I sighed a cloud of frost into the chilly air. "I'm sorry I didn't listen to you."
"Huh? What about?"
I frowned. "About quitting this quest and going to Tungaant with you and Karalti. We're going to lose. I don't know if we could ever win."
"Then we lose." Suri shrugged. "At least we've upped the odds."
“I wish I could reload a checkpoint or something.” I chewed my bread and cheese with a scowl. Even the rationed army cheese in Archemi was delicious, but I was so anxious that eating anything felt like a chore. “I was a loser my whole life. I want to win for once.”
“Can’t win ‘em all. Besides, you’re the one who thinks that life is a game. You telling me you weren’t any good at playing games like this one?”
“Most of my videogame experience was with antiques,” I admitted. “I collected games from my grandparent’s era. Didn’t play PVP, because I hated it. I can beat most single-player games on Hard Mode, but I wasn't ever going to make a top-ten scoreboard on an MMO or an FPS. Not like Baldr."
"No idea what those are, but you're a good soldier. You survived a war. I’d call that a success."
I shook my head. “I didn’t survive it. It just killed me at home instead of some Indonesian hellhole. Now I’m in a different hellhole, doing the same old shit, and it’s just as pointless and miserable as the first time around.”
She shrugged. “Not that pointless if you or me becomes Voivode. And that’s looking increasingly likely.”
“I'm not cut out to be a Voivode, Suri. I'm not cut out to rule anyone. I'm not ambitious enough." I gestured out in the direction of the battlefield. “I know how to build a bunch of funky traps, but don’t know anything about running a magically powered Napoleonic-era economy.”
"Which means you’ll probably be pretty good at it," Suri replied. "Because you feel the responsibility. Unlike Baldr, you're not some war-happy, overly ambitious cunt who treats life like it's a game where he has to score all the points. In Baldr’s way of thinking, everyone except him is a loser. The people whose lives are in his hands are all losers. He's at the top of the scoreboard. Who gives a fuck about anyone else?"
As I listened, I began to fume. "I know he thinks that way. But he's not here."
"Right, so, if we give up now, Ignas is going to have to deal with this mess, and then crazy dev-possessed Baldr is gonna overrun Vlachia and we'll be on the run. He's gonna come here, plunder Lahati's Tomb, find Matir's Dragon Gate and fuck it in the arse because he wants to win." Suri paused to take a drink of milk. "And if he does, everyone else loses. Me, you, everyone. Forever."
"He may already have a Dragon Gate," I said. "We don't know. I had a vision of him fighting this big-ass monster in front of something that looked like one. That was my last major contact with Matir. He hasn't said anything to me since then, except to update my quest."
"What did he say?"
"Just one word. ‘Hurry’."
Suri scowled. "Sounds like he’s gettin’ weaker. The Gates are supposed to seal him up, right? If the Demon’s using his power to raise this army of his, he has to be losing strength."
She had a point there. Matir had manifested in front of me the first time, altered the game and thrown his weight around. Everything since then had been more subtle. "You could be right. That would explain why the Caul is getting weaker, too."
"Right? And if he gets too weak, the Caul is fucked and then we don't have to just worry about Baldr. We'd have to worry about the Drachan." Suri pointed up at the sky. "You haven't won every battle in your life, have you? If we lose here, we rally somewhere else."
"You're right, as always." I offered my arm out to her. "Castellans are basically fancy bouncers, aren't they?"
"Pretty much." She leaned in.
"Then you should be the Voivodzina, and I should be the Castellan." I pulled her into a side-hug. "That way we get to do what we're both good at."
"Yeah, no. I'm too tired for that shit." She laughed.
"Seriously, though - you'd be a great leader," I said. "You ARE a great leader. You pretty much have it all: you're smart, you're authoritative, you're sexy..."
Suri looped her other arm around my shoulders, putting herself between me and the edge of the ramparts. "And YOU need to go look in a mirror and say that about yourself some time."
She leaned in to kiss me, and I felt the stiff muscles of my back loosen. When we pulled apart, some of the bad head noise had cleared.
