A Song of Shadow Read online

  “Listen here, you Casanova,” Bogart flared up predictably. “I’m about to loop those strings around your scrotum and hang you from that there branch. And then we’ll see what tears first: the scrotum, the string, or your vocal cords!”

  His voice was so convincing that the spirit of the ukulele immediately removed his hands from my person and slid away a respectful distance.

  “Oh,” I was even a little miffed. “And I was about to ask you to blow the fire higher so that I could burn a dumb log.”

  “Nah. He’s educated, can’t you see?” the orc tossed more brushwood into the fire. “We’ll teach him the statutes and make a human out of him. Do you hear, Uke...what’s your name anyway?”

  “Whatever you want it to be, you big hunk you...” the spirit replied in a different voice: a female one. The ghostly figure rippled and began transforming, turning into an attractive woman in nothing but a necklace of flowers and a tube dress.

  “Hic,” Bogart hiccupped and dropped his jaw. Having mastered his surprise, he asked: “How about just bare-ass naked? Is that too much to ask?”

  “Weren’t you saying that VR is boring and meatspace is fun?” I burst out laughing, looking at the orc’s engrossed expression.

  “It’s not too much to ask at all,” the ghostly babe winked at him. “But first we’d have to step aside...”

  “You can cut my tongue out, so long as I can keep my eyes,” I said. “I want to see all of it!”

  “I’ll hold you to that,” Bogart immediately responded. “No, but why not? There is something to see here indeed! She reminds me of one of my stripper friends.”

  Encouraged, the ukulele spirit winked at the orc and arranged herself in his lap.

  “Send me the video, we’ll make a clip out of it,” I told Bogart, whose eyes were already rolling back into his skull.

  He somehow regained control of his face and even tried to use his fingers to unroll his eyes.

  “Rather than a clip, use it for a drama,” he finally corrected my proposal. “One that’ll make Shakespeare jealous...”

  “So I should throw her in the fire after all?”

  I brought the ukulele up to the fire with a very serious face, observing carefully the transformations on the faces of Bogart and his new girlfriend.

  “There’s burning jealousy for you,” the orc remarked and winked at me. “Kiera Khan, say the word and I’ll be faithful to you all my life. And, you metamorph, don’t panic,” he counseled Ukulele who had frozen in horror, “Auntie Kiera is joking. She doesn’t harm the defenseless. Well, if they behave well.”

  Bogart clapped his hands behind his head and lay back on the sun-warmed earth. With Ukulele still sitting on his lap, the picture turned out to be a vulgar one and I was just about to remark on it when I was interrupted...

  You have been stunned for 5 seconds!

  A biota rogue appeared out of nowhere and a torrent of system notifications about incoming damage to my materia shades began pouring past my eyes. During the seconds that I was stunned, another rogue took out the ukulele spirit and shanked Bogart who was still in stun too. The orc saved himself at the last instant, somersaulting backwards out of his supine position. As he did so, he managed to quaff a healing potion and then jumped back a good ten meters. The fireball that slammed into Bogart elicited a flurry of polished swearing. Merlin appeared out of nowhere and darted at the mage who had overplayed his hand.

  I counted about a dozen attackers and to Bogart’s luck, eight of them poured everything they had into me. Geranika’s shield creaked and groaned under the colossal dps as I frantically jangled on the ukulele, sending the first impact shade at the rogue. Four seconds and a one-shot. I even noticed the face of a mage contort in surprise, before the next shadow sent him to rest in meatspace. A fireball crit almost wiped out my second materia shade, but Bogart’s well-aimed dart punished the insolent, depriving my spell of its next target.

  “I got the right one!” I shouted to Bogart, summoning another impact shade into the world.

  I have a fairly uniform spell rotation. Practically one-button, not counting the upcoming Shadow Shield recast.

  “Ten-four!” barked the orc and focused the priest, whom I had somehow lost track of. Merlin on the other hand had not: Having finished chewing what was left of Bogart’s first attacker, the tigress happily sank her fangs into a new victim.

