Chapter 42 - Retake the Initiative

Tensions were high.

The church contingent wasn’t particularly keen on surrendering their weapons after so long in the dark, and it took some negotiation to come up with a way to do it. The guard commander wouldn’t let anyone take a step without full disarmament and removal of armor. Sissa didn’t like having her squad shown such disrespect, and she wasn’t backing down. Meanwhile Geddon and Samila stood at Sissa’s side with their hands ready to draw.

Trix and I, on the other hand, had no weapons to drop as far as the guards knew, so we stood with the civilians, though the guards did eye my metal arm with some concern. One by one, all the quarrels slowly drifted over to point at me, and the commander had some probing questions about what I could do.

“He is a Brother of the Order of Dawn, and he’s as trustworthy as any of us, you pillock,” Sissa argued in my defense. “And I’d wager he’s done more to save innocent life in the past week than you and your band of bullies have your entire lives.”

It was a bit much, but, as I said, tensions were high.

Sissa’s words didn’t go over well. The commander’s face turned red, and a prominent vein popped out of his forehead. “I very much doubt that, young miss. You’re lucky I don’t just have you shot then seal this tunnel back up. Would be a lot less trouble for us, and we could go back to our posts.”

“I might be the first shot, but I won’t be the first to die,” Geddon rumbled, stepping forward before Sissa stopped him with an outstretched hand.

“We have civilians with us, sir,” I said, hoping to appeal to his sense of duty or humanity… miurity? “Seal us in if you have to, but they don’t belong down here.”

The man’s eyes shot over to me then to the civilians, calculating. Then his gaze came to rest on the kid.

That took the wind out of his sails. He calmed, taking a big breath and relaxing his shoulders, closing his good eye for a good five seconds.

“Alright, all of you come inside, and we’ll get this sealed up. Weapons sheathed and no sudden movements. You’ll all then be taken to quarantine until you can be examined for plague. Is that acceptable, Sergeant?” He finally asked Sissa, putting a significant pause between Sissa’s rank and the rest of the question.

It was a start.

Sissa turned back to look us all over and gauge everyone’s feelings, then nodded. “That is acceptable, but I won’t stand for my people to be treated badly.”

“Neither would I,” The guard commander sighed. “and I’m protecting my people by confining you. You’ve had too much contact with the plagued to not be regarded with some caution.”

“Fine,” Sissa agreed tersely, sheathing her sword and stepping to the side to allow the civilians to come through.

The grandmother was weeping, the shopkeeper stoic. The kid, however, looked shell shocked, more than I’d seen from him even in the undercity. Maybe seeing the adults at each other’s throats removed a layer of familiarity he’d been able to cling to for the entire ordeal. Hard to tell.

After that, the guards took us in while the commander took a ring of little dangly charms off of his belt and waved it at the portal to the smugglers’ tunnels which prompted it to close.

All but one conspicuously missing brick of course. I wondered what the going rate for magical quellstone door replacements was.

The guards gave me a wide, wide berth once they got a whiff of me. Trix, with his filthy church robes and small stature was treated with the most deference, surprisingly, with guards apologizing to him for their treatment and asking if there was anything they could do for him.

Trix, for his part, seemed to deal with the attention by trying to hide behind whoever was close at hand, Geddon ideally, Samila as a backup.

I caught Samila’s eye and raised an eyebrow in question. She leaned in to whisper in my ear: “Always be nice to the healer.”

“I heard that,” Trix said. “Just to clarify: I’m not a healer, commander. I can ward off death for a time, but it’s not true healing.”

“We’ll take anything we can get right now, Brother Yik’i’Trix,” the guard commander declared grimly. “Even as you are, you are most welcome inside these walls.”

“Not to sound unappreciative, but whose walls are we inside?” I asked.

“You’ve broken into the Spire, sir,” one of the guards said hoarsely, a young man with a dirty bandage wrapped around his throat. “Specifically the Black University, if the banners and colors didn’t clue you in.”

