I spent the rest of the day with Hollis drilling me on the basics of dual-wielding axes. Which he considered an awful choice of weapons. An axe and shield? Fine. Two daggers? Fine. But two hatchets? The very concept disgusted him ... though he admitted that the approach suited me.
“Especially given your advantages,” he added, after hours of throwing-axe practice.
We retreated to an out-of-the-way corner to explore the limits of my ‘gift.’ He wanted to help me learn how to integrate my smokiness into my melee style--and into my broader combat ability. Tansy joined us, but to my surprise, Hollis refused to let anyone except for the ‘indebted’ ollies watch us practice.
“You can trust your life with anyone in this cellar,” he told me. “I’d bet my life on that. But I’d bet my soul that you can trust we five ollies.”
“So ‘ollies’ is okay to say?” I asked. “I shouldn’t say ‘olifarn?’”
“That’s what caught your ear from what I just said?” he asked.
“Oh, uh, I’ve been wondering.”
He trunk twitched in amusement. “We usually call ourselves ollies, that’s fine. Just don’t call us ‘eliphant,’ and you’re good. That’s like calling humans ‘apes.’”
“Which, yeah,” I said.
“Now back to work,” he told me, and I turned into smoke again.
He whacked at my cloudy form, attempting to contain me, to limit my motion. Well, though really attempting to teach me how to deal with getting violently stirred during combat. I wafted around columns, trying to escape him--and then to resolidify a single hatchet-wielding arm to surprise him with a sudden attack.
I couldn’t pull that off, though. Turning one arm to smoke while the rest of me stayed solid was easy, but turning part of me solid while the rest stayed smoke was impossible.
Hollis insisted on pushing me until I drained my mana completely and I returned to my body with a headache. Then we did normal axe forms until I recovered, and after that we repeated the same exercise, except with him and Tansy both stomping on my cloud of smoke. Which helped focus on moving isolated parts of myself--and also made me wonder if I could return to my body at any point in my diffused cloud, not just in the dead center.
Maybe. Not yet, but eventually. Which would mean that if I kept a thread of smoke active, I could basically ‘blink’ back and forth along its length.
Eventually.
Hollis also tested my webtouch awareness, which he’d noticed almost immediately. Apparenlty he’d tested my ability to sense behind my self without me even noticing. At first he’d suspected another gem, because he’d heard of a ‘danger sense’ type gem. I’d told him it was something else, though, and despite his curiosity he didn’t pry.
Tansy, on the other hand, did pry. I didn’t know how much to admit, because being a summoned creature from another plane of existence was a bit much. So eventually I told her that I’d bonded with a gem of ‘sheathed smoke,’ which meant that I sheathed my weapons and myself in smoke, and I’d also gained a smokey awareness of my surroundings. Which didn’t make sense, but: magic.
When we finished, I collapsed exhausted onto a bench for a while. A bunch of infenti came and introduced themselves, and one was named ‘Chetty.’ After we chatted for a bit Ia sked her to get information about Erdinand and the prison.
She was happy to oblige. Not because, like the ollies, she felt indebted, to me. Instead, I suspected that she saw me as a weapon she could point in the direction of the Six Coves forces. Then she’d stand back and enjoy the bloodshed. Which wasn’t completely wrong.
After that I bathed and ate and slept and ... well, fell into a pretty comfortable routine.
For the next few days, I trained hard, I ate loads, and I slept deeply.
One time when I woke, Chettur banged into my room and hurled a pair of well-crafted boots at me.
I thanked her, and she said, “Ga! Stupid boy.”
I chatted with Princess every evening, to keep her engaged and help her shake off her continued exhaustion
I learned a few dicing games from the infenti, and a few pebble games from Tansy, who was one of the top ten fighters, though not quite top five.
I learned a board game, too, called Shores, in which the players needed to fortify the coasts of their islands. At first I expected the game to involve defending bridges and defeating invasions, but no, you needed to defeat some kind of horrible ‘Plague.’
Except when I said that aloud, one of the infentis scoffed. “Defeat a Plague? Ha. We wish.”
“You can’t defeat a Plague,” Tansy told me. “You just try not to lose every single person in your care.”
“It’s a game of attrition,” the infenti told me. “And survival.”
“So how do you win?” I asked.
“By being the last to die,” he said.
“Well, that’s cheery,” I said.
“Turning reality into a game helps us face the horror.” Another infenti raised her mug of ale. “That and drinking. Okay! Who goes first?”
The game was like a multi-player Go, except with the goal of protecting your section of the board, called your ‘shore.’ A killing ‘plague’ spread from a coastline, but there wasn’t much of a story considering what the infenti had said about ‘reality.’
She’d been serious, though. That much was clear. So over the next day or two, I asked a bunch of people a bunch of casual questions about the plagues. And in the interest of brevity, this is what I learned--and what dropped on me like a fucking piano on Wile E. Coyote’s head.
