Castle Kingside

Icy winds battering her face, Angelika sprinted at the fore of over a hundred troops, boots pounding sand in a mad scramble to reach the coast. She arrived first and tiptoed a glance over the barrier.

Along the shore, salty droplets slithered down the cores of crawlers, of which at least eight protruded from the murky ocean depths. Two carriers moaned at their flanks, and above, a swarm of fliers glided through dark skies, the glow of their circuits illuminating the emerald underbellies of clouds with concentric swirls of blue.

Crap. Did they come for the crawler Angelika captured that afternoon? Dimitry needed one to test impedeall on, but she knew fucking around with live heathens was a bad idea. This was proof.

The troops seemed to think the same. They reached Angelika in clumps, heaving for breath with bulky cast steel guns clutched in their arms. A man among them stared straight ahead, eyes wide with horror. This would be his first true battle. Not the handful of crawlers and fliers the Hospitaller usually fought, but an entire raid. And contrary to the shitty behavior of heathens, these didn’t charge immediately. They were waiting.

Angelika thought she knew what for.

A giant flier hovered at the horde’s center. Like hundreds of piercing blue eyes, the radiant jewels on its chest slid across the opposing company of gunmen and the sixty weapons they held before focusing its gaze on her.

Goosebumps crept down Angelika’s arms, warning that the ‘watching’ devil had identified her as the commanding officer. Her grip tightened around the cold mahogany stock of her voltech rifle. “Positions!”

Her troops freed themselves from the terror and spread along the heathen barrier, bunkering down beneath the split halves of crawler cores like they did during their drills. Tonight was a test. If people who were peasants a month ago survived, they might overcome the Night of Repentance as well.

Angelika prayed they would. Her troops had neither the disciple nor the tailored clothes of a man-of-war, but they followed her commands without complaint. Perhaps that was enough. “Let’s murder these fuckers!”

Her rallying call inspired battle cries to sound across the beach. Most harbored vengeance, others cracked with fear. Nothing out of the ordinary. It wasn’t rare to see a sorceress break down before a fight, so why wouldn’t a poorly trained commoner?

The sound of shifting sand came from behind.

Angelika pivoted around her boot.

Two yellow-robbed women ran closer. The younger was the ever-silent Anelace, steadfast gaze never betraying her thoughts, and the elder was the hero of the Gestalt Wars, condemning all with sharp amethyst eyes. Leandra stopped ahead and leaned her rifle against her shoulder. “Where do you need us?”

Angelika’s grip loosened. “M-me?” She looked around. “You’re talking to me?”

“Who else?” Leandra frowned. “Your Highness said you know holy arms better than anyone else. You will lead us into war.”

If Angelika was jittery before, she shivered now. How the hell was an unranked combat sorceress like her supposed to order around two of the most celebrated warriors in the kingdom? What if she made a bad decision? Said something stupid? Stepped on someone’s foot? The pressure nearly made her gag.

“Well? Do you have a plan or not?”

“Our, well, our troops will need time to load. T-that means we should use defensive magic while they focus down the crawlers, right? Kill the fliers after. That sounds about right… right?”

“That’s for you to decide, Little Angelika.”

Angelika shrunk away. She must have said something stupid already.

“They come!” Anelace shouted.

Two ear-shattering whistles pierced the night. Waves splitting alongside their rectangular stone torsos, the carriers torpedoed closer, bumping into naval mines along the way. Booms resounded from flashes of red as they crashed through arcane powder mists and slid across the beach.

Currents of warmth and cold surged across Angelika’s body. This strategy—she had seen it earlier this month! The carriers would become forward barriers so the crawlers could advance. Her defensive weapons were better saved for the main force. “Lady Anelace, ignore the carriers. Please cast ignia on the land mines only when the crawlers start moving!”

Vol clenched in her fist, the court sorceresses held her palm over the barrier.

