I groaned while teetering on the edge of the window, rethinking how long it would take to walk instead of dropping—plenty of swords were strewn around the grounds for Tometh to find instead. A howl from the gargoyle drew my attention away from the distant ground. It stood atop the slanted rooftop with its wings spread, and I hoped for the sake of the short fence and enchantment guarding it, they were for show.
I kicked out and fell forward without looking down and reminding myself how far the fall was, tucking my head to my chest so it didn’t bash against the sill. The nearby tents billowed, and loose shrubbery scattered from the wind I used to soften my landing. My feet hit the ground, and I rolled to the side to save my ankles from the worst of the impact. Tometh’s sword and my bow fell out of reach, but I quickly brushed off the kicked-up dirt and gathered them.
The screaming from people was worse for my sanity than the cries of any ghoul. I wanted to grab the shoulders and clamp my hand over the mouth of whoever was making all the noise so far away from the fighting. People looking behind them more than ahead barreled into and past me along the paths, no one but knights heading with me in the opposite direction. The majority of them were captains and adjutants from the party with loose uniforms and rosy cheeks but weapons in hand.
The gargoyle didn’t fly off the rooftop but fell, letting its outstretched wings catch the air to glide towards the fence. I didn’t have a solution for the creature twice my height and ignored it in favour of getting Tometh his weapon. He was holding the gate as the last of those out in the street crammed inside, ghouls on their heels. He, Kera and the guards pushed it closed, stabbing at the creatures pressing into the other side.
The mana bubble wrapped around the compound’s fence flared to a solid haze where the gargoyle dove into it head-first. I was frozen in place, waiting for it to come crashing through the protective capsule into the tents beyond. Instead, the second storey behind the creature crumpled as the ghoul was flung back into it. Considering the screams from the building, it was not the ideal outcome, but I selfishly cheered it wasn’t in here with us.
“Valeria!”
I ran around the last few tents between us and through the wave of civilians, depositing the sword in Tometh’s arms and drawing an arrow. The ghouls were already flooding in to take up the street and find the gates to the rest of the city. The eastern, western and northern gates had all been abandoned, allowing them free rein through the maze of streets.
The doors and windows of the shops along the ground floor across from us were under siege, with glass shattering and only the wooden boards blocking entry.
Panicked cries came from inside a home without sufficient barricades. A spear stabbed out of a shattered window into a ghoul climbing through the wooden boards. A new wave of ghouls honed in on the sound and broke through the lone sentry. There were three more floors above them, and I tracked the clamour and mana, my heart racing as the screaming began. My breathing slowed, and the blood drained from my face as the screams persisted and intensified, only to fade and begin again in a different pitch.
There was a full street full of ghouls between us and them. I couldn’t find a path to help in time. From the defeated look on the soldiers’ faces, they didn’t either.
The gargoyle extracted itself from the collapsed wall of the second floor and threw a bloodied mess into the street below to the glee of its lesser kind. My knees were ready to buckle, and the arrow I held dropped to the ground. The clamour around me was muffled, and my head turned on its own to glimpse each new horror surrounding us.
A militia member moved to open the gate despite the ghouls pressing in. They grabbed her arm as she went for the latch, but Kera yanked her away before she could fumble it open.
“We should help… we have to help,” she muttered.
“We can’t,” Kera said, holding her arms behind her back.
She dropped her spear and fell to her knees, tears flowing down her cheeks. Despite the understandable reaction and my own panic slowly taking over, trying to open the gate was an embarrassing response. I took a deep breath and baulked at the sour thoughts running through my mind about the guard. I slowly kneeled to pick up the arrow I’d dropped, took a few more deep, calming breaths to ensure I didn’t throw up in my helmet or fall over, and stood again.
“You should go back inside,” Tometh said, luckily unable to see my face through the helmet’s visor.
