Only Anna was slower, but she was engrossed in the work.
Tallah hadn’t fought on the wall during the night, opting—and being almost forced—to spare her strength and gather as big a store as she could take. It hadn’t really been much of a fight at all, the daemon force subdued and lacking its previous bite. If anything, they’d been closer to what she remembered of the Rock, the monster army just a disorganised mess that couldn’t muster any coordination to stage a proper assault.
They’d thrown themselves blindly at the walls and had been cut down by arrows and boiling pitch. Some still screamed down there, stuck to the ground by the cooling tar until either the sun did them in, or the soldiers marching out come morning.
The soldiers themselves were quietly watching the monsters running away from the encroaching morning. A few loosed arrows at near targets. All she could read on all their faces was quiet gratitude for an easy night after the excitement of the previous days. Many had already laid down their weapons and laid down to sleep behind the protection offered by crenellations.
Vergil was somewhere on the wall with his new squad friends. Last she’d seen of the boy he was halfway drunk and heading down to Sil’s ward for a purger. He hadn’t come back to the room over the day and, instead, drank with adventurers until he fell asleep at the table. They’d found him and the elendine sprawled across the hard wood, asleep with a tankard of ale between them.
Tallah smiled at the fresh tonal whiplash. Vergil was at once a budding warrior, and a complete child, and a mystery she was growing more and more tempted to solve.
Maybe later.
Standing atop the wall, watching the thaw sun cresting over the Dragon’s Bone and the far cliffs lighting up, the immensity of what she was about to do hit her. It would still be a bell before the light hit the Cauldron properly, so she waited, convinced by Vilfor and the others not to take any unnecessary risk before the time was ripe.
She drew inward and entered Christina’s office.
“Getting jittery, my dear?” Bianca asked from where she sat by the door.
Christina had summoned a high-backed chair for her. She always got restless and irritated if she lounged for long in an armchair.
Tallah stared the woman in the eye. Bianca smiled. Whatever unpleasantness had passed between them was now water under the bridge. Apologies had been made on both sides and a solution discussed and already implemented in parts. Anna had been kind enough to teach them both some of her own mental wards.
Christina summoned tea but Tallah ignored it. “Waiting is the worst part of this whole endeavour,” she complained as she dropped into a chair. “I could just go now.”
“Yes,” Christina answered distractedly from behind her desk. She was writing something in a great, leather-bound book. “But your lover was right to demand your patience.”
“Caragill is not my lover,” Tallah said, a touch too sharply and too fast.
“And you are not a blushing virgin to react like a sodden cat,” Christina tutted. Bianca snorted and hid it behind her cup of tea. “We are as ready as can be. I have no wish to get ourselves killed in this endeavour, so let’s try and not. Any advantage we can use, we should grasp with both hands.”
“How’s Anna?” Tallah asked, aware of her growing blush.
Christina sniffed, then smiled, never taking her eyes off her blasted tome. “She is handling the work splendidly and I feel her stores are just as strong as ours. If you don’t do anything too reckless to demand her healing prowess, she should be good enough to handle the load up until you reach the Anvil.”
That was a good half-day away, even at flight. To think that the two fighting forces of the Cauldron could have been driven back so aggressively that they each retreated to their own fort and got locked down…
“I need your attention, Christi,” Tallah said.
“And you have it, my dear,” Christina said without looking up from her scribbling. “I’m listening with my entire heart.”
“Not here. Out there, when we’ll cross. I need you watching.”
“Anything for, in particular?”
“The other channellers.” Tallah scratched absently at her scar before she caught herself doing it. “They saved that white-faced creature. There’s at least another pyromancer down there. I don’t know how they’re dealing with the daemons, and I don’t know what their capabilities are. I want eyes in the back of my head on this crossing.”
“I will be watching, naturally.”
“Don’t only watch. Engage if you see anything. Do not wait for my attention to split.”
Christina finally raised her eyes and looked at her. “You are worried. We haven’t really operated in such fashion before.”
Tallah rolled her shoulders and began working on her fingers, cracking each in turn, both in the mindscape and in the flesh. “I want those bastards dead.”
“We should want to know what they know and how they did things,” Christina countered.
