Silenos’ position had changed, for the better in some ways, for the worse in others. He was not ignorant as to the tenuous position in which he, and the city, now resided.
Among his advantages was the fact that he had apparently earned some measure of respect and trust through his stratagem and magical aid during the last attack. To his disadvantage was the fact that their enemy would be moving to consolidate with other armies in the region, that the city’s defenders had been either killed or wounded in multitudes, that much of their defences had been weakened by bombardment, and that he had now caught the direct focus of this Dark Lord onto the city itself. There were limits, Silenos knew, even to what a Senior of House Shaiagrazni could achieve, and he could sense himself approaching them.
His options, however, were numerous.
Numerous insofar as a pair was numerous, at least. He could flee or stay. Fleeing would guarantee Silenos’ safety, but doom the city. In doing so it would cost him a powerful potential ally in claiming this world for House Shaiagrazni, and would have few benefits save, he supposed, free time. Silenos was confident he could flee from a city falling just as easy as a city awaiting attack.
Which made the decision clear, he would stand with the defence and do whatever he could to make it successful, abandoning it only if his options seemed limited.
Silenos spent the better part of a week acting to add whatever strength he could to the city’s martial prowess. He used fleshcrafting to heal those who he could without exhausting himself, subtly improving their bodies as he restored them for greater strength and speed. The city’s waterways, he decided, had held before, and so he did not do anything drastic that might have cut off its supply of drink. The walls were by far his greatest concern.
Trebuchets, the most advanced weapon utilised by this savage world, were pitiful by comparison to the cannons used in Silenos’ own land. Nonetheless, so too were these people’s fortifications. The walls had been damaged by artillery fire, and scaled quickly before siege engines even before that. So Silenos turned his focus to rectifying that vulnerability above all others.
It was not long before the horizon grew dark once more with approaching enemy forces, and the city’s triumph melted back into fear. Even Silenos felt a stab of apprehension, for they saw instantly how much larger the new mass was than the last.
There had been three armies within the general region around the city, Silenos had crippled much of one. The remaining two, he now saw, had merged with its remnants. Clearly this Dark Lord had at least enough intelligence to recognise the threat he posed, for the marching bodies drawing towards him numbered in the hundreds of thousands, at least.
He could feel the worry running through his own forces, an uncharacteristically logical response from them. His bag of tricks was running empty.
Many of the corpses in the city had been excavated and destroyed before his arrival, in some attempt by the people to prevent the Dark Lord from reanimating them and adding to his armies should he have taken it. Perhaps it was not such an unwise decision, but given the circumstances, it foiled much of what he might have done to protect them.
His Grotesquery was intact, at least. Silenos tweaked it as the army neared, rethreading its body, maintaining its flesh. Most undead could not regenerate by themselves, though the ability to create such advanced reanimates was hardly uncommon in House Shaiagrazni, even still, Silenos opted to add a personal touch. The construct alone made up a considerable fraction of their martial power, had he been able to craft three or four more, there would have been no fear of defeat.
Men took to the walls, and siege engines began their bombardments as the enemy armies closed in. Formations of rotting zombies and withered skeletons flew apart upon the impact of trebuchets, each one obliterating one body in its entirety, then scattering several more around it. The undead were unimpeded, simply marching on past their own devastation, acknowledging it as the triviality it was.
Nearer, nearer, nearer still they came. Returning fire with their own engines, and pushing forth others. Siege towers, Silenos recognised them as, great constructs of wood and iron made to allow for easy, covered climbing onto the walls. A single cannon would have reduced one to so much kindling, and yet the shoddy hulls of lumber proved stubborn against mere trebuchet fire.
The enemy was soon close enough for bowmen and crossbowmen to begin peppering them with arrows, utilising curious, blunt-tipped projectiles fired by over-drawn bows. It was a logical innovation, undead did not care much for skewered organs or ruptured arteries, by far the most reliable way to stop them was breaking their bones. And yet they came on regardless, inexorable march simply absorbing those casualties lost to cracked skulls and mangled limbs. Those undead with broken legs dragged them behind, those with destroyed craniums fell and moved no more, but not one lost its animacy.
Silenos found a flicker of something at his heart, then. Something that might, before his years of conditioning and ascension, have been accurately described as fear. He crushed it like a maggot underfoot, surveying the destruction.
