Dagger Lord: A LitRPG Series Read online

  “What the hell was that, you bastard?”

  Mav edged away. “You made the game dirty, Jack. Guess what? That’s the way I like it. What you did wasn’t steel baroque, but anything goes when the daggers are out.”

  Jack ran at him. He ducked his head and gave his best impression of a Sfera player charging into opposition ranks, aiming at Mav’s stomach.

  All it took was a single side step and a hook around his foot, and Jack was on the floor.

  “Time to stop playing,” said Mav.

  Jack tried to get up, but Mav put his boot on his chest and pushed him down. His face changed. Gone was the mischievous, somewhat grouchy thief, replaced by a man Jack had never met. He had Mav’s face, but this man had no humanity in him. His eyes had the endless depth of a killer, large and white and lacking emotion.

  He pinned Jack’s arms under his knees. He held his dagger closer to his eye.

  “Give me what I want, Lord Halberd. Otherwise, I’ll start with the eyes, and move on to the balls…”

  Time to stop playing nice, thought Jack.

  As Mav gripped his arms, Jack used smoke twist. He suddenly felt lighter, and he realized that his body had turned into a large plume of smoke. He looked to his right, and he felt himself drift out of Mav’s grip. His mana started to drop, and he felt his head throb with concentration while he kept the power working. When he was away from Mav he deactivated it. He felt himself again, though wisps of black smoke drifted from him.

  “Speaking of balls,” he said.

  Mav turned to face him. Jack ran at him, and then lifted a knee and jammed it into Mav’s privates.

  The thief winced, and then he collapsed to the floor in a heap. Hew wheezed a little and rolled around. When he was finished, he let out a long sigh, and pushed himself to his feet.

  “Don’t you have any honor, you don of a bitch?” said Mav.

  Jack grinned. “Honor? Spit.”

  Despite the pain he was still in, Mav smiled. “Maybe I am a little out of shape, after all,” he said. “And not just in my body, but my head. I must be if I let a bastard like you catch me off guard.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  There were no exotic berries or vegetables on the marble table in the meeting room the next afternoon. Elena had called them to an impromptu meeting, and it sounded urgent. Jack sat at the head of the table, weary after a morning of levelling up in the forest with Mav. He and Mav attended the meeting covered in mud, leaves, and the stains of forest-wolf blood. Elena wasn’t much better; she wore a shirt dirtied from her work in the stables.

  “What was so important that we couldn’t change our clothes?” asked Mav. “I only wear this coat because it’s already so covered in shit that a little more doesn’t hurt. It bloody chafes, though.”

  “I’m only guessing here,” said Jack. “But it might just have something to do with the strange box.”

  In the middle of the table was a wooden box. It was slightly bigger than a cigar box, and it was made from stained oak. A scent of nutmeg and cloves rose from it as if it had been doused in them. On the top was a scarlet silk bow.

  “It came this morning,” said Elena. “Delivered on horseback by a riderless mustang. There was almost a riot when the peasants saw that there was no rider, but the horse didn’t have Molde.”

  “Veik again?” asked Jack.

  “The peasant who brought it to the castle said the horse was saddled, but there was no sign of a sigil.”

  “Destroy it,” said Mav, eying the box. “Don’t mess about.”

  Elena nodded. “For once, I agree.”

  “You’re not curious?” asked Jack.

  “Curiosity is seldom free from danger.”

  “It was sent here for a reason, and I need to see what’s inside. I’ll open it.”

  He reached for the box, when Elena put her hand on top of it. “One moment, Lord. When the peasant delivered the box to us, he was behaving extremely strangely. He was almost in a zombified state, completely unresponsive to stimuli. He was himself again after handing me the box.”

  “You think there might be some kind of poison in the box?”

  She shook her head. “I recognise most forms of poison, and I have handled it without issue. But the effects of the peasant are peculiar. It may have been a spell, but I suspect something else.”

  “Magier Alchemi?” asked Jack.

  Mav squinted at him. “How do you know about that badger-brained harem of spell weasels?”

  “Not Magier Alchemi,” said Elena. “Sometimes, when one gets too close to a portal, it can have strange effects on the mind. Much like our peasant friend. There are only a few groups who utilize portals on a regular basis.”

  “Tachers,” said Jack.

  She nodded. “Perhaps the horse entered your lands through a portal.”

  “If we’re going to open the damn thing,” said Mav. “Let me get my mitts on it first.”

  “What are you going to do?” asked Jack.

  “Use my trap skill, of course. No point being able to sense traps if I don’t bloody do it when a zombified peasant delivers you a gift.”

  Mav stared at the box. He rotated it as delicately as if he was handling a bomb. When he’d looked at it from every angle, he finally seemed satisfied that there was no booby trap. “Seems fine to me,” he said.

  “Then I guess I better open it. Here goes.”

