We made good pace.
The Army of Callow had been hammered into a host that could move on the quick by years of campaigning abroad, and for once we weren’t too starved on trained officers: the combination of the First and Second Army that Juniper commanded had benefitted from the officer pools being combined. It’d be Hells to split the armies back up when it was done, of course, but that was a problem for the future. There simply weren’t enough potential soldiers left back in Callow for the First and Second to be raised back up to full strength separately anyway, they’d be staying combined until the end of the war. The ‘Fifth’ Army, as the rank and file had taken to calling it, wasn’t going anywhere for some years.
The Levantines under Razin and Aquiline weren’t a drag on our pace, the way they’d sometimes been in Hainaut. Now that they were relying on our supply train instead of their own, the Dominion warriors were as cut free from a tether: they were usually quicker on the march than my legionaries now. The lighter armour and years of raiding had trained it into them. The Twilight Ways made for a pleasant reprieve from Wasteland weather, even if we’d only ever tasted the outskirts of that, and we advanced faster than Juniper had anticipated. We had to slow down around the end of the first week, waiting for reports about the march of the other armies.
Marshal Nim and her legions kept to the same brisk pace they had so far, which meant in about two weeks both our armies would be forced to emerge from the Ways or face the possibility of a contested crossing should we be beaten to returning to Creation. The surprising part was that Dread Empress Sepulchral seemed to have been gaining on the Black Knight: she was in hot pursuit, still a week behind even though the Legions were using the Ways and she was not. It seemed impossible, and the Jacks confirmed there was more to it a few days later. It was not Sepulchral’s entire army that’d been keeping up that breakneck pace but instead a large vanguard.
Two thousand household troops and her entire cavalry contingent, Vivienne’s people believed.
“She’s trying to keep up the pressure on Marshal Nim by having a force nipping at her rear,” Juniper opined. “They won’t engage, but they’ll raid her supply lines and try to hammer any detachment she splits from her main host.”
“If the Jacks have people in Sepulchral’s camp able to learn this, the Eyes will too,” Vivienne noted. “I have no doubt Malicia informed her Black Knight of the plan before it even began.”
I snorted.
“Old Abreha’s counting on it,” I said, reluctantly admiring. “She’s trying to goad the Black Knight into engaging us hastily.”
Sepulchral had nothing but gains to make from the Loyalist Legions and the Army of Callow getting into a messy, ill-planned battle.
“It’s cleverly done,” Juniper admitted. “If Nim sends a force south to make the vanguard back off, she has to either leave it there – and weaken herself just before she fights us – or slow her march so it can rejoin. Which would buy time for the slower part of Sepulchral’s army to catch up.”
I shared a look with my marshal. It was an inspired tactic, playing to the strengths of her army and the weaknesses of the Black Knight’s positions. It was, in other words, not a tactic that Abreha Mirembe or her generals had likely come up with. Sepulchral was a skilling intriguer but a solidly average battle commander, looking at her record. And as far as we knew neither Aksum nor Nok had any noteworthy military talents in their upper ranks. So who was planning Sepulchral’s campaign for her? I glanced at Scribe, who had been silently keeping notes as we spoke.
“Make it a priority to find out who’s been giving out those orders,” I ordered her. “The last thing we need is for Sepulchral to become a genuine threat.”
“Ime has been concentrating on putting out the last gasps of my influence in the Wasteland,” Eudokia said. “It might be possible to find this out, Queen Catherine, but I will have to burn most of the agents I have in Sepulchral’s camp.”
Meaning she would no longer be confident of catching anything going on there afterwards. We’d be relying solely on the Jacks, and Vivienne’s spies had been playing catch-up with the Eyes since the moment they were first raised without ever quite touching that prize. I hesitated, then turned to Juniper.
“How confident are you of beating that army if you know who commands it?” I asked.
She did not answer immediately, considering the question seriously.
“Seven parts in ten,” Juniper of the Red Shields finally said.
I nodded. Good enough for me.
