by Dante King
“Your hordes down there?” I gestured to the courtyard far below. “Might take them a while. And in the meantime…” I drew my sword. “You’re stuck up here with us.”
The priests stepped back, and I braced myself, expecting to be hit by some impressive earth Augmenting power. Instead, they fumbled for weapons, some fastened to their belts, others left in corners of the room. Were they such badasses in combat that they wouldn’t need to use their magic now?
Then, I remembered Mahrai and how reliant she had seemed on her golem. These guys weren’t reaching for their weapons because they were great fighters; they were doing it because they were limited Augmenters. Vesma and I were facing a bunch of one-trick ponies, and we had plenty of tricks of our own.
Vesma went first. She raised her hands, placed them together, and summoned a ball of fire between them. The Untamed Torch shot from her palms straight at the nearest priest. It hit with a blast of heat and light that engulfed him in a torrent of flame. He staggered back as flames roared along his robes and produced the stench of burning fabric and charred flesh. As he staggered backward, I channelled Flame Empowerment technique. The fire grew fiercer, racing across the priest’s body and out along his arms and legs. He screamed and ran back through the other priests as flames rose higher from him. As he went, the fire jumped to the others, setting some of those at the back alight.
While the chaos we’d sown spread, I charged. With the Sundered Heart in one hand and the Depthless Dream in the other, I sliced and stabbed at the priests. The first had just enough time to swing his hammer up into the air, leaving his chest exposed, and I impaled him with my sword. As another swung a club, I parried it with the trident, knocked it aside, and brought the sword around to slice off his hand. For a moment, he stared in shock at the stump. I kicked him in the gut and sent him flying off the balcony to land with a wet thud on the ground below.
Vesma spun her spear then swung it in a low arc that knocked the legs out from under several of the priests. She ran across their prone bodies, stamping on them as she went, and charged a priest holding a crossbow at the back of the room. He just had time to pull the trigger, but Vesma raised a Flame Shield, and the bolt glanced off it to stick into the ceiling, trailing smoke. Then, she was across the room and eviscerated the bowman with her spear. Entrails spilled from his stomach as the crossbow fell from his hands, and he slumped to the floor.
More priests were coming at me with weapons raised. Like the rest of the warriors in the Gonki Valley, many of them used heavy, two-handed weapons that allowed them to deliver powerful blows, but they were relying on strength over skill, while I had both. Rather than stand and fight, I moved quickly between them, dodging and deflecting attacks, not forcing myself to bear the weight of their strikes. As I dodged and darted, I stabbed at them with both sword and trident. Ice and fire flickered across the weapons, adding magical strength to my hits.
One of the largest priests stood in front of me, a curved sword in his hands. He swung with all the grace and poise of an executioner, aiming to lop off my head. I ducked and turned the movement into a low kick that swept his legs from under him. He crashed to the floor, still clutching his sword, but I kicked him in the hand, and he lost his grip. The blade clattered onto the floorboards. As he scrambled to get hold of it, I finished him off with a thrust to the heart.
An ax hit the ground, missing my leg by half an inch. I whirled around and saw a priest facing me, a look of pure hatred in his eyes. He lifted the ax again and swung it at chest-height.
There was a clang of colliding metal as I blocked the blow with the Sundered Heart. The priest brought the ax back, but I was on the attack now. He blocked a blow from the Sundered Heart, and while that kept him busy, I thrust hard with the Depthless Dream. The prongs of the trident went right through his chest, water magic and cold steel slicing through muscle and bone. The force of my blow slammed him back against the wall and pinned him there.
Despite the trident through his chest, he was still moving. His lips bared in a snarl.
“The Straight Path will triumph,” he hissed as he brought the ax up.
I brought the Sundered Heart around and sliced clean through his neck.
“Fuck your Straight Path,” I said as I turned from the headless corpse spouting blood.
Vesma darted through the other priests, leaving a trail of devastation in her wake. Men and women fell with flaming robes and charred faces or blood spurting from spear wounds. She used the spear like a vaulter’s pole to propel herself into the air and kicked one of the larger priests in the face. Her momentum took her with him as he staggered back. She landed on her feet, brought the spear around, and cleaved him in half with one swift stoke.
“You’re going to crush us, are you?” she asked with a grin.
The priests were running low on numbers, but their dedication to their cause and to our destruction was clearly fanatical. Despite the burned and bleeding bodies of their friends littering the ground, three more ran at me.
“For the Straight Path!” they screeched in uncanny unison.
Their attacks came thick and fast. I didn’t have time to counter-attack as I fended off three weapons with two of my own.
While they acted in unison, the priests weren’t tactically coordinated. I pulled around to my left, back onto the balcony, and two of them ended up blocking the attacks of the third.
With the odds tilted, I was able to go back on the offensive. As one of the priests swung his mace, I countered the blow, then hacked at his arms with the Sundered Heart. It wasn’t a clean blow, and instead of severing the arms, I left a bloody mess of shattered bone and gouged flesh, but it was enough to leave him unarmed and defenseless. I thrust the Depthless Dream through his neck, and he sank to his knees, gurgling out his last breath.