I smiled, stroking a lock of fiery hair from her cheek. "We've come a long way since we met at the morgue."
"Yeah. Still surrounded by corpses, though." She smiled back. “I was a real grumpy cunt back then, wasn't I?”
"You still are." I glanced to either side to make sure no one was looking, then pressed my thigh in up between hers until she gasped. "But I'm pretty sure I know how to turn that grumpy frown upside down and make it-"
"Ahem." There was a cough from behind us and up.
Suri jumped. I turned to look back, and saw Vash squatting on a small buttress overhead, his pipe clamped in the corner of his mouth.
He drew a deep, dignified lungful of smoke. “Much as I would love to watch the two of you keep necking like a pair of doves, I was wondering if I could steal Dragozin for half an hour or so to discuss training and troop movements?”
"Sure." I cleared my throat and stepped back. "I'll see you at the meeting tonight."
"And after." With a smoldering look, Suri strode off, putting a little extra bump into her hip on the way to the staircase.
Vash hopped lightly to the ground and stood up, all the while watching the exact same thing that I was. “She’s a fine woman.”
“She is.” I nodded. “I was thinking about… After all this is over. You know.”
“No, I do not know. I can’t read your mind any more than you can read mine.”
I shrugged, almost too embarrassed to say it. “You were joking when you told me that if I didn’t marry her, then you would. But I’m starting to think I might ask her to… uhh… become the Voivodzina. For real.”
“To marry you?” Vash snorted, exhaling a cloud of smoke. “She’ll say no. And you shouldn’t ask.”
“What?” I bristled. “Why? She loves me, I love her-”
“And you’re tittering in love like a teenager. Even if she were to say yes, you’d be happy for all of six weeks before the relationship suffocates and collapses.” Vash exhaled his pipe smoke with an exasperated huff.
I scowled. “It’s been nearly a month, and we haven’t fought once.”
“A month? That’s all. Burna’s balls.” He rolled his eyes. “Definitely not. Wise people wait to see if the person they love is someone they can properly argue with. Then they marry, and they fall in love with that person over and over again.”
With a grimace, I turned to look at the battlefield. “You’re a monk.”
“So?”
“What would you know about being married?”
“My parents,” he replied. “They were an excellent couple, and madly in love. But they were an arranged marriage to start with. My mother already had another husband; my father married up into her clan. It took them time to get to know each other.”
That took me aback for a second, until I recalled some of my racial information: Tuun clans had matrilineal inheritance. “You always in the business of telling people how they feel?”
“Only when I know what I’m talking about.” Vash looked off toward the clouds, his expression wistful. “A month is nothing. Dragozin. Live with her in close quarters for another six, and if you make it that long, I’ll officiate it myself. There’s also your dragon to consider.”
“Karalti? Nah, we’re okay. We sorted that out. She understands that I love Suri and her in different ways.”
Vash gave a non-committal shrug. “She won’t be your young ward forever. Nor will you be her guardian.”
“She’s like my kid, man. She’ll find her partners, I’ll have mine. That
’s how it’s supposed to be.”
“I don’t know you well enough to have this discussion yet… but perhaps one day after this is all over, I’ll attempt to break through that thick skull of yours.” He scratched his cheek, a wry, disbelieving smile playing at the corner of his mouth.
“What?” I glared up at him. “Spit it out. Mayne I’ll surprise you again.”
He snorted. “All I will say on the matter is that once Suri discovers her ambition, things may change.”
Her ambition? It was one of the things I liked about Suri, the fact she was so proactive. I shrugged. “I guess we’ll see.”
“Indeed.”
We lapsed into a comfortable silence as we walked. It crossed my mind to ask him about his ‘kinslayer’ remark a few days before, but that probably wasn’t polite. I tried coming at it from a more neutral angle. “So… you said all Baru had to survive a usually-fatal illness, right? What did you survive?”
“I said a disease, or a great injury.” He drew on his pipe and exhaled, swinging around a corner and gliding down a flight of stairs.
“What was it for you?” I followed him down. “Your face?”
“Fairly obvious, isn’t it?”
