Fortress Al-Mir

The logistics of the Walking Fortress weren’t exactly simple to operate.

A giant mobile fortress wasn’t easy to access while it was on the move. Theoretically, it didn’t need to be accessed. It possessed the same food production and living quarters magic that Fortress Al-Mir had. Yet there were still certain personnel and equipment that needed to move between the fortresses.

The teleportation circles didn’t work with a mobile target and walking up to the legs of the tower to access the interior while it was on the move was utterly impossible. Since he could freely teleport to his territory, and the Walking Fortress was his territory, that left Arkk to do most of the work himself.

It was a bit of a strange feeling.

Arkk was the leader of a free company. He commanded hundreds of men and was seen as an equal to a longstanding company commander. He could cast magic unseen in the world for thousands of years. He worked with an ancient monster, a dragonoid, and some kind of strange hive-mind collective. He dethroned a duke and put a puppet in its place. He had entreated with a god.

And here he was, acting as a simple courier.

Arkk teleported from ritual circle to ritual circle, moving a heavy crate loaded with equipment. A pair of orcs helped him carry the box through the teleportation circles.

Once they got close enough to the tower, he simply teleported all of them onto one of its floors.

Without him, the whole tower would have had to come to a whole stop while everyone carried the boxes up its many, many stairs.

“Thank you, Tell’ir. Penna.” Arkk stretched his back, glad to be out of the somewhat cramped underground chambers where the teleportation circles were hidden. “You are dismissed. There is a canteen two floors below us,” he said, motioning to the door. “Or you can find bunks a floor below that.”

“We don’t get to see these things in action?” Penna asked.

Arkk paused, considered, and then shrugged. “I don’t have a problem with that. I don’t know that there is going to be much to watch, but… Sure.”

Penna grunted a laugh as she nudged her elbow into Tell’ir. “Told you.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

Arkk watched as they moved off to the side of the room. It was a large room, divided roughly in half. One side was open and empty of anything save for a few targets at a far wall, providing an opportunity for archers and crossbowmen to practice their aim. The other side of the room was further divided up into individual sparring areas. Posts in the ground could hold up wooden dummies that would allow melee weapon training without a live opponent.

There were several similar training rooms around Fortress Al-Mir. Besides the gambling dens and fighting pits, they were some of the more popular locales within the fortress. The ones here barely looked used, however.

He wasn’t sure why that was. At the moment, the Walking Fortress housed about six hundred soldiers from White Company, three hundred former soldiers of the Duke’s Grand Guard, and about seventy others. The latter of whom included Larry the butcher heading a few others from the kitchen staff, spellcasters trained to use the bombardment magics and charged glowstones, the scrying team, and Dakka’s specialist team.

Most everyone either stayed in their bunks or ate and drank at the various canteens.

Quickly locating Dakka and her team, Arkk found them lounging much higher in the tower, having taken over one of the upper floors meant for the senior commanders for their own purposes. Which wasn’t something Arkk had opposed. Dakka was a commander, even if her power was generally limited to the field. If she wanted to share the floor with the rest of her team, that was her prerogative.

In the blink of an eye, Arkk teleported Dakka and the ten members of her team directly to the training room. There was a brief moment of disorientation. Everyone had been sitting around, having what looked to have been a fairly serious discussion even as they sat relaxed in the various furniture of Dakka’s quarters. Since Arkk always knew when he was teleporting himself, he had never experienced it himself, but everyone else had to take a second to grapple with suddenly being in a new position, a new orientation, and a new room.

But all of Dakka’s team were experienced members of Company Al-Mir. This wasn’t the first time they had been teleported, nor would it be their last. Feet thumped together as the group reoriented toward Arkk.

“Sir! You’re earlier than you said you’d be,” Dakka said. Nobody in Company Al-Mir saluted save for some of the more recent hires from other mercenary companies or the Duke’s Grand Guard. Dakka nevertheless straightened her back in a show of respect.

It was a bit… much, Arkk felt. Dakka, Rekk’ar, and Olatt’an were easily the three orcs he knew best simply because they were the first three, along with Larry, who had come to him. Of them, he always felt a bit more of a connection with Dakka. Olatt’an was an old man with a lot of experience to share and Rekk’ar was younger and more brash—and clearly didn’t like almost any decision that Arkk made no matter the situation.

