There had been a surprising number of enemies plaguing the Governor of Kaltan, Silenos found. Or perhaps not surprising. Social revolutions tended to inspire conflict.
House Shaiagrazni had been founded in the Great Alignment, some two thousand years before his birth, and even in those primitive times they had suffered inconvenience enough. Their homelands of Gwalhi had been ruled by an Emperor at the time, whose armies numbered almost a million, and whose military casters over a thousand. Their established order of rule by birthright and noble supremacy had been so completely at odds with the alterations proposed by his forefathers that there was no surprise violent contradiction had come.
That contradiction had been crushed, however, by the simple fact that one million drooling cows with pointy sticks, bolstered by one thousand semi-literate apes with half-remembered spellbooks, were no match for the supremacy of magic that had been the first Elders of House Shaiagrazni. Only numbering half a dozen had made no difference for Silenos’ Master and her peers, they had simply unleashed magic until all who opposed them had either fled, surrendered or been reduced to a cloud of vaporised carbon wafting about molten craters pockmarking the landscape.
Silenos had rather a similar approach planned to resolving Baird’s little counter-revolution.
A man screamed, that irritating way men tended to when they found their legs suddenly separated from their hips. He felt his lip curl at the sight.
He had been a warrior, clad in plate and belonging to that caste these simple people called Knights. Trained from his youth to hone a recognised talent for violence, instilled with discipline and skill. By all metrics he ought to have been above such petty displays of cowardice as to scream. What in the world did this world teach its soldiers?
Well, evidently, they did not teach them much in the way of preventing dismemberment. Silenos took a swift step to one side, avoiding the column of splashing ichor that cut through the space he’d just been occupying, then watched as his flesh construct swung the man’s torso down into the street with a single muscled tentacle. Steel and flesh both gave in more or less the same way, popping against the stone and leaving a gory painting. Its toy broken, his construct turned and lumbered off to find more pickings. There was no shortage of them.
Only ten minutes had passed since the fighting began, three hours since the announcement given. A day since Silenos’ help offered. Baird had been reluctant to accept Silenos’ suggestion of posing warrants of arrest for a full fifth of his known enemies, but it had worked splendidly.
Within half a day there was open rebellion, tens of thousands of men readied and marching to seize back the city, trained and armed on whatever funds were available to the aristocratic survivors and migrants.
Gathering so many in the same place had made it near effortless to destroy them all at once.
“Back, you foul monster!” A man roared, holding a sword almost as big as the Godblade in one hand, and a great sphere of searing flame in the other. He cast his magic against a flesh construct, bathing it in stone-splitting heat, then thrust his sword. The keratin plates broke steel handily enough, and he was soon bowled over to be crushed.
Silenos had worked rather carefully on the monsters he’d sent out, given that he’d had the biomass only for three of them. Each was a fine piece of artistry, even by his own post-genius standards. His Master might even have refrained from calling them failures.
“LUTHAR!” A woman screamed. “YOU MONSTERS, MEN, FIRE!” Silenos’ eyes flicked over just in time to see his creation pelted by a hail of crossbow bolts, each striking with force enough to skewer a man fully through. They bounced harmlessly from its armour. Flexible stuff, woven dense and durable with deposits of iron. He’d not had time to make it as flawless as his own, but it would have turned away those primitive weapons that passed for artillery in this world. The creature opened its mouth, inhaled, then shredded the company of bowmen with a blast of its own projectiles. Slugs of calcic density propelled by a mechanism not dissimilar to his own weapon.
He had to admit, all the dirty brawling he’d been forced into had given Silenos some insight into what made for an effective armoury. His grotesqueries had certainly benefitted.
One particularly impressive enemy evaded the long, tendinous lengths of musculature Silenos had shaped into limbs. He sidestepped the nacre barbs tipping them, twisted aside from the volleys of cannon-shot that smashed apart stone everywhere it hit, and danced around patches of burning fire that might otherwise have scorched him. His sword was an impressive, magical thing which would have carved through sheet metal, and managed to do a formidable job in scything through the centimetre of armour protecting Silenos’ creations. Oxygen-bright blood frothed from the wounds, splashing across the man, who seemed to wear it with pride.
Interesting. Silenos pondered the practicality of making his creations’ ichor toxic or acidic, even while sending silent, Necromantic commands for another grotesquery to close in and aid its sibling.
The man who might have contested Ensharia with even odds of winning did not last long against two of Silenos’ creations, and his allies lasted less time still in his absence. It was less of a battle than a massacre, the mark of a properly engineered Shaiagrazni design.
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“How do they move like that?” Asked the Necromancer named Sphera. Silenos glanced at her as she questioned him, and decided to let her impudent demand of an answer slide. There were more productive things than plucking out a disrespectful tongue, for the time being at least.
“How should they move?” He asked, drawing an irritated frown from her.
“Sluggish as a geriatric cow.” She growled. “You made them from corpses slain and buried years ago.”
