Chương 83: Chapter 77.5: The Ruination Of Time

++The implementation of modern-day technology and magic in warfare was something I eagerly took my chance to observe, another point of interest for later use. ++ - From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, 'The Great Lich'. 1, 891 A. E. Isabel took to the new routine of the army about as well as Agrian would have expected. She practically bounced off it, and he suspected it was actually a physical effort on her part not to start screaming with every order given.

Agrian's one saving grace, that he was being limited to simple and easy assignments due to his being the newest battlemage, seemed only to worsen her temper. His sister took it as a personal affront.

"Do they think I am a simpleton, is that why I am doing such menial tasks?" Agrian decided not to tell her that she was probably right. What made things worse was that for each task they were given to do together, they'd be given one more each that was to be accomplished separately. Agrian's tended to be faster, Isabel's easier. The result of this was that he had a lot more free time, and far lower blood pressure.

"It's because you're a woman," he told her one morning. Agrian had dug a latrine pit for the fourth day of their march; not exactly pleasant, but done in a few hours. Isabel, on the other hand, had spent the whole day running messages by hand for casting squad leaders who simply couldn't be bothered to walk between tents, and didn't have the mana to spare sending notes other ways.

"Yes," Isabel snapped.

"Why are you telling me that?" Agrian blinked.

"Uh, I…Uhm…"

"You thought I did not know, is that it?"

"No, I—" —"Why? Spit it out."

"... I wanted to let you know that I know, so…you know, I'm…on your side." He gave her a smile and held both thumbs up to punctuate the point. Isabel was not amused.

"You are an idiot."

"Are you bleeding down there?" Agrian asked. Isabel's face sort of spasmed, and she didn't speak to him for another week. Both of them were more properly situated into their new roles in the world by then, it all happened surprisingly fast. Faster for Agrian. Isabel was more generally robust—however much she complained, there were very few things that could so much as crack her mentally—but Agrian soon found himself enjoying a warm welcome among his new squad.

Laiel Fiq, the casting squad leader, was a big, gruff tower of no-nonsense severity, but the others seemed to take a liking to both Agrian and the rest of the group that had departed with Aryqatan. With the Demigod conscious from her wounds, but still a Demigod, Agrian and his peers were about the only source of information available to normal people about what had happened. Isabel was an alternative, but most grown men were not inclined to ask questions to a girl her age.

Even Agrian got tired of repeating the story somewhere after the sixth time, especially with how people seemed to deflate after he did.

"You don't need to be modest," one man told him somewhere around the third recitation.

"Putting everything on your little sister." Agrian didn't bother trying to convince him that Isabel's role was going unexaggerated, he got the feeling that would be an uphill battle. His real work started out simple enough, but fortunately kept him unavailable from all the pestering questions while he did it.

Agrian's Winzorth grades had made their way ahead of him to the army, so it was known that he was literate and numerate, though uninterested in both, and more magically dextrous than about ninety nine out of every hundred adult magicians. Soon enough he was tasked with putting up tents and pavilions for the magical core, which Agrian found to be tedious but useful work. It gave him a chance to practice his magical dexterity and precision, and above all else; his multi-tasking.

Keeping the tents up as he drove in pegs, providing support to counter gravity in several different points at once, holding lines taut and a hundred minor other things all kept Agrian occupied. In theory he could've done the work of a hundred people with his magic. In practice, the bottleneck was his own ability to focus it on several things at a time. He was working on that bottleneck and driving it back, and this task was a pretty good way to go about doing it.

There were other jobs, less pleasant, but for the most part what struck him was seeing the way the army actually functioned. From bottom to top, the army was a great big ladder with each rung being shakier than the one before it. Agrian experienced only a very particular stretch of the force directly; being a magician meant that he dealt only with other magicians. Even still, this general trend was present here too.

The casting squad leaders, Fiq for example, would answer to the Company Leaders who each oversaw a dozen or so squads by themselves, totalling a command of, ideally, around seventy-two each. In turn, these men answered to the Regimental Casting Leaders, who each commanded no more than a dozen Company Leaders. A rational commander, a competent man or even a small child might have wanted to set this up in such a way as to ensure that the best suited leaders ended up in each position.

That wasn't how Garamon's army worked though. Agrian's father had once called it the refuse pile of Garamon society, and only after spending a few weeks marching with it himself did Agrian finally come to understand just what that meant. It was political. Of course it was political, it was a point of concentrated power which inherently politicised all things. Agrian wasn't the sharpest knife—nor, indeed, spoon—in the drawer, but he'd figured that out himself long ago.

