webcrawl/APGTE/Book-6/out/Ch-013.md.tex

\hypertarget{chapter-12-contest}{%
\chapter{Contest}\label{chapter-12-contest}}



\epigraph{``The enemy's come to die on this field, my friends, for an awful
prince and terrible pay. We, on the other hand, have come to die on this
field for a terrible prince and awful pay. That the Heavens are on our
side ought to be evident.''}{Captain Thierry the Acerbic, addressing his company before the
infamously bloody Battle of Motte-aux-Foins}



Anticipation hung in the air like smoke.

The sigil of the Seventh General, Vesena Spear-Biter, was painted on
thousands of stretches of dark cloth hanging from arms and armour and
even hair: two jagged, monstrous fangs tearing at what looked like a
thunderbolt of iron. Red and white set on black, it was eye-catching and
when the breeze blew through the outskirts of Serolen a sea of pale
teeth biting into iron stirred with it. These were not the drow from the
Outer Rings I'd once fought, the dregs of the dreg-empire. No, the
Vesena came armoured in iron and obsidian, bearing polished cuirasses
and helmets shaped like angled bat wings. Tough \emph{tezkuze} leather,
those massive hard-skinned blind lizards who could eat even Mighty
should they prove reckless, had been fashioned into trousers and
long-sleeved vests touched by tinkling bracelets and sculpted greaves of
stone or dull iron. There was an order to this host of the Firstborn,
unlike in most of their kind, for in the days of the old Empire Ever
Dark the Mighty Vesena Spear-Biter had been known as the `Relentless
General Whose Victories Flow Like A River'.

The Vesena were not so much a sigil as they were the last field army of
the ancient Empire Ever Dark, kept standing through the ages by sheer
dint of the Spear-Biter's brutal murder of all rivals and naysayers.
Time had taken its toll, and warriors now stood where once soldiers had,
but there was no closer among the Firstborn to a professional army than
the Vesena Sigil. It had occupied the whole of the city of Great Noglof,
before leaving with the Exodus, and made the entire city into a bustling
army camp -- kept going by the plunder in Night and gifts and food that
was brought back by the fighting drow of the sigil after every campaign.
Even now, a discerning eye could make out what had been the components
of a field army simply from the way the warriors were equipped.

First came long stretches of skirmishers, bearing hard bucklers of iron
painted with their sigil while long barbed javelins hung from their
backs and short blades were kept at their hips. Dzulu, most of them, but
the Vesena were one of the rare sigils that \emph{taught} Secrets to
their own and so they all shared a deadly blackflame trick that allowed
them to have quite the sting to them.Behind them came hunters, those
that would have been infantry regulars in olden days. These stood in
companies of nine times nine each led by the least of the Mighty, an
ispe, and were armed as I had only ever seen the Watch be armed: though
they bore long swords of Night-forged steel on the flanks, they also
held horn bows. Short, stout and curved these little wonders were no
match for a good Deoraithe longbow but they fired at surprising range --
regular arrows would be next to useless against the dead, of course, so
the Vesena had adapted by infusing obsidian arrowheads with Night in a
way that made them burst on impact.

At heart of the army stood the finest warriors of the Vesena, three
thousand hulking towering shapes whose shells of iron-joined obsidian
left no opening at all from head to toe. The Ebonclad were a cabal of
their own within the Vesena, each and everyone a jawor that drew on
Night to breathe and see through the sealed armour and wield their large
stone-and-steel maces. As another exotic addition, the Vesena Sigil also
boasted no less than ten of the hulking things called \emph{zanikzen},
the famed annihilation-engines that Mighty Ysengral had gone to war nine
times to steal only to be driven back every time. House-sized and made
entirely of bone and onyx, they looked like two-wheeled carts holding up
the fused bones of a hundred ancient drow whose wretched half-seen
silhouettes ended up pointing their hands towards the horizon and
forming a gaping maw filled with spear-like spikes of onyx. As field
siege engines I deemed to be to be inferior to what the Empire and
Callow used, but they'd been murderously proficient at defending
tunnels.

