Guild Mage: Apprentice-Chapter 156. Reconnaissance

After an entire evening on the wall, Wren’s fingers were numb. She’d emptied two quivers of arrows into successive waves of Antrian war-machines, though the normal arrowheads she used for hunting were completely ineffective against the mechanisms of the enemy.

Instead, she and the other archers waited for the trebuchets on the walls to launch great clay pots of oil into the thickest press of the assault. When the pots broke, splashing oil everywhere, Wren and the Crosbie bowmen launched a wave of fire arrows to ignite the oil. Longbows were better than crossbows for such a tactic, which meant that, unlike at Whitehill, she was one of hundreds of archers.

When the oil burned hot enough, it didn’t melt steel outright - but it did cause the metal to soften and then deform under the weight of the war-machine’s own mechanisms. It would have been more satisfying to watch armor run like water, but it was just as effective for their legs to collapse, stranding the half-disabled Antrians in the field.

Wren was nearly finished shovelling a quick meal of porridge, ale, and sausage into her mouth when Thora ran into the barracks dining hall to find her. While Castle Whitehill had been built for a family to live in, the Crosbie’s Valegard was a military installation through and through. As a result, the common soldiers did not eat in the great hall: instead, there were multiple barracks inside the walled compound, each with its own kitchen and tables.

She was impressed there was enough space to absorb the reinforcements that Duchess Julianne had brought. Soldiers dressed in black and red mixed easily with those wearing white and green. A few days of manning the wall together had already begun to build camaraderie between the men and women in service to the two houses.

“Lady Liv needs you up on the wall,” Thora insisted, while Wren crammed one last bite of sausage into her mouth and then washed it down with a gulp of ale.

“I’ve got a feeling I know what she needs,” Wren said. “We need to stop by the butcher first.” She ignored the maid’s protests and practically dragged the other woman along in her wake, asking directions of passing soldiers and servants until they found where half a dozen lambs were being slaughtered for the evening meal in the great hall.

“What do you want, again?” one of three butchers asked, squinting at Wren and Thora with a great cleaver in his hand.

“Blood,” Wren repeated. “In bottles, if you can do it. Fresh. She’ll pay you on behalf of my lady.” The huntress elbowed Thora, who scrambled to take her purse out of the pocket beneath her dress.

“And who is your lady?” the butcher persisted.

“Livara Tär Valtteri,” Thora said. “Adopted daughter of Duchess Julianne, and journeyman mage of the guild.”

“Some sort of Eldish blood magic?” the butcher squinted suspiciously.

“Something like that,” Wren said, before Thora could answer. “The blood. She’s waiting for us up on the wall.”

“With Duchess Julianne,” Thora added.

The price of two silver suns later, the two women walked across the courtyard with two bottles of sheep’s blood, one in Thora’s hand, and the other in Wren’s. She wrestled the cork out of the top on their way up the stone steps that led to the parapet, and found Liv, Rose, Julianne, and Arnold Crosbie waiting there.

Wren was only half-surprised to see Liv on her feet: the thigh wound had been brutal, and the girl was lucky to be alive, but then again it wasn’t like her bones had come to life again and started wiggling around. Still, the girl looked exhausted, and Wren didn’t blame her, after the night they’d had. For a moment, Wren’s thoughts skittered to Jurian, like a bug across the forest floor, but she took hold of them and focused on what was in front of her.

“Let me guess,” Wren said, making her way over to the crenellations. “You want me to fly out and go take a look.”

“I do,” Liv confirmed. “Something is happening out at the foundry, and I think it’s House Iravata. They’re supposed to have wyrms with them.” The girl’s eyes flicked over to Wren’s bottle of uncapped blood. “You found a source?”

Wren nodded, put the bottle to her lips, and tossed back a few gulps. “The butcher gave us a few strange looks, but when I dropped the duchess’ name, he decided our coin was good enough.”

“Wonderful,” Julianne grumbled. “Now all the servants are going to think I practice some sort of blood magic.”

“That looks vile,” Rosamund spoke up, for the first time since Wren had arrived.

“Are we certain we trust this woman?” Arnold Crosbie asked. “Once a traitor -”

“I trust her,” Liv said, interrupting the baron. Wren grinned - a year ago, the girl wouldn’t have had the confidence to do that. Not unless she was already furious; once Liv got angry, she didn’t hold back.

Wren drained the rest of the bottle, then handed it off to Thora. “I’m going to want the second one when I get back,” she said. “This may take a few hours. Someone make sure our girl eats in the meantime, please.”

She hopped up onto the stone of the parapet, putting her rear on the crenel between the merlons, pulled her legs up, and spun around so that she was facing out over the battlefield. Then, Wren pushed off the wall. As she dropped, she took bat form, spread her wings, caught an updraft, and made her way up into the sky above the valley.

