Chương 86: Chapter 79 - A Ladder To The Skies

++If there is any one advantage I must credit for my doing as well as I did in struggling against the Gods, it is that their servants are… utter morons. ++ - From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, 'The Great Lich'. 1, 891 A. E. Nesariyah had stayed quiet and hidden, just as she'd been told. She'd wanted to help, to fight, when the foreigners came with their cannons and their clumsy magic and their endless hate.

But to help, her father had warned her, would be to face death, and he had not wanted that for his daughter. So here she was, tucked away and hidden. Orapathaqi's foremost magical talent and one of its ten greatest casters hidden from the fighting. Could she still go and help? No, it was far too late. The walls had fallen and the city was taken. And by the sounds of things, it had all happened fast enough that she would not have done a thing to change the outcome even if she'd been there from the start.

And still, she wished she had been. Because she was staring down death anyway, and it was… young. Impossibly young. Fifteen, maybe younger. Tall for its age and pale, with eyes like crushed emeralds and a face like cut diamonds. Beautiful, she thought, but looking at her in a way that seemed so wholly removed from beauty. What was beauty to a corpse? What was sexuality to the end of all things? The invader took a step forwards and Nesariyah reached for her magic, then felt it slip from clumsy arcane fingers.

She would have cursed herself, if she had the breath to spare. Maybe cursed her temple if she'd had yet more excess on top of that. Nesariyah had never been trained as a war-caster, and now that her blood was hot it seemed every magical lesson she'd ever been given was slipping away. Another step. Now the invader was just three paces away. Nesariyah started thinking stupid, primitive thoughts; what if she rushed the pale devil? As close as this, she might hit her before a spell was released.

No, that shield was still there. She could feel its energy from this close and was ashamed to say it exceeded even her own, whoever— whatever —this child was, she had taken to magic like… Like nothing Nesariyah had ever even read about. The invader's eyes started flicking over her, running up and down Nesariyah's form. She felt herself flush. She'd heard of the depravity of Garamon, was— —"you are magically talented," the girl said, as if she expected it to be news to Nesariyah.

"Stay with me." Nesariyah couldn't speak for a few moments, surprise and confusion muting her.

"... what?" she croaked.

"The city's fighting is done," the Garamonic woman explained impatiently.

"What you are hearing rumbling in the distance is not combat, it is sport. Currently there are somewhere just shy of a hundred thousand men rampaging through Orapathaqi and raping everything with breasts, and a great many things without them. If that happened to you, it would be inconvenient for me. So stay by my side. It will let me ensure you do not throw a wrench into my plans by being victimised."

That might actually have been the most horrific thing anyone had ever told Nesariyah in her entire life, and it was said with all the emotion of an Unbirthed.

"... Okay?" it was really the only thing she could say. Nesariyah smelled something burning, cooked pig. She realised it was the charred meat of her father and had to fight herself not to look down at him. At his corpse. Because there was no him anymore. He had not been properly embalmed and stored, now his spirit was gone and scattered to the Depths.

"Are you crying?" the foreigner asked. Nesariyah sniffed back a tear before nodding, suddenly not trusting her voice. The girl looked from Nesariyah to her father, lip curling.

"I wonder if your father was nicer than mine," she murmured idly.

"... or if you are simply a fool."

Orapathaqi became, for a few brief hours, the most terrible place in all of Arwyna. For the magicians and higher-grade warriors, its siege had not been such a horror. They were men of power, and if they attracted the enemy's violence more for their stations they were also far more suited to weather it. Casualties among these groups were low, as they always are. Each one sorely felt and deeply mourned.

It was casualties among the common men, the rank-and-file, that made up the bulk, and by the next morning estimates would be completed placing the butcher's bill at over ten thousand men. This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work. Those ninety thousand who still remained felt this and felt their own near-survival as burning welts upon the soul, and a soldier knows only one way to right any wrong.

When they were past the walls, and their enemy was beaten, they took their revenge upon the city of Orapathaqi so as to avenge themselves upon its people. It is a savage thing, a soldier's anger. Men taken from the gutter and cheated, beaten or sentenced into lifetimes spent killing and dying. They are creatures of little learning and strong emotions, whose existences are vast spans of monotony and boredom punctuated by brief explosions of violence.

When they set their mind to revenge, it comes as savagely as anything in the world. The horrors inflicted upon Orapathaqi rewrote history books overnight. Buildings were burned, citizens either dragged screaming out of them or barricaded inside to charr with their homes. Perhaps the latter groups were the more fortunate. Children were cut down and dismembered, their little heads held aloft on spikes and bayonets, their parents made to watch the butchery.

