“I would love to,” he told her. His hand caressed her hair before touching her face. She turned and kissed his fingers. “But we have people sleeping just a few feet away.”
He really wanted her, though. Right then and there, even if they had to bite on a rag to keep quiet.
A moment later he and Tava were in Saturnyx’s special place, not quite a dream and not quite reality. He and Tava were naked; the inevitable smells and dirt that came from living outdoors for several days, not to mention having fought a messy battle, were all gone. She looked and smelled as clean as if she had bathed in rose water.
“I may stay or go, as you please,” Saturnyx told them.
“I want her to say,” Tava said. “To help me, you know? And to bring us all joy, together.”
“Okay,” he told them. “But there is something I need to do first.”
He went down on his knee in front of Saturnyx. “Can’t speak with your father first, unfortunately.”
“No, since he has been dead for three thousand years,” Saturnyx said, looking as close to tears as she ever had.
“Will you consent to become my second wife? And I don’t have a ring again, dammit!”
“Damn the ring. Where would I put it? I have had many lovers among my masters, but never did one of them ask me to be his wife.”
“Now that I have, will you stop calling me ‘master’?”
“I might at that. Now…”
“Now, we celebrate,” Tava said, standing up and turning around so Hawke could see all of her. “The three of us.”
It wasn’t officially a honeymoon, but it blew all of Hawke’s fantasies clear out of the water.
Fifty-Eight
The town of Orom rose slightly over the horizon as the group prepared for their last day camping off the side of the Legion’s Highway.
“It’s not very big,” was Desmond’s first comment.
Hawke felt slightly defensive about the town, but on the other hand was too happy to care about the off-hand opinion.
“It will grow on you,” he told him and Nadia.
“Sure,” Nadia said.
She’d grown a little distant after Hawke’s engagement. Maybe she felt like she had poured her heart out to a guy who had other things in his mind. He wasn’t sure, and didn’t have the energy to care, either. Saturnyx and Tava still teased him about making the Sorceress his third wife, but he found the idea absurd. A liberated woman from Earth would never go for that sort of stuff. He had to admit that he found her Elven looks hard to resist, but he’d never been the sort of guy who had to go after everybody he found attractive. At least, not all at once.
Hawke looked at Tava, who was gathering wood while managing to bend over at just the right angle in his field of vision, and smiled. He had no complaints in that department. Zero. It was like he was starring in his own adult movie, except he was with two women he genuinely liked. He hadn’t set out to ‘make friends’ with them; it had just happened, and the sex was icing on the cake. Or vice versa, depending on his mood. But it was all cake, every night, whenever they weren’t on watch, doing camp chores, or eating.
He didn’t mind that his sword-slash-second fiancé could hear his every thought and throw in her special brand of snark. That was enough to make Hawke wonder if he’d fallen under some sort of spell. It helped that Saturnyx was unusually understanding when he did or said something stupid. Her millennia of experience meant she didn’t expect him to be perfect; she understood that people could be insensitive, petty, or just plain dumb at times. She didn’t hesitate to let him know when that happened, but she didn’t hold it against him, or bring it up again to score points off of him. Right there, she had all of his previous girlfriends beat.
Kinto walked up to him. “We will arrive at my lodge in the morning. Then we can pay the Prefect a visit.”
“We still can’t walk up to him and chop his head off,” Hawke said. “I really want to, but we don’t have any proof that he conspired with Domort to have us killed.”
“You are right, Paladin. But seeing us return might give us both proof and cause to act.”
“Okay, I think I know what you’re saying. ‘The wicked flee when no man gives chase,’” Hawke quoted the Bible, although he didn’t remember the actual passage.
“Well said! Either his master has informed him that we foiled his attack, or he expects us to be safely dead. Tomorrow, we will return, bringing Dwarven miners and two more Adventurers. Felix is a coward. He will flee our wrath or try to spring another trap. We will have him then.”
