Velsolis and Xarrin leading me around made me wonder if I should have stayed green. There were still more demons than not that were other colors, but with the pair of them I probably wouldn’t have stood out. Obviously I needed some horns and not tusks, but other than that I would have been fine. Less illusion would be optimal, but now people could recognize me and it was too late to change.
Midnight slipped in through the door behind us as we entered the Center of Peace and Violence. He scurried off to sneakily look at places that Inasyah and I weren’t going to be. Or at least not right away since we didn’t exactly have details.
“You know,” Xarrin commented as we walked into an official looking office. “We don’t get many visitors who aren't at official stationings in the area.” Uh-oh. Suspicion. “Did you run into any trouble?”
I wasn’t sure what to say about that. However, Inasyah was prepared to respond. Or perhaps she rapidly improvised, which was basically the same.
“A little,” she said. “There were some knights intruding into our territory.”
“Knights!” the man said. “From where?”
“Zuresh, of course.”
“Of course,” he nodded, his horns drawing my eye to themselves as he did so. “That is the most likely issue. Did you run into any heroes? I didn’t see any captures.”
He just straight up said it, huh? Normally I was fine with straightforward conversation, but this time I was at a loss. Inasyah was apparently trained for infiltration though.
“Heroes? I didn’t expect them to be here so fast.”
Technically, she didn’t even lie there. She merely used an ambiguous question and a redirection, which was exactly how good lies were told. But I still thought it was risky. Was the current presence of heroes something we should know about as good citizens of the demon kingdom?
Velsolis stood awkwardly inside the room, her large metal studded club not providing her much room to avoid bumping into cabinets. “We’ve already seen a bunch,” she said. “Not here, but Zuresh is probably the last to call their heroes. Those knights could have been scouting out the area for their training. One must imagine them unfortunate to have run into your sort instead of land ravagers or disembowelers.”
I don’t think we saw any disembowelers, but we probably encountered land ravagers. Was Velsolis assuming we were stronger than both? She was right, of course. And the fact that we were here meant that we won. Which was true, but not quite in the way she imagined.
“They weren’t expecting us, I think.” Maybe neither were these people. “I’ve never captured a hero before, what do we do if it happens?” That wasn’t a lie, even though I had been involved in the capture of a ‘hero’. Because New Bay heroes weren’t the same thing as the heroes here. I didn’t even think about the possibility when I said it, because the word the demons were using for ‘hero’ contained nuances more like ‘extradimensional invader’.
Xarrin chuckled at something. “If you had captured a hero, I’d be surprised. That’s dangerous business, but the bounty is better. Newlings start at five crowns and only go up from there. If you do happen to do it… we could handle a couple here, but we couldn’t immediately pay for a full group of six.” Was it always six? Midnight didn’t count. Or rather, Midnight and I counted as one together. “Closer to the capital they could manage, but heroes are notoriously slippery so I’d suggest making sure you had them secure. And even if we don’t have the coins on hand we could pay in kind or send you a writ for the royal treasurers.” He looked me up and down. “I wouldn’t try to steal the honor from anyone, and especially not someone who could wrestle Velsolis.”
“I lost, though,” I pointed out.
Velsolis had opinions about that response. “Of course you did. You’re not even a martial combatant, but a spellcaster of some sort. I just can’t quite tell which kind.”
“I’ve been known to throw around a bit of lightning from time to time,” I said. That was probably safer than saying spatial magic. First, because the humans seemed to deride it. Second, because what if only the humans had it? They were the ones summoning people from other worlds after all. “So about the heroes. How do we tell them apart from other humans?”
Xarrin explained that. “There are several ways. First, they’re usually young, with dopey looks on their faces. But The Six could just send their own foolhardy youths into battle, so that’s not guaranteed. The actual confirmation involves testing the curse.”
I was pretty sure that counted as confirmation. I would have to ask Midnight about Lana’s actual name. “I don’t have any experience with that,” I admitted.
Xarrin shrugged. “Same. Yalith has some info, and she might even dabble in such magic. Mostly we just keep anyone that could be a hero in antimag shackles until a collector can teleport out.”
Was it such an important thing that they would teleport someone to collect captured heroes? What a silly thought, of course it was.
“Who’s Yalith?” Inasyah asked.
