by Dante King
Behind me, the harpy horde filled the sky. The earth trembled beneath the feet of the Church army as I ordered the wyrm into position for its devastating attack. The Church troops didn’t know whether to fear the shaking ground or the blackened sky more.
“Church of Light Army, and the free men of Prand you have enslaved in your service, I address you, all of you!” I roared. “Your master, Elandriel, the lord of lies and prince of cowardice, sent you here to destroy my city and lay waste to my lands. He wanted me to come here to fight … so here I am! I, Vance Chauzec, Lord of Brakith and God of Death, stand before you, and by the time the sun rises, you will all serve me whether living or dead!”
The Supreme Commander of the Church army, a tall and powerful Resplendent Crusader in shimmering gold armor who wielded a sword glowing with pure white light, stepped out to address me.
“You are lord of nothing, Vance Chauzec,” he spat, pointing his enchanted blade at me. “Your dark sorcery is a cheap parlor trick compared to the righteous power of the Lord of Light! Tonight, our forces of Light and Purity will vanquish your vile horde of demons and unclean things. Led by me, this army shall wipe the evil stain of this blighted city from Prand!”
“For every harm you’ve done to the innocent people of Brakith, scumbag, I’m gonna take off an inch of your skin,” I snarled back at him. “I know which god you really serve, and it sure as fuck isn’t that pathetic sap, the Lord of Light. By the time dawn comes, you lying snake, every inch of skin will be flayed off your body for what you’ve done to my people! But I didn’t come here to address the likes of you, you worthless maggot … I came here to address the free men of Prand you have forced to fight in a war they had no interest in fighting! Yes, conscripted soldiers! I’m talking to you!”
I quickly slipped a portion of my spirit into the conscripted soldiers whose bodies I had possessed with my enchanted crossbow bolts. With a simple mental command, I had them belt out a few yells of support, which were soon echoed by tens of thousands of discontented conscripts.
“Turn your blades and spears on those who forced you to come here!” I roared. “Fight against those who dragged you at spearpoint away from your fields and families, and I promise you that you will leave here tomorrow morning as liberated men, free to return to your homes! Even though you wear the armor of my enemies and carry their weapons, I have no quarrel with you.”
After telling them this, I didn’t need to use my puppets to stoke up any more anger or discontent. The conscripts were already at boiling point, and this promise I’d just made was enough to push them into a full-on mutiny.
“Fuck the Church of Light!” one soldier yelled. “Let’s kill the bastards and go home!” His cry of rebellion was immediately echoed by thousands of other angry shouts from the conscripts.
“I’m warning you, you uneducated gutter scum!” the Supreme Commander yelled. “Anyone who attempts to mutiny against his commanders will be burned alive, their sins purified by the fires of righteousness!” He was trying to sound confident, but the notes of panic in his voice were painfully obvious.
“There’s a lot more of us than there are of you, you pompous fuckin’ windbag!” a conscript yelled at him.
“We’re not taking orders from you lot anymore!” another shouted. “We’ve had it with this pointless war!”
“Sergeants, seize the rebels!” the Supreme Commander yelled. “Seize them all and flog them and prepare their bodies to be purified by fire!”
“Free men of Prand, it’s time to make your choices!” I roared. “Fight me and die, or fight against your enslavers and live!”
The Supreme Commander decided his best chance at stopping this rebellion was to try to take me out, and he spun around, aimed his sword at me, and blasted out a torrent of holy fire. I’d been expecting this, though, and in a flash, I pulled both the power of all the vengeful dead in Brakith and the many souls trapped in the Gray Sentinel into me, filling my armor with immense strength. The Supreme Commander’s blazing holy fire was intensely potent, far more so than anything Elyse was able to command, and its heat and fury were enough to turn even the thickest steel to molten sludge in mere seconds. Against the power of Death I now commanded, it washed off my armor like rainwater.
