Viryl sat on the edge of Darlah’s bed, clutching her journal in his calloused hands. Anker, peering over his shoulder, accompanied him as he read.
It wasn’t easy for Viryl to skim through those lines. He shook a little, and even Anker could feel his heart skipping a beat when he discovered that Darlah had been interrupted just as she was about to say goodbye to him. She hadn’t been granted the grace to deliver her last message, not even through a few posthumous lines.
To keep him focused, Anker ran through all the information they had out loud. «The last update was yesterday, and this morning Melfis sent us to this address. We found Darlah’s door broken, and she was murdered. The work was done by knights of the Order of Libertas in the paycheck of a mysterious individual. You think this is a trap they have cleverly lured us into, and this diary should contain a clue that can lead us to our next destination. Any ideas?»
«See this entry?» Viryl asked with unexpected detachment, showing the page he had just read, the third to last in the diary: «It is marked with a symbol drawn with the same pen that has erased all references to the man we are looking for. Coronice… the Brotherhood of the Crawling Worm…»
«Coronice… at the deconsecrated church of Veltagia the Raven Girl made a joke that I have not yet understood. She told me that my chivalric epithet and her name are extremely similar. Coronice, the black moon. Could this be the same person referred to in the diary?»
«Let’s see if I can find this symbol somewhere else…» Viryl reasoned to himself, and quickly flipped through the volume, stopping on a page in its first quarter, exclaiming: «Here it is! The seventh day of the month of Caducicus, two years ago! It still speaks of the Brotherhood of the Crawling Worm, and refers to a figure called the “Slimy Glory”. Their base seems to be at the Slaughterhouse in the old quarter of Meridania.»
«Then I’d say we have our next stop,» Anker concluded, heading for the exit of the bedroom.
«Not so fast, boy. We’re in no hurry,» Viryl retorted, stopping him at the door.
«Do you think there’s anything else we can find in the diary that might be useful to us?» Anker asked.
«That’s unlikely, the knights of Libertas are not known for sloppiness. They couldn’t have risked revealing their client’s vulnerabilities to us if we’d decided to do a more in-depth reading. But that’s not what I meant. We’ve chosen to fall for their trap, and it will almost certainly be suicide. But that doesn’t mean we should just go and drop our pants.»
«What do you have in mind?»
«You must have realized from inspecting the shelves in this house that Darlah was a skilled alchemist as well as a prostitute and a heretic. I’ve already got my eye on some pretty good ingredients. In a couple of hours, I should be able to concoct some brews that would blow up a Gregherian bastion. As for you, do you still have any of those automaton insects you used to spy on the anarchists?»
«Do you want me to reconnoiter the slaughterhouse?» Anker asked, admiring Viryl’s resourcefulness.
«Bingo, my boy!» Viryl stated, slipping Darlah's journal into a pocket of his belt.
*****
When Anker and Viryl descended again into the outskirts of Meridania, leaving the apartment of the murdered prostitute, it was just after one in the afternoon. The tension for the imminent confrontation with the Brotherhood of the Crawling Worm was palpable. The plan for the attack had been studied almost in the smallest detail.
The streets were teeming with workers who were cheerfully leaving their emporiums and workshops to go to lunch in the taverns and inns of the city. The residual snow of the previous days had compacted into slippery slabs of white ice, which shone under the blinding sun of midday, the undisputed protagonist in the clear blue sky.
The knight and the fallen, with their weapons at their sides and slung over their shoulders, were foreign bodies in that jovial and bustling crowd. They were not the only dissonant element in the cheerful chatter of the streets of Meridania. On the rooftops and in the abandoned attics of crumbling buildings, on little-exposed balconies and in dark and secluded alleys, at least a dozen knights of the Order of Libertas in their ethereal armor studied their movements in silence, shadowing them from afar as they headed towards their destination.
«They watch over us like vultures circling a dying animal, those wretches.» Anker indicated nervously, feeling suffocated by that inescapable encirclement.
«Let them do their job, boy.» Viryl reassured him: «They are knights without pride, dogs ready to do anything for a morsel from their master. But for now, fortunately, they are not our adversaries.»
After retracing via Zaniarti, the knight and the fallen crossed a circular square with a large round flowerbed in the center and a marble fountain composed of three overlapping basins, from whose edges hundreds of sharp icicles hung.
They headed east, along a tree-lined avenue, at the end of which they could glimpse a raised arched gate in continuity with the ancient walls of the city. Beyond them stood the whitewashed roofs of ancient buildings constructed of opaque clay bricks, piled and stacked along the salient of the gentle mound that had constituted the original settlement from which Meridania had expanded across the entire plateau.
