…or, Substitute Creatures
Iason grabbed me as I approached the ticket office. No surprise there. Nobody else in the province would have given my name as Iamos.
Well, some surprise. There was the small matter of him not being out on the field.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“You must come with me, quickly,” he said, grabbing my bare wrist.
“What’s happening?”
“You must come with me, quickly,” he repeated, pulling on my arm.
“Iason, answer my question,” I said.
“I did. You must come with me quickly.”
“That’s a hell of an answer.”
“It’s as much as you should need,” he said. “What if the matter were urgent?”
“Then you should tell me it’s urgent,” I said.
“It’s urgent,” he said, pulling sharply on my arm. I yanked it free.
“Not so urgent that you can’t turn this into a power struggle,” I said. “You got time to tell me what’s going on. Why aren’t you on the field?”
“Because I was busy negotiating my masterstroke,” he said. “I will of course explain it to you—”
“Of course,” I said.
“—but it would be best done out of the open,” he said. “Come!”
“That was all you had to say,” I said. I fell in step with him as he headed for a shed built into the side of a bound behind the main bleachers for our side.
“You can’t trust that I have a reason when I tell you to come and come quickly?”
“I wish I could trust that you had only one reason,” I said. “That elf girl, Alli Glittereyes?”
“I am not familiar,” he said.
“She has glittery eyes?”
“So I gathered,” he said.
“She lured me into the woods for sex,” I said. “Then she tried to cut off my cock.”
“I’m not surprised,” he said. “If I could outfit women with proper genitalia, I would do so. It only stands to reason that some of them would feel a perverse inversion of this natural corrective impulse. Or perhaps she sought to rectify her own deficiency? I do not know. Who can fathom the mind of a woman?”
“She was going to sell my balls to Ursula for favor,” I said. “She wanted my cock as a trophy of her conquest, and the whole thing was also to get back at you.”
“A baseless vendetta from a mindless creature,” Iason said. He pulled open the shed door to reveal steps down to the staging area. He held the door open wide for me and ushered me ahead of him.
“Yeah, I can’t imagine what she might have against you,” I said, rolling my eyes as I stepped past him. “Though honestly, it’s as much about your stag bracelet than your attitude towards women.”
“Your stag bracelet now,” Iason said.
“Do you really think of it that way?” I asked.
“Of course I do,” he said, coming inside and closing the door. “You’re my stag. The bracelet itself is of no further use to me. Now, listen. You must understand the situation before we go any further.”
“That might have been my line,” I said.
“I am serious,” Iason said. “For this to work, it must be like the volcano god story. You remember, during the card game? How seamlessly we both came together in the ruse?”
“I seem to recall Marlot having something to do with it,” I said. “But yeah. I think I can imagine a little bluffing. Unless you’re planning on passing me off as a half-ogress.”
“That, my dear Iamie, is approximately what I intend to do,” Iason said. “The creature is unavailable. Some form of emotional distress. I have convinced the general coach to allow me to bring you into the match in its place.”
“I know I don’t make a very pretty elf, but trust me, the humans in the stands will know the difference,” I said.
“With the absent fighters from Harlowe’s brute squad, we have a point surplus,” Iason said. “One human, even with a stag bracelet, is not going to put us over our limit.”
“Are they allowed to sign up new fighters when the match is already underway?” I asked.
“Substitutions are allowed so long as the substituted-for fighter has not entered the field, so long as they do not increase the point total of the army, and so long as all sides approve of them,” Iason said. “The college of Blackwater has almost agreed to the change. All that remains is for you to be evaluated and approved for play.”
“Why would they accept a substitution?” I asked.
“Because the alternative is an emotionally unstable ogress,” he said.
“But you said she’s not available,” I said. “That’s the whole point of the substitution.”
“I confess, that had completely slipped my mind,” Iason said. “Would you like to tell Blackwater, or should I?”
“How can they not see through that?” I said. “We’re losing out there. If our ogress was fit to deploy, they have to figure we would have deployed her by now. This isn’t a case where we’re in any position to say ‘hey, let us go easy on you’. Any change they accept when they’re ahead is likely to be for the worse.”
“Alternately, why would we choose not to field our star monster, even as we fall further and further behind? This makes our position convincing: our back is to the wall. Either they accept our substitution deal, or we have no choice but to unleash the fury.”
