Interlude: Ritah

“Guildmistress?” asked Ritah as the half-dhampir trailed off and took on the same far-away look she had been constantly wearing since three days ago, when she’d had that surprise meeting with the board.

“What?” said Laera. “Oh, yes, sorry. Um, yes, we can organise an Iron exam if there are enough people interested in taking it. Uh, please coordinate with Jalver…”

She trailed off again, and Ritah made a note before putting down her clipboard.

“What is it, Laera?” asked Ritah, coming and sitting on the office’s desk.

Over the months working for the half-demon, Ritah had come to both respect and like her new boss. Laera was a very hands-off kind of manager, and once she had figured out that Ritah was competent enough to handle most things by herself had left her to her own devices. Ritah still kept her informed, but she never felt like Laera was breathing down her neck. More than that, she liked Laera—she was friendly and funny and fair, and didn’t lord the fact that she could bend steel over non-Guild members like a few of the adventurers did.

Laera started again, and then rubbed her face, pink eyes flicking to the closed door before she spoke again. “The Board thinks Mercia is going to attack us,” said Laera. “Two regiments, and a squadron of frigates were dispatched to Port Imperial.”

Ritah gulped, a heady mix of fear and rage making her heart boom in her ears. Mercia, the slavers, they were coming…

“We… we don’t know for sure,” said Laera. “I didn’t- I knew they were angry, and- and I don’t know; I thought they wouldn’t try it, didn’t have the troops, didn’t have the nerve… but they’ve been attacking the Guild throughout their territory.”

“They’re coming for us,” said Ritah, balling her hands into fists and taking a deep breath. “They’re coming.”

For Ritah, for Nessah, for all of them…

“I don’t- I don’t know what to do,” said Laera in a slightly desperate voice. “The Board has given me discretion. We can bolster our fortifications; maybe start stockpiling food, but we can’t… we can’t hold off that many people. Maybe with double the Guild members…”

Ritah turned away, crushing her fear and trying to clear her mind. She wasn’t a great fighter, but she was smart, this job had shown her that. She was virtually running the day-to-day affairs of an entire settlement. There had to be something she could do. Think. Think.

She could cultivate more contacts in Port Imperial—she’d already done that, to a degree, as part of her duties as secretary of the Sapient Emancipation League. She had a contact she trusted with the Sisters of Lorvel, a doctor at the hospital, several beastkin merchants and craftspeople, and even a disgruntled sergeant who thought that slave-catching was beneath him (although he thought he was corresponding with another dhampir). But those were just that, contacts, people she might be able to wheedle some intelligence from, but that was unlikely to blunt the power of such an overwhelming force. What else? What else?

There were the other freemen and women, they could organise a militia. Jalver would assist her, he knew about military things, tactics, training, and even if he still wasn’t speaking to Laera, he’d want to help—he had no more love for the Mercians than the Guildmistress.

“We’ll think of something,” said Ritah, her voice flat and mechanical.

Laera didn’t reply, just nodded numbly.

Ritah picked up her clipboard and moved back to the front desk, working mechanically as she wrote several memos and set the wheels in motion for an Iron Exam. Hah, an exam—when death was coming for them?

Could she run? Escape with Nessah? She had some coin saved up, she might be able to get passage on a boat somewhere. But… but a Chosen with no papers was liable to get snatched at one of the intermediary harbours, to say nothing of the ports on Carritas where the local bandit-kings and lords and collaborators traded in their own flesh and blood…

She closed her eyes and put her face in her hands. No, she couldn’t run, not to just be captured by bandits, put back in chains. She’d kill herself and her daughter before she let that happen; she would not go back to that.

Which made it simple. She had to fight. Guildport was her home. She had nowhere else to go; there was nowhere else that Nessah might be able to live a good, normal life. Here was the line; this far, no further.

She finished the last memo and then set it aside, steeping her fingers and closing her eyes.

“Break down the problem,” she muttered to herself. “Its simplest form.”

