by Dante King
Fang rumbled out a low growl, as if to agree.
“I … I see, yes, I’m sorry Vance, I didn’t mean to insult you like that,” Yumo-Rezu said, looking uncharacteristically sheepish.
“Apologize to him too,” I said sternly, pointing to Fang. “He might not be a dragon, but he’s been the best damn mount a warrior could hope for, and he’s been by my side right from the beginning, and for far longer than you have.”
“I’m … I’m sorry Fang,” she said.
I gave a satisfied nod; Yumo-Rezu’s goddess side seemed a little haughty, and while I had bonded with her, she would have to understand that I wouldn’t allow her to treat me or my minions in that manner.
I sent Fang off toward the ocean, then turned to face Luminescent Spires, which was looming before us, blotting out the gray sky like a vast mountain or volcano. We must have looked like three tiny ants, sent to infiltrate a gigantic enemy anthill.
And infiltrate it we would.
As we got closer, we were able to see more details. The city walls were a hundred feet tall. Archers and crossbowmen were stationed every few feet along the entirety of the fortifications. There would be no scaling those walls; any attempt to do so would get you turned into an arrow-riddled pincushion in seconds.
The enormous oaken gates of the city were barred shut, and a huge press of commoners and peasants were waiting outside. Many had carts filled with produce from the nearby fields, but others looked like beggars.
“The gates will open at dawn,” I said. “Let’s get up closer and observe for a while.”
The city walls were surrounded by a broad, deep moat, and the only way across was the huge stone bridge in front of the gates, where the crowd of farmers, peasants, and beggars was waiting. Beyond the moat was open grassland. The only way to approach the city without looking suspicious was to join the throng of people on the broad dirt track that led from the farmland to the city gates.
“We’re going to stick out like sore thumbs in that bunch,” Yumo-Rezu said.
“We need to get closer,” Friya said, “but the moment we get within sight of the guards and the soldiers on the walls, they’ll raise the alarm.”
I shook my head. “There’s no need for concern. I’ll be able to get right up to the gates without anyone knowing I’m there.”
“How?” Friya asked.
“Like this,” I answered, closing my eyes.
I searched for the presence of death, and was immediately confronted by a vast amount of it, all concentrated in the center of Luminescent Spires. There were more fresh human corpses there than on a battlefield; the scale of the slaughter was scarcely comprehendible. I now knew without a doubt that the Blood Pyramid lay below the city, and that Elandriel had been keeping himself busy sacrificing people in their thousands while I’d been in Yeng. This did not bode well. He and the Blood God were stronger than I could have imagined, and it would take all of my power to defeat them.
Human death, however, was not what I was looking for right now. No, the corpses I was seeking out were far smaller and more inconspicuous, and I quickly found exactly what I’d been looking for: a dead rat. There were plenty of them around, of course, but I picked one out that had died quite recently. This fresh corpse hadn’t yet begun to rot and stink in earnest. With a tiny spark of my life force, I resurrected the little creature. Its glazed-over eyes shone with a bright yellow-green glow while its stiff rigor mortis body softened and flexed with a new and unnatural vitality.
I snapped my fingers, and it sprang to its feet, scuttling out from under the bush where it had died and zipping over to us. Yumo-Rezu saw it coming, shrieked, and jumped into my arms. I had to laugh; rats were the last thing I’d imagined the mighty Dragon Goddess would fear.
“Get that filthy little thing away from me!” she yelled.
Friya chuckled and knelt down, putting out her hand. I directed the undead rat to scuttle onto her palm, and she picked it up and stroked it, cooing over the tiny undead beast.
Yumo-Rezu’s face wrinkled with disgust and loathing. “Ugh, that’s revolting!” she spat. “Just send it on its way and get it away from us!”
“They are very intelligent creatures, and can be quite affectionate as pets,” Friya said. “I kept some as pets when I was little.”
“This one isn’t a pet, though,” I said. With a simple mental command from me, the rat scurried down her arm, side, and leg onto the ground. “He’s a perfect little spy, my eyes and ears to find out what’s going on at the city gates. Look, they’re opening now; he’d best be on his way.”
