70

The Carrion King was much easier to move than the Lord of the Forest had been, particularly after it had been gutted. The massive vulture was similar in size to the stag, but its hollow bones and the fact that they didn’t need to carve their way through thick forest to move it made a significant difference. Still, Michael and Davi found themselves once again being the ones transporting it by nature of their larger size.

“This doesn’t seem fair,” said Davi, as they walked along the road, leaving the battlefield behind them. “I almost died less than an hour ago.”

Michael nodded next to him, sweat dripping down his face. “It’s definitely a little much. I just healed everyone, after all.”

“What abilities did you say you both had?” asked Ollie. “Major Strength and Major Recovery? Seems like a good use of resources to me.”

“You’re both taking the shorter shift tonight since we’ll be stopping to camp soon. You’ll get a longer rest tomorrow while the others have a turn,” said Bayle, causing Ollie’s grin to sharply recede.

Once they were a decent distance from the battlefield, they set up camp a half mile from the road. Food was cold bread, salted pork, and water. Bayle was wary of lingering enemies and mercenaries, so he didn’t want to start a fire. Luckily the weather had been turning warm, so it wasn’t too uncomfortable without a fire. Michael enjoyed being able to see the night sky clearly as well. The three strange moons and thousands of unfamiliar stars. He wondered how any astrologers had reacted to being so far from stars, they placed so much importance on. He certainly wouldn’t be asking any women what their sign was. Not that that was something he’d been doing much of back on Earth either.

“What are we actually going to be doing, Lieutenant?” asked Davi.

“We’re rendezvousing with allies at the base of a Tusynian castle,” replied Bayle, not looking up from the marking he was making in yet another small book.

“I understand that, but what will we be doing there?”

“The siege has stalled, so we’ll be taking the castle ourselves.”

Ollie laughed a bit. “What?”

“We, as in all of us here now, will be taking the castle.”

Michael, who’d already given up on disputing the absurd since he got there, opted for a different question. “How?”

Bayle closed his notebook and reached into his pack, pulling out what looked to be a very old stack of papers.

“This castle has changed hands four times, but it was originally ours.” He rifled through the papers, pulling out a specific one. “I found accounts from when it was built, before it was lost, retaken, and lost again. In all cases it was lost to a straight siege, but there is another way inside.” He held up a faded sketch of a number of pipes and tubes that Michael couldn’t make sense of. “The castle was built when we’d only just started to get the hang of plumbing. As such, there’s a large pipe we can all walk through that takes us up to the bottom of the castle.”

“And you don’t think they know of it?”

He shook his head. “They do, but the fumes in it would kill most men long before they made their way inside. That’s why there’s never been an attempt to take the castle through it before.”

“And what keeps us from dying?” asked Marcus.

“Penitents Ollie and Michael,” he replied carefully, returning the old documents to his pack. “Ollie will be creating an airtight barrier around us all for us to travel with. Michael will heal us if something goes wrong.”

“I don’t know that my healing will work on toxins like that.”

“It doesn’t need to keep them from harming us, just heal the damage it does as fast as it happens until we’re through. It’ll be unpleasant, but survivable as long as your stamina holds out.”

“Couldn’t someone have done this same thing before?” asked Marcus.

“Yes, but mages of Ollie’s talent and healers like Michael would never normally be put at risk in this way. We’re lucky to have Penitents like you available.”

“I feel lucky,” said Ollie dryly. “I’ll need to take all this fortune down to the pokies and see how well it holds.”

Michael popped the last bit of bread into his mouth and washed it down with water from his canteen. It wasn’t like another dangerous mission was something he and the others had expected. Once he was done eating, he made his way to his tent and lay down.

“I thank the Divine for granting me the strength to keep Davi alive and heal my friends and allies,” he murmured the prayer quietly before kissing the token of the Divine that hung from his neck. It had become a ritual for him, and he found himself comforted by it, even with what he’d seen on the battlefield. Sometimes, he could almost swear he heard an answer.

They woke and broke camp at early dawn and started walking again. This time they ran into no more titled beasts or mercenaries. The footprints and signs of the army moving ahead of them started to seem more recent, fresher. The horse shit still smelled, the scraps of food left behind were still swarmed with maggots, and the footprints hadn’t yet started to fade.

Bayle kept a close eye on everything at the front, and in the back Michael found himself dragging the Carrion King along the ground with Marcus at his side and the others a short distance ahead of them. Michael wanted to get the first shift out of the way, even though he didn’t really need to do it, and Ollie saw no reason to prevent him from volunteering.

“He doesn’t sleep,” said Marcus when they’d lost a bit of ground to the others and were lagging behind.

“What?” asked Michael.

“Bayle. He doesn’t sleep. I made my way out of my tent to take a piss and maybe see how close of attention he was paying. It must’ve been very early morning, and he was still there, scribbling in one of his notebooks in the pitch black.”

Michael had thought he’d heard some movement and a few words exchanged during the night, but he’d fallen back asleep too quickly to pay it any mind.

“Rethinking your… plans?”

Marcus nodded, grunting a bit as they started pulling the body behind them uphill. “Too many unknowns with Bayle. This may be the furthest out of Stent we’ve ever gone, but he’s too dangerous to try anything with. Fuck, the scouts would’ve even been a safer bet.”

Michael shook his head. “I still don’t know if I can even heal the… problem.”

“Either way we’ll have to wait unt⁠—”

“Catch up!” yelled Bayle. “We all need to stay close.”

They grunted, putting their conversation to the side for the moment, and began pushing themselves harder to catch up with everyone else. The Carrion King was, as a fresh piece of carrion himself, attracting a large number of flies that would occasionally land on it for a drink of sweat. That combined with the smell was making Michael regret his decision to volunteer for the first pull of the day, but then again, the smell and decay would only be getting worse once it got hotter.

After another half-hour, they switched off, and it was Ollie and Pyotr’s turn to pull. They were a bit slower, forcing everyone else to walk at a lessened pace, but once Ollie started to use magic to help reduce the weight of it, they were able to move almost as quickly as when Davi and Michael were the ones pulling it. A few more hours of walking and a few more trade-offs later, the castle finally came into sight.

It was an ugly creation, with high brown stone walls, gates of black iron, and blocky towers every thirty or so feet. Knowing that the castle was originally a product of Stent didn’t surprise him at all, as their architecture and styling always seemed to lean toward the simple over the aesthetic. Around the castle was a sea of tents and men. He saw a number of them patrolling the edge of it, reinforcing the barricade that was so standard to Stent camps, and assembling what looked to be siege towers and firing catapults that were flinging rocks in the direction of the gate but falling short.

There seemed to be a very deliberate distance between the walls and the camp. He even saw a few mages throwing Fireballs at the walls, though they seemed to be exploding against barriers of invisible force before they were able to reach their target. As they got closer, Michael began to be able to see the soldiers. They didn’t seem too bad off. More worn down than those men at the fort they’d come from, certainly a bit dirtier, but not as bad off as he expected men who’d been besieging a castle and had just fought a pitched battle a few days ago should look. They all took some time to gawk at the dead beast they were dragging, many of them suppressing a gag at the sight and smell of it.

Unlike other times they’d arrived in camps, there was no question as to who they were as they walked inside. Soldiers and knights simply saluted Bayle and moved to the side as he walked. Rank seemed to have its privileges. They reached the center of the camp, not where the Penitents resided, but rather the part where the command tents had been set up.

“Wait here,” he said, walking inside.