“That’s the plan, anyway,” Hawke said, looking at the distant walls and the Prefect’s Keep on top of its hill. It all seemed quiet and peaceful, and he hoped they weren’t about to bring chaos to the town.
He found out early in the morning that chaos was already there.
* * *
“Something is wrong,” Kinto said the next morning. “The smoke from dozens of cooking fires should be visible on a clear day like this. I see nothing. Nobody is tending the fields, either.”
The group was approaching Orom; they would need to walk right past it to reach the hunting lodge. The gates would normally be open from dawn to late dusk, instead, they were closed, with a heavy crossbar clearly visible through the gap between the heavy swinging doors.
“There is a body to our left,” Tava called out in a cold voice. “Thirty yards off, by the tall grass.”
“Go check who it is,” Kinto told her. “Bring your brother.”
“What is this?” Korgam asked. “Is the town under siege?”
“Everything was fine when we left,” Hawke said. “Well, not everything; the Prefect was working with the Necromancer, or at least we suspected that, but he was keeping up appearances.”
“What’s wrong?” Desmond said. His greatsword was too long to keep hanging from his belt, so he carried it in his left hand. His right grabbed the hilt, ready to bring it out.
“The place is too quiet, and they’ve shut the gates. Keep alert, everyone.”
The group spread out into a rough circle, with people looking in every direction, including up. Tava and Gosto jogged to where she’d spotted the body, knelt down by it, then jogged back rather than shout what they had found. Hawke nodded approvingly. They hadn’t worried about making noise until then, but yelling would surely alert anyone nearby that they had company.
“It’s Farmer Petres,” Tava said. “Claw marks on his back. Throat ripped open.”
“I see some big birds up in the sky!” Nadia said in a frightened voice. “To the east!”
Everyone looked. The birds were coming in behind the morning sun, making them hard to spot, and they were either fairly big or a lot closer than Hawke thought. He squinted and used his True Sight:
Mummified Huntresses (Undead)
Level 4 Harpy
Health 52 Mana 60 Endurance 48
“Undead harpies?” Nadia said before Hawke could finish reading their status boxes, thanks to her Elven vision. “A dozen of them!”
Kinto frowned. “Can’t meet them in the open. They’ll murder us from range, with spells, bows or javelins, or even rocks dropped from a height.”
“Gates are closed, the lodge is almost a mile away,” Tava said. She pointed to the nearest building, a farmhouse surrounded by a fence. “The Petres farmhouse!”
“Let’s go!”
Everyone ran to the farmhouse. Hawke waited until everyone had passed him and used the time to cast his self-buffs while Taggan and Egg did their group enhancing spells. The flying figures altered course, going from a slow glide to furious wing flapping as they sped up in the direction of the eleven Adventurers. It was going to be close.
As they approached and no longer had the sun at their backs, the critters’ hideous appearance became apparent. Harpies in every game Hawke had played weren’t known for
their beauty, but these looked like someone had taken the worst parts from the ugliest crones, vultures, and snakes, mixed them together, and then dehydrated them for that extra Mummy touch. Their naked humanoid bodies were grotesquely wrinkled, with withered breasts that hung down like sausage casings; they had patches of scaly skin around their heads and reptilian eyes glaring over their fanged mouths. The wings and lower legs were birdlike, but unlike most harpies he had seen in games, this bunch had both wings and arms. And three of them were holding bows, with quivers hanging by their sides.
“Run faster!” Hawke yelled as an arrow hit the ground a few feet from him.
Nadia tripped and fell. Without pausing, Hawke scooped her up and carried her under his arm like a chicken. Undignified, but better than being wounded or dead. An arrow struck him right between his shoulder blades but did no damage. A lightning bolt hit him, with similar results. Having good armor and magical force fields kicked ass.
When they reached the house, he helped Nadia to her feet and sent her in before he turned around and tried to deliver some payback. One of the Harpies had dived a little too close and was just beginning to climb away. He got it with his Hammer of Light; the anti-Undead double damage effect was more than enough to ‘splash that bandit,’ like they used to say in old war movies. Tava had rushed to the farmhouse’s second floor and opened the window’s shutters to get a shot off. A second Harpy plummeted to the ground, an arrow protruding from its ugly face.
