Sabine was a princess pursued by the sorcerer Dahkhal until she managed to turn the tables on him. She exchanged the world’s memory of her existence to trap Dahkhal as a tiny jellyfish in a
Sabine was a princess pursued by the sorcerer Dahkhal until she managed to turn the tables on him. She exchanged the world’s memory of her existence to trap Dahkhal as a tiny jellyfish in a ring on her finger. In an ironic twist, Dahkhal was the only person who remembered who she was, and they became friends. That is, until the ring was stolen from her by Deacon Struct. To read the previous adventures of Sabine, click here. To support us on Patreon, click here. The story continues below.
♦
Sabine awoke from a slovenly sleep with a pounding in her head and a pounding on her door.
“Oi, redhead, you’re three weeks past due on damn near everything—wake up!”
We could kill him, you know, Dahkhal said. Not me, maybe, but, you know, you.
She absentmindedly shook her left hand to shut him up with a plink—plink—plink and an ow—ow—ow. The fourth finger on that hand still felt so naked without Harrow’s ring. Garbed in little but her nightclothes and cloak, she stumbled to the door as a hangover threatened to crack her head open.
Slizzer stood on the other side, a scowl on his face as he examined her. “You look like you got dragged through one of the hells, girl.”
“Nah. One of the hells might be nice. At least I might have a friend around there.” She leaned further into the doorframe and started to play with the tassels of her cloak. “I, uh—I don’t have the money I owe you for the room. But I was thinking—”
Don’t even try it, Dahkhal said. How many of your husbands only found you attractive because of a royal decree? There’s a house of ill-repute just across the path, you won’t win him over.
Sabine started whacking her left hand against the wall and put on a sultry voice as she undid her cloak. “Could we maybe come up with another payment method? One more to your pleasu—”
“No!” Slizzer practically barked the word, the force and shock of the shout was so loud Sabine stumbled backwards and fell onto the bed. As he pinched the bridge of his nose, Slizzer said, “I’ve had it up to here with you buying drinks on credit and renting out this broom closet. What’ve you got?”
After a little fumbling around, Sabine slipped a drawstring bag from under her pillow and threw it at him.
Slizzer glared in at the contents and mumbled, “One silver, two bronze. Ugh.” As he looked up at her again, he asked, “Are you sleeping in that cloak? That bed had a blanket, didn’t it?”
“Where do you think the one silver and two bronze came from?”
Another disgusted sound slipped from Slizzer’s lips. “I’ve seen some pitiful looking mercenaries in my time, but this is the most pathetic thing I’ve ever laid eyes on.”
The barman speaks great wisdom, Sabine, Dahkhal said. You are the most pathetic thing anyone has ever seen.
That lit a fire in her belly. Sabine rose, pointed a finger, and asked, “If you’re so—” her momentum was interrupted when a hiccup rushed up her throat. She beat her chest to force another down. “If you’re so damn sick of me being—” Again, she was cut off by a belch, and again she pounded her chest.
Deeply unimpressed, Slizzer turned away from her. “Just get me the money you owe me. Fast.”
As her opponent proceeded down the hall, Sabine called out, “If you’re so damn sick of me being here, why don’t you just throw me out?”
Slizzer didn’t look back. “I have my reasons. You need a job? I’ve got a few bottles of lager down at the spring. Go fetch them. I’ll give you a bronze for every three. And if you drain any of them, I’ll confiscate that mattress and make you sleep on the floor, with the rest of the bugs.”
Sabine mumbled a response as she wobbled toward the staircase. She hadn’t gone much further than the privy out back since the spectacular failure of The Ultimate Party job. She’d spent most of that time alternating between feeling hammered and hungover, and her thoughts oscillated between, I am getting too old for this, Am I getting too old for this? and, Wait, crap, how old am I again?
♦
For about a week after Struct stole the ring that contained Dahkhal, Sabine searched for someone to report the situation to. Not just for her kidnapped, fair-weather comrade, but also for all the damage Struct claimed he could do if he unlocked Dahkhal’s power. She went to the mercenary guild, but Cecilio On’Leah Halfblind told her, “You got a reward you wanna put to his capture? I can’t motivate any mercenary in the realm without a reward.” She stormed into the central administrative lodge of her backwater prefecture. When she told the man with the scroll at the front desk she had a doomsday that needed averting, she was told she could be penciled in in three months. Apparently Serek had a massive backlog of doomsayers who never settled down for an instant. A problem that had only gotten worse in times of undead trees, mass disease, and whispers of potatoes coming to life and crawling about.