Dakka was still fairly casual with him when alone. It was just in front of others. She was setting an example. The others on her team mimed her show of respect. Still, while Arkk now thought of himself far more as a leader and commander, it just felt weird with Dakka and a few of the others he knew well.

“We made good time thanks to Tell’ir and Penna,” he said, gesturing to the side of the room where the two orcs had taken up their position.

With a curt nod of her head, Dakka slowly turned to the stack of crates at Arkk’s side. “So these are…”

“You wanted something to even the scales,” Arkk said, teleporting the lids off the crates.

As he did so, the light in the room seemed to dim ever so slightly. Thin slits in the walls provided fresh sunlight to complement the glowstones set into the ceiling. Yet a small portion of that light stopped bouncing around the room, absorbed into the darkness within the crates.

One of the crates held freshly forged scythes. The blades were wrapped in cloth made using the ceremonial blade. They had discovered that shadowy cloth to be one of the few things the shadow blades could not cut, which made them the perfect sheathes for when the scythes weren’t in use.

Arkk gripped the sturdy wooden haft of one of the weapons, pulling it from the crate.

“Oh no,” one of the orcs grumbled.

Arkk cocked an eyebrow. He wasn’t quite sure which orc had spoken but, looking over, none looked particularly happy. “Something wrong?”

A few of the orcs glanced at one another before one, Klepp’at, cleared his throat. “Just worried you’re going to have us reaping fields again.”

Arkk blinked. It took him a long second to think all the way back to when he had first strongarmed all the orcs into joining him. The very first task he had assigned them had been to help out with Langleey’s harvest. With a small chuckle, he shook his head. “I don’t doubt that these would be effective in a field. Maybe too effective. Tell’ir, Penna. As long as you’re here, grab one of those training dummies and slot it into the hole here.”

The two not of Dakka’s team looked surprised to be addressed. They got over it quickly enough, moving one of the dummies into place. As they did so, Arkk carefully removed the cloth sheath from the scythe.

Very carefully.

If he was being honest, these scythes frightened him a little. They were almost too dangerous.

“The blade will cut through anything cloaked in shadow,” Arkk said as he readied the weapon. “Since they absorb light around them, that basically means anything.”

With fairly casual ease—the scythes weighed only as much as the wooden staff that served as their hafts—Arkk sliced the wooden dummy clean in two.

Dakka let out a long, slow whistle.

“The only exceptions are other things forged with the Cloak of Shadows’ power and the magically reinforced stone of Fortress Al-Mir. Don’t know how they will fare against that golden armor. Can’t be worse than anything else we tried.”

“Do they have to be scythes?” Raff’el asked.

“For now, yes. Unfortunately, we don’t have the ability to make custom designs in the Shadow Forge yet. We had to make do with the molds already present. The Protector is sending other instances of itself to explore a few of the other temples for more molds but no word back on that just yet.” Arkk carefully placed the cloth back over the scythe’s head and replaced it in the crate before moving over to one of the other crates. “It’s also why the armor we made is something of a one-size-fits-all.”

Arkk lifted a thin slice of shadow from the crate. The front half of a breastplate. It wasn’t as all-encompassing as properly made plate armor, thus it would need to be augmented with regular armor to provide full protection, but it did weigh almost nothing and was practically impervious to normal weapons and most magics that he and Savren had thought to try.

Explaining that to the orcs, Arkk handed out a few of the pieces. They had greaves, cuisses, boots, and gauntlets. No helms, unfortunately. But Arkk had a plan for that.

“They just so happened to have orc-sized equipment in these forges?” Dakka asked as one of the others helped her equip some of the armor.

“You recall what Vezta said? Black Knights—not sure if they were a race or some kind of military order dedicated to the Cloak of Shadows—bore a resemblance to orcs. These Shadow Forges were likely created to serve them.”

“Ah.” Dakka accepted the explanation with a nod of her head.

Arkk wasn’t sure if that was the truth but it made the most sense to him. Humans and even elves would find the armor far too bulky to use. Perhaps someone hulking like Horrik could make use of it but Arkk wasn’t willing to ship this special equipment off to Katja before he had equipped every single one of his orcs. And even then, he wasn’t so sure.