The priest beside him made a low swipe with an ax, trying to take my legs out from under me. I jumped over the attack and back onto the balcony rail, then leaped from there into the air. I spun head over heels as I went, turning myself into a wheel of death, with sword and trident spinning with me. The blade sliced through the priest’s shoulder, the spear caught him in the back, and he collapsed.
I landed, weapons raised. The last priest had taken a few steps back, not out of fear but to give himself momentum. He roared and charged, a long-bladed spear held out in front of him. When he was almost on me, I dropped and raised my weapons around where the spear would be. He had too much momentum to stop, so he kept coming, and I hooked his spear down. It caught in the balcony rail, which he also collided with. His momentum carried him over the edge, and he plummeted to the ground below.
I peered over the rail. Amazingly, that final priest had survived the fall. He pulled himself up on one leg and drew a shortsword from within his robes, then looked around the courtyard. He was surrounded by a maelstrom of combat as my companions fought the corrupted lesser earth golems.
Tahlis sprang up out of the dirt behind the final priest. “You people ruined my guild. Now, I’m going to ruin you.” He slammed his bare palm into the priest’s back. The blow produced a sound like a thunderclap, and the priest’s body shuddered before imploding in a shower of bones, blood, and gore. It was as if Tahlis has produced a Ground Strike within the man’s body, and the force of an earthquake had ruptured him from the inside out.
As the last of the priests fell, the remaining golems stopped moving. Their weapons fell from their hands and crumbled to dust that scattered on a warm breeze across the courtyard.
Ganyir looked up at the balcony where Vesma and I stood triumphant. “Scout the rest of the fortress. Find anyone else who wishes to fight us and deal with them.”
I wasn’t used to obeying orders from the lord, but his plan was a good one.
“I’ll come with you, Swordslinger,” Tahlis volunteered after he appeared behind me.
“I’ll join the others,” Vesma said.
Tahlis led me to a door beside a staircase that led into a network of corridors. Th
ey were carved from the raw rock and seemed to go deeper into the mountainside, as the boundary between human building and natural feature faded. The space was defined by narrow hallways connecting rooms of various sizes, some containing frugal supplies, others bunk beds, and a few for mundane purposes such as laundry.
Torches flickered on the walls of the corridors. Someone had taken the time to illuminate this place, which meant that this part of the fortress had been in use, even while its rulers were in the City Palace and most of the army was on campaign.
“Where does this lead?” I asked.
Tahlis didn’t initially respond. He was crouching in the middle of the corridor, one hand pressed on the worn stone floor.
“I can feel movement below us,” he said. “There are people down there.”
I drew the Sundered Heart. “Where are the stairs? We should find out if there’s a threat.”
Down another corridor and two sets of stairs, deep in the rock of the mountain, we reached an area where the walls hadn’t been carved with such care. Instead of the smooth stonework we had seen before, it was rough, bare rock. The air down here was less pleasant too, thick with rot and sweat.
We walked through a guard room with a table in one corner and shields hanging on the wall. I slid back the bolt on an iron gate and led the way down the passage beyond.
“The dungeons,” Tahlis said. “I don’t think we’re going to find the Unswerving Shadows here.”
This passage was lined with doorways, each holding a heavy wooden door. As we approached the first one, someone called out plaintively from within.
“Please,” they croaked. “Please, some water, some food. Please don’t leave us here to die.”
A wave of fury rushed through me. I kicked the door with all the strength I had in me. The wood around the lock splintered, and it flew open.
There was a clinking sound and frantic whispers. I looked in to see around 20 people of various ages, all dressed in rags that revealed their emaciated bodies. They were chained together, their faces covered with hoods. They cowered against the walls as I stepped in.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m not here to hurt you.”
The closest prisoner trembled as I reached out and carefully removed the hood. She blinked in the light, stared at me, and clutched two of the shorter prisoners close. I removed their hoods too and immediately saw a resemblance in their faces.
“Your children?” I asked her quietly.
She nodded.
“Why would anyone lock up children?”
“They said we were heretics because we refused to join the Cult of Unswerving Shadows.”
“Of course.” I clenched my fist. It made sense, the sort of sense only a dark and twisted order would follow. Lock up the dissenters and anyone they cared about, and fear would keep the rest in line.
“You won’t be prisoners anymore,” I said. “We’re bringing the reign of the Unswerving Shadows to an end.”
I focused a small, intense blast of Untamed Torch on the link in the chain that fastened it to the wall. White heat melted the metal, and the chain parted. One by one, Tahlis and I removed the prisoners’ hoods and freed them from their bonds.
Some of the other cells held similar prisoners, ordinary Hyng’ohr citizens and their families, locked up for refusing to bow to a terrible path. Tahlis and I led them out of the dungeon and up into the fortress to a set of rooms with beds, chairs, and tables, barracks spaces for an army in times of emergency. The contingent of guards and cultists we’d slain seemed to have been the only ones manning the fortress.
While they rested, we fetched what food we could find from the fortress’ supplies and water from the wells attached to the kitchens. Soon, the starving prisoners were digging into the first proper meal they had eaten in weeks. As much as it had chilled my heart to see how they’d been treated, it was now warmed by the sight of people relishing the restoration of both freedom and food.