He was still a bit mortified to see just how deep it went here. From what Agrian could tell, higher rank meant little aside from higher familial connections or seniority. Half the commanding magicians were just here to gain some clout for their family, and the other half were here because they were so dribblingly inept that the families in question had decided there was nowhere they could be placed without doing damage except the army. Agrian and Isabel, in that regard, were actually a fairly typical example.

Isabel had gotten herself enlisted with the use of a favour, Agrian had done the same thing. The only difference was that they weren't idiots, but that was mainly just incidental. This was fine by Agrian. He'd learned long ago that stupid people tended to gravitate up to society's topmost positions, it was just how things were. He couldn't be sure why, but suspected that the intelligent of the world were just less sociable and thus unable to form the kinds of cronyist blocs that kept Garamon's morons doing so well.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it. For an example of this, he could have done no better than his own little sister and her current place in the army. Like Agrian, Isabel had been given work. Unlike him, she was not happy with this fact at all. Their nights were generally spent together, since Isabel was the only person Agrian really liked here and Agrian was the only person Isabel wasn't actively contemptuous of. Huh.

Funny way to think of his sister, but true. Isabel probably didn't like him. She had his best interests in mind, he knew, but that was more because of her weird thing with oaths and obligations. A debt she was repaying rather than anything done from the heart. That knowledge didn't sting him like it used to. Maybe there was a hollowness in him at knowing how his sister felt, but if there was it'd been with him long enough that Agrian was long used to its presence.

"What do you know about the city we're approaching?" he asked, so that he'd be thinking about something else. It was dark and cold tonight. Agrian still hadn't gotten over how chilly deserts were, how fast the heat left them. Isabel didn't seem to mind. Maybe it was because she was so much colder still.

"Orapathaqi," she said. The foreign, strange pronunciation was effortless on her tongue. She had a way with languages that belied her Garamon upbringing.

"It is one of the older cities in Estalia."

"How old?"

"Unclear. Three thousand years is the most common estimate."

"Three thousand years." It was older than Garamon, Agrian thought. Another week later and army life had just become… life. Mundane and predictable, seeming to compress the days and let them slip by him like ice underfoot. The slow march was the only thing to really strike him anymore. He felt like one of a great centipede's limbs, but even that wasn't quite right. Too fast, a centipede. Maybe he was more like an individual muscle in the belly of a great slug.

Oozing along the ground one tiny fraction of its journey at a time, inexorable and tedious, always growing closer but never doing it fast. Even with their destination in sight, they didn't speed up. They just kept marching on. If nothing else, that destination gave Agrian's brain something to do while his legs remained busy. The city of Orapathaqi was one of the greatest sights in Estalia, apparently. If that was true then it didn't bode well for the country's wider greatness.

Agrian got the impression of old glory long run out as he gazed upon it. Walls of sandstone reached high, a good fifty paces off the ground in some areas, and even the savages of this land had managed to leave its battlements decorated with more cannons than he could count, but there was no sight of industrial smoke or factory chimneys.

It looked to him like he was staring into the ancient past, watching some primordial human cradle forcibly dragged into the twentieth century and made to imperfectly mirror the civilisation of modern man. And it was imperfect, indeed. He couldn't help but chuckle as he laid eyes on it.

"Won't be much of a fight, this, surely?" he grinned.

"Oh I don't know about that old boy," Packlin Dup replied.

"Looks to me like we might throw our backs out hauling all the treasure from it." Agrian was growing excited now, eager. How far from the city? No more than a few miles, and they were already stopping long before they reached it.

"This is your first siege right?" Fiq asked him, along with the other boys from Aryqatan's mission. All of them nodded in the affirmative.

"Right," the casting squad leader grunted.

"Then you won't have a clue what's about to happen, and pretty much all of it is going to surprise you. Modern war is quite unintuitive for amateurs. Basically, we'll not actually do much fighting. A single burst of it once the city's been softened up enough, until then our job is just to stand around and stay ready." Agrian didn't understand what he meant at first, had no idea what could possibly leave so much of an army just spent standing around. A hundred thousand men, that was a lot, right?

So many that they had to do something. But he realised what was going on soon enough. Once the cannons were laid out, mostly medium guns with six-inch bores, it didn't take long for the bombardments to start. Heavy shot ripping through the air invisible-quick, crossing the space between themselves and their target in a scant few seconds. Even from as far back as they were, Agrian could hear the distant rumbling of explosive shells landing home behind Orapathaqi's vast walls and wreaking havoc on the city beyond.

