‘There is a dragon out there, Tallah!’ Bianca was making a nuisance of herself, pestering Tallah ever since she’d passed the gate. ‘You can’t be serious about helping these people.’

Problem was…

“How’d your cadre die?” Tallah asked as she sat with Vilfor, pouring over the maps, trying to gain insight into the overall state of the Rock. “I will not believe for a heartbeat that thirty of Catharina’s best were taken out by those dregs out there. Barely looked like a second stage incursion.”

Bianca was holding her upright. The spiteful ghost poked her right between a couple of ribs. ‘Listen to yourself! You can barely stand and you decide to grandstand? Have you gone completely daft?’

“We’ve been fighting ceaselessly ever the break of thaw,” Dorin, the quartermaster, said. “We’ve managed to push back a fourth stage not two days ago. They’re rebuilding their strength. Tonight was a manoeuvre to keep us pinned before the real beasts come out.”

Tallah scoffed, not quite believing her ears. “A manoeuvre? Since when do daemons deploy military tactics?”

She didn’t really mean the venom, but it had been a trying night. In all her time serving at the Rock, there had never been even a coordinated incursion. Every band of the monsters was always just out for blood. Tactics were… unheard of.

And Dorin wasn’t a fool. One didn’t grow old serving in the Cauldron by being a fool.

“Assassinations,” Vilfor rumbled finally. His fists clenched on the table and he drew in a deep, growling breath. “Our mages were assassinated by a group we’ve rescued from the forest. They were our guests for a season. Adventurers.”

Tallah cocked an eyebrow and looked around the table. Most of the upper echelon of the Rock looked away abashed. Now that was a sight to chill the blood.

“Thirty mages killed… by a group of adventurers?! I can’t believe that.” It was absurd. It even quieted Bianca.

“They had a mage of their own. Some Crepuscular I believe. Daemons got in through that one. Don’t ask how. We’ve been busy since.”

“They got daemons inside the walls? Up here?”

She already knew the answer before Vilfor pointed a finger downward. “Down in the city,” he said, face grown nearly purple in barely subdued rage. “They brought the monsters to the civilians. Chaos ensued. We had an incursion at the same time outside the walls.”

That brought things into sharp focus. Monsters in the civilian area meant chaos. Monsters at the gate meant planned chaos. Per procedure, Vilfor would have had to send several of the cadre into the city to help with quelling the bloodshed.

“They picked them off?” she asked. It would have been a masterful stroke of villainy.

“Aye,” Vilfor spat. “Seven dead before we knew what was happening. Slit throats. Heads cut off so Kor couldn’t get to any. Bloodbath.”

“And the ones on the walls?”

“The Crepuscular came to help. Four more of the cadre turned rogue the moment they were all gathered on the battlements. Turned their magic on their peers.”

Tallah leaned back in her chair and pressed a hand to the bridge of her nose, feeling a headache coming on. Catharina would be livid with losing so many trained channellers. She would get murderous to learn of turncoats in her coteries.

“Why isn’t the empress here, sorting this mess?” she asked. The question was aimed at Vilfor, but her eyes were locked on Rhine’s wraith as it drifted through the room.

Vilfor shrugged and shook his head. “We’ve sent word. We’ve sent runners. A whole squad of soldiers. We’ve even sent a bloody raven. We have no answer from her or from the princeling in Valen.”

Someone was intercepting those messages. It didn’t bear thinking of what that entailed. The relief force for the Twins headed out of Aztroa in mid-summer and normally arrived by mid-wither. Vilfor and his men were on their own until then.

She thought back on what the procedure was in this case.

“You’ve collapsed the ravine, yes?”

She got a nod for an answer. All these men with all their soldiers and all their civilians were utterly trapped in the Cauldron. They’d done their duties just as expected, and whoever had organised this strike against them had known exactly what was going to happen.

Someone was working on weakening Catharina’s realm. That much was vastly clear.

Her eyes turned on Vergil and she frowned. Once again, she felt a pawn in some great game whose rules she could not fathom. The boy, marked by some unknown force, had been in her path. And together with him she’d ended up learning uncomfortable, complicated truths about humanity at large. And now this.

Had this been a move by Panacea?

Or was it this Ryder character’s hand tipping?

‘I can fly us out of here,’ Bianca protested some of the ideas that swirled inside Tallah’s head. ‘There is a bloody dragon out there.’

“When did the dragon show up?” she asked. Bianca cursed at her.

As if on cue, a roar filled the air outside and every soldiers in the room jumped to their feet. Sil and Vergil too, though the boy was so lost to sleep that he mistook Sil’s chair for his weapon.

Only Vilfor and Tallah remained seated, looking up and listening without any reaction.

“It’s quite happy,” she noted.

A soldier opened the door. “Dragon in the field, sir,” he said in a breath, as if the entire fortress hadn’t heard the beast’s voice. He’d almost knocked Sil over with the door.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

“Eating the corpses?” Vilfor asked, unperturbed.

“Yes, sir.”

“Try and not attract its attention. It’ll eat its fill and bugger off soon enough.”

So, there was a dragon that didn’t much care what it ate as long as it ate. Could be worse, I guess. It could have a taste for human.

The daemons in the Cauldron were enjoying a powerful resurgence after years of being suppressed.

There were some people running around who’d gone daffy and decided on suicide by daemon.

And the other fortress Vilfor refused to talk about.

What a grim picture this all paints. She sighed and rose from the chair.

“Are you arresting me, Vilfor?” she asked, mustering as much command in her voice as her state allowed. Not every night a sorceress got to do the work on an entire cadre and still spend the day talking with a roomful of old farts and ancient veterans.

“Are you guilty of anything?” the commander asked, barely cracking a smile.

“Not to my knowledge.”