“Do it,” I ordered Scribe.
Aside from that little surprise, the beginning of our southern offensive was trotting along nicely. As the second week since we’d left the outskirts of Wolof began, it looked like as if our preferred outcome would come to pass: a decisive pitched battle with the Loyalist Legions at least a week before anyone else was close enough to intervene. There’d been no real hiccup to our advance so far, which only made it natural that Creation would then promptly snatch the ground out from under our feet. Unlike some of the past instances of the Gods pissing in my morning gruel, however, this time the snatching was not a fucking metaphor.
Half-past Morning Bell, as we marched along the Twilight Ways, the ground literally fell out under my army.
Great cracks spread across the ground, fast enough my officers had time to do little more than shout warnings, then great chunks of the Ways fell down into Creation like shattered glass panes. It was all the more hellish for the suddenness of it: there’d been no warning, not ominous sign. In thirty heartbeats my army had turned from a smoothly marching column into a groaning and wounded beast, spread out in chunks in the middle of a particularly vicious Wasteland dust storm. There was enough order in my ranks that I managed to rustle up two mage lines and Hierophant to form a shaky protective ward around the column, keeping the whipping dust out of our faces long enough that priests from the House Insurgent could begin seeing to the wounded and dying.
I ran around trying to get proper wardstones in place, hindered by the fact that they’d been built to protect the shape of camps and not columns, but before I got anywhere the storm suddenly died. It’d lasted perhaps half an hour after my army fell, and just as suddenly as it had come it was gone. Clenching my teeth, I got to finding out the damage. It’d been a short fall down, at least. That’d taken off the edge some. Hardly more than four feet in most cases, and the Order of the Broken Bells had been in the vanguard ahead of the fall so it’d mostly been remounts that’d broken their legs falling.
The grassy grounds from the Ways that’d fallen with us began to decay quickly and the emanations were somewhat toxic so we had to move away and reform, but order was getting restored as lieutenants saw to their lines. Numbers for casualties and wounded quickly made it up the chain, eventually getting to Juniper and myself: only seventy-nine dead, but almost three hundred wounded. We’d also lost enough horses for the Order that their staying power was compromised for longer-term engagements. Not necessarily an immediate concern, but by the time we got to Ater any knight who lost a horse would be fighting the rest of the campaign on foot.
There’d been more painful damage in a strategic sense.
“We’re paralyzed for at least two days,” Juniper bluntly said. “That we still have any supply wagons capable of moving is a miracle, and if the healers can’t fix the oxen pulling them we’re going to have to kill the beasts.”
Which would further slow us, for all that it’d add to our meat reserves. We could compensate by putting the Order’s remaining remounts to work pulling the wagons and arranging relays of legionaries – mostly orcs, given their greater body strength – but it’d still be a blow to mobility. Hopefully our healers could salvage at least some of the beasts of burden while our sappers repaired the broken supply wagons. The only silver lining was that Pickler’s obsessive care for her field engines meant they’d been insulated from shock well enough the fall had caused need only for minor repairs and replacements. We wouldn’t be headed into battle with the Legions of Terror without working war engines.
“We need to find out where we are,” I sighed. “And if returning to the Ways will just see this happen again.”
I’d already asked Masego to look into it. Wasteland weather was infamously dangerous for good reason, but ripping an army out of the Twilight Ways was going too far. My instincts screamed enemy action, but which enemy?
“I’ve sent out scouts,” Juniper said. “I’ll send someone to fetch you when they begin coming back.”
“I’ll see what Hierophant has for me, then,” I said, groaning as I got back to my feet.
I’d almost lost Zombie the Sixth to this mess. He’d broken a leg and bucked me off, but the priests seemed to think he could be made better. I’d be stuck borrowing a mount from the Order until he was fit to ride again, though. Masego wasn’t hard to find, considering he was still exactly where I’d left him. The hastily raised tent was kept standing more by wards than wood, not that he seemed to notice. Earlier he’d been using scrying rituals with some difficulty, going through the Observatory, but now he was instead running spells on the storm dust he’d sent Apprentice out to gather. Though the outer ward would have warned him of my entry he did not immediately turn. I left him to his spells, waiting in silence as I leaned against my staff. He turned to me when he was good and ready.
