The skeleton was decked in bronze, the scales of the armour pristine and the strange horned helmet it sported was freshly polished – as well as open faced. I closed the distance so the swing of its axe would pass behind me, rasping down the Mantle of Woe without even cutting cloth, and smashed the pommel of my sword into the skull. One blow shattered the jaw, a second the nose and the third ripped the head right off the spine.
“Form up,” I shouted. “Seventh Company, do I need to gently hold your fucking hand before you put those shields locked?”
“Yes please,” a woman’s voice shouted back.
I snorted, getting a glimpse of a tall Soninke flashing pale teeth at me before her lieutenant slapped the back of her helm. The seventh company heeded my order, though, echoed as it was by the shouts of a dozen angry sergeants. With the seventh, the twelfth and the fourth forming up on our left flank we should be good to push further up. Their shield walls blocked the streets on that side, though at the moment they didn’t have anyone to face down. My hand was still smoking from my last use of Night collapsing a row of the houses between those streets, helped along by every mage we could scrape together. We’d wanted to leave them up, use them to keep the dead herded when they showed up, but it’d been too much of a risk.
After the fourth time a supposedly clear house was revealed to have had ghouls hidden somewhere in hit that then leapt from the roof straight at a mage to die tearing the throat out, I’d decided to stay on the safe side. The houses had been almost absurdly easy to bring down, we’d found, which had the back of my neck pricking. That did not strike me as an accident. Satisfied with the seventh company’s formation, I tore my gaze away from them and turned to the tall orc lieutenant that’d been waiting patiently on me as I shouted.
“I’m listening,” I said.
“Ma’am,” he began, “we-”
He was interrupted by a horrific scream as a hellish burst of red light bled all over the clouds above us, a distorted ring of magic burning with runes flickering open a dozen blocks ahead of us. A misshapen horror dropped through, too-small wings looking like rotted bone slowing the descent of a creature with distended scaled belly with too-long arms ending in massive claws. The horror dropped down out of sight, still letting out those soul-rending shrieks. The lieutenant drily swallowed. I clapped his shoulder.
“Cheer up, lieutenant,” I said. “Sure, that was one of the foulest abominations either of us has ever seen but for once the damned fucking thing’s one our side.”
The flying fortress hovering above that part of the city, raining down spells and stones, made that pretty clear. The Praesi were tossing devils into the mess ahead of my army like a fool trying to buy a wish at a fountain, which was both encouraging and not: much as I was happy they were softening up the opposition, I did have to wonder how bad it must be for this to be the seventh time they were burning a greater devil contract.
“Hungry Gods,” the orc got out, “I guess that’s something to be thankful for. Fuck of a day if-”
His face turned anguished, pulling a fresh cut on the side of his nose, when he realized who he’d just been cursing with.
“-ma’am,” he hastily added, then saluted for good measure. “The front is stalling, ma’am, Commander Spitter requests that you come help break the stalemate.”
I nodded.
“Tell him I’m on my way,” I said. “The flanks are set up, we need to begin pushing into the city.”
The avenue we so badly needed to get to was straight ahead, by memory, and I’d spent so many hours looking at maps of Keter that I could see the layout of the city when I closed my eyes.
It had been millennia since the fall of Sephirah and the living ceased to stay within the walls – save for a few hundred servants deep in the heart of the city – but though the Dead King had had worked his horror on all that lay within the walls there were still traces of the city that once was. I’d seen in the Arcadian echoes that Keter had been raised on a pair of hills by a river, and though the water was long gone the city still echoed of it. The Crown of the Dead was built upwards, the bottom of it beginning at the foot of its forty-yards high walls and rolling up to the raised plateau where the two hills had once stood.
There the five palaces of Keter awaited us, and the Hellgate whose taking would be our victory.