But to Angelika’s despair, the enemy didn’t act as predicted. Rather than forming two forward lanes for the crawlers to funnel through like last time, the carriers swerved into a V-shape. Ground quaking, their long bodies rolled forward, land mines erupting beneath them and gushing blue organs across the sand.

“Those things,” Leandra hissed, “they’re pushing each other!”

Angelika was wrong. The carriers weren’t barriers. They were fucking siege engines with crawlers driving them forward! She had to destroy them and expose the back line before they rolled over her ranks! “Powder ladies, to me! Now, now, now!”

The women lugging around the black powder barrels rushed closer.

Angelika couldn’t wait for all eight to arrive. “Roll the ammunition over the wall!”

They did, and five wooden casks tumbled downhill towards the carriers.

“Anelace!”

With a wordless spell, the barrels exploded between the carriers. Thunder roared and wails shrieked as blue guts and stone shards sputtered from occluding veils of smoke. The siege engines stopped, but the tremors didn’t.

“They’re still moving in there!” Angelika’s arm shot up. “Aim!”

Sixty silvery guns hunkered over the barrier’s edge.

A crawler’s claw poked out from the mists of spent black powder explosives.

“Release!”

Flashes blazed in the dark, each crackle billowing swathes of rancid fumes. Many guns crackled at once and petered out with the incompetence of a few stragglers.

The heathen advance halted.

Silence choked the air.

A squinting soldier tilted left and right. “Did we get ‘em?”

The only response he heard was ramrods scraping against steel barrel walls as everyone rushed to reload.

Heart pounding against her ribcage, Angelika fanned smoke away from her face. Frozen sand construction irritated her neck as she leaned over the barrier and peered into the thinning mists. She saw them.

A pair of crawlers stood on their hind legs. Blue blood poured from wounds small and cratering across the belly of their exposed cores. They collapsed, and six more stomped over their corpses in a mad rush.

Angelika gasped. Those fuckers—they sacrificed themselves! The two front crawlers soaked up every shot so those in the back could charge forward unharmed. How did they predict her plan of attack? Have they been studying guns?

No.

It was the watcher. That fucking thing knew everything!

“Aim…” Angelika uttered. She raised a trembling arm. “Aim… aim. Aim the fuck now!”

A soldier fumbled her gun. Before she or her battle buddy could catch it, the weapon fell and spilled powder across the ground. Another one gazed at the approaching heathens. He shot too early.

“If anyone else releases before I say so will get their heads stomped—“

The flight of a dozen fliers severed Angelika’s breath. Their blue-striped frames soared into the sky, and before long, poisonous feathers rained from above. Stone plunked against the crawler skins her troops hid beneath. Screams rang out.

“Hold and you’ll be fine!” Angelika shouted. The fliers could wait. She had to murder the heathens before they overran her troops. “Anelace, Leandra! Protectia! Spread them out with protectia!”

The crawlers slammed into unseen walls and fanned out.

An opportunity.

“Now! Release!”

Only half the guns went off, but this time they hit their targets. Iron balls pelted the approaching crawlers. Four dropped immediately or collapsed along the way, but the last two stepped over the barrier.

Angelika’s head shot left and right. Shit! The troops were still reloading. If the heathens reached them, there’d be a massacre. “Anelace, Leandra. Kill them now! Please!”

The court sorceresses lowered their protectia barriers and reached for their voltech rifles. But they were too late.

A crawler swiped its claws into the guts of a man, and two women fled to escape another only for stone feathers to pummel them from above. They squirmed as heathens’ blood seared into their tattered clothes.

Shit, shit, shit!

Teeth chattering, Angelika shot pellets into the melee.

Black powder blared, and shrieks erupted from veils of smoke. Fliers plummeted to the sand, a crawler collapsed on a man, and a yelp cut short at the peak of its agony.

Fury welled within Angelika like furnace flames inside her gut. Her eyes flicked towards the watcher. This was all that thing’s fault. She aimed the voltech rifle at the giant flier flapping over the shore. “Propelia.”

The iron ball crashed into its eye. A gem fell out, bluer than aquamarine, as the watcher fled into the clouds.

