Book 7: Chapter 7 - A New Road (RAW) (Patreon)

Chapter 7 - A New Road

“A young soldier saw an officer steal rations from the weakest recruits. He said to his commander, ‘Sir, my heart burns at this.’ 

The commander replied, ‘Then do not waste the fire. Anger for oneself becomes rebellion. Dislike of injustice, disciplined by duty, becomes righteousness.’

So, the soldier reported the theft and shared his own rice.

Years later, when he led men, he punished cruelty before cowardice. ‘Why?’ they asked.

He replied simply, ‘An army stands on order, but order stands on justice. The first seed was simply this: I could not bear to see wrong done.’”

- The Book of Wise Tellings from the Land of Streams.

I had Larynda inform my hangers-on, including the two elf sisters, of my intentions for the morrow while I bathed. We would leave at first light, departing this miserable place and making for the distant city of Meridian. With any luck, my freshly burnished reputation for violence would hold until then.

The water in the inn’s bath ran brown.

It took several warm pails and a great deal of scrubbing before I began to resemble something human again. I realized, somewhat belatedly, that it would have been a trivial thing to use my own powers to reduce the viscera, grime, and acquired biological filth clinging to me into dust. Yet somehow that felt wrong. This was not merely about cleaning the body. It was about cleaning something deeper, or at least pretending such a thing was possible. A small, meditative ritual by which the mind might be distracted from the fact that it still had to live with itself.

Estaza ran the cloth along my back, her cunning hands drifting playfully lower with each pass. On another day, in another mood, I might have appreciated the effort. But I was not much in the mood for fun and games. I was not in the mood for much of anything.

“We are leaving tomorrow,” I said, rising from the bath to towel myself dry. “To Meridian, and then to Quas.”

“Meridian?” The waifish woman’s hands stilled, surprise sharpening her voice. “But surely we are here to secure the keep for Damien.”

Damien, I thought. Damien.

Before this, Estaza had always called him Lord de Savant. Or Commander. A long, pregnant pause settled between us, heavy with steam, water, and the sour little truth she had not meant to reveal.

“But my place here is with the Dragon,” she said at last. “My contract is to the Dragon.”

There it was. The real truth of the matter, stripped bare in the slowly cooling air. Estaza had been nothing more than a way for Damien to keep tabs on me. Had I been a lesser man, I might have raised a hand against her. But I was not, and had never been. Besides, a slap from me in passion would have turned her head to paste against the tiles.

“Do as you will,” I replied coldly, toweling myself off without bothering to cover my nakedness. “It matters not.”

She tried to follow after me, but one glance in her direction stopped her in her tracks. For a moment, I imagined I saw regret there. Perhaps I did. More likely, I merely wanted the world to be prettier and cleaner than it was. 

I suppose a part of me had always known Estaza was one of Damien’s tools. Her sudden appearance in my life had been too convenient, too neatly timed, and too perfectly shaped. She was, at the end of the day, a camp follower and a whore, and whatever warmth had passed between us had clearly not been enough to change the direction of her loyalties.

Truly, this world had a habit of never disappointing. From now on, I reminded myself, I would have to learn to keep my expectations low.

That evening, I had Larynda sleep in my room. Not for company, but for safety. Marimae and Saranea slept in the room beside mine, their security left to their own hands and whatever gods watched over them. I told my ward that I needed only a few hours to feel fully restored. Sleep, in any case, was never the pleasant oblivion it used to be. Mine was too often haunted by nightmares that I had long grown inured to.

Larynda had learned not to question me when matters were serious. She bolted the door behind her, nodded, and settled herself near the entrance, her twin staves resting across her lap, her eyes sharp despite the fatigue pulling at her face.

Once I was restored, I took over the watch and let her rest. There was little enough point in planning every detail now. We would do that on the road, resupplying from whatever towns and villages lay between Meridian and us.

We would leave at dawn without fanfare, and anyone who tried to stop us, I would grind into the stones.

I would leave this place with a favor owed by a man who might one day grow powerful, perhaps even powerful enough to matter. If I was lucky, Damien might remember the debt when the hour came to collect. If I was less lucky, I would have to remind him.

Beyond that, the open road awaited me. New storylines. New quests. The hands of Fate pulling at me where the world demanded I go.

And despite all of this, a part of me was almost looking forward to it. 

