Kingdom Come

by James Osiris Baldwin

  MP: 200/200

  Weak Against Dark & Water

  Immune to Earth

  The Voivode of Myszno and the patriarch of the House of Bolza has been transformed into a Nasaku Thrall, the servant of a powerful desert-forged vampire species that is unharmed by sunlight. Equipped with an unholy lance, a life-draining touch and the power of necromancy, he is a formidable foe.

  My eyes narrowed. “He’s Level 25. We could take him.”

  “You would strike at an emissary in the back?” Istvan turned on me, paling with horror. “It is dishonorable.”

  “It’s practical.” Suri gave a curt nod and pulled her rocket launcher from her Inventory. “Honor is for sports. This is war.”

  “Guys, wait.” Rin waved her hands. “Let him go back and report… he’s had a chance to see the Prezyemi Line as it is. It means he’s going to report false information.”

  “Speaking of that.” My keen eye caught something moving on the ground. “Karalti, you seeing what I’m seeing?”

  By way of reply, the dragon took a few steps forward and blasted the ground with flames. Her sticky Ghost Fire splashed over the mud, incinerating the hundreds of tiny black scorpions that had been slowly and stealthily crawling their way toward us through the muck. They squirmed and thrashed as the flames consumed them.

  I turned to look back at the others. “First order, Istvan: establish a no-fly zone half a mile out over the Endlar. No bugs, no birds, no bats, no nothing. If it flies or has more than four legs, someone needs to kill it. Vampires use animal familiars.”

  “Yes, sir.” Istvan saluted. “May I get a ride back over the wall?”

  “Sure.” I nodded to the girls as Suri reached down to give Rin a hand up onto Cutthroat’s back. “Now let’s go get ready to throw these guys the biggest wet t-shirt party the world’s ever seen.”

  Chapter 43

  Aerial scouts confirmed what we already suspected: we didn’t have a week. We had four days.

  Just like the three-day organization of Ignas’ coronation, preparing the Prezyemi Line in the way we wanted it would have taken months in the real world. As it stood, we were able to get about ninety percent of it done by the evening of the third day. Suri, Rin and I worked in shifts, sleeping the minimum four hours to rest and then rising and throwing ourselves back into work. Rin worked with Viktor to produce the explosives and oil we needed. Day and night, the battlefield was crowded with people and tankers, airships and quazi. Ships from Litvy arrived non-stop, far too many for Korona's crumbling skydock to properly handle. They were backed up for miles, loading and unloading, picking up people and animals and carrying them north as low as they could fly. The Tengeri, a salvage ship, was called to dredge up the corpse of the Warsinger and transport it to Litvy. And while all that was going on, Karalti and I set up on the roof of the Central Bastion, watching as my half-assed plan came to fruition below.

  We were pitching two lines of active defense and three lines of static defense. The active defense units were the soldiers tasked with maintaining the no-fly zone, and those who had been sent out into the Endlar to find and sabotage the Demon’s Ix’tamo. Rin had strategized that the Demon used the poor-quality mana generated by the Ix’tamo to sustain his cheaper units, using them like resource nodes to animate large numbers of zombies, skeletons, and plague rats. She had invented a device that allowed us to remotely turn off the nodes – deactivating the Ix’tamo, and potentially causing waves of Napathian infantry to collapse. I’d ordered our precious few Rangers to find as many Ix’tamo as possible and attaching these devices to them. We were, essentially, hacking into their power grid.

  The lines of static defense were at the wall itself. After evacuating Slutlava, we shored up our ramparts and blew the first dam. Even the controlled demolition of the Gul River Dam was incredibly destructive, sweeping away all but ten miles of wall, obliterating the town and flooding the island delta so badly that we almost lost our Airship Hangar. But the flooding had the desired effect: The Western Front was drowned, the river returned to its natural and spectacular course. The remaining mess was so extreme that not even a thousand zombie brontosauruses had a hope in hell of getting through - not unless Ashur also got his hands on a crane and a convoy of semi-trailers.