“I dunno, man. I can’t read your mind. You don’t have to tell me if you can’t.”
“Then I won’t.” He glanced sharply over one shoulder. “Though I never said the injuries or illness had to be of the flesh.”
Chapter 44
The horns began to sound in the middle of the night. Because of course.
“Okay. Here we go.” I stood up from the table in the War Room, nearly knocking over the miniatures we'd been using to rehearse the battle. Istvan looked up from his book, ears pricked. Vash startled up from where he'd been snoring face-down on the table and wiped his mouth. Suri calmly finished buffing her sword and got to her feet.
"Ready?" I gave each of them a nod in turn, lingering on Suri.
“Always, Your Grace.” Istvan bowed from the neck.
“Today’s the day I complete my zombie hand puppet collection.” Vash banged his ironclad fists together. “The Nine themselves couldn’t stop me.”
Suri chuckled, flashing sharp teeth. She came to me, and pressed a dry, chaste kiss against my cheek. "Good luck. Don't die."
My mouth went dry. “You either.”
"What are you two so anxious about? Death is merely a discomfort for your kind." Istvan gave us a wan smile as he joined Vash and clapped him on the shoulder. "We will be at our positions, as will the others. May Solnetsi catch you in her wings should you fall."
"Indeed. Burna marladik, my children." Vash made a sign of benediction with one hand. "Now let’s go and whup some soggy undead ass."
We ran outside to find the Fort in a state of barely controlled panic, as noisy as it had been the first day we arrived. There were barely six thousand soldiers left, enough to fill the transports moored at the Skydock. Troops ran to their positions. Makeshift elevators transported the bravest of the brave to the battlefield: the riflemen who would man the third line of defense.
As we rushed up to the walls, two of the great Hussar-class warships and their Bathory-class escort sailed over the wall, their engines blasting a steady roar over the wail of horns, the shouts of soldiers, the creaking of wood. Catapults were wheeled into place. The sailors turned on searchlights and rushed to arm cannons, fuel shields, and prepare to bomb the shit out of the Napathu when they reached the field. I watched the ships: the dark-hulled Arpad split to the west with three flanking ships; the elegant Novara, which carried Admiral Gehlan, went to the center with six escorts.
“Karalti! To me!” I jumped to catch a wall, got a grip, then jumped up onto the crenellations above.
Karalti's trumpeting roar pierced all other sounds as she dove out of the sky, invisible until she passed through the beam of one of the searchlights. She made a pass in front of the soldiers descending to the ground, and cheers went up - intensifying as she dipped a wing and I leaped out. I caught onto the saddle like Spider-Man, waving to the whistling soldiers as we flew back around and up, where we got our first look at the army of the dead.
Monstrous. It was the only word for it. Zombies poured in from the shattered treeline like a carpet of ants, an unending tsunami of bloated bodies. Skeletons lurched, sprinted and stumbled behind the black wave of putrefaction, rats swarming around their feet. First came the fear – then the cold certainty of my training. Adrenaline had barely begun to make my heart pound when the strange battlefield calm descended over me. I gripped the haft of the Spear, straightening my spine until it was as hard as the hot metal in my hand. The weapon’s seams of red light intensified, and the blade flickered with a corona of scarlet fire.
Players couldn’t normally P.M most NPCs, but the Mass Combat window had a special channel that enabled communication with your officers. I set up my management windows in multiple virtual screens, locked them in view, and watched as the horde massed toward the first line of defenses. I took note of where everyone was. Suri and Vash were at the top of the Central Wall, stationed with the artillery. Istvan was at the Skydock with Zediwitz, staging the final evacuation. Rin and Viktor were in position at the dam. The zombies were closing in every second, nearly within range of the cannons. Six hundred feet… five hundred. “Fire at will.”
“OPEN FIRE!” The cry went up and down the Line behind us.
