“Be careful once we leave the cover of the woods. There’s been fighting around the bridge before, so–”
Bel’s words were cut off by an excited shriek from the scrattes. One of them had caught sight of the water, and Bel’s planning was lost in the ensuing noise.
“What the hell,” she complained to herself, but she took off running too.
When she had escaped from Baytown with Beth and James, they had stopped to overlook a battle between the Baytown militia and the Points-Delver Alliance. She assumed that if the bridge that spanned Cobalt River was worth fighting for then, it would still be protected now. The river ran deep and fast and was a couple thousand strides across, so the bridge was bound to be an important place in the war.
Her assumption turned out to be wrong, or at least outdated.
The bridge had been burned to its husk, with just metal shell remaining to mark its former glory. As they neared a pair of tall beams that marked its former beginning, Bel saw that there were a dozen scouts stationed on the far side. They were leaping onto their riding lizards and preparing to flee – back to Baytown, probably.
Bel pointed frantically in their direction. “Stop them! Don’t let them alert the town!”
“On it,” Cress shouted. She took to the air, with Oculaire right behind her.
Bel immediately began to worry that she’d just sent two gorgons to fight six times as many of Technis’ soldiers. She cranked up the power to her eye of the huntress so she could see the action, nervously clenching her hands as she watched the two flying gorgons overtake the scouts. It quickly became clear that her concern was unnecessary.
The soldiers had never seen any gorgons before and their archers began the fight by looking into their eyes. Two of them were rapidly petrified and another three collapsed into violent seizures. While the rest of the soldiers panicked, Cress smashed a skull with her hammer and sent one of the riding lizards tumbling with her powerful voice. Oculaire danced behind her, cutting through several bodies with elegant swings of her long handled axes. They cleaned up the rest of the humans with practiced efficiency and took control of the lizards, marching them back towards the bridge.
Some of the gorgons burst into conversation, and Fortuit stepped forward to translate.
“Sotil and the others are surprised. Are the humans here truly ignorant of a gorgon’s powers?”
Manipule clicked her tongue. “Maybe if Sotil would spend less time drinking and more time listening to Bel she would know what was going on.”
Bel glanced at Sotil, the muscular gorgon who had been in a low-simmering feud with Manipule ever since they had argued over who’s voice mattered when reaching a consensus. The gorgon’s deep green snakes writhed with irritation as she pieced together Manipule’s words.
“Hey,” Bel interrupted, “there’s no need to fight. We’re finally on the surface, right?”
She pointed to the far side of the river. “Fortuit, remind the other gorgons that the humans here have never seen a gorgon. Not only that, but ever since his experiences in the third dynasty, Technis has probably believed that power is best concentrated into a small number of individuals. That worked out okay when their ruler was a master of transportation and teleportation, but Technis’ army–”
“Bel,” Fortuit interrupted, “perhaps I can render the meaning of your words without the history lesson. Would that be alright?”
“Ah.” Bel nodded sheepishly. “Yeah, that’s fine.”
Manipule patted her arm. “I think your history lessons are interesting.”
“Well I don’t,” Orseis griped. “I’m going fishing.”
Orseis pranced to the water, skipping around the scrattes who had paused to splash water over their bodies. She turned back to Bel at the water’s edge. “And don’t even think of asking me to carry people across! Not happening!”
Bel frowned. She hadn’t thought of that part.
----------------------------------------
Several hours later, after failed attempts to freeze the river (which failed due to the volume of water) or swim across the river (which failed due to the water’s speed and depth) and finally to throw scrattes into the river (which seemed pointless to Bel, but the scrattes tried it anyway), Orseis finally suggested that they build boats for the scrattes and fly everyone else across. That way, the boats could be small and scratte-sized, and the scrattes had already shown that they didn’t mind getting wet.
They marched back into the forest, found a large tree, cut it down, hollowed it out, and made the crudest dugout canoe that Bel had ever seen. Orseis held her ground, refusing to tow it across, so Cress and Oculaire were forced to pull it from the air instead, using a pair of vines tied to the front of the canoe.
It wasn’t fast, but that was fine: the scrattes had something important to tell her, and so far their crude drawings formed a tapestry that filled up a hundred strides of the silty soil along the river. She and Manipule stared at the pictures as the scrattes continued dragging their sticks over the ground, determined to communicate through brute force.
