Tenebroum

Chapter 167: Ever Further

As the months ground on, The Voice of Reason and her forces moved ever further north. They kept a good pace, but even so, they were never able to outrun the news of their approach and gain true surprise. Though there was a time when such an outcome would have been ideal, even if such things were impossible when one served a master as illustrious and powerful as she did, she would no longer have welcomed it now.

Not only did that lack of surprise do nothing to aid their enemies, it undermined them. Every week, she continued to glide inexorably further up the coast, visiting every Sultan and Pasha that would receive her and crushing the few that would not. In every port she visited, the rumors of the black sailed ships ran before her like messengers announcing her arrival. They foretold the danger that any city or kingdom would face as soon as they sighted her on the horizon.

The threat was very real now. However, it did not come from her tiny fleet. Instead, it emanated from the Dark Paragons that scoured the deserts in her wake, marching north with their growing armies. The message was an incredibly clear one: make a deal with her or deal with them. It wasn’t hard for most people to decide the right answer to that question.

The Lich’s forces were an unstoppable wave of darkness now that was slowed only by the treacherous terrain they were forced to navigate. She had gotten only the briefest glimpse of their armies when they laid siege to Abbas, but what she was deadly enough.

Other than the truly wealthy city-states like Tanda, these desert cities had only small walls of sandstone or adobe. They were just strong enough to look imposing and no more. They didn’t need any more than that. Not when they relied on the desert as their primary form of defense. After all, how could a force of any size lay siege to your walls when there was nothing to drink and nowhere to hide from the sun? How would someone move siege equipment through endless soft sand?

Wars this far north had apparently been decided with subterfuge and piracy more than large armies or even the lightning-fast cavalry that the lords of the region loved to use in their endless border skirmishes. When launched against the forces of the Lich, though, those proud princes and their expensive horses had a way of disappearing into the desert, never to return. The cities themselves did not fare much better.

Though Tanda had all but surrendered without a shot at the apparent behest of a small god that had no wish to give the Lich an excuse to devour it, other cities had proven more truculent until the brutal fall of Abbas had given them a reason to take her unspoken threats more seriously.

Of all the cities in the area, it was one of the most powerful. It had a small standing army, a few mages, and a proud Emir that would pay tribute to any man. On her brief, chilly visit, the Emir had made it known that “Even if you think your lord to be a God, that changes nothing, for he is not our god.”

She hadn’t done much to attempt to change the man’s mind. While some rulers could be reasoned with, and others could be convinced by discussing what other rulers had chosen to do, she knew immediately that even spending this much time with the Emir of Abbas had been a waste of time. He could not be brought to their side; he could only be killed and removed as an obstacle.

Abbas’s resistance lasted for a month, but only because it took that long for two of the three armies making their way north to get into position for a truly decisive strike. They would snipe at traffic on the trade routes and make whole mounted patrols vanish into dust, but they did nothing to attack the city itself until all was in readiness and they had moved up their lines to within a few hundred feet of the enemy’s torches.

It was only when everything was in readiness that they boiled up from the sand as one and attacked. Such a precise attack would have been impossible for living troops, but the Lich’s deathless soldiers had no such limitations.

As the Voice of Reason watched from just offshore, she’d expected to see the green and orange fire of the Lich’s alchemical explosions light up the night. Instead, all remained dark. Instead of wasting such powerful tools on such a pitiful target, huge grapnels were thrown by the largest of the abominations, and then whole sections of the fragile walls were pulled down by inhuman strength.

Once they were breached, it was all but done. The defenders ran out into the dark to try to plug those gaps, but they had no idea what it was they faced. From everything that the Voice had heard, it was widely assumed that the very nature of the Lich’s forces was assumed to be exaggerated. A place as sunny as the endless desert rarely dealt with the undead, so the idea that someone really might raise thousands of corpses and use them to crush you was seen as more than a little far-fetched. That night, they learned the truth, and not even the mages could save them.

