Chapter 41

Spring had made its way over the land before we knew it, and the snow drifts had almost completely melted away at this point, except in areas where they received no direct sunlight all day. Ara and I were taking Dog for a late afternoon walk through town as we accomplished some minor errands while Knick and Hammer were back at the forge trying to finish up a few final knives or swords before we took off for the mountain. We had stopped by the tax collector’s office and paid off Ara’s upcoming taxes a month or so early, much to the deferential tax collectors surprise, but we weren’t going to be in town when they were due, and we hadn’t managed to sell the smithy yet.

I had been discussing the issue with Baron Tilamet, and he had offered to make the sale in my stead since he still felt he owed me a favor. I had ultimately agreed, and Ara and I had stopped by a trustworthy messenger’s office earlier as well. I had paid for a guarded courier to take a couple of packages out to the baron’s mansion for us so we wouldn’t have to spend two hours walking out there and back. The first was a small box that contained the deed to the smithy as well as a letter of permission giving the baron full authority to sell the smithy in my stead.

The second package the baron wouldn’t be expecting. It was a long wooden box containing a shining steel sword and a blade steel dagger. I had put a bit of coin into that project to have the baron’s family seal embossed on the handles of both by the best woodworker in the city. Even with the extra finery on the handles though it still hadn’t taken Knick or Hammer a full day to complete the works. I’d left a small note in the long box that said simply, ‘A sample of the goods I was producing in my forge over the winter, as promised.’

The current plan was to head out at the end of the week, and we were pretty much already prepared to go. The guys were just finishing off the last of the iron ingots and blue heartwood at this point. Knick had a rather sizable stockpile of blade steel knives that we’d be able to sell on the mountain, and Hammer had created a variety of swords, albeit a much smaller number given the increased time they took to make. Still, he’d been knocking out at least one or two a day for the past month, and we had so much stock we could pretty much open a weapon shop if we wanted and cash in hard when we got to The Mountain.

Our gold reserves had grown as well. I had been regularly winning a little bit at a time from Baron Tilamet’s weekly game but never let myself make more than fifty gold at a time and would purposely lose the odd pot to each of the nobles in turn in an effort to keep their opinion of me at least somewhat favorable. I’d also scored an invite to a couple of higher stakes games that I had done quite well at. The last game had cleared me over four hundred gold, and our nest egg was nearing two thousand gold at this point. I’d had a bronze bound locking chest constructed just to hold it all, but it was so heavy when filled with coin that Hammer was the only one who could lift it.

Ara was holding my arm as we strolled through town, down The Mountain Road, on our way back to the smithy, and Dog was cheerfully sniffing at everything he could get near from the radius of the leash I held in my free hand. We stopped briefly to let some children pet the huge dog as he happily licked their faces, causing them to shriek with laughter and disgust. We smiled down at him as the children ran off laughing, and we continued our leisurely stroll.

“I wonder what’s going on?” asked Ara, drawing my attention to a large crowd gathered in the main square of the town up ahead. There was a distinctive platform that had been constructed, standing above the crowd.

A gallows. As we came closer I could see no fewer than five men standing in a line on it with their hands tied behind their backs, and around each of their necks hung a rope that dangled loosely down from a wooden bar above them. As we approached the crowd they parted to let us through with polite bows. My nobility was well established in Lake City at this point, and I was known by sight to many. We reached the front of the crowd just as a gray haired man approaching the end of middle age, with his back to us, walked up the steps to pace solemnly in front of the condemned men. He had the densest cloud of magic I had ever seen, the same dark blue cloud as Baron Tilamet.

So, an air mage then. I had asked the baron what his particular type of magic was over the course of one of our games and had been told that his air magic wasn’t a particularly rare form of magic amongst nobles. Baron Tilamet had indicated that the other baron we were playing with, who had an orange cloud of magic, possessed fire magic that was considerably more rare, though nowhere near as rare as my healing magic.

“These men!” began the air mage. “Are guilty of conspiring to harm a noble! This crime merits the sentence of death! As your city lord, Count d'Lake, it is my duty and my privilege to carry out their punishment!” He spoke loudly, but the words were somehow amplified further and boomed over the entire crowd. I looked around and saw tendrils of that dark blue magic extending from the man out over the crowd, the amplified voice seemed to be coming from them.

“You raped our daughters, you piece of SHIT!” screamed one of the bound men. I guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, I thought to myself with a grimace of disgust as I recalled the count’s son that I’d killed back in Tiga five years ago.

