Kingdom Come

by James Osiris Baldwin

  “How’re you goin’ up there, soldier?” Suri called up.

  “Good. Just finished.” I closed my HUD and rolled up into a crouch to see Vash glaring at me as he belted his gauntlets on. “Ready to go back to Korona and make an entrance?”

  Suri put a boot on Cutthroat’s stirrup and pulled herself up into the saddle. “Ready to go back to Korona and bang Soma and Istvan’s heads together, more like it.”

  Chapter 23

  It took the better part of the night to reach Korona, and the sun was just coming up over the horizon when we sighted the Prezyemi Line from the air. This was made much easier by the fact that part of it was on fire.

  “Oh jeez.” The sounds of artillery pounding the wall to the west of Korona made me wince. Magical barriers sprung to life over the archers and riflemen who fired down at the seething black mass surging toward them below. “Ohhh boy.”

  “Do we go?” Karalti labored with the weight of the Ix’tamo and Vash on her back, while I hung onto her forearm like a pirate on the mast of his ship - or a stripper on a pole, depending on your angle. Her maximum carry weight in the air was now something like six hundred pounds, but anything over three hundred inflicted a movement penalty.

  “Hell no. We need to drop off the dumb stupid rock and our passenger first.” I closed my eyes, then opened them wide to zoom in on the battle happening to our left. “Should probably hurry, though. This looks like the real deal.”

  Bells were clanging all over Korona as warships and griffin knights surged westward. We circled, watching below as Suri and Rin crossed to the gate at the base of the wall. Only once they were inside did we circle the skydock and come in to land. Controllers on the ground galvanized into action when they saw us, waving flags and hustling people out of the way as we did a wing around, giving the people below a good view of what - and who - we were carrying. That maneuver was the end of my dragon’s endurance. Struggling for air, she evened out into a glide, straightened up as she came down, then flared her wings just before touching down to a stumbling trot.

  “Oof.” She shuddered with effort, wings drooping, panting heavily as her stamina ring flashed. “That was close.”

  “Yeah, but you made it because you’re a fucking boss.” I unlocked my white-knuckled hands from around her arm and jumped shakily to the ground, shaking out the adrenaline, and turned to see a mob of soldiers charging toward us. They clamored as Vash vaulted from Karalti’s back to the ground, cheering as the monk threw up his arms and ran toward them. But it only took the edge off the barely suppressed panic echoing around the fort - spearheaded by the fact that the General and Field Commander were nowhere to be seen.

  “There is zero strategy here, Karalti. No strategy and no leadership. Istvan and Soma had better be at the front line.” Furious, I raided my pack for stamina potions, uncorked one, and held it up for Karalti to drink. She bought her head low and tipped it back, jaws open so that I could pour it down her gullet. By the time they were finished working, I heard the screams of ‘control your fucking bird!’ and saw the cloud of mayhem that usually preceded Cutthroat’s arrival, just before the hulking black hookwing drifted a corner around the gate to the docks and loped toward us.

  “You! Take this!” Suri snapped at a passing dockhand as she jumped off Cutthroat. She pulled her reins around and handed them to the startled man, who eyed her, then the foaming, wild-eyed hookwing. “Get her somewhere dark! Like a stall, a stable. No sunlight, no light. She’ll die. Okay?”

  “I... uh... the hookwings are all corralled outside-” he stuttered.

  “Just find somewhere for her that’s dark!” Suri snarled. Cutthroat champed her jaws, head darting from side to side as she came up behind Suri’s shoulder to back her up.

  “Yes ma’am! I mean, my lady!” The man awkwardly saluted, and tried to tug Cutthroat away from Suri. The big female did not want to leave, and as she realized what was happening, her crest feathers fell. She turned her head and squawked in disbelief as the man hauled ineffectually at her reins.

  “Go on, you big fluffy cunt! I’ll come get you when you’re not a goddamned vampire!” Suri waved her off sternly.

  The hookwing’s dead yellow eyes got big and sad. She dropped her muzzled head, and placidly slouched off with the nervous soldier, not even pausing to snarl at someone who bumped into her tail.