  The battle ended in less than a minute. A hectic minute, but still a minute. The penalty from the blighted ground and my buffed damage didn’t give the attackers a chance. When all is said and done, Shadow players are a terrible, ugly kind of OP. But whatever. I now had 13 of my 30 biota kills.

  “That’s that,” said Bogart, looking around the battlefield. “Our little ghostly temptress has fallen! We must say something fitting for the occasion...”

  He looked around, found the place where he had been at the beginning of the battle and collapsed to his knees raising his hands to heaven.

  “Noooooooo!” the orc’s howl resounded through the forest.

  Startled birds scrambled from the treetops, and Bogart, listening to the echo, grunted with satisfaction and got to his feet.

  “I declare this civil funeral service complete,” he said, concluding the battle, and wiped off his pants. “Here Merlin! Ah, good, good kitty...” and, still scratching the tigress behind his ears, he asked: “Look here, you Floral Terminator, you sure did a number on those guys: You had eight wise men pouring all their wisdom into you and you were hardly bothered. Does everyone in your faction get that kind of firepower or did you earn it yourself?”

  “Geranika has designated me as his favorite wife,” I stuck my tongue out at the orc. “Do you remember how I told you about the defensive spell that he gave me for composing the Hymn to Shadow? Well, its protection is determined by Int and I just dumped all my stat points into Int. Until those murderous fan clubs start equipping gear with +150% to their stats, they won’t be able to touch me. Well, and then there’s another recent acquisition—the impact shades. I summon a shade from the wrong side of the world and it turns my enemies inside out. It ignore defense, and doesn’t give a crap about level difference. Oh and they never miss.”

  “A straight up Wunderwaffle,” Bogart scratched his head first, and then, carefully wiping his hand on his trousers, scratched Merlin. “I would even say, revenge weapons, a villain’s dream from movies about special agents and superheroes.”

  “That’s me I guess,” I scarfed a foot and bowed to my meager audience. “Okay, I don’t think I need to gank anyone for the next twelve hours, so I’m going to run and see if there are any quests from the renegades and then take a break out in meatspace.”

  “Are you talking about a quest to the kitchen for tea?” the green jerk immediately gibed.

  “Are we doomed to such a monotonous existence?”

  “Well, we can have some ice cream at that ice cream shop near the tourist tram,” Bogart offered, after a moment’s thought. “They got these little meat-filled pastries there, so I won’t starve either. Better yet, we can wander around the park. Go up to the singing gazebo. Well, if you’re in the mood for a walk that is.”

  “Oh,” I said with excitement. “What’s that singing gazebo like?”

  Bogart looked mournfully at the skies. The heavens responded with a migrating flock of bird-lizards, which were abundant in these parts.

  “Where do these barbarians come from anyway?” the orc complained to no one in particular. “Kiera Khan, child of the northern climes, how can you not know about the singing gazebo of the glorious city of Pyatigorsk, eh? It’s decided: We will visit the singing gazebo. As they say, it is better to hear it once than listen to others talk about a hundred times.”

  THE ‘SINGING GAZEBO’ turned out to be an antique building at the summit of the highest of the hills at the base of Mount Mashuk.

  The dome, supported by seven columns and crowned with a weathervane, as Pasha and Sasha explained to me during our ascent, wa
s actually called an ‘Aeolian harp’—in honor of the ancient keeper of the winds in the Odyssey, and was built more than two centuries ago. It was the citizens themselves that had christened it the ‘singing gazebo,’ due to the harp installed inside: strings that were connected to the weathervane and which ran from the roof to the floor, changing direction and sound as the wind changed. The view of the city from here caused a whole barrage of emotions, warmed by the string symphony of nature itself—a simple, and simultaneously complex, majestic melody, living its own life, beyond the touch of man.

  Naturally, this wonder could not leave any intelligent creature indifferent. Therefore, the site was constantly crowded—from couples who came for the romance of the place to artists and sculptors earning their money from the streams of tourists.

  Perhaps, our trio did not attract much attention thanks to this. Only some elderly lady looked at Pasha with puzzlement and a young, patriotic artist, who looked like a cartoon lion, tried to give us a newly-painted landscape. Quite a good one, by the way.