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Indeed, though their lightning did some good, most mages seemed to try a sort of sandstorm spell first, which was entirely ineffective against the dead. It was so powerful that it could turn the desert sands into a weapon that scourged flesh from bone and even made the sails of her ships flutter over a mile away, but in this case, the loss of flesh did nothing to stop a zombie from ripping you to pieces.

Though the city was annihilated that night, something else happened that hadn’t occurred in a very long time; the Paragons’ forces left survivors. That wasn’t an accident. No brave forces had managed to fight their way free of the noose. With less than five thousand zombies and abominations, it would have been the easiest thing in the world to crush every last spark of life in the city, but that’s not what happened.

For months, the Dreamer had done to seed how dangerous the Lich’s forces were in the mind of these desert dwellers, seeing was believing, and the fear of the few men that would escape this night would spread like the plague, leaving tens of thousands in their wake begging to be saved from such a fate.

The Voice of Reason’s lips curled in a smile as she remembered watching how that spread from city to city and how much easier her job became after that. Though the Paragons had not wanted to spare even a single life thanks to their natural blood thirstiness, they had acknowledged that hers was the correct approach.

As a result, most of the city-states and kingdoms she found as she worked her way up the coast were practically clamoring for her arrival. According to the Puppeteer, people were saying, “The only way to avoid death is to make an agreement with the Dark Lady.”

She smiled at that. Not only did she like the name, but she liked that hers was the only path to salvation for these fearful leaders. That let her impose ever more onerous terms of these places as they traveled north. Fearful rulers rarely did more than agree when they understood how precarious their positions truly were.

At this point, all it took was one look at her death knight vanguard, and she could see the rumors play across their faces. Sometimes, she was fairly certain that if she’d demanded their firstborn, they would have agreed. She didn’t, though. She wasn’t here to choose what would hurt these people the least but to reach agreements that would benefit her master the most.

From the smaller, poorer communities, she still chose a tithe of flesh, paid for with both the dead and the living. The larger cities would pay this way too, though often at double or even triple the rate that Tanda had gotten away with so long ago, but now they paid in gold, too. In most cases, such as the cities Idrhim, Malwar, and the island of Golway, a talent a year was the agreed upon sum, over and above all tolls that were paid with blood and flesh.

“You serve me well,” the Lich told her, sending a fragment of its soul as a message delivered by one of its dark riders in an unarmed death’s head. “Even now, ships full of the damned travel down the poisoned Oroza to be delivered into my inner sanctum peace does us many favors but do not forget that if these petty allies betray us, the bulk of my forces will be cut off far from here. So, learn well the price of subservience, and ensure that we shatter all those who might one day become a danger.”

Even if the message was a backhanded compliment and harsher than the praise she’d hoped for, The Voice of Reason understood the Lich’s concerns. She gave a full report about her reasons and the results they’d achieved, hoping that the news of several shipments of gold would please her dark lord more than the earlier victories had.

She also informed the Lich that the desert was supposed to taper off soon and that, in the event they were betrayed, they would simply poison every oasis that wasn’t behind city walls. Once that had happened, they could build a route through the deep desert that simply could no longer be reached by living bearings and their mounts due to the distances involved.

“Based on everything we’ve learned from the dead and the living, the Kingdom of Varenell lies less than a hundred miles to the north. By all accounts, it is nothing like these little desert kingdoms, and it had much more in common with Hallen’s cohesion. So, I thought it best to save military resources where possible to focus on the conquest to come.” Even after she finished her full report, she waited until the dark rider left before she relaxed visibly.

It was only when she was alone once more and entirely surrounded by the mindless automatons that had been loaned to her that she let worry cross her face. Had she done the right thing? She wondered, looking up at the blighted moon. Would her desire for domination via peaceful conquest come back to haunt her?

Even if it did, it didn’t matter on some level. She’d been created to want these things. She could no more be bloodthirsty than the Dark Paragons could become wise pacifists. The Voice’s gaze flicked down to her hands as she briefly recalled a moment that she’d been more than a little bloodthirsty, but she put it out of her mind. That conniving princess had deserved everything she’d gotten and more.

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