Inexorable

“Courage and cowardice fill the same grave, but earn different eulogy.”
– Lycaonese saying

Otto Reitzenberg’s crown sat ill on his brow, and always would. On it weighed the three deaths that had carried him through the gates of Sternlerin fortress: his father and sisters, every one of them a better and braver soul than he. They had perished at the Enemy’s hand, and with every death further down the line of succession the crown was passed until it sat on his brow. Sat laden with the weight of those who should have led their people instead. Sometimes he thought he could hear them in the wind. Father’s rasping laughter, his throat never quite recovered from the poison on the ratling spear. Gude’s calm and steady drone, never moved to haste by fear nor displeasure. Elsa’s thundering wraths and kindnesses, neither any less terrible than the other. The Enemy had come for the House of Reintzenberg, that day, and spared only the runt of the litter. For the blood he carried on his brow his people had named him Otto Redcrown, and in his hands the heavy charge of turning back the tide of the Dead had been left.

He was not that charge’s equal.

“Come now, Reitzenberg,” the other man drawl, “no need to look so grim. The situation’s markedly improved since this morning.”

The Prince of Bremen scowled at his companion, unamused by the attempted levity. Prince Frederic Goethal was the very personification of every mocking tale shared around fires about the Alamans – covered in silks and ribbons, his long flaxen hair cascading down in ringlets all the way to his shoulders and usually drunk well before noon. The Prince of Brus was also the only ruler from south of Neustria to have sent so much as a single sword to join the defence of Lycaonese lands. And it was more than a sword the man had ridden with: near the entire army of Brus had made for Twilight’s Pass under the prince. Frederic was, Otto believed, both a finer soldier and a finer tactician than the Prince of Bremen himself. Yet he was also as prone to preening as the colourful azure and crimson kingfisher that was the banner of the House of Goethal. The juxtaposition of the two was disconcerting, made more so by the fact that the man was barely twenty and boyish in looks besides.

“I do not see how, Prince Frederic,” Otto said. “For one, this appears to be a dragon.”

The long stretch of mountain passes, valleys and narrow ridges popularly known as Twilight’s Pass had several choke points, the jagged pits of Volsaga being the latest they had been forced to defend. Volsaga Fortress itself, raised on a narrow strip between two sharp cliffs, had held for a fortnight as the dead massed their hosts under cover of constant, grinding assaults. It might have held for another fortnight, Prince Otto thought, if not for the Dead King unleashing the skeletal horror he’d just referred to. The gargantuan dragonlike thing had torn through the outer walls, ignoring like arrows and stone like they were summer rain, and scattered the defenders as the lesser dead poured in. Now it was curled around a low peak that loomed above the path into the fortress, forbidding attempt to claw it back from the dead.

“’twas a dragon, perhaps,” Prince Frederic mused. “It is now quite dead, one assumes.”

“We pulled back in time,” Otto grunted, ignoring the other man’s words. “We’ll save maybe half the companies we’d committed to the fortress. That is still a heavy loss. It will be a fighting retreat until Graueletter, too, and that abomination is bound to pursue.”

“The dwarven ballistae seemed to have only irritated it, alas,” the Prince of Brus conceded. “Though given the weather in this parts, it is a miracle the things work at all.”

“How, then,” Prince Otto patiently said, “has our situation improved since morn?”

“I would think that obvious, Reitzenberg,” Prince Frederic said, and elegantly flicked his wrist upwards.

The Lycaonese prince glance upwards, and saw little more than the sky. There were none of the corpse-drakes, at least, which he supposed was a small mercy. Both archers and slingers were beginning run out of projectiles, and it would be days before the next supply convoy.

“I see nothing,” Otto admitted.

“The sun has finally deigned to arrive, my friend,” Prince Frederic cheerfully said. “We will, at least, perish slightly thawed.”

A convulsive chuckle tore free of Otto’s throat before he could help himself. It’d been a dark jest, but then Lycaonese humour was not renowned for its lightness. The Prince of Brus took a moment to push back his long curls, then glanced curiously to their side. The Farewell Stones were a striking sight, Otto would admit. The steles of granite carved straight from the stone went on for most of a mile along the mountain path, most of them with a large iron peg hammered through. Some were empty, others rusting, but in every last one a farewell in iron had once been made. It was not a monument the way southerners would know it, but to his people it held great meaning.