The red sun was just rising over the distant eastern hills. A mile away, the massive oaken city gates were groaning as teams of oxen within the city walls cranked the huge system of pulleys, gears, and wheels that opened the gates. People were now shoving and jostling in the crowd that were eager to get into the city.
“Off you go, little buddy,” I said as I sent the rat scuttling on its way.
There were plenty of live rats around, and the peasants and beggars were used to them, so nobody noticed or cared about one more rat on the road. If they’d looked a little closer at this one, they would have seen its unnaturally bright green eyes … but who ever took a moment to examine rats and their eyes? My undead rat soon arrived at the city gates, which were now open. I closed my eyes and flung part of my spirit into the rat, experiencing the world through its senses.
Human beings now looked like Frost Giants, even little children, and I felt smaller and more vulnerable than I ever had in my life. One wrong step on the part of a careless person, and I’d be squished like a bug. However, my vision was sharp and my hearing and sense of smell were impressively accurate.
I scuttled through the crowd and found a small shrub near the gate where I could hide out and observe the guards and the crowd, and not get trampled or run over by an ox cart. There were dozens of heavily-armored guards inside and outside the gates, while above the gates, crossbowmen lined people up in their sights, their fingers on the triggers of their crossbows. The guards were certainly expecting trouble, and were ready to react with lethal force at the slightest hint of it.
Guards with spears formed a barrier in front of the crowd, and they were only letting a few people through at a time.
“Farmers first!” the head guard yelled. “If you’re bringing produce for the market, get to the front. Everyone else, make way and let them through or you’ll get a good clobbering. Move, make way!”
Through the rat’s eyes, I watched as a gnarled old peasant farmer pulling a handcart full of cabbages pushed his way through to the front of the crowd. The head guard interrogated him while two other guards got busy with stabbing their spears repeatedly through the load of cabbages in the cart. Anyone who might have been hoping to sneak into the city hiding under a pile of cabbages or tomatoes in a cart was going to end up skewered.
They eventually let the old man and his cabbages through, then repeated the procedure with the next cart, which was filled with potatoes and manned by a chubby middle-aged peasant couple. During the interrogation and produce-stabbing, I turned my rat’s attention to the beggars gathered in a packed throng behind the farmers and peasants, and listened to their conversation.
“I can’t bloody believe we’ve been locked out of the city for a week now,” one toothless beggar muttered. “How does that prick Elandriel expect us to survive outside the city walls?! What does he think we can eat out here? Grass and dead rats?”
“They have to let us in today,” said another beggar, a hunch-backed cripple. “And the bastards have to feed us today too! It’s Saint Suncred’s Moon! The Church has to bloody well let us in and feed us!”
“What’s going on there?” Yumo-Rezu’s voice broke my concentration, and I pulled my spirit out of the rat and back into my body.
“They’re checking every cart that comes into the city, and the gate’s heavily guarded. We could take them, of course, but there are thousands more troops inside the city. But
I think there’s a way we can get in without anyone noticing us.”
“How?”
“I heard one of the beggars say that it’s Saint Suncred’s Moon today,” I answered.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“It’s a Church of Light doctrine,” I said. “Once every lunar cycle, on the day of the dead moon, the Church is required to feed the poor and beggars for free, in honor of some old asshole called Saint Suncred. It’s become a very important tradition, especially here in Luminescent Spires. If the Church refuses to do this, they’ll have full-scale riots on their hands. And from what I could hear, the poor and the beggars have been without food for a week now, so tensions are high. I think they’ll let the beggars in once they’ve finished checking the farmers and their carts.”
“So we’re going to disguise ourselves as beggars to get in?”
It was then that the words of Elandriel’s prophecy sprang back into my mind. I would end up in the rags of a beggar on the streets of Luminescent Spires, he had said with such venomous spite and scorn all those years ago. And his prophecy was about to come true, but not in the way he had thought. I would indeed walk the streets of Luminescent Spires dressed in a beggar’s rags, but under this disguise, I would be a vengeful god, here with the sole purpose of destroying him and his Blood God.
