“Archers,” John said as an order, quietly but with the tone he would have used as a Legion Centurion. Tilda pulled an arrow from the open quiver on her back and nocked it to the string, while Zeb stepped up beside her with his ready crossbow. John moved a bit to the left of them, shield raised and his sword still behind it, while Shikashe stepped out to the right with his hands near the matching pommels of his swords.
For several moments no one moved. Not much detail could be perceived at the distance, which was beyond Tilda’s range of anything but a high arcing shot, but if any of the shrouded figures did so much as twitch it went unnoticed.
“Perhaps they are a party of adventurers?” Heggenauer asked without sounding very hopeful. The acolyte was keeping protectively close to Amatesu and Nesha-tari.
“They are not human,” the shukenja said with some authority. Tilda glanced back at her and saw that Amatesu had slid a tonfa from her sleeve into her hand, a peasant weapon of the Far West based on the cranking handle of a mill stone. It was a heavy square club not so different than a Miilarkian buksu, but iron-shod on one side and with a pin through the end as a handle.
“Does anybody want to talk to these guys?” Zeb asked.
Uriako Shikashe abruptly barked at the figures, startling the party but getting no response from the strangers. He drew his katana with one hand, and made a beckoning gesture with the other.
“There are moments when I hate that man,” Tilda heard Zeb mutter.
There was movement then, though still not from the shrouded figures. On the dais above and behind them a seventh shape appeared, strolling out from behind the broken obelisk. This one was not in white but instead seemed to be wearing some sort of suit of dark, charcoal gray, complete with a waistcoat. His head was uncovered and he had jet-black hair, and a forked beard. His skin was a pale, ashy gray and his eyes smoldered red, even from across the distance.
He looked toward the party as he rounded the front of the obelisk, and Tilda thought she heard a clop like a hoof as he moved. He stopped, leaned his back against the obelisk, and crossed his arms. His teeth showed white against his gray countenance as he grinned broadly, and there was another spot of white at his lapel as though he were wearing a flower as a boutonnière.
Then a bit of hell broke loose.
The six figures on the ground exploded forward, leaving their robes behind to settle to the ground. Each was revealed as a roughly man-like figure, lithe almost to the point of emaciation with scaly skin of dark red and sickly green. They had claws, horns, thick tails, and their devilish faces grinned within bristling beards of what looked like steel wire. They bounded forward on bent legs, waving their weapons and chattering some sort of language. Tilda realized with a start that though their words were utterly alien she could almost understand them, as if their meaning went somehow directly into her mind. Their words were all of blood and carnage.
“Shoot for effect,” Deskata said calmly, and Tilda and Zeb raised their bows. The creatures had closed about half the distance when both released their shots. Zeb’s went wide but Tilda’s arrow hit the foremost creature in the chest and staggered it, though the arrow shattered on impact without piercing.
“They are immune to non-magic!” Amatesu shouted, and Tilda had a cold feeling of total helplessness. If any of the numerous weapons she carried were magic, she reckoned she would have noticed it before now.
Uriako Shikashe however rushed forward to meet the creatures with the white blade of his katana humming in the air. The first of them snarled at the samurai, but with a great bound it leaped easily over him and bore down on John Deskata with a saw-toothed glaive mounted on a four-foot shaft, barbed hooks curling at the bottom of the long blade. John sheathed his sword and crouched behind his tower shield. Tilda drew another arrow despite thinking it would do no good, but then the veteran of the Legions did something rather remarkable. John timed the creature’s charge and when it raised its glaive above its head he pulled down on the top rim of his tower shield, swinging up the bottom around the pivot of his bent left arm. The creature’s beady yellow eyes widened, and the base of the blessed shield took it full across the mouth. Blood sprayed out in a fountain and teeth rattled down the face of the shield like hail. John drew his sword and hacked across the thing’s belly with the same motion as it fell to its back, but his blade rebounded as though it had hit iron.
