IrateRapScallion
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Chapter 64
🕑 Added 2019-03-16 17:14:06 +0000 UTC“Incoming!” the lookout called out loud enough for everybody nearby to hear. Almost absentmindedly, Arlette bent down under cover as a wave of projectiles of all sorts flew over her head, the volley of flying death barely registering in her mind.
Arlette knew that spacing out while under attack was generally a poor idea, but today she just couldn’t help it. It wasn’t like she was in any real danger anyway. Today seemed to be one of those days where the Ubrans had decided to rest, which meant they usually just pelted the top of the wall with barrages of arrows until they felt like they’d put on a decent enough show, and then fell back. Much of warfare was a battle of attrition. The relentless daily assaults on the walls were an attack on more than just the obvious vector. Sure, the most obvious goal was to overwhelm the defenders, open the closest gate, and wash over the rest of the city. But even if that failed, these attacks wore the Eterians’ thin not just in numbers but in stamina and strength—eventually, they would be too tired, too weak, or too few to hold back the Ubran legions any longer.
Arlette felt like they were getting closer to that point than she wanted to admit. Just earlier that day, she’d overheard nearby troops gossiping about rumors that the higher-ups were going to start a new all-hands-on-deck strategy to replace the current shift-based system.
Arlette had never been in a siege herself before, but she was educated enough to understand that they were rarely quick affairs. It paid to prioritize the long-term over the short-term whenever possible, especially if you were the defenders. With that in mind, until now the army had been split into two rotating groups—the day shift and the night shift—in an effort to prevent wear-out for as long as possible. Since the great majority of attacks came while the sun watched over them, most of the defenders stood on the wall then, while a smaller group manned the defenses under the moonlight.
“Incoming!”
Of course, in the case of a real emergency, the night shift would be called upon to reinforce their daytime counterparts, and in the rare occurrence of a night attack, the day shift would be on standby, ready to assist. Assignments between night and day rotated frequently, as the generally less-demanding night served as a bit of a rest for the weary. Arlette and her squad had already been on night shift twice.
Now, however, it seemed that those in charge felt there weren’t enough people remaining to split up. If true, that was a bad sign for her. It would mean she’d be even busier than before, spending nearly all her waking day atop the wall, and that meant almost no time to continue her search. That was if the city even held much longer.
The argument could be made that the Ubrans didn’t even need Sebastian as long as they had patience. After all, she and the rest were essentially trapped with a limited, dwindling food supply and no way of replenishing it. There was no hope of victory for the Eterians if it remained just them versus the Ubrans. Everybody in Crirada was slowly withering away from the lack of food combined with the constant exertion. Eventually, they would just hit their limit.
That was the crux of the matter. Sieges, by nature, were what happened when the defending side couldn’t defeat the attacking side on the battlefield, leaving their only option for victory to hold out long enough for something to change and flip the balance in their favor. In this case, that meant lasting long enough for one or more other Nocend nations to send reinforcements to combat the Ubrans. The problem was, some other army appearing out of nowhere to save the day seemed impossible at this point. It was Arlette’s opinion that if the other nations were going to get involved then they would have shown up already.
The great majority of her ire was directed at Drayhadal and Stragma. She didn’t know what was wrong with them, but she did know that their armies were strong enough to possibly turn the tide of this entire war. Especially the Stragmans—if they were to send the vast majority of their forces, they might have enough people to rival the Ubrans in numbers. But no, they’d stayed in their forest, content in the knowledge that it would make invading their nation profoundly difficult. She found it strange, as it seemed to go against the aggressive nature of their society as she understood it from her short time there.
The Drayhadans, meanwhile, were notoriously insular and likely considered the actions of others to be below them. She had thought they’d be able to understand the threat that the Empire represented but it seemed that she was wrong. Did they really think the mountains that marked the border between them and Eterium were enough to dissuade the enemy? The Ubrans had crossed The Divide! Some measly normal mountains would barely be a bump in the road.
Gustil was gone, its armies ravaged and its people now under the invaders’ boots. There would be no more troops from her adopted home country. The thought that she’d lost both nations she’d called home made her want to despair.
Kutrad and Eterium had already lost nearly all of their troops. The Battle of Rul had cost the Eterians greatly, and their successive failures to stop the Ubrans’ march through Gustil and Eterium and meant that the only remaining portion of their army already occupied these walls. Kutrad had rushed as much of their forces towards the front lines as well, their troops joining up with the Eterians and the Gustilians to assist in defending the few Gustilian cities that had still stood free at the time, only for them to be lost just like the rest. All they had left to send were their jaglioth cavalry, a slow unit which hadn’t been able to make it to the previous battles in time and had therefore survived. Both the countries still had plenty of civilians, so there was always the possibility that somewhere an army of barely-trained peasants could be formed. Arlette wasn’t counting on that, however. Unless the army outnumbered the Ubrans twenty to one, she didn’t foresee it making a difference.
That left only Otharia, the one country so up its own ass that it made Drayhadal seem sociable and welcoming in comparison. Arlette doubted they cared one bit about the outcome of this invasion, if they even were aware of the war at all. Sure, there’d been talk of somebody new taking over, but their actions, as far as she could tell, had been no different than the old regime so far.
