Archemi Online Chronicles Boxset

by James Osiris Baldwin

  The fierceness burning inside me melted a little at her expression. “It wasn’t that long ago that I used to carry you around, huh?”

  Karalti’s horns lifted more, and she pressed her muzzle against my hand, eyes wide and trusting. “I miss it sometimes.”

  “Me too. But there’s never any point in wishing you were something you were in the past, right?” My smile widened, but then froze as a yellow side-quest notification flashed in the corner of my eye. I pulled it over to have a look, and my eyebrows shot up when my narrator read it out for me:

  New Quest: The Queen’s Mantle

  Karalti has experienced a vision of her mother gifting her with access to the Path of Royalty, the Path which unlocks a Queen dragon’s ability to command and lead other dragons. To understand more, you will need to read and research the Solonkratsu, Archemi’s native dragon species.

  Reward: EXP, new Path options, Bonus Ability Points.

  My guts churned. The reward was good, but that paragraph contained two of a dyslexic’s least favorite words: ‘read’ and ‘research’.

  “Are we going to rescue my brothers?” Karalti asked. “And my mom?”

  “I hope so. I mean… yeah, we will. Someday. One way or another, we’ll sort it out once we’re strong enough.” Nervously, I accepted the quest and added it to my ever-growing queue. “Maybe Suri can help.”

  Karalti rumbled. “I don’t want her help.”

  I slid down to land lightly on the wall, then sprung down to the walkway. “We need her strength, Tidbit. The Eyrie is a big place, and when the time comes, we’ll need everyone we can get. That’s a long way off, though. We’re nowhere near powerful enough.”

  Karalti spread her wings, letting them ripple in the wind. “Fine, but I’m not running away again, ever. If I see Lucien and Violetta, I’ll burn them to ashes for what they did to my brothers.”

  “No, you won’t. You’ll fly back here as fast as you fucking can,” I said.

  She turned to glare at me, snorting steam. “Why?”

  “I just said it. We’re not strong enough yet.” I held her gaze. “Not by half. You did the Bioscan. You know as well as I do that they’re way, way too OP for us to handle yet.”

  “That’s why you kill the humans. They’re weaker.”

  “You don’t know that.” I scowled. “If Lucien is anything over Level 20, he could survive a direct hit of your breath weapon, assuming you could hit him. And he is. His ‘glancing blow’ wrecked my magic armor and nearly killed me.”

  The dragon hissed, dancing from foot to foot. “I want to fight!”

  “Look,” I said. “Just accept that we’re not there yet, okay? You’re Level 8. I’m still only Level 16. Believe me, you’re not the only one who’s frustrated.”

  The dragon’s eyes narrowed as she turned her flank to me, tail lashing. “Ugh, whatever. I’m going hunting.”

  “Okay. But you’re going to hunt game,” I said. “Don’t pick a cow or goat or some tame dinosaur off the Volod’s land. Challenge yourself. And stay in touch with me while you’re out, okay? I’m worried the Freak Squad’s still hanging around.”

  “I’ll hunt where I please. You can have opinions about humans, but you leave being a dragon to me.” Karalti tossed her head impetuously and dove off the side of the castle like a kingfisher before she swept into the air: lean, hungry, and terribly, defiantly young

  Chapter 4

  About ten minutes later, the five of us – me, Suri, Rin, Ebisa and Ignas – were gathered around a great mahogany table in the Royal War Room. The room was still laid out for the meeting he’d had with his advisors earlier in the day, and there were two maps to consider. The first was a huge seven-by-nine-foot map of Vlachia, which hung on the far wall behind Ignas’ royal seat and was marked up with twine and pins. The other was the three-dimensional map of Myszno on the table in front of us.

  I’d quickly realized two things. The first was that Vlachia was frickin’ enormous: a million square kilometers of forbidding mountains, frigid taiga, dry steppe and desert. Despite these variations in terrain, nationality and language, it had just twelve provinces. A late-Medieval nation of this size and cohesion couldn’t have existed in the real world, but Vlachia had one thing Earth hadn’t obtained until the 1940s: air power. The territory had been forged by dragons, and was now maintained by airships.

  The second thing I noticed about the situation was that we’d seriously underestimated our vampire problem.