And in the very middle of the army, seated atop a writhing living throne
made of once-Mighty foes stripped of Night so thoroughly they became
nisi, Mighty Vesena the Spear-Biter waited. Though it would have been as
ravaged by age as Rumena in appearance, being its senior, the long
stripe scars going down its face made it impossible to tell what it
might once have looked like. It wore an armoured cuirass of obsidian
over flowing pale cloth, needles of bone woven into its pale long hair
to keep it in an elaborate bun. It claimed for only a weapon a
long-handled axe -- so long as to be half as tall as they -- whose head
was steel so deeply imbued with Night it flickered around it like smoke.
Around it an honour guard of rylleh stood, clad in bright colours, but
the lesser Mighty had been spread among the host as commanders of dzulu.
The Sisters had once told me that most titles among the Mighty had once
been military ranks in the Empire Ever Dark, for the soldiers had been
among the first to thrive in the nights after the end of the Twilight
Sages, and the Vesena in a way kept closest that that old truth.

There were twenty thousand, all in all: but a fifth of the might of the
Vesena Sigil, but its sharpest fangs were all bared here, spread amongst
the trees. Facing them was only deep darkness and the mists of the
Gloom. Open grounds for six hundred feet after the end of the forest,
which struck me as having been the Dead King's picked battlefield: the
dead fared poorly in the woods. Against, drow, anyway.

``They haven't even dug ditches,'' I frowned. ``Sloppy. Ysengral would
have done better.''

Mighty Ysengral, the Cradle of Steel, had distinguished themselves to my
eye as the finest of the Firstborn generals even if they were towards
the lower end of the Ten Generals when it came to raw power. Considering
it was debatable where Rumena would rank second or third among them,
though, that was still nothing to sneer at.

``Ysengral was defending the Wilting March from another breakthrough,''
Komena said, and I almost shivered.

Standing to my left, eyes silver-blue and form little more than
flickering shadow, the image of what had once been a mortal woman was
sharing the sights with me. Before I took my eye off her, every time I
glimpsed a long-fanged skull beneath the shadows that was always gone if
I tried to find it. There was a twang of something like iron and blood
to her voice, something I could not help but taste against the roof of
my mouth. Komena wore armour, and a sword at her hip. She was the
Youngest Night.

``We did not foresee the Hidden Horror until it was edging into the
Gloom,'' Andronike said, her voice coming from my right.

Her eyes, too, burned pale blue. But over her face flickered the shape
of the iron mask she had once worn as one of the Twilight Sages, and the
thick billowing cloak she had decked herself in almost seemed like
dark-feathered wings whenever she moved. There were strings twined among
her fingers, which she ever twined. The affect to her words was subtler,
like a drink thought harmless until your tongue was felt to be numb. She
was the Oldest Night.

``You didn't get time to dig in,'' I put together. ``Vesena was the
closest?''

``Kurosiv,'' Komena replied, shaking her head. ``But its horde was
spread out. Vesena was ready for war.''

``He's able to slip past your scouts with entire armies now,'' I
whispered.

Shit. If they could only tell that the Dead King was attacking when he
was beginning to breach the Gloom, then that gave them what -- half a
day to mobilize at most? They'd either have to permanently garrison a
significant portion of their forces to defend all the southern stretches
of Serolen, which would cripple their ability raid into Keter's
territory, or start breaking through whatever means he used to obscure
the movements of his armies on this front. I would have pursued the
matter in conversation, but was robbed of the opportunity: the battle
was beginning. It started with a sound like the whistle of a falling
arrow, though utterly deafening. Then flashes of blinding light scythed
through the mist in five places, like a titan's raking claws, and for a
moment the passage between Keter and Serolen was forced open by the
sorceries of the Dead King. In that heartbeat, long ladders of steel
with spiked ends fell through the open space and buried deep in the
ground, the runes carved on the glowing bright. Like a steel road, one
meant to keep the gap open.

``Second through sixth,'' Mighty Vesena said, voice ringing out.
``Wail.''

