Chapter 42 - The Earth Remembers

“You’ll never find a better sparring partner than adversity.”

- Golda Meir

The first problem, Seraphina decided as she swept out of the study with Frest following close behind, was determining whether there was actually anything to do about it. An unidentified army appearing within striking distance of the Imperial capital was certainly alarming, but Tianhua was hardly some provincial market town protected by a wooden palisade and three retired soldiers with bad knees. It was the seat of the Jade Dragon Throne, surrounded by walls, garrisons, arsenals, and the Imperial Guard.

Unfortunately, armies did not ordinarily appear out of empty countryside.

“Lady Wen, remain here for the moment,” she ordered as she reached the doorway, then glanced back to find Meilin already halfway to her feet. “If the palace receives an official summons, you may tell them that I have gone to see this so-called army for myself. I should like to know precisely what we are frightened of before everyone begins running in circles.”

Meilin looked distinctly unhappy with being left behind. “Should I not come with you? I know the city better than—”

“No,” Seraphina interrupted, although she softened the refusal with the smallest smile. “If there is no danger, then there is no reason to drag you halfway across Tianhua, and if there is danger, I would rather not explain to your father why I carried his daughter toward it.”

Frest waited until they were well beyond the study before glancing sideways at his mistress. “That was almost considerate.”

“I am frequently considerate. People simply lack the sensitivity required to recognize it.”

“Of course, milady,” he replied flatly, a smirk somewhere behind his eyes.

They moved quickly through the Spring Palace, though Seraphina refused to run, and servants began bowing themselves against walls as they passed. She sent a footman ahead to order two horses prepared and another to fetch a plain cloak, since arriving at the city wall dressed for an afternoon of poetry would be inconvenient enough without attracting half the district along the way. By the time she reached the outer courtyard, her palfrey had been saddled, while Frest’s heavier charger stamped beside it beneath one of the grooms. Several Carcaronne men-at-arms immediately moved to accompany them, but Seraphina waved them back. A large foreign escort galloping through Tianhua while rumors of an unknown army spread would produce exactly the sort of misunderstanding she did not care to resolve.

The ride west took longer than she would have preferred despite the city not yet descending into panic, which meant its streets remained full of ordinary evening traffic. Porters carried baskets home from the markets, carts groaned beneath sacks of grain, sedan chairs moved between prosperous residences, and vendors continued shouting the virtues of their wares. Here and there, however, Seraphina noticed signs that the news was spreading. Soldiers moved more quickly than usual toward the western districts, their messengers forced their horses through intersections with little regard for pedestrians.

Nothing about Tianhua itself suggested immediate danger, and that was almost more troubling.

“So the scouts truly saw nothing?” Seraphina asked as they turned onto a broad avenue leading toward the western fortifications.

“According to the man who brought the report to the man who then brought the report to me…” Sir Frest began. “The army appeared as if out of nowhere.”

“Armies do not suddenly sprout from the fields,” she replied testily.

“I thought you might say that, but appear one has, milady.”

Seraphina gave him an irritated look. “You are insufferable. Your source?” 

“A scout… we might have been playing cards, Lady Seraphina. Good pay encourages professional development,” he commented

Despite herself, the corner of her mouth almost turned upward, but the sight of the western wall ahead ended the impulse. Stone stairs climbed toward the fighting platforms, towers rose at intervals behind heavy tiled roofs, and soldiers were already carrying bundles of arrows, crossbow bolts, and other supplies toward their assigned positions. Officers shouted orders while runners came and went from the gatehouse, yet the gates themselves remained open because merchants, farmers, and travelers were still being hurried inside.

The commanding officer at the nearest stair did not wish to admit her, which Seraphina considered understandable but inconvenient. He bowed, apologized, explained that the walls were being prepared for possible military action, and suggested with commendable delicacy that a foreign noblewoman might find another location more suitable. Seraphina listened until he had exhausted himself before informing him that she simply did not care and that she would remove his head from his shoulders if he did not comply.

Whether he believed the first claim or merely feared the consequences of offending her, the result was much the same.