While he was futilely blasting me with this gushing river of heat and light, I calmly raised my kusarigama and threw a small tornado at him. The tornado wrapped its whirling winds around him, trapping him in a prison of madly spinning air. The tempest winds ripped his sword out of his hands and flung it aside, putting an end to his attack on me. Now, with him struggling helplessly, imprisoned in this cage of air, I lifted him up above the battlefield for all to see.
He was my prisoner, and he would watch from this air cage as I wiped out his army.
“The time for words is over!” I roared. “Anyone who now stands against me will die. Death to all of you!”
I commanded my harpy horde to attack, and the air became a hurricane of beating wings as the undead creatures shrieked out their ear-shattering screeches and dived toward the army. Behind me, Rami-Xayon called up a raging dust storm, battering the entire Church of Light army with howling, dust-choked winds. Then, in the midst of this unfolding madness, my most brutal weapon entered the fray.
Exploding out of the ground beneath the army’s feet, the gargantuan undead wyrm smashed upward through the earth. It was like a volcanic eruption. The force of the beast’s attack launched a plume of earth, boulders, and shattered bodies hundreds of feet into the air. With its chomping, house-sized mouth containing multiple rows of gigantic teeth, the wyrm plowed voraciously through multiple groups of Church troops, obliterating soldiers like a snake smashing through a mass of panicking ants.
“Attack!” I roared. “Destroy anyone who resists!”
Behind me, my party members and the Brakith guards roared out their battle cries. Led by Rollar, charging into the battle on his undead direbear, blasting sonic booms of thunder from his hammer, they raced into the mass of enemy troops.
The rebellious conscripts needed no further encouragement to turn their weapons against their former masters. The Church commanders and veteran troops were now on their back feet, fighting for their lives, and nobody would be able to even think of arresting the mutineers.
“Fight for the God of Death!” one of the conscripts yelled, yanking off the white tunic that marked him as a Church soldier. “Fuck the Church of Light. Let’s kill these hypocritical, stuck-up bastards!”
Tens of thousands of other conscripts roared out their approval and tore off their Church tunics. Their spears, axes, bows, and swords were turned on their sergeants and the veteran Church warriors. As the first of my harpies started crashing into the massed ranks of veteran soldiers like boulders launched from celestial trebuchets, the mutineers began attacking their former masters.
I watched my horde of harpies smashing through the Church ranks. The undead creatures dragged screaming soldiers hundreds of feet into the air only to drop them like stones onto their comrades.
The rebels were fighting tooth and nail for their freedom while my party was carving a path of ferocious destruction into the heart of the Church Army. My wyrm was laying waste to entire divisions at a time, plowing through them and diving underground, then resurfacing in a volcano-like explosion of earth a hundred yards away to devour yet another 50 or 60 screaming soldiers in one savage gulp.
“Let’s have some fun, Talon,” I growled, pulling the power of Death into the chain end of my kusarigama.
It was time for me and Talon to get in on this action, and I swooped down with my kusarigama whirling around me with deathly glee.
The battle raged for the best part of an hour, but the result had been a foregone conclusion from the outset. And when the last of the veterans and commanders died, I raised the dead …
And now I had a new army on Prandish soil.
Back in the assassin’s den in Luminescent Spires, Yumo-Rezu and Friya were trying to shake me awake
. My work in Brakith was done, so I gave Rollar some orders on what to do next, then pulled my spirit out of the actor’s body and returned to my own body.
“Where did you go?” Yumo-Rezu asked. “You’ve looked like you’ve been in some sort of trance for the last few hours, and I could sense that a large portion of your spirit had left your body.”
“Oh, I was just in Brakith.” I opened my eyes and grinned at her. “You know, annihilating a hundred-thousand-strong Church of Light Army. All in good night’s work. And now that that’s been taken care of, it’s time to break into the vaults of Luminescent Spires.”
