Chapter 8, Episode 22: Charge
The next day, I woke up at our base in the City of Lost Souls at a time closer to noon than dawn. After staying up late casting the ritual, I’d slept in quite a bit.
After a greeting to Sebas and Reinbach, who kept watch, I took the dishes still left on the ofrenda for breakfast. It’d be a waste to throw it away, and eating the food offerings was a way of paying respects to the dead in and of itself by symbolically sharing a meal with the spirits.
While I was enjoying a relaxed breakfast, Remily and Sever returned.
“Welcome back,” I said.
“You’re up,” Sever answered. “We took a quick look around, and it seems like your spell last night was quite effective. I was expecting to have to spend another day whittling them down, but it seems fine for us to head to the tower.”
“Oh? I thought it was unusually quiet around here. All clear around the tower?” Reinbach asked.
“Much of the cursed energy has dissipated from the city, most of the Undead are gone, and those that aren’t are calm, somehow. They don’t move much more than their eyes when we walk by. For the most part, the Undead are, well, dead. We’ll have to deal with the corpses, but they won’t be a threat to us, at least,” Remily explained.
“Then I’ll have the goblins and grave slimes take care of the remaining Undead,” I said.
That begged the question: what sort of funeral rite was it to have the grave slimes eat the dead? Considering that some cultures on Earth performed sky burials where the dead were left on an altar for the carrion birds to feed on, I liked to think my way was more respectful than leaving them to rot, at least. It was a slime burial.
While they continued to describe the situation in the city, I finished my meal.
We began our operation for the day when the sun was high in the sky. Leaving the goblins and grave slimes to take care of the Undead strewn throughout the streets, we made for the tower standing tall in the center of the circular city. We had no encounters along the way, and arrived safely at the tower.
“There’s still that feel of cursed energy around here,” I noted.
“Not only is this the center of the City, it was once the gallows. Your smoke didn’t reach inside the tower, it seems,” Reinbach remarked.
Before charging into the tower, we needed to clear the cursed energy one more time. After going through the preparations that I’d gotten used to by now, I started cleansing right away.
“That spell of yours really is handy...” Sever said.
“What’s the usual way to clear cursed energy in a place like this?” I asked.
“Easiest way is to burn it to ash, if it is something that burns. If cursed energy still lingers, we’d source a specialist most of the time.”
“There are exorcists and warlocks who make a living out of dealing with the Undead and cursed energy,” Remily added. “They’re knowledgeable and well trained, so they’re always a safe bet. What little tricks I have up my sleeve are nothing compared to what they can do.”
Remily’s specialty was fighting with Shadow magic, so there must not have been as much overlap between the two disciplines as I’d thought.
And even though I’d learned to clear cursed energy, my method was far more instinctive than studied. “Maybe I should properly study cursed energy if I want to learn more about grave slimes.”
“If you’re interested, I can introduce you to a warlock the duke has a working relationship with,” Sever offered. “What do you think, Remily?”
“With more knowledge comes more options and security. But, if we’re going to get Ryoma a tutor, we need to be careful about who to hire. They need to be someone who can handle him,” Remily said.
“Master Ryoma can already wield some spells at the same caliber as an expert. I would trust them with many things, but not to restrain themselves from derailing sessions to learn more about his magic.”
Surely, there were many candidates who vied for the duke’s patronage. Anyone who Reinhart picked out must have the prowess and passion for the job. No wonder many of them were nerds in their field.
We watched the tower fill with smoke until a swarm of shadows appeared at the tower’s entrance. A horde of Undead—devoid of cursed energy—came rushing out, only to be wiped out by the adults who made it look so easy.
“Oh!” Remily said sharply, like she’d dropped something breakable. She was looking at her staff with a shadow of sorrow on her face.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I knew this would happen sooner or later... It reached its limit.” Remily showed us the side of her staff where a crack ran through it.
“You said you needed midnight dew to make a new staff... Are you all right?” I asked.
“It won’t hold me back in battle too much. I can use magic without a staff. It’s not like this one was incredibly powerful, or anything.”
She’d said that her parents had gifted it to her when she became an adult, so it was more of a sentimental piece than anything.
