Inferno (Play to Live: Book # 4) Read online

  The albino troll peeked into the bucket and suppressed a sigh. The spaghetti may have looked like juicy mealworms, but that's where the similarity ended. Spaghetti was disgusting and tasteless and had nothing inside.

  Still, Snowie didn't dare protest. He already knew that Bomba didn't like worms for some reason.

  Remembering Widowmaker's advice to compliment a lady whenever possible, Snowie racked his brains for something nice to say. "You my baby bomb... all 500 kilotons of you..."

  This time the lady warrior did hear him. Swinging round, she stood with her hands on her hips, indignant. "You wanna say I'm fat?"

  Snowie took another look, mentally weighing up a 500K GP — he'd lugged plenty of them down into the underground dump. Actually, the similarity was striking. But he knew better than to argue with a lady,

  "My fault, sorry. Of course you're fatter than that! You're unique, almost like a 1000K blockbuster!"

  Bomba raised her eyebrows in indignation, searching his face for a trace of mockery. Then she remembered who she was dealing with. Stepping closer, she patted the back of his neck. "You're my little rocky fool..."

  The troll purred with delight but couldn't be sidetracked. "Bomba babe," he stubbornly continued. "I've been meaning to tell you... I've seen you looking after all those kids..."

  Bomba's face darkened. Her shoulders sank. "And?"

  "So how about we get our own little Snowies and Bombas? Like, gray and white, you know?"

  "Like Dalmatians, you mean? No, wait! What did you just say?"

  "I said, how about we get a few little munchkins of our own? Only I meant to ask you, you don't happen to know how to make baby trolls, do you?"

  * * *

  I was on my way to the castle's front gates when the earth trembled beneath my feet. A rockfall echoed from the walls of the few restored buildings that had risen from amid the ancient ruins still surrounding the donjon. I glanced in the direction of the third defense ring, now enveloped in a cloud of dust. Predictably, the overzealous dwarves had demolished a large chunk of the wall claiming it was beyond repair. They didn't at all enjoy handling large slabs of reinforced concrete girded with steel, so they used every opportunity to demolish the whole thing and build it anew using their own old tried and tested methods.

  I startled every time they did it but the result was worth it. Granite was every bit as good as concrete, especially with all the durability runes and resistance to elements that the dwarves generously bestowed on their handiwork. This alone made me feel better, despite the funny feeling that the dwarves' motives weren't exactly altruistic. They didn't get rid of the old concrete slabs but went to great pains to crush them to dust, then strip them of every bit of steel. Mithril fragments and the silver-and-purple bullets that were stuck deep in the concrete came as a salvage bonus to quench their undying beer thirst. Whole barrelfuls — no, whole cellarfuls of beer, by the looks of it. Each!

  Recently this had led to an RV between the Dwarven masters and Durin the castle keeper. The prudent zombie dwarf had taken Snowie along complete with his wondrous mithril club, but as it turned out, this wasn't his main trump card during the talks. The burly dwarves were paralyzed with envy when they saw Durin's glittering special-occasion beard. This was a masterpiece conceived by the greatest experts in jewelry and wig making, six metals plaited into six braids: copper, steel, silver, gold, platinum and mithril.

  Yes, this was the gift I'd promised to my scorch-faced quartermaster. Had it not been for the beard, I'd still be begging him to agree to the RV. Now though... awe and splendor! Durin with his booming voice commanded respect and secretly dreamed about adding a seventh braid, of adamant this time. Most importantly, he was now relatively easier to deal with — as far as quartermasters went — and devoutly loyal to me as someone who'd reinvigorated both his status and his self-respect.

  The talks proved to be an enormous success. Now the dwarves would have to surrender twenty-five percent of all recovered materials to the clan's treasury. Those of you unfamiliar with dwarves' nature shouldn't say anything. I'll repeat for those who are: yes, ladies and gents, you've heard it right. Twenty five!

  I hired a group of a dozen goblin rangers headed by Harlequin himself to ensure the dwarves kept their end of the deal. Their custom configuration had cost me a pretty penny. Still, I suppose I had to be grateful that the hire interface allowed me to fine-tune their identities at all. I watched the pay bar go through the roof as I inched up the sliders for bravery, intuition, honesty and integrity. All I could do was shake my head at the resulting identity of a level-headed, pure-hearted, clean-handed watchdog. I should probably move them to Cryl's department: he'd appreciate a few ready-made security agents.

