Warsinger: Ch 2

Phew: sorry I've been quiet, guys. I'd planned to post some chapters last week, but my wife ended up in hospital for five days after a sudden collapse on the 23rd.

Anyway, here's chapter two!

The woman we were here to rescue, Suri, had spent four days in this sandy shithole. After fighting bravely in the final battle against the vampire lord plaguing our adopted home nation of Vlachia, she’d plummeted to her death in raging floodwaters. And it was my fault.

Suri and I were both glitched characters, but we had different problems with death. In my case, it was memory loss that ate pieces of my mind away each time I died. In her case, she was unable to assign herself a spawn point, and so she always respawned in the place she was ‘born’ – Al-Asad prison, in her native land of Dakhdir. She’d described Al-Asad as being mostly underground. Maybe the prison part was, but the horking huge fortress on top of it was definitely not. It was stuck on top of the only hill for miles around in this vast, dune-swept desert plain, looming over the desert like an extremely intimidating wedding cake. Two concentric walls of white stone surrounded a steep, paved slope, and the actual castle was mounted on top of that. There was a steep zig-zag road leading up. The entry was a small gate at the base of the outer curtain wall, barely big enough to fit two hookwings shoulder to shoulder.

“Yikes.” I remarked to Lavahn. The shadow hung obediently by my left, keeping pace with Karalti’s air-speed. “I don’t know how we’re getting in there.”

“No one goes in. No one goes out. Except the Sultir’s soldiers,” the shadow replied. Its soft, hissing voice was somehow audible over the wind. “It is a place of death.”

“I’d say that we’re in imminent danger of skeletons, then.” I narrowed my eyes to peer at it. "Yeah. That looks like a BONE-CON 5 to me."

The ghostly bandit said nothing, but it radiated cold, silent loathing.

It was easy to imagine this citadel looming over the acres and acres of lush farmland that had existed here not too long ago. From the air, I could see the faint outline of the river that had once wound across this place, the straight irrigation channels that led from it, and the impression of squared lots under the sand. It hadn't been abandoned for long - maybe twenty, thirty years. Long enough for the desert to crawl over everything and bury it. " I'm really glad we don't have to assault this place from the ground."

I bent down over Karalti's shoulder, flaring my eyes to focus in on the castle. As I did, a flight overlay appeared, superimposing my view of the terrain. As it did, I got an alert.

New Quest: The Lion of the Desert

You have arrived at Bakhat Khasir, the fortress which guards the subterranean prison of Al-Asad. To learn more about the fortress, focus on it and label the different castle features. The more thorough you are, the better knowledge you will gain.

Reward: Skill EXP, Knowledge (Grade varies)

Ooh, a castle minigame. I was good at those. The A.R interface was exactly like the J-MAP helmet HUD I'd relied on for five years as a soldier in the jungles of Indonesia. And not only that, but I'd been reading up on castles on my way here - not because I'd been expecting a castle, but because of the one I had to fix up back home. ‘Home’ was the province of Myszno, in the country of Vlachia, which shared a very rugged, mountainous border with Dakhdir along the north-south line. It was the land that Suri and I, along with our friends and allies, had given our lives for.

I got to labelling Bakhat Khasir, eyes darting from place to place. Some of the elements of castles were familiar from previous roleplaying games and late-night informative video binges. Most of them were from my on the fly experience of defending the province of Myzsno from a horde of undead. Some of it was from... reading. If you'd asked me six months ago if I, Hector Dragozin-Park, would ever pick up an actual book on castles and read it from cover to cover, I would have laughed my dyslexic ass off. But each time I battled my brain weasels and successfully read a word, a sentence, a page, my ability to understand the contents improved. Characters didn’t just level up physically in this game. Slowly but surely... I was getting smarter.

"Okay. Curtain wall, gatehouse, crenulations, machicolations - that's how you pronounce that, right?" I asked Karalti. "Also, don't you think Khasir sounds like a kind of cheese?"