“I’m good,” I said as the remaining captains and knights pushed through to join us, more sufficiently armed and armoured than Tometh and Kera. The gargoyle dropped to the street with a flap of its wings to slow the fall. It ambled through the ghouls pouring past our gate. The castle ghoul towered over those beside it and strode toward the fence, reaching out to test the metal rods. The iron sapped the strength it gained from the constant draw of mana it relied on, and the fence held.
It tried with the hand wearing my gauntlet and marginally bent a rod before giving up.
Without taking its eyes off the mages gathered around me, it stalked past us towards the opening to the city's northern half. I had an iron arrow drawn, but when I lifted my aim towards the creature passing us, Tometh pushed it back down. “Don’t.”
“Why not?” I whispered back.
“Any vessel, with or without mana, will have its direction reversed, even from inside the enchantment. So it’ll bounce back to us.”
“That’s dumb,” I said without thinking and switched to a steel arrow.
“It’s efficient; fewer conditions attached means it survives longer on less supply. Which is what it's designed for,” Tometh said, taking the arrow away from me. “The harm we can do with steel isn’t worth angering it before we have a plan.”
“We need to make it quick,” Captain Kera demanded, pointing to a section of the city where the ghouls broke through. “Cause my people are in the middle of that shit.”
“And mine are in the pathway of that abomination,” Tometh snapped, pointing to the checkpoint where the gargoyle had disappeared around. “We can’t rush out of here and compromise the bastion just to die in the street.”
The captains gathered around a trampled tent to continue their discussion, not bothering to make space for me this time. They quickly identified where each unit was and what they thought their troops would do in this scenario. Everyone's eyes were continuously drawn to the ghouls reaching through the fence and trying to climb over, only to be flung away using their own momentum. The few militia left around the gate stabbed into them but hardly made a dent in the hoard.
A traitorous idea wriggled around inside my brain, entangling me in a very unpleasant pursuit. I tapped Tometh on the shoulder when he took a break from refuting a plan to break out and secure the street again now that the main threat was gone. He brushed me off with a ‘not now.’ I waited patiently while he discussed the merits of sending up a distress spell, hoping every surviving squad would simultaneously make their way here and clear the streets.
Captain Jestile discarded the idea for being too risky and leaving the civilians the squads were likely guarding vulnerable. However, the next idea of deactivating the enchantment and sending each captain over the fence to their squad was designated more risky. A zip line from the top turret of the bastion to the surrounding houses was put on ice until they could ascertain if we had a rope long enough. I tapped Tometh’s shoulder more forcefully, and when he turned to me and held up a hand like he wanted to strangle me, I thought about keeping my ideas to myself.
I reached up and grabbed the lobe of his ear, dragging him out of the circle and bringing his ear down to my level. I let go before he actually tried to strangle me and hoped the plating of the helmet would be enough to stop him. “I can get through the enchant without deactivating it and the streets without being noticed.”
“And?” Tometh asked, seething but cooperative.
“And,” I said, lowering my voice further now that everyone was staring at us. “I can probably get to your team and pass along orders or find out what happened to Kera’s.”
“You think you can get through that?” Tometh asked, gesturing to the ghouls pressed all along the fence and flowing through the street. “There’s also no keeping that a secret.”
“As long as you don’t tell Jeremy, I think I’ll survive,” I said. “To both your points.”
“Agreed, we’re past secrets at this point.”
I chewed on my lip and silently agreed. “While we’re talking about secrets, I have something to admit.”
Tometh’s eyes narrowed. “Mhm?”
“Before I came to your office on the night of the attack… I snuck into your communications wing—not the one full of bird crap—and sent a transmission asking for help.”
Tometh straightened and looked to the sky, breathing deeply through his nose and blowing out a misty breath. “Of course, that was you. Do you know how many centuries in the deepest dungeon that would get you? What about the creature, a friend of yours?”
“I think we should judge me based on intent and outcome rather than some laws,” I said, less confident I wasn’t getting in trouble due to his hostile glare. “And no, that thing followed me there and has been nothing but a nuisance.”
