exit strategy for him. Lazmador paced up and down, kicking his cross-legged lieutenants out of the way.

  “I don’t need to tell you what rests on our affording this character with a convenient escape.”

  Sedge cleared his throat and asked what Lazmador’s reward was. A fair question, I thought.

  “The opportunity to earn enough gold to end all this,” Lazmador said, and swept his arm about.

  It was about then that I heard Mezzerain’s growl. I stood and looked out of the hut’s door.

  “You’re not truly expecting me to climb up that flimsy thing,” he said, with almost a smile on his face.

  “Mezz!” I shouted, and scurried down the ladder, soon in his arms. Star was walking toward us from the camp with a very nervous-looking Glenwyth in toe.

&nb
sp; “What kind of a bug was that?” she asked.

  “We heard you were in the bar, so we went there first,” Star told me.

  I pushed Mezzerain away and ran to them, hugging them both.

  “How did you get out of the embassy?” I asked.

  Star looked puzzled. “We weren’t under any more surveillance than usual, but this place runs under most buildings—our spies use it to travel the city. I hear we’re in action. We gotta plan?”

  I pointed back up. “Sedge has.”

  Star looked up. “Why don’t Glenwyth and I nip up there and look it over while you and Mezzerain spar a bit. He was quite irked you missed this morning—then again, we were halfway up a mountain.”

  “Was that just this morning?”

  Star laughed. “Well, we won’t be getting any sleep tonight, so you best remember it fondly.”

  Mezzerain grinned and walked farther around the cavern away from the makeshift village. “They pile their rubbish this way,” he said.

  “Down here?” I asked, skipping off after him, pulling my sack out and calling for my staff.

  “No sneaking up on me,” Mezzerain said, just as I readied it for a vicious swipe.

  He wasn’t wrong. It took us a good half an hour, but as we neared, the stench grew stronger and stronger. Pile upon pile of waste soon came into view, reaching for the cavern’s ceiling. The stink was overpowering, the rats, abundant, and the piles…moved.

  “So,” Mezzerain said. “The ladder up to the Lowlands Embassy is about four hundred yards that way.” He pointed over the rubbish. “Take it from me, elves don’t like rats or whatever else is rummaging under there, nor do they like bugs. Fragile things, elves.”