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I struck out furiously, a jet black spit of darkness tossed out in a heartbeat, but the Varlet’s grey cloak swirled as it slipped behind a stumbling Hune smoothly and used her mass for cover. I had to disperse my own attack, already moving deeper in, but my general screamed hoarsely as the blade bit into her again from behind. Fuck, one poison I might have been able to slow but two? Past subtlety, I wove hooks into the tent’s ceiling and ripped the whole thing down on where I believed the Varlet to be. Success, at least for a heartbeat – a shape swallowed up by the canvas and wooden frame struggled to get out, even as Hune fell to her knees. The ogre rasped out a breath, her limbs trembling.

The slit throat would kill her even if the poison didn’t, so I began weaving Night into the surrounding flesh to halt the bleeding. Just a time-buying measure, but it was a start. General Hune turned burning eyes towards the shape cutting its way out of the canvas, and in a croaking voice forced out a few words in a tongue I did not know. She choked on blood after that, but whatever it was she’d said it… reverberated. I felt a shiver of power – not Light, not Night, but something… older. Deeper. Like cool and dark water from a lake so deep its bottom had never known the light of day. Even as the Varlet’s blade finally cut its way through the canvas the Revenant was brutally smashed into the ground by some invisible force.

Bones cracked and the dagger was shattered, but in the moment that followed Hune’s face paled.

“Stop that,” I snarled. “It’ll kill you before I can-“

Not one to waste time, I laid a hand on her exposed wrist as even when she was on her knees her neck was too high for me to reach. I pushed Night into her veins, looking for the poisons, and within a breath I’d found it. Clenching my teeth, I steadied my stance and grasped the substance tight – I’d have to rip it out, if she was to live. Instead, the moment Night touched the poison the substance erupted. It turned into some sort of virulent acid, and I withdrew my power with a sympathetic scream of pain as I felt the poison hollow her out from the inside. I opened my eyes in time to see the tall ogre spasm violently, once, and her eyes roll up to show the whites. Like a great tree, she toppled forward.

General Hune was dead before she hit the ground.

The Varlet, though smashed, was snapping tits limbs back into place and crawling out of the pile of canvas. Snarling, I formed a ball of blackflame large as a horse and smashed it down onto the Revenant. It would keep, at least for a bit. Instead it was my general I limped towards, feeling sick in my stomach. I’d killed her, trying to meddle with that poison. If I’d held my hand, a healer in sorcery or Light might have attended to her instead and… Damn me, I silently swore. Damn this. The closest I’d ever come to what I was considering was Warlock seeing to Nauk, and that’d gone wrong in distressing ways. But it was my hand that’d killed Hune Egelsdottir, in the end, and that meant I owed. I drew deep of Night, deeper than was wise with a battle still to be fought, and knelt to lay my hand against the side of the fallen ogre’s neck. The last wisps of life were already fading, but the soul would not be far.

“Rise again,” I murmured, the power singing in my blood.

It coursed through the large body, muscles twitching, and rose to snatch the soul. I held it, for a moment, and that was enough to draw attention. Something unspeakably larger than I found my threads settling around the soul of Hune, and its disapproval was as a physical law. I remembered, dimly, once seeing the ogre kneeling before a bowl on a Callowan field. She’d spoken prayers, and the bowl had emptied. I withdrew the Night, the backlash still shaking my bones, and bowed my head in acknowledgement. My interference here was neither needed nor welcome, for wherever it might be that Hune Egelsdottir was headed she was in favour.

Below, for all its horrors, always paid back its dues in full.

I set aside the torrent of emotions that wold only distract me, eyes returning to the Varlet at the exact moment that the grey-cloaked thing emerged from my black flames. It was an artefact, that cloak, which seemed to have a bit of resistance to everything but brute force. The hood was up but in the shadow of it I still glimpsed calm red eyes and an ornate half-mask of jet and silver. There was an air of elegance to it, and to the Varlet’s demeanour as well: it moved like a courtier, if a very deadly one. Unfortunately for the Revenant, I was also entirely out of patience with its existence. It produce a long curved knife, though its stance implied it was about to run for it. Not that it mattered.

“There’ll be none of that,” I coldly said.

