Chapter 137 - Winged Death

  Peter led us toward his table, which was already heavily laden with an astonishing variety of foods. I glanced at Farnsworth, but he was surprised as well. Back home, we were eating nonstop dry foods and canned goods. It was all that remained edible from the supermarkets, and thankfully there were piles of the stuff still available. But this was very different.

  The table had fresh boiled eggs, pastries with steam rising from them, a wild selection of cured meats and bread that looked like it had come fresh from an oven. There was even bacon! I hadn’t had bacon in so long! My mouth started watering as soon as the smells hit me.

  I didn’t know if this was a special show he was putting on for us, or if this was how he ate all the time. If it was the latter, then I really wanted to know more about this place.

  “I’m Selena Serrano. This is the head of my military, Clay Farnsworth. We’re grateful for your hospitality,” I told him.

  “You are more than welcome,” Peter replied. He swept his hand across the table. “Please, have a seat and help yourselves. You must be hungry after your journey.”

  Why not? We did as he suggested, sat and dug in. The food was every bit as good as it looked and smelled, and the next few minutes didn’t have much in the way of conversation—just quiet munching noises. Peter joined in, taking several slices of the cured meats and making himself a sandwich.

  “It’s good of you to come all this way to see me,” Peter said between bites. “I’d meant to get out there more myself, you know. It’s just been so busy! We’ve had enormous challenges making KingsHaven large enough to house all the refugees flooding our way. I imagine you’ve had similar issues?”

  “Somewhat, yes,” I said. “My fields are not as far along as yours, but we’ll be ready for planting in the spring. In the meantime, thank god for the supermarkets.”

  He nodded. “We used that early on as well. Now, we’re leaning toward using perishable food first. This stuff, for example,” he said, stabbing a slice of prosciutto with his fork, “won’t last forever. We need to use it while it’s still good. Some cured meats last a fairly long while if they’re kept properly, but even that will only last so long. We’ve focused on using up those goods while they’re still here with us.”

  I took another bite of warm, delicious bread and decided that we needed to get on that bandwagon as quickly as possible. Someone at the farm had to know how to make bread, and I wanted this on our tables, too.

  “Have you any contact with other Domains?” I asked. “I was surprised to see that this was a tier two Domain. Mine is, as well, and so is another in our alliance. But it’s not easy to get that second stone.”

  “It was not easy, you’re quite right,” Peter replied. “The first one just appeared to me, and when I held it, it allowed me to claim these lands as my Domain. The second… Well, we won that by wiping out a particularly nasty nest of goblins. They’d been preying on the surrounding territory, killing and eating anyone they ran into. Taking them down wasn’t easy, but it was necessary.”

  “I did much the same thing, up north. There were goblins near UVM. They’d built a fort,” I said. “The fort didn’t last long against Sue, though.”

  “Sue—ah, the dinosaur!” Peter said, smiling. “Yes, that’s very impressive. Is she the actual Sue, the tyrannosaur from Chicago?”

  “The very one,” I replied. “The museum had Sue as part of a visiting exhibit at the university. Something about Vermont not having any dinosaur bones on display, so they took pity on us, or something like that?” I chuckled. “It was good timing, anyway!”

  “Amazing. What a lucky find!” Peter said. “Selena—may I call you that? Feel free to call me Peter, as well. We kings and queens ought to be on a first name basis, I feel.”

  “My first name is fine, yes,” I replied with a genuine smile. He was likable, charismatic in a way that I could tell wasn’t purely from crystal attributes. If his magnetism came from a Charisma stone, my Will ought to more than cancel it out. This was just him.

  “Well, I hope I’m not being rude, but I wanted to know how you got your rank. I’m tier nine, as I am sure you can tell,” Peter said. “But I’ve never seen anyone reach your rank. I had help, of course. My people all contribute to the overall welfare of the Domain, and I benefit from that, which enables me to better defend them. Since you’re tier ten, I assume you have done something similar?”

  That answered my question about how he’d gotten his rank up. I felt a small pang of disappointment. If he’d somehow slain a tier nine monster, I was ready to be seriously impressed, but since he was just leeching off the efforts of several thousand individuals, it was a lot less interesting.

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  I kept my face bland, though, not letting that out onto my face. I shook my head gently. “No, actually. I worked my way to tier seven through killing a lot of undead, a fort full of goblins, and a nest of giant ants. But the jump to tier ten was because I led the force which defeated a tier ten creature, called a ‘Forgotten King.’ He was an undead monster leading a legion of other undead.”

  “Not the best force to bring against a necromancer,” Peter said. “Which I’m assuming you are, given the company I heard you brought with you.”

  I nodded. “My powers helped, but they were much weaker than his. It was a near thing.”

  My hand went to my belly, where a wraith’s sword had stabbed clean through me. The wound was long since healed, of course. It healed that day, thanks to the power of my Drain Life spells. But the memory of that injury was something I thought I might always carry with me. Up until that moment I’d started to think I was immortal, invulnerable, proof against all harm. The wraiths, and then Lyonius, had shown me how untrue that was.