***

We left as planned after a forgettable breakfast, the elves taking with them two fine horses and a pair of pack animals that looked as though they had been bred for the long road. They wore good armor too, my money having provided them with pieces of Mithril I had either won, purchased, or bullied out of lesser men among the Mercenaries. Cordelia, as always, looked beautiful in her unnatural way, as if she did not quite belong in this world. Beautiful and imposing, she sat astride a warhorse that looked as though it could trample bears to death and think little of the matter.

No goodbyes were necessary for the fighting men of the Mercenaries. And of Estaza, there was no sign.

But an ending was still required for those who had served me. I gave the people who had followed me all the way from Al-Lazar a generous severance, enough that some openly wept and blessed the very ground upon which I stood. Gratitude came rarely my way and always looked strange to me. Too naked. Still, they had earned their coin, and if I had learned that loyalty bought cheaply was rarely worth the price.

Without servants, the road ahead would be rougher than I was used to, but no doubt faster. At some point, I would have to think of rebuilding a retinue. People to deal with the things I cared not to touch. A smith, perhaps. An armorer and a cook, if fortune decided to be unusually kind. I considered the matter for a moment before remembering that such enterprises had a habit of spiraling out of control in their scope.

Best to keep things small for now.

As for me, I wore my full harness of Adamantium plate. The weight of it was a solid comfort in these less-than-happy times, and the process of putting it on had begun to feel almost ceremonial. Tighten a strap and a buckle, adjust the plate, and seal the meat within. A shell of black gold closing around the body, piece by piece, until the man beneath became something less vulnerable and perhaps less human.

Yet this armor felt steadily less like protection from the world and more like a way to protect the world from me. A seal and a regulator of sorts of my vast and now overwhelming power.

That thought inspired me to try something as I sat in the saddle with far too much time on my hands. I pushed my own muscles against themselves, pressing and pulling in opposition, a form of isometric training using the only thing that could truly resist my Strength: myself. Theodore, my ceratopsian-like mount, plodded along beneath me with his usual ponderous indifference. Hidden behind my helm, I was glad no one could see the strange face I must have been making from the effort. Idly, I considered testing the Second Horn, the massive lance resting along Theodore’s frill, but thought better of it.

So, like this, our unlikely group set out from the city.

I took a moment to look back at the town, thinking, briefly and foolishly, of what might have been. Then it happened, with timing so perfect it was almost insulting.

Quest Complete: Liberate Eloishe Citadel

You have gained 15500.

You have reached level 30.

You have gained 3 Attribute points.

You have gained 1 Skill point.

It seemed Damien had indeed taken his ancestral home, and by the lack of smoke, fire, and frantic bells, perhaps he had even done it cleanly.

Good for him.

Still, it would have been better if he had been honest about the whole thing. Then again, this world rewarded deception far more often than honesty, and only fools complained when a knife behaved like a knife.

Offhandedly, I put one Attribute point into Strength, raising it to a pleasingly round seventy, and the remaining two into Luck, because I had the distinct feeling I would be needing it. As for the Skill point, I decided to dabble, rare for me, and put it into Whispers of the Grave, strengthening the spell that allowed me to command spirits to possess fresh corpses. It was a more exotic choice than usual, but the dead had proven reliable in ways the living so often failed to be.

As for Great Prayer, I had no idea what it was for. I had a feeling, however, just a feeling, that it would be best not to use it, even to test it. Magic had costs beyond Mana, and I had no desire to owe the Goddess Avaria any more than I already did.

Ironically, I found that the stronger I became, the more I could empathize. A little at least. Sort of like a rich man finally noticing the poor because he had gained enough breathing room to look down and see them. Perhaps I was slowly regaining my humanity. Who knew? 

But then again, did it matter, so long as I achieved my goals?

I guided Theodore with my legs, bringing him closer to Larynda. Perhaps she was the only person on this continent who genuinely wanted me to live a very long and greatly extended life.

“All of this is secondary,” I said. “A side quest… a secondary objective,” I corrected myself. “What more is required to complete the elixir?”

“Crystallized Dust is the catalyst,” she answered, her voice serious. “The gem we acquired from the Bronzegate is the source, or active reagent. We still need a suitable base and stabilizer.”

Behind her, the elven sisters’ ears perked.

The mystical mumbo-jumbo Larynda spouted made a kind of partial sense to me through the lens of basic chemistry. Sort of. However, I did not need to understand every step of the process. The result was all that mattered. Immortality, and with it, the most precious resource of all: time. Enough time to grow strong enough to defy the gods themselves and bring them down low.

