The Blood Groove (Purgatory Wars Book 4)

by Dragon Cobolt

  No one had made iron.

  But one alchemist had accidentally found a way to make lead. Heavy, toxic, and soft, it had been relegated to a curio, especially considering how much easier other materials were to work with. And alchemists were too busy trying to make gold, after all.

  “They’re good,” Laurentinus said.

  “The trick is getting them good enough that they can do it in a fight,” Liam said. His palms rubbed against his eyes as he shook his head. “Keep drilling them.”

  Laurentinus saluted.

  When Liam returned to his manor house – the sounds of gunfire still echoing from the training yards – he tensed. The absence of Tethis remained, like a jagged gap in his mouth. His eyes would dart around, looking for her. She wasn’t in the house. Not this level, at least. Her body waited in the crypt, resting underneath a stasis spell cast by one of the biomancers in the city. The idea of having Tethis’ body dumped into the ocean, to be fed on by the fishes? It was hideous enough to make the idea of sending her home impossible. At least, until the war was over.

  And Liam could put a bullet in Fizit’s head.

  “It could have been anyone,” Meg had said.

  “It was her,” Liam had said, quietly. “She’s their spymaster. I want her dead, Meg. Put the word out.” He had paused. “Do you have to go?”

  “Now more than ever.”

  Meg had left for the valkyrie village three days ago. The word was that the entire Aesir kingdom was under Sysminor’s effective control. The conquest of every coastal town had stopped trade to the larger cities inland. Strike forces of lizardfolk mages had attacked irrigation and left ruin and confusion in their wake. It didn’t take many mages to bring down torrential flooding and to blast apart aqueducts with lightning and fire.

  The huscrals who had gone to Sysminor’s side had completed what Brax’s modern tactics had started. They ringed the remaining free cities, keeping them locked down.

  And now, a vast storm front covered the entire coastline. The clouds blocked any movement of ships or armies from Babylon, and rendered their ability to send signals via their lighthouse utterly irrelevant. For the moment.

  Liam came to his office and to the paperwork that waited for him there.

  The scribes that Tethis had picked and trained were good at their jobs. Unfortunately, that just meant there was no let up in the paperwork. Liam shook his head, walked behind his desk and sat down. He started to read reports. Food supplies were remaining level. Tax income had stabilized. The fresh security measures at the dock had produced some complaints. He frowned, a tiny throb starting behind one temple.

  Tethis is dead, he thought.

  He set down his papers.

  The crackle of gunfire filled the air.

  Liam breathed out again. It was like a release valve. Hearing that – and imagining lines of lizardmen collapsing under the fury of smoke and lead - he grinned fiercely.

  A knock came at the door.

  “Come in,” Liam said.

  Mary stepped into the room. “I came here to ask if you wanted to come and pray with me tonight,” she said. “I’m holding a vigil for the dead in the Aesir kingdom, and for our fortunes.”

  Liam shook his head. He looked down at the papers.

  Tethis is dead.

  The crackle of gunfire. It was more steady this time. They were getting better with each repetition.

  “No,” he said, quietly. “I have work to do. There’s a whole lot of sulfur that has to come from somewhere. And Ra-” He tapped a scroll of papyrus. “Said that the Pesedjeti are sending an emissary, to discuss reparations for the battle a few months ago. I need to get ready-”

  “Liam, you’ve been working yourself ragged ever since you got this position,” Mary said, her voice firm.

  Liam didn’t look up from his paperwork. He could hear her tail lashing from side to side.

  “Work has to get done,” he said.

  “You have aides. A whole council, in fact. Damnation, the world – the war – won’t end if you take more than an hour to grieve,” Mary said, her voice flashing with anger. Liam looked up at her. She glared at him. “I may not have known you for a year. But maybe that helps.” She shook her head. “Maybe the fact that I’m not a Hellenic mercenary helps too. I’ve seen how you look at the training grounds.”

  “Hierophant, I think that it is time for you to leave,” Liam said, trying to sound serious. He felt rage start to boil under his belly. His throat felt tight. Mary pursed her black lips.

