It wasn’t a headache.
It was the deafening beat of leathery wings.
We’re too late, Chase realized. They had won the battle but not the war. The dragon had arrived.
And then a furry hand fell on her shoulder. “We’re not lost yet,” Cagna said. “We don’t have to fight this thing—”
WHUMP.
“We can totally fight this thing!” Dijornos roared, his face radiating hellish glee in the firelight. “We’ve got a full party! We got ranged; we got healing; we got damage; we got tanks! We can do this!”
WHUMP.
“This isn’t a pahty thing,” Madeline pointed out. “This is a raid thing at least! And we don’t have numbahs”
Dijornos did a double take. “You know about raids?”
“My fiancee is a guildmastah. Of cawse I know about raids! And we don’t have the numbahs fah this one.”
Dijornos’ face twisted into a mask of indecision. He looked back and forth from her to the dark spot in the sky. The rapidly growing dark spot in the sky.
WHUMP.
“Run,” Chase decided. “Run!” she shouted again, when they only looked to her.
They fled, heading for the southern wall, and dashing right past a line of porcelain dolls, past them and past the black-veiled figure who stood among them like a giant among children.
“Dragon’s coming, Corinthia! Run!” Chase yelled.
WHUMP.
“Command Undead! Go home darlings!” Corinthia shouted, then hiked up her skirts and ran for her life.
“Too slow!” The Muscle Wizaard decided and scooped both sisters up, tucking one under each arm. Then they were off, and Chase and Greta were stuck with their legs flailing out in front, and their heads staring down at Bastien’s loinclothed rump.
“I feel like a pig in the oiled bacon race,” Greta said, and Chase snorted hysterical laughter. More than it deserved
WHUMP. Whump, whump whump whump....
Wind howled past them, knocking Renny off his feet until Madeline caught him with her jaws, flapping her red-painted wings to compensate. The group staggered, slowed as stone crunched and shattered behind them.
The dragon had landed.
Chase opened her eyes, and she and Greta stared back at it.
Four stories tall from head to tail. Green, emerald green glittering in the firelight, as it stared down upon the compound from its perch on the crumbling wall. It surveyed the destruction, and Chase could almost feel the anger radiating from the creature.
Then its horns tilted, as its head shifted and eyes the size of dinner plates narrowed.
As it looked to them.
“Go faster!” Chase shrieked.
“WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?” The beast spoke, and its voice was strength and fear and death. It spoke with the voice of a thing that had seen empires rise and fall and been unimpressed.
“Hell with this,” Madeline said. “Go. I’ll see if I can tahk some sense inta him.”
With a clatter she rose on wings of wood and leather, and the great beast’s eyes snapped to her... and widened in shock.
“WHAT? HOW!”
Madeline roared.
His answering roar knocked her out of the sky, and the sheer force of it bowled the group over... all save for The Muscle Wizaard and Dijornos, who dug their feet in and braced for all they were worth. Bastien clung to the little halven girls with grim resolution, and for her part Chase and Greta ducked and covered.
“I thought you were going to talk to him?” Cagna asked, helping Madeline off the ground.
“That is tahking! Dragons roah to talk in dragon! It’s how the skill wahks!” the little red dragon explained.
“How’d it go? What’d he say?” Renny asked.
“Not good,” Madeline said.
The dragon reared back, and a glow built in his mouth. Corinthia caught up with them and ran past, dolls following.
“Oh hell! Shield Against Fire!” Madeline shouted.
Instantly the air around them shimmered...
...as the dragon breathed flames.
A dome rose about them, becoming visible as the air itself burned, an inferno of sound and fury and heat that pounded upon Chase and her friends. A sea of light, a river of burning that broke and parted around the dome that encircled them.
And when it ceased, the stones around the dome were cracked and bubbling, tar and grit and impurities running and flowing, and what was left of the nearby buildings blazed.
“Manipulate Air!” Renny shouted, and sent a howling gale southward, blowing flaming wreckage away and cooling the stones. “Let’s go!”
