Next

In a seat at the bar of The Wailing Griffon, a tavern in the slums of Ranara, an aging warrior talks as much as he drinks, and he drinks way too much. These are his tales...

The Job with the Keep and the Lake of Lava
by Nathan Dain

It was supposed to be an easy job. I remember thinking that at the time as I leaned up against a big boulder that was almost too hot to touch. I remember, because that was the first chance I'd had to reflect on my predicament.


We'd started out as a pretty big group: eight of us were the muscle, one an enchanter of some sort, and the last was a guide. It was the guide who'd hired us, but I should have known better. His name was Sevious, and he was one of those shifty buggers that always show up after the fighting has ended and pick all the bodies clean of loot. Don't get me wrong, I'm not one to pass up loot, but you know the kind of guy I'm talking about.


The job was simple: break into the Keep of What's-Its-Name, kill the Count of Something-Or-Other, and grab the Orb of Thingamajig. Supposedly, the Count was about to use the orb to wipe out a defenseless town of puppies or some other nonsense, and at the time I'd recently lost a king's fortune in a game of Daggers, so I really needed the money. (I know, I know. You're thinking, “But you're the epic Bram Thunderfist, greatest swordsman for hire this side of the Eonies Ocean,” and, yes, I am. But Daggers is a game involving, weirdly enough, daggers, and Swordsman is my title, not Daggerman. Different skill.) Even so, I didn't have a good feeling about Sevious the moment he squirmed into the pub in which I was meditating on being drunk, and I knew I shouldn't have agreed to what sounded too good to be true. But, like I said, money.


So, the ten of us all met up outside the town of Sadrodger, a hovel of a place made of dirt, mud, and wet dirt, met each other for the first and last time, arm wrestled and sparred as a way of getting sober and evaluating opposing skills—well, except of course for the enchanter whom no one even wanted to look at on account of him being one with the spooky arts—and set off into the Foothills of Scorching Torment.


In case you've never been down that way, I'd encourage you to avoid the Foothills of Scorching Torment. They're not as pleasant as they sound, and they lead up into the Mountains of Incinerating Screeching Death, though I have to say, the naming scheme of the region is really on the nose.


Point being, we traveled for just under a day, and none of us were happy about it. Breathing was difficult, what with the poisonous wind raging down from the mountain tops. Even worse, the alcohol proved dangerous as it tended to spontaneously ignite, and we were forced to make our way up the mountain dead sober. By evening, we crested the lip of the Valley of Terror, and first set eyes on our goal: the Keep of... yeah, I still can't remember what it was called, but it was big, with lots of pointy spires, and nestled on a massive jagged rock right in the heart of a yawing lake of bubbling lava.


I had my misgivings, though from where we stood, it looked like an easy enough path. A wide meandering trail of obsidian paved a land bridge over to the island, and other than a few large boulders dotting the road, it looked pretty straight forward.


And that was when people started dying.


There's always that moment in a job where the job starts reminding you why it is you're being paid large sums of gold to do something that sounded easy. It usually involves lots of blood and screaming.


The master of the arcane arts was the first to go. His role was to use his unnatural abilities to disable the protective warding erected between the two towering monoliths at the narrow entrance of the valley, and he did just that with great alacrity, but he also unleashed a wave of groks who were apparently lying in wait. If you've never seen a grok, count your blessings. They're the smaller, uglier cousins to goblins, but they smell worse and have a mouth like they've vomited a cutlery shoppe.


So when the spell slinger brought down the barrier—I think his name was Phil. I'll just call him Phil—anyway, Phil took a grok to the face. It wasn't pretty, and all hell broke loose. Hell, in this case, sounded like the gong of a ten tonne bell as a thrumming vibration resonated some kind of alarm across the entire valley.


Being in the very back, I had a good view of the unfolding chaos. Tactically, I find the rear of a group to be the best place to assess a situation, and it helps that I'm a towering behemoth of a man and can see over my fellow adventurers. It also helps that when everyone else is being pressed, you get an extra second or two to delineate the subtleties of what's unfolding before you. Some may call it cowardice, though those who might are obviously not used to being a magnificent specimen of bulging muscle and masculinity who typically fills the doorway and keeps overzealous companions from seeing the battlefield, prompting them to subsequently fire blindly into the fray and come dangerously close to shooting said epitome of stunning maleness in the posterior. I learn from experience.


