by Choi, Bryan
“What the hell happened to me?” Taki looked down and blushed as he realized he was naked. “What is this place?”
“It’s what it looks like,” Jibriil said. “A princess’s chambers.”
“Why the hell would there be a princess here?”
“The Rex has a daughter in every city and keep,” Jibriil said. “Helps him keep all of his castellans, barons, and counts under watch. The Teufelsbrucke is no exception. The bitch here has been draining your blood for a week. I’m not sure how you managed to wake up. Thought I’d find you more…husk-like.”
Taki patted his chest where the false Lotte had bitten him. He winced to palpate a pair of wounds similar to holes left by fangs. “How did you get here?”
“Snuck in, killed some chevaliers, and then killed her.” Jibriil fished around in an open chest and pulled out a tunic, which he tossed into Taki’s lap. “Here, get dressed. If these aren’t your size, I’m sure there are plenty more to choose from. There’s also boots and tabards, too. Goddamned man-eater, this one was. Can you walk?”
Taki slowly eased off the fur mattress and found his footing on the chilly floor. “I think so. Give me a minute.” He pulled on the tunic and noted with some distaste that it was indeed property of a former Ursalan squire. He stumbled over to where Jibriil had pointed and gritted his teeth as he beheld a pile of discarded outerwear. How many others like him had fallen victim to the monster? She collected their clothing. The thought made him want to retch.
“Try to be quick about it,” Jibriil said, tapping a foot. “Won’t be long till they discover the bodies. I don’t want to be here when they do.”
Taki grunted and obliged. He threw on a richly embroidered, padded tabard and secured it with a thick leather belt. After he tried on a few ill-sized boots, he found a pair that seemed to fit. As he rummaged further, a glint caught his eye. It was a small dagger in a leather sheath, and the only weapon he’d seen in these chambers.
Jibriil seemed busy poking at the corpse. Taki silently reached into the pile, took the sheath, and secreted it under his tabard and out of sight. They made no sense, Jibriil’s actions. First he gains my trust, then he sells me out, and now he’s come to rescue me? For what purpose? The dagger’s weight reassured him. When the moment was right, he’d use it to kill the archangel and be done with everything. But right now, I need to get out of here, and he seems to know the way. Just to be sure, he patted the weapon’s hilt under his clothing. “I think I’m good,” Taki said. “What now?”
Jibriil nodded in approval. “Now, we get the hell away from here, sneak outside the walls, and hope that your friends don’t blast us on sight.”
“Wait! What about my friends?”
“Ah, you can’t hear it down here because we’re so deep in. Sir Taki, the Teufelsbrucke is under attack. The Imperial Army’s at the gates.”
High above the Devil’s Bridge, blazing jars of pitch arced from catapults, leaving smoky contrails in the air. The missiles smashed against the Teufelsbrucke and sprayed liquid flame through its gunports. The men hiding behind were turned into a screaming mass of melting limbs.
On the ramparts above, a Templar swiveled an ancient relic around on a pintle, aimed at an advancing column of Imperials, and pulled the trigger. On the ground, troops wavered, fell to their knees, and burst into flames. Others rolled on the ground, screaming and choking as their vestments smoked and their blood boiled. The Templar swiveled the contraption and took aim at another group; before it could fire again, the back of its head exploded in a cloud of spall and brain matter.
Hadassah whooped in triumph at the hard-won kill. She worked the bolt on her rifle, and a smoking, hand-length cartridge plinked onto the rubble nearby.
“Direct hit, enemy helmet!” Irulan shouted, and swept the crenelations with her spyglass.
“Helmet?” Hadassah sniffed. “I turned his brains to baba friggin’ ganoush!”
“That’s what you should be doing, anyway!”
“Did we scare ’em off the death ray?”
“Aye. We’ve got to move, though. Their muskets are taking shots at us, and it’s only a matter of time until the cannonballs follow.”
The women turned around and skidded down the gravel rampart and into the trench behind it. They trudged past battered pavisiers and dusty laddermen, all lined up for a turn at the grog trough. It had only been a day since the siege began in earnest, but the strain of fighting in the thin mountain air was already taking its toll. Hadassah stopped, took a swig of cold tea from her skin, and spat.
