Bloodcrete (The Weirkey Chronicles Book 6), page 25
"So that's Wiltur's secret army," Friend Nauda said. "That's repulsive."
"Bad!" Associate Krikree agreed.
"But if he was planning to work together with them, he wouldn't have summoned them now. What were they supposed to do? Steal the artifact and then run away?"
"I believe he will pretend to fight them," Fiyu said. "Then he can be the person who won the battle, but he can collect the artifact from them later. Tythes said that was what he wanted most."
"How did he pay them? There aren't any Stronghold mercenaries anywhere, as far as I know. Clearly they've been given wild tribes bodies, but is that really payment enough? We're missing something here."
"There's something even bigger," Friend Theo said. "There aren't any good gates between Deuxan and this part of the continent - trust me, I checked after Esaire fought me. I also don't think anyone in Norro Yorthin has a Deuxan weirkey."
That was indeed a troubling thought: House Crimson was powerful within one region, but this spoke of power on a much larger scale. Fiyu bit her lower lip as she considered the possibilities. Her own relative had apparently worked with others across worlds, so it stood to reason that there might be other organizations with more sinister motives...
"Fight!" Associate Krikree said, pointing a spear out toward the battle.
"We see it," Friend Nauda snapped. The Slescan immediately dropped to the ground prostrate, her body trembling.
Friend Theo knelt beside Associate Krikree and rubbed her head in a way that made her spine loosen slightly. "She's saying that we need to take action, or it will be too late. Everybody was already tired, and this new army is potent."
"Should we move now? Tythes said he was going to start something, though he's done precious little..."
Even as Friend Nauda spoke, however, Fiyu was sensing a substantial change in the battlefield. She couldn't feel the gate opening, but she identified it when numerous shapes began to flow through. Slescans. A massive force of army ants, rapidly swarming out of the gate and attacking the Deuxan army. No... it seemed they were attacking anyone in their path.
"That can't last," Friend Nauda said, but it didn't sound like she believed it. "Slescans like that can't survive here, so they should start crumpling... but they're not."
"It's a safe assumption that Tythes had a plan for that too." Friend Theo examined the battle with a cool gaze. "So he's brought an army to counter his father's. We don't know what either is going for in the end, but that part makes sense."
The others seemed happy to presume the reasons, but Fiyu stretched her senses further. Something flickered in the mass, and she would have missed it if her senses hadn't merged with her body in her Corporeal Floor. She could just make out a figure moving among the Slescans: it felt like a humanoid figure wrapped in gauze, so she presumed it was Unknown Tythes. There seemed to be a cloak of cantae flowing around the Slescan army, very subtle but definitely present.
"So that's what he's doing." Friend Nauda folded her arms and frowned at the battle. "Do we attack Wiltur's army, then? If Tythes has that under control, and the Asplundat Movement can be convinced to stand down, then Wiltur is the only one pushing the battle on."
"I am not sure that is wise." Fiyu bowed in apology to Friend Nauda, but she continued sharing her thoughts. "That army is large and includes a Stronghold. It also may intend to leave. I believe it would be better for us to locate the artifact. We can have more impact on it than on the battle overall."
Friend Nauda looked at her with a deeper frown, but didn't argue further. Both of them glanced toward Theo, but he only shook his head. "We don't know enough. The Order of the Deepest Blue is a wildcard too, and they might already have run away with the device. It could be essential, or we could be chasing nothing."
"Come on, Theo," Friend Nauda said, "we need someone to break the tie."
"Fiyu-queen good! Nauda-queen bad!"
"Oh, now you stand up to queens?"
Associate Krikree retreated to the other side of Friend Theo's body and brandished her weapons defensively.
"Doing nothing is definitely the worst choice." Friend Theo turned to face the group, and the trembling in his secondary muscles had entirely vanished. "We push closer under Fiyu's stealth, then we split up and avoid attention. Nauda, you find Tythes and argue with him until he stops causing so much collateral damage. Fiyu, you can most easily slip around the fighting, so confirm whether the Order stole the device. Krikree... do you want t-"
"Ivo-sister!"
