Ilsa and Yasno stared at Hish, then at me.
“That’s a technique used solely by pure fire elementals. Last I checked, I don’t fly around wearing next to nothing and my name isn’t Salamander,” Ilsa said, referring to the most well-known of the pure fire elementals. “Doing that is virtually impossible for humans, Hish.”
“Oh, so… I don’t know,” Hish said lamely.
I sighed. Evidently, Hish’s ability to forget things she was uninterested in had worked its magic on the other side effect of unstable magical energy. “You’ll see. Are we ready, Ilsa?” She nodded in reply, and I let Yasno give the signal.
He thrust his fist into the air and fired a red flare. Moments later, we received a green one in return from the gatehouse.
“Cutting it a bit close,” I hissed. That meant that Miya was ready to go. I hoped that she could hold her shot for longer. Then again, she likely did that when hunting me, though I doubted she had ever fired something quite like this at me. I wasn’t a solidly built, century-old thick wall of stone, steel, and magic. At the very least, I lacked any stone in my bones and was certainly older than the walls.
We scythed through the knights outside the gatehouse. To their credit, they didn’t panic as we crashed into them. Whether it was against Hish’s blood-covered company of eviscerators or Yasno’s stalwart knights, the foes held their ground. Or at least they held it until an oni weapon tore them from it. The screams of terror died down quickly, the enemy backing against the wall and gate as we carved a path for the mages. They stuck close to the human knights.
“Shields up and keep them up,” I shouted. Fire and magical lances were already beginning to rain down on us. An arrow bounced off my helmet. It was a heavy rain this time, far thicker than that at the outer wall. They had been expecting us and likely thought we would try another ram. Explosions of flame burst out from the shield wall nearby, the heat fierce enough to trigger my protective runes. Immediately, I felt my temperature stabilize as all the outside air was cut off and purified.
This could be very bad. I looked up and saw dozens of magical lances shoot down and score the knights’ shields. One lance went low, blood fountaining from the shin of the knight it carved into. It had punched through his armor. He was pulled back, shields retracting and reforming around the hole like some sort of live insect colony. The wall had to hold. The lives of not only dozens of mages behind the knights but of every soldier in the army depended on the shield wall.
Possibly the lives of every oni depended on it, too, if Lyria was feeling particularly vengeful.
I felt magic building. Huge volumes of it. It was wild, scratching at my nerves like somebody was grinding her nails on stone. Every moment felt like agony. This was it, I realized. The air around the gatehouse shimmered. Magical energy, raw, almost entirely unpurified and held in the form of inert gas, was being brought into the world right above us. I wanted nothing more than for it to cease existing.
Then the bubble burst, the shimmer becoming a massive light show. Prismatic light glimmered so brightly that I wondered if Lyria could see it from where she was. Around the nearly solid mass of rainbow-colored energy, so large it felt like the world was shaking as it tried to deal with it, I could see the white shimmer of the barrier of the wall. The barrier wasn’t whole. All around the rainbow mess were noticeable holes, and they were growing larger. Then the hole would get smaller as magic poured back in to fight it. It almost seemed like a tug of war battle.
Disruption. That was the other effect of a large volume of unstable magical energy: disrupting other spells and magical effects. We were disrupting the magical barrier around the gatehouse. Given the raw power of the barriers in the wall, the lifespan of this disruption spell could be measured in seconds. That was all we needed.
A green flare exploded above our heads and lasted for a moment before collapsing. The disruption affected it as well, as all magic was equal once in the material realm.
Even more magic exploded into the world far behind me. The red glow atop the gatehouse of the outer wall increased in intensity. Miya stood there, bow outstretched and ready to fire.
Around her were more magical circles than I had ever seen a single individual maintain at once. Her bow was glowing with them. Her horns each had one, there was one for each hand, and a larger one was outstretched beneath her. More than all of that, her arrow had dissolved into a lightning bolt of pure energy inside which there was far too much magical energy. The night lit up with Miya’s raw power and fury. All sound stopped. All eyes were on her.
