City of the Dead

by Vasily Mahanenko

  A surprised gasp rippled around the workshop as soon as the ladder disappeared, further accentuating the legend of the great warrior. Tailyn’s guardian couldn’t be bothered with him—he’d spent the previous three days locked up in his palace letting nobody inside. Everything was perfect, which made Motar’s order that much more frustrating. Still, he left the city. Sitting around was getting on his nerves, and he wanted to cheer himself up.

  “Remember what the boss said?” the guard at the gate asked.

  “Yes, gather my herbs and come right back. When the new herbalist shows up, she’ll need them,” Tailyn replied. Rumor had it that Master Isor had written the baron and asked for someone to step in for Mistress Valanil. The replacement for the woman who’d been kidnapped by the lixes was supposedly going to be showing up shortly.

  “Good, just don’t go far. The god only knows where that lix is hiding.” The guard peered out at the area surrounding the gate, doing his best to spot their foe. Needless to say, it was nowhere to be found.

  For two whole days, Tailyn followed Motar’s instructions to the letter, gathering flowers right by the city walls. Surprisingly enough, there were plenty of them—there were lots of herbalists in the city, though none dared venture outside it. A level three lix was an excellent reason to call in sick and spend a few days at home. At first, Tailyn shared their concern, constantly looking around and keeping his electric strike card clutched in one hand. But nothing happened, and the anxiety gradually subsided. Tekhor’s squad continually patrolled the surroundings in a fruitless attempt to find the last beast. Quite possibly, it really had run off back home. People slowly began leaving the city and getting to work. The first few headed out, then whole groups left, and finally, Motar was forced to lift all restrictions and call off the hunt. The lix was assumed to have run off.

  Tailyn’s two days of work resulted in 112 daisies, 87 lavender flowers, and plenty of sideways glances from the other herbalists. And as soon as the quarantine was lifted, the boy headed straight into the ancient city. He was accompanied by a veritable crowd of boys looking for their first stone, with adults and a few guards standing somewhat farther off. Just in case.

  But nobody had any desire to venture any deeper into the city. The boys, looking around nervously and expecting the evil monster to come leaping out from behind every rock, grabbed a stone and dashed back to the safety of the adults. Meanwhile, Tailyn “accidentally” ducked behind some ruins, waited for everything to die down, made sure everyone had headed back without noticing he’d gone missing, and then headed higherup. He was on his way to the hole.

  It took the boy a few hours to reach his destination. Never in his wildest dreams would he have imagined that there could be so many loaches growing in the city of the ancients. And since there was no way he could leave the loot just lying there on the ground, by the time he got to the hole, he had 94 flowers in his inventory. If he could find an alchemical lab somewhere, he was finally ready to make elixirs. But where was he going to find one of those in a border town?

  Everything was as quiet by the hole as it was in the rest of the dead city. Materializing his ladder, Tailyn rubbed the nape of his neck—he hadn’t thought about how he was going to get the enormous piece of equipment down below. It weighed quite a bit, almost as much as the boy himself. And he didn’t just have to get it down into the hole; feeding it into the opening meant getting it almost vertical. Tailyn wasn’t sure if he was strong enough for that.

  He needed help, but he also knew asking an adult for it would have led to some awkward questions. The god had made it clear that nobody was supposed to know about the mission, so that wasn’t an option. Tailyn was going to have to figure something out himself.

  But how? His first thought was to head back to the city, stop by the temple, and entreat the god to unlock strength for him. It was a required skill for guards, miners, blacksmiths, and everyone else who had heavy things to lift as part of their job, but the question was what Master Forian would say. The last thing Tailyn wanted was to upset his tutor. He’d already lost the ring, and he didn’t want to lose his spot next to the mage, too.

  Suddenly, he realized what to do. As he was going through his inventory, his gaze fell on the rope. Eureka! He could tie one end of it to the ladder, pull the end up, and drop it down into the cave. Then, when he needed the ladder back, he could just pull the rope up. The plan was a good one.

