The Duty (Play to Live: Book # 3) (32 page)

I chuckled and stopped in my tracks, having covered barely half the distance. Even in that, I was trying to win some invisible points demonstrating my domineering position, however unconscious. I made a show of scratching Bagheera's neck, waiting for their reaction. Five minutes seemed to have lasted forever; then the enemy ranks seethed, letting out a few officers in gaudy clothes surrounded by their retinues of adjutants and bodyguards.

One of the officers raised a timid hand over his head. A white silk scarf fluttered in the wind.

We'd won.

Chapter Eighteen

T
he Chinese negotiating team was impressive. A large orc walked first, smug and full of himself, sporting some custom-made colors—a very expensive option in the Admins' book. I quickly looked him up: the leader of a top Chinese alliance. He was chaperoned by two enormous NPC bodyguards, level 400 Terracotta Warriors clad in steel and mithril.

Oh wow. Those were some high-profile dudes. I wondered if he'd left behind two Nova Plus castles unprotected, splurging his entire hire budget on the pleasure of having two six-thousand dollar goons behind his back for a day. Actually, if I applied my own philosophy here—money being secondary to authority—then his actions made perfect sense. I was pretty sure my men were duly impressed.

Next to him and his hard-boiled bodyguards, the remaining officers looked rather bleak despite all their gold braid (by the pound), the glitter of magic stones and gorgeous plumes in their headgear. Were they breeding ostriches in the desert? I didn't see either the Shui Fong representatives nor the Maoists among them: apparently, they had their hands full with other matters.

Bagheera growled a warning, making the negotiators stop a few paces away from me. The orc gave the panther a glance full or contempt and scowled, turning on his caps-lock voice.

Yeah, right. Your wish is my command. Who did he think he was? "
We demand you bring back the captured slaves, pay ten million gazillion contribution and cancel the excommunication."
Not happy, eh? You guys not capable of a sincere prayer to attract our beautiful goddess' attention second time round? Well, tough. The goddess of blissful death is not for the likes of you.

The orc took in my sarcastic stare and lost it completely. According to my very basic knowledge of the Chinese etiquette, I don't think anyone had given him this kind of look for a long time. I didn't think many people ever dared to raise their eyes at all in the presence of anyone that high a rank. So he went on hissing, turning on the heat,

"You think we can't survive without your divine slut? A goddess of slaves and cowards! There is only one warrior god: Yu-huang, the Jade Emperor. And
he
rewards his faithful servants well! Look at the Terracotta Warriors, the soldiers of
his
legion that he entrusted to me for my fierce faith and my good deeds in
his
name! One word from me, and they will trample through your ranks, there and back again, only becoming stronger as they devour your souls!"

I studied the motionless figures. They were definitely golems, even though they must have been based on clay and not metal. It didn't make them easy prey, though: level 400 spoke for itself. But any golem was nothing else but an undead furnished with a captured human soul. Which made them beings of the Dark by definition. And if so...

I glared at the orc and swung my hand, motioning him to shut up. "Enough! I don't think you know who you're talking to, either! You've chosen the wrong approach from the start. You dared insult the Goddess. That's more than enough to merit a death sentence."

His retinue backed off. He too turned sort of pale—the senior officers must have already known about the loose-lipped Weidong's sorry fate. Obeying his silent command, the Terracotta Warriors stepped forward, shielding their master with their powerful mass. Oh well. It would only be more spectacular this way.

I pointed at the insolent negotiator and activated the Religious Outcast skill. "Kill him," my voice was calm to the point of being tired.

A skeptical smile curved the orc's mouth. The tracers of two sabers flashed by. I swung my head aside, avoiding the thick jet of blood which was now gushing from the green stump that had once been his neck.

His body dissolved into thin air. A gilded tombstone crashed onto the sand. In the silence that followed, the masterless Terracotta Warriors crumbled into dust, the wind taking away the tiny particles of reddish clay.

I gulped and gave myself a mental high-five. "How many more of you do I need to surprise to death in order for you to realize this is serious?" I said with a disenchanted voice of a Hollywood hero. "How about you quit playing power games? You're looking at only a part of the Russian cluster's joint forces led by the Dark Pantheon's First Priest. So are we going to have a constructive discussion or do you want a personal Inferno invasion in each of your respective castles?"

