“Now now dispel now!” She yelled.
“Dispel magic!” She heard over the yelling, from just behind her. Then something that could have also been a dispel magic, from further back, where the other wizard was. She’d spread them out in the battle, to make sure at least one of them survived to get within range.
At least one of them got through, because when she hit the gate, what had been augmented animated wood but was now disenchanted, ordinary, somewhat rotted mossy wood splintered and gave. She brought the sword through it in a single ponderous thrust. Then the bulk of Reason slammed into it, and it burst into fragments.
Screams from above her, and then she heard splash of liquid, and a smell filled her nose as she backed off, hastily.
Oil!
Her mentors had briefed her on this. Fire, sticky fire like Geek’s fire from alchemists or oil or tar from sieges, could roast a steam knight alive in their suit.
Which is why, like most problems she’d come to, Cecelia had given a lot of thought and experimentation to finding a good solution. And in this case, the solution involved the outer layers of quilted cloth she’d sewn around Reason’s helm and front. “Clean and Press!” Cecelia shouted, and sighed in relief as the first few flaming arrows clattered off of her, seconds too late.
Relief that lasted until something inhuman roared from above her. “Burninate!”
Her world became fire, and she shrieked as red numbers rolled up from Reason’s components. She backed off further, hunkered down, and started hissing the spells of her backup plan. “Distant Animus blanket! Invite Blanket!”
Rustling came from below her, as the fire-quenching blanket she’d commissioned from the royal enchanters wormed its way out of the cork-stoppered compartment she’d put it in, and crawled up Reason to smother the flames. “Mend, mend, mend,” she chanted, once the fires were out. Distant animus was a good ace to play, but it had a range limitation of about one foot per level. Which was more than enough to land the spell on the blanket five feet from her.
“Ricochet shot!” She heard someone call, then whipped her cheek to the side, as a lucky crit hit Reason’s visor slit, bounced toward her, and collided with her helm instead of her face. Close! Too Close! She wanted to turn, to flee, to retreat. Instead she slammed the burning arbelest up to cover Reason’s visor, gritted her teeth as the heat roiled around her, and waited.
She’d done her part here. She’d shattered the gate, and she could hear the bellowing of the troops around her as they surged to and through the wall, and the shouts and cries of combat once they were past the gate. Cecelia and Reason had given them their shot, and now it was on them to make it count.
So she knelt, letting the blanket do it work, breathing as shallowly as she could, mending the damaged parts of Reason as the flames died, falling to the fireproof blanket’s embrace. If I hadn’t cleaned the oil, I’d be dead, Cecelia knew. There would have been no way to escape Reason quickly enough.
The minutes passed, the fire died, and when Cecelia lowered her the arbelest arm, an imp crawled through the visor. “Kayin has entered the village. Everything’s chaos. The dolls are in charge, cult says follow their orders. Dreadbear’s a teddy bear in a voodoo outfit. They have a dragon golem and Kayin wants to know if you want it dead.”
A dragon golem! Cecelia’s eyes widened. She’d only ever heard about dragonfire. Never seen it in action.
Now I have, she supposed, shuddering at how close that last call had been. “Gods dammit grandfather, you nearly killed me,” she croaked.
“What? What what? What?” The imp jumped up and down, boggling at her. They were generally dim, she knew, their own intelligence a reflection of the creator’s own. And the imp handler hadn’t impressed her overmuch in that regard.
Cecelia cleared her throat. “Tell Kayin to take out the dragon if she can. Leave Dreadbear to me.” Gods, if Dreadbear was what she thought it was, she wasn’t sure she could kill it. She really, really hoped she could take him alive. Get him away from Grandfather, to a safe place where she could break the little golem away from the rebel lies the old man had been teaching it.
But first things first. “Return to her with those words. Do you understand?”
“Yes yes I go!” The imp screeched and departed.
She’d heard that the higher-level officers had access to better imps, ones her father had personally made. Ones that were suited to skilled recon and intelligent enough to operate independently.
Dumb or smart, they still creeped her out.