The rest began to gain altitude to move out of range. Hawke took down a third one with a couple of insta-cast spells. Three down, nine to go. Arrows and spells kept falling around – and hitting – him, though. He reluctantly went into the farmhouse just moments before a rock the size of a soccer ball smashed the ground, near to where he’d been. That would have hurt, auras or no auras.
The farmhouse was a solid building with a wooden slat floor and thick walls. Hawke heard several impacts on the roof: arrows, another heavy rock, the zap-thunder of a lightning bolt. Nothing seemed to get through; even if it did, the attack would have to punch through the second floor to get at them, although he worried about Tava upstairs.
Egg was casting a spell. Hawke hoped it would take care of a few more Harpies. Kinto was by a window, holding his new bow. None of the windows had glass; instead they had wooden shutters that the Hunter had flung open to look for targets. The Harpies stayed out of sight and kept hitting the house. If one of those lightning bolts set the thatched roof on fire, they would be forced to go out into the open.
“Anybody hurt?” Hawke asked.
“Nothing that hasn’t been healed already, Paladin,” Korgam said. “And Egg will soon…”
The Priest shouted the final word of the spell and Hawke felt a rush of power leap from him and explode upwards. A moment later, nine Harpies dropped from the sky like so many turkeys flung from a helicopter. One of the bodies crashed right in front of an open window and exploded on impact in a cloud of feathers and powdered flesh and bone.
“My sixth-level spell is called Mass Blast Undead,” Egg announced proudly. “Under the circumstances, I think it was a good choice.”
“Har! A great choice, yer bald-headed Holiness!” Korgam shouted between laughs.
For slaying your foes, you have earned 450 Experience
Current XP/Next Level: 9,853/10,000
Egg’s new spell took ten seconds to cast and had a hefty thirty Mana cost, but it would inflict fifteen points of damage per level of the caster to any Undead within six hundred feet. The Priest had become the group’s mobile artillery. Hawke made a mental note to hand over any Mana potions he found to him; they needed the bald guy to keep dropping bombs on the enemy. The Event they had survived would have gone a lot more smoothly if that spell had been in play.
“Okay,” Hawke said after the rain of Harpies had ended. “It’s time to see what’s happening in town.”
Fifty-Nine
“Guess we’ll have to break in,” Hawke said.
They were in front of Orom’s secondary gate, which was smaller but was also closed and barred from the inside. They had called out and gotten no answer. Hawke hoped that the silence meant the people inside were hiding rather than dead. Mostly for the townsfolk’s sake, but he was also worried about a zombie apocalypse featuring the town’s two thousand inhabitants.
The defensive wall was fifteen feet high and had no easy handholds on its flat surface. It wasn’t an impossible climb, just inconvenient. Walls couldn’t keep people out unless someone on the other side was working on keeping them out.
“I have some rope. Did anybody bring grappling hooks?”
Korgam, Taggon and Egg all produced grappling hooks and more ropes. Dwarves believed in being prepared. An inconvenience became just a P.E. lesson. A few swings and throws got the three ropes set. Hawke led the way; his armor was surprisingly light, so he didn’t take it off, just in case someone with a crossbow and itchy trigger finger was on the other side. He heard or saw nobody on the quick climb, and reached the wall without incident.
Congratulations! You have learned Climbing at level 1.
Congratulations! Your Climbing Skill has been raised to level 2.
“I already knew how to climb a rope, Arbiters,” Hawke muttered as he scrambled over the battlements and surveyed the town from the top of the wall. The streets were deserted. Whenever he’d been there, the place had been alive with people, dogs, cats, even the odd barnyard animal some townsfolk kept in their homes. Nothing moved anywhere. It worried him. He looked at the Prefect’s Keep: the front door was open, but he couldn’t see inside from where he was. A glance at the Shining Father Temple to the south revealed that its gates were closed, but showed signs of damage, as if someone or something had tried to break in. That looked like the first place they should check out.
