“As useless as I expected.”
A tall woman sat on a grand throne, one leg crossed over the other with her elbow on the armrest, propping her head up. The fingers of her other hand drummed against the chair as she observed the chaos down below.
It was a clever trick. It would have been more clever were it not for how easy it was to see through. At least, she thought it was simple to see through. The fact that her contemporary took one look at the illusory army, believed he understood what was going on, and immediately set off to find the source of the power implied that their opponent had a better grasp on his opponent than she thought.
Now, while he was off meditating and concentrating, his army was being torn apart.
She shifted in her throne, swapping elbows from one side to the other. With an utter look of disdain, she plucked a thin white thread from her black dress and obliterated it.
“Empress, your orders?”
Luminous white eyes flicked to the side.
An older man wearing a clean-cut black and silver uniform stood ready and waiting. He had a cane, simple and unadorned with fine detailing, planted between his feet. Both hands rested upon the silver handle as he stared out the large glass windows. As he felt her attention on him, he turned, raising a white eyebrow above his round glasses.
“Ready the cannons,” she said with a lazy wave of her hand.
He nodded his head, turning on his heel. The long cape he wore as part of his uniform fluttered behind him.
“Wait, Berthold,” she said.
“Empress?” He turned back. There was no confusion in his eyes or questioning why she had stopped him. Whatever she decreed would become edict. It didn’t matter how much she contradicted herself or how often she changed her mind.
Her words were law.
“Ready the cannons but do not fire. We have a truce with the Evestani. Accidentally striking a single man even in accident would violate that truce.” There was little need to explain herself. If she said not to fire, not a single man would do so even were monsters of old charging straight at the cannoneers. But Berthold would appreciate the intricacies of her thoughts.
“If we laid down fire at the battle line, it might harm a few, but it would save the vast majority,” he said with a faint glint in his old eyes.
“Nevertheless, the truce stands.”
“Understood,” he said, laying his hand across his chest in a firm salute. “I’ll see that the men await your orders.”
Watching him go, she waited until the heavy wooden door swung shut behind him. Only once she was alone did she dip her finger into a small bowl of water resting atop a pedestal next to the throne. With an idle motion, she swept the water into a gentle swirl.
“Find anything yet?” she asked.
A golden light pulsed at the bottom of the basin. “It’s underground. I can tell that much.”
“You sound frustrated.”
The golden light pulsed again in an unintelligible snarl. “If you have nothing to contribute, stay silent.”
She, naturally, ignored that command. “While you dealt with your little issue, I found myself musing on the absence of our comrade.” Waiting a moment for a response ended up a futile endeavor. The water simply boiled in irritation. So she continued. “My spymaster has received reports of a string of excommunicatory notices released by the Abbey of the Light’s current ecclesiarch. A handful of prominent inquisitors, priests, abbesses, and so on and so forth have all been removed from the Abbey’s roster.”
“Is there a point to your babbling? I’m trying to concentrate here.”
“All excommunicated individuals are in or were recently in the lands of Mystakeen. Many are known to have associations with the leader of the so-called Company Al-Mir.”
“So what? The…” The golden light in the basin dimmed momentarily. She could almost hear the scraps of wilted wit mustering together to form an insult. “The Limp Light is sticking to her word of not allowing anyone in good standing to fight against us. When she didn’t show up to assist us, I told you that she was plotting something. I was right. As always.”
She hummed lightly, stirring the water again. “I merely wonder what her end goal is.”
“She hates us. Wants to kill us. Take the world for herself. Is that so hard to understand?”
“From you, I would expect it.”
“Same with you,” the golden light pulsed.
“Indeed. But her?”
“What does it matter? She can’t deal with both of us. We handle this little insect and then swat… Ah, there!”
She watched through the great windows. A thin ray of gold lanced out from the center of the Evestani forces down below. It burrowed underground before passing too far, presumably to strike at the underground ritual array.
“Got it! The illusion is gone, right?”
“Indeed,” she said, leaning forward to better peer out the windows. “I can now clearly see the undead army slaughtering your forces.”
The water in the basin erupted like a geyser as the golden light in its depths gleamed in angry incandescence. “The what?”
“Skeletons, it seems,” she said, keeping her tone utterly calm. “Every one of your soldiers they attack rises to join the undead army. A few thousand of your soldiers died while you were looking for that illusion spell.”
“You…” The water boiled over, slopping onto the floor. “You did nothing?”