All of them, if necessary.

My teeth ground together at the thought.

“That is, if it can be balanced correctly,” Larynda continued.

I turned slightly toward her. “What do we need?”

“I have some ideas, but for things like this, we need certainty. We only have one chance at it.” She pursed her lips in thought. “The Academy of Meridian might have the answer. Or at least enough information to help me find one. Then, there, of course, Quas.”

Then she beamed at me, a truly sunny smile cutting through the dust, sweat, and miserable road.

“It is a good thing we are heading there anyway, right?”

Her optimism was infectious. Despite the trials of the past days, despite the betrayals suffered and the fresh scars left upon body and spirit alike, I found myself smiling. Drawn, unwillingly, into that small and stubborn bit of light.

It would not last, but for now, it was all I had.

***

So our journey continued, with little in the way of outward excitement, save for a small organic increase to my Strength thanks to my new training methodology. Every morning, I found that my experience had crept upward as I slept, sometimes by only a single point, sometimes two if I was lucky. I wondered why for the barest moment before deciding the question was not worth the dignity of pursuit. There were some mysteries in this world that were simply not worth the bother.

We stopped at small, picturesque villages along the way, resupplying whatever we needed from places that smelled of woodsmoke, livestock, and quiet desperation. These matters I left to Larynda. She had a better eye for supplies, and, more importantly, people tended to haggle less nervously with her than they did with a man in black-gold armor sitting astride a creature that looked as though it had been bred to crush shield walls.

One thing of note was that I spied a growth of Snap-Honey near one of the village paths. The sight of the carnivorous plants sparked a small flicker of nostalgia. I harvested them without much care, my armor more than sufficient to ignore their biting attacks as I tore them out, roots and all. Their little tooth-filled mouths snapped and worried at my gauntlets like starving dogs against a castle gate.

They broke up our usual fare of travel food well enough, and what we did not eat, we fed to the mounts. Theodore, in particular, seemed to approve.

It was on the third week of the road that we encountered a rather suicidal group of would-be bandits, the classical foe an adventurer in games might have to deal with at low levels. Dusk had come as we traveled through woodland, searching for a place to make camp, when a large log suddenly crashed down across the road in front of us. A moment later, another fell behind, cutting off our escape.

Fools or desperate men. It did not matter.

I cast my magic and urged Theodore into a thunderous charge, Sage’s Sight painting three score brigands among the trees around us. They cried out as one, and a volley of bolts and arrows filled the air, all aimed toward the primary threat: Me.

It was still all so utterly pathetic.

Rust, my precious friend, answered my call. Its invisible black lightning found the arrows and bolts in midflight, igniting steel and iron alike. Shafts became burning splinters that splashed harmlessly against Theodore’s armor and scattered across the forest floor in brief, guttering sparks.

Larynda, not to be outdone, cast her own magic. Lances and blades of Water sliced into the trees to our left, cutting through branches, bark, and the men hiding behind them with equal indifference. Screams followed the wet sound of impact.

To the right, the elven sisters had already engaged the bandits. Their swordsmanship was a dance of cold grace, painting the forest in the silver of Mithril blades and the crimson of opened throats. They moved beautifully, if one could appreciate beauty in the efficient butchery of desperate men. They moved in a pattern I had taught them.

Cordelia, too, showed that her Goddess still bestowed blessings upon her. The attackers behind us were forced to their knees as her magic made the world heavier around them. Wild-eyed men found themselves pinned beneath invisible judgment, their weapons slipping from their grip as one of the major forces of the universe was amplified tenfold.

She executed them as if they were penitents, singing a prayer as she lopped off their heads.

I crashed into a group of men who had thought nets could stop a rider atop a charging Lamushitu. The point of my lance struck the first man and turned him into an explosion of gore before continuing on to impale another behind him. And another. Disdainfully, I flicked the corpses from the weapon as Theodore spun beneath me, his thagomizer lashing out and knocking more of them down like bowling pins.

That broke them, but I was not in a forgiving mood.

Forgiveness was a coin I had spent too much of, and too recently. I ran down the survivors, trampling and goring them in ones and twos, ignoring their pleas for mercy and the shrill, broken sounds they made when courage fled and death came close.

My experience barely increased. I found, however, that that was not the point at all. The attack, if it could truly be called an attack, had been a welcome diversion from the doldrums of the road.