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So Tenebrous returned to my shadow and the Battle of the Ruins, as General Pallas had suggested it be named, came to an end. It was a victory, but a costly one. From the first charge to the lines of the dead collapsing completely the battle had lasted barely three hours yet it was still one of the bloodier ones I’d fought over the last year.

Part of that was the nature of the armies involved. Orcs and Levantines tended to have inferior equipment to the Army of Callow, with its standard issue armour and weapons. Levantines were armed according to the wealth of the captain who led them in battle, an irregular arrangement, and the Clans were even worse. Equipment and training both varied wildly from clan to clan, though the larger ones all fielded a core of well-armed veterans as their main fighting force. On both sides, though, the average soldier didn’t usually have a full suit of mail and plate was fairly rare. In a bloody, graceless brawl like the one fought today that meant casualties had begun to rack up as time passed.

The other side of the coin was Keter’s forces, who in this case had boasted equipment parity at best but had the one advantage that undead could never lose: they weren’t alive. Sure, the averages Bones was barely better than a Proceran levy in a fight but unlike that levy it would not tire or rout. It made Keteran armies a fucking pain to actually break, because they wouldn’t run if they began to lose and they had an advantage the longer the battle continued. However unimpressive a skeleton wielding a bronze sword might be, when it was facing soldiers too tired to put up their shields in time it was going to start landing blows.

The Clans had been taught that hard lesson today. Holding the flanks against onslaughts all afternoon until Lord Yannu was able to swing around his forces to reinforce had been a bloody business and only gotten bloodier as the hours passed. Though Hakram had not yet put together a system to count casualties like the Army of Callow’s, the rough estimate he’d gotten was that out of the twenty-three thousand warriors that’d sallied out only about fourteen thousand would be coming back. Almost ten thousand dead, a rough day for the orcs. The Levantines had walked away much more lightly wounded, down about four thousand warriors out of their twenty-seven. The worse off were still General Pallas’ kataphraktoi, who’d had gotten themselves mauled keeping the right flank from collapsing. They’d almost half of their three thousand in furious charges,

It would be hours yet before we knew the real count of the butcher’s bill, but there was no time to spend grieving. We needed to get moving, lest we be caught out in the plains come dark. First came the grim labour of taking care of the dead, warriors stripping their fallen comrades of arms and armour – we could not afford to waste any – before dragging them to make great piles. Mages and priests torched those until there was nothing left for the Dead King to use, mounds of bodies crackling bright as the afternoon crawled forward. We then left the field with what some might have called unseemly haste, but it would have been a mistake to linger.

There were still other armies out there, and the last thing we needed was to get stuck fighting them in the dark.

While I could have left the returning army in the dust, flying far ahead on Zombie’s back, I led her into a landing instead and rode to speak with the victors of the day. Most cheerful of them all was the Barrow Sword, who had slain the Wolfhound and so fulfilled his end of the bargain with the Blood. He had earned a place in the Rolls. He’d also picked up another trick along the way.

“Night, huh,” I mused, cocking my heat to the side.

“So you can tell at a glance,” Ishaq replied, stroking a beard matted with blood and dirt. “Useful.”

“I’m still First Under the Night,” I simply said.

That the Barrow Sword had taken the offer did not surprise me in the least, as Ishaq was brutally pragmatic even by Levantine standards, but that Sve Noc had extended it in the first place did. It had only been a matter of time before they began approaching villains, of course, but beginning with the representative for Below under the Truce and Terms was a bold statement. Maybe even more than that, I thought. The most powerful heroes all tended to have use of the Light, so granting Night to the most visible of the villains on Calernia – Neshamah and myself, anyway – was as good as slapping down a gauntlet. There was another merchant of miracles at the market, and this one a lot less squeamish than the Choirs.

If we were not at war and Calernia on the brink of annihilation, I suspected quite a few heroes would have answered that challenge sword in hand.

“I count myself in the finest company, then,” the Barrow Sword grinned.