“Now if you’ll come with us, you’ve all been assigned an escort, and they’ll take you to accommodations . Fennel!” The commander called to a young, lupine looking guard with sharp features and facial hair on all but his eyes. “A bath for this one, then off the quarantine.”

—--------------------------------------

I was separated from the group and escorted down a series of long, straight hallways of smooth, white walls and regularly spaced pairs of doors. My eyes were still getting used to how bright it was in here, and the white certainly didn’t help things, my eyes tending to water and blur when I looked directly at anything.

Were they overcompensating for just how dark the underground typically was elsewhere? Hard to tell.

Our route took us past all the white then through a large room with multiple soft couches and tables that were set up for some kind of social occasion with softer light coming from golden lamps and flickering sconces. Books laid strewn on most of the tables along with playing cards and dice. I recognized the general setup, even if I’d not been to university myself.

A common room. We came in through a dormitory.

The only people we encountered was after two flights of stairs where we passed a pair of women that, upon seeing us, retreated into one of the doorways, quietly engaging the lock with a click. Understandable considering how I looked and smelled but disquieting nonetheless.

Any misgivings I had for my situation vanished, however, once Fennel showed me to an honest to Constance bathroom with running water, scalding hot and absolutely glorious. The bath was a big, group sized bowl, more like a shallow, steaming pool than a personal tub, but I had the place all to myself.

On the wall were brushes, mirrors, and towels along with a bucket of white flakes that smelled like soap and worked into a lather when I experimentally rubbed them between my fingers.

Slipping into the water, I felt the first warmth I’d experienced in a long, long time that wasn’t the result of self-immolation.

I… didn’t know quite how to react to it. It felt wonderful, like a return home to civilized life but wrong somehow, like this moment of comfort was not what I should have been doing, not what I deserved.

Soon, the questions were rolling in.

Where were the others? Were they getting the same treatment I was? What had the dragon wanted to do with me? How was I supposed to ‘send them home?’ Would I need to send the people of Ralqir home to save them? Was that a good thing? How would I do that?

How would I find the other Animator on Ralqir? What would I do when I found them?

What was happening right now outside?

What was I going to do about it?

It was all so big, and I’d just gotten to the point where I couldn’t count my levels on my fingers. The pleasure I should have felt during my first touch of civilization was gone, replaced by a hollow, small feeling.

I hurried to be done, cleaning myself as deeply as I could, scrubbing hard until my skin turned red and I started to get damage notifications if I lingered too long on one spot.

—------------------------

Fennel had clothes for me when I stepped out, simple black robes and undergarments. He told me to leave the old ones. He’d come dispose of them later, probably burn them. The man was in a hurry, nervously dancing around with his crossbow on his hip like he had somewhere to be, but he was tight lipped when I asked him what was going on.

He wasted no time in getting me to ‘quarantine.’

Quarantine turned out to be someone’s office, a very small office no bigger than a broom closet where the desk took up the majority of the room with only enough space to fit a chair on one side of it and a chair on the other for visitors. The rest of it was decked in papers and books.

Real page turners.

“Treatise on the Formation of Isolationist Groups in Western Imperial Provinces” and “Variance of Dominion Signs in Tribal Societies and Social Implications” were two of my favorites. I almost got through the opening paragraphs of those.

The same feeling I’d experienced in the bath was still there in my mind. I felt like I should be doing something. I had the urge to be somewhere.

To know what I’d set into motion.

The guards that had come to get us all had injuries. Fresh ones too. Did that mean there was fighting? They wouldn’t say one way or another, too concerned that we would be one of the plagued soon if we’d made contact with infected people.

The office had no windows, so I couldn’t look outside.

Reading wasn’t diverting my mind. The walls were too close, the air too still. I imagined the undead scratching at the ground beneath my feet, chipping away at the foundations of the city until I would be back down there with them, in the dark.

I can’t stay here.

The door, of course, was locked. The lock, however, was metal.

