Book 6: Chapter 48 - Layers of Deceit (RAW) (Patreon)

Chapter 48 - Layers of Deceit

“Where the line is frail, display strength. Where true frailty remains, cloak it first in strength, and then in studied weakness. Let no pattern bind your hand. March not by obvious reasoning of even wise words, but by the deeper calculus that carries the field.”

- Attributed to Damien de Savant.

I eased myself slowly out of the slender Estaza’s arms with care, taking pains not to wake her. It was time. 

In the adjoining room, I found a heap of blankets and twisted sheets piled into something more akin to a beast’s nest than a bed. Larynda sometimes did not sleep gently. Tossing and turning was her night’s activities when she had been smaller. Given the life she had lived, I could hardly fault her for it. Even so, I woke my ward as softly as I could.

She muttered first, slapped weakly at my hand, then made a few short stabbing motions with a knife that was not there before her green eyes cracked open.

“Gil, it’s too early for this. Let me sleep, just once, in a decent bed,” she mumbled, voice thick with the remains of the night’s sleep.

“It was a decent bed,” I said, keeping my face straight. “Now it looks like some creature’s den. I need your help getting my armor on.”

Putting on arms and armor could be done alone, but only most miserably and awkwardly.

“Ask the dark ones you like so much,” she muttered back, dragging a pillow over her head. “The sisters.”

So prejudice had found a way into her heart despite my efforts to the contrary. Usually, I might have let it pass, but today, I had no such patience.

“Larynda,” I said, my voice firm in the tone that made it clear this was no request.

“Fine. Just give me a minute to dress.”

So modesty at long last had taken root in her as well. The old Larynda would not have cared in the least. Life among the traveling folk had left little room for shame as we had spent much time together in close confines.

I stepped outside while she changed, then knocked later to make sure she was decent.

When I entered, she was in trousers and a loose shirt tied at the neck. Small frills at the elbows left her forearms bare.

“Well then. Best get it over with. Damien thought it wiser if you did not wear, you know, the heavy black-and-gold set. Your old plate and mail are in the chest. I got them ready.” She pointed toward one of my chests, then gestured toward a halberd against the wall and a curved sword in a plain black lacquered sheath. “He suggested those, too. If you walk in wearing what you usually do, it rather ruins the trick.”

She opened the weathered chest banded in brass. Inside lay my old Aranthian plate. One glance at the contents told me I would not look out of place in it, at least not at first.

Larynda started with the breastplate, her hands deft on the straps, cinching steel over me with the ease of long practice.

“Well, at least you’re in no danger of growing fat,” she said, tapping my back so I would lift my arms.

It was true enough. This incarnation, this avatar, did not change. My hair would not even grow beyond the length it had first taken in this world. I had tested that once. Cut it. Watched it return. No longer, no shorter. It was another reminder of the strange rules this world imposed upon me.

“What is my cover story meant to be?” I asked as she fixed the rerebraces and settled the pauldrons into place.

The weight was light. Far lighter than the black-and-gold armor I truly favored. On me, it felt almost false, like stage metal hammered into the shape of war. That was what it had become. Not protection. Costume. A lie worn openly so Damien de Savant might step more cleanly toward the ambition he had nursed for years.

Truth be told, I had nearly forgotten this set existed.

“What’s a cover story?” she asked lightly. “You planning to tell tales around a campfire?”

I kept my voice flat. “What did I tell you about inferring from context, Larynda?”

She huffed. “Fine. Your ‘cover story’ is that you’re a young hedge knight seeking service with Lord and Lady de Savant. You’re from the Isle of Qis, so no one questions your complexion, and from a wealthy merchant family that decided to indulge a foolish third son and send him off to play at adventure. I’d suggest the name Efthimios. Rare enough that no one will know better, but common enough to sound vaguely real.”

“That sounds absurdly elaborate,” I said, holding still as she buckled on the vambraces. “As for the name, I will reserve judgment.” 

Still, I knew I would have to trust her and Damien it.

“It only has to get you through the gates. De Savant knows the sort of men who guard a citadel gate. Men like that will let you in for curiosity if nothing else, then send you on to the master-at-arms. At least that is what Damien thinks. Most of the cost of creating a man-at-arms comes from equipping them. If you brought a horse along with you, you’d be perfect. But then again, that’d be too perfect, he reckons. You only need to get through the gates, don’t you?”

I let her words flow over, sampling them and testing their weight and meaning. The logic was sound.