“They probably want to find a bunch of people to sacrifice,” Manipule said, pointing at a graphic section of the drawings.
“They could be asking for salt water,” Bel replied, hoping for a less-violent interpretation. “Imagine that part as a creation myth rather than something literal.”
Manipule squinted at her. “Salt water? What is that?”
“Water with salt in it. You know what salt is, right?”
“A flavor?”
Bel turned to Fortuit. “Hey, Fortuit, you know what salt is, right?”
The respected gorgon tapped her finger against her chin as she thought. “It is a rare mineral, but I have seen it. It is a crystal that melts in water.”
“Really? Rare? How do you preserve food without salt?”
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Fortuit gestured at the rest of the gorgons, who were busy digging through the food that they had found in the humans’ supplies. “Some of the others have abilities to dry meat.”
Bel shook her head. “Okay, wow. I’m going to assume that the scrattes need saltwater then and couldn’t find it underground. Baytown should be perfect.”
“I wonder if you are too hopeful, Bel,” Manipule said, in her cautiously criticizing tone. “You say that Baytown is a perfect place for us gorgons to settle, and now you also say the water there is perfect for the scrattes.”
Bel rolled her eyes. “Maybe it’s my mom arranging a bunch of lucky coincidences. It doesn’t really matter either way – if Technis’ people are still in Baytown, then we need to deal with them before we’ll be safe. And they’re going to notice that their scouts have disappeared, so we should attack while we still have surprise on our side.”
Bel patted the other gorgon on the shoulder and tried to smile confidently. “Don’t worry, I’m sure things will work out.”
While Manipule was still thinking it over, Bel waved her arms at the scrattes and flashed them a double thumbs-up. They were in the middle of drawing what was either a group of potatoes basking in the rays of the sun or a giant squid squeezing the life out of a group of people. Bel was happy to interrupt them before they added more details so she could still assume the nicer alternative was correct.
“I’ve got it,” she said to their leader. “I’ll lead you to a nice beach. We’ll have to fight a bit–”
She mimed a few jabs of a dagger.
“But it’ll probably be what you’re looking for.”
Her smile wavered. “I mean, whether you want blood or an ocean, either way, it’ll be there.”
The scratte shaman nodded enthusiastically. He turned and spun his stick in the air while shouting for his people’s attention. While he was busy trying to cajole them into some semblance of order, Cress and Oculair tugged the last dugout across the river. They tossed their towing vines to the ground and stomped over to the other gorgons, demanding their cut of the human food. Orseis was in the river, plucking fish as easily as a regular person plucking berries from a bush. Bel thought that things were going well.
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“It is a bit more fortified than you mentioned,” Cress complained. She pointed to the large wooden towers that overlooked a five stride tall wall of rammed dirt that encircled the town. “I would not want to risk flying past those without know the abilities and weapons that they have, and we cannot use our gaze abilities when we cannot see our adversaries.”
Bel shoved her hands through her snakes, disturbing them as she vented her frustration over the unexpected obstacle. “That didn’t used to be there,” she complained.
The giant wall had brought her plan of a surprise attack to a sudden end, and now they stood at a safe distance from the fortress. Bel prodded her snakes, considering her options. Sparky could work to burn down the towers, but the rammed dirt wouldn’t be especially flammable. Flora would be good if Bel were already inside of Baytown, but being rooted to the spot outside of the walls would just make her a target.
Her plague snake hissed eagerly, but Bel didn’t pay her any mind. Playing with a new form in the middle of a life or death situation didn’t feel like a good idea to her.
“What’s that?” Cress asked, pointing at something the defenders were hauling onto the wall. Bel squinted and saw what looked like a large pipe on wheels.
“If it’s some kind of ballista, it’s going to make a direct approach almost impossible,” Cress continued. “For once I am happy that gravity’s pull is stronger here, or else I would be afraid of their range.”
Bel stared at the device, an uncomfortable feeling stirring in her guts. A second one was being rolled up next to the first.
“I don’t think that’s a ballista. It’s a cannon.”
“What–”
Bel interrupted the question, raising her voice as she turned to address the crowd. “Everyone get back!”