The Crows and I were standing by its side and so we'd seen its eyes had
not blinked, not even when the light had been at its brightest. Five of
the massive \emph{zanikzen} lit up, thousands of glyphs in Crepuscular
craved into the bones unveiled, and as crews attended to the large
engines I saw heat waft of the surface and half the body of a nisi too
close to the maw turn to ash. Heat shimmered between the onyx spikes,
near-invisible lances of impossibly hot air shooting out and lashing out
at the ladders in a lazy, low arc. The needles went abruptly still
afterwards, forcing out a strange sound like a hundred inhuman wails.
The first to get hit dented, and its front melted like summer snow, but
the dead had moved quick enough to contest three of the remaining four.
Ghouls who'd moved forward like lightning threw themselves in the way,
embracing annihilation to curb the blow, and though one of the lances
tore through and broke a ladder's end in a spray of earth the other two
held. The dead had three beachheads. Further down the line, another five
bursts of light signaled that Keter was broadening its offensive.

``Two by breach,'' Mighty Vesena ordered.

Even as the drow annihilation-engines began hammering at the fresh
beachheads, the Vesena Sigil began its advance without needing to be
told.

``They're impressively disciplined, for a sigil,'' I admitted, eyes
remaining on the battle.

``Vesena made of the old western army regulation a set of holy rites,''
Komena told me, sounding fond. ``All who break them are said to have
broken faith with the sigil and are free to be slain.''

I'd gathered that Vesena Spear-Biter was a darling of hers, which didn't
surprise me all that much. Komena did tend to favour the old warhorses
who'd survived the collapse of the Empire Ever Dark.

The ever-relentless dead had wasted no time getting through their
protection for the three ladders that'd landed: shield-soldiers the size
of ogres in heavy plate, protecting in a ring the more vulnerable mages
putting up translucent shields of sorcery preventing repeating fire from
the engines from getting through. With the second wave, if Keter's usual
northern doctrine held, would come another circle of corpse-mages to
attempt to raise rough but swiftly functional wards that'd make it hard
work dislodging the dead from that position. The Firstborn were well
aware of that, of course. Even as the first rank of a shield wall formed
beyond the beachheads the drow skirmishers finished closing in the
distance. Javelins flew whistling, the drow never breaking stride or
slowing as they threw, the barbed ends hitting the shields of the dead
with dull thumps before exploding in black flames of Night.

The shield walls broke, shattered like overripe fruits as the the first
line of skirmishers unsheathed swords and wading into close combat. The
lines behind disrupted the gathering dead with further throws, enabling
the nimble drow to slip through the gaps in the defences of the dead.
Mighty Vesena had been, I gathered, one of the few Firstborn generals to
win victories against the dwarves during the war that broke the Empire
Ever Dark. It had typically won those victories by hitting the
heavy-armoured but slow-moving dwarven armies with crippling blows while
they were in movement, never allowing them to deploy the siege engines
and harsh sorceries that'd shattered so many drow armies. Traces of that
mindset could still be seen here I decided as I watched the drow
skirmishers of what the expanding assault of the Dead King had made the
right wing slink their way deeper behind the lines of Keter.

Their objective here was clear: hitting the dead mages putting up
shields before a second wave could set up wards, then prying away the
Dead King's breaches from him one after another. It was a much more
aggressive defence than Ysengral was prone to waging, or even the other
general I was most familiar with: Radosa. The Hushing Dread actually
preferred letting the greater strength of the dead past the Gloom before
striking at the weakened defences of the breaches, picking off the
enemies at its leisure within the forest. Its battles lasted twice as
long as everyone else's, but then it also counted about a third of the
casualties most the time.

``He's fought Vesena before,'' I grimaced. ``And no one else uses the
blackflame skirmishers. If you use the same tricks against the Hidden
Horror too many times\ldots{}''

In the distance another set of blinding lights shone. And again. And
again. \emph{You're going to run out of skirmishers before he runs out
of cabals capable of making those, Vesena}, I grimaced. And I would give
the Spear-Biter its due, the first three breaches the Dead King had
forced through were swept back. The skirmishers were just a little too
slow, a flow of reinforcing armoured Binds pulling them down and
slaughtering them to the last, but, a second wave of longsword bearing
warriors carved their way to the mages before the second wave could put
up wards, helped through by the focused arrow-fire of their brethren.
They slipped into shadow and danced around the bone-giants, artists at
their work, but what was three beachheads when another ten had just
dropped in the span it took to clear them? The right flank had gone
quiet, but the wailing of the \emph{zanikzen} was the herald of strife
spreading to the left and the centre. The Vesena redeployed with
impressive swiftness, as a well-oiled machine, but this time when the
skirmishers hit the first wave of beachheads they found they were
expected.

