Breath in the Stone Part 3
An account from the beginning of the crusade and the Thundering Vale campaign.
Lau, a hobgoblin priestess; and Scarlet, an inferness; wandered forgotten tunnels and hidden worlds—as a sentinel of the necropolis followed them out of its demesne. They found an injured soldier in the middle of a brutal tunnel skirmish and escaped with him.
Scarlet beckoned them to follow her, and she led them with the fluid clarity of someone experienced with underground evasion. She knew civil engineering well enough they escaped the remnants of the mob, now mazed on top of insensate in the wake of their fiend's demise. The pursuers' mad baying gradually faded against the roar of water and they adjusted both the old bird's arms around their shoulders, using him as a third support.
"We need to keep moving. When a demon dies, it's supplicants change--go insane or even turn into actual monsters. And I'm just weighing you down. Tempted to tell you two fertiles to let me buy you some time."
"Fertiles!?" asked Scarlet, outrage concealed by the bran's head feathers, beside herself.
"Well… we are," responded Lau from somewhere beneath his neck-scruff. "And Hells no, old guy."
These corridors were an anthill of right-angled branching slots, the major passages sided by carved stone screens, the ceiling lit with cultivated fungi giving a neutral amber glow. Beyond the access-gaps between these panels, narrow stone-grated corridors spreading like roots of stone and darkness. The screens could hide sneaking enemies, the water muffling their approach, and their hopes of navigating someplace more secure went frustrated.
Their strength finally faltered at once an intersection consisting of a large room where three such corridors converged. The two women set the senior down under a deep blind arch that would have made the place a complete cross. The darkness and roar just past the all-surrounding screens set the trio ill at ease; they cast their gazes in all directions, knowing they would be found once they stopped.
The senior calmed down during their flight, from an eruption to a mere smolder, and the women figured that was as calm as he would get. They pushed against the plates in his coat's jacket, teasing his arm up while Lau loosened a close-fitting breastplate. She saw a puncture wound in the meat of his chest and broken ribs where the demon's tongue glanced by them. He swatted her hand away as she tried to cast magic and put a hand over the wounds, uttering prayers.
"You're lucky it only rattled your cage, old bird," Scarlet commented after a minute, the old bird aping marvel at the fucking comedian. He looked like some divine entity draped over the frame of a man the features of a corvid--a raven, given his size… with an attitude more like a chronically grouchy bull crow. His face's black plumes were either flushed with indignation or simply traced old scars.
"Making the most of your armor and wards," the brannoch replied with his full senses and unusual diction, opening a compartment on his crossbow. "Conserve energy, let the hits glance off… or turn a fatal hit into a merely telling one--it was this or another sucking chest wound. A few broken ribs I'm used to." He pointed a bolt at her.
"You, however, are not used to yours with the way you're carrying yourself,” and fed it into the bow. “Not what I expected with your reputation," he punctuated with each reload, eliciting a garnish of surprise and a blank masked stare from Lau before a bolt-tip tapped her mask. "And you, whelp." The buzzard loaded the final bolt into what the women barely registered was some kind of repeating crossbow. "Never learned how to get on with a long-term injury. And I would expect someone of your--tch!--stature to know who the Craibhach are." Now it was Lau who betrayed the sense of losing a secret, Scarlet glancing with furrowed brow.
They looked back at him and saw in his lap the pistols previously sticking out of Lau's breastplate. One of them he was pushing a charge and ball down.
"You… know who I am?" the horned woman asked. The buzzard's inky feathers furrowed over dark brown eyes like he was used to dismissing ignorant youth, the ramrod tracing the movement his head took as he shook it.
"I know who both of you are. But you don't know one another--or you wouldn't be together." Each woman visibly wrestled with second-thoughts and second-guesses while he punctuated each word with tamps.
"And who are you, sir?" Scarlet asked. The old bran tchika'd, practically flicking the rod of his second weapon back into its sleeve. He gazed past them weirdly.
"You'd know me by deeds… my name being quite irrelevant now," he cocked both implements against his coat and aimed past the women. They turned--and saw several pioneers down the corridor perpendicular to the other two, emerging from a gap in the screens. "Looks like they snuck here through the secondary conduits." Five in all advanced with long knives drawn, the one at the front bearing also a sword looted from a city guard.