  The province of Myszno took up about a tenth of Vlachia’s total area, contained within a weird-looking ring of mountains. These mountains were extreme in terms of both height and climate, but that hadn’t stopped the vampire’s army from marching through a narrow, treacherous pass across the border from the south. Three months later, and they’d gone and turned the south-western corridor into a 2500-square-mile goat rodeo, taking over four counties and putting them to the sword. Those counties were some of the most heavily settled regions in the province. Hundreds of thousands of lives had been lost, with every viable corpse reanimated and added to the ranks of the undead. It was a Clusterfuck. Capital C, capital Fuck.

  The others in the room seemed to have reached the same conclusion. Rin was staring at the diorama with a confused, wandering expression. Suri worried her bottom lip with her teeth, frowning as she considered the field of purple toothpick ribbons marking out where the horde had overrun the province. Ebisa waited behind her mask, as silent and grim as a graveyard angel. Ignas sipped a glass of amber beer and waited expectantly for our opinions.

  Finally, I gestured at the map and slumped back in my chair. “Well, Your Majesty... with all due respect, on a scale of One to Fucked, Myszno is bent over a barrel and Big Dick Bubba is standing right behind it with a can-do attitude and a big ol’ can of goose grease.”

  “Eww.” Rin wrinkled her nose.

  “How evocative,” Ebisa rasped.

  Suri let go of her lip and shook her head. “Hector’s right; this is a bloody nightmare. Tactically speaking, this isn’t just an upstart incursion. This is a war scenario.”

  War. Now that I’d spent five years fighting, the word always hit me like a sharp jab to the gut. I never wanted to go back to war, not even in my dreams. Not even in a game.

  Ignas nodded to Suri’s words. Despite his bravado in the Parade Ground, it was clear now that the confrontation had taken a toll on him. He still had the air of tough, observant confidence I’d come to expect from him, but his eyes were sunken, the lines around them deeper.

  “My thoughts exactly,” he said heavily. “I commissioned a report on my Coronation Day, which we received this morning. By the way the ministers were talking about this issue, I expected that we’d lost perhaps two hundred miles of territory to this creature. But no.” He gestured angrily at the fan of corruption radiating up from the south. “Four counties overrun, over a hundred and fifty villages put to the sword. The Voivode and his entire House are dead or worse, the ducal castle taken... and the whole time, my worthless excuse for a brother sat on his hands. The only reason the Demon hasn’t overrun Litvy and broken out through Vastil Pass into the mainland is because of the Prezyemi Line and the Endlar… and how long can we hold that?”

  The Endlar Wilderness was a massive swathe of swampland and forest, unmapped and uncharted. The Prezyemi Line was the huge wall that faced the Endlar’s northern edge, separating the low-land Racsa County – the ducal seat – from the highlands of Vastil County.

  “Looks like it. Question is, why is this vampire invading Myszno on the sly like this? What do we know about him?” Suri folded her arms loosely across her chest, scowling in thought.

  “We know almost nothing, not even his name,” Ignas replied heavily. “What we do know is that wherever he goes, horror follows. Entire villages and towns are being wiped out. Eyewitnesses say that as the undead pursued those who fled, some ran straight into rivers or lakes and drowned themselves in their panic. Others escaped into the wilderness only
to starve. They’d rather be at the mercy of the allosaurus and Kileskus than this creature, who they simply call ‘the Demon’. He is from Napath, one of the Shalid countries. We share a border to the south.”

  Suri grunted. “Napath, huh? That explains a lot.”

  I bought up my HUD and telekinetically skimmed through the virtual interface to my Archemi databank. “I don’t have anything on Napath in my wiki, other than a basic map.”

  “In Dakhdir, we call it Adu Alonwaa, the Land of the Dead. All the citizens are undead of some kind or another. The only living people there are slaves.” Suri tapped the southernmost range of mountains. “Some friends of mine said it’s ruled by a council of really fuckin’ old archmages… old as in, when they were born, the Shalid was still a jungle and the place was ruled by Meewfolk.”

  Rin nodded. “The Council of the Breathless. Liches and vampires.”

  I looked up at her from my chair. “Aggressive?”

