“Don’t worry,” the voice behind me said softly. “Don’t worry, we’ll help you.”
So I didn’t bamf my hatchets from my domain and decapitate a motherfucker.
Instead, I spun and fired up Intuit, which labeled him: Crachen, Level 4.
“It’s okay, friend,” the crachen told me, soothingly. “It’s okay, we’ll help you.”
“Why?” the petite infenti standing behind him asked. “Why will we help him? This is going to bite us in the ass.”
“Don’t listen to Big Sid,” the crachen told me. “Her cry is worse than her claws.”
“I’ll shove my claws in your shell and dig,” the infenti grumbled.
“I’m Erdinand,” the crachen told me, his voice still gentle. “And you’re on the run, aren’t you? From the Port? From someone, at least. That’s why you’re out here all alone and ...” He gestured to me with his pincer. “... a little worse for wear.”
“What’re you talking about?” I asked him, equally quietly. “These are my very best rags.”
He giggled. “It’s good you can still joke.”
“Yeah, it’s great,” Big Sid the tiny infenti said. “We can laugh and laugh and laugh as they shoot us full of arrows for helping a runaway.”
“I have a plan!” Erdinand announced.
Big Sid turned her pink eyes on me. “He has a plan. You know what that means? That means we’ll be lucky if they just use arrows.”
“He’s human, right?” Erdinand turned to me. “You’re definitely human. Right?”
“I admit it,” I said, getting a better look at these two.
Erdinand’s shell--if that’s what you called a crachen’s carapace--gleamed a jade green in the sunset. The gap between the top half of his clamshell head and the bottom half was slightly off-kilter, which gave him permanent lopsided grin that seemed to suit his personality. Or maybe that was common with crachen, how would I know? He stood a couple inches above five feet tall and was carrying a satchel half-full of greenery that almost matched his shell.
Half-full of the fragrant bush I’d crawled beside, actually.
The infenti was even shorter than him, which considering her nickname must’ve been fairly unusual. She was red-skinned like a proper devil, with two straight horns and an extremely shapely figure considering her height. She, however, didn’t seem to have a permanent grin.
Instead, she bared her fangs at the crab-man while he spoke.
INTUIT: Infenti, Level 4.
“Well, everyone knows that all the best servants are human!” Erdinand said, ignoring her expression. “So we’ll grab him some clothes and put him with us on the servants’ wagon and nobody will notice.”
“Someone will notice,” Big Sid said.
“Nobody who matters. And anyway, humans all look the same. He’s a dead ringer for the cook.”
“The cook is shorter, skinnier, and like a decade older.”
“Yeah, but they both have face-hair! I though he was the cook for a second, except for what he was wearing. Um ...” Erdinand opened his pincer wide. “Oh! Oh! Oh, I know. We’ll say he’s the guy!”
Big Sid sighed. “Which guy, Erd?”
“The one who didn’t show up. The last servant, the man-of-all-work. We’ll say he was late, so he followed us, and now he finally caught up.”
She rubbed her face with a red, clawed hand. “The only problel with that that it’s ... stupid.”
“Maybe, but nobody will care enough to ask any questions. And what do you want to do? Leave him out here alone, in the cold, barefoot, alone, in rags, to starve, alone?”
“I mean--“ She shot me an apologetic look. “Yes?”
Erdinand giggled again. “See? You can joke too, Sid!”
“There’s another option,” she told him. “Like, there are people who’d immediately report this guy to the Sixers, right? Then they’d whip him and drag him home. Right?”
“Yeah, but--“
“So let’s not do that,” Big Sid said. “Let’s not turn him in.”
He elbowed me like we were sharing a joke. “Of course we won’t!“
“Because we’re good, kind people,” she continued. “Or at least, you’re a good, kind, fucking idiot. So we won’t do that. We’ll just pretend we never saw him.”
“That sounds okay to me,” I said.
“Stop playing around,” Erdinand told Big Sid, with humor still in his voice. “Okay, you two stay here and I’ll get the clothes.”
Then he scuttled away through the bushes, back toward the wagons, his green shell blending in the dusk.
The infenti sighed, then told me, “He’s hopeless.”
“Seems nice to me.”
“Completely hopeless. Cockeyed bloody optimist. He lives in this happy world where everyone is good and nice--so you better not mess with him.”
“I won’t,” I said.
She showed me her teeth. “Or I will stick my horns into your eyes and twist.”
“Then I definitely won’t,” I said.
She was only level four, so it wasn’t like she could follow through with the threat, but she was also trying to protect her friend, so I sympathized with her despite her hostility. I wondered about her and the crab-guy both being level four, though. They seemed around my age, or their racial equivalents. Like they were adults, but hadn’t been for that long. So maybe level four was average for your early to mid-twenties? Like, if you didn’t get tossed into a magical level-up tutorial and given a gem and ... everything else?