  The result was that Fort Korona now overlooked an arena about a mile across: a kill zone boxed in by torrential waterfalls and rivers to either side. And that zone was a doozy. We clear-cut the marshy forest back by a further 600 feet, then set up the first line at 820 feet from the Wall. Rows of felled, sharpened trees had been set up like a phalanx line of spears. Using triceratops and allosaurus brought by the Orphans, we hauled them on sleds, rammed them into the earth, and wound barbed wire through the lot. Just behind the abatis line was a deep 15-foot trench filled with oil, and right behind that was a shallower eight-foot trench filled with landmines. The trenches were cut in a concave design, forming a ‘salient’ – a bulge that could be attacked from three sides by our aerial artillery.

  Three hundred feet from there was the second unmanned trench line, also cut to form a salient. The no man’s land in front of it was heavily mined and groomed with another tricky bit of landscaping I’d learned in Indonesia: lilia, shallow pit traps cut in a five-by-five pattern, filled with short, sturdy wooden stakes. Each pit was big enough to catch to a foot of a human, horse or hookwing and bring them down. That hundred-meter stretch was sprayed with naphtha.

  At a hundred and fifty feet, within support range for the wall, was the third and final manned line. Using wreckage from the Wall, we built scrap bastions of stone in a chevron pattern, giving the stationed Riflemen room to shoot down on the horde from an elevated, covered position. Magical shield caches were installed every fifty feet to give cover from mortar fire and maximize the firing time available to the troops. Between them and the horde stood a third and final deep oil trench. If I’d been planning for living enemies, I would have ordered the garrison to build and deploy Spanish Riders – barbed wire ‘boxes’ – or a double apron fence, set up guns at either end, and rain hell down on them from the front and sides. Suri had pointed out that the zombies would just crush the Spanish Riders and use them to climb the bastions, so instead, we took the big, curved wooden struts used in the bellies of airships, and turned those into a back-curving fortification that was deceptively hard to climb. There was no time to find Istvan’s tribe and recruit them into the defense - every man and woman was put on building earthworks or producing munitions.

  The evening of the fourth day found Suri and me on the wall, taking a break to split some bread, cheese and goat's milk for our last meal of the day. Pillars of smoke rose in the distant sky, where the forest was turning gray. A line of fire burned from horizon to horizon across the Endlar. Every day brought some new kind of flying horror to our blissfully Soma-free fortress. Corrupted Pteranodons, gulls carrying plague rats, kalxat and Frankensteinian creatures sewn out of bits of different things. We burned them to ash. That was how the air tasted now: ashy and foul, like seared rotten meat.

  "Do you think it’ll be enough?" I crouched on the edge of the parapet like a gargoyle, looking down over the field. “I mean, if I was a normal human foot soldier and I saw this place on my J-map during an approach, I’d be pissing myself. But for all we know, they’re going to turn up with eight hundred cannons and a thousand mages and just blast their way through everything.”

  Suri made a muffled sound of agreement around a mouthful of food and took a swig of milk to chase it down. “It’s what we have, lover.”

  “Yeah.” The sun was starting to go down. I stared south, searching for gaps in the defense. Somewhere, hundreds of miles away, was Egbolt Castle - and beyond that, below where the Dark Star hung in the sky, were the Thunderstones and Matir's prison. We were almost there. The only thing separating us from our new earldom was an endless army of the dead.

  I sighed a cloud of frost into the chilly air. "I'm sorry I didn't listen to you."

  "Huh?
What about?"

  I frowned. "About quitting this quest and going to Tungaant with you and Karalti. We're going to lose. I don't know if we could ever win."

  "Then we lose." Suri shrugged. "At least we've upped the odds."

  “I wish I could reload a checkpoint or something.” I chewed my bread and cheese with a scowl. Even the rationed army cheese in Archemi was delicious, but I was so anxious that eating anything felt like a chore. “I was a loser my whole life. I want to win for once.”

  “Can’t win ‘em all. Besides, you’re the one who thinks that life is a game. You telling me you weren’t any good at playing games like this one?”

  “Most of my videogame experience was with antiques,” I admitted. “I collected games from my grandparent’s era. Didn’t play PVP, because I hated it. I can beat most single-player games on Hard Mode, but I wasn't ever going to make a top-ten scoreboard on an MMO or an FPS. Not like Baldr."