“Damn right we’re disguising ourselves as beggars.” I slowly clenched my fist with grim determination.
“How?” Friya asked.
“It would be a lot easier if I had the Beauty Mirror,” I answered, “but deception and the art of disguise were some of the things I was trained extensively in when I studied under the great assassin masters. There’s a fine art to it, but I haven’t forgotten my lessons. First, we need to get ourselves some rags; that’ll be the easy part. When it comes to acting, you’ll have to follow my lead. Just do what I do, and we’ll all get through.”
The first order of business was finding some rags to wear. This proved easy enough, for many peasants had not yet awoken, and plenty of them had left washing out to dry overnight. I headed over to a group of peasant houses that lay within a stone’s throw of the city walls and crept through the huts, snatching garments off lines. Soon, I had gathered enough clothes for myself and the two women. I also took a few blankets; these would be needed for the disguises too.
“Before we put these on, we need to make them look as filthy and ragged as possible,” I said, “so stomp them in the dirt, rip holes in them, tear the stitching out. Just beat the shit out of these clothes until they look just like beggars’ rags.”
We got busy, and soon enough, the clothes had been beaten into a state that made them look as if they’d been worn by some street urchin for a few years without being changed.
“Put them on, ladies. Let’s see how you look.”
We pulled the rags over our armor, then the hoods over our faces to shroud our features in shadow.
“Convincing, but we’re not there yet,” I said to Friya and Yumo-Rezu as I looked them up and down. It was plain to see that beneath the rags were two sexy women with killer bodies, and I suspected that I looked like a muscular warrior despite my grubby rags. “This is what the blankets are for.”
We took off the rags, and I bundled the blankets up and tied them to various body parts. Now, when we put the rags on, the bundled blankets beneath them made it look as if we had grotesque deformities and hunchbacks.
“There’s one last thing I need to do,” I said, “one finishing touch to complete the illusion.”
I drew on the Death energy beneath the ground, pulling the stench of putrid, rotting flesh from the decaying corpses and imbuing the rags we wore with it. Now, the rags smelled utterly vile, and we could convincingly come across as diseased, revolting beggars.
“Ugh, this stink could make a maggot gag!” Yumo-Rezu gasped, on the verge of retching. “It won’t stick to us when we take these horrible rags off, will it?”
“The Death magic is bound to the rags,” I said. “Once we toss them aside, the stink will stay with them, and we’ll smell as fresh as roses, trust me. Now that we look the part, it’s time to act the part—and here, as crazy as it might seem, subtlety is our enemy. Contrary to what common sense might tell you, sometimes the best way to be inconspicuous is to actually draw attention to yourself.”
“Are you sure about that?” Friya raised an eyebrow. “I’m confident that we can fight our way out of whatever trouble we might get ourselves into, but you said yourself that stealth rather than brute force should be our priority for this mission.”
“Friya, I was an assassin long before I was a necromancer or a god, and I was a damn good one too. One of the best in Prand. Trust me when I say I know what I’m doing. Let’s go join the crowd of beggars out there by the gates.”
Both women seemed quite uncertain about doing this, but they nonetheless obeyed. Short of charging in with our weapons drawn and magical powers blazing, there wasn’t any other way into the city.
“Give yourselves a good limp and hobble when you walk,” I said as we emerged from the cover of the bushes and stepped onto the dirt road “You ever seen a beggar with a healthy stride?”
I set an example for them to follow by putting on a pronounced limp, stepping heavily with my right foot while dragging the left behind it, as if I was lame. I took a few hobbling steps like this, then looked over my shoulder to see how the women were doing. Both of them had put on convincing limps.
“That’s good,” I said. “Keep it consistent though. Don’t switch legs or change to a different kind of limp. You’d be surprised how easily even average people pick up something like that. Memorize the limp you’re using now, because you’re going to have to use it consistently until we’re deep inside Luminescent Spires.”
“I think I’ve got mine down,” Friya said, hobbling along quite convincingly.
