Seen from the above, it was easy to understand why General Sacker had agreed to the cease-fire.
The Rebel Legions were like a bottled rat, now that the Black Knight had called for a retreat of her own army. Juniper had wasted no time surrounding their position in the valley, turning all engines on the tightly-packed ranks, and Sepulchral’s own army had hit them in the back even more brutally at my order. Sacker’s troops defending her camp had collapsed under the combine pressure of mage cadres and Nok wavemen, archers who lived up to their sharp reputation. It’d been a bloody business, feeding levies into Legion fortifications, but we’d caught the rebels unaware and the disparity in numbers had them collapsing in short order.
The camp was ours now, the parts we hadn’t torched anyway. That’d left the Rebel Legions surrounded between steep hills, stripped of supplies and room to maneuver as the noose tightened around them. To annihilate Sacker’s army, nothing would be required of the Army of Callow save that it hold its own palisades while at a generous advantage. All Juniper needed to do was wait while Sepulchral hammered at the Rebel Legions from behind with her great numbers and fresh troops. The rat would be pressed against the bottom of the bottle, squeeze so tightly nothing was left but ground flesh and blood. So when the offer had come from Juniper, it’d only been natural that General Sacker accepted a cease-fire and talks.
Zombie the Seventh took nothing more than the pressure of my knees to be guided into a gentle downwards glide. The creature – she wasn’t a hippogriff, not exactly, but given the similarities I was currently leaning towards ‘hippocrow’ – had proved to be eager and obedient after I’d raised her, perhaps because the Sisters had taken a personal interest in the process. Komena in particular had felt intrigued, enough to lend a hand to the process. Regardless, my latest Zombie had proved to be a very good girl indeed on top of being even quicker in flight than I’d thought she would be. Turns could get a little tricky, mind you, but Zombie clearly relied more on Creational laws than magical ones when it came to her flight.
Compared to my last flying mount, anyway.
The no-man’s-land between our position and that of the rebels had been cleared for the duration of the talks, legionaries returning to hide behind their walls, and the empty space made it all the easier to pick out the delegations. Juniper didn’t seem to have brought any officers with her, but she’d been wise enough to bring Indrani and Alexis as bodyguards. There wasn’t a lot that’d be able to get past those two. Sacker, on the other hand, had with her two men with the painted insignias of senior legates on their armour. There were half a dozen regulars with them, but they might as well be decorations for what it mattered.
I landed half a hundred feet away, Zombie’s arc smoothly turning into a run and slowing down as we approached. The Mantle of Woe trailing behind me, sword at my hip and yew staff lowered, I brought my mount to a halt before the delegations.
“Marshal Juniper,” I smiled. “Congratulations are in order.”
The Hellhound scoffed, but I could see the pleasure she was badly hiding.
“Could have gone better,” Juniper said. “But we can save that talk for the camp, Warlord. There are more pressing matters to settle.”
“So there are,” I agreed, eye turning to the three top officers of the Rebel Legions.
“Black Queen,” General Sacker blandly said. “Greetings.”
Someone had remembered my warning, I noted. Good. I’d been completely serious.
“Sacker,” I said.
“The legates with me are-”
“Irrelevant,” I bluntly interrupted.
The human of the pair, a middle-aged Taghreb, looked furious at that. She didn’t speak out, though. The orc seemed to take it in stride, which raised my esteem by a notch.
“Either you can speak for your entire set of legions or this conversation is pointless,” I said. “I did not come here to indulge in petty games.”
“I can speak for our men,” General Sacker flatly said.
A look to the legates – the light caught in her fake eye, reminding me I was not the only woman here to have lost one – served as both a quell and confirmation. Neither gainsaid her.
“Good,” I smiled.
“We’re willing to surrender,” the old goblin said, “under certain terms. Guarantees need to be made that no soldiers will be harmed. Regular food and water. We’re willing to sit out the rest of this war if-”
She was serious, I realized. How many soldiers did she have left of the thirteen thousand she’d begun the day with? Couldn’t be more than eight, after the beating they’d taken. And she still thought she was in a position to strongarm me. I’d been too soft on these people, I suddenly realize. The Rebel Legions had taken my coin and grain before selling me down the river without a second thought, and the way I’d just taken it had made them think I was easy pickings. I’d held back, out of a desire to maintain the armies of Praes for the greater war and out of respect for my father.
