The Last Echo of the Lord of Bells Preview Chapter 2

Hey, it's time for the second preview chapter! Woo! Less than two weeks until release day! 

Chapter 2: Canyon Kingdom

Hugh Stormward and his friends descended into Highvale easily, even in complete darkness. Hugh expanded the Stormward’s Crown around all of them, then altered it to block their light cantrips from shining down into the canyon and revealing their presence.

Not that Hugh or Sabae needed the light cantrips— Hugh’s sphinx eyes and Sabae’s enchanted goggles let them see just fine.

According to Talia, seers normally should have detected their entry and dispatched a patrol to make sure they weren’t there to cause trouble— it was standard procedure whenever anyone entered the Stoneknife Canyon from the mountains, rather than the normal passes and paths. It caused endless difficulty for raiders from the Clans, though Hugh didn’t have much sympathy for them.

With Mackerel blocking all scrying, their group descended into the canyon kingdom completely unobserved.

“So the whole kingdom’s this narrow?” Hugh asked. “Just one long canyon?”

Talia shook her head. “There are plenty of villages up in the mountains and tributary canyons, but the overwhelming majority of Highvale’s population lives on the terraces along the main canyon walls.”

“Not somewhere yeh want ta live if yeh’re afraid a’ heights,” Godrick said, peering off the path to the steep terraces below them. 

“I like it,” Sabae said, leaning over the edge.

“Isn’t Ras Andis basically designed the same?” Talia asked.

Sabae shook her head. “Ras Andis is one giant road switchbacking down a cliff face. Similar, but not the same.”

Hugh interrupted before Godrick could start an argument about whether it really was different— as much as he enjoyed their pointless debates, now was hardly the time. “How are we going to find your grandmother’s conclave?” 

Sabae frowned. “It shouldn’t be too hard— it was an open invitation to states and great powers who oppose both Alustin and Havath. I’m more worried about drawing attention to us by making inquiries.”

“Clan Castis has quite a few informants and contacts in Highvale, especially in Oldfort,” Talia said. “If we can track one of those down, it shouldn’t be an issue.”

As Hugh’s friends began piecing together their plan, he gazed down into Highvale.

His sphinx eyes gave him a clear view of the farm fields, villages, and cities covering the terraces below them, even through the current light-distorting effects of the Stormward’s Crown. He could see almost as clearly at night as he could in the day, and his eyes were far sharper than normal humans. He could even clearly make out riverboats plying up and down the mighty Stoneknife River far below.

Despite the stunning scenery, he couldn’t help but feel troubled.

He’d never particularly wanted to visit Highvale. Thanks to his former bully Rhodes, a member of the Highvale royal family, he didn’t have particularly positive associations with the country. It was slightly irrational of him to judge one of the most powerful nations on the Ithonian continent by the behavior of one of its citizens, he supposed, but he’d never made any claims towards being the most rational person around.

Now that he was visiting, however, he did his best to go in with an open mind. After all, he’d just visited literal alien worlds, Highvale surely wouldn’t be a problem for him.

By the time they descended to the upper terraces in the canyon, the others had already finished planning out their next move, then started and completed one of their long, pointless arguments. No one won— no one ever did, that wasn’t the point— but they were all so tired that they lacked the energy to continue. Just this morning, they’d woken up in an alien world, fled a poisonous hurricane, spent hours wandering through a mind-warping mistform labyrinth, and then suffered through a nasty bout of aether sickness on returning home. At least their new Limnan magic had helped alleviate the aether sickness a little.

Despite their fatigue, they waited for the road below them to empty of travelers before dropping down onto it. As they did so, Hugh retracted the crystal nodes of the Stormward’s Crown back into his storage tattoo, dissolving the wards around them.

It was a short walk to the nearest city. The fallow rice paddies alongside the road gave way to tenements and storefronts with startling abruptness, as though the city planner had carved between town and country with a huge but razor-sharp knife.

They were so tired they walked into literally the first inn they found, a place called, for some odd reason or other, The Blind Pig. It wasn’t anything fancy, but it was clean and well-kept.

Weirdly enough, there was a closed door mounted high up on the wall behind the bar, with a spellform-covered doorknob, but Hugh was too exhausted to pay it much attention.

After months off-world, it felt surreal hearing people speaking Ithonian again, and being able to rent a room or buy food without elaborate pantomime.

The instant they finished eating, the group retreated up to their rooms. Hugh barely even had the energy to put up defensive wards around them before he passed out.

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The next morning, Hugh woke up from disorienting dreams thinking there was a battle outside the inn. He was already rolling out of bed and pulling Crown nodes out of his storage tattoo before he’d even woken up.

“It’s just a festival,” Talia muttered from under the covers. “Highvale has a thousand of them.”

Hugh blinked in confusion, then edged over to the window.

Sure enough, the noise outside was shouting, singing, dancing, and illusionists plying their trade. It wasn’t as hectic as the sandstorm festivals in Theras Tel, but it wasn’t that far short.

Mackerel sleepily flapped over to the window, but his sleepiness vanished the instant he saw the festival, and the spellbook gave Hugh an excited look.

Hugh rolled his eyes, but nodded. It wasn’t like he was going to get back to sleep anytime soon.

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To Mackerel’s irritation, it took almost an hour for Hugh to get the others awake and moving, but the festival was still in full swing by the time they left the Blind Pig. 

If anything, it had only picked up its pace.

Enchanted cloth fish swam over the heads of the crowd, darting in great schools between clouds of levitating paper lanterns. Illusionists turned stretches of road into palace hallways or forest floors, musicians played on every corner, and food vendors did a thriving trade in various fried and fermented foods. 

