Before the dark thoughts could overwhelm me, I narrowed my eyes and studied Vulkan Keep’s defenses from the air. If Baldr attacked, he wasn’t going to have an easy time of it. There were multiple rings, starting with the bridge over the canyon valley that served as a moat. Then there was the barbican, a fortified gatehouse which led to a kill zone separated from the main castle by another gatehouse, the only way through the outer curtain wall. The wall was partly built into and camouflaged by the obsidian stone of Mount Racosul, the huge dormant volcano that loomed over Taltos below. There was the outer bailey just behind that, a crescent-shaped open space where most of the ancillary buildings used to manage the Keep were located. The inner bailey was built more directly into the enormous natural cave structure behind the castle, which sheltered the keep from aerial attack – an important feature for fortified positions in Archemi. The volcano concealed the strongly fortified living quarters and defensive elements under the direct command of the Volod. The Parade Ground, on the other side of the mountain, was pretty much the only open area and was outside the main walls. Flanking towers were embedded to either side of the inner bailey, the patrolling guards concealed by crenellations along the walls and reinforced caverns from above. Vulkan Keep wasn’t some whimsical Elvish relic. It was ugly and blocky, but it had been built to be impregnable, not pretty. So far, so good.
The War Room was on the top floor of the donjon, the highest tower of the keep. Like the Eye of Sauron, you could stand on the balcony that was shielded above and in front, and look out over the Keep, the parade ground, and the switchback road that ran down the mountain across a fast, icy river and ended at the gates of Taltos far below.
Karalti soared down in an elegant arc to land on the edge of the balcony. When she had her balance, she flipped her wings, folding them neatly against her flanks, and hopped down to the broad catwalk.
“Are you alright?” I unbuckled myself from the saddle, but didn’t slide down.
“No.” Her normally girlish, chirpy voice was uncommonly serious. “But… Do you think…?”
She trailed off, tail lashing, and flattened her crests down against her skull.
“Do I think what?”
The little dragon shook her head, restlessly flexing her killing claws against the stone. “Do you… do you think… my mom is still alive?”
I felt a pang behind my ribs that had nothing to do with the lingering ache from Lucien’s swords. “I don’t know.”
“I never got to meet her.” Karalti began to pluck at the edge of the wall with her dexterous hands, picking at the seams between stones. “My blood tells me that I have to meet her, at least once. If I don’t…”
She trailed off again, hissing softly with frustration.
“If you don’t meet her, what happens?” I asked.
“I tried to command my brothers before. I told them to leave. They should have listened to me.” Karalti replied. “We are blood-kin, and I am their Queen. They should have obeyed me. But there was nothing. It was like… they didn’t recognize me.”
“That’s because they’re Stranged, Tidbit.” I swung my leg over to sit side-saddle, bracing my heel against her wing shoulder. “They’re fucked up from whatever cheats Baldr used to make them level so fast. You can’t expect them to act normally.”
“No. That’s not what I mean.” She darted her head back and forth, then turned around to pace. “My mother has something that she must give me. If I’d been allowed to hatch properly with her, I ‘d be able to command them, Stranged or not. I can see her when I close my eyes sometimes. She gives me something from her mouth and passes the mantle of Queenship to me.”
I frowned. There was a lot about dragonkind I didn’t know, given my strange start in Archemi. “If you’re having visions of her, I’d like to say she’s alive. She probably has to be careful how she contacts you.”
“Do you… do you think she loves me?” Karalti craned her head around to look back. “Be proud of me?”
I reached out and chucked her cheek. “There’s no way she couldn’t love you, Tidbit.”
Karalti’s luminous eyes searched mine, and her horns lifted a little. “What… what is she like? Is she smart and beautiful? She must be, if she has so many males courting her.”
For once, I didn’t want to tell Karalti the truth. Not all of it, anyway. Her mother was obese and sickly, chained deep in the bowels of the Eyrie just as she’d been her entire life. I shuddered to think how she was being treated now, after helping me escape. But despite it all, she had preserved some dignity, the spirit and the will to fight on. Karalti was living proof of her courage, and her power.
