V3Ch96-Battle of the Charnel Fortress Part 1

After Tybalt had seen to the beginnings of his revenge against the Greentear family, he and the others took up their places for what he would later dub the Battle of the Charnel Fortress.

The struggle wouldn’t be quick, even after the two leaders with time powers had passed away.

Tybalt would have liked to perform more assassinations and undermine the leadership structure further, but General Caracalla had ordered doubled patrols before he was killed, and the men were already spooked by the uncanny atmosphere of the Charnel Fortress. They were hanging close together, these were elite soldiers, and the necromancer wanted to begin the large-scale violence without risking any kind of commotion setting everyone on the defensive first.

Edgard took Tybalt and those who would be positioned directly alongside the necromancer through the walls. They passed behind the officers’ quarters, beneath Caracalla’s room, and then over the chapel. As they made that last move, Tybalt felt a bit nervous.

He could sense, as they moved above the space, that this was where all the priests and holy knights the Divine Trust had brought were making their camp. The aura of the opposing gods’ clergy and their connections to Vika and Astara was viscerally unpleasant for him, given the number present. Out of the troops who had crammed into this fortress, Tybalt guessed there were at least a hundred holy men and women.

He tried to suppress his own semi-divine power as much as he could while they were passing overhead, but he was still a little surprised that there was no movement from below, no indication that they noticed the High Priest of Mudo was passing.

There was no way the necromancer could have missed this gathering of holy people. It was interesting that he himself was apparently less conspicuous.

I guess the aura of the fortress is so ominous that my similar one isn’t a big change to them, he thought. Its darkness clouds everything for these people. You can’t really see a black cat in the dark on a moonless night. Not unless you look it right in the eyes.

Tybalt, his wives, Aoife, and Samara finally emerged with Edgard inside the crypt, just past where the Divine Trust’s representatives made camp in the chapel.

There was something darkly funny about once again being so close to the enemy, and this time right alongside the people who should have been specialized in locating and defeating him. But, of course, he didn’t allow himself to laugh.

“We will maintain as close to silence as we can here,” he said quietly. “Anyone who can’t abide by that should leave.”

The others just looked at him steadily, and Tybalt finally nodded and sat down. Tybalt’s wives had decided, at some point, discussing the matter outside their husband’s presence, that they were all staying. Even the noncombatants. They considered it important, since he was going to be here, that they all be present somewhere in the fortress until he left.

The necromancer couldn’t say he was disappointed. It was a sweet gesture from the ones who were nearly harmless. As for the ones who were both deadly and not heavily pregnant, he had been planning to keep Aoife, Dero, Kistana, and Samara around anyway. Mariella and Vidalia were both useful, but their stomachs were as round as giant eggs now.

Tybalt sat down with his legs crossed and closed his eyes.

“All right, Fortress,” the necromancer ordered. “Share your sight with me. We’ll finalize our attack plan and begin the battle as soon as we can.”

The others in the crypt were moving around him - Edgard, going off to join the other chthonic mages to transport relevant assets into position around the Charnel Fortress, and Dero preparing to teleport people around.

There was also a teleportation circle the dark elf had prepared in advance inside the crypt, and in a few minutes, people began to arrive through it - some beastfolk, but mainly Colin’s high elf troops. Since Liora would be in the crypt, they had insisted on this positioning.

But for the next ten minutes, Tybalt mostly shut out the actions of his own side.

The Charnel Fortress connected him with its senses, and the necromancer allowed his mind and the spirit’s to temporarily merge, at least in part. Their energies mingled, their two conscious minds both seeking the same goal.

He felt what the Charnel Fortress felt, heard what it heard, and most importantly, saw what it saw. He took the measure of the Fortress’s own power, which had continued to grow and to look more and more as the necromancer’s power did. Tybalt sensed his own undead, lurking where he had placed them, beneath the floorboards in key locations, and he knew where the spirits and corporeal undead under the Fortress’s direct control were. Most of the haugbui were in the crypt itself, waiting to be called upon, while the shades and wraiths were hiding inside the walls, likewise ready to be set loose upon the Fortress’s unwanted guests. Tybalt’s own banshee was similarly concealed.

Equally importantly, the necromancer instantly knew the positions of every single soldier and officer in the Charnel Fortress.

The structure is overcrowded, with far more people here than it was designed for, he assessed. When I massacred the inhabitants, there were around two hundred. That was the bare minimum to keep the place operational. But it should only have been habitable for a thousand. Maybe two. Now it’s around three thousand people in total. Around two hundred and fifty in each of the four barracks, four hundred sleeping in the mess hall, twelve hundred in tents set up in the courtyard, two hundred just lying around wherever they can in the halls. The lucky ones have sleep sacks. There’s even a few sleeping in the landing on the stairs. Of course, the officers are mostly still walking around setting up for the night, making plans. Only a few are headed upstairs to their special housing even now.

