Rekk’ar stood atop the lower ambulatory of Fortress Al-Lavik, a small balcony that ran the circumference of the tower near its base. Archers stood to either side of him, wielding greatbows mounted to the brickwork. It was only a step removed from full ballistae. The lance-like arrows they wielded were enough to punch through most armor of any poor sod hit by them, and then anyone standing immediately behind them as well. The Eternal Empire’s armor protected them to a degree, but it still obeyed the rules of reality. Any lance that struck a knight launched them backward, bowling over their own allies.
The archers hadn’t loosed a lance in several minutes now. With the addition of the Anvil’s forces to the Shieldbreakers, Black Knights, and every other squad capable of doing damage, the melee had become too hectic. There was too great a risk of hitting their forces.
Unfortunately, following an initial success of pushing back the Empire forces around the base of the tower, they quickly closed ranks. The Empire tightened gaps, covered each other well, and hunkered down, becoming an effective fortress of their own even if they lacked the brick walls. It wouldn’t last. It couldn’t last. They would tire. They would break. They would fall. Fortress Al-Lavik ensured it. They had no support and nowhere to retreat to tend to their injured. No stores of food to maintain their strength.
All it would take was a little time.
Rekk’ar curled his lips in anger. His tusks would have been on full display were it not for the shadowy helmet he wore.
Time they apparently did not have anymore.
“Recall them,” he snarled off to one side.
Evelyn, some human with one arm who hadn’t bothered to get it replaced with Hale, raised her eyebrows. She stared a moment but moved before Rekk’ar felt the need to snarl at her. She grasped one of the trumpets and sounded the warning to pull back.
With that done, Rekk’ar turned to the Protector looming over the archers. “All teams you’re in contact with need to return to the tower,” he said, grinding his teeth together. “Assemble in the lower levels for further orders.”
The Protector nodded, presumably carrying out Rekk’ar’s orders.
The orc turned back, gripping the railing as he leaned forward, glaring at the now-fighting retreat down below.
Another few hours and they could have claimed victory over that force. Another few hours and he would have claimed victory. The airships would have remained overhead, but they were someone else’s problem. He would have destroyed an army that was said to have never known defeat. Sure, it was only a fraction of that army, but the sentiment stood. The greatest achievement he could have imagined. Some of the old boys he once knew never would have thought him capable. A petty raider of farmers and craftsmen turned to a successful general who clashed on a scale of nations.
Now, they were pulling back, leaving the army alive to cause more problems. All because they didn’t have time.
“Damn Arkk,” he muttered.
The retreat wasn’t going as well as he had hoped. Were he in the position of the enemy army, he would have been relieved that they were being given some breathing room. The Eternal Empire wasn’t so grateful. The moment they had even a smidgen of space, they tried to turn the tables.
“Archers,” Rekk’ar barked. “Suppress them. Aim far. Hit one of ours and I’ll throw you over the edge myself.”
A few of the closest archers gave him wary looks at that. They were all smaller than he was. Several were humans, but a few beastmen were among their ranks. Those without the skill to fight in close combat and without the ability to conjure up great amounts of magic. The greatbows only required careful aiming, with the winches attached to the tower wall doing all the work of actually drawing the bows—making the distinction between the bows and ballistae even fuzzier.
Rekk’ar wasn’t worried. The retreat had sounded. Their forces were backing away. While the Eternal Empire advanced in their wake, they weren’t in such a tight melee anymore.
He was pleased to see that it was an orderly retreat. Nobody turned and sprinted away when the trumpets sounded. They covered each other’s backs. Even the metal men from the anvil used their strange, puppet-like movements to throw oncoming attacks off balance.
A thunk from one of the nearby greatbows rattled the air. He watched the heavy bolt arc and fall, slamming into the center of the Eternal Empire’s forces, well away from anyone retreating. It wouldn’t help their forces disengage, but it would hopefully keep the Eternal Empire from becoming overwhelming.
“Left side warning,” he said, noting the way the enemy forces were maneuvering, trying to create a concave around their retreating forces.
Evelyn picked up a trumpet and started sounding an alert. Rekk’ar called out a few more commands, both to her and to the Protector. Having an elevated view of the battlefield was a tactical advantage he couldn’t have even imagined in his raider days. Every so often, he noticed the inevitable injury. There wasn’t much he could do to help that, not beyond what he was already doing.
Arkk was teleporting individuals out, both injured and people who got trapped in precarious positions. According to the Protector, nobody quite knew where Arkk was or what he was doing. He did wonder why Arkk wasn’t simply teleporting the entire army back. Perhaps he was busy, or perhaps there were simply too many. With the Anvil forces, their numbers had more than doubled. Maybe even tripled. Given their sudden appearance and all the chaos going on, nobody had given him a number and Rekk’ar hadn’t bothered trying to count.
More lances launched and more orders turned to the toots of trumpets.