I snorted. He was in a gloatingly fine mood and I couldn’t get myself to smack his fingers for it. Taking care of the Wolfhound had been solid work on his part: by itself the Revenant wasn’t much trouble for our finer Named, but it was never by itself. It was always a meatshield for another altogether more dangerous Scourge, turning difficult opponents into outright lethal ones. It would have been even better if he’d gotten the Mantle, pain that she was for me to deal with, but I wouldn’t look a dead Scourge in the mouth. I’d praised him enough during the report, though, so instead of reiterating and swelling his head I changed the subject.

“I hear there was a scuffle with the Blood during the battle,” I idly said.

Curious dark eyes studied me.

“If Itima Ifriqui truly died of old age,” the Barrow Sword said, “I will shave my beard and enter a monastery.”

Yeah, hadn’t bought that either. Someone had killed the old viper, though it was hard to tell who. None of the other Blood were kicking up a fuss though, not even her sons, so I was inclined to let sleeping dogs lie for now. It might be worth squeezing some answers out my ducklings later, but I wasn’t inclined to get too involved if the boat wasn’t rocking. Moro Ifriqui, though one-armed since the Graveyard, was popular with the Vaccei captains and on much better terms with the rest of the Blood. As far as I was concerned, Levant had traded up when he got put in charge – informally for now, until his kin Levant pushed through the same procedural trick that’d allowed Razin to become Lord of Malaga without returning there to be acclaimed.

“Not too much to be gained from digging,” I mused. “The army’s holding up well, which is the important part at the moment.”

Ishaq was no fool, so he nodded in acknowledgement of my unspoken warning. He could have a look if he was curious, I’d tacitly told him, but only so far as it didn’t endanger the readiness of the Dominion armies.

“I imagine my duties will be keeping me busy,” the Barrow Sword replied.

“Good man,” I pleasantly smiled.

I stayed long enough to get the tale of the fight told to me by the entire band of five, expanding on the simple report, and handed congratulations where they were deserved. Ishaq, cleverly enough, was unstinting in his praise of the Vagrant Spear and the Harrowed Witch. By doing so he was sharing the glory with a heroine in good odour with the Blood and by far the least threatening of the villains under the Terms, both strikes useful to him in the long term. He was shaping up nicely as my successor for representative, I decided. He’d been the right pick, for all that Indrani had needed to get her hands dirty to put him in place.

Speaking of Indrani, I found she was not in so fine a mood as the Barrow Sword.

“Couldn’t land an arrow on the bastard,” she told me, speaking of the Hawk. “It’s unpleasantly good at running.”

“You kept anyone important from getting shot,” I reassured her. “Which was what I asked you, ‘Drani, not a scalp.”

“Aquiline got shot,” she pointed out.

I rolled my eye.

“Not by the Hawk,” I said. “That girl needs to start using a fucking shield or get better at ducking. If she gets killed by a skeleton, I may not be able to stop from laughing at her wake.”

Which my finely-honed diplomatic instincts led me to suspect at least some Levantines might take offence to.

“You’re all heart, Cat,” Archer drily replied.

I shrugged. Aquiline would survive, the arrow had missed her lungs and they’d gotten her to a healer in time. The light armour preferred by the Slayer’s Blood had its uses, I wouldn’t argue otherwise after witnessing firsthand the skill of Levantine skirmishers during my Wasteland campaign, but it was ill-suited to the kind of battles the Dead King gave. She should order some good plate and get it over with before she picked up enough scars it’d ruin her paints. Gods knew today’s wound was certain to leave one, mage healing or not. I left Indrani to her mood, which at least seemed to be inspiring her to scheme ways to handle the Hawk when they next met.

Hakram was easy enough to find, and though his chiefs were in a festive mood – a victory had been won today and everyone knew the Clans had done the heavy lifting – I knew that look on his face. It was the kind of calm deliberation he put on when he was trying not to openly disgruntled. I’d seen him put on shades of it more than once after Vivienne beat him at shatranj, though the shade of it today was rather more serious than that. I traded congratulations with a few chiefs, meeting Juniper’s father for the first time in the process. Oghuz the Lame was an impressive sort, all the more for being chief of a clan as powerful as the Red Shields when he needed a cane to walk.

Most orcs saw cripples as barely better than children, so he must still be a deft hand at duelling despite his age.