Though the skirmish couldn’t have lasted long, in Angelika’s mind, the guns blazed forever until, finally; they fell silent. A field of dead heathens lay before her. She had won, but the aftermath didn’t sound like a victory. There was no victorious chanting, nor did anyone dance a triumphant jig over the enemies’ corpses. She heard only whimpering.

Angelika didn’t want to see. The desperate prayers to Zera told her they were there, along her sides, but everything within her begged she kept looking forward. If she saw, her quivering legs would collapse under the weight of their sacrifice and send her toppling over.

Or maybe they were still alive.

Yeah.

Alive.

All she had to do was keep looking forward and the troops she trained would live forever.

A yellow-sleeved hand fell onto her shoulder. “Angelika.”

“Please,” she muttered, “don’t make me look.”

“You’ll regret it later.” Sand popped beneath Leandra’s boots as she walked away.

Catching a staggered breath, Angelika nodded. Her troops might have been peasants, but they were her peasants. She marched through snow with them, grilled fish with them, learned to handle guns with them. The least she should do was accompany them one last time.

Angelika mustered the courage for a glance along the barrier.

Dimitry’s ambulances rushed in from the settlement. Two medics loaded an unmoving man onto a stretcher, guts drooping over the edge, while another poured water onto a lady’s leg as she yelled and squeezed heathen’s blood out of her wounds.

Stomach twitching and squeezing, Angelika looked the other way.

A barrel maiden prayed at her husband’s side, pressing his pale hand to her cheek. He was bleeding all over. The more he bled, the louder her prayers became, each verse sharper and more vivid than the last. They were the kind that could never be forgotten.

Voltech rifle slipping from her grasp, Angelika’s boots peddled ahead of their own accord. She dropped to her knees beside the couple and waved her arm at a medic. “We need some help over here!” Heart racing, she turned back to the wife. “Your name—it’s Lorelai, right? Lorelai?”

“Mad’m sorceress,” the barrel maiden said, “I beg of you. Save Flynn with your magicks!”

Flynn and Lorelai, Flynn and Lorelai! How the fuck could Angelika forget their names? “S-stop crying. Look, I know the apostle. He’s really holy and this is nothing for him. He’ll save Flynn. I swear. Hey! Where the fuck is our help?!”

Medics ran in to pull Flynn onto a stretcher. They carried him off to a tent that peered down from the snowy cliff.

Stumbling after them, Angelika prayed to Zera and Celeste that she wasn’t a liar. The battle replayed in her mind. What could she have done better? She should’ve kept the formation closer together. No, the gunmen—she ordered them to release too early. Why didn’t she study more? Why the fuck couldn’t Angelika read the strategy book Lady Mira and Lord Richter had written for her?!

Self-flagellations barraged her mind from the beach to the medical hut.

A man tightened his coat outside, repeating the same few words. “All ye who are hurt and can walk, over there! Those that can only talk, by the wall. The poor souls that cannot do either are to be taken inside.”

Oozing blood all over, Flynn mouthed unheard words.

Lorelai threw her patched cloak over her husband, revealing the tattered gown she wore beneath. Angelika pitched in with her robe. “Just keep breathing. We’re almost there.”

They swerved into a tent overcrowded with victims and medics. The canvas walls glowed an urgent red, and inside, a tall man with pale green eyes raced to examine the wheezing man he hunched over. Dimitry touched the man’s jagged ribs and glanced at the enchantress across the bedroll. “Numb his chest.”

Medium black hair concealing her onyx glare, Katerina held out her palm. “Relaxia.”

Dimitry sliced a hole in the man’s side with a tiny knife, and after thrusting his fingers inside, widened the gap with pliers until air hissed out. He jammed one of those thin glass pipes Her Royal Majesty used to deliver letters into the hole. The thin walls fogged up like a jar containing old, moist food.

The man’s heavy breaths stabilized. “I… I can...”

“James.” Dimitry pointed to a wide-eyed medic. “Come here and hold this tube. Just like this. Don’t move. Not even a little.”