“Incoming!”
She couldn’t control the actions of nations, but she could control her own; which was why she was busy contemplating how best to use her possibly-limited time remaining. She spared a glance backward, taking a peek at the wasteland that had been Crirada’s Worker’s Quarter just the day before. Assuming that he hadn’t died in the terrible events of yesterday, Sebastian had fewer places to hide, but even three-quarters of a city was still too much ground for her to cover in just a short amount of time. She needed to figure out a way to search more places at once, or perhaps some other way to look for clues that didn’t involve skulking around an entire metropolis.
“What about you, Arlette?” Lezo asked suddenly, pulling her roughly from her thoughts.
Arlette twitched slightly at the use of her name in public. She’d been going by Lucana Domatin this whole time in an effort to hide herself and not tip Sebastian off to her presence. While any hope of that working had likely died after her imprisonment, that didn’t mean she wanted the attention her name would bring. Lezo wasn’t helping. Ever since finding out her true identity, he’d dropped calling her “Lucana” altogether and she hadn’t been able to get him to stop.
“Huh?” she replied, having missed most of the earlier conversation.
“Do you think they’ll try tonight?”
Arlette thought about it for a moment. “I hope not. They’ve hit us eleven times in the last eight days, so they have to give their own a rest too, right?”
“That makes it four against one, idiot,” Kima chimed in. “Stop making claims based on nothing.”
“It’s not nothing! It’s my gut!”
“As I said,” Kima snorted, “nothing.”
“Bah! A gut is all you need!” Lezo harrumphed. “They’re gonna try something tonight, I can feel it.”
“Sure they are, oh great Oracle of the Northern Wall,” scoffed Kima.
“Incoming!” As she did all the other times, Arlette slumped behind the nearby crenelation along with the rest of her squad. A massive volley of arrows, fireballs, and other projectiles came crashing down a moment later, scattering across the now empty stone.
“I don’t know why they bother with this,” Danel wondered, a weary look on his face. “It’s not like they’re accomplishing anything besides giving us more arrows.”
“It’s for show,” Sergeant Muga chimed in, a hand lazily scratching his beard. “They want a rest as much as we do, but they have to at least look like they’re trying because you-know-who is watching.”
At the mention of the Ubran leader, Arlette glanced towards the west. Every day, Emperor Haidar Batra sat on his throne out in the open while holding court, as if daring the Eterians to try to take his life. It was quite the power move, and as much as she didn’t want to admit it, the sight had an effect on the defenders’ morale. Knowing that the man who had caused all this sat just beyond their reach really stung.
“Who cares why they do it? It’s so boooooriiinnngg,” Lezo whined. “Let’s talk about something else.”
“Like what?” Kima replied.
“I dunno... how about what we’re going to do when this is over? What are you going to do when we get out of this?” he asked, turning to Arlette.
“I don’t know,” she replied, noting his use of the word ‘when’ rather than ‘if’ but refraining to comment. “I mean, even if we win this battle, the war won’t be over just like that. Things are still going to be messy for a long time.”
“What about after that?”
Arlette shrugged. “I haven’t really thought that far ahead. None of that matters if I can’t accomplish what I came here for. What about you guys?”
“Well, my parents are tailors and they’re going to need somebody to take over for them at some point, soooo...” Lezo replied.
“A tailor? You?” Arlette and the others cackled.
“Can’t you just see him sewing with those giant sausage fingers of his?” chortled Kima.
“I could do it if I tried!” Lezo protested. “I did it all the time when I was a kid.”
“That’s because your hands were tiny back then, dumbass!”
“Well what about you then, shorty?” Lezo shot back.
“Ah, well, I’ve been fighting all my life,” the spearwoman replied. “Don’t really know what else to do with myself at this point. If I don’t rejoin the army, I’ll probably go register as a mercenary.”
“You have to register somewhere to be a mercenary?” Lezo asked.
“Of course, you dunce! How did you think you become a mercenary?” Kima retorted, giving the large man a not-so-playful shove. Not for the first time, Arlette wondered what in the world attracted her to him.
“I thought you just, you know, went out and did it...” the axeman admitted sheepishly while the others began to laugh at him even harder.
“No, you idiot! You gotta sign up and get put on a list! You think they’re just gonna let people just wander around with swords and shit and not even know who they are?”
The laughter inside Arlette came to a sudden halt, stifled by Kima’s words and a sudden realization. She was just as dumb as her rock-headed squadmate. The list! Why hadn’t she thought of it before? Every government with any sense had a copy of the Mercenary Guild’s list of mercenaries operating in their nation at the time. All she had to do was get her hands on that list, and she’d know the names of every mercenary in the city. Sure, none of them were going to say “Sebastian Cunningham” on them, but there had to be something she could use. It was a far better plan than just sneaking around the city hoping to run across something.
There was just one problem: that list would be in the citadel, and she wouldn’t be welcomed there any time soon. She could try sneaking inside on her own, but getting into a place like that, where the entry points were limited and well-guarded would be tricky. But with help...
Arlette cleared her throat.
