Josh was staring at an enormous pair of nostrils, set in a wide, soft nose. The nostrils flared at him.

“What do you mean, you’ve never ridden before?” Jann asked, exasperated.

They were standing in a stable yard in the pre-dawn light. Above the stable door poked the head of a curious horse. Josh had decided that if Lady Paleyne was going to travel to Dendral on a journey lasting three days, instead of the week it would take to walk, then he might as well give in and go along.

No-one last night had mentioned horses, however, and in the general flurry that had followed, Josh hadn’t thought to clarify the question of transport. Insofar as he’d considered it at all, he’d imagined a nice, comfortable travelling carriage. Similarly, the rest of the party hadn’t thought to inquire into Josh’s horse-riding skills, or lack of them.

Jann and Josh were interrupted by one of the castle servants, arriving with a tray containing slabs of bread soaked in beef dripping, and mugs of ale.

“The poor Lady Alianne, eh?” the servant said, although he sounded more curious than sympathetic. “Surprised your mistress ain’t staying to dance attendance on her.”

Lady Alianne had taken to her bed the previous evening, claiming symptoms of weariness and fatigue. Maybe it had been to get out of a last-minute expedition to Dendral. Now that Josh was realising what it would entail, he could sympathise.

From what he had overheard last night, Lady Paleyne’s purpose in going north by herself was to fulfil one of Lady’s Alianne’s obligations. Since Lady Alianne’s primary mission had been to travel to Dendral and receive a Philosopher’s Stone, whatever that was, Josh wasn’t sure how it was possible for Lady Paleyne to achieve that in her stead.

Happily, it wasn’t his problem.

Jann gulped down a mouthful of ale and gave the servant a baleful look.

“It’s not your place to question your betters,” he growled.

“No offence intended,” the servant said, adopting a wounded tone.

While this conversation was going on, a couple of grooms had been bringing the horses out. There were four riding horses with empty saddles, and one pack horse, none of which looked any more enthusiastic at the early start than Josh. The party would consist of Josh, Jann, Lady Paleyne, and the little female servant, Bethca.

“So, you’ve never ridden any horse at all?” Jann demanded of Josh, handed the mug of ale back to the servant without looking at him.

Josh swallowed his bread and dripping, and said “No,” defensively.

Jann swore under his breath, but immediately cut his profanity short as they were joined by the two women. Lady Paleyne flung back her hood and directed an anguished look at the horses.

“Oh, must we?” she asked, in a martyred voice. Her voice rang around the courtyard, causing everyone to turn and look. Bethca, beside her, was quiet and withdrawn by comparison.

“The approach to the Abbey is single track, my lady,” Jann said. “It won’t take a carriage.”

Abbey? What Abbey?

“How inconvenient,” Lady Paleyne said, in the same ringing voice.

“And the shrine itself is only accessible on foot, my lady,” Jann added.

“Oh heavens! Do not say so! Why did I allow myself to be talked into this?”

Bethca approached and tentatively touched Lady Paleyne’s arm.

“Lady Alianne is counting on you, my lady,” she said, in a small voice. It sounded like something she had been coached to say.

Lady Paleyne heaved a huge, put upon sigh.

“Of course, Bethca my dear, you are right. I can only hope the beds the Abbot will offer are soft enough to make up for it. I shall sleep well tonight!”

Presumably she meant the Abbot of whatever this Abbey was, and not the Abbot of High Howe Priory. Was this going to be the party’s first stop along the way? What shrine did she mean?

It took the combined efforts of two grooms to assist Lady Paleyne onto her horse, leaving Jann to boost Bethca into the saddle. Both women were wearing split skirts for riding, and Lady Paleyne sported an ostentatious hat with a wide brim and a tall plume. Bethca, by contrast, merely wore a subdued cloak, presumably because she was a servant and didn’t rate fancy clothing.

Jann stopped by Lady Paleyne’s stirrup and murmured to her, possibly warning her about Josh’s lack of riding skills. She sent a quick glance towards Josh and nodded. Then Jann snared the reins of one of the remaining horses and tugged it towards Josh.