“And yet my actions were well within my rights as a noble. While your actions were not within your rights. Thus you die, peasant.” His arrogantly amused words weren’t amplified this time, but by virtue of being in the front row I could hear him clearly. The amplification came back on as he said, “You have all heard their crimes! Now you will witness their punishment!” The dark blue tendrils of magic above the crowd split into myriad tentacles that snapped down and encircled each and every person watching. I felt a tendril whip down around me and hold me in place so I couldn’t possibly turn away, it disintegrated where it touched my chest and back so it instead wrapped around my elbows, holding me tight. Dog went mad, barking like he’d lost his mind. He strained against the leash as he tried to get at the noble binding me, it was all I could do to hold on. A couple of the tentacles of magic attempted to tie Dog up as well, but they seemed to slip ineffectually off of him.

Count d’Lake held up a hand and snapped his fingers. At the very moment he snapped his fingers he used a tentacle of air magic to pull the lever at the side of the gallows, and trap doors behind him opened up under each of the condemned. They dropped through and, as they reached the end of their respective ropes, came to a sudden stop. I heard a crack and three of the men went limp. Two of the men weren’t that lucky though, and their bound legs kicked in a panic as they strangled slowly. The count was staring at Dog as he barked furiously at him. The men slowly succumbed to strangulation, and urine dripped from their boots as they died. Dog never ceased his barking and snarling for an instant.

The count created a dark blue platform of magic that would be invisible to everyone else here, stepped off the gallows onto the platform, and slowly floated down to a stop on the ground in front of me. “You should learn to properly control your pet, boy.” the count growled at me in an irritated tone.

As I opened my mouth to respond, he suddenly drew his sword and hacked ungracefully down at Dog. The sword struck Dog squarely in the top of his head with an ugly THUCK! Dog immediately stopped his barking and sank to the ground. The count smiled cruelly as he placed a foot on Dog’s face and awkwardly yanked the bloody sword free with a sucking sound.

DOG! I have to heal him! I have to heal him! I HAVE TO HEAL HIM! The thought reverberated through my mind over and over as I strained against my magical bindings. The count’s smile turned ugly as he turned his attention from Dog to me, and I felt the bindings tighten painfully around my elbows. I HAVE TO HEAL HIM! HE’S DYING!!! Panic enveloped me as I watched Dog bleeding on the ground. My green healing magic flashed impotently through my entire body as I tried to get it to Dog. My elbows wouldn’t move, so I pushed my magic into them as hard as I could, even trying to push it past the limits of my skin. I felt something in my mind creaking as I pushed harder and harder until something in my mind cracked, and suddenly the lightning flashed outside my arms and cut the bindings to pieces. The tentacles snapped back into the count like a rubber band, and he stumbled backwards holding up his sword in between us as his eyes went wide.

Suddenly freed from the bindings, I immediately knelt down next to Dog, put my hand on his side, and slammed my magic into him as hard as I could. I quickly brought the magic to his head to heal the wound, but found it wouldn’t heal. Something vital in his brain seemed to have been severed, and it appeared that not even magic could put it back together. I could somehow feel his soul ever so slowly leaking out of his body as he whined miserably. I could also feel his pain. He was in so much pain. Tears came hotly to my eyes, but I didn’t hesitate. I drew a snake blade backhand from my belt and slammed it down between his ribs skewering his heart. I twisted the blade and drew it out, wiped it off on his fur, and sheathed it. I stroked Dog’s fur lightly as he breathed out his last gurgling breath. With my magic still inside him I felt the very moment his soul left his body and ceased petting him.

And then I felt a cold, all-encompassing, RAGE pouring through me like ice water in my veins. This absolute asshole killed my Dog. I am going to KILL him. I took a deep breath to center myself. Can’t let him see me coming, he’s a powerful mage, and Ara is right there. Play the game, kill him later. I put a lid on my righteous anger and painted a cheerful smile on my face as I stood. “My apologies, Count d’Lake, you’re quite right. I’ll do my best to train the next one a bit better before letting him out in public.” I gave a contrite, if shallow, bow.

“How did you do that to my magic, peasant?!” he asked angrily, still pointing his bloody sword at me. I cocked my head to the side as if confused and looked around as if trying to spot the peasant he was speaking to. A well dressed elderly man ran out of the edge of the crowd near the stairs of the gallows and quickly held up a hand to whisper in the count’s ear. “What?! A lord?! This urchin?! I heard the count mutter to the elderly man who continued to whisper in his ear. Finally, the count held up a hand and the elderly man bowed as he took a respectful step back. The count placed his bloodied sword on his shoulder and strode closer to me. “So, you’re The Gambler, Lord Nameless, that I’ve heard so much of.” He spat my name as if I should consider it an insult. “I suppose I can’t argue with the fact that you’re a lord if you can counter my magic.” Dozens of deep blue tentacles flew out of him, and I instinctively drew out my magic from my body in a cloud of lightning tightly wrapping my body like a second skin. As the count’s tentacles of magic hit my healing magic they were torn to shreds and snapped back into his body. He winced, and blood began flowing from his nose as he ceased his onslaught.