Higher and higher she went, until Wren was finally confident that the Antrian war-machines below her wouldn’t pay any mind to her passage. The last thing she wanted was to find out what kind of enchantments those things carried, all by herself and far from the safety of Valegard.

Still, it felt good to fly again. Opportunities at Coral Bay and in Lendh ka Dakruim had been few; most of the time, the risk of discovery, and the consequences that might bring, hadn’t been worth it. It would have been easy to lose herself in the freedom of it, but Wren focused on what she was there for: to scout the enemy.

The valley itself was essentially a wasteland, with drifts of wrecked machinery sometimes piled a dozen feet high, the mounds of twisted metal crawling with Antrian scavengers. Like ants, the scavengers proceeded back to the foundry itself in long lines, each one carrying some component or armor plate that they judged a worthy prize.

Wren couldn’t tell when she passed into the shoals of the rift; like all her people, she couldn’t use mana, and only the deepest depths of a rift felt uncomfortable. Instead, she marked the transition by the presence of enormous rats, scurrying in and out of burrows they’d dug into the scrap. There were insects, as well, such as spiders the size of a cat who’d built tenuous webs between rock pillars or rusting heaps of metal.

The stone formations were curious, and almost beautiful. Wren tried to picture what the valley might have looked like, before it was filled by the cast-aside refuse of Antrius’ creations, and thought that it once must have been a beautiful place.

Wren headed for the great machinery at the east end of the valley, and as she drew closer it resolved from dim shapes, half-glimpsed through the dust, into clanking, grinding, smoking machinery, all turned to different purposes. Great pits had been dug into the surrounding cliffs, and elevated troughs reached out of the pits down to the machines below. Chunks of ore - iron, if Wren had to guess - trundled down the troughs, born along by some sort of moving track. She saw that they tumbled, finally, into great chutes of steel, which carried them into the depths of the machinery and beyond what she could see.

In truth, she could have spent hours exploring the massive, hulking machines, nearly all of which seemed to remain active even after more than a thousand years. Swooping down between the spires and great boxes, the chutes and grinding gears, Wren saw great bays below, with war machines nestled in their cradles, the glow of mana-stone pulsing around them.

However, the wyrms drew her attention.

There were three of them, great black serpents longer than a sailing ship, and they’d coiled themselves around the rock formations of the valley, just outside the complex of machinery, where they could warm themselves in the morning sun. Like all the snakes Wren had been familiar with in the jungles of Varuna, they seemed to move slowly and sluggishly when cold. Probably the best time to kill them would be at night, and she resolved to mention that to Liv and Julianne. That oaf Arnold Crosbie could hear it too, if he happened to be standing close by when Wren made her report.

The Eld were camped near the wyrms, outside of the machinery, and Wren didn’t blame them. They’d brought tents, and dug firepits. There were sentries, and they seemed to know their business, so Wren didn’t get too close. She made a quick count: as near as Wren could tell, there were perhaps two hundred infantry, and another hundred archers, along with three great saddles that had been set aside for the wyrms.

None of this, of course, answered precisely what the Eld were doing at the foundry. Wren flapped over to a convenient metal pipe, gripped it with her feet, and tucked her wings, hanging upside down to watch for a while. Like the soldiers at the castle, the Elden men and women below were cooking their morning meals - but as Wren observed them, she noticed a pair of them leave the camp and venture into the depths of the machinery. Dropping down from her perch, Wren followed. She didn’t fly for long, but just fluttered from one perch to another, trying to stay directly above them. In her experience, most people didn’t look up often.

“- that it doesn’t take much longer,” the man below said, in the dialect of the Eld. It wasn't Wren's best language, but she could make the meaning out well enough.

“Why? The humans at the wall have shown no intention of pushing in as far as we are,” the woman at his side asked. “Sending them a group of Antrians every few hours is enough to keep them pinned down.”

“This place doesn’t terrify you?” the man said. “What it can do? I’d rather be dead than turned into one of those - things.”

“Don’t let Calevis hear you say that,” the woman warned him. “Now hush. He’ll want a morning report.”

Calevis. Wren knew that name - she’d last seen him in the meeting of Ractia’s lieutenants, beneath the western mountain fastness in Varuna. It had been just before she left to assault Soltheris, and her decision to fly south to find Liv. She didn’t regret her decision - whatever was happening here in the foundry, it felt wrong to her on a fundamental level.

Carefully, she followed the two soldiers into an area that reminded her of the bays where the Antrians had been stored long ago, at the Well of Bones, and beneath the mountain in Varuna. A door opened for them, and Wren fluttered in before it could close again, then up to the ceiling where she hid herself among the machinery in the darkness. Instead of rack upon rack of cradles, however, this building contained a single such place, in the very center, there was a single mechanism, holding the crippled body of an Elden man.