Lau readied her knife and beseeched the most-powerful ancestor whose mystery she was inducted to; Scarlet helped herself up against the wall, rubbing her scaled claws and lowering her face in a not-entirely-human snarl; true to many old nonchalant soldiers in a last stand, the bird remained comfortable and drew beads with his pistols.
Something like a sudden bark, a nonverbal exclamation from a strange language, like the concussion of a large stone falling on wet earth. A staccato of syllables, and a section of stone screen behind the pioneers collapsed. A bulky silhouette cast in dust and shadow purposefully strode out, arm unerringly reaching for the nearest pioneer.
And under the eye-slits of a horned helmet, smoking blue-green eyes the color of rime.
The silhouette barked more words, concluding them with slamming the unalert soldier through the opposite screen. It emerged from the dust, dark metal plates, dark fabric, even the fur cloak looked darker than it should have been, everything a hue of grave soil. It swatted aside another pioneer's blade and sunk into him another knife taken from a long-dead comrade, lifting him off the floor and throwing him with both arms into a third. The fourth and fifth circled.
Both waited for the other to make the first move and take all the risk on a shared enemy. As they circled, they drew back, barking at one another in their language.
The shadow interrupted them in its own speech and lanced out with its blade. The fourth in front of it shot back with a laugh--and his jaw was met with a club in the attacker's other hand, then with the knife. The attacker lanced out its club and hooked the dying pioneer's neck with a flattened, hooked boss, using both their mass to about-face the fifth with his dying comrade between them.
The dark thing threw its scavenged knife at the fifth pioneer as the fourth was kicked forward; the fifth anticipated this as if from practice and slipped aside as he ran forward--into the knife taken from the third. The fifth pioneer anticipated the club darting to his neck, but his laugh was cut short--the club raced past, hooked the back of his head, and was brought close to the attacker bearing his third comrade's blade.
The pioneer rolled back and recovered his stance--and took a thrown knife into his gut. He clutched the wound, but his defensive stance was broken by the shadow's advance, swinging its club with both hands.
As they pushed themselves, deaf from the water and the blood in their ears, Scarlet looked down at the bran--why was he lighter? "Suka! We left his bow!"
"Barely had any bolts left, leave it!" he said between breaths. "Keep going!"
The discarded crossbow was lifted, turned over, inspected. Staples on the palm and fingers of heavy leather gloves that lent grip gingerly crossed from the bayonet over the surface of a metal box inset into the stock in front of the trigger guard, finding a catch and opening the top. Inside were bolts--it looked down at the handful it clutched, from the same hallway as the dead fiend. Glowing eyes of unmortal intelligence scrutinized the artifact fabricated on a level of ideation so literal and material as to be entirely foreign, like gazing on the shedding of an existential mayfly. Information encoded on the particles of the weapon and its missiles passed from their matter, integrated into an alien mindpath. It looked ahead, flicked the magazine shut, and spun the bow around to cycle the string back.
THEY SLOWED THEIR pace in a colonnade overlooking one of the major cisterns regularly used by the city; the glow of the beneficial life used to filter the water reflected off white elements in the ceiling. Scarlet tried to keep a sharp groan to herself entering the first 'normal' color and amount of light in days--and not particularly bright at that. "That thing has stalked us since the entrance to the pre-Arcadian ruins."
"I first encountered it deep in the prehistorical part of the underworks." This aroused Scarlet's interest. "Where it seemed to kill a lot of pioneers." She deliberately ignored Scarlet's question, and the bran seemed to notice as they moved around a fallen column. "Not a demon, not influenced by chaos, but nothing I recognize of your kinds' restless dead."
"Above our paygrade," the bran said, leaning on them and also trying to hold both up. “And the word you’re looking for is necropolis.” The earth shook and they nearly fell, flexing torn muscles and fractured bones to stay upright.
"Is it undead?" asked Scarlet.
"Same eyes as we saw before, since the ‘necropolis’. Same eerie rasp," replied the Lau. Both turned to the old bran, and he nodded.
"Good guess from the pointy girl." The Bran rubbed his brow. "I know an undead when I see it. Plus undead hate outsiders." Mari nodded. "Called on them once myself." This nigh-universally criminal admission drew the gaze of both women, though the Bran missed not a single beat. Some commotion across the cistern caught their eyes while sounds of close things caught their ears.