The inside of the city was a maze whose layout changed according to the Dead King’s whims, streets and ‘houses’ – most of them empty, used only to store the dead and their arms away from weather so they would not rust and decay – raised and demolished according to arcane designs, but a handful of parts had remained unmoving through all the crusades. Most important of them was a set of six large avenues crisscrossing the city, the largest of which went through north to south and had been built over the now-dry riverbed of the river that had attracted people to live here long ago. For our push into the city to have a change of getting anywhere, we needed to get onto one of those avenues.
The rest of Keter was a playground of death, and though those avenues were sure to be trapped and heavily defended at the end of the day they were the one part of the city that Neshamah couldn’t actually destroy while defending his capital: he needed the damned avenues to move his soldiers around. He could use the smaller streets, sure, but them being a maze was a double-edged sword and they also happened to be narrow. Meaning not a lot of soldiers could squeeze through and given that the Dead King’s great advantage was numbers that was a harsh handicap when tangling with the Army of Callow. We’d earned our reputation as the finest foot on Calernia the hard way.
Soldiers were milling about in a semblance of good order, lines and companies shifting to anchor our flanks or press at the front while we expanded on all sides to make room for the troops continuing to cross. I winced as I saw a ballista bolt from somewhere to the northwest scythe through a few of my soldiers, killing or toppling them to a more horrible death. Neshamah was beginning to move siege engines in position at the top of the still-standing walls on both our flanks, which was going to be a problem. We’d either need to take the walls to silence them, spreading out further than I’d like, or keep our mages lines focused on the defence until the soldiers had crossed. Juniper’s problem, I reminded myself. She’d figure something out. I shook myself out of the thoughts and followed a line of regulars towards the front, through melted stone gone cool and buildings shredded by the Ram.
Beyond the grounds glassed by the Light the shattered buildings rose into a ragged slope of collapsed walls and loose stones, which we climbed in haste as arrows fell in sparse rain from a long distance. Arcing shots, likely fired blindly from behind enemy lines at a place they knew would force us to lower shields for balance. Let it not be said that the Dead King’s commanders were unskilled, however empty and brutally efficient a kind of skill it might be. Climbing down the slow onto a paved street, I saw exactly what Commander Spitter had needed me for. After crossing the bridges we’d swept through the enemy defences and then another three city blocks beyond that as the dead tried to put together a shield wall to check our advance, but it’d not been enough.
Keter had recovered from the surprise two blocks further in, though. A barricade was encircling our position, as I blinked in astonishment at the sight of it – it’d not existed a quarter hour ago – I realized exactly why those houses on our flanks had been so easy to collapse.
“Shit,” I muttered.
Keter was possible to fortify in a way that no other city in the world was, when it came down to it. Even the great fortresses of Calernia had to make concessions to habitability, but what did the Crown of the Dead care for that? There were no living souls within the walls and so the city made solely to be held against invaders, massive armies led by heroes. And though we’d avoided the worst of the defences by collapsing a wall instead of taking one of the gates, we’d known that was not a state of affairs that was going to last. Nor had it. That impossible barricade that had encircled our vanguard, leaving only one way through in a narrow street, had not been assembled – it had been collapsed. Undead had smashed the houses, collapsing them in a way that blocked streets as well.
I threw up an eye of Night as high as I could and cursed again at what I saw. Like industrious ants, skeletons were going around collapsing houses all around our beachhead to encircle it in a loose ring. And where a later of barricade had already been made, they went about adding a second. They’re hemming us in, I thought. If we don’t break through quick enough, they’ll just bottle us here and shoot us like fish in a barrel. And like all the finest trap did, they’d left us with a visible way out so we’d commit: that narrow street in front of our vanguard, packed so tightly with undead they could barely move. A funnel for us to charge down and die in. I began elbowing my way forward, though after the first few times my soldiers saw who I was and parted their ranks instead.
“Shield wall,” I shouted. “Get those fucking shields up before you all get shot!”
