Kings of the Wyld

by Nicholas Eames

  “The solution is complex, but the procedure is easy enough. You’ve been out of the game a while, Slowhand. We’ve come a long way since you and yours sheathed your swords. I can have the unguent ready within the hour if you’d like.”

  Either the arachnian was being serious or he was hopelessly inept at pulling off a joke. “What’s this … unguent made of?”

  Three pairs of segmented arms shrugged. “Quite a few herbs, actually, plus a bit of troll, a dash of starfish, and some people.”

  “People?”

  “People,” said Tiamax flatly.

  “Is it magic?”

  “It’s medicine. Also, there’s a pinch of orc to help the bones mature faster. Did you know an orc can grow more than two thousand teeth over the course of its lifetime?”

  Clay hadn’t, but he was too aghast to say so at the moment. Eventually he tipped his head to indicate the medic’s broken mandible. “Why not use it on yourself?”

  Tiamax made a clicking noise. “Doesn’t work on us hatchers, I’m afraid. Besides, I think this makes me look tough.”

  Ashe, who was sharpening a blade on the couch across from Clay, scoffed quietly.

  “How long will it take?” Clay asked skeptically.

  “Several hours,” said Tiamax. “I’ll give you something to help you sleep. The regenerative process can be somewhat painful, I’m told. Also it’s quite unsettling to watch, as you can imagine.

  Clay sighed. He had little to lose in trying, he supposed, and if this miracle unguent spared him from explaining to Ginny why he’d left the house with two hands and come home with only one, then it was worth a shot, no question.

  “Then again,” Tiamax mused, “‘Nohand’ has a certain ring to it.”

  Barret, on lookout from the opposite rail, was the first to spot them. “There! Edwick, bring us down.”

  “Down we go,” shouted the bard, his hands moving lightly over the steering orbs.

  The airborne dhow swooped low over rugged foothills, and as it swerved to land Clay caught sight of his bandmates. Gabe and Ganelon stopped to watch, but Moog hiked up his robes and ran at a sprint to meet the craft as it touched down. The owlbear cubs loped behind him, nipping at one another in an effort to be nearest the wizard’s heel.

  Matrick loosed a whoop and leapt past Clay. He and Moog came together in a tangle of wild laughter and a great deal of jumping.

  Clay eased himself onto the ground. Despite the medic’s attention (and a junkie’s helping of drugs to numb the pain) he was still in pretty rough shape. Tiamax had stitched his face up and set his broken arm with a splint and sling, but a dull ache suffused his entire body, and his head throbbed as if he’d drunk an entire keg by himself the night before. Then again, considering the fact that he’d fallen down a mountainside and spent the following day running halfway up it again, Clay had to admit he felt far better than he had any right to.

  “Clay!” Moog bounded up to him, blue eyes glistening. “By the Tiny Gods of Goblinkind, I thought I’d never see that sweet face of yours again!” He spent a moment analyzing the arachnian’s stitch job. “That hatcher is an artist with needle and thread, I’ll grant him that. The things I could accomplish with four more arms than I already have. And your hand! May I?”

  Clay shrugged, and the wizard stooped to examine the appendage.

  “Fascinating,” he breathed, then leaned in close and sniffed. “Is that starfish?”

  Clay withdrew his hand as Kit shuffled over. “You’ve a bit of phoenix in your blood,” said the ghoul.

  Ganelon stepped up and clapped him on the shoulder. “You die hard, Slowhand,” he grated, which, as Clay understood it, passed for a glowing compliment among stone-cold killers.

  “But I break easy,” Clay said, mimicking the words he’d said to Larkspur the day before. He wondered briefly whether or not the daeva was dead. When Clay had seen her last she’d been laid out, unmoving, with a long iron bolt jutting from her chest. And before that … well, he was fairly certain she’d been about to kill him. But even so, a part of him hoped she lived long enough to outrun the shadow of her past.

  Ganelon chuckled, gave his shoulder a friendly squeeze, and stepped away.

  Gabriel approached him last. “I thought—”

  “I know.”

  “If you—”

  “I know,” Clay cut him off again.

  Gabriel flung himself the last few paces, crushing Clay in an embrace so tight he could almost hear his ribs groan. Clay clamped his good arm around Gabe’s neck and felt his friend draw a shuddering breath.

