A Practical Guide to Evil

Chapter Book 7 ex17: Interlude: End Times

Antigone had been just a little too slow to stop it.

That would have been enough to unsettle Hanno even if he’d not just seen the Tomb, the great lake that separated Hainaut from the Kingdom of the Dead, freeze over. A horde whose numbers dwarfed the stars in the sky had already begun to march across the thick ice, a tidal wave of death advancing without anything as careful as tactics or strategy: they marched in a straight line, killing every living thing before them. Hainaut was lost, Hanno of Arwad had known in that moment. It could not be held against this, even though the Dead King might well have doomed himself with such a bold stroke. And yet, even as the dark-skinned man watched the inexorable crawl across the horizon, it was not the sights that had his attention. Or his worry.

Antigone had been just a little too slow to stop it.

It was not that providence had abandoned the Witch of the Woods, for it had not. She’d been awake and out in the hills when it happened, at Hanno’s side as they discussed whether a raid to break up the army gathering north of the Cigelin Sisters was feasible. Antigone had been, relatively speaking, in the right place and at the right time. She could have prevented it, feasibly. Looking back, Hanno was certain of that. The opportunity had been provided. And yet Antigone’s answering stroke, her attempt to inflict a flaw on the enemy ritual, had been just a little weak and too slow. She’d misjudged what was needed by a hair’s breadth, which against the likes of the Dead King was more than enough to lose.

It’d been just slightly off, and that was what disturbed Hanno. The Witch of the Woods had been nudged towards a victory, yes, but Hanno feared that her enemy had not been nudged towards defeat. That the grand scheme of freezing an entire lake through a great ritual had not been marked with doom. And the implications of that… He struggled to even grasp the scope. Had the Gods Below chosen the King of Death as their champion, intervened to protect him from the promise reverses? And if they had, was today even the only time they would step in? He almost shivered at the thought. The Dead King had been monstrous enough when he had been, if Catherine was to be believed, in disfavour with the Gods Below.

If he was the favourite son again, the war had become a manner of desperate that begged for a stronger word.

“The clouds are not receding, Lord White,” the Mirror Knight said.

Many had taken to calling Hanno by the title of Prince White, and he no longer bade otherwise, but Christophe had never been one of them. The other man had been scalded by politics, the dark-skinned hero thought, and now avoided them like the plague. And it was a manner of politics to call Hanno any sort of prince, he would not pretend otherwise. A line was being drawn between here and Salia, all of the west deciding on which side it preferred to stand.

“They’re expanding,” Hanno softly agreed.

Dark clouds had appeared in the far distance, above what he knew bone-deep to be the Crown of the Dead without knowing how or why, and they had only been expanding since. A mile every hour, perhaps? It was hard to tell from so far away.

“I fear the Dead King means to cover the entire sky,” the Mirror Knight said. “And that we’ve few means to stop him.”

Hanno could only guess at the truth of that, but it rang true to him. It was a way to block out the sun, to wither crops and force soldiers to fight in the dark. It would spread fear, too, at the simple sight of it. How many would flee just for being convinced that the Gods were abandoning them all?

“Antigone will slow him down,” Hanno replied.

Christophe turned green eyes on the once-White Knight, face grim beneath the helm.

“And how long will that hold?”

Hanno did not answer. Silence lingered.

“Hainaut is lost,” he finally said. “We cannot hope to hold it. Let’s head back to camp, Christophe, a message needs to be sent to General Abigail.”

The Mirror Knight rose to his full height, sun glinting off the polished armour.

“And what will it say?” he curiously asked.

“That she is to retreat,” Hanno of Arwad said. “As we will.”

A line of defence would be left behind, but already he knew what must be done. Most of his army would go to the muster Cordelia Hasenbach had called for, the great host being assembled for a desperate last strike at the heart of the Enemy.

To Salia they would go, and after that only the Gods knew.

Henriette had done well, Prince Frederic Goethal thought as he beheld the walls of Courtial.