Shikashe’s did not. The next creature in line tried to engage the samurai who with a lightning-fast series of blows severed its weapon, a leg, and an arm, then twisted past to skewer it through the chest from behind. For a moment its yellow eyes were focused on Tilda, then with a sound like a wet pop! the impaled thing simply disappeared, only the two halves of its broken weapon clattering to the street. Shikashe blinked in surprise above the leather half-mask of his kabuto helmet, then turned to confront the next creature charging him.
Two each were bearing down on the samurai and the legionnaire, while the one that John had felled was still blinking groggily on the ground and hacking up blood. Tilda shook her quiver off her shoulder and let several arrows spill loose on the ground. She went to a knee, held her bow sideways across her body, and began nocking and shooting as rapidly as she could. Her first shot hit a creature running at John in the knee, not piercing but staggering it to the side. She kept shooting it, keeping the thing at bay with each impact even if doing no serious damage. John had dropped his sword and engaged the other with both hands on the straps of his shield, deflecting the blows of a glaive and whomping or body-slamming the creature when he could.
The one behind him with the bloody mouth began to regain its feet, and before Tilda could shout a warning a searing sizzle filled the air. Tilda felt every hair on her head stand up as a blue bolt of lightning zipped past her and struck the creature, flinging it limp and smoking away into the plaza. Tilda snapped her head around and saw Nesha-tari looking nothing short of magnificent, sparks dancing in her hands and the flashes illuminating her sky-blue eyes, and a wicked grin. Beside her Zeb was blinking at Heggenauer, as the priest held his mace in one hand but had the other gripping the haft of the double-headed axe in the Minauan’s hands. The acolyte’s head was bent and he was murmuring with his eyes closed. When he opened them Zeb shivered, and both the mace and axe took on a faint glow of soft white light.
“Let’s go,” Heggenauer said, running forward past Tilda even as he raised his shield. Zeb looked at his axe, smiled faintly, and went after the priest.
Tilda did not shoot again as the melee grew crowded. John kept driving one of the creatures back with his shield and Heggenauer bore down on the one Tilda had thus far slowed. Shikashe opened the chest cavity of another with such violence that a red mist spattered the samurai’s armor before it disappeared, along with the falling corpse. The odds were three on three until Zeb tipped them. John saw him coming and sent his hissing opponent staggering back with a final blow of his shield, and the Minauan buried his axe between its shoulder blades. Heggenauer fended off an attack with his shield and landed a sideways blow on the creature’s ear with his mace, breaking off a horn and sending the monster reeling to the ground. Shikashe’s sole remaining antagonist was back-peddling, but the samurai lunged to stab it shallowly in the chest. When it dropped its weapon and clapped both hands to the wound the samurai took off its head at the shoulders. The spinning head winked out of existence in midair.
Heggenauer clubbed the one on the ground with an awful sound of impact, and before he landed a second blow it too disappeared. The acolyte’s mace rang loudly off the cobblestones and echoed across the plaza. As the echo faded, it was replaced by the sound of slow clapping.
The seventh and last figure still stood at the obelisk in his gray suit, and his smile had not changed.
“Very impressive,” the figure called, and Tilda understood its words perfectly though she could not have said what language it was speaking. Yet for that, its voice was somehow cultured, vaguely even regal.
“Thou art as f
ormidable a bunch of monkeys as I have seen in a goodly while.”
Nesha-tari shouted to him in Zantish, and the figure bowed in her direction.
“I am known here abouts as Lord Balan, Madame. Though just Balan shall suffice, for you.”
Shikashe shouted in Ashinese, and Balan smiled at him.
“Not just yet. But in all likelihood, soon.”
With that, Balan gave another bow to the whole party, thrust his hands in his coat pockets and strolled leisurely back behind the obelisk. He too disappeared, but without a pop of finality.
The party stared, for as he left they all had seen that Balan’s right leg ended in a cloven hoof which struck up a spark each time it touched the ground. There had also been a whip-like tail emerging from the back of his tailored suit coat. The spade-shaped head at the end of it had almost seemed to wave at them.
Chapter Thirty-Two
The Duchess Claudja Perforce of Chengdea presently had at least four things to worry about, only the last of which was her own life.