The front line of cannons exploded like a Mexican wave. The bitter odor of gunpowder stung my nose, and the air dragged at Karalti’s wings as their payloads exploded past us, striking the mob heading for the abatis line. The cannonballs sprayed into the endless mass of undead, blowing bloody furrows through the horde. Unfazed, more zombies flowed into the gaps left by their crushed comrades. The second line of cannons blew seconds after the first, sending more bodies flying into the air. I gripped the edge of Karalti’s saddle, watching intently as the zombies began to pile against the abatises, where their straight line broke and started to blob. As soon as the crowding reached critical mass and the first zombies began to push and climb the phalanx line of trees, I messaged Suri. “OPEN CATAPULTS!”
The trebuchets groaned as the counterweights swung, whipping out huge balls of flaming pitch across the field and smashing them right into the blobs of zombies who had gotten trapped by the trees. The squeals of burning vermin punctuated the battlefield din as the oil on the mud caught fire. Flames spread like a living thing, feeding hungrily on the mass of greasy struggling flesh. But just as before, more undead flowed in to fill the gaps, charging heedlessly across the field. The abatises were being shoved aside by the sheer number of bodies, zombies flowing through them like a liquid… and then tumbling heedlessly into the deep oil-filled trench just behind.
“Archers ready. Rifles ready. Lighting first trench in five seconds. Copy all.” Suri patched through.
“H and K copy.”
Karalti broke her hover to swoop back and down, flying back toward the Line. I clenched my jaw as the archers on the wall lifted their bows, aimed, and fired.
A cloud of flaming arrows lit the sky, arching and then raining down over the fragmenting barricades. Despite the fire, zombies and skeletons were now charging in over their crushed and impaled brethren. Cannonfire was keeping them at bay, pushing them back onto the oil-soaked mound just as the flaming arrows landed and set the entire trench ablaze. The first wave of undead became one enormous pyre as the oil and kerosene ignited. Zombies lost their forward momentum: a crush was building at the back as they stumbled head-long into the crematorium that consumed their vanguard. The piles of zombies belched black smoke into the sky - and as their fellows climbed over them anyway, explosions began to rocket across the field. Flaming corpse parts were blown everywhere, and the trench line collapsed completely as huge craters opened up in the mud.
“Woo-hoo barbeque!” I punched the edge of the saddle. “Okay, Tidbit - let’s do this!”
Karalti beat her wings as she reared up and let out a cr
y of challenge. The fire, explosions, and the sheer mass of the ongoing pile-up was turning the enemy back against itself. But no matter how many stumbled to their knees, burning, thirty more seemed to replace them. We joined with the 2nd Company Dragoons, and as we swept out over the field, the central part of the first barricade collapsed and a metric fuckton of [Skeleton Swordsmen] poured into the kill zone.
“How’s the evac going back there?” I patched to Istvan.
“Smoothly for now. Morale is good, but there is a lot of fear,” he replied. “We have five ships loaded, three in transit.”
“Good. Rin, how’s the dam looking?”
“It’s ready to blow!” She replied. “I’m starting to think we can do this! (o^-')b”
The zombies and rats had been the vanguard - the real army was following behind, and there were some units we hadn’t seen before. Undead dogs, thousands of them, eyeless, their gaping maws drooling green-tinged foam. A line of T.rex lumbered through the trees, swinging their heads to clear their path. They crushed friend and foe alike under their huge feet on their way toward the second trench line. Behind them rode shrieking double-line of [Lalassu Chargers], spectral warriors galloping their ghostly hookwings between and around the dinosaurs like a tidal wave of deadly mist.
“Fuck!” I quickly input my orders to the Dragoons on the menu and used the HUD to highlight the wraith cavalry. “Suri, see those wraiths?”
“Vash is advising us how to handle the spooks. He says magic.” Suri replied.
“2nd Company RB Maegi, protect infantry flanks from the ghosts!” Karalti broadcast.
The quazi knights obeyed, splitting into three: the two wings carrying battle mages moved to flank the oncoming specters as they charged straight through the next line of barricades as if they weren’t there. The Lalassu Chargers leveled glowing incorporeal lances at the infantry behind the final line. The soldiers were desperately firing on them, but neither guns or arrows did any damage. Panic was starting to take hold.
Archemi Online Chronicles Boxset Page 120