How hard could this be?

In movies, everyone leaped agilely onto horses. You put your foot in the stirrup and then you vaulted up. However, the stirrup hung just level with Josh’s waist, which meant he needed to stretch his leg up until his knee was practically level with his ear in order to put his toe in it, and then somehow lever himself up into the saddle. Even with his improved fitness, it seemed a daunting task. Nevertheless, he followed Jann’s instructions, and to give himself the necessary boost he grabbed onto the ends of the saddle with both hands.

Instead of boosting Josh up, the saddle twisted around on the horse’s back.

Jann gave Josh an irritated look, reset the saddle and told him to try again.

This time Josh pushed off properly using the foot that was still on the ground, but somehow the foot that had been in the stirrup slipped out, and he ended up boosting himself into the saddle on his stomach, so that he was lying across it like a sack of potatoes. The horse snorted and side-stepped, evidently offended by this unusual method of mounting. Josh scrambled around as quickly as possible until he was facing the right way.

Jann sighed, and showed him how to put his feet in the stirrups, and how to sit. Then Josh had to take his feet out of the stirrups while Jann checked and tightened the girth, and adjusted various straps. Humiliatingly, Jann didn’t offer Josh the reins, but instead tied them to his own saddle.

Josh started when his horse walked forward, because the saddle dipped and rolled as it did so. It was weirdly like trying to balance on a boat at sea. He held firmly onto the pommel as the cavalcade clopped through the narrow gateway leading out of the castle, and emerged into the town square.

At first, Josh merely concentrated on staying on top of the horse. It felt far less secure than it looked. After a while, however, he began to relax as he got used to the motion, and instead focused on his character sheet, because he had managed to get enough rest that night for some of his attributes to advance.

Running away from Varian’s gang had given him 2 points in Speed, all the healthy eating in the druid’s grove had given him 4 points in Constitution, and walking and shooting a bow had given him another 3 points in Strength. Scribing the spells had given him a total of 4 in Dexterity, and all his magical exertions over the last two days had given him 4 points of Chi, on top of the 4 points he had gained from regular magical practice along the road. He’d even got a point in vocalisation after telling the story of the book moth to Lady Alianne’s party at the inn in High Howe.

Josh’s player rank had dropped two places, which suggested that the Assassin and the Demon who arrived in the world at the same time as him had out-levelled him. His Gladiator rank had gone up by ten after the death of Mistrz. Josh hoped Mistrz was okay, and that he had managed to resurrect somewhere safe and hadn't subsequently run into Varian’s gang.

He focused on his character sheet again and decided he should do some running every day to see if he could boost his Speed, Endurance and Resilience a little more, and maybe think up some acrobatic exercises that would improve his Agility. What kind of bonus would horse riding give him?

BASIC INFORMATION

Name: Josh Armstrong

Profession: Apprentice Plumassier

Level: 9

(Experience available! Check your achievements to apply experience!)

Total experience points: 6,006

Experience to next level: 401

Player rank: #865

Kills: 2 / Deaths: 0

Gladiator rank: #476

PHYSICAL ATTRIBUTES

Constitution 34 | Strength 58 | Agility 27 | Speed 21 | Endurance 32 | Resilience 32 | Manual Dexterity 67 | Vocalisation 35

MAGICAL ATTRIBUTES

Power 1 | Chi 40

MESSAGES

You have gained 1 point of Strength, 1 point of Dexterity, 2 points of Resilience, and 4 points of Chi.]

You have 10,680 unapplied experience points. Go to the Quest and Achievements menu to apply these points now!

You have enough experience points to reach level 12. Once applied, additional levels will take effect during your next long rest. Multiple levels may take more than one rest period to apply.

QUESTS

A Magical Infestation: Clear the book moths infesting the chambers of Mistress Hallon. Reward: 50xp.

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-> Progress: you have removed the infestation. Reward: 100 xp (applied).

