Warsinger

by James Osiris Baldwin

  It got darker and danker the closer we got to the Administration Wing. The rough tunnels made it hard to pinpoint where sounds were coming from. Cutthroat turned a corner, splashing into a flooding corridor, and then pulled up with a sharp squawk before colliding with a pack of guards battling prisoners. Over the clang and clash of swords, the ground began to rumble again. Three [Royal Prison Guards] whirled on us, scimitars flashing in the dim light.

  “Yah!” Karalti urged the big hookwing on as I levelled my weapon like a lance from behind her. But before Cutthroat could even take a step, the wall in front of us exploded inward. A massive armored worm plunged through the hole and engulfed the brawlers with a mouth big enough to drive a jeep into.

  “Jesus titty-fucking Christ!” I clamped an arm around Karalti’s waist, tensing to leap back, but the worm didn't even seem to notice us as it snaked on through, raining rock, sand, and wooden beams down over its semi-truck-sized body. There was a purple skull next to its health ring, meaning it was an extreme challenge versus my current level. Its tag read: [Sandworm Juvenile - Level 45].

  The worm seemed to go on and on, until finally it vanished into its new burrow in a rain of dirt and stone shrapnel. The tunnel collapsed behind it, the wall sloughing off onto the floor in a pile of rubble.

  “Woah.” Karalti pressed back against my chest. “That’s not good.”

  I was gaping like a slack-jawed idiot. “Level 45? The Queen of the Sands is Level Forty-fucking-Five?!”

  “I don't think that was the Queen of the Sands,” Karalti replied nervously. “It was a Juvenile. I think that was one of her kids.”

  The guard station was abandoned, and it looked like there had been heavy fighting at the door. We had to dismount and lead Cutthroat through the scattered corpses and broken furniture. A twisting shaft led to a set of iron doors that looked like someone had used explosives to blow them open. Water poured from overhead, running across the ground in filthy streams.

  “Cuh-CAW!” Cutthroat muscled past me, ducking through the sheet of water into the dimly lit hallway beyond. “Cuh-CAW!”

  Dead guards and prisoners choked the corridor. Cutthroat began to drool from excitement, foaming at the corners of her mouth as we rounded a corner and almost ran right into a manned barricade made of broken stones, furniture, broken cell bars, and spears. The men and women defending it yelled and aimed a battery of makeshift weapons at us, from bricks to crossbows and matchlock rifles.

  “Thambava!” a woman shouted at us.

  I reined Cutthroat in hard. “Hold your fire! We’re-”

  Before I could even attempt diplomacy, Cutthroat let out a raspy screech of joy and barreled forward at speed. “CU-CAW! CU-CAW”

  “Cutthroat, you rotten piece of- ARRRGH!” Rifles and crossbows discharged, thwipping past. Karalti ducked. A quarrel struck my pauldron, denting it, while others hit Cutthroat and buried in her flesh. She didn’t seem to notice. Instead, the hookwing charged through the narrow entryway at a sprint, demolishing the rubble to either side and nearly tearing our legs off in the process.

  “Eeeeek! Cutthroat! Stop!” Karalti hauled back until I was sure the rings would tear through the dinosaur’s tough hide, but Cutthroat was in full juggernaut mode. No matter how hard we pulled, she knocked people to either side, roaring at anyone who dared to get in her way, and careened around the corner of the tunnel into a guard station that had been converted into a field hospital. Injured people were spread out on blankets and cloaks on the ground in rows, some senseless, some moaning in agony. Stronger people were gathering them up in preparation to evacuate. And coordinating them all was the woman we had come here to find. Suri - tall, athletic, her red fly-away hair plastered to her dark face with sweat and dust - stood up in alarm as the biggest blackest hookwing bounded into the room and ran at her with her arms held wide.

  I wrapped an arm around Karalti’s waist and braced. “Watch out watch out WATCH OUT-!”

  The dinosaur collided with her with a ‘whump’ of feathers and flesh hitting armor. The impact rattled my teeth, but Suri had just enough time to brace before the short ton of squealing hookwing connected - and was strong enough that she actually kept her feet.

  “Holy shit! Cutthroat!” Suri laughed as the dinosaur began to slobber all over her face, pushing her muzzle away and leaning her head back. “Hector! Karalti!”