  When Clay trusted himself to speak, he did. “I’m back.”

  “You’re back,” Gabe said into his shoulder, and then withdrew, taking in the rest of the band with eyes gone sharp and bright as diamonds. “And now we finish this.”

  “To be honest, I didn’t plan on coming,” Barret said. “Only my wife got sick of me moping around the house. She fairly put the sword in my hand and kicked me out the door!”

  “Lies,” Ashe cut in, stating the obvious.

  Barret chuckled. “Anyway, my boys are in Kaladar for the War Fair, or I might have brought them along. They’ve got their own thing going now. The Wight Nights, they call themselves. Orc-shit name for a band if you ask me, but they didn’t bother asking.” He blew out a long sigh. “Ah well, can’t imagine they’ll be sorry they missed out on this little adventure. We hit a few pretty vicious storms on the way across, and had to land once and fill the engine with water that smells like a city sewer, but hey—we made it!”

  “I’m happy to be here,” said Piglet, crunching on a pretzel half as big as his head.

  “Me too,” said Ashe with a cutlass smirk. “It’s some kinda thrill, I tell ya, starting a fight you can’t win.” She winked and sidled up beside Ganelon. “Makes my britches moist.”

  “We might win,” squeaked Piglet.

  Tiamax raised a glass. “Here’s to moist britches and the boundless, irrational optimism of youth!” He looked twice at Matrick (well, twelve times, actually, if you counted all eight eyes and subtracted the two patched over). “You need a drink, Matty?”

  The old king smiled politely. “No, thank you. I’m … all done, I think.”

  The medic made a sound between a hiss and a rattle that Clay took for disbelief. “Done what? Not drinking. Drinking?”

  “Drinking, yeah.”

  “Well that’s it, then,” said Moog cheerily. “World’s over.”

  They all laughed—even Ganelon—and Clay’s mind went back to the night they’d spent in the mountain cave, when he’d pondered the bizarre sense of elation that so often suffused the eve of battle.

  This is it, he thought, looking from face to face around the skyship’s deck. Each smile a fraction too wide, every laugh a little too loud. There was something unreal about this moment, something not quite right, like watching a beard-spider dance or getting stabbed on your birthday. This is the end. And every one of us knows it.

  “We didn’t know where exactly to find you,” Barret was saying. “But then we saw the smoke, and found these two scrapping with the manhunter and her thralls.”

  “Lucky for us,” said Matrick.

  “So Larkspur is dead?” Gabe asked.

  “Probably?” Clay guessed, and saw Ganelon’s eyes narrow a fraction.

  “I’d forgotten about the War Fair,” said Moog, absently stroking the feathers of the owlbear asleep on his lap.

  “Biggest party in the world,” said Barret. “I’ll confess I’m a little sorry to be missing it.”

  Ashe swatted the air. “Pah! What’s to miss? Just a bunch of wannabe mercs and washed-up heroes mucking about in some old ruins. Here’s where the real party’s at, eh Gabe?”

  “All done,” piped Kit. The revenant had been hovering over a low table for the better part of an hour, using chalkstone to sketch a detailed map of Castia and its surroundings. The members of both bands gathered to survey it.

  “The city straddles
the river, like Fivecourt, except it is built on a rise instead of a valley. There are two gates. East—” Kit used a slender grey finger to point them out on the map “—and west. The walls are thick and extremely high, which is why it has withstood the siege for so long already. You could go over—or under, I suppose—but there’s no going through. This is the noble quarter here, and a wall surrounds it as well.”

  Gabriel scowled at the map with sour interest, as though it were a painting of his ex-wife naked. “So if the outer wall is breached, the survivors will hole up there?”

  Kit shook his head. “The outer wall was made to protect men from monsters. It has flame throwers, shock turrets, and ballista towers every fifty yards. This inner wall serves to stop peasants from wandering into a senator’s backyard. If they do manage to get inside the city, the Horde will roll over that second wall like it was a picket fence.”

  “Can we sneak in through the river?” Gabe asked.

  “Lastleaf will have tried that already,” Kit told him. “The river curves north here. It runs beneath the hill and is trapped in the city reservoir, but there are several gates barring the way. It was never used for trade, only a source of freshwater.”