The first thing I noticed was that Sevious was nowhere to be seen. The second, was that five whirling, gnashing balls of grok could turn an unsuspecting enchanter into a grotesque splatter of Phil-goo within a heartbeat without using a drop of magic. Luckily for most of my co-workers, they too discovered this fact before the small wave of grok could gain momentum.


I really try not to commit co-worker names to memory. In my line of work, they never last long. To prove my point, companions one and two squawked out a last breath before companions three, four and five cut into the cloud of disarray and stemmed the press of foul, blender faced monstrosities. Which, I suppose, was the moment I realized what was happening.


The collapse of the magical barrier thingy, and the ringing thrum it created that resonated throughout the valley, seemed to be a dinner bell of sorts. From up on high on either side of the skinny pass we all stood in, at least four dozen fuzzy, pointy grok faces peered down, and spurted from their burrows like maggots popping out from a corpse.


I was pretty sure my colleagues weren't yet up to speed on our new standing in the world, so I called out the one command every sell-sword instinctually and instantly reacts to, “CHARGE!”


The other toughs were big, stupid and decent at whacking things with whatever their chosen weapon was. That none of them knew what we were charging didn't change the fact that co-workers three through seven jolted forward in a rush of sharp swinging metal, cutting down the last of the toothy meat grinders in front of us in a stunning display of coordinated butchery and down the slope toward the sweltering land bridge. It wasn't a long run, but the heat climbed well beyond tolerable within just a few strides.


Steel armor isn't known for its ability as insulation, well, except for insulating one from bites, blades, or clubs, but keeping its wearer cool isn't one of its strong suits. (Heh, that was almost witty.) The metal suit wasn't pleasant before we hit the valley, yet as we reached the land bridge, it occurred to me that my long standing distrust of magic might have been overcome if I'd known how blooming hot it was going to be, and accepted a Sorcerer Sam's Spectacular Climate Stone when I had the chance. Everyone else had grabbed one, but no, I had to be all stoic and principled. Well, consider that lesson learned. I still don't like magic, but sometimes you have to swallow your pride.


Through rivulets of sweat pouring across my eyes, I concluded I'd have to rely on my exquisite instinct, honed skill, and impeccable physical condition with very little help from my vision. Unfortunately, bubbling molten rock isn't as quiet as you might think: deep chest-vibrating rumbling with short concussive pops, and when multiplied by the volume of a lake of it, it can easily disorient your echolocative perspective. This can, of course, be overcome by even louder sounds.


Did I mention that groks aren't quiet beasts? They like to bark right before they attack.


The first bark came from over my right shoulder, giving me plenty of time to plant my feet, shrug my right pauldron tight to my helmet, reach over my left shoulder to the hilt of Kelly, my as-yet sheathed great sword, and feel the clatter of breaking teeth against my now very protected neck. The muffled yelp brought a smile to my lips, but I was just beginning.


As I spun to face the hoard, Kelly rang free and cut a glittering arc of devastation across the first four groks at about belly high, which for groks is much closer to face high. Too bad for the groks. Furry misshapen heads popped into the air one way, and furry misshapen bodies fell the other, but by now, the hip-high hoard had organized and blanketed the slope up to where we'd entered, grouping into neat little clusters just waiting to be hacked down, though there did seem to be more than my initial count indicated.


My second swing had a little more oomph and easily clear-cut another six of the buggers, and with the press of their tiny nasty cohort, those itching to get their own chance shoved another two to instantly fill the gap, giving the more industrious of the two the chance to latch onto my leg with its mouth. Aside from the added weight on my thigh, I wasn't too worried. My armor is made of dwarfstar steel, and was crafted by the great dwarven artisans of the Hraggalgglal Citadel. Hardest non-magical stuff in all the realms, and definitely not something you want to stub your toe on. Obviously, this rock-biter hadn't seen how its sibling had fared with the whole chompy-chomp thing.


I'd well and truly begun my glorious rending of beasties, when springing from behind my left side and throwing himself way too deep into the dentally-enhanced swarm came co-worker number five. (I think I'll just shorten the companions' names down to their number. That seems easier.) So in came Five.