One Shaping session later, I had the front cover off of the locking mechanism and the tumblers exposed. They were actually quite complicated from a mechanical standpoint, small and intricate with metal and rubbery bits jumbled together in some kind of knot. I didn’t know much about locks. Engines were more my thing.

So, I simply touched each tumbler one by one and Shaped it until I could just extract it from the lock as a whole. Then the scrap metal would go into my spatial storage. Soon, I was just looking at a rectangular hole where the lock used to be, and the door opened with a click.

I smiled, stepping out into the hallway, feeling pretty pleased with myself for not resorting to explosives this time.

That feeling left me two feet from the door when I bumped into a terrified looking Miur in black robes. The guy had to be about my age, maybe a little older with long, brown hair and big doe eyes. He was standing, mouth agape and staring at me, his bent glasses hanging down on his mouth like he’d forgotten he wore them.

“Uh. Hello,” I ventured, giving him a little wave.

In a move that seemed more like a socially ingrained reflex than anything, the Miur boy returned my wave and mouthed something akin to a greeting.

I cleared my throat and continued. “Sorry about the- uh- Sorry about the lock. I think it engaged by mistake. Was thinking about going for a walk.”

The young Miur shook his head, his prominent antlers banging into the doorframe across the hall and bringing him up short. He didn’t seem to notice, though. “Yo- Your supposed to stay in quarantine until-”

“Hey, I know. I really do. But I’ve been in there for a while. Look at me. I’m obviously not infected.”

“We’ve sent for the headmaster.” The words came off like assurance, like he wanted to let me know that someone was coming to help, but a warning as well, as if the mention of the headmaster should have kept me in line, but I was too ignorant to be cowed. There were some advantages to being an outsider, I guessed.

I shrugged. “Okay. Great. He can come find me when he gets here then.”

The robed Miur looked left and right down the long hall and pushed his glasses back up to his eyes. “You have to be in quarantine. The guards-”

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

I changed tacks. “Listen, friend. What’s your name?”

“Angol,” he replied after some hesitation.

“Angol, I’ve been underground for a long time, and I’m tired of it,” I admitted. “And I want to know what’s going on.”

Angol shook his head vigorously. “I’m sorry, but you can’t wander around. You could infect others. You have to get back in the room.”

“No, I don’t think so, and I promise you I’m not infected. I would know,” I assured him. “I’m pretty sure the plague only works on certain types of things. I’m not one of them.”

Angol swallowed, looking like he wished desperately to have someone else here to back him up, but, despite his wishes, no one materialized. “The guards said we need to be sure,” he pleaded. “People can’t see you out and about.”

So now it was about who saw us instead of asking me to get back into the room. That was progress.

“Well, I’m out now, and you’ve made contact with me, Angol. Wouldn’t you have to quarantine too if you followed the guards’ orders?”

“I-” He paused, thinking. “I don’t know. Maybe. Probably n-”

“Looks like we’re stuck together then.”

“That’s not how that works,” Angol said, some conviction seeping into his words now.

“We’ll have to find another room,” he continued. “And we’ll inform the guards. We can bring you food too, if you cooperate.”

He was thinking now at least, meaning I could reason with him.

I stood my ground, channeling my inner Samila. “I’m not getting into another room, Angol, and you and I both know no one is here to make me. I want to walk, maybe see the daylight. I’m sure you have better things to do than babysitting me.”

“You can’t,” Angol declared with finality.

I pulled out my trump card. “I have to poop.”

“You must be joking.”

“Kind of,” I admitted. “I’m just pointing out that this whole thing isn’t well thought out. Tell you what. Maybe you can come with me. Show me around. Keep me away from others. It’ll be just like quarantine, but with fewer broken doors and soiled undergarments.”

His expression grew calculating, and he looked down to the floor for a moment to consider. “You wanted to see daylight?”

I nodded.

“Okay. If I do what you ask, will you go to quarantine after?”

I shrugged. “Depends on what I see.”