  “Not anymore,” Matrick said glumly.

  Vanguard’s bard, sitting cross-legged on his pilot’s stool and tuning a mandolin, cleared his throat before speaking up. “Remind me again why we don’t just fly in? I mean, we’re here for Rose, right? Why not just snatch her up and be on our way? Maybe even catch the last days of the War Fair.”

  “Plague hawks, rot sylphs, you name it,” Moog answered. “We caught a glimpse of the city in my crystal ball before Gabe—” he caught himself. “Before it fell in the river. The sky was full of all kinds of awful. Also, Lastleaf has a wyvern matriarch with him, and her brood will be there as well. We’d get torn apart long before we reached the city.”

  “Fair enough,” said Edwick, returning his attention to the instrument in his hands.

  Ganelon pointed to a crude circle sketched to the west of Castia. “What’s this here?”

  “Teragoth,” said the revenant. “Well, the ruins thereof. The Dominion road runs right through Castia, under the arch of the Threshold here, and up into the old city.”

  “Threshold?” Barret interjected. “You mean like the one in Kaladar?”

  “Just so,” said Kit.

  Clay took a break from anxiously chewing his lip to add his own voice to the mix. “Don’t forget about Akatung. Shadow said he lairs in a shrine there.”

  Barret frowned. “Akatung. Why does that name sound familiar?”

  “Dragon,” said Ganelon, and Edwick chose this moment to strum an ominous note on his mandolin.

  The frontman’s bushy brows nearly leapt off his face. “Say what now?”

  “Never mind the dragon,” Gabe assured him. “We’re not going into Teragoth anyway.”

  “Yes we are!” Moog blurted.

  Clay was back to biting his lip. Here it comes, he thought.

  “I have a plan,” the wizard announced, peering down at the map over steepled fingers. Laughter bubbled up his throat and emerged as a worrisome cackle. “And let me tell you, friends—”

  “It’s risky?” Gabe supplied.

  Moog glanced up. His eyes wide and wild above a lunatic smile. “Verging on suicidal,” he said.

  Chapter Forty-eight

  The Maze of Stone and Fire

  “Suicidal is right,” Ashe muttered. “I can’t believe we sent Matty into a dragon’s lair by himself.”

  “I should have been the one to do it,” said Kit. “I’ve little to fear from a dragon, but Matrick—”

  “—was once a thief,” Gabriel told them. “And a damned good one. If anyone can pull this off, he can.”

  They’d entered Teragoth before sunrise this morning, giving Castia a wide berth and approaching the ancient ruins from the south. Edwick brought the Old Glory in low, so as not to draw attention from the Horde. Kit had offered an unasked-for narration as they navigated the derelict city, elaborating on its former glory.

  “There’s what’s left of the akra track. I won a fortune there once, and lost it all on a single bet.” He shook his head and pursed his bloodless lips. “I should have known a bird named Sure Thing was too good to be true. And look, the scroll house! It had a roof once, and a lovely patio from which you could see the entire city. They served the most incredible brunch: poached basilisk eggs and toasted bread with brown butter preserve. No one does a good basilisk egg anymore,” he remarked sadly, and Clay heard Ganelon mutter under his breath: What the fuck is brunch?

  They’d set the skyship down in what had once been a grand forum. Moog’s plan—Moog’s brilliant, desperate, utterly preposterous plan—required one of them to sneak into the old shrine to Tamarat, the apparent lair of the dragon Akatung. Matrick had volunteered, and so the rest of them sat aboard the Glory, hoping against hope that their presence in the city remained unnoticed by Lastleaf or his Horde.

  Clay had been cautiously hopeful since the wizard had outlined his strategy the night before, but when the sun broke over the snow-mantled mountains he was offered his first glimpse—aside from what he’d seen in Moog’s crystal ball—of Castia itself, rising like a white shoal in the midst of a poisoned ocean just a few miles east.

  And suddenly every breath was a sucking gasp, every heartbeat a hammer blow. A part of Clay’s mind begged him to turn away, to close his eyes, to look anywhere but at the writhing, crawling, clamouring monstrosity that was the Heartwyld Horde, but he could not.