Through the black flames leapt out slender, almost insect-like
silhouettes.

``Hexenghouls,'' I whispered.

Shit, Neshamah really wasn't pulling punches here. Those nasty little
things weren't like most ghouls: swift and passingly intelligent in a
way that allowed them serve as both harassers and a sort of replacement
for the Dead King's general lack of cavalry. No, these were almost as
smart as people. Hexenghouls, named by the Lycaonese, were good at two
thing only: killing, and disrupting magic by their mere presence. They
had hardened bronze rods instead of bones, enchanted in a way that
Masego told me destabilized the structure of spell formulas when they
got close enough. Those vicious beasts were the reason Lycaonese mages
were relatively rare while as a people they had much reason to keep
magical bloodlines going. Every year, scaling through passes and
mountains, those monsters made it into the lowlands and went
\emph{hunting}. Tonight, deployed in numbers I'd rarely before seen,
they went through the skirmishers like a sickle through wheat. The few
dzulu who were quick enough to call on Night found they couldn't focus
it properly and were massacred within moments.

Night was not sorcery, but evidently the Dead King had been adjusting
what he ordered carved onto those bronze rods.

The second wave of longswords drove them back, even if they destroyed
but a handful, but by the time the hexenghouls retreated behind them
stood a heavy shield wall of skeletons. Too heavy to punch through in
time: valiantly the warriors threw themselves against it, but Neshamah's
second wave of mages came through. Wards came up and then, with a
position finally secure, the dead began unleashing their real
offensives. Beorns tumbled through, carelessly stamping through the
skeletons, and spat out the corpses they held within them in the middle
of drow ranks. Dzulu could do nothing against the likes of those, much
less the even more heavily armoured `tusks'. Those were a recent
addition to Keter's arsenal, rarely seen on my front: catapult-sized
necromantic constructs shaped rather like boards, unlike many of the
Hidden Horror's creations they held within then no lesser dead. They
were instead filled with \emph{rocks,} and in front of them jagged tusks
of steel were meant to make them into moving battering rams designed to
crack open shield walls.

Going against drow foot? They trampled straight through those lines like
they weren't even there.

``Now,'' I murmured, ``for the tug-of-war.''

With a slew of fresh casualties, Night and necromancy came out. Even as
the officers-Mighty destroyed the war-constructs or died trying, the
mage cadres of Keter competed with drow as to whether corpses would get
up as undead or be emptied of Night first. The undead drow could not use
Night, but they \emph{would} explode with what they'd held when their
corpses were shattered. It wreaked havoc on the attempt to keep a battle
line going to have your own dead blow up on you when you drove them
back. Not that there was much of a battle line: at best it could be said
that there was a line where the Vesena and the dead met. And where half
a hundred Firstborn must have died with every passing beat. Behind it
was an ugly chaos of Mighty and war-constructs tangling in duels that
paid no heed to the warriors around them. For all that Vesena
Spear-Biter had mimicked the ways of the old armies of the Empire Ever
Dark, it was only that: a mimicry. The Mighty were not true officers,
they were chieftains who ceased paying mind to their own companies the
moment there was a great foe for them to fight.

``Using the Mighty as construct-killers instead of officers works
better,'' I noted, brow creasing at the sight. ``If the Spear-Biter sent
packs of pravnat and jawor after the beorns and the tusks they could be
put down much quicker. Instead they keep running into isolated ispe and
pravnat and overwhelming them.''