“I’ll confess never to have heard of this shrine,” the Prince of Brus said. “May I ask what it stands for? It does not seem dedicated to the Heavens, at least in no way I understand.”

“It is not,” Otto replied. “My people call them the Farewell Stones, and they are no hymn to Above. They are… a vow, I suppose. Oft renewed, never fulfilled.”

“A Lycaonese custom, then,” Frederic Goethal said, eyes curious.

“This place, Volsaga,” Otto slowly explained. “It is halfway through Twilight’s Pass, and the easiest path through it. Armies have marched here since before the days of the Iron Kings, when we were tribes held together only by fear of the dark.”

The Alamans prince listened attentively, his face twisting with fascination.

“When we come through here, to march against the Plague or the Dead,” Prince Otto said. “We make a farewell in the stone. Before going to war, we leave it as an oath.”

“The spikes of iron,” Prince Frederic murmured, glancing at the long stretch of them. “There must be hundreds, and the rust… Some of them are mere traces, now.”

“We have done this,” Otto Reitzenberg said, “for many hundred years. Every time knowing it might be the last. That this war could be the one that breaks us and lets the Enemy devour us all.”

“But there is always a fresh farewell,” the other man said, tone thoughtful.

Otto nodded, pleased her understood.

“When the farewells reach the end of the steles,” the Prince of Bremen said, “those at the beginning have faded. So it has been, so it will be.”

Otto turned to his sworn swords and curtly gestured. They came forward with a large fold of leather and opened it before the two royals. Inside was a large peg of iron, and another of his soldiers offered a steel-tipped hammer to accompany it. The Alamans prince smiled in understanding, eyes sweeping to the stele closest to them. Empty, save for some last traces of rust deep inside.

“You are to add your own farewell, I take it,” Prince Frederic said.

“We,” Otto Redcrown said.

The other man studied him closely.

“How many Alamans have given farewell here, Otto Reitzenberg?” he quietly asked.

“After today,” Otto said, “there will be one.”

The Prince of Brus paled, as if slapped.

“There is no need to-” he began, then bit his lip and when he resumed speaking his voice was hoarse. “There should be no reward for this, Prince Otto. Not for simply joining the battle when you’ve all had to bid farewell to these passes for centuries.”

The Prince of Bremen shook his head, for after all the other royal did not understand him. Did not understand this.

“We are not better,” Otto said. “We too have murdered and schemed, Frederic Goethal. We have warred on our own and on southerners for greed or lust for power. There is naught in our bones that sets us apart from the stuff of other men.”

The last of the House of Reitzenberg straightened his back and took the iron peg he was being offered.

“It is the choice that matters,” Prince Otto Redcrown said. “Of marching through the pass. Of leaving shelter behind so that you may shelter others.”

The hammer was pressed into the hands of the Prince of Brus by a gruffly insistent armsman, and the fair-haired Alamans finally took it. There was no disapproval in the eyes of the soldiers sworn to Bremen, as Prince Frederic prepared to hammer in the peg that Otto was holding in place. There would be none from the soldiers of Hannoven, either, or Rhenia and Neustria. Why would there be? When the call had sounded, when the Dead had crossed the lakes, only one prince had come north. The name of Frederic Goethal would be remembered in these lands so long as Lycaonese held them. The hammer came down, claiming three strokes before iron nestled deep into rock. Otto clapped the shoulder of the other prince, after.

“We retreat to Graueletter,” the Prince of Bremen gruffly said.

“No,” Prince Frederic quietly replied. “No, not quite yet. You northerners are not the only ones with their pride.”

The flaxen-haired man whistled sharply and there was a cheer from the slope below, as the two thousand horsemen that were his persona retinue raised their banners. The Prince of Brus sent for his horse and deftly mounted the saddle, claiming a long lance from his page.

“The fortress is lost, Prince Frederic,” Otto told the man.

