V4Ch4-Clear and Present Dangers

Tybalt, Vidalia, and Mariella dreamt again.

The world faded and then returned, the three floating now above what Tybalt immediately recognized as Enh.

“Three major threats in the capital alone,” Vidalia said quietly.

The gravity of the dream pulled them down slowly, gently, toward the royal palace.

Tybalt was in the lead when it became obvious that they were being guided to a certain tower. He saw the face through the window, a beautiful woman’s face, though it was obscured by some of her hair falling in front of it. He could never forget that face.

Samara’s sister Asha, the High Priestess of Astara.

She was shackled to a wall within the chamber. Apparently, the Kingdom that had placed her under house arrest had now taken her incarceration to a new level of seriousness.

Samara would appreciate the irony of this situation. Asha repeatedly sends her little sister into harm’s way, and Samara ends up very pleasurably shackled by me. Asha stays back at the Great Temple and finds herself shackled against her will and with no one to blame but herself.

“So, why is she still registering as a threat?” he asked after a moment. “The Kingdom has arrested her—”

As they reached the windowsill, presumably about to be pulled into the room the High Priestess occupied, Tybalt felt his body hit resistance. The air in front of him turned as solid as a wall, blocking forward motion completely.

“What’s going on?” Mariella asked, her body likewise pressed against the barrier, unable to advance in the direction Vidalia’s powers had been pulling them.

“Just like when we tried to spy on her in the Great Temple, once upon a time,” Vidalia said. “Remember, darling?”

Tybalt frowned. “I thought the Great Temple was warded against us, but the odds that the palace has that same protection… don’t seem very high, given that actual fortresses and important places that we’ve visited haven’t in the past. Especially not with the tension that has often existed between the Crown and the priesthood. I can’t imagine that someone from the Great Temple would have warded the palace. You can’t force that out of them. The Goddess would probably know it was being forced, and you might get cursed instead. Or so I’ve heard… Without divine power helping, as far as I know, only the high elves have been magically skilled enough to ward large areas - pretty much their whole territory - against your intrusions.”

If this was done centuries ago, Tybalt thought, the protections would have faded by now. Which means…

“Maybe the protection follows her,” Mariella suggested, completing Tybalt’s thought.

“And maybe she is a relevant threat,” Vidalia added.

At those words, the woman in the tower -  who had seemed listless at first - seemed to stir. Her eyes stared out through her messy, unwashed looking hair, and her eyes grew frenzied.

“You!” Asha growled. “You… You’re the one who did this to me!” Her arm jerked forward to point at the windowsill where Tybalt and the others had been blocked from entering. The shackles jerked her to a stop in mid-motion, but it was obvious what she was pointing - and looking - at.

The necromancer turned his head to look behind them. There was nothing but empty air.

Fuck, she’s actually reacting to us…? He turned to look at Vidalia, whose eyebrows had retreated upward.

“Maybe she is a threat,” Tybalt agreed. “Time to go.”

“Yeah,” Vidalia agreed.

“You! Guards! Someone, arrest them!”

As the woman behind them began to rave, Vidalia’s dream gravity jerked them away, pulling them suddenly far down in elevation and toward the western city wall.

Just before they would have been jerked outside the city boundaries, they were pulled into a building that appeared to be a tavern.

As the trio floated in, they saw a mixed group - mostly men, but some women - who looked to Tybalt like adventurers.

They wore no uniforms. Their clothing was mismatched, but they appeared to be well armed and, if he was any good at gauging strength - which, at this point, he was - they would be fairly powerful individually.

We just fought an actual army with decently powerful individual members, though, the necromancer thought. If they’re not a group of people who work well as a group - if they’re really just a collection of squads that all have different modes of operation and different training - I don’t know that they’d be a real threat.

He turned his head to the side to say something, and he saw that Mariella had gone pale.

“You know who they are, Mariella?” Tybalt asked.

“I recognize a few of them,” she said. “I told you about them before. The Kingdom’s elites.”

Tybalt’s eyes widened.

“Uh, who?” Vidalia asked, scratching one of her big fennec fox ears. “I wasn’t there for this conversation, I’m almost certain.”

“The people who sew their mouths shut or chop off arms and legs to grow more powerful,” Tybalt said. He looked to Mariella for correction, but she was nodding along. His eyes returned to the people in the room, who were suddenly much more interesting than they had been. Now that he knew what he was looking for, he could see the potential threat more clearly.

The man with his mouth sewn shut was cloaked in dense mana. A double amputee woman sat beside him, and a nude woman whose features were impossible to really examine because her body was covered in hundreds or thousands of tattoos. There was a man with muscles even more ridiculous than the Hero’s but whose visible skin was all scar tissue, as if it had been flayed off and had to regrow. Another man who appeared to have multiple large open wounds on his body - and strange sounds came from them.

And the grotesques continued with each new person Tybalt looked at somehow strange and disturbing to look at in different and new ways.

“What makes them so special?” Vidalia asked. “Besides being really off-putting visually.”

“They’re all practicing the self-imposed restriction or sacrifice method of increasing your power,” Mariella said. “It’s a way of damaging yourself that makes you more attuned to the essence of your class. Combined with meditation, it can make a person much stronger.”

“Permanent self-inflicted harm,” Tybalt added. “Which is why none of us has tried it.”

He knew what the sacrifice would be for himself. He had known for almost a year, ever since he and Mariella had the conversation about these freaks in the first place.

The necromancer would have to fully embrace undeath.