Officers echoed me across the army, our lines grown ragged from the breakthrough steadying just as the first undead crossbows and javelinmen began lining up atop the barricade. We’d taken the Dead King aback with our charge, but now he’d forcefully stabilized his line with the collapsed houses and he was setting up another killing field: if those barricades weren’t about to be sprouting a forest’s worth of range troops, I’d eat my crown. I particularly did not like the look of the javelins: those went right through shields and plate when thrown right, which the skeletons were sure to. It wasn’t the thought that we couldn’t smash our way through that had me worried, mind you. We could and goddamn would. It was the other ninety times we’d have to do it before we got anywhere near a victory. Was the Dead King already ordering a second ring of barricades to be collapsed around us, or was he going to wait a bit more?
Either way, I grimly thought, the only way we weren’t going to be drowned in street-by-street fighting was by moving too quickly for him to be able to keep us bottled up. And the only way for that was to break through another fourteen blocks straight ahead, to reach one of the five central avenues of Keter. I knew better than to think every step in direction wasn’t going to sprout a fresh nightmare in need of putting down. Thankfully, I was due the presence of some people who knew a thing or two about doing that. I swung my sword at a knot of skeleton crossbowmen, blowing them off the rampart as air exploded in front of them, and ran a hand down the chord of a story. One was almost there.
I felt out the outcome a heartbeat before the sequence of it could begin, and immediately pulled on Night. A large beorn came into sight, having climbed a large tower to the east, and after a roar it leapt. I could see the trajectory before it had even begun to move. A smooth arc down, straight into the company of heavies from the Third that was hammering at the enemy shield wall trying to keep us pinned in the avenue. And it might have landed, if not for the silhouette that ran up a half-collapsed house without breaking stride before leaping up, shining with blindingly bright Light. I caught a glimpse of a greatsword being swung as the beorn was carved through from head to toe and somewhere behind me I felt the twin shiver of an aspect being used and magic blooming: a gale of wind caught the halves of the beorn and the roiling skeletons within, tossing them back into the enemy ranks.
A heartbeat later the Blade of Mercy landed on his feet and the Rogue Sorcerer ended his spell. A heartbeat after that, what looked like a horse-sized worm made entirely out of muscles and fingerbones popped out from behind a tower to the west and spat a cloud of poison at that same company of heavies.
Fear, relief, horror returned. The Dead King’s favourite play.
“None of that,” I said, clicking my tongue, and released the Night.
A spinning sphere swallowed the cloud before contracting and exploding into a ball of poisonous flame, which a flick of my wrist sent right back at the bloody horror. It slithered into the tower for cover but not quite quick enough, its bottom half incinerated as the roof of the building collapsed atop it. Since Roland and the Blade of Mercy were here, she should be somewhere – I frowned, then turned around and hit the space right behind me with the flat of my sword. The Painted Knife let out a yelp, cold steel slapping her cheek, and I spared a glare as she backpedalled.
“How many times am I going to have to tell you you’re not bloody invisible, Kallia?” I said.
“At least you didn’t drop me down a tower this time,” the Painted Knife reproachfully replied.
“Day’s young,” I grunted, “and if you keep trying to sneak up on me during battle I might reconsider.”
I was completely serious, which the heroine seemed to pick up on.
“I hear your words, Black Queen,” she assured me.
I hummed, entirely unconvinced. I was pretty sure this had turned into one of those headache-inducing Levant honour things for her, which meant I was going to have to keep breaking her legs until she decided not even the bragging rights were worth that amount of pain.
“Your last two?” I asked.
“They should be-”
There was a great cracking sound to my left and I immediately turned, eye going straight to the unusual sight of someone single-handedly smashing their way through a barricade that was almost entirely stone with little more than a war hammer. A woman in bright red plate – Gods, the sight of it had every inch of me offended, that was just asking to get shot – with a helmet forged to look like a grinning devil and weapons strapped on her back was pulverising chunks of stone with every swing. And though she was almost seven feet tall and broad as a barn door, it wasn’t muscles alone that let the Red Knight shatter stone like it was overripe cantaloupes.
