Chapter 4

“My first thought was to try to join the human thugs working for the wizard and use that as a way to find my way to him. However, I realized in time that my ignorance of the current culture would give me away, probably within the first day. Any other similar schemes would be equally useless. I just don’t know enough about this culture not to give myself away almost immediately.

“Everything I can think of always collapses under that same hammer of logic. Can you think of anything that I might do, other than just crash in and trust to luck?”

“I may be able to help you with that tack. I have several magic rings and amulets and one brooch that might help you survive a frontal attack, but there are no guarantees. Let me dig them out of my pouch and I will show them to you.” Eglos took a moment to reach into her fanny pack and came out with one brooch, two amulets, and six rings.

“Not all of these can be used together because they have canceling effects on each other. However, there are some that I can’t see you doing without. The problem with the rings is that they might interfere with the use of your gloves, so that would have to be tested. I recommend that you wear the rings under your gloves if that is possible.

“This ring with the ruby is the one that I am certain that you will need most. It provides protection against fire in any form, and is 100% effective. Try this on before we go any farther.”

I took off my left glove and slipped the ring onto my smallest finger. I didn’t feel any different after I put the glove back on, and I had no trouble moving my fingers in any way that I needed to. Okay, that seemed to work fine as far as using my hands was concerned, but did it have any effect on the magic?

Eglos said, “Let me see how fire affects you with that arrangement.” She lit a small taper and held the flame under my open left hand. The fire seemed to have no effect on me. “Okay, now let’s test your glove.” She handed me a stick about an inch in diameter. “Squeeze this and see what happens.”

I had no problem in crushing the piece of wood in my hand, so it looked like this ring and the gloves had no harmful effect on each other. That was one big worry off my mind. I now could go in with no fear of being met with a fire weapon. Fire was a favorite weapon of wizards, so I could expect to encounter one or more such attacks.

She handed me a ring with a diamond inset into it. That I put on my right hand in the same way as I had handled the ruby ring. “That ring is a shield against damage from cold. I’m not sure how we can test it, but I’ll drag a broken piece of ice across your skin. Tell me if you can feel this.”

I couldn’t feel the ice against my bare skin, and the skin was not dimpled no matter how hard Eglos pressed on the ice. That was not much of a test, but it was all we could manage at the moment. Frankly, I was not really afraid of what cold could do to me, but the diamond ring was classifiable as insurance.

The next test was with an amulet that was supposed to protect me against lightning. Now that was something that I was concerned about. Unfortunately, we had no way to test it. But it did nothing to affect my gloves, so I took the amulet on faith.

The brooch was the item that I most feared as a detriment to my other magic items. The brooch was to be pinned to my shirt and would protect me against all forms of magic spells. We dd not have a good way to test the brooch because Eglos had no way to cast a magic spell against me, so that was another item that I would have to take on faith.

Upon further thought, Eglos did not think that the other magic items were worth bothering with. Once I was wearing the brooch, the amulet, and the two rings, we repeated the tests to make sure that the gloves and the boots were still working as they should. Everything that we could do said that the gloves and boots were both doing what we expected of them, so we stopped the tests.

That seemed to set up enough protection to get me by, so I settled on those four added items. The other rings were for teleportation, lie detection, and other passive effects, so I did not see a use for them on this mission.

One of the rings I didn’t need was for far-seeing. Eglos put that one on in hopes of being able to follow my progress during the attack. That was a poor substitute for actually being with me on my mission, but we both felt that it was better than nothing.

We debated whether an attack at night or during the day would be better, and we could draw no conclusion. Eglos used the ring to try to find out where the wizard was currently located. This was the first time that she had used the ring for a serious purpose, so she was somewhat tentative at first, but she got control of it after some practice and started looking for the wizard.

She finally found him in a banquet room surrounded by more food than any human could possibly eat. He was surrounded by 10-12 naked and buxom young women who were all doing their best to keep him entertained. One was feeding him while others were busy carrying food back and forth to the kitchen.

Another young woman was kneeling on the floor between his spread legs giving the wizard a blowjob. Eglos was appalled at that sight, but I kind of expected it—it seemed like the sort of thing a man in his position with his attitude would do. It struck me that this might be the perfect time to attack since the wizard was completely distracted by his enjoyment of his own pleasure.

The problem was that I was more than a mile away and did not know exactly where he was. That meant that I was going to have to find out where this room was; I assumed that it was in his palace, but I didn’t even know where that was. Okay, we had to admit it, I could not attack today because a lot of preparation was necessary.