In Tybalt’s mind, the lich beckoned. He knew the only one of his predecessors still on Abadd had become a lich. That was what maintained him as a presence despite the passage of centuries since his defeat by the forces working under the God of War and Goddess of Love. It had also led to that predecessor becoming a threat to the whole continent.

But I really don’t want to be a walking skeleton, he thought uneasily. He still had his beautiful wives to bed, more children to father, and many more of the world’s pleasures to taste.

“So, what are these special soldiers doing right now?” Vidalia asked.

“Looks like they’re just drinking at a tavern,” Mariella said.

Then one of the men below raised his voice and his mug.

“To another assignment from His Majesty!” he roared.

“To the King’s trust!” echoed another.

Everyone downed their drinks as one.

Tybalt had the sense that this was a ritual that had been observed many times before. If this was a normal celebration for a new assignment, drinks were probably on the Captain or the Major. The necromancer looked carefully for a minute to try and identify who was paying the bartender, but it proved impossible.

“It looks like they have a tab,” he muttered.

And the men and women below were also not acting like an elite military unit right now. They were getting drunk. Having fun, dancing with each other, making raunchy jokes.

Not that different from Tybalt’s old squad, honestly, though this group undeniably carried far more of a sense of menace.

I wish I could just Teleport in right now and use Breath of Decay on the whole room at once, he thought. But that would be a waste of powerful future undead, and more importantly, Enh is undoubtedly warded against teleportation, if anywhere is.

“Are you trying to figure out the command structure?” Mariella asked.

Oh, right, she’s met these people before.

He nodded.

“As for the ones I’ve met before, the man who looks like he’s been flayed is a Captain, and the one with his mouth sewn shut is the Lieutenant. He can transmit orders directly into his subordinates’ minds.” She added those last words as Tybalt opened his mouth to ask that very question - how someone who could not speak could be an officer.

“All right, I don’t think we’re getting much more here,” Tybalt said. “The night is short. Let’s move onto the next threat.”

Vidalia nodded, and the gravity of the dream began pulling them somewhere else.

They passed through one wall of the tavern, then flew quickly toward the southeast corner of the city.

Then they were pulled beneath a nondescript-looking building.

In a torchlit, underground chamber, dozens of men in black, brown, and sand-colored robes gathered around a single figure.

They whispered in a tongue Tybalt did not recognize, their manner urgent.

“Who could they be?” Mariella asked, frowning. “From the way they’re dressed, they look like some sort of occultists. A rival faction of believers in Lord Mudo? Extremist worshippers of Vika or Astara?”

“No,” Tybalt said slowly. He hadn’t recognized their speech, but as he stared at them, he saw something that he did recognize. “You see those blades hanging from their sides?”

“The copper-colored ones?” Vidalia asked.

“They look like something I could imagine people using in cult rituals,” Mariella said.

The necromancer smiled at his wife’s imagination, then shook his head.

“No, this is the Order of the Red Blade,” Tybalt said. “Legendary assassins the Kingdom supposedly saved from among one of the peoples it conquered to reach its current size. I didn’t really believe they were real… but there are always rumors. A Kingdom always needs some people in the dark to do its dirty work.”

Mariella sighed. Tybalt didn’t need her to say anything to guess that this was just another way in which Niet fell short of the version of it she had imagined in her head.

I would use assassins myself, though, he thought. There’s nothing especially wrong about it that I can see. Why is it better to let troublemakers march an army to your capital and fight a long rebellion, instead of just killing them in their sleep?

The gathering quickly lost most of its interest for them after Tybalt figured out the identity of this threat. He couldn’t understand the language the assassins spoke, after all. But he knew what he needed to know.

The Kingdom was sending assassins after him, plus its elite special forces, and perhaps there was even a chance they would let the High Priestess off her leash to lead her faithful in an attack of their own.

And all of these headaches are concentrated in Enh… It makes me wonder if it’s even sane to bring the people I care about along for this attack. It’s never safe to march alongside an army at war, but if there are assassins coming for me, and special forces, then even right at the heart of my army might not be a secure location.

He still vividly recalled how Black Hailgrim, veteran of two different Parties of Heroes, had chopped up elite undead over and over as he tried to break through the necromancer’s army. If there had been twenty of Hailgrim instead of one, the result of the battle might very well have been different.

Let alone close to a hundred people, which was how he reckoned the special forces and assassins together added up.

“Well, on the bright side, your magic apparently didn’t register the actual Royal Army as a threat,” Tybalt said after a few seconds of thought.

“Maybe, darling,” Vidalia said slowly, thoughtfully. “But I think it just presented us with the biggest, closest in time threats. Maybe the Army won’t be a threat until we march on Enh.”

“While the assassins from the Order of the Red Blade are coming for us now,” Tybalt finished.

“And the special forces squad we saw,” Mariella emphasized. “Don’t underestimate them. I’ve seen a little of what they could do. I remember just witnessing their strength made me think my magical talent was worthless.”

The necromancer sighed. “Well, there’s always something. I’ve fought an ancient dragon, been betrayed by a sentient fortress that could corrupt everything around it, and stolen the soul of the once-in-a-generation Hero. We’ll endure this.”

Somehow.

The rumors about the assassins that he had heard were deeply disconcerting, to say the least.

“Next we’re going to the far south,” Vidalia said. “The last threat we’re looking at is longer term from our point of view, but it threatens someone else in the medium term.” She looked at the fire mage sympathetically. “This one has to do with your father.”