Marcus kept his tone level, but even so he saw Elly tense as he spoke. It didn't stop him from continuing, didn't stop him from voicing his opinion, but he supposed it was good to know she wasn't wholly comfortable with this either.
"I fail to see how this will boost morale."
She flickered her eyes at him, not turning away from the gallows. Fifteen men and women there, awaiting execution, and thousands of whom Vess deemed the most likely to flee stood around them in formation.
Dozens of companies, all silent as the grave. Marcus' voice hadn't broken that silence, his sound dampening illusion quickly becoming one of his most useful non-combat matrices, and from where they were standing none of the soldiers could see his lips move.
Elly's reply was as level as his question had been. "It isn't supposed to. Those men and women didn't just flee, they attempted to kill their officers. Our officers, wielding our authority to lead these soldiers. This is supposed to make everyone understand the consequences of treason."
He didn't reply, and some cold part of him agreed. The part that had survived a six-month siege, that had seen him burn a mountain town to ashes and considered the death of all its inhabitants an acceptable price for victory. It had shrunk after his escape from the artifact. Had been tempered with relaxation and passion projects, but now?
Now it looked at fifteen breathing dead-men and agreed with Elly's judgment.
It was why he hadn't protested when she insisted it should be him to give the final order of execution. Bad enough only Mirranians had run, she'd said. If she was the one to hang them, resentment would grow. The nobility would use it to fuel an us-versus-them mindset, nobility that was already unhappy at a Crown-owned army.
Marcus grunted, letting his privacy illusion drain of power and spinning up a voice enhancement matrix in its place. "For attempted desertion, I sentence you to death by hanging. For attempted murder in pursuit of desertion, I sentence you to death by hanging. For surrendering without resistance when caught, this sentence will be carried out without the customary punishment of whipping. On my Crown as King of Mirrania, and all those who live within its borders, I order you to die."
His voice rolled over the watching soldiers, over the Dukes and Duchess who had come to watch, and it rolled far over the hills before finally dying down. Marcus sliced through the rope holding them up, and fifteen necks broke as gravity pulled them downwards.
A quick death, all things considered, and only for those who had actually attempted to kill their officers. For those who had only taken the opportunity to flee a different punishment had been arranged, their companies broken up and distributed amongst the army.
Those men and women would not be given the opportunity to run again, but if they served out the rest of the war without further infractions, their record would be wiped clean.
Hells, it even turned out some few among the cowardly soldiers hadn't joined their fellows in fleeing, though that had taken a good few hours to sort out. Those eight had been promoted, something which Elly had made sure every soul in the army knew.
Marcus watched fifteen souls die, then turned to the rest of the soldiers. Those who wanted to go home, those who were afraid and regretting their decision to join the army, finding their ill-conceived notion of glory nowhere to be found.
Tough. No one forced them to join, and while he usually accepted a change of heart, they were at war.
Hells, his earlier statement about morale felt more ridiculous the more he thought about it. Still, he had been right. This wouldn't inspire valor. Neither would what he was about to do, though at least it wasn't more hangings.
"We are at war," he began, voice still thundering over them. Despite that his actual tone was calm, as if nothing that had happened so far influenced him in the slightest. "A war the Empire started, and a war that we have to endure. The fact they sent an Archmage is not a statement of strength, my soldiers. It is one of desperation. For centuries they have left us alone, content to trade and ignore us, but now it changes? Now we are suddenly no longer capable of ruling ourselves?"
Marcus tsked, the sound of it echoing loudly. "No. They need us, and that means we have leverage. Yet already the south lies in ruin, castles burning and homes shattered, and that will not stop. Not until we have proven ourselves capable of resisting them, for the Empire respects strength above all else. So fight, my soldiers, and you will find the Empire not nearly as eager to spill their own blood as they pretend."
Spines didn't straighten, doubt and fear didn't suddenly go away, but it was all he had. Lies with just enough truth to be convincing, and fifteen softly swinging corpses added another reason to fight.
