It wasn’t the worst thing in the world to be trapped under what was honestly my best friend in either of my lives. I did get a bit frustrated when I had to make it up the stairs to our room with said best friend lounging determinedly on my wings. It was even more frustrating when I got a hankering for some of the cafés and eateries we had visited the last time we were in the city, and she still wouldn’t budge.
Yet, the Abyss provides. When I complained, Mia just snatched her weird conch phone out of one of the pouches on her hip. Not fifteen minutes later, a delivery demon knocked on our door and awkwardly handed over our food and drinks. His awkwardness was one hundred percent Mia’s fault. The cat, in all her catty glory, refused to move off of me or even properly interact with the delivery demon.
We managed, though, and then I had some gloriously puffy pastries to snack on, washed down with a sweet drink that reminded me of chocolate milk, only so much better. The brat cat was, of course, making a mess all over my wings with her crumbly tart-style pastry, but at least she was avoiding any liquid accidents.
If she ended up spilling something sugary and brightly colored and it stained my feathers, being my best friend would not save her.
Glaustro showed up not long after we finished our snack, as if to confirm that, yes, he had a penchant for cruel and unusual humor. His arms were full of maps, reports, and other official-type documents. Bronwynn was right behind him, burdened by just as much paraphernalia.
I asked the only reasonable question. “What, exactly, are you doing in my room with all of that?”
“Our room,” Mia immediately corrected, then plopped her head onto my shoulder to keep an eye on the two demons.
Glaustro pulled over a table, heedless of the totally personalized and carefully arranged setting of our room, then started to spread one of the maps over it. It was tricky, because the table was actually smaller than the map by at least ten inches or so in every direction, but he didn’t seem to mind.
“We are getting some planning done,” Glaustro informed us cheerfully. “And we are doing so in your room because I’ve already had to fend off ten scrying probes within twenty minutes. I got so tired of it, I had to leave my quarters. I don’t think they’d waste time looking for me in the room of a random mortal soldier. Besides, it’s helpful to have you on hand.”
“Why is it helpful to have me on hand?” I let my grimoire drop off the side of my bed, seeing as I wasn’t likely to get any more studying done anyway. “And what do you mean by ‘scrying probes’? Why would anyone bother spying on us?”
“Because some of our plans hinge on your ability to keep up with Methialia and do aerial reconnaissance. With you here, I can consult you on your flying abilities. You are forbidden from taking on too much work, by the way.”
I groaned and tried to flop back down on my bed dramatically, but this was difficult with a brat cat on top of me.
“You still didn’t tell me why people are spying on us all of a sudden, or why you need us scouting to begin with,” I pointed out. “We already proved that I can’t fly in the storms, so won’t I be useless anyway? Methialia too, for that matter?”
“You will not be useless. It’s the cleared territories that I’m worried about. I’ll need you scouting when we pass through those.” Glaustro glanced at the closed door, then lowered his voice. “You might not realize it, but we’ve upset the status quo. A ton of people had all sorts of interests intertwined in promotions and earning Crewe’s favor. We’ve inserted ourselves into the promotion pipeline, and the lieutenant general is praising us in front of people who failed to perform as well as we did.”
“You’re getting promoted?”
“How is that the only thing you picked up from everything I just said? I’m maybe getting promoted, if we continue to perform as well as we have so far. This will be assessed at the end of Lagyel’s invasion. I thought you’d be more concerned about the people who will probably try to kill us to prevent exactly that.”
I shrugged helplessly. Or I tried to, because again, brat cat on my back.
“I figure that’s more of a you problem,” I said, then hastened to explain when he shot me an acidic look. “I mean, it’s not like I’m going to be much help when fighting other demons. If they ambush, I could maybe take one or two with me. Maybe. Then I’d just be back in the Abyss waiting for you.”
Mia grumbled something on the subject of fighting demons, but she did so quietly enough that I couldn’t pick it up. Glaustro, meanwhile, suddenly looked grim.
“All jokes aside, if we do get ambushed, you two should focus on surviving the encounter. I don’t want you playing hero. This is an important time for your development, and you need to strive to survive for as long as you can. Ideally to the end, of course.”
“They already know that, Glaustro,” Bronwynn chimed in from the side with a scoff and a roll of his eyes. “In fact, if I may remind you, we literally have to force them to slow down.”
‘Them’?!
Narrowing my eyes suspiciously at the use of the plural, I craned my neck and tried to glare at Mia. She just looked away all innocent-like. Her face was as carefully blank as always. But I had gotten pretty good at picking up on some of the subtle expressions she let herself show when we were alone or in the company of friends. Sure, the term ‘friends’ applied only to the two demons in the room with us, but that wasn’t the point.
Stolen novel; please report.
The point was that she was keeping something from me. And after she had the gall to accuse me of being reckless…
I promised myself I would get to the bottom of the mystery soon, choosing instead to focus on Glaustro and the bigger picture for the moment. “So, what’s with the maps? Also, isn’t scrying on us inside the city mostly useless? It’s not like they can easily ambush us here.”
“They’re not scrying me for the sake of being some garden variety stalkers, Hayden. I’m afraid that the recent string of rewards has triggered something of a gold rush for the golems. Not even Crewe knows who leaked the information, but with the rewards out there, people are trying to claim them.”
“Wait… are you telling me someone is trying to track down the golems before us? But… do they have those devices Crewe gave you? Or any kind of plan for actually killing the golems when they find them?”
