Ascendant

It was actually kind of impressive just how deep the new road penetrated into the forest, but then again, Nym supposed a few thousand industrious soldiers could fell a lot of trees very quickly, especially if they needed that lumber. The wagon rumbled over the dirt, bouncing over various ruts that had already formed in it, but Nym bypassed all of that discomfort by simply flying at a walking speed six inches off the ground next to it.

“What weapon did you end up getting?” Ophelia asked, once they’d rejoined Bildar and made it through all the checkpoints. They’d been cleared to move up to the five-mile mark, where they’d receive further instructions on where their services were most needed.

“I couldn’t find anything,” he told her.

“Nym! This wasn’t a hard job. Just go to the store, pick out something you can carry, and pay for it.”

“But there were all these mage weapons that were just the sharp bits and they were either too heavy or didn’t do anything or were too hard to get back.”

“Why were you looking at mage weapons? Those take months of practice to get any good with. You just needed a short sword or a mace or something. It’s a weapon of last resort for when you can’t pull anymore arcana into your soul well.”

“I’ve never had that problem,” Nym said.

“You… I… Be that as it may!” Ophelia trailed off, grumbling under her breath. “We’ll look into it later. I’ll go with you next time.”

“Sure,” he said, having no intention of spending five or six shields on a chunk of metal he’d never use. “Next time.”

Ophelia gave him a flat look, grumbled to herself some more, and returned to smoothing out the worst of the ruts in the road in front of them. The wagon kept bumping along, and after a few hours, they came upon a barricade blocking the road. It was manned by forty or fifty soldiers, and Bildar left them outside while he went in to talk to somebody.

Traveling through the forest this way was incredibly boring and tedious. “When do we start work?” Nym asked.

“Probably tomorrow,” Ophelia told him. “We’ll need to determine what job site we’re most needed at, but if I had to guess, I would say we’ll probably be extending this wall to encircle more of the perimeter and help keep the undead outbreak contained.”

“Would the wall really stop them? The frost wraiths I saw could fly.”

“Frost wraiths? No, no, this is a lot of ghouls, wights, and geists the army is dealing with. That’s probably lucky for us in some ways. They’re nasty, but much easier to contain than a wraith or specter outbreak would be.”

“I don’t know what any of those things are,” Nym admitted.

“Oh for the love of… Seriously?” Ophelia said. “It’s like you’re trying to get yourself killed. Did you do no research at all on undead before you signed on to help the army contain them? Between this and the lack of a weapon…”

The barb hurt, especially coming from Ophelia. She’d always been so nice to him before. Something must have shown on his face, because she took a deep breath and said, “I’m sorry. I should have made sure you were better prepared for this. We had weeks to get here and it never came up.”

“We were busy making the golem spell,” Nym said.

“Yes, but still, there was time. Well, we’ve still probably got some walking to do before we get to the job site. Let’s go over stuff right now.”

So they did. Ophelia lectured and Nym’s head was packed so full of random factoids about various undead that he was sure he’d forgotten half of it as soon as he learned it. Ghouls were canny ambushers who lurked in shadows and climbed up high to jump down on people. Wights were more straight forward and would come right at a person, but they were also significantly stronger and could easily overwhelm the average unarmed human. Geists were something completely different, and other than a basic description and the advice to run away, they didn’t get too deep into the subject.

As they walked, Ophelia pointed out different spots a ghoul could be hiding in to ambush them, though considering it was still late afternoon and it was far from dark, it was rare that the shadows were deep enough to hide a man-sized undead monstrosity in them. It would be a very different story come nightfall, and it was more important than ever to make sure they had adequate shelter to sleep in.

Eventually, after much bureaucracy and much traveling, they reached a point where Bildar handed off the wagon to an officer and received a handful of crests in return. Most of the supplies went with it, but they kept a few packs and barrels for themselves. Nym didn’t much mind the weight of his own stuff and the few packs he’d been assigned, but others were less fortunate.

“This sucks,” Monick said. “Why are we building in the forest? Why not build a wall around the outside of it where other creatures can haul our belongings for us?”

“Bildar lives to torture us, brother,” Nomick told him. “But more specifically, me. Why do I have the heaviest barrel while you have the small, light one.”

“Oh shut it, both of you. Poor Nym is carrying twice the weight of anyone else, and he’s just a kid,” Ophelia told them.

“Wait, what? I am?” Nym looked back at the packs floating along behind him. They didn’t feel that heavy.

“Well if the weight is so negligible, feel free to carry my share too,” Monick said. He held up the cask to Nym, who easily swept it up into his airborne parade of supplies. “Oh, I didn’t mean- Are you sure, Nym? It’s fine, really. Here, give it back.”