“I’ll take you to see her after we settle the formalities here.”
-----
The formalities involved less punching than I would have liked and more coming up with a name for our mercenary group on the spot. In a panic, I’d just said ‘Power Brigade’. Inasyah didn’t complain… yet. But she might when we were alone. Other than that we were asked what sort of tasks we’d be interested in undertaking. He mentioned extra patrols to ward off human intruders, but also a lot of monster slaying. Including the aforementioned land ravagers and disembowelers. And also something called death lizards.
Velsolis had noted that we had lots of ranged weaponry so we could target sky strikers, which were apparently trouble for Quest’s Beginning and End. Fort Seire. Same thing. Since they could circumvent the walls, I supposed that made plenty of sense.
I was happy to volunteer to battle monsters. Or rather, to get paid to do so. Humans were a bit… we might not be able to capture them all. And it would be easier to reveal ourselves. Plus, the random knights might not all deserve to die. I was pretty sure that the royal family still did, though. If they were willing to properly train their own people they wouldn’t have to snatch outsiders and curse them.
When we went to see Yalith, we came across a black furred feline. Of course, I knew Midnight would be there before we entered the room. I always knew what direction he was in. Likewise, he would have known I was coming.
“Meow,” Midnight said as he looked back at me lazily. He had to know he could just speak Celmothian, but maybe he was worried someone would have translation magic and pick up the words.
“Is this your cat?” the woman who must have been Yalith asked. “Because I don’t think there’s anyone else new here. If he’s not your cat I’m claiming him. So polite! I was showing him the books I was reading, and he only pawed at them once.”
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
Her skin was the blue of a hazy day and her horns curled down just above her shoulders. I wondered if that would interfere with her tilting her head. She was patting Midnight on the head, and he was making a face like she was some aunt you tolerated at family gatherings. Not that I knew about those outside of Earth movies.
“These fellows were wondering about the hero’s curse,” Xarrin explained. “I thought you might have something on that.”
“I sure do!” Yalith said. “Let me get volume number one!”
She jumped up from the table she was sitting at, almost knocking off some of the various tomes piled atop it. She spun around, speaking magic and using one hand to form somatic components. Then she pointed at one of the books. It was yanked off the shelves, but not by Telekinetic Hand. Yalith pointed at Inasyah after that.
“Special delivery!”
Power Brigade training had taught me to react quickly. Even before the book began to move, I felt something off about it. I could be wrong since I wasn’t that familiar with enchantments, but I could feel a faint bit of fire. And what she had said about Midnight pawing at books…
Not all of those thoughts actually passed through my head. Instead, I thought that I had to deal with some fire. Mana flowed rapidly. With Advanced Energy Magic, it was simple to call upon Energy Ward in an instant. I didn’t know what to target, so I just hit the whole book, making sure that nothing could escape. If there was nothing to worry about, it shouldn’t matter.
I reached out to grab the book, but it went around me and landed in Inasyah’s hand. In some ways it was like Gift, but somehow flashier despite the other one teleporting things.
Fire burst throughout the book. Or rather, the idea of fire. It was negated by Energy Ward. The amount of it was enough to severely burn someone. Or… destroy the book?
I eyed the shelves. Did they all have that same enchantment? My eyes flicked back to Yalith. Had she noticed my spellcasting?
“Volume one has most of the important stuff. If you need to create something like it you’ll need volumes two through four, and I don’t have five and six because the royal court refuses to copy them.”
Inasyah handed the book to me. I couldn’t tell if she noticed my spellcasting either, but Midnight did.
Book. I should probably open it.
I did that. My eyes weren’t really focusing on the pages, though. “Why would humans want to curse their heroes?” I asked.
“Because they don’t want to be here, obviously,” Yalith said. “I mean, can you blame them? They rarely even get close to killing the king. Mostly they get a lot of people killed and then humans try to move into the border lands and die to the monsters. Or starvation. Why do they think we don’t live there?”
A good question. I hadn’t talked with the humans enough to know.
“Could we just remove the curse and send them back?” I asked idly as I scanned the dense pages full of text, drawings, and hand gestures. I could learn a lot from this. I moved over to the table to set down the tome and indicated to Midnight that he should climb up onto my shoulder, and hopefully he would think to record the pages.