She fired. The shot echoed throughout the city, the shock waves visible in the air before I even heard it. The trail of light left behind the arrow was so solid that I thought she was firing a solid beam of light for a moment.
Then the entire gatehouse exploded—the wooden gate, the stone housing, the walls, and every soldier atop or inside them for nearly twenty meters in both directions. Dust, wood, stone, mortar, flesh, blood, and bone all blended together in the aftermath as it rained down on us.
I couldn’t make out anything I heard. Yelling. People were yelling. Everybody was yelling. Lots of pointing. Nobody could understand a damn thing and we could barely see.
Yasno fired a flare in the air. I thumped my fist against my breastplate and heard the dull thump through everything else. Others looked over, and more fists clamored against breastplates.
My fist shot into the air, and I chopped my arm downward, through the space where the gatehouse had been.
We charged through the wreckage and toward the citadel—toward Marshal Otwin.
Chapter 25
All hell had broken loose in the middle of Talepolis. The dust hadn’t even settled from the ruins of the inner wall’s gatehouse before we were hacking down the defenders on the other side. We slammed into ranks of blank-eyed soldiers who could only stare at us in confusion as we burst from the cloud of devastation. Their screams of pain quickly gave way to raw terror among their comrades.
The inner wall had been breached. The oni were here.
No cavalry rushed to their aid, nor did any bombardment of magic save them. My ears still rung from the explosion earlier. So did everybody else’s, presumably. I looked back at where the gatehouse had once stood and saw a cloud formed of dirt and dust floating above it. Dozens more figures marched out from within as my ranks of knights, mages, and soldiers pushed through.
This was all part of the plan, even if I hadn’t quite anticipated the devastation. The enemy was in complete disarray. There was disquiet in the air, as if nobody could quite believe what had happened. The boulders had ceased. So too had the defensive fire from the rest of the wall.
I wondered what the enemy were all discussing over the magetalk devices. Or did the rest of them simply sit in silence, Otwin repeatedly asking for a reply from a commander who could not answer? Up until a few moments ago, he had been as real as that gatehouse. Now he or she couldn’t even be buried.
I had performed many shocking actions in war, but this certainly ranked high among all of them. It was the raw intensity of the destruction. It would surely not be the first time I would need to draw on this power against people who were fighting for a misguided cause. The fact that I was taking over this city made it more difficult. Repairing the hole would never quite repair the scar, simply due to how obvious such a massive change in the stonework would be. That was to say nothing of the potential damage to the barriers now that we had destroyed one of the nodes that bound them to the wall.
Pushing those thoughts away, I focused on the present. Full sight and sound had returned to me and with it the need to move on.
“Yasno, Ilsa, Hish, to me,” I shouted.
The mages were behind me, forming small packs behind the knights as they advanced. Ilsa was with them, as I had expected, and she ran up to me, her face noticeably shaken. Grabbing her by the shoulder when she got closer, I watched for Yasno and let her lean into me. He wasn’t far, walking toward me and yelling or
ders to the knights as he came. The gestures never stopped as he walked, his face never looking to mine. He was in full command here. Hish, by contrast, was nowhere to be seen.
“Yasno, it seems you have things in hand,” I said, giving him an approving nod as he approached. “You know our next move.”
“That I do, Bulwark,” he said, finally looking me in the eye with his typical dour face. Unlike Ilsa, he was not shaken and there was no judgment in his eyes. “I do get to keep Ilsa for the cleanup, however? Or has there been a change of plans?”
I hesitated. With Miya now completely spent and resting in the rear lines after that enormous expenditure of power, Ilsa was necessary to provide the raw power we needed for the next phase of the plan. Clearing out the walls from behind, splitting up our mages into each unit of knights for standard city fighting tactics, and providing tactical expertise was everything Yasno needed right now. On the other hand, I felt that Ilsa might need me more than anybody else right now.
