29. In the Shadow of Death
In the Shadow of Death
The dead army outnumbered us easily twenty-to-one, and probably more, given the number of dead animals.
Had those actually been trained soldiers and war-beasts—or even armed and mounted civilians—we would have been slaughtered, Alluin or no Alluin.
Luckily, though, the blood mage either didn’t understand combat or was unable to perform that level of fine control of the reanimated corpses.
The dead were relentless and tireless, but they were also unarmored and had no finesse.
If they dragged you under, you were fucked, but we weren’t all immediately going to die.
If it had only been the single dead in a slouching horde, we would have held our own with ease.
We would still have needed to conduct a fighting retreat, given the sheer mass of our enemy, but it would have been a simple enough task to butcher and burn the bodies.
The trouble came from the blood-magic constructs.
Standing between fifteen to thirty feet tall, made of bodies of people and animals alike spliced into horrific wholes, the constructs were lumbering, terrible things.
Unlike the single bodies, which could be butchered using swords and axes, the limbs of the constructs were thick, meaty pillars wrapped around wood and stone.
Some had been built around entire trees, the branches jutting through rotting carcasses and laden with crows and ravens who cawed their delight.
Others appeared to be made entirely of bodies, their misshapen forms slumping with every ponderous step.
They were slow, but they couldn’t be meaningfully damaged by our weapons.
If they hit you, you were either killed or tossed aside.
Some of them—the most horrible of them—had forward limbs covered in hanging arms, and would cling onto anyone and anything they struck, crushing and smothering their prey.
Any dead thing they stepped on became incorporated into them. They left trails of rotting ooze, and they didn’t stop coming.
The Third Battalion took the field in the dark of night.
We moved into the front in a pincer movement, letting the beleaguered vanguard retreat down the flat central path we’d cleared for them.
Our battlefield was lit by the gibbous moon and by fire.
Archers in the rear lofted fire-arrows over our heads, burying them in constructs so that the battlefire soaked into their tips peppered the monstrous things with hundreds of oil-lamps.
The acrid scent of burned flesh and woodsmoke couldn’t cover up the sickly-sweet smell of rot.
The evenings were cool in the spring, but the days were not, and the tens of thousands of days-old corpses reeked of death and decay.
Some were swollen and bloated. Some had split, their guts held in only by their clothing.
Whatever unclean magic moved them didn’t preserve them.
It merely animated them, making dead muscles twitch and dead flesh writhe.
An eerie lack of voices reigned over the battlefield, but it wasn't silent.
The sounds were far worse than silence. Joints popped and snapped as limbs fought the grip of rigor mortis.
Feet tramped, a dull, endless vibration as a city of dead moved towards us.
The lumbering constructs creaked and squelched.
At the front lines, the heavy thunk and wet slurps of weapons going into and out of unprotected bodies turned the night into a nightmare, as if we were some great mouth chewing up corpses.
Above us all, carrion-birds flapped and cawed, rejoicing over their good fortune. Flies and carrion-beetles hummed and buzzed, landing on the living to lap up sweat and nibble at eyes. I even heard the calls of scavengers—those with more lenient definitions of meat.
As much as I hated the feel of flies on my face or the cacophony of the crows, I didn’t begrudge them the battlefield. When the enemy was already dead, every bite eaten by every maggot and crow was an act of alliance.
We funneled the army through the gap in the cliffs and set off the black powder.
Walls of stone collapsed down on the front lines of the dead army to cheers from our soldiers, but unlike living foes, there was no will to break.
The dead were already dead. They wouldn’t turn and run.
The rest of them just kept coming, plodding and crawling and climbing across rough stone, ignoring the terrain. They didn’t get tired, after all.
And so we retreated, endlessly. There was no victory, only winnowing; cutting down the front lines of the enemy like a butcher carving slices of meat off a haunch.
Though I was a powerful fighter, I didn’t try to extend myself, rotating with the rest of the fae soldiers in half-hour shifts.
As difficult as it was to leave the battlefield when I felt fine, I knew this was an endurance fight, not a single melee.
We were going to be dueling the dead until at least moonrise tomorrow, when Dain could tackle the constructs with the full moon’s power behind him—but unless we got lucky, we were going to be fighting for days without rest.
The moon set. We fought by firelight and by glowing orbs of light that the glamor-mages in the Armies cast as we retreated.
The merciless blue-white light revealed the dead in all their horror: burned skin, missing eyes, oozing wounds crawling with flies and maggots.
More than one man lost his supper in the face of the stench and the sight of the enemy.
I didn’t, but only because I’d seen worse. Phazikai had only been the last of the slaughter of the Annihilation War. I’d walked battlefields covered in the rotting dead and I’d buried the mangled bodies of children. This latest horror was only the most recent for the fae on the field.
The sun rose. I lost two men to the footfall of a construct, and nearly lost the rest of the squad when the hateful thing tripped and fell, spraying its component bodies across the battlefield.
Only Dain’s intervention, flinging himself into the fray and neutralizing the blood-magic of an entire limb of the thing, kept the interaction from being a slaughter—and we were damn lucky that he’d been there to do so.
