Cascade
Chapter Five: Things Fall Apart
The pounding on the door wasn't getting louder or harder, but with his back braced against it, almost able to feel the intense gazes of the seven or eight knights on the other side, Ephraim couldn't think of any gate, portal, or any entryway of any kind that he had ever wanted to open less. The other doors into the royal library were securely locked, but this one was the public entrance, and had idiotically – in Ephraim's opinion – not been built with eight locking bars on the inside and huge serrated spikes on the other. Thump, thump thump…
"I could help take some of the pressure–" Tana volunteered again.
"No, no, this is easy, don't strain yourself," said Ephraim, finding it easy to fake nonchalance. "The corridor is too small for all of them to apply force properly; you know it doesn't work if you try to press against someone's back while they're pushing on a door."
"Not really," said Tana. "You had the military lessons, remember? I had to endure hours of needlework and that sort of thing until I could talk Innes into letting me join him for some… what did I have to call it… 'emergency self-protection' classes. And I had to run away to join the army."
…Thump, thump, thump…
"That I know perfectly well," said Ephraim, remembering his shock at seeing Tana appear on the battlefield out of nowhere, in Pegasus knight's armor. "One more thing Innes will never forgive me for."
"Well, it was that or blame Eirika," Tana remarked. "Saleh, anything coming yet?"
"I'm afraid progress has become somewhat slowed," the sage replied, his voice coming from among stacks of books, through which they could see Ewan's flame-red hair even in the darkness. "I can't see."
"Light a lamp, perhaps?" said Ephraim. "I realise that asking a mage for fire in a library is somewhat insane, but given the circumstances…" The knights on the other side of the door continued to pound at it in an implacable rhythm.
"That wouldn't help, King Ephraim. I mean I've gone blind."
…Thump, Thump… The king and queen were silent for a moment.
"Ewan, he hasn't got a bag over his head or something, has he?" Ephraim asked, hopefully.
"No, sir, I'm having to read everything to him," said Ewan. "His eyes are still all right, so we're hoping it goes away soon. But we're no further ahead from hours ago."
"Well, what do you know?" Tana asked, knowing that Ephraim shared her sentiment that Saleh's blindness was about appropriate to the course of their day so far. Particularly since this hit to the sage's fighting prowess, in his current state of bonkersdom, wasn't much of a loss.
"I vote that we just let them work–" Ephraim began.
"I'm sure you do, but as two-thirds of the royal family, my votes beat yours," Tana neatly cut him off.
"This is why I was keeping you safe in the royal keep, you realise," said Ephraim, sighing with his entire body. …Thump, thump, thump…
"Start talking, Saleh," said Tana, neatly skewering Ephraim on the end of a Look that made it exceptionally clear that she had her own views of 'safety in the royal keep'.
"The sigil is definitely an arcane beacon of some design, meant to funnel power into this world from another realm of existence. It specifies location, purpose, filters energy, and is generally very direct and demanding about what it wants. But whoever wrote the first one was a genius, because they didn't just find it, they invented it. I have no earthly idea what it actually does, any more than walruses know what a Frelian gumbo-sieve is for."
"What in the name of the Divine Light is a walrus?" Ephraim snapped.
"Just hold the door with your superhuman strength and leave this to me, dear," said Tana. "Do you know how to stop it? Block it? Dispel it? Anything?"
"The simple solution would be to erase the symbol," said Saleh. "As is the case with most simple solutions, I believe that any such attempt would be a spectacular failure."
"And what do you mean, 'the first one'? Wouldn't they have to write all of them?" Tana went on.
"Oh, no, those curvy bits in the lower right quadrant clearly indicate that it's meant to become self-replicating, once it gains enough strength. A bit like rolling a snowball down the peak of a mountain and watching it obliterate several villages with an avalanche at the bottom," the sage went on.
"Your analogies are just the best." …Thump, thump, thump…
The two knights sprinted down the city's streets at full charge, desperate to reach the castle before anything could go wrong there, and it was quite some time before either one of them noticed that every block was deserted, even moreso than the rain would make likely. Franz, of course, had the salvation of the kingdom on those few parts of his mind that weren't utterly stuck on his companion, and Amelia was trying to get him to stop and speak.
"You know, it would improve our chances of getting the message to Ephraim if you would tell me what it is," she pointed out.