* * *
The night was much darker than usual, the light of the three moons muted somewhat by a thick sheet of clouds blanketing the entire sky. The clouds were much lower than usual, too, so low that they sometimes enveloped the top of the wall itself.
With the clouds came mist and fog thick enough that, when at its thickest, made it so she couldn’t see more than fifty paces ahead of her. The spirits were looking out for her tonight, it seemed. Arlette couldn’t have asked for a better situation. Not only would any guard’s vision be impaired, but the mist would also muffle the sound a little bit as a bonus.
“These clouds sure are something, huh?” Sergeant Muga asked as she stared up at the sky through the window of their small hotel room.
“Yeah...”
“This is the sign that winter is slowly beginning to fade,” he continued. “Apparently it’s like this here towards the end of winter every year. My father grew up here before he moved out and met my mother. He used to say that you could set your calendar to it. I always thought he was leading me on but maybe I was wrong. Either way, good luck for us, eh?”
She returned his lopsided grin with a small smile of her own. After their squad’s shift was over, she’d gotten them to a more private place and pleaded for their assistance in sneaking her into the citadel. She’d come up with a whole fake rationale for why she’d need to break into her own side’s headquarters, but surprisingly it hadn’t been needed; her assurance that it would help in the fight against the Ubrans was all it had taken to get them to agree.
While Supreme General Astalaria’s gambit the day before had succeeded greatly in killing a whole lot of enemy soldiers, it seemed that it had also royally pissed them all off. Not only had they all found the deed abhorrent, as any person in their right mind would, they’d also lost nearly all of their possessions thanks to the event, as they’d been housed in that quarter. Lezo had been the loudest voice of protest, not shutting up for a quarter of an hour about how he’d lost his “secret stash” of alcohol. Arlette wondered just how much backlash the general had created with his own troops if these veterans had so readily volunteered for insubordination. Had the blow to the Ubrans been worth the cost?
Having nowhere to go with their old housing now gone, the whole squad now occupied the various rooms in the same empty inn as her. They’d all met up in her chamber before heading to the citadel. With the five of them plus Sofie, Pari, Pari’s equipment, and two beds all squeezed into the chamber, there was barely enough space for her to move about. Danel was engaged in conversation with Sofie about something while Lezo and Kima were clustered around Pari. Lezo seemed interested in the beastgirl’s handiwork, while Kima just seemed dazzled by the girl herself. That left just her to talk with the squad leader.
“Are you sure this plan will work?” he asked. “It seems too...”
“Simple?” Arlette offered. He nodded. “You’re soldiers, you’re not used to this kind of thing. And now with the fog, the more complicated we make everything the more likely something will go wrong.”
“I guess you’re right,” the older man allowed. “You’d know better than me anyway.”
“It’s not like I’m some spymaster or something,” Arlette replied. “I’ve done most of my work on the battlefield just like you.”
“But you have done this before.”
“A few times. Only when the enemy is distracted and not expecting it. That's why I need everybody's help. You and Kima distract the guards, Danel is the lookout and gives us the signal, and Lezo gets me onto the wall.”
“Why not just go in through the gate?”
“Well, I can’t turn invisible so the guards would see me.”
“No, I mean just walk in like a normal person. You’re part of the same side. Just talk to the guards and go inside.”
“The General just threw me in the dungeon like three days ago. I don’t want him aware I’m anywhere nearby. There’s no knowing what he’ll do.”
“If you say so.” He didn’t sound totally convinced, but Arlette didn’t feel like elaborating any further.
“We should head out,” she declared to everybody.
“Here, take these just in case,” Sofie said, handing her a small bag.
Arlette peeked inside to find two pairs of candles, one pair a light blue with specks of black and the other a pair of mottled yellow—boomcandles and stinkcandles respectively. “Isn’t Pari out of the ingredients to make these?” she asked. “We should save these. It’s not like I’m going anywhere too dangerous, anyway. I’m not even taking my armor.”
“It’s just in case. It will make me feel better knowing you have them,” the other woman replied with a look of concern. “Be careful.”
“I will.” She turned to the rest of the group. “Let’s go.”
* * *
As the squad approached the citadel, they heard a series of horns from behind them and froze. The Ubrans were gearing up to attack.
“Ha! Told you,” Lezo crowed.
“Shut up, asshole,” Kima responded, giving him a rough shove. She turned to Sergeant Muga. “What do we do?”
The older man had his eyes closed as he thought. “I don’t hear the other three,” he noted after a moment. “It seems they’re only forming up to hit the west side.”
“Weird, they always try to hit everywhere to spread out the defenders as much as possible,” Danel noted.
“Let’s continue with Arlette’s plan. The call for reinforcements hasn’t gone out, so it doesn’t sound too serious,” the sergeant decided. “But, if they do call for help or the Ubrans scale up their attack to the other sides of the city, we must abandon this and head to the battle.”
“Agreed,” Arlette nodded.
They continued on through the deepening fog, stopping just as the citadel wall came into view and ducking into a nearby alley.
“Here should be good,” Arlette said softly. “The gate’s about four hundred paces to the left. Be loud, loud enough that we can hear you even over here. If we can hear you, the guards on the wall will hear you too. Don’t try too hard and push it for too long. We only need to attract attention long enough to get me onto the wall without their noticing. It might take me a while before I’m done, so don’t bother waiting for me either. Go back to the inn and relax or something. I’ll meet you all there later.”