  “She’s gotten smarter,” I remarked. “She can understand human speech now?”

  “I dunno.” Suri scratched her head. “I dunno if she understands the words, or if she just reads my tone of voice. Seems like it though.”

  “Sure does.” I nodded. “Hope you’re ready to bring her a big bouquet of severed arms when you get back. She’s going to be pissed when she realizes you’re killing things without her.”

  “Yeah.” Suri jerked her head at the Ix’tamo. “Need a hand gettin’ that bloody thing down?”

  “Sure do.” I looked to Karalti. She flashed Suri a double-fanged sneer, but knelt down gratefully for us to get the heavy crystal weapon off her back. Rin joined us just as we got it to the ground, and ran across, flapping her hands, as we tried to figure out how to stand it up.

  “No no no no no! Don’t mess with it!” She pushed me away from it, and waved Suri off as well. “Leave me here with this! We’ll get a cart. Soma and Istvan are with their men on the Western Wall. Go there and help - I’ll take care of the Ix’tamo and make sure it’s stabilized!”

  “Roger that.” I cupped my hands to my mouth. “Vash! Hey! Asshole!”

  “What do you want, you syphilitic dog?” He shouted back cheerfully.

  “Want a ride to the fight?” I called. “Or you gonna stay here so these guys can suck your cock all day?”

  He then clapped one man on the shoulder before turning and springing off the ground. He flashed into invisibility, then seemed to fall out of thin air into a crouch right in front of me, standing almost nose to nose. I took a step back as he spat to the side and looked past me to Karalti.

  “Lady? Shall we go?” he said.

  “With Hector,” she replied primly.

  The monk sighed dramatically. “If we must.”

  Before he could go around me, I blocked him and met his eyes. “Can we talk about this problem you have with me? Because this is a giant clusterfuck with no discernable strategy at play, and thanks to Istvan and Soma, people who don’t need to die today are going to die. This is difficult enough without you climbing my ass for trying to save my friends.”

  Vash’s scarred mouth twisted down in about three different directions as he scowled. When he spoke, it was in Tuun. “Must I lay it out for you simply, like you are a child? Very well. You took a sacred oath in vain, and that is a very bad thing to do. Bad enough that untruth taints you like a disease.”

  I frowned, confused. “But I-”

  Vash took a step forward, getting right up in my face. “You-” he pointed. “-lie so readily and so easily to yourself that it has left you pitted and rusted, like bad metal. And thus you took a sacred oath in vain and betrayed that oath when it was convenient for you, immortal.”

  “Wait.” I held my hands up. “Immortal? You... you know I’m-?”

  “Starborn? Yes. I also know this: you and your friends do not truly die. Had you kept your word, they would have suffered briefly, then woken up somewhere.” Vash never raised his voice, but now that I had met his gaze, I found I couldn’t tear my eyes away. “You lied to yourself, told yourself there was no other way, that you are not smart enough to think through the dilemma. So you broke the oath to spare yourself the burden of your growing, and to ward off the brief suffering of their passing. That is the truth of it.”

  “But I-”

  “The Moon Pact is important to our people. The Tuun were the first humans in Archemi to understand the power and burden of magic, the knowledge that words have power to unite or separate, to form or dissolve. To speak untruth is to fray the bonds of reality itself. By doing so, you spread your corruption to all o
f us, like a sick person coughing in a crowded room.”

  I took a nervous step back. “Okay, I admit it. I fucked up. But you need to understand something: if Suri dies, she won’t wake up somewhere safe. I will, Rin will, but Suri won’t. She’ll wake up inside the prison where she was tortured since she was a little girl, and I would lie, cheat and steal to protect her and make sure she never goes back.”

  The monk then did something I would never have expected of an NPC in any game I’d ever played. His piercing stare and menacing scowl wavered. He scratched his chin, looking over toward Suri. She was hanging back, waiting for us to finish speaking.

  “There is some truth in that,” he admitted. “The woman is a walking mass of scars, some so deep it is a miracle that she is sane. What she has seen, I can only guess at. It has left her callused and opaque. But still - you are a vector, Dragozin, and your word is meaningless to me until you atone. Sane men must pursue reality at all costs. We will talk about it another time - for now, we must kill zombies, yes?”