  “Liam, it is not Christian-”

  “It’s not?” He sprang to his feet. “Tell me what’s not fucking Christian about punishing evil people? What’s not Christian about killing those who threaten those I swore to protect?”

  Mary shook her head. Her voice was bitter. “So. You’re just like the rest, aren’t you?”

  Liam blinked. He felt as if he had been slapped and he didn’t quite know why. Then Mary laid down the words – each one brutal.

  “You told me of your church. Of the councils that said who could be priests and what form Jesus and the Trinity took,” she said, sneering. Her one exposed fang glinted in the sunlight shining through the window. “You told me of the splits, the divisions, the killing. The crusades. And you said that it wasn’t Christian. That that was the divinity of the church being dragged into the mud. What are you doing here, wearing that?” She pointed at his chest. At his crucifix.

  Liam looked down. His eyes screwed shut. He squeezed the crucifix. His first had been given to him by his father. It was gone, consumed to save their lives, in a spell cast by Tethis. It had been replaced by Mary. And now, it felt like she was taking it right back.

  “It’s my fault,” he whispered.

  Mary drew her finger back. Her tail had stilled.

  “It’s not your fault,” Mary whispered.

  “Neb Mataare, a Chosen of Anubis, once demonstrated a truth telling on me,” Liam said, his voice ragged. “A magical spell that can tell if someone is lying, if they mean someone harm. I worked out the mechanics with Tethis, you know?” He shook his head. “And I shot down the idea of putting up that kind of screening because I’m a self-righteous prat.” He sat down at his desk, his hand over his face. Tears dropped off his chin. “Liberty before tyranny. Give me freedom or give me fucking death.”

  Mary didn’t move.

  Liam slammed his fist into the armrest of his chair. “And now, Tethis is dead, and I could have stopped them, but I didn’t want to do something that is the most weaksauce fucking evil in the world. A security check in a port?” He shook his head, laughing. There was no humor in his face. “Jesus Christ, imagine how many smugglers we’d catch with that alone. But no, no, I had to be a bleeding heart liberal social justice fuckwit and let a few goddamn assassins into my city.”

  Mary shook her head slowly. “They’d have found another way.”

  “Would they?” Liam asked, his voice tight. “I fucking doubt it. What’d they do? Climb the walls? Those are patrolled. Hide in a cargo container? We could have searched those-”

  He stopped himself.

  Mary shook her head again and walked around the table. Her hand rested on his shoulder. “I don’t know what the right decision is,” she said. “Priests aren’t here to tell you what to do. Not good ones, at least,” she added as Liam shot her a look.

  Her fingertips touching him created warmth that rushed through Liam, reminding him acutely that Meg had been out of town for three days. Which sounded like it should have been a sarcastic thought.

  But it wasn’t.

  “What we are here for is trying to help you know how to make the right decision,” Mary said. She pushed on Liam’s shoulders, spinning his chair. She smiled down at him. At that moment - her hair framed by the warm light from the window and her ruby red skin glowing with the refracted sun - she had never looked quite so beautiful.

  “How?” Liam asked.

  “Well,” Mary said. “The teaching I think you
need to remember is this: for we have sinned and we have all fallen short from the glory of God and her Mother.”

  Liam smiled slowly. “We’re all fucked?”

  “We all fuck up,” Mary said.

  Hearing such blunt words from the lilin nun made Liam double take.

  Mary smirked at him. “And thus, all are justified freely by Mary’s grace to redeem themselves and the world, as Jesus and the Holy Spirit did.”

  Liam shook his head. “Your bible’s really different from my bible.”

  “But the meaning is the same. If you fucked up? You fucked up. Fix it.” She frowned. “Don’t make another mistake on that mistake, fix it.”

  Liam closed his eyes, leaning his head forward. He rested against her, feeling a tightness across his shoulders fade away. Being near her made his head spin slightly but he remained focused. Fuck up? Fix it. But don’t make a new mistake. He sighed, quietly.

  “We need to win the war,” he said.“And we need to win the peace.” He drew his head back. “The problem isn’t security checks.”

  Mary nodded down to him.