* * *
Every so often, I learned, the still, quiet ocean begins to bubble beyond the coast of a random island.
The mana-rich water roils violently.
Usually, nobody notices. (So you might wonder how anybody even knows this happens. That’s what I wondered, and everyone looked at me like an idiot. This was a culture tale, patched together from the broken stories of broken survivors on islands that only drifted within boating distance of each other once a year. You don’t interrogate those tales, you accept them.)
Anyway. The water roils, and later--a week, a month, who knows?--one of the Plagues attacks.
Except the Plagues aren’t viruses, they’re not diseases carried by water or air or contact.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
They’re creatures.
One looks like a slug bigger than the biggest cathedral, with acid slime and impenetrable skin.
One is a jellyfish that hovers among the clouds, lashing downward with ten thousand murderous tentacles.
One is a fleshy bubble that births ten thousand smaller fleshy bubbles that swarm and kill and eat.
Another is just the stench of burning hair, followed by half the people on the island murdering the other half in a frenzy.
Some are weaker, some stronger. Some are just what they call ‘a blood wake,’ which is when an island is struck a glancing blow by a Plague that is targeting a different island completely. Still, all are catastrophic. Whatever their form, the monstrous Plagues burn with the desire to destroy islands, to slaughter every inhabitant. They attack brutally, mindless and murderous, for no reason, with no cause, hungry to rip peoples’ lives apart.
Apparently some believe there is only one Plague, which changes shape. Some believe there are dozens. Some believe the Plagues kill until their appetite is sated, but most agree that they retreat when they suffer enough damage. So armies and the gemmed join together to injure them, even though a Plague cannot be defeated. And they will not stop until every person--every infenti and crachen, every ollie and human and strider and traguld--is wiped from the face of the realm.
“Is this myth?” I asked Hollis. “Or is this true?”
“It’s true,” he told me. “When I lived on Larkspur, I met people who’d fought a Plague. One of the weaker ones. I saw the scars on the earth.”
“Damn,” I said.
“And I’ve fought blood wakes, myself. They’re more common. In the wake of a Plague attack on some far-off island, terrible creatures crawl from the surf.”
“Damn,” I said again. “But, uh, that’s never happened here? To Waldhill?”
“Blood wakes? Sure. Two in the past twenty years. But Plagues themselves? They usually target the larger islands, and the continents. That’s why continents are frantic to grow stronger. The larger the landmass, the more often Plagues attack. So like Krelv needs to grow powerful enough to damage a Plague, to drive it away. They do that by gaining population, which attracts more Plagues.”
“Vicious cycle,” I said.
“Extremely. But Waldhill’s probably safe from the Plagues for now. Focus on the problem at hand.”
The problem at hand was in his hand: a crossbow with blunted bolts that he fired at me while I sparred with Tansy, training me to dodge them, and blink them into my domain. Yeah, he was serious about teaching me to survive.
Anyway, that’s what I learned about this new world.
What dropped on me like a piano came later that night:
QUEST: Stop the Plagues.
REWARD: A second chance at life, after dying tragically to an SUV, in a magical world of adventure and danger and love and pain and friendship.
QUEST: This is why you travelled here, Alex.
QUEST: This is the quest.
QUEST: This is the reason you are here. This is the reason you are alive. This is the reason.
QUEST: Stop the Plagues, Alex. End the Plagues.
How? I asked in my mind.
No answer.
They don’t even come to Waldhill! I said in my mind.
No answer.
Well ... well what tier are they? I asked in my mind.
And that time, a notification answered: Sorrow.
* * *
Maryne joined me for breakfast every day. Just the two of us. She’d clearly told the others to stay away, though at first I didn’t understand why. Yet by day three I found myself enjoying the quiet, undemanding intervals. She didn’t judge. She was only ten years older than I was--in her thirties--but she had a soothing maternal air about her. One that my mother completely lacked, which probably explained why I appreciated it so much.
So on the fourth day, I told her everything.
Well, almost.
I didn’t admit that the notification had tasked me with ending the Plagues. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that, and I suspected that it sounded insanely grandiose. Like, “Sure, I can’t beat your husband in a spar without using my magic powers, but I’m still going to defeat a creature that destroys entire armies.”
I did tell her about levels and tiers and quests, though, and she’d never heard of any of them. Not a word, not a whisper. She hadn’t heard of the Billowing Ones or domains or boons, either.
Still, she listened to my story with her bright, placid attention, resting her big hand on mine sympathetically. We talked for an hour, and I felt like a weight had lifted from my soul.
She chased Hollis off with a glance when he approached, then said, “Don’t tell anyone else this. Not even my husband.”
“Oh,” I said, and must’ve looked surprised.