“That may be,” the man smiled, “but you were not wrong, in saying the beast will pursue us during the retreat. Many will die, should it not be slain.”

“Charging the path is a fool’s errand,” Prince Otto bluntly said. “It will kill you all.”

“So we will do no such thing, my friend,” Prince Frederic replied. “See the low peak where it looms, and the slope above it.”

The Prince of Bremen flicked a look, only to confirm what he already knew.

“It is sheer enough to be called a cliff and not a slope,” he said.

“We shall be most careful not to tumble, then,” Frederic Goethal grinned, looking for all the world like an impish boy. “Worry not, Reitzenberg. We will return victorious, should we return at all.”

“It is folly,” Otto said.

“I am a Goethal of Brus, my friend,” the prince said. “I Dare are the words of my blood, and to them I will keep. Prepare the retreat. We guests must meanwhile earn our keep.”

The Prince of Brus rode away to join his retinue, and Otto stood on the heights above them spellbound. They were a colourful lot, these Alamans horsemen, a riot of silks in red and blue trailing behind their polished scale like fairy wings in the kingfisher’s colours. Pages saw to their riders, and to the cheers of the soldiers offered up thin glasses of what Otto thought might be crystal. Pure crystal, exquisitely shaped and filled with red wine. Prince Frederic took up his own and led his mount to the fore of the retinue before raising his glass.

“Ladies and gentlemen – to Procer, and Her Most Serene Highness,” he toasted.

As one, the soldiers toasted and drank. Not the full glass, the Lycaonese saw, but a mere sip of it.

“To our hosts.”

The Alamans drank.

“To the kingfisher, may we never shame it,” Prince Frederic said.

A cheer followed, and another sip. The Prince of Brus’ horse arched impatiently, though even one-handed the man reined it in effortlessly. He laughed, loud and bright.

“To doom, and glorious death,” he bellowed.

Madmen that they were, every single one of the Alamans flung their glasses against the ground. Crystal shattered, red wine spilled like blood, and behind Prince Frederic Goethal the riders followed. A fortune had been broken on stone in a moment of pique. Otto Redcrown watched as they rode up the mountain paths, disappearing in a crown of mists and stone. There was nothing he could do but arrange the retreat and wait, ordering bowmen companies forward to cover the retreat of the last soldiers escaping the fortress. The dragon of bones stirred at the sight, though it did not yet deign to intervene. There was still fighting taking place in the fortress courtyards behind it as the dead overwhelmed the last of the trapped defenders, and it lazily watched until nothing but the dead remained. Mere moments after, two thousand Alamans crested over the mountain path overlooking the abomination’s perch.

Otto’s fingers tightened as he saw them slow as they reached the edge of the slope, that steeply inclined bare rock precipitously tumbling down towards the skeletal horror that still remained perched over the path. The kingfisher banner rose glittering under the sun, blue and red and glittering gold, and two thousand lances were lowered as the cavalry thundered down the slope. To doom and glorious death Prince Frederic had summoned them, and the Alamans joined him laughing and singing their summer songs as they charged, silks trailing behind them like ephemeral wings. The beast only saw them too late, and like a pack of bright-clad wolves they tore at it. Tore at it and died. Leathery wings were ripped, but their beating still shattered horsemen and horses alike. Claws tore through armour and lace just as easily, maw crushed men and mount in a single screaming snap. But the madmen did not flinch or flee or withdraw. With hungry tenacity they carved up the abomination, ’til limbs had been rent and bones broken.

Until the Prince of Brus himself shattered the skull with a hammer, and the eldritch lights in the monster’s eyeholes were snuffed out. The man raised it high above his head and the cheer from the army was deafening, defiant. A sliver of light brought to a dark day. Of the two thousand horsemen that sallied out, six hundred returned.

Easily thrice that many soldiers might have been lost in the retreat, if they had not gone.

—

There was going to be a snowstorm tonight.