  “Suri!” Karalti let out a wordless cry of joy and vaulted to the ground. Suri laughed and caught her around the waist, and smooched the top of her head before looking up to see me. Her face relaxed, relief plain in her eyes and parted lips. Then she looked past me and scowled. I turned to see a wall of weapons bristling in the doorway, and the faces of terrified, uncertain people staring at the scene in mingled confusion and despair.

  “Kaa’ji karu neka achha! Te sang’le lo’oka hey?” Suri called back to her troops, reassuring them as she patted Karalti on the back like a baby. The dragon wrapped her legs around Suri’s thighs and burrowed her face into her shoulder, cheeping like an overgrown chick.

  “Achha? Kharōkhara?” the woman at the front of the gang of prisoners asked.

  “Hōya, sarva kathi tiki ahe.” Suri wagged her head, the Indian-style nod that meant nothing and everything at the same time. “Sorry, Hector. Just letting her know everything’s alright.”

  “Suri. Thank god. Are you okay?” I stopped just in front of her, and took a moment to hover my hands just over her arms. Suri’s eyes reddened. She bit her lip and nodded, and I pulled her into a fierce embrace. For several long delirious seconds, we clung onto each other, barely daring to breathe in case the other pulled away.

  “You always do that,” she said thickly. “Wait for me to give you the nod.”

  I had to clear my throat to speak, and when I did, my voice was husky. “I know it means a lot to you.”

  “Yeah. It does.” She was trying to keep it together, but now and then, a shiver passed through her body and into my hands. Her back felt like a washboard, it was so tight. “I wasn't sure you'd ever be able to find me.”

  “Of course I found you, babe. I'm basically human herpes.” I pressed my lips to her forehead and breathed in deeply. She smelled like someone who'd been crawling around in a muddy shithole for two weeks, but under that was just her. Her skin, her hair, her perfume. Other than Karalti, it was the best smell in the world. “You'd have to die, like, fifty more times to throw us off the scent.”

  She laughed, tried to stifle it, and failed. It came out as a giggle-snort. Her dark skin blushed a deep coppery red as she covered her mouth. “Oh jeez, this is just what you want to hear after searching for me for weeks. I'm, uh, not exactly the picture of grace and charm right now.”

  “Of the two of us, I'm the one who should apologize for existing,” I replied. “Dick cheese and all.”

  “Bloody hell.” She made a face and groaned, shoving me playfully. Suri was a min-maxer who trained her Strength and Stamina to obscene levels. A playful shove from her was kind of like a friendly nudge from a T. Rex. “Well, it's definitely you. No mistaking that sense of humor.”

  “The Army trained me well.” I grinned without thinking. The expression froze on my face when Suri sucked in a sharp breath, staring at my new fangs. Oops. Shit.

  “Hector… what happened to your teeth?” Her brow furrowed, and it was my turn to cover my mouth. I tried to take a step back, but Suri held onto my waist. She seemed to see me properly for the first time, lifting her hand to gently stroke the edges of my cheekbones, then down to my neck. She felt for my pulse, and pressed her lips in a thin line when she couldn't find it. “You’re cold. Were you...?”

  My heart finally kicked, my pulse beating rapidly under her fingers. I averaged about one beat a minute now, so ‘rapid’ was about one thump every ten seconds. “Vampirized? Kind of. He tried, but the Mark of Matir fucked up the vampening process. I'm only half-dead. The technical term is 'Dampyr', but I have some PTSD around that word from bad online roleplaying, so I'm going t
o stick with ‘vampire half-blood’.”

  The expression on her face was unnerving and unreadable. I hadn't felt this awkward since trying to ask a girl out to prom, and that was during the worst of my acne days.

  “It's no big deal,” I laughed into the uncomfortable silence. “I just have to stay out of the sun, sleep in a big litterbox, drink a little blood now and then. Not your blood. Karalti has to donate to me anyway, because of the Dragon Bond requirements, so I just... uhh... take a little extra now. Like a chaser.”

  Her brows furrowed. “Are you still alive?”

  “Technically.”

  “And we did defeat the Demon, right?”

  “Yeah. I mean, we didn’t kill him but... yeah, we beat him.” I winked. “You got your arms wrapped around the Voivode of Myszno, baby.”