“Ryoma, can I burn this too?” she asked, as if to disprove my assessment.
“Isn’t that a memento?” I checked.
“Yes. It was a gift from when I first started working as a royal sorcerer. After a lot of things went wrong, I was jaded and tired... In a moment of weakness, I’d sent a letter home, not expecting any response since I ran off from my village. When my parents—who never left the village unless they had to—came to see me, it was a big surprise. A really happy one.”
I listened along, understanding the sentiment.
“But what’s the point of holding on to a broken staff?” Remily continued. “My memories won’t leave me if I let the staff go. Even in my village, we’d use them with care until we couldn’t, then use them as firewood.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Every time. Besides, no one perfectly matures the moment they come of age. It takes some time for legal adults to really grow up. My parents gave me this staff to help me through the transitional phase of slowly leaving them and becoming independent. It was never meant to last this long.”
A brush of color on her cheeks told me that it was akin to training wheels on a bike. Then, she explained that her staff had only survived this long because she hadn’t been using it every day. The national treasury funded supplies for royal sorcerers, so they were given standard staffs or provided with funds to custom order their own upon request. Remily had used those staffs for work. Otherwise, this staff would have given out a long time ago.
“So, if it can be of use at all, I have no reservations in burning it. Unless it’ll interfere with your ritual,” she added.
“It shouldn’t interfere,” I said. This spell wasn’t designed to quell souls like last night’s ritual, and I knew of a similar custom performed in Japan where hemp wood was burned to send smoke to the spirit world. It would be simple to tie in the burning of her staff.
I told Remily this, and she closed her eyes for a few moments in a reverie, then snapped her staff a few times and tossed the pieces into the fire without hesitation. The staff fragments crackled in the flames, burning fast and bright as they turned to white ash and a cloud of smoke.
“Once those burn out, let’s go in,” Remily suggested. “A lot of the cursed energy has cleared inside. Detecting magical energy should be much easier now.”
“Okay,” I said.
None of us spoke much after that while we waited, watching the fire and smoke.
***
Once we’d cleared enough cursed energy, we marched into the tower with light slimes on our heads and an emperor scavenger slime leading the way.
The tower had a doughnut-shaped layout. Starting with the warden and executioner’s quarters on the outside, it moved to guard posts, holding cells for inmates on death row, then the gallows in the center.
To prevent inmates from escaping, I’d been told, the passages within the tower were somewhat mazelike. The abandoned structure was dark, but the light slimes on our heads did a fine job of lighting our way.
Whatever Undead were left inside didn’t pose a problem either. The corridors were narrow, so once the enormous emperor slime blocked them, any corporeal Undead had no way to escape. The Undead wardens that came rushing to the entrance were being pushed back like a rolling tide. Occasionally, a wraith passed through the walls, where they had presumably avoided any smoke that had filled the tower. But each of them was taken care of with a single Light Shot. As long as I focused on detecting magical energy and could sense a wraith approaching through the wall, it wasn’t a difficult task.
“I expected grueling work when we observed the city from the outside, but no such luck,” Reinbach joked.
“The slimes have helped us approach this in the safest way... But this is almost too easy,” Sever said.
“Oh, Mister Sebas. Can we have some water?” I asked.
“Right away.” Sebas cast a spell and generated several liters of water, which the emperor slime happily drank up. After ten seconds, the massive scavenger jiggled, and I sensed that it’d had enough.
“‘That’s enough,’ it said. Thank you,” I relayed.
“I can help with that much any time,” Sebas said.
We kept walking for some time after that, through what seemed like a sizable tower. Of course, all the compartments it once housed explained its size.
“We should find midnight dew below the ground level,” Reinbach reminded us.
“It normally grows wild in dark places, like caves. So, the Starving Gallows fits the bill,” Remily said.
“That brings back memories... I used to visit every year while training new recruits. Those stairs are perfect for lower-body conditioning,” Sever reminisced.
“The stairs are that long?” I asked.
“Didn’t I tell you?”
“Only that it was a place where inmates were executed by starvation, but nothing about its structure.”
“All right then, I should tell you, even though it won’t be a pleasant description,” Sever warned before starting.