"Alright, Krikree and I will go to the Blacksilver defenses in case the device was returned. If you see a way to improve things, take it, but I don't think this battle is getting stopped with an easy discussion. The best we can do might be preventing the worst in the aftermath."
It was a sad conclusion, but Fiyu believed that Friend Theo was correct. She strengthened her stealth around her companions and led them into the chaos.
~ ~ ~
Nauda wished that everyone would have agreed with her plan, and she would have preferred to stay hidden within Fiyu's sphere, but she couldn't counter their arguments. With all the best actions seeming likely to fail, they needed to test for what was even possible.
Along the way, she forced herself to take a closer look at the "fleshmaskers" who had arrived. Through her telescope, their soulhomes appeared to be built partially from flesh. They used sublime stones and metals, but fibrous tissue connected them, and some of the walls throbbed as she watched. All of that was repulsive enough, but what troubled her more were their shielding walls. None contained any trace of living materials, and she strongly suspected that if they wanted, they could pass as real Fithans. This attack was designed to horrify, not deceive.
As soon as their group split up, Nauda began sprinting across the top of the plateau. She couldn't fight many of the soulcrafters in the battle, so speed was her best defense. Fiyu had said that Tythes was staying in the center of his Slescan army, which meant Nauda could guess his position. Most likely he was using the stone sphere artifact that he had used on Slest to hide himself.
When she got near the ants, they immediately tried to swarm her. Nauda could have fought her way through, but they might technically be allies against the much worse Deuxan fleshmaskers, so instead she gathered herself. With her bondsfungi hardening her skin, she charged directly through the group, knocking them in all directions. A few jaws scraped off her skin, but none of them managed to draw blood.
Once she got close enough, the barrier around Tythes failed and she could see him: calmly walking among the ant army, a dark blue sphere raised over his head. He used it to wave cheerfully at her and the cantae over the battlefield shifted wildly.
"Nauda! How do you like my bugs?"
"Is this why you seduced Queen Yeshir?" she asked. As she got within a few steps of him, the ants all disengaged and continued rushing toward the other armies. "Did you know that she eats the meat of intelligent humans?"
"Oh, she definitely does, if you know what I... wait, that one actually works. She really strips the bone clean, if... actually, that one could make sense too." Tythes sighed theatrically. "I'm cursed with a gift for tantalizing innuendo."
While he played at being a fool, the ants he had led into Fithe swarmed over a woman and tore her apart. Nauda almost leapt to act, but it was one of the fleshmaskers. No one deserved to die that way, but she wouldn't risk herself for someone who wore human skin to work with Wiltur. She had to admit that Tythes had placed his gate very effectively so that his ants primarily attacked the new fleshmasker army instead of all the others.
"You said that you were willing to work with us." Nauda jabbed Tythes in the chest. "Just what is all this? Do you know how many will die before they're done?"
"Oh, quite a few. To return to the question you carelessly abandoned earlier, these actually aren't Yeshir's soldiers. They were stolen from one of her enemy hives."
"What? How did you manage that?"
"I promised them the flesh of all the humans living in this region."
Nauda stared, wondering if it could be a sick joke, but Tythes only grinned.
"I know, it's really quite troubling how the Slescans have such a limited understanding of commerce." All at once his smile vanished. "I'm sorry, Nauda. But this is too important for your moral concerns."
Before she could react, Tythes flipped a hand upward and Nauda was struck by a wave of cantae. She braced herself, and the bondsfungi deflected it, but she realized when her feet left the ground that it had never been intended to harm her. It only launched her into the air, sending her sailing high over the battlefield where Deuxan and Slescan flesh-eaters tore into one another.
Her arc would have taken her to one of the few less occupied plateaus, but in midair she passed an Asplundat Authority. A jagged piece of stone flew toward her and Nauda barely raised her staff in time to meet it. Even with her full binding technique, her momentum was wrenched to the side and she went tumbling over the stone.