The Secret in the Library: Defeat the wormspider defending the library and retrieve the valuable magical item from the vault. Reward: 400xp.

-> Progress: you have defeated the wormspider. Reward: 100 xp (applied).

-> Progress: you have retrieved the magical item. Reward: 300 xp (applied).

The message prompting him to apply his remaining experience tempted him every time he saw it, but he held off. Level 12 was still pathetically low. So far, the lowest level person he had come across was Shuriken at level 18. Josh thought he would need to level up into the high twenties or early thirties to be able to defend himself against the likes of Varian. And presumably there were level 40 predators out there, even stronger than Rob.

Was the max level was capped at 40, like it had been in Spiralia Online? Josh wished he’d thought to ask Rob about that, while he’d had the chance.

He looked up, blinking as a shaft of light from the rising sun met his eyes, and realised that the shadows were being cast behind them. They were travelling south-east along the road the Josh had walked along a few days ago, when he had been heading to Brackstone. Why weren’t they taking the north-west road to Drendal?

He wanted to ask, but everyone was several paces ahead of him.

How did you make a horse go faster? Were you supposed to nudge it with your heels or something? Josh tried, but the horse just ignored him and continued plodding along the road. Before he had the chance try again, he saw a group of riders waiting at a crossroads ahead.

It was a party of four people, two men and two women. Josh recognised one of them as the fellow noblewoman Lady Paleyne had been speaking to in the stand at the archery training. Clarice or Clarissa or something like that.

They greeted each other, and Lady Paleyne handed Clarisa her ostentatious hat.

“One day you must tell me what this is all about,” Clarisa said, adjusting the hat so that it tilted stylishly.

“A wager, my dear. I promise I will write to you and give you all the salacious details,” Lady Paleyne told her.

Clarisa’s eyes were bright with glee. She gave Josh a sly, sidelong glance that made him grit his teeth.

“I would be most grateful! You want me to ride to the Abbey of Saint Kraster, stay one night, and return to Brackstone?”

“Precisely. You do me a great service. I will not forget this.”

After taking their leave, Clarisa’s party spurred their mounts on down the road to the south-east, and Josh realised what all the pageantry had been about. Lady Paleyne had made a big obvious scene about going to some Abbey, and now Clarisa was taking her place.

Lady Paleyne, meanwhile, turned her horse to the road the led north-east. This took them further away from Brackstone, on a road that followed along the base of the plateau. Josh tried to reconcile the geography in his mind, based on what he knew of Spiralia.

To the north-west, on the other side of Brackstone the road looped in a series of switchbacks to get onto the plateau, and then it followed the river north to Dendral. The switchbacks had been a prime spot for players to ambush other players in Spiralia, but Josh guessed they would be better guarded here, since it was one of the key arteries between the north and the south. But they weren't going that way. Lady Paleyne's mission must be more secret than Josh had realised.

To the north-east, the way they were heading now, the land broke up into a steep, rocky, mountain range, and although there were passes to the north, they were narrow and probably unsuitable for horses.

Lady Paleyne couldn’t be planning to take one of those routes, could she? It would take much longer than going by the main road to the north-west.

Josh’s thoughts, however, were increasingly distracted by the state of his thighs. After the first hour he was aching and mildly uncomfortable. After the second hour, muscles he didn’t know he had were queuing up to complain. After the third hour, he was in agony, and all he could do was cling grimly to the pommel and endure.

He didn’t immediately notice that the horses had halted in the middle of a small hamlet, until the others dismounted. He desperately wanted to get off, but he wasn’t sure if he would be able to stand if he did.

Lady Paleyne came to stand beside his horse. To Josh’s surprise, she laid a hand on his knee, closed her eyes and chanted under her breath. Chi, warm and tingling, flooded his limbs, easing his muscles until the agony faded to a dull ache.

