Altevia Aulus Cornetia

  “The lord's sister was trying to listen us again.”

  “Again?” Sergius said suddenly and sighed, “I hope she didn't hear too much.”

  I looked at them in confusion, “What happened?” I asked, and they told me about last night's funny little incident, and I giggled a little unintentionally when I heard about the little theatre they had put on to send Ingrid away.

  “Anyway, get ready, we'll be out soon.

  If she's heard anything, we need to get out of here before the Silberhafens start questioning us.”

  After Sergius' words, I quickly got ready, grabbed my green cloak and dagger, went down to the entrance and as I got on the carriage, Sergius threw a stone at me gently. After catching the stone in mid-air, I looked at the fire runes on it and turned to Sergius.

  “You never know when you might need it,

  Hide it, it's highly illegal.”

  “Illegal? How powerful is it?”

  “When you want to use it, activate it, throw it and run as fast as you can.”

  Did he just give a kid a fucking grenade?

  Inside the carriage was my small grey bag, I threw the firestone in my bag and took a deep breath. This was going to be my first dungeon crawl, I had no idea what I was going to face, but I was excited.

  After we left the Silberhafen's house I had a strange feeling, I looked around and when I couldn't see anything, I thought it must be excitement and ignored it. Our first stop was the harbour, Sergius gathered a team of 20 men from the ships, among them I recognised Wyll as a familiar face, but I didn't know anyone else apart from a young boy named Ivan who came to the mage club once in a while. Ivan wanted to be a fire mage as far as I knew, but he was often frightened and immobilised in the face of danger, but after a few punches to the face he became more poised and determined. The idea of the mage club was something that just came to me out of the blue and I did it largely to pass the time, but it was nice to see it really helping people and me.

  “Before we leave, can I sit on the porcelain throne?” asked Wyll, and I looked at him in wonder. Sergius nodded, and this time I looked at Sergius and he said, ‘He's gonna shit.

  I chuckled, while Wyll went to the loo we gathered round a table to go over the dungeon plan that the scouts had drawn up yesterday, we were on the centre deck of the biggest ship, the big white scrolls that the plans were drawn on were laid out on a big table here and about 10 of us were talking around the table and someone came up and was whispering something to Sergius when we heard a man's voice and we turned round.

  “You don't need to prepare, we're friends, aren't we, Lord Cornetia?”

  Quickly the plans on the table were hidden, and I looked at the rabbit mehum, who was standing in front of us, with dozens of men behind him. Mehum, with long, black rabbit ears, wearing a black and yellow shirt with sleeves rolled up to his elbows, with a big muscular body, approached us and locked eyes with Sergius. They were close in height.

  “Lord Ashford.” Sergius smiled, “To what do we owe the pleasure of your visit?”

  Lord Ashford's eyebrows furrowed and as he took a step closer, Sergius added, “If you want a kiss, I prefer a more polite approach.” and the men of the ocean chuckled.

  “Where is my crystal, Lord Cornetia?”

  “What crystal?”

  “Are we really going to play this game?”

  “What game? Are you all right, Lord Ashford?”

  Lord Ashford suddenly drew a short black sword from his belt and held it to Sergius' throat, and in that brief moment, the sound of countless steel was heard. Before I knew it, a man from the Ocean had moved in front of me, guarding me with Nazir, in case of danger.

  “You will give it to me now!”

  Sergius had his hands up and was still looking at Lord Ashford with a sneer on his face, “Or…?” he mocked, and Lord Ashford's men were flanked by about 30 other men from the ocean, and they were surrounded in a circle.

  Lord Ashford looked around, his eyebrows furrowed, and he lowered his sword and said, “We are not finished.” and then he walked away, pushing our men. After he had disembarked, Sergius turned to us with a serious expression and said, “Double the number of scouts, we must not be followed to the dungeon.” and he turned to me, “Alt, perhaps it would be best for you to stay at Silberhafen castle for now, what just happened was a bit unexpected.”