She wasn’t good at much aside from breaking shit, but that much she was really good that.
The villainess might still have taken a few javelins in the neck for her troubles courtesy of the undead above, though, if not for the fact that they were currently occupied with an enthusiastically murderous wolf the size of a small barn. Where the Hells the Skinchanger had actually found a wolf that large in Lycaonese lands was a mystery to me, much less killed and skinned it for use, but I wasn’t going to argue with the shapes the woman had chosen to take up: they were a pretty repertoire of clawed and fanged nightmares, even the fucking birds. I didn’t know why the eagle-thing she sometimes turned into had horns, of all things, but apparently they were both amour-piercing and poisonous so why the Hells not?
A someone who had ridden a flying horse for several years, I had a healthy appreciation for aerial impalements.
“There,” I completed for the Painted Knife. “So I see.”
She looked faintly embarrassed. So she hadn’t actually ordered the Red Knight to make that breach, huh. I sympathized. Even I found the villainess difficult to deal with, and unlike Kallia my authority was bolstered by the fact that I’d once brought down a four-story tower on the Red Knight’s head just to make a point. Hadn’t actually done much to her, which was why to this day I was pretty sure to kill her I’d need a pool of acid of some sort. Fortunately, she was so infuriatingly terrible a person I was also pretty sure I could get the Concocter to brew said acid for free.
“A second breach will hasten our advance,” I continued. “But you need to get your band ready after we punch through.”
A steady stare met mine.
“The Scourges are coming,” the Painted Knife said.
“At least one,” I agreed. “And it’ll be coming with lesser Revenants to use as meat shields.”
The Dead King wasn’t going to commit his finest remaining blades to fights to the – second – death so early in the battle, but he’d be looking to pick up a few kills among our Named if he could. Thin the herd, so to speak, and throw Revenant bodies in the way to get his Scourges out if we got too close to taking a scalp. I had every intention of snuffing out one of his last heavy hitters if the occasion arose, mind you, and Hanno should be fighting at one of the gates with the same intention. The trouble, we both knew, was that invaders past a certain point there was no choice but to fight on the Hidden Horror’s terms.
Not something that tended to go well for us, as a rule.
“We will be ready,” the Painted Knife swore, then hesitated.
I cocked an eyebrow.
“Might you keep the Rogue Sorcerer by your side?” she asked. “Skilled as he is, we move quicker without him and he is most useful from the back.”
“I’ll drag him along,” I agreed.
Roland was one of those eminently reasonable mages that actually wore armour, so I had no issue bringing him into a battlefield. Besides, for a spellcaster the Alamans was actually ridiculously difficult to kill: the amount of protective artifacts he wore on him at all times was impressive paranoid even by Wasteland standards.
“Good hunting,” I said, offering my arm.
“And you, Warden,” the Painted Knife replied, clasping it.
I waited for Roland, and gentlemen that he was he didn’t make it long. Some part of me was always surprised that the Rogue Sorcerer wasn’t taller, I thought. It must have been the long leather coat over the chain mail, covered with pockets full of artefacts. Though the dark-haired man usually went without a helmet, this once he’d made an exception and put on a plaint bassinet that pressed his curls against his head. He had a short wand painted blue in hand, which to my senses reeked of the fae. Huh, I’d never seen him with that one before.
“Catherine,” he greeted me, glancing at the melee ahead. “I’m grieved we only came so late.”
“Named wouldn’t have been useful on the bridges,” I admitted. “It would have been handing Revenants to the opposition.”
Not entirely true, but the few Named that would have made a difference had been needed elsewhere. I was already here, after all, and insisting the Army of Callow should also have the services of the Witch of the Woods on top of mine would have been a hard sell.
