This Used To Be About Dungeons полностью

“Which is just about the only use for the loadstones, ay,” said Hannah.

Alfric took the two of them, each smaller than a dinner plate but fifty pounds apiece, and put them into the book, which he’d had Mizuki bring when she teleported to them using the knife. Loadstones were practically worthless, but he needed to bring them back to Besc, and that meant carrying around the book, which meant fifty pounds of extra weight. Alfric was eager for another storage entad, and there had been quite a bit of discussion about limitations and methods the night before, all leading up to this. Mizuki had come in later, leaving Hannah and Alfric to walk together, which had passed mostly with idle conversation. Perhaps Hannah should have taken the opportunity to talk about a few sensitive matters with him, but it didn’t seem like he would have taken it in the spirit it was intended.

“So if you screwed this up, the wardrobe would go floating into the sky?” asked Mizuki.

“And we’d never see it again,” said Alfric. “Unless you could fly after it, I guess.”

“It’s not, unfortunately, something I can do on demand,” said Mizuki.

“You can fly, Mizuki?” asked Hannah.

“Yeah, I’ll show you tomorrow,” said Mizuki. “Or later today, if we get back in time, which we should.”

“I’ve always wanted to fly,” said Hannah, nodding. “It’s a bit useless in most dungeons, but if there’s somethin’ for fun that I’d want, it would be some way to soar through the air.”

There was an older tract on Garos that Hannah had once read, which posited that people walked along the ground by the will of Garos, since the ground defined a symmetry between the ground and the sky. It was the sort of spurious writing that seemed to have filled the library in the seminary, with many pages devoted to all the ways in which this metaphor worked and did not work and how the dichotomy between ground and sky might be explained by other gods. Hannah had no problem at all with thinking of the ground and sky as being counterparts to one another, it was the kind of exercise that she liked, but the writer hadn’t seemed to have been of the opinion that he was having a flight of fancy, he was much more making grand statements about the gods and how they had made the world. It wasn’t even settled whether or not the gods had made the world, and though Hannah was of the opinion they had, it rankled when she saw someone simply take it as fact without adding a whole host of caveats.

A more interesting symmetry, in her opinion, was between the sea and sky, where you could transpose birds to fish and vice versa, and that was the kind of thing that seemed ripe for a good prayer session. Hannah had never particularly wanted to swim in the ocean though, not like she wanted to fly through the sky.

She refrained from saying any of this out loud. The laity tended to accept religious talk and the quotation of scripture, but there were limits, and Alfric was likely to be spotty on the finer points of theology, to say nothing of Mizuki.

“Okay,” said Alfric. “Seems like with the book as additional ballast, this whole assembly will only be about twenty pounds. I think we’re ready to go.” These were approximate guesses, and based on their disagreement about the wardrobe’s actual weight, Hannah mentally revised his estimate upward.

They set off out of the room they’d been in, with Alfric and Hannah maneuvering the wardrobe. It only weighed thirty pounds or so, but it was bulky, and beyond that, it still had mass to it, meaning that it was slow to get moving and then, once moving, slow to stop. The trip back was going to be a long six miles, though Hannah was fairly confident that they would get into the swing of things.

“Better for me to be in the front,” said Alfric once they were out. “That way if it runs someone over, it’ll be me, and hopefully you can heal me up.”

“Always willin’ to take a hit, that’s what I like about you,” said Hannah.

“I can think of lots of things I’d rather be liked for,” said Alfric.

“No, she’s right,” said Mizuki. “It’s very fetching, how you offer to get stabbed for people.”

“You know what, I’ll take it,” said Alfric, grinning at her. “And if you ever need someone to get stabbed, I guess I’m your guy.”

“Have you been stabbed before?” asked Hannah.

“Oh, many, many times,” said Alfric. “My father gave me a lot of training with clerics on hand to heal me. It was pretty enviable, I feel. Besides, I’m a chrononaut, so there are experiences possible for me that aren’t possible for someone else. I’ve been stabbed, burned, decapitated, strangled, you name it.”

“Well that’s horrible,” said Mizuki.

“I wasn’t pushed into it,” said Alfric. “My parents offered, and I said yes.” He shrugged. “In their opinion, it was better to know what trauma felt like in a safe, controlled environment before having to experience it in a dungeon, and I agreed. Still do, actually. If the first time I ever got burnt was while my life was on the line, I’d be far less likely to handle it well.”