The only things the Starving Gallows held were a spiral staircase that led deep underground, and a pair of shackles at every step. Every day, a new death row inmate was chained to the top of the stairs, bumping every surviving inmate down by one step. Rinse and repeat, so an inmate would descend farther from the sun every day.
Once the inmates were bumped down and the dead were removed, they received some stale bread and water. At this point, I wondered how the place was called the Starving Gallows when the inmates were fed. The bread and water were not an act of mercy, though, nor were they poisoned.
Here’s the catch: the bread and water were issued only once a day, only enough to feed two-thirds of the inmates shackled to the spiraling stairs, and all of it was placed on the top step. Not only was there not enough food to keep all inmates from starving, the inmates lower on the spiraling totem pole had to wait to be given their share by the inmates above.
Naturally, inmates higher on the staircase tried to hoard food. It was easy to score three meals’ worth as long as you passed on less to those below. Some must have tried to stash as much bread as they could. To the inmates below, those were unforgivable crimes.
At first, the inmates had no problem filling their stomachs. But every day, they would see less and less bread and water. Once pickings became slim, inmates started to steal each other’s food.
Their shackles were tight enough to keep them from fistfighting each other, but just long enough to reach their neighbors on either side. If they were lucky, they could knock the bread out of their neighbor’s hand. Actions like that triggered more fighting among the inmates, but the shackles kept them from killing each other.
Farther down, where they didn’t even receive scraps to fight over, the inmates withered away due to hunger and thirst. Throwing hands at their equally starving neighbors was fruitless, so they shouted insults at the inmates above who still enjoyed a day’s meal.
Those who could shout, however, were the still livelier ones in the Starving Gallows. Those who were starved worse lost their sanity and resorted to cannibalism. With their last drops of strength, they reached for the piece of meat on the step above or below them.
Cannibalism wasn’t easy, and not just because of the horror of it. Practically speaking, even if an inmate could try and kill a neighbor despite the constricting shackles, any wound they might earn themselves would most likely kill them quicker with infection than hunger. And since they were shackled to the step at all times, there was only one place their excrement could go—where they stood. Their immune systems would have been weakened by starvation, and they obviously received no medical treatment.
Voices of the inmates at all positions along the spiral echoed up the void in the center of the stairwell. From the moment they took one step into the Starving Gallows until their final moment, they were tormented by the threats and curses, and cries of pain and madness.
“It’s gruesome,” I said. “While I think there’s a need for punishment that fits their crime... I can see how those Undead came to be.”
“Good. Keep that feeling with you,” Sever advised. “When people no longer doubt the morality of their ends, they all too easily justify any cruel and sinister means. Even the atrocities committed in the Starving Gallows were seen as a form of justice. Criminals were being punished, after all. People applauded the practice, if anything. Turning a blind eye to the abuse of the inmates perpetuated by the wardens was another symptom of that mentality. Some records say that if someone so much as criticized the wardens, they would be subject to their abuse.”
“Another reason the Knight’s Order uses this location for the training of new recruits,” Sever continued, “is to teach them—who will be the executors of justice for the new generation—stories of those who became drunk with the zeal of enforcing justice at all costs. To teach them that the line between right and wrong is never absolute. A knight must carry a sense of justice in their hearts, but they must not become blinded by it. That is how keeping the law turns into acts of savage violence.”
Plenty of examples from Earth came to mind, like the Salem witch trials. In medieval times, I’d heard that executions were a form of entertainment as well as a form of punishment. The concept of schadenfreude existed worldwide. Deriving pleasure from others’ misfortune seemed to be human nature, no matter the time or world. Even those not training to become a knight—who carried weapons on their belt and were backed by the extension of the king’s power—would benefit from heeding Sever’s warning, lest they lose their humanity.
“At least that story killed just enough time,” Sever said. While I was contemplating his advice, we’d nearly made it to the Starving Gallows.
After turning left at a fork, the corridor widened. At the end of the hall was a thick and heavy double door that had nearly rotted off of its hinges, flanked by a rusted set of armor on either side.
“It’s a cliché for a reason,” I said, as the suits of armor creaked and raised their lances.
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