Clay eased himself onto the ground. Despite the medic’s attention (and a junkie’s helping of drugs to numb the pain) he was still in pretty rough shape. Tiamax had stitched his face up and set his broken arm with a splint and sling, but a dull ache suffused his entire body, and his head throbbed as if he’d drunk an entire keg by himself the night before. Then again, considering the fact that he’d fallen down a mountainside and spent the following day running halfway up it again, Clay had to admit he felt far better than he had any right to.
“Clay!” Moog bounded up to him, blue eyes glistening. “By the Tiny Gods of Goblinkind, I thought I’d never see that sweet face of yours again!” He spent a moment analyzing the arachnian’s stitch job. “That hatcher is an artist with needle and thread, I’ll grant him that. The things I could accomplish with four more arms than I already have. And your hand! May I?”
Clay shrugged, and the wizard stooped to examine the appendage.
“Fascinating,” he breathed, then leaned in close and sniffed. “Is that starfish?”
Clay withdrew his hand as Kit shuffled over. “You’ve a bit of phoenix in your blood,” said the ghoul.
Ganelon stepped up and clapped him on the shoulder. “You die hard, Slowhand,” he grated, which, as Clay understood it, passed for a glowing compliment among stone-cold killers.
“But I break easy,” Clay said, mimicking the words he’d said to Larkspur the day before. He wondered briefly whether or not the daeva was dead. When Clay had seen her last she’d been laid out, unmoving, with a long iron bolt jutting from her chest. And before that … well, he was fairly certain she’d been about to kill him. But even so, a part of him hoped she lived long enough to outrun the shadow of her past.
Ganelon chuckled, gave his shoulder a friendly squeeze, and stepped away.
Gabriel approached him last. “I thought—”
“I know.”
“If you—”
“I know,” Clay cut him off again.
Gabriel flung himself the last few paces, crushing Clay in an embrace so tight he could almost hear his ribs groan. Clay clamped his good arm around Gabe’s neck and felt his friend draw a shuddering breath.
When Clay trusted himself to speak, he did. “I’m back.”
“You’re back,” Gabe said into his shoulder, and then withdrew, taking in the rest of the band with eyes gone sharp and bright as diamonds. “And now we finish this.”
“To be honest, I didn’t plan on coming,” Barret said. “Only my wife got sick of me moping around the house. She fairly put the sword in my hand and kicked me out the door!”
“Lies,” Ashe cut in, stating the obvious.
Barret chuckled. “Anyway, my boys are in Kaladar for the War Fair, or I might have brought them along. They’ve got their own thing going now. The Wight Nights, they call themselves. Orc-shit name for a band if you ask me, but they didn’t bother asking.” He blew out a long sigh. “Ah well, can’t imagine they’ll be sorry they missed out on this little adventure. We hit a few pretty vicious storms on the way across, and had to land once and fill the engine with water that smells like a city sewer, but hey—we made it!”
“I’m happy to be here,” said Piglet, crunching on a pretzel half as big as his head.
“Me too,” said Ashe with a cutlass smirk. “It’s some kinda thrill, I tell ya, starting a fight you can’t win.” She winked and sidled up beside Ganelon. “Makes my britches moist.”
“We might win,” squeaked Piglet.
Tiamax raised a glass. “Here’s to moist britches and the boundless, irrational optimism of youth!” He looked twice at Matrick (well, twelve times, actually, if you counted all eight eyes and subtracted the two patched over). “You need a drink, Matty?”
The old king smiled politely. “No, thank you. I’m … all done, I think.”
The medic made a sound between a hiss and a rattle that Clay took for disbelief. “Done what? Not drinking. Drinking?”
“Drinking, yeah.”
“Well that’s it, then,” said Moog cheerily. “World’s over.”
They all laughed—even Ganelon—and Clay’s mind went back to the night they’d spent in the mountain cave, when he’d pondered the bizarre sense of elation that so often suffused the eve of battle.
This is it, he thought, looking from face to face around the skyship’s deck. Each smile a fraction too wide, every laugh a little too loud. There was something unreal about this moment, something not quite right, like watching a beard-spider dance or getting stabbed on your birthday. This is the end. And every one of us knows it.
“We didn’t know where exactly to find you,” Barret was saying. “But then we saw the smoke, and found these two scrapping with the manhunter and her thralls.”
“Lucky for us,” said Matrick.
“So Larkspur is dead?” Gabe asked.
“Probably?” Clay guessed, and saw Ganelon’s eyes narrow a fraction.
“I’d forgotten about the War Fair,” said Moog, absently stroking the feathers of the owlbear asleep on his lap.
“Biggest party in the world,” said Barret. “I’ll confess I’m a little sorry to be missing it.”
Ashe swatted the air. “Pah! What’s to miss? Just a bunch of wannabe mercs and washed-up heroes mucking about in some old ruins. Here’s where the real party’s at, eh Gabe?”
“All done,” piped Kit. The revenant had been hovering over a low table for the better part of an hour, using chalkstone to sketch a detailed map of Castia and its surroundings. The members of both bands gathered to survey it.
“The city straddles the river, like Fivecourt, except it is built on a rise instead of a valley. There are two gates. East—” Kit used a slender grey finger to point them out on the map “—and west. The walls are thick and extremely high, which is why it has withstood the siege for so long already. You could go over—or under, I suppose—but there’s no going through. This is the noble quarter here, and a wall surrounds it as well.”
Gabriel scowled at the map with sour interest, as though it were a painting of his ex-wife naked. “So if the outer wall is breached, the survivors will hole up there?”
Kit shook his head. “The outer wall was made to protect men from monsters. It has flame throwers, shock turrets, and ballista towers every fifty yards. This inner wall serves to stop peasants from wandering into a senator’s backyard. If they do manage to get inside the city, the Horde will roll over that second wall like it was a picket fence.”
“Can we sneak in through the river?” Gabe asked.
“Lastleaf will have tried that already,” Kit told him. “The river curves north here. It runs beneath the hill and is trapped in the city reservoir, but there are several gates barring the way. It was never used for trade, only a source of freshwater.”
“Not anymore,” Matrick said glumly.
Vanguard’s bard, sitting cross-legged on his pilot’s stool and tuning a mandolin, cleared his throat before speaking up. “Remind me again why we don’t just fly in? I mean, we’re here for Rose, right? Why not just snatch her up and be on our way? Maybe even catch the last days of the War Fair.”
“Plague hawks, rot sylphs, you name it,” Moog answered. “We caught a glimpse of the city in my crystal ball before Gabe—” he caught himself. “Before it fell in the river. The sky was full of all kinds of awful. Also, Lastleaf has a wyvern matriarch with him, and her brood will be there as well. We’d get torn apart long before we reached the city.”
“Fair enough,” said Edwick, returning his attention to the instrument in his hands.
Ganelon pointed to a crude circle sketched to the west of Castia. “What’s this here?”
“Teragoth,” said the revenant. “Well, the ruins thereof. The Dominion road runs right through Castia, under the arch of the Threshold here, and up into the old city.”
“Threshold?” Barret interjected. “You mean like the one in Kaladar?”
“Just so,” said Kit.
Clay took a break from anxiously chewing his lip to add his own voice to the mix. “Don’t forget about Akatung. Shadow said he lairs in a shrine there.”
Barret frowned. “Akatung. Why does that name sound familiar?”
“Dragon,” said Ganelon, and Edwick chose this moment to strum an ominous note on his mandolin.
The frontman’s bushy brows nearly leapt off his face. “Say what now?”
“Never mind the dragon,” Gabe assured him. “We’re not going into Teragoth anyway.”
“Yes we are!” Moog blurted.