His cousin and heiress had been charged with preparing the defences of Brus while he fought abroad and she’d seen to the duty with skill. The last wave of Lycaonese refugees from Neustria was being ferried south into Segovia even as the evacuation of his own Bruseni began, emptying the north of his principality in anticipation of the war reaching it. And it soon would: Princess Rozala had sent word that Cleves was lost and she was retreating into Lyonis, which was the beginning of the end for the defence of that front. Unlike rocky, narrow Cleves the lands of Lyonis were fertile flatlands. There were no natural defences to use against the dead and too few fortresses to stem the tide.

It was only a matter of time until the northeast of Brus began to see raids from the Enemy, probing the defences, and it already was from the northwest. The retreat from the Morgentor had been a march through nightmares, Neustria falling apart around them as the dead butchered thousands and swelled their armies with the slaughter, but the armies had made it. Frederic had risked a raid against a Crab to buy the army time to pull ahead of the tireless armies of the Dead King, but Otto had decided to blithely walk back his agreement and pull him out of the fire at the last moment. It’d been a miracle they’d made it back, much less losing as few men as they had.

But now here they were, their rearguard even now making its way through the hidden paths that led through the great marshlands to the northwest of the principality. Frederic himself had ridden with the van, as was his preference, and that’d led him to the low hill where he’d reined in his charge. In the distance the walls of Courtial, the great fortress the predecessors of the House of Goethal had raised at the edge of the swamps, rose in pale stone. There was a walled city at the foot of the fortress, a mere four thousand souls or so, but that made it the largest gathering of people in the region by far. It was why Frederic had decided on Courtial as a supply base, knowing that a host as large as his own would need the spare hands.

Of the nearly one hundred thousand soldiers that had once stood on the walls of the Morgentor only thirty-seven thousand had made it south, and of these only twenty thousand would keep marching south. Brus’ borders could not be held with only the garrisons now defending them, even if Henriette had moved Heavens and Hells to swell those ranks. Twenty thousand would have to be enough when he answered the First Prince’s call to muster. It will have to be enough, Frederic thought, for there are no more men to spare. The thought was grim but no less true for it. Passing a tired hand through his hair – the helm had ridden tight against a ribbon, tugging at it – the Kingfisher Prince allowed himself a short moment of peace.

To feel the wet wind coming from the marshes, enjoy the sight of the distant green of the rolling plains to the south. It had been years since he was last in the land of his birth. He almost felt a stranger to it.

The peace was ended by the sound of approaching hooves. Frederic felt his retinue stir at the bottom of the hill, but none called a warning. A friend, then, and not unexpected. It was not long before a dozen heavy horses barded in steel joined his retinue below, parting to allow through their prince: Otto Reitzenberg of Bremen, who men called Redcrown. Perhaps the finest friend Frederic had ever made, the man who had saved his life more times than he had fingers to count. Otto deftly guided his charger up the slope, slowing when they became of a height.

The Prince of Bremen was dark-haired and dour, with that unfortunate Reitzenberg nose and a chipped tooth he’d never gotten around to getting fixed, but you would not have known it from the way his people reacted to him. Cordelia Hasenbach was still held in high esteem among the Lycaonese, but she had not fought with her people – not the way Otto Redcrown had. When word had come that Mathilda Greensteel and the Iron Prince had died in Hainaut, the prince of Bremen had become the living banner of the northerners. So long as he stood, they would not falter. Frederic much feared what would happen were he slain, and not only because it would feel as if half his soul were lost.

“Otto,” the Kingfisher Prince lazily said. “Come to see the sights?”

“Not a mountain to be found,” Otto grunted. “It is troubling, Frederic. Like walking around with the back of your trousers missing.”

Frederic laughed. Otto had never set foot out of the Lycaonese principalities before the war, and rarely out of his native Bremen. This was the furthest he’d even been from home. A home now little more than ashes and undead.

“I’m glad you will be able to see the plains before the war reaches them,” the Prince of Brus said. “It is not the right season for the flower fields, but-”

There was a sound like a scream, if the world itself could scream. Frederic froze in surprise, but a heartbeat later his sword had cleared the scabbard. It was not only him who’d heard the noise, he saw, for Otto and both their escorts were arming themselves. The scream died as suddenly as it had come, but it left behind thick unease.

