protest. “I’ll take him to the nearest Infirmary,” the guard said. “You should come with us, Master Commander.”
“Yes, we’ll need him to show us where the hideouts are along the Green Road.” Corbin nodded slowly, briefly glancing at his daughter. “Valaine, my dear, organize an expedition for this. We need at least two or three thousand troops, preferably Crimson and a few gold.”
“Yes, Father,” Valaine replied. “We’ll have to comb the Green Road all the way to Astoria. Such an expedition requires Visions, too, right?”
“And supplies. At least four or five carriages with blood and healing herbs,” the Crimson guard holding the Darkling said. All the Aeternae in direct service to the Crimson dynasty acted as Corbin’s lieutenants from what Valaine had explained. Many of the operational logistics were automatically delegated to them, allowing initiative.
“I’d like to join you,” I said, looking at Valaine.
“You should,” Corbin replied for her. “You’ll have a lot to learn from such a campaign. And I plan on using every resource we’ve got until that bastard is captured and executed.”
Even though I was usually against the death penalty, the disgraced former chief councilor had done too much harm. He couldn’t be allowed to live. My only hope was that we’d capture him alive, so we could at least extract as much information from him as possible before severing his head.
But death was definitely his only option. For his involvement with the Darklings. For what he’d done to Nethissis. The universe had a tendency to pay its creatures in kind, but sometimes it needed a little bit of a nudge. In this case, I was more than fine with being said nudge.
Nethissis
“What is this place called?” Seeley asked.
We’d been here for a few hours, and I’d spent most of them moving around, spying on the black guards and watching as they set up camp in what looked like an abandoned city. Stone and marble ruins poked through the tall, thick grass. There were patterns visible not only in the green areas, but also in the patches of dried dirt that persisted in the middle of a once highly populated city.
“Astoria,” I said, my gaze wandering across our new temporary home. I’d heard Zoltan call it Astoria, and I’d picked up more information from his Darklings. This had once been a sprawling metropolis. It had resisted numerous Black Fever outbreaks, but the last one had destroyed it. Most of the Aeternae inhabitants died during the last episode, their remains burned by the surviving Rimian and Nalorean servants.
No one wanted to live in a place with so much death, so the servants moved away, leaving the city to wither and shrink under the sun, under the wind, under the storms and the many snows that followed. The entire settlement covered several square miles, surrounded by rolling emerald hills with wild trees and abandoned orchards that still flourished and bore skull-sized fruits.
Beyond the eastern hill barrier, the ocean sprawled forever, its dark blue waters glimmering beneath the hazy, reddish pink sky. It was a quiet place, further isolated from the rest of the continent by a massive, half-moon-shaped forest which covered enough land to make Astoria significantly inaccessible.
“No Reapers here, either,” I added, though we had both known that was going to be the case. I’d meant it more as dry humor. Fortunately, Seeley caught the nuance and gave me a half-smile.
“How are you feeling?”
I shrugged. “Still pissed off, obviously. But I admit I am a little hopeful, given the circumstances of my death. I’m definitely more accustomed to being nude twenty-four seven now. Again, sorry for that. It was out of my control.”
Zoltan’s ghoul had killed me in snake form, forcing my body to resume its natural form. There was no ghostly apparel available, so I was reduced to moving around as naked as the day I’d been born—the irony did not escape me, for I’d walked into death with my birthday suit on.
Seeley had been nothing but honorable and respectful about this, though I knew it was hard for him to focus. Fortunately, my long copper-red hair did cover most of my private parts, which took some of the pressure off the both of us. Despite my condition, however, I felt better than a few days ago. I had a better understanding of how it had happened and what had led everything to blow up in Zoltan’s face the way it had the other night.
Piecing together whispers from the black guards, Seeley and I understood that the