Angol frowned, not liking the answer. “Just don’t talk to anyone or touch anyone. Also, don’t be seen by anyone.”

“Total gray man. Deal.”

—---------------------

We went upstairs. We went up lots and lots of stairs.

I’m not going to say I was tired by the time I started to see daylight, but I knew that without my enhanced Body I would have had to take several breaks.

Angol, on the other hand, took it like a champ. Maybe Miur were descended from mountain goats instead of deer like I’d assumed. The guy was always quick to lead me up further and further, peering into hallways on each landing to make sure the coast was clear before we continued upward.

The glimpses I caught of each landing definitely had the feel of a school to them. We left the dormitory section after a few floors and entered classroom territory. Grand lecture halls with wide open double doors would be right next to the stairwell while honeycombed cubicles and lab equipment would be on other landings.

We encountered very few people, but the times we did were strange. Everyone looked on edge. Many were armed, not just a sword on a hip or two, I mean naked steel clutched in white knuckled hands. We gave those a wide berth.

At one point, Angol had a tense, whispered exchange with a handful of students that had formed a checkpoint of sorts on one of the floors using turned over desks and stacked chairs, but they let us by unopposed once they saw my arm. The knives they carried looked sharp, their faces looked hard, but, apparently, they weren’t ready to tangle with someone they perceived as being a practitioner.

“Charming people. I can see why folks are clamoring to get in,” I joked.

I had no idea how popular the Black University was, but the whole thing felt wrong. Even if Angol spoke just to correct me, it would be better than all the nervous silence.

Angol let out a high, strained laugh, painful to hear and probably more painful to do. “Oh, they are clamoring to get in, alright, now more than ever. That is the problem.”

“How so?” I asked.

“We’ve had to bar the doors.” He said it so matter of factly, it took a handful of seconds to sink in.

“The Returned?” I guessed.

Angol nodded, not bothering to look at me, climbing another flight of stairs. When he spoke, he sounded tired.

“Everyone with a dominion or combat experience has been conscripted by the Prefect. That just leaves a handful of us.”

“Conscripted?” I asked. I knew what the word meant, but my clan had never been the “fight against your will” type of people. If you didn’t volunteer for a fight there was something wrong with you by Constance’s standards.

“Yes. She called for faculty and staff as soon as the walls were threatened and then for qualified students shortly after,” he said as he waited for me on the next landing. “Since then, there have been no more public announcements.”

“They have students manning the walls?” I asked, incredulous. “Can they do that?”

“No,” Angol replied with a shake of his head before he added. “Well, some took up posts on the wall, I guess, originally, but now I don’t know where they are. Like I said, it’s all the students with dominions and military experience. It’s not unheard of. We’re an Imperial school. It’s just not been done in recent history. Lucky us, I guess.”

“So, it’s just you and others that didn’t meet the criteria?”

“Yes,” he said, his shoulders stiffening. “We’re still here, doing our best. This is our floor. Come.”

Angol took me away from the stairs and to another landing with big double doors that stood closed, but I could see daylight streaming in from between them and under the sweeps.

The lanky Miur pushed the two doors open with a hard shove to reveal a wide observation deck or, upon closer inspection, an outdoor amphitheater. We were up high where the seats were arranged in a semi-circle that went down step by step to focus on a podium with its back to open air…

…and the city below.

What I saw down there froze my breath in my lungs.

I’d never seen the city from above before, but I could tell things were all wrong. Smoke billowed from several different places where buildings laid collapsed in ash, the black columns casting huge shadows over entire neighborhoods in the golden evening sun. Two of the gates I could see were on their hinges collapsed or thrown open. Screams echoed up from the ground below, faint and indistinct from such a distance but harrowing, scenes of ending lives, made somehow more real by how small they seemed from up here. Flashes of something from the eastern gate preceded a sharp crack that came half a second later. Black shapes poured over the battlements of the walls and over the roofs of buildings, through the streets and out of doorways.