It was long past time I stopped.
“Archer,” I said, “nock an arrow.”
I heard a chuckle and did not need to turn to know she obeyed. I met Sacker’s eyes evenly.
“You seem to have some grave misunderstandings about the nature of your situation,” I said. “So letme be clear: if I tell Archer to fire that arrow eastwards, Sepulchral’s army will resume its attack.”
The goblin scoffed.
“You’d lose-”
“I don’t give a shit how many of them we lose,” I coldly said. “I’ll spend her entire army if that’s what it takes to break you.”
I harshly laughed.
“Terms?” I mocked. “You’ll sit out the war if? I didn’t come here to negotiate with you, Sacker. I did that once before and you fine fellows me in the back. We’re past making deals.”
I struck my staff against the ground and the sound rippled out, dust flying up.
“You can surrender unconditionally,” I said. “Or Archer will shoot that arrow and I’ll fucking kill you all.”
Sacker’s face tightened, her ever half-closed eyes opening fully. She studied my face and whatever she found there had her hesitating. She turned to Juniper.
“And you have nothing to say to this, Marshal of Callow?” she pressed. “Your men will be the ones spent for this madness.”
Juniper’s face hardened and she bared pale fangs.
“Every sack of grain your soldiers ate, every crate of steel you used, could have kept some of my legionaries out west alive,” the Hellhound growled. “And what did we get for it? Be careful now of calling on sentiment. You might not like what you let out of the cage.”
Sacker flinched. Juniper had been as a niece to her, once. Maybe she still was in some ways. But personal ties cut both ways. She turned her eyes back to me, knowing better than to ask for anything out of the likes of Archer and the Huntress. Hells, of the two Alexis would probably be the hardliner. She had that traditional heroic disregard for the lives of anyone that might be considered to stand under Evil’s banner.
“Many officers will balk,” General Sacker told me. “If you do not offer guarantees-”
“So let them balk,” I shrugged. “We can have this conversation again in half a bell, when I’ve put another few thousand in the ground.”
The genuine indifference in my voice, I thought, was what got it through to her I wasn’t bluffing. I absolutely wasn’t. I’d just make sure that the household troops from Askum and Nok were the vanguard for the assault instead of the levies, to keep the casualties of the attack where they deserved to be. The goblin sagged.
“An hour,” Sacker said. “Give me an hour to talk the officers into it without bloodshed.”
I glanced at Juniper, who looked like she was biting down on the answer she wanted to give but did not have the authority to. No objections there, then. I might as well give the rebels a little more rope, lest the noose turning into an outright hanging.
“An hour,” I agreed. “If I don’t have your formal and unconditional surrender by the end of it…”
I did not finish the sentence, or particularly need to. Sacker and the legates left, tails between their legs, and returned to their lines.
I got my surrender before the time had passed.
“We are now victims of our own success,” General Zola sadly said.
No one in the war council – our usual, save now with the addition of General Jeremiah Holt – argued with that, because it was the honest truth. We’d forced the Rebel Legions to surrender and the Loyalist Legions to retreat to their camp in northern Kala Hills, but we now had fresh problems on our hands. Namely, seven thousand eight hundred and seventy-nine prisoners of war that we needed to keep an eye on. And keep under a roof, fed and with enough water to live. We were effectively being forced to supply a second army of prisoners and our supplies would be stretched to a breaking point if we did. Much of the Rebel Legions’ own foodstuff had been either burned or looted when Sepulchral’s forces took their camp.
Some of that I could get back from them, but I didn’t want to take too much. The Praesi law that undead could not hold noble title meant that Abreha Mirembe’s hold on her own army was painfully fragile, holding mostly because the soldiers from Nok were going to stick around as long as it looked like Isobe was still going to inherit Aksum. Otherwise those forces would be marching away by now, leaving behind them a vicious Aksum civil war. No, I had to leave Sepulchral some of the goods. Asking back for half was reasonable, I decided, and I’d set Vivienne to arranging it.