Chapter Twenty
Now that the Church of Light army had been obliterated and Brakith freed, it was time to get my forces to Luminescent Spires for the final battle. Stealth was no longer necessary, at least not for the members of my party and my undead troops in Brakith; I was sure that Elandriel had watched the battle and witnessed the destruction of his army. Stealth was, however, very much necessary here in Luminescent Spires, since a large part of my strategy had relied on deceiving Elandriel by possessing the body of the actor. To keep the illusion up, I retained possession of my doppelganger’s body. He—I—would lead my forces to Luminescent Spires, openly this time, flying by day via my undead harpies and camping in abandoned forts and other secure places at night.
Elandriel had no idea that I was right here under his nose, and I intended to keep it that way for as long as I could. My assassin allies returned to the den just before dawn, and they brought with them a good number of additional assassins.
“You’re in luck, brother,” Rhuz said to me. “A member of our brotherhood recently infiltrated the vaults to carry out a mission there. He has some valuable information. Brother Yollah al-Khazar, step forward.”
A thin, wiry middle-aged assassin stepped forward and bowed before me.
“Brother Jang al-Ghazul,” he said in a reverent tone, “you are a living legend in our order, and it is an honor to serve with you.”
“And I am honored to serve with all of you,” I said. “Brother Yollah, what do you know of Luminescent Spires’ vaults?”
“A lot,” he answered with a sly smile. “A disgruntled treasurer hired me to dispatch one of his superiors, who was embezzling gold and sleeping with said treasurer’s wife. It was a long game, two years in the planning and execution. I had to be hired as a guard, and then earn the trust of the senior guards to work my way up to the rank of Guard of the Lower Vaults—that’s where all the most valuable loot is kept.”
“So, you know the layout of the vaults, I take it?” I asked.
“Like the back of my hand,” he answered. “I could lead you through the vaults blindfolded, if necessary.”
“Can you get us in?”
Yollah frowned and shook his head. “That’s the difficult part, and that’s why I had to go with such a long game when it came to assassinating the senior treasurer. I first asked the Thieves’ Guild for assistance, thinking that they would jump at the chance to break into the richest vaults in all of Prand. They told me that they’d been trying to break into the vaults for years, and that their best lockpickers had all had many attempts at trying to breach it, but that it simply couldn’t be done. The locks were too complex, and the doors were not only made of the stoutest oak and the heaviest steel, they were reinforced with all sorts of magical protection. The place is sealed up tighter than a nun’s cunt. The best thieves in Prand have all tried to break in many times over the years, and all have failed.”
“There has to be a weak spot somewhere, though,” I said.
“There is,” Yollah said. “There’s a secret escape tunnel, built to evacuate the place in a hurry and get all the most valuable treasures out, in the event of the city being taken by an enemy or something. It comes out into the sewers below the city, which also lead to some sort of enormous, ancient structure beneath Luminescent Spires…”
“The Blood Pyramid, trust me, I know all about it. Tell me more about this secret tunnel.”
“The thing about it is,” Yollah continued, “the door can only be opened from inside the vaults. And before you even think of trying to smash it in with brute force, it’s a few feet of solid steel and stone. Even if you did conjure up a strong enough explosion to blow the door in, the force of that would certainly collapse the whole tunnel and bury us all alive.”
“Can you get inside to let us in through the secret door?” I asked. “Would any of your old guard buddies let you in?”
He smiled grimly and shook his head. “After I did the deed, they quickly figured out who I really was. The vault guards have a price on my head now.”
The task was looking quite insurmountable, but then an idea popped into my head.
“What if I could get someone inside; a really small someone, with whom I could communicate the whole time? Could you work with me and direct them to the secret escape tunnel so they could open the door for us?”
“You mean like a child?” Yollah asked. “Even the smallest children couldn’t slip through the bars and crawl through the necessary tight spaces to do that, I’m afraid.”
I grinned. “Far smaller than any child, brother. Give me a few minutes and I’ll show you.”
I closed my eyes and accessed the many intense black threads of ethereal power that linked me to each of my undead minions. I was seeking out one minion in particular, and I quickly located him and snapped my fingers, summoning him to me.