My smile never wavered. I flipped my cloak back over my shoulders, showing my gleaming black scale mail and my obviously expensive sword, axe, and matched knives. I held my hand to my chest as I bowed deeply. “It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance Count d’Lake. I regret never having run into you on one of my many gambling sessions.”

“I don’t gamble if I can avoid it,” grunted the count, wiping at his nose.

And yet you gambled and lost when you chose to kill the wrong man’s dog today, asshole, I thought to myself. Outwardly, I simply nodded my head in acceptance of his words and continued to smile pleasantly at him.

“See to it that you take your trash with you. I don’t want animal corpses littering the streets of my beautiful city,” he spat, as he turned and began walking away dismissively.

“Of course, my lord,” I said simply with my unceasing smile as he strode away, the elderly man in tow. The magic holding the crowd in place dispersed, and they began making their way from the square while glancing back at me where I stood next to Dog’s body and at the count as he walked back to a carriage on the edge of the street. He got in, and the carriage immediately took off towards the castle. I noticed that one tendril of his magic had remained in place, hovering a good body length above me, and stretching farther and farther to the receding carriage. Hmm, since he’s an air mage I suppose that means he’s listening in on me to try to make sure I’m not going to try anything. Paranoid, aren’t you, Count? Smart though, that’s going to make this a bit harder.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

I bent down and gently picked up Dog, straining a little. He was heavy and was near the limit of what I could carry in my arms. He hung limply as I stood and turned to Ara. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. “Oh, Dog,” she said sadly as she reached out a hand to stroke his fur as I held him.

I felt tears welling up in my eyes but held them back. I don’t cry. I never cry. “Ara, dear, would you please run along back to the smithy and send Knick with some coin to meet up with me? I’m going to bury Dog in the ancient graveyard to the west of town. He’s quite heavy, so I expect it will take me some time to get there, Knick shouldn’t have a problem catching up. I don’t believe I have it in me right now to pay the graveyard guards, and I’d like Knick to handle that for me. Afterwards, I intend to make myself quite drunk, so I’ll be back very late, don’t wait up. Ask Hammer to help you pack everything up in the cart, please. We’re leaving town in the morning. I am done with Lake City,” I said, emotionlessly.

Tears continued to stream down her face as she clasped her hands meekly together in front of her and gave me a small curtsy. “Of course, my lord. I’ll see to everything. Leave it to me.” She turned and hurried south down the street towards the smithy.

I turned west and made my way slowly from the square, carrying Dog. The street headed directly west to the graveyard’s entrance so I wasn’t forced to make a single turn as I slowly carried my burden down the center of the street while folks watched and whispered to each other. I had made it a bit better than half way there when Knick jogged up from behind me. He simply fell into step beside me without a word. I couldn’t even bring myself to look at him. It was taking everything I had just to hold the tears in while I walked slowly with heavy steps.

It took hours to get outside of town and make my way down the road to the graveyard. Sunset was shining redly on the predominantly white stone headmarkers by the time we reached it. A guard stepped forward to challenge us as we approached. “Hey, now. You can’t bury an animal in the King’s Graveyard, man,” he said as we neared him.

Knick walked in front of me and confronted the guard. He held out a handful of gold coins to the man. “We’re going to bury our friend. You can take the gold or I can take your life,” said Knick, showing the man the knife that had appeared as if by magic in his other hand. “Choose,” Knick said as his voice became cold and his killer’s grin stretched across his face. The man hesitated, but his eyes had locked onto the gold, and he held out his hand under the small pile of coins in Knick’s. Knick placed the coins in the guard's outstretched hand. “Smart choice,” he said simply, and I continued on my way unimpeded.

We walked slowly through the myriad gravestones as the road began spiraling around the center of the graveyard. I began looking for somewhere to leave Dog, but nowhere seemed good enough. We walked for over an hour down the slowly narrowing stone path that spiraled through the graveyard until we eventually reached a massive mausoleum at the center of the graveyard. Now THAT is worthy of Dog, I thought as I began walking around it, trying to find a way in. There were what appeared to be giant stone doors on the front of the tomb, but upon closer inspection they were merely carved into a solid piece of stone and weren’t functional. I continued to look for a way in, but there was nothing. Until I reached the back corner of the large tomb and found one of the large stone cubes that sat at the base of each corner of the structure had cracked badly and started to separate unevenly from the walls. I could see blackness leading farther inside where it was pulling away from the tomb.