It was working! Dimitry was fixing Angelika’s mistakes! “Your Holiness,” she said, “we need you to heal Flynn as well!”

Grimace on his face, Dimitry strode over. He glanced over the wounds. “Expectant. Leave him near the wall.”

Hope spread across Angelika like warm, resplendent waves. If Dimitry did all that crazy shit for the other guy, who looked like he only had a few broken ribs, then maybe Flynn wasn’t doing too bad. She forced a grin to cheer up a sobbing Lorelai. “Expectant? As in expecting a full recovery, right Dimitry?”

There was no response. He was already hovering over another patient, twisting a rod poking out from under a bloody bandage. “Milk, did you tie this tourniquet?”

The bulky mountain of muscle next to him shook his head.

“How many times do I have to tell them? If they don’t wind the windlass tight enough, the patient bleeds even more. He should be fine now. Put him back with the others and make sure no one touches the wound. I want to see him again in two hours—when the moon is highest in the sky. Remind me.”

Milk tossed the man over his thick shoulder like a sack of fent and marched away.

Though Angelika willed herself to stay optimistic, Flynn was growing stiff. Why was someone with a bleeding arm getting so much attention but someone bleeding all over none at all? A deep nagging gave her an unacceptable answer. Swallowing it down, Angelika approached. “Hey… about Flynn.”

Dimitry glanced away from yet another patient. He scanned her face, and with a sigh, his focused frown unraveled. “Angelika, I know you want to help, but I’d prefer if you kept an eye on the coast for me. Okay?”

His tone said it all.

Fighting back the choking in her throat, Angelika nodded. She made her steps as quiet as possible as she left him to his work.

The metallic stench of blood fouled the air, seeping from containers stout like beakers and thin like test tubes. Most samples were fresh—collected from volunteers moments ago—yet many more stood on the table long enough for a yellow plasma layer to separate from the murky crimson hematocrit beneath.

Dimitry scooped a spoonful of plasma supernatant from one vial into the blood sample of a dying patient. He held up the mixture to a tallow candle’s light. The grotesque liquid curdled into waves of mismatched red.

Shit. Agglutination. Yet another mismatch.

Undulating waves of cold crept down Dimitry’s spine, but he gritted his teeth to steady his nerves. Right now, an anemic patient’s pulse grew weak. Skin pale and lips blue, she had lost too much blood after a strike from a crawler severed the arteries in her thigh. Though Dimitry had sutured the wounds shut, hemorrhagic shock would take her soon. Only the swift discovery of a donor could save her life.

So Dimitry tried again.

And again.

Time slipped by, but success never came. Flask shaky in his grasp, Dimitry couldn’t figure out where he went wrong. He should have found a matching blood type by now. Did the people of this world have more antigens than people on Earth? Maybe instead of the usual A, B, O, and Rh factors, they had five immunogenic antigens, ten, fifteen, or even fifty. Perhaps another variable entirely confounded him. Hell, even if the transfusion succeeded, there was the worry of transferring a lethal infection from the donor to the host.

It didn’t matter. Dimitry could handle any infiltrating pathogens later—once the patient had stabilized. He had to continue testing before another soldier joined the nine that had already died. Time constraints had forced him to abandon too many lives already. This one still had a chance.

The curtain to his bedroom tent opened.

Dimitry lifted his hand. The vial he held failed to shield his eyes from dawn’s blinding light and a frigid breeze.

A freckle-faced girl stood in the doorway, pink ribbon dangling from a disheveled ginger ponytail. She was Lili—the head nurse Dimitry entrusted the cathedral’s management to in his absence. The position was mostly symbolic. Two months of clinical experience was nowhere near enough to treat people. Dimitry called for her last night to assist with the triage, and now that the initial rush had ended, she was collecting fresh blood samples for him.

But something had changed.

Lili wasn’t carrying a tray of glass containers. Her normally eager eyes glazed across the frozen dirt floor. “I did everything as you said. Still, she...”

