Chapter 71 - Pick my Battles
The rain didn’t stop until sometime in the middle of the night according to Trix. That didn’t mean the pass was *passable* yet. That water took a good while to run its way down the mountainside, slowed by the thick root system of the black shrubs. That was okay, though. We had to break camp, and that took time.
Also, by ‘we had to break camp’ I meant ‘I had to break camp.’ Me.
Everyone had been slow on the uptake up until now on just how useful a magical pocket dimension of questionable volume was. While true that they hadn’t had full knowledge of what I could do for more than a few weeks, they’d still not realized the sheer utility of the thing.
They’d chosen to bring their own packs with their own provisions at the start of our journey, probably out of habit for the military folks. You get told how to pack your things on deployment enough times, and suddenly it becomes the only way you can pack.
That programming was quickly over-written, however, after I was able to produce dry bedding for everyone last evening by just making them appear in my hand. Samila looked ready to kiss me, the goblins snatched at the blanket and constructed a little fort to sleep in, and Geddon actually went so far as give me a sloppy one-armed hug just before he keeled over for the night with the sheets haphazardly draped over him. The journey up had been hardest on him with the exception of Beedy, who had more color now after some fire and a meal.
So, that’s how they all grew an appreciation for my breaking the laws of time and space. Now, they were all too ready to give me their packs to haul down the mountain even though I insisted they’d get them back just as soggy and gross as at this very moment.
“Wait. So, the items tucked away inside of you are frozen in time?” Geddon asked, looking down at me quizzically like he was trying to suss out where my magical pockets resided.
“Please don’t say it- uh- like that,” I pleaded before adding: “But yes. I’m pretty sure that’s how it works.”
Samila was curious as well. “How sure? Can you feel it rolling around in there?”
I sent a little mental probe into the place that I associated with the ability, nudging a few things. Somehow, I just seemed to know they were all frozen in there, in stasis. I shrugged.
“I mean, I can’t be one hundred percent sure, but I’ve got a sword in here that’s been in the process of, sort of, uh- exploding for weeks now. Not even a tickle.”
“What made you want to put an exploding sword inside of you, Monk?” Bole sneered from above his open pack. He was the only one to not trust my ability to do the lifting for him.
“Oh, for the love of- It’s not inside of me,” I insisted. “I didn’t eat the damned thing.”
“Not what I was implying.”
I shot him what I hoped was a whithering glare, but he was characteristically unphased.
“Ryan has an exploding sword?” Trix asked.
“First I’m hearing of it too,” Samila lamented sarcastically. “Surprising. Most other men are more than happy to brag about their exploding swords.”
“Well, let's see it,” Sissa cajoled, raising an eyebrow.
This conversation was going in three different directions with just as many undertones, only one of which I was going to address.
I raised my hands placatingly. “Did you not hear that it’s literally in the process of exploding? I like having hair,” I said with my hands purposefully relaxed at my sides and not running my fingers through my new brown curls. It had grown back fairly evenly too. Messy but evenly so, which was a miracle in itself.
“Perhaps the right question to ask, then, is ‘why is it exploding, Ryan?’” Trix asked, saving me from further innuendo as he rolled up his little Vulpa sized blanket.
I looked around at the group, wondering what was appropriate to share in front of Bole and Beedy. I chose to be specific on materials but vague on the cause of said explosions, just in case, and hope the rest caught on well enough.
“It’s a brightsteel blade. Broken. I found it in a cave where the Underriver feeds into the swamp, and, so far, all it’s done is explode. Multiple times,” I said carefully.
Bole whistled. “And he’s a relic bearer on top of everything else. Be careful, though. Tell a high enough priest about your little sword, and you’ll be made a martyr or worse. Would be a terrible thing to witness, how they’d take it from you.”
“That is not how that works. Relic bearers are honored by all the faithful,” Trix corrected, but Bole ignored him.
“Seriously. Were the universe so kind to me, Monk,” he said, locking eyes with me, something approaching pity tugging at the edge of his features. “I’d wonder if kindness was really its goal.”