“I think she has your cheekbones,” I told him.

“She does, the poor child,” Oghuz mourned on behalf of his daughter. “At least she mostly inherited Istrid’s looks aside from that.”

“They make you look friendlier,” I said, patting his shoulder. “Hakram’s might as well be a razor blade.”

The older orc looked rather charmed at that, to my surprise. I chatted with him longest of the chiefs, but he still left with the others when their Warlord implied he needed to speak with me privately. Then outright stated it, when the slower sorts failed to catch on. Eventually it was only the two of us, Hakram’s face slumping into exhaustion as he met my gaze.

“Come to see how I’m holding up, I take it,” the Warlord said.

The tone was a little pointed but was tired enough to fall short of being accusing.

“Something like that,” I acknowledged.

I wouldn’t deny that I had come as the Warden as much as I had come as a friend. Rare were the situations these days where I could afford to be only one of the two. He didn’t look pleased by the reply, but I suspected he’d appreciated I had not tried to pretty it up.

“I will not falter, Catherine,” Hakram said. “But will you begrudge me that I am bitter it was my people who bore the weight of the slaughter today?”

“It’s why you agreed to take the flanks,” I evenly replied. “Levant’s twenty-seven thousand are all that’s left of their armies. You have numbers they do not.”

He’d brought almost thrice their number in warriors, and that hadn’t even been the entire army he’d marched south to Ater. Mind you, orcs fielded a lot more warriors than most other nations since most of a clan except the young and the elderly would take up arms when there was plunder to be had. Considering how many women there were in orc warbands and their age – between twenty to forty – if the force brought to Keter was wiped out the consequences for the Steppes would be disastrous. Much worse than if the Dominion lost the entire army they’d sent to the Grand Alliance

“More died than was necessary,” the Warlord growled. “We fell for the trap. I did not gainsay Yannu then and that is my guilt, but I will not forget we were left to stand alone for most of the battle.”

“That’s fair,” I honestly replied. “I imagine General Pallas feels much the same. The course of the fight ended up going badly for both of you, so you have good reason to resent him.”

So long as they didn’t end up blaming Careful Yannu for malice that did not exist instead of a tactical mistake, I had no issue with some resentment existing. The Lord of Alava was a skilled general, but in this instance he’d not particularly impressed. To be honest, if it had been the Army of Callow dying on the flanks I’d likely be a great deal less gracious about this than Hakram was being.

“Pallas bled her men for us,” Hakram conceded. “It was worth gratitude.”

“She bled her men because if Troke’s flank collapsed we were going to lose the battle,” I said. “Pallas isn’t exactly a bleeding heart.”

She was, however, a talented tactician. She’d even correctly identified that with the Warlord holding the other flank together, it was Troke’s that was in dire need of aid.

“Her reasons matter less than her actions,” Hakram replied.

I shrugged. I wasn’t going to argue the point if he wanted to toss thanks General Pallas’ way, honestly. She was back under Helike and Empress Basilia these days, but I hadn’t forgotten that Pallas and her soldiers had fought up north with the Grand Alliance years before anyone else from the League gave us the time of the day. Instead of arguing, I hummed and took a look at his Name to confirm the subtle difference I’d felt in him from the start.

“I see you picked up an aspect while you were at it,” I said.

There he looked pleased.

“The traces of it were there, but it came together during the battle,” Hakram said. “You can discern the word?”

“My sight’s not that precise,” I admitted. “Not right now, at least. I tend to see more deeply around pivots, when fate is thicker. But I can tell what it’s about, more or less.”

Active authority, in a local and direct sense. Not surprising for a career officer and my former right hand to pick up, especially after he’d stepped into large boots of his own by becoming the Warlord.

“Lead

,” Hakram said, not hesitating a moment.

I felt something in me unclench at the offered trust. For Named, aspects were cards best kept up your sleeves: keeping them hidden until they could be used to devastating effect was often the difference between winning or losing a fight.

“Try to use it,” I suggested. “Let’s see if I can help you feel out the limits.”

It would have been a more politic use of my time to ride with the Blood instead for the rest of the way back, but part of me refused to think of that as the better use. We marched together the rest of way back, others flitting in and out but the two of us staying side by side until the camp was in sight.