In my hand a golden chalice filled with red sand appeared as I drew out an artefact from the Night. I tipped over the sand and the red was caught in the breeze, to seemingly no effect. The Varlet stepped back, just as the first red gain touched the blackflame.

“Surge.”

The black fire roared out, exploding in a column that rose high in the sky and swallowing up the Varlet whole. It’d been a warrior’s aspect, meant to strength a body or a blade temporarily, but the property of strengthening had been rather broad in nature. It’d been the better of the artefacts I got out of the Revenants slain at Second Lauzon, though it was still relatively weak. Still, feeding a stolen aspect into one of the most dangerous uses of Night saw me get my due: the aspect that’d maintained a bubble of silence containing us ended, and I suddenly heard the bustled of hundreds of soldiers converging towards us. I paid them little attention, slowly limping forward.

The Varlet struggled against the flames, trying to slip out, but I made them follow. Leaving my sword sheathed, I idly spun my staff and used the motion to guide the black flame into a tightly-packed sphere that caught the Revenant and lifted it from the ground. I grit my teeth, feeding more power into a working I was finding increasingly difficult to control – the aspect had made the fire wilder somehow, more willful as much as more powerful. A heartbeat later the sphere was… snuffed out, suddenly, as the power of an aspect flared and gutted out. The cloak fluttered down, but when I threw a javelin of Night at it I saw it was empty.

The Varlet landed in front of me, and I finally got a good look at it. Though the corpse was severely burned, there were still a few dark tresses of hair and the remains of an elegant doublet in the scorched ruin I had made of this one. It struck out with yet another knife – straight and thin, a stiletto this time – but I caught its wrist with my free hand. It was stronger, but what did that matter? Before it could power through and sink the blade into a junction of my armour near the belly, I left my staff to stand and plunged my free hand into his chest. The Revenant twitched, freezing, as I went looking for an aspect to rip out. Three left, I felt.

One that was like an ever-shifting fang, another like utter stillness and the last… a hundred eyes, never blinking? I snatched the fang, hand withdrawing to find my fingers clutching a long wyvern’s fang so thoroughly covered with overlapping runes that there was no trace left of the original untouched paleness. Harm, I grasped in the same moment I stole it. So long as something drew breath, this aspect would birth something capable of killing it. Endless possibilities flickered through my mind but the Varlet was already drawing back so I simply picked one close to the surface. The fang went back into the Revenant’s body with a wet squelch.

It screamed, its ability to impose stillness gone as the poison coating the fang destroyed yet another aspect.

The Revenant flailed at me, which forced me to draw back, and tossed a knife so I ducked in a way that painfully pulled at my bad leg. By the time my gaze went back up, the Varlet was nowhere in sight. Fuck. If I’d been able to choose the aspect I harmed it would have been the eyes, they were the obvious pick of the stealth one, but it’d not been that discriminating a weapon. I smacked the butt of my staff against the ground, Night shivering out as I looked for a trace of the Scourge, but I found nothing. I almost snarled, my anger flaring hot. Another loss, another one I’d known for years gone and what did I have to show for it? I forced myself to breathe out, suddenly aware of the hundreds of soldiers looking at me.

The ranks parted for an officer, a tall dark-skinned woman in her forties with a fleshy face and eyes of a tinge that bordered on amber. She wore her armour like the veteran that she was, and I gave her a jerky nod as she approached.

“Legate Zola,” I said, keeping my voice calm.

“Your Majesty,” Legate Zola Osei replied, her lightly accented voice pleasant to the ear. “You have avenged our loss.”

My eyes went to the unmoving form of Hune, toppled down unceremoniously. We’d never been friends, she and I, and I’d not been blind to the fact that she’d only stayed with me because the ogres wanted someone well-placed in the camp of every possible winner of the conflicts in the east. But she had been with me for a long time, since the start almost, and that… mattered. How many of those were left, these days? With every battle, there were few less.

“No,” I grimly replied, “I haven’t. But by the day’s end, perhaps we will have given her a fitting pyre.”

The legate saluted, fist over heart, and to my surprise more than a few of the soldiers around us did the same. My voice must have carried further than I’d expected.

“You have seniority among the Second Army’s legates, if I recall correctly,” I said.

“I do,” Legate Zola quietly replied.