“That did not come from the swamps,” the Kingfisher Prince decided.

“Heaven’s ward,” Otto quietly said.

Frederic followed his friend’s gaze, across the distance and all the way to the pale walls of Courtial. At first he thought it was a heat haze, improbable as it would be, but it was not. The stone was twisting and slithering, spinning out in strands. All of the madness orbited a single form, a great eye of sickly green light set in a pulsing haze of purple flames.

“Demon,” Frederic rasped out, coldly furious. “The Dead King seeks to destroy the city before we can hold it. I will not suffer it.”

He cast a look at his riders.

“Raise the banner,” the Kingfisher Prince ordered. “Lord Gontrand, you will ride in haste for priests and mages. There is no time to-”

The world screamed again, wracked in pain. There was a splash of murky darkness in the heart of the fortified city. Within a heartbeat, screaming began. Terror, Frederic recognized. They were screams of utter terror. His Name flared in protection, burning away the sliver of corruption carried by the distant sounds.

“You will need the Stained Sister and the Astrologer,” Otto evenly said. “It is nothing but throwing away lives otherwise.”

Frederic bit his lip until it bled, but curtly nodded. Getting himself killed would help no one, besides – the world began to scream again. Not the city, this time. In the distance, the green rolling plains to the south lit up with red. Fire was spreading through air and ground alike, like baleful tendrils. There was another scream.

And another.

Another.

Another.

This, the Kingfisher Prince dimly realized, was no longer a war. It was an extermination.

It was madness, Roland thought. Impossible.

He was in Aisne, looking into the rumour a Revenant had been seen. There was all of Brabant between him and the fronts. Aisne was not safe, for nowhere was safe in these dark times, but the principality had been spared the swords of the Dead King. Even after the Carrion Lord’s depredations during the Tenth Crusade, the land here remained some of the finest in the principate: great golden plains as far as the eye could see, vineyards and orchards and merry streams. These were the heartlands of the Principate, only Cantal and Iserre fancied as richer in harvests.

And now Rogue Sorcerer was watching that same harvest die.

Entire swaths of the sunny blue sky above had broken like panes of glass, sights from the eerie horizons of Arcadia shown through the rifts, and great stones had fallen down. One through every rift, and though they fell without regard to where they might land Roland did not think that this was a mere bombardment. He hurried the closest fallen stone, riding a horse half to death, and found that death had arrived long before he could. The stone, a massive thing of granite the height and width of a dozen men, had shattered a barn that mercifully looked like it’d been abandoned. But it was not the stone that struck fear in him.

Out of small holes in granite, almost like pores, small critters were pouring out. Hardly any larger than crickets, they had a glint of copper them in the glare of the sun as they spread out like a cursed plague. They fanned out like a curtain and, instead of any sort of terrible curse, they simply spoiled all they touched. Like rippled going through the field before him, Roland watched with muted horror as in a matter of moments they made half a mile’s worth of grain uneatable. Half-rotten, perhaps even poisonous. Gathering himself he pulled at the most destructive of magics within him, spraying flame and whipping up a storm of it.

Thousands of the undead critters died in moments, leaving him panting and already half spent. There were still a few out there that he could see and he took the time to clear them out, but his mind was already awhirl at the implications.

“This will kill us all,” Roland de Beaumarais whispered.

How many of the stones had fallen? At least six here in Aisne, and the Dead King would have done much the same across all the lands that serves as the breadbasket of Procer. Cantal, Iserre, perhaps even as far west as Aequitan. He was killing the infestation here, but how many of these abominations would land days of travel away from anyone who might end them? The great stone pulsed with power, but the Rogue Sorcerer snarled in rage and snapped his wrist towards it.

“Confiscate.”

The magic invested in it was foul, handling it felt like licking pestilence, but even as the stone went inert Roland forced himself to study the sorcery. It had been meant, he decided, to release another swarm. It had been gathering power from ambient sorcery ever since unleashing the first. Likely the stone itself was being converted into the foul critters and the spell would run out when there was no longer enough granite to sustain the enchantments. Four, five swarms, he guessed. And, even as his heart clenched and his blood turned to ice, Roland de Beaumarais corrected his words.

