Steel Wolves of Craedia (Realm of Arkon, Book 3) (33 page)

It was only in the third village that I saw a local up close. The old demon was standing on the side of the road, leaning on the shaft of a shovel dug into the ground, and eyeing the armored warriors riding past him. I focused on the demon, and swore through clenched teeth when I noticed the debuff on him. The malady that had befallen Gilthoreans was called the Gray Scourge. The old demon's stats were decreased by ninety eighty percent! I wondered how he remained on his feet at all. Hart! And, as always, I was catastrophically short on time—just a day and a half to rescue the locals from the affliction. The mad race was continuing. And I had been relying on the Gilthoreans for assistance! I'd been hoping to recruit at least fifty people today, and tomorrow morning to head into the gods-forsaken instance, which was designed for a raid of fifty, and blow it all to hell. But if all the locals were smitten by this debuff, they were essentially useless. Thankfully, our own forces should be more than sufficient: the level 180 dungeon was designed for a raid of fifty, while the lowest member of my clan was 188. Admittedly, it was concerning that I'd yet to complete an instance that didn't also feature some nasty and unforeseeable surprise: the Swamp Cave had the raid boss, the Ghorazm Ruins had been several months of pure torture, and even the West Wing had forced me into rescuing some barbarian.

So, what did I know about this plague? The outbreak happened after the local ruler, Satrap Rumpel, had taken his forces to the Derelict Temple a little under one month ago. I had no idea what had possessed him to go there or even if he had survived the expedition. What else? The plague probably couldn't be cured by your standard methods, and I didn't have enough potions of Greater Healing for the entire province. The only remaining option was to remove the source behind the symptom known as Ulrich the Zealot. I'd never met a demon or beast from the Gray Frontier with that kind of name. I would guess the bastard was one of the disavowed—who else would hang around a temple occupied by the fiends of the Twice Cursed god? Could it be him that the vampire patriarch was going to see? X'tahr was feeding worms presently—assuming they could stomach his flesh—and couldn't answer that question. I decided to ask Ulrich instead, right before bashing in his head. 

"Look, dar, we're expected," the necromancer's daughter motioned toward the open city gates. A crowd was gathering right behind them. 

"Looks that way."

The sight of the locals was enough to bring my mood to its lowest point. As we came within a hundred yards of the city, I ordered the party to stop, rode forward a bit and barked:

"Vaessa, Aritor, Hagedia, with me! The rest of you, wait here in your saddles! Elnar is next in command! Leave your puppies here, Vaessa, no use frightening the locals," I said to Vaessa as she rode up, then spurred Gloom toward the city gates.

Mishtah's architecture of primarily single-story houses lent it the look of a pastoral French town from the Middle Ages, even as its walls couldn't fail to impress—roughly twenty feet tall, with battlements spaced out every two hundred yards. The lower section of the wall was made up of crude boulders held together by some kind of mixture, and the upper of neat square blocks laid in a perfect pattern. Every five-seven yards along the perimeter gaped the narrow vertical slit of an embrasure, gazing gloomily upon the world like the eye of some fantastical creature. Jutting outward from the top of the wall were jagged, human-sized spikes. And finally, there were the massive iron-plated gates. Put it all together, and a properly trained garrison could probably withstand a storm against a force ten times its size.

The demons' faces meeting us were dour. Not a hint of aggression, no, it was something else. The plague had depleted their inner resources beyond any reasonable limit—the despair in their eyes was both palpable and difficult to put into words. They stood there in deathly silence. All I could hear was the beating of hooves on the ground and Gloom's heavy puffing.

"Save our children, Dark One!" a young demoness in a plain farmer's garb stepped out of the crowd. The anguish in her green eyes, turned red from tears, was indescribable. The woman blocked the boar's path, holding in her arms a child that couldn't be older than five. Upon closer inspection I saw that the woman's stats were lowered by ninety five percent, and the child's by ninety eight, same as the old demon encountered earlier.