I looked past Big Sid to the soldiers in the camp. Most were level five, a handful were level six, but one huge scarred ollie was level eight. Huh. So maybe level three for teens, four or five for normal adults, level six to eight for veterans and then over 10 for gemmed? I wondered if every 10 levels was a significant step up or something, moving to a higher tier, like maybe that meant more than a normal level-up. That reminded me of games I’d played. Except I was gemmed and just level six.
On the other hand, I was literally an anomaly.
I frowned. Why was I wondering about levels while I was apparently in imminent danger of being whipped and dragged ‘home.’ Well, good luck with that second part.
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“So, uh,” I said. “Sixers means people from Six Coves?”
Big Sid eyed me. “The fuck else would it refer to?”
“Mandrills?”
“Hah,” she said. “Sixers are greedy apes, no offense.”
“Yeah. Uh, why would they drag me home?”
“What do you mean?”
“What do you mean, what do I mean? Why would they drag me home? The Six Coves people, not the mandrills.”
“Where’ve you been? When Six Coves invaded, they imposed martial law. We’re not allowed to leave the towns or villages. You know this.”
“Sure, but I don’t live in a town or village.”
She squinted at me. “Outlying areas count. Long as you’re close enough that you contribute to the spire. The hell is wrong with you?”
“I don’t know where to start.”
“Start by telling me how you don’t know that.”
“Oh. I, um, crossed a bridge a while back. Got stranded here. Been sort of ... by myself for too long.”
“Fucking Erdinand,” she grumbled. “That shellhead could find a lost puppy by just falling out of bed.”
“You like puppies!” Erdinand said, emerging from the shadows. “Everyone likes puppies. They’re puppies.” He shoved a bundle of clothes at me. “Put these on! What’s your name? I’m Erdinand and that’s Big Sid.”
“My name is Bellsyd,” she told me, “but someone started calling me Big Sid, and it stuck.”
“It’s funny because she’s so little,” Erdinand explained to me, as I stripped off my filthy clothes.
“Oh!” I said. “I get it now.”
He looked as pleased as a person without much face could look. “I couldn’t find shoes for you, um ... what’s your name?”
“Alex.”
“Are you from Ryetown or the Port?”
“I’m from Prenzin,” I said.
“What?” One of his eye stalks extended toward me. “No, I mean what town. Like, there’s Ryetown. That’s the town we’re heading to. Then there’s Mical and Varley’s Mill--and the Port is the port, the biggest town on Waldhill.”
“He knows what a town is,” Big Sid told him.
“So you’re ... from somewhere else?”
“Yeah, a different island. Called Prenzin.”
“Oh! Huh. Well, if anyone asks say you’ve been living in the Port. Here’s a wet rag to scrub off some of the--oh! You’re clean, it’s just your clothes that’re so dirty. You bathe, that’s good. Humans need to, I guess, which is a little weird.” He paused, then raised his pincer dramatically. “Also, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but everyone can see your face. It’s right out there in the open.”
“Ignore him,” Big Sid told me. “He thinks that’s a joke.”
Erdinand cleared his throat. “So. Alex. Tie this around your chest, that’s a servant sash, it means you’re part of young Lord Usim’s household, at least temporarily.”
“That’s who’s in the fancy wagon?” I asked, tying the sash. “Lord Usim?”
“Him and his governess and sometimes his personal guards though they most ride.”
“So we’re all servants?”
“I’m a groom,” Erdinand announced. “And a houndskeeper, too, and I’m learning to be a falconer, and Big Sid is a lady’s maid.”
“I’m not a fucking lady’s maid.”
“You’re a maid for the lady.”
“I mean, yeah, but that’s not what I am.”
They bickered while I dressed in the drab pants and a frilly shirt of a servant. Then I pulled a deeply dorky hat onto my head, a sort of fringed bonnet and said, “How come you’re not wearing hats?”
“Horns,” Big Sid, pointing at her forehead. “And shell. Hats are for humans and ollies.”
“I don’t know how you walk around with that hair,” Erdinand said, stretching an eyestalk toward me. “Like a million tiny tentacles that don’t do anything. Okay, you’d best hustle back before you’re missed, Big Sid. Don’t worry, I’ve got a plan.”
“Don’t get me killed you overgrown oyster,” she said, and slipped away.
“She pretends she’s grumpy but really she’s only cranky,” Erdinand said, then handed me an empty satchel. “Fill this with sweetweed for the horses.”
He chattered at me for ten minutes while we filled satchels with buds from the fragrant bush. Then we walked openly across the camp to the horses. We fed them the sweetweed, we brushed them, we refilled the buckets at the stream. We watered to the horses, then I pretended to check them for ... horse things, I didn’t know what exactly ... while Erdinand ambled over to the fire.
He returned with two wooden bowls of chicken stew and a big hunk of coarse, grainy bread with a slightly-charred crust. The stew was thick, with lots of chopped root vegetables that weren’t quite potatoes--more like turnips or rutabaga--and a shitload of thyme and chunks of chicken.
SUCCESS! Civilization? Close enough, but that’s definitely a warm meal!
REWARD: Minor expoi. So close to gaining another level.