“This has killed us all,” the Rogue Sorcerer whispered.

Procer did not know it yet, might nor for days or even weeks, but it was starving.

Princess Rozala watched in mute horror as the wave washed over the rampart, sweeping men and engines away in a murderous crash.

She’d thought they had longer, that though the defensive line around Peroulet was good as fallen the city itself might hold a while longer. That it might slow down the advance of the Enemy before the army holding it was forced to retreat through the Twilight Ways into Lyonis. And was she not right to hope? The Dead King had thrown devils at these walls, and when that failed a pair of demons, but they had held. Gods, it had cost them but they had held and sent the beasts screaming back into the Hells. They’d tied down an army a hundred thousand strong by keeping the city, buying time for walls to be raised to their south, and even as the dead assaulted the walls day and night the defenders held. Exhausted and bleeding, but so very proud. Had they not held against the Enemy’s worst?

So the Dead King began to drown them all.

It was said that the Black Queen’s most fearsome spell – the Deluge, singers called it – had been used against her in Hainaut, but Rozala had not thought her own host at risk. The Enemy had never used it elsewhere, perhaps out of fear that he would be caught and the spell would be turned against him. Whatever the truth of it, such restraint was gone: a great gate had been opened at ground height facing the gates of Peroulet and within moments the blast of water had smashed them down. Water began pouring into the city, tipping over soldiers and horses, breaking houses. It had not stopped there. Another two gates were opened on the city’s flanks, higher up. The tides there were now sweeping over the ramparts, crushing whatever men had manned them.

Rozala had been commanding from the summit of the keep at the heart of the city, as she liked the vantage, but now she was being forced to watch the city drown and her army with it.

“Louis,” she said, forcing herself to be calm. “The outer city is lost. Order our priests to form shields across the streets from the height of…”

She paused, searching through her memory.

“Therrien Avenue,” the Princess of Aequitan finished.

“That’s abandoning a third of the city, Rozala,” her husband quietly said. “The one where most of our soldiers are.”

“It is either that or losing all of it,” she evenly replied. “Send the order, along with that of general retreat.”

The moment they had lost the walls they’d lost the siege. All she could do now was salvage all she could of the army and pray it was enough. Louis Rohanon grimaced, but did not argue. He’d been in this war just as long as she had, he too knew the looks of a city lost.

“It will be done,” he promised, then hesitated.

She smiled, laying his hand on her belly. It had swollen, but she was still months away from birth according to the priests.

“Go,” Rozala ordered. “We’ll live through it, all three of us.”

He laid a kiss on her hand and left. The princess avoided the amused gazes of her personal guard as her husband and secretary left. She had never been much of a romantic herself, as they well knew, but she did appreciate her husband’s continued tenderness. It was terribly Alamans, but it’d grown on her. Shaking off the thought, Rozala brought up her Baalite eye again and continued to preside over what was already promising to be one of the greatest defeats of her career as a general. The battle was lost, there was no denying that, but she must learn all she could of the Enemy’s tricks before her army retreated.

The Dead King was in fine form today, it seemed. The water pouring out of the gates had not stopped, filling the outer city so much it was not spilling over the walls and the shields raised by priests and mages were buckling under the weight. It was not the end of it, though. Great war engines not unlike oversized ballistae had been dragged to the fore of the undead army outside the city, a dozen of them, and bombardment began unceremoniously. The projectiles they shot arced upwards, above the shields her people had raised, and tore through the hasty attempts by her last spare mages to bounce them off. Great monoliths of obsidian tore into the paved roads, cleaving through the stone, and began pulsing with sorcery.

“All Named on the monoliths,” Rozala ordered. “The water was merely a strike, these are the killing stroke.”