There's this inexplicable fashion that's gained popularity among the mercenary circles of dual-wielding long swords. Not a long sword and parrying dagger or something reasonable, but two full-sized long swords... at the same time. Sure, when it works it can look spectacular, and can get you a few unexpected hits, though I certainly don't recommend it as a go-to fighting style. Mind you, I can pull it off, but it takes a tremendous amount of dexterity, stamina, coordination, and concentration. Something Five clearly didn't have quite enough of.


Five's first flourish of sword-swinging gusto dropped two of the pokey-faced nasties, but he quickly made the mistake of fully skewering a third with his fourth strike, causing his balance to falter under the perhaps forty pounds of dying grok flesh impaled on his left sword. He was apparently just inexperienced enough to not give up on that sword then and there, and the murderous malcontents seized on the mistake with a surge of toothy enthusiasm.


He probably would have been fine until I came to his aid if his armor had also been forged of dwarfstar steel, but alas, it wasn't and he wasn't. He'd opted for tight, lightweight leather armor—and we can all see how well that worked out for the cow. After the ensuing display of rather gruesome savagery, the rest of the companions seemed to feel that I was doing a magnificent job fending off the mouth beasts, and decided that firing arrows was perhaps the better choice for this particular encounter.


There's something almost meditative about hewing large groups of enemies. I often find myself setting about the rhythm and connecting with my body and its place in this magnificent world we live in. The tightening of muscle, the percussion of pounding blood, the dance of life and death balanced in a series of moments that tenuously string together the boundaries of this reality and the next.


That, and it's great fun.


A small mountain of headless or pin-cushioned groks lay before me before the remaining half started to question the wisdom of energetically rushing toward the big man with the giant deadly sword. A few more arrows found targets, and the last twenty or so of the foul critters finally decided that we just weren't as interesting as they'd first thought, turning tail and scampering away in a frantic retreat. I wasn't stupid enough to take off my helmet, but the respite did give me time to finally wipe my eyes clear of the stinging sweat.


All that was left was to loot the bodies. Unfortunately, groks prefer to fight naked, trusting in their grimy, matted fur to provide protection, and their teeth instead of weapons. Meaning, they don't typically carry valuables. So, I dug down into the mountain of gore and uncovered the remains of Five.


As I said earlier, I learn my lessons, and know when to swallow my pride. After a little fidgeting, I rectified my previous bout of philosophical obstinacy and had my very own Sorcerer Sam's Spectacular Climate Stone. In moments, the cool whirling air turned my personal armor sauna into merely a very damp suit of chafe-iness.


Right on cue, Sevious came trotting down the now-vermin-free slope, eyeing the dead and dying for anything that might catch a price. He was smiling. “Sorry we got separated there. You handled those things pretty well though, didn't you?”


Three pointed her finger, “No thanks to you!”


“I'm sorry? Dealing with whatever those were is not in my skill set. Besides, you've been paid good money to do exactly as you did.” Which wasn't exactly true. I was given a small amount of gold as a forward to buy supplies before we set out, but the veritable mountain of wealth I was promised would be given upon completion of the job. I was pretty sure that was the arrangement the rest of the crew had agreed to, as well.


The smug slimeball pushed past the mound of corpses and back to the front of the group, before sweeping out his arm toward the winding land bridge. “Shall we continue?”


I wasn't thrilled with how this was shaping up, and by the grumbling of my dwindling number of co-workers, neither were they. Four dead, and we hadn't even breached the walls of the keep yet. But as Sevious mentioned, money. A lot of it. Even so, thinking back on it now, that was the point I should have just turned around and gone back to the pub. I've got good instincts, I just need to listen to them more.


The progress forward was exhausting despite the fact that the path was level, we were all sporting magic to keep us cool, and that morning we'd all quaffed a Blessed Potion of Cleansing Toxic Fumes Off-gassed by Lava (which is an oddly specific blessing to bestow upon a beverage, but I'm certain I'm not the first to notice how quirky the gods and their priests can be). Nevertheless, exposing oneself to the belches of the earth is never a good idea. I coughed up blood for a week once I got back to the pub, and I'm positive it was from breathing in big heaving mouthfuls of that crap.