"Can't stop, not enough time to explain it all twice," Franz insisted.
"What? Why? What's the deadline?"
"Dunno, just guessing," he stated, still staring straight ahead. "Apocalyptic danger. You know."
"And where is everyone?" Amelia wondered, finally deciding that the empty streets were more than coincidence.
"How do you run and talk at the same time?" Franz asked, mildly exasperated.
"I don't have quite your obsession with platemail," she said briefly. "You know, it's really just a tease to shout that you understand what's going on and then charge–"
Franz skidded to a halt, spun, pulled the recruit close, and kissed her before she had decided how to finish her sentence. In the moments after they parted, Amelia noticed a strange, searching worry in Franz's eyes, as though he was waiting to see if she would transform into something else, but when no such conversion took place, he just said "Trust me. We need to hurry."
"…One of these days that's going to stop working."
"What a terrifying thought."
"Just run, will you? I can already tell that if we find out why everyone's inside in the next few minutes, we'll really, really regret it," Amelia said, urging Franz toward Grado Keep again.
"So eventually the sigil won't even need people to keep drawing it in order for it to gain power," Tana said, summarizing a ten-minute explanation from Saleh that had featured three unrelated references to ice-fishing. "It'll just spread on its own?"
"Demonic possession as plague," said Ephraim. "Interesting."
"We have no reason to believe any demons are involved at all. Have you found anything more, Ewan?" asked Saleh.
"I'm reading as fast as I can," Ewan insisted. "And that doesn't count having to translate most of these words into proper non-bloody-ancient spelling. When 'this' is 'thysse' and 'said' is 'spakenned', light reading stops being quite so light."
"We can switch if you want. I'll read, you hold the door," said Ephraim. He was obviously starting to sweat, his blue hair sticking to his forehead fractionally more with every shudder of the door in its frame. "We at least have lances in here, right?"
"I tried," said Tana, "but you insisted that I not do any heavy lifting."
"Oh," was all Ephraim said. He set his feet again on the stone, trying to get comfortable, and stretching his arms out to either side as far as he could. His fingers just barely hooked around the edges of the stone frame, giving the king a fraction more leverage. It would probably keep them safe another few minutes, but he knew that demon-possessed people – if that's what these were – were notorious for not ever tiring, whereas he had been awake for almost twenty-four hours already.
...Thump, thump, thump…
The unfortunate fact was that eventually they were going to break through, and he would stand unarmed as the only obstacle between more than half a dozen knights and his wife, their future child, a brilliant sage, and a brat who deserved to annoy the world for another ninety years. So much for it being good to be king.
"That pounding is giving me an atrocious headache," said Tana, striding away from the group. "Look, that's it. I mean, really, priorities, people." Distantly, Ephraim heard a sound like a cascade of blankets tumbling into a pile, and a moment later several long, metal poles clattered at his feet. Tana stood over them, looking much more determined than he felt.
"Curtain rods? I don't–"
"Doing what I say now, your advice on the hopeless situation later," said Tana.
"I've read a great deal about this," said Saleh, helpfully. "Hormonal imbalance."
"Good lord, is that it?" asked Ephraim. "Franz, Amelia, Her Majesty the Queen – yes, I think that means everyone who drives me insane is being befuddled by hormones."
"Done?" asked Tana, apparently trying to decide if either end of her improvised weapon was sharper. "Good. Ewan, get over here and be ready to blast things. Ready, and… now!" Ephraim leapt away from the door, rolling to his feet again with a lance in hand and ready to face however many foes were to be brought against them.
Naturally, the door didn't open right away, although the sounds of thumping continued. The king and queen shared a glance, and Ephraim cautiously levered the door open with his 'lance'. Both doors were quickly opened the rest of the way by one of the knights, although by the way he was flying through the air and applying all the force with his head, Ephraim quickly formulated a theory that said he didn't want to.
"King Ephraim!" Duessel roared from the corridor, surrounded by knights and handing out disciplined thrashings with the kind of jolly generosity usually only seen during festive seasons. "Excellent to find you standing, sire! Deal with this one, would you?" With that, the greatknight smacked one of his foes toward Ephraim with the wide flat of his axe, and spun to smite another one with his shield.
Obligingly, Ephraim brought the rod down on the stunned knight, who quickly righted himself and rushed Tana with terrible ferocity. This was only the last in a long line of mistakes, as she parried his blow with one twist, smashed him aside with another, and then Ephraim set into him.
