Asking for help prickled his pride anyway.
Ziel leaned close, examining the script. Orthos wondered how he was going to unravel it, until Ziel pulled his hammer back and smashed one of the sigils. The rest fizzled to essence in seconds.
“I could have done that,” Orthos said.
“Not everything needs a technical solution.”
“Good. Or I wouldn’t know what to…do you hear that?” Now that the frozen time had been released, a gust of air blew from the door, carrying with it an overpowering stench.
And that sound wasn’t the groaning of the metal, but the howling of wind.
Ziel had heard the same thing, because he threw the door open wide. And immediately halted.
A hole had been torn in the far end of the room, though it looked like it led to a larger area of the castle, not outside. The hole was still smoking.
So were the bodies.
Dead humans lay scattered around the room, some two dozen of them, and it was clear what had killed them. Black dragon’s breath. Their wounds were seared shut, some of them cut into pieces from the heat of the Striker techniques.
Remnants, broken into chunks, dissolved all over the room. The slaughter looked as though it could have happened moments ago…and if the Last Oath Monarch’s scripts really locked places in time, then maybe it had.
“Should have let them rot,” Orthos grumbled. He didn’t understand the point of preserving them at all, much less in two layers of preservation script. If she had wanted to preserve the bodies, the one on the entire castle would have been enough.
Ziel looked over the bodies with cold indifference. “Strengthens my theory. She wouldn’t have used the script to preserve this room if she intended to use a longer-lasting one on the whole castle. She must have Forged this to last for a few days, and when she realized she would take longer, then she used the Array to lay the working around the whole place.”
“But why preserve it at all?”
He shrugged. “Hope of survivors? My guess is that she wanted intact corpses to bring b—”
Orthos sensed a flash of power and dashed out of the way, but a Ruler technique controlled all the wind aura around him, sucking air from his lungs.
Ziel dispersed it with a wave of his hand. The pulse of broken wind disturbed the smoke.
A rattling breath broke the silence. Ziel controlled force aura to shove a body aside. Beneath that was a survivor.
A second glance made Orthos realize it wasn’t a survivor. Just another victim who hadn’t realized he was dead yet.
The gray-haired man wore sacred artist robes of green and white, but most of them had been scorched black. He’d been affected by a Blackflame technique Orthos had never seen before, one that left veins of black twisting through his flesh, dissolving him from the inside.
Orthos met the man’s eyes, and he saw no fear of death inside. Only hate.
Ziel stepped up, and Orthos shuffled aside to make room. He knew what had happened now. These were some lesser sacred artists who had accompanied their Monarch to attack the fortress of the black dragons.
They had gotten what was coming to them.
Emala, back when she was a Sage, must have brought lesser Lords and Golds with her to help with her siege. They had paid the price for their intrusion.
Ziel knelt at the man’s side and brought out his hammer. “Close your eyes. I’ll make it quick.” He didn’t sound sympathetic, but clinical and professional. It was one of the things Orthos liked about him.
When the dying man saw Ziel’s face, he changed. He tried to speak, coughed, and shuddered back. He seemed desperate to get something out.
The man patted his pockets, then awkwardly lunged at a body next to him. He fumbled at the pockets as Ziel watched him and waited for a response.
After a few seconds, the dying man brought out a purple-streaked river stone roughly the size of a coin. A dream tablet.
With the last of his strength, he pressed it into Ziel’s hand. Then he gave another rattling breath and sank down.
He still wasn’t quite dead. His chest rose and fell irregularly. But it was only a matter of moments.
With his head, Orthos indicated the entrance. “Come. Let’s not wait for his Remnant.”
He started to walk, but Ziel stood in place. He was frozen in place, holding the dream tablet. His cold expression cracked.
Revealing fury beneath.
A moment later he seized his huge hammer in one hand and dropped to his knees. He grabbed the man by the outer robe and shook him. “Why would you show me that? Huh? Why couldn’t you just die!”
Ziel raised his hammer and green sigils floated around it. Orthos dashed further away. From the amount of power gathering, Ziel was going to destroy everything in the room.