He turned, Elly joining him so quickly it looked like their exit had been planned, and before long they were riding back into camp. The mood was rather tense, especially so among Mirranian soldiers, but everywhere Marcus looked he could see them doing their job.
Marcus only let go of what he tentatively called his 'royal demeanor' once they got back to his tent, dropping himself into a chair. He sighed, drinking deeply from a drink already on the side-table.
"I just killed fifteen people."
She hummed, shaking her hair free from where it had gotten tangled. "I know. You did well. No hesitation, stern but fair, you laid out your expectations. There's no real winning in a situation like that, but you got the closest you could."
"I just killed fifteen people," he repeated. "I've never done that before. Not outside the School of Life, where everyone was more a shadow than flesh and blood. Seeing them alive and well after killing them undercuts any guilt I might have felt."
Elly shifted, taking the seat next to him but not getting too close. He appreciated the gesture. "Oh. Did it feel different?"
"No," he replied, not sure how to feel about that. "It feels exactly the same. Or, more accurately, it feels like nothing at all. I mean, I gave a poisonous sedative to my dad, but I never considered that a kill. I never considered it much of anything, actually. Just an ending. Is this shock?"
She sighed. "People in shock usually don't ask if they're in shock. Did you enjoy killing? Either your dad or the prisoners?"
"No."
"Then the School of Life might have been real enough to train the instinctual value of life out of you." She waved a hand before he could say anything. "I worded that poorly. I don't care about killing, which is quite usual for any career soldier. If I once did I don't really remember it, so I might have been born that way. Hard to tell. As long as you don't enjoy killing you will probably be fine."
"Probably?"
Elly shrugged. "I don't claim to have all the answers. But if you ever turn full megalomaniac I promise to put a sword through your heart, alright? It can be this really tragic end to our marriage where I inherit everything and you die reviled."
He snorted, which turned into a laugh the joke probably didn't deserve, and he almost felt the tension leave his body as he kept laughing. It turned slightly manic towards the end, but she didn't seem to judge.
"Thanks," he finally said. "Now I need to get to work on that detection matrix. If I'm right it should allow me to feel extraordinary power signatures regardless if those people are using said power, which would allow me to keep an eye on the Archmage."
She stood, nodding. "I'll leave you to it. The army needs to be partially restructured, companies stationed further apart in a loose formation to limit the effectiveness of large-scale magical attacks, and it will take a while. We should be at the Triple Crossing within the next few days, at which point we can try to cut off the Legions between us and the sea."
Marcus nodded to show he'd heard her, his focus turning to magic. Magic and all its wonders, for while the elements were an almost undisputed champion of war, magic was not all fire and stone. Not all slicing gales and crushing water. Magic could be anything, as long as the wielder had the will and talent to create it.
And he'd been working on this since before the war had started. A way to gather information that didn't rely on summons or was limited to a small space. And space, ironically, seemed to be the solution. A way to vastly increase the distance, or more accurately let the spell 'ping' many areas nearly instantaneously.
It would have miles and miles of range, but the information overload was too severe. Now, though, he hoped that by isolating the signature above a certain threshold would let him more accurately detect large groups of moving mages.
He breathed in, mentally calibrated the matrix for a thirty mile circumference, and let power flood into it. The combined spatial and divination spell strained, forcing him to manually hold some components in his mind, but as information started flowing his lips grew into a smil-
Marcus shot up from his chair, Elly pausing from where she'd been about to leave. "They're here."
"What?"
"The Empire. They're less than forty miles from us." The largest signature vanished, which meant the Archmage had somehow felt him passively detect power residue, but that wasn't important. "They're coming straight at us. All of them."
Elly frowned in the way that meant she'd realized something. "The overwhelming number of enemy summons wasn't meant to keep eyes on us. It was to make us pay attention to them while they got into position. This- From which directions?"
