“I guess not. But it probably means we can’t really be friends.”
“Perhaps not close ones. Still, I don’t know enough about the meaning of the word to say we can’t be like friends, if that makes sense.”
Looking up at me with a tilt of its head, a befuddled Lormevar said, “I don’t think it does.”
Swearing I saw a nascent grin on the corner of its mouth, I cracked a small smile of my own. “Aye, I guess it doesn’t.”
It chuckled, followed quickly by a burst of tears. I sat by the tortured creature. Lormevar leaned into my shoulder and clung on to me like a child to its parent.
“Don’t die, Mercer… I w-want to see Orda.”
I wrapped my arm around its shoulders. “You will.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
We neared the brim of the White Wastes a couple of hours before sunrise. We followed it westward until the signs above and below indicated we needed to descend to find a place to land. According to the maps, there was plenty of open space to fit a dozen airships on the ground in the southern Villa. The trick was learning whether Lucian persuaded his allies to defend the area out in the bleakness. An impossible detail to see from so high up. Fortunately, I had the means to find out. I sheathed my shotgun into the holster at my back and put on the shoulder-belt containing its shells.
An awful chill burst into the hull when I opened the door. After freezing my lungs with a deeper inhale, I stepped out of the airship. With about half a minute between me and the ground, I wasted no time in summoning Aranath. He dove for a few seconds before he traced our link to the point he could line his back to me, poor visibility or not. I grabbed the saddle’s horn and pulled myself to a seating position. Once secured, the dragon spread his wings halfway to reduce the steepness of his dive.
Squinting less harshly now, I saw how a squat mountain range became a natural barrier to the encroachment of the huge glacial wall that stretched endlessly north. The tail end of the range drifted southeast for a couple of miles before dwindling to nothing. In the land between the drooping tail and the ice wall, the Villa’s various buildings lied. The area directly north of the tail worked well as an ambush point, for going too far east from the range’s conclusion led to a hilly, rocky region unsuitable for stress-free trekking on foot, landing airships, or setting train tracks.
I had Aranath fly nearer and over the last bit of mountain. Sure enough, I began to see roaming black dots on the gray ground. A lot of black dots. Why were they moving so wildly? Were those flashes of light coming from spell and gunfire?
“What’s going on?!” I asked my mount.
“Fiends. They appear to be attacking humans who have barricaded themselves behind rock walls.”
Humans? Lucian’s allies? Or someone trying to reclaim the Villa from him? Whatever the situation, I said, “Try clearing all the fiends you can! Leave the humans alone if they don’t attack us!”
Tucking in his wings, the dragon set out on the attack. The night-reaping radiances from his dragon breath presented a clearer view of the battle. The surviving humans were within two elevated rings of rock. A third ring seemed to have been breached, since nothing sane stirred within it. Going by the dozens of lifeless bodies strewn about, we had arrived well into the middle of the battle. Much of those bodies and the rings lied near a broad two story structure of brick and metal built up against the ice wall.
To get any information about the survivor’s souls, I gripped Lormevar’s hilt when Aranath happened to fly close to them. However, the sword told me nothing. Figuring we still might be too far and flying too fast to confirm whether their souls were hexed or not, I stopped myself from concluding one way or the other. I thus kept Aranath a comfortable distance away from the rings, especially since emphatic gunshots affirmed they were not yet defenseless.
For an unknown reason, the two hundred or so fiends failed to include any of their winged brethren, making it easy to burn them to ash from the sky. With their numbers rapidly shrinking, and the cumulative streaks of molten ground encouraging it, the fiends scattered. To give the prearranged signal to the airship, Aranath seared a giant circle on the ground south of the battle. Then, rather than use costly dragon fire on the stragglers, Aranath landed on the ground to crush several fiends beneath claw and tail.