Kima and Sergeant Muga nodded. Lezo handed them two small bottles of liquor while grumbling about wasting their last reserves, but it was important for the plan that their breath reeked of alcohol. They each took several gulps.
Meanwhile, Lezo and Danel made their way up a nearby external staircase, whereupon the Feeler boosted the Observer up onto the roof of the two-story building they hid behind. Danel’s eyesight was the best of the group; that, and the idea that he could use his Observation to create pieces of ice to silently signal to the others made him best suited to be their lookout and coordinator.
Once Danel was ready, Sergeant Muga and Kima left while taking some more swigs of alcohol. Meanwhile, Lezo and Arlette stayed out of sight by the entrance to the alley, waiting for the signal to move. A few moments later, they heard the sergeant guffawing boisterously at high volume. Arlette cracked a small smile. The man sure knew how to be loud. It reminded her of another man who’d been about the same-
Arlette cut that line of thought off before it could go any farther. That man was dead to her. He hadn’t even been real in the first place.
A large, empty road encircled the citadel, creating a large gap of at least a hundred paces between the wall and the closest buildings. The citadel wall itself stood at about twenty-five paces high, a small shadow of the massive wall that ringed the city itself. Still, it was more than adequate. Very few Feelers were strong enough to be able to leap that height, and the gap between the wall and any nearby buildings kept people from leaping from a nearby roof.
A small spike of ice about the length of her hand formed on the ground in front of them—Danel’s signal to move. Lezo and Arlette ran as fast and quietly as they could, covering the open ground as quickly as possible while keeping an eye out for figures on the wall. Arlette trusted that Danel would not have sent them had he not witnessed any nearby guards moving in the direction of the racket happening at the gate to her left.
As soon as they got to the wall, Lezo squatted with his his hands together and she stepped up onto them. He gave her a look asking for confirmation and she nodded. With a small grunt, he heaved her skyward.
About two-thirds of the way up, Arlette realized it wasn’t going to be enough. She could feel her momentum petering out as she approached the top of the wall. Desperately, she stretched her arms up and just barely was able to catch her fingers on the top. The momentum them immediately slammed her face first into the side of the wall.
Slowly and carefully, so as not to ruin her hands’ fragile grip, Arlette pulled herself up and over the crenelation. As soon as she was atop the wall, she threw on a disguise and looked around. Nobody seemed to have noticed her little endeavor. Letting out a breath of relief, she turned away from the gate and began walking confidently along the wall, making sure to keep her gaze mostly outward as a guard should.
She’d “dodged a bullet”, as Sofie sometimes said, whatever kind of animal that was. Just a little weaker on the throw and she’d have fallen back down with only Lezo to break her fall. Not to besmirch the man, but she didn’t feel like that would end too well for her. Also, her choice to leave her armor at home for better stealth had turned out to be unexpectedly wise. The amount of noise the metal would have made when she hit the wall would have been clearly audible to anybody nearby.
It wasn’t Lezo’s fault, really. There hadn’t been any chances to practice so this had been his first time. If he’d had as much experience as Jaquet, he would have been able to throw her up properly. Jaquet had had the art of Arlette-throwing down pa-
Arlette stopped for a moment, closed her eyes, and shook her head to clear her mind of these terrible thoughts. What was going on with her today? She needed to keep her focus. The hardest part was over, but the real work was about to begin.
* * *
Finding the proper ministry was a simple task, as she’d been there multiple times before when dealing with the administration of the Ivory Tears. Part of an area she’d long ago dubbed “Bureaucracy Row”, the entrance to the offices could be found along a lengthy hallway with door that led to offices for all sorts of mundane governance-related things: farming, masonry, bookkeeping... you name it, there was probably an office for it somewhere down that hall.
This time, however, the offices looked very different than what she remembered. Gone was the hustle and bustle, the noise of ruffling paper and quiet conversation, the clerks and scribes that acted like they had too much on their plate to deal with you. Instead, there was dust and silence. All the better for her.
She slipped into the office where she’d signed up the Ivory Tears years ago, back when they’d stayed in Crirada for half a year. Judging by the thickness of the layers of dust on the desks and floors, nobody had been inside this room in days. Making sure the doors and windows were shut to block the noise and light, Arlette Observed a small candle flame and began to rummage through drawers, looking for what she desired.
There were budget documents, whole books on mercenary law, and a myriad of random notes and other things she could make neither heads nor tails of... but no mercenary list. After minutes of searching, she still couldn’t find the list she needed. Suddenly the folly of her plan became clear to her. Supreme General Astalaria’s command would surely need the list she was looking for. They must have taken it way back when he’d first arrived and likely kept it in his command headquarters, well out of her reach.
Arlette sank down to the floor and covered her face in her hands. She’d placed so much hope in this effort. She’d even enlisted her squad and put them at risk. For what?
Desperately she wracked her mind, trying to think of something she could get out of this now. When she’d first visited this office, she’d signed up her band and what had the man said? Right, this had been their first service in Eterium and she’d asked how the country would handle payouts. He’d replied that their info would be shared with the Ministry of Payroll office and that she should direct her questions to them instead before proceeding to dismiss and ignore her.
