Warsinger by James Baldwin (most important books of all time txt) 📕

arms with Ebisa, and then – after they stared at my hand a moment – Letho and Gruna. Then I sprinted for Karalti, who huffed with indignation when I was close enough to mount.

“I can do more than hold a torch, you know!” She flattened her crests, absently preening one of her hands. “I know some of what you know, I just… I haven't practiced it yet! But I cast spells!”

“Don't worry. We'll figure something out.”

Without passengers, there was no need for saddle straps. I bounded up onto her back with Jump, caught the leather grips near her shoulders, and held on as the Queen dragon bellowed a warning and flung herself into the air. She rose with giddy speed, far faster than any normal human could stand. I grinned as my head swam and my heart lifted and thumped down as she swooped over the walls, and leaned with her as she banked hard, then dived toward the smoking city below. After so many days of carrying passengers – Suri, Cutthroat, Masha and the others – it was liberating to be able to fly at full speed, full torque… a welcome relief before becoming mired in whatever shit we were bound to find under the city.

***

The quest began at the entry to the Fol Alugut – Karhad’s main sewer line, which was so old and notable that it had its own name like a fancy mansion in Beverly Hills. Access was through a pair of heavy iron doors in the city’s waste treatment plant, where liquid for tanning and solid fertilizer for Racsa’s crops were produced. The plant was currently switched off, the mana tanks that powered the peeling machines lying idle. The collection pools had a smell so intense that it had a fucking texture.

Neither the quest or the survey had given us any real clue as to what we were going to find in the sewers of Karhad, just that the blockage was most likely in the center of town: in the Hill District, the oldest part of Karhad. The Hill District housed both the ruined university and the oldest church of Khors in Myszno, the Holy Temple of the Crucible, both of which had been built on and over preexisting ruins left there by some long-forgotten human presence.

The wiki had some basic information about Fol Alugut. For one thing, it was an actual river, an underground spring that had continuously served the city for over two thousand years. Household toilets, public latrines, and countless other sources of sewage pumped latrine slurry straight into it, but the water had stopped flowing and so had the waste. A chat with the NPC engineer who met us at the waste treatment plant revealed that the river had shown no sign of slowing throughout the majority of the Demon’s occupation. It had started to dry up barely three weeks ago, and after the city was liberated, two City Engineers and three brave priests of Khors had gone in to survey the system and try and find out what was wrong. None of them had returned.

We started in the maintenance tunnel they had entered, following the small battery-powered lights they’d used to make their way. We had a couple of miles to walk to reach the updated quest marker, but even this far away, the stench was gnarly.

“Gods! It stinks!” Karalti snuffled behind me, pawing at her running nose. “Ugh!”

“I thought you liked poop.” I teased aside a curtain of hanging fungus with the tip of the Spear, revealing a slippery cat walk sloping gently down and to the left. “You used to roll in it all the time when you were a baby.”

“Go to hell,” she grumbled. “I like SOME kinds of very fresh spoor, okay? They smell like prey animals. It’s like when you go to the market and smell all those different food smells mixed together-”

“Look, I'm an adventurous eater, but I draw the line at deep fried deer shit.”

“You don't eat it! You just sniff it, silly. There's so much information in a little piece. You can tell what direction they were traveling in, how recently they were there, if they've had babies recently, or whether they're male or female, or in heat...

“Hey, Karalti. I’m not judging you. Whatever flicks your clit.” I paused for a second, cocking my ears as a small ‘bang’ echoed up from the bowels of the earth.

“What?”

“You know. Buzzes your bean? Pokes your pearl?”

“Ugh, you're the worst.” She scowled, holding the torch up with one hand and pinching her nose with the other.

“Not as bad as Fol Alugut, though. This place is really fucking rancid.”

The maintenance shaft led all the way to one of the secondary sewer canals. By the time we reached it, I was pretty sure all of the skin on the inside of my sinuses had been obliterated. The regularly-spaced lighting ended here. There were glints and glimmers for about two hundred feet to our left, and beyond that, nothing but a dull black abyss.

“I’m gonna say that lighting a fire down here is a bad idea,” Karalti remarked. “Let’s get some of those magelights… they don’t throw sparks.”

“Here.” I pulled out two torches, cold and sticky with pitch, then a coil of [Hemp Twine]. “Stick four of them on and tie them to these.”

“Ooh! Good idea! Hang on, I’ll get some.”

Our improvised crafting session led to the creation of two [Arcane Glowstaffs], the fancy way of saying ‘duct-taped magic flashlights’. They cast a steady, cool light that became increasingly eerie as we edged toward the real darkness ahead. Karalti carried both of them while I handled the Spear.

“Something’s off,” I said to her. “Feel that?”

“Yeah. It’s cold.”

There was a drying channel of decomposing sludge not very far from us: sludge that should have been radiating warmth. As we headed toward the last light in the tunnel, I began to notice other off-putting signs. For one thing, the smell was getting better, not worse, as we went. For another,