“Why are you telling me this now?”
“We’re past secrets at this point?” I tried. “Felt like information you should know. Maybe the possibility of reinforcements arriving tomorrow would change your plans.”
“Tomorrow? Explain your thinking. A request for help that evening would still have a delay in receiving, reading, and planning.”
“Jeremy doesn’t sleep early, and he would have woken the duke up,” I said. “So no delay, and a three-day ride of a force entirely on horseback. And they did receive it since Jeremy said in his message, ‘on the way,’ not something like departing now. So, tomorrow evening.”
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“Okay, enough,” Kera stated, marching over to us on behalf of the group. “What are you telling Tometh to have him sighing every two seconds?”
“I’m not sighing.” “Nothing.”
Kera rolled her eyes and poked Tometh between his furrowed eyebrows. “If you’re going to crater the city, I want to be a part of the discussion this time.”
The other captains strayed over after Kera to express similar wants with folded arms and worried looks. Tometh’s first task for the next bit was assuaging the fears that we had more Dragon’s breath we wanted to use inside the city limits. His second was to convince them I was capable of gathering information in the catastrophic conditions outside the fence.
“You’re all just standing there?” Captain Hauser said at the head of the commander’s group of captains and proprietors, slowly making their way through the tents. “We. Are. Under. Attack. And you’re standing there sucking your thumbs?”
Most carried crossbows, even the few civilians that had joined—a stark difference from the mixture of melee weapons the knights around me carried.
“What I think the captain is trying to express in his overzealous ways,” Commander Arardish said, stepping around the captain. “Is, do you have a plan, or are we standing around collecting dust?”
“We have two dozen captains, adjutants, auxiliaries and guards, at best,” Tometh said. “Most of which, not to disparage, are here because they can't handle the front lines. There’s nothing we can do to change what’s happening out there on our own.”
“We have the brightest strategic minds in the kingdom here,” the commander said. “And you’re saying there’s no plan.”
“I said we can’t change the situation on our own. We have a plan.”
We, I mouthed, unsure if I was offended by the lack of recognition.
“Do tell?” Jacora said, hefting his crossbow towards the fence and somehow missing the wall of ghouls pressed into it. He handed it off to someone else to reload for him and brushed off his hands. “Because I’m losing faith in you knights if you didn’t know something like that creature existed. I would have never invested in this place if I knew that behemoth was lurking nearby.”
“We knew,” Commander Arardish said. “But only recently from the Drasdan girl, so there was nothing we could have done to prepare.”
I decided I was offended by the recognition and silently thanked Tometh for leaving my name off before.
Captain Hauser levelled a crossbow at my head. “Always her. The outsider with a mana reserve small enough to be faked with one of their runes. I haven’t seen her cast a spell. Can she? When will we finally hit her with a dose of the serum and expose this witch.”
“Drop it, Hauser,” Tometh said, raising a palm towards him. “She has a mana disorder that prevents spellcasting. We already checked her during the incident near Ulasa. We’re not hitting a mage with mana poisoning based on your delusions.”
More crossbows were raised, loosely aimed towards me. I reached for an arrow. The militia and civilians watched, not knowing which side to join. Faces in the windows of the bastion looked down on us with muted horror as their protectors aimed towards each other.
“Don’t you dare,” Hauser shouted, looking me in the eye through the sights of the crossbow.
I couldn’t hear the rest over the calls for weapons to be put down and spells untangled. The commander waved his arms and pushed crossbows away from me. Tometh cautioned against using deadly spells, having prepared a wind-based one without an edge.
Commander Arardish slowly went for Hauser’s crossbow, seeming to caution against shooting me. I kept my bow undrawn, not adding to the chaos. Hauser’s finger twitched as Arardish reached for the bolt.