“Yeah, we’d need more gear to win this one,” Dijornos said. “We’ll come back when we’re prepared.”
But Chase could detect the quaver in his voice.
“You go, I’ll draw him off,” Madeline said. “Maybe if we weah him down, he’ll listen to reason. Renny? Some help?’
“You got it!” The fox hopped on her back, and the two elementalists took to the skies.
Chase considered telling her friends to stay and support Madeline. It was tempting... but she knew she should check it first. “Foresight.”
...Yeah, no. Definitely no. Hoo BOY would that have been a poor decision. Once her ten seconds of horrific vision was up, she shouted, “Do it! Run!” and tucked herself in under The Muscle Wizaard’s arm as best she could.
“Where?” Cagna shouted as they fled.
“Home base!” Chase shouted back. “Get to the alleys, then head to base!”
Five minutes later, the group hauled up short.
Home base wasn’t there anymore.
The street led up to it... and was gone. Simply gone, swallowed into a blackness deeper than the night.
It roiled and churned, a sphere that seemed to envelop the block in a roughly oval shape.
And every so often, deep in the heart of the blackness, came a green glittering glow.
“The dungeon core,” Chase whispered.
“What?” Corinthia asked.
“Something we brought... it’s gone wrong. At the worst possible time. Why now? Why is—” Chase shuddered as realization caught hold of her. “The crystal. They were trying to find the crystal. They meant this! This was the crystal they were looking for, the one that the dragon’s shadow... oh gods. Oh gods, we brought it here! We’re to blame!”
“What are you talking about?” Greta asked, squirming free of The Muscle Wizaard’s arms.
“It’s a corrupted dungeon core,” Chase explained, following her sister to the ground, unable to take her gaze away from the almost-pulsing darkness. “Something went wrong with it, and it was getting worse, but we were too busy trying to find Thomasi, and we didn’t watch it. We didn’t realize what was happening. Oh gods. The divinations even told me it was bad news, and I ignored them! What was I thinking?”
“You know, that was the question that I was going to ask you, Oracle.”
The voice was familiar, but so unexpected that Chase’s mind blanked for a second.
Slowly, she turned.
And there stood Vitaly, in the lorica of old, a horse-hair-maned helmet atop his squat, armored form.
No, wait.
There was no armor.
It WAS his form, shorn of the coveralls. Metal and pistons and gears and steam bubbling slowly from a boiler where his gut should be. The wax mask over his metal face was cracked and melting, and instead of a mop he held a spear, its bronze blade glowing and traced with numbers in the ancient script.
Behind him eleven more figures stood, some metal, some beastkin. Yubai stood with them, armored and bearing a crossbow twice his size. He grinned and waved.
Dijornos swore, ending a long, vulgar sentence with “—ing sweet!”
“And now I know why a dragon burned my city,” Vitaly said, his voice losing its pretense of humanity.
“He wanted the core, too?” Chase said, looking back to the darkness.
“Core?” Vitaly shook his
head, drops of wax flicking the ground from the motion. “So much knowledge you’ve lost over the centuries. That is not a dungeon core. That is only what the new arrivals call them.”
“Then what is it?” The Muscle Wizaard asked.
“Call it what it is,” Vitaly said, leaning on his spear. “That thing you corrupted was once a dragon’s egg.”
CHAPTER 25: GETTING THE BAND BACK TOGETHER
Twenty minutes later they were marching towards the Sovereign bridge, calling out the cadence that Vitaly had taught them.
She didn’t know the meaning of any of it, but it fit in perfectly with the march of metal feet, and the clack of claws on beastkin feet as they pounded the cobblestones.
Even Dijornos had gotten into it, belting out rough approximations of the ancient words, compensating for the bits he couldn’t get with vulgarity.
Lights across the bridge flickered. Chase felt eyes upon them as they approached, knowing they were backlit by fires that flared in the sky as the dragons fought. Imagining what the defenders saw. Just black figures in the moonlight, almost a score strong.
Chase let her cadence trail away and padded over to Vitaly. “We’re going to start getting arrowed here any minute now if someone gets dumb.”