Port Imperial was going to attack them—

No, that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that Port Imperial was getting two regiments and a squadron of warships. Which meant…

Port Imperial has too many troops; we can’t defend against them.

Alright, yes, that was better. That was the real problem. The solution to which was equally clear.

Even the odds: improve Guildport’s defences and/or weaken Port Imperial.

The how was the rub, but every problem had a solution.

A group of adventurers entered, dusted and a bit bloodied but laughing. There were two dhampir, both Outlanders, Zoe and Swithin—the former she knew well from her League activities, the latter as a fellow part-time nurse at Charlie’s clinic. The other two were Chosen: one Outlander, Tulok, with white bear-like ears; one from Carritas, a bronze rank called Moarva.

She took their notes mechanically, looking after them as she continued to focus on the problem. Zoe would fight with them, Ritah knew—she was a good person. Swithin would as well, she was fairly sure—she’s seen him spending time with a fellow ex-slave. Tulok she didn’t know well, but Moarva, the Carritasian, would take up arms. He’d have to, they’d kill him—you couldn’t reliably enslave someone with a mana-core.

Yes, some of the Outlanders would fight; the Chosen adventurers would fight; even some of the dhampir, like Jalver would also fight; and Ritah and her fellow freemen and women, both those who’d never known chains and those who had, would fight to their last.

She cocked her head to one side. Those who had known chains, like Ritah, would fight…

Her ears shot up, her eyes widening as the solution presented itself to her.

Elegant.

Simple.

Just in and of itself.

Possible.

Perfect.

***

Nor Shall My Sword Sleep In My Hand 6.1

A trio of roaring illusory lions—which I had been very pleased with when I’d finally managed to summon—erupted from my hand and bounded forward towards the mycelium horror that had pinned Mousington down and forced him to create a solid disk of metal to ward off its blows. The orange and blue constructs lunged, their faux-physicality knocking the monster off balance as they ripped and tore into its fungal flesh.

I felt a flicker of attention turn towards me, and shielded on instinct a moment before a torrent of some kind of blueish energy erupted from one of the mushroom-like spellcasters—humanoid fungi-things complete with gemmed staves and mushroom caps that looked like wizard hats—and raced towards me.

“Velevir, we need some help!” I shouted as there was a large pulse of light from half a dozen meters to my right, and bits and pieces of charred and blackened mushroom rained down all around me. The battered, bloodied, and quite possibly possessor of several fractures Velevir blurred in my direction, smashing the spellcaster with her hammer so hard that it exploded.

“Fuck this!” said Nathan. “We need to fall back!”

“Ready crystals!” shouted Velevir. “Call aye!”

I scrambled for my belt, where there was one of the quick-teleport crystals stowed in a specially sown and padded pouch for situations just like this one.

“Aye!” I said.

“Aye!” said Nathan a moment later.

“We are ready!” said Mousington, who refused to say the much simpler ‘Aye’ to let us know he was ready to break his.

“Break!” said Velevir.

I closed my grip, and the crystal shattered in the middle. Powerful blue energy raced over me, and I had a brief sensation of falling before I suddenly found myself standing at the entrance to the dungeon, in the large well that now had two lifts to help service it.

It was raining, as was now the norm, and as I began checking over the others the newer, less rickety of the two elevators started to descend, bringing with it a group about to head out.

“I used to like mushrooms,” muttered Velevir, exhaling as I repaired the several fractures, cuts, and lacerations she’d suffered from the fungal monsters.

We were all wearing cloth around our mouths to protect us from the ubiquitous spores of the fourth floor, which had, amongst many other horrors such as giant spiders and huge millipedes and smaller rock-boring Shai-Huluds, lots and lots of mycelial monsters. Still, I took a moment to kill all the spores clinging to her body and render them inert. One of the other adventurers delving on the fourth floor, a silver ranked beastkin woman with serpentine features, Yiri, who was part of Jalver’s group, had come to my clinic with a really bad cough a few days earlier, and I’d found fungus growing in her lungs. Hence the facemasks.