“And how do you propose we capture one for interrogation, Christi? When surrounded by enemies?” She shook her head and straightened her back. “If you see anything, strike it down. I won’t waste time trying to divine the plan. We will force our way through it. Remember that we weren’t supposed to be here at all, so our presence is already a destabilising factor for them.”
“As far as you know,” Bianca said, speaking up for the first time. “It might just be that the healer’s goddess is behind all this chaos.”
“I find it unlikely,” Christina said.
“Bianca’s right, by considering the absurd. We have no workable information. Whatever went on before our arrival has left very little for us to discover or interpret. And Vergil blew up the only other way in or out of the city.” Tallah grinned and allowed her confidence to rise up, needling Christina’s arrogance. “Do you know the old saying? That no plan survives contact with the enemy?”
“Naturally. It’s especially true when the enemy is an overwhelming force.”
“Today, we will be that force,” Tallah said, grinning. “We don’t know any who, how, why, or where. Just a when, and that is uncertain at best. We cannot plan against lack of information, so we will crush them beneath our heel.”
“You two are beginning to sound alike,” Bianca groaned. “And that thinking will see us dead.”
“Not with you tempering us,” Christina said. She matched Tallah’s grin. “As far as terrible plans go, this one’s not one of our worst.”
“What plan?” Bianca sulked in her uncomfortable-looking chair. “Hit the bad guy with a lightning bolt is not a plan, ladies.”
“The one for the crossing. We keep to what we discussed,” Tallah said, dismissing the jab. “No unnecessary risk now, unless we find any of the missing channellers. Those will take priority. We avoid the white-faced daemon and the dragon if either shows up.”
Caragill had drafted several routes for her to consider depending on what she found out in the wild. There were several alternative routes to move through if the larger, open areas were too dangerous. Bianca had memorised them all.
“And we will save most of our strength to reach the Anvil,” Bianca said. She gave Tallah a level glare that spoke at large of her misgivings. “I will not engage unless absolutely necessary. Remember what we agreed to in Grefe.”
Tallah did remember. She’d asked for their help and wisdom in navigating her way forward. That, and the recent mishap with Bianca, was the reason why she was sitting down and scheming with them.
No more mindless mistakes and flights of fancy. They needed to coordinate better and work together better. And she needed to listen to them if her plans were absurd or she strayed too far from her goals.
This was not where they needed to be. She was far from anywhere useful to her mission. But, if she did manage to restore a semblance of status quo to the Cauldron, it would be a place at her back that was willing to shelter and aid her within the empire. If things did not go well farther up in the north, she could always recover here, especially if she left behind a shard.
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She’d been fighting for too long with no contingency or escape route.
It was time that changed.
“They’re pulling away,” a voice said by Tallah’s shoulder.
She snapped out of her inner council. Caragill stood by her, dressed in light armour, looking ready to head out into the Cauldron. He had his helmet off and the wind tussled his hair.
“Vilfor is giving me a force,” he rasped. “We will range parallel to your flight path and harass some of the daywalkers. With some luck, we should draw plenty away from you.”
“A bit late for plan changes,” she noted. “How did Vilfor agree to it?”
She forced herself to look at Caragill properly and meet his eyes. Despite the scars she’d left him with and the summers piling on his shoulders, he remained a handsome man. It twisted the knot of guilt in her stomach.
“Was a light assault tonight. Plenty of rested soldiers that didn’t get to do any fighting. And we’ve been recruiting some of the louts from the bars and taverns.” He smiled. “They’re itchier than you to get to the fight.”
‘You can apologise for kicking him out like that, you know,’ Bianca whispered in her ear. Tallah swatted her away.
Caragill knew why she’d done what she’d done. He was the only other person aside from Sil and Vergil that knew of the empress’s treachery and about Rhine. She’d told him when she’d burned him, thinking he was part of the same conspiracy, thinking he’d betrayed her trust. Tallah had been barely able to think back then, the soul trap burning inside her, ripping shreds out of her sanity.
It didn’t excuse her actions.
If he was angry with her, he hid it spectacularly well. Maybe she should restrain him and have Sil perform a mind touch, just to make sure.