The payroll office! Perhaps they had a copy of the list!
Quickly she went back to the hall and proceeded to the payroll office at the far end of the hall. She’d been here before too in her past quest for answers to simple questions. Much like the other rooms, dust caked the desks and tables. Unlike the other rooms, cabinets and shelves lined the walls, all filled with records going back decades. Summoning another flame, she began to look once more.
Half an hour of worried searching later, she found what she was looking for: a large book resting on top of some papers inside a cabinet drawer with words “Mercenary Records” written in elegant handwriting on the spine. Eagerly she opened the tome, flipping through the pages expectantly, only for her excited smile to falter.
This wasn’t the list she wanted. Instead, it was a compilation of all the mercenary bands in Eterium, each page listing a specific band’s details, including the name, the number of people, the details of their contract and how much money was owed, and the band’s leader. Other than the leader’s identity, no other names were listed. Frantically, she paged through the book, hoping to find more names later on, but alas, there were none. All she found was the same information sort of information on every page, with various numbers and names whatnot crossed out and replaced with more recent information, sometimes multiple times.
With a sinking feeling, Arlette realized she hadn’t thought this through. “Sharing information” didn’t have to mean the Mercenary Ministry just copied a humongous list of people and gave it to the Ministry of Payroll. That would be a lot of work and they’d have to do it frequently to keep up with people joining, leaving, or dying. Why would they bother to do all that when the payroll office wouldn’t even need all the names? It wasn’t like they paid each mercenary individually. They just gave the whole amount to the band’s leader and let them handle it.
She quickly went through various sections of the book, checking for anything that struck her as wrong. There were the Crescent Executors, a well-known group led by Volkan Basturk; the Shadows of Sacrifice, a lesser known band that she’d worked with once before, led by a woman named Angharad Camm; the Shields of the Valiant Order, a newer group led by Gabon Veleza...
Most of the mercenary bands she found she’d at least heard of before, and she couldn’t find anything out of the ordinary with the ones she didn’t know. Arlette was of half a mind to just give up and leave. The longer this went on, the more of a waste of time it seemed and the guiltier she felt about it. No, she decided. She’d already cashed in this favor and involved her own squad in this foolish idea. She owed it to both herself and to them to at least finish looking through this place in the faint hope that she’d find something, anything, that could put her closer to finding Sebastian.
With that in mind, she renewed her search, checking the next drawer of that cabinet, and then the one after that before moving to the next cabinet. A while later, she’d run out of cabinets. This was the last one. This was it. She’d already checked the desks and the bookshelves. If there was nothing worthwhile inside this, then tonight would be labeled an unmitigated disaster.
The top drawer contained a series of large books containing payment records for various low-level government officials. The second drawer contained neat piles of loose parchment that looked like contracts signed with various businesses. The bottom drawer, the third and final one, just contained more records. Arlette leaned back and sighed hopelessly. What a letdown this had become.
Just as she was about to close the bottom drawer, she stopped and looked at it in greater detail. She’d just spent the last half hour looking at cabinet drawers, and something was subtly off about this one. On a hunch, she removed all the records from it and put her one hand on the inside bottom of the drawer and the other hand on the underside. Her findings only made her grow more interested: the height of this drawer didn’t match up on the inside with the outside! Taking out a dagger, she began feeling around for a way to remove the false bottom before finally just jamming the knife into the crease between the side and bottom and wedging the bottom off.
There was a small book inside without any marking on the cover. Curiosity combining with desperation, she flipped it open and paged through until she hit the first blank page. The book was just another list of names, none of which meant anything to her. She read through the few names on the last page.
Txarles Azcona, Santzo Burgubure, Orfeo Vara, Zeres Zalbidea, Talia Araucua, Karmen Beriain, Jakob Barabe, Gendule Velez, Eako Mendieta.
What did those names mean? It couldn’t be the mercenary list she’d coveted; the book itself was far too small to hold even a quarter of all the names in such a list. Flipping back to the front, she noticed something written on the upper corner of the inside of the cover: “Sweepers”. Her spirit fell. All the secrecy made sense now, in the most disappointing way. This was a list of the people who made up the much-maligned social class of street cleaners. They were looked down upon by all, including her, as harbingers of disease and filth. In order to protect their identities from a public that would shame them greatly, as well as to help block the toxic smell of the refuse they dealt with, Sweepers wore masks and concealing cloaks. But of course somebody had to know who worked behind those masks because somebody had to pay their wages like any other government employee.
Nothing could have summed up this entire endeavor better than this last discovery: a cart-load of potential and expectation that in the end amounted to absolutely nothing. Enough was enough. This entire night had been a monumental waste of time. With a sigh, she stood up and left the offices behind.
Getting out of the citadel was comically easy compared with getting in. All she had to do, clad in her illusory disguise, was walk out like anybody else, and so that was what she did. What reason would guards have to keep her inside?
Another series of horns echoed across the city as she made her way back home, a different and more fortuitous pattern than the last one. The attack on the West Gate had ended, and the walls still held against the Ubran menace. At least one good thing had happened this night.
