Chapter 26 – Begins and Ends With Nu
One little maid, once called a lover
Two little maids who gave her cover
Now the one has dirt above her
Three little maids from school
Three little maids, take one away
Two little maids remain and they
Won't have to wait very long, they say
Three little maids from school
Three little maids, all torn to pieces
Fed to the foxes, tossed to the breezes
Seeking our revenge on all who sees us
Three little maids from school
An unearthly screech ripped through the air as Egmont's sword fell through the girl standing in front of him. It was not a cry like that of a voice; rather, it sounded more similar to a sheet of metal being rent asunder, almost as if the girl herself were made of aluminum, though without the resistance a metallic girl would provide to a sword slicing her in half. Egmont brought his sword through her torso and out the side of her leg and then pulled back.
For roughly a second, the girl appeared to have been split in two. Then her two halves pressed themselves together, and the fissure separating them vanished, leaving no trace of the attack save a frowning expression on the face that had been gaily singing before Egmont's attack. Her eyes flashed with anger. She raised her arms in front of her until they were parallel to the ground, and she clenched her fists.
Instinctively, Egmont brought his arm up into a defensive posture, and not a moment too soon. A burst of red lightning bolts shot from the girl's hands and struck Egmont's shield, and at the point of impact, the air exploded, making a sound like thunder and pushing Egmont back onto the sand. He lay there but a second before resuming his assault, sword flailing wildly back and forth, each blow eliciting the same sound of scraping metal followed by the target fixing herself and launching a counterattack.
Paem stood back, utterly in shock at Egmont's ferocity. She readied herself in case one of the other girls attempted aid the one with whom Egmont was sparring, but neither did. The only instance of battle within sight was that in front of her between Egmont the Knight of Kalinovo and a ghost girl who refused to be killed. Try as she might, she could think of no appropriate response to the scene.
Eventually it was Egmont who broke the pattern of attacks and counterattacks between the two parties. Previously he had used mostly wide, powerful arcing swings of his sword, the sort of blows he might use if his opponent were on horseback. After making little progress with that style of fighting, he substituted a swifter thrust toward the torso of the girl, but at the last instant he pulled back in a feint. Paem recognized that he missed her because she did not hear a scraping sound as Egmont finished his motion. The girl readied her counterattack anyway, raising her fists to charge her lightning, but with Egmont's sword closer and under better control than it had been after the longer sweeping strikes, she never had a chance to pull it off. Instead of putting up his shield, Egmont stepped to one side and pulled his sword into an uppercut slice directly through the ghost girl's left wrist.
This time, instead of a screech, Egmont's strike met with a bang, a flash of red, and a fireball that threw both combatants ten feet in opposite directions. Egmont's sword spun over his head before landing with its point down in the sand.
Paem almost ran to where Egmont had landed, but not knowing the status of the girl, she checked herself and scanned the other side of the battlefield for signs of life. She found more than she expected.
Egmont's attack had done its job; the ghost girl's left hand was gone. Clutching the stump on her wrist, she writhed about and cried with a voice like that of a cat. Her voice grew louder and louder until it finally broke, but when it did so, she summoned an even larger ball of fire and flung it at Egmont. He only narrowly dodged.
What worried Paem more than the ghost girl, though, was the marching pattern of the Golems. The majority of them continued to press forward, but nearly a third of them broke formation and began stomping back and forth haphazardly, their pace quickening. A few charged off from the main line into the distance, like seeds flecking off from a dandelion and blowing away. Others collided with each other and with the Golems still marching, knocking many of them onto their backs, from which position they appeared unable to stand again. Through all of this, Golems continued to pour out into the desert, and the thicker the crowd, the more disorganized the lot became. If the behavior of the pack had been like a liquid flowing down a pipe before, the addition of the disorganized division within acted as a clot, slowing the traffic and increasing the density near the origin.
Eventually, the density became too great, and the ground began to give way. The hole where the large monster sank after Chrono killed it expanded, creeping over the Golems' path and swallowing them as it went. Marching, nonmarching, and fallen Golems all disappeared underground. The lip of the growing crater, fast becoming a trench rather than a mere hole, became engulfed in a tower of dust; it looked like a whirlwind moving along the path and eating everything in its way.
Paem shouted at Egmont to follow her, and then she ran as fast as she could. The flow of the Golems cut her off from the City of God's Hand, so she ran in the direction of the Yellow River Fortress.
Risking a glance behind her, she saw no one following. Egmont had resumed his battle with the ghost girl.
Paem shouted again, but her voice disappeared into the roar of the collapsing earth, the wild Golems, and even the odd metal scraping sound or exploding fireball from the skirmish still happening behind her. She dared not go back. The cloud drew closer and closer to the ghost girls, and she wanted as much distance between her and the mass destruction as she could manage.