It took Viryl and Anker about twenty minutes to climb the slope, at the apex of which stood the first cathedral of Meridania, classical in style with later Gothic elements. Once past the old church, down on the other side of the slope, close to the perimeter wall of the old quarter, they could glimpse their destination. A large parallelepiped of bricks topped by a wooden roof, clearly distinguishable from the surrounding buildings.
After they had descended a long stretch of the steep staircase that wound toward the slaughterhouse yard, Viryl handed Anker a neurostimulant potion, similar to the one he had given him in Zelfiria but with a few extra ingredients added. It was time to go on stage. Anker grabbed it and drank it in one gulp.
On the inside of a bend in the stairway, the wall of a building was conveniently low and offered a variety of handholds, including twisted iron, protruding bricks, windowsills, and ledges. Viryl found a route to climb it up, and Anker followed his moves. The building’s roof was not very steep, and Anker was relieved to see that the snow, though compacted, had a rough, coarse texture that gave the soles of his boots some grip. From that first rooftop they managed to climb onto the roof of an adjacent building that was a little higher, which allowed a satisfactory view of their objective.
*****
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12:13 PM
«So, boy, did you manage to get in with your bug?»
«Yes. Luckily, the slaughterhouse has decent sympathetic coverage. Only a couple of rooms are shielded, and since the connection was weakening I preferred not to take the risk of exploring them.»
«Perfect. What is the layout of the place like?»
«In the first room, the one just behind the large entrance door, there is nothing that you wouldn't expect to find in a slaughterhouse. A pen of pigs, a slaughtering space, animals screaming in agony or death and dissected on marble tables. At the back, however, beyond a couple of annexes and warehouses full of stored meat, the situation is promising. There is a large room in which the bodies of animals and humans dangle from the ceiling. They look like rotting corpses, dripping with maggots, and there are dozens of them. The entire floor is made of a narrow mesh grate with a large basin in the center, and along the perimeter are two wooden balconies, one on top of the other, interconnected by ropes and walkable planks. On those terraces are waiting what I believe to be our enemies: absurd people, with leather hoods pulled down over their heads and blood-stained aprons covering their bodies, armed with cleavers. There are about a dozen of them. They certainly have bad intentions, but I don’t think they pose much of a threat.»
«I bet they’re watching the entrances to the big room.»
«Well, of course they do. There are a few back doors, too, but there’s only one front entrance, and they all seem to be staring at it. I think they expect us to come through the main entrance.»
«If we want to get off to a good start, we have to take them by surprise.»
«I expected you’d say that. There are some large rectangular windows just above the second balustrade. The wooden roof also seems pretty weak, we could take some tiles off it and lower ourselves from there.”
*****
To reach the optimal point from which a leap to the top of the slaughterhouse would be practicable, they had to overcome an obstacle course of about three hundred yards on the attics of about twenty buildings. The level of the roofs sloped steadily towards the surrounding walls and the streets that separated the buildings were rather narrow, so the jumps they had to make along their race, while potentially fatal if one were to slip, were not particularly difficult to make.
Five of the knights of the Order of Libertas after them were already waiting at seemingly unreachable elevated points. Once again, motionless and with arms folded, they did not seem to want to interfere.
Anker enchanted his boots with anti-gravity magic, activated a small explosive drone automaton, and nodded to Viryl. They simultaneously launched themselves onto the next roof, and then, one leap after another, reached their destination, a canopy that jutted out toward the left side of the slaughterhouse.
Without losing momentum, the knight and the fallen, with the drone in tow, ran and each threw themselves toward one of two adjacent windows: Viryl to the one on the left, Anker to the one on the right. They shattered them, shielding their faces with their arms, and landed in unison on the uppermost balcony of the large room with the bodies hanging, accompanied by the crash of a shower of crystals. The drone continued in its flight and nosedived over the parapet, slipping between the cracks of the grate on the ground floor. A distant bang was heard.
To his right, Anker immediately found himself with one of the Crawling Worm cultists: without even giving him time to turn, he drew his saber and neutralized him with a lightning-fast slash. As the enemy fell to his knees, clutching his torn belly, Anker raised a hand to his nose. The putrid stench of the hanging carcasses was nothing short of unbreathable.