He had no doubt that less than a twentieth of the enemy would actually fall or be injured before leaving the walls, which meant the battle would be decided on how quickly those walls held. The siege engines were priority one.
His magic built, a snarling, flowing river of power in his fingers, hotter than magma, thicker than steel, deadlier than any force the primitives around him could muster with their technologies.
Never one to specialise himself for battle, Silenos nevertheless had more than a few tricks up his sleeve to prepare for such things. He called on his Necromantic might, breaching that veil between life and death, running mental fingers through it and feeling the slide of souls against them. Silenos ignored them. He wasn’t looking for wisps of deceased humanity now, he had no flesh with which to use them, instead he wanted the substance they lived in.
The Abyss, made of Shadestuff. Unimaginative though the names were, they referred to magics older and more powerful than any individual within House Shaiagrazni. Silenos drew on them, readying a globule of the viscous fluid-like magic as he pulled it into reality.
Shadestuff was blacker than black and deadlier than death, held carefully from his skin by a lifetime of practiced caution. Taking a moment to get his aim, Silenos propelled it at one of the siege towers.
He had experimented with acid, once, to see the strongest varieties and their effects on living matter. The most corrosive solution had been able to strip a finger down to bone in mere moments. The shadestuff would have left that bone a swirling mist of carbon within the same timeframe.
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It crashed against the tower, melting and obliterating wood so quickly there was no time for the effects of inertia and surface tension to be seen. Whatever it hit simply stopped existing before it could even be sapped of speed, projectile tunnelling clean through the structure, then falling to snatch away the bodies of a marching undead rank behind it.
Silenos had already prepared another globule of shadestuff, following the first up and obliterating a second hole out of the siege tower. Two, it appeared, was more than the structure could withstand, and its lessened integrity finally surrendered to the assaults of gravity. It collapsed, raining tonnes of wood down upon the undead that continued mindlessly pushing it, even as their work was made pointless.
He barely acknowledged the sight, instead hurling yet more shadestuff. Another tower fell, then another, and soon the enemy had no siege engines left at all. Silenos turned his focus on their ranks instead, feeding undead to the abyss by the dozen. He hurled down pools of the inky void to swallow them as they marched through, concentrated it into a slick, oil-thin stream and hosed entire formations out of existence. Destroyed hundreds, thousands. It was a droplet in the enemy’s ocean of bodies.
The concept of morale did not truly apply to an army of the dead, their psychologies, if the primitive magics that directed their locomotive forces could even be described as such, simply failed to register the necessary sensations. Fear, self-preservation, panic, confusion. All were irrelevancies. It was why petty Necromancers had ever been such a thorn in the world’s side, even a near-total absence of skill could conjure a force that was unrelenting in the truest form. And if an army did not relent, then half the principals and stratagems of war humanity had ever devised were rendered useless.
Siege engines ripped jagged holes in their ranks, bowfire left them twitching and spasming in the dirt, pikes skewered limbs and severed tendons as they shambled up ladders. Some undead even climbed the walls simply by gripping the stone, most falling, but those who made it managing to attack the enemy in the least expected places and further disrupt their defence.
When victory came, it would be upon a mound of ruined reanimates feet deep. But there was no doubting which side would win. Twenty minutes had passed, and Silenos’ enhanced cognition counted more than nine tenths of the enemy still active. A decimation, but not a devastation.
The enemy did not experience anything that could be called morale, but undead still required direction. Without a guiding force of higher intelligence they would, at best, continue mindlessly attacking without use of the siege engines allowing them a foothold. Silenos peered through the army to locate his target.
Years ago he’d made his deal to gain the eyes that let him perceive magic as lesser men did light, and he put them to good use in finding his enemy for a beheading strike. It was the familiar glow of power he’d seen surrounding the Belladonnan Puppeteer, which told him he’d be contesting either the same individual, or the same order of being.
Silenos gathered himself, and took flight from the castle walls. His back exploded into leather wings of twisted muscle fibre, beating at the air as exothermic chemistry vented pressurised, burning gas from vents crafted into his flanks. The propulsion was as great as Silenos was yet manage to engineer, carrying him across the world in moments. He flew over the heads of shambling hordes beneath, arcing straight for the undead’s General.
And he changed his body as he did.