“Fuck me,” I said. “What the Hells happened to the floating siege towers?”

Vivienne looked grim. Given the wreckage I was looking at, she had good reason to. Keter was an island of stone surrounded by a deep chasm that was broken by only four bridges, which were the natural path to take when trying to take the city. Because we weren’t raging idiots, we expected that the Dead King would use them to funnel our armies into narrow killing zones for as long as possible and then collapse them the moment there was a risk of us actually taking one of the gates. We’d prepared for that eventuality – it was not happenstance that none of the three most powerful mages in the Grand Alliance had left the camp – but it’d always been understood that the gates were unlikely to fall to us.

That was why Praes had turned floating structures into great siege towers, so that we might broaden our assault.

“Two were sunk,” the Princess replied.

I grimaced, but to be blunt I was not surprised.

“There’s a reason we didn’t fill them with troops from the start,” I said.

Only enough to secure a beachhead on the walls, no more. Otherwise we risked pissing away a few thousand soldiers to exactly no gain whatsoever.

“Two touched the walls,” Vivienne continued. “Masego kept most of Keter’s counter-magic off them for long enough.”

“That’s impressive,” I said, “but since I’m not looking at a wall flying our banners, I’m going to assume that something went horribly wrong.”

“We still have one tower,” she sighed, brushing back a strand of brown hair.

“I hope to Below you don’t mean that one, Vivi,” I replied, pointing forward.

The outer rampart of Keter had been, in a manner of speaking, breached. Someone had seen fit to smash the floating siege tower into said wall, hard enough that it had gotten embed into said wall. It looked, I thought, a little like a knife dropped into a bloc of butter and jutting out. Except for the part where it was all stone on both sides and several tons of it were involved. The ‘bottom’ of the tower was extending far enough out of the wall that it really should have snapped off or dragged the whole thing into the chasm by now, which meant the enchantments keeping the structure aloft still partially worked. It was an oddly disturbing sight.

Princess sighed again.

“The assault went well at first,” she told me. “We pushed across two of the four bridges, and though Keter spared neither arrows nor sorcery we reached the gates. The siege towers were torched before they could cross, but the ladders and the rams got through.”

“So when we started knocking at the gates, Keter dropped the bridges,” I predicted.

She nodded.

“We sent heroes under the bridges first, to try to prevent that, but Pickler believes that there is no outside mechanism. The bridges were built from the start with foundations under the city of Keter that could be brought down,” Vivienne said. “It was old work, regardless, and played out differently on the two bridges.”

I could see one of the two from where we stood, the fortified camp surrounding Keter as a ring of flame from all the torches and bonfires lit in the night. The arch of stone was missing its forward half, leaving the gate of Keter to stand over a sheer cliff.

“The Witch should have been able to handle that,” I said, nodding there.

“She did,” Princess replied. “She held the stones aloft long enough for our forces to retreat through them. And on the other side Sahelian negated the Enemy’s work.”

I cocked a curious eyebrow.

“Only a section in the middle collapsed,” Vivienne said, “splitting the army in two and stranding the vanguard. She filled the gap with ice.”

I sniffed in disdain. Someone was cribbing from my tactics. I’d started that whole ice thing in Dormer, long before anyone else got famous for it.

“So we kept up one of the bridge assaults and landed two towers,” I mused. “Still a solid enough offensive. I take it that’s when it started going wrong?”

“The Tumult came out to duel Hierophant to keep him from protecting the towers,” she replied. “And Keter counter-attacked with wyrms.”

I blinked. Those were great snake-constructs that’d only rarely seen use out of Twilight’s Pass, being the Dead King’s equivalent of our Praesi floating siege towers. The massive snakes were armoured and had ladders inside, which the dead could climb after the wyrms hooked themselves to the edge of the wall with steel and bone. What use could they have-

“He crammed his siege towers into our siege towers, like a snake forced into the maw of a larger one,” I breathed out, putting it together.

It was both utterly wasteful of manpower, I thought, and brilliant in a twisted way.

