Chapter 58

  ‘Well, that’s a city alright. Nothing like Garoshek,’ I commented as I lay flat on my belly at the edge of the crater, looking at the city in the distance through my rifle’s scope.

  ‘It’s Orroth. It’s big. It’s crowded. It’s … big,’ Grashon agreed, nodding vigorously next to me.

  ‘I knew some demons who traded in Orroth,’ Lanny joined in. ‘There’s always EXP to be made in a city like this.’

  ‘Bonders are better here,’ Vikaret said.

  ‘Agreed. I had my bow bonded here. I wonder if Fragnok is still alive,’ Surthakar added.

  ‘Fragnok did your bow?’ Iska asked. ‘He’s done my dagger, too.’

  ‘Fragnok does good bonding work,’ Zagrathar joined in. ‘Grash, if the old demon is alive, he could re-bond your new axe,’ he said to the big grunt.

  ‘Yeah, bond’s a bit dodgy.’ Grash admitted. ‘I’ve heard about this Fragnok. Expensive?’

  ‘Depends on what you want done,’ Vik said. ‘Re-bonding your axe … well, at least 100 EXP, I think.

  ‘Oi, you’re joking, right? That’s almost half a level for me!’ Grashon protested.

  As happy as I was that we had all made it here in one piece, I was somewhat incredulous about the current topic of conversation. As if this was nothing but a shopping trip, and as if the city wasn’t surrounded by an army of two hundred thousand minotaurs and other assorted Third Ring demons, organised into who knew how many tightly packed camps around the place. Then, just to deny me any peace of mind, Burning Darkness put his tuppence down.

  ‘Ah, these guys have no idea what a good bond is like,’ he complained. ‘Listen, my man, what you and I have is special. There isn’t a bond like ours in the whole of the Fourth Ring.

  ‘I guess you don’t want to pay a visit to this Fragnok fellow, do you?’ I said to my sword.

  ‘100 EXP for re-bonding a stupid axe? That’s called amateur hour where I’m from,’ he said, sounding like he had just spat on the ground. ‘Any youngling who ends up surviving his first year in the Fifth Ring will be bonding his own weapons and items better than the oldest crafter here. Hell, some of the better items can reach out and form bonds by themselves.’

  ‘Can you?’ I inquired.

  ‘Who do you think did our bond? It sure wasn’t this Fragnok fellow,’ he said, growling and giggling at the same time.

  Thinking back on it, it was true. No crafter had been involved in the bonding process between us, and it sure as Hell wasn’t me who had done it. I hadn’t even known what a bonded weapon really was at the time. But crafters and bonders were the least of my worries; I was looking at a city under siege, and somewhere in there a general was waiting to be recruited along with her army, so I decided that instead of listening to my squad prattling on about bonded weapons and Fragnok’s undisputed reputation, observing and planning was a better use of my time.

  Looking at Orroth on my zoom screen, I was impressed. The same way Garoshek was a proper town compared to the much smaller Scaragar, Orroth was a proper, big city compared to Garoshek. The walls were high, thick and heavily fortified, complete with bastion-like towers at set intervals, and the gates were protected by the barbicans in which they were housed. I could see thousands of tiny figures all along the battlements on the top of the walls, standing or moving, peeking through the crenels of the parapets. If I wasn’t mistaken, the broken structures scattered outside the walls were the remnants of siege towers and ladders. I wondered how many attempts to storm the walls had the defenders repelled in the past couple of months. Well, however many it had been, it seemed Riaret’s demons were capable of holding the magnificent city that lay within the walls.

  Garoshek was a fairly large collection of simple buildings and houses; nothing too tall, nothing too fancy, and quite frankly a bit monotonous as far as architecture was concerned, especially compared to the Lost Pillars. It was a town that told the story of a utilitarian style born of the hardships of Hell. Orroth on the other hand, seemed intent on showing everyone that as difficult as life could be in the Fourth Ring, there had been a time when demons used to give a damn about building things that looked good. Even through the scope, I could clearly see the spires and towers reaching for the burning sky from the centre, I could see domes with long, stone spikes jutting out of them, I could see pyramid-like structures surrounded by obelisks, five and six storey houses resting on giant pillars, spiraling stairways, and many unusual and somewhat scary looking buildings. Of course, the outer areas or districts — whatever demonic city planners might call them — had plenty of the boring old houses I knew from Garoshek, but the centre of Orroth was a sight to behold, even from this distance.

  ‘So, what’s the plan, Boss?’ Grashon asked, which meant the squad was finally finished discussing the prices of weapons and bonding.