Instead, Nym plucked the rest of the supplies out of everyone else’s hands. “At the speed we’re walking, I think I can manage this for about an hour or so,” he said. “If we’re not there by then, you can have it all back, and my stuff too.”

“Shouldn’t be that long,” Bildar said from the front, consulting a crudely drawn map he’d been given back at the last base. “Maybe half a mile ahead of us. Thanks, Nym.”

The others mumbled thanks as well, the twins in a considerably better mood and Ophelia with pursed lips as she glared at them. “It’s not fair making you carry it all,” she told Nym. “Here, let me take some of it back.”

Nym raised the luggage farther overhead. “It’s fine, I said. You’re really overestimating how much effort it takes to lift this.”

“So you’ll carry close to two hundred pounds of supplies without complaint but won’t buy a three-pound sword to protect yourself with?”

“Well that’s different. I’d have to haul it around all the time, and physically carry it. I don’t want to do that. Plus it’s not like I even know how to use it anyway.”

Ophelia just sighed and shook her head again. “Thanks for carrying everything, Nym.”

They reached the encampment about half an hour later and got settled into their site. The first order of business was to create a semi-permanent structure to live in while they were working, since this would be a project that ran for weeks and weeks. They would move the camp every few days as the wall continued to grow, which meant there was no point in making anything elaborate.

But they were after all a crew of earth mages, plus Nym. It only took them an hour or so to put up a small hut made of six rooms. The outer room had a door leading outside, and five other rooms were arranged in a half-circle around it, one for each of them. The rooms were small, barely enough to fit the folding cots they’d brought with them, but it protected Nym from the elements and rogue undead that might roam through the camp.

When it was time for bed, the door was sealed off completely. Nothing bigger than a bug was getting through the strategically placed air vents and they’d made the outer walls of hard-packed earth almost a foot thick. Nym slept just fine, safe and secure inside his room.

* * *

The next day was when the real work began. An army overseer started handing out tasks, and the Earth Shapers ended up with exactly what Ophelia had predicted: building the wall up. That wasn’t as easy as it sounded, since the army didn’t actually want to clear away any trees, so the wall was the farthest thing from a straight line that it could possibly be.

They worked in a pattern, first transmuting the ground that was going to be shaped into loose sand so that they could sweep all the plant life out of it, then hardening it back up into thick, hard earth, and finally raising it ten feet straight up. Ideally, there would be no trees near the front side that a canny undead might use as a ladder to climb the wall.

The army recognized the impossibility of this. They knew the wall wasn’t going to contain all of the undead, and that there was no way to run a wall through a forest while making no effort whatsoever to clear trees. It was a net, designed to stop the majority of the stupid undead. Active patrol units with paired trackers scoured the forest, looking for sign of clever or strong undead who’d managed to slip past the growing defenses. Freelancers helped fill gaps in the patrol routes.

Nor was it perfect, given the sheer number of miles the wall would have to cover. If it helped funnel the majority of the undead to the fortified positions the army had set up, it was doing its job. Every few miles, there would be kill fields cleared that allowed soldiers to rain death down on the undead that crawled their way down the length of the wall, looking for an opening.

Nym understood the logic of it, but it was boring work. After the first three days, he was ready for anything else. The Earth Shapers, however, knew exactly what they were signing on for when they’d started the journey, and at nine shields a day, were in no hurry to run the contract out.

“How many feet of this wall have we raised?” Nym asked when they stopped for their lunch break on the third day.

“Honestly? Hard to say for sure. A few thousand maybe? We’re probably losing better than half the distance weaving it between all of these trees,” Bildar answered. “Too bad a job like this pays by the day instead of by the foot. I’m sure we’re doing more than a lot of other crews, but we’re all getting paid the same for it. We’ll be linking up with Sansom’s group’s section here in the next hour or so, and probably moving the entire camp another mile into the woods this evening.”

“I thought we’d be doing something to help hunt down the source of the problem,” Nym said. “Instead… this.”

Bildar laughed. “I told you earth mages are good for defensive fortifications. This is a nice, safe, easy job. The pay is good, and we’ll provide fallback positions for those brave soldiers who are culling undead numbers on the north side of this wall. Make no mistake, this is as much a contribution as picking up an axe and going out there to chop down undead flesh.”

“Undead incoming!” a voice yelled through the trees. “There are hundreds of them. Everyone get back to the outpost!”

“Safe, huh?” Ophelia said. “You just had to open your mouth.”

Other earth mages streamed through the trees around them. Nym recognized most of them by sight now, if not by name, and he turned with the rest of his group to follow the stream of them retreating back towards the camp and its defensible walls.

The ghoul leaped down from a tree overhand and landed on Nomick, sending the man sprawling with a pained scream. Nym staggered to a halt, his mind whirling as he tried desperately to think of what to do to save his friend.