‘Tallah!’ both ghosts admonished her private thoughts.
“So, are you ready?” Caragill asked, oblivious to the turmoil his presence stirred.
Tallah sighed and allowed herself to be lifted half a meter in the air. She donned the Ikosmenia and stared out across the expanse of the Cauldron, seeing the storms of illum that only daemons could churn up. There were a lot of them still, but spread out and diffuse across the great forested expanse.
“As ready as I’ll ever be,” she said, turning in place to face the way she was meant to go. “How long until you’re out there?”
He pulled on his helmet and mask, both painted a mottled grey to better fit in among the last surviving snow of winter. “Give us half a bell and we should be engaging the stragglers.” He pointed out to the woods that encircled the perimeter of the Cauldron. “We’ll make a nuisance of ourselves there while you plunge into the gulch. You should be protected by the first light. It hits at the right angle to not provide much cover for daemons. After that, you’ll need to handle things on your own.”
“You’re only going as far as the woods?” she asked.
“Any farther and we risk being hit too hard by the big daywalkers. Kitties we can handle, but bigger gets touchy. All I got from Vilfor is permission to ease your first passage.” He turned and strode away from the battlement, waving over his shoulder. “Good luck, Cinder. Maybe we’ll see each other again.”
If not in this life, maybe in whatever’s next. It was an old, customary saying from her days as Justice. When they raided some outpost, if it were particularly dangerous, they always expected losses.
‘Awww. Bianca, she’s smiling,’ Christina needled her.
‘I see it. It’s precious. We should immortalise it somehow, or she should try smiling more often.’
“I smile plenty, thank you so very much,” she groaned. Her breath misted white in the morning’s chill.
‘What you do, dear, is grin like a mad woman. It makes people uncomfortable. Just ask the boy.’ Bianca pushed forward a distorted image of Tallah meeting Vergil in the innards of the fortress. ‘I think you scared him worse than Anna’s creature.’
She almost invited the ghost to get buggered, but remembered Bianca’s particular sensitivities. She swallowed the well-wishing and turned to look down to where the great iron portcullis opened up. Men spread out in formation below, little motes that swam in the illum currents, heading out towards the spent pyres and past them.
A small army followed, but this headed out to repair and reset the traps and the fortifications now the monsters were gone.
Bianca drifted her gently over the wall’s edge. Tallah was keenly aware that she shone with power and any Egia-sighted creature would see her as bright as a falling star. Having met Erisa and the Mother, she was keenly aware that the sight could be reproduced by others aside from the true-born Egias, and the idea sent ice-cold chills down her back.
But daemons had never shown any kind of affinity for illum sight. For them, one channeller was the same as one fighter on the ground. It’s why the cadres assigned to the Rock were as successful as they’d been in the past. They could be easily dispersed among the regular soldiers and perform a variety of manoeuvres to corral and cut down the hordes before they became too difficult to handle.
But that white-faced creature wasn’t the same as the rest, which meant there could be more with more exotic abilities. Tallah steeled herself for caution and slow, deliberate progress. It was more important to reach the other fortress than to cause havoc on the way.
The men were almost at the edges of the forest now, advancing through the mud sludge with grim determination. There had been a bit of a snowfall earlier in the night, probably the last for this winter, so there was still plenty of white to camouflage their advance.
They were too far now to listen on, so Tallah allowed herself to drop off the wall.
‘Here we go,’ Bianca said. And then she cut her anchors.
The wall and Tallah’s stomach fell away as she plummeted towards the ground from a hundred meters up-high. She restrained the urge to whoop in pleasure, or cry out in terror, as the ground rushed up to meet her.
Bianca anchored her sideways, tightened her grip, and Tallah’s fall turned into a swing that launched her parallel to the ground like a stone across the battlefield where soldiers were carrying corpses to the pyres.
Past the forest, several hundred meters away, was the gulch. It was a crack that almost encircled the plateau of the Cauldron, one that stretched down deep enough that a fall would be fatal there. It was lit up by the morning light, jagged and broken inside like a mouth full of fangs. They flew for it at breakneck speed, aiming to dip inside while Caragill and his force would keep any observers from the forest busy.
