Captain Tometh

Wild mana had already seeped into the mage’s corpse, the fourth so far, hiding the fact they ever had the gift to begin with. Despite the icy weather, the body was still warm, but the perpetrator had vanished from the inadequately patrolled wall. I should hope their soul would be with The Mother Zalarya, but I’d have to still believe in the imperial religion. Without a target for my anger and concerned soldiers looking over my shoulder, I steeled my features.

Worryingly, the defensive line had yet to be breached, so the killer was moving around us undetected. Not a common feat for the mindless creatures, and if the wounds across the dead’s throats weren’t already festering, I’d have assumed a person had made the kills. It was still possible, and it wouldn’t be the first time ghoul parts had been turned into weapons, but that theory didn’t sit right with me.

People, mages or otherwise, didn’t get to sneak up to the throats of mages at heightened vigilance. Well, unless you were a certain illusive girl, yet to show her face again after another day of exhausting fighting. I held onto the excuse of her and my 2nd simply being late or unable to reach us since dwelling on the alternative wouldn’t help our situation.

Help was on its way—the surrounding squads must have all learned of our situation by now.

I stood from the body and surveyed the worried expressions around me, trembling hands gripped to weapons. Pairing up wasn’t helping since the second and third deaths were together, and someone somewhere would always find themselves isolated out here on the bastion grounds. We’d enclosed the sunken tunnels behind the defensive walls for protective reasons, and now it was working against us. As long as we didn’t know the perpetrator, it was too risky to stay on the line.

“H-hello! Healer! Someone's hurt here!” A voice rose from deeper within the defences. “I-I think they’re gone.”

The hilt of my sword creaked as I gripped it, ready to shout at those forgetting their posts near the openings, already thoroughly enwrapped by ghouls getting through the breach in the fence. Yet I sighed, understanding the situation was growing untenable. I sent out a series of pulses for retreat and amplified my voice for those who wouldn’t understand. “Militia, fallback to the bastion. Captains hold the door until the last one’s through.”

The last portion was redundant since I would be the last through the gap, making sure it was sealed and whatever or whoever was killing us stuck on the other side.

…

The light of dawn filtered through the barricaded windows, past drawn curtains, to highlight the dust drifting through the corridor. Since I’d been allowed to sleep through the last hour of darkness, I assumed nothing catastrophic had happened outside of my post in a lengthy hallway. I shuffled over to catch a thin sliver of warmth on my cheek and closed my eyes, basking in the rays like a common reptile.

A shard of glass broke off the frame of an already shattered window, and I let my eyelids rest a little while longer before cracking them open to investigate. Another pale hand reached in through the new opening, lines of black blood dripping off it from the jagged edges. Yet, the morphed stone barricades and wooden boards largely held, the arm only adding itself to the forest of limbs reaching into the hallway. I checked if my sword still rested beside me, gauged my mana reserves at half replenished, and closed my eyes again, tucking my hands under my armpits.

Another night had come and gone, most of us not having a chance for more than a few hours' rest. The assassinations hadn’t depleted our numbers too severely but meant we had to defend every inhabited area whilst we didn’t know what it was or how it got around. Regardless, we could hold the bastion indefinitely, the old keep built for a siege by mages.

However, food would become an issue after the week ended… if we didn’t tear each other to bits before that issue arose.

Word of the deaths had reached the civilians crowding the floors above. They were frightened, scared for their lives and families, but I was still justified in finding their outright panic annoying and counterproductive. No, they couldn’t all have a private room, sealed from the inside to stay in. No, there was no escape. No, we didn’t have secret smuggling tunnels. Yes, spreading out from the specified zones was a bad idea. No, smothering the screaming baby wouldn’t help.

I kept my senses stretched out across the ground floor now that it was less crowded by bodies, tracking the knights and militia. Discerning the mages was easier than ever, but the talentless were more hidden because of the depletion in the wild mana around us, the ghouls sucking the area dry.

After experiencing this new low, I vowed never to complain about the disparity between the outside world and inside the mana-rich capital.

A new pair of mages appeared in my mind’s eye, and I mapped their route through the bastion, my frown deepening as they didn’t add to the patrols along the perimeter but headed towards me. Their reserves were too depleted to get a proper signature or outline of their figure, but the enchanted weapon was one Hauser always carried with him.