The upstairs was a lot of officers’ quarters. Much smaller rooms than anything else in the Fortress, but the tradeoff was that the roughly a hundred officers and NCOs would only have one or two roommates each.

The Charnel Fortress had sealed the General’s and Major Geta’s doors, locking them and closing up the space where the keyholes were, so no one would be able to enter without kicking the doors in. Most of the officers were still assisting their units in getting organized for the night, a few were on watch, and around twenty-eight were either already upstairs or headed up there.

I need to make sure I send a strong group upstairs to deal with them, the necromancer thought. The officers were experienced. He could feel how powerful they were.

“Charnel, here’s what I want to do…”

He quietly made his final selections for which undead and which living troops to dispatch in which locations and when. Then he opened his eyes and verbalized those decisions as orders to the living beings around him.

He was pleased to find there were already a hundred high elves in the crypt with him and his wives, thanks to the teleportation circle.

“Commander Shalott,” Tybalt said, rising with a smile. “It’s good to see you.”

The man saluted crisply.

“I was told to keep my voice down, sir, but it is a pleasure to be of service in protecting the Queen.” His eyes flashed to Liora, and Tybalt saw a hint of something more than mere courtesy in that gaze. Shalott was far too old for her - at least, from a human perspective, being centuries old while Liora was just past thirty - but that didn’t stop him looking. “Er, the Queens, I mean.”

Tybalt nodded and stifled the urge to smile.

People always want what they can’t have.

“It’s a proactive defense I have in mind for her,” the necromancer replied. “I mean, them.”

The Commander reddened slightly but said nothing back.

Then Tybalt quietly laid out his plans for Shalott and his fellow mid-ranking officers, who gathered their respective squads and relayed the same to them.

None of the high elves present were vampires beside Liora. That was a deliberate choice on Tybalt’s part. He was going to be careful where he deployed living versus undead troops, and he had more than enough of his own undead - and the Fortress’s.

On Tybalt’s orders, Edgard transported the first hundred high elves upstairs, moving them ten at a time through the floor and up into the hospital - the only major unoccupied space in the fortress that Tybalt had sensed. As those high elves were shifted from place to place, more of their kind continued to arrive through the teleportation circle until there were a total of roughly two hundred within the fortress. Half of them were stationed upstairs, laying low in the hospital, while half remained in the crypt.

The Grand Beastfolk Army had fifteen hundred beastfolk, including all of Kistana’s monks, outside, along with the remaining almost eight hundred high elves and nearly two thousand undead, but so as to avoid being seen, they were crouched hidden in the dunes, far enough away from the Fortress that they couldn’t instantly rush in and exploit any weaknesses.

Tybalt contacted Esmerelda to issue orders to his forces waiting outside. She and the gashadokuro were the only strong undead not currently inside the Fortress.

The orders were simple: “You may advance now.”

As that communication went out, several things happened all at once.

***

In the northwestern barracks - barracks one, in Tybalt’s mind - four of Tybalt’s huntsmasters stepped through the wall, escorted by one chthonic mage. A moment later, powered by that same chthonic mage, Pillars of Earth rose and sealed the doorway. Then the chthonic mage stepped back into the wall and headed off to accomplish another mission.

As the soldiers in the bunks nearest the mummies stirred, twenty-five shades and wraiths flew through the surrounding stone walls and entered the bodies of the nearest humans. Only two of those men - a particularly pious soldier wearing Astara’s conjoined hearts symbol, and a powerful mage - managed to quickly force the spirits out. They moved on to the next available bodies.

Two of the huntsmasters instantly attacked those who had resisted possession.

The room had not been quite asleep yet. Many men were sleeping two to a bunk, when they had been accustomed to sleeping on their own, and it was harder to get to bed that way.

Now the bunkhouse stirred.

“Who the fuck are those—” The first soldier to notice the strange newcomers was cut off with a crimson arrow through the eye.

As the room roused to indecisive action, the possessed soldiers drew their weapons or called upon their host bodies’ other skills and began to attack.

From behind them, protected by the curtain of human bodies provided by the shades and wraiths, the huntsmasters conjured arrow after arrow and fired into the room, turning the bunkhouse into a shooting gallery.

***

In the north central and northeastern barracks - barracks two and three, for Tybalt’s purposes - two forces, roughly a hundred undead each, smashed through the floorboards in the center of each room and flowed out like a fountain of flesh and bone.

There were zombies, wendigos, ghouls, ghasts, and skeletons in their number, all eager to rend flesh from bone.