“There must be something we’re missing,” said Nathan thoughtfully, stroking the beard he was growing in, mainly because Velevir was constantly complementing him on it—at least, that was my hypothesis.

“They are endless!” said Mousington, flexing his claws and resheathing his array of floating steel dirks in the dozens of holsters he had hidden beneath his rather fantastic three-piece crushed blue velvet suit which he wore over tightly woven chainmail he claimed was mithril. He took off his wonderful matching feathered hat and whacked it with a paw. “We do not like them!”

We, along with every other group delving in the fourth level of the dungeon, had run into a rather large problem. As soon as you stumbled upon one of the large, semi-intelligent mushrooms that lit up the cavern, they let off a signal that summoned fungal creatures from across the entire floor in an unending wave that eventually forced even the strongest groups to retreat.

“Well, whatever we’re missing, it’s for another day,” said Velevir. “Come on, I need a drink.”

As one of the only four groups that had made it to the fourth floor, we’d been delving every second day. Which was a lot when we’d typically spend at least eight hours wandering the subterranean maze of gorges and cliffs and waterfalls and bio-luminescent forests. The top ranked group, which was all silvers, were able to go every day because of the ‘priority’ system their ranks afforded them, something that made Velevir complain and bug Nathan and I to take the Bronze exam. Personally, I was glad that I didn’t have to spend a third of my life down in the dungeon.

We were all filthy, so we washed and bathed before heading out to Meria’s for food and drink. The Guildhall was becoming increasingly packed during the day, with guild members still arriving every week despite the Mercian ships prowling the waters and looking for any lone vessel obviously headed for Guildport.

That had apparently gotten them into skirmishes with a few of the other powers, but that apparently also happened all the time, and Mercia was still the main strength on the central coast of Rorrovia.

Meria’s was also busy, but one of the perks of sleeping with the owner was that we had a table reserved for us just right by the staff area, where my girlfriend and three of her cousins now worked, racing to grill fish, take orders, prepare salads, take stock, and all the other stuff that I’d sort of learnt by osmosis was involved in running a restaurant.

“Hey sweetie, bit of a wait right now,” said Meria, kissing me on the cheek as we entered the half-tent, half-timber framed ‘building.’

“I just really want some of that strong liquor, please—the one that tastes like varnish,” said Velevir. “And yes, I’ll pay.”

“Sure, Vel—just give me a minute,” said Meria absently, scribbling something on her notepad before rushing over to take another order.

“Maybe we just go back to delving the third?” I said as I sat in my favourite spot, where I could keep an eye on both the entranceway and where Meria worked the grill. “The second?”

“No way,” said Nathan. “We get way more exp from the monsters on the fourth.”

‘Exp’ was what Nathan, for some reason, called the amount of mana that we could feel leaving the bodies of slain enemies and coalescing in our cores. Why, I had no idea. I assumed it stood for something ‘gamer’ related, and hadn’t bothered to find out.

“The money is better too,” said Velevir. “The concentration of mana in the stuff we loot is far higher.”

“What do you even spend your money on, anyway?” I said.

Velevir had recently decided to surreptitiously give quite a bit of money to the anti-slavery league, which I had been delighted by, but other than maintaining her gear and eating out somewhat lavishly for every meal and paying for her room in the hall—which wasn’t even that much—she didn’t have that many expenses considering the amount of money she made.

Velevir shrugged. “I’ve got a cousin back in Mercia,” she said. “She’s slow; I make sure she has enough to get by and pay for some carers. Other than that…”

“She buys porn,” supplied Nathan.

Velevir turned crimson. “It is not porn!”

“I don’t know babe, when you read that bit out to me, sounded like porn,” said Nathan, grinning at her.

She scowled and punched him in the arm hard enough that the crack drew attention from around the room, but Nathan might as well have had skin of iron at this point, and just continued to snicker.

“It’s not!” she said.

“Sure, babe.”