I fixed my dragon with a steely glare. “She never got to live the kind of life you have. But your mom’s a fighter, and she’s super smart. If she’s alive, the thing that’s keeping her going is knowing that you’re fat, dumb and happy. And free.”
“Yeah. I guess.” The dragon looked down. “You know, I’m happy that I’m getting bigger, because it means you can fly with me and I can protect you better. But sometimes, I still feel really small.”
The fierceness burning inside me melted a little at her expression. “It wasn’t that long ago that I used to carry you around, huh?”
Karalti’s horns lifted more, and she pressed her muzzle against my hand, eyes wide and trusting. “I miss it sometimes.”
“Me too. But there’s never any point in wishing you were something you were in the past, right?” My smile widened, but then froze as a yellow side-quest notification flashed in the corner of my eye. I pulled it over to have a look, and my eyebrows shot up when my narrator read it out for me:
New Quest: The Queen’s Mantle
Karalti has experienced a vision of her mother gifting her with access to the Path of Royalty, the Path which unlocks a Queen dragon’s ability to command and lead other dragons. To understand more, you will need to read and research the Solonkratsu, Archemi’s native dragon species.
Reward: EXP, new Path options, Bonus Ability Points.
My guts churned. The reward was good, but that paragraph contained two of a dyslexic’s least favorite words: ‘read’ and ‘research’.
“Are we going to rescue my brothers?” Karalti asked. “And my mom?”
“I hope so. I mean… yeah, we will. Someday. One way or another, we’ll sort it out once we’re strong enough.” Nervously, I accepted the quest and added it to my ever-growing queue. “Maybe Suri can help.”
Karalti rumbled. “I don’t want her help.”
I slid down to land lightly on the wall, then sprung down to the walkway. “We need her strength, Tidbit. The Eyrie is a big place, and when the time comes, we’ll need everyone we can get. That’s a long way off, though. We’re nowhere near powerful enough.”
Karalti spread her wings, letting them ripple in the wind. “Fine, but I’m not running away again, ever. If I see Lucien and Violetta, I’ll burn them to ashes for what they did to my brothers.”
“No, you won’t. You’ll fly back here as fast as you fucking can,” I said.
She turned to glare at me, snorting steam. “Why?”
“I just said it. We’re not strong enough yet.” I held her gaze. “Not by half. You did the Bioscan. You know as well as I do that they’re way, way too OP for us to handle yet.”
“That’s why you kill the humans. They’re weaker.”
“You don’t know that.” I scowled. “If Lucien is anything over Level 20, he could survive a direct hit of your breath weapon, assuming you could hit him. And he is. His ‘glancing blow’ wrecked my magic armor and nearly killed me.”
The dragon hissed, dancing from foot to foot. “I want to fight!”
“Look,” I said. “Just accept that we’re not there yet, okay? You’re Level 8. I’m still only Level 16. Believe me, you’re not the only one who’s frustrated.”
The dragon’s eyes narrowed as she turned her flank to me, tail lashing. “Ugh, whatever. I’m going hunting.”
“Okay. But you’re going to hunt game,” I said. “Don’t pick a cow or goat or some tame dinosaur off the Volod’s land. Challenge yourself. And stay in touch with me while you’re out, okay? I’m worried the Freak Squad’s still hanging around.”
“I’ll hunt where I please. You can have opinions about humans, but you leave being a dragon to me.” Karalti tossed her head impetuously and dove off the side of the castle like a kingfisher before she swept into the air: lean, hungry, and terribly, defiantly young.
Chapter 4
About ten minutes later, the five of us – me, Suri, Rin, Ebisa and Ignas – were gathered around a great mahogany table in the Royal War Room. The room was still laid out for the meeting he’d had with his advisors earlier in the day, and there were two maps to consider. The first was a huge seven-by-nine-foot map of Vlachia, which hung on the far wall behind Ignas’ royal seat and was marked up with twine and pins. The other was the three-dimensional map of Myszno on the table in front of us.