She was led onto a high section of the western wall, where perhaps a dozen Imperial soldiers and two junior officers were straining their eyes toward the horizon. Far beyond the cultivated country surrounding Tianhua, something dark could indeed be seen along the great road. To unaided sight it resembled little more than a stain spreading slowly across the pale green and brown of the spring landscape, yet there was enough of it to make Seraphina understand why the first reports had been alarming.

“I will require the battlements cleared,” she demanded simply.

The officer beside her frowned. “My lady, these men are on duty.”

“Do not make me repeat myself,” the young girl repeated, giving him a look that could strip paint from the walls

The man considered that argument and apparently found no comfortable answer within it. He ordered his soldiers and subordinates down to the next platform, although several looked back with poorly concealed interest before disappearing beneath the stairs. Seraphina waited until the last helmet vanished, then turned to Frest.

“If anyone comes up those stairs before I am finished, send them back down,” the girl ordered succinctly.

“With words?”

She looked at the fine sword at his hip and then at him. “Begin with words, finish however you have to.”

Once they were alone, Seraphina approached the crenellations and rested both hands upon the stone. The approaching force remained much too distant for the naked eye, but the problem was essentially one of optics rather than magic, and Crystal had always rewarded exactness. She lifted one hand and called upon the familiar spell, feeding Mana into it while holding the desired form clearly in her mind.

A tiny point of rose-colored crystal appeared above her palm before spreading outward into a circular pane no larger than a coin. She curved it carefully, adjusted its thickness, then created another transparent disc behind the first and a third beyond that, each held in the air by the structure of the spell itself. The surfaces caught the evening sun and fractured it into soft pink shards across the battlement while Seraphina altered their shapes by fractions, thinking in terms of focal length, refraction, and tedious geometry.

The first attempt magnified the western countryside into a rose-colored blur. She clicked her tongue, altered the spacing, and tried again. This time, the distant road leapt into clarity.

“There,” she murmured.

Frest moved closer, trying to look completely unfazed as his mistress performed magic. “See anything?”

“Men.”

“Well, that confirms the army part,” he said with an incorrigible grin on his face.

“Oh, do be quiet.”

Seraphina narrowed the field and increased the magnification until the indistinct mass resolved into separate figures, and as details emerged, her annoyance gave way to confusion. They were certainly soldiers, or at least they had been armed as soldiers, but no standards rose above them and there was almost no cavalry. The greater part traveled on foot in a broad, disorderly mass that spread from the road into the adjoining fields, and their equipment bore none of the uniformity she expected from an Imperial formation.

Heavy furs hung from shoulders despite the mild spring evening, while round shields, crude mail, iron helmets, broad axes, long spears, and heavy chopping swords appeared throughout the column. Northern tribal equipment.

Seraphina’s expression tightened as she adjusted the lens and focused upon a group nearer the front. One warrior wore a wolfskin over his shoulders and carried an enormous two-handed axe, while another had a collection of bear teeth hanging from his belt. Their armor was battered, their shields split, and their clothing so caked with mud that the colors had nearly disappeared. At first she thought they must be survivors of a battle…

Then one of the men turned his head, and she saw that the left side of his face was missing from the cheek downward. Seraphina stared more carefully and realized that what she had taken for dark mud along his jaw was dried flesh around exposed bone, while his teeth showed through the ruin of the cheek. An arrow passed entirely through his throat beneath the chin, yet he walked with the same steady pace as everyone around him.

She shifted the lens to another. This man had no right arm below the elbow, and the stump was black and dried rather than fresh, while a spearhead protruded from his ribs. Another walked several ranks behind him with his neck bent so badly to one side that his ear almost rested upon his shoulder, while another had been split from collar to breastbone and bound together with what appeared to be rawhide cord. The entire army was, very decidedly, wrong.

“Oh, drats,” she half-cursed.

Frest stiffened. “What?”

Seraphina did not answer immediately because she was already casting Identify through the lens, fixing her attention on the one-armed warrior until magically gleaned information formed across her vision. At this range it would not show anything except for their names and monster type.