In the end, Ilsa made the call. She pushed me away, took a deep breath and shook her head.
“I’m fine, Mykah,” she whispered to me. Then she turned to Yasno. “Yes, you get to keep me. For a time. A certain somebody else has a date to keep. I’m pretty sure I saw Hish run off earlier.”
I blinked. Damn, she had already charged off. Looking at Yasno, I saw him nod with a grimace. What a mess this could turn out to be. The wild card of our plan that would overturn Otwin might go off early, ruining everything.
Slamming my fist into my breastplate, I rushed toward the citadel. It didn’t take long to find Hish’s trail. The headless corpses were a dead giveaway, although the nearly naked, crying men and women were more obvious still.
The citadel soon overtook all the villas, the palatial fortress complex making its presence known. By raw size it was almost the size of Tornfrost Watch, containing multiple courtyards and a huge keep that spanned the entirety of the grounds. It wasn’t as defensible in practice, as its use as a palace meant that the courtyards were not truly segregated by separate walls as in Tornfrost. Nor was the keep as suited for defense it appeared to be. It instead acted more like a palace fit for a prince. The prince of Aghram had ruled from here when he needed to affect a more martial tone than his private estate closer to the capital could provide.
That meant that the moment we were through the walls and gates, this assault was a success in my mind. We might get locked out of the keep, but there were so many ways inside that I doubted that could happen.
Said walls and gates were the problem, however. As tall and strong as the inner wall, they posed one further problem: their barriers impeded physical passage. Unlike at the outer walls, my real objective here was Otwin. If I got in, then I could almost certainly claim the citadel by myself. Leaping over the walls and charging in was simply not possible due to these barriers.
I pondered alternative plans from a distance. Hish had already begun to form up outside the front of the citadel with her company—companies, now. There were a lot more than fifty oni here, all of them dressed in Hish’s beloved barbarian style. Much of their armor was recently looted, too. The breastplates and uniforms still bore Imperial or Aghram crests and colors rather than the blue or gold of Hish’s main company. As I watched, more oni arrived. Two hundred at first, then three hundred.
Placing the magetalk disk on the ground, I began the process of powering it up. It had only just turned on when it came to life. A black and white projection of a man in fine clothes appeared above the disk, staring at the citadel. I turned the disk around so that he faced me.
“So you finally deign to talk to me, Arium,” Marshal Otwin said. There was no color to a magetalk projection, but I liked to imagine that he was flushed. Then again, the frilly ruff around his neck looked tight enough to be cutting off circulation. Perhaps, because he was a vampire, he hadn’t yet noticed.
“Yes, well, I’m outside and figured it was about time to say hello to the supposed protector of Talepolis,” I said.
“Supposed? I am the marshal of the vampiric province of Aghram. The reason you have gotten this close to me is that I have let you. Do you know why I have let you?”
He was exactly as pompous as I had expected. She certainly chose as I suspected she did.
I waved my hand in the air in a bored “go ahead” motion. He scoffed.
“You’re some hick general from up north, fighting barbarians for decades on end. We vampires have redefined what the Rogistran Empire is and has always been for centuries,” he gloated. “You can give these horned fools civilization, but what you lack is a true appreciation of it, which means you can never truly ingrain it into them.”
“Such a true appreciation that you deposed the emperor and the princes,” I said, figuring to take the chance to bite.
“An outdated structure that has no place in the future. We are the future. Vampires, dragons, mystic foxes, elves, dwarves, mages—you had your chance, I understand, and failed to grasp it. I have not made that mistake.” Otwin grinned at me, his fangs showing and almost seeming to gleam in the black and white projection. “Your humanity is what I can exploit. This city full of humans is untouchable to you. So you stand out there, unmoving, while the dragon closes in on you. And I remain here, entirely safe and sound.