“There are two gates,” I said with a thin smile. “The outer gatehouse and the keep beyond it. Getting through even one cleanly would make things easier. Fewer deaths. Less resistance.”

The young Water Mage gave a bitter laugh. “As if that ever troubled you.”

“Needless death is still needless,” I said. “Better that blood buy something, even if only a little purpose.”

The words tasted strange even as I said them. The truth beneath them was uglier. The whole point was slaughter. To kill enough men within the keep and enough lesser nobles fit to bear arms, that the balance would crack where Damien needed it to crack.

It was a narrow line to walk. My objective was butchery, but measured butchery. A cull with intent behind it. Still, I was certain Damien would forgive a certain amount of collateral ruin in the course of my little harvest. There needed to be enough death that the rescue of a thousand men became a necessity.

I wanted experience. That, in truth, was why I had agreed. Not for promises of aid. Not for coin. Not for strategy. I realized it as Larynda helped with the faulds, greaves, and the rest of the lower harness. I had done this because of a gnawing emptiness so deep it felt almost metaphysical. A stale, scraping ennui that only movement, only danger, only the rise of numbers could blunt. A new view. A different road. A masterpiece painted red.

Then came the last touches as I clad myself in the panoply of war. I buckled the sword at my waist and took up the halberd, careful not to strike the haft against the frame. Simple weapons. Plain things. Honest in shape, honest in purpose. I did, however, allow myself a small piece of ostentation; my dagger, the Dancing Blade which I settled next to the curved sword.

“You’re forgetting something,” came Larynda’s voice.

I felt the object before I properly saw it. My hand moved of its own accord, the Mimic in my arm taking hold for me, and I caught the thrown helm in a single smooth motion. In the corridor, I looked down at the stylized wolf’s head worked into it, then clipped it to a hook at my belt.

I decided not to wear it. I needed trust. Trust came easier when a man showed his face. I had been told often enough that I was forgettable, another unremarkable face fit to vanish among a hundred others. That plainness would serve me well here.

“So you’re really just going to walk up to the gate?” Larynda asked. “That’s all?”

I turned back to her slowly, metal clinking with each small movement.

“That is exactly what I intend to do. Cross the drawbridge. Talk my way past the guards. Kill the important people inside.”

She placed her hands on her hips. “But you don’t even know who you have to kill.”

“I know enough. The armed men. As many as possible in the castle.” I paused. “I need to create enough chaos that Damien has cause to intervene. He must enter as the hero. I must enter as the villain. And villains are remembered for the bodies they leave behind. In its way, this is kinder than a long war.”

“But...” she complained.

She stopped there, but I saw it well enough. The plea in her eyes. The stubborn wish that there might still be a gentler road. The girl knew violence. She had lived near it, suffered it, survived it. But she did not welcome it. Not as I did. She did not understand that violence strengthened. That each death fed the invisible arithmetic of this place. Those bodies became increments. Power. Advancement. Levels.

Perhaps none in this world understood the truth, could see behind the curtain that all of this was just a collection of ones and zeroes.

“But nothing,” I said. “The die is cast. This is how it must be. See to Theodore. Make sure the stablehands feed him well. I think we’ll need him soon enough, and in haste, once this is done. We can discuss the after when there is an after to discuss.”

I imagined I heard muttering some complaint.

So I went down the stairs in measured steel steps, keeping out of as many eyes as I reasonably could. Fine Aranthian plate like this was rare, but not so rare as to be unbelievable. The lie would hold. Better still, the quality of it would lend weight to the deception when the time came to exchange it for black and gold.

So the people looked, but not with alarm. It was the same brief glance I remembered from another world when something sleek and expensive passed in the street. Interest without consequence. A note struck and forgotten before the echo died. By evening, they would not remember me at all, or would remember me wrongly. Either served.

I whistled to myself as I went, some jaunty tune I had picked up among these primitives, stepping around the piles of dung that sweepers and collectors were already at work clearing. The streets carried people toward the keep and away from it in an easy current. Even with my poor sense of direction, there was no chance of losing my way.

That was when I noticed it. Or rather, noticed the absence of it.

The city should have reeked. Filth. Waste. Smoke. Wet stone. The press of humanity. Yet what reached me felt muted, thinned out, as if the world itself could not be bothered to finish dressing the stage. I chalked it up to the false logic of this place, another seam showing through the painted surface. Another reminder that this world was built on belief and is only as solid as the faith poured into it. Even so, it was real enough where it counted, and I had no intention of wagering otherwise.

Lack of smell or no, it changed nothing. Dying would never be an option for a man who trying to walk the road to a fresh eternity.