Calevis of House Iravata hung from great arms of metal, gripped by articulated fingers. His torso and arms were naked, the skin pale in the gloom, and his body seemed to end just below the waist, his legs entirely missing. Or at least, the legs he’d been born with.

Half a dozen mechanical arms moved in perfect coordination, assembling new limbs of steel bone, wire, mana-stone, and gears. Sigils glowed inside the mechanisms, and Wren knew that Liv or Sidonie would have known what the enchantments were meant to do at a glance.

“Report,” Calevis rasped, and when he opened his eyes, they gleamed like emeralds, just as Wren remembered.

“We’re keeping the humans pinned down at their fortifications,” the woman Liv had listened to on the way into the structure began. “They’ve gotten reinforcements since we arrived, and we can tell them apart by the colors. Green and white, instead of black and red. The waystone on the other side of the wall has activated several times, including last night. We’re pretty confident they brought in additional mages in the latest group, because of the amount of magic used last night.”

“Do they have the numbers and the power to push to us here?” Calevis asked.

The male warrior shook his head. “We don’t think so, and they’ve shown no sign of making the attempt. As long as we leave soon, I think we can get out without a battle.”

“And production of war-machines continues without delay?”

It was the woman who answered. “Since we followed Ractia’s instructions to spin up the production facilities, the foundry has been turning out three of the full-sized war machines each day. We’ll pass twenty new machines today; added to what we found in storage here, we should be able to bring at least eighty back to Varuna.”

“Excellent.” Calevis nodded, then flinched and hissed, as if in pain, at something the mechanical arms were doing to what was left of his lower torso. “I require another day here - two, at most. You are to keep pressure on the humans, using the worst of the scavenged or repaired machines. Do not waste the newly produced Antrians unless they launch a foray to reach us. If that does happen, tell me immediately, and hold the wyrms back. Wyrms take time to breed and train - Antrians can be repaired or replaced easily.”

The man and woman bowed. They retreated three paces, then turned and made for the door - walking more quickly than when they’d entered, Wren noticed. She fluttered down after them, swooped through the door before it closed again, and then headed immediately up, up, out through the great smokestacks and grinding gears of the foundry. Wren didn’t relax until she’d made it up into open air, and then she set back off across the valley, making her way west as fast as she could. She’d learned more than enough - no need to press her luck and maybe get herself captured or killed.

By the time Wren came in sight of the wall again, she saw that Sidonie and Arjun, Mathew and Triss, and even Master Grenfell had all joined the impromptu conference atop the wall. There were armored young men with a striking resemblance to Baron Crosbie, as well, and since the sun was now high in the sky, Wren could only assume that someone had made Liv eat at some point, rather than let her wait atop the wall the entire time she’d been gone.

Wren swooped down and landed on two human feet, her new boots from Lendh ka Dakruim scuffing the stone as she got her balance. “Blood,” she said, reaching her hand out to where Thora waited with the second bottle. The maid handed it over, and after popping the cork, Wren drank.

“Fascinating,” Sidonie said. “I think that’s the first time I’ve seen you shift.” The girl adjusted her glasses, and Wren saw that she had a notebook open and perched on the flat stone of one of the crenels. “How much blood does it take to fuel each shift? Would you say a bottle of blood is equal to one ring of mana? Two? Ten?”

“You can quiz her later,” Liv told Sidonie. “What did you find?”

“It’s Ractia’s people, alright,” Wren said. “Three wyrms, two hundred infantry, a hundred archers, and they’ve got eighty fully operational, just built Antrian war-machines that they’re holding back. All they’re sending this way is the stuff they don’t want - old, half repaired machines and scavengers. They’re perfectly happy to wait there for another day or two, and then make their escape.”

“That’s actually a good thing,” one of the boys Wren didn’t recognize said, but he flinched when Triss smacked the back of his head.

“No it isn’t,” the young woman chided him with the familiarity of a sister. “We don’t want to just let the enemy accomplish what they’ve come for, if we can stop it. Are they just here to make off with war-machines, Wren, or is there something else.”

“Oh, there’s something else,” Wren confirmed. “They’ve got Calevis - one of Ractia’s lieutenants, the leader of her Eld and wyrms - hooked up to the machines. It’s building him a new set of legs, from what I could see. If we let it finish, then one of her leaders is back on the field.”

Duchess Julianne and Liv shared a look, and for just a moment Wren could believe they might actually be mother and daughter, even though she knew they weren’t.

“We begin planning an assault on the Foundry Rift, then,” Julianne said. “Arnold, figure out a rotation to get all your best people rested, just in case there's a counterstrike.”

“You want to hit at night, or in the very early morning,” Wren suggested. “When the wyrms will be sluggish from the cold.”

“They don’t like the cold, you say?” Liv asked, a dangerous gleam in her eyes.

“Tonight, then,” Julianne said. “I want everyone rested, well-fed, and holding as much mana as you can contain. When the sun goes down, we strike.”