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“Run?” Bataar asked, but I was already racing toward the cleared entry, blasting the golems in front of me with barrages of mental force, demanding that they stagger backward before our charge.
“What are you doing?” Bataar asked.
“We need to get higher up so we can see what’s happening,” I said.
“We already know what’s happening! We’re surrounded by hundreds of golems!”
I searched for Saboraak’s mind. Nothing.
Hopefully, she and the other dragons were far away out of this mess. Hopefully, she was flying free toward Questan. There would be allies there.
We climbed the stairs between the frozen golem bodies as my mind raced. If these things were reanimating, it meant I could only pause them, not kill them. And an army this size couldn’t be stopped for long. Bataar was right that we needed a way to get those souls freed from the bodies of the golems.
“How do you think they made so many golems so quickly?” I asked Bataar as we scrambled up the staircase. I could barely spare enough mental space to ask anything with the effort of keeping the golems back. Someone had said something about where these golems had come from. Why couldn’t I remember it? I was too tired.
“I don’t think that Apeq made all of these, if that is what you are asking. I think he made the flyers. Ore production has massively increased in Ko’Torenth over the past two years, but even with all of that, the industries in that country can only produce so many finished metal products. I could see him making these flyers. But I don’t’ think he made the land golems.”
“I think of them as creeping golems,” I said. “And someone said something about them being ancient.”
We reached the next floor and I led the way to the staircase. It was the exact route I’d taken before to come downstairs with the mother and children. Now, I was racing time again – but this time with Bataar.
“Stop,” I shouted at the golems. “Stop, stop!”
“I think you need to stop shouting and sing,” Bataar suggested.
Ha! My singing was bad, but not bad enough to slay the enemy.
“Any idea where he could have found thousands of creeping golems?” I asked, ignoring his suggestion as I blasted at golems behind us and in front of us.
The Castel was crawling with them – every room, every hall, every staircase had golems creeping across it, slowly and steadily like ants marching in a line. It made my skin crawl.
“There is an ancient legend of Kado the Wolf King,” Bataar said. “Kado marched his army of silver wolves across the earth and won for himself a great kingdom.”
“Lucky Kado.” I paused to catch my breath. We were on the third staircase. One more to the top of this tower, if my memory was correct.
“When he had finished cleansing the land of a great evil and winning it back for his people, he marched his armies under the mountain and there he died with them.”
“Wait, so they all just disappeared?”
“Yes. The people celebrate it on the night of the darkened moon.”
“The eclipse?”
“Yes. Kado and his wolves were at peace under the mountain.”
“And where was this mountain?” I asked.
We were almost there. Just a few more steps. I was growing used to the constant distraction of freezing golems, but it still felt strange to walk between their frozen forms. They were like dozens of serene statues posed with snapping jaws and half-raised paws.
“The location was secret. And the secret was lost.”
“Maybe it was in the kind of place you might find if you operated an extensive mine?” I suggested drily. I was beginning to get a feeling about where Apeq might have found his army.
“If they were mining in the heart of a mountain,” Bataar agreed.
“And how did Kado power his army of silver wolves?”
“They aren’t golems in the story,” Bataar said. “They are actual wolves. But the legend did say that they grew stronger on the memory of the dead. That they grew stronger and increased as they defeated enemies.”
Yeah, stealing souls would do that. It would swell out those ranks.
We reached the top of the stairs and I froze every golem at the top of the tower in a single wave of mental strength.
Wow.
No time to stop and marvel, Tor. I needed to see what was happening.
I strode to the edge of the tower and looked out over the heaving, writhing city. It was impossible to distinguish streets from buildings anymore. Everything was completely covered by moving golems, their bodies flashing in the light of the morning sun.
Except for a small space cleared out at the edge of the city. In the center of it, a man with a bottle green cloak stood, so tiny from here that it was hard to see him at all. I pulled out the tube Nostar had given me from inside my pocket and took a look. In the wobbling glass I could see his face as clear as day:
Apeq A’kona.