  "No idea what those are, but you're a good soldier. You survived a war. I’d call that a success."

  I shook my head. “I didn’t survive it. It just killed me at home instead of some Indonesian hellhole. Now I’m in a different hellhole, doing the same old shit, and it’s just as pointless and miserable as the first time around.”

  She shrugged. “Not that pointless if you or me becomes Voivode. And that’s looking increasingly likely.”

  “I'm not cut out to be a Voivode, Suri. I'm not cut out to rule anyone. I'm not ambitious enough." I gestured out in the direction of the battlefield. “I know how to build a bunch of funky traps, but don’t know anything about running a magically powered Napoleonic-era economy.”

  "Which means you’ll probably be pretty good at it," Suri replied. "Because you feel the responsibility. Unlike Baldr, you're not some war-happy, overly ambitious cunt who treats life like it's a game where he has to score all the points. In Baldr’s way of thinking, everyone except him is a loser. The people whose lives are in his hands are all losers. He's at the top of the scoreboard. Who gives a fuck about anyone else?"

  As I listened, I began to fume. "I know he thinks that way. But he's not here."

  "Right, so, if we give up now, Ignas is going to have to deal with this mess, and then crazy dev-possessed Baldr is gonna overrun Vlachia and we'll be on the run. He's gonna come here, plunder Lahati's Tomb, find Matir's Dragon Gate and fuck it in the arse because he wants to win." Suri paused to take a drink of milk. "And if he does, everyone else loses. Me, you, everyone. Forever."

  "He may already have a Dragon Gate," I said. "We don't know. I had a vision of him fighting this big-ass monster in front of something that looked like one. That was my last major contact with Matir. He hasn't said anything to me since then, except to update my quest."

  "What did he say?"

  "Just one word. ‘Hurry’."

  Suri scowled. "Sounds like he’s gettin’ weaker. The Gates are supposed to seal him up, right? If the Demon’s using his power to raise this army of his, he has to be losing strength."

  She had a point there. Matir had manifested in front of me the first time, altered the game and thrown his weight around. Everything since then had been more subtle. "You could be right. That would explain why the Caul is getting weaker, too."

  "Right? And if he gets too weak, the Caul is fucked and then we don't have to just worry about Baldr. We'd have to worry about the Drachan." Suri pointed up at the sky. "You haven't won every battle in your life, have you? If we lose here, we rally somewhere else."

  "You're right, as always." I offered my arm out to her. "Castellans are basically fancy bouncers, aren't they?"

  "Pretty much." She leaned in.

  "Then you should be the Voivodzina, and I should be the Castellan." I pulled her into a side-hug. "That way we get to do what we're both good at."

  "Yeah, no. I'm too tired for that shit." She laughed.

  "Seriously, though - you'd be a great leader," I said. "You ARE a great leader. You pretty much have it all: you're smart, you're authoritative, you're sexy..."

  Suri looped her other arm around my shoulders, putting herself between me and the edge of the ramparts. "And YOU need to go look in a mirror and say that about yourself some time."

  She leaned in to kiss me, and I felt the stiff muscles of my back loosen. When we pulled apart, some of the bad head noise had cleared.

  I smiled, stroking a lock of fiery hair from her cheek. "We've come a long way since we met at the morgue."

  "Yeah. Still surrounded by corpses, though." She smiled back. “I was a real grumpy cunt back then, wasn't I?”

  "You still are." I glanced to either side to make sure no one was looking, then pressed my thigh in up between hers until she gasped. "But I'm pretty sure I know how to turn that grumpy frown upside down and make it-"

  "Ahem." There was a cough from behind us and up.

  Suri jumped. I turned to look back, and saw Vash squatting on a small buttress overhead, his pipe clamped in the corner of his mouth.

  He drew a deep, dignified lungful of smoke. “Much as I would love to watch the two of you keep necking like a pair of doves, I was wondering if I could steal Dragozin for half an hour or so to discuss training and troop movements?”

  "Sure." I cleared my throat and stepped back. "I'll see you at the meeting tonight."