“Then we’ll make up for the absence it now,” Roland firmly said. “Where do you need me?”
I couldn’t help but smile. He’d been one of the first heroes to grow on me for a reason.
“You’re with me,” I said, “and we’re going into the thick of it.”
“Ah, certain death,” he drily replied. “How I missed working with you, Warden.”
“Don’t be so gloomy,” I chided. “It’s only mostly certain death.”
“That would be our finest odds in quite a while, then,” he snorted.
He gallantly offered me his arm to walk, which was a nice thought but still got him elbowed in the ribs. It was a battlefield, not a garden stroll. Alamans, Merciless Gods. Even at the bloody end of the world. The closest we got to the front, the harder it got to move: the press of soldiers tightened, kept on tightening until it squeezed into the sole street that had been the sole way out of the barricades. Now there was another opening, I thought, but the pressure would not be relieved for some time yet. Maybe thirty feet ahead of us I saw the shield walls hammering at each other, the dead packed tight as my heavies tried to break through them. I leaned closer to Roland.
“Can you clear that?” I asked, gesturing in the melee’s direction.
“Given time to cast,” the Rogue Sorcerer replied. “Why?”
“Because unless I’m mistaken,” I murmured, “we’re about to ambushed. I need you to draw attention.”
He sent me a pained look. I stared back, unmoved, until he conceded with a sigh.
“Bait it is,” Roland said. “Is Kallia near?”
I nodded. The Painted Knife, for all that her team had some rather straightforward brawlers, was still an assassin at heart. She was waiting too. The Rogue Sorcerer rolled his shoulder.
“Then let’s get to it,” the hero said.
I took a step back, pulling on Night, and let if fall over me like a veil. I tore out a sliver and shaped it into an eye, tossing it up in the sky, and as I closed my eye of flesh I saw through the other. The Red Knight’s breach had let the companies there turn the tables. Climbing through the mess was hard and there were corpses all over the slope, but now my legionaries had climbed atop the barricade and were tearing into the crossbowmen and javelineers. Ahead of me I looked past the brutal melee in the street, seeing how skeletons were pouring in from all adjoining streets to pack this one so tight they could barely move. Yet it was the houses I looked at closest, the tiled stone roofs. I couldn’t see a Revenant yet, but that hardly meant there were none.
Ahead of me, the Rogue Sorcerer let out a hoarse shout and pointed an ornate casting road at the sky: flames poured out like a flock of birds, bright and of many colours.
I could not spare a longer look than that, because the enemy were moving. Three Revenants on a rooftop that’d been empty until an arrow went flying – my heart clenched for a moment but the archer was in bright green leathers, so not the Hawk – and an illusion broke. I kept my eye on them even as what must be a mage Revenant, given that otherwise the swirling colours of those robes would be some sort of a crime, raised an ornate golden staff and pulled an illusion on them again. I’d had a heartbeat to look at the third, finding good plate and a large shield that did not belong to any of the Scourge. Whichever was there they were still lying in wait, so I held back as well.
Around me soldiers began to press forward, parting around my position without knowing why, and I made a note that whatever it was Roland had used it had seemingly worked.
The three Revenants were under illusion again but now that I knew what to look for I could taste the subtle power in the air and follow their position. The Painted Knife’s band went about it another way: a heartbeat later a hawk dropped down on the rooftop, turning into a large hound as it landed, and immediately began sniffing the air. Knowing their position was blown, the Revenants engaged: the illusion went down, an arrow was loosed at the Skinchanger – which she turned into a bear to shrug off – and the sword and board undead doubled back to attack our scout Named. A tactical mistake, I thought as the Painted Knife appeared behind their mage and hacked through the hand holding the staff. A heartbeat later the Blade of Mercy was there as well, landing in a flash of Light that tore a hole through the roof and forced him to roll forward so he wouldn’t drop through.