He forced open the door to my hallway, breaking the hinges I’d distorted to make it harder to open. “Oi Tomey, what do you think you’re doing, sleeping with a chest full of mana while the rest of us burn through ours up there? Have you even killed anything in here?”

I raised a brow, surprised he had abandoned the forced respect he’d at least used to show my position. “Their screams from losing a limb would only worsen our encirclement.”

He and his junior eyed the arms forced through the gaps, reaching around for anything they could get their claws on. “Fucking creepy. The commander wants to see you, and there’s no excuse not to since you’re clearly unoccupied.”

“On the southwestern turret, sir,” the adjutant added. “Directly above us.”

I grabbed the hilt of my sword and used it to pull myself up. “I know my bearings. Stay here and keep watch.”

Hauser scoffed. “Not a chance in the six realms. You haven’t even caught the traitor murdering us. Have one of the militia do it while we guard the civies.”

I unsheathed my blade and embedded it into the wall next to his naked neck before he even finished flitching towards his scabbard. A wide-eyed Hauser glanced at his adjutant, who had taken a step away, settling into a decent defensive stance. “You’re staying here. You seemed to think it was nothing important or dangerous for me to be doing it. So it shouldn’t be an issue for you.”

“Y-you don’t give me orders—”

I pulled the blade from the wall, nicking his neck on the way out. “I hate giving orders. You’re good at looking out for yourself, Hauser, so heed my words when I say I trust I will find you here when I return.”

The adjutant stepped back and quickly saluted out of sight of her boss as I passed. I bit back my scathing remarks of what I thought of the gesture and went for the stairs to the rooftop. They had known who their captains were when they specifically asked to join their teams, content to sit in the prestigious position of a knight and draw in the benefits without lifting a finger. The only time they’d gone into the capital was to retrieve the piece of wall from the second ring to join the order.

Now that they were in a situation which valued competence over roe, they’d changed their minds. A more diplomatic person would take full advantage of the attitude switch and draw them to my budding coalition, but I was in no mood. I still directed them to where they would be most useful to the defence; whether they kept their allegiance after the siege was up to them.

I walked through the crowded hallways, the rooms already crammed by everyone looking for a private space for their families. Most of the people who’d come to the bastion were parents, overly cautious during the evacuations for the sake of their children. They sat with toddlers too young to understand anything, their reassuring smiles not reaching their hooded eyes. The older children had vastly different ways of coping with the situation, some sitting with their friends playing games while others stared out at the windows towards the encroaching flood of monsters, hatred in their eyes.

If one positive existed to all the trauma, we would get a new round of recruits if we survived this.

Grandparents seemed to have a more common solution, repeating old prayers they probably hadn’t recited since childhood. The open display of faith was a worrying sign of what they thought of our odds. After the fall of the continental empire, religion fractured, but after The Fall, organised religion in Werl ceased, unable to consolidate without the stored wealth lost inside the capital. Faith had been relegated to the privacy of one’s mind, where they were free to believe what they wanted without reproach.

Still, I didn’t disparage as I squeezed past a group of them praying together. Despite considering mana a gift from something greater than us, I was confident it wasn’t from the benevolent gods the old scripture claimed. Because if they existed, they would be responsible for the horrors outside, and I would worship no such god.

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I shuffled up the last set of rungs to the top of the battlements, the piercingly cold air hitting the back of my throat, pushing away the fog clouding my mind. There was a scattering of civilians across the bastion’s four turrets, looking for fresh air and open skies. Arardish and his entourage were almost the only occupants on this one, the commander issuing demands to those around him.

I didn’t announce my presence to the occupied knights, being more interested in figuring out what they were busy with. A burly captain stretched back the bowstring of a magebow with our highest draw weight, a blunted arrow with a rope attached to the back pinched between his fingers.

“Higher!” Arardish yelled.

The captain’s muscles burnt mana as he adjusted while keeping the string drawn back, the bow bending to a discomfiting degree.

“To the left… release.”