With easy access to only one Shadow Forge near the portal, they were exceedingly limited in how quickly they could produce this equipment. As it was, what they had now was literally every piece that had been produced. The final gauntlet had been finished just this morning. Perr’ok would continue making more but a full set of equipment took over three days to manufacture.

Drastically less time than normal armor in a normal forge—which could take weeks for an average set of armor—but a normal forge could be expanded until every blacksmith was working at once, creating dozens of pieces a day.

As it was, he was just happy they had gotten this much before reaching Elmshadow.

“We don’t have much time to train with this. Keep the sheathes on until you’re sure you aren’t going to smack into each other or anything important. But I want you on this every day until we arrive.”

They had between seven and twelve days, depending on terrain, to get ready.

“Arkk, t-there’s a change in the situation at Elmshadow.”

Slowly, Arkk opened his eyes. He was trying to scrape together every bit of rest he could manage. Unfortunately, it felt like some new problem cropped up every few minutes. Sometimes it was things at the Walking Fortress, which were relatively easy to deal with as he was physically present.

When he felt tugs for his attention over at Fortress Al-Mir, things turned more harried. Ilya was in charge over there, assisted by Vezta. Sometimes, he was able to teleport one of them to the person who called for his attention. Sometimes, Ilya or Vezta was the one calling for him. Everything needed to be in order over there. At the moment, the Walking Fortress could drop a lesser servant to the ground below to dig out a new teleportation chamber to add to the chain, thus allowing him to rush back to deal with problems like Kia and Claire getting a little too vigorously engaged in interrogating some Evestani scout unit the tower had crossed over and subsequently captured. That wouldn’t last once they arrived.

Arkk needed to be fully focused on Elmshadow with no distractions.

He stood from the large chair positioned in the center of the command floor.

The room was one of the few with large, open windows. A balcony before the windows let them stretch both higher and lower than the floor itself, letting him look down at the ground ahead of the tower even from his chair. As one of the highest rooms in the tower, it provided a view that kings wished their castles could provide.

There was enough room to fit all the strategic staff. A large table in the center of the room held a drawn map of Elmshadow and its surrounding terrain. Little models marked out notable locations within, such as the keep and force concentrations. The scrying team updated the map nearly constantly, working in groups. Either side of the map had a lower level, divided by a few steps downward, where the scrying teams worked in groups around the clock. Both crystal balls were here in Al-Lavik, one in either pit.

There were four pits in total. Two were unused at the moment. One major goal was to figure out how to build scrying-capable crystal balls or locate other methods of distant vision. Arkk hadn’t had the time to properly investigate crafting methods or external builders of scrying equipment just yet.

Luthor, the chameleon beastman, stood in one of the pits. They were shallow enough pits that someone standing would be at chest height with the rest of the room. It was just enough to let them have a degree of separation while seated to concentrate on their duties while everyone else in the command room did their work.

“A change?” Arkk asked, fighting down a yawn.

Communication was still a problem. There were magical methods of mimicking an in-person conversation, but they were involved and ritualistic. Nothing that could be used in the heat of combat. Even outside combat, the Duchy’s official military detachments still preferred to use written letters delivered by Swiftwing harpies because the rituals were too complex.

At the moment, Arkk and Savren had devised a series of spells that would light up the exterior of the tower, with different colors warning anyone outside the building of predetermined changes in the situation that the scrying team noticed or simple tactic changes, should that be required. It wasn’t ideal. The tower was likely to be at the backs of their forces. But it was better than nothing.

The Protector—three of it—were in the tower and were willing to facilitate communications. But that was still limited to just those three. They couldn’t be everywhere at once.

Savren had ideas about the Protector’s mental link with its bodies and ways of possibly mimicking that link with an enchanted device. Thus far, that project was purely in the theoretical stage.

“S-Sir. The fog in the crystal balls is c-changing.”

With a slight shake of his head, Arkk refocused on the situation at hand. That fog Evestani used to obscure scrying was one of the bigger banes of his existence. It ranked right below the Heart of Gold’s magic. Any change was likely to be bad for him.

“What are they cooking up now?” Arkk hummed as he descended the few steps into the scrying pit.