  Before I could react, Suri pressed her body to mine and kissed me long and deep. It was the first time I'd kissed anyone since growing in the fangs, and I was conscious of them as her tongue danced over mine and found the razor-sharp point of a tooth.

  “Mm!” She made a sound of surprise and pulled back, leaving a sweet iron tang in my mouth.

  I tried to ignore the way my abnormally slow heartrate sped up to near-human levels at the taste of her blood. “Yeah, that's going to happen. Sorry. You okay?”

  “I've had worse than a scratch before, lover boy.” Suri regarded me wryly. “Can’t fault you on your timing, though. Got a couple of rats to dig out of this hell-hole. You up for it?”

  “I don’t want to shit on your parade, but we’ve got a big quest on a timer,” I said softly. “You and me both have to be in Taltos in seven hours.”

  “Seven hours?” She squinted at me. “How the fuck are we going to get to Taltos in seven hours?”

  “Karalti,” I said. “She can teleport now.”

  “Oh. Well, that’s good.” Her lovely face hardened into a hawkish mask. “This place is gonna come down ‘round our ears in about twenty minutes, according to my quest timer here, but I’m not leaving this place until I get my hands on those motherfucking Wardens and pop their heads like a couple of pimples. How do you feel about running down about fifty gun-toting automatons and breaking into an Architect’s survival bunker to kidnap or kill 'em before we jump to Taltos?”

  “Well, I got an erection while you were describing the mission parameters, so I guess that’s a…” I paused for effect. “Hard yes.”

  “I hate you.” A slow smirk spread over Suri's mouth. We were the fang twins now: like all Fireblooded, Suri had sharp, short, dog-like fangs in place of normal human canines. “You ready?”

  “Almost.” I reequipped my helmet and thumped it. “Before we do anything, I bought you some presents. Just give me a sec while I line all these up, and then… HHGGRRBL!”

  I gave my best puking impression while dumping all of Suri’s gear from my Inventory onto the ground. A pile of coal-black steel plate armor, a magitech grenade launcher and a stack of ammunition for it, a huge-ass Zweihander sword, two finely worked double-sided axes, and her pack. The equipment clanged and crashed onto the stones from the infinite reaches of hammerspace, and suddenly, I was no longer encumbered. When it was all unloaded, I stepped back and jazzed my hands. “Ta-dah!”

  “You bloody legend.” Suri sucked the teetering pile of gear into her own virtual Inventory dimension, freeing up space in the hall. “I missed you, cutie pie.”

  “I missed you too, snuggle pumpkin. But thank Rin. She made it all,” I replied. “She and Ebisa have been putting their heads together over the crafting table more and more often, if you know what I mean.”

  “You know Mercurions are getting serious when they start crafting together. They’re already practically married.” Suri stared off past my shoulder for a moment as she equipped her new gear. The armor and weapons magically appeared on her body, replacing the rusted chain and torn leather she’d been wearing. My jaw hit the floor and the ‘hard yes’ joke took on another dimension. The armor wasn't revealing - to the contrary, the new set of plate covered everything important and squishy, as armor should. But it was made for a woman, by a woman who loved other women. Rin’s armor hugged Suri’s body in all the ways it should while protecting everything it needed to.

  “Very nice. She’s gettin’ good at this,” Suri drawled. She rolled her shoulders and then her hips, testing the mobility. The layered plates hissed as they slid over one another. She examined the new sword next, freezing in place with the rest of us as the roof rumbled overhead.

  “Welp, time to go find this bunker of yours,” I said. “What do we know about these Wardens? Paths? Levels?”

  “They’re low level enough they ran and hid instead of facing us and fighting,” Suri said. “Dunno what their names are, just how they look. Down in the Dregs, me and the other women they had trapped knew ‘em as the Giant and the Rat. Now that you’re here, we should be able to break through the kill zone and get ‘em. And once we get our hands on those mongrels, there’s gonna be hell to pay.”

  Chapter 9

  The tunnels beyond the makeshift hospital were completely dark. They’d been bombed into oblivion, with craters in the floor and a groaning roof that rained sand down on our heads as the four of us – Suri, Karalti, me, and the unseen presence of Lahvan - crept out into the open.

  “Ugh, that burned sugary smell,” I muttered. “They blew the place with nitroglycerin?”

  “Yeah. No open flames down here. It's volatile as shit.”