Halfway through their return to the fortress and the situation was starting to deteriorate. Rekk’ar opened his mouth, about to call for a stop, for their side to push against the Eternal Empire just enough to shove them back a step. The command never made it out of his mouth before he heard a sharp, grating whistle in the air.
An obsidian pillar slammed into the ground in the center of the Eternal Empire’s forces.
It stood tall, imposing. Its sleek, polished surface reflected the chaos around it. A moment of stunned silence fell over the battlefield as both sides paused, their eyes fixated on the enigmatic structure. The air seemed to hum with slowly building energy as a low, resonant thrum reverberated through a sudden wind.
Without warning, the obelisk burst into life. A brilliant line of blood-red energy lanced from its apex, frying the very air as it targeted a random soldier in the Eternal Empire’s army. The beam ignited anything it touched with malevolence. One of the Eternal Empire’s ancillary squads, perhaps a logistic unit or loaners from Evestani, scattered like ants caught under a lens of glass as the beam swept over their position. The obelisk tracked them with cold efficiency, each movement calculated, each moment a brief eternity before a swathe of soldiers was cut down.
The commander of the Eternal Empire’s ground forces barked out orders. Rekk’ar couldn’t hear from this distance, but he could see the way the man was swinging his arms about, directing units around him in an attempt to deal with this new threat in their midst.
A second obelisk slammed down, crushing him.
“Bombardment magic active once more,” the Protector intoned, making Rekk’ar hop lightly in surprise.
Rekk’ar glanced upward, frowning at the lack of airships. One of them had been interfering with bombardment spells earlier—then the bombardment chamber had blown up, taking down the tower’s defenses—but with the airships gone, they must have gotten some ritual working again. He wasn’t quite sure where the bombardment team had pulled that spell from, but it was working wonders. The blood-red beams didn’t do as much to the knights as they should have based on how they cut down the unarmored units, but it was the exact kind of chaos they needed.
The retreating forces broke away from the Eternal Empire, leaving them behind fully.
“Treat any injuries,” Rekk’ar said as the first obelisk started crumbling apart. He hadn’t noticed any real damage inflicted upon it. It must have run out of magic. A third one quickly replaced it. “Organize anyone healthy into fresh squads. Anyone too exhausted will remain here. Those who can still fight need to move to the teleportation chamber and begin making hops to Fortress Al-Mir. Everyone else, get them patched up as much as possible and seal the tower.”
“Understood.”
Rekk’ar nodded his head, then glanced around at the awe-struck archers. True, their near ballistae couldn’t contend with bombardment spells, but that was no excuse to not try. “Did I tell you to cease your attacks?” he barked out, pausing just a moment for them to mentally answer the rhetorical question. “Suppress them into the ground.”
Repeated thunks of launching lances thrummed the air as the archers followed his orders. There was a lot of confusion at the moment. Likely even more with those soldiers he had just ordered back. They would have questions for him. Questions he would very much like hearing the answers to.
Turning, Rekk’ar gave a light nod to Tell’ir. He would have command, though it wouldn’t be much of one. The battlefield would be empty of anyone to command soon.
“Airships increasing in speed, Sir. Don’t reckon I’ve ever seen something move so fast. Barring teleportation, that is.”
Arkk spared Harvey an appreciative nod of his head. It seemed as if his forces noticed what was going on. People were transferring to Elmshadow and then back to Fortress Al-Mir as fast as they could. But Fortress Al-Mir, despite its name, wasn’t Al-Lavik. He hadn’t spent months filling it with weapons and magic for war. Assuming any assailants would have to go through Elmshadow to get to him there, it just made more sense to occupy his time at Elmshadow.
They didn’t have a bombardment room. They didn’t have the magical defenses that had kept Al-Lavik safe from both conventional magic as well as those magic-draining eggs. All they had was an admittedly thick layer of earth followed by the reinforced bricks of the fortress. Bricks that had already proved they could crumble and fail when drained of magic.
They were running out of time.
They stood before the crystalline archway. Lesser servants curled around both sides of its base, holding tight, as if a slight slip of their grip would see it running away. The rocks that had been partially blocking it were gone, cleared away courtesy of even more lesser servants. Now, it was just a simple archway, just like every other portal they had seen.
Except it wasn’t active. No silvery membrane stretched between the archway.
“Zullie?” he called out.
The witch turned back, lips curled in frustration. “It must be something in Fortress Al-Mir. Everything here should connect.”
“I’ve followed all of your instructions. Everything in Al-Mir looks how I expect it to look and how you described.”
“Then check again!” Zullie snapped, her irritation getting the better of her.
Behind Arkk, he heard Camilla mutter, “Can’t even draw a straight line in this place and thinks her work is perfect…”
Arkk didn’t exactly disagree. While he was fairly certain the problem was here, he still sent a lesser servant crawling up the Al-Mir archway, inspecting every little rune and even every little scratch. From their experiments with returning Agnete home, they knew the portals weren’t so sensitive. The highlands portal still functioned even with a significant slice of material having been shorn off for use in the small anvil portal. The real problem was that they didn’t have a keystone.