  I focused my attention on the minotaur camps surrounding the city, at least a hundred of them if not more. The patterns of the enemy emplacements were similar to what we’d seen at Garoshek; fortified camps with one to two thousand enemy soldiers each, built and placed around the city at three to four hundred metres distance from the walls consistently. But unlike at Garoshek, where they had kept a distance of at least sixty or seventy metres between neighbouring camps, here they had been set up a lot closer to each other, leaving less than twenty metres between them. Outside the gates of the city, the camps were larger and more heavily fortified so they could mobilise more troops to repel any breakout attempts. Sneaking through the encirclement would be more difficult here than at Garoshek.

  ‘We wait,’ I said to Grash.

  ‘Wait? Wait for what?’ he asked.

  ‘Aren’t we going to sneak in? Like we did in Garoshek?’ Zag asked.

  ‘No. We wait,’ I said. ‘There is a demon in the city called Rathar-Koren. He’ll come to us and will get us in.’

  ‘How?’ Iskaret inquired, not at all convinced that anyone could get in there without her expertise as a scout.

  ‘He is one of Kralsen’s,’ I said. ‘If we’re talking about sneaking, I hate to say this but he’s better at it than any of us here.’

  My two scouts, Zag and Iska, weren’t happy about my statement — I could tell that much by their sneers — but it was true; the Fifth Ringers of the Kralsen Hive Mind were the undisputed champions of sneaking, on account of their psychic ability to quite literally erase themselves — and hopefully us — from the perception of others. I wasn’t worried about getting into the city; I was worried about finding the right way to handle negotiations with Riaret the Severing Strike.

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  ***

  ‘Welcome to Orroth, Hellfire Lord Hyde.’ A deep, rumbling voice coming from nowhere greeted me, and I wasn’t the only one who jumped up in a jolt of shock and surprise.

  The squad reached for their weapons collectively, Lanny squeaked like a terrified cat, and I couldn’t recall ever drawing my bonded sword faster than I did now.

  The squad relaxed as they laid eyes on the visitor in our midst, no doubt seeing an ice-demon. Had they been seeing the pitch-dark creature of pure blackness I was seeing, I wasn’t sure they would have lowered their weapons as quickly as they did. Well, at least I could confirm that my Psychic Riposte skill with its 10 plus 2 levels was high enough to see through not only Zeneth’s perception-based camouflage but this guy’s as well.

  ‘Rathar-Koren, I assume?’ I asked the hive mind demon, putting Burning Darkness back into his sheath on my back.

  ‘Indeed.’ The clipped answer came.

  ‘Okay, thanks for coming,’ I said to him. ‘So, it won’t be a problem to get us into the city I hope?’

  ‘No.’

  Huh! Were all the Kralsenite demons this curt? I was kind of hoping Zeneth’s enthusiasm for one-word answers was a personal quirk of his and not representative of his entire collective, but it seemed all my hopes had been in vain. Maybe this was one of the cultural differences between Fourth and Fifth? Ah, I could ponder this later.

  ‘Right. Splendid. So, how are we going to get in there?’ I inquired.

  ‘Walk,’ he said.

  Why I had expected a more elaborate answer, I’d never know.

  ‘What? Is that it?’ Grashon summed up the meaning behind the look on everyone’s faces.

  Rathar-Koren turned his head slowly to look at Grash.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  My squad members looked at each other, completely puzzled, and then I remembered that they didn’t know what the Kralsen Hive Mind was or how they operated. In all fairness, I was sure I didn’t know all there was to know about them either, but I knew enough to take the dark fellow’s word when he said he’d get us into the city.

  ‘Don’t worry guys! If he’s at least as good as Zeneth-Rakar, we’ll walk through the enemy camps like they’re not even there,’ I told them.

  I got a nod from Rathar, which was quite reassuring, although the squad still didn’t seem convinced. And that was fine; they were demons, and if I’d learned anything about them, it was their casual disregard even for their own lives, and I had no doubt that they’d have no problem to attempt to fight their way through a minotaur camp if I ordered them to.

  ‘Well, let’s get going then,’ I said, holding in a worried sigh, and I mentally prepared myself for what promised to be the most nerve-wrecking walk in the park.

  ***

  We climbed down the gentle slope of the crater. Once we were on flat ground we had a two-kilometre trek ahead of us to reach the nearest of the Third Ring camps surrounding the city, and I was already nervous. We followed the hive mind demon in complete silence for twenty minutes through the flat, barren terrain until we could clearly see the minotaurs and other demonic creatures going about their business at the edge of the camp less than fifty metres from us. We became even more quiet; I was almost holding my breath as we carefully inched forward after our dark guide, and I could tell that my guys — especially Lanny — were trying their best to be as small and unnoticeable as possible. Having a rough idea of how Kralsen’s ilk applied their psychic trickery to erase us from the perceptions of anyone in the vicinity, I was sure our efforts to be stealthy were superfluous and did nothing but slow us down. Zag and Iska, my two scouts and sneak-champions, looked especially unhappy about the affair. But from our perspective, we were about to trudge through a tent city housing thousands of the Third Ring bastards, and we weren’t actually invisible; we could see and hear ourselves and each other just fine, and it went against all human and demonic instinct and intuition to accept unreservedly that the weird demon leading us would make it fine with a type of mind-magic not commonly practiced or even understood in the Fourth Ring.