“Doesn’t feel like we’ve got a thirty-thousand-strong army with us,” she said. “Damned bridge is no closer to the taking.”
“It’s because we’re bottlenecked,” Irulan said. “Only a few hundred can squeeze into the front lines.”
“What a shithole. I bet the entire castle’s full of traps and no naked maidens to save, either.”
“Well, there is Natalis.”
Hadassah spat again. “I swear, if we take this thing and some cock-puncher tells me my princess is in another castle…” She hefted her behemoth of a gun over her shoulders, almost knocking down a pair of fighters. They cursed at her, but she silenced them with a glare. “To the breastworks, spotter. We’ve got shitlords to remove.”
Nearby, Lotte crouched with Aslatiel and two leutnants behind a battered mantlet. Bullets smashed into its pockmarked face in chaotic rhythm, and the men flinched to hear it. Lotte peered around its side and quickly pulled herself back to avoid garnering attention.
“Just as before, there’s no end to them,” she said. “Can we use the mortars yet?”
“Aye, effendi,” one of the officers, a janissary, said. “But they are too far back. We would hit our own men while we bombarded the fortress.”
“I won’t allow that. At least not without a good trade in Ursalan lives. Von Halcon, how fares the engine?”
Aslatiel seemed to disregard her at first. He knelt with his eyes closed and his palm splayed out on the ground. Before he could be accused of rudeness, he emerged from out of his trance and nodded to her. “It’s ready. It will be coming up the road to the bridge within minutes!”
True to his word, the ground started to rumble, and gravel danced in place. As the siege engine came into view, a roar of approval rippled through the entrenched mass of Imperials. Standing twenty meters tall, it was clad in thick metal scales and boasted carronades to spray a castle’s defenders with grapeshot. A tower that heavy would have been impossible for men or horses to propel, but this one was powered by fuel and the knowledge of the ancients.
“A fine and terrible beast! If only I’d had one the first time,” Lotte said, shaking her head.
“Infantry Commander,” Aslatiel said. “Withdraw the ladders but keep up your fire. Draw the enemy’s wrath away from the tower.”
“Effendi,” the man replied.
“Are you ready, Satou?”
“Aye,” Lotte said. “I’ve waited for this day for years. Now I’ll show you the wrath of an archangel.”
Aslatiel clapped her on the pauldron. “For the glory of the padishah. And, for your revenge.”
“I’d best not keep my date waiting.”
As the siege tower rolled past, Lotte emerged from behind the mantlet and hopped up to the lower deck. Berserkers in plate twiddled axes and halberds and shifted restlessly in anticipation of the fight to come. As she strode through the mass of fighters, they wordlessly parted to allow her passage.
At the base of the stairs up, a hulking commander blocked her passage. Twisting braids of coal-black hair spilled from beneath the rim of his sallet.
“Yuriel of Cloud,” he said in a gravelly baritone, “you have killed many of our number on the battlefield. Now you direct us to our deaths. Will you promise us glory and bloodshed?”
Lotte smiled and rested her palm over the pommel of her greatsword. “You do me honor to remember my deeds. Yes, it is true that you may die under my command, but I can only
promise you bloodshed. I cannot promise glory.”
“Then why should we follow your lead?”
In a flash, she had her greatsword out to chop at the man’s neck. The blade stopped just short of his ringmail.
“Glory is yours to take by the throat and not mine to spoon into your mouth like your mother,” she said. “Now stand out of the way, or else get thee off my beast!”
The berserker’s eyes glinted under the slit of his visor, and he stepped to the side. “We look forward to spilling Ursalan entrails with you!”
With his words, the berserkers let out a roar of approval and clanked their weapons against their shields. Her path unobstructed, Lotte wound her way up the planks and then reached the top. Bullets and stones clanged loudly against metal scales as the siege engine rolled across the bridge. Under its solid metal wheels, the bodies of the fallen burst against unyielding stone.
The swarm of berserkers tensed for action, with Lotte in the center. Ominously, the patter of bullets started to die down. She knelt and started her incantation. No sutra would protect her indefinitely or completely, but she didn’t intend to stay still.