I closed my eyes, breathed out and centred myself. Grief, however complex its nature, could wait until tomorrow.

“Then you have command, General Zola,” I said, opening my eyes. “Confirm your replacement legate quickly, and have the announcement sent to all the appropriate officers.”

There was no argument. I looked around, and for one dreadful heartbeat I recognized no faces. Some were young, some were old, and they came from places that spanned half of Calernia’s length, but there was not one among them that I knew. I lead an army of strangers, I thought. And no amount of salutes or cheering could obscure that bitter truth. I mastered the spasm of unease, forcing myself to move so it would not show as much on my face. My eyes drifted down and I caught sight of the Varlet’s grey cloak, laying abandoned on the ground.

“Someone take that and throw it into a warded chest,” I ordered.

It was sooty and rumpled up, but no broken. If Hierophant found no trap woven into its fabric, I might gift it to Indrani so that at least one smile came out of this fucking horror of a day. I limped away, feeling like screaming. Breathe in, breathe out.

There was still a battle to win.

When they came for us again, it was without holding back. There were no tactics to speak of, no elegant manoeuvres and clever traps. On the other side of the murk stood over forty thousand of the walking dead, while the bloodied remains of my ten thousand stood behind walls and palisades like rocks awaiting the tide. And to the sound of rippling drums, a deep rumble that had my soldiers shivering even when they stood behind wards protecting them from the fear-inducing sorcery, the enemy began its advance.

I awaited them on the wall, cold-eyed and patient.

Through scum water and mud, endless ranks of skeletons marched in silent ranks as magic rippled in the distance, Keteran rituals birthing columns of billowing black smoke that rose into the sky like pillars trying to support the very heavens. The deafening screeches and buzzing of swarms filled the stagnant air, clouds of insects so thick they seemed solid shifting around cacophonous flocks of dead birds. Vermin scuttled through the swamps, rats and other crawling things, a tide that swum and skittered around the footsteps of steel-clad dead. Hulking shapes stirred out of the water, snakes long as streets and crocodiles large as houses, each bearing in their belly more of the hungry dead. Ghouls prowled the host in howling packs, passing below great skeletons bearing large ladders of black iron, and among it all a single great banner flew from an iron mast taller than the tallest of trees: ten silver stars set on a deep purple, perfectly circling a pale crown. It looked like the Dead King had deemed this battle worth the flying of his banner.

It was, I would not deny, a fearsome sight. An army like this would have been a terrible foe even with twice our numbers, well-rested and behind walls of stone. Instead the legionaries of the Second Army stood on baked mud and wood, clutched their weapons as they looked at the ripples in the water that the dead’s approach was enough to cause. The cacophony of screeches and buzzing filled the air even as the smoke began to obscure the sky, the great pillars forming a ceiling above us. The noonday sun fell into shade, and as the hideous drums of Keter sounded the shivers settled into the bones of my men. This was not a battle that a reasonable woman would ask them to win. They were tired and few and a very long way from home.

Hune Egelsdottir was dead and the army she’d led for years was still reeling from the loss.

As always, Keter’s blade had struck true. I looked at them, and now behind grim faces I glimpsed the first seeds of defeat. Not yet sprouted, but there nonetheless. Their general was dead, and though the way of the Legions and the Army after them was to that every officer could be smoothly replaced there was still something missing at the heart of the Second Army. Hune had led these soldiers from the moment there’d been a banner for them to fight under, and that was not a shallow bond. If I wanted them to win today, the fire gutting out in their bellies had to be lit anew. I sunk deep in the Night and called it close to me, let it swim through my veins and thread into my voice so that whatever I spoke would carry to every ear.

Limping, tired, I climbed up to the edge of the rampart and turned to face my men.

“I am told,” I said, and before the third word was finished not soul in the army spoke, “that there has only ever been one legion in the long history of Praes that ever dared to take the cognomen now borne by the First Legion: Invicta.”

I smiled meeting the eyes of the soldiers around me.

“Undefeated, it means,” I told them. “It was a heady boast to make even when it was conferred in the shadow of the surrender at Laure – a feat the Tower only ever achieved twice, over many years of striving.”

And not striving gently.

