Milc/C.J. Milnes
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Chapter 48 - Give them the bird
🕑 Added 2025-05-05 20:48:07 +0000 UTCGlimpse was orbiting above Urkash. The city was on a whole different scale to any that I’d seen before. There were two sets of walls. The outer walls towered a good fifteen metres tall and must have been four metres thick at the base. Huge blocks of stone, irregular in shape, had been laid together so carefully that I doubted I’d be able to find a single handhold if I wanted to try and scale them.
Behind those walls lay long streets that ran straight and intersected regularly, giving the city a surprisingly well-organised, grid-like layout. It appeared to have been recently rebuilt; many of the buildings were cut off, either half-demolished or completely torn down to make way for the efficient road network. The workers had built piles of rubble and transported them outside the main walls, piling them up into a crude bulwark, making it almost impossible to move siege engines up to the wall.
The inner city, which hadn’t been remodelled, lay within a five-metre-tall wall made of red bricks, probably baked mud unless I missed my guess. The buildings within this sector were of much higher quality construction than those beyond the red wall. They were about the same size, but each had at least a small plot of land to call their own. Some had decently sized grounds that included fountains and ornate gardens.
At the centre of this noble's district lay a palace. Another wall guarded it, but this one was more for keeping out the riff-raff than serving as a defensive bulwark. It was only three metres tall and was thin enough that one of the Fangs could simply punch his way through the thing.
Away to the south and east, an ocean stretched into the distance. The sunlight sparkled on waves as they rolled in and out. An arm of stone, possibly artificial, or at least a partially enhanced natural formation, curled around to create a safe harbour against storms. Glimpse could see dozens of ships at anchor and half a dozen moving slowly under sail in the distance.
In one claw, my crow held a single stone bead. Within that bead, my kill team were all in whatever strange stasis living people entered when inside a storage space. Glimpse was looking for a good place to put down and let the boys out to play. The city seemed underpopulated to me. Some sections were bustling, like any city, with thousands of people flowing from place to place. They looked like ants from up in the sky, but the seemingly random movements clearly showed some patterns of behaviour. The market districts around the granaries were the busiest. Still, the industrial area, which was choked with clouds of smoke from the forges that partially obscured my birds-eye view, also seemed to be a focus of the citizens' activities.
The docks stretched out into the water, small skiffs moving back and forth to the ocean-going vessels. The smaller boats were filled with goods, either being loaded onto the ships or offloaded onto the shore. That was going to be a problem. I had no navy for a blockade. I made a note to check with Pertabon to see if the Legion was capable of seafaring. We’d still have to build a fleet from scratch. Shit.
The amalgam guarding the outer wall was Ashrot on steroids, or fertiliser. I still wasn’t sure what the right way to think of the huge constructs was. They seemed almost fungal in their ability to grow and move, but were closer to a mammal than a plant.
The thing dwarfed all the amalgams we’d faced before; it was large enough to encompass the much larger walls of Urkash. Its body pulsed and shifted as whatever internal processes that fueled the thing took place.
What do you think? Glimpse sent.
Plenty of empty spaces to let them out, I grumbled while the scale of the amalgam absorbed me.
Not about that. About the defences.
I scowled, and Kril winced, spilling the refill of stew he was passing me into my lap.
“Bad news?” he asked before moving back to the pot hanging from a tripod over the fire.
“Urkash is not going to be fun,” I growled as I swept the mess off my impenetrable tunic. I switched back to Glimpse and phased out the quiet conversation of my friends.
Where are the bandaged men? There’s no zombie horde. I can see the guards, and I’m assuming that complex just to the east of the palace is Mortimer’s academy for his Soulbound.
The smaller palace couldn’t be classified as anything else; it was a rival to the main palace, but lacked the ostentatious outer wall. It was lined by a waist-high wall instead, but no one went near the place. All the normal citizens passed by on the other side of the road, and within the grounds, I could see people flinging spells at targets in the grounds.
I don’t know Ray. You can see what I see. Where should I let out the kill team?
Find an abandoned building somewhere in one of the depopulated areas. You’ll need a base well away from the academy, I sent.
What are our primary targets?
I thought for a few seconds, spooning stew into my mouth on autopilot, hundreds of miles away from where my attention was focused.
The granaries had been built before Mortimer culled the city and turned everyone into zombies. I’m guessing a lot of these people are now permanently dead undead, scattered across the steppe and the badlands. We’d need to take them all out quickly. If we don’t, they’ll guard the ones left so heavily the blokes won’t stand a chance of getting to them. Then there’s the fucking docks. They’ll be bringing in food every day. Not enough to support the city if we cut them off from the harvest, but enough to stretch out their reserves for months.
I can deal with the boats, Glimpse sent with the equivalent of a bird's grin. He sent me an image of divebombing the ships out to sea and unleashing fireballs from the sky on them as he swept past unharmed.
I didn’t have a navy. Maybe having an air force made ships unnecessary for now.
Ok. Let the guys out somewhere discreet, and we can have fun playing a game of Battleship.
A happy caw came back to me, and Glimpse began to circle lower, making sure to stay away from the patrols on the walls as well as keeping clear of the academy.
He flew from roof to roof, moving steadily into the more desolate parts of town. This section wasn’t as uninhabited as I’d assumed from on high. The bird's keen ears picked up quiet conversations from within some of the buildings where he stopped to perch. From the snippets of conversation we caught, the people were terrified. Squads of Ascendants, I assumed it was the moniker that the Soulbound Servants had been given or picked for themselves, would sweep through and select people, either for training with trinkets or to be fed to the thing on the walls.
