Moving the Pieces by Dan Melson

Author:Dan Melson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dan Melson
Published: 2022-04-11T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

When word came of First Wall’s fall, the city went insane.

Never mind that the majority of the Guardsmen we’d committed had made it out of the trap and were headed back to Yalskarr for the defense of the city. Never mind that there were no flanking maneuvers possible around Yalskarr’s defensive perimeter, or that we had most of the workforce of the city turning them into two layers of real defensive walls. It had been two sixty-fours since any demonic force had managed to defeat our guardsmen in the field – fifty-one of the Earth years I’d grown up with. The Yalskarrans had become complacent; now they were terrified.

The berths on the undelivered ship that Yonshall was planning to take out as soon as it was dark had already been filled. I’d had him pass the word for everyone selected to get on board before noon. They were still waiting for nightfall, but I’d posted guards from among those workers whose families were onboard but weren’t being evacuated themselves. I figured that gave them the most motivation possible to see that nobody unauthorized got aboard. Still, the man who would have been second mate lost his berth and his job attempting to smuggle one of the wealthier merchants onboard as his aged father. I called the proctors to come take them both for wall construction myself. But that didn’t change the fact that everyone who could get away from wall construction was trying to sneak onto the docks for a spot on any ship, bound for anywhere. I finally had a secure room set aside where the wall proctors could come collect new groups of laborers as fast as they could make round trips out to the walls.

The outer wall was out on the edge of where the last assault had poisoned the soil against edible crops. Nobody on Calmena had the equipment for an analysis of demonic blood, but crops that grew where significant amount of their ichor had been spilled were poisonous to humans, where they would grow at all. Not ‘fall over dead immediately’ poisonous, but after a few days or weeks, you’d get sick and likely die unless you stopped eating poisoned food – or unless you were trained in necris, which none of the Calmenans were. Eventually, whatever it was would break down, but it lasted for longer than a Calmenan lifetime. The farmers who lived near the city had been compensated with land from other farmers who hadn’t survived, and Yalskarr had pretty much grown out to the limits of the killing fields of two sixty-fours ago. I remembered when I’d thought N’yeschlass had been impressive for Calmena with about 90,000 people. Today’s Yalskarr had fifteen times that. Bazhen and N’yeschlass and Windhome Bay and others were even bigger – times had changed.

The inner walls were the old agaani bastion, being rebuilt as much as time allowed. Since they circled a steep hill twenty to thirty paces high on a promontory between the two harbors, they didn’t have to be absolutely perfect.

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