Finally, the arrows against her slackened, and she stood, to see the shattered gates before her, and most of her army fighting inside the town. No good place for her there, so she waited, observing, for the bodies to move so she could squeeze in without trampling her own people.
And then the level-up flashed across her field of view, and she sighed. She’d hit level five steam knight, finally. “Status, help,” she said, and settled in to read and best think how to synergize her new tricks into her tactics.
“Ma’am!” Graves rode up, an entourage of skeletons following him. “The things from the lake were animated boats with wooden wheels nailed on. They were full of skeletons. There was something in the water croaking eldritch song supporting them, but we drove it off with concentrated fire. Renick thinks it was some kind of bard.”
“Bard?” Cecelia blinked. “Seriously.”
“Yes. Also, uh...” he rode in closer. “I seem to have unlocked a Tier 2 job I’ve never heard of.”
“Really?” Academic interest fired up... then faded, as she looked to the battle raging in the town. There was a time and place to discuss this in depth, and it wasn’t here. “What is it? Make it short.”
“It’s called Death Knight. Big on necromancy and buffing undead. And plagues and frost for no reason I can tell.”
“Gods.” Cecelia rubbed her face. “You’re one of the few people I trust with something like this. Look, will it help you survive this battle?”
“Most definitely.”
“Take it. As your current commanding officer I authorize it.”
“Thank you ma’am! Yes!” he stood there for a second, helm elevated as he read the details. “Intelligence and Con? Okay, works for me. Good news is the plague stuff is only plague resistance at this level. Everything else seems manageable, nothing that the inquisitor would kill me over. Oooh, this’ll help. Bony Armor!” Half the skeletons shivered and fell apart, wrapping around him, until his pauldrons were jawless skulls and the rest of his plate was laced in ribs.
“Cute,” Cecelia said, dryly. “All right. Get Renick and the wizards and let’s go get this over with.”
*****
Midway through the town, as they fought the fifth batch of cultists in the burning remnants of a block of houses, Graves stiffened up. “Shit! I just got Kayin!”
What was he... oh. Oh!
“Ask her where!” Cecelia shouted, rage filling her. “We’ll fumping make them pay!”
“Speak with Dead.” He chanted, and Kayin’s voice echoed through their minds.
“Hey Cecelia. Got the dragon, fucked up the escape. Bad assassin, no cookie.”
“Where!” Cecelia said, shaking, feeling the tears burst from her eyes. “Show us where!”
“Southwest, by the church. They’ve got a rallying point there.”
“ON ME!” Cecelia bellowed, and surged ahead, breaking Steam Knight protocol. Her friend was dead, and by the gods she’d make her killers pay.
They found her by the church, windows shattered, cultists inside firing arrows desperately at the approaching knight.
“TALK TO THE HAND!” Cecelia roared, and her arm intercepted arrow crits as she charged the building. “STEAM SCREAM!” she bellowed, and Reason sent a shuddering howl to the skies, trembling the stars within their firmaments. She had the hot satisfaction of seeing green numbers, big ones streak from the cultists at the windows as they shrieked, and then she was crunching through the wall, sword raised
high. “Oh yeah!” She yelled, sword chopping down as blood sprayed red, red on the busted bricks.
At some point in there she unlocked the berserker class.
“Undead!” Graves called. “I’m on it... what the hell?”
Kayin yelled from her gem. “That’s it! That’s the thing that got me, the dragon rider!”
“Call Faia! Least Elemental! Shape Faia- shit!”
“Bitch please!” Renick roared, and then came the sound of heavy metal boots stomping through wood.
“An Emberling? Seriously?” Renick said. “Oh. Oh shit, Kayin. Sorry.”
“Yeah, that’s my body. The little shit got my throat,” Kayin said. “It was pretty messy. You might not want to see this, Cecelia.”
Finally, there was silence. Cecelia snorted snot from her nose, and blinked away tears. The fury drained from her, leaving her feeling hollow.
She wasn’t sure what kind of people were insane enough to take rage as a job feature.