Vesena's strategy being a success had depended on breaking through the
initial defence of the breaches and shutting them down before casualties
could mount, but that'd failed. Now the attempt by its sigil to push
through the dead was turning into the sort of meat grinder that could
utterly destroy an army if a general got stubborn. With the centre and
the left wing taking such a beating, the Vesena were forced to thin
their right flank to reinforce the lines that'd been devastated by
constructs. And even then, the remaining skirmishers were now pointless
going around through the woods in a far-flung circle that might allow
them to eventually flank the left wing of the dead but practically
speaking would just take them out of the battle for the rest of its
span. Mistake, that. They'd have been more useful kept anchoring the
thinning right flank in my opinion.

``The Vesena are inflicting great losses on the dead,'' Andronike
replied.

``Sure,'' I dismissed. ``Those officer-Mighty are pure slaughter against
Keter's Bones and Binds. No denying that.''

It was hard to, when all it took was for even an ispe, the lowest of the
Mighty, to reach the shield wall of the dead to contemptuously crack it
open.

``And I don't mean to dismiss what's being achieved here,'' I continued.
``At this point Mighty Vesena had lost what, three or four thousand?''

``Closer to four,'' Komena told me.

``And it's cost the Dead King more than three score of his finest
war-constructs, on top of at least thrice that in foot,'' I said. ``The
problem here is that while Vesena's sigil is killing the enemy, it's not
doing it in a way that wins the battle.''

I pointed at the worst of the slaughter, where the lines were going back
and forth.

``They've been gaining and losing the same thirty feet since the battle
started in earnest,'' I pointed out. ``Maybe this battle can be won, at
this exchange rate of lives for undead, but it'd be pissing away the war
to keep fighting it this way. Packs of Mighty striking together allows
for decisive blows in a way spreading them out cannot.''

``General Rumena said much the same,'' Andronike said. ``Though it did
mention that Vesena's methods would function significantly better when
on the offensive instead.''

I narrowed my eyes. Yeah, I could maybe see that. As an offensive army
they'd be smashing through whatever forces the Dead King could put in
their way, which tended to be light on war-constructs, and if they ran
into a few of those then the same rylleh that'd yet to move so much as
an inch would be able to handle them.

``Might be,'' I muttered.

The battle was going badly for the Vesena, even a fool could have seen
it, but to the Spear-Biter it must seem like it could still be turned
around. The \emph{zanikzen} had polished off every breach they could,
leaving only the four whose wards had been raised, so they began
pounding at the dead instead. Every burst of burning heat swatted down
entire companies, and the crews prudently aimed them far behind the
fighting so there'd be no risk of hitting their own. They wouldn't be
able to handle that rate of fire for long, not without risking the
engines blowing up, but then they'd didn't really need to. The superbly
aimed hits slackened the pressure of the dead against the drow and,
sensing an opening, Mighty Vesena sent in its finest. The Ebonclad
advanced, flowing forward silently as if they were gliding over the
ground. Signals went up in the sky, woven in Night, and a corridor was
opened for them to strike cleanly at the dead. The sight of it
was\ldots{} I let out a sharp breath, genuinely impressed. It was like
watching a hammer strike at an egg: clad in ebony armours sealed by
melted iron, the Ebonclad were untouchable to the dead. Their large war
maces, on the other hands, released waves of Night whenever they struck
and so pulped the dead straight through their armour.

The tusks and beorns that'd not been handled were struck at in groups of
then, methodically and cleanly if with little regard to the collateral
damage against the dzulu. That armour did not seem to hinder them
sinking into pools of shadows, and they even seemed to have greater
control over the trick than most: they sometimes slunk up the beasts and
let only the upper half of their body emerge form the shadow, striking
at the necromantic constructs with impunity.

``Impressed?'' Komena asked.

``They're exceptional,'' I acknowledged. ``But Vesena just got played
the fool.''

It'd been baited into committing its finest troops before Keter slapped
its last cards on the table.

``Oh?'' Andronike hummed.

This battle had already taken place, so they knew what had taken place
while I was left to guess. But while Akua might have pointed out to me
that the Dead King had grown to learn my tricks, the opposite was true
as well.

``We haven't seen Revenants yet,'' I said. ``When we do, I wager things
will swiftly proceed downhill.''

The Ebonclad smashed their way through the dead on two of the breaches
and began making serious assaults on two of the warded beachheads, but I
bade my time an counted up to seventeen before my cynicism was
`rewarded'.