“And most would consider it an honor to wield such an artifact, Corporal Bole, and I find your opinion of our brothers and sisters uncharitable to say the-” Trix began before Sissa cut him off with a violent shake of her head, and an almost inaudible hiss that the little Vulpa heard much more acutely than anyone else. Sissa’s stone hard expression held a warning, a grave one, unspoken but very real.
Bole just laughed, though, a barking, bitter thing that conveyed no warmth or joy. He kept laughing until all other conversation was good and dead.
—-----------------------------------
The descent started late morning after Tiba thought the pass would probably be drained enough to not be a dangerous prospect, and she turned out to be correct. Aside from a few slippery vertical drops turned temporary waterfalls, the pass was largely fine if damp and cold to traverse.
Eventually, the black shrubbery thinned until it only appeared in circular clumps, and we started getting peeks of the all too familiar (to me, at least) titanic trees with multicolored bark overhead, and the ground went from jagged rock to spongy tree litter and soil, still wet with last night’s shower. Once we were fully off the mountain, the smell of rotting vegetation and petricor wafted through a pervasive, light fog that presented the legion mammoth tree trunks that stretched off into the distance as shadowy obelisks. It took me a good half mile or so to really bring my mind around to dealing with just where I was.
The location and its significance hit me, suddenly, and I stopped midstep, my throat tightening as I remembered my first days on Ralqir none too fondly. Mostly it was a lot of running… also spiders.
A feeling of terrible uncertainty took hold of me.
This is all really happening. Home is just through these trees. It’s literally a universe away, but it’s right over there too.
I swallowed, thinking of how close my old life was. Just a hike in a particular direction and a flick of my will, and I’d be back where I started with my dad and my people, and-
And Ralqir will just be a memory.
I surreptitiously glanced around the group, at all of my friends, imagining doing so again for the last time. The only other time I’d hopped universes, I’d paid for it with a friends’ life. I remembered the feeling of helplessness watching Vince die, the despair at having done nothing, the loss. I was ignorant of the toll I was paying the first time, and as long as I could help it, I’d never pay it again.
Never again.
That didn’t mean I wasn’t losing them, though.
Ralqir would be functionally unreachable once I’d left. I wasn’t even sure if it was possible to get to Ralqir outside of the System’s tutorial insertion point.
Well, it was probably possible. The multiverse was a big place. Exotics, from what I’d heard, sort of popped between universes in places where two of them rubbed up against one another in the void. Who was to say that somewhere in our cosmos we weren’t connected in some way with this one?
Of course, I wasn’t stupid. I couldn’t do the math just now without a napkin, a pen and several degrees I didn’t have, but, roughly estimating, the odds of me ever finding Ralqir again were vanishingly small. Finding this place again before my friends were dead and gone from old age: as close to zero you could get.
Once I left, that would be it.
This decision to leave was a precipice, a bottomless pit with the unknown lying in wait somewhere in the depths. Having it so close unnerved me, filled me with fear and regret for a thing I hadn’t done yet.
The fact that I still had a job to do saved me from full blown dread and kept my feet moving, however. Silver lining: I could still die before having to choose, and, oddly, that was a comforting thought.
I still had to do right by this place, these people, my friends. My arrival had caused a lot of grief for them, and I had a duty to make sure that, in my departure, I left Ralqir in a better state than I’d found it. That meant a life without the scourge. I owed them that.
Tiba led us quietly east and a bit south, deeper into the forest where I continued my slow descent into deja vu. I could almost feel the wreck I was back in those days, mind fractured, running for my life, dreaming of home, fighting to live just a day longer.
Well, I wasn’t that guy anymore. I was the guy that was going to slap the scourge in the face so hard, it had no choice but to gather itself all in one place. Then I’d give it the finger as I escaped, ideally as Jassin and his army crested the hill with catapults and a thunderous cavalry charge.
I’d leave just as the killing blow landed, and the scourge would know I was never running. I was hunting.
We all stayed quiet now that we were in what we assumed was enemy territory, but in reality, there seemed to be nothing to hear us. This place was alive last time I was here. Now it was eerily empty, not in the physical sense but in other ways.
There were no birdsongs anymore, no skittering reptiles on the trees, or random animal calls in the distance. Nothing moved unless we moved it. The only noise came from the wind in the leaves and the crunch of leaves under our feet. Every move we made seemed to split the hushed stasis the forest seemed to be under.