The first was Sir Towsan. Perhaps Gideon should not have been her first concern, but he was nonetheless. Her last sight of the old knight who had been as her father’s right hand since before Claudja’s birth had been grim. She had regained consciousness, briefly, behind the Dead Possum Inn after the Sarge had first punched her in the face, and seen Towsan fighting back-to-back with the Jobian acolyte Brother Heggenauer. They had been surrounded by both the filthy legionnaires and several Destroyers of the incendiary god Ayon, enormous in their black plate armor and wielding great two-handed swords with the blades engulfed in flames. Claudja had tried to get to her feet, and been struck a second time in the back of the head. She had seen no more, but knew that the odds for Towsan and Heggenauer had not been good. The best she could reasonably hope was that the absence of the Destroyers in Vod’Adia meant that the knight and the cleric had at least taken some of the bastards with them.
Yet Claudja wanted as much as anything to believe that Towsan might have survived. The situation behind the inn had been chaotic, and the Duchess thought she had seen other people fighting against the Ayonites, just before her world had gone black a second time. She had not seen them clearly and had no reason to expect help from any quarter. Yet one had seemed to be a dark-haired woman, flitting about and striking a Destroyer over the helmet with a club. It was probably too much to hope that Matilda Lanai had come after her and maybe saved Sir Towsan, yet Claudja wished it to be so fervently. Towsan had been almost a second father to her since she was a girl, and he would have been so by law had his son Lukas lived a few months longer.
Claudja had grieved for her betrothed already, and she could not bear the thought that his father may have fallen as well. Because of her.
So the Duchess thought of the next thing on the list in her head, occupying her thoughts as the legionnaires led her through the monochromatic streets of the Sable City. That thing did not fill her with worry, nor sorrow, nor guilt, but only with a murderous and white-hot rage. That thing was Pagette.
The Ayonites had been awaiting her arrival in Camp Town and they had already arranged with the legionnaires to lure her away from Jobe’s temple. In all of Chengdea there was only one person beside Towsan and her father who had known enough of Claudja’s mission to tip off the Ayonites well ahead of time, and that was Pagette. The trader and spy in her father’s service who had arranged for Claudja and Towsan’s travel to Camp Town could easily have sent word of the Duchess’s approach ahead of her, through the bullywugs whose language he understood. He was the only person who could have done so. If Claudja lived to see Chengdea again she had every intention of reviving some ancient Kantan methods of execution, involving teams of horses, to deal with that one.
Any return to Chengdea however was likely to require a miracle. If Claudja somehow got away from her captors and out of this horrid, dusty, demon-infested place, there was still the matter of her mission to the Codian Empire. It was the reason for her unorthodox departure from home in the first place, and was perhaps the last chance of saving her father’s realm from both the villainy of Ayzantium and the rank incompetence of the Daulic crown. That was now the third thing Claudja had to worry about.
Only then could Claudja face the cold fact that the situation she presently found herself in would almost certainly be the death of her. Even if her rag-tag bunch of captors, the most singularly worthless trio of soldiers the Duchess had ever seen, somehow managed to get her through Vod’Adia without getting them all butchered by gibbering demons or whatever had made the unholy roaring in the night, their intention was to move her, magically, to Ayzantium. That sounded like a death sentence whether the spell worked or not, and looking at the “Wizard” Phinneas Phoarty, Claudja was not brimming with confidence that the fellow could manage a parlor-room cantrip, let alone a complicated spell of teleportation. Every magician Claudja had encountered in Daul was elderly, with decades of wisdom and experience in the magical arts. Even with the premature streaks of gray in his brown goatee, Phoarty looked like a junior shop clerk with nervous, fluttering hands, wearing ill-fitting clothes.
But Phoarty apparently had a plan. Some way he hoped to aid Claudja, perhaps when the time came for him to work his magic and get them out of here. The young man with the perpetually perplexed expression was going to save her with his mighty wizardry. Claudja would not hold her breath waiting for that.