Which got me thinking, why the hell would someone build a keep in the middle of a lake of lava? I mean, the view is terrible, the heat is unbearable, and you're sucking down a staggering amount of poisonous gas with every gust of wind. And that's not even considering how you get the thing built in the first place. What kind of workforce is willing to subject themselves to those kind of conditions for the years on end it takes to construct something like that? And then the obvious problem of building on lava. Talk about a specialized skill set.


I was busy musing over ancient labor law when we reached the roughly halfway mark across the obsidian road, and I noticed the first signs of something being very wrong. Bubbles on either side of us were clustering into tight six-foot circles. And then all at once, they erupted.


Have you ever stared at a fire for a good long time and felt like it was alive? Maybe even that the fire was looking back at you? Well, often it is. More specifically a small charquet, usually no taller than the length of your finger, has taken up temporary residence until there's nothing else to eat. Well, I didn't know that in very large fires, or in this case a lake of lava, charquets tend to get rather big and have lots of friends.


I had practically no time to act, and I figured it worked so well the first time I might as well try it again. With as much authority as I could, and let me assure you, I can generate quite a bit of authority, I bellowed out, “CHARGE!”


Too little too late, well, except for Sevious, who somehow had already bolted a good thirty lengths ahead of us. That's not to say the group wasn't moving, it was, just not fast enough.


Individually, what sprang from the lake wasn't exactly what I'd call large, maybe the size of a dog... a small dog, but for whatever reason, they did have the shape of a dog. And they flew, without wings, fast. And there were a lot of them, darting across the path in front of us, searching for what I can only assume was something to set fire to and consume. So, to put it succinctly, we were suddenly in a raging storm of flaming wingless flying puppy-dogs of death.


The temperature jumped as the torching terriers began slamming into my armor, straining the regulating capacity of the Sorcerer Sam's Spectacular Climate Stone. Even so, I was lucky, being fully clad in steel, whereas Seven had gone with style over safety: she didn't wear a helmet, and her hair was a touch longer than is wise when going into battle. To give her credit, she did get her arms up almost immediately to protect her head, but there's only so much coverage a shield and arm can grant.


Of all the ways to go, I hate watching people cook. Well... unless it's by dragon. Dragon breath is usually hot enough that it's over before you even knew it was about to begin. Thankfully, full grown charquets working in tandem seem to be on par with that kind of heat, and Seven was well-done before she'd even hit the ground. The ensuing bonfire was abrupt, intense, and drew the full attention of the other death puppies, giving the rest of us a brief reprieve from the onslaught to hustle toward some kind of cover on the far side.


Still following up as the rearguard, I was pegged in the back by a few flaming stragglers once or twice, but other than that, we made it the rest of the way across unmolested. Which I think brings us back to that point I first mentioned: leaning against a rock, trying to catch my breath, and realizing that none of this was as good as it first sounded.


Sevious had disappeared again with the promise of figuring out a way to open the imposing main gate, leaving Three, Four, Six and myself to warily watch out for any wayward charquets. Which was just as well. I really didn't like being around the little creep.


I took the time to think.


From a distance, the keep had appeared ominous. Standing at its base looking up, I was less impressed. To confirm my earlier ponderings, I was beginning to understand just how well building this thing out here had gone for Count Something-Or-Other. The craftsmanship was terrible. Nothing lined up very well, the quality of the material was sub-par, everything was made out of the same cracked obsidian, and there were gaps between the stones you could fit your whole hand in. I guess some people just don't take pride in their work.


On a more important note, half of us were gone.


I have to say, that's an aggressive rate of loss for most of my jobs. Usually, I'm only down one or two at this point, but five? That stung a little. Almost like I wasn't pulling my weight.


Meh. I was about to find out there was nothing to be done for it: from that point on, it only got worse.


Before too long, a loud clanky mechanism deep in the wall released, presumably by the hand of our sneaky colleague, and the big metal doors swung with a deafening rusty screech that let everyone in the valley know that the doors were in fact on their way open.


Access to the interior achieved, we ignored that anything hiding was surely aware that we were now there as well, and cautiously crept our way into the cavernous halls of the keep to find that the black obsidian building on the inside was just as poorly made as on the outside. Except that the inside was rigged for death.