Like great raking claws, five lights burned again where the battle had
begun. On the right flank that'd been so weakened reinforcing the
others.

``Vesena just lost this battle,'' I grimly said.

Though the \emph{zanikzen} were on the edge of breaking apart, they
still fired unflinching at the fresh breaches. Two per breach, as Mighty
Vesena had early ordered. Or so they attempted. Three of the
annihilation-engines went up in storms of ashen heat, killing the crews
instantly, and one aborted its shot. Still, every breach received a
direct shot just as the rune-inscribed ladders came down and one even
received two. That one broke. The other four held, protected by what
looked like swarms of ghouls nailed to the ends as a grisly shield. With
the army already too committed down the line, it would have been a
disaster to try to redeploy. So instead Mighty Vesena sent into the
breaches what few regulars it had left, and with them sent its hardest
hitters: it sent out rylleh. Unfortunately, the Dead King had picked his
timing exquisitely. Before the rylleh were halfway there, Revenants
strode out of the warded breaches and tore into the Ebonclad. Half of
the rylleh had to be recalled, which made a mess of things.

``So that's where the Stitcher went,'' I muttered.

A castle-sized abomination made from the bodies of half a dozen horrors
put together -- the scales and bones of a dragon, what looked like the
heads of at least three sea snakes, the heavy fur and leather of ratling
Ancient Ones -- was butchering its way through the Ebonclad, even
swatted down a rylleh that got too close. The Revenant was inside, and
damnably hard to put down. We hadn't seen her in a year, so I'd hoped
the Blade of Mercy had damaged her beyond use in their last tangle, but
it seemed not. Hanno was convinced she'd been a healer before the Hidden
Horror got his hands on her, which somehow made it all even more
horrifying. Even as I watched, Mighty Vesena tried to stabilize the
situation by firing its remaining annihilation-engines directly into the
Revenants, but that caught only one and killed a few hundred of the
Ebonclad in the exchange. Bad trade, the Seventh General was losing its
cool.

Even worse the rylleh who reached the fresh beachheads were not, to
their surprise and mine, greeted by swarms of ghouls or skeletons.
Awaiting them were dead mages and large pots of metal, heated and filled
with two things: necromantic sorcery and steel scraps. Like sharpers
they blew, the cursed metals ignoring most defenses that could be put up
by Night, and I winced when I saw not one but three rylleh go down. They
got up shortly, of course: rylleh were harder to kill than that, and
even if one had actually died that probably wouldn't have kept drow of
that tier out of the battle for long. But the corpse-mages were bearing
strange metal staffs, and though I could see no visible mark of sorcery
being employed the three rylleh that'd been struck down\ldots{} stayed
down.

``Weeping Heavens,'' I murmured. ``Has he found a way to shut down the
Night?''

``Not quite,'' Andronike said, voice grown cold. ``Those staffs were
made of an alloy of tin and antimony, and strangely enchanted -- they
did not disrupt Night, or end it, which we could have fought. They
directed it away from our warriors, down into the earth.''

And moments later, petty ghouls they would otherwise have been able to
slaughter by the hundreds began tearing into the downed rylleh. They
devoured their flesh so that they would never recover from that death.
Gods, I fucking hated fighting the Dead King. There was always another
nasty trick just waiting to be unveiled. Binds began pouring of the
breaches, forming up under arrow fire by the increasingly outnumbered
and outflanked Vesena. This was going to turn from a defeat into a
disaster, if something wasn't done soon, and I wasn't the only one to
see it.

The Seventh General, Vesena Spear-Biter, took the field personally.

I did not even seen them move until they were standing before the
Stitcher, long axe resting against the shoulder.

``Sa vrede?'' Mighty Vesena asked of the Revenant.