“You’re not wrong,” Vitaly nodded. “Column, halt! Novem! Something more cheerful.”
One of the metal men saluted, then took both hands and twisted its helmet. A pair of tubes protruded, folding out and falling into place as gears ground. A puff of air, two, and then the horns blared.
“A horned helmet with actual horns,” Cagna said, then shook her head. “Why the heck not?”
“That’ll probably do the trick.” Chase took a deep breath. “Okay. Refuge in audacity. Let’s go.”
The bridge had taken a beating. The cobbles sagged, and the footing was uncertain. But the barricade on the other side looked quite sturdy, and the people on top of it had a lot of crossbows.
Their looks of confusion changed to shock, as Vitaly and Chase tromped up, trailed by their respective people.
“Take us to Sir Barriano,” Chase said simply. “We would parley.”
They let them through without an argument.
And as they went, as they walked through the lines and the crowds of the mustering militia, two words were spoken, over and over again.
“Legio Ferrum,” gasped a middle-aged woman holding a halberd.
“Legio Ferrum,” whispered an old geezer stationed on a chair at a crossroads, his bow resting on his lap.
“Legio Ferrum!” cried a boy of maybe thirteen summers, who was running bundles of bolts back and forth between the regiments.
Chase listened, and looked, and saw the wonder rise in the Gnomans’ eyes, as the legends of old walked among them on the eve of battle.
“This is better than a Rally the Troops,” Cagna muttered. “They better not see you leaving, Vitale.”
Chase blinked.
It was just a slight difference in accents, southern versus northern. She’d been pronouncing his name wrong, she realized.
Vitale.
Vitals, in the ancient tongue.
The guts of the city, here on parade... no. No. The heart of the city.
“We might not be leaving. Or if we are, we’ll be taking them with us,” Vitale said. His wax face was gone now, melted away and revealing the pitted steel beneath, and the glass eyes that Chase had mistaken for the real thing.
Then they were at the gates of the Basilica and through. The courtyard was bare this time, though the bivouacs and tents remained.
The inside of the tiled hall was as she remembered it, mostly; the pews had been pushed to the side, but the altar and frescoes remained. Vitale studied them with a grunt, then pulled out what Chase initially took to be a bundle of rags. He inverted his spear and screwed them onto the butt.
Then he reached up and started dusting them, cleaning the frescoes above the door with the utmost care.
“Is now really the best time for that?” Greta burst out.
“A custodian’s job is never done,” Vitale replied. “If I don’t do it, then who will?”
Feet echoed on distant tile, and Chase turned just in time to see Sir Barriano enter the room, flanked by two armored figures. He surveyed them with serenity, his face not showing a bit of emotion.
But Chase could read the tension in the way he stood.
“Sir Barriano,” she spoke, before he could. “I apologize for my abrupt departure the last time. It was not my choice, but once my feet had been set upon that course, I could not deviate from it.”
“Are you here then to return to my custody? For if that is not the case, then your apology is without worth.”
Chase swallowed. “If that’s what it takes, then okay, I will.”
A slow blink. The man’s posture eased a bit, then he tensed up at her next words.
“I just ask that you put me someplace I can see Thomasi if you do. We’ve got a lot to catch up on.”
“You know of that. And you come to me in the company of the Duodecimen themselves. The legendary twelve custodes...” his eyes flicked over Yubai, and the rat-man next to him, and the sheepkin beyond that. “Though some of them are not as I imagined they would be.”
“Time takes its toll upon all,” Vitale said, and the Knight jumped a bit, as if he hadn’t expected the metal man to talk. “Fortunately, we were given instructions to account for this. Our Auxilia have the same duties and authority granted to the senior custodes.”
A gleam surfaced in Barriano’s eyes. “An authority that comes from an oath to Gnome itself. Have you come then to help us, in our hour of need?”
“In crisis that threatens the city itself, we are allowed to show ourselves and offer what aid we can to the legally appointed consul,” Vitale confirmed. “And therein lies the problem.”