“As far as we can tell? No, on all fronts. Apparently, there is a consensus that small units of demons can handle the things before they awaken, which in turn means anyone could do it. Just find the core and smash it before it wakes up. Easy, right?” Glaustro scoffed, showing exactly what he thought about the intelligence of his fellow demons.
“But… surely they can’t just do that,” I protested. “We’re the ones with the orders. Isn’t this against legion laws, or something?”
“It would be if legion demons were the ones doing it. Technically, bounty hunters, profiteers, and all the other scum that pay their way through to invasion worlds are associated with the legion, but they don’t really answer to Crewe. He can force the issue, sure. But they seem to believe that as long as they present their success before him, he’ll just pay them and let them move on.”
My head spun, and I stared blankly at the older demon for a few seconds while my brain rebooted. Really, I should have expected such individuals to exist, but still…
“There really are unaffiliated demons just running around Lagyel?” I finally managed.
“If an invasion stalls, or if we are invading a particularly powerful world, then it’s standard policy to let such demons in to sow chaos and confusion. If they accomplish something? Great. If they fail, then it’s no skin off our backs,” Glaustro stated indifferently, still studying his map. “The problem is, we’ve got the invasion back under control, so they’re getting bolder and coming out to play.”
“And they’re spying on you to figure out where they might be able to find a golem, without having to go out there and traipse through endless sandstorms,” I concluded, not at all happy with where my logic was taking me.
Glaustro just shot me a small smile. “Exactly. Here, you see these?” He tilted the map up. From my position on the bed, I could barely glimpse vast stretches of land covered by swirling storms, disrupted by only a scant few clear areas. “These new survey maps help us mark out the different storms. That means we can approximate where we might find new slumbering golems, since they seem to always be located in the middle of the territory they’re affecting.”
I wished I could get up and take a closer look. Then again, Mia had taken to kneading her claws against my back, which was… well, oddly comfortable. I felt some of the tension-knots in my back relax and fade away, and I had to bite back a happy sigh.
“I’m guessing the maps are not publicly available?” I asked.
“They are reserved for Crewe’s ‘hunting teams’, as he calls us,” Glaustro explained. “He seems caught between exasperation and amusement when it comes to the golem issue, though he has made it known that if someone ruins his invasion plans, they will permanently regret it.”
I shuddered. “Do I want to ask?”
To my surprise, it was Bronwynn who answered, his tone deadly serious. “I caught Crewe punishing someone when Glaustro sent me to pass a message along. Trust me, you don’t want to know. No one wants to know. If you piss him off, just kill yourself on the spot. It’s better for your long-term mental health.”
I believed him, and wisely decided to change the subject.
“So, any ideas on where we’ll be headed next, or when? I didn’t have time to get it done before we left the tree city, but I really need to pick up some upper body armor before we set off again.”
I had waffled too long on whether I wanted to let someone else touch Yules’ armor. By the time I visited an armorer in the tree city, they told me they couldn’t make alterations to it quickly enough to meet my deadline. They also seemed way too pleased about getting their hands on armor made by the Amahis Armory, so I got out of there fast and found a different shop to pick up some basic, cheap leather.
I just needed to find someone capable of putting together some halfway decent upper body armor. Alterations to Yules’ set would have to wait until I could visit her again.
“We leave in a couple days. Crewe wants to send a survey team to the site where we destroyed that last golem, so we can hitch a ride back with them. That way, we can head straight over to the next golem. See here?”
Glaustro tilted his map again, and I caught a trio of holes in the ever-present murky representation of Lagyel’s churning storm clouds. “Someone else managed to take down a golem nearby, so we can easily approximate the location of at least two other golems. We’ll head for this one. I already cleared it with Crewe, so it’s been reserved for our unit.”
Glaustro tapped a point on the map, but really, I couldn’t glean any details without taking a much closer look than Mia’s position on my wings would allow.
I sighed. “It’s nice to have a plan, at least. I’m guessing it’ll take us some three, four days to cross into the territory of the next golem? What are the chances that some of these rogue demons manage to catch up to us in that timeframe?”
Glaustro seriously considered my question, but eventually shook his head. “It’s not very likely. I just want to take all the precautions we can. But they tend to stick close to conquered cities, and we’ll be teleporting anyway. We should be in the clear.”
That helped me unwind a good deal more. It wasn’t that I didn’t have faith in our unit when facing some subpar scavengers, but I also wasn’t underselling my own abilities at all. Even with all the strides I had made, I was one hundred percent not ready to be messing around with demonic combat yet.
“Sounds good,” I said. “Now, could you please order this lazy cat on top of me to let me go shopping today? I don’t want to face another golem in just this leather, but I also don’t want to cut up Yules’ set to make room for these things attached to my back.”
Glaustro was amused and took full advantage of the opportunity to tease me, but he did give his permission eventually. That made Mia roll off of me, and I shook out my poor wings with a relieved sigh.
We spent most of that day and the next strolling around the city and shopping, which did yield several useful items. I had a decent armor replacement, though it only came with a basic toughness enchantment, and I picked up several more healing potions, just in case. All in all, when we met up with the rest of our unit to tackle the next golem, I actually felt prepared for what was to come.
Naturally, a part of me suggested this was exactly the point when everything would go wrong, but I did my best to ignore that voice at the back of my head.
I wasn’t that unlucky. Right?