It wasn’t a done deal, I thought as I watched them. The mage Revenant’s hand kept wielding the staff even when cut off and the Blade of Mercy backed off in surprise when the sword and board undead took on his greatsword without batting an eye, but the band of Named had the advantage. Which meant we were soon due… Darkness fell over the roof and I cursed. I’d been too much to hope that being buried under most of Hainaut had been enough to kill off the Mantle, I supposed. At least I got to find out where she was, which happened to be a rooftop far to my left. Standing besides what had to be the sloppiest Revenant I’d ever seen: barely more than ragged skin and bones, with floppy hair and loose farmers’ clothes. Not a weapon in sight and he looked pretty confused.
He couldn’t have been more obviously dangerous if the word had been branded on his fucking forehead.
“All right,” I grunted. “My turn.”
The setup ought to work. I released the Night hiding me and shaped it into solid shadows instead, coiling around me and then exploding outwards in tendrils that I used like great legs. Shouts of surprise came from my legionaries below as I stepped over them and over the barricade, skeletons hacking away at the shadow limbs harmlessly. A streak of magic whizzed my way but I adjusted my position absent-mindedly to let it go wide, eye still on the Mantle. She pointed her great steel mace towards me, her armoured silhouette cast in the half-light allow through by the clouds, and the world shivered from the strength of the curse that shot out. She had, unfortunately for her, fallen prey to the story I’d prepared.
A woman decked in red steel leapt up in the way of the curse, laughing, and the world shivered again.
I’m not the fifth in their band, I thought, you struck too early. I smiled down at the Scourge even as I guided myself to land on the rooftop closest to the Mantle’s. The Red Knight joined me up there, her armour glimmering deeper red from the curse she had been able to Devour. She spat to the side, reaching at her back and taking up a broadsword.
“Weak,” the Red Knight sneered. “Your hatred is weak. I’ll show you what a real Named is like, you petty armoured bitch.”
I rolled my shoulder, limping up to her side as the Mantle pivoted to face us and the Revenant at her side looked at us with befuddlement. I reached out with my Name, tried to get a read on what he could do, but all I got was a vague sense of bad luck. And yet I smiled, as I felt a ripple behind me and to our side the Mantle’s darkness suddenly vanished. Roland’s Confiscate worked on the Mantle’s curses, then. Good to know.
“Keep her busy,” I told the Red Knight, preparing to leap to the other roof. “But don’t take risks. We can afford to wait until the others are-”
Instinct pulled at me and I obeyed, taking a step to the side. It saved my life. I felt a raging current of power suddenly unleashed from below and the world exploded. I tumbled down through heated shards of what had been tiles a moment ago, shielding my eyes, as a curse passed close enough to rustle the Mantle of Woe. I hit the ground a moment after, swallowing a scream as I landed on my bad leg, but I stood through the pain to face a simple oaken staff being pointed towards me. A ragged figure in faded grey robes, eyes lifeless and long black hair tumbling down his back, stood before me inside a circle of wards. The Tumult, greatest spellcaster in the Dead King’s service, began to incant. Instinct pulled at me again, the warning of certain death, but before I could heed it and move a cacophonous noise drowned out everything else and the ground shuddered.
The wall blew up a heartbeat later, spraying shards everywhere as the flying fortress crushed three city blocks and I had to pull Night to be just so the shockwave wouldn’t splatter me all over the walls. The Tumult was not so lucky, his wards allowing through no harm but just enough wind that he was smacked flat against his own magic shield. Breathing out raggedly I released the Night, wiping dust out of my eyes, and found laughter bubbling out of my throat as someone floated down to the ground to stand between me and the Scourge. Akua Sahelian, armoured from head to toe and somehow still the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen, stared down the undead mage
“This one you can leave to me, darling,” she drawled. “We never did finish our little chat in Hainaut.”
In the distance I heard hooves, followed by war cries in Mthethwa, and finally I let the laugh free.
Time to collect some scalps.
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