  Jack pinched one end of the scarlet bow between his thumb and index finger. He slowly unravelled it, then pulled it away. The lid of the box came with it. Inside, packed amongst heaps of sawdust, was a memory crystal.

  “I’m getting sick of these things,” said Jack.

  “Don’t leave us sat with our thumbs up our backsides. See what’s inside.”

  Preparing himself for whatever vision was to come, Jack took hold of the crystal. The meeting room disappeared. The crystallized marble table vanished, as did the window showing the view of his lands. He found himself in a windowless dungeon. He stood in the corner of it. The room smelled of sweat and mildew. Wood shavings lined the floor, and bloodstains covered some of the fragments. The only way out was through a door in the middle of a row of bars. Moisture covered the dark stone walls. In the centre of the room, was a man strapped into a wooden chair. His eyes were wide and glassy, and he had an altogether absent expression on his face. A robed figure stood above him.

  The robed figure held a strange implement in his hands. It was five pointed spikes connected by a wooden grip, which the figure held in his palm. He spread out the spikes, and Jack saw that they could be adjusted as if they were fingers on a claw. He lined each spike up with a point on the strapped man’s face. One on each temple, two on his forehead, and one on his neck.

  “This will hurt,” said the robed figure.

  The strapped man was unresponsive. He seemed to be in a state of shock.

  “I know you can hear me,” said the figure. “And I know you feel the mind claw’s tender caress. This will be unlike anything you have ever experienced.”

  With that, he pressed the spikes into the man’s flesh. The tips pierced his skin. The man let out a long wail of pain, though his eyes didn’t betray any sign that he could see the tool, nor the man who wielded it.

  “You can feel it drawing out your memories, can’t you? As a leech sucks blood, as a mosquito drains life force from a succulent vein.”

  The man screamed. Jack wanted to cover his ears, but he was an unwilling participant in the memory, watching it from the eyes of whoever else was in the room. This observer didn’t make any attempt to drown out the sound.

  “When debts aren’t paid willingly, there are other ways of taking them,” said the figure.

  The strapped man wailed as his memories were drained from his skull. The claw implement seemed to throb as though it were alive. Jack noticed that a sinewy cord hung from the end. It trailed along the floor and to the corner of the room, where it connected to a sinewy sack shaped like a giant egg. The egg seemed
to wobble as the man’s memories leeched into it.

  The robed figured suddenly turned. He was looking at the man in the corner of the room.

  “I hope you understand now, Lord Halberd,” said the robed figure.

  The unexpected use of his name sent a cold dread through him. Could the robed figure see him? Impossible, this was just a memory.

  The strapped man’s arms went limp, and his head slumped to the side. His screams were gone now, though their memory seemed to have left an imprint on the walls of the miserable dungeon. Then, the vision drained.

  Jack found himself back in the Castle Halberd meeting room. He realized he was gripping the edges of the marble table. He felt shaken and nauseous.

  “What did you see?” asked Mav.

  Words eluded him. The horrifying vision of the memory splitter wouldn’t leave. He heard the squelch of the egg sac as memories were pumped into it. The echoes of the strapped man’s cries sent a shiver down his arms.

  Elena reached into the box. Sawdust rustled as she moved it. “There’s a note,” she said. She picked up a scrap of paper.

  Jack recovered his poise. “What does it say?”

  “It says…twelve thousand flek.”

  “Well, he already knew that,” said Mav. “They already got their point across.”

  A serious look passed over Elena’s countenance. Jack didn’t like it.

  “Is there more?”

  “The terms have changed,” said Elena, her voice grave. “Twelve thousand flek in one hundred and twenty days,” she said.

  “One hundred and twenty days?” said Jack. “That’s crazy. They already said I had a year to pay.”

  “The tachers aren’t known for being princes of patience. Bastards are one vial short of a potion,” said Mav. He looked at Elena. “No offence.”

  Elena rolled her eyes. “There must be a reason for the change. They wouldn’t act on a whim.”

  Whatever the reason, Jack didn’t like it. He felt anger building up in him. Not only were the tachers pressuring him in his first days in Royaume, but they were hurting people to send a message. He resented the people of his land being treated as pawns.

  “Those fucking assholes,” he said.

  He picked up the crystal again. Before the vision could take hold in his mind and replay, he threw it across the room. It exploded on the floor, shattering into hundreds of glass pieces that caught the shine of the Holuum suns.

  Elena jumped in her seat. Even Mav shifted uncomfortably. Jack realized that he wasn’t acting as a lord should.

  “Listen,” said Mav. “I think you’ve got bigger problems than I realized. How about, until this gets straightened, I take my cut down to five percent?”

  He felt his anger dissipate. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t mean to be a dick. I just need to deal with the tachers, somehow. I making progress in almost everything, but this is just one thing I can’t quite work out. How am I supposed to get that kind of money?”