“Yet that’s always the way that it’s been: the deed is done, the laurel bestowed,” I said. “We do not give out a steel avenue before the victory has been won. Even in our bragging, we remain humble.”

I laughed in contempt, and at the sound I saw a subtle current go through my men.

“Today is not such a day.”

Then went still, and the weight of so many eyes turned on me was almost crushing.

“I already know who you are,” I said. “I know it because I knew you, back when you were a mere two thousand – half of you snatched from gallows, the rest having never reddened your blade.”

The Fifteenth had tasted of war before it was even fully grown, hadn’t it? Our roster had still been half empty when we first knew battle.

“All over the world,” I said, “wise lords and clever princesses dismissed the thought of you. A bastard legion, they said. A stillborn mistake. And then you won at Three Hills.”

I let silence set in for a moment.

“Luck, they argued,” I idly said, then paused. “So you won at Marchford.”

A battle that’d seemed apocalyptic, long before I’d known the true meaning of the word.

“Again and again they sneered,” I said, “and always through the blood and mud you rose. Dormer. Liesse – twice! – and even the green fields of Summer. You broke the back of a dozen princes at the Camps, then humbled the other half at the Graveyard.”

And the First Army had, in time, laid down its arms and left the fronts. Not so with the Second: under Hune they had neither withdrawn nor flinched no matter what came calling.

“I have never set an expectation that the Second Army did not surpass,” I told them, meaning every word, “not across a dozen ruinous fields of war. In all things, in all strife, your excellence has prevailed.”

My gaze swept the soldiers assembled before me, that tapestry that made up the east of the Whitecaps – orc, goblin, Praesi and Callowan – and I honestly could not bear to lie to them. To embellish with some patriotic turn of phrase, to speak of the good of mankind. Not when they had already given so much, and asked so little in return.

“And the truth is,” I quietly said, “I have asked of you more than a queen has the right to ask.”

I gestured towards the swamplands behind us, towards the encroaching nightmare.

“This day, this place, are beyond the duty of your oaths,” I admitted. “You stand halfway across the world, surrounded by death and smoke on all sides, after having already won too many wars under my banner. You have already paid for peace in blood, and yet here you are again: down in the mud, standing alone as horror comes.”

My fingers clenched around my staff.

“So I the cognomen I grant you now is not for victory this day,” I said, “for have you not already won me victories enough? I name you Excellens, in the old Miezan, to acknowledge what you already are: surpassing excellence, a neck that was never made to bend.”

Indifference would have had a bite, here, but that was not what I saw in them. It was… hesitation. Uncertainty as to the nature of the gift they had been handed, what it meant.

“I quibble not over this honour,” I said, “because it is your due. A settling of accounts. I would have been ashamed to keep it back any longer.”

But now that I had ended the matter, ceased using it as a bludgeon to get them to fight, I could talk to them without the… pretence. The insincerity.

“And freed of this, without right or call, I ask you once more,” I said. “Fight, and win.”

My voice rose.

“Even though the day is dark and the enemy is great, even though all the world would call it folly to even try, I still ask you,” I said. “Fight, and win.”

What I saw in their faces then, I did not have a name for. It was not pride, but it was not far from it. It was not bitterness, but it was not far from it. Maybe it was a little of both, over the years grown together like ivy and oak: inseparable.

“I can give you the word, you know, but it was never mine,” I told them. “It was always yours, and in the end the only people who can decide what it means will be you. Now, for good or ill, is the moment where that decision will be made.”

In the distance, behind me, I felt the ground tremble under the drums of Keter. Silence and a sea of faces beheld me.

“So what,” I softly asked, “will it be?”

The silence stayed. I breathed out, slowly. It had been all I had to give, save for strength of arms, and that they already had of me. I watched them, and my eye caught sight of a pair of tall orcs. Heavies, in dirtied armour. I’d seen them before, I thought, when fighting on the shore. One of them met my eyes, dark to brown, and struck his sword against his shield. It rang out, somehow piercing the cacophony of horror marching against us. It sounded, I thought, like a plea. The answer came further down the line, from another face I recognized – a Taghreb soldier I’d once joked with on the march, who had promised his wife a house in Keter. The sword went against the shield, ringing out again. It was a fair-haired girl, after, the Liessen looks writ strong in her face.