They were all probably Undead Revenants of various levels between ten and twenty-five she guessed. 

Her mouth tightened.

She selected a different figure, one who moved with considerably more grace than the corpses around him. The warrior was tall even by northern standards, wearing blackened mail beneath a ragged bear fur, and the long sword in his hand gave off a faint distortion that looked almost like smoke curling from cold iron. A Wight her Identify returned, though 

“What is it?” Frest repeated, and this time there was no humor in his voice.

“They are dead,” she stated flatly.

He looked toward the distant army and then back to her. “Dead as in doomed, or dead as in undead dead dead?”

“Dead as in they should be lying quietly beneath several feet of earth and troubling no one. The undead kind, Frest.”

Seraphina moved the pinkish lens across the host again, but now that she knew what she was looking at, details that had escaped her immediately became obvious. Many of the living corpses still bore the wounds of open battle. Arrow shafts remained lodged in backs and shoulders, broken spearheads jutted from torsos, and some wore armor crushed inward by the impact of cavalry. Others had injuries that looked less like battle wounds and more like the consequence of being packed beneath earth and stone. One Revenant even had a broken wooden stake protruding from his shoulder.

For several moments Seraphina merely watched, and then the pattern resolved itself with unpleasant clarity. Fan Xiwei had smashed the northern horde.

The stories had celebrated the annihilation of Enkarn’s army, and the victory parade and the carried captured banners paraded through Tianhua. More importantly, it was known practice that barbarians were to be buried alive as punishment for the loot and rapine they had inflicted on the Empire. 

Seraphina suddenly remembered something else. The weapons. The iron of yore.

“Oh, those monumental idiots,” she whispered half to herself.

She almost laughed, but the sight through the crystal lens prevented it. “They buried them with their weapons.”

Frest waited, plainly expecting the significance to become apparent on its own, and when it did not, Seraphina finally lowered the magnification and explained.

“The northern tribes do not all bury their dead as civilized people do. The Three Bears and several related tribes maintain a place called the Valley of Unrest, deep in the North, where they cast many of their honored warriors after death along with their arms and armor. The valley is saturated with Necromantic Mana, and after enough time the bodies rise, then they fight one another until they are hacked apart, only for whatever remains to rise and fight again.”

Frest looked at her for a long moment. “They consider this desirable?”

“They are of the North,” she answered, like one of the braindead NPCs who tried to put an air of mysticism about them.

“That explains nothing,” the man pushed back.

Seraphine just shrugged before she returned to the lens, studying the dark weapons carried by the advancing dead. The Valley of Unrest did more than preserve corpses. Iron was an inferior vessel for Mana when compared to other more magically attuned materials, but centuries of continual exposure could achieve miracles. A sword buried in that place and wielded by the restless dead decade after decade became impregnated with necromantic power. Armor grew unnaturally resilient. Even crude iron could become something perilously close to magical when left in a supernatural cesspit for generations.

“Enkarn raided the Valley,” she stated slowly. “He must have stripped his ancestors of their weapons and armor before crossing the mountains. Perhaps other tribal graveyards as well. He needed enough enchanted equipment to make his people dangerous against the Empire. Truly dangerous."

Frest grimaced. “Charming fellow.”

“Practical, in his own barbaric fashion. The problem is that those weapons were soaked in Death Mana for generations, and then thousands of living men carried them. They would have been exposed to it day and night, while fighting, sleeping, eating, bleeding, and killing. It must have been working its way into them long before Fan ever caught them.”

“So they were already becoming these things?” he replied, looking quite horrified.

“Some of them, perhaps. Slowly. Enough exposure to Necromantic energy can make the living increasingly resemble the dead. Less pain, less fatigue, greater endurance, wounds that stop mattering quite as much, and eventually…”

She gestured toward the army.

Frest rubbed his jaw. “And then the Imperials buried them alive.”

“With the dead, the raw terror from being buried alive, and all those weapons packed together in the same pits,” Seraphina confirmed. “Because naturally no proper Imperial officer wanted crude northern iron. They would have taken anything visibly precious and left the axes and swords with the bodies.”