“It kept us from landing a beachhead on the walls,” Vivienne said, “and once he had us pinned, the Seelie came out.”

Masego insisted that what that Scourge did was ‘fascination’, a form of enchantment, but it was pretty much mind control whatever he wanted to call it. So the Dead King had kept us contained to small tunnels with no real room to manoeuvre than then unleased the fucking mind control fairy on the people inside. Yeah, I can see that turning nasty. Just for a bit, though. After that, it’d be sure to summon…

“The Blade of Mercy and Daring Pyromancer ran into her,” Vivienne continued. “The Seelie got the Pyromancer, but the Blade cut the spell out of him and they set fire to the wyrm. It made her retreat, but ended up being something of a tactical mistake.”

Setting fire to tightly enclosed spaces full of people who couldn’t easily get out tended to be that.

“How bad?” I grimaced.

“Almost two thousand dead, more from the stampede and the smoke than the fire,” Vivienne said, “and the dead got to the heart of the tower in the chaos.”

“So that’s how it got crashed,” I frowned.

“No,” Princess shook her head. “They tried to make them crash into each other.”

Her description of what came after that was nightmarish. The Praesi mages controlling the other tower had seen the threat coming and tried to withdraw, but the wyrm inside had fought the movement. The soldiers inside panicked as the dead kept pouring in, meanwhile the other tower rose higher could it could be smashed down like a child banging rock down at another. Fortunately, the Black Knight had led a band through daring strike into the grounded tower to remove the wyrm using some acidic creation of the Concocter’s that would dissolve it from the inside. It would have still failed, if Hanno and his own band had not stepped in to settle the other tower.

“How did they even get into it?” I frowned. “It should have been fully in flight by then.”

“The Mirror Knight,” Vivienne said.

“Sure, throwing him is the traditional opening gambit,” I acknowledged. “But after he landed – wait, are serious?”

She nodded, lips twitching.

“They bound themselves to the Mirror Knight and had him thrown by a trebuchet, using him to pierce through the siege tower’s walls,” Princess said.

I paused.

“I know it’s in poor taste to complain when they’re on our side,” I said, “but sometimes I do get a little irritated at how they keep getting away with this shit.”

After that they’d fought their way through the dead and taken back control of the tower, holding it up long enough that the other one was able to get away. The turnaround was not to last, though, since the Tumult slipped past Masego and crippled the enchantments keeping the tower up. It began to crash.

“How’d they get out?” I asked, morbidly curious.

“For a very brief moment the falling tower and the one withdrawing were aligned, with only a gap of a dozen feet between where one ended and the other began,” Vivienne said. “So they…”

“They jumped,” I said, rubbing the bridge of my nose. “They jumped out the falling tower into the other one, like assholes.”

Vivienne’s blue-grey eyes betrayed some amusement at my expense.

“He’s not even really Named anymore, he’s transitioning,” I complained.

“I’ll be sure to bring the matter up at the next war council,” Princess replied, serenely smiling.

My lips twitched, and the two of us stood there in silence for a while. Staring at the dark silhouette of Keter in the distance. The humour slowly melted away.

“How many?” I asked.

“At least sixteen thousand dead,” Vivienne softly replied. “And I hear your battle was closer than anticipated.”

“Fourteen thousand dead or thereabouts,” I said. “The enemy got clever with a sand trap and mauled our flanks. The Clans soaked up the worst of it.”

At least thirty thousand dead between the battle and the storm, huh. I stood there and let myself grasp that, the sheer number of soldiers we’d gotten killed in a day. I had fought entire campaigns where I had lost fewer men than died today. And it was only going to get worse. None of us had truly expected this assault on the walls to work, deep down. It was a first probe, to see how heavily defended the Crown of the Dead was. Almost two hundred and fifty thousand soldiers had come here to break the end times before they could break us. Nine more attacks like this and we’d run out of men.

We hadn’t even managed to set foot inside the fucking city.

“It’ll look better tomorrow,” Vivienne finally said.

“No it won’t,” I murmured.

A moment.

“No it won’t,” my friend admitted.

So we stood there in silence, sharing company, until fear had dulled enough we could crawl into our beds to sleep.