  I absolutely needed to do whatever it took to ensure their prompt digitization. Firstly, because I needed them really badly, and secondly, because who do you think I was, shelling out four thousand bucks a month for a dozen green-skinned devils? Take Snowie, my clever albino troll: his unique custom configuration had already paid for itself, having allowed him to go perma with remarkable ease. Now all he cost me was a quite reasonable pocket allowance. Then again, introducing him to Bomba had probably not been such a clever move. Their upcoming matrimony and his position as a family breadwinner might prove quite costly as I'll be forced to pay him a top warrior's wage.

  Actually, should I try and help the goblins go perma right now? What if I gave them some unique identity traits? Let's say this one had a limp from a childhood injury when he'd been caught in a wolf trap. There goes!

  A moderate injury: -15% off the hire cost.

  Oh wow. Piggy — off! I forced my inner greedy pig away from the controls. Trust him to come up with a bunch of blind quadriplegics for a penny a dozen.

  Now. You, you'd been born on planet parade day, stripping you of all racial abilities. -30%, good. Agility a bit off but I could adjust it by hand, I suppose. As for bonuses to throwing weapons and to gathering, we didn't really need those, did we?

  Now you. Sorry, buddy, but your Mom must have done it with a dwarf. Just don't ask me how she'd managed.

  Half Blood!

  Penalty to XP: 25%

  50% growth rate to a random characteristic

  Random racial skills configuration giving you a minor chance of generating a unique ability.

  Well, well, well. That looked interesting. The penalty wasn't a problem. Backed by the clan's resources, I could powerlevel the Hoover Dam if need be. But 20% off his rental plus the char's apparent uniqueness were worth it. It would actually be a good idea to mix-and-breed the entire gang, that way no one'd feel under-serviced. In this manner I could save a bit of cash while making my team stand out from the regular goblin crowd.

  The further racial experiments revealed a whole mine of scary developments. After I'd added four assorted races to a char's family tree, the hire interface blinked with a red message,

  Warning! An uncontrollable mutation! Chances of a character's successful generation: 30%.

  Warning! The summoned creature's mental makeup will qualify it as a monster rather than an NPC. Its instinct disbalance will have a tendency toward hatred, fury and anger. Priority will be given to primary strength characteristics and combat skills.

  Warning! In order to control the creature, you will have to complete the following quest chain: The Child of Chaos. In order to initialize the quest, you will need to desecrate a functional temple by sacrificing its priest on the temple's altar.

  Warning! Worshipping Chaos may affect the skills and appearance of your avatar!

  Jesus. The character generator was smoking and snorting, offering then promptly deleting more and more pictures of potential monsters, trying to prevent the advent of a new spawn of evil. I watched a chain of slimy stooping figures flicker before my eyes. They looked so similar to the orcs of Mordor!

  The mutants cost peanuts, both in gold and in mercenary points, even considering their level 200 and the ticked box of the "free movement beyond the castl
e walls" option. My Super Nova status allowed me to churn up a couple of thousand of those, then follow a few easy steps: take over a neighbor's castle, boost my own army numbers, rinse and repeat. Bring the nearest frontier town into submission then move on, devouring the neighboring mini cluster, my gray hordes stretching beyond the horizon... How utterly sick.

  Whoever had made provision for a stunt like that? Had it been the Admins' preparation for some future global event? Or could a real seed of Chaos have sprouted in our world's backyard? I needed to have a talk with the Fallen One and monitor all the known temples, those of Light included. If any shit hit the fan, at least I would know what was going on.

  I'd folded my experiments and okayed the summoning of my half-blood gang.

  From that day, the goblins had been scurrying around the building site, driving everyone white-knuckle mad, but they had already earned their keep tenfold, to the point where the dwarves would try to drop an apparently dislodged rock right on top of them. In return, the goblins had gotten mithril detection down to a fine art, stripping the dwarves of any surreptitious gains.