There was a satisfying twang as the arrow was hurled through the air, a bundle of rope uncoiling to sail after it. I glanced back and forth from the quickly vanishing bundle to the arrow just reaching its apex. It cleared the bastion grounds, over the first row of buildings and then the next, before the rope was pulled taut, and it plummeted.

Our end of the rope was secured around the battlements, and the other was now draped over the first few rows of houses, the length between drooping down into the grounds before the arrow caught on something.

“You’re not planning to escape that way, are you?” I asked the group, not bothering to disguise the implied cowardice.

“Ah, you actually came,” Arardish said, brow furrowed. “Why not? This, dear boy, is textbook, and someone has to get out there and command the disjointed mess of soldiers your captains left. Your little relay obviously failed, but I still feel safe in leaving the bastion in your capable hands.”

No matter how self-serving they seemed, arguing his intentions was no use. “And you already have someone to tie the rope on the opposite rooftop?”

“It’s obvious what we’re doing. Someone will come.”

While knights who ventured into the capital were no strangers to using the roofs to traverse the city, there weren’t any squads in that area from our last census. Some were off in the distance on their sections of roof, but there was a reason why we needed Valeria to pass between them all. The gaps were too risky to cross unless someone was brave enough to trust a weightless spell to take them the exact distance every single time.

I shut my mouth as an angled window built into the tiles opened, and a man’s head poked out to investigate why something had hit his roof.

“See now,” Arardish said with a smug smile, turning back to wave over the man’s attention. “You there!”

His shouts did nothing but agitate the ghouls towards our section of the bastion. I slapped a palm to my forehead since we’d spent days scolding the civilians repeatedly for doing more than whispering. The damage was done, so I magnified my vision to see what we would get out of it. For as much as I thought Arardish simply wanted to run away, a link to the outside wasn’t the worst idea.

No one could hear anything over the ghouls' clamour and snarls, but he tried again regardless. The man followed the rope to the waving commander, and after a bit of pointing, he leaned out his window to find the end draped over his roof. He leaned further to observe the ghouls swarming down the street below him. He made a half-hearted stretch for the rope, his arm not reaching half the distance needed, then seemed to apologise and closed the window.

I refrained from aggravating the annoyed Arardish further by commenting on the futility of his plan. The rope was barely secure, so even a weightless spell's effect might not dampen the strain enough to make it. I also doubted he intended to test it himself.

Wood cracked below us, and Hauser’s voice called over the enraged snarls of ghouls. The hallway below was already weakened by spreading the stone over the windows, and now Arardish had called every ghoul on the grounds to press into the walls.

I leaned over the battlements, a blast of air shooting out of the gaps below, doing no more than disturbing the stray strands of hair on the ghouls’ heads. A more substantial spell coalesced, but there were no effects on the ghouls at all; it was aimed somewhere else. Another was cut off mid-cast, and a third was released further inside the bastion, light leaking off the attack shining out onto the ghouls from the barricaded windows.

Before I could turn to see what mess Hauser had caused, the rope hanging next to me shifted. The windows on the three rows of buildings it draped over hadn’t opened. The tether was slowly pulled taut and shuddered as something handled it on the other end.

Sunlight glinted off steel as it poked over the edge of the tiled ridge, the two twisting horns atop a slender helmet responsible for the reflection. I magnified the sight, finding one of the horns crooked from my handiwork.

“Oh, why are you there?” I grunted. The girl followed the length of rope to our position before turning back, gesturing while conversing with another party. While it was nice to know Valeria hadn’t gotten herself killed, I wanted to know how she’d ended up on the opposite side of the city to where she was supposed to be, in the east with the 2nd, moving towards us. Had the gargoyle forced them there?

The rope shifted again, pulled taut as someone else climbed up. Instead of a steel helmet, favoured for its protection, or a naked head of hair, favoured for visibility, a brightly coloured beret appeared over the ridge. The rope continued swaying, and more green hats joined them on the rooftop.

The shouting from downstairs called for concern, but I took a second to savour the only time in my life I appreciated seeing the pompous relic from the old dress uniform, something only ducal knights would wear.

Valeria

“Valeria, you’re tangling it,” Yis said, taking the length of rope out of my hands.