  The corridor junction had been blown up hard enough that it was now lop-sided. I knew we were getting close to our goal, because the corpse reek was so overpowering that it drowned out all other scents. The dead bodies of prisoners and guards were scattered everywhere in the straight stretch of hallway before the crossroads. Karalti sniffed curiously at the nearest corpse, then sneezed. “Blurgh. Gross.”

  “Not into carrion?” I stopped to survey, sucking on one of my teeth as I flicked from point to point.

  “Nope. That’s all Cutthroat.”

  The devs of Archemi had been kind enough not to be completely realistic when it came to decomposing corpses. As overwhelming as it was, the stench was only about fifty percent as bad as the real thing. By day three and at these temperatures, a real body would have been as red and green as a Christmas sweater and leaking white goo all over the place. These corpses were relatively normal-looking people who happened to be dead. There was limited bloating or liver mortis, just old blood, pale skin, and splotchy black patches like stains on old leather.

  “So, what was this about fifty gun-toting automatons?” I asked quietly.

  “Mechanical Turks,” Suri hissed back. “They’re Artifacts the Wardens used to guard the female prisoners. When we broke out, they pulled all of them back here and set them up like a firing squad to shoot anyone tryin’ to get down that hallway. The Turks are controlled by an Overseer, this little floating sphere thing. If you take it out, the Turks go down, but we can’t fuckin’ reach it.”

  “The Overseer’s behind the line?”

  “Yeah. Three or four rows of ‘em, endless ammo. They’re firing Phantasmal rounds.”

  “Phantasmal?” I queried the wiki without thinking. “Hang on.”

  Phantasmal (Effect; Level 10 Enchantment)

  Phantasmal weapons and projectiles pass through non-magical armor and barriers (walls, floors, etc). They damage corporeal living creatures and incorporeal undead, as well as living construct cores (but not unliving constructs, or the construct’s metal or mineral chassis). Phantasmal rounds pass through most materials to a distance of five hundred feet. The rounds cannot penetrate Bluesteel or any higher-grade material, or magically- warded surfaces, such as walls protected by Protection Geas III+ or Field of Silence II spells.

  Karalti hunkered in close. “I can detect them?”

  “Save the mana: you’ll need it when we escape from here. The bodies on the floor already signal the Turks’ position well enough.” At the corner junction, the b
odies were thrown to one side like a slumped pile of ragdolls where they'd been blasted by flanking fire from the killzone. These guys had been shot from the right. The pileup and the side lean were pretty intense, so the fire had been from relatively close range.

  “Got any Darkness tricks that might help?” Suri asked, squatting down behind me. “Something to wipe their line of sight, maybe?”

  “Yeah. Hang back.”

  I dropped to a slow crouch, weaving between the buzzing corpses. There was no other sound from any of the fetid, darkened passages, other than the distant rumble of sandworms and the soft hiss of sand as it streamed from the cracks in the ceiling. When I reached the corner, I pulled a small mirror from my Junk pile in my Inventory and used it to try and carefully peer around the edge of the hallway. But before I could see anything beyond a flash of steel, the Mechanical Turks opened up. A deafening barrage filled the crossroads, rupturing the opposite wall and sending chunks of stone raining down on the pile of bodies below. My response was hard-wired: get down and start counting bursts. On my belly, hands clamped over my ears, I counted a volley every five seconds. Even for a high-level player character, the blazing mana-infused musket balls were a lethal deterrent. The Mechanical Turks were firing in rows, loading, setting, firing in perfect unity. And Suri was right - they never seemed to run out of ammo.

  After a short eternity, the firing squad stopped, and the corridor fell into a ringing silence. “Lahvan! Now!”

  The Shade tensed against my will, briefly, before his resistance melted. He peeled out of the darkness and flowed down the hall. He rounded the corner, but didn't trigger the Turks. I closed my eyes to concentrate on him, and found I could sense some of what he did. The shadow passed through the four-deep ranks of machines, his form splitting and gliding over the enchanted metal. A clockwork metal sphere hung over the last two rows of Turks, twisted and turning in mid-air like some kind of nosy Lament Configuration. The clockwork machine was engraved with a pattern of blazing blue eyes, all of them restlessly scanning the hall in all directions. Lahvan escaped notice until he burst up out of the squad like an oil slick - at which point, the [Overseer] went from blue to red, and the first row of Mechanical Turks fired.