"That's exactly why I'm here!" I held the reins, speaking loudly for all to hear.

The crowd stirred to life at that instant. I heard cries and exclamations, and a whole score of people began talking to me simultaneously, so that nothing at all could be discerned.

"Quiet, all of you!" a deep voice growled. An enormous demon emerged from the crowd. The chatter subsided at once, and the newcomer turned to me.

"You see, dar, our children and elderly will actually die tonight at midnight."

"What?!" I exhaled, flabbergasted. "What in Hart's name is going on here?"

"With the Gray Scourge, children and elderly die on the twenty ninth day after falling ill, and the rest on day thirty," Vaessa said to me quietly. "I've only just now recognized their affliction, though little would have changed if I'd realized it two hours earlier," the magus concluded with a heavy sigh.

"How did they contract the disease?"

"I am Kargal, captain of the city guard. Satrap Rumpel had perished in the Derelict Temple, along with all two hundred soldiers that had gone with him. Not one had returned. At midnight that very night, flocks of large black birds flew into every settlement in the province, and when we awoke the next morning we were already ill. We were able to shoot down several of those fiends with our arrows, but that didn't stop the plague."

"What kind of birds were they?"

"Most likely gerdards—heralds of death, wild beasts from the Gray Frontier. One such bird can alight on a roof and infect everyone in the house with a deadly disease. And a flock of them can infect a whole town," Vaessa explained. "Summon Gerdards is among the higher-echelon necromantic spells. I haven't mastered it, for instance. The plague could have been averted if there was a practicing necromancer in the province, or even a necromancer's apprentice. A simple antidote needed to be administered within three days of falling ill, but now the only way to cure the disease is to kill the one who had set these beasts on this province."

"All the nobles are dead, dar, and I've been doing my best to keep law and order, however poorly," Kargal continued. "When the plague fell upon Gilthor, I gathered all able-bodied soldiers from the neighboring settlements, and three days later we set out for the cursed Derelict Temple. There were nearly three centuries of us. But our path was blocked by mysterious magic when we reached a gorge that leads to the temple. We tried everything we could think of, but all our efforts were futile, and a week later I led the soldiers back."

"Not one noble is left in the province?"

"Only the children of those who'd perished in the Derelict Temple. There's Lieta, Satrap Rumpel's daughter. And she will die like the rest of us unless—"

"How did you learn of my coming?" I interrupted him.

"A pigeon arrived from Xantarra nine days ago. Satrap Gorm wrote that if anyone can save us, it would be you," the demon raised his eyes from the pavement and fixed me with an intent look, then spoke loudly and clearly, over the sobbing of women heard all around. "We've been waiting for you, Dark One! All of us soldiers who are still standing, we are ready to follow you to the temple! Save our children, dar, and Gilthor will be yours..."

You've accessed the quest: Saving Gilthor.

 
Quest type: epic, unique.

Slay Ulrich the Zealot in the Derelict Temple.

Reward: experience, unknown, increased reputation with the Craedia Princedom, increased reputation with Gilthor Province.

Attention! The time for completing this quest is limited! If you do not slay Ulrich the Zealot in the allotted time, the residents of Gilthor Province will perish, and you will fail the quest.

30:16:31... 30:16:30... 30:16:29...

If you slay Ulrich the Zealot by midnight tonight, your reputation with Gilthor Province will rise to exalted. In addition to other rewards, at the completion of the continental event in the Cursed Princedom, regardless of how it ends, you will gain full control over all three satrapies of Gilthor Province.

6:16:31... 6:16:30... 6:16:29...

The rustling that sounded in the ensuing silence gave me a start. The demoness standing before the boar slowly kneeled, still clutching her baby in her hands. Another woman followed, and then another... And then it was as if someone hurled sand in my eyes.