Then came stillness. A change in the air, nothing she could put her finger on. It was like reality shuddered. She’d felt it before, a few times.
She backed Reason out of the church, wheeled around, gasped as she saw Renick and Graves off their horses, kneeling next to Kayin’s charred corpse. Her darkspawn helm showed her the pool of blood her friend had died in, in agonizing full color. It pooled around the rent stuffing and green fur of a little dragon, torn and fragmented from Kayin’s successful work.
Cecelia swallowed, hard. “We need to get her to the corpse cart. And make sure their necromancer gets nowhere near her.”
“Well, her spirit’s with me. They won’t lock her soul into a corpse, that’s the important thing,” Graves promised. Then he glanced west, to the shore, and frowned. “The little puppet thing had a spirit. It was like an undead sealed into a toy body.”
Cecelia blinked. “What? You can do that?”
“No shit?” Kayin sounded interested.
“I’ve heard rumors,” Graves said, muttering. “They can go into animi, but they pass on once the animi expired. Or if you’re really evil you can enchant weapons and armor, make hauntblades or wraith armor.”
“I could maybe stand being a knife for all eternity,” Kayin mused.
But Graves was still talking. “That... that puppet was a fire elementalist, though, and I’ve never heard of jobs carrying through. And it was a girl’s spirit that ran by me, right into the lake.” He turned, surveyed the town. “And there goes another! On the edge of the shore. The dead cultists, their spirits are running into the lake.”
“Soulstones,” Cecelia whispered. “Soulstones don’t need to breathe. They’re under there somewhere.” She sighed. “It would probably take days to find them. And something capable of operating underwater.”
“The way is clear,” Anise announced, stepping out of the shadows. “We need to stop the rite.”
“Yes, of course,” Cecelia was drained, so drained. The battle had been long and hard, and now she understood why the cultists hadn’t feared death. “Grandfather, what have you done?” She whispered.
“Your orders, Captain?” Anise asked, hands folded behind her back, smiling.
And oh, did Cecelia hate her at that moment. But why? She wondered. Anise was easy to blame, true, but she couldn’t help what she was. And she hadn’t killed Kayin.
Cecelia thought. And as she did, that sensation from earlier nagged at her mind. She’d felt something like that before, both in the Catamountain, and in the dungeon the elite knights had special access to...
“Renick, Graves,” she said, carefully. “A second ago, did it feel like everything shifted? Like when we ran Daggerhall together?”
“Yeah. Yeah it did,” Renick said. “I didn’t think anything of it, but now that you mention it...
Cecelia gnawed her lip. “It must be Grandfather. Renick, take Kayin’s body to the corpse cart, then get the army moving. Inquisitor, I assume the sacrificial site you found was that thing?” She pointed across the lake, to where a green glow was visible to the southwest.
“Yes.” Said Anise. “I’ll have the scout guide them.”
“You’re not going yourself?” Grave asked.
“If this strange feeling is your grandfather, I need to be there with you when you find him,” Anise smiled at Cecelia. “You understand, dear.”
“I know,” the girl sighed. “You don’t trust me one bit.”
“I trust you every bit as much as you trust me.” Anise's smile grew.
“That’s pretty much what I just said.” Cecelia confirmed, then checked her coal reserves. A bit left. Enough for the task at hand. “Stand back. If there’s a dungeon it’ll be in the church somewhere. I’ll clear the wreckage and see what we can find.”
The trapdoor they eventually uncovered, and the wooden stairs down, were too small for Reason. With a sigh, Cecelia decanted from her suit, animating it and inviting it to her party. It should be enough to stand guard over the site while they explored, but... “Kayin, do you still have a messenger imp?” she asked.
“The building I stowed them in caught on fire. Pretty sure they couldn’t escape.”
“Bad way to die. Not that there’s a good way. Ah... sorry,” Graves said. “Thoughtless of me.”
“No worries,” Kayin said from her soulstone. “I’m pretty much beyond offending, here. Besides, I’ve made too many corpses to be sensitive about my own.”
“Heh. Just sit tight, we’ll get to you shortly,” Cecelia smiled, glad to hear her friend’s spirit in good... well, spirits.