Nauda sailed through the upper part of the dust storm and smacked into the side of another plateau. She managed to get a grip with her other hand and levered herself upward. It took more out of her than it should have, since the blows had shaken her, but there was no one attacking her. In fact, it seemed like the battlefield had grown quieter.
Overhead, the Strongholds were emitting enormous amounts of cantae. The fleshmasker was lashing his silver whip into the stone sphere of the Asplundat soulcrafter, and even if she wasn't inside it, the sphere seemed to be sagging like her strength was running out.
Just then Wiltur attacked from behind with a blinding show of light. It produced a cantae shockwave that blew back Nauda's hair, but she had a feeling that it hadn't actually done much damage. She saw the Deuxan Stronghold fly backward, apparently unharmed, and then he pulled out a weirkey and vanished.
"The enemy has fallen!" Wiltur boomed over the battlefield. "Come, let us finish the others!"
All theater. Nauda wasn't sure if the lower ranked fleshmaskers had ways to escape or if they were being sacrificed, but there were still plenty of them fighting for their lives. She thought it looked like those in the north were slipping away, while those attacked by Tythes seemed to be pinned down.
Then it had all gone close enough to Wiltur's plan. He floated over the battlefield, grandly generating another sphere of crimson cantae. Until that moment, she hadn't seen any similarity between the man and his son, but they both had a flair for the theatric. Now Wiltur could be seen as the hero of the battle, strike a blow to his enemies, and possibly still end up with the demonic artifact in secret.
The earth quaked and a fist broke through the stone of a nearby plateau: larger than the hand of a titan and formed of blood red stone.
Nauda and half the battlefield stared in shock as a golem taller than the plateaus emerged. Every surface of its body bled a thick liquid that felt potent even from a distance. After Theo had told her about the bloodcrete, she had assumed that he had interrupted the Asplundat plan to hide it in the Dustwind Plateaus. Apparently they had more of it than anyone had predicted.
Even from a distance, Nauda thought she could see surprise in Wiltur's posture. He swiveled and released his crimson sphere against the golem... which easily batted it aside with one hand. The sphere sailed into the clouds, dimming to a red glow, and then exploded as bright as a second sun.
When the golem leapt up to a plateau, the earth shook. It reached up, so tall that its fingers threatened to grasp Wiltur. He retaliated, and the burst of cantae sent red stones scattering across the battlefield.
As the fragments plummeted toward her, Nauda threw herself over the edge of her plateau. She struck the opposite side and skidded down, even as she watched the debris from the battle crashing into the opposite wall. The surface was going to be lethal for anyone without strong defenses soon, and she definitely couldn't do any more good up there.
Before Nauda could develop a new plan, she saw a man running past her in a House of Burning Leaves robe. Homez charged after him in full stone armor and gestured wildly at her. "Stop him!"
She hadn't intended to comply, but she automatically thrust her staff and bound the man in place. He seemed like a normal Archcrafter from Norro Yorthin, so she was technically fighting against her own side. Homez had sounded so urgent, however...
Suddenly the Fithan man's flesh twisted, and he slipped out of her binding. Nauda had a brief glimpse of a Deuxan face underneath, then the entire mass snapped together. That confirmed her theory that the fleshmaskers could hide themselves perfectly, and she had seen something even more important: he had been carrying the demonic artifact inside his flesh.
Nauda should have been glad to have run across him. But as she prepared to fight, all she could think was that Fiyu and Theo were charging into the most dangerous part of the battle for nothing.
Chapter 25
Running through a battlefield was simultaneously very easy and very hard. Theo freely cast gravitational fields around him that rendered the majority of opponents unable to effectively strike him, thus giving him a clear path. But the instant an Authority noticed him, or a Stronghold technique came anywhere near, he was running along the edge of death.
Krikree ran alongside him, viciously striking at anyone who could get through his gravity. She seemed to be enjoying herself, antennae twitching wildly as she fought. Often when an opponent dropped she would look back toward him for approval, and though he couldn't focus much on her in the middle of a battle, brief eye contact seemed to be enough.