  “If he was really someone who could cause us trouble, why didn't you finish him off while he was surrounded?” I asked, and Sergius laughed, “Didn't you see the blue canary symbol on his men's cloaks? We always have to be careful not to be the first to attack in these situations with nobles, it gets complicated.”

  I sighed, it was really the right time to have such a problem, how lucky I was...

  Sergius grabbed Wyll by the shoulder as he came out of the loo and washed his hands with the water spell, and as Wyll looked at him in surprise he said, “Find Lady Mira and send ten men to protect her.” Wyll nodded and when he left Sergius called one of the scouts over and leaned against the table.

  “We need to keep Ashford under control before we go to the dungeon, I need to know every move he makes, but I can't spread the ocean's men around too much, we need to organise a small team-”

  Stolen story; please report.

  “If all you want to do is control him, why are you having the men of the ocean do it?” I said, and when Sergius looked at me in confusion, I continued.

  “He's not from around here, is he? So he'll have to rent a place or a couple of places here and stay there, which should be easy to find as they'll be staying in a big house.

  He's got at least 20 or 30 men in that house, so he's got to feed them, and they look like they're getting ready for a battle, so he's probably got a couple of prostitutes to keep his men's morale up.

  Follow his men, I believe in one night you can probably find out who's cooking their meals and who's buying them prostitutes.

  While the women are bugging them and selling us information, the cooks will poison their food and you can give them diarrhoea and make them unable to fight, so no one dies and we can go to the dungeon in peace.”

  Suddenly everyone was looking at me strangely and I asked, “What happened? Would that not work?” and Sergius replied, “No, it's just... we're lucky you're on our side.”

  Sergius lifted his lip, nodded his head and said, “Okay.” and as he called out to one of the scouts, I added, “When you find the pimp and the cooks, send a ‘human’ to contact them.”

  **

  Everything went according to plan. Lord Ashford had rented a large mansion in the south of the city, the men of the ocean managed to sneak up on Lord Ashford's men and we were able to find their prostitutes. After paying their pimps a good price, we got the women to work for us and got some good information. Lord Ashford wasn't very safe here, he didn't have many men and he had two ships with dozens of men coming here soon, and besides that, according to the women, it wasn't easy to get his men to talk, but at least we learnt that they would be on standby until ‘information’ came in. We surmised that this ‘information’ was probably the crystal to find and open the dungeon, or the location of the dungeon.

  The cooks did a tremendous job, using a few small herbs I had prepared in their dishes instead of the herbs they normally use, and when we learnt that the prostitutes had not been called for the following night, we could see that it had worked very well.

  We decided to postpone the journey to the dungeon for a day, so today, actually right now, we were on our way. Xadora had a marvellous landscape, there were many lakes, rivers, streams and grass. It was mostly green. We started the journey without a carriage, only with horses and bags, I couldn't understand it at first, but after a while I realised that we couldn't take the carriages here anyway when we left the main road and went through the trees and hills. We were constantly checking to see if we were being followed as we went along, and finally, when we had been travelling for a long time and were close to the dungeon, we caught someone. The trouble was, it wasn't one of Lord Ashford's men, it was Ingrid von Silberhafen. Fortunately the scouts realised who she was and were not too rough with her.

  When Ingrid moved her shoulders nervously, the scouts let her go and she looked around with an angry expression.

  “Was she alone?” I asked, looking at the scouts and they nodded. The angry look on Ingrid's face changed to fear. I walked over to her and reached round her waist and took the wand from her belt, a short one with a bright red stone on the top.

  “You seem to know how to cast spells, did you not defend yourself?” I asked.

  “Your men sneaked up on me.” she murmured and I moved her wand on her legs, “If you're that easy to catch, you're lucky you were caught by us and not some bandits."