As a last ditch attempt to catch Egmont's attention, Paem cast a shadow spell on the sand in front of Egmont, but he did not appear to notice it. His full attention rested with his nemesis.
The flash of his steel and the glow of the girl's magic persisted right up to the end. Paem felt a slight lump in her throat when she saw Egmont strike his final blow. Then the cloud swallowed him, the girl with whom he had fought, and both of her companions, and then it moved on.
Paem felt nothing, not even the overbearing sun or the sting of the sand on her face, as she turned her head and sprinted full tilt away from the scene.
XXX
Coppelia stopped running and pointed at the ranks of Golems.
"Mister Chrono, they have ceased their marching. Whatever had been controlling their movements has stopped."
Chrono pulled up beside Coppelia and sized up the Golem army. Whereas before a few of the Golems had broken off from the main group and stumbled around the open desert, now nearly all of them seemed to be directionless. The rough shape of the column remained, stretching ahead into the distance, but its structure degraded as attrition cost it almost all of its constituent Golems. Those that did not collide and fall to the ground eventually escaped from the pack and lumbered off in no direction in particular, and with the general forward march no longer in effect, the Golems who wandered off were not replaced by new arrivals. Thus, the vein of Golems grew thinner.
"Does this mean..." Chrono began, but Coppelia cut him off.
"This means we must hurry. If Miss Orchid is in control of these creatures, she may be in danger. It is in our best interest to reach the final destination of the third company of Golems as soon as we can. We can still follow the track of the fallen Golems."
Chrono nodded understandingly.
"Mister Chrono, I believe it is also in our best interest to reach more solid ground. I hear a catastrophe behind us, and I can see a cloud of dust moving ever closer. If we do not make haste, we may not survive to accomplish our mission."
Chrono realized he had remained rooted to the sight of the mass of disorganized Golems, and he only broke free when Coppelia shook him back to reality. Indeed, he could see the cloud in the distance, and he could hear a faint but growing rumbling sound accompanying it. His survival instinct screamed at him to dash away from the ominous cloud, but something held him back. A thought.
"Paem and Egmont are back there!" he insisted. "What can we do?"
Coppelia frowned. "Our priority is to reach safety and find Miss Orchid. We must proceed."
"We can't just leave them!"
"Is there anything we could do if we did go back?"
Chrono's feet carried themselves a few paces in the direction of the cloud. "There is always something we can do! Even if we risk our lives, we can help them. That's always what happens!"
"Are you certain that-"
Something cut Coppelia off in mid-sentence. In fact, something cut everything off. All at once, the world around Chrono froze. Coppelia's voice, the stamping of Golem feet, the crashing of rocks, and even the wind fell silent. Chrono put his hands to his ears to see if something had happened to them, but he seemed fine. At least he could hear himself think. He tried snapping his fingers to make sure he could still hear; it turned out he could.
He then heard something else: "Chrono!"
It was the voice of the Fairy Disenchantment.
"Chrono! Do not delay. Follow Coppelia. There is nothing else you can do but to follow her."
Chrono felt a slight surge of anger welling up. "How do you know?"
"Just run, Chrono! Run or be swallowed by the earth! Run or be eaten!"
Before the words could sink in, time snapped back to normal for Chrono. The sudden jolt of noise after the relative quiet shook him to the point where he lost his balance, but he recovered before he could fall. Coppelia tugged at his wrist, and he nearly fell again, but she caught him with her spare arm.
"Mister Chrono, please hurry. I can fully sympathize with your desire to help your comrades, but if we do not hurry, we might all die. This is our only chance."
Chrono shook his arm free and started in the opposite direction. "Without the others, we don't even know where we are. We'll be lost in the middle of nowhere again."
"You do not wish to see friends harmed. Yet, you are my friend, and I do not wish to see you harmed. Can you appreciate my dilemma?"
"Just a bit longer!" Chrono pleaded. "I need to know that they are okay. I need to... wait, look! Is that...?"
Coppelia stepped in front of Chrono. "I will save Miss Paem. Please run to the Yellow River Fortress."
Chrono sighed, took a deep breath, and ran.
XXX
The Yellow River Fortress sat on the north side of a canyon, at the bottom of which ran the Yellow River. Its walls made of a solid mixture of limestone, clay, and brick, it had stood its position for countless centuries, an oasis of stability and a beacon of life and comfort in the harsh and desolate land. Sand piled against the northern wall up about a third of the way; anything beyond that had been been removed to preserve the tactical advantage of having high walls to deter an invasion force. Most of the fortress's windows were small and covered with thick glass to keep stray sand particles at bay. A sort of drainage ditch for sand had been dug around the northern gate to flush excess sand away in order to keep it from interfering with the normal opening and closing of the gate. Visible in a few places were reinforced iron and copper pipes for pumping water up from the river below into the fortress. Within the walls were some patches of soil for farming.
