IN WHICH SIGHTSEEING IS PLANNED.
It's hard to talk frankly to a man with golden eyes. John's eyes were shining sun from corner to corner, without white nor pupil. It was hard to tell whether he was just looking in your general direction, or staring into your eyes. Then, you'd get the feeling he was looking somewhere inside you. He had never been without followers these last few days, never did someone cross his path. They bowed, against his humble admonishments, and trod in his footsteps.
Keller, for what it's worth, had not stopped ribbing him since the battle.
John just strode about, speaking with everyone, anyone, about how they were feeling, how much they had to eat, to carry, to wear. How they felt about, perhaps, travelling somewhere. No, there wasn't a plan, no not quite yet, do not worry, the Dawnbringer will always protect us. Trust me.
A few nights back, lying out under the clear stars, a spider had crawled over my neck. It was a smear now, but every so often it came back. I felt it now, watching John at work. He came to me eventually with a flat smile and sparkling eyes.
"Susan. Just who I wanted to see. You've seen Alaxoria, yes?"
"Last I saw of her, she was building - well, her shelter," I kicked a pebble, why was this feeling so, so glum and sticky? This was John I was speaking with. "She hasn't come out since last night."
"Good. Well. When we need her, we'll know where she is."
Keller strolled into the space between the huts, hands in his pockets, Zephyr by his shoulder.
"Are you absolutely certain it's not jaundice, Zephyr? I'm sure there's some quinine in my bag somewhere for a remedy. And you know, our John does like his ale. Oh, John, there you are. We were just talking about you."
The flat smile remained. "Keller. Excellent. It's time."
"No."
"You haven't-"
"No!"
The flat smile remained.
"John, it's not happening. We are not going back to the citadel, not until spring comes at the very earliest."
"Yes. We are. All of us."
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There was a bit of an argument. If I'm honest, it was a fight. Technically, John drew his sword first, but it was probably just to make a point, to wave it in the direction of HIS tower or the citadel. Keller had a knife in his hand before John's broken blade had even cleared the sheathe, and had it in the air before another word could be spoken. It shan't be I to decide where the blame falls between those two, but like as not: both of them. John and Keller always get into these scuffles, but this time Zephyr butted in with a wide-bore time slowing spell, trying to settle things diplomatically. It clipped me as well, which set off my amulet, and I'm never in the mood for the gut-wrenching that time spells cause. So, perhaps, I may have messed with Zephyr's spell, just a little. It took them a moment to realise what I had done, changing the scale and concentration. There was a single mote of dust that was pinned in mid-air, experiencing about a century of subjective time. Zephyr was not well-pleased by my meddling, and proceeded to lecture me on the importance of non-violent resolution, accompanied by beams of paralytic light when I wouldn't stop laughing. I could've dealt with those as well, for sure, but John saw Zephyr going at me and figured I was in danger, and went after Zephyr. While John was distracted, Keller sidled up for a well-placed kick. I wasn't having any of that, and caught Keller in the ribs with my shoulder as he drew back.
That was how Alaxoria found us, in a bickering pile, Zephyr with two of their good spells popped, John mildly stabbed, myself bleeding from a nose I didn't recall getting booped on, surrounded by horrified faces staring between the wooden walls of the huts. Oh, and Keller, who was somehow completely fine, until Ala walloped him with the haft of her axe.
"What was that for?!" he cried, rolling over onto his back.
Ala paused for a moment, inspecting an errant splinter. "Either you know what you did. Or, you were planning something sneaky-bad. Or, you are not planning, and will do a sneaky-bad very soon anyway."
Keller held up one finger, and looked like he was about to say something. Then, he did.
"We should go back to the citadel."
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John really wasn't happy being over-ruled, but the five of us were going back to the citadel, and the rest of the survivors would stay right here. Zephyr wasn't happy with the state of the settlement, the attack from the Mountain Spirit had blasted one of the lightning-warded trees into sawdust, and they hadn't noticed for an entire day. Keller wasn't happy that we were leaving everyone in such an indefensible location, but the citadel was a pressing concern, and John wouldn't be dissuaded. I was fine with it all. Alaxoria was miffed at missing out on a good brawl between the lot of us, it had been months since the last opportunity. And Berkeley the clerk was extremely upset at being left in charge.
"Me? Are you serious? But, there's no reason, I've got nothing! I don't even want to be in charge!"
"Why Mackerel, that is precisely the reason you've been given the post. Here, hold out your hand. Other hand. There you go. Stop! Don't look at that, and also don't point the hollow bit at me, or at anything else you'd like to keep. It's very delicate, it's mostly glass and spiderweb. If something gets into the camp and past the lightning trees, point the hollow end at it and panic. Panic as hard as you can. It'll work safely the first time, maybe the second. After that it'll work just... not safely. Understand? Good man. I knew I could count on you." I joined the others before he could finish spluttering, who were discussing the food situation with Hedda and Arsworth senior.