"Watch your seven!" they heard, and Scarlet caught someone leaping out of the shadows near the wall. She seemed to pat them on the back several times like a prodigal friend but the other two saw her rake the same, bloody talon underhanded across the stranger's neck, their expression already dim even before fading from mortal wounds.
Lau spun, knife drawn, and gasped in surprise: a blade raced across her breastplate and cut her shoulder, the wielder sinking themselves into hers out of reckless abandon. For some reason, a reflexive prayer to Otukyen on protecting womanly integrity found a home in her mask, and whether it attracted positive favor or not, she chose to stick to her guns. She shoved the attacker away as it tried a final stab at her pelvis, it's gasp and her gasp both punctuated by the bran's shots when he whipped level his pistols. Lau saw he already had one reholstered and drew a knife with one hand as he struck another attacker across the face with his other gun.
A tide of semi-horrified thrill washed over her, retreating as quickly as it came to expose thoughts she never imagined--but were always there. The sheen she needed to concentrate on to see things aligned to cosmic anarchy appeared all on its own, and she saw regardless of shadow the numbers they faced--and what they faced: the dead fiend's mob. Androgynous, pudgy, short undeveloped limbs and weak features on round faces; dangerous when their physical mass all focused on one direction, able to trample to death in groups and kill with many cuts between armor.
Realizing she was in the thick of it, her prayer reflexively shifted to Otukyen's far less magnanimous husband. She saw another aura appear, a presence that demanded to be seen, feared, obeyed--but it protected. Indistinct hominid shapes hinting at flexible steel armor over corded limbs deflecting the mobs strikes were barely perceptible with her mask--without it, she probably would not even notice; did the bran and inferness?
The phantasms all seemed to pause and make the same gesture in the same direction, then became invisible even under Lau's mask. Why had the mob not crushed the mere three of them yet? Lau saw the auras of the mob turn far in the back, some kind of commotion--did the bran's remaining company engage them?
"What the hell's going on over there!?" said--someone from the company. A quick glance and it was the company across the chasm, some even loosing arrows into the mob away from the three of them.
"Oh staav, one of 'em's fucking warping!" crowed the brannoch. "Light! Now!" Lau saw one of the mob float in the air--their suicidal trick for coaxing a demon through a channel opened in their own bodies. The mob nearest the sacrifice seemed to clamor about, trying to get away from the coming explosion of bone and then indiscriminate claws and teeth.
Until this point, Scarlet did little beyond thrashing in the back any who tried to square off on Lau and the bird. Both saw her gesticulate and utter something that felt like an unwanted man breathing down Lau's sympathetic nervous system and made the bran growl.
Lightning arced out from Scarlet, who held one talon to the nearest of the mob to focus much of the plasma while her other she held up, a continuous blue-white light as a volley of arrows landed on the mob. All eyes were on the floating thrall, some of the dozens of tightly-grouped arrows fell into it; yet the three as well as the defenders across the cistern saw it was not 'warping'. Instead, the wailing beast was impaled with violence enough to be lifted off the flagstones, the mob around it sent into flux--to fight or get away. Another volley; whatever held it aloft stumbled, the thrall making a final scream as it fell. Scarlet's spell made a last pulse of light and all saw what attacked the degenerates.
All heard what the shivering priestess heard beneath the city: the running of thick instrument-strings and deep drums to make temples burst.
A visage of desiccated death and wrath, expressionless skin dried into bared teeth and an unmoving scowl, eyes the frozen twin lights of a dooming star. It swung the bran's crossbow in an arc, cutting open or knocking away the quivering biomass assailing it. It held one of the downswept horns of its helm in one hand, one of the mob holding the other, trying to wrestle it away. This freak the undead kicked to the ground, cycled the crossbow, and shot. To the three and the soldiers across the cistern, it seemed to scowl at each of them simultaneously as it put the helm back on while another volley of arrows hailed around it.