“It was a ritual,” Hierophant said.
I glanced at the dust but he shook his head.
“This is simply dust,” he said. “We are near the Gust Ribbon from what I gathered while scrying, so the dust storm itself was drawn out of it by the first part of the ritual and only then empowered. There are striations in the magic saturation of the dust that make the sequence plain to see.”
Near the Gust Ribbon wasn’t saying much, as it was a winding and moving region that stretched across the northwest third of the Wasteland. Wasn’t overall reassuring, though, considering it was called that because it was plagued by sudden and powerful storms that had a nasty tendency to spill out in every direction. It wouldn’t be safe to stay here long even if we didn’t get hammered by another ritual.
“So someone leashed a dust storm, empowered it with a spell and sent it our way?” I asked.
“It was quite brilliantly done,” Masego said. “The dust, you see, solved the issue of air being able to hold too little magic for most large-scale ritual work. The storm was turned into an array that thinned the boundary between the Ways and Creation – which is already very thin – until it was on the very edge of shattering.”
“Are you telling me that the physical weight of my army is what shattered the Twilight Ways?” I flatly asked.
“As I said,” Masego smiled, “quite brilliantly done.”
I clenched my fingers, then unclenched them.
“This is Malicia,” I said.
It had to be. People had been telling me again and again that weather sorcery was the specialty of Taghreb, and there was only one army out there that fielded a significant amount of high-calibre Taghreb mages. More than that, we’d known for months that while High Lady Takisha of Kahtan had played coy with sending the Tower actual troops she’d not been shy with providing mages instead. It’d take more than just a few cadres of talented mages to pull off something like this, though. I knew that and so did he.
“This is Akua Sahelian,” Masego corrected, confirming my fear. “There are maybe four other practitioners in Praes capable of such a ritual, but there appears to have been an uncontrolled surge in the middle of the span – I suspect mages grew exhausted and their replacements had inadequate control – that was masterfully redirected instead of allowed to collapse the entire working.”
He paused.
“I would be capable of this,” he said, without a hint of a boast. “My father was, and so was Dumisai of Aksum. I would not bet on Naziha Sarrif being so capable, however, and she is the finest mage in the south. There is only one woman in all of Praes with the talent and schooling to do it.”
His face was calm.
“I have already told you her name.”
That was what happened, I told myself, when you let someone as dangerous Akua go to your enemy’s side. She didn’t stop being dangerous, it was just turned on you instead. I breathed out, suddenly tired. I had seventy-nine names to learn. I owed that, and truthfully more than was possible to repay.
“I found something interesting, however,” Hierophant said. “The way the boundaries of the ritual array were defined was… peculiar.”
I cocked an eyebrow at him, silently urging him to continue.
“Much more of the Ways fell than was necessary,” Masego said. “Without looking at the equations myself I cannot be certain, but it seems to me that the power could have been made… narrower. Concentrated on ensuring there would be a faller from higher up instead of such a large swath of territory.”
My fingers clenched.
“What are you saying?” I asked.
“That no one capable of crafting such a ritual,” Hierophant evenly replied, “would have made such a mistake in ignorance. It was a choice.”
A pulled punch, he was saying. Seventy-nine dead, my entire army paralyzed, and still a pulled punch. Not without reason had we once named that woman the doom of an entire city. I silently nodded, at loss for words. Glowing, fiery eyes studied be from beneath the eye cloth.
“I do not understand why she is no longer with us,” Masego admitted. “Is this about revenge? Indrani tells me that in Hainaut you had the opportunity to let her go to her death. I had thought – and she – that you refused because you were letting go of all this long prices business.”
He paused.
“She is no longer here,” Masego plainly said, “and so I am confused.”
