Siege Tactics (Spells, Swords, & Stealth Book 4) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  12.

  13.

  14.

  15.

  16.

  17.

  18.

  19.

  20.

  21.

  22.

  23.

  24.

  25.

  26.

  27.

  28.

  29.

  30.

  31.

  32.

  33.

  34.

  35.

  36.

  37.

  38.

  39.

  40.

  41.

  42.

  43.

  44.

  45.

  46.

  47.

  48.

  49.

  50.

  51.

  52.

  53.

  54.

  55.

  56.

  Epilogue

  Other Works

  About the Author

  Siege Tactics

  Spells, Swords, and Stealth: Book 4

  By Drew Hayes

  Copyright © 2018 by Andrew Hayes

  All Rights Reserved.

  Edited by Erin Cooley ([email protected])

  Edited by Kisa Whipkey (http://kisawhipkey.com)

  Edited by Celestian Rince (https://celestianrince.com)

  Cover by A.M. Ruggs

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Acknowledgements

  This book goes out to every Dungeon Master putting in the hours to make a great game. It’s not always the most glamorous gig, but we truly couldn’t play without you.

  As always, I want to say how much I appreciate my beta-readers for helping with their feedback. Thanks Bill Hammond, E Ramos E, TheSFReader, and Priscilla Yuen for all their wonderful assistance.

  Prologue

  The last guard fell, head caved in by a hand covered in leaves and grass. With him dead, the room was silent, save for the gentle rustle of plants and her own determined footsteps. The priestess had no name; it had been lost long ago, so she’d issued no challenge as she mowed down the fodder. Normally, these might have been an obstacle for her, but as this was her final errand, she was well-equipped for such mundane dangers.

  Here, she was to pick up the final item – the last one for good reason. Should she die and lose the others, it would slow Kalzidar’s plans, at most. But this, this was something special. Even her god considered it a rare find, a treasure the location of which had only ever been detailed in a single missive. The guards had no idea what they were protecting; this was just another treasure room to them.

  Near the rear of the chamber, behind piles of gold and a few flickering gems, she swept the glittering refuse aside. Carefully, following the instructions just so, she pressed her hand against the bricks in a precise sequence. Dimly, almost inaudibly, sounded a click. The corner of the room parted, revealing a hidden seam that opened to a small chamber, too tiny even for a gnome to slip through. No, this existed only to house a single item. Concealed without magic, using mundane trickery, it might well have stayed hidden until the whole building aged into dilapidation.

  As soon as her eyes fell upon the soft emanating glow, she knew her task had been a success. She’d found the final piece of her glorious god’s plan. Reaching forward, fingers trembling slightly, the priestess laid her hand against a smooth face of the surface. Immediately, the world warped, shifted. New magic and information came pouring through her head. For a moment, the priestess feared she would lose herself entirely in the flow.

  Then, mad as it had started, the feeling came to an end. She dropped her prize into a bag at her hip. The priestess was warned the retrieval might be intense and had mentally prepared herself. There would be time to learn how to use the item as Kalzidar needed, although not as much as she might have liked.

  From what she’d been told, many of the pawns were nearing their positions. Soon the conquest would begin, and Kalzidar’s glory would flow from one end of the seas to the other. With his faithful at hand, watching as the world fell and kingdoms burned, they would see their wrongs avenged in a blaze that wiped the land clean.

  All of that would come with time and dedication. For today, the priestess had more tasks to handle. Yes, she had completed the gathering of supplies, but that was only the first step. Now, it was time to start on her real preparations, just as the others already had.

  1.

  If there was one benefit to the extraordinary circumstances Russell had found himself in, one silver lining to the bizarre madness engulfing his game, it was that the events he’d endured had definitely raised his threshold for weirdness. Once, receiving a strange summons from a company he’d spent the last few months scouring the internet for more information on—to no avail—would have seemed insanely coincidental, but that was before Russell had been possessed by a magical item inside the Spells, Swords, and Stealth module he’d been playing with his friends. After glowing dice and having his body used like a puppet, there were few things on Earth capable of rattling his nerves, and a simple invitation was not among them.

  Much as he’d grown, however, Russell still wished he could have brought someone else to this meeting. The instructions he’d gotten were very clear: this special “VIP” meeting was for Game Masters only. No players or friends could tag along for the ride. It was news that hadn’t gone over especially well with Cheri, Russell’s sister and the party’s blast-happy mage, Chalara. Getting her to agree to drive him and then wait in the car had been a near week-long fight; if their parents didn’t insist on her driving anywhere outside of town, Russell might have risked trying to ditch her. He still wasn’t completely certain she wouldn’t come bursting in the front door after five minutes of being left alone outside. In fact, he could definitively say that the only thing keeping her in the car was the same element that had pulled Russell into the drab depths of an unfamiliar office building near the outskirts of town: magic.