The battle didn't last much longer, with both Ephraim and Tana taking the fiendishly determined knights down one by one as Duessel supplied them. The only real moment of tension was when the greatknight found himself caught between two talented wielders of silver blades, and although he was only able to keep one busy, the other had only enough time to take aim at the folds between his armor plates before Ewan sent him singed and rolling back down the hall.
"To business, then," said Duessel, when every knight was lying unconscious on the stone floor. "Purely out of curiosity, I have to ask if everyone in the entire world has gone utterly mad, or just me."
"It's everyone else, don't worry. You don't seem surprised that we were fighting Grado soldiers," said Ephraim.
"Oh, I was, I was. The first time. The next four skirmishes rather wore the sheen off that shock. Now I just want to know what's been happening to my men. They're still fighting with as much talent as I trained them to have, and I'm sure that doesn't happen with hypnotism or mind control or any of those ridiculous practices."
"As a practitioner of arts that you apparently consider ridiculous," said Saleh sternly, stepping out of the shadows, "I feel that I should point out that vests do not have sleeves."
Duessel regarded Saleh calmly for a moment, then turned to Ewan. "And you want to be a wizard when you grow up, do you?"
"It'll be years before Master Saleh lets me try anything that has a chance of melting my brain," Ewan said, and Ephraim was certain he sounded slightly disappointed.
"Why is it that I keep having to remind people: priorities!" said Tana.
"Quite so," Duessel agreed. "Who do we have to axe?"
"That's a bit of a violent leap, isn't it?" asked Tana.
"Not really," said Duessel. "Hardly anyone is able to harness this kind of incredible dark power and then give it up without at least an exorcism. And the benefit there is that people hardly ever die of axe injuries before the exorcism."
"True," the queen agreed. "But we still don't know what's happened, or where anyone else is – Franz and Amelia could be anywhere, if they haven't been cursed or captured or killed. We'll need a miracle to get anywhere from here."
"I can see again!" Saleh declared, blinking rapidly. "Agh… and my eyes have dried out. Ouch."
"…A better miracle than that," Ephraim amended.
"KingEphraimI'vegotitI'vegotitI'vegotit!" Two figures had just burst out of the stairwell down the hall, one in spring green and the other blood red, still charging at full speed.
"It's true," said Amelia. "I still haven't heard what it is, but after that armoured knight we had to use to vault over the main gates, it had better be good."
"Well, don't pause for effect," said Ephraim. "What do you know that we haven't figured out?"
"The enemy of death, that's what they keep saying they are," said Franz, possibly unaware that he had just run a mile. "And that doesn't make any sense when it seems like they're all trying to kill us, does it? Only they're not trying to kill us, they're trying to keep us from ever dying."
Ephraim's eyes flickered to Amelia. "Has he been getting enough oxygen?"
"No, it does make sense," Franz insisted. "The only reason people die is that they start out living. If you're not alive, then you can't die. Death isn't the opposite of life, it's the absence of it. So the enemy of death isn't life. It's undeath. The undead don't ever die."
"Is he making sense yet?" Ewan asked. "I can't tell."
"We did just fight a small horde of skeletons," Amelia admitted. "But how does that make sense? If people were just turning undead, why would they go all freaky-culty?"
"Because you can't make a person undead," said Saleh. "The soul prevents it. A body inhabited by a spirit will always eventually wear out. Undeath replaces the living spirit with a wraith. In skeletons, there's nothing to tell them apart, but if a wraith inhabits a living body, it takes on all of that person's attributes and personality."
"And that exact-copy-of-a-person will never actually die," said Ephraim. "Aside from actually being a hideous mockery of life, at least. …It sounds like conjecture, but I'm inclined to think you're onto something."
"It does match what we know about the sigil," Saleh agreed. "It would try to coerce the… infected person to let it work, because that would make its work much easier. Then connect to an astral realm, beckon the wraith, drive out the spirit, and bind the two together. Neat and unspeakably evil."
"Excellent. How do we proceed, King Ephraim?" asked Duessel.
"Cure the city, destroy the sigil's power, and axe the person responsible," he said firmly.
"Oh, oh! Put me on the third team," said Tana, waving her hand in the air.
"…Don't you get to decide that sort of thing yourself, as queen?" Franz asked.