She cleared the table with an uncaring sweep, putting a map of the surrounding area on it. Marcus joined her, mind straining as he tried to orient his spell with said map, and he picked up a charcoal pencil as the information flowed.
His hand moved almost on autopilot as he sketched, more and more Imperial mages vanishing from sight. But not all, and what remained painted a not-so-great picture.
"Surrounded," Elly grunted, barking at the Royal Guards to have general Pator put the army on high alert. She traced the markings he'd made. "Can't get to the castle at the Triple Crossing, can't move back towards Redwater, can't hide in the hills. If they'd caught us with this… How didn't our spies, let alone Vess' succubi, find out about this?"
She shook her head, answering her own question before he could. "Too early, not in a position to do so, not important. We dig in here. Build five central fortifications in a small circle, two commanders for each. Force them to engage us on prepared grounds. How many traps can your mages lay?"
"Some, but I can do more. Stable runic traps are hard to make, but they last days before losing power. I could make ten an hour if I focus on nothing else. The Empire can probably get rid of them."
"Probably," Elly agreed, eyes roving over the map. "But it's one more layer they need to watch out for. We have ten, maybe fifteen hours? That's assuming they march through the night, which I think they will. Giving us an additional eight to figure a way out is not to their advantage, and they can rest their troops just before engaging."
Marcus nodded, quietly pointing out which specialist forces they had and what they could do, and before long they moved to the proper command tent. Moved through an army kicked into high gear, companies already moving out with shovels in hand. The soldiers looked confused, the officer looked confused, but they moved.
Ten hours was not enough to build anything grand, let alone a castle, but primitive walls could be created. Earth dug and piled onto one side, both magically and manually, while sharpened sticks embedded in the defense. More, probably, though that was more Elly's domain.
His was magic, and the Empire was going to see they didn't hold sole dominion over the art.
REPLACE WITH LINE BREAK p^o^q REPLACE WITH LINE BREAK
Marcus breathed, not daring to stick his head out from behind the wall. Nearly a thousand men and women were with him, standing halfway up a mound of earth rising six feet high. The other side fell down further than it should, far enough any climb was exhausting and slow, and behind the wall their camp slumbered quietly.
The sun was just rising over the horizon, chasing away the dark and cold bit by bit, and Marcus knew the Empire was just eight hundred feet away. Had been for almost seven hours now, surrounding his own protections with a wall of flesh.
In those seven hours he'd watched a basic, wooden palisade be constructed seven hundred feet away from their earthen wall, stamped deep into the ground but not nearly thick enough to stop a determined charge. Then his summons had confirmed the light-weight wood had been transmuted to weathered oak, which made for a far more effective deterrent.
The Legions carried those stakes everywhere, apparently. Balsa wood, grown in some remote part of the Empire. Extremely lightweight, but still wood. Marcus didn't know much about transmutation, but what little he did know was that power was dependent on the degree of change.
Turning air to gold was so prolifically expensive he doubted even the Archmage would be capable of it. But one type of wood to another? Well, one short night had seen the man transform tens of thousands of the stakes. Probably without exhausting himself, unless Marcus had rather critically overestimated the man's competence.
Royal Guards shifted around him, breath turning to fog through their fully enclosed armets, but Marcus didn't pay them overly much attention. Neither did he pay attention to the six Life Enhancement soldiers charged with his personal protection, the four warmages whose sole duty it was to shield him from harm or the flock of summons screaming overhead.
No, his focus was on the enemy. There was an energy in the air, one he couldn't name yet feeling more heavy than even the Magic coursing through his veins, and he knew this was it. The Legions would charge, traps would be triggered, thousands would die.
He would die, perhaps. Or Elly would. His barely-qualified students from the Academy, those he'd dragged into this war. The terrified farmhands only just out of basic training. Perhaps the Archmage would die by some fluke of fate. That would be bad.
The Empire would come down on them like a raging storm if that happened. Fortunately, Archmages were very well protected. But it also made his job harder, not being able to take advantage of a one-in-ten-thousand shot at the man's life.