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The compass, however, was going insane. It had begun to act up since it entered the valley, riding on Trix’s wrist. The Vulpa was at the front of the group hiking alongside Tiba when I noticed him look at the little watchface, tap it repeatedly, and put it up to his ear.
Thinking something had gone wrong, I jogged up to him to ask what was the matter, but I guessed as soon as I got within ten feet of him. There was a tinny, buzzing sound coming from the compass, the little mallet inside tapping on the back of the housing so fast it resembled a musical note. When I looked into the compass’ face, the needle spasmed, spinning this way and that, never long enough to really tell us anything.
I shared a long look with Trix then shrugged, holding out a hand to put the compass away in my storage space. The compass wasn’t going to be of any use here in the belly of the beast unless I reprogrammed it to be more specific in what we wanted. It was supposed to point out ‘living’ scourge touched, but perhaps this close to where the infection resided, most things were technically scourge touched, especially after the scourge expanded their influence so broadly. I’d need to add ‘rejigger the targeting logic’ to my to-do list unless I wanted the turrets to just shoot at scourge-touched trees all day.
Sometime in the afternoon as the dense green of the canopy overhead was starting to go gray in the waning light, Tiba stopped and waved at us to join her.
“There,” she said, indicating a direction with the tip of her finger.
I peered into the gloom, getting low and tilting my head to see where she was pointing. At first I didn’t see what she meant. For miles, the tree trunks stretched on in every direction almost uniform in their non-uniformity, drawing the eye in odd directions, but other than that-
Then I saw it, a dark shape among dark shapes, only this one stood out much shorter than the rest of them. It was a clump of little rocky outcroppings, maybe twenty or so feet tall, that jabbed out of the ground like a miniature mountain ridge, wide at the bottom, thinner at the top but flat like someone had come and cut off the peaks. The base, meanwhile, was asymmetrical and smooth, and the roots of the structure splayed outward almost organically.
Like a tree.
Yes. Now I saw it. This was the stump of a tree. More accurately, several petrified stumps of monstrously large trees, having grown together somehow when they were alive, now fused into a solid pillar of rock by time. Their equally hardened roots that now made up the wide base had, at some point in the eons, been exposed by weather and shifting soil underneath.
The four petrified stumps had long shed their rougher bits forming smooth walls that curved and flowed into one another seamlessly, or as seamlessly as they could, having been separate organisms in life. Their gigantic stone roots formed a webwork of waist high walls, pitfalls, and weaving trails that trapped standing water and muck between.
Tiba and her honor guard, no longer needed as guides, looked around with their mouths open like tourists, the guards pointing at things with their spears and giving each other congratulatory slaps on their backs as if they’d just reached the summit of a mountain, and it was time for a drink.
They led us around to the other side of the stump, which took longer than one would have expected. The closer we came, the bigger the place revealed itself to be. While the hunched redoubt was short compared to its living counterparts that shaded us from the sun, the structure still loomed over us the closer we got until we had to crane our necks to appreciate it up close.
Once on the other side, we discovered the way in, an uneven set of stone ‘stairs’ that must have been part of the whole before they came loose and topped onto the ground like a discarded tower of children’s blocks.
Tiba smiled and gestured at the hollow with a sweep of her hand.
“Welcome to the Shade Market, great fortress of goblinkind,” she pronounced, puffing out her chest with pride and posing in front of the yawning entrance. She said the name reverently, more so than the way it came out when I translated it for the others. She spoke of it like a legend come to life instead of an old hollowed out tree.
“This place predates the Purge,” Trix observed, crouching down to run his claws over the contours of the stone where he was perched. “How is this possible?”
“What?” I asked, confused. “Lots of things predate the purge, right? Hell, we were sleeping in a place that predated the purge a few days ago.”
“No,” Trix insisted as he held out a chunk of petrified tree to me as if that told me anything. “This, if I am not mistaken, is mendau, but that is impossible. The Dark Lord made the mendau- Ah. He designed them to reclaim the world and shade it from the maelstrom. As long ago as that was, it is much too recent to petrify like this.”