“One hundred thousand dead, Zeze,” I quietly said. “She doesn’t get to have that swept under the rug. Nobody does.”
“So it is revenge,” Masego mused, brightening for having understood. “Why let her go to the Tower and become the Warlock, then? It does not strike me as a very good vengeance.”
“Because she’ll hate it,” I quietly said. “It will be everything she has been taught to want, but even as she gets it every victory will taste like ashes in her mouth. And when reaches the end of that line, of that dreadful dream, it will not be joy she feels.”
It would be horror, I thought. Horror at the prospect of spending the rest of her life wearing shackles around her wrists that she would have put on herself. And the moment she understood that, understood that she wanted to be better than the girl she’d once been instead of simply an older, crueller version of her, I would be there. Waiting with an offer that she would accept.
“And after?” Masego asked.
“She trades a broken dream for a broken crown,” I murmured.
I did not believe we could destroy the Hidden Horror, not truly. Not now and even less after we gifted him the crown of Autumn. So he would need a prison and a warden. A box he would surely break in time, a pit he would dig himself out of, but a realm of endless paths? That might do the trick. There he would be cursed to wander forever alone, as a broken queen on a broken throne kept him imprisoned until the end of times. And that queen’s throne would lie in the heart of the city she had doomed, perched atop her very folly as she kept the peace of Twilight. She would make the choice herself, willingly and without coercion. That was the retribution I owed a hundred thousand screaming souls: an endless vigil holding back a greater evil, knowing every part of it was of her own making.
I was Callowan. My prices were long, and paid twice.
The first scouts returned with word of a town to our southeast. Scrying wasn’t working well in the region, which Masego believed to be because of the same ritual that’d brought us down. To sum up a quarter-hour explanation, ‘much magic in sky dust makes magic in sky difficult’. I shared this summary with the table, which prompted him to admit he wished he had a way to disown me. On the bright side, he also believed that while it was still unsafe to return to the Twilight Ways for at least two weeks it was unlikely that we were going to be hit with a storm again. The same phenomenon that screwed up scrying would make it ‘astronomically difficult’ to get another ritual going. I’d intended on going back into the camp after the conversation, but Juniper had notions of her own.
“You’re pacing back and forth like a tiger in a cage,” the Hellhound said. “Make yourself useful instead. Take knights and have a look at the town, find out where we are.”
“I’m not pacing,” I reflexively defended, but she had a point.
I took thirty knights of the Order and Scribe too, since she was the woman with the maps. Eudokia didn’t recognize the region itself, though she did note that the dusty and rocky grounds here would be a good fit for certain parts of the Cradle: a rough square of land near the middle of the Wasteland that had fairly steady weather but got the spills from more… exotic parts. We rode out briskly, finding the town the scouts had marked in less than an hour. It wasn’t anything all that impressive, I saw as we got closer. A walled town large enough to hold maybe a few hundred souls, surrounded by sparse farms and skeletal orchards. We found several wells on the way, though, which was good news. Too many of our water barrels had broken during the fall.
The gates were closed when we got there, an iron-barded set tall as a man but too cramped for most carts. No great traders, then. The walls weren’t anything I’d have a hard time smashing with Night if I put my back into it: six to eight uneven feet of stacked stone and mud with wooden spikes on top. Over the gates, an old dark-skinned woman in faded robes was waiting for us. Spread out further atop the walls were maybe a dozen archers and an unarmed pair of middle-aged siblings that must have been the town mages. They weren’t the ones in charge, though, as was made clear when we reined in our horses at the edge of bow range and got called out by the old woman.
“State your business,” she demanded. “Are you with the army to the north?”
I blinked. My knights carried the royal banner with them, which usually got recognized and took care of most questions before the talking began. Not so this time, evidently. Seeing no point in subtlety out in the middle of nowhere, I went with straightforward instead.
“I am Queen Catherine of Callow,” I called back. “I only want to talk and buy goods.”
There was some consternation atop the wall, several others coming close to the old woman before she angrily waved them away.