Not every squad that came in contact with a construct met the same fate.
I got eyes on Alluin around mid-morning, while he and Dain were discussing strategy.
I didn’t get the chance to talk to either of them, but at least that brief sight let me know that they were still doing well.
Alluin was where he belonged, rear of the fighting, and Dain had a grim eagerness about him as the full moon’s rising approached.
My prince was all but unstoppable with the force of the moon behind him.
I was looking forward to seeing him cut loose.
The moon rose again in the early afternoon, and Dain took to the field.
There was nothing else in the world like my prince.
In the light of the full moon, he stood on all fours—ten feet at the shoulder and built like an armored wolf, but with the taloned feet of a dragon, powerful twin tails, and his scythe-like secondary arms. We fell back for him and he hit the front lines of the dead army with the force of a trebuchet stone striking a castle tower.
Glamor arced in front of him, vicious blades followed by walls of force, intended to reduce walking corpses to legs and torsos.
Behind him, ice crackled, frost blooming on the ground before climbing up into a latticework.
In moments, a thick wall of ice grew, following Dain’s path as he plowed through the front of the army, cutting it off from us.
Ragged cheers rose from the army, matched with howls from the throats of the fae who’d fought with Dain before.
I fell back with my unit, stunned, familiar enough with Dain’s glamor to know that he hadn’t made an image of a wall.
That was an actual wall of ice, not one that could be broken with iron.
I’d never seen him do something like that before. He must have learned in Phazikai.
He wasn’t a curse-child. He wasn’t some echo of a god’s touch or a child overwhelmed by a god’s power. Dain could be nothing but Faerqen’s blooded son, a demi-god sired by the deity who ruled over glamor, winter, and death.
Gods, I was fucking glad he was on our side.
Dain’s attack and ice wall didn’t exactly let the army rest, but it gave us a reprieve.
There were few enough dead on our side of the wall that we mopped them up within an hour, and the chunks of quivering flesh that remained couldn’t move quickly enough to pose a threat.
Even when one of the constructs broke through the wall and enough of the dead piled up against it that they started falling over the top, we didn’t have to retreat, swapping fresher units to the front and giving the fae among us as much of a rest as we could.
I considered finding Alluin, squashed the idea as being entirely self-centered when he needed the time to plan our retreat, and ended up perched on a rock morosely, nursing a mug of over-steeped, over-leafed black tea as I watched Dain tackle one of the constructs.
He leaped on top of the damn thing, tucking his hind feet up to protect his unarmored belly, then buried his jaws in the back of it and hooked his wing-arms up underneath to gut it.
I recognized the move. He’d used a much less refined version to turn my settee into smithereens.
“That’s my boy,” I whispered, lifting my tea in a distant salute.
The ice wall fell a little over four hours after its creation, broken by constructs and the pounding of bodies wielding crude clubs.
The army started retreating again as evening fell, driven by our relentless foe, a grim sort of determination settling over us as moonlight and flame lit our battlefield.
Many of the constructs had fallen, but hardly all, and Dain couldn’t be everywhere at once.
Even with glamor and ice, even with the tirelessness and speed he had under the full moon, he could only control so much of the battlefield.
Constructs fell and rose again, but smaller and weaker, or built haphazardly. Dain froze and shattered bodies, and they stayed frozen and unmoving. On the front lines, severely damaged bodies stopped moving, their animation cut off as their ability to make forward progress grew limited.
Dain was burning through the blood-mage’s power, but not fast enough.
Given the magical strength and control of our enemy, I couldn’t believe it was anyone but his mother.
The blood shed by the death of a city had to have granted her an enormous amount of magical strength, but once it ran out, the dead would fall and there would be no army.
Nephinae Ronelis—for she was only herself while Dain reigned as Regent, even if the power of the Court still fell first to her—needed to shepherd her strength and her life-force if she intended to reach the Antlered Palace.
Hour by hour, it became more obvious that Dain wasn’t her primary target.
She might have been able to overwhelm him if the entire army had swarmed onto him, crushing him by sheer mass, but Nephinae didn’t even seem to want to waste energy fighting her son.
She hindered him, harried him, and moved relentlessly forward.
If we’d gotten out of her way, no one would have died—not until she reached the palace to conduct whatever horrors she had planned, at least. The dead army had no scouts and no reserves waiting in the wings.
When we sent our most grievously wounded to the rear to be evacuated by wagon and cart, nothing followed them but scavengers.
We were merely an obstacle to overcome, and she would have been pleased to let us flee.
We didn’t flee. We fought as the moon crossed the sky and as the sun rose again. We were soldiers, and this was our home. I would defend the Antlered Palace until my last breath.
Dain didn’t shift back to two feet. I wasn’t sure he could.
He tackled the constructs, over and over, fighting without reprieve, so much more physically capable than even the mortals on the field.
Unlike him, I was exhausted, but the stimulants and painkillers kept me awake and in top form.
I could feel it lurking beneath the vivid buzz of the cocktail of drugs, though, an endless lassitude that wanted to drag me down.
When this was over, I thought, I was going to drop like a shot dove.