Waiting for the bloated sky-boat to descend reintroduced the cold back into my bones. Switching to my corruption helped, but stepping near the heat coming off the scorched streaks on the ground provided greater relief. We stood a thousand yards away from the rock rings, but a dragon’s adjusted eyes saw them well, so Aranath would be aware of any movement made by the survivors. I also kept an eye on the other buildings in the Villa, though from the ground they looked farther away than being in the sky first implied.
Many of the airship passengers eventually made their way to me. I unsummoned the dragon and informed the group of the humans in the rings. The strategy to avoid being shot at was for earth casters to rise walls of rock to hide behind before moving forward and taking cover behind the next uplifted rock. In this way we dashed closer and closer to the survivors.
Getting within effortless shouting range, I looked through one of the slits in the rock wall and said, “You guys work for Lucian?!”
“I doubt he’s alive to pay us!”
“Don’t give a fuck if he is alive! Get me out of here!”
Lormevar continued to not sense any hex. As the enchantment stated previously, its spell was not good at forcing others to kill by way of a direct order. Coin handled that job well enough.
“Get out of the rings and toss your weapons away!”
Part of the rings tumbled away to allow eight men to amble over and through the fiend corpses. They threw their weapons toward us. Another direction by me had them turning around and getting on their knees, hands behind their backs. Krewen soldiers next patted them down.
With everything turning out fine, I stepped out from behind the wall and went up in front of the mercenary line. “Anyone want to tell us what happened here?”
“What does it look like, genius? Ghouls attacked us!”
“But from where, dumbass?” asked Felicia. “Are there more?”
“There might be more in the ice mill. I guess that’s where they came from, but I don’t know for sure. We just had to bail out quick.”
“Why was Lucian here?” I asked.
“We’re not paid to ask questions.”
“He has to be hiding out here,” answered another. “I figured he was scared of the ghoul brothers and Vanguard chasing after him. I thought they were responsible for the ghouls.”
“Well, one of the ghoul brothers just saved your asses,” said Isabel. “Where’s your boss?”
“Never saw him make it out here. Must still be in the mill.”
I asked a few krewen to escort the survivors back to the airship. A couple of them were then to go visit the other buildings to check for any Villa workers who did not have the sense or ability to leave this place. The rest of us made for the mill, which no lightbulb or fire illuminated. Reaching the open front door, several pyromancers began to spark their fireballs to life, but as I told Alex to take point, I assured them the initial darkness would work in our favor.
We entered a spacious room filled with stacked and varisized boxes and barrels. I threw in an explosive stone and ignited it in midair. Fiends somewhere within the dark maze screeched and hissed. Snarling legs scurried our way. Prepared for that, Alex put a stop to the mindless charge of three four-legged shapes when they entered the range of his spell. He and I wanted to test our newfangled weapons, so we pointed our shotguns at the heads of the wailing, malformed hounds. A tap of the trigger resulted in the fiend’s quavering head exploding into uncountable pieces. The hot, rancid blood and inner flesh immediately manifested in our nostrils.
In this manner we investigated the mill. Not a fast way to sweep the decent-sized construction, but relatively safe. The adjacent storage area had the windows at the
back wall shattered and the large double doors busted down somehow, making it the most likely place the fiends forced their way into the mill. While the night made it difficult to see too far in, a huge tunnel entrance gouged into the glacier a few yards away was too noticeable a feature to miss.
The unhampered flash from my explosive stones or the straighter beams of a flashlight sometimes revealed scamps clinging to the walls or ceiling. Gunfire either killed them outright or forced them down nearer Alex. Our group’s size shrank on occasion so we could get a watch looking out from the windows. We didn’t want to find ourselves surrounded from the outside if more fiends cascaded out from other buildings or tunnels in the Villa. Likewise, watchers went in areas with stairs leading to the second floor or the basement, where inhuman and inkrewen noises self-confessed the presence of the enemy.
Getting to the first floor’s western side showed us a lot more examples of fiend and mercenary parts being fed upon. A hallway crowded with the dead particularly hinted at something, or someone, important lying within its rooms. A locked metal door at the end further strengthen that theory. Dragon fire burning through the door’s handle unlocked it. My hand pushed open the door, giving access to Alex’s spell.