The world itself seemed to confirm and agree to that.

Quest: Liberate Eloishe Citadel

Good enough for me. Liberate… what a clean word for what I would be doing.

Even if the lives waiting inside were worth next to nothing on their own, the quest reward would make up the difference. It usually did. Every scrap helped. Every inch counted toward the grind to reach the new plateau. The sun, moon, and the stars themselves all seemed to hang in proper alignment, as though the world itself had finally conceded the shape of my purpose. Balance restored as the world returned to how it should be.

Soon enough, I found myself at the drawbridge over the broad moat to the central citadel still humming a tune.

Up close, the place was more formidable still. Generations of de Savants had layered stone upon stone, wall upon wall, until the fortress looked fit to endure the wrath of heaven itself. It was the kind of stronghold that armies shattered themselves against. Decades of craft, planning, and siege logic had gone into its making. Yet all that labor was rendered meaningless when a single warrior in no lord’s colors was simply allowed to approach.

Damien had been right. A place like this did not fall easily to force. It needed deceit. Or something so far outside ordinary thought that every conventional defense became worthless and moot.

The next part might be difficult. Still, even with Charisma as one of my dump attributes, I could find a way through with words if I had to. And if words failed, my old would not. The portcullis was heavy and stout, made of black brooding iron or steel, if my eyes did not deceive. That meant very little to me if things took a turn for the worse. Rust whispered to me, words sweet words that promised consumption and release. It would be easy to end things in an instant, to force my way through in an unholy conflagration.

Still, no. I could not think that way.

If I used magic, this would become laughably easy. It would strip all savor from the act. A game too easy was a game diminished. It fell to the player, now and then, to impose balance on it if the designers did not. Not because defeat was possible, but because victory tasted better when it had to be worked for.

And I was the player here. Not to mention that I wanted to see how far martial skill alone would carry me.

There was nothing I could do about the Gifts that my choices had earned me, like Regeneration and my other passive abilities. I made a self-imposed rule that I would use magic only if I felt I really needed to. I had enjoyed difficulty in my old world. I would enjoy overcoming it in this one. But, I did not want my experience of the challenge ruined by pointless self-abuse dressed up as principle. I found that I rather enjoyed winning.

The guards at the gatehouse saw me long before I reached them. They had the look of men who knew something of professional violence. Mail at the throat. Spear shafts planted butt-first on strong timber. One had a split lip gone white with scar tissue. Another had eyes like cold dishwater and a nose that had been broken more than once and healed badly every time. They watched the road, the moat, the folk coming, and then they watched me.

My sabatons rang against the planks of the drawbridge in a slow, even beat.

One of them shifted first, lowering his spear across the mouth of the passage. Behind him the gatehouse tunnel yawned, thick with the smell of old iron.

“State your business,” he challenged, a sheep before a wolf.

I let the halberd rest easy against my shoulder and looked at him plainly.

“Service,” I said. “If your lord has use for another sword arm.”

That got a few looks. Not the open laughter of men hearing something foolish, but the shorter, sharper kind. Measuring. Testing where to put me.

The scar-lipped one leaned a shoulder against the wall. “Name,” the man asked with his perpetual grimace before taking a moment to spit in the waters of the moat.

I gave him the one Larynda and Damien had chosen for me and let it sit between us like a coin laid on a table.

“Efthimios. Of Qis,” I stated plainly, hoping my Charisma could cover this shallow deceit.

His gaze moved over my face, then over the armor, then back again. He was not looking for truth. Men like him knew truth rarely showed on the surface. He was looking for cracks. A man wearing steel he had no right to wear.

Another guard stepped closer and circled half a pace around me. I could feel his eyes moving over the breastplate, the pauldrons, the old marks in metal repaired after battle.

“Qis,” he muttered. “That where they teach boys to dress like lords?”

“I dress like a man who intends to stay alive,” I answered with an attempt at an easy smile, imagining exploding his head in a glorious red burst with my fist.

His hand hovered near my vambrace, then stopped just short of touching. Even here there were boundaries. A peasant levy might paw at another man’s harness to see whether it was real. These men knew better. Good steel had a way of announcing itself, and to touch was to invite violence with an open door. Something in my expression must have warned him off such suicidal folly.

An annoyed voice came from deeper in the gatehouse.

“What’s the hold?”

Bootheels struck stone. A man emerged from the dim of the gatehouse tunnel, broad through the shoulders, not young enough to be vain about his scars and not old enough to have grown infirm. His hair had gone iron-grey at the temples. One cheek had been split once from ear to jaw and stitched with neat, ugly work. He wore no helm. Men moved out of his path without seeming to think about it.