  “This is it—Kiera Khan—the singing gazebo,” Sasha majestically presented me to the local landmark. I bet Michelangelo used the same tone when he presented the Sistine Chapel to Pope Julius II.

  “Well and all those,” he nodded at the onlookers milling around, “are details of the landscape.”

  “It’s astounding...” I whispered, examining the instrument from different angles. “I wonder if you cobble something like this together in Barliona, whether the wind will cause the strings to sound?”

  “That’s a question for the programmers,” Pasha immediately recused himself from making any predictions.

  “Yeah,” Sasha agreed with his friend. “You know yourself it all depends on the little men in their closets pushing their magic buttons. The etherlords of the cyber, in a manner of speaking.”

  Pasha rolled up to the edge of the platform and stuck his face into the wind.

  “Once upon a time, a young lieutenant named Mikhail Lermontov stood in the same spot where Pasha sits right now,” Sasha intoned in the voice of a tour guide. “And took potshots at anyone who dared criticizes his poetry: Pushkin, Salieri and that, uh, Aesop fellow.”

  “Uh-huh,” I nodded with an intelligent look. “And Homer...Simpson. I’m not as dumb as I seem, Snegov.”

  “Ah don’t piss on my taking-the-piss-parade,” he said indignantly. “Instead of backing me up with an account of Lermontov’s tragic affair with Anna Karenina, must you break my wings just as I am set to soar? Right at the root—at the very ass. Can you imagine my suffering?”

  “You there, sufferer, did you bring the water?” Pasha spoke up.

  Sasha sighed, and hollered: “Sir, yes, sir, Master Yoda sir!”

  Like a crazed boar he tore past some tourists, causing them to start.

  “In actual fact, Mr. Lermontov was a...peculiar individual,” Sasha continued, returning. “Paradoxical, you could say. And, in a word, this place really was an observation post during that war. However, by the time Lieutenant Lermontov arrived for his service, the gazebo had been here several years already.”

  “The only people I know who aren’t paradoxical are all assholes,” I shrugged. “But at school, I remember, they told me that a great poet was exiled to these parts during wartime.”

  Pasha waved his hand, seeing someone from his acquaintances, and stepped away to say hello.

  “Well, I think the epithet ‘great’ is arguable,” Sasha disagreed, following his friend with a glance. “If you ask me, his verse is too sugary and pretentious. But the fact that his was a desperate kind of courage, that’s without dispute. A daredevil if there ever was one. And a mouth fouler than mine, for which he paid dearly in the end.”

  I looked out over the stone railing: The hillside was not particularly high, but still made me nervous.

  “Come on, tell me more,” I said, sitting down on one of the benches. “In school, they mostly focused on unrequited love, persecution by the powers that were and similar snot.”

  “Ugh, they do love their snot,” Sasha crumpled his nose. “It’s like with Vertinsky: All they talk about is how he was a great singer and artist of the Silver Age, blah, blah, blah—but try and find a single mention of the time he was saving lives on a hospital train during World War I. And Mr. Lermontov is no different—a classical officer of that era. A poet, an artist, and a master of slicing you face open with the saber. To his misfortune, he got too deep into politics, but that’s a minor foible, as they say. Only the saints are spared those. Young Mikhail was feared and respected, even though he wasn’t here long, less than a year. Courage sacks cities, as they say. And if it weren’t for his cutting tongue, he could’ve made general or even field marshal.”

  “Speaking of cutting tongues,” I remembered, “I have an order for another insult that will slip through the profanity filter. If only I had a larger client base—I would grow nice and rich of people’s vim and spite.”

  “I don’t understand,” Sasha said, surprised. “What’s the problem with using one’s own unprintables?”

  “Barliona has an abuse filter that includes a number of offensive words,” I explained. “If a player doesn’t want to encounter any cursing, he can just turn it on. Can you imagine how many people want to bypass it and tell their fellow man how they really feel about him? So my side gig is composing phrases that will pass the censor.”