“Ready your shields!” Lotte shouted as the tower finally ground to a halt. “They intend to meet us with lead! In turn, we will give them steel!”
A carronade broadside thundered above, and one of the men blew a shrill whistle before kicking a massive latch open. With a creaking sound, the main ramp fell forward and slammed against the lip of the fort’s ramparts.
Flashes of light burst through the smoky haze, and charging berserkers dropped. Bullets whizzed by Lotte’s head and gouged her armor. She held her blade high, leapt from the edge of the ramp, and swung. A chevalier tried to block her strike with the shaft of his poleaxe, but her blade simply cut through the wood and split him from helmet to crotch. She whirled and slashed away at a thicket of spearheads before bowling the men over like so many ninepins.
Metal boots clomped against stone in eerie rhythm. The ramparts shook, and she realized that their small foothold was now surrounded by demihuman giants. Armed with armor-shredding guisarmes, the Templars also hid behind slab-like pavises. Lotte cursed. A shield wall was the hardest formation to crack.
Her greatsword cut deep into the soft iron face of one of the shields and forced the Templar behind it to stumble back. In retaliation, two of the guisarmes lashed out from either side to gut her. One of them she deflected with her blade, but the other caught its hook on a gap in her armor and tore a ribbon of metal away. She hopped back, dismayed to find blood welling up from under the gash. Her side throbbed, but she paid it no further heed. The circle was closing.
A few of the berserkers charged together, only to end up torn to pieces by the spears. Lotte cursed and tried to drag one of the wounded away, only to have a pauldron torn away and the side of her neck gashed open for her trouble.
At Lotte’s side, Elsa clamped a hand down on the wound and started to infuse prana, stemming the blood. “It’s no use, we have to retreat,” she said, and tugged on Lotte’s arm.
Lotte drew her pistol, aimed, and squeezed off a round at a gap in the shield wall. The slug downed one of the giants, but his compatriots simply rushed to fill the gap.
“Now,” Elsa said.
Just as Lotte was about to sullenly agree, she heard a woman roaring.
Her features blurred and her limbs like small maelstroms, Lucatiel leapt off the top of the siege tower and landed in the middle of the shield wall. The Ursalans in her path shattered like chaff knocked aside by a flail. Crenellations nearby turned to dust, and great chunks of stone and mortar tumbled from the outer walls. The Templars shared the same fate, and giants hurtled to their deaths at the bottom of the ravine. Lucatiel straightened her posture, splayed her swords in outstretched arms, and turned her head to wink at Lotte.
“Hey, Big Sister!” Lucatiel said. “You look to be in a jam! Never fear, I’ve come to unfuck you.”
“Then don’t just pose there! Press the attack!”
Lucatiel flipped her off and then drove her swords into a nearby Templar’s gut. She scissored them, and the behemoth fell apart at its waist. Another Templar tried to bash her with the face of its pavise. Lucatiel kicked the massive shield aside and sank a blade into its faceplate. She let go, drew one of her pistols, and blew a charging chevalier’s brains out. Finally, she wrenched her blade out, and the Templar clattered to the ground.
Taki kept his gaze lowered and his helm on, as Jibriil had instructed. In the chaos of an enemy attack, the usual vigilance of the keep’s guards had gone by the wayside so long as the pair of men walked with purpose. For now, Taki was glad he hadn’t simply stabbed Jibriil in the chambers. The Teufelsbrucke was a fiendishly twisting hell, especially in its lowest levels, where the princess had made her nest. Rows of cells all held emaciated prisoners who regarded the two with sunken eyes, but there was nothing Taki could do to help. He was barely strong enough to keep pace with Jibriil.
After they’d climbed a few spiral staircases, the sounds of battle were more apparent. The sound of stone crunching under leaden balls took on an almost rhythmic quality, and the keep seemed to shake with every hit. Dust and smoke swirled in the air and plunged even well-lit halls into a murky twilight that Taki almost felt he could simply push aside. The acridity of burnt human flesh stung his nostrils and made him gag. Jibriil wasn’t immune, either.