Shouts and the clash of steel alongside wild, animalistic snarling formed a tapestry of background sound that I would not soon forget.

“You said you’ve been underground for a long time, right?” Angol asked me.

I nodded. Dumbfounded by the picture in front of me.

I was going to save this? How?

Despite looking down on the scene like a giant, I felt so small.

Angol didn’t come to the railing as I had. He stood behind me, turned away so that he wouldn’t see.

“All the Returned in the city went mad all at once. That was bad enough. Then the beasts from the wilds came. The guards and the staff were called away, then some of the students. We were told to barricade the doors and lock ourselves inside. That’s spared us much of the violence so far. I was up here when Queenshall fell. That’s our sister school. I saw the Returned take them below,” Angol stated brittly.

He paused to let me take it in, or maybe he was lost in his own thoughts. “I just thought you should know what’s going on if you’re so eager to break quarantine and risk us all.”

I worked my tongue around to try to get my dry mouth to work again. “So, everyone that was in charge is gone, and you’ve been left to your own devices?”

Angol’s slumping shoulders lifted slightly in a half-hearted shrug. “We have the guards, but they are busy repelling the enemy down in the library. They were able to seal up the entrances to all but two of the Undercity arches,” he informed me grimly. “They tell us what’s happening sometimes, but it’s mostly the wounded that come up to rest. Even then, I think they are trying not to tell us much, so we don’t panic. My classmates and I, we formed a group that helped keep people fed and calm, and that’s all we’ve been able to do.”

“I see.”.

“So, if you could just… get back in quarantine, and not give me another thing I need to worry about, that would help me greatly,” he said, taking his glasses off for a vigorous cleaning to give his shaking hands something to do.

I thought for a moment, looking down at the chaos of the city, the carnage. Black shapes swarmed through the streets. Limp bodies were being carried indoors while others were being ripped apart.

“Angol?” I asked.

“Yes?”

“When you said you sent for the headmaster. He’s not actually coming is he?”

Angol’s eye twitched. His jaw clenched. He looked like he wanted to deny it, but he couldn’t bring himself to try. After a handful of heartbeats he shook his head in confirmation.

“He’s out there somewhere, isn’t he?” I guessed.

“They all are,” Angol whispered. “We’re alone.”

I swallowed and drew myself up straight, turning to put my hands on both of Angol’s shoulders like Geddon had done with me. I hoped I was doing this right..

“Angol, you’ve done a great job,” I began, putting as much force behind the words as I knew how. “I mean that. I can tell you care.”

“I’m just doing what anyone would do,” he muttered, looking away uncomfortably.

“Maybe so,” I conceded, angling my head to meet his gaze and hold it there. “But, as alone as you feel right now, you’re not. You have us. Were you told who I came with?”

“Some church guards and a healer?”

“Right. I have a proposition for you.”

—----------------------------------

“Here I was hoping for some time to take my boots off,” Sissa said breathily as she leaned on the railing overlooking the besieged city.

Could I even call it besieged anymore? Didn’t that require the enemy to be outside the walls? I didn’t know. Maybe I’d ask later.

I nodded. “Yeah, I thought maybe that was in the cards too, but even with a bath, I couldn’t sit still until-”

“Until there was no more work to do. No more arrows to jump in front of.”

I didn’t answer, but she’d hit it on the head.

She shuddered, crossing her arms in front of her chest and rubbing warmth into her shoulders. “It would have been nice if things had been handled after we did what we did. No more civilians to save. I was quietly hoping someone topside who knew what they were doing would have received our distress call and had this under control by now, someone with gray hair and ink stains on their sleeves. You know the type.”

“Yeah,” I answered. “I think I do. Someone with a plan.”

She sighed, wiping her eyes and stretching her neck tiredly and showing off just how bright her blue scales shined in the sun, a contrast to her black borrowed robes that practically drowned her. Down in the Undercity, I knew on an intellectual level that she was shorter than me, slighter in frame, but this was the first time I’d realized just how small she was, fragile looking.

