The Clan (24 page)

The dwarf pricked up his ears, looking at me expectantly. I screwed my face into an appropriately official expression. "Durin the Dwarf, Master of the Mithril Smithy, I hereby invite you to join the Children of the Night and accept the post of the clan's steward and treasurer!"

Why not? I didn't have enough people, did I? So I had to think of something pretty quick. At least he wouldn't be able to run off into the real world with our money. Nor would he fritter away the funds to the first so-called friend or honey trap.

"Your job will be to guard and increase the clan's property. Which doesn't mean I'll have to run after you begging you every time I need a nail to drive in the wall! You are the guardian; I'm the owner. You have a minute to consider my offer."

The ex-Master didn't hesitate. I don't think he expected to get a second similar offer from somewhere else. The alternative, however, was sad and unenviable.

He nodded. With a metallic click, he drew his hand from behind his back and offered it to me, palm up. On his thumb hung the pin ring he'd pulled from the grenade.

"Don't move," I said to him calmly. "Show me your other hand, very slowly, and please don't unclench it!"

Impressed by the seriousness in my voice, the dwarf pulled the other hand from behind his back, showing me the primed grenade. I lay my hand over his wizened fingers and squeezed it to prevent him from letting go of the safety clip. Gingerly I removed the ring, pinched the two ends of the split pin in my teeth and rethreaded it into the hole. Breathing a sigh of relief, I much more calmly let go of the clip handle. What a kamikaze. Had he just tried to blow us all up or was he really so clueless? I didn't ask. I motioned him to open his shovel-like hand, caught the deadly pineapple and cautiously put it in my bag.

The dwarf's greedy stare followed the disappearing treasure. "Do you understand the steel invaders' mechanics?"

"Sort of," I mumbled as I scanned the heap for any more hazardous junk. Trust them to unearth some tactical nuke so that this smartass could try to take it apart with a sledgehammer. How was I supposed to rebuild the Temple after that?

I wondered what the Vets would think when they noticed an atomic mushroom on the horizon? Would Dan and Eric immediately think about me? I seemed to be their prime suspect for lots of things.

"And who are you?" the dwarf squinted like a cop and
—inconspicuously, so he thought—reached under his cloak. "Are you their servant or something?"

"Don't worry. It's been eight hundred years since anyone heard about them. Few still remember they existed at all. The
world has new inhabitants now: the Immortal Ones. Millions are just visitors while hundreds of thousands have settled down here for good. I'm one of them. So please stop searching your pockets for whatever it is you're looking for, just surrender it to our ammo depot. Pointless trying to kill us: I've just told you we're immortal. So are you with us? Here's the invitation."

I selected him as target, crossed my fingers
—no clan had ever hired a zombie before—and sent him an invitation to join. The Universe didn't shatter—apparently, the world's mechanics had been sufficiently changed the last time—but our clan counter grew by one.

Now that's a motley crew! Should I invite the Fallen One to join, too? Or Macaria, talking about the devil? Had she already realized she was now sitting on a time bomb? How did she expect her priests to level if she'd pulled them out of the food chain between her worshippers and herself, stripping them of the necessary referral XP? Never mind Eric: I was sure the Vets wouldn't let him down by seeking another priest for their own initiation. Actually, hadn't they invited me to some official 'do or other this coming Saturday? That was in their own interests: the priest's raid tricks and special abilities could add their two cents to the clan's power making it stronger and more competitive. But what was I supposed to do with the other Temple priests? Did I have to pay them for every initiation? Suicidal little cow. First she'd made a real botch of things, then she disappeared and left me to clean up her mess!

I stirred and glanced at the zoned-out zombie who must have been digesting his new status, saying goodbye to his eight hundred years of solitude.

I mentally reached for the Castle-controlling
artifact. "Lurch!"

"Yes, Master!"

"What do we have in the way of a treasury? Know any?"

"Three!" AI reported with a note of pride in its voice. "One is official, used as bait for burglars and as decoy for an attacking enemy. Lots of traps and very few real treasures, mainly costume jewelry. The second one is the owner's personal treasury, an artifact strongroom with floating coordinates. It's currently on standby buried deep in the foundations and can be moved closer to your suite at your first request. Finally, the secret vault used to store real treasures. Status: yellow, borderline functional. Unfortunately, the regenerating wave that occurred sixteen hours ago has caused forty-one tons of the vault's contents to mysteriously disappear."

