18. Blood Bone City
Chapter 18
Blood Bone City
A n echoing of fucks traveled the length of the chasm as we free-fell downward before our reactions eventually kicked in enough for us to reach out, doing so before it was too late. And thankfully, each of us managed to grab onto something, so as when the bridge finally made impact against the other side, we did too. Although the second I heard the wood crack under me, I reacted once again, this time to save my brother. Praying that the rope I had looped around my hand would hold, I reached down quick enough to grab him. Then once I had hold, I yanked him up to the rope so as he could grip on and get back his footing.
This now meant that the bridge had just become a ladder and we were forced to climb up this fucking, plummeting cliffside.
“Well, that was unfortunate,” Marcus said, making me grit my teeth and warn in a deathly tone,
“Not another fucking word out of either of you until we are on flat ground again, you understand me?!”
“Sure thing.”
“No problem,” they both said at the same time, which thank fuck for me, meant the rest of this climb was at least done in peace. However, the second we made it to the top and while we were lying flat on our backs trying to catch a breath, Orth was the one to break the blissful silence, asking us both,
“Now as for this bullshit with Smidge…”
“Oh, come on, don’t act like you didn’t know!” Marcus snapped in response to this, now pushing himself up to a sitting position, however, my brother ignored this and instead looked to me. The foolish twat who had been in the middle of this rift of theirs for over three hundred years. Hence why I covered my eyes with my arm and tried to forget where I was for all of four seconds.
“Is this shit true?” he asked me, making me release a sigh before lifting my arm and looking to him before admitting,
“Honestly, I thought you knew.” His eyes widened in shock before narrowing.
“How the fuck would I? She never said a fucking word!”
I scoffed a humorless laugh, sat up and told him,
“Orth, everyone fucking knew… it was that obvious.”
“Well not to me it fucking wasn’t!” he snapped again, making me sigh but before I could respond, Marcus got there first.
“You’re not lying,” he stated and for once, not in mockery.
“Does it look like I am?! God’s bollocks, but I had no clue… you gotta believe me, brother, I wouldn’t have…” I was quick to interrupt him, shaking my head at the same time telling him,
“Wouldn’t have what, Orth? You did nothing wrong.”
“I flirted, that’s bad enough to give her the wrong idea,” he argued.
“Yeah, but you also flirted with a hundred others that stepped through Devil’s doors…”
“Meaning what?!” he snapped in response to my point.
“Meaning that you can’t control someone’s feelings… Isn’t that right, Marcus?” I said, shooting a look at the one in question who held a hard expression before it eventually softened.
“No, evidently not, and for my crimes of not being allowed to love the way she needed, I got centuries of watching her use you as a way to make me jealous for not claiming her. A joyous fucking time as you can imagine and no doubt some fucked up version of karma seeing as she first tried to use me to make you jealous. Something that naturally had no effect, seeing as you were fucking clueless,” Marcus said bitterly, to which my brother looked truly shocked. Now shaking his head slightly as if dumbfounded by something that seemed so obvious to everyone else.
“I had no idea… truly,” he told Marcus, who shrugged his shoulders but said nothing to this.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me?” This question was then aimed at me, making me scoff.
“You’re an idiot if you think that I didn’t.”
“But I don’t ever remember…” Again, I was quick to interrupt him.
“That’s because you always shrugged it off as nothing. Never took it seriously, so I just stopped trying to get through to you. After a time, Smidge just seemed to accept it as nothing more than a friendship between the two of you. Plus, it was obvious her love for another took its place, but unlucky for her, it was yet another love that couldn’t be reciprocated and now we know why,” I pointed out, making each of them look regretful but none more so than Marcus. As out of the two of them, he was the only one that actually loved the girl back.
“So that’s what this feud has really been about all this time?” I asked the two of them, looking from one to the other.
“I thought he was fucking around with her feelings and she’s like a sister to me, so yeah, I didn’t like that,” my brother admitted.
“That irony, she’s a real bitch, isn’t she?” Marcus bit out bitterly. My brother wisely said nothing to this, but I didn’t miss the way his jaw clenched. Because Marcus was right, the very thing Orth had held against him all these years had been the very same thing he had done.
“Look, as much as I appreciate this little couple’s therapy session we got going on here, I have to say that your timing fucking sucks! So, let’s try and remember why the fuck we are here and get this shit done, and preferably without giving me a headache and a reason to want to kick both your arses… so what do you say, can we get the fuck out of this cave now and find this arsehole, gypsy fucker and kick his arse instead?” I said, making them both nod before my brother did the decent thing and held his hand out for Marcus to shake. Something that shocked the shit out of both of us.
Meaning Marcus wasn’t a dick about it for once and instead took the offering for what it was… a truce at long last . So, they shook on it, making me mutter,
“Fucking peachy, now let’s get on with it, should we?” I said before taking the lead, which meant making our way through yet another tunnel. By the time we finally reached the end, I had cursed this mountain more times than I could count.
