“It’s good to see you again.”
Ilya nodded her head, clasping hands with Hawkwood. She had wondered where White Company’s leader and its remnants had gone. The last she saw of him, he had been playing attendant to Prince Cedric. A fairly concerning position given the Prince’s reputation. When he dropped off the face of the world, Arkk had feared the worst. It was nice to know that fear was entirely unfounded.
“You as well,” Ilya said. “Shame Arkk isn’t here. He would have been relieved to know you’re alright.”
Hawkwood’s neatly trimmed mustache twitched. He looked much better than he had around the time of Elmshadow’s assault. Like he had actually managed to get some rest in the last few weeks. Thinner, probably from the constant marching and war rations, he still managed to jiggle his stomach as he chuckled. “You thought something happened to me? I can’t die yet. Too much work on my desk.”
“It’s just that, with the Prince, we weren’t sure…”
“Ah. I understand,” Hawkwood said, frowning as he rubbed at his chin. “To be honest, I’m not sure what I think of Cedric. At times, he acts the ruthless man his reputation portrays him as. Five minutes later, he offers a more gentle hand, caring for his men and his country. Regardless of his current mood, I don’t believe he would be one to throw away subjects both loyal and useful as White Company are.”
Ilya pressed her lips together, wondering if that demon of his took on even Cedric’s guise on occasion. It would explain the discrepancies in his actions. Or he was ill in the head. The latter had empirical evidence. No one with their head on straight would consider summoning a demon, let alone go through with it. Even Vezta, a monster whose thoughts didn’t align with those of anyone normal, found the very prospect loathsome.
Rather than voice her thoughts on the Prince, Ilya let the subject change. It wasn’t productive at the moment to start whining about the bastard.
“So you’re leading the charge into Evestani?” Hawkwood asked, cocking an eyebrow. “A Swiftwing reported that we would have allies, but I never expected you to be our reinforcements. This isn’t the same tower that retook Elmshadow, is it?”
Hawkwood took a step back, turning his head back and forth as he looked around the main entryway which was currently flat against the ground for ease of access. His logistic personnel rushed back and forth, carrying boxes and supplies inside around him. The soldiers marched inside in twin single-file lines, taking stairways up to the barracks levels. It was obviously not the same tower. The walls were far more shadowy than brick-like, the architecture was more akin to a church—especially one of those temples in the Underworld—and it was far, far smaller. Still huge for a giant walking building, but not that big relative to Arkk’s tower.
“We built another one.”
“The fact that you can build more than one is… alarming. Didn’t Arkk say it required a rare magical artifact? The kind that simply couldn’t be found anymore.”
“We found one more.”
“If you’ve found two of these relics in such a short amount of time, I imagine you have a third somewhere else. Perhaps more?”
They hadn’t. Not unless Arkk was keeping something else from her. Ilya didn’t think he would do so. Not after he had come clean about his undead army. But with so many moving parts within Company Al-Mir, it was possible that he had simply forgotten to mention something like that. Either way, “I don’t think I’m at liberty to say.”
With a knowing nod, Hawkwood smiled. “Of course not. I’d expect nothing else. And if our invasion of Evestani goes as smoothly as the retaking of Elmshadow because of this tower, I shan’t complain.”
Ilya wasn’t sure that retaking Elmshadow had been smooth. Plenty of people perished, including a significant fraction of White Company. But, she supposed that compared to a more conventional battle, it likely felt smooth. “We won’t have any of the specialists,” Ilya said. “No dragonoids, inquisitors, or purifiers. On the plus side, we aren’t likely to have to face anything like that either. I imagine Evestani’s avatar is a bit preoccupied at the moment. Near as we can tell, the Eternal Empire is also focusing the entirety of their forces on Arkk.”
A long moment of thought-filled silence passed. Hawkwood’s expression shifted from pleased at hearing that to a dour frown. “Two full armies plus that avatar?”
“Before you suggest we turn around to help him, we are helping him.” Ilya turned to the entrance of her tower, knowing exactly how many men were still meandering outside while waiting for the queues to move. They were almost loaded up. “As soon as everyone is inside, we’re setting out.