So during the second day of travel through the desolate black streets, Claudja walked with only seeming indifference. The legionnaires had slowed their pace after the first day and crept along more carefully, watching the buildings around them, and so too did the Duchess. Claudja’s head was bowed and her hands were tied before her but her eyes moved over everything, and she listened carefully to every word anyone said. She made an effort to note anything that might be useful as a landmark later on, even among the unremitting sameness of the black buildings.
Early in the day their route was blocked by a wall almost as large as that which surrounded the whole city, dividing one district from the next. They moved along it to the east and before finding a gate they reached a place where a section had collapsed outwards, obliterating a whole city block. It took the group until well after noon to pick their way over the rubble, and the legionnaires cursed frequently as they bruised shins and banged knees among the loose stones. Claudja carefully made her way across with a supporting hand from Phinneas. At least he was good for that much.
On the far side of the rubble the Sarge called a halt for a rest in the walled courtyard of what had once been a great house. The group stayed far away from the gaping doorways as they now knew something of the type of beasts that might lurk in the dark interiors. They sipped fetid water from diminishing skins, and disconsolately gnawed some fatty and poorly-salted meat, spitting out chunks that had gone to rot. The Sarge said they would rest for half an hour, and Ty and Rickard sprawled out on the ground. Claudja sat against the wall, glancing occasionally at the Sarge’s mutilated left hand. She hoped the wound had hurt a great deal. After a while she spoke to him.
“Is your accent Tullish or Tholish?”
The Sarge looked over, his square jaw working on the last rubbery strip of meat.
“Neither,” he said with his mouth full.
Claudja narrowed her eyes. “Gweiyrish?”
The Sarge smirked and forced down his food.
“Ah, the Duchess has an education. Very knowledgeable, your Worship. I’m sure you make sparkling conversation at dinner parties and what-not.”
Claudja ignored that. “So, did you desert the Legions out of loyalty to the vacant throne of Gweiyer?”
The Sarge snorted. “Afraid I’m not that political. Whoever said we were deserters, anyway?” he asked, looking at Phinneas.
“No one had to say anything,” Claudja said dryly. “You are legionnaires in league with Ayzantium. I believe that would run contrary to your Empire’s politics.”
“What do you know of the Empir
e?” one of the other legionnaires growled from the ground. It was the big fellow with the flat Beoan accent and the belligerent slope to his forehead. The others called him Ty.
“I know that desertion from the Legions is a capital offense,” Claudja said. “I know that none of you are ever going to be able to go home again.”
Ty looked at Claudja with smoldering hostility, and the sandy-haired fellow called Rickard pushed himself up to his elbows to glare at her as well.
“Can we not gag her Highness?” he asked the Sarge, but the Gweiyerman looked faintly amused. He waved his men to silence with his mangled hand.
“What is your point, Duchess?” he asked indulgently. “I can’t imagine you just want to make conversation with a bunch of commoners.”
“How much do any of you really know about Ayzantium?” she asked. “About the kind of men you were conspiring with in Camp Town?”
The Sarge shrugged. “What’s to know? They have plenty of coin, and they’ll shell it out liberally in exchange for you. Horayachus was very clear on that point.”
“Who is he, their leader? A Destroyer of Ayon?”
“Some sort of Red Priest, right up until a burning inn fell on his head.” The Sarge grinned. “I suppose that is the Burning Man’s idea of irony.”
“So, you are acting now on the word of a dead priest of Ayon? A minion of the god known as the Oath-breaker?”
The Sarge spread his hands. “All the Ennead have a lot of names. Besides Oath-breaker and the Burning Man, they call Ayon the Destroyer, the Stormking, the All Killer…doesn’t sound like a god I’d care to cross.”
“There is no need to cross Ayon to draw his fury,” Claudja said, looking at each of the men in turn, including Phinneas. The young Circle Wizard’s brow was furrowed in that confounded way of his that made Claudja doubt him profoundly. She sighed, though not out loud.
“Say you do get me to Ayzantu City. With no Red Priest to speak for you, why in the world would you think the Ayonites will give you coin instead of just bending the lot of you backwards over a sacrificial altar?”
The Sable City (The Norothian Cycle) Page 40