“There’s nothing worth burning here,” the old woman yelled out at me. “Go away.”
I sighed. Why was it never the useful parts of my reputation that preceded me? Deciding to make a point, I murmured a prayer to the Crows and let the Night sluggishly wake to my words. I went for something loud and dangerous looking over actually dangerous, blasting a chunk of the countryside in a whirl of black flames. I let silence follow in that sights’s wake as it sunk in that I could wield the same power against their wall to fairly predictable results. I then politely requested to be let in so we could talk and I could arrange the buying of goods, which after some arguing between the ‘warriors’ was granted.
The gates swung open and we were ushered through deserted dirt streets to a hall of stone. There the old woman from earlier received us by a great fire and extended hospitality in the name of the town, Ogarin. We refrained from accepting food or drink anyway. She introduced herself as Anan, the current haku to the town. Bailiff was probably the closest equivalent to the title we had back home, from what I understood, as a haku’s authority was centred around arranging the collection of communal taxes and work levies in the name of the local lord. The town was part of the territory of a Lord Abara, she informed us, who ruled from a fortress called Kala further to the southeast and situated at the bottom of the eponymous Kala Hills.
“I’ll bargain so the town does not get sacked, Your Majesty,” Anan said, “but we don’t have much to trade. We already sent our crop tax south to the fortress. There’s been a food levy across the Wasteland.”
I frowned.
“Who does Lord Abara swear to?” I asked.
She snorted.
“His uncle swore to Wolof, but that was in High Lady Tasia’s day,” she said. “Now he’s sworn to no one. It was the Tower that came to collect.”
So Malicia – more likely the Black Knight through her – had been emptying the Wasteland of food, to feed Marshal Nim army and make sure my own wouldn’t be able to add to its supplies from the local stores. Not without starving towns and villages, anyway, which aside from being deeply distasteful to me was likely to mean resistance to my troops from locals. No one liked having the table robbed by a foreign invader, as my childhood in Laure had intimately taught me. We got a little more out of Anan about the region we’d ended up in with some wheedling. Ogarin was at the northwestern edge of Lord Abara’s lands but linked by a dirt path to a better road that Anan called the ‘half-road’. I asked, naturally. It was a name that pretty much demanded it.
“We’re between imperial highways,” Anan said. “One of the old Abara – in my great, great grandmother’s day – swore himself to Aksum, and to make it stick he planned to connect Kala to the highway between Ater and Aksum. It was going to make us rich, he claimed. Only he died before it was done. His daughter instead went back to the Tower’s protection and pocketed the gold, leaving the job half done.”
The half-road wasn’t properly paved, she explained, just made of stone. While usable for carts it tended to be rough on the axles. It went towards the southeast, eventually coming close to the Moule Hills. Those were a bunch of steep slopes, so in practice the road was nestled in a valley between the Moule Hills to the south and Kala Hills to the north. North of said Kala Hills, she continued, was the small Nioqe Lake and the other town sworn to Lord Abara, Risas. Further north than that was the southern edge of the large Jini Plateau: all cliffs there, nothing we could travel through.
The way I figured, the sooner we got on the half-road and began moving south the better. I’d suggest a detachment head out to Nioqe Lake to see to our water situation, but there simply weren’t enough water sources in the region to sustain the presence of an army as large as mine for long.
As for trading, strictly speaking it was treason for the town to bargain with us while we were at war. I allowed the shadow of a possible sack to loom over the negotiations, though, which motivated the town to do it anyway. It wasn’t my intention to go through with it, but if my reputation was black in these parts then I had no qualms in using that. There wasn’t much food and Anan was reluctant to part with was left, but tools and wood were on the table – armies chewed through those like hounds through meat – and I promised to restrain my soldiers from robbing farms or entering the town. I even paid a generous fee for use of their wells, which Anan did not need to know was from the Wolof treasury.