  “Uhh... okay?” Just like that, the supernatural gravity of Vash’s presence snapped like an elastic band, releasing me. I looked up to Karalti, who chirruped and shrugged her wings. She bent forward, but Vash didn’t climb her. His form blurred, and he teleported onto her back in a crouch. I motioned Suri to join us, and she ran in to catch my hand and pull herself up.

  With her stamina refilled, unburdened and rested, Karalti was able to take off into the air at her full adult speed, shooting past the warship and the quazi on her way to where smoke rose in thick black clouds. Only once were we away from the waterfalls did we hear the true volume of the battle: the boom of mortars and cannons, the sharper rapport of rifles, the screams of men.

  At a glance from the air, the battle was not going well. The wall was a formidable defense - as static fortifications went - but the Western Wall didn’t command the same kind of awesome strategic position as Korona. Ten-foot walls faced a thirty-foot ridge that dropped sharply into a muddy no-man’s land. The sodden earth was buckled and treacherous, trenches zig-zagging behind wooden spikes and reams of barbed wire. That mess was only about 400 yards long. It ended in a stacked ring of felled trees, their sharpened crowns pointing toward the south - a crude abatis made to stop siege engines and other large things, like tanks.

  Abatises are great – if they’re arranged properly. These ones were not. The positioning of the trees meant that the thousands upon thousands of civilian corpses hurtling themselves across the battlefield could just slip through. They sprinted through the relentless pounding of grapeshot and canister fire from the cannons lined up along the wall. For every zombie that fell, another three seemed to trample over it. Legless bodies dragged themselves by their arms, filling the trenches, forming bridges over the barbed wire, and permitting their fellows to climb them and continue toward their goal: the wall. They crawled up their makeshift siege towers like lizards while terrified soldiers shot at them with guns and bows, or plunged pikes up and down like butter churns, trying to shove them away. People poured buckets of oil through machicolations and hacked off dead hands with axes as they reached up over the parapets to grasp for whatever they could grab. It took no time at all to see there was a growing problem. Every zombie that fell was picked up by its shambling comrades and hurled onto the burning, moaning ramps that were being built against the base of the fortification, with every sacked body making it easier for the ones behind to climb.

  “There!” Vash pointed toward one of the bastions, where Istvan stood among his men, alternating between firing the rifle in his hands and barking orders at the archers and artillery surrounding him. A knot of mages held a protective magical shield over them all, sheltering them from the mortar fire that rained down from above. They were doing everything they could to stop the zombies in No Man’s Land.

  “Karalti, get as low as you can.” I ordered her without thinking. “We have to watch out for those shells.”

  “Okay! Vash, get ready to jump!” The dragon dropped a wingtip and swooped down.

  Just then, I got a short quest alert. [Quest Update: Objective - take out the Demon’s artillery before the siege train arrives.]

  “Fuck, I just got assigned a quest objective!” Suri yelled so I could hear her, leaning in.

  “Me too!” I called back. “Was yours about taking out artillery?”

  “No - it’s for protecting Istvan on the wall! Drop me off!

  Karalti’s twin hearts pounded with mingled excitement and nerves beneath us as she dove under the next round of arcing shells, then lifted above the explosions and shrapnel. Senses in synch, I felt her pulse surge as those soldiers on the wall saw us and scattered cheering broke out among the pointing and shouting men, loud enough to be heard over the cannon fire that drowned out almost all else. Two sergeants hustled men from the walkway as Karalti came to land on the parapet’s edge. She bowed down, and when the troops saw who we were carrying, this time the scattered cheers became a roar that went up and down the line.

  “Ah hahah, my boys! Guess who’s back!?” Vash jumped up over Karalti’s head to roll and bounce up on his feet, as light as a champion boxer. “This motherfucker, that’s who!”

  As I helped unbuckle Suri, I saw Istvan break through the thinning crowd and tackle Vash in a hug. The wiry monk caught him on reflex, then laughed and pounded the other man on the back.