“I prefer the troubles of a great victory to those of a great defeat,” the Princess in question snorted. “We have supplies enough to push back the issue for a few days without it denting our reserves too much. We can keep our attention on more pressing matters.”
Juniper cleared her throat.
“Speaking of,” the Hellhound said. “Pickler, what is your timeline on the work?”
After the surrender came and the rebels laid down their weapons, there were only a few hours left before sundown. Since it was clear there’d be no more fighting for the day, Pickler had taken to bettering our position in anticipation of tomorrow. Companies of unarmed prisoners had, under the wary eye of our own legionaries, been set to taking down the enemy’s fortifications: tearing down their palisades and filling their trenches.
“Our palisade will be the only one standing come dark,” Sapper-General Pickler said, “but the trenches are harder work. Maybe half of it done in time, if we’re lucky. I gave orders to focus on the road, it’ll be easier for us to move troops across if we need to go on the offensive.”
“Can goblin prisoners not be put to work in the dark?” Brandon Talbot asked.
I grimaced at that and wasn’t the only one.
“They’ll run,” I said. “And do just that if we’re lucky. They’ve a lot more goblins than we do, too, so even if we put our own goblin legionaries as overseers it’d be a major risk. Better to just left the work unfinished.”
“Agreed,” Juniper said. “It is only a precaution, regardless. I don’t believe that Marshal Nim will be going on the offensive. Her losses appear to have been extensive.”
I cocked an eyebrow.
“We got casualties estimates for her too, now?”
The tall orc nodded. With the casualties taken in the early skirmishes around the region, the desertion of the Thirteenth and the mauling the Eighth had taken during the night our guess had been that the Black Knight had been fielding an army about sixteen to seventeen thousand strong. How many were left now, though?
“At least five thousand and a half dead,” the Hellhound said. “Tentatively we’re pegging her current strength at eleven thousand.”
I let out a low whistle. With the Thirteenth as last moment reinforcements, this morning we’d fielded around fifteen thousand men. Our butcher’s bill had us at twelve thousand eight hundred and twelve soldiers now. Almost thirteen thousand strong. Gods, even Sepulchral had lost more men than we had: her twenty thousand had, between civil war and battle and desertions, tumbled down to maybefifteen thousand now. Gods. Our total losses had been less than half of those of every other army on the field individually, not even put together.
Juniper had, over the span of an afternoon, not upended the balance of power so much as murdered it and buried it in a shallow grave. Weeping Heavens. I found my glass of water, emptied it on the ground and leaned back my seat to grab a bottle of aragh. I poured myself a finger, then found a few grins and cups headed my way. When everyone had their own in hand, I solemnly raised my cup.
“To the Hellhound,” I said, “and the Battle of Kala.”
It was with rowdy cheer my toast was taken up, drinks going down and being poured anew. I met Juniper’s eyes and grinned, enjoying the dark flush to her cheeks. Aisha even talked her into a cup of her own. I laid back into my seat, enjoying the warmth of the tent, and breathed out weeks of worry. They could be put to rest, for a few hours. We’d earned it.
After all, for all the troubles of victory I’d rather be in this tent tonight than any of the other three.
With morning came the time to make the difficult decisions.
The Black Knight still had a sizeable army holed up in Kala Hills, but so long as Sepulchral remained on our side the threat was mitigated. None of my general staff had an appetite for trying to force that camp immediately, especially not when leaving the Legions in it would make them wither on the vine. We’d poisoned Nioqe Lake and Nim herself had poisoned the main wells in the region, so in at most a week their water situation was going to start getting dangerous. Only the scale of the losses they’d taken in battle would prevent it from being an issue even earlier. Taking into consideration our numerical advantage – we had the Loyalist Legions outnumbered almost three to one – and our fortifications in the valley, it would be suicide for the Black Knight to attack us. That meant we had enough breathing room to handle our own internal troubles. The most urgent of them was, unsurprisingly, what to do with the several thousand prisoners we’d taken.