I knew better than to believe that, however.

Slowly, Sissa straightened, her shoulders flared out, and her back went straight, going from zero to soldier right before my eyes. Her mouth turned down, and her eyes hardened until she was staring down at Eclipse as a different person: the Sergeant.

“The way I see it,” she said with the force and confidence of her rank again. “With the streets taken by the enemy, supplies and healers can’t reach our fighters out in the field. See that? How the pockets of fighting are clumped so far apart? That means they are going to lose sooner or later. The enemy can afford to bring fresh troops in and fight even as they die by the hundreds. Meanwhile, every loss on our side can’t be replenished. Every drop of sweat or blood is another mark against us. They’ve been fighting like this for a week, you say?” She turned to Angol who stood off away from the railing, taking great care not to look over the edge.

He nodded in answer. “More or less, ma’am. There used to be larger and more numerous battles happening down below, but they’ve gone now.”

“We have to assume they were overrun,” Sissa said quietly to herself, biting her lip.

“Angol, you said that you’ve been feeding everyone since this kicked off,” I reiterated. “How much food and supplies does the university have access to?”

He blinked rapidly as he did some calculations in his head. “Our stores are supposed to feed a full stock of students and faculty, I think, with some things coming in daily from the market, but we have plenty if we ration, not the most appetizing stuff but edible.”

“Do you happen to have a med school? Doctors? Surgeons in training? Medical supplies?” I asked, fleshing out my half-formed plan.

“Uh. Yes, but no healers,” he replied. “I’m actually on the medical track but I don’t have my dominion yet. We can only provide the basics.”

“What’s that over there?” I asked, gesturing toward one of the gates where the sea of black bodies surged and flashes of magical power zipped around the area like angry hornets.

Angol turned to follow my pointed finger. “That’s the southern gate house and refugee area. They’ve held out the best so far.”

Sissa nodded as if that wasn’t a surprise. “They had a lot of guards stationed there when the goblins started to come to us for help. Goblins tend to cause trouble, so more guards were dispatched to keep the peace. I guess that’s worked to their advantage. Lucky them.”

I had a pang of worry for the Stone Hearts that were probably housed there, but there was more to think about just now. Now it was time to lead the conversation to where I wanted it to go.

“Okay. If you were to set about rescuing one of these groups, how would you go about it?” I asked with a raised voice, meant to include the others.

Geddon didn’t disappoint. “Overwhelming force, collect the survivors, charge back to a safe zone. Stop for nothing. Take heavy losses but gain capable fighters,” he boomed the second row of seats, his giant feet up on the row in front of him. “Not much else to do.”

Samila seemed to agree, coming in to stand on my right, opposite her sister. “The big guy’s not wrong about the situation needing a heroic charge for once. You have to be effective enough to relieve pressure on the group, enough to let them move safely, then have a corridor for retreat to a position of strength.”

“Well, we have one of those,” I said, slapping the railing with my natural hand. “The Spire is holding out pretty well. That just leaves overwhelming force and a safe corridor.”

“Don’t forget the ability to relieve the pressure,” Sissa cautioned. “It won’t do any good to get there and ask them to move if they’ve already got one arm in the creatures’ mouths.”

“Okay. Fine. I’ll move it further up the list,” I said.

“What are you proposing, Brother Ryan?” Trix asked from Samila’s shoulder. He couldn’t see over the railing without some assistance, but he refused to climb on the railing. Maybe he just liked riding people now.

I looked down at the rooftops, the straight streets with long lines of sight, the lack of civilians that might end up as collateral damage. With enough material, it could work.

“Brother Ryan?” Trix asked again, bringing me back to the moment.

Blinking, I turned back to the rest of them, the plan cementing in my head… kind of.

“He’s going to build more of those things,” Samila sighed. “And we’ll be on scavenging duty until he’s done.”

“Hey! Give me some credit!” I protested. “I was going to take on some interns.”

Samila grinned wickedly. “We are at a school.”