It was about then that she’d first heard Dahkhal in her head again. Well, some incarnation of a goddess you turned out to be. You can’t even foretell the end of days properly.
For a moment, this perked her up. “Dahkhal? Can you hear me again? Where are you? Where can I come get you? We can stop this thing—”
I’ve always been here. Sabine practically heard the sneer on his face. I never left.
It didn’t take long after that for Sabine to realize the Dahkhal voice in her head had grown meaner, more aggressive, and less helpful than ever. This was all still a good two hundred fifty-four years before Serek’s first witch would try making the leap to psychology, so there was no one around to inform her she appeared to have developed a second personality. On the day she went to retrieve Slizzer’s bottles, she’d taken to believing the not-Dahkhal voice to be, “Some kind of glandular problem.”
♦
As Sabine arrived at Slizzer’s spring, she caught sight of a figure dressed all in black pulling at a rope in the water. She had to shake her head to make sure she wasn’t imagining that too, and called, “Hey, you! This water’s private property!”
The figure jerked his head up and looked at her. He had the acne-ridden face and itchy mustache of a man in his early twenties. “What was that?”
“Drop the booze,” Sabine fumbled for the athame latched to her belt. “It’s my landlord’s stock.”
The man with the rope threw back his head and laughed as he yanked the rope and brought half a dozen bottles of Slizzer’s lager up with him. “No more property, no more landlords,” he said. “Haven’t you heard? The end of days is upon us.”
Sabine drew the dagger and rushed at him. Unable to get the ties slipped from the bottles, the thief ran away with the line still attached. In her rushed, sloppy state, Sabine tripped on the rope and fell flat on her face.
Oh bravo, absolutely spectacular work, Dahkhal said. She calls herself an assassin and she can’t even catch up with a beer thief.
The robber was already slipping from sight as he ran uphill into the deciduous forest, but the rope latched to Slizzer’s bottles dragged behind him. She still wasn’t in any shape to run, but she pushed up from the dirt and chased the line anyway.
What are you doing? Dahkhal asked. Are you still chasing him? Why? For that bastard’s lager? He’s not even worth it.
“I know that.” Sabine puffed as she said it. “But I—if I can’t handle the stupid stuff, how can I handle anything else?”
Who says you can? All you’ve ever been was a pampered princess who stumbled into lucky solutions to mercenary jobs over and over again.
She tried to press down his words as she kept running, and only occasionally stumbled. A cold waterfall descended to Slizzer’s spring as she pursued the thief uphill, and she stuttered to a stop as she came to the end of the rope. Her target seemed to have disappeared entirely, she stood alone on the rocky hill.
And what do you know? Simplest chase in the world and you couldn’t even catch him. Pitiful.
As Sabine involuntarily shook her left hand, she caught sight of something carved into the side of the rocky hill. She stepped forward and squinted her eyes. Indeed, a trio of slashes ran down the stone façade before her. The more she stared at them, the more the curvature seemed familiar.
“Wait… this whole time… really?” Because the slashes in the rock looked identical to the three slashes across Deacon Struct’s face.
Sabine drew the athame, extended its magic-consuming blade, and swung at the stone. The athame dissipated what was apparently an illusion and revealed a long, snaking tunnel that contained the waterfall and a pathway. A pathway almost certainly dug out by one of Struct’s giant moles.
“Oh Gods, they’re right here! They’ve been here the whole time!”
So you found one of Struct’s passageways, big whoop, Dahkhal said. You couldn’t even beat his idiot son, and you think you’re going to beat the man himself? You don’t have the stomach for it.
“Of course I do! I’m going to go in there, I’m going to stop him, I’m going to save the real you—”
At that point, the pain of running uphill with little but the previous night’s drink in her belly made Sabine keel over and throw up into the waterfall.
You see? What did I tell you?
As Sabine wiped the bile from the side of her mouth and glared down into the darkness, she said, “You were right. But I’ve got the stomach for it now.”
To Be Continued…