So, the timelines didn’t add up. I turned a flat bit of petrified wood over in my hand, wanting to guess, but I chose to ask the expert instead.
Tiba seemed excited to share, taking the stone from me and holding it out to Trix as she spoke. “The stories say that this is a safe place for goblins back in the before. They are planted by the ancients for us to bring us together. When the Black Ones take it, the tribes start to break apart and wander with no place to gather anymore, no trust in one another. Now, though,” she growled excitedly in a way that needed no translation. “We take it back.”
Her guards grunted from behind her, knocking the heads of their spears together in the goblins warrior version of a high five.
Trix’s eyes widened, seeming to catch a bit of that Tiba enthusiasm even after translation. “Ancient even before the Purge. That would make these proto-mendau trees then, your Highness. Progenitors to those that protect us all now.”
“It looks similar to the ones that surround us, doesn’t it?” I observed. “I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference if I were asked.”
“What does the queen say?” Trix asked.
I turned to her and interpreted as best I could.
“The trees of the big valley are always the same, casting it all in shade forever. Goblins always like the trees. Good shade for our eyes. Good shelter for our children. Good ingredients. Good hunting. My ancestors plant trees before the Purge. Many, many more after, spreading them until the whole world is ready for us to walk upon.”
“Is she saying that her people planted all the mendau after the Purge? Impossible,” Trix gaped.
Tiba snorted, laughing a little at the question. “No. We just help. The trees do all the hard work.”
“Maybe the Dark Lord acquired more than his pet human in this valley,” I speculated.
Trix tilted his head curiously, his ears all the way up. “You have a theory?”
“The Dark Lord’s family holdings were just across the mountains from here, right? Close enough that he stumbled upon a human that wandered too far from his tutorial” I said. “That might mean he was on good terms with his goblin neighbors. Good enough to let him wander around out here in their territory.”
“That is a sensible assumption,” Trix replied.
I went on. “So, maybe once the Dark Lord realized what his new pet was doing to the world, and he was about to pop the whole planet into the Bera Maelstrom to do something about it, he looked to what he knew for the solution.”
“A valley of trees hungry for sunlight and able to live communally,” Trix continued for me. ”He used them as a foundation.”
I nodded. “A template. And he just so happened to be neighbors with a sizeable goblin population that knew the trees and knew how to take care of them,” I finished, looking over at Tiba, knowing she probably didn’t understand what we’d just said, but the pride she felt as we spoke about her people was easy to see.
“You’re going to have to write a book when this is all over, Trix,” Samila joined in, sheathing her sword as she climbed down the steps to join the rest of us. “The inside looks empty like the rest of this forest. You should come see, though.”
We entered through the ‘door’ to find that the place was shaped like a hollowed out molar or a weird, clover-shaped arena. The whole thing was maybe the size of several larger Eclipse-style homes put together, one central courtyard with four roundish protrusions at roughly equidistant corners. The inside was spacious, carved out, probably from the little spring that burbled in the middle of the courtyard floor and trickled down the steps to disappear under the soil.
The erosion process had help, however. Faint tool marks and browned, faded paint decorated the walls while animal sign like bones and clumps of dried feces dotted the floor. There were also rudimentary shelves built into the walls, big enough for things to be set in or maybe for a goblin to sleep. Kicking the leaves up to check beneath, I discovered a solid stone floor instead of the squishy tree-stuff dirt that littered the rest of the forest.
I eyed the little spring, wondering if it was good to drink.
“It’s not bad as far as fortresses go. Thick walls, a singular gate, fresh water source,” Sissa mused as she inspected the place with a discerning eye, turning in slow circles. “But it’s no Dark Lord’s Spire. Some, if not a majority of the creatures we’ve fought can scale the walls. No cover from the elements or from attack from the air. No escape if we are surrounded, which we most certainly will be. We don’t have enough people to man the walls either, though I guess your turrets will take care of some of that.Still-”
“You think we should find another place?” I asked.
Sissa sighed and shook her head. “No. No. I don’t mean to sound like I don’t appreciate a good strongpoint. I’m just pointing out the weak points in our armor. We shouldn’t move. Trix believes that your insertion point is only a few miles southwest, and if we went and found a cave somewhere that we could defend better than this, your objective would be much farther away and just as inaccessible when the enemy clusters in the mouth of said cave. More so, even.”