  It was a good lesson, even if it was a hard one. Better to learn it that way than in a more fatal manner!

  “Are there others up north with similar ranks?” Peter asked.

  It seemed like a harmless question, but it also might not be. Still, it was information he’d get sooner or later, regardless. Send a high tier scout up north, and he’d soon know everything there was to see about our ranks. I decided it was better to tell the truth as much as possible, and hope we could build a strong friendship.

  “No one as high rank as me, no. But we have several folks who are close,” I replied. Not entirely a lie. I was pretty sure our next highest rank was tier seven, among the three allied Domains, anyway. “We’re fighting a series of skirmishes against orc tribes to our north, now. They’re mostly tier four and five, which is helping people grow more rapidly.”

  “Orcs, you say? Amazing! That sounds like something out of Tolkien.”

  “It does, doesn’t it?” I replied. I left out the comments I was thinking about how his clothes looked like they were grabbed off the Lord of the Rings costume rack, too. At least I’d confirmed my first impressions about the guy being a medieval fantasy fanatic. “The monsters are gradually getting worse. Makes it easier to tier up, but also makes it more dangerous.”

  “We’ve noticed the same thing down here; monsters are growing stronger. There’s a pack of tier five dire wolves in the woods southeast of here,” Peter said.

  “Are they a threat to travelers on the road?” Farnsworth asked.

  Peter shook his head. “Not so far, at any rate. But they grow bolder as they grow stronger. Sooner or later we’ll have to root them out, clear the forest of dangerous creatures, just to keep everyone safe. The fighting never seems to end.”

  “Eventually, I suspect we’ll reach a point where things settle down some,” Farnsworth said. “There are only so many monsters out there, after all.”

  “But are there?” Peter asked. “Or are new ones continuing to arrive? Or evolve, from existing beings? We think the goblins used to be squirrels, for example.”

  “Yeah, I’d noticed that link too,” I said. “I don’t know how this will end. I do know we need to keep our people alive until it does, which is why we have built an alliance between our Domains. There’s only three Domains as members, so far, but we hope it will grow as time goes on.”

  “And you came down here to…invite me? Or see if I would be a good candidate, perhaps?” Peter asked.

  “Something of both, I think,” Farnsworth replied.

  “Well, it’s certainly an interesting proposition,” Peter said. “We’ll need to spend some time hashing out the details, but I am all for improving my people’s prospects by building friendships with nearby people. In fact—“

  Before he could finish whatever he wanted to say, Peter was cut off by the tolling of a heavy bell. It sounded like the sort of thing one would hang in a church—long, loud, deep ringing tones boomed throughout the castle. He froze as soon as it started tolling.

  “We’re under attack,” Peter said, standing. “You’ll have to forgive me. I need to get to the battlements. I’ll have Major Harding get you somewhere safe.”

  I stood, too. “Peter, as you pointed out, I’m tier ten. I’m not fragile. And what sort of new allies would we be if I hid when you were in trouble? Let me come with you. Maybe I can help.”

  “As you wish,” he replied. He was already moving toward the doors. “Keep up, though!”

  Farnsworth rose and followed close behind both of us as we set out through the castle halls. It wasn’t long before we were climbing a spiral stair, and then we were out in the open air again, atop a thirty foot tall stone tower. How the hell had he built something like this? Even with a thousand people working on the construction, a fort like this should have taken years, right? There was seriously more to this place than met the eye. Had he found a way to magically hasten the construction?

  “What’s the word?” Peter asked the guards already standing atop the tower. There were three of them, two tier four soldiers and a tier five.

  The tier five pointed at the sky off in the distance. “It’s the dragon, your majesty.”

  “Again?” Peter spat. “Very well. We’ll see it off, same way as last time, eh?”

  The soldiers looked nervous, but willing. Peter went to a machine set on the tower’s edge. It looked like a giant crossbow, with a long, sharpened iron bar sitting where a bolt ought to be. It wasn’t wound, though, so Peter took to a winch immediately, moving it without effort. He clearly had crystal-enhanced Strength. The winch moved like the wind as he whipped it through each rotation, slowly pulling back the string.

  “Ballista,” Peter said, grunting with the effort. “Only real weapon we have against that thing.”

  I looked skyward. Sure enough, the dragon was winging its way directly toward us. It wasn’t high in the sky, like I’d usually seen it. No, this time it was only a few hundred feet above the ground, low enough that I could make out far more details than I ever had before.

  It was blood red in color, with spines running down its back and horns sprouting from its head. Two massive wings swept the air out of its path with each beat. It had four massive paws, each armed with sharp claws, held tight against its body. I tried again to see if I could sense its tier level, but—no luck. Whatever rank the dragon was, it was far enough above me that I couldn’t sense its power level.

  I hoped Peter was right about his ballista chasing the thing off! A glance at the neighboring towers told me the guards atop each were winding their own winches, so we weren’t reliant on a single device for our survival. But there were only four of the machines. If they all missed, I had a feeling we were seriously screwed.