Ado was not a general, and far from an expert on the art of war. As something of a politician, however, she fancied that there was something to be understood about the logistic

al aspect of battle, if nothing else.

And as far as she could tell, the logistic chances of each man in her forces killing one hundred undead each was fairly limited.

Perhaps that was an exaggeration, as far as she could tell there were only a million marching towards them, after all. And it was far from the Dark Lord’s finest. Venka’s army had been a sizable fraction of that, from what she’d heard, with most of its composition being entities of considerable power. This was just…

Corpses, reanimated and thrown hastily at the enemy. Battlefields made empty and weaponized at random. It was the military equivalent of breaking a bottle over someone’s head.

But ten men with bottles were more than a match for one with a sword, and ten to one odds were on the generous side of current numerical estimates. Her blood ran cold as she saw the forces close in.

There were many advantages to an all-undead army, but by far the largest was food. The total lack of it meant that the greatest limit on any gathering of bodies was effectively gone.

And by God, was she staring at a gathering of bodies now.

Wudra’s best were gathered, and that was no mean thing. Ninety thousand men at arms, all trained to a standard almost the equal of Kaltans. They manned the ancient cities outer wall, for the most part, sheer numbers necessitating that they spill out of its more defensible fort. Besides, even if Ado had the space to concentrate them all within the center she couldn’t have done it. Ordering the men to abandon the city at large would have gotten her lynched within the hour, not the wisest beginning to a defence.

And she’d not had much to do with this one, either. She wasn’t a warrior, and while her academic knowledge of war allowed for the occasional piece of useful insight, she’d been frustratingly reliant on Wudra’s military minds.

Which, she suspected, were total shit. But that was aristocracy, Ado supposed.

Good Lord, I’m turning into Baird.

The Lord Paladin was out there, somewhere, Ado knew. On the outer walls, ready to meet the enemy first. She’d been told it was most effective to have him in the fighting as soon as possible, so that he could do his work in wearing the enemy down. Whether that was true, she had no way of knowing. She lacked the knowledge. Fuck.

Her thoughts were interrupted by the scrambling sprint of a messenger, whose face she had already turned to long before the speech came. Small boy, too young to fight, clearly, but by the speed of him he’d make a decent warrior one day. It sickened her a little to be thinking like that, and Ado buried the thought by listening.

“Gener, uh, I…”

“Queen Mortascia.” Ado gently corrected him, finding the scramble for proper titles far, far more tedious than she had shortly after first meeting Shaigrazni and claiming her throne.

“Right, apologies Queen Mortascia, Prince Folami is seeking an audience with you.”

“Seeking?”Ado asked.

The messenger winced.

“He’s forcing his way over here, and none of the guards are willing to risk hurting him by stopping him.”

Figured. Well that was fine, Ado had been careful to surround herself with men who had rather less scruples than that.

“Send him on.” She instructed, bracing herself for whatever was awaiting her.

Folami did not take long to bring himself before her, storming over at a hurried pace. Ado resisted the urge to swallow as she laid eyes on him.

“Brother, whatever this is, it will need to wait, I’m busy-”

He silenced her, instantly, by kneeling. Ado stared, stunned. Folami spoke.

“My Queen, you must forgive me. I have acted improperly, treacherously, and deserved every response you showed and more. I ask for the chance to win back your good favor through deeds in the following battle.”

For one moment, Ado was left scrambling for what to say. In the next she had it, and let the words leave her as a calm, cool stream.

“You have my permission.” Ado said, at last. “Now go on and redeem yourself.”

Folami nodded, getting to his feet, turning and heading off to do just that. Ado watched him leave, still frowning. What had happened to cause this change?

Or was it just an act to lower her guard? She couldn’t know, and had no intention of relaxing until she did. But either way there were bigger threats to her- and others- for the time being than her little brother and his potentially troublesome ambition.

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Minutes more passed, then the siege began.

As Ado had been told was typical, the Dark Lord’s forces came on as a simple tidal wave of flesh. Almost climbing over one another to smash into the walls, and completely ignoring the retaliatory shots of trebuchet stones and ballistae, Magi and archers. It was impossible to count them, and impossible to count those destroyed with each passing second. Scores, perhaps. Scores of casualties, thousands each minute.

She did the relevant mental calculations, and her blood chilled as Ado realized just how tiny a droplet in the endless ocean of their hordes that was. There would be no winning this. She knew that instantly, no matter what the Paladins insisted. There would be no destroying one million undead.

They continued hammering into the walls, seeming to do it almost randomly at parts. Ado wasn’t sure what the plan even was on their enemy’s end, and even briefly wondered whether they were intending to have their primitive, rotting undead claw down the stone battlements with fingernails and teeth.

But the fighting continued, and their true purpose became terribly clear. Ado watched as undead began to climb undead, forming mounds of their own flesh to scale, drawing ever closer to the tops of the walls. Then jumping onto them.

Well, it made sense she supposed. In some terrible, revolting way, it damn well made sense. If one had the numbers for that, and cared more about seizing a city quickly than anything, and could replenish any losses with interest by actually taking it…It made fucking sense.