That was a spell! Lady Paleyne wasn’t some small-time illusionist, but a healing mage. Josh eyed her with surprised respect. She gave him warning look, as if daring him to say anything, and returned to stand beside her own mount. Jann, Josh realised, had gone into the house where they had stopped, and he came out with a jug, four mugs, and a plate of warm pastries.

These turned out to contain minced meat, potatoes and cheese. Josh devoured his portion, and washed it down with cider from the jug. By the time they set off again, he felt almost human.

They travelled like that for hours. Every three hours they would stop, more to give the horses a rest than the riders, and Lady Paleyne would cast the spell that soothed Josh’s aches and pains, allowing him to ride on without falling off or dying.

By the time they came to their destination it was late afternoon. They had ridden up into some low foothills, and before them lay a massive, weathered stone archway, sandwiched between two high, sharp-edged cliffs. Set into the archway were two vast doors of wood that towered above the mounts and their riders. Although the archway was ancient, with crumbling stone and weathered decorations, the wooden fittings, and the two wooden towers mounted on either side, were recently built and in good repair.

Josh recognised this place from Spiralia Online. They were at the Azure Cathedral.

They were going into a dungeon?

In Spiralia, the Azure Cathedral had been a subterranean end-game dungeon, the kind that needed a twenty-man raid to complete it. Josh had done it once, with a guild who had been advertising for extra players to pad out their party. He had been playing his paladin at this point, and a paladin in a dungeon would normally function as a tank, which involved getting the enemy monsters in the dungeon to focus on him, while the damage dealers killed everything, and the healers healed.

Being a tank was challenging. You had to know the route through the dungeon, all the stages the boss monsters would go through, all their attacks and mechanics and how to avoid them. While you were fighting, you not only had to keep boss monster's attention on you, you also had to keep an eye on the damage dealers and routinely pull enemies off them before they crumpled like the wet paper towels they were. A dungeon was not a place for exploration and adventure, it was a pre-planned and tightly choreographed event requiring the intense focus of multiple people all working together.

To ensure that he wouldn’t look like an idiot, Josh had watched several video guides, and read through a number of written guides and walk throughs before even attempting the dungeon.

It was a good thing he had.

When the guild group had invited him onto their comms, half of them had been either drunk, or stoned, or both. The main tank had dropped out halfway through, because his wife had needed him for something, which had left Josh suddenly in the hot seat, despite being a relatively new player. Their comms discipline had been horrible, with everyone talking over each other and people gossiping when they should have been focused on combat. Meanwhile the healer had refused to use a microphone at all, and then raged in text chat at the damage dealers for not paying attention, and not doing their jobs properly.

It had taken them eight hours to clear a dungeon that was supposed to take three, but they had made it by the skin of their teeth. When the guild had subsequently asked Josh to join them as a permanent member he had politely declined and backpedalled as fast as he could.

For one moment, Josh wished very intensely that he was back in that raid, exhausted after an eight-hour stint of gaming, and desperately trying to keep the boss’s attention on him while staying alive long enough for the party to focus fire it down. Then he shook himself out of the memory. He was here, the Azure Cathedral was apparently a real place, and it was no use wishing otherwise.

The Cathedral had been a stunningly beautiful dungeon. Part of him couldn’t help wondering if it would be as amazing in real life as it had in the game.

In Spiralia, it had once been a holy place of the stone elves, but some catastrophe centuries previously had resulted in the caves being overrun by crystalline monsters. The elves had all but died out since, and of their lineage only a handful of half-elves had remained. It was one of these half-elves who had provided the quest that allowed players to raid the dungeon.

What had happened to the Cathedral in the fifty years since Spiralia’s timeline had diverged from the world of Six Spires? Had the Cathedral been taken back? Was Josh about to meet some half-elves?

While Josh had been pre-occupied, a small door set into the massive wooden gates had opened, and a guard beckoned them inside.