Bam! My virtual greedy pig collapsed, unconscious. I gave him a mental slap on his fat cheeks, wiped his large tears and sighed, "Oh, well. No use crying over spilt milk. Now listen: on my orders, Durin the Dwarf has been appointed castle treasurer. He is granted access to the last treasury you mentioned. His initial task will be to store the mithril ore and other valuables. Notify me of all instances of him carrying out more than 1% of the vault's contents."

With a smile, I turned to the dwarf and slapped his wood-hard shoulder, shrinking as I imagined him crumbling to the floor with my hearty endearment. But by now he was too dry and wizened to fall apart. Good.

"Welcome to our ranks! We are few but we do have potential—a Super Nova castle, the First Temple complete with a priest, and the promise of support from two gods. Potentially we might be looking at a major war but you can't scare a dwarf with a good fight, can you?"

He grinned in agreement, exposing a row of perfect white teeth marred by a couple of impact gaps. His jaw must have suffered a few quality punches in its time: to the best of my knowledge it took a good horse's kick to make a dent in Dwarven teeth. And not just any kick but a fractal one involving some twists and turns. Dwarves could gnaw on rocks without as much as a toothache.

I was about to send him back to the cellars for a new dose of mithril when I remembered the point at which we were interrupted. "How many grenades did you say you had stashed?"

He tried to play dumb but now it wasn't so difficult to put the squeeze on him. If he were a clan member in an honorary post, he had to get used to discipline and hierarchy. He seemed to have realized it as he mumbled,

"Seven with rings. And two crates without, that's another forty."

Logical. They had to store the grenades without fuses. Finding them was another thing. I told them to go through the place with a fine-tooth comb and deliver the steel invaders' treasure to me personally. And gently, on tiptoe! I couldn't really say that the discovery of the grenades shifted the balance of power, reversing the course of history. How much explosive would they contain in total, a hundred grams? That wouldn't exceed the destructive effect of a level-90 Shooting Star spell. And that's in an ideal world, considering the weird markings. It could be a gas grenade, a signal flare or a thunderflash for all I knew. You tried to use it as a last argument in a critical situation only to discover you'd just lobbed a smoke bomb at the charging enemy. That wouldn't help you bring the world to its knees. Now if I had a whole factory of those, I could in theory give them to any number of zero-level characters, essentially arming them with the equivalent of a near-100 magic. But now all I had was a new tool, a trump card up my sleeve and I needed to make sure I used it promptly.

I turned to the two other clan members. "Lena, do leave the pup alone, will you? His mom can't wait for you to go, you've been treading all over her paws, I'm surprised she hasn't bitten you yet. Let's go outside and check on those ruins. I want to see what those mad goblins have done."

I lay my hands on their shoulders and led them toward the exit to demonstrate the whole grandeur of the Super Nova ruins. We stepped out, blinded by the piercing sun after the Temple's majestic gloom. Then we cried out: I in surprise, Lena in awe. The inner court looked as if it had been worked over by a talented landscape designer. Colored mosaic paths ran amid rich flowerbeds that climbed some of the walls forming hanging gardens. I didn't know any of those billions of flowers and plants that swayed in their pots, each humming its own note that weaved into beautiful melodies. Fruit trees offered their shade, all in different season: cherries budding and in blossom, and those bearing fruit from pale yellow to deep burgundy, all clinging to the same lace pavilion. Jesus, it was beautiful.

"Lurch?" I whispered into the artifact, unwilling to break the spell of the moment. "Got something to tell me?"

AI was smart enough not to ask me what I meant. "You did allow me to use 1% of all the units generated for my own needs, didn't you? So I thought I'd make myself pretty, the façades at least. Lying in heaps of debris for eight hundred years was intolerable. I used to be a painter once, you know..."

"I don't want to know! What 1% are you talking about? Have you done anything inside at all? I can see at least five gardeners here! Where do you think you got the money from?"

"Sir," Lurch's voice filled with injured dignity.

"Don't sir me! Okay, you can call me Master if you really have to..."

"Master, didn't you authorize me to hire extra staff with the automatic payment option? Indeed, the final version of the design you see now cost a hundred times more than I could afford. But I only paid for the project itself, plus the seeds and the enhanced-growth seedlings. The rest was all done by the staff hired as of your orders."

"Was it?" I didn't like the way he said it. "Who did you hire, then?"

"Ahem," Lurch paused. "Just some gardeners and diggers, a few stonemasons, carpenters and interior decorators, plus a couple handymen here and there..."

