Chương 4

At some point in the long march, I became aware of it. The energy, flowing between us. Animating us. Cycling through us. It was that same, perfect warmth from the pillar beneath the temple. As the dead coalesced into an army, the intensity of the energy increased, and as we marched I finally identified the source. It was, naturally, the crown upon the prince's brow. With curiosity, I examined the shape of that magic.

I realized that it was the same as that which kept me animated, only writ large, covering entire counties in its embrace. And it was not limited to the humans. Dead predators—foxes, wolves, bears, and three great cats—joined out march. They were as welcome addition as any other. Death had made us equals. This was the first time I began to question whether I was different. The other Inalten showed complete indifference to the radiating waves of magic coming from our prince's crown.

Oh, they obeyed, but the magic did not lick and flicker to their thoughts the way it did to mine. Perhaps they had none for it to lick and flicker. Nobody said anything. Nobody noticed. Only the mortals made any noise except footsteps, one after the other in an endless, silent procession. We did not creak or groan. We did not rattle chains. We brought the silence of the grave with us. And as we marched, we brought the peace of the grave to those foolish enough to get in our path.

That we were still inside the empire's borders didn't matter, when the lesser undead began sensing life from the peasants or animals large enough to have some semblance of a soul, they stalked that soul and ripped it out of their body, usually leaving a messy result. And thus our ranks grew. I heard my prince talking about 'evacuations' and lamenting that the farmers and peasants didn't heed the warning in time whenever we passed a purified village or croft. But where were the peasants to go?

The army had told them to evacuate, but where could they go that was not in our path, when our path was one that only the prince himself knew? And there was the grin on his face when he lamented the loss of life. The one that told me, perhaps, that he did not mean his words. He needed footsoldiers, and nature hadn't provided him with enough. So he lingered in his own lands long enough to fill out his ranks before launching our long march through the desert.

The scent of rotting flesh changed then, passing through that barren landscape, as the relentless sun cooked those bodies that were still wet, rendering them like dried jerky. My brothers and I were unaffected, but the lesser undead were preserved, their bodies taking longer to fall apart and thus serving their purpose that much better. Once we were in the desert, the prince openly explained his plan. We were to circle around the wastes and come up in the rear of the Daltias Kingdom.

The unexpected prong of a pincer attack closing on the stubborn carapace that was the Daltius's final bastion of resistance against the Zozheim empire. Prince Rials was confident in his victory. He had every reason to be. The Daltian-Zozheim war was entering its second decade, and the fighting had mostly been on the western front. This was the first time this pincer attack, circling through the desert and coming up on the eastern front, had been attempted.

Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions. The Daltians had fortresses and outposts lining their borders on the desert, but he sent us Inalten ahead by daylight to pacify them before they were able to light their braziers and alert the nation. I have, for some reason, an incredibly clear image of one of those raids. It is the image of the soul of a page leaving his body as I held him down and slowly pierced his chest with my blade.

He screamed and shouted less than most, although his face and his stench and his britches were wet with fear. His final words were "Mother," and then I pierced his heart. He went still a moment later. I do not know why the boy was there. But I know why I remember killing him. I had been ordered to go forth and kill all the men in the fortress, and I had to reason for a moment whether I ought to kill this child as well. I hadn't my prince to clarify his orders, nor any living to drag the child before for advice.

I had to reason out my purpose all on my own, using only what wits Vorulsht had given me. The result was one more dead child in a war that had killed millions of them. It's strange that I should remember one face. But I do. After all, it followed me for months after that. The risen page boy was feral and ferocious, but for whatever reason it always seemed to be nearby until the true battles began.

I did not see how it fell its final time, but I'm assuming it was somewhere in the third outpost we pacified after that. It lost its left arm in the first garrison, and half of its face in the second. Then I never saw it again. I can still smell that child's fear, if I think hard enough. It was as sick and sweet as any I've ever tasted, and relieving him of it with clinical precision was rewarding in a way I cannot explain. To this day, I'm not certain that I was meant to kill him.

Perhaps the prince would have preferred him a prisoner to interrogate. But then again, he'd never interrogated any other prisoners, man, woman, nor child. No. The child was meant to die, or Vorulsht would not have put him in my path. But why do I continue to see his face? * We pillaged for six weeks on the eastern border of Daltius. We were commanded to leave no survivors, and the first week our army swelled as we outran the news of our presence.

The Daltian response was slow, thinking themselves safe so far from the front, and soon our numbers had swollen to the hundreds of thousands. Six weeks of slaughter. Six weeks of bleeding bodies reanimating and slaughtering the ones they had just been trying to protect moments before. Six weeks of bloated bodies bursting in the sunlight as they continued marching along with the army anyway.

I was ordered to kill two of the Prince's retainers because they began to have 'moral objections' to the rate at which we were slaughtering civilians. He listened to their arguments in his command tent as the living rested for the day, having ridden their horses to keep up with the horde. He allowed them their say, listened to their every word, asked a few clarifying questions, and even agreed with them that the loss of life was regrettable.

Then he ordered me to kill them both with the same tone of voice that he ordered me to clean his chamberpot. And I fulfilled the order with the same amount of disinterest as I had for both task. It was neither unpleasant nor disgusting nor troubling. It was simply a task I must do because the Crowned One commanded it. I do not know the names, the ranks, nor the titles of the men I killed for speaking against the atrocities we committed.

They were the last ones to do so, but their names would be recorded along side the ones who reveled in it. History would treat my living companions as monsters. More so than the army they commanded. When the towns fought back, we slew them to the last child. When they surrendered and opened their gates, we slew them to the last child. When they fled before us, we chased them down and slew them. When they killed themselves to escape us, well, they did our work for us.

Only those who destroyed their own bodies truly escaped joining our ranks. We cleared out thirty villages in those six weeks. Three cities. Hundreds of thousands of dead men, women, children. Six weeks of unchecked slaughter before the Daltians finally managed to put up a fight. It wasn't much of one.