By the time he got anywhere near the Blacksilver circle, he knew that he had no chance of finding the device. It was possible that the Order of the Deepest Blue had already escaped with it. But he still closed in, because if he was staying invested in Fithe, he should check on the people involved.
It didn't seem like there was much fighting around the metal circle that defended the largest farm. Parts of it had been dented, but the barrier stood firm, which just meant that none of the Strongholds had struck it directly. Fortunately, it seemed like the Asplundat Stronghold had been pressing the battle further east instead, and Wiltur didn't seem to have any reason to kill off the local Fithans. They were reasonably safe, he just needed to locate House Blacksilver.
Then an enormous golem made its way onto the plateaus, erasing all other concerns. He'd never imagined that the Asplundat Movement could have smuggled in so much bloodcrete, or that it could be controlled by one person. As it began to fight Wiltur, he thought that it was being controlled by an Authority, spending their life to briefly fight on the level of a Stronghold.
Combined, the Asplundat forces were driving Wiltur further back. Theo monitored them via his gravity senses and just focused on reaching the defensive ring. He didn't see any of the Blacksilver soulcrafters who had once been there, though given the chaos of the battle, he shouldn't have been surprised.
No, he did see one... on the other side of the barrier, Karchibol lay surrounded by local Fithans. His robes all across his torso were wet with blood, but it seemed like the local healers had stabilized him. A young woman, maybe even one of those whose farm he had defended long ago, stepped up to the edge of the barrier.
"Are you here to help him?" she asked. "He won't die, but we can't fully heal him."
"There's still too much going on out here." Theo glanced around the evacuee area again, as something was troubling his senses. Nothing that he could see. "What happened to House Blacksilver?"
"All your friends? They tried to fight for us, but they got pushed out when the new armies showed up."
"Hold for now. I'll try to..." Again a flicker. Theo threw himself back before the air split in half where he had been standing.
When he traced the cantae technique back to the source, Theo saw a haze of air that slowly resolved into a form. It was one of the Deuxan fleshmaskers... no, it was the Authority who had begun their attack with a decapitation. The man walked around the edge of the defensive barrier, scraping the tip of his sword against it. Sparks flew up from where the two touched, and it wasn't the sword being damaged.
"There's what I actually want." The fleshmasker smiled unusually widely, as if Theo was seeing teeth behind a skin suit. "Half-breed? Outsider? It doesn't matter, you'll be much more interesting than this barbarian flesh."
"So you can talk." Theo turned toward him as if he wasn't concerned to be facing an Authority. "I wondered if you were all monsters."
"Oh, not at all. We simply have... highly-refined tastes."
While the fleshmasker walked closer, Theo heard an [Ambush!] pheromone from Krikree. He resisted the urge to look at her, but emitted [Not] in response. His senses weren't polished enough to be sure, but she seemed to be creeping up on their opponent from behind.
"Nothing to say?" Another too-broad grin. "Well, don't struggle too much. Wouldn't want to mar all that nice skin."
Theo cast a cantae bolt at his opponent's face, but the fleshmasker cut it out of the air with a contemptuous swing of his sword. He was definitely fast, and his soulhome operated on a principle that Theo had never seen before. If not for Krikree and the local Fithans, he would have already fled instead of taking on such a risky fight.
Shards of the bloodcrete golem scattered over the battlefield, interrupting their face-off. The fleshmasker knocked them out of the air with his sword, while Theo simply reversed the gravity of the shards approaching him. He saw Krikree moving and his spirit screamed [No!], but she was already attacking.
To Krikree's credit, she struck in vicious silence. Her pickaxe struck the Authority in the back and actually penetrated some distance despite his cantae, it just wasn't enough to disable him. His upper body swiveled entirely around and he slashed out at her, yet she managed to dodge the cut, and even a second, her spear stabbing into his chest repeatedly.