“We can’t handle feeding them for the rest of the campaign,” Aisha said. “And even if we could, we need to begin marching on Ater soon. There is no practical way to bring that many prisoners with us on the march.”
“We should keep the officers of tribune rank and give the Fourth’s Justice to the rest,” Brandon Talbot advised.
Gods, that stupid name. It was what some of my men had taken to calling the punishment I’d given the Helikean cataphracts after capturing them back in Iserre: broken fingers and being stripped of equipment.
“This is a wild land,” Aquiline said. “It would be kinder to simply kill those warriors than to maim and release them. The sword will hurt less than claws.”
“It would be a death sentence to release them like that,” Vivienne agreed. “Ideally we would ransom them instead, but they’ve managed to burn every bridge they have. There’s no one left who’d pay for them.”
“Amadeus might,” I objected.
“He can’t afford the price,” she frankly replied.
“We should seek to recruit soldiers instead,” General Jeremiah said. “It would make up for our losses, and the Army of Callow has expertise in assimilating legions.”
I rather admired the entirely unashamed way he said.
“That was my thought was well,” I admitted, “and Juniper’s too. How did that go?”
The Hellhound sighed.
“Malicia poisoned the well,” she said. “Most of the rank and file are convinced we assassinated two of their three generals just before making common cause with Sepulchral after a coup failed. Maybe three hundred volunteers, and I wouldn’t trust them right off.”
Fucking Malicia. I might have given the order to kill Mok, sure, but I wouldn’t have been sloppy enough not get blamed for it afterwards.
“They might not be willing to fight for us,” Vivienne said, “but they might be willing to fight against the Black Knight.”
She paused, choosing her words.
“We could offer some of the soldiers freedom in exchange for serving as the first wave of an attack against the camp in the hills.”
I chewed on that for a moment. Juniper looked on the fence, but the idea appealed to me. Sure it’d be putting troops we didn’t trust all that much in our order of battle, but it’d also soak up casualties that would otherwise thin my own ranks. And, even better, I wouldn’t be expected to keep feeding those soldiers after they went their own way.
“We’d have to limit the numbers,” I said. “Else we’re just releasing an army into the wilds.”
“Organization will be tricky,” Juniper said. “I’ll want to position them so if they turn against us it won’t lead to disaster.”
That wasn’t a no, and after a round of debate the idea was adopted. Aisha left the tent to begin organizing it. That didn’t entirely solve our prisoner problem, though, since two thousand at most was what I was comfortable arming again. The arguments went in a circle. No one thought we should feed the prisoners or keep them with us, but most of the measures that’d make them no longer a problem for the rest of this campaign also effectively consigned to death by Wasteland. Everyone agreed, at least, that we should keep the high-ranking officers as prisoners. Execution was floated as an option – by Talbot – but even those that didn’t balk at killing prisoners thought it might lead to mass unrest among the imprisoned soldiers.
“Even arming half of them would be a mistake,” General Zola argued. “With that many soldiers, which we agreed would be needed to survive the Wasteland, they have enough men to begin seizing the private armories of nobles and towns. They would rearm and pursue us.”
“We don’t know for certain that they would,” Juniper grunted. “But I take your point. I don’t want to leave that force at our back either.”
And that was the crux of the issue, really. We all wanted to march on Ater, where the war on Praes would be brought to an end, but we needed to clean up house first. That would mean dealing with the Sepulchral situation, later today, but also tying up all our other loose ends. Marshal Nim’s army needed to be decisively broken or made to surrender, and after that was done I didn’t want Sacker’s army nipping at our our heels when we moved south. Hells, to be frank I didn’t want them involved in that siege at all. They’d not proved to be trustworthy enough to be allowed to, and they’d failed to be victorious enough to force the issue their way. I could just see them stumbling into us at the last moment and fuc- wait, no.
“We’re looking at this wrong,” I said. “Juniper, how long do you expect operations in Ater to last?”
“Two months at most,” she said.