Velevir huffed and crossed her arms. “I do like keeping up with the new releases,” she said. “Of romance novels. It costs a bit to get them shipped here.”

Meria rushed over with our drinks, kissed me on the cheek again, and then raced off.

“But no, we do need to keep on delving in the fourth,” said Velevir. “I know it sucks, but groups that downgrade stagnate.”

Which was a bad thing, apparently.

“And you two need to take the bronze exam,” she said. “How is your study going?”

“Err… good?” I lied, speculatively.

In truth, I hadn’t been studying for the test at all. In what little ‘free time’ I had, I’d been reading the book that the dungeon had given me. With the help of several dictionaries, I’d actually been able to make some headway into what turned out to be a book on ‘Mind-Walking’—which seemed to be what the book termed my empathic powers.

The first half of it was a series of exercises designed to focus and sharpen the gift, meditations essentially. I’d done a few of them, and I did feel like they were stretching my power in ways it hadn’t been stretched before. The second half was more interesting, and though difficult and dense, went into ‘psionic theory.’ At least, that was what I thought it was, translating it was taking a lot of work and I didn’t have enough time to make a really good crack at it. I’d considered asking Elder Scorra to do it for me, but then decided I’d rather get good at Ancient Caith myself; after all, there might be more puzzles on later floors that could require it.

Still, justified or not, my obvious lack of study earned me a glare from Velevir.

“What about Lord Mousington?” I said, trying to deflect. “I haven’t seen him open his book in weeks!”

“He also needs to take the Iron exam,” said Velevir, redirecting her ire towards the grimalkin man, who was lapping at a cup full of milk. If Velevir’s scowl had any effect on him, he gave no indication, and continued to stare off into the middle distance.

“I’m serious,” said Velevir. “I know people are bottlenecked on the second floor at the moment, but that won’t last forever.”

“Alright, I’ll read a few more chapters,” I said, standing and moving over to an area of the kitchen that had somehow been repurposed by a dashingly handsome and wonderful enby into a bookshelf, much to the irritation of the restaurant owner. I pulled down the two copies of ‘Bronze Exam Course Materials,’ passing one to Nathan as I returned. “But I have clinic in a few hours.”

The lunch rush gradually began to thin out, and I read while Velevir coached the less academically inclined Nathan through the material. There was a lot more to know to go up to the third rung of the Guild’s ranking system, and a lot of it was surprisingly academic. To successfully pass you needed to know the Guild Charter inside and out, the document that governed the rules and regulations on how the entire organisation was structured, you needed to pass a course on first aid—which I had strong opinions on I intended to tell Laera for the next edition, and pass several ‘leadership tests.’

Bronze ranked members of the guild were expected to be able to assist in the running of a branch, in a pinch, as well as lead less experienced members safely into delves. The expectations weren’t as high as they were for Irons, who had been known to be interim Guildmistresses or masters, but it was still a big step up from the tin exam which was primarily focused on how not to die.

I had also expected it to be very dull and boring, but to my delight it was exactly the kind of nerdy history-slash-political stuff I liked.

To my surprise, the Guild was actually reasonably democratic. Board members were elected every two years from an open list that anyone of Iron rank or above could nominate themselves for, and which members of every single rank cast equal votes to elect twenty-four representatives, who then in turn chose the Director from amongst their ranks. The board was the one who appointed Guildmistresses or Guildmasters to run branches, and there were procedures for Guild members to dismiss the local branch leader if they were judged incompetent, although it did have to go through the board for approval.

There were political blocks on the Board that even had names, with the ‘Carritas Reformist’ faction having held the Directorship for the past five elections, and which was the group that most Beastkin and kobolds, who made up the plurality of guild members, and about ten percent of the dhampir and dwarves voted for.