His eyes settled on me and stayed there. Not on my face first. On the armor.

He stopped an arm’s length away. Close enough to smell the leather oil on him and the faint sourness of old sweat. His gaze moved slowly, taking in the chest, the articulation at the joints, the condition of the rivets, the way the plates sat on me.

“Where’d you get that?” he asked.

“Family harness. From a warlike uncle,” I lied casually.

His eyes narrowed. “Your family breeds king's knights?”

“Merchants,” I said. “The richer sort.”

One side of his mouth twitched, though whether with disbelief or contempt I could not have said.

He reached out then, not crudely, but with the right of a man who knew steel and had earned the right to lay a hand on it. His knuckles rapped once against the breastplate. The note that came back was clean and hard.

Not parade armor. Not gilt shell. Good plate. Fine plate of the sort that longed for the killing fields.

The men at the gate watched his face.

He crouched a little, eyeing the fit at the knees, the greaves, the buckles at the ankle. Rose again. His eyes lingered on the sword hilt, the plain sheath, the halberd head.

“They’ve seen use,” he commented. “You've seen battle, or a few skirmishes at least. Your barely old enough to shave.”

I held his eyes with all the confidence of youth. “I have.”

The irony of that understatement was not lost on me

“Where?”

“Where men paid coin for it. Al-lazar,” I replied with pause. “I've seen battle and held the line.”

Better lies are those that are tempered with truth. The best lies are those with room for apparent correction. A man feels smarter for peeling back the first layer of deceit.

He held my gaze a moment longer than was comfortable for ordinary men. That did not trouble me. I had looked into worse things than him and watched them blink first.

“You answer like a man who enjoys being difficult. The armor's seen battle, not you,” he stated, trying to sound wise and all-knowing.

It was time to make him think he caught me in the lie. The bluster of youth.

“I answer like a man who knows too much talking can cheapen him. I know how to fight.”

That almost drew a laugh from the scar-lipped guard. The older man silenced it with a glance so slight it barely counted as movement. He was minor nobility, perhaps a knight by his bearing and the way that common men-at-arms around him deferred to him.

I had promised myself not to use magic, but an overwhelming itch came over me. A simple need which bettered reason. And, one Identify spell could hardly be classed as cheating.

As the spell reached its silent completion, it felt almost like relief.

Jacques Boulle - Knight (Human lvl.16)

Health: 260/260

Stamina: 38/42

Mana: 11/11

Improved Swords (lvl.3)

Improved Unarmed (lvl.2)

Improved Riding (lvl.5)

Sir Jacques Boulle stepped to my side, looking at me now, looking at the way I held myself. He found nothing to sneer at there. I, on the other hand, had plenty to sneer at.

“Can you ride?” he asked brusquely.

“Yes.”

“Can you hold a shield wall?”

“Yes.”

“Can you keep your feet when men begin screaming?”

I certainly could do that. However I found inflicting such screams a recent past time. So I looked past him into the dark of the gatehouse above, where murder holes opened above like black sockets in the stone, pretending to dwell on the question.

“Yes.”

A pause again.

Not long. Just long enough for him to decide whether I sounded frightened, eager, or dead somewhere in between.

“Can you obey?”

That one came flatter than the others.

I shifted the halberd down and let its butt strike the stone once. 

“I can, if there is honor in it.”

The guard with the broken nose snorted. “Hear that? Already thinks himself a household man.”

The older Knight Jacques never looked away from me, grey eyes like fresh struck steel.

“You wear fine armor for a hedge knight.”

“I did not say hedge knight. A merchant’s of Qis who has some skill in war,” I corrected, playing the part.

The Knight shook his head. “No. The Master of Arms will decide that.”

His eyes were sharp. Not clever in the courtly sense. Not polished. Just sharp, but not hopefully sharp enough.

I said nothing as the wind moved over the drawbridge, carrying with it the faint stink of the moat used as a convenient sewer. I looked away as if in embarrassment, as the Knight drew a slow breath through his nose.

“If you meant trouble, you would not come through the front gate in armor like that,” he concluded at last. “As bold as this.”

There it was. Not trust. Not even close. Just a shape of reason he found acceptable enough to walk beside. It was enough.

He jerked his chin toward the tunnel. The spear lifted from my path.

He gestured, the action was all easy authority and order. “Inside.”

I went, fighting a smile. The stupid fools had let me in.