The stupidity of it became almost elegant once she saw the whole chain. Enkarn had stolen generations of Death-tainted weapons from the graveyards of his own people and distributed them across his horde, while Fan Xiwei’s army had then killed or captured most of those men in one place. The survivors had been buried alive beside the dead, and the weapons had gone into the earth with them.

The dark energies had nowhere to go except into flesh, bone, rust, earth, and whatever stubborn fragment of purpose remained in the men beneath the soil. Instead of extinguishing the horde, the Empire had planted it. Fan had essentially made another Valley of Unrest.

Seraphina felt Crystal’s familiar coldness somewhere within her thoughts as she increased the magnification again and followed the head of the army. There, among the more coherent wights, walked a figure so large that recognition came before she saw his face.

Enkarn had always been enormous. When alive, he had towered over Seraphina. His armor was battered almost beyond usefulness, the breastplate caved inward at one side while several broken arrows still protruded from his mail. Ragged fur hung from one shoulder, and what remained of his hair was still unmistakably blond beneath the dirt and dried blood.

He carried a massive axe in one hand that pulsed with evil energy. Seraphina stared at him and felt an emotion she did not immediately care to identify.

“Enkarn,” she half-whispered.

Frest turned sharply. “You are certain?”

“He has looked better, I cannot say undeath agrees with him.” 

Even dead, Enkarn moved toward Tianhua with the same wild pride with which he had once stood before her grandmother and accepted the ridiculous bride price Seraphina had offered him to get the man out of her hair. She had challenged him to bring her the life of a Dragon, and when he had asked whether she meant a Skylord, she had given him another target instead: a Dragon without wings, sitting upon a throne of jade.

At the time, it had seemed clever. A thing from out of the tales, and very impossible. It seemed the man was still willing to make a go of it.

She searched the formation near Enkarn and found the Windspeaker who had stood beside him in Carcaronne, although death had left the woman almost skeletal beneath the remnants of fur and leather. A staff remained in her hand, decorated with bone, feathers, and dark metal charms, while a faint haze followed every step she took. 

Whatever intelligence remained within the horde, it was sufficient for command, because the army was not wandering at random. Some revenants carried standards reduced to little more than poles and torn cloth, while the more powerful wights moved near the front and flanks as if maintaining the ghost of an old marching order. In short, they had retained purpose. More specifically, Enkarn had retained purpose.

“Oh, you ridiculous man,” Seraphina muttered.

Frest heard her. “What, Lady Seraphina?”

“He is still coming for the Emperor.”

Then Frest slowly turned his head toward her. “Because of your...”

The Knight showed admirable discipline and did not finish the sentence. Seraphina could practically hear him refusing to think the thought loudly enough for her to punish him.

She dissolved the outermost crystal lens and allowed the remaining panes to hover before her while she considered the problem. Tianhua would know the truth soon enough. Or their contrived version.That the army was an army of the Undead. There might be an hour before the gates were sealed completely, perhaps somewhat less if the officers on the western wall possessed unusual competence. An hour was enough to flee.

Her household could be ready quickly. Sir Vikens could gather the Knights of Carcaronne and the men-at-arms without much difficulty, while Miriam knew which possessions mattered and which merely cost money. The rest could be abandoned because almost everything in the world was replaceable when one possessed enough money.

They could slip through another gate before the city fully understood what was happening, putting distance between themselves and Tianhua while the Undead fixed their attention upon the Jade Dragon Throne. Tia could conceal their movements if necessary. It was the logical choice, and Seraphina liked logical choices.

Unfortunately, she had not crossed half the civilized world for the privilege of making a sensible retreat. Her purpose in the Empire had always been simple, however elaborately she dressed it in diplomacy, cultural exchange, poetry, and tea. She needed a husband. More specifically, she needed the sort of husband whose family possessed armies, legitimacy, wealth, and political interests compatible with Seraphina’s, eventually placing herself upon the Throne of Aranthia. 

Tianhua was where those men were.

