Chapter Thirty

“Forgive me if I sound like I doubted you, but…they really did spell my name out, didn’t they?” Cinna mused, staring up at the slanted roof several blocks away. After telling her about what she’d seen, Lilia had guided the princess to a nearby rooftop with a line of sight to the tower. Most of the structure was built from stone, but a wooden shelter had been erected over the top and plastered with animal skins. Someone had gone to the trouble of arranging those skins so that the negative space between them spelled out Cinna’s name.

“Weren’t there easier ways to do that? Like bones? Or ink?” Lilia asked, perplexed by the sight.

“The skins aren’t there just for this message. Fresh skins are a cheap means of fireproofing the wood below against flaming arrows or fire mages. The structure itself is meant to provide cover for the defenders during a siege like this,” Cinna explained.

“Oh. That makes sense. It doesn’t look like there’s many arrows getting through,” Lilia noted. “But what’s the point of spelling your name out if they’re not going to tell you anything else?”

“I’m assuming someone meant for it to act as a signal. Though I have to wonder how they expected me to find it in the first place. You said none of the other towers have my name on them?” Cinna asked, turning away from the tower to face Lilia.

“Not that I’m seeing,” she replied with a shrug.

“Maybe they simply had no better ideas and were left hoping I’d happen upon this while searching for a way in. Though I still cannot figure out how they knew to expect me in the first place.” Cinna turned back to examine the tower again, but Lilia didn’t think there was much else to see.

As she looked at the tower herself, Lilia spotted a glint of light off something metallic. She hadn’t even figured out what she was looking at when Cinna’s working arm shot up, catching an arrow straight out of the air.

“Wah!” Lilia shouted, ducking behind Cinna, who glanced back with an amused look on her face.

“Better a late reaction than none, I suppose,” she joked as she fiddled with the arrow. Then she handed it to Lilia. “Could you take this off and show me what it says?”

“It almost hit you!” Lilia pointed out. She took the arrow obediently, though, and realized a piece of paper had been tied to the shaft.

“Normally I would have simply let it. My armor is more than capable of deflecting an arrow. But that would have made retrieving the message tied to it more difficult,” Cinna replied while watching Lilia untie the string binding the paper.

“You could tell there was something tied to it…?” Removing the string, Lilia pulled the paper off the arrow and then stood there awkwardly, not sure what to do with the arrow now. Seeing that, Cinna took the arrow and tossed it aside, leaving Lilia’s hand free to open up the message.

“The paper slowed it down somewhat, I think. I don’t believe that archer drew their bow fully, either,” Cinna explained. Then she got a look at the message in Lilia’s hands. To Lilia it just appeared to be a bunch of crudely drawn lines. She’d made better pictures in dirt. “Hm. It appears to be a map.”

“This is what a map looks like…? Wait, that’s what we were here for! We can go now!” Lilia celebrated.

“Heheh, no, Lilia, not that map,” Cinna corrected, chuckling. “This appears to be a partial map of the city. I believe these are streets. There’s a spot marked with an X, as well, and…this here, at the bottom left? This may be a diagram showing how to open some kind of door.”

“I don’t think that’s a door. Where the handle?” To Lilia it just looked like a big rectangle.

“Not every door has hinges and a handle. This one is likely disguised as a wall somewhere—I believe whoever sent us this is directing us towards a secret passage leading out of the castle. An escape tunnel, most likely. Could you check from above and see if you can find an area with streets arrayed like this?” Cinna asked, pointing at the messy lines she claimed were a map.

“If you really want me too then I can try,” Lilia agreed dubiously. She frowned, not really expecting to find much. But she shifted her attention to Directions’ viewpoint as asked.

Viewing Storrhamarr from above really brought home how big it was. Far larger than any place Lilia had been before. All…well, she hadn’t kept count, but it was an admittedly short list. Cinna had mentioned that Storrhamarr served as the capital of a county, whatever that meant. That likely had something to do with its size.

In practice, that meant that even from a birds’ eye view trying to compare the city’s streets to the “map” took quite some time. Initially Lilia tried just scanning the entire city in search of a matching pattern, but then she realized that from so high up she actually wasn’t seeing the streets properly. Some buildings had balconies and such that obscured the streets below them, which were so narrow as to be easily hidden. Others had elevation differences between them that made it hard to see the streets except from directly above.

After Directions circled the city three times without Lilia finding what she was looking for, she asked him to drop lower so that she could get a closer look. That made things worse in its own way though; from his new altitude, Directions only had any given street in sight for a few seconds at a time. Lilia had to ask him to fly in smaller circles next just so that she could take her time.