“Today is the day Evestani falls.”
----------------------------------------
Whatever else happened, the Eternal Empire’s airship backed off. That was an opportunity that Arkk couldn’t ignore. Before he even got to his feet, the tower was moving once again.
He had not been idle during the delay. Weathering the bombardment gave his lesser servants time to burrow ahead, digging long and narrow tunnels poised to receive the legs of the tower. It would let them move rapidly, much as they had when first marching out of Elmshadow, at least for a short distance. It wouldn’t be as fast as if they had marched unimpeded, but it would let them make up a little lost time.
They had to be ready. The airship could begin bombardment again at any moment.
At this point, Arkk had no clue where the deserters had ended up. There were only three real possibilities. Either they had fled and deserted for real, they had gotten lost somewhere in the forests and Arkk had passed them, or that airship had spotted them earlier and already wiped them off the face of the planet. Whatever the case, they were nothing more than figurants in the conflict going forward.
Arkk hoped they survived if only to keep the Prince off his back. Otherwise, he couldn’t care less.
The engagement had begun. Whether or not he found them, he could only follow through in ending this.
“Coming up on our opponent’s reinforcements,” Rekk’ar said.
Arkk peered out the window, using his one remaining hand to hold up a spyglass. His left eye didn’t have the dark line through it that his right eye did, but he still brought the spyglass to his right eye before having to correct himself. His vision wasn’t perfect, even in his left eye, but it was good enough to see.
The reinforcements weren’t more flying ships. Nor were they the whale ships. Of the latter, the one that had taken to the skies was still unaccounted for while Lexa was ensuring one other couldn’t take off. Best he knew, the third was still grounded, though Arkk doubted it would remain so for long after what happened to the second.
No, the reinforcements were down below. Where Evestani had erected their barricades and began reinforcing Woodly Rhyme, the Eternal Empire’s army marched forward. It wasn’t their full reserves. Roughly a hundred score of their black and white armored soldiers stood in a wide field. The ordered rows and columns held fast with no sign of panic or chaos. Each step of the tower sent a jolt through them, but not one turned and fled.
Arkk wasn’t sure of the wisdom of splitting their army. Both inter-army divisions between Evestani and the Eternal Empire as well as the latter sending only two thousand to meet with him. They certainly had some kind of plan. Arkk almost hoped they did, or else the tower would crush them underfoot as easily as it crushed the trees.
The soldiers were alone down there. No trebuchets or siege engines. He didn’t even see any sign of magic among them, both in terms of rituals and battlecasters.
“Spot anything?” Arkk called out, turning to move backward.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
A flat-clawed hand thumping against his chest stopped him with more force than he expected. “Stop moving,” Hale grumbled as she worked his flesh with her favorite spell. She was in the process of regrowing his arm. Already, he could see scales forming around his shoulder, roughly similar to those of Priscilla and Hale.
It itched.
“Sorry,” he muttered as the scrying team responded.
“No heavy weaponry or glowing tents,” Luthor called back, confirming what Arkk saw through his hazy eyes. “Just a bunch of soldiers. Most carry longswords.”
“Enemy airship maintaining their increased distance,” Drek said right after. “Looks like they put the fires out. I’d expect them to move forward again.”
Arkk flinched. “Not what I want to hear.”
“Thought you ought to know anyway.”
He had a point, but Arkk wasn’t sure what he would or could do if that thing started attacking again. He had just about killed himself the first time around. Zullie, Savren, and the rest of the research team were working full-tilt on some kind of extreme-range solution for him but he didn’t know when or even if that would bear results. He could try to hit it with a lightning bolt again. Maybe with a few more precautions.
He had a feeling Rekk’ar might not let him. The orc’s eyes kept drifting over to Arkk whenever he thought Arkk was occupied with something else. It was a little touching, if Arkk were being honest. There was genuine concern in Rekk’ar’s constant glances. Knowing Rekkar, the concern in his eyes was probably more for his own sake than for Arkk’s, not wanting the one in command of the tower to pass out and leave everyone stranded, but it was still touching.