  Liam bit his lip. His hand found and squeezed Mary’s hand. She smiled down at him. Liam looked to the side, still thinking. His thoughts skittered away from Tethis and security checks. Think bigger. Don’t just make a new mistake. He visualized Purgatory, and visualized the locations of the Aesir and their cities. He could see them as if they were on a map floating before him.

  The cloud bank.

  The coast, covered.

  The destruction of irrigation in the Aesir interior.

  “He’s going to attack Olimurias,” he said, quietly.

  Mary frowned.

  Liam looked up at her. “Take Wotan, box in the cities. Where does he go now? North? To the Pesedjeti cities along the Barrier mountains? South? To the Hellenic league?” he shook his head. “No. Take Olimurias and you have the smartest people in Purgatory.” He stood, his hands squeezing Mary’s other hands. “And that’s where we can end this.”

  Mary nodded.

  “And if we can end this, then...” he sighed. “Then we can fix it.”

  In the silence that stretched between them, there was a crackle of gunfire. And for the first time since Tethis’ death, Liam didn’t smile at the sound of it. He was too busy realizing just how close he was standing to Mary. The red-skinned girl was so beautiful. Touching her made Liam’s skin feel warmer and warmer. She breathed in, and that tiny motion drew his attention to the tight straps of her nun’s outfit, firm across her breasts.

  He had seen those breasts being squeezed and cupped by scaled hands.

  He had seen those black lips, fastened around red lizard-cock.

  He had seen her sex, spreading and wanting and eager.

  “Liam...” Mary whispered.

  Liam leaned in.

  “W-We...”

  The door to the room banged open.

  “Sir, sir, I was going through Tethis’ papers and-”

  Vani stopped as she looked at Mary and Liam. Mary was standing by the window, looking out of it, seeming to be quite fascinated with the bustling city of Babylon. Liam, meanwhile, was at his desk, scribbling notes on a piece of paper. Vani blinked slightly, then shook herself. She walked forward.

  “-and I’ve been, ah, deciphering her notes.”

  “Yes?” Liam asked. Vani seemed relieved as she looked into his eyes. Liam wondered how terrifying he had looked over the past few days. He put that thought aside as Vani set a piece of paper down. She had filled it with diagrams in her own hand.

  “Tethis was working on several spells. Uh, not just ways to use hardened crystal, but some healing spells that I can’t make heads nor tails of. But this?” She tapped. “She was studying teleport shrines.”

  “Well, I knew that,” Liam said, his brow furrowing confusion.

  “No,” Vani said, her eyes glinting. “That’s just it. She knew how to operate them.”

  Liam blinked.

  Then it clicked.

  “Oh son of a bitch,” he whispered.

  “What?” Mary asked.

  “Vani, I want you to tell every scribe to start rooting through the city. I need every adventurer's journal, every record of archaeological expeditions, every piece of scholarly research we have on the shrines of the Ancients.” He tapped at the desk. “And I need you to get every wizard we have who isn’t going with the army to research how to replicate what Tethis did.”

  Vani whistled slowly. “I’m just an alchemist, so I’m no specialist. But...” She shook her head. “It’s possible that we might not crack this. According to her journal, she never managed to teach anyone else.”

  “She was one of a kind,” Liam said. “But if she can do it, you can.”

  “Well, uh, again, just an alchemist-”

  “Someone can!” Liam shook his head, laughing. It was a brittle laugh. But it was still a laugh. “Get to work, Vani.” He turned to Mary. “Mary, I’m going to need you to ride herd here. The Cross Guard are heading for Olimurias.”

  “What about Meg?”

  “The valks?” Liam shook his head. “If they come, send them to Olimurias. If they don’t, then...” he paused. “Tell Meg that I didn’t have a choice.”

  ***

  Meg’s wings ached but it was the pleasant ache that came from a good afternoon of flying. Part of her was irritated, though. She hadn’t been flying enough recently. Short hops and combat was one thing, but endurance flying took regular practice. She beat her wings again, then snapped them out and caught a thermal as she looked down over the jungles.