"How many?" I groaned.

"A hundred and seventy nine sentient beings," Lurch answered in a sunken voice. "But it's only for twenty four hours! And then I did send you a full expense report!"

"Where is it? Where the f-" I stopped noticing my friends' scared faces. "It's all right. Just the Castle's AI exceeding his authority. I've got to show him who's the boss..."

I finally trawled the message from the depths of my overflowing inbox. I opened it and groaned. "You butthead! You only sent it to me two minutes ago, didn't you? Jesus... An Elf designer, fifteen hundred a day. Total, forty one grand? Lurch?"

"He's the King's personal designer, Master. An award-winner. He used to decorate the palace of-"

"Fire everyone! Once their twenty-four hour contract is expired!"

"We can't!" Lurch protested. "All this will die!"

I looked at the glorious beauty around us. At Lena who was sitting amid the flowers that seemed to cuddle up to her, stroking a huge violet blossom that curled up in her lap ringing like a silver bell.

"Very well. You can leave the bare minimum of staff to care for all this splendor."

"You really like it?" Lurch asked timidly.

"Of course I do. But for future reference, all expenses over a hundred gold have to clear my desk. This is official, effective immediately."

"Yes, Sir!"

I heard what sounded like the chirruping of hundreds of sparrows coming from the direction of the mosaic paths. Then a screech of metal. This felt like some sick déjà vu.

I turned my head and my blood turned to ice. Squalling and quipping, a dozen goblins were dragging across the paving stones the enormous egg of a 500K GP bomb, its stabilizing fins bent.

Chapter Eighteen

"A
ll freeze!" I squeaked, watching the metal spark against the stone. "Where d'you think you're taking that?"

Apparently relieved, the goblins let go of the bomb which thumped to one side, crumpling its fragile fins. I shut my eyes and shrunk my head into my shoulders. A second passed. Nothing. Phew. I could live without this sort of surprises.

One of the cleaners—no idea where he'd got hold of his grubby bandana—wiped his sweaty forehead. "Well, eh... You said eggs, didn't you? We're taking this thing over there," he nodded at some designer art in the shape of a hill two stories high covered in flowers and veined with blue streams.

I stared at the hill's rounded sides. Then one of the flower beds stirred, letting out the shabbily clad skinny backside of a goblin crawling out from under the amber moss. The creature cast a furtive glance around and began studying his stolen trophies. Raising his left hand to his nose, he sniffed what on closer scrutiny turned out to be another grenade. With a screech of metal against metal, he tried to bite a bit of it off, snorted his disappointment and cast the inedible thingy aside. The grenade thumped up and down on the uneven ground, rolling toward us.

By then I was quite used to the sight of ordnance being dropped. Stepping on the dirty-green sphere, I stopped its chaotic journey. The same as the one I'd taken from the dwarf, only the markings this time were a sickly glittering acid green. Good thing, anyway. Waste not, want not.

In the meantime, the goblin was already appraising
another trophy. This time he was in luck. An enormous egg the size of that of an ostrich—at least—promised him a hearty meal. The goblin sniffed it greedily, bit the top off, then began swallowing the contents. I, however, was studying the handmade hill with a different eye, recognizing the familiar shapes of various ammunition in its bumps and mounds. If the whole thing detonated, holy mother of God...

As if answering my thoughts, a dull explosion echoed not far from us. The earth shook quite tangibly.

"That's nine," Lurch commented.

I peered at the cloud of smoke rising over the castle walls. "A sapper only gets to make one mistake. And that's when he chooses his profession."

Only then I noticed the goblins' foreman. He was running past us, his stick shredded, one eye twitching.

"Harlequin? Where do you think you're going?"

"Eh? What?" he looked about him. Finally noticing us, he ran right toward me. "Master! Forgive me, Master, but we need more hands!"

"Really? What have you done with the old ones, then?" I upped the sarcasm in my voice.

He hung his head. "It's that damn nest. Once I told those idiots we were looking for eggs, they keep tasting everything they find. Also, sometimes the shells break when they drag them. Then we had this big boom..."

"Casualties?" I grew serious. It was all right laughing at it, but every blown-up goblin was costing me.

Harlequin made a helpless gesture. "I can't be everywhere at once, Master. These are their clans' castoffs, they have no brains, only instincts. If I could have some warriors or craftsmen, or even free artisans... Those guys over there are junk. All they're capable of thinking of is food, sex and the fear of punishment."

