Legate Mot bit into the thin slice of bread liberally slathered with butter and honey, chewed the too-soft morsel and refrained from grimacing. Showing anything but appreciation for the bounty of a new land would bring ill luck to the expedition, yet the dismal quality of the goods all but demanded it. The bread was empty of substance, too much starch and not enough fiber, the butter had been cut with crude low-quality fats and the honey was more sugar than not. Then some alchemist with barely any skill in their art had tried to cover for those deficiencies by artificially strengthening flavors while melding them together against more discerning palates.
It would have only worked on those who'd never tasted proper food but it mattered not. After more than a century of rising through the ranks, Mot could have chewed on brambles from the crags of Maveth with no change of expression. He instead bit into the second slice of bread, this one garnished with salt that had been whitewashed with chalk dust of all things, chewed, swallowed. Then he concluded the ceremony by burning both slices as offerings to the Builder of Towers.
As the satisfying smell of that mockery of sustenance reduced to ashes pervaded his appropriated chambers, he sank back into the couch dimly reminiscent of his bone and leather work seat back home. As best as he could tell, most of the couch was made of glue. The solid bits were fine sawdust glued together. Most of the fabrics were strange glues stretched out and woven together and much of the stuffing was a glue-like substance turned to foam. It all groaned under the weight of his five-cubit-tall frame. Like almost everything else around him it emanated ruin in his magical awareness, deliberately constructed to fall apart much earlier than it should have.
Those emanations had been what had first drawn his Lord's attention when he'd cast out his senses to the aether, looking for a suitable target for their gate spells; an entire civilization built upon the ruin of things. What arcane secrets would they discover? What advancements could they trade for? The magnitude of Mot's disappointment when he discovered they didn't have a lick of magic was beyond words. Instead of an advanced culture they could barter with, they had stumbled upon barbarians. No matter. If they could not be partners they could still be pawns.
Mot banished such distracting thoughts and turned his mind's eye upon his task. First dozens, then hundreds then thousands of distant views vied for his attention, his focus split again and again and again to manage them. He'd known mages powerful enough to level a town in one blow that couldn't handle the multiple perspectives required of officers of the Legions; like a Decanus could scry upon and command ten subordinates at once and a Centurion a hundred, Legates had to be capable of at least a thousand. Unlike simple communication tools or spells that anyone could get their hands on, Mot got a comprehensive understanding of the entire battlefield that those relying on maps and relayed information could not even imagine. He was there when an Iron Beak reduced yet another enemy scout to slag. He guided a century of skeleton archers to fire on distant targets they could not see. He saw one of the newest towers getting torn from its foundations.
Like all things, scrying was not perfect. Against the people of this land with their total lack of magic he might as well have been a god. Against those with magic of their own things were less clear. Mot had spent twenty years among the weather witches of the Bleak Peak to earn his mastery over the weather and it was that magic that brought him whispers through the wind of where his attention faltered unexpectedly, of where things happened before his mind's eye without him noticing. A subtle influence had spread like an invisible web throughout the city, distorting his perception and pushing plans off course. The investment and fortification of this small city into a proper foothold had fallen nearly a week behind and now he could wait no longer.
It had been a good, straightforward plan he and his Lord had come up with. Magic could come from any deliberate effort to produce magic, from any method and belief chosen over reality while a cost was paid. It was the kind of contradiction many couldn't understand and even more refused to accept, which could be exploited in war. Even if the enemy had magic of their own it wouldn't work through the same concepts, and the one who spread their concept more gained superiority. The Mage-Lords of Maveth had invented their own magical tradition with war in mind based on a deceptively simple notion; violence generated magic. With that concept forming the basis of their powers, every clash, every battle would make them stronger no matter who won or lost as long as the war still lasted. Mot's Lord had taken this one step further; against people without their own tradition if they made it obvious enough where the magic came from the locals would embrace the same concept, the same magic. And from there, converting them to their side or controlling them indirectly would be easy.
In retrospect treating the savages as stupid, however primitive they undoubtedly were, had been a mistake. They might not have magic, they might lack proper education, they might still use plumbing and fossil fuel, but they had brains and ideas of their own. One of those ideas had come close enough to Mavethan Sorcery to tap into the same energies Mot had deliberately cultivated throughout the city, yet was different enough in application to form a magical tradition of its own. Somehow, many locals both understood and believed in the idea of gaining powers through violence and believed it not to be real, while still making efforts towards specific results.
He could have stamped it out early on, would have if not for the interference of another mage of unknown origins. Now that it had spread to more than a few dozen initiates that ship had sailed; ideas were notoriously hard to root out both from the minds of people and the fabric of magic they imprinted upon. He would have to purge the adherents of this new tradition and soon, but for now he had another problem to deal with.
The locals' military had finally mobilized.
xxxx xxxx
Gargoyles were the preferred scouts of Mavethan armies. Winged statues of stone smaller than children and animated by magic, they could be conjured en masse by even Dark Mason initiates. Their toughness and small size made them hard to destroy with projectiles while their density allowed them to fly in even very bad natural weather. The latest versions had added wand enchantments for a fire bolt spell and tied it to the construct's rudimentary intelligence. Short ranged and relatively weak it could only harass weaker infantry units, but the effectiveness of an airborne fire-starter in raids could not be understated.
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As his hundredth scout was destroyed, Mot mused that he would have preferred an invisibility enhancement. Even without magic, the locals' weapons of fossil fuels and iron were effective against gargoyles up to a quarter league away. He finally resorted to hiding the small constructs in trees or on top of buildings to maintain clear line of sight to the coming army.