“Got anyone?” I asked my brother.
“Yeah, but they’re not struggling or anything. I think they’re unconscious.”
Confident in his assertion, I let Isabel’s fireball pass into the room. In the corner sat a slumped Lucian. Alex went up to take away the rifle on his lap. Doing so dropped his right arm from his armpit. That arm ended in a stump wrapped in a bloody rag, not a hand.
Bregman went up to check the pulse at Lucian’s neck. “Very weak.”
Looking at her fireball, I said, “Wake him up, Isabel.”
“Gladly.”
She lowered her flame to Lucian’s right knee. Its controlled burn destroyed the thick fabric to get to his skin. A couple of baking seconds got Lucian to pull in his legs and emit a lamenting shout. Isabel removed the flame from his leg and grew the bolide to provide a good light source. Lucian tried blocking the light with his nonexistent hand, but on seeing it gone, he moaned and squirmed.
I crouched and put my hand on Lormevar’s hilt so it could listen. After giving him a merciful moment to understand his plight, I asked, “What’s going on here, Lucian?”
A garbled chuckle. He tucked his stump under his armpit. In a pained whisper, he said, “Congratulations, d-dragon knight. It’s b-been determined that D-Dretkeshna has outlasted her usefulness.”
“Did you determine it?”
Another chuckle. “If things were still up to me… if they’ve ever been… I would be in my warm house, eating warm food, and burying my dick in warm pussy for the rest of my life.”
“Then who is it up to? The soulless man?”
A raised eyebrow. “Soulless? Hmm… maybe so. There’s nothing behind those eyes, not even when he chopped off my hand.”
“Why’d he do that?”
He hung his head. “There’s no godsdamn point anymore… Hurry up and kill me. Get your pitiful little revenge.”
I removed my hand from the hilt. “We will. We’ll even do it quickly if you answer all my questions. If you don’t, well, we’ll find out how many times you can be knifed and flayed by flame before death finally claims you.”
After a moment without any kind of answer coming from Lucian, I nodded at Bregman. The Vanguard aimed his boot on the scald Isabel applied. The stomp persisted as Lucian screamed in pathetic anguish. His yelps reminded me of the dogs and wolves I beat to death back in the fighting pit. Bregman grabbed his hair to get a better view of Lucian’s agony.
Through clenched teeth, Lucian cried, “Fuck! Fine! Fine! Get the fuck off!”
Bregman stopped the torture after another few obscenities yapped by Lucian.
“I take it having people do whatever you want all your life doesn’t make for a man of resolve,” I said, my hand reconnecting with the hilt. “This soulless man, who is he? Why’d he chop off your hand?”
Through chattering teeth and heavy breaths, the viscount said, “My hand… embedded within the palm… it had the vlimphite I needed to weave the sword’s magic… I guess I outlasted my usefulness too.”
“What’s so special about this vlimphite? What kind of prana is in it?”
“Don’t know… All I know is I wanted what my grandfather had… and I needed to find more of this special vlimphite to keep it.”
“How do you find it?”
“I can’t f-find shit. A machine in my factory does it… Somehow it knows what v-v-vlim… what vlimphite ores are special and which are not… All I and my family have done is make sure our workers cut out the special vlimphite right and send it here.”
“Why here?”
“Silver made it his home. The s-soulless man. It’s he who decides what to do with each new crystal…” An ugly sneer twisted his lips and cheeks. “I do know what he saved some of them for…”
“Get on with it, shithead” said Felicia. “Unless you want to know how many teeth I can kick out of your cock-sucking mouth.”
“Hmph… Mercer, right?”
“Aye.”
His paler and paler head had a hard time not sagging by this point. “If I knew t-trying t-to kill you would lead to this… I would have… helped you get off this w-world instead.”
“You would’ve also needed to get a lot more people off this world if you really wanted to get rid of me. Now, what have some of the special crystals been saved up for?”