A yank downward sent her again into a dive, her body remaining in an upright position.
Bianca’s mind flowed across Tallah’s, the sea of information a nauseating, impossible to comprehend challenge. Equations that spread out in chains across her mind’s eye, endless in the way they shifted and adjusted. She’d tried once to understand all that the ghost did and thought, holding on to Bianca’s mind with a vice’s grip.
All she managed was give herself a headache that hadn’t abated for days.
Now she forced her focus to rise over this sea of mathematics and take in the world.
Illum flowed freely here, in the depth. In Grefe it had bounced off most things, the whole place built in a way that trapped power inside the city.
Here, it permeated the very bedrock of the world, barely distorting when passing through solid stone. The Cauldron was a place that was bathed in two realities. The one from Edana, and the one across the daemon’s portal. A certain sponginess afflicted the world here, contained by the mountain ranges that surrounded it.
She’d need to pick the dwarf’s mind about this place someday. Maybe that one remembered things the empire had never learned.
‘Please focus, Tallah,’ Christina admonished her as Bianca yanked them sideways to pass through a narrow gap in the underground fissure. ‘You can wanderlust as much as you like when we’re back safe.’
She came back to herself and her eyes scanned the surroundings for changes in the illum flow. There were none. As turbulent as the power was, red and purple with anger and death, it was nowhere near as chaotic as it had been in Grefe or the maze. She was alone in the fissure, tens of meters beneath the surface, and followed its many twists and turns, valleys and hills. They kept out and away from the radiating fissures that penetrated beneath the roots of the forest above.
Bianca slowed them up to a more usable pace, swinging on the tides more easily as she fitted Tallah’s body between cracks and leaning rocks. Silence stretched, taught like a musician’s string. No sound dripped in from above. None from below. The swish of Tallah’s own cloth and the rush of blood in her ear were the only sounds accompanying the flight.
Gently, the fissure began to narrow. Their flight eased as the ghost navigated the needle ears. They would need to head back to the surface soon and face whatever it was that awaited them.
For now, it had all gone wonderfully to plan. The light oozing down was warm on Tallah’s back. There was the smell of old blood on the air, but the fissure had swallowed up millions of daemons over time. Some corpses still clung to the rocks, where they’d fallen and broken or were impaled. They made for a gruesome sight as they began climbing.
It should have reeked, but the scent that met them was mostly earthy with a slight tinge of mildew and blood.
‘I will pick up the pace once above,’ Bianca said. ‘I do not trust how good our luck’s been so far. It’s not natural.’
Tallah agreed with the sentiment. An easy path wasn’t something she dared hope for. It never went that easily for them.
As if drawn by an invisible string, a shadow darkened the gulch. Bianca spun her around to face the open sky.
There, passing in a lazy arc, like a vulture circling and waiting for its next meal, was the dragon. It descended from the mountain’s slopes, wings outspread, flying low to the ground, enough so that its great bulk shaded the fissure. Its head swung around, as if the beast hunted for something. Illum roiled around it, clinging in tatters to its scales, horns, wings and tail.
It resembled, to Tallah’s eyes, a comet on the night’s dark sky.
Heartbeats later it was past, its silhouette disappearing over the edge above.
‘It’s going in the same direction as us,’ Christina said. ‘You just had to open your mouth, Bianca.’
‘Do we change vector?’ Bianca asked. She proposed a different route that took them on a perpendicular to their current path, deeper towards the centre of the Cauldron, but away from the dragon. That was a lot of open ground to cover and they wouldn’t be able to maintain altitude or direction control quite as well.
“No. We head into the forest. I don’t think it’s here for us.” Tallah felt the embers of fear lighting inside her gut and she squashed down on it. She didn’t want to think of the white-faced daemon just then. “We’ll continue into the woods. Easier to navigate and stay hidden until we reach the Bloody Hand.”
As if to answer her plans, a roar filled the world and descended into the fissure to shatter into deafening echoes. They were now metres from the surface.
The dragon roared again, and Tallah recognized the fury in that mighty sound. And the hunger.
One thing she could now know for certain: the beast wasn’t idly ranging. It was hunting. And it was angry.
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