I set Dog’s body down gently and grabbed hold of the large cube of stone and began pulling on it. Knick grabbed the stone beside me and we managed to pull off a large piece of broken rock, then another, and another, slowly pulling apart the cracked cube until we found ourselves with a small opening that I would just barely be able to squeeze inside. I looked in and saw that it led to a large chamber. I’ll leave Dog there. A resting place fit for the king of dogs. I picked up Dog, and, as I backed into the opening, began dragging his body into the tomb after me. Knick watched me but seemed content to wait outside.

As I got all the way inside, I picked Dog back up and looked around. It was a featureless stone box. The only thing in the room was an altar-like rectangular coffin coming up waist high on the side of the box nearest me. I gently laid Dog’s body down on the stone coffin.

“Rest in peace, buddy,” I said aloud. I don’t cry. I never cry. I sobbed. I couldn’t stop. I could hear myself wailing as it echoed off the featureless stone around me. I pressed my forehead to Dog’s side, and I cried like I’ve never cried in two lifetimes as Dog’s fur soaked up my tears..

I don’t know how long I wept over Dog’s body when I noticed it. Dog’s blood was pooling on the top of the coffin, and it was glowing with thick gray magic. The magic seemed almost like it was pulling something out of the blood and turning it to stone. The magic creeped through the pool to Dog and he began turning the same gray as the blood. I wiped the tears from my face and watched in disbelief as he slowly turned to stone.

I was suddenly looking at a perfect statue of Dog’s corpse when I felt a creaking in my mind and something pulled itself out of the top of the statue. It sat there looking at me.

It was a small gray monkey filled with the same opaque cloud of stone gray magic I’d seen permeating Dog’s blood and then his body as he turned into a statue. “Ah, that’s so much better,” said the monkey. “Thought I was never going to get out of there.”

“What. The. Fuck. A monkey?!” I was so surprised I’d said it in english.

“I’m not a monkey, dammit! I’m an incredibly powerful demon! That’s an odd language you’re speaking though,” the monkey said, thoughtfully. “Are you from particularly far away? Or have I just been stuck in this box for a really long time?”

“Yes,” I answered somewhat sarcastically, still in english. Going from crying over Dog’s body to conversing with a monkey demon was giving me a bit of emotional whiplash.

“Whatever,” said the monkey, unconcerned. “I suppose condolences and congratulations are in order, kid. If you freed me from that damned box then you did it with the blood of a loved one whose life you took with your own hand. On the plus side though, you freed me from that box, which means I’m going to grant you power like you’ve never dreamt. It’s not free, mind you. The more you give me, the more I’ll give you, so keep that in mind.”

“Huh?” I said, confused.

The monkey sighed theatrically, “Look, kid, magic ain’t free. You seem like a bit of a rube, so let me lay it out for you. You freed me from my prison with the blood of a loved one you killed yourself. That is price number one and gets you basic access to stone magic. You want more magic, you gotta pay more. Price number two would be half the light of the world,” he chuckled to himself.

“Sure, you can have the left eye my beautiful mother gave me when I was born. That qualify for more magic?” I asked flippantly.

“Deal!” Said the monkey. I suddenly felt magic flowing into me, and my mind creaked again until I felt something crack inside me as the monkey’s eyes glowed brightly, somehow still the same gray as his magic, just brighter. There was a painful, wet, tearing sensation in my left eye socket. I ran my green lightning healing magic into the socket and felt it heal almost instantly. “Nice. That was tasty, kid. Price number three, you have to give me your name. No one you know now will remember your name,” it chuckled. “Hell, even you won’t know your name anymore once I’ve taken it from you.”

“Hmm,” I thought about it. “To be clear, you will take the name I’ve had the longest? Like the first name I ever recall having? Or are we talking about the first name I was given on this planet? As I already obliquely mentioned, I’m from particularly far away. Or what if I was never given a name in the first place, huh? What would you say if I was nameless?”

“Wait a second,” said the monkey. “Those questions would mean…Are you a reincarnation that kept their memories?! That is crazy rare, kid, but, even if that is the case, you can’t give away your name from your last life. It’s this life that you’re living, so it’s this life I’d want your name from. To answer your latter question though, if you were already nameless you’d already meet the third price.”