SUPPORT: Levels don’t always indicate combat prowess. Often, yes. But a level nine baker isn’t a deadly wielder of the colander and the rolling pin. And you are uncharacteristically correct that every tenth level, moving to a higher tier, is substantially more significant.
Support? Why the hell had that popped up? And what did it mean? Not the sentence, I understood the sentence, and frankly I wasn’t surprised that levels didn’t indicate much. I’d killed things over my level; they weren’t an accurate reflection of my chance to win a fight. What I didn’t know was, was that what the ‘Support’ boon did? Gave me helpful hints? Or ... unhelpful hints? And why had one suddenly appeared? Why tell me that, of all things? I had a thousand questions, and roughly nine hundred and ninety nine of them were far more important that ‘do levels always indicate combat prowess?’
I thought about that as I wiped my bowl clean with my bread. Erdinand called greetings and jokes to the other servants, who responded to him without looking twice at me. Maybe because all humans looked the same, or maybe because they saw a guy in servant’s clothes mopping up his stew beside Erdinand, and that was the exact opposite of noteworthy.
Anyway, after we finished eating, we started repairing tack and patching saddlebags. Considering Eridnand only had one hand with fingers--the other was a pincer with three mobile pincer-tips--I was surprised at dextrous he was.
Then Big Sid walked past us, muttering, “I’ve mentioned Alex while I changed. How he joined us late and I don’t like him.”
“You complained about him?” Erdinand his eyes somehow looking cross. “Sid!”
She showed him a sharp-toothed smile. “That way nobody got suspicious. I was like, ‘Ugh, have you met the new guy, Alex? He showed up late then kept talking to me. He’s on the prowl for some horned loving.’”
“You did not say that!”
“Now when anyone sees him, they’ll think, ‘oh, there’s that human trying to get with Bellsyd,’ instead of ‘who in the tide is he?’ Here.”
She dropped a pair of shoes on the ground and strolled away. I watched her go, because she’d changed into a dress that was flowing and clinging at the same time. Really snug around the hips. As a general thing, I didn’t ogle undersized demonesses, but I’d been alone too long, and maybe I was on the prowl for some horned loving.
“She cleans up nice,” I said, moving my gaze back to Erdinand.
“Oh, she has to wear that when she’s attending Miss Kathina,” he said, kind of missing my point. “That’s the young Lord’s governess. They usually eat alone, but sometimes Miss Kathina likes Big Sid in attendance for ... I don’t know. Maid stuff. Miss Kathina is gemmed, and Sid wants a gem more than anything, so she treats Miss Kathina sweet as a new lamb, trying to get her approval or support, I guess.”
“She treats her sweet as a lamb?” I snorted. “That doesn’t seem, uh ...”
He giggled again. “Like it’d come naturally to Big Sid? It doesn’t! That’s what so funny. But she has a lot of mana in her, and she’s hoping if she’s polite, she’ll get noticed and maybe eventually, somehow, eventually, gemmed. Six Coves is a bigger island than Waldhill, and with links to Krelv--y’know, the Whetstone?--so they’ve got way more gems than a normal island their size.”
“But they invaded, right?”
“Right,” he said.
“So ... is anyone fighting against them?”
“They tried. We tried. We lost. They’ve got more people and more power. And Big Sid, after we lost she started pretending she doesn’t care about anything except magic, anyway.”
“Huh,” I said.
“And the Sixers aren’t that bad,” Erdinand told me. “As long as you do whatever they tell you.”
“Everyone’s pretty nice if you do what they want.”
“Well, that’s true. Oh! Can you juggle?”
“What? No.”
“Some humans can juggle. Uh, so what can you do?”
“I can sew,” I told him. “And do simple food prep? I’m good at groundskeeping and basic admin.”
His mouthparts moved. “That’s not much, for a servant.”
“Okay, but in my defense I’m better at small engine repair than anyone on a hundred islands, and you should see me surf.”
“Huh?” he said.
“Yeah, it’s not much.”
“Right, so we’ll just give you the shit work,” he said.
“Sounds good,” I said.
What Erdinand meant by ‘shit work,’ it turned out, was mostly laundry, but also literal shit work: emptying the chamberpots from the fancy wagon. Still, I didn’t mind. I didn’t know why I didn’t mind, but I didn’t. Well, partly because I was enjoying being part of a group of people again, and actually socializing. But mostly because I liked being underestimated.
Me? I’m just a weak human servant cleaning poop, no reason to look twice. I don’t have magic hatchets in my domain and a gem that lets me turn into smoke and skin as tough as a crachen. I’m just scrubbing dirty leggings, that’s all.
When I finished wringing the wet clothes, I draped them on the drying line attached to the servants’ wagon. Then I considered joining the other servants at the smaller fire. Instead, I stretched out on the bedroll under the wagon, the one Erdinand had set up for me. I figured it was better to stay in the background a little longer. So I just lay there and listened to them chat.
She didn’t answer.
I continued.
She didn’t respond.