"Cut it out, will you?!" I screamed at them, trying not to look at the kneeling women. "I was going to kill that son of a bitch anyway! You!" I snapped at the captain, turning Gloom sharply toward the gates. "Stay here and maintain order! Vaessa, Aritor, Hagedia, with me! On the double!" I spurred the boar toward the exit, cursing the writers responsible for this half-baked quest.

Chapter 14

Who of us hadn't read books in which characters drove their horses to exhaustion or even death every hundred pages or so, supposedly fueled by necessity? Don't get me wrong, there are all kinds of situations that might call for extreme measures, such as when a human life is at stake, but whenever I would read about some asshole killing an animal this way without justification, I would begin to feel burning hatred towards them. Why? Show me a person willing to kill their pet dog or cat? Or even someone else's and not their own?

It is a known fact that, unless reanimated, a horse driven to extreme exhaustion dies an excruciating death. And since a hero never knows the exact breaking point of the horse he's riding, his cruelty is even less justified. Getting to his destination on foot sucks. And whenever I'd read a phrase along the lines of, "I've missed you so much, my sweet princess, that I drove three horses to death on my way here," I badly wanted to hear the princess reply, "Get the executioner! Off with this dumb bastard's head!"

But no, the character wasting his mounts so needlessly would be allowed to keep breathing. Not only that, he'd know exactly where the next victim of his negligence would be waiting for him.

Where was I going with all this? Well, this last quest I'd been given had put me in precisely the kind of situation that many would argue justified this type of animal cruelty. Thankfully, I didn't need to agonize over it since that option wasn't even available for me and my clanmates. Simply put, it wasn't possible for a century of armored soldiers to gallop down a road less than four yards wide. Maybe in the real world such a thing would be possible, but not in the game world that operated by its own rules. In the game, a mounted horse was completely lacking a survival instinct, obeying his rider like a fine German car. My clanmates, on the other hand, had long stopped being computer programs, at least to me. Moreover, they seemed more human than many of the humans I'd known in my past life, and one of the ways in which their humanity manifested was absent-mindedness—a decidedly human characteristic. The point being, whereas a horse in the real world would do its best to avoid crashing into the horse in front of it, in the virtual world the chances of a collision went up by an order of magnitude, and we stood to lose an hour or more patching up injuries. The risk inherent in galloping the century to the temple simply wasn't worth it. We ended up leaving the horses less than a mile away from the pebble-covered path. I wasn't worried about their safety—there was no one around to steal them, and the local predators couldn't handle them either—so we left them grazing there with a clean conscience. The path was clearly of the less-traveled kind, unkempt and sloping sharply upward. It wasn't until eight thirty that evening that we finally reached the rippling film of a portal—visible only to me—that would lead us through the mountains and into the Derelict Temple.

There were fragments of obscure statues scattered outside the entrance. Not that I cared to know the history of this place: whoever had inhabited it before was long gone, and the current tenants would soon be requested to evacuate by yours truly. Requested politely, no doubt, albeit not in writing. I had no doubt that I'd be able to bring my demons inside. After all, the local satrap had been able to go in with his forces as part of the quest's backstory, while their "self-aware" counterparts following the patch weren't allowed in. I suspected that if they had had at least one player among them, things might have turned out different, but as it happened it was up to me and my troops to complete this quest, which was obviously conceived by a morally bankrupt bastard. And here's the best part—we had only three hours and eighteen minutes to do it. 

"So where's the temple?" Reece said doubtfully, materializing in the dungeon right after me. 

Then again, calling the picture that opened before us a dungeon would be quite a stretch. It was simply customary, a familiar term used by players to refer to any of the game's instances, be they inside or outside, below or above ground. 

After passing through the portal door, we ended up in a wide mountain passage that sloped upward still, then turned sharply right at around the four hundred yard mark. The passage was about one hundred yards wide, with sprawling terraces overhanging each other some fifty feet in the air that were linked to the ground by timeworn stone stairwells.