Longer than that and we’d be forced to make a deal anyway. Procer was already buckling, if we wanted there to still be a west by the time we returned we couldn’t tarry.
“So we strand them,” I said. “We keep the officers and arm enough they should be able to survive the Wasteland, but we take all their mages. If they don’t have any access to the Ways…”
“Even at their fastest possible pace, they’ll arrive along after the dust is settled in Ater,” Juniper finished, tone considering.
“Best we end things with the Black Knight before that,” General Jeremiah pragmatically advised. “Still, seems a sound enough plan.”
Not the most elegant way to deal with prisoners, but we didn’t have time for elegance. A round of agreements, some more enthusiastic than others, saw the matter settled.
“We’ll be receiving Sepulchral this afternoon,” I said, “to confirm the terms of our cooperation. Once she agrees to lend her aid to an assault on the Loyalist Legions, I believe we should begin preparing for an attack.”
“Agreed,” Juniper growled. “We have the numbers to properly squeeze her now. I want to swing part of our force out east around Kala Hills and encircle her. The same paths they used to ambush us there can be turned against them now.”
The discussion grew animated after that, commanders pitching in for a plan to either force a surrender out of Nim or crush her army irreparably, but I excused myself eventually and Vivienne did the same. We needed to get moving if we were to be ready to receive Sepulchral.
Abreha Mirembe wasn’t exactly my creature.
You could barely tell even she was dead, since it was poison that’d done her in and she’d been pretty ghoulish even before biting it. I’d raised the would-be empress as undead through use of the Night, but that didn’t exactly give me control over her. I could move her limbs, sure, and inflict pain on her soul. But I couldn’t control her mind, save through coercion. She’d showed me deference since her raising, but that wasn’t the effect of the Night so much as the knowledge that I could send her back to the grave with a snap of my fingers. I was uncomfortably aware that the ties binding me to her were not meaningfully all that different from those binding Malicia to Sargon Sahelian.
I’d soulboxed a High Seat too, it just happened that said box was their own corpse.
We kept the audience private, as small as it could be. That meant two people on our side, Vivienne and myself, and three on hers. High Lady Abreha herself, her designated heir Isobe and the niece that’d tried to usurp his place, Sanaa. Considering the only reason Sanaa was still alive was that she had enough supporters among Aksum’s army and vassals that her death would caused armed reprisals, I expected relations between her and her aunt to be frosty. To my surprise, Sepulchral now seemed to be favouring her over Isobe and takin no pains to hide it. Praesi. Abreha must have decided that a closely-fought coup was a sign of talent and begun to reconsider succession. Isobe was displeased by that undercurrent, by these talks and most of all by me.
“Rumour in the camp is that he blames you for this,” Vivienne murmured into my ear.
I blinked at her.
“Why?”
“He lost a lot of face in front of vassal lords and household troops when you and Lord Tanja humiliated him,” the Princess said. “He’s been saying that if not for that more would have stuck with him instead of turning to Sanaa’s camp.”
That might be partially true, I thought, though ironically enough Razin had probably done more damage than I did. It was a little much to blame me for his own failure to gather a solid core of supporters, though, especially when he’d been the one starting with a – oh Gods, I’d been spending too much time with Praesi if the decisions of someone like Abreha Mirembe were beginning to make sense to me. Best get this over with. After half-hearted courtesies we got to the meat of the talks, which was defining what Sepulchral’s position would be going forward.
“I want you to formally renounce your claim on the Tower,” I said.
“That cause is lost,” Abreha conceded. “Yet renouncing it will have costs for my supporters. I’ll not lay down arms only to have a puppet ruler installed in Aksum.”
“We can understand that concern,” Vivienne diplomatically said. “I assure you, neither Callow nor the Grand Alliance intends to intervene in your matters of succession.”
The old woman laughed.
“A nothing promise,” she said. “You will have to do better than that. You want my army for your siege of Ater, and I want sturdier assurances in return.”
“We could always offer our services to Malicia instead, should you-”
Sepulchral’s hand slapped Sanaa across the face. I hadn’t even made her do that, so I cocked an eyebrow.