Sadly, all the guards seemed to be human. The party was led into a courtyard beyond the gate, where everyone dismounted. Above them, carved from the three sides of the cliff that enclosed them, were a maze of round turrets, which formed a jumbled castle. Narrow stone steps led up to a balcony overlooking the courtyard, and continued on, criss-crossing and connecting the turrets in a series of stairs that made Josh dizzy just looking at them. Apparently stone elves hadn’t considered guard rails a necessary architectural feature.

It was familiar from Spiralia Online, although there the courtyard and the castle had both been in ruins. Josh had admired it then, but now, looking at it in real life, it made his throat close up with unexpected awe.

“Magnificent, is it not?” Lady Paleyne murmured beside him. “This is my first time seeing it, too.”

He glanced down at her, and noticed that there were shadows under her eyes, and her cheeks looked pale with exhaustion. What was wrong with her? Had she been overdoing it with the healing spells?

Little Bethca moved up to Lady Paleyne’s side. As she did so, Josh felt a gentle wash of magic radiating out from her. He hadn’t felt it before, but was the first time he had been this close to her all day. He shook his head, blinked, and looked her more closely. Bethca hadn’t exhibited any signs of magic yesterday. The line of her neck as she turned her head towards Lady Paleyne seemed different too. There was something more autocratic about her posture. Did that mean she wasn’t really a servant? Was she a hidden mage, too? Had she been faking the role of servant?

Before Josh could pursue this thought, three people—all humans—stepped out of the balcony and came down to meet them. From the ensuing conversation, he gathered that one of them was some kind of Warden, and his job was to guard the entrance to the Cathedral. He seemed to disapprove of Lady Paleyne’s request to gain entry, but his protestations stopped short when she held up a small metal medallion. After that he bowed stiffly, and led them towards a set of double doors set into the bottom of the cliff at the far end of the courtyard.

The doors opened with a ponderous creak, revealing a great hall with stone columns, each carved to resemble the roots of a tree. This was also familiar from Spiralia, although it had been the trigger point for a cut scene which Josh hadn't been able to watch because the guild group had skipped it and got impatient when he didn't immediately do the same.

The Warden instructed the party to proceed to the end of the hall and ring the bell. The riding horses had been led away by the guards, but Jann kept the pack horse, which clopped into the great hall after them with every sign of disinterest.

As the made their way down the hall, Lady Paleyne stumbled on an uneven tile, but Bethca seemed not to notice. Josh hesitated, then offered the former his arm, which she took gratefully.

“You shouldn’t have helped me,” Josh said in a low voice, feeling guilty.

Lady Paleyne shook her head.

“Not that,” she said shortly.

Was she casting some kind of other magic? The magic on Bethca perhaps? Even as he thought that, Bethca turned her head again, frowning.

“We cannot have you fail now, Pally,” she said.

The moment she spoke, the illusion blinked away for a moment, and Josh realised he was looking at Lady Alianne. It had been Lady Alianne all along, pretending to be Bethca. Had Lady Paleyne been casting an illusion spell all day?

No wonder she was exhausted.

“If I give you a magic feather, can you, uh, suck the magic out of it to replenish your reserves?” Josh asked her, as they reached the doorway on the opposite side of the hall. There was bell hanging to the side of the door with a rope attached. Lady Alianne just stopped and folded her hands inside her cloak, so it was left to Jann to step forwards and ring the bell.

“Sucking magic out of enchanted objects is an extremely bad idea on many levels,” Lady Paleyne said, with some asperity. After a moment, she added, “Presumably you mean the feather in your hat.”

“Yes.”

There was a short silence, and then she sighed. “Give it to me, if you please.”

Josh took off his hand, charged the Glow enchantment so that it lit up, and handed it to her. She didn’t take the hat, merely laying a finger on the feather. The sparkles faded and she took in a deep, relieved breath.

“That helps, a little.”

“Again?” Josh asked.

She let him charge it twice more, and although by the end of that she still had shadows under her eyes, her cheeks were flushed instead of pale.

“That will do,” she said. “Any more, and—”

She broke off as the door in front of them opened with a jerk. Everyone turned to face it. Was Josh about to meet some stone elves?