I had no idea how many more hours had passed but the second I could finally see daylight I was ready to practically weep for joy. Even more so when we saw that not only had the landscape changed, but there was now a city in the distance.
An ocean of yellowish grey sand lay before us as far as the eye could see, and this time without a mountain in sight, just the distant city. The land looked like baked clay and sank a little with the weight of our footsteps, compacting it down until it crusted over, like crumbled paper. As for the rest of the landscape, there wasn’t much to speak of. A few bare pale trees with pealing bark like old wallpaper, a few boulders of yellow rock and animal bones that were scattered like rubbish after a festival.
But all of this meant very little in sight of the first real sign to the end of our journey.
“There is the Dava, come on,” Marcus said before making his way down the hill the end of the tunnel had taken us to. One that gave us a vantage point to be able to see where we needed to go, as the Gypsy King was only going to be where others could be ruled over. Although to be honest, I had no fucking clue as to how many cities there were in this realm, I just knew that I didn’t have the fucking time to walk to them all.
But if he wasn’t in this one, then at least there might be someone residing there for us to ask… or torture, depending on how unhelpful the locals decided to be.
“What does Dava mean?” I asked, thinking this was useful to know.
“It means city in Dacian,” Marcus replied and prompting my brother to think of his stomach.
“Well as long as they have food, as I am fucking starving.” he complained and I wasn’t surprised, as I had lost track on how long we had been here.
“When we approach the Dava, I think we should try using that stealth I was talking about before,” Marcus suggested, making me frown.
“You anticipate trouble?” I asked, noting the narrowing of his eyes as he took in the city walls.
“Not sure, but you don’t have battlements just for the view.” Well, he had a point there, and the closer we traveled, the more and more this place started to look like a fortress.
A fortress made from bone and blood.
“And some people think Devil’s is creepy,” Orth muttered in sight of the walls that had been built up from various demonic skulls and secured into place with what looked like red mortar. Not only did it make for a startling contrast but was obviously what gave the city its sinister name.
Ideally it would have been better for us to wait till nightfall to make our way inside, but looking up to the eerie yellowish sky, then fuck only knew when nightfall would be, if ever. I also felt like we had wasted enough time already, so we carefully made our way closer to the walls, pausing to hide behind boulders every time we could see a guard doing his rounds.
Doing this took time, but it ensured we got there undetected, and close enough to creep along the wall until we found a way inside. A blind spot on the east side corner ended up being a place the guards couldn’t reach and therefore gave us our best chance of getting inside without being seen.
“I am so sick of fucking climbing,” my brother grumbled, as the one thing about a wall made out of horned dead demons, was that it offered an easy way to climb. Which also made getting inside a lot easier than expected. It gave us another vantage point as the second we reached the top; we were able to see the whole city inside the walls. All of which seemed to center around a large arena. One that was constructed using giant rib bones and lengths of stitched pelts and stretched hides that had once belonged to Hell only knew what.
The only way to describe such a place was that had this been on Earth, you would have believed some apocalyptic event had taken place. The movie Mad Max certainly came to mind, only minus the crazy vehicles and their rageful drivers.
“What now?” I asked Marcus, as he was the only one that knew anything about this realm.
“I suggest we try and find an inn.”
“Good plan, an inn usually has food.” Orthrus replied, once more thinking of his stomach.
“Yes, and it also usually has people, you know, the type we can ask questions,” Marcus added, making Orth slap him on the back and say,
“Sure, that too.”
“Well, we can’t just start scaling down this side of the wall, as someone is bound to see us,” I said, pointing out the obvious.
“Over there, that door must lead down to street level.”
“And if it doesn’t?” Marcus asked, making me tell them both,
“Well, we have little choice at this point.”
So, we followed the battlements around, keeping out of sight of the guards until getting to the only door accessible to us. Its crude construction was made of what little the land had to offer in way of building material, as it too was made from long femur bones.
It was clear from walking the small distance we had travelled, that the land had once been a mass graveyard. Perhaps the remains that lay scattered were once the fallen, left over from some battle fought an ancient age ago. Bones had been utilized to build this place, as even the staircase leading down looked to have been made by crushed up skeletons. Small pieces were mixed with more of that blood red mortar.
“Well so far so good,” Orth said the moment we made it to street level, pushing open the door and walking out unseen.
“How’d you figure?” I asked, as we started to make our way around the corner of what could have been a workshop of some kind.
“Nothing has tried to kill us yet,” he replied just before we suddenly came face to face with our next challenge, and the small army of demonic soldiers that had obviously been hiding in wait.
“I think you spoke too soon, brother,” I remarked in a casual way, knowing that our only choice now was to fight our way out of this. Well, that was until we heard a sound behind us and foolishly turned to look. The second we did, a green powder exploded around us and was blown in our faces, forcing us to breathe that shit in before it could be helped.
Which also meant that by the time our arses hit the floor, the last thing we saw before we passed out was the grey robe belonging to…
“Solomonar… the sorcerer of the mountain.”