"Sargeant! Volley!" the crow shouted, grabbing both women by their collars and pulling them back. At first they thought he was talking to them, but Lau knew a prayer when she heard one. A few arrows streaked away from them into the floor and legs of their pursuers, sending some to the ground and impeding the others. For a moment the scrambling mob framed the tomb-guardian as it walked towards they three, glaring under its helm, grabbing one thrall and running the bayonet through.
Ten Thunders, Lau thought; the heavenly steed Otukyen rode over the sky to give birth. She prayed to him-who-carries-from-danger, hoping the other two began to feel as light as she did, and lent her weight for the three of them to abscond. As they passed through a black arch, the sergeant across the cistern called out to the bran. "Meet up three stadios this way!" the bird replied.
What felt a lifetime later, a kid in a blue kilt and somber breastplate came around a corner, palpably relieved for the chance to holster his sword. Gentlemanly to the two clearly non-Arcadian women, his regard focused on the bran, whom he was most-glad to see. He shoulder-carried the senior and the two women suddenly felt weightless as they lumbered to the serendipitous rally point, where a few more of his kind sat, all eager to support the bran as he limped over.
They were joined by the remaining city defenders from the bran's unit, coming from a perpendicular corridor. Some were dressed in the blues of the locals, others in the reds of the foreign companies raised for the crusading forces. They acknowledged the bran, who returned the nods; yet the men in red began muttering to themselves and beckoning someone forward. The bran and Lau canted their heads while Scarlet recoiled, an oath on her tusked lips. A man came forward, sergeant ranks on his shoulders and tam, stowing a long sword as he came approached her.
"Roonta Sarlatova! Stya zhat cheni!" His was the voice which cast the spellwork during the skirmishing. Mari huffed the only Lidovic word she knew.
"Er, priyet?"
The bran leaned over, speaking out the corner of his beak. "She's under arrest."
THE PRIESTESS LEANED over to the bran as they filed into a stairwell. "Can't you just annul the arrest or something? How can he act in a Lidvicovan capacity here? I thought this was your unit…" The bran stifled a snort for her sake.
"Lidovican. And he is acting in an Arc Royal capacity. Lidovica and Arc Royal are long allies, share old treaties and alliances. Past a certain point, a warrant holds in both polities--and the Russet Kites' warrants go deep enough, especially hers--with her pedigree, no less… He just happened to be the right man in the right place, from a certain point of view." Lau shook her masked face and silently gestured for more context, and the bran gestured to leave it--indicating the bound and gagged beanpole in front of them. The sergeant explained earlier his ample ability to dispel her magic as he kept her in front. Lau chose not to inquire why, and the sergeant was unfazed by the blank regard she gave him.
"Besides, I'm not in charge of this unit, girl." Lau voiced confusion. "I'm not in the Arc Royal Corps or any of the armed recognized churches." He looked around, motioned his head to the men surrounding them. "I'm an errant servant of… divine connoisseurs of mortals vying to become the ultimate practitioners of the ultimate art." Lau contemplated this in silence, knowing the unseen forces acting between everyone in this case were simply the mores of barbarians.
The occasionally-trembling corridors and stairwell opened up to a colonnade that ran along the marble foundation and load-bearing elements of a large building; cracks in the ceiling let in natural light, while cracks in the stone let in a tense feeling of urgency. "A superheavy," said the sergeant. "Clung to the underside of Point Radovic as it came in over the Flint Sea. Dropped off to build speed, used ground effect to arc over the coast, the prairie, the city walls--dove into the city from above, where any stone would be the thinnest. That's what's causing the tremors. We don’t know how much the walls harmed it, they were… ‘focused’ on everything else."
They climbed out an atrium's stairwell to grey crucibles pouring glowing metal--the late afternoon sun and storm clouds. Thicker and darker than any was the shadowed diamond-shaped hulk of Point Radovic, a floating mountain that would hang directly over the city in a few days. Closer still hung smaller objects: the skybarges resembling at a distance the fingerbones of something long-dead and cosmic. A disquieting silence sent a spasm up Lau's back, shoulders, and neck.
Of the city called Thundering Vale was this: storied buildings in varying states of destruction, beautiful white and blue stone turned to fodder; an ochre haze veiling a broken skyline in three directions, the fourth an incline to the black mass of the wall surrounding the highest terrace; over that, the keep aptly named the morningstar. Above everything was the setting sun, wan in the haze and clouds, the eye of a displeased god ready to turn its back on mortal life entirely with the coming of the night.