Oh well. Hint taken. Penny wise and pound foolish. But how was I supposed to know you needed brains to collect junk and sieve through stone debris? True, I'd accepted the cheapest offer available... and a cheapskate always pays twice. "What are our losses, exactly?"

"One mighty big egg, three medium ones and lots of small ones. They just swallow them whole, the bastards..."

Illustrating his words, a new
Boom!
assaulted our ears, much more powerful than the previous one. The earth tried to shake us off. A gray cloud of dust rose to the sky over the outer wall.

"That's
four
medium ones," the foreman corrected himself.

"Actually, I meant workers. And how about this egg, does it count as 'mighty big'?" I looked at the bomb which by now was gradually integrating into the garden's design. The flowers' tendrils climbed its rough sides, generous touches of colored moss streaking the sad metal. Quick job. Better not to drop anything of value here: before you could bend down to pick it up, the lost gold piece would be forever buried inside the trunk of an ancient oak tree. No joke: it looked like the gardeners had overdone it on the growth promoter.

"That one? That's a medium one," the goblin snickered at the bomb. "The real mighty big one, that was a different story. I was a hundred paces away and my eye is still twitching. So I'm afraid we don't have many workers left, Master! A dozen-plus at most. You've got to hire a few new ones."

Holy cow. I dreaded to think what it was that they'd detonated over there. No, I couldn't leave it like that. These little goblin rats were certain to blow us all to hell and back. Besides, it was a shame wasting our supplies so pointlessly. Every explosion made my inner greedy pig sob as he mourned, crossing it off his list, every bit of the loot we could have taken off the great dragon Nagafen had we used all that ammo to blow him to smithereens.

"Lurch? Do we have somewhere where we can store hazardous artifacts? Someplace well protected, preferably underground?"

"We do indeed," he answered. "The lowest level of the basement, Alchemy Laboratory #2. Before, it was occupied by some spider-like monster and now it's Hell Hounds living there. Master," he hurried to complain, "the hounds disturb the walls' integrity! They're digging two tunnels, one of which is coming out behind the exterior wall!"

I glanced at the hound next to me. I had little doubt that her mental magic skills were more than enough to listen into our conversations, so openly she sneered and wiped her feet on the grass as if removing the non-existing cobwebs. Actually, I wouldn't want to be the spy who used the tunnel to walk right into the Hell Hounds' lair. Besides, I had indeed promised I'd let them choose any room they wanted so it wasn't quite kosher to backpedal now, not to mention the harm it could do to my reputation. Head tilted to one side, the hound followed my thinking process with some interest. Jeez. I really didn't need another cloak-and-dagger specialist to haunt me.

"No, Lurch, I don't think we need this kind of time bomb right under our backsides," I told him. "If something goes wrong, God forbid, the First Temple will be blown to kingdom come. At least my friends and I can go back to our respawn points, but the NPCs have no such luck. You'll be reduced to nothing. Hound?" I halted, not knowing how to address her. It really was time I got her a name. "Excuse me, Hound, if you find it too personal, but actually
—are you male or female?"

The pooch glared at me, tensing up. Her mental message hit me like a slap in the face
—literally, judging by the Divine Immunity prompt that popped up. I ignored the attack. Sorry pup, I didn't mean it.

"Female," she mumbled, indignant. "Males are incapable of mental speak. They can't lead the pack," she snorted, bathing me in another mental wave of indignation that sent the squeaking goblins scampering away. She was one powerful bitch.

"Sorry, babe. It's just that I don't know how to address you. I'm fed up with calling you hound. What if I call you... eh..."

I rummaged through my memory, trying to think of something nice as I hurriedly discarded various Ladies and Lassies. Inferno creatures were fast and deadly. Lightning sounded about perfect, but for me it was more associated with the cute Disney car than a dog, and in this world of wishes coming true you had to be careful about any subconscious slips. I didn't think the Hound would grow two pairs of wheels but nor would she appreciate a postbox-red lick of paint. Oh well, if not Lightning, what then? Spark? More modest but also fast, it too could hurt or even lead to a fire or an explosion.

"Spark! How d'you like that?"

The Hound started. Her nostrils flared, her claws crumbling the path's precious mosaic as she retracted them. She tilted her head to one side, apparently listening to herself, appraising her new status. Her eyes glistened with intellect, acquiring a new unusual depth.