“Oh. Cool. Then hook me up, because I’m Nameless,” I said, amused.

“You know I usually get more pushback on that particular price. Fair warning though, you can’t beat the system. If you DO have a name you’ll lose it right now,” said the monkey wryly as his eyes began glowing brightly. Again I felt magic pouring into me as my mind creaked under the strain until I felt something inside me crack open. I could now feel the stone under my feet intimately. I felt how it stretched to the path that spiraled around this mausoleum until it turned into the road back into town. I could even distantly feel that the castle in the city was attached to the same vein of connected stone. I crouched down and put a hand to the floor and suddenly knew I could mold the stone to my will with my imagination being almost my only limit.

“Holy shit,” I muttered quietly.

“Yep,” said the demon monkey as his eyes faded back to their normal gray. “You now have complete control over stone. The final two prices just increase the level of power available to you. Basically you can do whatever you can imagine with stone now, but if you want to go bigger you’ll need more power. To give you a frame of reference, the guy in this box,” he tapped a foot against the stone coffin below Dog’s statue. “He had paid one more price than you have so far and he used it to build that big ass mountain of his and ruled over it and the surrounding land as a king for the rest of his life. He was too scared of paying the last price though so he wasn’t as powerful as he could have been.”

“And the last two prices?” I asked.

The monkey shrugged, an exceedingly odd gesture to see in a non-human creature. “I can only tell you the next price since you have to pay them in a certain order. I don’t make the rules, kid. The next price is the head of your greatest enemy. It must be someone who has taken something precious from you though, it can’t just be some random asshole you hate.”

“Oh, good. That was my next stop anyway, and the stone magic you just gave me is going to go a long way towards making killing that evil fuck way easier.”

“Ooo, a revenge trip. Love it! Lead on, kid!” The demon monkey jumped off the coffin, scrabbled across the stone floor, and climbed up onto my shoulder, wrapping his long prehensile tail around my neck.

I held out a hand and felt the stone in the wall flow apart into a door perfectly sized for me. I strode out the opening and closed it seamlessly behind me. Knick had apparently been leaning against the wall of the tomb near the opening we’d created, and he sprang away from the wall with his knife in his hand as I exited. I held my hand out, and the crumbled cube on the corner of the building melted and reformed, looking as perfect as the other four corners of the structure. I walked over to Knick. He opened his mouth to say something, but I held a finger to my lips, and he closed it silently. I looked up and saw that the count’s air magic was still in place above me. I used my newfound stone magic to enclose Knick and myself in a dome of stone that rose from the ground around us and closed silently just above our heads. “Sorry about that Knick,” I said in the pitch black darkness. “The city lord is using air magic to listen in on everything going on around me right now, and I don’t want him to hear this conversation. I just stumbled onto some ancient stone magic and took it for my own along with this demon monkey. Right now, I’m heading back into town to kill that fucker and take his head for killing Dog, but I don’t want him to hear me coming, so we need to be smart about this. We’re going back into town to go drinking. At some point I’m going to leave for a little bit to kill him before coming back to continue drinking, so people will see me and know I was there all night when the city lord died under mysterious circumstances. That will keep us from falling under suspicion and having to deal with any of the fallout from killing a noble. Or that’s the hope anyway. Sound like a plan?” I asked nonchalantly in the darkness.

I heard Knick sigh exasperatedly, “I should be used to this shit by now… Sure, Nameless. Let’s do it.” I dropped the dome silently back into the ground with no mark to be seen to show it had ever been there.

I walked to the front of the mausoleum where the path back to town started but then paused. I raised a hand and a thick square stone column rose up from the ground to just short of head high. I instinctively changed the density of the stone and felt it become heavier as it changed color to a matt black. Then I pressed my will down onto the stone and felt the upper half form a perfect statue of Dog standing attentively atop a stone cube, looking like he’d just seen something dangerous. I focused, and the detail grew and grew until it almost looked as though you could reach out to pet him and feel fur instead of stone. I stood at the front of this statue and crouched down in front of the cube of stone he stood on and formed deeply carved letters in the common tongue on the front of the stone.

HERE LIES

DOG

MY GUARD

MY PROTECTOR

MY FRIEND

I poured magic into the stone monument to Dog, and increased its hardness and durability until I knew it couldn’t take any more without massively increasing its weight to the point that it would sink into the ground. As it stands, I’m pretty sure it will outlast the tomb it stands in front of.

Knick had watched this all, wide eyed, but he said not a word. Knick reached out and ran a hand along Dog’s statue’s back. I gave him a nod and he fell in beside me as we turned and began the long walk back to town.