Rekk’ar didn’t have anything to worry about. Arkk knew he had been injured. He could see the lack of an arm clear as day. It didn’t hurt. Not even a little. Even jostling his shoulder only felt strange in that he was expecting a familiar weight there. Hale had done good work numbing him.
Except for the itch as new muscle and sinew spread out beneath her fingertips.
Under lighter circumstances, Arkk would probably have been freaking out about now. He had lost an arm! But, at the same time, he was cognizant that it wasn’t the debilitating injury it should have been. Not with Hale. He had almost turned her down, thinking he could always go to Agnete. Even before visiting the Anvil, Agnete had built a set of mechanical legs for Katt’am that worked well enough. But Agnete was busy and Hale wasn’t. Arkk was nothing if not practical.
He could always chop it off again if he decided to go the machine route. And wasn’t that a strange thought to float through his mind.
Even outside of knowing he could replace the arm, there was something else suppressing the panic. His arm just felt too… small to care about. It was a strange thing to think, given that his arm was practically a fifth of him, but the feeling remained. An arm was just an arm. It wasn’t like he lost his Heart.
“I don’t like this.”
It was Arkk’s turn to look to Rekk’ar. The orc glared through the small hole in the window, staring down at the army assembled ahead of them.
“Something bad is going to happen. I’d be browning my pants if I was ordered to face down this fortress with nothing but a sword and shield. They ain’t even flinching.”
“Could they carry enchanted weapons that they think will cut the reinforced stone?”
“And what?” Rekk’ar said, turning on Arkk. “Hope to bring down the tower by nicking the legs? Even if their swords could cut stone like a knife in a bucket of lard, only the most delusional would think they stood a chance at harming the tower before it stomped on them.”
“Maybe they think they can rush the doors and get inside before the legs—”
“Large-scale magic array!” Drek interrupted with an alarmed shout. “Dead ahead!”
The legs of the tower slammed down, stopping its forward momentum instantly. Glowing white lines surged through the forest between Arkk and the army, forming a massive ring with several crisscrossing lines. Arkk recognized some parts of it instantly. An entrapment array. There were some added bells and whistles that he didn’t understand, but its main purpose was to keep whatever was inside from moving.
Whatever was inclusive of the two tower legs that were stuck inside.
“They’re holding us in place,” Arkk said, pulling up the spyglass again. The army wasn’t standing still any longer. They were advancing. If they stepped on the ritual circle, they would become trapped as well… but of course, the army setting up the trap would have some countermeasures.
“You might have been right about them rushing the doors,” Rekk’ar grumbled. “We fight them out there?”
Arkk shook his head. “I have full battlefield control within the tower. Not enough land claimed outside it to be effective. It also funnels their army into tight corridors, taking away their number advantage.”
“They would know that. They must have a plan.”
“Well, you think on that. My plan is to get us unstuck as soon as possible. I’m having the lesser servants eat their way up to the surface to try to disrupt the ritual. And…”
Arkk dropped a yellow marble into the slot down in the bombardment team’s chamber. In less than thirty seconds, a rain of colorful fire cascaded down on the ritual array. Boulders fell from the sky. A dark cloud welled up, lazily wafting around the tower’s highest point. Black rainfall started, first as a drip, as if it were water wrung from a filthy rag. It quickly accelerated, becoming a monsoon of black. Trees withered and dried out, the grass and bushes of the forest below first turned an unhealthy yellow, then dried out to a crispy brown, before finally turning to black necrotic plants, dead in every way that mattered.
The Eternal Empire didn’t care. They marched forward. An acid-yellow flame hit the ground ahead of one of their units, but the soldiers marched through. The caustic fire licked their armor but did nothing more. The black rain just made their armor glisten, doing nothing to stop them. Only the house-sized boulder crashing down did any damage. For all Arkk knew, the soldiers it hit were still alive, just pinned underneath.
It was like an entire army outfitted with that golden knight’s armor.
The shadow scythes could stop it. The magic in those dark blades ruined whatever enchantments had been on that armor. They cut through with some resistance, but easily compared to anything else they had tried.