“Even assuming they accept me, I’m not a fighter,” I said. “So obviously you’re looking to bring in your mount. How’s that fit with your assassin role?”
“It does not,” Iason said, grinning. “But it would give us the best chance of capturing their standard and bringing the match to a close before we can lose through other means.”
“So for my first time on the skirmish field, you want to turn me into a lodestone for every arrow, spell, and fighter the enemy team has?”
“We will have the element of surprise,” Iason said. “To say nothing of your great speed and my instincts as a rider. If the monsters can be convinced to rally at the same time as we make our play, they may not know which of us is the diversion.”
“I’m still not sure,” I said. “I’m not trained for this.”
“You do not have to be,” he said. “You only have to be my mount, and you are very good at that.”
“My legs and antlers wouldn’t be mocked,” I said. “So if I hurt someone—”
“It will be because they declined to get out of our way,” Iason said. “You aren’t going to stand and fight anybody. The goal is to end the match quickly, not draw out the conflict.”
“And if we fail?”
“Then your part will be over quickly,” Iason said. “So you have very little to worry about, either way.”
“Except when people blame the loss on the last minute substitute who made a big play for the standard,” I said.
“Believe me, the blame for the straits in which we have found ourselves is already properly assigned,” Iason said. “There is little you could do to change that. If we succeed, we will be the heroes who salvaged victory when all seemed hopeless. If we fail, we will be those who dared to try when all seemed lost. And, as I said, it will likely be over quickly, either way.”
“On account of the whole enemy army trying to kill us at once when we touch their standard.”
“Yes,” Iason said. “It will be a good incentive to keep moving.”
“Why exactly is the ogress not fighting?”
“I told you, an emotional instability,” Iason said. “She had some sort of encounter with the demonic student in her dorm and is now afraid to fight.”
There was the strongest evidence yet that the Mack girl’s innocent act was just that. If she could scare a half-ogress skirmish captain, she was bad news.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Nobody is quite certain,” Iason said. “But one of the fen-dwellers was taken away, raving and clawing at its face.”
That definitely sounded like a bad scene.
“There seems to be some question of leadership for the squad in the absence of the captain,” Iason said. “Frankly, I would have made the large horned fellow the captain. He seems much more stable than the ogress proved to be, and he is equally as imposing physically.”
“I doubt the other team would agree to let MU sub in an unknown to get rid of him,” I said.
“True, but he does have one solid advantage over the ogress: he is here,” Iason said. “Both the absent members of the Harlowe squad are female. What does that tell you?”
“Maybe that Mack lives in the women’s part of the dorm,” I said. “Look, I’ll do this, because I kind of want to cut loose after the day I’ve had. Dragons, elves, everything. But I know you want me to do it, so I want something in return.”
“Name it,” Iason said.
“You’ll give it to me?”
“I’ll listen to you name it,” he said.
“I want us to sit down and have a little talk,” I said.
“Always talking,” Iason said, throwing up his hands.
“What’s wrong with talking?” I asked.
“Iamie, I doubt you would consider it a virtue if your other opening dripped as indiscriminately as does your mouth,” Iason said.
“Yeah, I’m going to ignore that comparison as long as you don’t make it again,” I said. “But I meant a specific talk. I spoke with my great-grandfather today, after the thing with Alli. When he saw the bracelet on my wrist, he refused to say another word to me.”
“Your elven ancestor?”
“Yes,” I said.
“He is a proper gentleman, then,” Iason said.
“What the hell have you gotten me into?”
“A relationship,” Iason said. “One that carries certain expectations among older elves. Don’t let it worry you.”
“Alli’s a middling and she seems to have the same expectations.”
“This is the same person who attempted to castrate you?” Iason asked.
“Yes.”
“Well, there you are,” Iason said. “Why pay attention to what she thinks?”
“Because she knows more about it than I do,” I said.
“That’s a perfect position from which to mislead a person,” Iason said. “It’s a valuable magical item. I gave it to you, free and without condition. It gives you the option of acting as my mount. Everything else is simply, what is the saying? Cultural baggage.”
“Not knowing about that stuff makes interacting with your culture dangerous,” I said.
“I agree,” Iason said. “You should not be interacting with elves apart from myself. Your esteemed ancestor had the right idea there, to be certain.”
“I thought that ‘right idea’ is part of the cultural baggage,” I said.
“It can be both,” Iason said. He started down the stairs. “But, come. As you said, we shall discuss this after the match.”