  “You’ll find a way,” said Elena. “I believe in you.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Despite Elena’s protests, Jack called an early stop to his lessons. He spent the rest of the morning in the building room. The upper platform of bookcases held books on every subject he could ever imagine. After perusing the shelves, he managed to find a book dedicated to exotic diseases.

  If he was looking for reassurance, the book was blind to his hope. Mav’s condition, Tantalus’s Bane, was horrific. Left untreated without Teyroot, it changed the sufferer’s mind and body until he or she became something decidedly inhuman. Most of Royaume’s medical practitioners believed that those infected with Tantalus should be killed. It was, they reasoned, kinder to the sufferer and those around them. If anything, this strengthened Jack’s resolve to find a cure, but not yet. He had so much shit in front of him that he needed to shovel some away before wading through more of it.

  After that, he sat in his Emperium chair and accessed his building menu. The nighttime intrusions of Bruce Frier and Crowley Drach worried him. For this reason, he spent flek on creating two new watchmen. Hopefully, they would be made of sterner stuff than the one he already had. He happily discovered that strengthening his security earned him a Peacekeeping point. It was his first.

  He capped off his building session by placing two new wells to make it easier for peasants to get drinking water. There wasn’t enough flek to spare to do much else.

  It was only a little progress, but it was something. Jack found it filled him with a renewed vigor, despite the shackles of poor sleep dragging him back. He and Mav spent the afternoon in the forest, where Jack earned level 9. They sold the pelts of their slain foes and topped up some of the flek that he had spent earlier. True to his word, Mav only asked for a five percent cut.

  After that, it was time to have a meeting.

  Mav laid on a buffet of snacks for them, and the crystal surface was covered with his creations. Belly of field bisse– a type of cow, Mav informed him – sat on a silver tray. It was roasted to perfection and stuffed with garlic and olives. One plate had portions of flame-cooked heckler wasps, with the stings removed and venom extracted. ‘Not an easy task, let me tell you,’ Mav had said.

  Their bloated bodies were cooked until their shells cracked like pastry. Not one to let things go to waste, Mav had boiled the venom until it was harmless, and then used it as a dipping sauce for shell pieces. Even Elena was amazed at his culinary talents.

  Mav stroked Bluntfang’s head. “I didn’t forget you, little fella,” he said and gave him dried heckler legs to chew on.

  Jack popped a piece of shell in his mouth. He couldn’t help wincing at the sour taste, and he felt bad when Mav caught his expression.

  “My palate hasn’t caught up with Royaume yet,” said Jack.

  “I haven’t tried these before,” said Elena. She cracked of some shell and chewed on it. For just a second, she screwed up her face. Then, so as not to offend Mav, she struggled to put a smile on her face.

  “Delicious,” she said. “but I prefer the field bisse.”

  “Thought you might,” said Mav.

  Jack was glad to see the two of them getting on. Mav seemed to be making a tremendous effort after his and Jack’s talk. He was even treating Bluntfang like an old friend.

  “Perhaps we should move on with the evening’s business?” said Elena.

  Jack washed the sour taste from his mouth with a drink Mav had made from gonja berries.

  “We need to decide what to do about the raiders in the flek fields, and about the tachers,” he said. “The problems are linked, to my mind. I can’t pay my debt without flek, but I can’t take the flek fields back without an army.”

  “And you can’t build an army out of thin air, either,” said Mav.

  “Not only that,” said Jack, “But we need defenses. It makes me uneasy that people waltz into Holuum without being stopped, and even more so that they can get to the drawbridge. I need to build walls.”

  “That would take a tremendous amount of flek,” said Elena.

  “And now you see how circular this problem is.”

  “For defense,” said Mav “look no further. I can make traps.”

  Elena scoffed. “Sorry,” she said, catching Mav’s eye. “I don’t mean to offend, but...”

  Mav’s cheeks flushed. “Don’t believe me? I can make a trap out of anything. Absolutely anything. Name something in this room.”

  Elena reached behind her and pulled out the cushion she rested against. “How about this?”

  “Well…I could use it to smother you.”

  “Guys,” said Jack.

  “Sorry.”

  “Apologies, Lord.”

  “I need to get flek production going. That’s the short of it. Without flek, we’re cut off from doing anything. That means we need to deal with the raiders, and us and a few watchmen won’t be enough. I need to pull an army out of my backside.”

  “Soldiers can be hired,” said El
ena, “but the most flek-effective means would be to recruit from your villager pool.”

  “I have a population count of thirty, and six of them are unassigned. So if we can trade animal pelts for flek, maybe we can earn enough to create some soldiers. It’s a start. I’m going to have to spend a little flek to gain a whole lot more from the fields.”

  “There’s a problem,” said Elena.

  “Why am I not surprised?”