Step by step, the thralls marched into the caltrop-laden ground—step by step, they went down, only to be pushed onto the earth, still struggling, by their comrades. Some hacked at their fallen brothers’ heads—not mercy killings, no. Adarin shook his head. They are killing them for better footing.

  Nearly a hundred thralls were spent that way, and the entire time Adarin’s musketeers happily assisted the enemy’s efforts at laying down a new ground covering with thundering enthusiasm. He felt the officers tense around him, their gawking disbelief thick in the air. He narrowed his eyebrows. Wouldn’t an enemy fighting the undead face a similarly efficient foe? I guess they’ve only fought monsters and men so far. Something to discuss with Rüdiger when we rewrite the training doctrine.

  While Adarin was lost in thought, Liora leaned forward, screaming obscenities at the advancing foe. Necromantic energy began building around her hand and Adarin stepped forward, pulling her back.

  “Liora, calm yourself. I know you want to get them, but this is not the time yet.”

  She looked at him and the fire slowly died in her eyes. She smiled sheepishly.

  “It’s just… they are so stupid.”

  Adarin laughed and several other officers picked up the chuckle.

  “That indeed they are.”

  Having circumvented the caltrops, the enemy troopers faced the next issue, namely the dense ranks of pikes. A small dike of dead bodies was forming where the caltrops ended and the pike range began, as rank by rank, their rhythmic thrusts reaped a harvest of pale bodies. Both skeletons and thrall fought in full silence, indifferent to their deaths.

  Two hundred more thralls rallied out of the depths of the temple, and Adarin ground his teeth. There really is an entrance somewhere there. How did we miss this? But luckily he kept the thought to himself.

  The two companies of undead thralls raised their weapons in eerie unison and started chanting a keening war cry, then charged over the corpses, climbed on the shoulders of their fallen, wounded, and dying comrades, and simply jumped into the pikes. Their sheer body weight tore the lengths of wood to the ground, and more thralls rushed onto the skeletons. Black steel met reinforced bones and musketeers holding the wedge after the first trench began firing pistols into foes caught on the pikes.

  The thralls were dying, but Adarin’s breath caught as he saw another 200 in the next charge. This time there were almost 20 lesser vampires and two of the elegantly naked humanoids, the higher vampires like the female he had killed, among them.

  The two higher vampires screeched—sound waves detonated outward in visible spheres. Evocation magic—suddenly Adarin’s world grew muted and soldiers and settlers went to their knees, covering their ears. Liora leaned against the pillar dedicated to the Avatar of Law, brushed the blood off her hands, and cast a healing spell. Her hands dripping with blood, she began charging around, touching officers, healing torn eardrums.

  But the charge was still coming. Adarin grabbed her and pulled her towards him.

  “Liora, the second-rank pikemen. Order them.”

  He observed the vampires, watched their beautifully feline predatory sprint, witnessed them jump. The side of his mouth twitched the moment the enemy gave themselves over to gravity.

  “Up, now!” he hissed at Liora, and Liora made a single movement.

  For a quick second the purple glittering of the control network of the undead lit up in her hands. Like a wave, the pikes of the second trench, that had been resting on the ground, rose up, and the triumphant howling of the vampires turned into panic as they began flapping their wings, desperately trying to alter their angle of descent. What they had seen as helpless meat ready for harvest below had suddenly turned into a forest of eager steel.

  Adarin coldly observed the muscle-bound male high vampire sailing through the air. He was weaving magic, altering his angle, but then a skeletal pike thrust up, caught his leg. He tumbled and his upper back was pierced by two pikes. Several more shot towards him, sinking into him, and soon he was held like a skewered pig, bleeding his pale silver blood.

  He screeched, grabbed for the pikes, broke one, then two, but several sergeants on the ground alongside junior mages had the same idea. Pistols, spells, and muskets were raised as the scene repeated itself at dozens of places all over the formation.

  Adarin dimly noted the other female vampire was halfway towards the ground, dragging herself down the single pike that had impaled her through the guts. The pike’s shaft glistened with her translucent blood and she was snapping frantically at the human below, swinging sharp claws, ready to rend and tear. But a musketeer placed his musket straight on her forehead, in a smooth rush, and pulled the trigger. Her head detonated in a shower of gore. The sharp ozone tang and the rich metallic smell of gunpowder proved the only epitaph the monsters would be getting.

  Pikemen began lowering their pikes, extracting the undead, when suddenly, from the ranks of the next cohort of thralls, another wave of lower vampires burst forward. Adarin screamed orders. Liora tried getting control of the skeletons, but too many of the pikes were entangled, busy skewering the remaining vampires.

  Again the monsters sailed through the air, but this time the discipline and coordination that had eaten the first charge alive was gone. Spells flared. One vampire was hit by a large globule of napalm fireball and went down into the second trench. Soldiers and settlers alike held the line, turning that section into an inferno that kept clawing at people until inside a barrow mound of a dozen corpses the beast came to rest.

  Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators!

  The thralls rushed forward, rushed over the lowered pikes into the skeletons, breaching the first trench.

  Adarin hissed in anger. “Dammit. Gavin, fire Gisela now. Into the breach.”

  The cannon one level above him on the pagoda roared and fired. Seconds later, runic fragmentation rounds went off, cutting off the tail end of the charge, and Adarin ground his teeth. Should have ordered him to fire into our own men. This is only cutting off the reinforcements.