The keystones, like the ones they had received from Sylvara for the Silence or the Laughing Prince for the Necropolis, seemed to force a connection. The Underworld had been established by Xel’atriss and the Anvil keystone came from the distant portal in the Underworld. Thus far, they hadn’t visited anywhere else, and thus had no access to other…
Keystones.
Arkk blinked. Realization hit him.
“Zullie, if Fortress Al-Mir had access to a keystone on that end, would it be able to force the connection open with no further input on our end?”
Zullie paused her inspections, turning her head back to face Arkk. Though she still looked frustrated, she did raise a curious eyebrow. “Where are you going to get a keystone? More delving in the temple? Won’t that be hard while you’re here?”
“No,” Arkk said. “The Anvil. When the portal closed, trapping Agnete on the other end, the Infernal Engine did so by removing the keystone. It then dropped it into a bank of similar rune-covered crystalline stones. Keystones! A whole bunch of them!”
As Arkk spoke, he was already resetting the Fortress Al-Mir portal. The lesser servants scurried over it, undoing the changes he had made so that they could reach the Anvil instead.
Come to think of it, the undead of the Necropolis might also have a stockpile of stones. It wasn’t much of a surprise if the Silence lacked anything similar—there wasn’t anyone living there to organize such a collection—and if the Underworld ever had the same, it was likely buried under the ravages of time.
But he knew the configuration required to set the portal to the Anvil without even consulting with Zullie. He had memorized that long ago.
“How will you know which one is which?” Zullie asked, moving alongside him as she cupped her chin with her thumb and forefinger. “Even I couldn’t tell just from holding the stones.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Arkk said. “We’ll just try them all. One by one, until we find one that connects to the Maze. If it doesn’t connect here, at least we’ll have made progress. We can try reconfiguring again from there.”
One of Zullie’s assistants, the orc Vezz’ok, had remained behind to manage magical matters at Fortress Al-Mir. Now, following a quick game of charades from the lesser servant, Vezz’ok moved forward and planted his hand on the portal, trying to activate it once again. Unlike earlier with their failed connections to the Maze, this one lit up almost instantly. Fast enough to surprise Vezz’ok, who likely assumed it would fail again. He jumped back from the forming membrane.
The lesser servants surged forward. As soon as the image of the massive factory that was the Anvil appeared in its portal, they moved through. He had no idea how long he might have before the denizens of the Anvil grew angry with him for pilfering their keystone collection. If they got upset at all. With Agnete, they had formed something of an alliance. Unfortunately, he was in no position to explain.
Only when the servants climbed up a tall ladder and moved across a narrow catwalk to the bank of keystones did Arkk notice his immediate surroundings.
Zullie, Camilla, and Luthor were all staring at him. Harvey with the crystal ball kept glancing up, but kept the majority of his attention on the images inside its glass surface.
“What?” he asked, looking around.
Zullie’s lips formed a thin line, but it was Luthor who asked the question on all their minds.
“D… Didn’t you say magic would flood into our world if you connected to too many more realms? You and Zullie were talking about magic toxicity levels… T-trying them at random isn’t going to start with this portal almost guaranteed, which means we’re opening at least two portals.”
“Then I’ll skip the first keystone I select,” Arkk said. “We’ll go straight to the second.”
Zullie managed the flattest stare possible despite her lack of eyes. “That’s not how statistics work,” she said in an equally flat tone of voice. Shaking her head, rubbing her temples, she drew in a deep breath. “With the war, we’ve not had time for a full risk analysis on the situation.”
“It isn’t going to be an instant problem, is it?”
The lesser servant in the Anvil moved as he spoke, searching through the neatly organized bank of keystones. Some possessed symbols he recognized. The Underworld, the Silence, even the Anvil. He ignored those, selecting one of each from the other dozen different patterns.
One of those mechanical eyes loomed overhead on its gantry, watching the servant’s actions. It didn’t raise an alarm or try to shut off the portal. Arkk took that as a good sign, that his actions were sanctioned by the factory—or at least tolerated.
“Certainly not,” Zullie said, splitting Arkk’s focus. “Recall what Yoho told us. He didn’t use specific numbers, but from context, we can conclude that it was at least a hundred years after the Calamity began that the last living people in the Necropolis died. I doubt they even realized the true scope of the problem in the first several years, beyond the obviousness of the portals failing. And the Underworld didn’t turn to the state it is in overnight.”
Arkk looked from Zullie to his scrying team. They weren’t his typical advisory council. They were employees. People whose well-being was his responsibility, both to return them home as well as to avoid them starving to death in a world filled with too much magic.
“We could still try to use our sympathetic link with Xel’atriss—”
“You think that’s less risky?”
“Well, no…”
Arkk shook his head. “We’ll deal with the consequences later. For now, let’s open some portals.”