She had spent too much time arranging her position at court. She had learned their customs, endured their poetry, accepted their gifts, rejected several perfectly respectable men, cultivated others, survived an attempt upon her life, humiliated Fan Xiwei, recovered her standing after the resulting scandal, and allowed half the capital to speculate about her connection to First Prince Hantien Huan.

To flee now would not merely mean leaving a city under attack. It would mean abandoning the entire purpose of her journey.

Reputation was a kind of currency, and unlike gold it became exceptionally difficult to recover once everyone agreed you had spent it poorly. If Seraphina slipped from Tianhua through a lesser gate while the Emperor, Princes, ministers, nobles, and common people remained behind the walls, no explanation afterward would erase the simple version of the story. That the foreign barbarian princess had fled.

Aranthians would hear it, and the Imperial court would remember it. And, Seraphine herself would never be able to forget it.

Seraphina looked again through her crystal lens at the advancing dead. The sensible decision remained obvious, and that irritated her more with every passing second because the alternative was rapidly becoming equally obvious. If Tianhua survived, and Seraphina de Sariens had remained to help defend it, then the calculus changed entirely.

The woman who had defeated Fan Xiwei in a private quarrel might become the woman who stood beside the Empire when Fan Xiwei’s buried enemies rose again. The Emperor could hardly dismiss such a service. And if the First Prince happened to require saving in the process… Well, that would be the icing on the rhetorical cake. She allowed that thought to sit for a moment before ruthlessly setting it aside. There would be time enough for all of that nonsense later.

Frest watched her expression with the wariness of a man who had served her long enough to recognize when several dangerous plans were competing for dominance.

“Milady,” he finally said, “what do you want me to do?”

Seraphina let the remaining crystal lenses dissolve, and rose-colored fragments scattered across the battlement before fading into Mana. Without the magnification, the dead army became a distant stain once more.

She rested her fingers upon the stone. “I shall return to the Spring Palace to make preparations and have Sir Vikens prepare the household quietly. Prepare for war.”

Frest nodded. “And Desdemona?”

“She is to be ready as well, although you may tell her only that there is a possible attack. I do not need her to become overly excited .”

“And Lady Wen?”

Seraphina considered the matter. “She stays. If we were to engage in a pro-active defense, I will not drag the daughter of Marquis Wen out of the capital.”

Frest hesitated before asking the question that mattered. “Do we tell the Imperial officers what is coming?”

Seraphina looked down toward the stairway, where the soldiers she had displaced would no doubt be growing increasingly curious. “Yes, although not until I have spoken to their commander myself. Tell them the approaching force consists of northern Undead, mostly Revenants and Wights, and that conventional wounds may not stop them. Do not tell them why I think the army exists.”

Frest accepted this with a quick, crisp salute.

Enkarn was coming. The man had crossed the mountains in winter because she had challenged him, united enough of the northern tribes to terrify the Empire, raided the graves of his own ancestors for weapons, survived long enough to reach the heartlands, been defeated in open battle by Fan Xiwei, buried alive with the remnants of his warriors, and then apparently decided that death was an insufficient reason to abandon his courtship.

There was something almost admirable in the stupidity of it.

Seraphina watched the dark mass advance for another minute and then looked back across Tianhua. She could leave before the gates closed and preserve her life, her retinue, her wealth, and most of her power while sacrificing the mission that had brought her here.

Or she could remain inside a city about to be attacked by thousands of dead northerners carrying weapons soaked in generations of necromantic power, and trust that the greatest military state upon this half of the continent, with a little help from herself, could keep its own capital from becoming a cemetery.

Neither option was satisfactory. Seraphina de Sariens had always considered herself exceptionally talented at creating a third choice whenever the world offered her only two. For once, however, she could not immediately see one.

She frowned again at the approaching army, then at the city behind her, and finally gathered her cloak around herself as footsteps began climbing the stairs.

For the moment, she would prepare to defend Tianhua and prepare equally well to abandon it. Which of those preparations she ultimately used would depend upon what the Empire did next, how quickly the dead approached, and whether Seraphina decided that an Imperial husband was worth risking her life to acquire.

It was, she reflected bitterly, becoming an extraordinarily expensive marriage market.