That the locals had thousands of armored vehicles of all types did not surprise him; if the civilians of the city had hundreds of thousands of their self-propelling chariots why wouldn't their military? What did surprise him was their scout teams being solely comprised of infantry. The fog he'd raised around the city with his weather magic had been invested with some properties of lead to block the cheapest and most common divination and communication spells. Unless the enemy had true scrying - unlikely, without magic - those scouts were vulnerable to being picked off one by one by heavy units. Oh well. It wasn't his business to tell the enemy how to do their job, only to get them to die for his Lord.
While the scouting operation was going on, the enemy was establishing dozens upon dozens of forward bases about half a league away from the edge of the fog, bases which served to bring in more and more supplies and troops through their aerial chariots with the horizontal propellers. It was like fighting the techno-barbarians of the Great Sea of Ice again, minus the magic. Not that these people were as disastrously arrogant as the Ferromancers always proved to be; their bases all sported proper, if flimsy walls and turrets of their metal-launching weaponry that could shoot down gargoyles from afar.
Back in the center of his fog-hidden city, Mot had his three Dark Masons finish the latest collection of barrows. Necromancy was a staple of Mavethan magic and countless centuries of folklore and tradition across the spheres had made it cheaper and easier to perform in darkness or underground. Barrows, echoing yet inverting the function of actual tombs, made the best compromise between cheapness, ease of construction and effectiveness when it came to rapidly producing lesser undead. With a hundred and fifty thousand dead locals plus another fifty thousand undead sent through the initial portals that had largely been destroyed since, there was a surplus of spirits to be drawn to the barrows. There Necromancy would clothe them in new bodies made from dust and air in reversal of entropy and death, then animate them by bridging the gap between spirit and false body.
Each barrow could produce a walking corpse in a few seconds and with twenty of them in working order Mot could have an army in a very short time. Many would scoff at the lowly walking corpse for its weakness and many limitations and necromancers of most cultures often tried for something better. Yet the cheapest, most expendable troops possible were the first choice of Mavethan commanders because they could be hurled at the enemy in droves where they would be violently slain... and that violence would generate power. Slightly more power in fact than it took to make each of the least undead, for the walking corpses would also be attempting violence on the enemy. The spirits would return to the barrows to be bound in dead flesh anew, before they could be used to harry the enemy and waste their resources while building up Mot's own.
The earth groaned under the weight of the dead as sixty thousand corpses walked out of the fog in a loose formation half a league wide and three hundred and sixty cubits deep. The locals' weapons barked and thundered, dead flesh was torn apart, explosions cratered the ground and threw them apart like rag dolls, constructs flew in their midst on jets of fire or fell from above and detonated, reaping hundreds at a time. In less than fifteen minutes the locals had won. Three hours later, they won again. Three hours after that came another victory, but for the first time the walking corpses came close enough to punch their bases' perimeter walls before being all destroyed. Another three hours saw a new horde coming as night fell and visibility was cut down. It took an hour to destroy all the walking dead that time, and the locals suffered the first casualties beyond mere lost scouts.
In the meantime, Mot had his Dark Masons build a second Lightning Tower then a third, while also raising proper, thirty-cubit-tall, three-cubit-thick iron walls in the inner city. Eventually, the enemy would have to advance in the area under Mot's control, or suffer endless waves of literally dirt-cheap attackers. Fortifying his position would make it harder for even larger armies to blitz his base, but Mot was no fool. He'd asked questions of the few locals converted to his side, questions that had revealed the locals' trump cards. It was another reason his Lord's plans had been delayed, but casting fire-immunity enchantments on anything important had been deemed necessary, much like against those Mavethan factions that employed proper fire-mages.
Hundreds of the enemy's aerial chariots rose in the air and his next night attack was cut down by explosions and rapid-fire weaponry before it could reach the enemy forward bases. With the walking dead unable to engage in violence, the net gain in power was negligible. It would have been a stalemate, even a dangerous delay against another magic-using foe, but since the locals had to expend resources to fight, they would eventually run out. Or at least this one army did; a bit over a hundred thousand men could not be the entirety of their forces. Not even close. No, he'd give them an incentive to keep the battle going.
Back in the center of the city, an ominous hum and crackle emanated from the tallest remaining building. Blue energy discharges cascaded across the length of a metal cylinder sixty cubits tall and in mere seconds a bolt of lightning tore through the skies. It traveled in almost a straight line for league after league in total disregard of natural law and finally struck one of the flying chariots, blowing it up in mid-air. By the count of six, while the enemy had only started to respond, a second thundering lightning bolt struck down another of their machines. Then another and another no matter how they dodged and swerved. Five minutes later, a good portion of the enemy aerial fleet had been reduced to burning slag, with the majority of the machines retreating beyond the tower's range.
The Legate lamented he did not have one of the proper Storm Towers of his Lord's stronghold. Not only could those much larger, much more robust versions launch a lightning bolt every heartbeat, but they could guide it to strike targets up to twelve leagues away, not the mere five his construction could manage. Still, the enemy forward bases were seeing activity like kicked anthills, thousands of troops moving erratically as their leaders reacted to this new capability he had revealed. He did not allow the tower to cut loose on ground forces; this capability he was saving for later, when the real battle came to pass.
Let the enemy believe themselves safe on the ground. When the time came he would not have one lightning tower but three, and they would be too deep within their envelope to retreat.