By the time Lilia finally found an area that resembled the image on the paper the sun had visibly changed positions in the sky. It must have taken at least an hour, but Lilia couldn’t tell for sure. She’d spent that entire time staring straight down so she’d been surprised when she noticed how much time had passed.

“I think I found it. This way,” Lilia told Cinna, heading back to the window they’d used to access the rooftop. She climbed inside, stepping carefully over a body lying near the window on her way to the door. Fortunately it still didn’t seem to be anywhere close to reanimating. Normally she could have let its soul loose but Cinna had asked her not to for now. Something about tracking that Lilia didn’t quite get. She’d tried to point out that releasing a soul wouldn’t leave a connection to herself, but Cinna had said that wasn’t the type of tracking she’d meant.

“Don’t stray too far ahead. It makes it more difficult to guard you,” Cinna called out while climbing through the window herself. Lilia, already standing at the top of the stairs in the hallway, had to stop and wait for the knight to catch up. She didn’t think she was in that much danger though. Cyclops and Mr. Bearbones were nearby, and Lilia couldn’t sense any souls still lingering about the building.

“It’s fine. There’s no one here,” Lilia assured Cinna when she entered the hallway. Then she descended the stairs without waiting for a reply. She felt confident that nothing with a soul could ever sneak up on her, so the only things she truly thought she needed to be wary of were things like arrows. And it wasn’t as if someone could just fire an arrow at her through the walls of a building.

But since Cinna had asked her to stay close, Lilia decided to wait for her at the front door instead of leaving immediately. The undead were all focused on attacking the castle, so there weren’t any nearby. It just seemed polite to do. Once Cinna joined her at the door, Lilia led her into the streets.

“You’ll want to take us towards the location corresponding to this mark,” Cinna instructed, pointing at the X.

“How do you know that?”

“It’s a common convention to mark the destination with an X,” Cinna answered.

“…convention?”

“Custom. Accepted practice. It’s simply how people mark such things.”

“Okay. I’ll have Directions sit right there so I know where to go,” Lilia stated as she sent a request to Directions asking him to do exactly that. She didn’t exactly know the route, but as long as she could sense where Directions was she could pick streets leading in that direction.

Judging by the number of souls around, getting there would likely have taken multiple hours under normal circumstances. With most of the city half dead, though, it took just around half an hour. All the bodies lying about made it hard to decide where to step, but that still ended up being easier than getting through a crowd. Lilia did have to watch carefully for any that had started moving again, but none seemed to be able to do much more than twitch just yet.

Along the way Lilia spotted another couple of soldiers and wondered again at the strangeness she felt when looking at their souls. It didn’t seem to be the result of any magic she was familiar with. There were no direction soul connections and no spells laid directly into the souls themselves. But Lilia could still tell that something had been done to them which made them different from the rest.

Like something had been taken…or maybe added.

Surely Master would have known. If only he’d had time to teach her more. Lilia hoped she could find him one day. She still didn’t quite believe he could be dead, but even if he had died, then perhaps she could bring him back? That would mean finding him first, though.

“Here we are!” Lilia announced as she turned the last corner, bringing Directions into sight for her eyes and not just her soul sense. He immediately flew over to her, landing on her shoulder. She gave him some head scratches. “Thanks, Directions! You did great!”

“Hm…if the street we came from connected to this one from that angle, then we should be…here. So that means it should be this building,” Cinna narrated as she examined the map and the surrounding buildings. Then she selected one in particular. It didn’t stand out in any way to Lilia’s eyes; just one building among many with a shop on the ground floor and homes above.

But Cinna knew these things better than Lilia did, so she just followed the knight inside.

Cinna walked straight through the first room without stopping. It might have been a tavern once, but it was hard to tell with all the furniture stacked against the doors and windows. In the backroom Cinna quickly located a staircase leading down to the basement level but stopped before going down.

“We’ll need something to light the way,” she declared, looked around until she spotted a lantern. After she got it lit she led Lilia down the stairs into the basement.

“What are we looking for now?” Lilia asked. All she saw were boxes. Boxes and walls.

“There should be a pattern in the bricks somewhere,” Cinna informed her as she scanned the walls. She didn’t specify what that pattern might be. It had probably been part of that diagram in the corner of the map…but Lilia had long forgotten what that looked like, so she waited until Cinna found it. Eventually the knight homed in on a few discolored bricks and pushed on the single normal-looking one in the center.

Right before Lilia’s eyes a section of the brick wall wide enough to fit two of her turned aside, revealing a tunnel.