  As we reached the very edge of the enemy camp and stared at a couple of minotaurs loudly playing dice with a batch of four werewolves while completely oblivious to our presence, I couldn’t help but recall the words of one of the most famous military leaders from Earth’s long lost past: the die was cast, and we were going to cross Camp Rubicon.

  And we did just that. Sort of. Instead of entering the enemy camp, we skirted around it to reach the narrow gap between it and the next camp — sort of a corridor some twenty metres wide — which was going to be the safest and fastest route through the encirclement. I didn’t know if Rathar’s stealth skill had an upper limit in terms of the number of demons he could fool at the same time, but as I was following him as closely as possible, I noticed as he sometimes slowed down or sped up to avoid getting too close to minotaur warriors who were passing from Camp Rubicon to the other, or werewolves and cavers running around with stacks of meat or wood. I had to give it to Rathar; his ability worked exactly as advertised; none of them ever knew we were there. And I was glad to see the psychic weirdo wasn’t leaving things to chance and was taking appropriate care in leading us, and halfway through the corridor between the two camps, I was starting to feel somewhat confident that we’d make it to the city without issues. Big mistake.

  Rathar stopped so suddenly I almost bumped into him, and the guys behind me almost bumped into me.

  ‘Miekdizraath-Jegronnod!’ I heard the pitch-dark demon whisper, and I could have sworn there was a large dose of fear in his voice.

  Before I could even formulate and utter the question of what the hell a Miekdizraath-Jegronnod was and what it had to do with us stopping, I had to get out of the way of the hive mind demon as he took a step back.

  ‘Oh shit!’ Burning Darkness’ voice entered my mind abruptly.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked, whispering and becoming more than just nervous again.

  ‘Go away!’ Rathar whispered loudly and began to flail his arms around as if trying to swat invisible mosquitoes out of the air.

  To whom or what he was talking to, I had no idea. My squad members were looking around too, their hands hovering over their weapons, ready to draw, but just as I couldn’t see, hear or feel anything, they couldn’t either, and their confusion was visible on their faces. I myself was ready to draw either my sword or my rifle, or to make a run for it if necessary and sprint all the way to the city wall — which was at least five hundred meters from where we were. Before I could make any decision, Rathar took another step back. The guy was definitely backing away from something. Cold sweat ran down my neck as I realised that if there was something here that could scare a Fifth Ring demon and could make my sword swear out loud, then we might be in serious trouble.

  ‘What the hell is going on?’ I whispered as loudly as I could, hoping I’d get an answer either from our guide or my sword.

  Unfortunately, Rathar simply took yet another step back, still gesturing wildly with his hands at something I couldn’t see, but then Burning Darkness finally gathered his wits and said,

  ‘Miekdizraath-Jegronnod!’

  That again? It didn’t help at all.

  ‘Am I supposed to know what the fuck that is? What’s happening? What’s got Rathar so spooked?’ I demanded.

  ‘My man, we’re in big trouble,’ my sword wailed as if the end of the world was upon us.

  ‘You’ve got to give me more than that,’ I growled at him, seriously worried and thoroughly angry at the same time.

  ‘It’s the Dimensional Devourer of Dreaded Duality and Decimating Dismay,’ he cried.

  ‘Uhm … quite the mouthful, but … I can’t see anything.’ I commented, looking ahead in the general direction from which Rathar was slowly retreating from, but there was nothing there, just tents.

  ‘Calvin! It’s right there! Right there! We need to run. Forget the city, if that thing is here then everything is doomed. The city is doomed. The Third Ringers are doomed. We’ve got to go, man, we’ve got to go!’

  Not exactly the answer I had been expecting, but seeing how the normally calm and enigmatic Kralsenite was backing away, and how my own bonded weapon was panicking like there was no tomorrow, I was inclined to follow their advice. I was about to lift my hand and signal the squad to start retreating the way we had come, when I finally saw the ghostly, translucent creature creeping forward from between the tents of Camp Rubicon, slowly and carefully making its way towards our group.

  It was the size of a dog — a German Shepherd, the most popular breed across colonised Allied Systems space — but it was sleek, it was pitch black, its ears were pointy and triangular, and it had a white patch on its chest as if wearing a white tie. With one eye open and one eye closed — or missing — it was staring at us, the green iris of its open eye almost glowing. I recognised the creature instantly: translucent or not and regardless of its size, it would have been difficult to mistake this fellow for anything else.

  ‘Guys, it’s a cat.’ I whispered. ‘Or … the ghost of a cat, maybe.