  But the day’s battle had rallied the morale of the settlers and soldiers alike. Axes and swords were brought forward, and the thunder of pistol and spell extracted the enemy’s blood in equal parts. The resistance stiffened around the fallen section of the second trench and the third trenches. A constant colonnade of shots and pike thrusts proved an insurmountable barrier for the charging enemy. Adarin stood still in his command post. He felt his wooden muscles shifting around the diamonoid dagger. What wouldn’t I give to just go down there and kill those fuckers. But… I’m the commander, and my role is to react to whatever bullshit they throw next at us.

  Gisela barked again, as did two other cannons, and the shattered remains of the outer fortress ring were reinforced with troops, with skeletal pikemen reorienting themselves. Just before the breach became a full encirclement, one gray-muscled brute raised its head and howled. As one, thralls and vampires alike grabbed soldiers who were wounded, dazed, or just down and dragged them outside and began retreating through the closing breach.

  Pikes reaped the lives of dozens. Musket fire cut into the retreat, but in the end nearly a hundred vampires and thralls, including several dozen prisoners, made it behind the temple doors.

  The bronze gates fell shut with a lingering gong.

  Adarin tensed, swallowed hard, and then one settler woman holding a bloody cleaver raised her tool of carnage to the sky and screamed a cry of victory. Fists and weapons shot up, and as the undead closed the final remnants of the breach, the cry of victory resounded around the pagoda.

  Adarin gestured to the officers and they joined in the celebration. People began dancing, cheering, and screaming mocking insults at the vampires. After almost a minute Adarin frowned. There was a new tone that was added to the celebration, something that lacked the cheer and happiness and pure exhaustion of a recently won battle. Then a second dissonant note, a third.

  ‘Silence,’ Adarin ordered over the noospheric link, then louder with his voice. “Quieten down. Something is happening.”

  Sergeants and soldiers calmed the settlers. The tones of celebration were replaced instantly. Terrible noises could be heard from the temple, men and women screaming their lungs out in what must be excruciating pain.

  A young mage who belonged to those monitoring the ward schema ran up.

  “Sir Adarin, that alteration magic—it’s not quite clear, but…” He swallowed hard. “The archmagister says it’s torture spells.”

  Adarin cursed and hissed. “Of course they know that a straight fight will only lead them to losses, so they fall back on their fucking terror tactics.”

  The grim faces of his officers twisted with disgust and fury. The screams multiplied and intensified, mockingly erupting from straight behind the temple doors. Ominous red fog spilled out from under them, seeming to carry images of twisting faces, of bodies torn into positions that nature never intended.

  Adarin saw Liora standing like a deer in headlights, gasping, her chest, her breathing shallow.

  “What… what am I doing? I can feel it. It’s the magic of life. But it is so, so wrong,” she whispered.

  Then Duchess Viola scrambled up and came to a gasping stop next to him.

  “Adarin, you need to do something. This… this is eating our morale alive.”

  “Yes,” Adarin hissed. His mind went to his options and then he shook himself out of his angry fugue state the moment he saw Devin coming down the stairs. The solution. It was so obvious.

  “Devin, how much more quicklime munitions do you have?”

  “Enough for ten salvos,” replied the kobold curtly.

  “Can you blow the doors or the walls of the temple?”

  Gasps and murmurs erupted from around Adarin. He noticed the faces of a third of the officers that showed squeamishness in this hour. Gotta remember them for later reference.

  He raised his voice. “The temple is being desecrated right now. A blown-apart door, some holes in the wall, can be repaired. To end whatever is happening to those people in there—”

  Murmurs of agreement quickly overshadowed furtive glances of doubt, but the doubt remained.

  Adarin ran up to the next level and saw that Devon was already maneuvering the cannons into place: four field cannons and the magical artifact that was Gisela. The kobold himself loaded the three quicklime projectiles into the slick steel barrels as the other cannons were readied and angled up with sandbags, lowering the barrels at the temple gate.

  Gavin looked around, already bouncing on his toes. “All aimed.”

  The howling and the red fog spread out, reaching the first line, and Adarin saw that settlers and soldiers alike were flinching back, some falling from their positions. They are on the verge of running. The terrible screams of endlessly prolonged death cried out like a song, and there was a promise in there. You too will suffer. Soon.

  One by one the cannons checked in with Devon and Gavin, the cannoneers confirming their readiness.

  “Fire,” said the kobold, not waiting for Adarin’s command.

  Sharp thumps—then a flash—and the bronze temple doors were gone, ripped into shrapnel. Thralls that stood behind the door were cut into pieces, and several musketeers on the higher levels began cheering, a momentary reprieve of confidence in the terrible dread that was settling into everyone’s bones. Adarin could have hugged them.

  Then, with three bolts of bright yellow fire, Gisela spoke, and a white fog erupted within the temple. The otherworldly fog of twisting faces began boiling into pink, acrid smoke, its structures and that tone of dread disappearing in an instant. The screams of the dying multiplied, until they were drowned out by coughing and gurgling sounds.

  No one spoke. No one dared move.

  As the dust settled, for a second Adarin thought he made out flickering movements within the temple’s inner sanctum, but only a thin layer of snow-like quicklime soaking up blood remained.

  Adarin studied the field of battle, the closed-up breach, the dozens of dead vampires. He looked around and swallowed.

  “Captain Krislov. Assemble a scouting unit. Two companies.”