  A couple of those budding security agents had already shown some promise. One of them, the lame guy I nicknamed Tamerlane, had uncovered a scam by one of the foremen to smuggle out mithril in double-bottomed barrels. For that he'd received a commendation from me, a Corporal's insignia and a whack on the head with a hammer from the angry culprits. Much to their regret, instead of being swallowed up by the universal void, the freshly-minted corporal had happily respawned in the barracks, then grassed his assailants up in cold blood. The Dwarves' foremen mumbled their apologies, paid the fine without a sound and moved on, coming up with ever more complex building traps for their offenders. Their confrontation rocked the celestial boat, swelling with the emotions of both parties and naturally leading to the result I expected: the entire special-service gang was to go perma any day now. How'd you like that?

  As a side effect of the memorable RV, the dwarves had developed a new fad — that of wearing fake modified beards. Silk colorful ribbons were immediately out: now dwarves would decorate their pride and joy with assorted bits of wire, precious stones and the hair of magical animals. They quickly came up with a strict hierarchy based on a rigid system of rules. I witnessed two silver-bearded old-timers giving a good hiding to a rank-and-file apprentice who'd dared to braid a gold thread into his own beard.

  Durin wasn't upset about their copycat practices. He would just screw his face up as he decorated his own beard with his new insignia: the silver stars of a warrant officer and the 'Clean Hands': a modest iron medal I'd invented to award exclusively to support troops. The dwarves were in for a new shock.

  After I'd demonstrated the Heart of the Temple fragment to Patriarch Thror and the deputies of the Dwarven priests' underground, I'd demanded the promised seven million gold and five hundred craftsmen for the restoration of the castle's defensive capacity.

  The dwarves played hard to get, asking me to hand the artifact over to them, and then maybe... I didn't listen any further. What if they lost the artifact in some of their internal priestly games or just summoned the wrong deity — say, Hephaestus who too was a patron god of blacksmiths. And that wasn't the worst option even. The problem was, the Fragment was neutral to both Dark and Light, capable of restoring a temple of any existing pantheon. And I really couldn't allow the Light ones to have a power tool like that.

  Another thing was, whoever summoned the god automatically received all of his gifts, depending on the level of the temple. I'd already cashed in whatever the Fallen One and Macaria had had to offer, but it was Ruata who'd laid her greedy mitts on Lloth's gifts. That Dome Shield around her altar was too good for words. Even the Fallen One complete with girlfriend had spent a good quarter of an hour trying to breach it.

  No, I don't mean that I hoped to get something equally as awesome. After all, her Impregnable Dome Shield was erected in a divine place of power, the closest thing to Lloth's own halls. There, the goddess had been in peak form which had in turn allowed her to inflict the ultimate discomfort upon my two rescuers. But still.

  I didn't want to part with whatever gifts Aulë had to offer. Even though level-1 altar only allowed for some petty craft items for blacksmiths, jewelers and artifact makers, already at level 4 Aulë offered his followers an unexpectedly hefty gift, the Heavenly Hammer. Imagine a tank dropped from the top of the Empire State. Bang! Even if it missed your head, the man-made earthquake would break your legs, crush your bones and knock out all your teeth from a carelessly dropped jaw. A century-old Naval expression had described it as "kinetic concussion". That's when the armored deck buckles under your feet through shell impact, kicking you so hard that it snaps your bones.

  Basically, our talks had gone nowhere. The dwarves were quite understandably wary of being ripped off while trying to push their own agenda. Me, I stubbornly stood my ground. Luckily, the Fallen One arrived to my rescue in the most sinister of his guises, appearing to the dwarves as a dark void swirling under the empty hood of his night-sky cloak. The apparition inquired coldly if a guarantee from a High God would suffice.

  While the dumbstruck dwarves shook their beards in agreement, I surreptitiously added a few more items to the contract, namely the restoration of the two forts that protected the access to the main gates as well as some improvements to the castle defenses. I'd done my bit of fortification studies by then so I couldn't speak in terms of something as dumb as "a very high wall" any more. All those escarpments, bastions and ravelins were pouring out of me right onto paper, generously covering the blueprints of the castle's forthcoming upgrade.

