Chương 6

The walls of Palandrias were too high to scale. The gates were too thick to crack. The sewers and tunnels leading into and out of the city were collapsed. A hundred thousand souls sat inside their perfect citadel, praying in the strength of their defenses. And for six weeks they were enough. The corpses piled high outside the walls, crawling in masses thirty feet high as they strove to obey the will of the Crowned One. But the Daltians employed a terrible weapon they hadn't been able to use elsewhere.

They threw it on these corpse piles, and flesh turned to sludge. Bones melted. The dead silently shrank and decomposed. So terrible was this weapon that it continued to burn through our ranks from underneath as the piles attempted to reform and resume their climb. At first my prince simply continued throwing bodies at the wall, confident that eventually they would overcome it. But this solvent, this liquid fire that did not burn, the Daltians seemed to have an endless supply of it.

Even as thousands and thousands of his soldiers melted under his command, I could smell Rials's determination. But after the sixth day, he called an end to the assault on the walls. He pulled the army back and consulted with his remaining officers, who advised him to starve the city out. To offer them terms of surrender. They were even generous terms. Execute the king and the royal family. Adopt Vorulsht as the religion of the land. Pay taxes. Submit to the tithe of bodies.

When the messenger on the wall responded by defecating over the battlements, my prince began the next stage of the assault. The living commanded the dead in creating actual catapults, and they loaded our undead inside. The walls were in the way, so we simply sent our soldiers over them in packs of three or four. Five or more at a time if we sent children. Which we did until we ran out of children.

The little monsters fought every bit as ferociously as an adult, and for some reason the adults had a harder time defending themselves against the feral things. The assault lasted for weeks. We never ran low on ammunition, for our numbers were legion. But the enemy persisted in their defense, even as we renewed our calls for them to surrender. They sent someone to negotiate, once. An assassin who attempted to stab my prince in the other eye.

I saved my prince's life that day, simply by gripping the man by the cloak and pulling him back the moment he attempted to dash forward. I had seen the glint of metal and knew he was about to defy my purpose for being, for my purpose for being was to ensure that the prince lived. I stepped on his chest, the man's ribs crunching under my boot. I held him like that, pinned to the ground, as the prince evaluated the situation.

"Thank you, Tal," he said wearily. He still wore the crown. He had never taken it off that I had seen, and it had been weeks since he had slept.

"Kill him. Then bring him to the catapults and send him back. Oh, wait. Since he is a messenger, I will write him my reply to the king's offer." He penned a message as I stomped on the man's chest harder, then his face. His skull crunched under my boot. This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience. Then his neck. A moment later, he rose, his head at an awkward angle. A living man accompanied us to the catapults, where the prince's will was carried out.

"They must be close to breaking," Prince Rials confided to me one day shortly before the end of the siege.

"I do not know how they have persisted for so long, but they must be close to breaking. If we stop our siege then we will have to go and forage and reclaim as many bodies as we can to try again. They will not have recovered, not completely, but they might have regrouped. We must break them here and now." He said that, but he did not have a way of doing that.

Even when he began launching rocks at the defenses instead of undead over the walls, the walls would light up with magical protections that kept them from shattering. The city inside had no such protections, but it was already a smoldering ruin. The city held. The prince's siege was broken when the Daltian reinforcements arrived, striking us in the rear. My prince had no scouts to see them coming, and so they were upon us before he realized what was happening.

These were not the unblooded men on their first seasoning march that we had encountered previously, but veterans of the twenty year war with the Zozheimian war. And they did not smell of fear. They smelled of anger. Of rage. And of grief. Because their families were dead in the city behind us. And they were determined to smash us against its walls. My prince decided to make an exit. He called together all of his remaining soldiers, all of his Inalten, including myself, and we abandoned the mass of common undead.

He was not disheartened, for he had struck a terrible blow against the Daltians. One that would see his brothers victorious in battle after battle, even as he fled back into the desert. Yes, he was in high spirits when the arrow caught him in the stomach, piercing his kidney. He gasped and fell from his horse, his crown falling from his head. And with that, a moment of stillness. I do not know if the world stopped, or if I simply perceived that it had stopped.

But I saw as the vast web of magic that had been woven by the crown snapped and changed and warped. The common undead that were escorting our escape turned upon our living guards and devoured them. The guards hadn't been expecting this, and the battle was short. I stood over my dying prince, examining him curiously. His remaining eye was black, having been burnt out when the crown fell from his head, the terrible price for using its dark magic for so long.

"Tal," he whispered.

"Tal, you have never failed me. You must take the crown, and you must return it to my sister. You know her, yes?" I did not answer. I picked up the crown and studied it.

"Good. I always knew you were clever. Maybe in a year or two, you would have been something truly special," he said. He gasped, but it was a death rattle. I had failed to keep him alive, but now nobody wore the crown and that did not trouble me. The battle around me continued. No living Zozheimians remained, but the undead were no less dangerous now that they were leaderless. I stood calmly for twenty minutes, still in the chaos, as I contemplated what to do. Then I began to walk. North.

Something was drawing my attention from that direction, and I would answer the call. * Day and night I walked for a fortnight. I did not know what called me, but it was a sweet siren to my senses. I felt the call getting stronger and changed my heading, climbing straight over cliffs and wading through lakes that got in my way rather than going around. I grew confused when my destination became vague. No, vague wasn't the word. There were multiple destinations, I realized.

The siren's call was in multiple places, almost singing to each other a beautiful chorus. I hesitated—a new experience, one that I felt rarely—between venturing to the strongest, or the closest. I chose the strongest. The siren's call came from a cavern. I had to crawl to enter it. I skinned my knees on the sharp stones; my armor had come undone at some point during the journey and nobody had told me to fix it, so much of it had fallen off.

When what I was wearing snagged on the narrow passageways, I removed what I was still wearing, climbing through the tunnel wearing only a ripped shirt, still clutching the crown. I came to the chamber, then, and I felt what I can only describe as awe when I emerged. The crystal pillar beneath the temple of Vorulsht in Zozheim had, I'd believed, been the largest deposit of that magical mineral in the world. This chamber was vast, and contained enough of that crystal to dwarf that pillar a dozen times over.

The energy flowing in this room was vast and incomprehensible. It made my skin crackle. The crown in the jewel shone brightly. I felt the magic suffusing my body. My mind. My unsoul. Calmly, I sat down in the center of the room. I closed my eyes. Time passed, and I allowed it to pass. I was silent, in silence. I had no purpose, but I needed no purpose. There was no will commanding me, save for my own will to continue existing. I realized I could cease existing with a thought.

And I chose to continue existing anyway. With the crown sitting in front of me, eight years passed.