One of the rings that Eglos had was capable of teleportation if the user knew where the other end of the jump was located and could see that the way was clear. If an item was teleported to occupy the same space as an object already there, there would be a tremendous explosion that would destroy both items. Hey, maybe this was the way to dispose of the wizard without me having to attack him in person.

We immediately decided to explore that possibility, and Eglos was going to be the assassin. We went outside the tent to make sure that a mistake would not destroy it—after all, we were ignorant, but we were not stupid.

The first step was for Eglos to practice teleporting various items about the camp’s area so that we could watch what happened. Wow, it worked every time! Eglos was able to teleport anything from a single grain of sand to a large boulder any place she chose. That took about an hour of practice, but Eglos was confident that she could use the magic of teleportation well enough to do the job.

Okay, now for the big experiment. She moved a large boulder well away from camp; that was to be the target. We had no idea how large an explosion we would make, so we decided to start small. She took a tiny grain of sand and teleported it to the inside of the boulder, which was about 2 feet in diameter. We were not sure of what to expect, so we were dumbfounded when the boulder exploded into tiny fragments that we could not even see. Not only that, there were scorch marks on the ground where the boulder had been sitting.

Damn, that was a whole lot more damage than we expected! Okay, we were going to have to be careful of where we caused the wizard to explode, because we were reluctant to cause the death of anyone else. On the other hand, we would not object to killing a few of the wizard’s minions—they were just as guilty as he was.

We decided to have Eglos follow the wizard around by means of her far-seeing ring. We figured that someone like him was sure to have a throne room and to fill it with his minions. That would be the ideal place to destroy him because the people would soon find out that the wizard was dead. The next morning, Eglos started to follow the wizard until he was in a good location for an assassination attempt. Meanwhile, I started searching for the smallest grain of sand that I could find.

I found what I thought was an appropriate bit of sand and placed it atop another, much larger rock so that Eglos would have not trouble finding it. It was a long and boring morning until the wizard went into a large room that actually had a throne for him to use. He sat on the throne and was surrounded by about a dozen of his followers.

Okay, this was the ideal time and place for the assassination. Eglos shifted the grain of sand to the inside of the wizard, and got a reaction, all right. Except this was not what we expected. There was no explosion, but the wizard jerked his body to a strange angle and slumped over to one side.

At first, none of the people around him noticed the wizard’s new position. It was a minute or so later that one of the courtiers noticed that something strange had happened and yelled for a doctor to be fetched.

It took nearly 15 minutes for them to find a doctor and have him show up to examine the wizard. In only a few seconds of examination time, the doctor announced that the wizard was dead, apparently of natural causes, seemingly from a heart attack. Of course, we were as astounded as all of the people in the room.

To our surprise, I suddenly knew a lot about human anatomy, especially in the chest. Was this a release of forgotten memories? I was beginning to remember more and more things as time passed. Was this the effect of the tent’s curative magic?

Anyway, it did occur to me that the sand particle had materialized inside one of the wizard’s lungs and reacted with a tiny bit of flesh there. A small explosion did take place which shocked his heart enough to cause it to stop bleating. I told Eglos of my idea, and it sounded so reasonable that we accepted it as the cause of death. After all, our real purpose was to kill the wizard, and that was accomplished. We were going to get no credit for the act, and we were both kind of relieved. We sure didn’t want the reason for the wizard’s death to become common knowledge.

Okay, we packed up and left the area. We never returned to Frocktown to see what happened there. Hopefully, the people were able to throw out their oppressors and return to happier lives.

We resumed our trip south, but we still needed to visit a market. Fortunately, we did come to a road leading to a town a few days later, and we took it. There was absolutely nothing remarkable about this town, except that the majority of people there seemed to be content. Eglos bought food to restock her fanny pack, and we left with no further ado.

By the way, Eglos told me to keep the magic items that she had given me because there was a good chance that I would need them. Meanwhile, she continued to wear the rings of far-seeing and teleportation for the same reason.

Eglos continued to use the far-seeing ability to check the road ahead of us in case there was trouble that we might encounter. As it turned out, all of that looking ahead did us little good when we encountered our next monster a few days later.

We had just finished lunch and were walking along enjoying the beautiful day when we felt a thumping on the roadway coming from behind us. We turned around to see what was the cause of this phenomenon. Eglos screeched and I mumbled something in a loud voice—approaching us was an honest-to-God Cyclops.