“Thank you so much,” said Shadiy, the woman I had first freed. “You’ve saved my family.”
“It’s what the Swordslinger does,” I said.
“You’re the Swordslinger?” Shadiy looked at me wide-eyed. “I never thought I would live to see a hero on that path.”
“And I never thought I’d get to be one,” I admitted. “Funny how life turns out, huh?”
Looking around the room full of feasting prisoners, I realized how much bigger my mission was than I had anticipated. It wasn’t enough just to kill the bad guys. My job was to make things better in the provinces, to restore lives that had been torn apart and land that had been ruined. I was here to bring good, not just drive out evil.
I took a seat next to Shadiy. “Tell me more about what happened to you.”
“The cult called us the Pathless. Anyone who didn’t follow their way was assumed to have no path of their own, no purpose worth speaking of. They killed some of us as an example to try to make others convert, but most of us who spoke out against Saruqin and his cronies were locked up. I think they were keeping many of the Pathless as a potential tool. If we eventually broke and converted, then we could be used to influence others, as a sign that all resistance fails in the end. But we stayed strong.”
“If so many stayed strong, how was Saruqin able to turn the guild and the clan against Ganyir?” I asked.
“Through poisonous words carefully chosen. He found the right ears to whisper in and spread rumors that Ganyir was an unintelligent buffoon, too proud of himself and only good for war. It was easy for some people to believe because Ganyir was known to be a great warrior, and they liked to think of themselves as smarter than him. That gave him enough followers to start taking control.”
“What of Mahrai? What was her role?” I was still wondering whether we might be able to use her against the cultists, or whether it was just a baseless idea running around in my head.
“Her power, and especially the earth golem, won over those who wanted to be that powerful themselves, as well as striking fear into some who might have stood against Saruqin.”
“She served willingly?”
“I don’t know. She was never present at the public executions. There were whispers that she could be sympathetic to our cause. But they soon ceased. Maybe she was once, but Saruqin would have ironed out any thought she had of conspiring against him. He might have threatened a family member, or told her she would be given to his cultists to alleviate their yearnings.
“Fear is at the heart of everything Sarquin does,” Shadiy continued with a shake of her head. “His corrupted priests roam the city, rooting out anything they consider heretical, from following other paths to criticizing Saruqin’s policies. We were all rounded up as heretics and left in the cells with barely enough food to survive. Some days I was so hungry, I thought they were trying to see if we’d eat our fellow prisoners to survive. But now…”
She held up a slice of bread with trembling hands, then looked at me with a wide smile.
“You saved us, Swordslinger.”
I considered what she had told me. Some of this was going to be painful for Ganyir to hear, but he needed to understand what was going on in his city. Importantly, he knew the city better than I did. He could ask questions that would give us a deeper understanding of exactly what the Unswerving Shadows were doing—where they kept their soldiers and Augmenters, which people of importance were on their side, who might join us against them.
“Will you come with me to talk with Lord Ganyir?” I asked. “I think your intelligence could be invaluable in freeing the city.”
“Of course!”
Shadiy looked at a man sitting across the table from us. Shadiy’s daughter sat in his lap and her son nestled in close. All three were eating like they feared they might never have the chance again. I hadn’t seen the man in the cell with her, but from his expression and the way the children acted with him, I assumed he was their father and Shadiy’s husband.
“Are you all right with them for a whi
le?” she asked.
Her husband nodded. “Of course. You go save the province.”
They smiled at each other. Shadiy stroked each of her children on the cheek, took a deep breath, and rose to follow me.
We found Ganyir and the others still in a large, echoing chamber with a high ceiling and a round table in the center. High-backed chairs were drawn up around the table, places where officers and commanders could gather while they made their plans. The walls were lined with benches for their deputies and messengers.
Maps were spread across the table, weighed down with markers representing where my companions thought Saruqin’s forces might be. The tone of the conversation was upbeat, buoyed by our success in dealing with the priests and their golems.
I introduced Shadiy and asked her to repeat her story.
As my companions listened, their expressions became grim. Kegohr clenched his clawed fists. Ganyir glared at the table. Kumi, in particular, seemed to retreat into herself, curling up in her seat with her arms wrapped around her. Stories of starving children were too much for her to take. Vesma frowned the whole time, her rage simmering beneath the surface.
Ganyir asked questions, as I’d expected. The conversation moved on to details I wouldn’t have considered, and Shadiy helped the lord place his pieces more accurately on the maps.
I went to Kumi, knelt by her chair, and laid a hand on her arm.
“Are you all right?” I asked quietly.
She nodded and stared at her hands. “I’ll be fine. I just wish there was something I could do to help those poor people.”
“Perhaps there is,” I said. “We haven’t found a lot of food here, and we have a lot of mouths to feed. If we can identify a source of supplies, that would be a huge help.”
Kumi turned to me, eyes bright. “Ganyir said that there are underground streams beneath the desert boneyard. Where there’s water, there’s life. We should be able to find fish there, or at least edible plants.”