  Magic was real – either that, or everyone in his gaming group had come down with the exact same type of crazy. The latter was possible, mass hysteria and group food-poisonings did happen, but they all knew that no matter how much easier it might have been to say otherwise, they were all sane. Which meant that what happened during that game had been actual, tangible, magic. Here, in their world, not imagined or animated or drawn with computers onto a large screen. It had flowed through Russell’s actual body; he could still recall his mouth moving without the permission of his brain. After a revelation like the existence of true magic, there were really only two options: run as fast as one could away from the source, or race after it with every ounce of strength they had.

  He and his group had gone with the second option, and ever since, Russell had been working nonstop to discover anything he could about the mysterious creator of the modules producing these effects. Unfortunately, his efforts had yielded one
dead-end after another, until the day the letter came.

  It wasn’t especially complex, this letter. An invitation, some rules, a time and a place. Bare bones, by any measurement. The sort of dispatch most would presume to be trash, or some kind of scam, and toss away. Only the people looking for Broken Bridge Publishing, the ones who knew there was more going on than should be the case with a normal game, would care enough to show up at the appointment. And that, presumably, was the point. With every release, there were supposedly fewer and fewer modules up for grabs. Even the rumors about Broken Bridge had dried up around the third release; the limited number of players who’d gotten the module were smart enough to not talk too much about what the experience entailed. Not that Russell blamed them. He hadn’t exactly raced off to the forums to recount his own incident. Even the ones who wanted to believe him wouldn’t, not deep down in the core of their beings. Some stories were just too big to choke down unless one saw it with their own eyes, and even then, that often wasn’t enough.

  Smoothing out the wrinkles on his button-down shirt, originally bought for a school dance the duration of which he and Tim had hung around the back of the gym, Russell arrived at the office specified in his letter. The door was boring, like the others in the building, though with one key difference. Drab as the rest were, they at least had some manner of signage indicating which business lay inside. Not Russell’s door, though. It was perfectly bare, not so much as a logo or initials to be seen. That lined up with Russell’s experience; Broken Bridge never seemed too keen on others finding them. Their marketing and brand management were pure shit from a fiscal perspective, but Russell was reasonably certain those weren’t aspects of their business that particularly concerned them. Knowing what Broken Bridge did care about was another matter, one where Russell kept coming up empty. Hopefully, today would change that. Russell hadn’t just come here hoping for another module; he also wanted some damn answers.

  With one last glance over his shoulder to make sure Cheri hadn’t stormed in after him, Russell grabbed the doorknob and pushed, revealing a plain room on the other side. In it were three chairs, all facing a door on the opposite wall. Above the door were two lights, one red, one green, the red one currently illuminated. A piece of paper was taped to the wooden door itself, its digitally printed words offering a single, simple instruction: “Wait for the green light.”

  Maybe it was a crowd management system; maybe it was a test to see if he could follow directions. If someone thought Russell was going to goof it up on a task like this after the Herculean effort of convincing Cheri to not do whatever she wanted today, they had another thing coming.

  He took a chair on the end and settled in, ready to wait however long was required. If they kept him out here for an hour, or three, or even the whole night, Russell would wait. There were cabs to call if Cheri bailed on him, and he hadn’t drunk anything on the drive over, so his bladder was empty. His whole party was counting on him. Russell would hold the line however long he had to in order to see what came next.

  As it turned out, he may have been a tad overprepared. In fewer than five minutes, the light switched to green, turning with so little fanfare that Russell almost didn’t notice. Not wasting time, he rose from the chair and pushed open the next door, half-expecting to find an identical room where he’d have to wait more. Once again, Russell discovered that the owners had gone another way. There was no dual-light system in this room. Rather, he found himself staring at a large table, several portable safes stacked up along the edges of the room, a few chairs, and one semi-familiar face.

  It was the hair that triggered his memory more than anything—multi-colored, bright, and garish—though the facial piercings accompanying the coiffure stole the remainder of Russell’s focus. Their last interaction had been brief, but between her looks and the context, it was one that was stuck firmly in the center of Russell’s memory.

  “I know you. You were at Double Con, the place where I got my last module.”

  She looked up from the table, as if she’d only just realized he was here, and met his confused recognition with a barely mustered shrug. “Yeah, apparently I didn’t fuck up that last temp job, so I got to do another. Any idea who the hell these people are, by the way? They pay great, but the actual work they ask me to do gets weirder and weirder.”

  Part of Russell wanted to doubt that someone would continue taking odd jobs from a company with no idea of what they were really part of, but living with Cheri had shown him that not everyone put extensive critical thought into their actions. Especially when there was a sound motivator, like high pay, in the equation. Still, Russell was taking everything she said with a grain of salt. So far as he’d seen, she was the closest thing to a face Broken Bridge had. For a company that seemed to do nothing by accident, the idea of them using the same random temp twice felt slightly tenuous.