I ducked but was laid out on my back as my helmet rang from the bolt’s impact. The shouting stopped mid-sentence, and everyone stared down at me. I pressed my hand into the damp grass to sit up and raised the other towards Hauser. Whatever kind of gentle breeze Tometh had been casting, I would magnify tenfold.
Tometh didn’t know or disapproved of my intentions and, lucky for Hauser, took hold of my outstretched hand to pull me back to my feet. I straightened my helmet and felt around for the mark left by the bolt between the antlers. It was only a scratch, repaired in a blink and a spike of mana usage.
“Calm, everyone,” Commander Arardish said with closed fists held high. “We’re riling up the real enemy out there and scaring the civies.”
“Get your captain under control,” Tometh snarled. “You don’t win this fight if it breaks out.”
Arardish crinkled his nose but nodded. He herded a stubborn Hauser and most others away. However, a few of them broke away to approach us instead. They were worried about the people under their command rather than the petty faction squabbles and wanted to know the plan and how they could assist.
“Everyone pass this along,” Tometh said, handing out a notepad and pencil. “Write down the last known location of your squads, who’s in command while you’re away, and your mana signature for authentication.”
“And she’s going to go to all of them? On her own?” Kera asked after being the first to record the information.
“She’s good at getting to places she’s not supposed to be in,” Tometh said. “While she links up with each squad to assess their situation, we will formulate a few plans we could enact with the information brought back.”
“And who’s the poor bugger we’re sending out to die? I’m also willing to risk meeting up with my troops, but I wouldn’t like my chances if we have to return.”
Tometh clapped me on the shoulder. “We have a uniquely qualified volunteer.”
“Volunteer is an exaggeration,” I mumbled while the new joiners tried to catch up with the absurdity of what Tometh had proposed. “I’m just trying to be helpful.”
“We’re trusting the girl Hauser just shot and accused of witchcraft to save us?” a captain with Arardish asked. “She’ll get out and not come back or, more likely, die within seconds.”
“We don’t have many options,” Tometh said. “And like Hauser said, she has a small mana reserve and doesn’t cast, so the ghouls don’t notice her as much.”
Tometh collected his notepad and flipped through it, marking directions, numbering pages and noting distinct buildings squads were next to. I took that as my cue to get ready, removed my helmet, undid my belt with the quiver, and dug down my neckline for the mana crystal. If I was going through the enchantment, I couldn’t bring anything that could be a vessel or vacuum of mana.
“What are you doing?” Tometh asked, finding a pocket on my side to stash the notepad.
“Taking off anything iron or holds mana?”
“We’ll make a distraction so you can go through the gate. Keep it on.”
“Oh, I didn’t think of that,” I said, putting the helmet back on and tightening my belt. I patted my pocket with the notepad and jumped to confirm it wouldn’t fall out.
“I still think you owe us an explanation of why we’re relying on Valeria,” Kera said. “That horsecrap about a small mana reserve isn’t good enough for those of us who know better.”
“Maybe when there’s more time to explain?” Tometh asked, moving away from us and running the flat of his sword across the iron bars. The ghouls grabbed the blade and cut themselves on the edge. The dings against the metal and angered cries attracted those around them. “Come help me draw them away.”
He formed a spell and launched the ball of light towards the bastion, illuminating the grounds and street. I frowned at losing the darkness I would have used to enshroud myself in but kept quiet as the knights drew more attention when they followed along. Tometh came back to help me with the gate, which still had several ghouls pressed into it. He stabbed into them and quickly undid the latch, opening the gate a fraction.
I drained my necklace and matched my helmet with the ambient mana.
“Fruitful travels,” Tometh said as I slipped through the gap. Ghouls still crowded the street but didn’t have time to notice me over the more tantalising display over the fence. I was across the cobblestone and by the home that had been broken into before they could take notice. I’d planned to climb, but I took a detour for the sake of anyone left alive inside.