She waved her arms for emphasis, but before anyone could move Bel heard a boom like thunder in the distance. Something shrieked through the air, and a moment later a large swathe of ten scrattes were reduced to a green paste. The little green people shrieked in rage and looked like they would charge, but Bel grabbed onto the nearest ones and pointed them in the opposite direction.
“Back! Retreat!” she commanded. “It’s a weapon from the Old World!”
Another boom sounded behind her, sending a shock of fear down her spine. Bel spun and began forming her armor into a large shield as she stepped in front of her allies and friends. A figure blurred past her and thunder boomed again from directly overhead.
Escalope slammed into the ground near Bel and a cloud of shattered metal rained down in front of her. The armored gorgon shook out her arms.
“I wanted to test myself,” she explained. “This weapon is mighty.”
“Yeah, holy shit,” Orseis agreed.
“Stop admiring it and run!” Bel commanded again. She shoved Orseis back and grabbed onto Manipule’s hand before leading her group back upriver. The booming of the cannon followed them, but either they moved quickly beyond its range or the humans had trouble adjusting its aim because its projectiles failed to hit them again.
Upriver and behind modest hill they paused to catch their breath.
“Well, what the hell do we do now?” Orseis demanded. “And what the hell was that!”
Bel expected Manipule to scold the girl for her language, but a look at the mild-mannered gorgon showed that she was too shaken to be her normal self.
Cress turned to Bel with a worried expression. “What was that? Some weapon that Technis devised? It threw those metal balls with the strength of a Titan!”
Bel shook her head. “No, it’s just something from the Old World. James told me about them, but I hadn’t seen any in Satrap.”
Orseis threw up her tentacles with disgust. “That something from the Old World! How are we supposed to fight people so far away that I can’t even see them? And what other technology could Technis have stolen?”
Bel shrugged. “I don’t know. James thought that cannons and rifles were pretty archaic, so we didn’t talk about them much.”
“Archaic?” Cress hissed. “What would be modern?”
“Uh, flying machines that move faster than sound. Projectiles that travel across the entire country and are precise enough to go through the window of a house. Explosives so powerful that a single one will reduce a city to ashes.”
Cress looked dumbfounded. “You said that the humans are weak, Bel! There are only a handful of us!”
“Those things are hard to make though,” Bel rushed to add, “I don’t think that Technis has any of that. And, you know, compared to that the cannons aren’t very dangerous.”
Everyone who could understand Bel’s words look at her with uncomfortable levels of incredulity. She groaned internally.
Did James ever tell me how his people used to attack a fortress with cannons?
She rubbed her temples frantically, trying to squeeze a good idea out of her head.
Go under it? Maybe Jann or Duran could do that, but not me.
One of her snakes wrapped its mouth around her finger, chewing on her for attention. Bel opened her eye to see her frustrating plague snake staring back at her. She grit her teeth, ready to scold the snake into submission, but then it behaved oddly, flicking its eyes back and forth. Bel followed its gaze towards the river.
“What? You want to jump into the water? I didn’t think you were a water snake.”
Then Bel remembered how she’d first met the spirit serpent: the rat-woman had unleashed it into the water, where it had taken the form of something spiny and dangerous. Bel looked at the river, her gaze following it downstream.
All the way into Baytown, she realized.
Then she remembered the complicated set of gates that could allow the water to flow through the town, washing out the streets or filling the various fountains across Baytown’s districts. Bel grinned.
“Look at you, finally being helpful,” she praised the death-seeking serpent.
“Bel!”
Bel spun around, momentarily surprised to see everyone gathered around her.
Orseis wriggled a tentacle in her direction. “See? You just need to yell when she’s like that.”
Bel cleared her throat. “Yeah, sorry for being distracted. Anyway, I have the perfect plan.”
She pointed to the water. “I’m going to attack through the water.”
She pointed in the direction of Baytown. “Once I take out the cannons and whatever humans are on the walls, you guys come in and wipe the rest of them out.”
She frowned. “Not the civilians though. They’re not evil, just misled.”
Cress glanced at the river. “How are you going to attack through the water?”
Bel proudly lifted her plague serpent, and it flashed a bright green streak down its body. “I’ve decided to name her Vex,” she announced.
“James always told me that plagues travel in the water, I’d just forgotten about it. We’ll just slip right in and kill everyone. Maybe it’ll even be easy.”