Two more hooded opponents on each of the adjacent arms of the same balcony, alerted by the clash of glass, turned and launched themselves at the duo who had just burst in, while a third took aim with a crossbow on the opposite side. Viryl hurled his javelins with his telekinesis spell, one at the enemy on the left, the other at the one who was aiming at them with the crossbow, pinning them to the wall. Anker ran toward the one on the right, and intercepted him with a lunge: the one, despite the blade stuck in his abdomen, advanced swinging his cleaver, but Anker stepped back, drawing his weapon and letting him collapse to the ground.
Caught up in the clash against the first wave of enemies, Anker did not notice an ominous crackling. Viryl, on the other hand, had enough reflexes to look down, over the parapet. One of the cultists on the ground floor had activated a winch that pulled eight cables that, passing through a block and tackle hanging from the ceiling, were knotted at the base of the balustrades on which they were standing and those on the lower level. The bastards therefore expected a surprise attack from above: they were trying to demolish the balconies to make them fall onto the grate on the ground floor.
Viryl turned to Anker to warn him, but he did not have time. He felt the boards of the balustrade give way beneath his feet and, as his breath caught in his chest as he felt the void opening beneath him, he barely managed to cast a hardening spell on his body to avoid the damage of the fall.
Unfortunately, Anker had no way to escape the trap. He fell to his knees as the floor collapsed, then rolled down and hit with a thud. He landed prone, trying to protect his head with his left arm, while his right gripped his saber not to lose it. The last remnants of the anti-gravity spell slowed his tumble slightly, but it wasn’t enough to prevent several fractures. His left wrist, three or four ribs, both tibial plates. His internal organs must have been even worse.
Rattling on the splintered wooden boards he had fallen onto, Anker dropped his weapon and pulled out a vial of Venemensta infusion, bringing it to his mouth to sip. He had to try to get back to his feet at all costs, but a dull, uncontrollable pain prevented him from even lifting his head.
Viryl recalled his javelins and rushed to the aid of his wounded comrade.
The Crawling Worm cultists who had fallen from the first-floor balcony were completely unharmed, but they didn’t seem to be ready to charge again right away. They were stripping off their aprons and heading toward the pool in the center of the pavilion, filled with a black sludge that those who had been stationed on the ground floor had already begun dousing themselves with.
After making sure he didn’t have any cervical fractures, Viryl carefully turned Anker around and picked him up by his armpits, then dragged him toward the nearest wall, so that he could sit up with its support.
«These pieces of shit knocked down the balconies,» Viryl hissed, while handing Anker an energy potion.
«I swear… I looked carefully at the pictures of the bug… I didn’t suspect anything of the sort,» Anker replied with difficulty, using up his last spark of energy. The cerulean infusion was starting to take effect, but he needed time to be operational again. He took the vial from Viryl and downed it.
«They pulled us down with a winch. They must have had it set up in case we didn’t come in through the main entrance,» Viryl continued, crossing his arms over his chest. He wasn’t going to scold the boy, but that oversight could mean trouble for both of them.
Anker knew that there was no point in justifying himself, so he dropped the subject and turned to the fraternity members who were still rubbing black slime on themselves. Unable to interpret the vision, Anker asked, «What the hell are they planning?»
«I think we’ll find out soon enough,» Viryl said with grim irony.
As soon as they finished their conversation, fat white maggots began to be regurgitated from the grate in the floor, slowly turning into a tide.
The swarming mound concentrated mostly around the pool in the center of the large room and slowly began to swallow the cultists, who did not move half an inch and allowed themselves to be completely submerged. Viryl and Anker watched the spectacle in amazement, unable to form an idea that made sense of what was unfolding before their eyes.
When the pile of worms had reached a considerable height, enough to graze the corpses suspended at a height of about twelve feet, it began to deform and bend in a preternatural way, forming a suspended half-arch. It seemed that the invertebrates were orderly and consciously supporting each other in the generation of that unstable geometric shape.
How this was possible soon became clear: the bodies of the larvae were fusing, so as to form the muscles, the organs, the exoskeleton, the jaws of a hideous vermiculated being of disproportionate size. It had no legs or tail, and its entire body seemed to be constantly generating and elongating from the pool of larvae that flowed into the room. Its segmented armor was reinforced with sharp scales while on the cephalic portion it had seven eyes and a round mouth large enough to swallow a horse and equipped with three rows of roughly cubic teeth, similar to molars.
«Those fanatics sacrificed themselves to summon a Fearkan?» Anker wondered, as he stood up trembling on his injured legs, driven by the urgency of facing this new threat. He felt no pain, but the calluses were still unstable and his body did not respond well to his commands.
«It seems so. Be on your guard, boy, the real battle begins now,»Viryl ordered him, while drawing a vial of crystalline fluid out of his belt.