"Yes, that's how I heard Istvan say it. And... what about cheese? That was kind of random."

"Sorry, I'm basically a human squirrel. Let's see: oh, man. You see that big sloped wall-ramp-looking thing?" I pointed at the steeply bricked wall down one side of the keep. "I know what that is now! That's called a talus!"

"Talus sounds like a boy dragon name."

"Yeah yeah yeah! And there's a moat underneath that. That's an open cistern, I think."

"Do they drink from there, or poop in there?"

"I dunno. Probably both." I checked off other points mentally: battlements, arrow-slits - this place had a lot of those - bastions, where the cannons were mounted. As we got closer, it became apparent that the place was actually pretty run down, too. There was grass or moss growing in the seams between bricks on the talus.

"Ugh. Humans are so gross." Karalti rumbled underneath me, a sound I felt through my legs instead of hearing with my ears. "So how do we break in? It looks pretty secure to me.”

That was a very good question. "I know it will involve what will probably be the worst swim of our lives, but I'm going to guess... the cistern?"

As I said that, there was deep, rumbling THUMP from deep underground. And then nearly of a quarter of this huge, almost unassailable structure sheared off like a collapsing sand castle, a cloud of dust blooming into the air as one side of the keep bounced down the disintegrating talus and collided with the water below.

"Umm." I blinked rapidly as the carnage unfolded. "Are you... seeing this?"

"Uh-huh." The dragon pulled up to hover, watching in mute disbelief as the entire north-western flank just simply caved in, sucked down into a sinkhole that expanded until it reached the edge of the cistern. Water exploded into the newly formed cavern, and for a stunned moment, I thought that I had somehow caused this. But then, there was another THUMP followed by an ear-drum rattling, tooth-shaking monstrous screech from the bowels of the earth. Cutthroat, hanging from her harness underneath Karalti's chest, began to kick and squeal and lash her head.

"What the...?" All the hair on the back of my neck stood on end. "Holy shit, Karalti. Whatever that thing is, Cutthroat is scared of it. And she ain't scared of shit."

"I know." Karalti's telepathic voice was unusually serious. "Hang on: I'm going to land. We have to find Suri."

The castle was seemingly deserted. No one ran out to survey the damage. When we landed on the shaking, bucking parade ground, there were no stationed troops rushing out to stop us. Karalti waited for me to unequip Cutthroat's harness, wings trembling in anticipation of taking off again if the ground started to collapse. I let the dinosaur drop to the ground, where she cowered, her feathers flat to her body.

"Fuck. This isn't good." I ground my teeth, looking for an access point. There was an arcade running along the sides of the parade ground, featureless doorway after featureless, abandoned doorway. 

Karalti shifted back down into her human form: nude, for a moment, before she equipped her combat gear. She wore black, close-fitting leather plate armor, and two arm-length cold iron gauntlets that weighed close to twenty pounds a piece. They moved with supernatural smoothness, though, jointed over her hands and elbows. While I went to Cutthroat, I saw her bind her long hair back with a plaited cord.

"Come on, girl." I crouched down next to the anxious dinosaur. "Show us where Suri is."

At the sound of Suri's name, Cutthroat's head lifted. She was drooling with anxiety, but after staring at me blankly for a couple seconds, she lumbered to her feet and shook herself out. Then, she pawed at her muzzle with the points of her wrists and looked at me pointedly. 

"Sure. Just try not to eat anyone we like, okay?" I unequipped it, and once it was off, she straightened up. After taking a moment to preen under her hook-arm, she put her nose down, sniffing deeply. Then, she growled, wheeled around, and stalked purposefully toward the east.

We followed her through a half-hidden gate, pausing only as another explosive concussion went off under us and the ground rolled beneath our feet. Bricks and sand tumbled down, and as we ran through it all, it became apparent that this upper fortress was actually little more than a gutted shell. There were signs of a garrison having been here recently: torches lit, food on the tables, doors hanging open. But we didn't hear anything or anyone until we got close to the other end of the castle.