\emph{Are you worthy?} I shivered to hear my words spoken by one of the
ancient monsters of the Firstborn, taken as writ of faith. Whether in
fear or thrill -- or perhaps both -- I could not be certain. Vesena
received no answer, and as the stitched up necks and heads of sea snakes
struck out at it the Seventh General vanished into shadows and emerged
atop the monster. The axe came down, head biting into the dragon scales,
and inside the beast a sea of Night cut through. Split in two, the
Stitcher's monster poured our blood, guts and strange liquids of many
colours. Inside a dead young woman screamed and the corpses of the drow
began gathering to her, forming another shell, but Mighty Vesena landed
before the Revenant and stood knee-deep in guts and blood. Its shoulder
twitched, once, twice and then it proved why it had earned the sobriquet
of \emph{Spear-Biter}. I'd thought it a reference to mere spears, once,
but that was not the case. Vesena had once warred against an ancient
sigil-holder that'd unearthed and partially repaired one of the ancient
wonders of the Empire Ever Dark, a great tower of arcane-forged steel
that gathered lightning into itself and spewed it in a constant storm
around itself. The steel walls had been thirty feet deep, surrounded by
constant death, and the way the tower jutted out from a deep pit in the
Inner Ring had led Firstborn to call it the Spear.

Night pouring out of it as it twitched, Mighty Vesena screamed in pain
and its mouth unhinged, revealing a bestial maw as large as the
sigil-holder itself had been. Bat-like wings tore out of its back, and
even as the Stitcher tried to form a grisly homunculus of drow corpses
roiling with Night the horrid creature Vesena had turned itself onto
unhinged its great jaw even further and revealed glinting fangs --
before biting straight through the corpses and Revenant, as it once had
through thirty feet of solid steel, and swallowed the Stitcher and a
bloody swath of her work whole.

Officers began calling for a retreat, heeding some unseen order, and the
Vesena obeyed in largely good order. Their sigil-holder continued to sow
destruction left and right, covering the retreat along with the
remaining rylleh, and I slowly breathed out.

``After?'' I asked.

``They pulled back and Kurosiv drowned the invaders in violence,
sweeping them back to the breaches, then broke the wards personally,''
Andronike said, her voice betraying little of her opinion of that
Mighty.

Mighty Kurosiv the All-Knowing, the Second General. It rarely bothered
with deeper tactics than throwing warriors at the enemy but given the
absurd amount of those within its sigil that tended to work regardless.
I found the way it benefited from the deaths of its own and so
encouraged them to be rather disgusting, and I suspected the Sisters
felt rather the same for different reasons: Kurosiv had found a way to
grow fat as a parasite nestled in the heart of the Night, exploiting the
system they had built as no one else had before or since. Rumena had
allegedly taken it as enough of a threat it'd exterminated its first
five sigils, earning the epithet of Tomb-maker in the process, but it
was telling that in the end it was not Kurosiv that'd settled in the
Outer Rings.

``Three other battles were fought that very same night, Queen of Lost
and Found,'' Komena said.

The images flickered quickly through my mind, almost a memory shared but
not quite.

Ysengral the Cradle of Steel, the Eighth General: a lipless grin and
tittering laughter hiding a mind like a steel trap. And traps did it
wield, mazes and madness and traps behind which stood soldiers in steel
and machine of war that worked on and fed of and spat out Night. Endless
bands of dead slipping through the Gloom, testing the defences day and
night.

Ishabog the Adversary, the Fourth General: ever-moving, ever-restless, a
spear and song on the lip and a glint in its eye. Only Mighty may have
the right to call themselves of the Ishabog, and mighty was their
calling: always one against ten, ten against a hundred, a hundred
against a thousand. Vicious creatures made of dead flesh hunting through
darkened woods in packs, hunted in turn.

Radhoste the Dreamer, the Sixth General: a bed of stone like a
sepulcher, carried by rigid in dread. Eyes closed but seeing, a mind
that spans miles and sifts through the sleeping and the dead. A hundred
battles fought with the Enemy like a fencer on the field, back and forth
ever going for the throat as a thousand die with every hour.

All happening, all being fought.

``Remind Cordelia Hasenbach that she will be fighting \emph{those}
battles as well, if she does not leash her lackeys,'' Komena hissed in
my ear.

And in the heartbeat that followed, they were gone. Dawn shyly peeked
through the flaps of my tent, and I eyed my shaking hands before
sighing.

So much for getting a good night's sleep before leaving.