“Decades.” Silenos corrected. “Yes. It was the earliest source of human biomass that had not been cremated upon death, this war with your master has done rather a lot to shape Kaltan’s burial practices.”
She breezed past everything but the magic, an admirable sign.
“And undead get slower and duller the longer you wait to reanimate them. After a few hours even I can’t bring something back with all its faculties, after a day my master can’t manage it. But you did this with corpses decades old. How does your Fleshcrafting make it possible?”
“No.” Silenos replied, honestly. “Fleshcrafting is limited in its effects over cerebral-” He sighed. “-Brain matter. Which is why I needed human corpses to begin with. There are simply better ways of reanimating something, your master is rather an amateur.”
She stared at him with something that could not have been mistaken for anger, humiliation, irritation or hatred. It was not embarrassment, not fear, not awe. No, Silenos would have insulted the woman were he to misidentify her response for anything so pedestrian and worthless as those petty thoughts. What he saw in her was hunger, the very same that burned in any true Shaiagrazni.
“How?” She demanded, in such a way as to deserve instant and agonising destruction…Were it not for her anomalous talent.
“That is a secret of my House, I have no inclination to share it with you, and many reasons not to.”
Her face was blank with carefully masked thought for all of a second, then she nodded and looked away. Silenos found himself slightly disappointed, but he supposed the truly intelligent could rarely be found making decisive judgements so hastily.
Soon, he thought, this one might ask to become his student. If Silenos was confident she would not betray him, he would grant her request. More than mere cognitive or magical genius, she had a trait valued in House Shaiagrazni that even Falls lacked. A total and unbroken lack of empathy. It was marvellous.
Wetness, hotness. They splashed against his face at once, a gooey, familiar sensation that curled Silenos lip. He raised his hand, grazing the squirt of blood with two fingers and absorbing it into his body. Curious how much less it bothered him to consume the stuff through touch and magic, than feel it resting against his skin. He supposed there had been no evolutionary advantage for his prehistoric ancestors to feel inclined towards avoiding the former. Disease did not spread well through a medium which had been disassembled into protoplasmic fluid.
The sun was starting to set, sending long shadows to cut through the battlefield and making the pooling ichor dance in shades of orange and pink, complimenting their natural reds.
His grotesqueries let out low, rattling moans as whatever remained of their enemies finally gave out. Silenos had structured the things to feel uncanny spikes of pleasure and fulfilment when they killed, so as to better motivate them into the murderous frenzy that best suited battle, and the consequence was that they practically thrashed in agony at running out of corpses to make. He smiled. It was rather enjoyable to see, all things considered. Silenos stepped down from the roof.
Around him the cobbled streets had been crushed, fine multi-story houses obliterated into piles of crumbled mortar and splintered wood, or else scattered out dozens of metres in every direction. Fires burned where magic had struck timber, and there were mangled bodies as far as the eye could see. An army’s worth.
It had taken the city’s aristocracy only a half day to muster their powers and stage their coup, a testament to their rage at Baird. It had taken Silenos slightly less time to destroy them, a testament to his genius.
The grotesqueries moaned, stumbling over to kneel before their Master, as was proper, and expressing their agony to him through more rumbling vocalisations. Silenos felt his lip curling. Each of the constructs had been damaged, but few in any serious capacity. That notable soldier who’d proven a match for one of them had, apparently, not been gifted the prowess of destruction to cut truly deep. Still, Silenos would need to turn his attentions to the things if they were to continue operating at full capacity.
He did so, and considered the weaknesses he’d seen exposed while he did.
Silenos’ first creations had each been made with six large, crushing limbs the width and length of oak trunks. Those had been excellent for destroying anything they struck, but rather poor in catching the quicker enemies. Given that his grotesqueries already towered over even an elephant, Silenos added some additional limbs. Smaller, longer. More akin to the branches of the tree than their thicker counterparts. He structured them with more numerous, flexible joints and imprinted the instinctual knowledge of how to wield them like whips to his monsters.
Their armour had been excellent, though with their score or so new weapons, Silenos could afford to reduce mobility and thicken it. He did so. He re-tethered nerves for faster responses at those sites that most needed them, increased the sensitivity of pain receptors and added in a more social instinct to ensure it would not require his direct attention to have his creations cooperate. That last feature would be well needed, for Silenos had just granted himself rather a lot more biomass.
He glanced across the battlefield, and did the calculations.
Each grotesquery was some two hundred metric tons in total bodily mass, due to the density of certain super-materials, and Silenos had access to enough rarer elements from the city’s warehouses and stores that he could be certain biological tissue would be the limiting factors. Estimating the average weight of a New Worlder at sixty four kilograms, and bearing in mind the estimate of fifty thousand or so for their army, that gave him…
He smiled.
Fifteen new grotesqueries? Sixteen? It really depended on how well he used the materials. Silenos glanced sidelong, checking the sun’s position.
Yes, fifteen new grotesqueries by noon seemed more than reasonable. A stronger force than anticipated. And Kaltan would make just the perfect stage from which to deploy it.