A gunshot sidetracked us all. Along with additional gunfire, I then heard krewen shouting something, but it didn’t become clear until the delivered message was shouted by someone within the hall, who exclaimed, “Ghouls from the glacier tunnel!”
“What are the crystals saved up for, Lucian!?”
A long, grisly sigh. “Before my hand was c-cut off, I activated a rune in the glacier. I know it links with others across the edge of the W-Wastes. Weaving that single spell dropped great barriers of ice… Armies of g-ghouls can now cross the Wastes at will.”
“How?” asked Bregman. “Even ghouls freeze out in the Wastes.”
“But not b-b-beneath its surface. Did you not… hear? They are coming from the tunnel.”
“Impossible!” said Ishree. “They would still need to cross a sea!”
“We already know he works with turncoats and hallions,” I said. “The Rathmore family provided ships and manpower, right?”
“An ancient agreement… For centuries we’ve been t-tunneling through the ice. Several have b-been f-finished for decades. Activating the runes have thawed the last remaining ice… The ghouls you’ve seen are but a small taste. Thousands already live within the tunnels. More will come. They will f-flood t-the north in the coming d-days.”
“Son of a bitch!” said Bregman. He lifted Lucian’s head by his hair, whose eyes could no longer return the glimmer of the firelight. “All this for some godsdamn crystals!?”
“Don’t you get it? Grenhath only exists for these c-crystals. As soon as they ran out, so would our time have come… But now that my family’s sword can no longer keeps you in line, there… there is no need to keep Grenhath away from the ghouls…”
“We have to try destroying-”
Isabel was interrupted by an unmistakable aura entering our perception.
“Ahh, she’s returned,” said the weariest man in any realm. “I believe you killed her child, d-dragon knight.” A smirk formed as his head hung. “Good luck.”
I moved my hand away from Lormevar. “Kill him, Bregman. Let’s get out of here.”
“Aren’t we going to try and block the entrance?” asked Isabel.
Walking out the room, I answered, “I’d love to, but unless I can get the time to let Aranath burn down all the tunnel he can, a higher fiend can clear some fallen ice away in hours. It’s not worth risking our lives.”
Bregman pulled the trigger of his revolver.
“H
e’s right,” said Svren. “And we can’t risk the airship being attacked. It’s an easy target.”
No one said anything else against leaving, so we ran through the lumpy floor to get to the exit as quickly as we could. The krewen soldiers had raised bars and hurdles of rock to obstruct the first floor windows and doors at the back while still allowing bullet and spell through. However, with the mill not wholly against the glacier wall, even fiends without the guidance of a hallion would only have to scramble around or climb the building to find easier access. And since we had not yet cleared the second floor, there was a lot of stamping and screeching coming from the invigorated monsters above us.
We reached the storage space to order everyone to retreat. Two threshers slammed into the rock barriers that took the place of the smashed doors. The rock held firm, but to lighten their load, I put a dragon stone to work. As a stream of dragon fire burned off a thresher’s face, I felt a vibration in the ground and air. The fiends in the tunnel shrieked as something invisible tossed them aside. That obscure attack smashed into the elevated rock, pulverizing much of it into a pebbled hailstorm. It blew out my flame, especially with my body and mind focusing on bracing themselves.
The rock, though largely destroyed, served to reduce the impact the air blast had on me, for I was able to take the brunt of it while remaining on my feet. The fiends were quick to clamber back to their feet. Hurrying to get to the brink of the tunnel, I sheathed my shotgun and pulled out two dragon stones.
“I’ll hold them back for as long as I can! Everyone get out!”
Not taking any chances, I bestowed a little of the crystal’s dragon prana into the two flames erupting from the front of both palms. Diminished control came by using the draconic prana to feed the torrential attack, but I didn’t really need control at the moment. The crazed creatures who came in direct contact barely had time to know they were being vaporized. The crystal could allow me to keep the spell going for about half a minute. Nevertheless, the indomitable corruption deeper in the glacier told the living fiends to press on.
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