“A cave would be a terrible place to hole up. My guns are loud. We’d all go deaf in a day,” I predicted.
“Just an example. Now that I think back,” Sissa began, wincing. “It was bad enough when Geddon had them going full blast on his back. Even so, I don’t like this. The fort is good, but the terrain is in our enemy’s favor. They don’t tire like we do, and your turrets may not be able to make up the difference in numbers. We’re going to be surrounded and swarmed, sure as sure.”
I looked up at the walls, picturing hundreds of snarling faces cresting the lip and filling the inside with enough flesh to drown us all. It was going to be Eclipse all over again.
“Bring down the trees,” Geddon’s voice muttered from behind us, quiet and contemplative.
As one, Sissa and I turned to see Geddon there, arms full of fallen branches and debris while his gaze was turned upward, not to the walls but higher. He had a thoughtful look on his face, somewhere between doing advanced calculus and having a particularly difficult time in the privy. He said nothing else.
“What’s that, Geddon?” Sissa asked as she took a quiet, careful step in his direction. I felt it too, the fragility of the moment, as if a wrong move on either of our parts would shatter Geddon’s concentration, and his thoughts would forever be unformed.
“Bring down the trees,” Geddon said after a long ten-count in my head, more confidently this time, nodding to himself, his eyes brightening as the idea took form. “Normally, I would relish the chance to be surrounded by enemies and making my last stand, gloriously so, but perhaps in this case, we can slow their numbers to a manageable amount and meet our ends later rather than sooner.”
“You want to bring down… those trees?” Sissa asked, pointing to the enormous trunks of the mendau that rivaled some buildings I’d seen back home. Even the smallest of them was thick enough for someone to hollow out and live semi-comfortably within.
“Well, not all of them,” Geddon scoffed. “Leave the ones that provide shade for us, but take down a circle of them further out. These vile, disgusting creatures are quite vulnerable to the maelstrom, yes? No offense Ryan.”
“None taken,” I said as I thought ahead. “So, we cut down a big circle of trees, not quite a complete circle though, so we can try to fight our way out when it’s time to leave. Then we let the light do the work for us. The scourge wouldn’t be able to come at us during the day, not in numbers. And charging through the starlight will still be an unpleasant thing for them, I imagine.”
“That still leaves dozens of dead trees out there that the enemy can use as cover,” Trix objected. “It will allow them to get closer to us before they swarm. There will be no proper line of sight to thin them.”
“Not to mention that when the first tree goes down, it will be like ringing the dinner bell,” Bole complained from beside me. I felt my shoulders tense but I, otherwise, did not let my discomfort show. I wished he would stop doing that, just appearing out of nowhere.
Maybe I could make a Bole compass…
“Everyone within miles will see it… probably feel it too,” Bole continued. “No time to do it proper-like for a full circle. Plus, you’d need ten strong lads with axes just to bring down one of them a day.”
That was a big problem, potentially a fatal one. Just setting the big trees on fire was an option, if they actually lit well, but trees of that size would take days to burn down. All the while the smoke would hurt the defenders more than it would the attackers. The defenders would be surrounded by wet wood and blinding smoke for maybe days at a time, stinging their eyes and clogging their throats.
Then there was the problem of how we would bring the trees down in the first place. It would take days just to hack through them even if we all dropped what we were doing and worked nonstop.
Then, I had an idea.
An awful, dangerous, perfect idea that I was sure I would live to regret.
“Oh, ho ho ho ho. Look. There it is. That look,” Geddon said, grinning ear to ear, pronounced canines giving him a predatory aire. “We’re doing my plan.”
I nodded, already half a dozen steps ahead in the planning process. “I’ll be in my workshop,” I heard myself say as my feet carried me to the corner of the fort that looked the most inviting.
Samila called down from the wall where she’d been kicking debris from the surface and checking for hazards. “Someone put on some tea. He doesn’t sleep when he gets like this.”
I was already reaching into my spatial storage.
Geddon, buddy, you’re going to love this.