  “As far as I can tell, they make Spells, Swords, and Stealth modules like nobody else. And I’m guessing they know it, too, since those of us who want to keep playing them have to keep jumping through all these hoops.” This could be a test, to see if he’d give away the secret of the modules to an apparent stranger. Sometimes, Russell missed the days when he could just buy a module for his favorite hobby without putting everything through three mental layers of conspiracy screening.

  “Must be some fun as hell games.” The mystery woman flipped through several pages of the binder in front of her. “I think I remember you, but I’m going to need a name and some identification anyway. The directions I got made it clear they want these going to the right people only. No exceptions.”

  “Russell Novak.” He’d already put his driver’s license at the front of his wallet, prepared for such a demand. In another life, he’d have been consumed with the idea of getting a car; in fact, it had been one of his major ambitions as little as a year ago. Now, the idea was barely a blip on the radar. The deeper Russell and the others dove into this mystery, the less he found himself concerned with the normal, mundane world. It probably wasn’t healthy—much worse, and his grades would start to slip—but he already knew he couldn’t turn back. Russell had found a loose thread in the fabric of what he’d thought to be reality. He’d never be able to stop pulling on it, to cease unraveling the mystery, no matter how hard he tried.

  She skimmed the binder before tapping once near the bottom of a page. “There you are. Let’s see here… hmm, interesting. You have some of the most varied choices I’ve seen so far.”

  A shiver prickled the hairs on Russell’s neck. “Choices?”

  “Yeah, choices. That last module I gave out was some kind of hub-town type deal, from what I’ve gleaned talking to the others who came in. Not every group made the same choices, so some of them have opened and closed different paths. I assume you all sent in box-tops and reports or that kind of shit, so the company knew how your game went. If you didn’t, don’t tell me. I’m just here to cash a check.”

  Maybe Broken Bridge really had hired the same temp twice. She struck an interesting balance of caring enough to be sure the job was done right while not actually giving a shit about anything that was happening around her. In this way, she might just be the perfect employee.

  “Anyway, since not every group took the same journey, they can’t all choose from the same options. Nobody on here has access to the whole list, not even you. Based on what I’ve been given, it looks like you can decide to head toward Baltmur, Lumal, Solium, or Keelport. Those names seem to have meaning to everyone else, so I presume, and hope, you don’t need any further explanation.”

  No, of course none of the others would need more. Any Game Master worth their salt would be intimately familiar with each of those names by this point. They were major geographic markers in the module-world Broken Bridge had constructed.

  Baltmur was a civilization built by supposedly-evil creatures, populated with races like ogres and trolls that usually served as the cannon-fodder of evil antagonists. Reading deeper, Russell had learne
d that it was a city originally dedicated to Grumble, god of the minions, which left him uncertain as to whether or not Baltmur was truly an evil place, or had merely been branded as one. His interactions with those who served Grumble had been unsettling at times, but Russell certainly hadn’t gotten the impression he was an evil god.

  Lumal was a single city kingdom founded on knowledge. Supposedly, those who gained access via one of its hidden entrances had access to wisdom, information, spells, and lore that existed nowhere else in the world. Of course, the caveat was that getting into Lumal was legendarily difficult. Even if one could find an entrance, which was often a quest in itself, the residents of Lumal hated most outsiders and would often refuse them entry without some manner of task or quest being passed first. Proving one’s worthiness to be in Lumal was part of getting in the door. Normally, as the GM, Russell could weaken the hurdle if needed; however, with these modules, he dared not meddle. Either they played the game as intended, or it would be the last module they received.

  Solium was an interesting option. For his party, and presumably most of the others, if they were following the same module progression, it would be essentially doubling back. There surely would be new content—time had passed in-game—but Russell didn’t bother entertaining the idea for long. His party wanted to progress, to move forward. Going back wasn’t an option, not as things stood now.

  That left only Keelport. As the name implied, it was a port city on the Western coast. Getting there would be a hell of a trek from where they were, but maybe the module offered a magical means of travel to help them cross so much land. Regardless, if they made it, they would have access to items and information from different lands. Keelport was a major hub through which countless ships and people passed. Plus, unlike Lumal, there were no barriers to entry. If they could make it, they could waltz right in.

  It was a hard decision, even more so because he didn’t have his party with him. They should have a say in this; it was their game as much as his. But life wasn’t fair, and the burden of choice sat squarely on Russell’s shoulders. He could either make it or walk away—which was still making a choice in itself. At the end of the day, it was a question of what he thought the group would care about most, and when Russell drilled the issue down like that, his choice was a shockingly easy one.