Arkk idly wondered who had copied who. Had the Eternal Empire captured some of that golden armor? Or the other way around? If the Empire outfitted all their soldiers with indestructible armor, it certainly lent credence to Rekk’ar’s report of them never losing battles back in their homeland.
“An army that doesn’t know defeat,” Arkk mumbled to himself as he lowered his spyglass. “Guess I’ll have to deliver their first. Rekk’ar, I’m moving you to the orc barracks. Inform them of the goings-on. Organize a defense at positions six, eight, ten, and fourteen. You have command. Tell them, Dakka especially, that the enemy equipment may act like that golden knight’s armor. She’ll best know how to explain it to everyone else.”
“You don’t think you’ll stop them from reaching the tower?”
“I’ll certainly try. But, as we expected, they had a plan. Best to prepare for the conclusion of that plan.”
Rekk’ar grunted, nodding his head. He was gone before he could finish.
Arkk stayed where he was, narrowing his eyes. He found himself trying to blink away the dark streak that ran through the right side of his vision. Useless. “Alert me immediately if anything about the situation changes,” he said, looking to the scrying team. With no further preamble, he teleported to the bombardment team.
He grimaced at the slight flare of pain once outside Hale’s presence, but the activity in the ritual room provided a distraction.
“—ignoring everything—”
“Focus the forward groups!”
“Can’t maintain circle three any longer. Necrotizing rainclouds dissipating. Replacement glowstones required.”
“Focus on disruption, not destruction!” Lelith barked. “More boulders. Quit with the flames. They’re useless.”
“Circle four deactivated. Circle one already instantiating boulders as rapidly as possible.”
“Would the siege shield stop them?”
“With how they’re ignoring everything else? Doubt it.”
The entire room was in such chaos that nobody noticed his arrival. Igvile, Bertram, Lelith, and Kassa rushed around the room. Lelith reconfigured rituals, rapidly altering their targets, while the others hurried around activating them. Igvile kept up with the regular status reports and Bertram seemed in charge of the glowstones. Their movements meshed together perfectly even as they argued over possible solutions to the enemy army.
“Circle thirteen prepared. Circle seven deactivated.”
Arkk found he had little to add to the situation. His suggestion would have been to add more boulders to the lineup, given that the boulders were the only thing he had seen that had worked. But his team was more than capable of coming to that conclusion on their own.
“Activating the—”
Arkk teleported away, reappearing in his research team’s library. They were engaged in a flurry of activity as well, running about. Zullie called out for notes from passages to be read aloud while Savren and Morvin rapidly exchanged papers between them. Unlike the bombardment team, they noticed his arrival. Zullie first, then Gretchen, then the others.
Zullie grimaced. “You aren’t here to change our project again, are you? We’ve switched focus three times today alone. Nothing will get done if you keep doing that.”
The exasperation on everyone’s faces at the prospect of another shift in their priorities was evident beyond Zullie’s voiced annoyance. Arkk looked around with a small frown. “No,” he said, leading to a collective sigh of relief filling the room. “Everyone continue as you were. I just have one question for Zullie. The project you called the Maze of Infinite Paths—”
“I believe your orders were to never bring that one up again.”
Arkk forced a smile. “The fun thing about being the boss is that I can change my orders whenever I wish. In this case, I’d like to deploy a small instance of the project directly ahead of the tower. Preferably in the next… three minutes, maximum.”
“Three minutes?” Zullie balked. “I’m all for breaking the rules of reality, but in…” Pausing, she frowned to herself. “How small of an instance?”
“Let’s say the size of one of the fortress legs.”
Zullie clicked her tongue three times inside her mouth before turning. “Gretchen, fetch me the book on the third shelf—No, not that one, the one you have to reach outside the library to grab.” Adjusting the rectangular glasses over her nose, Zullie turned back while Gretchen hesitated, wiggling her fingers in nervousness as she stared at a small black void on one of the bookshelves. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” the witch said with uncharacteristic concern in her tone.
“Me too… Me too.”