“What’s this festival for, anyhow?” Sabae asked, stepping around a pair of old men, well into their cups despite noon being hours away yet.

Talia shrugged. “Highvale has something like two or three festivals a week. Most of which are local festivals that are only celebrated in parts of the kingdom, but there are still several a month in any given town.”

“How does their economy even function, with that many festivals?” Hugh asked.

“That I can answer,” Sabae said. “This is the single best pass across the Highreach Range, they receive almost as much trade as Theras Tel. They can afford to throw as many festivals as they want.”

“Ah’m more interested in how they’re doin’ this much magic with so little mana in the aether,” Godrick said.

Hugh frowned. Now that Godrick mentioned it, it was pretty weird.

“The festival is part of the reason it’s so low in the first place,” Talia said. “Highvale wants their aether density low, remember? Makes it hard for great powers to sustain their activity if they try to invade.”

Hugh had, in fact, known that, and he felt a little silly for forgetting. “Still, it feels weird to be using their mana for festivals. They could be using it to build weapons or something?”

Sabae shrugged. “Makes sense to me. Keeps the populace happy, and prevents a nasty mix of mercantile and military interests. Nations that spend too much gold and mana on enchanted or alchemical weapon production often end up in dangerous spirals of weapons spending. The business interests involved usually end up hijacking their politics, forming a deeply corrupt alliance between industry and their military. Plus, enchanted and alchemical weaponry is a lot less useful than a decent mage battalion, and Highvale has more than their fair share of those.”

Hugh nodded, though he still felt a little doubtful about partying as a military defense.

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One of Hugh’s worries entering Highvale had been in regard to Talia— he’d been fretting about angry mobs or something of the sort.

To his surprise, outside of a few mildly suspicious looks from guards, Talia barely seemed to warrant a second glance from passersby. More, there were huge numbers of clansmen wandering the city unmolested by guards. None from Clan Castis, so far as he could see, but plenty from other clans.

When he asked her about the seeming lack of animosity, she seemed utterly baffled.

“Why would there be a problem?”

Hugh gave her a puzzled look. “Because of all the raiding?”

“We’re not here on a raid though,” Talia said, looking even more confused.

Sabae butted in before the conversation could get even more muddled. “The Clans might raid frequently, but the value of their trade with Highvale dwarfs the costs of the raids, and the Clans are usually careful about avoiding civilian casualties. It’s been deadlier and more acrimonious in the past, but in recent decades both sides treat it as just a bloodier-than-usual training exercise.”

Talia scowled, but didn’t disagree.

Clan Castis didn’t have any informants near their present location, unfortunately, so they’d have to make their way to Oldfort, Highvale’s capital. It wasn’t too far— either a few days by walking, or a day downstream by boat.

Their exit from the city was so abrupt Hugh felt disoriented as he stepped out of the city. To their left was a woodblock art printer, to their right was a blacksmith's shop filled with iron and charcoal mages, and ahead of them, the city simply ended and more farm fields began. Just a few hundred feet away, a rustic farming village interrupted the fields, looking absolutely bizarre in contrast with the city behind them.

“Highvale is seriously weird,” Hugh said.

Even Talia nodded at that.

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The hike down to the nearest rivership port was fairly direct, but brutal on their legs. The various paths that led down between the terraced levels of Highvale were ridiculously steep, to the point that Hugh suspected that Highvale had the most muscular average legs of any kingdom on the continent.

There were apparently dragons that ferried passengers, as well as a few mechanical lifts, but they were expensive and crowded. They still had more than enough gold to afford it, of course, but they were trying to avoid attention— and much of their money was still in the bizarre coinage of Hebrast.

Not to mention that their group wasn’t exactly nondescript.

So instead of an easy trip down, they were trudging down perilously steep and narrow switchback roads and staircases that felt more like ladders.

There was one part of the descent that Hugh rather enjoyed, however— a long, wide staircase cut deep into the wall of one terrace, so far back that it emerged halfway into the upper terrace. It was a more gradual slope than most of their trip so far, but its gentler grade wasn’t why Hugh enjoyed descending it.

No, he enjoyed it so much because there was an entire town carved into the walls of the staircase.

Shops and restaurants were carved into the cliff walls at the level of the staircase to either side, while homes were carved farther up the cliff face. Ladders and stairs led farther up, and there were even a few stairwell alleys leading up and down away from the main stair.

As they got lower on the stairwell, many of the stairwell alleys were replaced by well-lit tunnels filled with shops. Every part of the stairwell town was packed with shoppers, salesmen, and travelers, and Hugh didn’t mind their slow progress in the least.

There was one store that Hugh forced the others to stop at, of course.

He hadn’t eaten a proper pastry in months, there wasn’t the slightest chance he’d pass one up now.

Hugh didn’t have any way of knowing that there would be a Havathi spy shopping in that particular bakery that would report their presence— nor would he ever know. It wasn’t, after all, as though the spy were stupid enough to try and intercept them herself.

Nor would it have particularly mattered if they hadn’t entered the bakery— they’d already been spotted by no less than four informants and spies from various groups. Even by one freelance information broker, who was happy to sell the information to anyone with coin.

Mackerel might make them invisible to seers, but didn’t do the slightest good against old-fashioned feet on the ground.

By the time Hugh and his friends boarded the riverboat heading to Oldfort a few hours later, the intelligence networks of half a dozen nations, city-states, and great powers were already aware of their presence.

And that number was only going to grow.