Captain Bernhardt had learned to tell the signs: wind grew restless, and colder, but you could still taste the heaviness in the air. It’d be a rough watch for whoever served after dusk, even more so for the rationing he’d had to place on braziers. Charcoal and stones were running low, and the promised supplies from Bremen had never arrived. In the captains’ private opinion, it was a toss-up whether it was the Enemy’s warbands who were responsible or the ugly truth that there were only so many supplies to go around and half a dozen forces that needed them more than his own. Not that the territory Bernhardt had been ordered to hold was without importance: Hocheben Heights sloped down from the southern peaks of the Kaltwend, a broad plateau that stretched all the way to the rocky shores of Lake Pavin. It was a lock on the hard spit of land that stood between the Grave and the tributary river to Lake Pavin, heights overlooking lowlands now crawling with the dead and damned. There were only a few paths up the sheer cliffs, though, and he’d ordered them collapsed the moment he took command. The dead had only half-heartedly tried the climb a dozen times since, and been duly driven back. He could understand why commanders might send the wood and grain to Twilight’s Pass or the Rhenian Gates instead, where every hour saw a fresh swarm of horrors unleashed.

It didn’t make the nights any warmer for his soldiers, though.

The fair-haired captain mused loosening the rationing for the duration of the snowfall as he tread the icy stones of Emil’s Displeasure, the long stretch of fortifications jutting from the edge of the plateau. The watchtowers were few, for this high up they were hardly needed, but Prince Emil Papenheim had not been skinflint in seeing to the defence of Hocheben. Stone parapets with punctured arrow slits oversaw the drop, and further back thick oaken trap doors led to the dug-in sections Hannoven soldiers fondly called the Emilzorn: tunnels leading to lower in the cliff side, through which ice-soaked trees and massive stones could be rolled down to fall at any force trying to climb up. Bernhardt had found the two hundred men and women left in Hocheben by the Iron Prince to be priceless, after coming to take command at the order of now-dead Prince Manfred Reiztenberg. His three thousand soldiers were mostly Neustrians, as was he, and they’d never had to fight for the heights in their lifetime. The old garrison knew the paths, knew the defences, and Bernhardt had made sure to make their own captain his second. You couldn’t trust a Hannoven woman to crack a smile even at her own wedding, famously, but what Captain Elpeth lacked in humour she more than made up in ability to kill things.

Bernhardt tightened his furs around his shoulders as he passed the third and last watchtower, slowing his steps by the brazier tucked away behind it. The three soldiers out on watch looked up guiltily as his arrival, well aware at least one of them should be up on the tower at the mercy of the evening wind.

“Captain,” the oldest among them began. “We-”

“Up,” Bernhardt interrupted in a rasp. “Now, and I will pretend I saw nothing. Don’t let it happen again.”

The older man saluted, the spear but clacking against the cold stone beneath, and Bernhardt watched him hurry back to his post. The other two might have looked abashed, he thought, though it was hard to tell with the padded cheeks of the helmets hiding away so much of their faces.

“It will snow tonight,” he told them. “Keep a careful eye out. The Enemy does not shiver or sleep.”

“We will, sir,” the youngest solemnly said.

Gods, he thought, she couldn’t have been older than sixteen by the sound of her voice. The lock of red hair that’d slid out from under the rim of her helm was moving with the wind. No older than Bernhardt’s own oldest daughter, which he’d seen off with the family coat of mail and his dead wife’s sword. Seen off to march with Prince Manfred’s host to hold Twilight’s Pass against the Dead King, along with most the Neustrian volunteers. Fredda could be dead, for all he knew. Word from the fighting at the pass had been sparse, but what he’d heard had been enough to chill his blood.

“I’ll take you at your word, soldier,” Bernhardt said, tone softening.

It was a whim that drove him to stand at the battlements, to take a look over the edge into the howling winds. Far below bare trees and evergreens stood half-buried in snow, until a frozen river cut them off, and it was the sight of that river that raised his hackles. A large patch of ice was cracked. He could see no dead moving below among the trees, and yet…

“Sound the horns,” he ordered. “All steel to the walls.”

“Sir?” the girl asked.

“Now,” he barked.

