V2Ch97-Men at War
As Dero and the rest of Tybalt’s entourage approached the walls of Dune, the clamor of battle faded, replaced by the sound of screaming, carrying from deep within the town.
The most disturbing thing was that the voices were predominantly those of women and children, rather than other fighting men. All the town’s fighting men seemed to have been slain, leaving only those they had been struggling to protect.
Of course, Dero thought. She considered whether she should stop Tybalt’s harem members from approaching closer. The undead, including those pulling the cart they were riding on, were advancing, of course, following their master, who had disappeared into the walled town a few minutes earlier.
But that didn’t mean the humans needed to join them. The camp followers and other civilians had already mostly stayed further back from the walls, waiting for the sounds of war to die down before they got anywhere near Dune. Tybalt’s future wives could do the same.
No, they need to know what’s going on. Sheltering them is pointless. This is what war is.
She wondered what she would have done if this was her army rather than the necromancer’s. You couldn’t just kill the men for breaking discipline and beginning to brutalize the townsfolk. You wouldn’t have enough left to field an army after doing something like that, and the survivors would resent you - maybe even plot your replacement.
“What’s going on?” Victoria asked quietly.
Oh, Vicky… the most normal of my new… friends? Are the group of us friends now? I think I like them. I know I like Vicky. She’s smart, the level headed one of the group. She’s not a complete pushover. She’s not dumb enough to worship Tybalt. He’s a flawed man, like everyone.
“Something Tybalt will fix,” Vidalia said.
Mariella nodded resolutely. “This is the thing he hated the most about the Army. He’ll address it. He won’t just allow the town to be butchered.”
On cue, the worshipers speak. Can I get an amen?
But she didn’t contradict them directly. She didn’t want to. It would be nice if they were right. This was the thing she herself would have to hold her nose and ignore if she wanted to advance alongside Tybalt’s ragtag army and perhaps help him administer this prospective empire. It tasted sour right now, though.
“This is how men behave at war,” Dero said quietly.
“But our people- ” Victoria began.
“Yes, your men, too,” Dero said, an edge to her voice. “Human nature and demihuman nature aren’t different things. The only thing you can do is try to mitigate it with, um, careful management.”
But their blood is up now, she thought. The town watch killed dozens of them, made them bleed for every inch of ground. They won’t be dissuaded by anything but death. And I don’t think Tybalt is willing to kill his own fighters to make them stop.
The group moved through the town’s gate alongside the flowing mass of Tybalt’s undead. The ground within thirty feet of the gate was littered with dead bodies, both human and beastfolk, almost indistinguishable from one another in the bloody mess of the battle’s aftermath.
A sort of stillness came over the party as they looked around and took in the horrific signs of slaughter.
Then Dero noticed something odd.
The stillness wasn’t just the ground in front of them. The sounds from the town were dying down rapidly. Not quickly enough for everyone to be dead.
What’s going on?
***
“Please, baby,” Kaylan pleaded, trying to keep her voice low as she shook her husband. “Please wake up!”
The sounds of screams and cries for help carried in from outside, but neither Kaylan’s pleas nor the more disturbing noises coming through the walls made her husband bestir himself.
It’s no use. Of course it’s not.
“Ma?” asked Nikita, their little girl.
“Yes, baby,” said Kaylan, nuzzling against her daughter’s hair.
“Is Da getting up?”
Kaylan blinked back unexpected tears at the question.
“Not right now, sweet pea.”
The half-truth made the little girl frown, but even in these, possibly their last moments, Kaylan couldn’t make herself lie to Nikita to give her comfort.
Kaylan’s husband, Richard, had been laid up with this strange illness for days, and though his wife had kept diligently nursing him and telling their daughter he would recover, she feared the worst. Everyone else she knew who had fallen ill had died. Sure, the Mayor had somehow powered through the illness - fat lot of good it had done him now, from the sounds of things outside - but the ordinary men and women of the town weren’t made of the same adamantine material as him.
If you would have gotten up, I just know you’d have found a way to get us out of this place, Rich. He had always kept his family safe from the dangers of the Salt Waste. It was a tough place, and only tough people survived. Please, Astara, hear my prayers. Give my husband his strength back, and I’ll never ask you for another favor again.