  “No. Not until now.” Ignas frowned down at the map. “Lady Suri and Lady Rin speak true. The rulers of Napath are undead necromancers, and their people worship them as gods. The majority of Napath’s citizens are vampiric.”

  “Huh.” I nodded. “Could Fangs-a-Lot be a lord from this council?”

  The Volod made a go-around sign with one long, sword-callused hand: a distinctly Vlachian gesture that I’d come to recognize as being like a shrug. “He’s powerful enough that we have considered it a possibility, but we do not know. Napath is excellent at keeping secrets. All the court bureaucrats are vampire thralls bound in service to their progenitors. They are functionally incapable of leaking information, even if they wished to.”

  “If he’s an exiled Breathless council mage, that’s bad news,” Suri said. “What’s the total estimated figure of his army?”

  Ignas winced. “He started with a mere six thousand troops from his native land. But after destroying so many villages and towns, and now the fall of Karhad, his ‘army’ has swelled to over sixty thousand corpses.”

  “How many people live in Myszno?” I asked.

  “As of last census, a little over two million, including foreigners. But that doesn’t include some of the native peoples and nomads.” Ignas reached out to touch the miniatures showing Egbolt Castle and the fallen city of Karhad. “According to Captain Istvan Demir, the Demon marched over the mountains with a small force of animated skeletons. They decimated villages in the dead of night, slaughtering everyone and everything in their path. Villages and towns in the highlands are often isolated by distance. The Demon butchered the inhabitants in the dark and moved to the next settlement. The army grows with every person they kill. Almost every fallen man, woman and beast is... repurposed.”

  “Necromancer’s code,” I muttered. “’Reduce, Reuse, Reanimate.”

  “The army then massed in the mountains and poured out to take strategic positions in the highlands,” Suri mused. “Now they’re pushing through the Endlar to the north.”

  “Precisely,” Ignas said. “Until now, we never had any reason to worry about Napath. We have been peaceful neighbors since the Age of Dragons.”

  “Then something’s fucky, for sure.” I scanned the table. “There’s a village in Myszno named ‘Myszno’ as well, right? Do you happen to know where it is, and if it’s near a landmark called the ‘Thunderstones’?”

  “I’ve heard stories of them, but no specifics,” Ignas said. “But I know someone who might. Masterhealer Masha hails from that province. She is Churvi, from the area where the village of Myszno lies.”

  “She’s what?” I asked.

  “Myszno, like the rest of Vlachia, is something of a melting pot. We’re in the very heart of Artana, and there are many peoples and some two hundred languages spoken across the land. The Churvi are native to Myszno. They bear a strong resemblance to your own people, the Tuun, and I believe their pagan religion shares some commonalities. There is actually a small expatriate community of Tuun who live among them. I recommend you learn all you can from her.”

  I scratched my jaw. “Andrik mentioned that there were Tuun there to me once.”

  Ebisa, who had been leaning indolently against the edge of the table, suddenly spoke up. “Sire, I must wonder: where is this Demon finding the mana to fuel this invasion? Just the expeditionary force would have required huge quantities of it. Now he’s up to thirty thousand head… he has to be getting that magic from somewhere.”

  “That is a question we don’t have the answer to.” Ignas jerked his chin up as he stood away from the table and began to pace. “Myszno used to be a great producer of mana, but the mines of the south dried up centuries ago. The remaining mines are in the north-eastern highlands, in the mountains that shelter Boros. They aren’t getting it from there.”

  Rin raised her hand, glancing timidly at Ebisa before speaking. “They could be using Ix’tamo. Stardrinkers… they’re Artifacts that can suck mana out of fertile land. Or…”

  “Or?” Ignas regarded her with interest.

  Rin glanced to Ebisa again. “Or… he’s somehow gotten his hands on sangheti’tak.”

  Ebisa shuddered.

  “What’s that?” Suri asked.

  “The greatest shame of our people.” Rin was stimming with her hands, linking and unlinking her fingers. “War machines that consume living beings for their mana.”

  “What do they look like?” I asked.