  Tailyn loved the idea he’d come up with, and he didn’t even bother to look around. Tying one end of the rope around his waist, he tied the other to a rung, hauled the other edge to the hole, and lifted his side with a heavy grunt. The ladder’s own weight began pulling it down into the hole. Slowly at first, it began picking up speed, and the boy barely had time to let go of the rung before it yanked him into the hole. The ladder was vertical.

  Proud of his own ingenuity, Tailyn gripped the rope. It was plenty long enough to make sure the long wooden ladder didn’t pull him in. Standing on the edge, he began pulling it back up, the going easy before it tightened. It was time to pull up the ladder. And Tailyn already knew how he was going to do that. There was a small tree growing nearby, and wrapping the rope around it a few times the way construction workers did when they were erecting buildings would take some of the load off.

  Tailyn began stepping slowly away from the edge, keeping the rope tight, when something happened that he wasn’t prepared for. The ladder began slipping farther in, and the boy was pulled toward the hole. Letting go, Tailyn watched as the rope slithered farther and farther away. What was going on? And then, he looked down at himself and blanched. He’d tied the rope around himself. Fingers shaking, he tried to untie the knot, but it was too late—the rope was all the way underground, and he was being hauled along with it. The boy fought back for a little while, gripping the rocks around him, but it was like someone was yanking away down below. Finally, Tailyn flew head-first over the edge with a loud scream. The impact of hitting the earthen incline just about wiped out his shield and knocked the wind out of him. His head spun, stars danced in front of him, he had a hard time breathing, and a darkness gradually slipped over him.

  Ka-Do-Gir, a level three lix and commander of one of the many squads assigned to the Culmart raid, was hovering over the boy. He recognized him immediately—the boy was the one who’d used the magic that had helped the city wipe out almost the entire first wave and necessitated the second. Drool formed. The lix hadn’t eaten in five days, and his inner animal was doing battle with his rational side. The former demanded meat, the food that would buy it another couple days. But he also knew that killing the boy right then would just postpone his own death. If they could come to an agreement, on the other hand, he had a shot at surviving despite the broken hind legs that were causing so much pain. He snarled. Without food, he couldn’t heal itself, and his inner animal was starting to get the upper hand. But it was right then that the string bean in front of him opened his eyes.

  The impenetrable darkness Tailyn found himself in was filled with an unbearable stench. Grimacing, he opened his eyes slightly only to have them widen when he saw the drooling lix standing menacingly over him. The throaty growl and bared teeth boded nothing good, and the boy froze as motionless as one of the many statues in the god’s temple. Only his wildly beating heart spoke to the fact that he was still in the land of the living.

  His foe’s behavior very nearly snapped the tenuous reins Ka-Do-Gir was using to keep his inner animal under control. The latter sensed prey, sensed its prey’s fear. It longed to feast on the boy, and it took an unearthly feat of will for the lix to regain control. He wasn’t some digital beast. No, he was a commander. And even though his troops were all dead, that didn’t change his status or rank. Doing his best not to frighten the boy, he retreated, still ready to leap forward the moment he saw a magic card. The child wasn’t a threat without it. With it, on the other hand, Ka-Do-Gir was a goner. And it couldn’t let that happen.

  Tailyn’s brain was overwhe
lmed with fear. He’d already reconciled himself to the fact that he was going to die, said goodbye to his friends and mentor, cursed the day he’d gotten the stupid mission, regretted ever being born… Eventually his thoughts began running in circles until he realized something: he was still live. Not only that, but the lix had backed off. Its growl was still just as menacing, only something about it suddenly didn’t seem as terrifying. A thought crossed his mind—the creature wanted to defeat him in battle like a true warrior.

  Ka-Do-Gir sensed the changes in the boy at once. Really, even little mages like that couldn’t stay scared for long, and that left the most important part. They had to figure out how to communicate. The lix wasn’t a tutor and couldn’t give Tailyn the linguist skill. On the other hand, there was a way around that, and it wasn’t even far off. The lix had spent the five days he’d had been in the cave going over it backwards and forwards in search of a way out, and he’d found something interesting on the other side of some debris. He could sense a crystal they could dig out and use to teach the skill to the boy. Just as long as the latter didn’t pull out his card. If he did that, it was all over.