The monoliths stood as sentries indifferent to the misery of the poor. Eight around every wall of the top three terraces, twenty-four in total. For untold centuries, just enigmatic pre-haergiothan architecture tens of thousands of years old.
Since last week, the tops were massive complications of ironmongery, thin spires and flagpole-like things sticking out in odd angles. When the invasion started, the monoliths wailed, shed their tops to reveal the artifacts underneath that would spin about and unleash white-hot comets and meteor storms on any demon that dared take flight. The ironmongery would wail, roar, and rain death indiscriminate of who was near the offending fiend.
Everyone sat down or stood in a rough circle. More men in the two colors, mercenaries in drab clothes and armor but ample jewelry, plus a crew of holy knights, clerics, and warriors of Saint Irinia. All haergothians, though a few had mixed features. As everyone collected themselves, the sounds of distant battle grew clearer; formations, vocal peals, and the explosions of powder and magic.
Stealing a maskless tired glance at a statue of a muse-actress laying among scree, Lau realized they rallied in the foyer of an opera house she visited not two weeks ago.
The ordained greeted the bran like doting grandchildren. Lau smirked under her somen at the respect afforded the senior, even if it was across racial boundaries. She easily imagined pale-skinned barbarians fussing over a sacred avian beast or effigy--not much different in this case, warriors attending that rarest of things: an old soldier. He waved off their glowing hands and pointed at the priestess. "Take care of the grey kid first," he advised them. An awkward moment followed as the gaggle of huge dudes (and a normal-built woman) in bright armor moved as one to look her over; the woman swatted the men away and picked up Lau's foreleg.
"How'd this happen?" she looked up from her inspection.
"Forty-foot fall through a narrow chasm deep underground, was able to, well, break my fall along the way. Me and a few other Tetsubos were following the Abyssal pioneers while trying to get back to… our brothers in the keep. Early morning of the sixth day."
"You've been this badly injured, putting weight on it, for a day and a half?" She turned her masked head, and the cleric relented on the avuncular bit. "Well, you defeated a tough challenge, but it's cost you the cartilage in your knee and hip."
Apprehensive uncertainty washed over Lau's head like cold sap. Heat from the onset of indistinct panic at an ill-defined unpleasant future radiated off the inside of her somen. Within a minute, sweat would bead on her bare head. "Your armor's sparse for a follower of the Saint." The white-skinned cleric wore a breastplate bearing he imagery of Saint Irinia.
"I focus on supporting my boys and healing them. Occasionally invoking deific wrath. Too busy learning scripture, church history, and studying magic to learn the finer points of fighting. You?"
"Glorious ancestors demand expression. Knuckle-dragging kin need protection." The cleric showed that was one thing they had in common. "Speak of the devils…" (And suddenly they had nothing in common.) Two squat individuals in grey armor and blue cloth of the same make as Mari's, but covering their entire bodies, walked into the group. They gripped wrists with a few of the other survivors and the polite kid in blue who found them pointed a thumb back to her. They looked over and curtly nodded to the guard, walking over with as much speed as unspoken social decorum allowed. They each put their right hands to their hearts and bowed heads protected with layered helmets and masks.
The three hobgoblins spoke in their guttural tongue; the two warriors had enough sense not to pester the cleric of Saint Irinia with inane questions about the health of their brat-superior, as she surmised the grey girl to be.
"Tenzig and Davaa?"
"Fell while we were trying to make contact with the Primus' men." Neither of the three expressed loss. "Their remains are with them." By now the two removed their masks, revealing grey-skinned faces more like panthers than haergiothan men under segmented helmets and cheek-guards.
"Did they know why he recalled the entire cohort to the Morningstar?" Lau kept hers on, bound as she was--and they not--by religious order.
"To guard something, or someplace. Or contest it. We weren’t in the main chamber of the keep, but something happened and the Primus and the seconds are convinced there is something important underground." Lau panned her head, processing everything, forming a bigger picture. "My Lady, the Primus intends to scuttle the Morningstar, demolish it as a cover for a reserve to secure the passages beneath. You know him."