“If he’s captured,” she explained, “they’ll interrogate him. Well, they’d interrogate everyone here, trying to extract secrets. They’d expect Hollis to know things, but not me. I’m just a wife and a cook. They’d never expect that I’d know anything important. I don’t see how anyone could take advantage of knowing about your past, but ...” She squeezed my hand. “There are mighty, terrible people in the world. Keep this between us. And, er, Princess.”
The scar on my wrist glimmered briefly with a rainbow of colors.
“You look after him,” Maryne said, addressing Princess.
The scar pulsed once more before dulling.
“She seems lovely,” Maryne told me.
“She’s like you,” I said, “except flighty and bratty and with a dozen eyes.”
When I finally stood from the table, Tansy pulled me downstairs for another training session. She was a fierce fighter, despite only being level five. Like most ollies, she didn’t bother with shields. She was the smallest ollie in the cellar, at only like six foot five, but she wielded a two-handed greatsword that was taller than me and must’ve weighed twenty pounds. Which wasn’t nearly the heaviest sword there.
Most Sixers were infenti, so I mostly practiced against the infenti members of the resistance, when Hollis wasn’t tormenting me. And I improved freakishly quickly. Which confused me. I should advance by leveling, not by training, right? So I hadn’t expected to get better until my quest finished and my ‘minor expoi’ kicked in. Yet after four days of intensive training, with the help of my ‘aptitude,’ I was at the same level but in a different league.
My strikes hit harder, my deflections came faster. My intuitive sense of my hatchets’ positioning blossomed. I felt the orientation of the blades without hesitation or effort--and when I threw them at moving targets, my blades often chunked into the target.
Not every time, but clsoer.
After I finished another circuit of training--fighting Hollis with smoke-form to exhaust my mana, fighting multiple infenti without smoke-form, defending against Tansy while practicing throwing--I rinsed off at the bucket and grabbed a hunk of dried fruit.
A couple of the guys were sparring, but I ignored them and sat beside Chetty at a bench. I had a hard time believing she was the old woman’s daughter--she was just so normal. At least for a dark-green demon woman. Also, she was in charge of intelligence-gathering for this section of the local resistance.
Not that they called themselves ‘the resistance.’ They didn’t call themselves anything, which annoyed me. C’mon, brand yourselves! When I asked what they were called, they said, “Our names.”
Anyway, Chetty gathered news of the invaders from a web of informants. Which meant from pretty much all the locals in town--servants, shopkeepers, everyone. Her people were already alert for any news of the Sixer plan to hack down the spire, which meant they were already spying on Wren and those around her. At my request, she’d also focused on information about Erdinand.
As I ate the dried fruit, Chetty told me that nothing had changed with Erd. He was still locked away. Not in any imminent danger. No good opportunities to stage a rescue. Nothing had changed with anything, really.
“So you’re just training and waiting for the right time to strike?” I asked, a little dubiously.
After days with them, I still couldn’t tell if they were an actual guerrilla resistance or just cosplaying one. Or maybe they simply weren’t sharing their strategy with the Random Human Dude who’d showed up out of nowhere.
“Until we know their plan,” Chetty told me, “we cannot know how to undermine it.”
“I’m not sure that’s true. Shouldn’t you try to seize the initiative?”
“We did. Then we lost the war. This time, we’ll let them think they’re unopposed until the very last moment. Then we’ll hit them with everything at once.”
“And what then?” I asked, because wouldn’t the Sixers in the Port simply send reinforcements?
“Then we’ll lose.”
“Oh.”
“But if we time everything perfectly,” she said, “we’ll have a chance to take the broken Ryetown spire into the mountains to hide it from them. And we’ll hope that’s enough to stop them. There’s a chance they can chain us to Six Coves with the other two spires. They might not need ours. But they might.”
“So you’re going to wait until they chop it down?”
She nodded. “And attacking it in transport is the only way we’ll win, even briefly.”
“Won’t the town still suffer?” I asked.
“Yes. There’s danger, especially to the weak and the sick. Like a mana-headache, but worse.”
“Oh. Well, do--“
“Ga!” Chettur whacked her cane on the ground as she approached. “You stop flirting with that stupid boy. I have news.”
“Hello, mother,” Chetty said, utterly calmly.
“You marry her?” Chettur asked me. “Big hips, she give you a dozen babies.”
Chetty ignored her. “You have news?”
“Ga! The news is, you’re too old! Should have married that boy ten years ago. All dried up now like last year’s fig. ” She poked my leg with her cane. “The Sixers know you’re in the city. A human with a shaggy face and two axes.”
“They do? How?”
“You think they told me? No. They announce you have to surrender.”
“Or what, mother?” Chetty asked.
“Or they kill the crachen,” she said.
My heart squeezed. “Erdinand?”
“Public execution,” she said, with a brisk nod. “Tomorrow at sunset. Crack him open like a walnut.”