Sure I was bluffing. But it did get their attention!

At this point things got moving, even if reluctantly. Task #1: prisoner exchange. As it turned out, our enemy too had had orders to take prisoners which was why the combat may have looked rather weird to the uninitiated eye. Constant hand-to-hand with lots of clinches and par terre situations, followed by dogpiles and tugs-of-war with a potential prisoner used as a rope—funny, yeah. Dreadful.

The Chinese had managed to get hold of forty-six of our permas who, for one reason or another, hadn't been able to change their patron god. Unfinished quests, high religious ranks they'd invested a lot into, or custom-leveling to gain access to a particular god's privileges—the latter was especially popular among paladins who'd sworn allegiance to Aphrodite's exaggerated curves. Each of them deserved the Grand Order of Lobotomy. Ridiculous, really: the First Priest of the Dark Pantheon saving a Paladin of Light from slavery! Surreal.

To cut it short, we exchanged all active soldiers on equal terms one to one. Any attempt at haggling was nipped in the bud. "I'll be the first to agree that each of our soldiers is worth ten yours," I told them. "But I should stick to the agreement if I were you because otherwise, I'd be obliged to increase my claims regarding Russian slaves accordingly. And those claims are quite high as they are."

The negotiators deflated and didn't broach the subject any more.

We exchanged the forty-something POWs on the spot, opening two portals opposite each other and running two single file exchange lines simultaneously. The guys didn't even get time to get properly scared.

But then the negotiators stalled, exchanging helpless stares, as they had run out of all their bargaining chips. No wonder: we had taken 380 prisoners, most of them high-ranking officers, elite warriors and top experts.

We should, in all honesty, have conducted a more equal swap. But to do so would be very much like cornering a desperate rat: it might run amok and attack anything in sight, even a human. Besides, dragging out the negotiations wasn't such a healthy idea. At any moment, God forbid, portals could pop open all along the oasis edge, letting out ten thousand warriors, and that would be the grand finale of my market day.

For all these reasons, I very importantly allowed the defeated enemy to save face while negotiating some truly yummy conditions. The swap was head for head, each Chinese POW for a Russian slave. With one extra condition: each POW surrendered the contents of both hands to the squad that had captured him. My allies weren't going to just let go of the excellently equipped prisoners, so that's where I had to surrender my power to their treasurers, storeroom clerks and other inner greedy pigs.

Admittedly, I'd set an example by making an awesome profit on the prisoners during the storming of the castle. The pic of me sitting on that towering thronelike pile of silver and gold bar had gone viral and was doing the rounds of the Russian cluster's media. In the picture, the Shui Fong gangsters were heaping glittering items of top gear at my feet, against the modest but significant backdrop of the dwarf mules lugging tons of loot toward the cargo portal. Newspaper analysts competed in greed, counting and recounting zeroes and publishing the trophies' estimated value.

We agreed to conduct the prisoner swap within twelve hours in the neutral grounds of the Fortress of the Blind King. That was a place popular with shady dealers as it boasted indecent quantities of NPC guards who didn't take sides, considerably reducing the risk of any strong-arm scenarios.

Our demands for the provision of free passage to the Lost City had caused the most confusion and took a lot of negotiation.

"If you're after the location's main boss in the Deserted Temple, he is unkillable. Three times we called up raids of fifteen hundred men each, and every time the Black Death," the negotiator gave Bagheera a confused glance, "made a quick job of us! He has a bunch of some very unpleasant skills. When his health drops 25%, he summons every monster within 300 feet from the Temple, and there're all level 300-plus! And if you do manage to work your way through their first wave and get the bastard's life down to 50%, he'll summon them again, this time within 1500 feet from the Temple. We can only conjecture that the next surprise would probably await the brave at minus 75% of their life, but that's pure theory as no one had ventured that far."

My heart missed a beat. I didn't let it show; instead, I nodded my acknowledgement. "We'll see."