"Fascinating," Isabel said from beside him. Agrian jumped, not having heard her approach, but his sister didn't even glance his way. She was staring at the bombardment.

"The guns?" he asked.

"How easily something can be destroyed," she corrected.

"That city is three thousand years old. As ancient as almost any settlement in Arwyna, and look at it now." As if to punctuate her words, another barrage detonated behind the walls at that very moment.

"The makings of man are so… impermanent." Agrian didn't know what to say. His sister had been acting weird since they came to Irucci, or perhaps since they escaped the ruins. Her eyes always seemed distant and her words always sluggish, like her thoughts were a million miles away from whatever conversation she was having at the moment. She didn't seem sad about this bombardment, he thought, but she was far from enthusiastic. Looking at it like a seasoned doctor might some terminal diagnosis.

Like it was an unfortunate fact of life she had just come to terms with.

"It's for the Empire," Agrian said almost without thinking. Isabel smiled at that.

"Of course. And how much longer do you think that Empire will last?"

"Forever," he replied at once.

"It's not a working of man, is it? The Gods rule it, and it will outlive anything built by human hands." Isabel didn't reply at first, just slowly turned to look directly at him.

"Perhaps," she said at last.

"We do not know how permanent the Gods truly are, do we? They like to keep facts about themselves hidden." Agrian wasn't sure what to say, so he said nothing and just turned back to the shelling. It wasn't nearly as impressive to look at, now. More… sad. Three thousand years. More than he'd live, probably more than thirty times as long as he'd live, and all that history was being eaten away one blast at a time. Now, looking at it just left him feeling hollow.

He glanced back at Isabel, expecting to find her expression matching his thoughts. It didn't. Her face was as blank as he'd ever seen it, still and stoic, just soaking up the facts ahead of them like she didn't care one way or the other what they were. Sometimes Agrian was jealous of Isabel's magical talent, or her intelligence, but at times like this he was jealous of this. That distance that seemed to exist between her and the world, the insulating crust that kept any mundane events from truly reaching her.

That was a kind of invincibility that he wouldn't mind sharing. Even if seeing it in her frightening him sometimes. The shelling continued for hours, and Agrian suspected after a while that the artillery commanders were prolonging it just to use up their stores of ammunition. Would Garamon really allow a professional army to waste munitions like that? Yes, he decided after a moment, obviously.

He'd done enough inventory work on the march to know that at least one round of ammo was lost to thievery and pawning for each one that was genuinely destroyed by spoilage. Eventually, though, even the artillery officers of Garamon adjusted their aim downwards and started trying to end things. Agrian watched as the remaining shells started striking the great wall itself, and stared in fascination as he saw the sandstone was barely pitted.

"I thought it was magic," Isabel murmured from beside him.

"It was far too unblemished for ordinary material. Magic fortresses were common back in the ancient world, it seems this is another example of them." Magic or not, the walls weren't invincible. With over a hundred guns aiming at them and spitting out close to a thousand shots each minute, each one powerful enough to rend a boulder into dust, the stonework of Orapathaqi's walls was slowly surrendering to the onslaught. Orders started moving around for men to begin their advance. Slowly, still.

Slowly as all things were done in the army, but on they marched towards the site of Garamon's destruction. Agrian wasn't at the front, but he still felt his heart thundering like someone was driving it with a pump. He heard every shell that passed over his head, whistling beyond. Had to be ten yards or more above him, but that felt like a small margin indeed when he remembered what each one had done to solid stone.

He didn't shield himself, it was hard to imagine that making much difference if a stray shot hit him directly. Instead Agrian just focused on keeping pace and heading for the fort fast instead of slow. Even with the shelling, there were defensive guns still left atop the walls that fired at the army as it approached. And this was when his first order came.

"Aether panels!" Fiq roared.

"One yard by one yard, max strength, five inches thick!" Agrian was late in obeying, and it took a smack to the back of his head while he froze in stupid uncomprehension before instincts took over and he began working the magic as instructed. In moments he'd done his part, and was waiting for the others around him to finish. The moment Agrian was done, his section of aether was plucked from his hand by strands of yet more aether manipulated by Fiq.

He saw it drift ahead to meet with more sections, locking together, then being moved along to right at the army's head. He realised what it was just a moment before the first Estalian cannon fired into it; a great metal slug that struck the magic material like… well, like a cannon. Aether burst apart and exploded into shrapnel, but it stopped the projectile dead.

"More aether!" Fiq roared, though he needn't have bothered on Agrian's account. He was already producing another slab to soak up more shots as they continued their attack.