"Don't ration the food, or anything like that." said Keller, looking at the clouds, figuring out the times and distances. "We'll be back in two days, you'll have plenty. If we aren't back in two days, you probably won't survive anyway." Hedda furrowed her brow and nodded with great solemnity. Arsworth just laughed with an open mouth.
"Oh, you kids. Like as much, all of us? We should all be dead already. Every day extra is all just gravy. Safe travels."
Time was of the essence, and we were all as hale as we'd been in some time, so John thought it best to crack out the eight-league tincture. Ala dispensed a white petal each, and Zephyr sent reinforcing spells down four pairs of knees and ankles, especially Alaxoria's repaired leg. Hedda seemed halfway to tears as she watched the preparations. "Hey, we'll be back." I said softly, fingers already twitching, toes tapping.
"It's not that, it's just - I've been thinking. About the citadel. And it's all just so - everyone is -" I patted her on the back, ever so gently, while she hiccoughed.
"We'll be back. And whatever we see, we'll make the best of it."
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The road flew by. Perhaps Zephyr could've figured a way to give the other four of us wings, but that was a trick to save for a rainy day. Instead, they soared above to watch the westward road while we stampeded down it. Alaxoria danced and laughed and span and kicked off trees, and kicked through trunks as well. She loved this stuff, all of it, the spells and the potions and the drugs. And she was damn good at it to. And damn, if it wasn't contagious! My legs felt like steel pistons, driven into the road with every crashing footfall, blood humming with spells and curling reagents. We barely scouted, and had no rearguard, and we were probably the loudest and brightest thing to anything with the second sight, but I'd dare any of them to try and stop us.
We crested the grassy dunes like dolphins breaching the waves, kicking up sand in great sheets. It was like moving through a dream. And like a dream, it twisted into a nightmare as the citadel came into view. Every other homeward journey had ended with the spires peeking over the hills in greeting. Not this time. The river had grown closer with each league we had crossed, and now our paths joined. The black slime had flowed downriver since the great obscenity had been performed, and now a greasy slick spread into the ocean and over the rolling breakers. The walls stood, and the shells of buildings, and the awful blank space that had devoured the wizard tower, and... nothing. The wind twisted, and the stench of carrion hit like a fist.
Zephyr cleared the spells in silence, and we walked towards our home. The decaying bodies of war-built creations lay in great charnel piles against the walls. Scavengers hopped and cawed at each other, but feathery bodies littered the heaps of flesh as well. The sheer curtain walls of necromantic bone had an implacable appetite.
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"The gate's on the other side of the river." said Keller. "We go over the walls. I know the words."
"You-" I started.
"Yes, I'm sure. Unless I'm not, in which case we're all about to die. Except you, Zephyr."
It turns out that Keller did, in fact, know the watch words. Close up, the bone walls weren't smooth, they were a frozen ripple of interlocking joints and vertebrae and teeth. With six words, the bone wall began to shift and groan. We stood beneath the walls in the slender shadow cut from the daylight, breathing through cloths, as long femurs eased out from the interior. Some of those bones belonged to long-dead soldiers, and some of those bones must've come from the creatures lying in puddles all around us. but for the life of me, I could not tell you which were which. The walk up the slender staircase was a little terrifying, all the worse as we knew what we would see once we cleared the top.
Outside the citadel walls, beyond the thin scum of black ooze, sunlight shattered off the swell, clear blue skies all the way to the horizon. Perhaps Keller had been right. We could've told six lies, purchased a boat, and gone looking for that horizon. Ears shut. Eyes forwards. It's easier to pretend it isn't happening, if it's not jammed in your eyes.
There was no city here. Just walls and buildings.
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Eventually, we stopped checking the dwellings and storefronts. Stopped looking for threats. Stopped looking for the bodies. We had never been looking for survivors, but we stopped that as well. There was nothing here, just fragments of ashen smears, drops of blood that had been cleaned up. The cobbles of the main thoroughfare had been shattered and melted, mixed with the sand beneath into grim glass. Each footstep crunched a little, flinched a little, loud over the sea winds and cawing from the meat piles outside. Zephyr stayed low and close, Alaxoria loomed behind, Keller went back and forth around us, blades out. It felt like the city had been fished out of the garbage, shaken up and down, and left carelessly by the seaside for us to find.
No bodies. No blood. Just the blackened river, and us.
Without the tall spires of the central keep, we all felt halfway lost, strangers in a strange city. The main thoroughfare spread out into the market square, abutting the riverside docks. Where the stalls and crowds had thronged, where the docks had rung out, where the roads had splayed with life and supplies, lay only blank melted stone. The city was laid out in a plain and efficient design, a four-way crossroads between river, city and sea. And of course, the dearly purchased arcane miracle that was the Western Citadel Portal. The archmages would've put it behind lock and bar beneath their tower, but the king listened to the generals and merchants and cattle-lords as well. And blessing upon us that the hard-fought compromise bore fruit, for the portal lay beneath our feet, buried beneath the great market square.