The messenger went off at a run, but few things were faster than sorcery. Rozala had read the reports of the Black Queen’s battle at Lauzon’s Hollow and she recalled mention of pillars of black stone with a similar look, but the difference in size was stark. No mere pillars, these: they were large enough that the war engines that shot them were made of steel and large as houses. The effect, though, seemed to be similar from the description she had read. A pulse of crackling lightning slew all men in range, and then a few heartbeats later a second pulse raised them from the dead. The size, Rozala decided, was a mere consequence of the power of the cursed things having been increased. It was still fundamentally the same trick.

Cold comfort, when she saw near a thousand soldiers die in the first pulse.

Practically speaking an enemy bridgehead had been established behind her lines and, more importantly, her shields. If the dead began killing priests… If Louis were here, with his head for numbers he might hazard a guess at the strength that the great volumes of water held back by the shields might bring to bear. Rozala did not have that particular gift, though she knew enough to suspect it would be a merciless slaughter.

“Full retreat,” Princess Rozala ordered, the words like ashes in her mouth. “All forces are to immediately begin making their way towards Gueridon Plaza. The wayfarer mages are to open the gates into the Twilight Ways.”

Maybe half her army would make it out of the city, if she was lucky, and this did not seem like a day for luck. Peroulet had held for weeks only to now fall in hours, and deep down Rozala was beginning to wonder if she’d not simply been allowed to remain here for some deeper purpose. She grit her teeth, putting away the Baalite eye. It did not matter. There was only one place left for her army to retreat to.

Salia, where Cordelia Hasenbach had called for a great muster.

After Brus fell, it was finished.

It had taken the Dead King years to take the Lycaonese principalities, and even Neustria’s fall had come mere months ago, but now it seemed as if the Enemy was no longer restraining himself. The principality of Brus still stood in the sense that most of its lands were intact and over half of its people remained, but as a state it was finished. All its major cities had been struck by demons and only the most heavily warded of border fortresses still stood, meaning that Prince Frederic now ruled over farmland being overrun and a panicked mass of refugees.

Lyonis was being swept through, its defences overrun, and now that the White Knight had withdrawn from Hainaut the lands it had defended were beginning to break as well. Prince Ariel of Arans was negotiating with the regent of Callow for his people to be allowed across the Stairway, having been refused by the Prince of Bayeux to his south, and the Brabantine refugees that Cordelia had not welcomed into Salia had armed themselves so they could force their way into Aisne even through a closed border. The moment word of it all had spread, the First Prince of Procer had lost the last power she held over the southern Principate.

No royalty south of Creusens still answered her letters, save those who had invited her to flee to their realm and continue her rule under their protection. Cordelia had declined the offer, even when made by those who genuinely meant the words. Her duty was in Salia. She had left her own Rhenia to burn for that duty and she would not forsake it now. She could feel it in the air, the way that all the winds were blowing towards the capital. The last gasp of Procer would be exhaled here, in the same city where it had been founded centuries ago. Agnes had agreed, though the predictions she shared afterwards were troubling.

But Cordelia Hasenbach would not go gently into the night, and so she had prepared.

Salia could not be evacuated. Even if her increasingly tenuous hold on the city could be used to bend the people that way, there was simply nowhere for them to go. With the refugees pouring in from the north, there were likely now as many people in Salia and its surrounding towns as in all of Brus. If the people were dispersed in every direction most would die from lack of means, and if they remained together they would be a crushing burden to whichever principality they fled to. Cordelia, much as the thought disgusted her, knew that armies would be mobilized to massacre them before they crossed the border if need be.

A decade ago that would have been unthinkable, but after the Great War and the brutality of the conflict with the Dead King? Desperation would make for ugly deeds.

And so Salia must stand, lest Cordelia condemn hundreds of thousands to death. Her duty decided, she had set to prepare the defence and even what would come after. Armies would gather to the capital so that they might set out against Keter, but those armies would need food and steel and supplies. She bargained and begged and confiscated – stole with the fig leaf of law – to scrap together all she could, and still Agnes told her that doom was coming. The armies would not be there in time. The Dead King would strike first. And so the First Prince of Procer turned to the sole recourse left to her.

She sent all villains east into Aisne and sent Agnes away from the city, where her sight would be needed, then dismissed her servants and headed towards the Chamber of Assembly.