  Once I had their signatures, I gave the Fallen One an inconspicuous thumbs-up: well done, bro! His glacial glare pinned me to the ground, freezing my spine solid.

  In the end, I was the last of all to come round. I wheezed, wiped off the streak of saliva dripping from the corner of my once-grinning mouth, and clicked my neck back into place. Oh well. I shouldn't go too far humanizing the Fallen One, forgetting his status as a Dark God. The dwarves were muttering between themselves, casting reverential glances my way with just a tad of sympathy. No one said that being a First Priest was easy. Okay, it was time to wrap up this show. Everyone had agreed on the terms. I really needed a break.

  The gold had dropped into my account later on that day; the promised craftsmen had arrived via a cargo portal early next morning. They had immediately proceeded to restore one of the dilapidated castle wings, to ensure comfortable lodgings for themselves. Those midgets loved their creature comforts! Amazingly, no sooner than the first wheelbarrowfuls of rubble got moving, a makeshift tavern was set up next to the construction site. You couldn't hide anywhere from the aromas of grilled sausages and fresh beer anymore. How was one supposed to work when a whiff of barbecue called your name through an open window?

  Once they settled down and stuffed their bellies, the dwarves set off to work.

  They scaled the collapsed fortifications, tapping the ancient stones with prospecting hammers. Soon they pronounced their diagnosis and decided on the course of treatment. A gray-haired architect — a Famed Master, no less — attacked the task with an ardor uncharacteristic for his age. He would, wouldn't he? Restoring an uncategorized castle could bring him a few precious points. There were not so many jobs of this caliber left in this world, and even fewer individuals eager to pay for them.

  Having said that, his professional rivals weren't too jealous. They were also busy. There were two more ambitious construction projects under way in the Valley of Fear.

  The first one was the building of the new temple grounds. Understandably wary of the forces of Light destroying Aulë's new Altar, the dwarves asked us to allocate them a plot of land right in the heart of the valley. Once their ancient priests had realized the nature of the divine artifact I had shown them, they buried themselves in their underground libraries, poring over crumbling manuscripts.

  Waving some ancient diagram in the air — splat
tered with some suspicious-looking brown spots — they presented me with the fact,

  "This is exactly what the temple should look like!"

  I glanced at the scheme of a squat building shaped like the Mercedes' three-pointed star. I shrugged. "Be my guests. Just don't forget to make a service niche under the altar. This is where I'm going to store an incredible treasure — let's call it my gift to the temple: twelve hundred pounds of mithril!"

  Casting respectful glances at me, the priests discussed my offer and agreed, seeing no objections. Gifts to the gods were always welcome, especially those of noble metals such as gold and mithril.

  This is how it happened that I got the legal right to bury, under Aulë's altar of gleaming amber, my trump card — the heavy GP bomb. A remnant of the long past war. Its one bang would change the hall's design, adorning its meticulously laid tiles with a 15-feet crater in the middle.

  As it turned out, the temple, built in record time, was supposed to be some kind of a divine dormitory. Each of its three wings had its own altar, situated closer to the center of the star. My inner greedy pig wept as it signed the invoices for two more precious bombs. Still, the memory of the cunning Lloth and her tricks made me want to err on the safe side.

  A week later, one of the wings was more or less finished. Even though the interior design works hadn't yet been completed — heavily-guarded caravans were still arriving, loaded with precious stones, granite and marble — the dwarves demanded I summon the god ASAP. They weren't happy, you see: they'd invested a shitload of money working around the clock, but they hadn't yet seen any results.

  I didn't play hard to get. So far, the dwarves had stuck to their part of the bargain.

  The same day the whole clan was formed up in a parade square within the north star-point of the new Temple. All buffed up to their ears as if going to war, they were wearing anything other than their dress uniforms, their bag slots bulging with vials. Even Vertebra, having for just this once succumbed to my pleas, was soaring high in the sky keeping an eye on the unfolding show. Most likely, it was simply because the Valley of Fear was her zone of responsibility. You'd be hard put to drag her out anywhere else, not with her independent character — and besides, she wouldn't leave her two chicks unsupervised, despite the fact that they'd both already ballooned to the size of a minibus with all the free mithril they'd consumed.