And the sound rose, one sword at a time.

With it the answer to my question came. Fight, the Second Army said. Fight, the Second Army screamed. Fight, the Second Army thundered, until the very air shook with it.

“Once more,” I quietly said, as the clamour washed over me and drove back even Keter’s screeching for a heartbeat. “Once more.”

And I would ask again, I knew that just as they did. And perhaps that on day they would refuse me at last. But today, they would fight.

With the song of ballistas unleashing death, it began.

It was all screams and blood and steel. After a while, I could barely tell the difference between one fight and another. I stood ankle-high in mud, sword in hand and hoarsely shouting as a tide of vermin and ghouls crawled through the muck and toppled the tight ranks of a shield wall.

“Hold,” I shouted, staff scattering black flame among the mass. “Hold.”

They held and they died, unflinching, until the Blessed Artificer scoured herself raw unleashing a cage of Light that bought us a reprieve. The cloudy sky – black smoke had swallowed it all up like a hungry maw – lit up in the distance with red, a warning of danger, and I ripped myself clear of the muck to limp away.

Gate.

The palisade exploded in a shower of shards, wards shattered as skeletons poured through the gap and our mages desperately struggles to bind fresh wardstones. I charged into the stream of dead, a line of heavies following me as we desperately scrabbled with steel and Night to plug the breach long enough for the Pilgrim’s light to incinerate the lizard abomination climbing the wall and a volley of fireballs to buy us just long enough for the sappers to bring down logs in the way.

“Half a cadence,” I exhorted. “That’s all we need to buy them.”

My sword bit into flesh, a ghouls drawing back with an ugly shriek, but a javelin went through the eye of the sergeant to my left and two more were butchered by blades after skeletons entangled them. Through the hole in our wards, a deafening swarm of insects began to pour through. I screamed, tossing a ball of blackflame into them, and Tariq deftly leapt atop a falling log. Light poured out of him in waves as he broke the dead beyond the breach and our wards came back on, cutting off the swarm.

The threat had passed. I was needed elsewhere.

Gate.

Even burning, the snake allowed dead to charge up to the summit of the wall. A massive undead crocodile’s jaw ripped at the baked mud, bricks flying every which way, but an arrow hit right between its eyes – an unraveller, too long to be a mortal archer’s work – and it dropped lifelessly. I kicked the Bone back down the wall, letting it drop onto another skeleton trying to climb out of the muck, and swept the bottom of the bricks with blackflame.

“Priests concentrate on the ramp,” I screamed. “We need to keep them below.”

Light came in streams, scything through the skeletons trying to claim a beachhead atop the wall, and when a massive bird made of ghostly blue sorcery struck at the burning snake construct the entire damned thing collapsed as the magical construct exploded.

“Summoner, there you were,” I laughed. “Good man. We sweep the top, no holds barred.”

With power and steel we scattered the enemy, and the moment the crisis was averted-

Gate.

“Keep them in the funnel,” I screamed.

The hole in our wards at the centre of the camp was made to look like a great black whirlwind, for it had filled with black smoke and screeching birds. Our mages were fighting back the attack, some sort of devouring spell, but birds were still slipping through. A pack of a dozen slipped out of the roiling smoke, headed towards us, but hellfire lashed out in a cloud of brimstone and Hierophant disappeared them with a slash of his hand.

“It is the smoke,” Masego shouted back over the din. “It hides the ward-breaking formula, prevents us from attacking it.”

“I have this,” the Apprentice claimed, eyes hard as she incanted in a resounding voice.

From her hands glimmering red light poured out, crossing into the black whirlwind and becoming part of it. She kept up the spell, the red glow lending a hellish tint to the Enemy’s work but also revealing all the secrets held within.

“Superb,” Masego praised her with a grin, glass eyes glinting so warmly it singed the edges of the eyecloth. “And now that your work is revealed, Trismegistus, all that awaits is Ruin.”

The aspect rippled out, tearing through a spell only he could see, and suddenly the hole filled up. The birds were instantly incinerated, but the smoke stayed – I’d already seen men dying in agony after inhaling it, so with a working of Night I sucked it all into a great ball and passed it off to Masego.

“Do what you will with it,” I said.

Gate.