Four fell into a pit of snakes, spikes, and whirling blades—I think the last bit was a little overkill; Six caught an eight-foot wide guillotine that dropped from the ceiling and cut him cleanly, or rather very messily, in half; and Three exploded. Not sure what from, but I hurried out of that passage as quickly as possible, not really wanting to find out.


After a fair amount of jumping, dodging, crawling, and flat out running, I was just starting to feel winded, and found myself in a massive, drab, and of course poorly-built throne room. Waiting for me, sitting on an onyx throne setting on an onyx dais that I found to be exceedingly pretentious, was a thing. It was humanoid, but I'm not positive that it was alive. If it was, it had lived life hard. Arms out wide in a pose of triumph, its wrinkles had wrinkles, and the skin that hung from its bones gently flapped in the toxic breeze. The blood-red robe it wore had significantly more substance, and weighed the thing down like an anchor tied to the crumbling black stone. It always has to be blood red. It's never something more cheery, like pink, or powder blue.


Worse yet, I was pretty sure it was smiling at me.


Oh, and the boot-licker Sevious was kneeling at its feet, obviously about to start licking boots.


“Well done.” The voice that cackled out from the thing reminded me of rotting paper and ash. Then it pointed at me with one of its dried-out, wrinkly-ass hands. “You are my new champion.”


Aww, hell.


Standing straight, I pulled Kelly from the scabbard and shrugged, “No thanks.”


Its smile broke into a rasping chuckle, and the sounds of hundreds of scurrying feet echoed from out of the shadows. “I do not think you understand the honor being bestowed upon you. My pet here has brought you to my home as my new vessel.” Withdrawing a brilliant iridescent orb from the sleeve of its robe, it held the shimmering sphere high above its head with a frail wobbly arm. “With the power of Thingamajig”—it didn't actually say “Thingamajig,” but as you can tell, I'm not very good with names—“I shall subjugate the greatest warrior this side of the Eonies Ocean, taking your well endowed and strikingly well muscled body for my own.”


Those were its exact words. Well, that last part was. Apparently, it had heard of my many exploits and thought it could contain my greatness for itself. Looking around, I got the feeling I wouldn't like how it was going to use my talents. “So... you want an exclusivity contract?”


“Foolish mortal, I will empty your flesh of your soul and fill it with my own. I shall once again be the epitome of masculine greatness! This trial was staged by Sevious just to see if you shined as brightly as we'd always heard. But now the trial has ended, and you have won eternal torment, stripped from your body, and cast into the depths of the Dying God!”


With that diatribe, I strongly suspected the thing was a wizard. Gods, I hate wizards. They always want what doesn't belong to them. Well, I'd been hired to finish a job, and I figured I'd get paid one way or another. Striking a heroic pose with Kelly held at that perfect angle that usually makes bad guys crap themselves, I grinned. “I take pride in my work, and follow through on my commitments. I believe killing you was a big part of this one. Why don't you come down here with your pet maggot, and I'll end the both of you at the same time.”


It laughed again, not making the slightest attempt to do as I asked. “Strong, nimble, virile, and dumb. You still don't understand the nature of the position in which you now stand. Let me illuminate the situation.”


Thrusting its shiny ball a little farther above its head caused whips of lightning to lance out to the rafters, dancing across the black stone as skeletal fingers of light. In the same moment, the shadows around me vanished, and revealed at least two hundred groks standing in a circle around the perimeter of the chamber, along with three fifteen-foot tall obsidian rock beasts bearing stone clubs, and a handful of fully armed and armored ash-crawlers wielding scimitars and tower shields. A croaking hiss slipped past the wizard's desiccated lips, “My pet has brought me that which I seek, and I shall relish the slow agonizing consummation of your body. Your consciousness will not survive the day.”


I wasn't quite sure I approved of its word choice, and was more than certain nothing would be consummating anything right that moment.


Steeling myself over Count Something-Or-Other's dry cackling taunt for a battle of truly epic proportions, and knowing that the stories of the imminent monumentous display of stunning physical prowess would echo across the realms for millennia from the mouths of the most celebrated bards to ever be celebrated, I realized: getting paid would be harder than I first thought.


You know how it is.

Tweet

Next

Home / Mindspace / Sci Fi / Urban Fantasy / High Fantasy /  About