  Rin wouldn’t meet my eyes as she fidgeted. Her gaze roamed aimlessly over the table as her voice became clipped and fussy. “There are roughly eight different classic forms of war magitech, but they can honestly be constructed to the specifications of the designer… some of them are like powered armor and are designed to be worn or ridden. Other forms are more like tanks, or drones, kind of. All sangheti’tak have a hybrid fuel system, using some elemental mana and drawing the rest from.. uhh… organic matter.”

  “Just say it,” Ebisa said. “They eat people. Preferably alive.”

  Rin nodded. “Yes… they eat people. Kanzo was exiled because he refused to build sangheti’tak.”

  Ebisa folded her arms. “These machines are mostly used in the civil war on Zaunt, where mana is precious. The secrets of making them are very closely guarded by the great Houses. It is absolutely forbidden for them to be exported to sang’hi.”

  Rin bobbed her head. “I know that. But the rulers of Napath are old enough that they might still have sangheti’tak blueprints from the Drachan War. They could even have information on the Warsingers, now that I think about it…”

  “We’ll talk about that later,” I said. “Let’s stick to Old Fangface here.”

  “Right.” Rin cleared her throat with a little ‘hem hem’. “Well, even if the Demon is leeching mana out of the ground, resource management is a core weakness of necromancy and undead forces. The undead must be constantly replenished with magic, and the effort to raise and control an army of that size would have to be... umm... well, astronomical. If we could cut off his supply somehow…”

  “I don’t think leeching the magic out of farmland would cut it. The only way this vampire could be building an army that size is if there’s liquid mana in Southern Myszno,” Suri said sharply.

  “Umm… okay. Sorry.” Rin shrunk back into her seat.

  Ebisa lay a hand on the girl’s shoulder. Her masked face swiveled toward Suri. “Are you a mage?”

  Suri scowled. “No, but-“

  “Then Rin is the expert here.” Ebisa squeezed the girl’s arm. “Would you trust her opinion on combat? You are the expert on that matter. She is an expert on this subject.”

  Rin pressed her lips together, blushing deeply.

  Suri sighed. “Fine, okay. Sorry.”

  I drew a deep, steadying breath. “How many men do we have stationed in the Prezyemi Line? How are they holding up?”

  Ignas gave a short, bitter laugh. “Hah. There are about twenty thousand men who’ve stayed to fight, and probably the same number of deserters. But not only is
the defense force outnumbered three to one, their own dead families are now shambling to the barricades and throwing themselves on their spear points. We can safely assume morale is low.”

  “What a bloody shitshow.” Suri grimaced, scanning something in front of her as if she were reading. “’Extreme difficulty’. The quest description wasn’t pulling any punches, was it?”

  I shook my head. “Noooope.”

  “Okay, yes, it’s a little overwhelming, but there’s no reason to give up! Necromantic armies are really centralized.” Rin stood. She was the only one smiling. “All we really have to do is take out the vampire general, and his army will just kind of... well... fall over.”

  “You say that,” I replied. “But what really happens when you take out a leader in a war scenario is that their army fractures and splits off into lots of little enemies, not just one. You end up with insurgencies.”

  “Normally yes, but Rin’s assessment – while simplistic – in fundamentally accurate in this particular case.” Ebisa unfolded her arms to point at the castle marker in the center of the map. “All of the Demon’s soldiers rely on his magic, his command, and his mana. Cutting those things away makes the undead return to death. So that is our objective – we find this vampire. We discover his weaknesses. We kill him.”

  “Again,” I added.

  Ebisa snorted.

  “That seems the best plan of action. Fortify the defense, then find and kill the source.” Ignas heaved a deep sigh. “But there is a problem. Our Ilian friends.”

  Rin, Suri and I all winced at the same time.

  “Before their visit, I’d planned to send the entire 4th Fleet to Myszno. Six battlecruisers, ten corvettes, seven legions of troops.” Ignas rubbed his eyes and the bridge of his nose. “But now, we can’t spare them. Despite my cavalier words, the fact that Ilia has come under the rule of a Starborn who is already styling himself an Emperor is a threat we cannot underestimate. The Knights of St. Grigori alone are a severe challenge for even the most well-equipped army. I’m going to have to go back through our records to see how prior kings handled armies capable of fielding dragons, but I can already tell you that depleting a quarter of our Navy would be a terrible mistake. I will discuss the matter with my advisors and see how many men we can spare.”