“Me too.” Yumo-Rezu put on a staggering, lurching limp.
“Talk to yourselves too,” I said. “Not a loud jabbering, but a good constant stream of muttering. Feel free to throw in a good few coughing fits. The sort of pox-cough that sounds as if you’re about to hack up an entire lung.”
Soon, we were all limping and staggering along, muttering to ourselves and breaking out into horrendous fits of coughing. The women were doing an even better job than I could have hoped for, but the real test was still to come. We reached the back of the crowd of beggars and penniless peasants, and I stopped the two of them and whispered some more advice to them.
“Remember, seasoned, street-hardened beggars are neither quiet, polite nor civil. Shove people out of your way, grab and fight for anything that looks like even a scrap of food, and feel free to scream insults at people and spit at them. Again, follow my lead here.”
I turned around and began shoving through the crowd. The magical stench of our rags made even the dirtiest beggars’ noses wrinkle with disgust, and I didn’t have to do too much pushing or shoving for people to move out of the way and let us move toward the front of the crowd. When I’d reached the first few ranks of beggars, who were tightly pressed in a reeking mass against the guards’ fence of spears, I decided it was time to ramp things up.
Tensions were already running high. Since this was Saint Suncred’s Moon, and the poor had evidently been starved for at least a week, the crowd of beggars was like a tinder pile, just waiting for the right spark to set them ablaze and trigger a riot.
“Let us in, you goat fuckin’ bastards!” I roared at the guards, adding a hoarse rasp to my voice and putting on a perfect crude commoner’s accent. “We ain’t had nothin’ to eat for a bleedin’ week. By the Lord of fuckin’ Light, it’s fuckin’ Saint Suncred’s Moon! If you pricks don’t let us in, there’ll be hell to pay, there will!”
“Shut your trap you foul-smelling piece of shit, or we’ll skewer you on a spear and roast you for your filthy friends to eat!” the head guard yelled.
“You can skewer me, but you can’t stab all of us, ya troll co
ck!” I yelled back hoarsely. “There’s a lot more of us than there are of them. Isn’t that fuckin’ right, everyone?!”
A good number of beggars and peasants yelled out their agreement. Inside the shadows of my reeking hood, I grinned. I could taste a riot brewing.
“You’d better shut your mouth, you scum, or I’ll have your corpse hanging in a crow’s cage at the crossroads before the end of today!” the head guard yelled back. “Guards, seize that rancid fellow!”
“I’d rather die on the end of a spear now than endure any more fuckin’ starvation!” I roared defiantly. “Maybe I’ll take a few of you pricks with me, eh? Come on, kill us then! But we’ll take more than a few of you down with us, won’t we lads?!”
Now the beggars’ shouts of agreement were filled with a lot more hostility and aggression. The crowd surged forward, and people were now yelling their own angry insults at the guards.
“It’s Saint Suncred’s Moon, you shit-eaters!” someone yelled behind me. “Never in the history of Luminescent Spires have the poor been locked out of the city on a day of Saint Suncred’s Moon, never! How dare you bleedin’ well lock us out. We’re starving, and our bleedin’ kids are starving too! Let us in, you fuckers, fuckin’ well let us in!”
“We’re all dying slow, horrible deaths!” Friya shouted just behind me, caught up in the contagious spirit of the growing riot. “I’d rather die on the end of a spear, fighting these evil bastards, than die a slow death of starvation like a trapped rat in a cage!”
The crowd roared their agreement with this sentiment, and the booming cry rolled through their ranks like a peal of thunder.
“Kill the guards! Storm the gates!” someone yelled from the back.
“They can’t kill us all! We can take ‘em!” someone else screamed.
“The nobles and merchants inside the walls are all sitting inside their cozy homes sucking juicy meat off the bones and dippin’ their fuckin’ bread in gravy while they leave us to starve out here!” an old man in the middle of the crowd shouted. “And on Saint Suncred’s Moon, too. It’s not just a disgrace, it’s criminal, it is. We won’t stand for it, we won’t fuckin’ stand for it any longer!”