Oh well. The Archmage seemed content to watch and transmute wood, so Marcus would leave the man to it. Without a demigod at their side the Legions could be beaten, and high on a victory the Empire could be bargained with.
It was a game of cost, in the end. The cost of sending more soldiers to subdue his Kingdom, the cost of training them, feeding them, of those soldiers not being stationed at the dungeon. So if Marcus came with an offer, one that would save them years of resistance and a great amount of resources, well.
The Empire was pragmatic. But before all of that this battle had to be won, which was looking more positive by the hour.
Duke Hargraf's lands had been invaded. His castle had been sacked, villages looted and Barons imprisoned. But the Duke was one of the most powerful men in the Kingdom, and his army was fat from trade with the very Empire now invading them.
Ten thousand levies were marching to attack the Legions from behind, hardened by three thousand household guards. It would either create a double encirclement, which Elly anticipated the Empire would not risk, or force them to break away.
And then he was out of time to think. Horns sounded, great blaring horns he'd never heard before, and he could feel the ground shake as Legions of Imperial soldiers moved to attack. His own men grew more nervous still, but that was why he was here.
Elly had warned this was the shakiest front. That it had the least veterans and more than the average number of souls who'd run if given the chance. Feet thundered on the floor as the Legions advanced, and Marcus could almost feel his emotions cool.
Nerves drained and impatience went with it, cold nothing taking its place. It was the same feeling from his youth, those times when he was doing what he would rather not. Socialise, learning etiquette and decorum and all the useless skills of ruling. The feeling had changed over time, but its core was the same.
Just cold apathy and a vague feeling of amusement, the former of which grew as an explosion rang out. Then another, then two more. The Legions were finding his runes, it seemed.
He pulsed his divination spell, finding a few scattered mages moving up, and soon after that power bloomed in small pockets. The detonations of fire and wind grew less frequent, which was sooner than he'd hoped.
Marcus nodded to his warmages, all five of them rising to peer over their wall. Four shields snapped into place, one after the other, and the layered defense was almost immediately attacked. Marcus looked over the empty grassland around their impromptu fortress, and all he saw was red.
Red and white as far as the eye could see, a human wave of muscle and flesh driven forwards through the traps. Mages moved amongst them, covering pitfalls with dirt and dispelling runes as they went, but it was slowing them down.
One of the mages toppled, the sound of a whistling arrow reaching Marcus' ears moments later. That was Elly using her proper warbow, he knew. The one that could take Life Enhancement energy which vastly increased the acceleration and penetration of her arrows.
Marcus breathed, spatial matrices weaving together as he exhaled.
The mage he'd targeted was suddenly much closer than she'd been before, and the thirty-something woman blinked in confusion before instinct kicked in. Her shield was augmented with more power, but Marcus didn't care much for that. He spat a disrupting wave of energy at her, her protections flickering but not vanishing, and his mace came down on her head once.
Her skull shattered and he let space collapse, returning her corpse to their own lines, and he turned to another mage. This one had guards, soldiers sticking close to the teenager, and Marcus felt a cold rush of satisfaction as another arrow found his head.
The Imperial Legions continued to advance, closing the distance ever so doggedly, and Marcus' own crossbow companies started to rain fire down on their heads. The enemy soldiers raised their shields and kept moving, Marcus could see his mages release nearly a hundred seven-foot tall 'minor' stone elementals, and more portals opened above as Imperial mages summoned whole flocks of birds.
Marcus grunted, moving back as his soldiers shifted nervously. Xathar was waiting for him, the demon seeming in the best mood of his life, and Marcus heard officers bark at their men to move closer to the edge.
He patted Xathar on his flank, his guards mounting their own horses, and a screaming fireball detonated somewhere to his far left.
The first, proper battle of the invasion was raging all around him, and all Marcus could feel was cold. Endless, clarity-granting cold.