  I could see her fear growing, I moved closer to her and as she took a step backwards she tripped and fell to the ground. I walked past her, looking into her eyes, pointed the wand at her and when she jerked her head back I smiled and twisted it in my hand and handed it to her.

  “We'll need to get at least 5 or 10 people with him to get him back, and considering they'll have to travel back and forth, we're greatly increasing our chances of getting caught.

  What should we do cousin?” I turned to Sergius and he lifted his shoulders and looked at Mira.

  “Why did you follow us, my lady?” Mira asked as she reached out a hand and helped her up. Once she was up, Mira cleaned Ingrid's back and behind.

  “I... I was wondering where you were going.” she said and I reacted, “So you're so unconfident and stupid that you decided to follow us instead of asking if you could join us?” and she frowned.

  ‘’She knows about the Artifact,‘’ Arthur said suddenly and Ingrid looked at him in horror.

  “See, that complicates things.” Sergius looked at Ingrid with an expressionless face and Ingrid suddenly shouted, “I won't tell anyone, I've never seen a dungeon and I just want to know what's inside!”

  We looked at each other, we couldn't kill her, and obviously I didn't want to kill her, but we realised we couldn't send her back.

  “When we find the artifact, what are you going to do?” When I asked Ingrid this, she paused, looked at the ground for a moment, then looked at me with clenched fists, “If you want to sell it, I'll buy it from you, but if you want to take it away, I won't do anything, I can't do anything anyway.”

  “Aren't you going to tell your parents that we found an artifact on your land?”

  She didn't answer and I looked her in the eye, “I'll give you this artifact-”

  Mira interrupted me, “Altevia…” but I nodded at her and continued, “Lady Mira needs this artifact, we can sell it to you when she's done, I don't know if it'll be usable or what exactly is in there, but if you don't tell your family anything, I'll pick it up and bring it to you myself when she's done.

  Is that all right with you?”

  Ingrid's eyes widened, she looked at me in amazement and with a smile on her face that she couldn't hide, she asked, “Would you really do that?” and Mira came up to us saying, “Altevia, your father and I didn't agree to this.”

  “You should go get the artifact yourself then, and you can deal with the lord who came to the ship,” I replied, and Sergius put his hand on my shoulder.

  “Altevia, it would be better if we talk about this.”

  I turned to Sergius, “In one of the options, we get out of the way and go home without any problems with anyone, in the other, the current one, we go to war with one lord, in the third we go to war with two lords at the same time which we stay in the same house with one of those lords.

  Doesn't seem like we have much of a choice?

  Or we can slit Ingrid's throat right now, throw her into the bushes and pretend we don't know anything when we get home and disappear overnight back to the Rosarium.

  It's your call.”

  “Or you can marry both Mira and Ingrid at the same time, and they can use the artifact happily and you can enjoy yourself, though the girls usually kick you out of the house after a child is born. At least that's what happened to me,” Arthur said, and suddenly everyone looked at him, including me.

  He was sitting on my shoulder, and he put a small piece of strawberry in his mouth and said, ‘What? It's not like it's impossible,' and I chuckled and gave him another piece of strawberry.

  After everyone looked at each other for a moment, Mira asked Ingrid, ‘I may need to use the artifact for a few years, can you wait that long?’ and she replied, ‘I don't seem to have a choice.’

  Now that I think about it, I don't think the option Arthur suggested was actually not that bad, but that's probably just me. Joking aside, even though a threesome is on every man's bucket list, I don't think I would choose anything other than monogamy when it comes to marriage, love should be a special thing after all.

  Now that we've solved that problem...

  “Five years! If you don't bring me the Artifact in five years, I'll tell my family all about it.”

  Everyone looked at Ingrid at once and Mira sighed.

  ‘’That's a long time for you humans, right...

  Agreed, I'll try to get you the artifact in five years.”

  I let out a sigh of relief, the uneasiness in me was instantly gone.

  After the agreements were made and everyone was ready again, we continued on our way.