Iron ladders dug into the walls of the fort, skeletons swarming the top of them, and even as my staff slammed into one’s side and dropped it below I saw one of the scorpion nests get overwhelmed – goblins killed, engines smashed. The Artificer had taken a wound driving back the Drake, and I was getting tired: we were taking back the fort, but the shore… Three long calls of the horn sounded, and with disbelief I heard the hooves of the Order of the Broken Bells as they counter-charged the dead pouring out of the shallows.

“With me,” I shouted, gesturing at the closest line. “Those ladders are ours.”

The dead fought hard to keep us away from the iron ladders, and one of those great skeletons nearly mad me fall off the wall before Adanna carved it in two, but between the two of us and the honest muscle of my soldiers we trashed all four of the damned things. Below us the Order of the Broken Bells withdrew as reinforcements for the mauled shield wall on the beach began to pour out of the fort, but with the knights here the danger had ebbed low.

Gate.

No, gates.

I’d not been the one to open them this time. There must have been almost a hundred, all large and stable even through Keteran counter-rituals. The pharos device had been used, I realized, likely at Hu- General Zola’s order. Or maybe Adjutant’s. Neither would have pulled the trigger early, though. Gods, we must have fought for so long delaying any longer would have exposed us to the risk of fighting the third wave as well. Yet we were still hard-pressed by the enemy on all sides, I saw and retreat would be… costly. Maybe if they were coming at us mindlessly, but they had enough Binds to keep them clever enough that they’d do more than mindlessly rush the positions we’d prepared to enable our retreat. I cursed. This was going to get…

The low strum of a cithern went through all of us, as if played straight into our ear. The dead, for a heartbeat, froze. They began to move again, and did not cease even when the melody began in earnest. It was I who froze, though when the singing began.

"Long have I walked the shore Known ruin, drunk bitter wine Brewed in dying light of yore Before triumph did resign."

I had expected the Rapacious Troubadour to sign, but it was a woman’s voice. One I knew well. And it angered me, just a little, that Akua Sahelian was apparently just as good at singing as she was at damn near everything. It passed, though, as much because of the gentle sadness of the song as what it was accomplishing. I could see it already, though the detail might have been hard to pick out for some.

Not a single Bind was moving.

"In shaded Wolof I knew Rest beneath the sycamore Yet as the western wind blew

My heart cried out for more."

The orders came down, by my hand and that of others. We would not waste the opportunity: full retreat into the Twilight Ways began.

"Born grieving, I will die Holding naught in my hand So why not reach out and Pluck stars from the sky?"

Stand by stand we began our retreat, funneling the dead into killing zones as the House Insurgent unleashed Light and we drew back to one holdfast after another. Already our supply train was passing through the gates, we only needed to last a little longer…

"I have known kings, petty men Of pettier kingdoms still Clutching tight their stolen wen Using them up to their fill And the poets weep, when did We become a people ruled? The empire folly undid Was raised by people subdued Born grieving, I will die Holding naught in my hand So why not reach out and Pluck the stars from the sky?"

The shores were empty, the palisade and fort abandoned and what engines had gone unsmashed being dragged through the gates. The Order would go through next, leaving behind an ever-narrowing square of infantry.

"So let me dance with ghosts, Beautiful, hungry devils Let me face great hosts In dark and bloody revels I will tread the isle blessed I will burn the fields of red And should arrant come the west The river will be fed Born grieving, I will die Holding naught in my hand So why not reach out and Pluck the stars from the sky?"

The fighting grew increasingly furious, the dead rushing at us in blind waves as our last redoubts wavered. But they were almost done, we could see the light in the horizon: the endless ranks of skeletons had ended, ground into nothing by the unflinching valour of the Second Army. And we retreated inch by inch, back to the gates as the Doom of Liesse sweetly sang.

"I have shared a bed with doom Danced with death as a lover Long have I dreamt of my tomb, And no dream lasts forever But now that the night has come I raise my hand to the sky And one last time I succumb To that old, beloved cry Born grieving, I will die Holding naught in my hand So why not reach out and Pluck the stars from the sky?"

The last gate closed behind the last living soldier, and so ended the Battle of Maillac’s Boot.

"So why not reach out and Pluck the stars from the sky?"