Finally, her heavy armored head lowered in a bow. "Thank you, Priest, for your priceless gift..."

Aha. There seemed to be a pattern here. Apparently, for all monsters a name was something much more important than just a sequence of sound waves. "It's my pleasure, Spark. I'd really appreciate it if you told me what makes this gift so valuable."

At the sound of her name, the Hound rolled her eyes and, forgetting herself, grunted with pleasure. "By distinguishing me from amongst thousands of others and rewarding me with this unique mark, you use your power of creation to enter me into this world, giving me a soul and a chance to be reborn. The name is what shields us from oblivion and its ocean of shapeless biomass that forms thousands of creatures every second only to be destroyed in a matter of hours by the death-hungry Undead Ones."

Oh well. These monsters seemed to have pretty grim afterlife ideas. Now I could understand their unwillingness to die. Wonder if the developers had introduced this behavioral algorithm on purpose in order to improve their combat qualities, or was it some secret knowledge that had surfaced on its own?

I turned to the foreman faltering nearby, "Harlequin? What do you think?"

He silently pointed at the gaping holes in his clothes, reached into his pocket and produced a handful of purple fragments. He lowered his head.

What was that now? Had he already blown himself up somewhere? Then how come he hadn't disappeared like the faceless cleaners had? Did it mean he'd respawned?

"Lurch?" I called.

"Master," his voice broke. "Only yesterday I was a mixture of cold logic and a desire to serve. And now I take in the flowers and colors, I feel tickled when the Hounds dig their tunnels, and drool over the mosaic roof tiles in the designer catalogue. Also, there's a couple of starlings made their nest in the donjon's Southern gun slit. The way they sing, it's something..."

The mind boggles. Who were we, then
—toddler Creators, playing with tin soldiers in some celestial nursery? Were we building worlds then destroying them without even realizing it? No. We were still a long way from becoming creators. We were, at best, some Godlike larvae, their gestation period stretching into hundreds and thousands of years. Only then, provided you hadn't lost your soul on the way, did you receive the chance to turn into a butterfly.

I turned back to the Hound. "Do you think it would be a good idea to give names to all the dogs in the pack?"

Spark paused, thinking. Then she shook her head, "No. I don't think it's a good idea to grant one a soul casually. Besides, your powers aren't boundless; on the contrary, they're infinitely limited. It's one thing to add one final stroke to the unique portrait of an already-extraordinary creature, finalizing its creation by breathing life into it. And it's quite another to create a unique personality from a faceless outline. I don't think you're strong enough to do it. You need to wait for a particular situation—an event, a deed of courage—when this member of the pack steps out of the ruck. Only then the precious seed of the name you give her can sprout into a fully developed soul."

That made sense. It felt
—how would I put it—it felt
right
. I had this sense that this was how it was supposed to be. Well, all the more reason to accept this explanation as a working theory until proven otherwise.

"I see," I said. "Okay, back to our problems. Harlequin, I'm going to hire you twenty top class workers. As for the eggs, you shouldn't drop or drag them. You need to carry them with caution and on tiptoe."

I paused, comparing the goblins' frail arms and legs with the half-ton contraption. Well, well. What you really needed here was a troll trained in ballet dancing so he could carry stuff around for them. I had to check the hiring board, they had all sorts there. If push came to shove, I could always create my own staff using the manual generation option. True, it was more expensive and had its limitations: you couldn't, for instance, create a vampire hobbit as strong as an ogre. But it probably could build something like a super-cautious and balanced troll.

"Lurch, I've got a job for you. You need to clean all the stage scenery from the hill. You can add all the props later. Let the goblins do their job first."

"
Both
hills!" the foreman demanded.

I looked around. Which both? Were there two of them? Why didn't I know anything about it? Indeed, at the back of the court lurked another rather enormous heap partially concealed by the first one. Hadn't I told them to put all atypical junk aside? Wasn't that what I'd told the foreman?"

Greed got the better of me. "Clean it up!" I snapped.

As Lurch sighed, protesting, the cleaners began pulling apart its colored moss and fragile flowers. I noticed a few of the more intellectual plants that, scared by the prospect of total destruction, tucked up the skirts of their leaves and scurried off the hill all by themselves. So! I'd seen fly traps and I'd heard of cannibal vines, but I'd never come across anything like this.

In the meantime, the goblins acquired a taste for pulling things apart. "Easy!" I shouted. "We'll still have to restore it all. I've paid for every handful of humus with my own money!"