Lord's Curse by Brandy Ackerley

Author:Brandy Ackerley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Inked Fox Press

Chapter 21

Himiko looked at the city of Sakre and kept her jaw firmly closed. It was so much larger than Hidan, so much wider, so much everything... she could hear the noise of so many people and they weren't even at the docks yet. She couldn't imagine how many people lived in it or how many hunters it would take to protect so many. Part of her was excited to be somewhere so vibrant, but a larger part wanted to skip this city and continue on their way.

Even the walls were different. In Hidan, they were no more than twenty feet high. The bottom five feet was made of a solid stone while the rest of the height was made with strong wood. It was easy to repair and replace, especially since they didn’t have access to a local mine for good stone. Here, the walls were double the height of the ones in Hidan, made of cold, dour stone secured by metal bands the whole way up.

What sort of monsters could they be dealing with here that the walls needed to be forty feet tall and made only of stone?

“It's so large. And there are so many people. Do you think they’ll still have space at the inn?”

Kuzunoha was acting like a bumpkin tourist, and Himiko was embarrassed standing next to her. Still, it was nice to see Kuzunoha happy, smiling with a rare, unguarded expression on her face.

“There will be multiple inns and they'll certainly have space. It's not their busy season.” Richard answered her.

Himiko didn’t even want to consider that this wasn’t the city’s busy time of year. It was too full as it was.

“How can you tell?” Isashi asked. “It looks plenty busy to me.”

Himiko saw a ship come closer to them and Isashi signed something with her hands to them. The man in the boat stood up and then flashed the same hand signal back. He must have been one of the hunters positioned in the water to warn of water monsters converging on the town.

The only place a creature would be able to attack easily was the dock since the walls stopped thirty feet past the land's edge. If an invader could get there unnoticed, they would be able to do significant damage before the hunters could reach them. If she remembered correctly, there was a gate that could be dropped, but that would leave all of the people outside to die until the hunters could arrive.

“That dock is only half full, so unless they have a very active fishing population that we didn’t see on our way in, it means that they're prepped for way more ships than are docked right now. During the busy season, all the docks will be full.” He pointed to colored balls floating on the water. “And there will be ships anchored all around the bay.”

The idea of a city this size doubling in a matter of months sent chills running through Himiko. Humans weren’t meant to live like pickled eels packed together in a jar.

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