  [Quest Updated: Unto Death. 270 Exp, +150 Renown (House Bolza), -75 Renown (House Soma)]

  “Praise the Forge! You found him!” Istvan called to us joyfully. “The filthy old wolf’s back from the dead!”

  “Not that old or that dead, but absolutely that filthy.” Vash squeezed him around the shoulders. “Speaking of that: let’s go see how hard I can go kick a zombie in the cooter!”

  “Anything you want, old friend.” For the first time since we’d met him, Istvan looked happy. He beckoned to us. “Come on, Fireblood! We need your strong arm! Dragozin - go attack the artillery! We have no idea what’s behind that curtain of smoke!”

  I clasped Suri’s hand to let her down. She leaned in to kiss me, and I kissed her back, long and lingering.

  “Fight hard,” she said in PM.

  I smiled when she moved back, squeezing her forearm. “You too.”

  Suri dropped to the rampart. Karalti turned and dove off the wall like a swallow, her roar of challenge echoing across the field. The sight of her galvanized the troops below. Looking behind, I saw archers aiming around her as we shot out over No-Man’s land and plunged into the heart of the assault.

  Chapter 24

  “We need to hit those guns. As soon as the cannons appear, I want you to use that new ability split. Get behind the artillery and get ready to flame.” I hopped up into a crouch, holding onto the saddle with one hand. “If I die, keep your head. I’ll respawn at the Fort and catch up. If I fall, don’t try and pick me up unless you’re absolutely sure you can make it without being nailed by a cannon. Okay?”

  “Okay!” Karalti dodged to the right and down as a ballista bolt shot just over her wing. “Get ready!”

  We broke through the smoke to see the ruins of the swamp crawling with undead. My HUD highlighted the individual units: the zombies were grouped in companies of a hundred each, which were blobbing together as they ran. The last unit of zombies were staggering up out of the mud, followed by a tidal wave of [Plague Rats] and [Skeleton Swordsmen]. Primitive iron mortars - smoothbore cannons not seen since the late 1700s back home - were set up in a line of shallow trenches, where three units of [Gigim Artillery] were set up. Each artillery unit was comprised of ten guns, each animated by two billowing humanoid shades. Each lot of twenty ghosts was supervised by a [Wraithlord Commander] riding a huge skeletal bull dripping in beaten gold and lapis lazuli barding. The heavily armored commanders carried magical staves, shadow matter streaming off them into the air.

  “You focus on the guns! I’m going for that commander!” I targeted the nearest one, banged my helmet a couple
of times, swallowed the knot of fear in the pit of my belly, and jumped.

  We were going fast - very fast. The undead literally had no idea what hit them. They aggro’d on us, dragging their mortars around through the mud, but we were too fast. At the end of the Jump, I shouted and drew the dark power from inside myself, letting it spill out into my weapon: Master of Blades. A wheel of black energy lances unfurled around me like a pair of wings, shooting past like bolts of lightning to strike the gunners. They groaned and shrieked like the wind as the lances fell down among them, evaporating into black mist. I used Rain of Glass to change my trajectory, the shattering energy acting like a cushion to halt my momentum and throw me back into the air. I focused all of those shards of dark energy on the [Wraithlord Commander].

  “Edin na zul!” The undead champion thrust his staff up above his head and made an arcane gesture with the other hand. The bolts of darkness thumped into a greenish energy barrier like arrows into a shield, embedding before they - and the shield - overloaded and shattered. He took no damage, but was defenseless as I soared down and hit Shadow Lance for the first time.

  The Mark of Matir surged, and a liquid rush of power flooded through my hand and into the Spear of Nine Spheres. There was a strange ghostly sensation - like the energy was searching for something in the weapon, but couldn’t find it – just before the flames generated by the Ruby of Boundless Strength surged into roaring black fire. “DIE PROPERLY THIS TIME, YOU PIECE OF SHIT!”

  “MAXIM XU-uhhh!” The shield shattered on contact, and the Spear plunged through the Wraithlord and burst out of its back in a cloud of dark embers. The Wraithlord’s skeletal mouth gaped as if in shock. There was a frozen moment where I looked into the glowing points of light in his sockets, and saw something I’d never seen in a monster before.