“I was unsure if you still counted the undead as yours. Our truce—”
“Fuck you, stupid–Do something—”
The voice of her cohort faded as the last of the water boiled out of the basin, leaving her finger stirring through air. She stared a moment, wondering if the few words at the end counted enough to lift a hand. But she had likely pushed him as far as was wise at the moment.
Raising a hand overhead, she flipped up a small cap on a long brass tube. “Berthold,” she said, speaking into the tube.
“Empress?” came the distorted response.
“Send in the vanguard to get those undead off our ally’s back. Then rain down fire on the bulk of the undead forces.”
“Understood.”
She leaned back in her throne, letting the cap fall over the mouth of the brass tube. The wave of black armored soldiers moved in almost immediately, easily handling what Evestani had struggled against for the last several minutes. A golden wall sprung up, further dividing the undead from the living. A bit late but better than nothing.
Her luminous eyes flicked over the undead as the cannon fire commenced.
“Clever tricks,” she muttered to herself. “But they won’t be enough.”
Arkk leaned away from the crystal ball with a grimace on his face.
He had known what he was doing the moment he started. He knew the likely outcome of the foul magics he used. Zullie had expressly explained the effects of the weapons she created using notes from the black book. Arkk had okayed it, signed off on implementing it, and then got Savren aboard to make the whole project more effective by disguising it as something else.
Even still…
Even still, some small part of him had hoped that the Golden Order’s avatar would have caught on sooner. But the disguise had worked on the avatar just as well as it had worked on the rest of the army. The avatar went off in search of the source of the illusion magic—and found it, eventually, blasting a hole through the center of the underground ritual circle. But all that did was vanish the illusion.
The skeletons were still animated. Their swords still corrupted anyone they touched.
“It’s fair play,” Rekk’ar grunted, seated opposite from Arkk. The green-skinned orc wasn’t looking at the crystal ball either. He had his arms crossed, staring upwards at the ceiling of the Walking Fortress command room. “They used their golden statue magic. We used necromancy. Same effect, in the end.”
Rekk’ar thought it was a good idea, clearly. Which did worry Arkk. He rarely approved of anything Arkk did.
“We hit them hard this time,” Rekk’ar continued. “And utilized your undead while disposing of them. The evidence we left behind in the village should imply that some rogue necromancer raised that army. Not us. That should keep the Prince and anyone else with objections off our backs.”
“They’ll know,” Arkk said, clasping his fingers together as he looked back down to the crystal ball.
Carnage filled the ranks of the Evestani army. After the avatar blasted apart a tenth of the illusory forces, they had formed up in proper battle lines, fighting down the illusions manually while the avatar looked for the source. Fighting illusion after illusion, with the tricks Savren installed in them, wore them down and, at the same time, made them complacent. When the first few died, it had come as a surprise. Chaos reigned. A thousand soldiers fell before any proper retaliation could commence.
Fire, boulders, and reality-shearing magic rained down on the army just as they started to get their footing. Bombardment magic driven by glowstone crystals and the lesser servants who placed them on the hidden ritual circles. The lines broke, the undead rushed in, soldiers died…
And then a brilliant force surged through the air. Falling boulders few back as if bouncing off a wall, multicolored flames snuffed out, and while the black voids of severed reality slipped through, those rituals were demanding enough in terms of magical capacity that they couldn’t do much on their own before the glowstones were depleted.
Arkk leaned in, narrowing his eyes as the Eternal Empire made its move. He imagined they had wanted to keep all that they could do secret, but the situation forced their hand. Regardless of how the rest of the battle went, this was valuable information.
To have so thoroughly nullified the bombardment magic, did they possess an avatar as well? Or were they simply using anti-siege spells similar to what Evestani or even he had used in the past? The effects weren’t anything flashy. Not like the Heart of Gold’s avatar when he used his defensive magic.
Arkk grasped the second crystal ball—both were with him today for the special operation, not wanting his scrying crew to see what the undead army at his command—and quickly angled its view upward.
“There it is,” Rekk’ar grunted, leaning in as well.
A ship. A flying ship. It sailed through the sky as easily as a regular ship cut through the ocean. The barriers came from it, different than the normal barriers Evestani or Arkk had used. More like constant gusts of wind that blew with such force that all the siege magic was sent askew, if not nullified completely. The wind barriers didn’t reach the ground—if they had, they probably would have blasted both armies off their feet—but they didn’t need the wind to stop the undead.