A few minutes later, the undead rat I’d earlier used to scope out the guards at the gates of Luminescent Spires came scampering into the assassin’s den. He had managed to cross a large part of the city in a small amount of time due to navigating the sewers. He sat up on his haunches in front of the bemused assassins, his beady little undead eyes glowing an unearthly hue of yellowish green.
“This is the little someone I was thinking of,” I said to Yollah. “I can see through his eyes, smell through his nose, sense through his senses, no matter where he is, as if they were my own. I can control every single one of his muscles as if they were part of my own body.”
“You could sell him to the Thieves’ Guild for a very handsome sum!” Yollah remarked, squatting down to get a closer look at my undead rat. “Such a humble little thing, yet capable of so very much! Yes, yes, he will be perfect! All he’ll need to do is get down to the lower levels, without some guard stomping on him or a cat grabbing him, and he’ll be able to open up the secret escape door for us from the inside.”
“A rat opening a door?” Yumo-Rezu asked. “That seems unlikely.”
Friya nodded. “I doubt even Vance could control a rat’s hands to manipulate a door in such a way.”
“It will work,” Yollah said. “The door is opened by means of a simple wall switch.”
“Good, that’ll be easy enough for the little guy,” I said.
“By the way, there’s one more thing,” Yollah said, “and I don’t know if it has anything to do with your quest against the Blood God, but my intuition tells me that it does. I discovered that there’s an extremely high-profile prisoner kept in a secret cell beneath the Lower Vaults. Only Elandriel and his most senior oblates have access to this prisoner, and only they know who he is. I did my best to find out his identity, but this secret has as tight a lid on it as any I’ve ever come across. Most people, even the most senior treasurers of the vaults and the captains of the elite guard, don’t even know this prisoner exists, let alone who he is. He may have some role to play in this story…”
“He may indeed,” I said, intrigued.
Who could this secret prisoner possibly be? Just the thought of it got my sixth sense tingling, and I knew right away that whoever it was, he had something to do with this whole tangled mess of lies, deception, power, and bloodlust.
“If there’s time, you should investigate this mysterious prisoner, Vance,” Friya said. “My instincts tell me that he is of some importance to your quest.”
“Yes, I feel this way too,” I
said. “I’ll check him out after we’ve got our hands on the Dragon Heart and the Lord of Light’s Tear. All right, I hope everyone is ready. It’s time to break into the most secure vaults in all of Prand.”
Before leaving the safe house, I enchanted the weapons of Rhuz and the other assassins with the power of Death. Their blades and tools glowed briefly before turning into a shade so dark that they seemed to swallow the light. The assassins seemed suitably impressed with my powers, but I didn’t have time for them to ogle over their new equipment.
Without further discussion, we headed down into the sewers, and I sent my rat to the vaults, ready to slip in when a guard or treasurer was let inside the enormous doors. As soon as we got below ground into the cavernous labyrinth of the sewer network, I began to sense the evil of what lay beneath the city of Luminescent Spires. The construction of the sewers themselves gave away the fact that there was something far more ancient beneath the city, for as soon as we climbed down one of the access tunnels and got into the sewers, we noticed that the stonework of these subterranean tunnels was very different to that of the city above them. For one thing, the stone was a type of old, red granite rarely seen in Prand anymore. The stonework was far cruder than the precise and perfect geometry of the very orderly city above. It looked like it had been built by men with far less of a grasp of architectural wizardry than those who had constructed the soaring towers and awestriking cathedrals of Luminescent Spires. Even so, the crude stonework was solid and had obviously lasted for thousands of years.
“What’s that smell?” Yumo-Rezu wrinkled her pretty nose with disgust as we walked through the tunnels, lighting our way in the inky darkness with burning torches.
“We’re in a sewer, in case you haven’t noticed,” Friya remarked dryly. “They’re not known for their fresh air and fragrant scents.”