Arlette arrived at the inn where they’d taken their rooms shortly thereafter—“taken” being somewhat literal in this case, as like most places in the city the building had been abandoned by its owners before the siege. She found everybody inside her room again.
“-so I pretended I recognized him as an old comrade from back in the day. I kept calling up old war stories and going on and on and he didn’t know how to deal with it at all,” she could hear Sergeant Muga explaining with laughter. “And get this: the thing that made them really mad, more angry even than how we were bothering them, was that we still had alcohol and they’d run out!”
A chorus of laughter went up. Arlette allowed a minute smile to emerge on her face. At least they seemed to have had a pretty good time. Everybody head turned her way as she opened the door, and immediately inquiries barraged her from every direction. She worked her way through the curious throng and plopped down on her bed, setting her sword against the nearby wall.
“That bad, huh?” Sofie asked.
“A total bust,” Arlette reluctantly admitted. “I couldn’t find anything. I’m sorry, everybody.”
“They didn’t have what you were looking for?” Kima asked with a frown.
“Yeah... I think the Supreme General himself has what I need. All I could find were a bunch of records too abstract to tell me anything useful.”
“That’s all? What a letdown,” Lezo replied. “You had me all excited, thinking we were going to be saving the day and all that.”
“Yeah, I’m sorry. It didn’t work out. I did find something you might find amusing, at least. I found a list of the names of the Sweepers who worked in the city.”
“Whoa, really?! Those freaks?!” Kima exclaimed. “Do they have weird-sounding names and shit?”
“Nah, they’re the same as the rest of us. Orfeo Vara, Jakob Barabe, Karmen Beriain, normal Eterian names.”
“Nya? Basilli?” a high-pitched voice chimed in.
“What?” a confused Arlette replied.
“Arly-sis said Basilli!” Pari declared.
“Oh yeah, I remember that now,” Sofie added. “That was Basilli’s other name, remember? Jakob Barabe. I told you back when we were being taken back to Kutrad. That’s so weird. What are the odds that we’d find another Jakob Barabe? Is that a common name here?”
“No, Barabe’s a pretty rare family name,” Danel replied.
“Yeah, I’ve never met a Barabe before,” agreed Sergeant Muga. “Is this somebody you know? The name Basilli rings a bell for some reason.”
“Basilli Inciar is one of the people who had a bounty on his head,” Danel reminded the older man.
“Oh, right. I guess he went his own way after the bounty was dropped?”
“No, he’s... not here anymore,” Sofie explained remorsefully. “He was a total jerk a lot of the time but funnily enough I miss him. Especially Arlette, she worked with him for years. Right, Arlette? Arlette?”
Arlette didn’t respond, the conversation’s words going inside her one ear and straight out the other. Her mind was too busy spinning with sudden thoughts, a series of what-ifs and crazy conjectures mixing inside her to fill her with a cold foreboding dread. There was no way the sudden thought that had popped in her head could be real. It had to be just another creation of years of paranoia. But...
There was only one way she could extinguish the ball of panic that was building slowly but surely in her soul. Arlette quickly got to her feet and grabbed her cuirass. The armor was something she’d picked up “secondhand”, so it didn’t exactly fit perfectly and it took a bit of effort to squirm into it even when rushing like she was now. Once it was properly encasing her torso, she grabbed her sword and headed towards the door.
“Arlette, what the hell are you doing?” Sofie asked.
“I have to go check something,” she replied as she slipped out of the room.
She could hear her squadmates heading down the stairs after her as she left the inn. She ignored the calls for her to wait, instead kicking into a fast run as she turned towards the West Gate. She was just going to check, just going to make sure that everything was normal, and then she’d come back.
Some strange occurrences today had been bugging Arlette since earlier. The most notable had been the strange attack that had happened while she was in the citadel. Why had the Ubrans launched a night assault tonight, and why only on one side when doing so meant they likely wouldn’t accomplish anything? At the time, she’d dismissed the oddity as merely just that, one of the many strange occurrences that happened during war through a combination of bad communication, bad planning, and plain bad luck. But as much as she hated the Ubrans, she couldn’t say they were stupid. Was it truly a display of incompetence?
Arlette had been around the gates and gatehouses of Crirada enough to understand the strengths and weaknesses of its design. Getting into a gatehouse from outside was nigh impossible unless you had enough people to completely overwhelm the entire area. You had to make it up to the top of the wall and then descend the many flights of stairs without getting roasted or impaled or turned into a pincushion just to get to the ground again. But even then your battle wasn’t over. The Eterians always kept a reserve of fighters down at the bottom to take care of anybody fast, strong, or lucky enough to make it that far, and even if you made it through them, you’d still have to take the gatehouse itself—another daunting task given how it only had two entrances, one on each side of the gate, which served as natural bottlenecks. If you somehow managed to survive such a gauntlet of death, then unless you were a strong Feeler accompanied by another seven or so Feelers, you wouldn’t have the strength to open the gate anyway!