"Tetsubos never risk their brothers like that unless for something heavy. My misadventure the past two days supports what the Primus thinks." The two knights of the Infernal Order of the Tetsubo gazed at the blade she offered them. One picked it up and examined it in his hands. "Whoever this enemy is, he sends his better men underground with detailed maps, searching for something. Better stock than the disfigured mobs we cut through on the surface."
"A cut above!" said the one with the knife. He and his partner mugged at one another jovially while Lau in her mask made a theatrical flourish as the Bran approached, flexing the arm over his healed flank.
"Shouldn't you be in a tree? Or did the buzzard fly down to pick the dead?" the other looked at the Bran but said to the joker. Lau stayed silent after seeing the dotage the natives, however savage, afforded the bird-man.
"Y'know the ravens around here like to snatch unattended toddlers," he said--in their language--catching them off guard. "You look about the right size. C'mere, shorty!" As shorty laughed his feigned panic at being roughhoused by a sky spirit, Lau noticed the Bran cut off the horseplay at exactly the appropriate time--to look overhead and swear.
A shadow flew overhead; some of the group involuntarily jumped and swore oaths, while others waited until they saw the bat-winged fiend before swearing theirs. As Joker and Shorty dogpiled Lau, an alien noise assailed every ear.
The peal of a bell, but unceasing; continuous until its pressure induced vague unease and terror in the back of the mind. The sound came from the monoliths, their canted spires shifting and rotating as the peal was interrupted by an artificial-sounding voice blithely saying something in an unknown tongue.
"Ward!" the sergeant screamed, his own hand upright while the cleric got hers aloft. Lau followed suit and focused a prayer, contemplating a passage that described shelter from fist-sized hail but imagined the hail as clotted blood riddled with jagged bone.
An eerie roar filled the air simultaneously as the stonework around them erupted with indistinct impacts, and the fiend bellowed in anguish as it impacted the ground some distance away, followed by the rumbling of a collapsed building.
"Recover! Casualty report!" the sergeant demanded, already hefting a dead blue-clad guard missing a large part of his torso by the time Lau’s pair helped her back up so she could ascertain just what the hells happened. Some names that meant nothing to her were called off by survivors.
In mere seconds the area around them looked completely different: a hail of something--projectiles--showered them at such volume, mass, and speed that many penetrated the wards. Far above, one of the spires on a monolith turned away from them among its ironmongery, part of it glimmering in the afternoon sun.
And it was one of the smallest of those death-rods.
The impacts dug into stone, through flesh in many cases, and Mari saw burn marks around marble and cauterized mortal wounds. The collapsed masonry around them was practically eroded several decades into the future from all the damage. The bran caught the bewildered tilt of her mask as her two men tried brushing off blue woolly aphids.
"It's been like that since the start. Any demon takes flight, the alloy nests on the towers kill it and anything near it. Spit out glowing red ribbons of fire and death like infernal dragons." She remembered with a shudder when the attack began, when the monoliths shook apart to reveal their metal innards--Tenzig, Davaa, and herself almost crushed by cart-sized debris.
"I was in the lee of the topmost district heading for the keep when it started. I heard them roaring and caught a glimpse of their fire."
"They didn't stop for hours, didn't run out of demons until daybreak. Didn't even need lamps or magic to see while fighting on a cloudy night." The second statement lingered in her mind, and she saw it seemed to linger in everyone else's mind also: the sheer number of demons was so great as to exceed the ability to form an emotion about it.
THOSE SPECIALLY TRAINED--Mari and her Tetsubos, the holy knights, the bran, and surprisingly the sergeant--identified the demon as a kaulivakos. "The Abyss' officers typically don't flee battle unless most of their force is dead, with the remainder a leave-behind force to cover it's retreat or go to ground and sew chaos. With a kaulivakos, we can expect an after party of about twenty-eight. It was fleeing in the direction of the enemy lines further along the terrace," the sergeant pointed away from the setting sun, in the same direction as a masoned stone face hundreds of feet high speckled with platforms, outbuildings, and stairs: the terrace to the central, highest, and most-secure level of Thundering Vale.
"Who holds the kaczern?" The top distance was bare of any construction--the actual wall surrounding the top terrace.
"The enemy still, and your brothers hold the keep. We still control the lower skydock, but the barges have nowhere to safely go until we take the upper." He looked north, towards the dying glory of the sun and the black diamond-hulk hanging in the sky off the coast.