The building I'd mistaken for a secondary Keep was actually a massive gatehouse, which housed a double portcullis blocking the entrance to a steeply sloping, mineshaft-like tunnel plunging down into the ground - the entry to Al-Asad. That tunnel was currently plugged up by a knot of shouting, violently terrified men. Guards and prisoners beat on the steel gateway with fists, truncheons, rocks, shivs, anything and everything that came to hand. They were crawling over each other like drowning rats in a bucket, heedless of the building crush behind them.

"AMNI BAHAR DU!" A guard shrieked in Dakhari through the gate as we drew up in front of it. "Mai minata karadi!"

He nearly sobbed the last phrase as cries of 'Amni bahar du!' rang out from fifty mouths.

"Fuck. Tidbit, grab Cutthroat and get to the side." I searched the gateway, looking for some way to open it. The crush built to a fever pitch as I ranged back and forth.

"Upara!" The guard's teeth and eyes flashed as he jabbed up toward the ceiling.

I looked up. There were arrow slits above the gate - which meant a space behind it. "Okay, hang on!"

The overwhelming majority of portcullises weren't meant to be opened from the outside, but this one was. The entry was to keep people in, not out, and so I was able to run up a narrow flight of stairs and find a hatch to get down to the winch room. I opened the outer gate first, as the roar of the crowd reverberated with increasing volume, and then the inner. The pressure against it made it hard to turn, and I wasn't even halfway when screams erupted, and the stampede ensued. I left it there and ran back outside to see people pouring out and sprinting away. Karalti and Cutthroat had shrunk back toward the stairwell, where the hookwing snapped and snarled at anyone who passed by too close.

"Hold her!" I ducked around Cutthroat, looking for anyone who might share a language with me. It was wall-to-wall Dakhari, many of them with the red hair, dark skin, and golden eyes of Fireblooded people. I snarled with frustration, and grabbed a tall, skinny guardsman as he ran by me. "Hey! Do you speak Common? Vlachian? Can you understand me?"

He snarled something in his own language, and tried to shove me off. I kept a hold of him, wracking my brains for how to communicate, when I remembered. My eyes narrowed. "Lavahn. Come here and ask this guy what the hell is going on down there."

One of the shadows pulled away from the wall, and he froze, bug-eyed and uncomprehending. Then it spoke to him in Dakhari. The guard turned an interesting green-brown color, sagging in my grip. Lavahn repeated what he said, and the man gibbered something back as the shade listened.

"He sayssss..." the undead whispered, "That there is an Architect down there. That the Warden denoted magical explosives, traps to seal the Gentleman's Ward from the Dregs. He says the explosives summoned something terrible."

"The Warden?" I glanced back at Karalti, who was watching us intently from beside Cutthroat. "What did they summon?

"The Queen of the Sands," Lavahn hissed. "An elder sandworm."

I scowled. "I'm looking for a woman. Her name is Suri. Have you seen her?"

The guardsman didn't understand what I said, but he recognized Suri's name. Before Lavahn could even translate, the guy began babbling again. The shadow hovered patiently, and when he was done, asked my question. "He says this is her fault. The woman named Suri led the rebellion from her place in the Dregs. She seeks revenge on the Wardens and the guards. It is she the Wardens fear... her and those who came to rescue her."

Those who came to rescue her? "Where are the Dregs?"

"In the east," Lavahn translated. 

"Fuck. That whole area is flooding right now." I shoved the guard away from me, and he stumbled before running off into the thinning crowd of evacuees. "Come on, Karalti! Let's move!"

"Get on Cutthroat! She'll steer us to the Dregs!" Karalti vaulted up onto the hookwing's back, taking the reins. "Get behind me - you have reach with the Spear if we need to fight!"