My gauntleted fingers had also split some of the interwoven fibres, but I kept that to myself as he undid the mess I’d made trying to tie the rope around a chimney. The bolt at the end of it had been detached after it had dropped out of the sky and almost hit our column steadily pushing through the city.

“Help me pull this, Leonarda,” he asked, struggling to eliminate the slack. I danced out of the way of the knights who stumbled across the roof, not yet trusting their boots to hold them on the rough tiles.

Below us, a wall of interlocked iron shields moved forward to the next set of houses. The army’s anti-mage company had been volunteered for the front lines, despite their captain arguing they were better suited to handle single targets and needed to be kept in the rear for elites. However, no other group was outfitted with so much iron, meant to be used against small groups of mages.

Their combat healers, our knights, and the remnant squads we collected followed behind the shield wall, knocking on the doors and ushering their inhabitants towards the encampment outside the city. Another set of shields came towards us from the opposite side of the street, the plan to meet in the middle at the gate.

We’d hit every entrance on the southwestern side of the city at dawn since it was the least infested part of the city. The newly arrived generals had argued for getting our forces inside the narrow streets as fast as possible to neutralise the ghouls' numerical advantage. My plan to go for the source at the capital walls had been outvoted.

The military had been slow and methodical in their push through the city, every building cleared and every flanking route covered. The cohesive unit of supporting soldiers, army mages, and generals behind the frontline opened a tunnel through their ranks to allow the teary-eyed civilians through. Rows upon rows of infantry would cover them to the city perimeter and the cavalry from there to the encampment.

Meanwhile, Yis and the knights argued over a list of hitches, bows, and knots, struggling to determine the best method to secure the rope. My helmet concealed the look of clear and utter disappointment on my face. However, my tongue gave it away. “You all can’t be serious. Wrap it around the chimney, tie it into a pretty bow, or just hold it. This can’t be that difficult.”

Their retort was insults given in a mannerly fashion about my lack of knowledge on the art of knot tying, and they went back to their discussion. Yis got his way in the end, and a hitch of symmetrical loops was fastened over the chimney, wrapped in the excess length. By then, the army had arrived at the centre gate and combined the two groups, encountering the first real resistance to our advance.

Passed many more streets with greater opposition, the grounds of the bastion were overrun, their protective enchantment down. I couldn’t tell if the ghouls had breached the building itself, but their situation seemed too dire to wait for the army to make their way there gradually.

I stepped over the ridge and down the other side, peeking past the overhang to see the consequence of falling. It was potentially deadly, but there was finally something I could do besides standing just far enough away from the commanders not to annoy them. I jumped up to the rope strung above, hooking my legs in a cross to hang upside down.

“Val?” Yis said, somehow surprised this was where things were going.

“Yes?” I asked, leaning around my body after pulling myself forward.

“Get down from there.”

“What did you think was the point of tying the rope?”

Yis stepped up to the ridge, swayed to and fro, then stepped back. “Valeria. Let the army do its job and bludgeon its way through; there’s no need for us even to throw around spells at this point.”

I pulled again, sliding along to hang over the street. “I’ll be waiting in the bastion for them when they get there. I’m sure your fancy knot will hold.”

Yis furrowed his brow, looking past me to the bastion. “Leonarda—”

“Want me to shake her off?” the captain asked. I narrowed my eyes, tightening my grip on the rope.

“No… By all the waving that rem is doing, they likely need the help, and it’s not the worst plan if we want them to be alive when the army reaches them. Get Captain Oteli and the rest of your squad up here. We’re going to follow her.”

Leonarda tucked away his beret and secured his sword before casting a weightless spell on himself. He reached for the rope and hooked the back of his ankles over, barely jostling it.

His movements along the rope were more fluid than mine, his arms and legs working in tandem rather than my slow pull. Yis jumped up with the same spell, hardly adding to the strain. Even when the whole group joined, I likely weighed more than all combined.

I swapped to shuffling like them, finding it quicker yet more precarious as my ankle missed the rope and dangled over the hoard for a second. After some time, I dropped my head back to see that the upside-down bastion hadn’t gotten much closer, while my arms were already fatigued. I took a deep breath, imagining the remaining distance as the clothes lines I’d climbed along before, merely repeating a dozen times.