"Three days until Point Radovic hangs over the city and the crone-gate opens to Lidovica," as the grey girl followed his hand.
"A dark omen of our fates for us to win or lose until then," said the sergeant, looking around, a look of shock marbled with frustration. “Where the Hell is she!?”
A minute of righteous pacing and unrighteous swearing passed.
"I had her in my grasp!" the sergeant fumed; he gesticulated holding something by imaginary horns and the men in red muttered something in their language. He answered by way of repeating the same name as in the underworks: "Roonta Sarlatova!" and their muttering intensified. The three hobgoblins and the bran rejoined the loose unit.
"What is that stuttering sputterer on about?" she asked the old crow and his ordained doters in Arcadian.
"That pointy woman with the milkmaid hair you found in the catacombs is Runt Scarlet," he said, drawing the attention of the paladins. "Infamous in Lidovica," he pointed his head at the men in red, "so all the boys in the foreign companies know of her. Fallen noble, part devil, full bandit, a walking siege engine capable of ample destruction. Assumed to be the leader of the Russet Kites…" the old craibhach faced Lau. "Did you feel a sensation of fear when she cast that lightning?" Lau hoped her posture did not betray the affirmation under her mask amounting to an admission of fear.
"It was certainly frightful to behold."
"Your kind would feel it deep, in your lizard brains." He took a pull from a flask. "Me, it just pissed me off."
THE SERGEANT ORGANIZED the withdrawal of the wounded--including Lau and the brannoch--who would go first with a few guards while the able-bodied followed to protect their rear. As they departed, the kaulivakos' minions began their push, starting with crossbows--Mari looked back and saw a man in Arcadian blues reeling with a quarrel in his neck. Her two knights shoved her away as they hefted their namesake weapons, screaming 'go!' as they turned to face the peal.
"Head on a swivel, shorty, I won't be around to snatch you up out of danger!" the bird shouted in Ghobli. Shorty burst a laugh as he charged away from them, Joker teasing him for being the pet bird's pet monkey. Mari saw a field of magic appear around the bran and then around Shorty, the former holding a hand up in a benedictive gesture while the cleric hurried him along.
Lau wanted to fly to the safety of the crusaders' cordon as swiftly as possible, get answers for her leg; if she had to use a staff to get back in the fight, fine; if it was her lot to saunter around a fortification and bless her kin in defense--as the ancestors deigned. A compulsive prayer hesitated—the fight went silent. She glanced back.
Crusader and abyssal alike paused for one lucid moment. A bark of syllables that gave everyone images of frost and blood. The distance of the collapsed opera house plaza disappeared between her and the glowing blue eyes, the dark plates and the earthen fur cloak. It stood on a high mound, victorious over mortals’ follies as the spires behind it wailed again.
Like the carved reliefs of heroes of old, the undead hulk reigned over all, a pioneer's head held up by the mask-straps while the monoliths wailed. It spoke, and the staccato blended in to the roar of glowing ribbons sprayed into the destroyed city and the skies above. The creature snarled under its helmet, dropping the head while the biggest spire on the monolith far behind it wheeled to point at a dark cloud, a low metallic horn followed by a white-hot meteor that lit up the neighborhood beneath it. She fixated on the cloud—a huge murmuration of flying demons approaching the city.
Then screaming. The wounded resumed their flight out of that place, the carnage out of sight behind the bottom yards of stone walls. Mari saw something land in front of them from a high arc, and passed a severed malformed head knocked free of its mask from the impact. She reflexively prayed again to Otukyen, hoping Ten Thunders would carry them to safety.
Part of receiving divine powers is being compulsive about it, making prayers an instinctive reaction to virtually anything and daily offerings a habit harder to shake than the worst vice. Another part is borderline self-gaslighting, that whatever happens is deific will--and hoping that some of the compulsive habits are answered in kind. Rain picked up as the fighting faded into the background, like Ten Thunders' borealis-mane trailing behind him to hide and protect Otukyen, the pain and exhaustion keeping the wounded too numb to waver under the exertion--as if blessed with divine swiftness. These gifts Lau thanked her ancestor-gods for as they entered the night and the rain it brought.