The seat of the Highest Assembly had little changed since the day Clothor Merovins had been elected as the founding First Prince of Procer. In a city that every ruler wanted to grace with another fresh thing of beauty, another layer of glamour and glory, the ancient hall remained untouched. Walls of whitewashed limestone, rafters of ancient creaking oak and that faint smell of wood smoke come from the fire that had caught during the second Liturgical War. In a city heavily laden with gold and marble and jewels, it was a stark and bare place – save for the twenty-four thrones that filled it. Twenty-three on the ground, one for each principality, and one for the First Prince on the dais above.

Cordelia sat on Clothor Merovins’ old throne and close her eyes. She could feel the grey granite beneath her, polished by a river but otherwise unadorned, and she set her palm against the coolness of it. In a way she had never been close to that seat, she mused. Cordelia too had been worn to smoothness, stripped of all her affectations. The fair-haired princess smiled at the thought, then in the pale light of the single lantern lit she waited in silence. It would come soon, Agnes had told her as much, and it would come here. And when her answer was given, well, she would learn something as well.

She was half asleep when the scream sounded, but ice ran through her blood and she was wide awake before the roof atop her was ripped off. Cordelia looked up at the night sky, the stars and the half-moon, but they were marred by a great gate spewing out winged abominations. A Hellgate. That was the Dead King’s bow, then, a Hellgate above the very beating heart of the Principate. Yet there was more. Ugly, unspeakable things that came creeping through the dark. That bent wood as if it were water and made of tiles wriggling snakes. How many were there? She could not tell, in the dark, but there had to be more than one.

It was a great winged devil that dared to first enter the Chamber, landing in a crouch before her. Shaped like a horned man, though broader than any man she had met, and covered with thick dark fur. Bestial and with a mouth full of fangs that it dared to grin at her with. She leaned forward, her dress of Rhenian blue pulling tight on her shoulders.

“Can you hear me, Dead King?” Cordelia asked.

The creature milled uneasily, then stilled.

“In a manner of speaking,” it replied, its voice not its own.

“Ah, I had hoped you would,” the First Prince of Procer smiled.

“You struggled mightily,” the Dead King said. “But there is no turning back the inexorable.”

“It may well be that we will fall,” the First Prince acknowledged. “But until then, Trismegistus King, do not forget one thing.”

She smiled, cold and hard and with every once of scorn every Hasenbach had ever felt for the old monster.

“This is Procer,” she hissed. “You tread here at your peril.”

Pale light washed over them all.

An eternity passed. The Light had seared Cordelia’s skin but left her strangely invigorated, and when she opened her eyes again she found… nothing. Not before her, not in the sky above, not anywhere at all. There was only Salia and her people. The ealamal had worked as the priests as sworn it would, scouring all of the principality from the Dead King and his works. It had been weakened, they told her, both in stringency and in scope. Power had been limited and been made less discriminating. Cordelia had still likely killed a hundreds if not thousands of people in Salia through that order, she did not delude herself otherwise. People who had not been tried, been judged under the law.

They had only been judged as taints on Creation by the Choir of Judgement even through all the priests had done to force mercy onto that judgement. No Damned could have hoped to survive were they present, which was why Cordelia had sent them to Aisne, for in the eyes of the Seraphim villains were scarcely better than devils or demons.

Even though there was a sliver of guilt at the deaths she had ensured, Cordelia knew that the fate her decision had spared Salia would have been incomparable. And, deep down, a part of her felt deeply vindicated. Many had tried to warn her off the angel’s corpse, called it madness or stupidity. Yet it had just saved every soul within the borders of Salia, and likely would again. Alone in the silent hall where the princes and princesses of Procer ruled but now she alone sat with silence for sole company, Cordelia Hasenbach looked up through the torn roof at the night sky. The pale stars set against the darkness, like candle lights never more than a breath away from being snuffed.

The Lycaonese princess raised a hand, as if to pluck them from the sky, and smiled.

“One more night to live,” Cordelia told them. “Dawn has not yet failed.”

She would win her people as many nights as she could, whatever the cost.