“Who are you speaking to?” Anise interrupted.
Cecelia shot Graves a glance, got one in return. “You didn’t hear that?” Cecelia asked.
“Let’s just focus on the job at hand.” The Inquisitor descended the steps, peering around, distracted and with a hungry look on her face. “A dungeon, yessss....”
“Might want to stay silent for a bit, Kayin.” Graves whispered. “Don’t want that one getting ideas about you.”
The cave below was relatively small, and definitely not a dungeon. It had bloodstained sand next to a cove full of dark water. There was also a small chamber down a side-passage, that led to a room with bleachers, mattresses on the grimy floor, and an unexpected shock to her sanity when Cecelia saw the kind of drawings that lined the walls. If there’d been any doubt to the righteousness of her cause, it was gone now.
But it was also empty of any kind of dungeon.
At least, she and Graves thought so until they returned to the main cave, and found Anise crouched at the water line, staring into the darkness. “Clever, clever,” said the Inquisitor, a smile curving her flawless lips. “They put it underwater.”
“How far?” Graves asked.
“Not far.” And then Anise waded into the cold water, fading from view as she went.
Graves and Cecelia shared a look. “Invite me,” she said.
One invite later, she and his remaining three skeletons, and a hastily created animus blade and shield went into the water...
...and surfaced into the light.
“Oh,” Cecelia said, staring around her, at the riverbank, and the pine woods just beyond.
And there, up on a hill, was a two-story house. Cozy, hidden...
...and familiar.
Beyond the stretch of river, a narrow bit of woods, and the house, everything was foggy and unresolved. The colors were bleached and strained, and some of the trees had a translucent quality to them.
“It’s new. Barely formed,” Anise hissed, to their side. She paced back and forth, hands flexing, fingers grasping. “Oh this will be perfect!”
But Cecelia didn’t hear her. She was too busy looking at the house, where she had been safe. Where she had been innocent once. And her eyes burned once more, as she felt her heart burn in her chest.
Here was her reckoning, she knew. The final reconciliation, one way or the other, the final challenge to overcome, to put aside childish things and become the w
oman her Father and her future subjects needed her to be.
And she didn’t know if she was strong enough.
CECELIA’S QUEST 5: WINNING HEARTS AND MINDS
“What is this?” Graves asked.
“This was my house. This is where I grew up.” Cecelia shook her head. “I was so naive back then.”
Anise smiled, and said nothing.
Cecelia’s voice sounded distant to her own ears. “He’ll be inside. I know what he’s doing, why he’s doing it.” She swallowed, hard. “And I’m going to march in there and tell him why it won’t work, and will never work, and arrest him for treason.”
“We,” said Graves.
“What?”
“We’ll march in there and arrest him.”
Cecelia closed her eyes. “Thank you.” Then she shot Anise a look, and found the thing glowering at the house. “Something wrong?”
“I thought I was done with this place. It gives me... indigestion.”
“We’ll get you something for that when we’re done. Let’s go... Inquisitor.”
Cecelia led the way, and as they went, the trees loomed larger and larger.
“What is this?” Graves asked. “I didn’t think there was any old growth left in the valley.”
“There isn’t. This is wrong. It’s a perspective trick. Which means... keep an eye out for giant scarecrows.”
“What?”
Then the first Raggedy Man stepped out of the trees.
“Eye for Detail,” she scrutinized it as it came, arms extended, lumbering toward them in eerie silence. Covered in tattered cloth, with straw poking out the eyeholes of its massive cloth mask, it was thirty feet tall if it was an inch. Grasping fingers of wood clenched, and more sticks of wood showed through its torn pants, woven together with old rope.
“Captain?” Graves shouted, moving his skeletons in between them and the raggedy man.
“It’s level seven, and weaker than our sergeants,” she snorted. “Let’s take it apart.”
It didn’t get a single hit past their shields before they knocked it to bits. Anise didn’t break stride, leaving them to deal with it as she marched up the hill.
Threadbare Volume 2 Page 29