If not for the Eternal Empire marching alongside Evestani, the necromancy might have taken out the entire army before the avatar managed to return. As it was, the knights of the Eternal Empire moved in now that the bombardment magic had been dealt with, interposed themselves between the undead and Evestani, slipping in and taking the brunt of the attacks. They were better armored, better trained, and obviously more experienced. A few did fall, but that number was practically nothing compared to the dead and redead Evestani.
“I mean, it is obvious who made the undead army, isn’t it?” Arkk said, scowling as a warm golden light spread through the fighting soldiers. The avatar was back. “Who else could do something like this? The Prince will know.”
The avatar was back and with him, that golden aura. The Heart of Gold’s domains did not include healing or anything that would directly counter a legion of undead skeletons and turned soldiers. But it didn’t really need to. The soldiers stood straighter, bolstered by the arrival of their god. A barrier of gold carved through the battlefield, dividing it in half with Evestani and the Eternal Empire on one side and the undead on the other. Some undead were caught on the wrong side but, without the bulk pushing forward, they were swiftly dispatched by the regular soldiers.
Then it started.
The ship, flying overhead, began unloading cannon fire down on the far side of the golden barrier. Bones shattered and broke, undead scattered beyond the magic’s ability to compensate for, effectively killing them. The bombardment was heavy and widespread, a single blast taking out two dozen skeletons in one strike. They weren’t even tightly grouped. Smaller, more precise shots took out stragglers, scattering their remains to the winds.
A beam of gold lanced out from the center of Evestani’s army, only about a quarter of the size of the mass beam that had taken out a bulk of the illusions at the start. But this one swept back and forth, slicing swaths of undead into pieces.
“It might be obvious if anyone looks too hard,” Rekk’ar grunted, shaking his head as the tables turned for the mass of undead. “But right now, it might be more convenient to believe in the innocent fiction of a third party raising those skeletons. You just decimated the Evestani army and probably pummeled their morale into the ground. We’re in a strong position with reinforcements on their way. The situation is too good for the Prince to start pointing fingers at those ostensibly on his side.”
“Maybe for now. What happens after?”
Rekk’ar’s lips curled, splitting to show off the bulk of his tusks. “They’re bringing the King’s army, right? What happens if that army falls? Accidents happen on the battlefield all the time.
“We’ll have dealt with Evestani once and for all,” Rekk’ar continued before Arkk could even begin to object. “If that thing your witches came up with works as intended, we’ll be rid of that avatar too. Our position will remain strong. Our allies, if they suffer too much, will weaken.” He thumped his fist on the table. “Claim the land for ourselves. Kick everyone else out. That second tower will watch our western border. This tower can move elsewhere to keep the Kingdom off our backs. We’ll finally have peace.”
“Ignoring that you want to get our allies killed, that demon—”
“Demon? If it exists, if the Prince summons it, so what? You’ve got countermeasures for it. Things that can kill a demon.”
Arkk doubted it would be so easy, but didn’t interrupt Rekk’ar.
“Build up enough of Dakka’s Shadow Knights, you won’t even need an army to hold this territory. Each one of them is worth fifty good soldiers, a hundred bad.”
“That still requires me to deliberately weaken our allies.”
“Arkk,” Rekk’ar said, his curled lips twisting into a frown. “I’m going to be straight with you because you’re an idiot farm boy who won’t understand if I’m not. Those allies are only allies until this war is over. You are a threat too great to let stand. Especially once it is no longer convenient to ignore the who behind that undead army,” he said, waving a hand toward the crystal ball. “You want to keep people safe? That’s fine. But keep our people safe. The best way to do that is to ensure that nobody, Kingdom, Empire, or Sultanate, can threaten us.”
A grinding noise filled the air as Rekk’ar slid his chair back, standing from the table. He gave Arkk one last look before nodding his head. With that, he turned and left.
Left alone, Arkk scowled, looking back to the crystal ball. There wasn’t much of a battle going on any longer. Just a clean-up operation. The enemy took damage. A lot of it, even, especially considering the minor resources he had expended on the battle. Was it enough to weaken them to the point where Arkk could handle the battle without ensuring those reinforcements were used most effectively?
Arkk shook his head. He didn’t agree with Rekk’ar on most of the orc’s ideas.
This one was no different.
At the same time, agreeing with it and deciding it was the best course of action were two very different things…