  “Well, it couldn’t take much work,” snorted Sasha. “The good thing about any language is the wealth of options it offers. You can come up with such turns of phrase that no filter will keep up—even if you force a hundred programmers to update it day and night. Zoology alone can supply enough lampoons for generations to come, and there are other subject areas to explore after all. Like grammar, for instance. To wit: ‘I’m about to conjugate all your roots and stick some choice suffixes and inflections so far up your coda that you’ll spend the rest of your life speaking in the subjunctive.’”

  “And what if we whip up something like that in game?” Pasha’s voice suddenly boomed right into my ear.

  I almost jumped over the railing from the shock, taking the bench with me.

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you,” the pilot apologized.

  I took a breath and mentally swore at the unknown engineers who had invented a silent electric wheelchair. Although what did that have to do with anything? I’m the one who’d gotten distracted.

  “Whip what up?” I asked, puzzled. “An advertisement that says: ‘I’ll let your haters have it so smoothly even the content filter won’t notice? Find us in the Blighted Forest, third mob to the left?”

  “Something like that,” Pasha nodded.

  On my other side, Sasha was all ears. I swear to FSM—he couldn’t care less about making money as long as he got a chance to cause some grief.

  “You’ve seen it yourself. The morally-upstanding, paying public will happily fall for any crap as long as it’s original and useful,” the pilot went on developing his idea. “So why don’t we supplement our cartography enterprise by baking like fortune cookies but instead of a fortune they’ll contain a choice phrase that’ll slip through the filter unnoticed. Or something like that at any rate.”

  “Hah! There’s an idea! So what can we cook up, without serious investment? Alchemy is not it. Jewelcrafting...too expensive. But cooking...Cooking!” I exclaimed. “We can bake some pies and muffins with insults on them. If you want, you can hurl it at someone’s face, or if you like, you can send it by mail. We could engrave our best bits on weapons too.”

  “Too easy to rip off,” Sasha said with a sigh. “And the trick here is the idea.”

  “While they’re ripping it off, we’ll come up with something new! And we can try and organize the entire venture around authorial recipes...or what are those scrolls called? I read that when creating an original item, you have to go through the registration procedure, which creates a recipe for you.”

  “Oh, there is an in-game patent o
ffice,” Pasha said approvingly. “That’s good to know. As the saying goes: One head is good, two is better, and three make it easier to think.”

  Sasha grimaced, his eyes narrowed, and he squeaked:

  “You won’t regret bringing old sea dog Billy Bones with you, you guys!”

  THE ONLY PLACE we could use as a workshop was the training ground that Eben had sent Chip and me to. Most of it was covered with filth, but the inventory remained in place and looked undamaged.

  “I will lead the parade,” Chip proclaimed. “My ingenuity stat is high as hell and I’ve got a good smattering of professions I’ve picked up along the way—from drawing to engraving. They’re not very high-level, but the hell with it. They’ll do for a start.”

  “Sounds good,” I nodded. “What are we going to craft?”

  “I’m going to make some grub,” Chip snapped his fingers in anticipation of the work ahead of him. He really was a Level 80 Glutton. With his enthusiasm, he’d be better off cooking than flying a chopper.

  “Do it, Michelangelo,” Bogart nodded majestically. “I will keep things simple and tinker with my beloved toys...”

  “You maniac,” Chip said.

  The orc responded by sticking his tongue out at him and went over to the machine. The work got underway. The pirq conjured over the fire like a wizard at work: measuring, weighing, mixing powders and substances burbling in pots. To my ear—uninitiated in the art of grub-o-mancy—even his muttering sounded like the recitation of spells.

  Bogart meanwhile busied himself with planning, sawing and hammering together pieces of lumber into eerie contraptions that would have been fitting props for horror films.

  “Kiera, hey, Kiera,” he called to me, examining his newest creation—a ball of stakes. “Do you have friends with spells?”

  “There is this one guy. Why?”

  “I was just thinking...” He carved the inscription ‘I, even I, am he who blots out your transgressions,’ into the stake and giggled. “Do you think you could help me put together something truly smashing? For example, Johnny falls into a pit and then whoosh—immolated! Could we me make something like that together?”