When I’d asked Velevir who she’d cast her vote for, she’d said the ‘Unity Ticket,’ which to my reading seemed like a fairly boring, middle of the road group that generally aligned with the Carritas Reformists on most issues and opposed the relatively small rump of dhampir reactionaries who wanted to ‘have more stringent membership requirements’ to limit the number of beastkin who could join. Once they’d been the perennial rulers of the Guild, but had by this point been in the political wilderness for decades.

The structure went quite a way to explaining why slavery had been banned in the Guild: it was an organisation where membership was kind of ‘randomly meritocratic,’ and which had for entirely self-interested reasons—to stomp out the possibility of a rival organisation—sort of accidentally given relatively significant political power to a segment of a group of people who were by and large disenfranchised—Beastkin and kobolds.

I was so engrossed with my reading that I barely made it to the clinic in time for my shift, having to race across the town with Mousington, my bodyguard for the evening, complaining loudly about the mud and the rain.

My clinic was pretty busy, with several expectant mothers there for routine, and thankfully with my power, rather quick check-ups, a handful of smaller injuries from some adventurers, a case of something very similar to malaria which I was able to deal with quickly, and the bakers’ son, Nessah’s friend Clorvir, who was physically fine, but who I could feel was very, very sad. I talked with him for almost twenty-five minutes before figuring out that he was being bullied, and that quite a bit of it seemed to be because he was dhampir.

I did my best to comfort him, but I wasn’t really sure what I could do to help: I’d been bullied a fair bit growing up for being so obviously queer, so I knew how cruel children could be, and how they would doubtlessly pick up on stuff like the tension between dhampir and beastkin here in Guildport. Although there hadn’t been any violence, there had been some loud and aggressive arguments since the Stormchaser had been sunk that I was fairly sure were at least in part due to the wider political conflict. Velevir didn’t get any flak for being Mercian—I was good enough at Valorian now to hear her accent—but that was probably because it was well known that she’d been part of the group that had broken the slaves out of Guildport, and although not yet a silver rank—she was planning on taking the test within the next year—and she was well respected as the leader of the group that had cleared the second and third floors first.

I resolved to speak with a few of the parents of the children he told me were the main ringleaders, and see if they couldn’t reign their progeny in a bit; little Clorvir, who I could sense had a massive crush on Nessa, wasn’t at fault for Mercia’s crimes.

After Clorvir and his upset but somewhat reassured mother left, the number of patients trickled away to nothing. Leaving me alone with my nurse for the shift, Swithin, the now-dhampir Saxon.

“Finally,” I groaned, sitting down and running a hand through my hair.

“Long day?” he asked in what we had sort of worked out I would have probably called ‘West-Saxon,’ and which I now more or less understood.

“Delving, then study, then this,” I said with a nod, replying in what was my attempt to speak his language, although a whole lot of Hochdeutsch ended up in there too, and I sometimes needed to ask for a word in Valorian.

The Outlander community was probably the strangest linguistic group I had ever heard of. Even the worst of us at languages, which was probably Nathan, picked up tongues at a phenomenal rate, and those of us who had been here for several months all spoke Valorian virtually fluently, often a reasonable smattering of the various Carritas languages, as well as, as in the case of Swithin and myself, any language similar enough to our native tongue we were sufficiently exposed to. Hell, I was pretty sure Swithin spoke English nearly as well as I had when I’d arrived (if with a heavy preponderance for non-Latin words). My English, thanks to Nathan’s continued insistence on speaking it when it was just us like the walking stereotype he was, was now probably good enough to study at university in.

“What about you?” I asked.

“My team is delving tomorrow,” he said with a nod. “We finally got a slot.”

He had, after a bit of horse-trading amongst the Outlander community, ended up on a team with Zoe, who was a cryomancer, Tulok, who no one still had any idea where he was actually from on Earth and, in defiance of his maybe-Inuit past, wielded light and heat similar to Velevir, and a bronze ranked beastkin called Moarva who was more or less the leader. That was a fairly common pattern, with Outlanders being sought out by more experienced native Alarians who acted as sort of shepherds, trading their greater experience for the promise of a team who would get strong fast.