Neither option seemed popular. Despite being given access to trinkets and the power to cast spells, none of the people left in the abandoned, slum-like sections of the city were enthusiastic. It meant another member of their family would be taken hostage by the Servants at the academy, and the unlucky bastard who got picked would be sent off to one of the frontlines in the wars.
The partially demolished buildings turned out to be our safest option for letting my dogs out of their cage. Glimpse found one on the edge of a new road that the demolition teams had more or less sliced in half. The section that connected to the rest of the terraced construction seemed solid as far as we could make out. It had easy access to the rooftops, although I suspected that would be less valuable than in other cities. Jumping the wide roads would be challenging for a baseline human, even if they used the Enhancement trinkets I had crafted myself.
Glimpse flapped down to land on the floor of a room littered with broken furniture. Someone had smashed apart the tables and chairs, and the shelves were broken, left scattered on the floor. It was perfect. I sent Glimpse a mental nod, and the bird rolled the stone bead away from him and looked at it for a moment.
They won’t survive this, Ray, he sent as we both stared at the bead through his eyes.
They might.
I don’t fancy their odds, my friend. I sighed, the bird was right.
It was no different before. They knew what they were getting into. They live for this shit, I replied.
I can feel your mind, Ray. You know that’s a lie. Not that they didn’t know what they agreed to! But this is different from before. Getting out of here won’t be possible unless they get back into the bead.
That option will remain open to them.
What had to be done wouldn’t be pretty. It would be barbaric, even by my standards. We needed to sabotage, kill, poison, and cripple this city. Most of the people here weren’t Mortimer aficionados. The team knew what they had to do. Feeling my resolution, Glimpse leant forward and rested his beak against the bead. A moment later, twelve men appeared in a group around the bird and the bead.
They didn’t speak, merely exchanging a series of nods and looks. Three moved to the doors and windows, checking outside before making quick hand gestures back to Powtu, who had remained where he appeared and watched his team fan out around him.
“We’re clear,” whispered the man who’d checked the windows. Powtu waited stoically until the guy who ran up the stairs came back and nodded to him.
“Right. Bird, we’re in a safe area?” Powtu asked once he had confirmation that the immediate surroundings were clear of threats. A single quiet caw was his reply.
“Easy to move about?” Another single screech came from Glimpse.
“The chief is watching?” Caw.
“What’s the plan, Lord?” Powtu said, nodding his head to Glimpse. I fired over a series of rapid instructions that Glimpse scratched into the brittle floorboards, creating simple rune-like writing that Powtu was able to read.
“Boys, you’re going to school. I think that’s what–” he spelt out the letters, “--means.” Glimpse cawed in confirmation.
“Janko, Herpatik, you two can go take a look at the granaries. Don’t get too close. We all need to switch to shit-sitter garb, Kratin, have a spy out the window and find some gear in your storage spaces that matches what the peasants wear here.”
Glimpse flew onto Powtu’s shoulder and pecked him gently on the cheek.
“You’re leaving us?” he asked. My vision was filled with a close-up of his brown eyes, and I could smell his musty breath. A single caw came out in response. He nodded.
“We’ll do you proud, Lord.” Glimpse took to his wings and shot out of the abandoned house, striving for height as quickly as possible to avoid accidentally being spotted by another Soulbound Servant.
Once he was several hundred metres into the air, he turned south. Our bond became smug with anticipation.
Time to have some fun?
Yes, Glimpse. Time to have some fun. Just be careful! I replied.
I made him wait until we were comfortably out of sight of the city, and then we started hunting. The ships of this age had single masts and banks of oars to move them. They could move quickly for short periods under oars, or steadily if the wind was behind them.
The crow's eyes were far superior to the human norm. He picked out specks on the sea that I’d assumed were flotsam and zeroed in on them like he was radar-guided.
Ancient ships were highly flammable. The tar and caulking used to make them watertight made them little better than oil-soaked tinder if a fire were to get out of control. Glimpse maintained a decent altitude as he passed over his first target. Then he released a bolt of fire fell like a seagull crapping on a tourist, it slammed into the base of the mast. Blue flames erupted as the detonation removed the mast, sending the upper half spinning out to sea before the tangled lines pulled it up short with a splash.
The boat heeled over, now missing a considerable portion of its midsection. Screams rang out as the rowers, trapped below decks, saw the creeping fire and struggled to escape their chains.
Next! The bird and I thought simultaneously. I grinned, and Glimpse let out a cackling caw of laughter.
We hunted ships together for a few hours. Any vessel we could find heading towards or away from Urkash was destroyed. Sailors threw themselves into the depths to escape our fire.
We left dozens of ships as burning hulks. The thrill of stooping on defenceless prey and obliterating them with a single cast of Fireball ran through my veins like fine wine.
“Mond, are you well?” I heard Jandak ask. He sounded worried.
“Of course!” I blinked as I opened my eyes. “Glimpse and I were just dealing with some enemy shipping. I don’t think we need to worry about a navy anytime soon.”
“You won’t have one, Mond. The Sykaraskyn don’t build ships, and the Huskar are too heavy,” Kril said cautiously. He was still scared of my upcoming revenge for the involuntary dream-spice. I wasn’t going to be a dick about it. He’d done what he thought was best, and while I was angry, punishing him would be like cutting off my hand. I grinned at him, and he flinched in response, looking away.
“Never fear, wise old sensei. We’ll just give them the bird.”
“What the fuck is a sensei?” The old man snapped with his signature cackle.