"You're seventeen years old with a shocking lack of facial hair; do not tell a grown woman how to organise battle strategy," she snapped back, adding "He gets the sigil-destroying job" with a jerk of her thumb. "Now, finding the person responsible sounds straightforward, but I'm terrified of what we'll have to go through to get answers out of Saleh."
"If I've read this properly, and I have, despite the ridiculous faces that squirrel on your shoulder keeps making at me, the sigil will likely attempt to take material form," said Saleh, arching his eyebrows. "An artefact of sufficient dark power, ideally a weapon, brought to consecrated ground where undeath has nevertheless taken hold, and it would have few difficulties, but finding both the object and place would be excessively difficult–"
"Oh. Divine. Light," said Duessel, slowly. He then snapped upright and saluted sharply. "My Liege, I request permission to take command of this particular objective immediately before we all get lanced in the face, and authority to recruit as needed."
"Done," said Ephraim, who could tell when Duessel knew something he didn't.
"Excellent. Franz, you're with me, and I'd like magical support as well – you, boy, what's your name?" asked the greatknight.
"Ewan."
" 'Brat' for short," Ephraim recommended.
"Quickly, now, before our job gets any harder," he insisted, and ran for the door with great galloping strides. Ewan sprinted to catch up, leaving only Franz half-hopping in their wake.
"Wait, I mean, where do you – what about Amelia?" he protested.
"I shall require her assistance," said Saleh, waving the young paladin away.
"I–" Amelia began, raising her arm to reach Franz's way, but she caught herself before she could say anything that Ephraim would doubtless refer to as unprofessional. He left her with a glance that combined his disappointment in leaving her behind and a sort of radiant affection that still left her feeling off-balance. When her thoughts finally broke away from wondering what to make of their last conversation, during the battle in the streets, she saw Saleh holding a slice of bread between herself and the door Franz had just vanished through.
"Drat," the sage remarked. "I was certain it would toast."
"Thank you, I feel much better now," Amelia said sarcastically. "What could you possibly need specifically my help with, anyway?"
"You're a girl," Saleh replied.
"You have three seconds to make that sound better."
"Oh, wonderful! Absolutely fantastic! I'm definitely glad you picked me over, say, any other female in the world!" Amelia shouted over the roar of the chill wind and rain. Her arms were wrapped tight around the neck of Tana's Pegasus, Achaeus, and he was obviously having a much better time than she was, flapping swiftly and joyfully through the storm.
"It is a known fact that Pegasi refuse to fly unless carrying at least one woman," said Saleh, calmly. "And Princess Tana will be much more effective alongside Ephraim, her own preferences for hunting villains aside."
"So I'm a useful gender and I'd be useless anywhere else. No wonder you're still single," she muttered.
"Speaking of which, it would seem that something significant is afoot for you and Sir Franz–"
"Just tell me if I fly off course," said Amelia, cutting him off. "I know you said you want to get to the southern coast, but once we're there, I'll need directions to that cove you mentioned."
Obligingly, Saleh sunk into silence again, leaving Amelia to soak in the rain, shiver in her armor, and try to figure out what could possibly be going through Franz's head. She knew he wasn't what anyone would call ordinary, but there were times when it was as if a hose got out of control in his brain, and what words got washed out into the open were anyone's guess.
"What do you suppose the chances are of being struck by lightning up here?" Saleh asked.
There was a pause. "…Eight, nine, ten," Amelia counted quietly. It hadn't helped. "Lightning? As long as I'm the one flying this horse – have I mentioned I don't like horses or flying? Anyway, how about you do whatever magical thing we need to avoid being blasted into crispy bacon?"
"Oh, gladly, although that will take time out of preparing to harness the Pure-Form Fourth Element to rescue us all from a plague of living undeath," said Saleh, impervious to Amelia's patience, which had burned up over the course of the day like flash paper in a blast furnace. "…It is far too hot up here."
Tana leaned into Ephraim's side and held him close as they walked quietly down the main hall of Grado Keep. Scattered soldiers who had been unfortunate enough to encounter Duessel, Franz, or Amelia on their way to the library were lying about the room. The sigil-curse might have been spreading to people at random now, permeating the city without needing to be drawn, but at least the new 'recruits' weren't as tough as the first ones, and as easy as ever to knock senseless.