She knew it was madness to even hope that the Goddess would listen to a prayer from a lowly peasant like herself, when important people were being butchered outside. But she couldn’t help but desperately grasp for any hope she could.
The door burst open, and a wild-eyed ibexman burst in, spear in hand, wrath plain on his face.
He bled from a shoulder wound, but he had far more blood on his spear from someone else. His eyes fell first on Nikita but then darted instantly to Kaylan.
She felt a shiver run up her spine at the look that spread across his face. She knew what was going to happen to her in the next few minutes, but she couldn’t focus on that right now.
“Niki, run,” Kaylan said. “Go run and hide. Down by the town’s far wall, where your friends play.”
She didn’t know if Nikita could actually make it all that way from memory, but sending her out was better than having her stay here. Hopefully.
The little girl clung to her father’s bedside.
“Da, Da, make the bad man go away,” Nikita said, tugging at her father’s bedsheet. “Da, wake up!”
“Baby, please!” Kaylan said urgently.
The ibexman took a step forward, his spear lowered to his side. Kaylan’s eyes darted back and forth between the enemy soldier, her daughter, her husband, and the door, her mind calculating how she and her child could survive this situation.
And then a miracle happened.
She saw it in the ibexman’s eyes. The reflection of her husband rising from the bed.
Kaylan swiveled to look, her emotions boiling up inside her, and she saw her prayers had been answered… but by the wrong god.
Richard’s body rose, but Kaylan could see now what she hadn’t noticed before: the sallow skin, the cold dead eyes, the clumsy weight of him as he shambled forward.
The beastman who had been advancing into the house shifted expressions as he got a good look at Richard’s face. Hostility, confusion, and then fear.
Whatever that meant, Kaylan welcomed it. Even if her husband wasn’t back, his body was protecting her.
Richard got up from the bed and took a step forward.
The ibexman backed into the wall, apparently forgetting where the door had been. He stood there as Richard closed the distance.
Kaylan’s dead husband got within a few inches of the beastman and then opened his mouth. A low rattling sound emerged before any words.
“Stand down,” growled the corpse.
***
As Dero turned her head to the side, the dark elf saw basic undead - almost entirely zombies - flooding into the mouths of town streets. In a low murmur, they all began speaking the same words at once.
“Stand down. The battle is over. Return to the streets and report to Lord Necromancer.”
The creatures repeated the same phrases over and over again.
Dero took a few steps forward - the others still held still in their positions near the town walls - and peeked down one of the narrow streets.
Zombies from within the town - plague sufferers - were already emerging, leading beastfolk out of homes they had been invading. Most of the beastfolk went quietly, with a variety of different, confused but cooperative looks on their faces. Some of them looked chastened, and Dero imagined they had been up to no good. A smaller number of the beastfolk were being dragged out, kicking and fighting, but those beastmen were simply held by two or more zombies instead of being escorted by one.
It looks like Tybalt’s monsters were already well established inside the town. It makes sense. That plague again. We did visit this town, and it looks like he did as much damage here as anywhere else. I guess… when most of your soldiers are undead, you can do war a bit differently.
She swallowed and admitted something to herself that she had refused to believe until this moment. I guess Tybalt actually does care about distinguishing himself from other conquerors.
“Did you doubt that our lord would solve the problem?”
It was Kistana’s voice.
Dero turned her head and saw the catgirl, supporting Andric on one shoulder. The foxman looked very tired and had clumsily wrapped bandages around his waist as well as on his nose, but he was alive, clutching an empty bottle that the dark elf imagined had held health potion.
“It’s not that I… doubted him,” Dero said, suddenly choosing her words carefully for reasons even she wasn’t certain about. “It’s that I know how armies behave. And I don’t worship the necromancer like the rest of you.”
“From now until the end of this war, within our forces, the dead will always outnumber the living.” It was Tybalt’s voice, soft as he emerged from one of the narrow streets, but carrying with the relative quiet. He looked at Dero as if he was making her a personal promise. Or perhaps he was looking at the group of women there to support him as a whole “The dead don’t do anything but what I want them to do. No one mourns them when they fall, they can be repaired from injuries that would kill humans or beastfolk without fail, and they don’t commit any crimes unless I allow it. So there won’t be any of this pattern of our people getting out of control.”