Yet, much like how she’d been able to stroll leisurely out of the citadel without issue earlier, all of this assumed that the enemy would be coming from outside the wall. If the reserves at ground level were taken by surprise and the gatehouse fell, suddenly the design of the defenses would be working against the Eterians instead of for them. A smaller group would be able to hold off the defenders more easily while they opened the gate. The thin width of the stairways down the wall would limit the speed at which the soldiers on the wall would be able to descend to take back the gatehouse. And all that only mattered if they even knew something was wrong downstairs!
Was it a coincidence that tonight was the first night with fog so heavy and clouds so low that the clouds engulfed the top of the wall, meaning that nobody above would even be able to see if something happened down below? Was it a coincidence that the fog would muffle the sound of any fighting if it were to occur? Was it a coincidence that this sort of weather happened every year reliably enough that you could plan on it? If she could think to use it to her advantage, why couldn’t somebody else?
All this time, Arlette had been focused on the mercenaries and soldiers in the city in her hunt for Sebastian. They were, after all, the only groups who remained in Crirada to fight. But that was actually incorrect—there was one other smaller group of people who had also remained, a group who didn’t fight but instead played another crucial role. They appeared after every battle, collecting the fallen weapons and armor, removing the gore and viscera, and taking away the bodies of the fallen.
The Sweepers. The one group of people that everybody else did everything in their power to pretend didn’t exist. Arlette was no exception. In an entire season, she’d never thought to investigate the Sweepers even once. In fact, like the rest of the defenders, she tried to avoid looking at them altogether. Only now, after Sofie and Pari had made this connection between Basilli and the Sweepers, had Arlette realized her folly.
It was possible, nay, likely, that this was all just a coincidence and there was another man named Jakob Barabe who happened to be a Sweeper in Crirada. But there was another possibility. What if Sebastian was posing as a Sweeper and had used Basilli’s name as his alias? Maybe he’d found out her dead cohort’s other name while looking into them, and, convinced nobody would ever know, decided to use that name for kicks? Taking the very identity of a man he’d killed with his own two hands was the sort of thing Sebastian would find amusing. After all, who would know? The names of Sweepers were kept secret! Either way, that name was one of the last to be entered into the book, meaning he’d been a recent addition, and his name hadn’t been crossed out, meaning he’d still been alive before the siege had started.
Which led her back to the strange attack. What if the attack had been simply a pretense? What if the result of the battle itself hadn’t been the point? What it the reason had simply to create some corpses and provide the Sweepers with a justification to appear and mingle with non-suspecting soldiers, and then strike when it was least expected? The soldiers wouldn’t see it coming until it was too late!
Arlette knew that she was grasping at straws, but once she’d connected all the disparate pieces together in her mind, she’d been unable to pull them apart on faith alone. She needed to know for sure. She needed to see the reserves by the stairs. She needed to see the guards outside the gatehouse entrances. She needed to witness with her own eyes that her wild imaginings were just that. Because if her fears were true...
It would be ludicrous. It would be insane. It would be the kind of thing that not even a madman would consider. It would be just the sort of thing that Sebastian would do.
The wet air whipped through her hair as she ran. She was getting close now, she believed, so she slowed down to recover her strength a little and move more quietly. Several moments later, the others caught up to her.
“What are you rushing off for?!” Lezo whined as soon as he pulled up beside her, his lungs puffing laboriously as he tried to regain his stamina. A man so large wasn’t good at running long distances.
“Not so loud!” she hissed. “I just need to verify something. That’s all. You didn’t have to follow me.”
“Your friend asked us to make sure you didn’t do anything regrettable,” Kima chimed in. “She said you had a look in your eye that meant you were going to do something stupid.”
Arlette sighed.
“Something doesn’t feel right,” Sergeant Muga said after a moment. “It’s too quiet.”
“Are you sure it’s not just the mist?” Arlette asked, fishing for confirmation that her paranoid conclusions might have some basis in reality. They passed by the final buildings and came upon the wide gap between the edge of the city and the wall. The fog here was thick, limiting her sight to perhaps seventy paces at best.
“Yeah... where is everybody?” Lezo asked.
The feeling of dread in Arlette’s gut doubled. Her squadmates were right, this place was too empty even for this time of night.
“Look,” Danel spoke up, as he squatted down by a dark stain on a stone-covered street. He ran a finger over the blotch and brought it back up for all to see. His fingertip was dyed red. “It’s fresh. Something happened here not too long ago.”
“Probably just some fighting with Ubrans who made it over the wall,” Kima offered up.
“Maybe,” Danel replied. “But they’re right, where are the reserves? The shift still has a few hours to go.”
“The gatehouse.” Sergeant Muga was already striding through the fog, a grim expression on his face. Arlette and the others quickly followed.
A few moments later, Arlette spotted the outlines of four figures in the fog. As they grew closer, those hazy silhouettes sharpened into four soldiers guarding the left side’s gatehouse entrance. The right entrance stood on the other side of the archway, barely visible in the distance as a dark blotch in the fog. She couldn’t see well enough to tell if there was anybody there.
The guards’ alert levels spiked as they noticed them approaching. Arlette let out a breath she hadn’t been aware she’d been holding. They were just guards. Normal soldiers. No animal masks, no all-concealing cloaks. Just guards, their armor crusted with blood. It seemed that they’d been fighting not too long ago.