"I'm so glad we're getting to spend some time together doing something we both enjoy," said Tana. "Just you, me, Siegmund, Vidofnir, and man hiding somewhere in this city who desperately needs an indiscriminate thrashing. It's so pure."
"No excessive risks, all right? I need to be able to count on whoever's got my back, so I can't ask you not to fight, but you've got someone else to protect, too," said Ephraim, frowning.
Tana gave him a Look through narrowed eyes, glanced down at her belly, and back up again. "Gosh. I had forgotten."
"All right, don't go berserker on me again. We have to think about this logically. The questions are: what kind of person would invent a plague of undeath to try to make the world immortal, where would they hide once it got going and people found out, and do you want the right or the left?" asked Ephraim.
"Oh, the left, definitely," Tana replied.
As one, they spun apart, hefting their legendary lances into basic guarding position, and lashed out with a synchronised pommel-smash at the pale soldiers attempting to creep up behind them. While their eyes alone were freakish with both pupils as wide as possible, like holes into an abyss, their complete lack of interest in the metal poles slamming into their ribs was much worse.
"No pain," said Ephraim. "They're not just the riffraff they let in these days, but actual living-undead."
"Well, the people who get into a big thing early usually get the best out of it," said Tana, trying to keep up her faltering confidence. So far she had only fought one of these wraiths-in-human-clothing, and it had been controlling a maid who was not at the peak of human physical prowess. Plus she had been armed with a carpet, which can be a great comfort.
Of course, a glance to her side at Ephraim was also a great comfort, especially since he was the sort of fighter who sometimes went into fits of giggles before battle, astonished at the idiocy of anyone challenging him to combat. The difficult with these enemies was that Ephraim and Tana wanted to avoid killing them, but they couldn't be easily knocked unconscious or driven back by fear of harm. They wouldn't notice pain until they lost the third limb.
The king struck first, warding his foe off with a thrust from Siegmund, and the knight leaned away from it appropriately, but as Tana expected, it was just the setup for a spinning approach that came in from the opposite side while the knight was still off-balance. When not meant to kill, the lances they both favoured were effectively just metal staves, and Tana took advantage of this with an equally sudden rush against her opponent, planting Vidofnir on the floor and using it to vault feet-first into the hesitating knight.
She and Ephraim consistently drove the attacking knights back across the entire hall, and it was only when the first adrenaline rush wore off that Tana thought to ask why their opponents were putting up so little resistance – and it was at that moment when the other three rush Ephraim from behind, one grabbing each arm and a third slapping a cloth over his face.
Tana quickly set about bashing them to the floor, but when the cloth fell away, it left behind a mark. These knights had though ahead about how difficult it was to draw on a warrior king, and had realised that, if placed backwards onto a kerchief, even a very complex blood-drawing could be stamped onto any unsuspecting bystander.
The sigil glistened a sticky red on Ephraim's forehead, and his eyes rolled back under his lids as he collapsed.
"Some of us can't take steps four at a time, you know!" Ewan called up the stairwell.
"And some of us don't have magical powers," Franz replied over his shoulder. "Give yourself some wings of living fire or whatever – you do not keep the Obsidian waiting."
"Franz, where are you?" Duessel called from even farther above.
"On my way!" Franz yelped, and redoubled his pace. Duessel just shook his head and continued his desperate charge, but some old instinct knew it was already much too late. There were times when you could outrun the enemy, but that usually depended on knowing where they were going to go before they did, and this time he was late, far too late, far too late…
"Cormag!" Duessel roared, grabbing the doorframe as he passed and using it to swing himself inside the wyvern knight's quarters. The room looked as though an entire barbarian horde had spent a week ransacking it, and belatedly Duessel saw the date-marker on the door, reminding him that Cormag had been on a training mission with the Frelian Pegasus knights for two weeks already.
"Whoa… I always thought Sir Cormag would be a neat-freak," said Franz, staring at the chaos within.
"Ordinarily, you'd be right," Duessel explained. "But they already have it – the dark lance, the one I gave him for safekeeping, the one that drove Valter mad…"
"Out on a limb here, but how much driving could that possibly take?" Ewan muttered.
"We will need wyverns, torches, shadowkiller swords, and fiendcleaver axes," said Duessel. "Immediately."
"I don't think I can fit the wyverns in any of my satchels," said Franz. "The rest we can handle. Where are we going?"
"Where else? Lagdou."