By the flash of dawn, every street seemed painted and viscous with spilled blood. Nu'chista watched this all with eager approval, while Aryqatan gazed upon it with something closer to scornful indifference.

"They're like animals," she growled. Though imbued with the blood of the Gods, she was not much larger than most human women. Her voice still carried through the three feet separating it from Nu'chista's elevation all the same.

"They are animals," Nu'chista corrected her. He glanced at Aryqatan and that single look bore the weight of an ironclad coming down to rest on her shoulders.

"They lack the divine spark." She didn't say anything about that. People, the little people and Godtouched both, liked to think of Demigods as being far more homogenous in thought than they really were. If a person was told to put their faith in a thousand superior beings, the thought that two of those beings might give different commands was… unnerving. But that didn't change the facts. The difference between Godtouched, Demigod and mankind was a much-debated topic among those of the semi-divine disposition.

Perhaps the Gods argued it, too. Aryqatan liked to think they were all in agreement, though. If she was to put her faith in a hundred superior beings…

"I suppose there are worse places to loose them on," Nu'chista sighed.

"Still, this sort of violence…imagine what they could achieve if they just directed it properly? That's why they need us, I suppose." The shepherds of mankind. Except right now, watching the fires and the murders, Aryqatan felt rather more like she was herding a pack of rabid dogs.

"When do we rein them in?" she asked. The other Demigod hesitated. Was he uncertain? Now that was a scary thought, and a reminder of how fragile power was. One hundred thousand humans, not counting losses, and only a bare fraction of them were even low-grade warriors. But so very many. There was a reason Demigods, even ones as strong as Nu'chista, moved in pairs around their men. We should've moved in pairs around the damned apprentices, too. Sakhent. That name still sent a shiver down her spine.

Nu'chista almost seemed to hear Aryqatan's thoughts then.

"The lich is still out there," he noted abruptly.

"This city needs to be prepared for him, however best it can. You said he was getting the better of you in direct combat?"

"He was," she confirmed. If her blood were not ichor, it would have left her cheeks burning as it pooled beneath them.

"A human, defeating a Demigod," Nu'chista sneered.

"Pitiful." He didn't need to fucking tell her.

"He's powerful," she pressed anyway.

"You can mock me all you want, but you need to take this seriously. Human or not, necromancer or not, he is strong."

"Even a child could have noticed as much," Nu'chista spat.

"I won't take this lightly, why do you think I'm so particular about preparing the city? However Sakhent next makes himself known, I intend to fight him on our terms. Then we can show the damned lich what happens to those who go against the will of their masters." Like so many plans, it sounded great. But the execution was still a ways off. Aryqatan's side hurt.

She'd caught a cannon slug early into the siege, already wounded as she was and close enough that it had been travelling faster than sound and, thus, struck her before the noise reached her ears. It was a big and heavy projectile that hadn't broken apart on impact nearly as fast as most others would have. A rib had cracked, slightly. That would be another day of healing. So easy to dismiss her wounds in the past, but now she felt every one of them keenly and constantly. An ache of the mind as well as the body.

Nu'chista didn't have her aches, of course. Aryqatan didn't think the Demigod had been hit by anything of note, but she doubted there was a cannon in the world that could wound him even if he stood still and let them. His major contribution to the battle had been a single sword-stroke from Marrow-Chewer, the vast executioner's sword supposedly given to him by Great Nglaru himself, to bifurcate one of Orapathaqi's walls. Followed, naturally, by single-handedly taking on half the city's high priesthood.

A dozen of the most powerful magicians in Estalia against one Demigod? The battle had been short.

"What will my share of the sacrifices be?" Aryqatan asked. After her cannon wound, she'd still removed whole formations of defenders. But that meant nothing if Nu'chista decided to hog things. By the look on his face, he was considering it.

"That's to be decided. We'll need to see how many are left first."

"Less are left by the hour," she pointed with another nod to the carnage unfolding in Orapathaqi.

"True. And morale will improve by the hour, too. We need that more." Easy for you to say, your divine father still rules the pantheon to grant favour directly.

"So we round the men up when, exactly?" she asked.

"When they're all raped out?" The world became sideways and the wind was suddenly screaming by her ears. Aryqatan felt the ground strike her. Not solid. It splashed, liquid and yet harder than steel as she felt herself submerged for the barest fraction of an instant before matter settled and hardened around her. By the time she came to, a crater rested around her that was wider than she was tall and half again as long.

Standing up, shakily, at its centre, she could just barely peer over the edge from the tips of her toes. She could see Nu'chista easily enough, he was standing on the rim and staring down at her with a face like thunder.

"Were you looking for the line just now?" he asked, over the sounds of molten sludge cooling into glass at the crater's edge.

"If so, it seems like you've found it. Don't overstep again, traitor's spawn."