  As he prepared himself mentally for the final battle, Tailyn pulled himself to his feet. The most important thing he’d learned from Motar is that warriors did their best not to die without a fight. If you did put up a fight, you got to go somewhere nice after you died, even if nobody knew exactly where that was. But everyone did know that it was for those who died well. And it was a great place. The fear gripped his body, and his legs were weak, but the boy was able to straighten up and even look around. The ladder was lying not far away. The rope was being gripped tightly by the lix, as it had apparently pulled the boy down. His virtual inventory appeared in front of him; the lix stepped forward, fangs bared. It obviously didn’t like what Tailyn had in mind.

  Ka-Do-Gir knew all too well what it meant when a mage’s gaze went slightly blank. Their clan’s wizard did the exact same thing when it was reaching into the god’s storage. While the boy had been unconscious, the lix had checked all his pockets, not finding a single card. And that was why he tensed up when the boy’s eyes lost focus—while he didn’t have much strength left, he did have enough for one last attack.

  A sixth sense told the boy that if he materialized one of his cards, the battle would be over before it ever began. He wouldn’t get a second chance. But while the odd lix didn’t attack, he could keep himself alive, and that meant he was going to have to get by without his cards. Somehow, just making that decision gave him a kind of confidence. He stared over at the lix, the latter getting less and less aggressive as time went on. In fact, as soon as he decided not to materialize his cards, his foe calmed down. That was interesting. Apparently, he didn’t want to kill Tailyn in battle.

  The lix let out a sigh of relief when the mage decided against using his cards, apparently figuring out that he wouldn’t live long enough, regardless. Despite his age, the boy turned out to be able to use his head. Ka-Do-Gir even appreciated the chance to work with such a threatening enemy, and so he pulled himself up on his front legs to head over to the embankment on the right. The crystal was right behind it. The mage would presumably figure out what to do—he had to.

  Tailyn practically stopped breathing when the lix got up and crawled off to the side. Its hind legs turned out to be broken, most likely, from the fall. Of course, the baron’s guards might have had something to do with that, too. The lix made it over to the embankment a few snarls later and began scratching at the soil with its claws. It worked pretty well, especially given the fact that the embankment was blocking off one of the passages. Then, stopping for a moment, the lix gestured for the boy to join it. The motion couldn’t have been more humanlike, in fact. Tailyn’s eyebrows shot up when he realized what the creature wanted—it was digging a hole through, and it needed help. But that was impossible. Lixes were dumb animal bereft of reason, and there one was trying to accomplish complex tasks. It snarled again, that time a bit angrier, and pointed at the soil one more time. Looking over at the ladder, his way out just a few steps away, he went over and dumped it into his virtual storage to make sure nothing happened to it. Then, he decided to materialize the shovel and pick. As long as the lix wanted him to dig, the shovel was going to make the job much easier.

  Ka-Do-Gir started crawling over to the mage, though he realized he was going to be too late. He’d let down his guard and waited until his opponent was too far away. Apparently, the hunger and broken legs were taking their toll—that was a mistake he never would have made before. But he wasn’t about to give up. If he was going to die, he was going to die fighting, though he froze a few steps away from the mage. The boy wasn’t materializing his cards. Instead, two items the lix recognized appeared in his hands. The prisoners the lixes had in their camps used similar devices to dig up the soil, making them nearly as productive as the lixes themselves even without claws and steel arms. Ka-Do-Gir stopped near the boy, his tongue dangling from his mouth. His strength was running out, his inner animal was taking over, and all he wanted to do was enjoy some meat and forget himself for a while. That would have bought him a couple days he could have used to think something up. Just then, his nose picked up the delicious smell of food. His consciousness faded completely. Opening his maw wide, he spent his last bit of energy to rush forward and latch his teeth into the pliant flesh. Fried, juicy, delicious, life-giving flesh.