“Count this a favour, girl,” Abreha said. “There are some people you don’t threaten unless you’ve made the decision to go through with it. They’ll just kill you if you do.”
Sanaa liked furious and humiliated, but to her honour she appeared to be listening. Huh. Maybe I wouldn’t be having a little conversation with Scribe about her, after all. I had no intention of leaving the High Seat closest to the border of Callow in hostile hands, but if she could learn that made drastic steps unnecessary. Vivienne cleared her throat.
“Assurances of what nature?” she asked.
“I want it confirmed by whoever climbs the Tower that I’ll legally keep my title until the end of the war against Keter,” High Lady Abreha said, “with all attached rights, including that to designate my own successor.”
I traded a look with Vivienne, who nodded.
“That could be arranged,” I said. “I take it it’s a formal Grand Alliance demand you’re looking for.”
The old woman grinned.
“I want it written in the treaty that settles this dance,” she confirmed.
She really was an old fox, I thought. That way no matter how ended up ruling the Dread Empire they couldn’t actually try to oust her afterwards without bringing down the Grand Alliance on their head. She was using a continent-spanning coalition as the guarantor of her succession. If nothing else, I had to be impressed by the sheer gall.
“I can’t formally agree to that without speaking with Cordelia Hasenbach, though I expect agreement on her part,” I said. “That said, I have half the Majilis of Levant in my camp at the moment and they’ll back those terms so I’m comfortable giving you a provisional approval.”
They were amenable to helping us against Marshal Nim with just that, so it was brisk business afterwards. They departed some hours after and I caught Abreha as she left, away from the others so we could have a quiet conversation.
“So what is it you’re actually after?” I asked.
She looked surprised, like she had no idea what I might possibly be implying. It was just a little too smooth to be believable. I cocked an eyebrow and she smiled.
“Who knows how long you war will last?” she said. “It might be a different empire, by the time the dust settles.”
“All about staying in the game, huh,” I said.
Abreha Mirembe cackled.
“It’s the very thing, Black Queen,” Sepulchral said. “Perhaps even the only thing.”
We spent three days recovering and planning our offensive against the Black Knight, whose army had further fortified its position in Kala Hills but not since moved. There was some trouble with the prisoners, people trying to flee in the night, but we’d disarmed them and the Wasteland was not kind. Those that got out did not get far, and bringing back the mangled corpses to display them soured the appetite for that kind of adventure. Our count of recruits rose to around four hundred but came to a hard stop after that, with further efforts yield nothing. Aisha’s efforts to make ‘volunteer companies’ that would fight against Nim were more successful, though, reaching close to the two thousand that I’d been willing to allow.
The rebels might despise us but they were scarcely fonder of the Black Knight, who had spurned their offer of joining forces in favour of remaining loyal to the Tower, and many found freedom in arms in the wake of fighting ‘Malicia’s dogs’ a rough but fair deal. Juniper and the general staff were putting the finishing touches on our plan to break the Legions with as few losses as possible to us, aiming to push the deaths on Sepulchral and the volunteers as much as we could without being too obvious about it, but I flitted in and out of those meetings. Most of my time was spent with Scribe and Vivienne, scrambling to get a read on the situation in the rest of Praes.
We still couldn’t scry properly, but that was a regional effect. Sending mages further out and then arranging messages being carried by horse worked, well enough that Cordelia was able to send her assent to High Lady Abreha’s terms and secure her alliance to us. I enjoyed the relative light demands made by this on my time, but the relative sense of safety was ripped out of my grasp without warning on the morning of the fourth day after the Battle of Kala. Even if Masego hadn’t immediately come for me I would have known something was up: the amount of power I could feel coming out of the Black Knight’s camp was like a lit beacon to my senses.
“War ritual?” I bluntly asked.
“No,” Hierophant immediately ritual. “And it is two rituals. One of them, the smaller, is making a gate into the Ways.”
I blinked.
“You told me the Ways wouldn’t be usable for a few days still,” I slowly said. “That they were still too fragile for large troop movements.”
“They are,” Masego said. “Which is why I believe the other ritual is meant to stabilize them in some way, or at least accelerate the process of that recovery.”