For his part, Swithin had discovered he had the ability to manipulate plants, which he was utterly delighted with. He wasn’t able to directly heal with his power, but in collaboration with the local alchemist he had doubled the town’s production of healing potions, and, like me, wore many hats: adventurer, nurse (or perhaps trainee doctor?), and sort-of alchemy apprentice. He also didn’t need touch, making his power more directly useful in combat, where he could rapidly grow and modify roots to bind and crush.

His team were, as I understood it, still on the first floor, taking things much more cautiously than Nathan, Mousington, Velevir and I, who had developed a reputation as being ‘somewhat reckless’ that didn’t feel entirely fair.

“Are you alright, Charlie?” asked Swithin, putting a cup of tea into my hand.

“As well as can be expected—a bit stressed, I guess,” I said sipping at the rather tasty brew that was amongst the many experiments that Swithin kept bringing in. “Although it’s not too bad, you and the others are able to carry the load here better.”

“We have had an excellent teacher,” he said, raising his mug to me. “And the plants of this world are truly remarkable. If we ever succeed in returning home, I should like to bring some with me.”

I sipped at my drink, my brow furrowing.

“What is it?” asked Swithin.

“I thought I was supposed to be the empath?” I grumbled, earning a laugh. “It’s just… I don’t know. You are from my past; if you were going to make it back, bring back magical herbs—if that worked, why don’t I know about it already?”

“Perhaps I do make it home, and the herbs lose their power on Earth?” he said.

“Maybe…” I said, shaking my head. “Or maybe Saniya’s right, and we’re all dead. This is some kind of afterlife, reincarnation.”

I didn’t want that to be true. I hoped it wasn’t true, but… well, as time went on it sort of felt more likely. There were people from my future who had come here, like Saniya, who was from some kind of Socialist India. There was magic here, yes, but was there time-travel?

“This does not seem like heaven to me,” said Swithin with quiet confidence. “I do not believe the Lord would be so cruel as to separate us forever from our families.”

Right, Swithin was Catholic. I sometimes forgot because he wasn’t really preachy about it like Caroline was about her Protestantism. There had been some kind of argument about that a few weeks ago, and he and Caroline no longer worshipped together, but I really hadn’t cared enough to find out the details. He was better off without her, although she probably wasn’t better off without him.

“I hope you’re right,” I said, finishing the rest of my cup and resolving to focus on the present, rather than naval gazing and wallowing in disquiet. “Alright, let’s go over the stock and then close up for the night. I don’t think anyone else is...”

I trailed off as I felt a burst of frenzied, worried emotions enter the edge of my awareness, coming from the dungeon’s entrance, and headed straight towards the clinic.

I moved to the door, drawing the attention of Mousington—who had been quietly reading in the corner.

“What is it, Friend Charlie?” he asked.

“I think… I think someone’s hurt,” I said as I peered into the night’s gloom, where a group of adventurers in full kit were rushing towards me, carrying a figure between them.

“Doctor!” shouted one as they drew closer.

“In here,” I said, holding the clinic’s wooden door—a recent upgrade over canvas—open for them.

They rushed passed and put an exhausted, bloodied, battered, and burned dwarven woman with an iron insignia on the table.

“What happened?” I said as I pressed my hands to her, pain and aches rolling over me as I began to heal her wounds.

“We don’t know, we found her by the entrance, just as we were about to head in,” said a tall kobold woman with a copper insignia and what had to be a dyed feathery mane in an actual rainbow of colours.

The dwarven woman’s eyes rolled in her head, exhausted and more than a little terrified. “Shai-Hulud,” she gasped.

Oh. Right. Fuck.

And, dammit, had I really needed to be the one to name that monster after fictional sandworms? It sounded badass and all, but it felt a little bit dark if it was actually killing people.

“Where are the others?” I asked as I stabilised her. “Are they back by the entrance?”

“I don’t know,” gasped the dwarf. “We got seperated. There was sand everywhere. I couldn’t see…”

---

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