“Ah,” Sir Barriano said, closing his eyes. “Chase Berrymore, I accept your surrender. I am sorry for what I must do. If it is any consolation, then you and Thomasi will be risking it together.”
“I’m a little confused,” Chase said, glancing from the Knight to the Custode. “How does my captivity relate to the authority over the city?”
“We’re the price he has to pay in order to become the Ruler of this city,” Thomasi said, strolling out from behind the altar.
There was a pause, then Bastien was shouting with joy and Chase was barreling past him to leap into the Ringmaster’s arms. Thomasi squawked and caught her, then Bastien caught the two of them, lifting them into the air and whirling them around as he laughed.
“Dude!” Dijornos said, coming in and Bastien paused mid-whirl so that Thomasi could bump fists with the big player. “How they hanging?”
“Big and hairy and hard to carry,” Thomasi said, and both he and Dijornos howled with laughter.
“The biggest. What’s all this talk about price?” Dijornos scowled at Barriano, who did a double take then stepped back in shock.
“The Butcher of Barvigga? Here?” The Knight’s hand whipped toward his sword, then paused.
“Yes. The third Ruler contesting the claim. Right here, right now,” Thomasi said. “Which renders your original bargain rather a moot point.”
“But the second one is still out there,” Barriano tapped his hilt, eyes not leaving Dijornos. “I’ll need her resources to find him.”
Chase didn’t want to let Thomasi go, but she ground her teeth together. Too many questions! “What are you talking about?”
“There’s no time,” Barriano shook his head. “The dragon burns more of the city. I must oppose him or lose all I’ve gained, lose the last defenders—”
“Viggo. Wait.” Thomasi said, looking down at Chase. “Let me sum it up. Viggo here is an old friend. I used to do spy work for him while I was on the road.”
“Dude, secret quests?” Dijornos said, eyes widening. “You didn’t mention that.”
“Well, they were listening to us talk, now weren’t they?” Thomasi said
. “Anyway, Viggo was in charge of guarding the sacred sites in Gnome. One of which overlaps a respawn point I’d visited. I came back there and sought his help to hide from the Inquisition. But... things had changed.”
“The Inquisition has grown,” Sir Barriano shook his head. “I warned him that I could not shield him for long. Then the dragon came, and while I was busy holding the city together, Zenobia came to me. She told me that she knew I was shielding him and offered their help to find and eliminate the players who were contesting my rulership.”
“I advised him to take it,” Thomasi sighed. “The only way the city stands a chance against the dragon is with a properly-appointed ruler. While that position is empty, Gnome’s greatest guardians can’t act.”
“And your price was Thomasi... and me, after she learned I was in the city,” Chase said, closing her eyes.
“It is not an easy thing I ask,” Sir Barriano said. He glanced from her to Dijornos. “Although... I may be willing to negotiate. You seem to have allied with the third candidate here. If he cedes his claim, then all I have to worry about is the last player, whoever they may be.”
Chase took a long breath. “Oh boy. Okay. First of all, Zenobia is dead. Second of all, the dragon was working with them, so they were playing you from the beginning...”
The room fell silent as Chase told the full tale, as quickly and concisely as she could.
Sir Barriano’s face went from ruddy to pale to ashen grey. He closed his eyes and lowered his head, thinking. “Gods. Gods above, I’ve been a fool.”
“They played everyone for fools,” Chase said, simply. “Up to and including me.”
“And they’re jerks,” Greta snorted, folding her arms. “We did the right thing and turned Vaffanculo in to the authorities, and they tried to capture us for our troubles! They almost got Mom and Dad, too.”
“I’d wondered why you were here,” Thomasi said, smiling at her.
Greta scowled at him. “Yeah, you better be worth all the trouble my sister’s gone to.”
“So what’s this about authority?” Cagna interrupted. “Something about rulership?”
Sir Barriano rubbed his mustache, considering his words before he spoke. “When a Ruler in a claimed domain dies, the domain is open to new claimants. Anyone of a sufficiently high Ruler level may claim the new domain, but they may only do so if all other Rulers capable of doing so either give their permission or depart the region.”
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