“Unless, of course, you are interested in—” What he was trying to sell me would forever be a mystery as he suddenly turned to one side, his voice becoming inaudible. He must have been distracted by something and turned off his audio.
I looked over at Hish. There were a dozen corpses at her feet. Men and one woman dressed in civilian clothes. Hish’s subordinates had sliced their heads clean off. She was cackling. The soldiers in the citadel could only watch, barriers on our side and a mass of other hostages keeping them from intervening.
My humanity, he had said. Perhaps. But not Hish’s.
“What are you doing, you madman?” Otwin screamed, his voice returning over the magetalk device.
“Demonstrating my humanity,” I said as I turned back to face him. “Care to look out your window? You do have those, by the way? I never know with you vampires.”
Smoke rose across the interior of the city, the light of the flames below reflected within it. Yasno and Ilsa were busy.
“This is… Is this not your empire?” Otwin asked.
“It was.”
“You have gone mad.”
“I didn’t slay Emperor Somnulus,” I said as Hish cackled again and I heard screams as another dozen people were executed. “You have a choice, Otwin. Care to show your loyalty?”
Leaning in close to the magetalk device, I looked directly at the little piece of quartz that was capturing my body through magic.
I spoke slowly: “Let me in, little vampire, or I’ll burn your precious mistress’s city down.”
Chapter 26
I ruminated on the idea of choice while looking at the gates to the citadel. Hish still stood outside it, her oni holding swords at the necks of the next batch of captured soldiers dressed as civilians.
Choice was a funny thing. We valued it so highly for the freedom we felt it gave us. Yet in truth, the choices we made were shaped so heavily by what we had experienced and the people we had in our lives. So many doors were opened and closed simply because of those around us.
I had long ago learned who controlled my choices in life. That was changing now, I felt. Perhaps that was a good thing, being in a more turbulent period when not everything could be so rigidly controlled and I knew exactly who mattered and who didn’t. Still, those people certainly included Ilsa and Miya, as well as a certain vampire that both Otwin and I once shared as a benefactor. She dangled us on strings like puppets, her machinations hidden within the folds of her beautiful dresses.
The difference between Otwin and me was that I had long ago severed those strings. As the gates of the citadel opened, it was clear that he had not. Her success meant more than his life, and he knew it. Only a man who had embraced de
ath would open those gates.
Hish hollered in victory and the oni cheered. The same was far from true of the soldiers, who were already fleeing the walls. I wondered where they ran to. Probably as far as they could get from the oni they thought would chop off their heads. In truth, I doubted even their chastity was at risk. Hish had admitted that she liked strong guys, after all.
Striding through the now-open gates, Hish’s company of killers quickly followed me into the now-empty courtyard. The rest kept watch outside the citadel, having merely dressed up in the barbarian uniform to look the part and be intimidating. Keeping some guards outside was important. I didn’t want to deal with any unexpected guests.
The emptiness continued beyond the courtyard and into the keep. The dark stone of the keep interior was brightly lit and extremely well-furnished, befitting of a palace. Rugs of extortionate prices and skins of phantasmal beasts covered the polished marble floors. The silver trims of the columns were polished so cleanly I could see my reflection in them, even if Otwin couldn’t. Our footsteps echoed throughout each level. I heard distant running and shouting but little else. Our display had scared his elite warriors more than expected.
“This is boring,” Hish said, holding both hands behind her head and pouting.
I held a finger to my visor. Something was off about the next room. We were on the third level of the keep and slowly rising to the fifth level, where I knew the prince’s private throne room was. The more grandiose throne room was not always the best place for those of a higher station, and a private receiving room did not force those beneath the prince to recognize his status. Otwin was no doubt skulking there, pacing about in fury.
This room, however, was the only way to get to the fifth level. All paths converged here on the way upstairs. We had already scanned the fourth level, finding that the administrative wing there did not include access to the fifth level. Instead, we had to walk through this completely windowless room, which had noticeable indentation from the corridors around it. The open doorways to the side also worried me.
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