  As his pick and shovel materialized, Tailyn suddenly felt his stomach growl. The last time he’d eaten had been that morning in the city. Then, there had been the hike, hiding from everyone else, the hole… It had been quite a while, and his stomach was making that abundantly clear. The boy noticed the lix creeping closer as he materialized the food. Suddenly, it hit him that the creature has smelled the fried meat, and with enough to last him the week, Tailyn decided to share. The adults always scared the kids with stories about how lixes only knew how to kill and eat, but meeting one face to face had already shown the boy that not all their stories were true. And since he knew he wasn’t going to be able to get the ladder up on his own, the boy decided to share a bit of food with his adversary. He had plenty of it, after all. The lix came over; the boy tossed some roast goose on the ground. He wasn’t going to feed it, of course. The hungry creature threw itself at the meat, looking awfully animalistic in that moment, crunching through bone and flesh alike before swallowing without bothering to chew. Apparently, it had spent the previous five days with nothing to eat. Tailyn looked down at the piece in his hand and tossed it over to the creature, too.

  The boy was no longer even thinking about his cards.

  Reason returned slowly, unwillingly to Ka-Do-Gir. The pleasant heaviness in his stomach reminded him yet again that he wasn’t getting out of the cave without the mage. Meanwhile, his hind legs began to tingle—the restoration process was kicking in. Six hours, and he’d be as good as new, maybe even good enough to dig himself a hole out. Maybe.

  Sniffing slightly, the lix quickly opened his eyes to see another piece of roast meat lying not far from him. His mouth watered as his front paws shot out to grab the food. Powerful jaws crunched through the thin bones, and the lix turned to look at the mage. He was sitting a little farther off, alive and well. And judging by the chewing motion his jaw was making, he was eating, as well. He noticed that the lix had come to and pointed at the ground. Ka-Do-Gir gathered himself to pounce on his opponent, but he looked around at the moment to see…water? Yes, it really was water. Forgetting everything else, the creature dashed over to the life-giving liquid. Lixes could live without food for three weeks; they could only live for one without water. And his week was almost up.

  Tailyn watched the terrifying monster lap down the water, and he was reminded for some reason of the neighbor’s dog. It was dumb, unpleasant, and a biter, only liking its mistress because she fed it choice meat. The same was true there—the more time he spent with the lix, the less he worried for his life. If the monster had wanted to kil
l him, it would have done that long before, back when he’d been lying there unconscious. And the fact that he was still alive meant the creature needed something from him. Really, that was so intriguing that the fear began to be replaced by intrigue. Nobody was going to believe him when he got back to Culmart.

  Grabbing his pick and shovel, Tailyn went over to the embankment blocking the passageway. The lix had clearly wanted to dig there, and that was fine with the boy. He wasn’t sure which way the control room was. He wasn’t even sure what the control room was in the first place. And so, why not start in that direction? Rearing back, the boy brought the pick down on the stone, knocking off an enormous piece. The packed earth meant it was going to take him quite a while. A couple minutes later, the lix joined him, growling and heading up to the very top, up by the stone ceiling. It barked at Tailyn and gestured for him to join it.

  The boy shrugged, headed up, and got to work on the stone. There wasn’t much light filtering down through the hole, so Tailyn decided to materialize his torches. No longer growling, the lix just watched him, though the boy froze once he had two torches in his hands. He hadn’t thought about where he was going to get the fire. But that was when the lix stepped in. Grabbing one of the torches, it slashed its claws across some stones, eliciting sparks it caught with the tar. Tailyn’s mouth gaped in amazement. It was impossible, absolutely unthinkable. The enemy of humankind jabbed the flickering torch into the soil on its side, gesturing for Tailyn to do the same on his. The boy lit his torch and followed suit. With much more light to work with, the pair built a system—Tailyn hacked away; the lix dragged off what the boy had knocked free. They quickly found themselves a meter deep. Just then, Tailyn realized what his foe had been thinking, as the soil up there was looser. There were fewer rocks and steel rods, too.