Vilfor’s gaze swept across the room. “Anyone have anything to say to that?”

Nobody answered. They’d all seen her flinging both fire and lightning, and one very large rock, throughout the night. They all pretended to be dumb.

“Good. Innocent. Now recruited back. I’ll have a room prepared—”

“No,” she said resolutely. “I’m fine without lice, thank you. My companions and I will be in the city proper. I need a hot meal. A mug of anything that’s not had a frog in it at some point. And a warm bed. I’ll be back up here at midnight.”

Again, nobody protested the idea and none of the soldiers made a move to stop her as she swept out of the room, Sil and Vergil in tow. Vilfor didn’t assign them a guard.

“Where are we going?” Sil asked.

Tallah tried to remember if the healer had ever been at the Rock before. She doubted it.

“To get some proper beds. Rest up. We’ll be here a while.”

“Why?”

‘Yes, Tallah, do explain why,’ Bianca sneered. ‘We’ve barely survived Grefe. Now you want us to take this on. Have you gone daft?’

“Bianca’s been pestering me all day with that question,” she said, letting a thin smile creep across her lips. “We’re going to stay because otherwise we are all buggered in the worst way.”

“I don’t follow.”

She sighed. “It’s simple: if the Twins fall, then the eastern coast of Vas will be a cesspit of monsters by this time next cycle. The Twins are a plug designed to keep this hole sealed shut. It’s failing at the moment.”

“Sounds to me like an impossible task,” Sil mused, stopping to gather her breath at the base of the stairs. “I’m sure the four of you are formidable, but you’re sharing one meat suit. If I understood right the first time around, you need tens of mages here to keep this place in fighting shape. You’re one woman.”

“True. True. Come, this way.” Tallah led them into the back of the barracks.

The fortress was abuzz with activity, barely fitting all the workers dealing with various tasks. They were repairing trebuchets, preparing new fortifications to drag out into the killing field, forging and sharpening weapons, fletching arrows. For a situation quite as dire as what the council had presented, the Rock was not despairing. It would be considerably harder to do what she planned if that were the case.

“So… what do you actually want to achieve here?” It was Vergil who asked, his voice sleepy. If not for Luna on his shoulder nudging him, he would’ve banged his elbows and knees on every possible obstacle in their way. For all his exhaustion, his head was still screwed on right.

“Compliance… no, wait. That’s not the right word.” She thought on it for a time. “I want their gratitude.”

‘Are you bloody kidding me?!’ Bianca’s outburst drove a spike of pain through the centre of Tallah’s skull. She staggered halfway down a set of wide stairs.‘When that dragons eats us and shits us out, let me know how this place’s gratitude helps us!’

Tallah groaned and ignored the jab.

Sil laughed tiredly and agreed with Bianca. “You can’t be serious.”

“I am. Vilfor is a respected commander in the empire. Getting him from Catharina’s pocket into my own would be quite useful later.” She grinned. “I’ve come to understand, thanks to you two turkeys, that I don’t need to aim to do everything on my own. Having someone in my debt can help us out of some binds later. Plus, it would gain us the Rock and its twin.”

“Are you drunk?”

“On prospective power, yes.”

Sil shook her head and said nothing. She and Vergil would come around to the idea, eventually.

The spiders had all but worshipped them for the help they’d provided, and it had been a small thing compared to what was happening here. The more she considered the idea, the more she saw the merit in it, even if on the surface it all seemed quite mad. But one never knew until one tried.

“I agree with Sil,” Vergil said. He gave her a grin. “I think you got into the Wail at some point.”

Ha. Ha. Vergil’s learned jokes.

‘He’s bloody right!’

She glared at the boy but he shrugged it off and smiled. “You can just say you want to do the right thing,” he said, not shying away from her gaze. “It’s honest.”

That was not… Well, she didn’t… Vergil didn’t know what he was on about.

“You’re blushing,” he added matter-of-factly.

Tallah said nothing.

The Rock of Mourning had once been a dwarven fortress. Its size spoke somewhat poorly of the dwarves themselves. It was the side of the mountain dug into the shape of an impregnable fort, built out of the bones of the world itself. Its age was unknown but predated handily humanity’s dominion of Vas, left behind by the retreat of the builders.

As the race that had waged the hardest war in recorded history against daemons on two continents, the dwarves had built here a settlement deep within the bowels of the mountain. That’s where Tallah led them.

“You cannot be serious,” Vergil said. “We just left an underground place. Why are we going into another?”

“Because that’s now your lot in life,” Tallah answered with good cheer.

There was singing on the air. Music floated up from the depths. There was laughter. And, although faint, there was the smell of bread. Her mouth watered even before they saw the cavernous belly of the Rock of Mourning, and the tight cluster of buildings huddled down there.

“This isn’t only a fortress?” Sil asked.

“No. It’s an entire city. People live here year round. The city cooks for the garrison above, and offers the manpower needed for everything else.” She shivered in pleasured at seeing the place so… alive. “One heartbeat away from disaster… and they’re singing. Can you believe these buggers?”

Sil and Vergil stared at what was spread out beneath their feet. The dwarves had built big. And they had been weird little buggers in their own right. The brutal facade of the Rock hid this delicate settlement within, homes sculpted out of the stone in flowing, mushroom-like shapes. Crystals hung from the high ceiling, reflecting captive sprites. Suspended bridges and walkways crisscrossed the ceiling, covering the entire span of the cavern, and were dotted with archer nests.

It wasn’t anywhere as grand as Grefe, but the influence was there now that Tallah had seen that marvel. Somewhere, in the distant, immemorial past, dwarves had visited Grefe. And she was certain they’d never forgotten what the makers of that place had achieved.

“Welcome to the Rock,” she said with a grin. “Make yourselves at home. We’ll be a while.”