John said the words, sixteen this time. When we had all paid close attention to the dozen passphrases that controlled the walls and stones and guardians of the city, never could we have guessed to what purpose we'd put them. We last, sorry inheritors of this place. The marketplace shivered, the hide of a dog with a fly on it's back. Shivered, subsided, and rose in the centre, a blooming flower. Stone panels folded back, white metal beneath, the hidden joints of a crackling shell as the melted glass crumbled to sand. Rune-carved stone pillars slid smoothly out of the new gaps, a lonesome monument in the blank square. Then, eye-watering, the scaly reek of dead fish. Long dead. The rising pillars did not pause in their sedate ascension, but dredged from the depths came a foul slurry of mashed knot-fish, squeezed through the margins and spilling out through gaps in the stone. They burst and slid and sprayed, crushed fruit of the worlds foulest wine press. Hundreds of them, thousands, long rotten, twisted to pulp.
The portal construct stood proud in the centre of the marketplace, seven great pillars as wide as a man and ten times the height, all seven of them arranged in a single perfect four-pointed square. If the grand spells were lit, we would see through to distant lands, and they to us, and walk or ride as easily through to those lands as to the next street.
We saw nothing but the rotten corpses of murderous fish.
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The way to the core of the portal mechanisms was slow and convoluted. Five streets back from the market square, an unassuming townhouse contained a reinforced bunker, the gate to the little constructed underworld. Or at least, the ashen rubble that was once an unassuming townhouse. Shifting it aside was a time-consuming annoyance, that played on our strung nerves. We were snappy and irritable with each other, and the stench of knot-fish had drifted downwind with us. In time, the dirty steel hatch was scraped out of the ground floor. It was true-forged steel, no magic in the sturdy mechanism, and the heavily-stocked shop above the townhouse had sold plate armour. Nothing to give it away to scrying. Perhaps the scheme would've even worked, had it been put to the test.
The hatch groaned open, the fetid reek reached up from below to catch me around the neck. For an instant, I was waist deep in the black river, feeling the froth and whirl of razor fins, saw the sky above lit red and white to wipe it all out.
Then, it was my turn to go down. John's sword reflected evening sunlight from somewhere far away, Zephyr let a little more blue out, while I fumbled up the glowing orb. It hovered above my head, while Ala pulled the hatch shut. The world shrank: Two brick walls, dusty stone floor, arched roof, two soft walls of rotten darkness before and after us. In the dark, with nothing to look at but the back of Keller's head, the city above us rolled over in my mind.
Over, and over, it rolled. Swept streets. Burned out shells, scraped clean. Down here, four breaths turned ragged and scraping against my ears. Even Zephyr's silence seemed to ring out. Keller tried to say something and it made me jump and flinch, Ala swear, John stop, Zephyr flatten against the roof. We moved on, loud and thumping creatures of the daylight.
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The tunnel did not so much open up, as squeeze out sideways, fall away, peel back. The ceiling above us twisted up and away, letting our little gleaming bubble fall on reeking, stinking blackness. Zephyr muttered, and sent a soft moonlight up above us. The conjured moon cast a wan light across the grisly scene, the pale glow picking out the smashed scales, the ripple of fluids, the cracked bones and stones, the mechanisms smashed and toppled, the decrepit sludge of ten thousand knot-fish. And the fallen chassis of a war statue. It lay, scattered against the floor, granite arms and legs splayed, amidst the detritus
"Oh." said Keller. "I didn't- I didn't think they could be killed." He picked his way through the dried morass of cursed fish, standing next to the great iron boots of the statue. The legs of the toppled war statue were caked in filth to calf-level, about the height of a man. The light shifted, revealing knot-fish corpses crammed into the comparatively delicate joints, squeezed to pulp inside great rents in the armour. Keller stepped out of salute-range and spoke the command words, but the great stone pile didn't move an inch.
"Where's it's spear." I said, casting my eyes across the chamber. We were below the market square now, above us sat ten thousand tons of stone and road, this space held the portal structure when it was folded away for safe-keeping. As well as the arcane mechanisms that powered the portal, the lifeline of the entire city. A masterpiece of magic and masonry, an artefact of such importance that...
"And where's the other war statue?" I said.
The ground doesn't shake when a war statue charges. It turns to liquid, vibrating up your legs, into your skull. Each colossal footfall has barely echoed before the next lands, the grinding inertia turned to spectacular momentum in a symphony of utter devastation. The second war statue was pierced through the heart by a house-height spear, draped in a cloak of a thousand knot-fish, crowned with a three eyed skull that bit deep with writhing teeth into the stone helmet. It carried another spear, snapped in two like a dried branch, revealing the core of enchanted bronze that should've outlasted any of us. It came down upon us like an avalanche, all the mighty twisted fury of the citadel, corrupted by the river-borne invasion. And now, a new invader, to fight and kill and squash, to fulfil those instructions chiseled in that stone head: kill them all.