And it might well spell their ruin.

Burning oil tipped down onto the undead, and achieved nothing as their deadened nerves failed to so much as spasm at the heat. Bolts and arrows ran through skulls, thankfully dropping them, but as fire was concentrated on the bases of those towering, fleshy siege-engines yet more bodies scrambled around them at the bases to shield them from harm. Ado scanned the horizons, trying to sift through the endless rivers of rotting meat for something resembling a leader to the chaotic mess of their enemy’s assault.

She found none. Either they were hiding beyond the limits of human sight, or there were so many simple zombies in the attack that picking out even a large or clearly advanced figure from among them was impossible.

Probably, it was both.

“My Queen, you need to get back from here!” Ado glanced over, to find a Paladin was speaking with her. She frowned.

“Shouldn’t you be killing undead?”

“I, we’re saving ourselves for the fortress, your grace. But that fortress will be the front line before you know it, the undead are breaching our outer defenses terribly fast.”

“Ah, carry on then.” She shrugged, watching the carnage unfolded and feeling somehow rather fascinated by it all. And not afraid.

That surprised Ado, and she found herself trying to piece together why. Had the fear just been driven out of her by an imminent execution? Was she just emotionally overloaded? Had she gone suddenly insane?

The latter, somehow, seemed the most likely. Particularly as she found herself chuckling upon seeing three undead at once lose their heads to one man’s swing.

“That fellow over there,” She indicated, “I’d like to see him raised to-”

A scream cut the air as several more undead pounced upon the man, dragging him down and tearing him to a thrashing corpse with savage bites and punches. Ado sighed.

“Nevermind.”

“Your highness.” The Paladin insisted, “Please, I really must insist.”

“Well that is a shame, because I find myself needing to insist as well.” She giggled. “Really sir, I don’t know what you think will keep me any safer here in the fortress, I’m far from the actual fighting and at least here my men can look at me for a source of morale.”

A trebuchet stone smashed into the base of an undead pile. Lucky shot, that. Very lucky- the bases had been carefully left beneath their lines of sight. Thousands of undead tumbled down, those higher up falling close to a hundred feet onto those below. Bones broke, thrashing stopped. It was rather a nice dent in the enemy.

Just a hundred more hits like that and we’ll have actually thinned the herd.

“Besides,” Ado added, “We’re actually not doing that bad, look for yourself.”

She did hope it wasn’t just wishful thinking on her part, but the rate of killing on her own side’s part seemed to have increased as more and more undead difused their ranks around the city. And walls were ever an advantage. Suddenly the idea of each defender killing no less than ten attackers seemed…Plausible, if optimistic.

“All the same,” The annoying Paladin insisted.

“Oh very well.” Ado sighed. “I’ll keep from hanging back here.”

The Paladin relaxed, for all of a second before Ado headed to the front, magic building. It had been foolish of her to even wait as long as she had. Their defense needed Magi, and as far as she could tell Ado was the most powerful one in the entire city.

At least until the doors finally got kicked down, that was. God knew what the Dark Lord would be throwing at them.

Ado hurled ice in a way she never had before. There was nobody close to give her any sort of appraisal or examination, but if there had been she was fairly sure she’d have gotten higher marks for her magic than ever before.

The undead probably didn’t agree, but then they were somewhat biased by being the ones she was blowing to pieces with it.

Icicles as long as an arm smashed into bodies with all the speed of a crossbow bolt, fully impaling them then continuing on to hit even more. Flechettes, as Shaiagrazni had called them, tore through a dozen in one volley, tiny finned darts that entered the body with far less fuss than they left it and painted the enemy’s non-existent ranks with rotting viscera. She conjured walls over the sections undead were leaping to, watching as numerous enemies simply bounced from the barricades and fell down onto their thrashing brethren below.

And that gave her an idea, after which Ado stopped hurling ice entirely, and began simply conjuring great boulders and darts of the stuff to drop down onto the enemy below. Gravity did the killing for her, and the few times she glanced down to watch the results, it did it well.

But there was more fighting than what was happening immediately around her, Ado knew that much. A hundred other skirmishes were occurring at a hundred other points of the wall, and most were doing far worse than hers. Word soon came that one section had fallen, then another, then a third.

And after that, the order to retreat was given, and Ado found herself seized forcibly by strong hands and practically dragged back towards the central keep.

She shot a few glances over her shoulder, and found her heart sinking at the sights. Fortunately, the undead were focusing on the defenders. Ado imagined it was to press their advantage, to keep the feral things from tearing apart civilians who might be made into yet more undead, or any other number of things.

Unfortunately, she was one of the defenders. And they’d already lost thousands in the fighting for their walls.

Siege engines kept the undead at bay just long enough for ninety thousand men to pack themselves deep inside the fortress and seal the gates, then a new kind of killing began. The kind exchanged between cold walls, without sight, fought on only the sounds of an enemy. Death was yards from her, and Ado knew nothing of it save the sound of its cool breath hitting the nape of her neck.

The undead didn’t keep her waiting for long, though. Undead never did.