Running behind the fortress was a bridge over the canyon, beyond which lay the so-called badlands, a seemingly endless stretch of sand and rock completely uninterrupted by signs of civilization. In the middle of the bridge stood a tower that could have been the twin of the northern Himmelkreuz tower near Lord Kuei's domain.
And everywhere around the grounds, inside the fortress and out, around in front, on the bridge, and stretching to the east and west along the edge of the canyon, there were Golems. The majority of them no longer moved, as most of those that could move had long since fallen over the edge and into the Yellow River far below. Those that remained either wriggled mindlessly on the ground or lay still, and those that lay still often showed signs of injury from magical burns or arrow wounds or spear punctures. Golems were by no means the only sign that life had been there recently; human corpses littered the grounds as well, though their numbers were far smaller than those of the Golem army. Their injuries were also far more gruesome. The saturation of dead flesh made the area reek like no place Chrono had ever visited before.
Just inside the cracked and battered front gate of the fortress, Chrono, Coppelia, and Paem gathered around a small mound of dirt in one of the patches of soil. Atop the mound they had placed a rock into which Chrono had carved Egmont's name and a short epitaph. Behind the rock he had stuck into the dirt a sword looted from the fortress, acting in place of Egmont's, which he had taken with him in his fight with the ghost. None of the three felt it would be right to go on without honoring the memory of their fallen knight, but Chrono had been the most insistent that he be given a warrior's proper burial, even if they had no body to bury. Paem had informed them, to their great relief, that they had time for the funeral, as the cloud in the distance had been caused by the collapse of the unstable crust of the land, but the ground near the canyon was solid, and thus the cloud could not reach them anymore.
The short vigil in memory of Egmont was attended by Chrono, Coppelia, Paem, and two Nus who had taken up residence in the fortress and who had been hiding in a supply shelter during the attack. As it turned out, several Nus lived in the area, though most of them took little interest in Chrono's party. Their presence set Chrono a bit on edge, as he had always felt somewhat ill at ease around Nus, but he did his best to ignore them at first.
After the vigil, however, ignoring the Nus became much more difficult. Whereas the party had only seen a few when they first arrived and a few more when they looked around for stores of food and water, their number grew, and the new arrivals came mostly from outside the grounds. First dozens and then hundreds of them plodded slowly but steadily across the dunes to the fortress and the outlying areas.
Within minutes, the almost hauntedly empty hallways of Yellow River Fortress filled with the round, blue, spongy bodies and noodle-like appendages of the Nus. At least one moved into every room in the fortress, and most rooms found themselves stocked with six or more. The open area outside the main structure but inside the outer wall became stuffed with them. Nus surrounded the wall, Nus covered the top of the wall, and Nus piled into the drainage ditch below. Neither nook nor cranny of sufficient size to house a Nu found itself unoccupied.
Something in Chrono's instinct to protect those to whom he owed loyalty caused him to stand near Egmont's grave. Coppelia stood with him, though Paem preferred to be off by herself. Chrono could not tell if she wanted to be alone out of grief over their friend or out of interest in the spectacle of hundreds upon hundreds of Nus piling into the fortress grounds, but he did not wish to press the issue. Instead, he and Coppelia watched as the Nus gathered silently around and stood as if waiting for some signal.
In contrast with the Golems, the Nus appeared each to be acting of its own volition. With the exception of a few groups of six, which Chrono recognized as hunting packs (he seemed to remember Lucca saying), there seemed to be no organized movement among any of them. The general trend was for each to find a spot in which to stand somewhere in or around the area, but several could be seen trading spots, pacing, or wandering aimlessly. Even the hunting packs showed only loose organization. Their overall effect was like that of a flock of perching birds, unreadable yet sinister.
Someone tapped Chrono on the shoulder; it was Paem. She had moved stealthily behind him. Her face wore an expression of deep concern, and she could not stop fidgeting with her staff and shifting her weight from one foot to the other. She seemed to be breathing heavily.
Leaning in, she whispered in Chrono's ear: "We need to leave. Fast."
Chrono raised his eyebrows in puzzlement. He had been enjoying watching the Nu gathering.
"Hurry," said Paem. "That tower in the middle of the bridge is another access point for Himmelkreuz. We'll be safe there, but we have to go. Now."
"What is the problem?" Chrono whispered back.
"The Nus," said Paem. "I've figured out what is going on. They've gathered to feed."