  "And after." With a smoldering look, Suri strode off, putting a little extra bump into her hip on the way to the staircase.

  Vash hopped lightly to the ground and stood up, all the while watching the exact same thing that I was. “She’s a fine woman.”

  “She is.” I nodded. “I was thinking about… After all this is over. You know.”

  “No, I do not know. I can’t read your mind any more than you can read mine.”

  I shrugged, almost too embarrassed to say it. “You were joking when you told me that if I didn’t marry her, then you would. But I’m starting to think I might ask her to… uhh… become the Voivodzina. For real.”

  “To marry you?” Vash snorted, exhaling a cloud of smoke. “She’ll say no. And you shouldn’t ask.”

  “What?” I bristled. “Why? She loves me, I love her-”

  “And you’re tittering in love like a teenager. Even if she were to say yes, you’d be happy for all of six weeks before the relationship suffocates and collapses.” Vash exhaled his pipe smoke with an exasperated huff.

  I scowled. “It’s been nearly a month, and we haven’t fought once.”

  “A month? That’s all. Burna’s balls.” He rolled his eyes. “Definitely not. Wise people wait to see if the person they love is someone they can properly argue with. Then they marry, and they fall in love with that person over and over again.”

  With a grimace, I turned to look at the battlefield. “You’re a monk.”

  “So?”

  “What would you know about being married?”

  “My parents,” he replied. “They were an excellent couple, and madly in love. But they were an arranged marriage to start with. My mother already had another husband; my father married up into her clan. It took them time to get to know each other.”

  That took me aback for a second, until I recalled some of my racial information: Tuun clans had matrilineal inheritance. “You always in the business of telling people how they feel?”

  “Only when I know what I’m talking about.” Vash looked off toward the clouds, his expression wistful. “A month is nothing. Dragozin. Live with her in close quarters for another six, and if you make it that long, I’ll officiate it myself. There’s also your dragon to consider.”

  “Karalti? Nah, we’re okay. We sorted that out. She understands that I love Suri and her in different ways.”

  Vash gave a non-committal shrug. “She won’t be your young ward forever. Nor will you be her guardian.”

  “She’s like my kid, man. She’ll find her partners, I’ll have mine. That’s how it’s supposed to be.”

  “I don’t know you well enough to have this discussion yet… but perha
ps one day after this is all over, I’ll attempt to break through that thick skull of yours.” He scratched his cheek, a wry, disbelieving smile playing at the corner of his mouth.

  “What?” I glared up at him. “Spit it out. Mayne I’ll surprise you again.”

  He snorted. “All I will say on the matter is that once Suri discovers her ambition, things may change.”

  Her ambition? It was one of the things I liked about Suri, the fact she was so proactive. I shrugged. “I guess we’ll see.”

  “Indeed.”

  We lapsed into a comfortable silence as we walked. It crossed my mind to ask him about his ‘kinslayer’ remark a few days before, but that probably wasn’t polite. I tried coming at it from a more neutral angle. “So… you said all Baru had to survive a usually-fatal illness, right? What did you survive?”

  “I said a disease, or a great injury.” He drew on his pipe and exhaled, swinging around a corner and gliding down a flight of stairs.

  “What was it for you?” I followed him down. “Your face?”

  “Fairly obvious, isn’t it?”

  “I dunno, man. I can’t read your mind. You don’t have to tell me if you can’t.”

  “Then I won’t.” He glanced sharply over one shoulder. “Though I never said the injuries or illness had to be of the flesh.”

  Chapter 44

  The horns began to sound in the middle of the night. Because of course.

  “Okay. Here we go.” I stood up from the table in the War Room, nearly knocking over the miniatures we'd been using to rehearse the battle. Istvan looked up from his book, ears pricked. Vash startled up from where he'd been snoring face-down on the table and wiped his mouth. Suri calmly finished buffing her sword and got to her feet.

  "Ready?" I gave each of them a nod in turn, lingering on Suri.

  “Always, Your Grace.” Istvan bowed from the neck.

  “Today’s the day I complete my zombie hand puppet collection.” Vash banged his ironclad fists together. “The Nine themselves couldn’t stop me.”