“I assume the king just keeps them,” Yalith commented. “So that the humans can’t get more.”
I turned to look at her. “What does that have to do with it?”
“Six by six is the limit, you know,” she said as if it was common knowledge. The other two seemed to get that as well. “That’s not just per batch, but active at any time.” The look of interest on Xarrin’s face indicated that maybe he didn’t know everything.
Good thing I was supposed to be an ignorant mercenary. “I see, I see,” I nodded. “So I couldn’t possibly get more than a hundred and eighty crowns.”
“Hah!” Velsolis thought that amusing. “As if you could even carry it all with you. Unless you’re the greatest spatial mage the world has ever seen.” I might be. But probably not, since I was only Advanced. “Your horses would be complaining at just five crown chests.”
Crown chests. Xarrin had mentioned payment for monster slaying in silver crowns so I had imagined the presumably gold crowns being ten or a hundred times as much. But a chest? Of sufficient size that five of them would strain horses. Now that was significant.
Yeah. Heroes were worth a lot. Maybe I could snag some of the other thirty-odd. Less than thirty, actually, with the ones dying to monsters and that one that was already captured.
“This guy does lightning magic, apparently,” Velsolis commented.
“Really? What do you think about flow modulation?” One handed gestures immediately tossed a book at me. “Have you ever tried to capture a storm? Did you know brains have lightning in them?”
Each one was another book tossed at or to me. Now that I had willingly accepted one, she presumed I wanted more. Each one I had to immediately counter fire traps. I was pretty sure the last one singed a corner and I rapidly cast Clean to try to erase the scent. Maybe nobody would notice that one piece was oddly shaped.
“Depends on the context. I don’t really have anything that could store one. I did know that, actually,” I answered the questions in order. “Am I supposed to… take these?”
“They’re supposed to stay in the library,” Yalith said. “You’re supposed to annotate them in case they got anything wrong! Or ask me about anything you don’t understand. How good are you at lightning magic? Separately, what’s your talent level?”
“Wha-”
“I actually don’t have any talent,” Yalith said. “I’m not sure it really matters.”
“You skipped the verbal components of your telekinesis spells.” She was probably supposed to use two hands, too. “How did you do that?” I sort of knew the answer. She probably manually manipulated the mana. I just didn’t know if she knew that.
“Eh,” she shrugged. “You’ll get it after a couple decades.”
She didn’t look that old. Or rather, she did look about a couple decades old. Somewhere around my age, maybe younger. Then again, none of these folk looked particularly old.
I didn’t know how to ask if demons lived forever. Especially since I was supposed to be one.
“I don’t know if I’ll be staying in town long enough to… annotate these. Can I take them with me for a while?”
“Like I said, you’re not supposed to,” Yalith said. “You’re supposed to sit at a desk and read them. But I’m the librarian and they’re warded so it’s fine. Don’t let your cat touch them.”
Midnight whispered in my ear. “Try to get that other one. It’s generic magical basics,” he gestured slightly towards the other one that was already on the table.
“My cat wants to look at that one,” I said.
“He can look,” Yalith said. “But if he burns it up I’m making you scribe copies of five tomes per.”
So that really was what was going to happen. Good thing I hadn’t just formed a coating of Energy Ward around the first book.
“Deepest Night is extremely well behaved. You have no worries about that.” I translated Midnight’s name and it sounded pretty cool. I think I liked this language.
Raglubithex’s language was also cool but that one hurt. I sometimes still doubled things when I thought about it and alliteration.
I was tempted as for how to ask for books for the sake of our little heroes. Would it seem too specific?
“Can I get a martial training manual?” Inasyah asked.
“You may have one,” Yalith said. “But as one clearly not desirous of forbidden knowledge, that is the limit I will set.”
I was prepared to negate that one’s wards. Though I wondered if I would run out of mana before Yalith if she kept tossing books.
Xarrin cleared his throat. “There isn’t actually any forbidden knowledge here, is there?”
“Of course not,” Yalith shook her head. “I would not keep that here.”
I believed that. Personally, I would keep it somewhere else. Like in Storage. I focused my magical senses with the intent to pick that sort of thing out, and I was pretty sure hers floated behind her back and only had enough room for a couple books. It must have been so awkward to reach. Or maybe she moved it when she wanted access.