It was instinct, he knew, but there was something wrong. Captain Bernhardt stepped back and went looking through the sparse supply cache at the watchtower’s side, until he found what he was looking for: a long torch, ending in a tightly-tied cloth soaked with oil. He plunged it into the brazier, waiting until it caught fire before stepping back to the edge of the battlements. Atop the watchtower the call to arms sounded, sharp and echoing across the heights. Steadying his hand, the captain tossed the lit torch over the edge of the cliff. For five, ten heartbeats he thought he’d made a fool of himself and utter relief swelled. Then the torch hit something that wasn’t there, and after a sound like a broken mirror a hulking shape flickered into sight.

“Gods stand with us,” he whispered.

It was no simple dead, but instead a great abomination. A misshapen thing made of men’s bones and stretched out leather, shaped as some long-clawed bear with an overripe belly scaling the cliff. It must have been almost two hundred feet tall and half as large. Empty eye sockets turned to look at him, and with a keening sound the abomination leapt up.

“Spears at the ready,” Captain Bernhardt ordered, hastily backing away from the edge.

Two sets of bones claws closed around the battlements, grinding against the stone, as behind Bernhard the first reinforcing company spread out. Shafts of wood with tips of iron or steel dipped forward. The fair-haired Neustrian bared his sword, cursing himself for having left his shield at the barracks when setting out. The abomination’s massive head came out, all leather and bone and blind malevolence. It opened its mouth, jaws unhinging, and with horror Bernhardt realized that the monster was not the whole of it: climbing relentlessly out of the dead thing’s belly were sure-footed corpses, armed and armoured. It was a siege tower, he realized, the likes of which only the Dead King could possibly craft. And a precursor to all-out assault. They might hold here, he thought, but how many others like this were climbing up the cliff unseen? The captain found the eye of a soldier at the front of the spear wall.

“You,” he said. “Go, and tell Captain Elpeth what you saw here. She has command.”

The young man opened his mouth to protest, but Bernhardt would not argue and so ignored him.

“Volunteers,” he called out. “Ten of you, with me. Let us give Keter its fucking due.”

In front of them the abomination was spewing out its dead progeny, corpse after corpse forming a foothold, but ten brave souls came to his side. They used the old way, knowing full well what it meant. Three large urns of pitch, three torches, the rest to serve as the arrow in flight. The girl was one, that soldier with the errant red tuft.

“Go back, kid,” he said. “Let another old hand take your torch.”

Dark eyes met his.

“Hanne,” she said, tone hard. “My name is Hanne, and I am Lycaonese.”

The rebuke was hard as the voice. No older than his own Fredda, the captain thought. What kinds of fathers were we, to raise daughters like these? It was a bitter kind of pride, but pride nonetheless. Grip tight around his sword, Bernhard nodded.

“Steady then, Hanne,” he rasped. “Remember that the flame is what matters.”

She let out a shivering breath, nodding.

“Though mountains crack, and ice will thaw,” Hanne said.

Bernhardt of Neustria let out a spout of laughter like a spasm and nodded, taking the lead. Behind him the volunteers fell into formation

“Though mountains crack, and ice will thaw,” he called out.

Spears cracked down against the stone, a defiant snap.

“Though walls will fall, to tooth and claw,” the captain screamed, voice rising.

Eleven against the assembling dead, and still they charged. Sword in hand Bernhardt hacked at the bronze-clad corpse before him, elbowing the dead aside and burying himself in their line. At his side the other swords fought like the mad, pushing in and knowing there would be no going back.

“Though stars will fade, and shadow spread,” Bernhardt screamed, and they screamed with him.

Three of the volunteers were dead already, taken by axe and spear, but the dead had not expected so fierce an assault by so few and for a heartbeat he stood before the beasts’ open maw with no foe before him. His sword he dropped, snatching a torch from one of his fallen instead and the girl, Hanne, pushed at his side even as he took an axe in the ribs. The gap in the enemy surprise had bought them was already closing.

“On the heights we stood, with iron red,” she whispered, teeth clenched.

Torches were touched to pitch – one, two, three.

Into the beast they leapt, screaming defiance, and from the inside it burned.

The Hocheben Heights held halfway to dawn, and the surviving garrison retreated in good order.