Luthor, unnecessarily, waved him over to the crystal ball. Harvey, the flopkin member of the scrying team, sat at the ball itself, holding his hands up to its smooth surface. The scenes inside changed and shifted, roaming over what Arkk easily recognized as Elmshadow Burg.

Much of the burg was hidden in a thick layer of that fog. Much of the fog surrounded the central keep. It was nothing that Arkk hadn’t seen before. Ever since Evestani pulled back to the burg following Gleeful’s fall, they had been hard at work. Much of the burg had been destroyed in fire—some as a result of Hawkwood while the rest came from the after-effects of those rays of gold.

While the keep itself was still missing its top—that poked out of the fog surrounding it—he had been able to watch over the weeks as they rebuilt the rest of the burg. They hadn’t rebuilt it the way it had been. Much of the partially destroyed buildings had been cleared out entirely, the materials of their construction being relocated to form defensive arrangements around the exterior of the burg’s walls. Two large turrets had gone up on the Duchy side of the burg, each of which held a large golden statue that vaguely resembled the one of the Heart of Gold in Al-Mir’s temple. They had expanded the barracks, built and rebuilt storehouses, and took over a few workshops and smithies, the latter of which had been pouring smoke from their chimneys almost constantly. Other areas were marked out as possible ritual sites for bombardment or defensive magics.

“What’s changing?” Arkk asked, only to see it the moment he finished his question. “Ah.”

Harvey shifted the view in response, closing in on the edge of the fog just outside the keep.

The fog had been hovering right around the inner walls, obscuring what Arkk presumed was the center of Evestani’s military operations. Except, it was no longer stopped at the walls. The fog billowed outward, flowing through the streets and over the buildings. It wasn’t exactly fast, but it was spreading out through the rest of the burg all around the central keep.

If it kept up its pace, it would likely encompass the entire city by nightfall.

“I think they know we’re coming, Sir,” Harvey said.

Arkk nodded absently. That was true. They had the map with markers for everything important already. But, if Arkk were in Evestani’s position, he would be using every spare second rearranging the city under the assumption that current targets of interest were compromised. Of course, he had lesser servants to do such work quickly and efficiently. Thus far, he had seen no sign that Evestani used anything other than the labor of their army to rebuild Elmshadow Burg.

With that golden avatar in play, he couldn’t discount anything.

“Keep a constant watch on it anyway,” Arkk said to the scrying team. “Especially the exterior of the burg. I want to know if soldiers leave in any direction.”

“Given that w-we’re still over a week out,” Luthor said, “they might not be able to maintain the spell that long. A circular fog l-like that… if it doubles in size, it quadruples the area. I-I don’t know the c-calculations for how much magic that drains, but I imagine it is considerable. If they’re trying to cover the entire burg, that’s… far, far more than doubling its size. They would have to double its size at least four times.”

Arkk stared at Luthor for a long moment, not having expected that from the chameleon beastman. He wasn’t sure it was perfectly accurate—he would have to check with Savren—but the sentiment was correct. If covering the entire burg had been magically feasible, they would have done so from the start.

“If Evestani wants to wear out their spellcasters this far in advance, I’m not going to complain,” Arkk said. Not that he believed they would do that without a plan. Perhaps they had come up with something similar to the charged glowstones that would let them maintain it without draining their people.

Luthor smiled, nodding his head as his beady eyes shifted back to the crystal ball.

Good that he was in high spirits. Arkk had a feeling they would need all the morale they could get before long.

“Keep me informed. And make sure the other scrying teams are aware that I’ve been informed.”

“Yes, Sir.”

Arkk climbed out of the pit with a larger worry on his mind.

The tower needed to be on high alert from now on. It would be too easy for the avatar of gold to slip out of the city and fire off one of his rays of gold.

Arkk still didn’t know how the tower would handle getting hit by one of those.

Zullie…

Against his better judgment, he had not put a stop to Zullie’s investigation into the Lock and Key’s power. Even blind, now with Hale’s assistance, she was working around the clock. She claimed she wasn’t an avatar and certainly hadn’t demonstrated any abilities resembling that of Agnete or Tybalt. But the ideas she had for magic now…

Arkk teleported to the base of the tower, pausing its movements for just long enough to make his way to the nearest teleportation circle.