Unwilling to suffer our presence on their stomping ground for any longer than humanly possible, the Chinese offered to set up a portal directly to the ruins. I scratched my head. Had this cumbersome raid idea been really necessary? Couldn't we have sent a messenger to the Asians, hire their wizard and jump directly to our destination in two easy transfers? Oh. Talking about slow on the uptake. On the other hand, we'd broken the chains of so many slaves; we'd laid our hands on a lot of gold and quite a few cool goodies, without mentioning the free authority rush. No, I had nothing to regret.

A group of our rangers was the first to enter the portal. Soon they posted a quick
OK
. The serpent-like raid followed: at least half of all the battle participants had expressed the desire to join the free ride in order to have a look at new lands, collecting beacon coordinates and farming new mobs. By now, our column counted some 700 men—nothing to turn your nose up at. Okay, maybe not in China, but as far as Russians were concerned, we had one hell of a force.

Immediately after the jump the raid fell apart, breaking into tiny clusters of independent groups that spread throughout the city suburbs, their screams of joy or wails of sorrow echoing in the chat as they looked for nice locations to pull level-300 mobs. Strange-looking gear and the rarest of ingredients that you couldn't get in our part of the world: everybody was in a hurry to grab whatever they could within the 12-hour window we'd been given.

Joined by the Vets, my mercs and I kept moving down the central street toward the Temple. Had it not been for Bagheera, we'd have never made it past the first intersection as the mobs guarding it respawned just as quickly as we took them out. This was no walk in the park: many times we'd pushed it too far, losing players by the hundreds during unsuccessful triple pulls, littering the ancient streets with tombstones marked in Cyrillic.

After four hours of the same, we reached the Deserted Temple—the realm of crumbled-down statues and gaping ruins. A lone spire reached for the sky, topping the miraculously intact temple dome still covered in peeling sheets of gold. This was antiquity itself—desolation and the creepy sensation of being watched everywhere you went.

The rangers dived into the darkness of the front doors and came back out half an hour later. "The boss is there," they reported in an unnecessary whisper. "He's sleeping. Inside there's a huge hall, the mob's aggro radius can't cover it all. The Chinese told us the truth. If we line up against the wall, all of us..."

Oh well. We could just as well go in, then.

In the gloom inside, the living moving stucco moldings insulted your eye and assaulted your brain. The indistinct statues of a long-forgotten deity were enveloped in gray mist. A sleeping Beast curled up on the sacrificial Altar; in a lavishly decorated niche behind him lay the fragment of the Heart of the Temple. The carved crystal had been destroyed by an unknown catastrophe, its facets glistening with the purple stars within. Hypnotically they called out to you. The fist-size fragment was barely a quarter of the real thing—but its power was well enough to restore the Temple. There it was, the potential solution to a multitude of problems, including our alliance with the Dwarves and the gift of seven million gold that they'd promised. The question was, how could we lay our hands on it?

As if sensing our attention, the powerful beast stirred, raising his head. Its yellow saucer eyes stared at me. Excuse me? I was looking at a carbon copy of Bagheera. No, I wasn't—as I kept peering at it, I could see dozens of little differences: it wasn't a panther at all but some ancient prototype of a saber-toothed tiger—tigress, even—albeit anthracite, her colorings matching the mist of mana swirling under the vaulted ceiling.

The beast emitted a curt quizzical growl. Involuntarily, about a hundred raiders stepped back in unison like a pack of strong dogs obeying a trainer's command—recognizing the leader's right.

I glanced back, committing the scene to memory. There they all were: the strong and the weak, the leaders and the led. This brief acid test had just put everyone in their respective places on the chess board.

Dammit! How were we going to get to the crystal? A power struggle didn't sound like a good idea. If the Heart of the Temple was still there, it meant that the Chinese had been right: they had failed to defeat the beast.

Purrrr...
echoed across the hall, a disturbing sound filled with promise. Activating a microport, Bagheera jumped right into the center of the hall. Where did he think he was going?

The saber-toothed tigress tilted her head, looking with interest at the panther who collapsed on his back and began thrashing the air with his paws as if catching invisible butterflies.