The men around the hole screamed out, alerting all around them to the attack.

Then they were buried under vicious bodies that ripped out throats, gouged eyes, broke bone, and - as soon as they detected that terminal wounds had been inflicted - kept moving. This was not typical undead behavior. They normally kept going past the point where fatal injury had been suffered, until the enemy was clearly dead.

This change was because Tybalt was more or less directly controlling all of them, albeit loosely, all of his will at present focused on maximizing his kills during the initial window of surprise.

Most of the men in their beds didn’t have their weapons immediately at hand, some of them were half-asleep until the screaming startled them, and they lay in darkness. It took precious seconds for someone to get a torch lit on one side of the room.

During that time, Tybalt’s creatures rampaged, and the air filled with the sound of screaming.

At almost exactly the same time that a torch was ignited, the guards who had been posted outside the door burst in, shields and spears at the ready.

The sight that greeted them was gruesome. Twenty mangled corpses lay on the floor already, while a dozen more writhed, severely injured, in their beds, on the ground, or clinging to their killers’ ankles. The undead attackers kept moving on, advancing toward men they had yet to assault or grappling the nearest figures as the victims screamed for help. Some men were already striking back with their spears, shields, warhammers, or axes, but their movements were still sluggish and clumsy in the half-darkness and half-sleep under which the enemy had begun their assault.

“We’re under attack!” shouted one of the soldiers.

“Undead! Coming through the floorboards!” yelled another.

They practically yelled over each other, making their communication anything but clear to the others on duty at the other end of the hall, let alone those on the other side of the fortress.

***

In the fortress’s two stairwells, several soldiers were roused from sleep as the entrances to the second level were sealed off by Pillars of Earth almost simultaneously.

“What the fuck is going on?” exclaimed one of them.

The others voiced similar sentiments, but none of them could see or hear what might be happening on the second floor.

***

Outside of the chapel, dozens of Pillars of Earth rose, sealing the entrance up, closing almost the entire contingent from the Divine Trust inside. There were a handful, at most, of the priests who had been elsewhere in the Fortress when it happened.

As the door was suddenly blocked, those nearest to it noticed the light from under the door disappear.

“What’s that?” one of them muttered.

Then the door at the opposite end of the chapel burst open - the door that led to the crypt.

“Undead? The necromancer’s forces?” someone called.

“Use Holy Light!” shouted another.

But the figures who stepped through the opening were neither dead, nor human at all. They were the tall, lithe figures of high elves, clad in elegant-looking armor and armed with swords and spears. More and more of them moved into the room and gathered at the far end, and their intentions seemed to be violent.

Still, it was obvious to anyone with eyes that they weren’t undead.

As one overeager priest shone his Holy Light into the face of one of those in the front, the figure simply blinked in annoyance at the bright illumination.

“What’s going on?” called out one priest.

Even as he spoke, dozens of elven warriors filed in.

“What in Kur are elves doing here?” exclaimed someone from near the sealed door.

“Attack!” shouted one of the group of elven warriors.

Then the high elves pointed their weapons at the priests, and the killing began.

***

From within the crypt, Samara’s hands shook slightly as she drew her sword. She had just seen the high elves go out toward the chapel.

Now she heard the screams of the Divine Trust members.

There was an instinct inside her, deeply ingrained, to go help them. She knew she wasn’t going to, of course. She would be loyal to her new master, not snap back to working with his enemies.

But that raised the question of what she should do now.

I probably ought to help the high elves fight, she told herself.

That was why she had the sword out.

But it was hard to make herself step through that door.

“What do I…?” her voice, low as she began to speak, trailed off in midsentence.

She looked at Tybalt, but he was still seated, eyes closed, his focus very clearly elsewhere at the moment.

“Just do what you can.” The voice came from beside her, soft and comforting. Gentle fingers took hold of Samara’s hands, which she realized only now were clenched far too tightly around her word’s hilt.

It was the foxgirl, Vidalia.

“What I can?”

“Yeah, you’ll be all right,” the foxgirl said. “You were wondering what you should do, and you’ll be all right whatever you choose.” She spoke with an air of certainty. “Just do what you feel comfortable doing.” She squeezed Samara’s hands and then rubbed the skin of her arm gently. It left goosebumps where she had touched, but that broke the spell a little.

“Right, of course,” the paladin said weakly. “Thank you, ma’am. I’ll go and do my duty to the master. It will be fine.”

She took a single step toward the door leading out of the crypt before a voice stopped her.

“Samara.” It was another female voice. Mariella’s.

The paladin turned her head and saw the fire mage smiling at her.

“Um, what is it, ma’am?” Samara asked.