Limpet teeth were formed of a keratin-based compound boasting strength an order of magnitude beyond that of steel, and retaining it regardless of size. Silenos had studied the creatures to mimic the atomic structure that permitted them such properties, and he now wove it into thick armoured plates across his body. Beneath that his skin and flesh changed too, made to a composition similar to that of hair, its shear and tensile yields growing to almost rival cast bronze.
His muscles swelled and rethreaded themselves into tightly woven bundles, ready to elongate or compress by many times their original dimensions, his nerves were reforged as dendrites thickened and myosin sheathes extended across their faces. Skeletal matter was broken down into constituent particles and recombined to be replaced with a boron carbide frame, and a hundred other parts of him were changed, improved, ascended.
When Silenos landed, he was a thing of terror and genius. The dirt compressed underfoot as his taloned feet came down, body bloated and expanded to a height of nine feet and a breadth of three men by his work. Jagged edges of nacre glinted prismatically upon the ends of Silenos’ arm, forming a great lance, and the world seemed to move at a fraction of its usual haste as sensory information ran along nervous tissue with speed to leave even sound behind.
The Beladdonnan Puppeteer, of course, was the slower of them. Not moving in time to keep his thrust from striking entirely, only turning what would have ran its cranium through into a mere shoulder-stab. The thing’s body was sent spiralling backwards, head over heels, and Silenos gave chase. His left arm was equipped with a keratinous mass shaped to a shield able to withstand cannon fire, and he rose it in time to block the jet of shadestuff thrown at him by his tumbling enemy. Still, he felt the organic barrier begin to wither and erode at contact. Few things could withstand such Necromantic power even for that long, blocking would not be a sustainable strategy.
Undead congealed out of the ground, surging high like overpressure from a landmine, and Silenos turned his shield to warding off their own strikes next. They were higher grade than the majority attacking, higher even than the Dullahan, he knew. Lesser Reapers and Dreamsnatchers, things of compact frame, dense magic and deadly, glinting-black blades. Shadestuff trailed from their attacks, scratching at his form, and he found himself backing away.
Flames lit the area like a bonfire just moments before the Belladonnon Puppeteers’ fireball impacted him. Silenos felt keratin expand and crack, compacted hydrogen absorbing the heat and dispersing it from his body, yet still leaving enough to sear the flesh. An attack like that would have left steel a semi-solid sludge, and there were limits to biological resilience.
Limits to his power in combat, too. Had Silenos the time and resource to construct even a single new grotesquery of considerable size, he would have seen these petty casters crushed between its strength and his own. By himself, against so many, he found himself failing.
Silenos drove his lance through an undead, tearing it apart with a wrench, then felt his war body’s tail whip around to break apart the jaw and neck of another. Blades dug into him from all sides, pin pricks and bee stings, but the weight that followed them was more concerning by far. It resisted his movement, threatened to hold his body, allowed the Puppeteer to ready another fireball. He braced for it.
But the impact never came.
There was a light, harsh and glaring, that left wisps of smoke hissing from the bodies of every undead present, like logs a mere instant before conflagrating. It had an intensity to it that almost masked the newcomer’s approach, but Silenos’ retinas were polarised against such damaging overload, and he could pick out the form of Ensharia as she charged in .
He had no idea how the woman had gotten to him, so far from the front, nor why she’d chosen to, but she moved with that sluggish, suicidal lethargy that came only from the combination of remarkable courage and weakness. An idiot, to be joining a fight of this calibre, but a useful idiot. He watched as her mace took a creature in its head and cast it down, bone cracking, snapping more heads to her. Then he moved in an instant.
Silenos let his whip go high as his lance went forth, driving the enemy back just beyond the range of his skewering weapon, and into the wide, sweeping strike of the longer-ranged one. At the last moment he had the coiled musculature draw back from his limb, cracking its edged tip like a whip and hearing as the half-kilogram of nacre left sound itself behind.
The snapping of atmospheric rupturing was so loud, even his supernatural ears barely picked up the sound of bone breaking beneath. The undead stumbled, kept from flying back by the simple physics of such a lot-mass collision, and Silenos was upon it in an instant. His lance was blocked, whip too close for use, shield serving only to pin the enemy down. So he closed the jaws of his war-body across the undead’s neck and bit down.