  It had taken her three days to cross the Basilisk Desert, stopping at oases that were easy to spot from the air. She had hunted with a sling and slept at night after jilling herself to sleep.

  She couldn’t help it.

  She missed Liam so fucking much, it was like a physical pain.

  She knew he missed her the same way. But Liam could, at the very least, distract himself. There were enough fine ladies in the palace and Babylon for him to forget her. Well, not forget her. Miss her less. Meg snapped her teeth, as if she were a bird with a beak.

  That didn’t help the fact she’d miss it. There was nothing quite like that exquisite moment of seeing another woman’s eyes light up when they saw him taking off his kilt. It let her re-live her moment of meeting Liam.

  The moment, well…

  Her life actually started.

  No, that was fucking stupid. She shook her head.

  Then, suddenly, her eyes narrowed and she focused in on a tiny glint of white. It was one of the valkyrie markers, designed to be easily spotted from the air but entirely unintelligible to groundlings. She beat her wings and followed the direction, swooping down, then banking to a stop.

  She had landed before an open clearing.

  Standing there were the valkyrie. There were easily five hundred of them. They went without bronze armor or weapons. Lumps of crystal knapped into swords, chunks worked into wooden branches to make axes. Maces of stone. Most, though, looked deadly enough with their bare hands and their slings.

  Meg smiled. It felt good to be around so many of her own people – even if the sneering condescension would…

  The valk leader – a tall, blond fellow – stepped to the side. A familiar tall, blond fellow. But before Meg could think about that, she noticed who was behind him.

  Meg’s wings flared and she tensed to leap.

  Nulldarts thudded into her chest and she stumbled backwards.

  Fizit smirked as she stood over her.

  “Teleport shrines are really useful, you know,” she said, her clawed foot resting on Meg’s throat.

  ***

  Vulkis rapped his knuckles on the wall leading into the hospital ward.

  “Come in!”

  The voice sounded faintly familiar. Vulkis’ brow furrowed as he stepped around the doorframe.

  Neb Mataare smiled at him as her glowing palm drew away from Eerika’s shoulder. The Aesir wom
an looked, as she always did, mildly pissed off. But the arrow had been barbed, and the time it took to limp back to port had allowed infection to sink in. The other crew who had been injured were in similar states, and this – plus the need to repair the ships – had kept Vulkis in Olimurias longer than he wanted.

  There were merchants to raid, enemies to sink…

  Women to woo.

  That’s just because you’re looking at Neb, Vulkis chided himself.

  Liam had told stories of Neb but those stories didn’t hold a candle to the reality. She was a curvy woman, with full, out-thrust breasts and a large bushy tail, which complimented her heart-shaped rump perfectly. Her muzzle was long and dainty, and her ears came to two narrow tips, both of them perked up as she looked at Vulkis. Being Chosen by Anubis meant that she had taken after the Pesedjeti god of death.

  Vulkis wondered how the Coptic dead got any rest if they shared an afterlife with people like her.

  “Vulkis Shieldbreaker, yes?” she asked, her voice delicate and educated sounding. She reached up to adjust the strange pair of glass rectangles contained in a wooden frame that rested on her snout. Vulkis had never seen such a device before and he wondered what they were for.

  “Yes!” Vulkis puffed up his chest, then bowed low. “And you must be Neb Mataare. The tales of your beauty barely do it justice.”

  “Ugh, shoot me again,” Eerika groaned.

  “You should be able to get up and leave in a few hours,” Neb said. “Just let the healing magic burn the last of the blood fever from you.” She shook her head, then looked back at Vulkis. Her eyes darted over his body. She looked curious. “You are the one who has been hitting back against those horrible lizardmen?”

  “I did lead the flotilla, yes,” Vulkis said, smiling.

  “How can I ever thank you?” Neb asked, her ears twitching. “I heard what those things did to Odin and Thor – the idea is just...” She shook her head. “And poor Sif!”

  Vulkis paused. “Well, I can think of but one way a woman like you can thank me-”

  “Oh, uh, I... actually...” Neb stammered.

  “Allow me to take you to dinner,” Vulkis continued hurriedly.