“Come on up,” he told the rest of the group. “Looks like nobody’s home.”
Tava was next: she came up faster than he had, moving with fluid grace. With her help, they soon had everyone up on the parapet. Hawke led the way as the group came down the stairs and walked through the silent streets, moving quietly and on the lookout for trouble. They were about halfway to the temple when trouble found them.
A figure shambled out of a house a few feet away from Hawke. The gray skin, empty eyes and terrible body odor would have identified it even without seeing its name tag:
Minor Shambler (Undead)
Level 2 Zombie
Health 26 Mana 18 Endurance 0
The Shambler reached for Hawke, its mouth opening and closing like a sewing machine. A quick thrust of his sword took care of him, just as more shuffling Undead began to emerge from their hiding places. Dozens of them.
“Let’s keep moving!” Hawke said. “To the temple!”
He let Kinto go first while he brought up the rear. Tava paused long enough to put an arrow through the eye of another zombie that was in the way of the group. Hawked looked back; the streets were filling up with zombies. Not as many as he’d thought, but enough. And mixed in with the low-level Undead, there were other monsters. Tall and wide humanoids were coming out; they had visible seams where arms and legs had been crudely sewn to mismatched torsos, Frankenstein monster style.
Abominations (Undead)
Level 6 (Elite)
Health 120 Mana 60 Endurance 0
Those weren’t townspeople. The Necromancer’s minions had invaded the town, and Hawke knew who had let them in. He ran after his friends.
A few zombies managed to intercept the Adventurers on the way to the temple, but the ones Kinto or Tava didn’t shoot down were chopped up by the Dwarves. Even Desmond got into the fun, beheading a zombie with a swing of his oversized sword. The Warrior gave Hawke a thumb up gesture before he went back to running.
Hawke threw a few Light hammers around as he ran, killing any Undead about to flank the retreating group. When he reached an intersection, he dropped a Consecrated Ground; a whole bunch of zombies reached the Life-imbued area
and hesitated – but the ones behind them pushed right into it. The low-level creatures sounded like microwaved bags of popcorn when exposed to the cleansing energy.
The temple’s doors had taken a beating but still held. There were scorch marks around the walls and door. Hawke figured the Undead had gotten burned when they came into contact with the structure. The gods didn’t care to have people touching their stuff, let alone the Undead.
Kinto knocked loudly on the door.
“Open up, Patros!”
No answer.
Hawke looked behind him. Forty or fifty zombies and a couple dozen Abominations were filling the streets behind them. And up in the sky, he saw more Harpies coming in. He’d seen enough zombie movies to guess how this was going to end if somebody didn’t let them into the temple.
Tava took another shot, and one of the Abominations went down with an arrow in his forehead. The shuffling Undead walked over the fallen body, soon hiding it completely. He glanced at the Dwarves: Korgam and Daggon moved up to form a line. In the rear, Egg was prepping Mass Blast Undead. Given the critters’ low levels, maybe worrying about escaping the zombies was stupid. They had killed hundreds of skeletons a few days ago. Maybe they should clear the whole town.
Hawke felt a wave of Mana explode out of the Prefect’s keep and touch all the Undead. A moment later, Egg finished casting Mass Blast Undead – and the spell failed. A notification opened up; it contained nothing but bad news:
Town Ruler has activated Call to Arms!
You have been Marked as Town Enemies.
Town’s loyal followers and minions have gained five levels within the town’s borders.
All spell casting from enemies has an 80% chance of failure within the town’s borders.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Hawke said when he saw the improved Undead:
Enhanced Shambler (Undead)
Level 7 Zombie
Health 105 Mana 70 Endurance 0
Abominations (Elite Undead)
Level 11 Monstrosity
Health 220 Mana 110 Endurance 0
Twilight Templar (The Eternal Journey Book 1) Page 35
