Chương 18

Huberlen the third, King of Polkaeni, stared at the map, listening to his generals assure him that the war was not lost. Huberlen tuned him out. The man was a good field commander, which is why Huberlen had sent him to the front. Where he had lost every battle. It wasn't his fault. Huberlen had made the same mistake when the war had started as well. He had thought that this would be a repeat of the Zozheimian Wars of Aggression. But Tal the Risen was not the Mad Emperor. He was something far, far worse. Reasonable.

His armies were made up of as many living as dead. At the start of the battle, at least. Some of the undead would fall, and some of the living would become undead. But the trinkets that had been pried from the Zozheimian lieutenants and generals did not work like they used to, and the dead for both sides fought for Tal. They were losing this war, and everyone in the room knew it except for the general who was trying to convince himself and everyone else otherwise.

"We will wait for the emissary to return," he said.

"And we will listen to Tal's terms. I will not commit to a course of action before I know whether I am dooming or saving my people." The room went silent as the general stopped talking. Huberlen sighed. He looked at the map. Tal-sha-shenk was spreading, having absorbed six nearby territories to become a proper empire, although Tal refused to fashion himself an emperor. Polkaeni was on the border of Zozheim.

It hadn't been at the start of the War of Aggression, but by the end of the war the nation separating them had been consumed in ash and fire. It was still being rebuilt by Zozheimian settlers, and Polkaeni settlers, and perhaps a few of the original inhabitants who had escaped to become refugees elsewhere. He knew how to fight the empire. He had been thirteen, at his father's side, watching every battle and listening to every strategy session.

He had known, then, that surrender meant death, and death meant that your body became a weapon for the enemy. But that wasn't true any longer. Tal-sha-shenk was not a paradise, but it was not a grave. Huberlen's spies confirmed that very few villages or cities were raised. Only those who had put up resistance during the conquest of their nation, in fact. There was the tithe to be concerned about, but one hundred thirteen souls out of millions?

That was a sacrifice many people were willing to make This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. Well, perhaps not the ones who were of the one hundred and thirteen, but they were not given a choice. A messenger arrived to announce the Count Ulmanes, the emissary that he'd sent to attempt to negotiate peace with the army that was marching through his lands. Ulmanes bowed to his king, and then looked at the map. He shook his head.

"Is this all we have?" he asked.

"We have thirty thousand men and eight thousand horse in reserve," the general who refused to admit defeat said.

"If we march them from here to here, we can—""Your Majesty, I advise surrender," the count said flatly.

"You would surrender? We will be destroyed utterly when—""This is not thirty years ago, you idiot," Count Ulmanes snapped.

"Yes, to have surrendered back then would have been to invite the complete destruction of our people. We had to bind together as a nation and gather our allies to fight back against the undead horde spilling in from the west. But I have seen the lands of Tal-sha-shenk. They are not barren wastelands. Their people are not mindless zombies. They are active and productive, even happy.

"Tal isn't just conquering the world. He's ruling it, and he's ruling it well. If we surrender, then we save millions of lives. If we fight, we do it only for the pride of the men in this room." Huberlen listened until the count had finished speaking, then said "You were gone two months. What, exactly, did Tal show you?" Ulmanes sighed.

"He brought me across the mountains on the back of a dead mountain cat. There, we watched the last stand of the Count of Little Urak. Tal told me that he had given the Count the same choice that he was giving us, knowing that the man would turn it down. Urak is isolated by mountains and three nations away from the front, the Count probably thought he was safe." Ulmanes sighed, and reached for a drink. It belonged to someone else, but he quaffed it anyway.

"He sent in a cohort of his Inalten, Your Majesty. That's it, just one hundred thirteen men and women.

"And they killed everyone. Every man, woman and child of Little Urak is dead." Huberlen realized that Ulmanes hands were shaking.

"He made me watch. The count had a hundred horse. He sent the cavalry at them. When that failed, he retreated to his walls. But the Inalten just climbed over. The screams from inside were terrible. And when the people opened the gates to try to escape, the count's horsemen, now undead, charged them.

"In five hours, the city was still.

"But that wasn't the end of it. The dead were sent off, out into the country side, to find everyone still alive. They did not kill them on the spot, but dragged them back.

"And I had to watch again.

"There is nobody left alive in Little Urak any longer, your majesty. But the fields are still being tended, and the livestock are being fed, and when the corn ripens, the harvest shall happen on schedule. But there will be no harvest festival this year. Nor any other.

"I was one of seventeen emissaries who witnessed the massacre." He pulled out a scroll.

"This is the official record of what we observed, signed by all seventeen of us. Now if you excuse me, I'm going to go get blackout drunk and possibly hang myself. If I do the latter, do me a favor and burn my body before it starts to move again." Ulmanes left the room, which was silent. Huberlen closed his eyes. One cohort of Inalten had destroyed an entire county. He did not know how many cohorts Tal had.

It had been ten years since the start of the war, and Tal had reportedly perfected the ritual to make them early on. Only those within Tal-sha-shenk knew how often he performed it.

"Send a messenger," Huberlen said softly.

"Tell Tal that I'm prepared to discuss terms." Six days later, King Huberlen the Third presented himself before Tal the Risen, and the king did bend his knee.