“That can be done?”
“I cannot,” Hierophant reluctantly admitted. “At least, I have not yet grasped how it might be done. It is possible that either Akua or other talented mages have found such a solution, however.”
“So they’re trying to slip away into the Ways,” I pressed.
“That seems likely,” he agreed.
Fuck. And that would mean facing this same army again, only holed up behind the walls of Ater. I could think of few things I wanted less. Juniper was of the same opinion and we hastily mobilized. Hierophant probed with spells and figured out the stabilizing ritual would need to finish before they could begin moving out, so we had a few hours to spare at least. Enough that we arranged for the volunteer companies to be armed and put in front while Sepulchral’s army deployed on the plains below the enemy camp. It all took long enough that Masego confirmed the stabilizing ritual was done by the time we began to march in battle formations, which meant I was now fighting the Battle of Maillac’s Boot again only from the other side.
We couldn’t even muster our whole army for the attack, since at least three thousand had needed to stay behind to keep an eye on the prisoners, so this was going to get messy. Taking a fortified uphill Legion camp with only hasty preparations? We sent the rebels and the volunteer companies as the first wave. To my distaste, I saw that Abreha had sent in her levies first. I could understand the sense in that, professional soldiers didn’t grow on trees, but it would be a slaughter. Still, horns and trumpets sounded. There would be blood. Soldiers marched up the hill, and atop it a thin crest of legionaries formed a shield wall of their own. Steel glittered under the sun, a sea of it.
It was an accident when it happened. They began singing, on one side and the other, with just a few beats of difference.
“Boot goes up and boot goes down –
There goes their callow crown.”
The Legionary’s Song, most people knew it as. Some called it Swallow the World instead, but they were fewer. The legionaries which had been named rebels began to sing it, moments before the legionaries that had been deemed loyal did the same. There was a beat of hesitation, steps slowing, and the songs melded.
“And no matter how high the walls
We’re all gonna make them fall.”
The couplet ended to the sight of the legionaries that’d been climbing the hill stopping. No arrows followed, no devastating barrage of spells or munitions.
“They can send us their pretty Knight,
Their killer all decked in white,
Only now we’ve got one too –
And he always gets his due
.
They got a wizard in the West
But now matter how he’s blessed
We got a Warlock in the Tower
Who’ll use his bones for flour
.
Let them keep their priestly king
Cause no matter how sweet he sings
We’ve got an Empress black as sin
Who’ll take his throne with a grin.”
It was a happy song, or at least meant to be. And yet somehow the tune that the wind carried all the way to me was mournful. A lament.
“We’re the Legion and the Terror
They’re in the right but we’re meaner
So pray hard boy, and pay your toll –
We’re gonna swallow the world whole.”
Atop the hill, legionaries looked at legionaries down it. And someone, some faceless man or woman, threw their shield on the ground. Their sword. And something hung in the air, a weight, as armies that had been savaging each other for weeks looked at each other. Someone in the volunteer companies threw down their own shield, and then it was like floodgates had opened. Shields and swords and helmets fell to the ground. And then, in the most damning of silences, the soldiers left. Nim’s, the rebels, even some of mine – the Thirteenth most of all, but had I not devoured legions before? The Army of Callow spat back out some of those sons and daughters.
Even some of the levies bolted, melting into the river of deserters.
“-Majesty, Your Majesty,” Brandon Talbot called.
I glanced at him.
“What should we do?”
I looked atop the hill. How many of her men had Nim lost? I couldn’t tell, but it was not few. Same for us, and somehow I knew that when I returned to camp prisoners would have joined the flood as well. We’d all brought armies here, waved banners and played games. Won and lost. And after two weeks of brutality, an army was walking away. Could I really blame them? What were any of the people here fighting for? Even those of us with causes had dragged them through so much dust they could hardly be recognized.
“Nothing,” I finally said. “Nothing. Let them go.”
Even the Black Knight what few had left to flee with. We would meet again in Ater, to end it all.
A song and then silence: so ended the Battle of Kala.