“Have you seen the reserves?” Sergeant Muga asked them. “We have a message for them but we haven’t been able to find where they went.”
Arlette was astounded at the older man’s ability to just spew bullshit with ease. He sounded exactly like a bored soldier carrying out a routine order.
“They went up the wall,” one of the guards replied.
“Really? What for?”
“Don’t know. Just overheard them get orders.” The man shrugged.
“Well then, while we’re here we need to speak to the Gatemaster,” the sergeant continued.
The guard shook his head. “The Gatemaster is busy at the moment. She gave orders to not be disturbed.”
“I see...” Sergeant Muga said, stroking his beard.
“Question,” Danel interjected, “where did the blood on your armor come from? It looks recent.”
“What, did you miss the attack, you idiot?” the guard replied, annoyed. “Ubrans did something weird this time. Don’t know what happened upstairs but a whole bunch of them got down here and we had to fight them off. A real pain in the ass, it was.”
“Then if your armor is so dirty,” Danel followed up, “why isn’t there any blood on your body?”
Everybody froze as Arlette noticed what Danel was saying: while the armor they were wearing was wet with blood and dirty like they’d just been in an intense battle recently, there wasn’t a single spot of blood or dirt on their exposed skin. It would be practically impossible to remain clean after such a fight... unless they’d been wearing cloaks and masks that would have caught all the blood, and then put on some pilfered armor afterwards.
Everybody moved at the same time. The talkative guard quickly drew his sword and struck at Sergeant Muga, who blocked the blow with his own sword while pulling out his shield. Arlette stepped backward, out of the range of the nearest guard’s mace as it flew through her former position. Then Lezo was between them, his large axe embedding itself in the guard’s shield.
Suddenly a low rumble began to eminate from the wall, the sound of gears beginning to turn and chains beginning to retract. Though she couldn't see the gate itself through the fog, a scraping sound coming from that direction told her everything she needed. The three huge metal beams that braced the gate were being retracted into the archway's side. She'd heard this sound many times before—it was the first step in opening the gate.
One more sound caught her ears: the sound of more “guards” approaching from the direction of the other gatehouse entrance.
“Arlette, get inside! We’ll hold these guys off! Stop them before they open the gate!” Sergeant Muga ordered. With the coordination that only a squad that had fought side-by-side could pull off, the other four squad members each sent a blade or an icicle towards the middle of the enemy’s formation, forcing their opponents away from the doorway for just a moment.
Arlette dived through the gap and ran into the gatehouse, sword gripped tightly in her right hand. Though the lighting inside was dim, with only a few small torches providing any illumination, she didn’t need much. As somebody who’d guarded these gates before the siege, she’d been inside plenty of times, and she knew exactly where to go.
The layout of the gatehouses was fairly simple. First, there was a long corridor about ten paces wide with an array of slits in the right wall going all the way from one end to the other. Ideally, this was where Eterian soldiers would unleash a variety of death into the invading Ubrans if the gate was breached. One look told her that wouldn't be happening. Bodies covered the floor in great pools of sticky, half-dried blood. Most of the corpses wore armor, but she spotted several wearing dark cloaks and animal masks among the dead. This had been a massacre.
Arlette ran over the mess of bloody remains as quickly as she could without tripping on the uneven footing. Her goal lied deeper inside. At the end of the corridor was a short hallway, perhaps twenty or thirty paces long that terminated into a stairwell with side hallway going left. Those stairs led to higher floors with more slits, and if you went high enough you’d be able to cross over the gate passage and descend to the right side of the gatehouse, which in most ways mirrored the left side she was currently in.
The one difference in the sides was the hallway to the left near the stairs, which was not reflected on the right side. That short hallway was her destination. At its end was the most important room in the gatehouse: the gear room. It was there that the actual process of opening the gate happened. Skidding around the corner, Arlette caught a glimpse of exactly what she feared—a collection of people wearing disturbing masks over their heads, their bodies covered by large cloaks, all of which were stained red with blood—before the view was cut off by a large blast of flame going off just in front of her.
Arlette threw herself backward, hoping to get around the corner before the flames hit, but she’d been moving so fast in the opposite direction that reversing course took time—too much time. The flames washed over her left arm and torso as she fell backward, the intense heat searing her flesh all the way to the bone. She screamed in agony as she felt her left side begin to cook. Quickly she rolled about as best she could to put out the flames, but great damage had already been done.
Her left arm was out of commission. If she made it through this it would heal eventually, perhaps after twenty days or so, but for now she was down to just one arm. Her torso had fared a bit better thanks to the armor, but just barely. Doing anything, from moving to breathing, sent spikes of agony straight from her side to her brain. Her fighting ability was now a shadow of what it was just moments ago. She coughed, then let out a hearty “FUCK!” as she leaned against the hallway side.
Then she heard a voice over the din of grinding gears and rattling chains, one that sent her mind reeling and spiraling into confusion and disbelief. It wasn't the deep, strong voice of Sebastian Cunningham. No, it was a different voice, but one still horribly familiar. It was the voice of a man that she'd watched die before her very eyes, now calling out to her with a simple, mocking greeting.
“Oh, hey Boss! Fancy meeting you here!”