Dimitry’s heart skipped a beat. “She what?”

“Her pulse stopped.”

“Did you try the wrist?”

“The neck, too. I checked so many times.”

Heat flushed into Dimitry’s face. His arm wound back to swipe the failed experiments from the tabletop, but he pulled back and scratched his scalp instead. Everything would fall apart if the apostle himself lost his composure. “I see. Thank you for letting me know.”

With a somber nod, Lili stumbled away. The curtain slowly shut behind her.

Legs heavy, Dimitry fell against the rough timber plank that was his laboratory workbench. Something sharp stabbed into his hip—the cannula Saphiria’s blacksmiths had forged from silver coins. He wouldn’t need that or its accompanying trocar anymore. The person who needed a transfusion was already dead.

Dimitry rubbed his burning eyes. What had he done? He sought to test impedeall on the captured crawler, and while the spell tranquilized the heathen as he had hoped, suggesting its potential applications on the Night of Repentance, it did so much more. The magic called down what the troops fearfully referred to as the watching devil.

And then this happened.

Questions without answers plagued his mind: what did the watcher want? Why did it start appearing now? How was it organizing the heathens into a formidable fighting force? More troubling, could Dimitry’s followers survive another attack? If this month was anything like the last, even more heathens would attack on the Night of Repentance. Maybe a carapaced devil, too. The watcher would doubtlessly be among them.

Survival instinct nagged Dimitry to return to Malten until next month, but the heathens were intelligent enough to destroy all the resources his people left behind. All of their effort would have been for nothing. Besides, he doubted anyone would follow him back here if they retreated on a morbid note.

There was no choice but to make a stand. Without this land, only a slow, painful death awaited the entire kingdom.

Dimitry stared into his open palm. Was this how Earth’s leaders felt when their constituents perished at war? Or did the irony of a surgeon sending people to die reach him at last? And Angelika—telling a nineteen-year-old to look away while the soldiers she trained died… the trauma he inflicted must have been beyond anything he thought himself capable of.

His hand clenched into a white-knuckled fist. Dimitry couldn’t let the catastrophe repeat. He had to make this work. If the heathens attacked because he had cast impedeall on the captured crawler, he’d summon the horde again when and where he was ready. And this time, Dimitry would be ready. He’d massacre them all.

A plan brewed in his mind.

The watcher would learn to regret its alleged intelligence.

Dimitry rushed across the colony, parchment rolls tucked under his arm. The overwritten letters contained the details of a trap employing every resource available—explosives, guns, and magic—and how they could annihilate most of the coastal heathens in one fell swoop.

He neared the massive oak at the settlement’s center and the command tent wrapping around its base. People debated inside.

Moritz’s voice eked through the leather tarps. “Whatever’s gonna happen, the barrier won’t hold. There’s nothing we can build quick enough.”

“Yeah.” A sigh from Elias followed. “We’re making guns as fast as we can, but two days won’t be enough to take on a full raid.”

“Who says there’ll be a full raid?” Warnfrid barked.

“They always come from the coast, my lord. Now there’s the watcher, too.”

“Meh! We’ll lose a hundred, maybe two, but it’s a small price to pay for our divine mission.“

“Thoughts, Leandra?”

“… I cannot say for sure, Your Royal Highness, but it is my humble opinion that we return to Malten immedi—“

The chatter ended when Dimitry strode into the tent, a long table stretching out before him. Everyone whose input he had requested sat in wait. Katerina, Anelace, and even the messenger the queen had sent to relay the status of her investment after last night’s attack. Twenty gazes looked up at him. Their dispirited expressions anticipated a strategic retreat from the surgeon who valued life above all.

They were wrong.

Dimitry dropped the scrolls onto the table. “Anyone who wants to leave is free to go. As for the rest of you, I know how to strike at the heathens’ weakness. We can wipe them out before they become strong on the Night of Repentance.”

No one stood up. Their wide-open eyes traveled down to prod the documents.

“In that case, let’s get started.”