Chapter 26

“What? Really? Giant undead skeletons? Now that’s something!” Kver replied cheerfully, shoving another blackberry cone under his mask.

They were sitting at one of the tables near the bar. Yan, Kver, Mai, Nik, and even Tiss, who, as you may remember, hated the smell of drunks. Though the guard quickly forgot all about that the moment he saw the rogue.

“Yes! I’m telling you! And I had to heroically stand between him and Sovt! I was unbreakable as steel! Took the monster down with one blow!”

“Didn’t you think you could easily get hurt?” Nik asked him. “Your physique isn’t particularly muscular.”

“Ha-ha, come on, Nik! This is Lim Lucius Leadastray himself! What did you say again? Leader of the gang?.. Um… the Sausages of Free Meal?”

“The Hostages of Free Will,” Yan corrected him, taking a handful of cones as well.

Sweet as honey.

“Exactly!” Kver nodded.

“So, are you working in Tsagat now?” Mai asked, tilting his head to the side.

“No, right now I’m on my own. Just little things here and there. Mostly working for myself these days,” the rogue replied with a sigh.

“Your companions must miss you,” Mai suggested.

“Probably…” Yan replied reluctantly, reaching for the bottle of wine. “We haven’t seen each other in a long time. That’s true.”

“Sometimes it is quite useful to visit old friends,” Tiss remarked coldly, tossing a portion of cones into his mouth, and immediately caught a reproachful look from Nik. “We-ell, when you’re in the mood for it, of course.”

“That’s for sure!” Kver agreed, throwing an arm around Yan’s shoulders and pulling him tightly against himself. “You seem kind of down, Lim. Or is it just me?”

“You? I don’t know,” the rogue replied evasively.

Then, suddenly, he decided to be honest.

“Well, maybe a little… Lately I’ve been having some intrusive thoughts, you could say… about the past.”

After saying that, Yan got a completely unusual reaction from his companions: they all fell silent and looked at him strangely. Strangely, as though they understood. Or perhaps… suspected something?

“Well then, in any case, if you’re telling the truth and you have so many different friends ready to help you at any moment,” Kver said, pouring himself more wine, “I think sometimes you ought to ask them for help. If they’re real friends, they’ll never refuse. Right, brother?”

“You can say that again, Kver,” Mai replied, smiling behind his mask. “Why, even us! We can help too, can’t we, guys?”

Kver, Nik, and Tiss immediately nodded.

Yan found that suspicious. But for some reason he stayed where he was, waiting for something. He asked:

“A-and what could you help me with, for example?”

“Well, what would you like?” Mai’s voice suddenly came from directly above him, while two heavy hands settled on his shoulders. “Perhaps something a little… special?”

“No, no! Girls are more my thing than guys!” the rogue replied at once, breaking free of the sudden embrace.

But then he quickly realized they were just messing with him and smiled. The mysterious four laughed too. Genuinely—not like cutthroats planning to strangle him and dump his body in a ditch.

“Strange. I could swear there’s magic floating in the air between us right now,” Yan thought. “And yet I don’t sense any threat in it, or any kind of enchantment. It doesn’t feel like evil sorcery or some kind of mirage. This magic seems to… simply exist, and fill me?”

“Mister Lim?” a familiar voice suddenly reached him, and Yan immediately looked around.

Morik was standing right beside their table, looking over their strange company in surprise. The rogue—and four guardians of world order.

“Oh, Morik, you’re already done?” Yan asked, getting up from the table.

“Yep! Just like I said: lean on me, Mister Lim! Are these your new friends again?” the sorcerer asked, looking over the four. “Looks like a den of hungry predators.”

“That much was obvious without you,” the rogue thought, then said aloud:

“This is Kver, Mai, Nik, and Tiss. They came here with the delegations from Encantaria and the Vault. And they’ll be at tomorrow’s reception,” Yan added, as if hinting at something to the sorcerer.

The sorcerer seemed to understand the hint. And, right in front of everyone, gave Yan such an exaggerated wink that even a blind mole could have seen it.

“I understand.” The sorcerer nodded. “Just so you know… Semyu said that our services… will be very…” The mage looked over all four knights again. “…useful for… moving from place… to place!”

“Excellent! Then… we’ll be happy to help… him,” Yan said.

Morik nodded. Kver and the others remained silent.

And as though in answer to Yan’s words, the tavern door suddenly flew open.

A crowd of mages in green robes came piling inside. Mages whose leader, as we remember, was Zaur Lime.

There were about seven of them. All in green robes, some with staffs, some with grimoires at the ready. A real green blot on the silk canvas of the famous tavern.

At their head was a short young mage with a thick mop of blond hair and:

“Semyu! We’re here on Master Zaur’s orders!” he squeaked in an unbelievably shrill voice. The mage clearly wasn’t older than nineteen. “You refuse to pay the dues even though you work in our district!”

“What?” came the innkeeper’s bear-like bass. He emerged from the kitchen with a large meat cleaver at the ready. “I already pay taxes to the city! Double taxes, at that!” said the mustache. “I already told you to tell your boss that his threats don’t work on me!”

“We know,” the young mage replied. “And that’s exactly why”—he swept his hand through the air, and the nearest table, customers and all, sank into the ground—“we didn’t come here to threaten you. We came to act!”

Silence fell over the tavern. Everyone froze, staring at the mages. There was only one thing written on every face—fear of those who could alter reality with a thought and bend the forces of nature to their will.

Magical discrimination in all its glory. Yan had seen this before. And he had seen far worse.

Thousandworld alone was enough.

Yes… over the course of his life, the rogue had managed to visit all kinds of worlds and all kinds of Empires. In some of them, anyone without magic was considered not even a person, but livestock to be experimented on and subjected to tests. In others, meanwhile, mages went so insane in their pursuit of even greater power that they tried to violate the most basic principles of the world order—to resurrect a dead god, or something along those lines. And when that happened, the victims numbered in the hundreds, sometimes thousands, of ordinary people.

Compared to things like that, Tsagat’s xenophobia was small-scale.

Still, that didn’t mean he had to put up with it every damn time.

Yan’s body tensed. He wanted to step forward, to say something, but Kver’s hand suddenly came down on his shoulder.

Hard as steel.

The knight looked at Yan through the narrow slits of his mask, then spoke.

“Leave this to us, Lim Lucius Leadastray,” he said unexpectedly. “You seemed to be in a hurry somewhere, didn’t you? Hey, you scrawny runts!” Kver called to the mages who had entered, thrust a hand beneath his robe, and drew a broad white sword split in two by a red stone. “Actually, taking someone else’s property and threatening the owner with violence is forbidden under the interworld code of all taverns and inns! Haven’t you heard of it?”

“What? And who the hell are you?” the mage asked angrily, watching the knight step in front of them. “Tsagat does not answer to the Vault!”

“I know,” Kver replied cheerfully. “The problem is, I’m not a representative of the Vault.”

That was true. He was from Encantaria.

From there, apparently, things turned into a fight to the death. Yan couldn’t say for sure, though, since by then he was already hightailing it away from the scene with Morik and the two silent adepts of the Blue Paths.

Those two, incidentally, had somehow managed to completely miss Zaur’s mages arriving at the tavern.

Well, happens to everyone, right?

“Happens to everyone,” Yan thought as he hurried Morik along. “Anyway… what the hell was that just now?”