“We can’t go out the front,” Jibriil said. “Gates are closed, and that’s where the fighting’s heaviest. Best bet is to reach the roof. Then we’ll try our luck with the nearest Imperials we see. Hopefully they’re not of a mind to execute prisoners.”
Taki glanced at his surroundings: a ruined servant’s barracks, well away from the press of chevaliers and guardsmen rushing to and fro. Now was as good a time as any to ask the question. “Jibriil, before we go on…”
“I know what you’re going to ask,” Jibriil said. He chuckled. “Yeah, I betrayed you to the castellan. In fact, I’d arranged for his men to seize you and the girl right at the gates, but then you pulled the big hero card, and it threw off plans a bit.”
Taki wheeled around and smashed Jibriil right in the chin. The archangel fell back against a rotting bunk, and before he could get to his feet, Taki was on him with hands on his throat.
“I never should’ve trusted you!” Taki roared as he squeezed. “I tried to ignore my instinct! I tried to think you’d changed! But fuck you! And fuck me for letting my guard down!”
“I told them not to harm you!” Jibriil sputtered. “I promised Duvalier a seat on the Astartean council for that one condition! Please!”
Taki slammed his forehead into Jibriil’s nose and was rewarded with a crunch. “So you were in league with him the entire time?”
“Yes! Though not against you, and not against the Imperium! I wanted to depose the primate.”
“By killing us off!”
“No! The primate was never going to let your army pass. He planned to eke out more and more concessions forever until your people were dead and the padishah sent someone else. He lied to you about Hecaton Mezeta! The bitch was never here!”
“Bastard! Fucking bastard!”
“I wanted to use you to spur your side to act. Then, I’d start a coup, seize power with Imperial help, and the castellan would’ve thrown the gates open. No one would’ve died!”
“You whoreson.” Taki sank a knee into Jibriil’s gut, and the man gagged. “Because of your cockamamie plan, Enilna froze to death!”
“She’s alive!”
“What?” Taki loosened his grip, although only slightly.
“I picked her up after she fled. We went back to Astarte together. Then, Lotte somehow convinced the primate to let the army pass. She told me that if she found your corpse, she’d chase me to the ends of the earth. So I came back.”
“I won’t let you betray her again,” Taki said, and smacked Jibriil once more in the face.
“Then just…do it now. It’s my j
ust deserts…”
Taki reached into the folds of his robes and drew his dagger. Then, he slammed it into the meat of Jibriil’s arm. Jibriil let out a cross between a groan and a sob.
“You piece of shit,” Taki said, and stood.
Jibriil coughed, rolled onto his side, and vomited. Blood dripped from his nostrils and speckled the mess. He spat and then panted for a while before looking up. “Then, Sir Taki, let’s move on. We’ve got a ways to the top…”
Taki wiped his blade off on the hem of his tunic and stowed it away again. “If you’ve lied about Enilna or hurt my friends in any way, I’ll cut your manhood off and feed it to you.”
“Aye,” Jibriil said.
Overhead, the sounds of cannon fire and explosions rocked the keep. They’re getting closer, Taki realized.
With some difficulty, the two wended their way through fallen rubble and gingerly toed their way around charred bodies caught in poses of pure agony. There was little time to reflect on the horrific sights. All Taki could think about was getting to open air, even if it smelled of burning pitch.
“Hold fast,” Jibriil said before Taki would have rounded a bend. Around the corner were massed armored chevaliers and their squires facing the entrance of a chamber. The front ranks had set up an overlapping wall of shields and pikes. The men in the rear aimed muskets, crossbows, and even a swivel-gun at the doorway.
“We’ve ambushed an ambush,” Taki said. “Back me, Jibriil. I’ll cast. Make them burn.”
“Use your head! You don’t have the energy,” Jibriil said.
“Unlike you, I’m not a greedy coward,” Taki said. He clasped his hands together and started an incantation. The air shimmered around him as prana coalesced around his focus point. Jibriil hadn’t been wrong: to make a pyr strong enough to disperse this formation would likely render him helpless afterward. But if he didn’t act, then whatever Imperial soldiers chanced into the room would be turned to mincemeat. The far door opened, and the Ursalans raised their weapons. Taki stepped out into full view, extended his arms, and let loose.