I hooked my bow over my shoulder and drew my dagger. The leather of my archer's glove protected my palm as I vaulted through the broken window. Pale bodies and black blood splatters littered the floor, making the room smell of rot and iron. It was quieter inside but loud enough that my footsteps across broken glass were indiscernible from the outside clamour. Spreading out my senses to check the upper floors made my eye twitch from also reaching the hoard.
The shop floor was clear of human corpses. I found the stairs and leaned back to see most of the landing above. It was clear, so I moved to the living area. A horrible crunching noise came from the kitchen, where a faint light shone from the entrance. I was glad the helmet protected my nose from most of the smell. I slowly went around the darkened dining room table, using my senses more than my vision, and peeked into the kitchen.
Ghouls were bent over a body behind the island counter. A spear lay in a pool of red blood spread across the white tile. The notepad in my pocket felt heavy, but I couldn’t let the vile crunching sounds continue. I ducked behind the counter and crept around, stabbing the first ghoul facing away from me through the neck. Two others had their heads buried in the spearman’s stomach and didn’t notice until a dagger also entered their airways.
A woman with a cleaver still clutched in her hand lay beside him. I stared into her soulless eyes and hoped it had been quick. I unwrapped her fingers from the hilt of the cleaver and snapped off the steel tip of the spear, using them to make bangles for my claws now that I was back to sneaking around.
I knew I’d see those eyes in my dreams as I climbed to the attic, killing the invaders along the way. I felt people behind locked doors and killed the ghouls trying to break in, but I didn’t have anywhere safer for them.
I found the window closest to the roof and climbed out onto the tiles, crouching on the ridge. The grounds around the bastion were filled with people again as they went to find their belongings. The threat was contained for the time being, and I doubted they wanted to be crammed in the bastion’s foyer and halls.
I pulled out the notepad and flipped to the first numbered page, noted the direction and ran across the tiles towards the southwest. Captain Jestile’s team had been holding the structure overlooking the main southern gate and would most likely still be there due to their focus on ranged attacks.
The rows of buildings didn’t join up, so I had to climb down and cross ghoul-infested streets without a distraction. I enshrouded myself in shadows for the crossing and climbed back up before they noticed. People inside were concentrated in singular rooms, and I was happy to note most doors and barricades were intact. Those that were overrun were quiet, and I didn’t have the time to check them all.
The last street I needed to cross was crowded with ghouls from shoulder to shoulder. It was closer to the main entrance, where the ghouls poured in and dead-ended. So, I wasn’t getting through the idle mass the same way I had before. A laundry line was strung between the buildings like every street prior, but I hadn’t needed to consider using them. I gradually tested my weight on a line and decided it was secure enough to climb across.
Halfway through, I regretted the decision since the thin line dug into my palm without a glove, and I formed a steel plate to take the strain instead. I reached the other side and not so gracefully pulled myself onto the slanted tiles. I lay there for a second, staring up at the stars. I didn’t let my mind stray for too long and pulled out the notepad to check the exact building.
There were no signs up on the roof or street names, so I found my best guess based on the scribbles and knocked on the slanted window. There was movement down below, but no one came—I knocked again with more force. I waited patiently as a mage wearing steel came up the stairs to the attic, and I refilled my necklace with mana. They stopped to listen, and I tapped my knuckle lightly against the glass.
“Hello?” came the muffled voice of a woman
“Out here.”
She cracked open the window with a dagger pointed at me and a spell sitting in her other palm. Before she could stab or cast, I flipped over the notebook and presented it to her. “From Captain Jestile.”
The knight took the notepad between the crack and, a heartbeat later, opened the window fully. “Sorry ‘bout that. Can you remove the helmet for a moment?”
“Sure,” I said, pulling it up over my head.
“Ah, you’re Tometh’s new project,” she said, flipping through the pages. “How far is the breach? We couldn’t stop that thing from breaking through and stand no chance of making an impact now. How many of us survived? Are there any nearby?”
I handed her a pencil. “You’re the first on the list, so I don’t know much.”