When we were done talking I stretched, groaning, and offered her a friendly smile. We’d been at this for over an hour now, and I was ready to leave. There was still one little detail to take care of first, though,
“So,” I said, “how likely is it that some of your dimmer boys and girls are outside and planning something unwise?”
Her creased face tightened.
“Not unlikely,” Anan finally said.
“I still remember what it’s like, wanting to put down monster to make a name,” I said. “So I’ll let that go.”
I met her rheumy eyes with mine.
“If it ends now.”
She swallowed. Anan preceded us outside, and while there was some shouting and a small scuffle it ended without corpses on the ground.
Three cheers for diplomacy, I thought, and got back on my borrowed horse.
We got some trouble with the locals the first night after we crashed, but not the two-legged kind. Our palisade, which had been hastily raised, was hit just after Midnight Bell by what we first believed to be enemy soldiers but turned out to be a coordinated attack by a pack of tigers. The unreasonably astute animals actually hit another spot in the palisade as a distraction while the rest dug their way under, attacking horses and cattle. Archer and the Huntress got themselves a few pelts for the trouble, but of the dozen tigers that came six still survived and ran away with full bellies. It was only to be the beginning of our troubles, I found out to my dismay.
A colony of head-sized scorpions took offence to our presence the following day and began attacking legionaries whenever they stepped outside the vermin wards, which thankfully held them back. It only stopped when I set out with a mage line and torched their underground lair, to a disquieting amount of chittering screams. A decision was made not to openly prevent my sappers from going into the charred ruin and stealing some eggs, considering scorpion fights tended to be good for the morale of the little bastards.
Then the soldiers that went to fill up water barrels at Nioque Lake – under the wary eyes of the townsfolk of Risas, whose homes were on the opposite shore – were ambushed by some sort of shrieking freshwater squid that dragged two men under before the Squire and the Apprentice killed it. Its flesh was apparently considered a delicacy in the Wasteland, Aisha informed me, because everyone in this bloody place was completely mad. I refused to have a bite out of principle, though Masego assured me with guileless malice it was delicious.
Archer was having the time of her life, at least, and came dragging back the carcass of what looked like a cow-sized lion with bat wings and a stinger-tipped tail the following afternoon. Masego was delighted enough when she offered him the venom glands that he enthusiastically kissed her cheeks, which had her in a terrifyingly good mood the rest of the day. I was only glad she’d killed the damned thing while out hunting and not after it’d flown into the camp and eaten a few of my soldiers. Not that our short turn in luck stopped a flock of blood-drinking bats that spat out paralytic venom – charmingly called something that translated ‘night kissers’ by Soninke, Aisha said – from attacking one of our night patrols.
The entire Wasteland was a fucking death trap.
It looked like we were going to be ready to march by Noon Bell on the third day, though, so I sat with Juniper to put together a vanguard. Two thousand light foot from Levant would do, we decided, with Archer and I accompanying them. Razin Tanja, whose forces were chosen to march, was pleased to be given the front as Levantines always were when awarded the possibility of being the first to be shot by arrows. Took all sorts. The Dominion warriors had taken well to the Wasteland, to my amused horror, Lady Aquiline even admitted it made her a little homesick. Fewer trees here than the Brocelian, she said, but the animals had a lot in common.
No wonder Levantines raided so much, I unkindly thought. I’d get out of the house as much as possible if my home was full of godsdamned bloodsucking bats, and fight for the privilege too.
We set out in passably good order just after Noon Bell, largely as we’d planned and to the palpable relief of many Callowan legionaries. I rode out with Razin and Archer for company, to a surprising chill under the afternoon sun. A cold wind was blowing in from the northeast, over the Jini Plateau. An hour got us to the half-road and from there we quickened the pace going southeast, until we came in distance of the Moule Hills and I was forced to call a halt. Not because three hours of marching had tired us out, but something entirely worse. On the steep northern slopes of those hills a fortified camp had been raised, wooden walls bristling with scorpions and catapults as six banners flew above them in the wind.
One for each of the five legions under Marshal Nim, one for the Tower.
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