I’d quickly realized two things. The first was that Vlachia was frickin’ enormous: a million square kilometers of forbidding mountains, frigid taiga, dry steppe and desert. Despite these variations in terrain, nationality and language, it had just twelve provinces. A late-Medieval nation of this size and cohesion couldn’t have existed in the real world, but Vlachia had one thing Earth hadn’t obtained until the 1940s: air power. The territory had been forged by dragons, and was now maintained by airships.
The second thing I noticed about the situation was that we’d seriously underestimated our vampire problem.
The province of Myszno took up about a tenth of Vlachia’s total area, contained within a weird-looking ring of mountains. These mountains were extreme in terms of both height and climate, but that hadn’t stopped the vampire’s army from marching through a narrow, treacherous pass across the border from the south. Three months later, and they’d gone and turned the south-western corridor into a 2500-square-mile goat rodeo, taking over four counties and putting them to the sword. Those counties were some of the most heavily settled regions in the province. Hundreds of thousands of lives had been lost, with every viable corpse reanimated and added to the ranks of the undead. It was a Clusterfuck. Capital C, capital Fuck.
The others in the room seemed to have reached the same conclusion. Rin was staring at the diorama with a confused, wandering expression. Suri worried her bottom lip with her teeth, frowning as she considered the field of purple toothpick ribbons marking out where the horde had overrun the province. Ebisa waited behind her mask, as silent and grim as a graveyard angel. Ignas sipped a glass of amber beer and waited expectantly for our opinions.
Finally, I gestured at the map and slumped back in my chair. “Well, Your Majesty... with all due respect, on a scale of One to Fucked, Myszno is bent over a barrel and Big Dick Bubba is standing right behind it with a can-do attitude and a big ol’ can of goose grease.”
“Eww.” Rin wrinkled her nose.
“How evocative,” Ebisa rasped.
Suri let go of her lip and shook her head. “Hector’s right; this is a bloody nightmare. Tactically speaking, this isn’t just an upstart incursion. This is a war scenario.”
War. Now that I’d spent five years fighting, the word always hit me like a sharp jab to the gut. I never wanted to go back to war, not even in my dreams. Not even in a game.
Ignas nodded to Suri’s words. Despite his bravado in the Parade Ground, it was clear now that the confrontation had taken a toll on him. He still had the air of tough, observant confidence I’d come to expect from him, but his eyes were sunken, the lines around them deeper.
“My thoughts exactly,” he said heavily. “I commissioned a report on my Coronation Day, which we received this morning. By the way the ministers were talking about this issue, I expected that we’d lost perhaps two hundred miles of territory to this creature. But no.” He gestured angrily at the fan of corruption radiating up from the south. “Four counties overrun, over a hundred and fifty villages put to the sword. The Voivode and his entire House are dead or worse, the ducal castle taken... and the whole time, my worthless excuse for a brother sat on his hands. The only reason the Demon hasn’t overrun Litvy and broken out through Vastil Pass into the mainland is because of the Prezyemi Line and the Endlar… and how long can we hold that?”
The Endlar Wilderness was a massive swathe of swampland and forest, unmapped and uncharted. The Prezyemi Line was the huge wall that faced the Endlar’s northern edge, separating the low-land Racsa County – the ducal seat – from the highlands of Vastil County.
“Looks like it. Question is, why is this vampire invading Myszno on the sly like this? What do we know about him?” Suri folded her arms loosely across her chest, scowling in thought.
“We know almost nothing, not even his name,” Ignas replied heavily. “What we do know is that wherever he goes, horror follows. Entire villages and towns are being wiped out. Eyewitnesses say that as the undead pursued those who fled, some ran straight into rivers or lakes and drowned themselves in their panic. Others escaped into the wilderness only to starve. They’d rather be at the mercy of the allosaurus and Kileskus than this creature, who they simply call ‘the Demon’. He is from Napath, one of the Shalid countries. We share a border to the south.”
Suri grunted. “Napath, huh? That explains a lot.”