  Someone, probably Gabriel, had once told him that to be courageous you had to first know fear. As Clay saw it, he would need a reserve of courage in the hours to come that demanded more fear than he had ever known, and so he let the horror of what they were about to face wash over him, soak into him, clamp around his soul like an iron fist, and squeeze …

  “He’s been in there awhile,” observed Tiamax. The arachnian had painted himself for war. His entire body was black, save for the tips of each spindly limb, which were bloodred, and he’d painted a red hourglass on his abdomen. Clay wasn’t exactly sure why an hourglass should be frightening, but for some reason it was.

  “I don’t think we’ve been spotted yet,” said Piglet, peering fearfully over the starboard rail.

  So far, so good, Clay thought.

  But then Ashe pointed down a debris-littered side street. “Gnolls!” she hissed.

  Clay squinted down the alley. A pack of humanoid hyenas were skulking in the shadow of a ruined wall.

  “Barret, Tiamax, Piglet,” said Gabriel. “You three run them down. Ganelon and Ashe, circle round and head them off. The rest of us will stay and wait for Matrick.”

  To Clay’s surprise Vanguard’s frontman didn’t blink an eye at taking orders from Gabe. He jumped over the rail and beckoned his bandmates to follow. “Let’s get this done. If these bonesuckers run off and warn their friends this whole plan goes to shit.”

  Kit followed Ganelon and Ashe overboard. “I know the city,” he explained when it looked as if the southerner would order him back. “I can help make certain they don’t escape.”

  Ganelon nodded grudgingly and the three of them hurried off east.

  One of the gnoll scavengers loosed a startled howl. Barret replied with his crossbow, cutting it short. He nodded at Edwick in the pilot’s seat and then squinted up at Gabriel. “Don’t go killing my bard.”

  Gabe’s smile was stretched thin. “No promises,” he said.

  Barret chuckled, then turned to the others. “Let’s roll!”

  Tiamax went first, four of his six hands bearing some sort of weapon, one of which was a barbed javelin. He hurled it as he closed, impaling one of the scavengers, and then spun his abdomen toward the rest. A splash of white webbing burst from the spinnerets near his rear, trapping a few of the gnolls as surely as a net.

  A sticky, super-gross net, thought Clay. He wrinkled his nose, wincing as the stitches in
his face pulled taut. Needless to say, he was beginning to understand Ashe’s reluctance to let the medic bed her, despite, as Tiamax himself had put it, the obvious benefit of having six hands.

  Barret reloaded his crossbow on the run. He got one more shot off (the gnolls ensnared by webbing were easy prey) before he slung the weapon across his back and drew a pair of short axes from his belt. Piglet lumbered beside him wielding a square longshield and his father’s spiked flail. Clay might have wondered if the kid could hold his own, except he knew Barret, and Barret wouldn’t keep him around if Piglet were a liability, regardless of whether or not he was Hog’s boy.

  Gabriel stirred restlessly, and Clay recognised in his friend the same urge he was trying to quell within himself: to jump out there and join the fight. The impulse wasn’t just mental, either. Clay’s heart was thrumming in his chest. His fingers twitched with the craving to feel Blackheart’s familiar weight, or a weapon’s heavy heft in his grasp, though that wouldn’t be happening anytime soon—not while his arm was in a sling, anyway.

  No doubt sensing their bloodlust, Moog shuffled over and crouched between them. “Pretty fat for a warrior, eh?”

  “Huh?” He and Gabe expressed their confusion in unison.

  “Elavis.” Moog indicated the statue in the centre of the shrine’s sunken plaza. It was in miraculously good repair, considering its age and the state of its immediate surroundings. Set upon on a plinth twice as tall as Clay, the ancient deity stood with his head bowed, one hand clasping the hilt of a huge broadsword planted between his feet, the other pointed east, presumably toward the heart of Dominion power. Also, as Moog had so keenly observed, he was pretty fat.

  “He was a hero of the Old Dominion. One of their greatest warriors, in fact.”

  Clay frowned up at the statue. “I thought humans were mostly servants back then.”

  “They mostly were,” Moog confirmed. “But Elavis was an exception. He made his name by challenging the champions of rival Exarchs to single combat. He died without ever having lost a battle. Too young, alas.”