Over the next several minutes, the undead gathered the beastfolk soldiers and brought them back close to the space closest to the town walls. A few beastmen tried to approach Tybalt, but he waved them off or ordered them to go back to the others.
He only spoke more than a few words when he had everyone gathered in front of him, ringed by the army of the dead that absolutely outnumbered the living by this point. Somewhere in the thousands, Dero couldn’t guess at exact numbers in the tight confines of this town’s narrow streets and the space between the buildings and the outer wall.
“Thank you for your courage in fighting under War Chief Andric to take this town,” Tybalt said. “I hope you will all remember this day with pride, will remember this period of victory after victory with pride. But I also want you to remember that when the town’s defenders die, the battle is over. Some of you were taking the fight to the civilians. If you’re defending yourself, it’s fine to kill. Necessary. But we want these people to follow us. We need the towns we’re taking to swell up our numbers. The humans will always outnumber us, and living soldiers are worth more than dead ones. We need to win some of the humans over to win this war. So this is a warning, a first and last warning, to anyone who might have gotten a bit confused in the heat of the moment.
“We are not the Royal Army. We have rules. We do not abuse captured people unless it is under specific orders, like interrogating a prisoner for information or punishing a criminal. I will be observing from now on, through the eyes and ears of the dead. Any crimes against people we have defeated will be punished as if they were crimes against our own people. Because they are our people, they just don’t know it yet. We are conquerors, not pirates. Rapists will be castrated. Murderers will be executed. If you do something similarly bad, expect some similarly ghoulish punishment. That’s all. Go and celebrate your victory. Tomorrow, we burn the town. The sick here have already turned into undead, so we just need to take everything that’s not nailed down and leave.”
He saluted, and around half of the beastfolk returned his gesture - sloppily, Dero thought, but she knew they hadn’t been trained properly - while the others just stood their slackjawed. The necromancer walked away, and the beastfolk began slowly exiting
Will this discipline hold? Or rather, how long until someone tests Tybalt’s resolve?
She no longer suspected that Tybalt would fail that test, she realized. He had shown he at least had the willpower to be a good leader. And that he had standards.
The dark elf realized she was faintly smiling. She shook her head.
Tybalt stepped back over to the group of his women.
“You did well,” said Andric, still leaning on Kistana. His voice was barely more than a wheeze.
“Thank you,” Tybalt said. “So did you. I hope you got a level out of the fight with the Mayor? I was watching through Baldwin’s eyes.”
“Yeah,” the foxman said.
“I can tell it hurts to breathe,” said the necromancer. “Go take a rest, maybe? I saw Tatiana was having her wing tended to by the medics over there. Her sister’s with her.” He pointed to a tent the alchemists - who Tybalt had re-dubbed as ‘medics’ - had set up.
Andric flushed slightly, then nodded. Kistana started to lead him off.
“The rest of you, I want to spend some time with me.” He raised his voice. “We’ll be in the Mayor’s house, Kistana!”
The catgirl turned her head back and gave Tybalt a brief, sharp nod.
“I need to make a decision I’ve been putting off,” the necromancer continued. “I’d like every member of, um- ”
“Your harem?” Dero asked.
“My inner circle,” Tybalt said, shaking his head, “to be present. I’ve been getting a bunch of levels without doing much. As much as I want to raise all these dead bodies- ” He gestured at the corpses all around, which his zombies were gathering into neat piles - “it’s more urgent for me to pick my new skills. If we’re attacked, or something else unexpected happens, I don’t want to get caught with my pants down. Not like when I ended up making a last minute choice right before the village got attacked.”
Dero saw Mariella nodding out of the corner of her eye.
“Of course we’d be happy to give you any advice we can, darling,” Vidalia said.
“You sure you want me there?” Dero asked. In her experience, mages were often extremely guarded about their skills, and Tybalt had not been particularly open thus far.
Tybalt opened his mouth to respond, but Victoria beat him to it.
“You’re already trusted to inscribe magical tattoos onto our bodies,” the foxgirl said quietly. “You’re definitely a part of Tybalt’s circle of trust, whether you let us inside your circle or not.”