I bought up my HUD and telekinetically skimmed through the virtual interface to my Archemi databank. “I don’t have anything on Napath in my wiki, other than a basic map.”
“In Dakhdir, we call it Adu Alonwaa, the Land of the Dead. All the citizens are undead of some kind or another. The only living people there are slaves.” Suri tapped the southernmost range of mountains. “Some friends of mine said it’s ruled by a council of really fuckin’ old archmages… old as in, when they were born, the Shalid was still a jungle and the place was ruled by Meewfolk.”
Rin nodded. “The Council of the Breathless. Liches and vampires.”
I looked up at her from my chair. “Aggressive?”
“No. Not until now.” Ignas frowned down at the map. “Lady Suri and Lady Rin speak true. The rulers of Napath are undead necromancers, and their people worship them as gods. The majority of Napath’s citizens are vampiric.”
“Huh.” I nodded. “Could Fangs-a-Lot be a lord from this council?”
The Volod made a go-around sign with one long, sword-callused hand: a distinctly Vlachian gesture that I’d come to recognize as being like a shrug. “He’s powerful enough that we have considered it a possibility, but we do not know. Napath is excellent at keeping secrets. All the court bureaucrats are vampire thralls bound in service to their progenitors. They are functionally incapable of leaking information, even if they wished to.”
“If he’s an exiled Breathless council mage, that’s bad news,” Suri said. “What’s the total estimated figure of his army?”
Ignas winced. “He started with a mere six thousand troops from his native land. But after destroying so many villages and towns, and now the fall of Karhad, his ‘army’ has swelled to over sixty thousand corpses.”
“How many people live in Myszno?” I asked.
“As of last census, a little over two million, including foreigners. But that doesn’t include some of the native peoples and nomads.” Ignas reached out to touch the miniatures showing Egbolt Castle and the fallen city of Karhad. “According to Captain Istvan Demir, the Demon marched over the mountains with a small force of animated skeletons. They decimated villages in the dead of night, slaughtering everyone and everything in their path. Villages and towns in the highlands are often isolated by distance. The Demon butchered the inhabitants in the dark and moved to the next settlement. The army grows with every person they kill. Almost every fallen man, woman and beast is... repurposed.”
“Necromancer’s code,” I muttered. “’Reduce, Reuse, Reanimate.”
“The army then massed in the mountains and poured out to take strategic positions in the highl
ands,” Suri mused. “Now they’re pushing through the Endlar to the north.”
“Precisely,” Ignas said. “Until now, we never had any reason to worry about Napath. We have been peaceful neighbors since the Age of Dragons.”
“Then something’s fucky, for sure.” I scanned the table. “There’s a village in Myszno named ‘Myszno’ as well, right? Do you happen to know where it is, and if it’s near a landmark called the ‘Thunderstones’?”
“I’ve heard stories of them, but no specifics,” Ignas said. “But I know someone who might. Masterhealer Masha hails from that province. She is Churvi, from the area where the village of Myszno lies.”
“She’s what?” I asked.
“Myszno, like the rest of Vlachia, is something of a melting pot. We’re in the very heart of Artana, and there are many peoples and some two hundred languages spoken across the land. The Churvi are native to Myszno. They bear a strong resemblance to your own people, the Tuun, and I believe their pagan religion shares some commonalities. There is actually a small expatriate community of Tuun who live among them. I recommend you learn all you can from her.”
I scratched my jaw. “Andrik mentioned that there were Tuun there to me once.”
Ebisa, who had been leaning indolently against the edge of the table, suddenly spoke up. “Sire, I must wonder: where is this Demon finding the mana to fuel this invasion? Just the expeditionary force would have required huge quantities of it. Now he’s up to thirty thousand head… he has to be getting that magic from somewhere.”
“That is a question we don’t have the answer to.” Ignas jerked his chin up as he stood away from the table and began to pace. “Myszno used to be a great producer of mana, but the mines of the south dried up centuries ago. The remaining mines are in the north-eastern highlands, in the mountains that shelter Boros. They aren’t getting it from there.”
Kingdom Come Page 4
