BECMI Chapter 336 – Delving Orders
“Given how many centuries they’ve been building towards creating some sort of undead nation-state, I think that Nyx and her fellow Entropics are going to be quite dismayed when they are annihilated forthwith,” Briggs addressed everyone grimly. “We’ll be taking them apart piecemeal, starting with all the independent necromancers and buried undead who should not have active master linkages in place. You will also be using those devoted Assay Master spells that tracked so many undead linkages and Charmed master/servant relationships back in Iberon,” he continued grimly, a lot of heads nodding. Those spells had provided clear clues of who was controlling whom, a vital link of intelligence many necromancers and undead didn’t want to think could be traced so easily!
“The teams going in first are going to have to be subtle and quiet about it. The undead have to be killed, but the others cannot learn of this crushing attack coming from all directions, lest they start an undead apocalypse by desperate undead. We need to crush the active necromancers, independent wight barons, wraith kings, liches, and vampire lords before moving on Morphail’s network of nosferatu and Caergard’s bone guards and undead Prince. I admit that the idea of killing two Zanzyran Princes and not doing anything illegal by doing so is quite entertaining to me!” Sama smiled cheerfully.
“Additional teams are being drawn up, all established Hunter teams are going to be accompanied by Rangers for securing egress points and preventing surprises from behind. The more intelligence you can personally gain on the layout of the barrows and the surprises within, the better. This will be a crushing series of attacks, but it does not have to take place in one night… it needs to take place in secret. Illusions to fool potential Scrying and other spells to mess with Divinations of potential watchers are going to be put into place,” Sama also added, looking excited and raring to go.
“You all have your assignments.” I waved to a stack of folders, which promptly flew around the room and landed in the hands of the officers and team leaders there. “You know the game and how we’re going to play it. Make them dead, stay alive, be ready to rinse and repeat. We will be standing by in case of emergencies. Don’t have emergencies. Make the other side have emergencies. Mislead them, don’t let them know how dangerous this is, and for the sake of the living, do NOT let them get away!”
Heads nodded all around, the folders were opened, displaying the targets the teams had picked, which began to light up all around the map.
None of them were major targets, but that was fine. If all went well, nobody was going to know we’d hit the minor targets.
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The Markspace was busy in a different manner than previously. This was the Operator Environment, where everything was done on the personal level. There was no mobilization of technology, no mutual maneuvering or support of one another. The operator teams, adventuring Fellowships, hunter parties, and Ranger bands were all operating in very different places with disparate goals, different targets with different defenses, and a mandate to keep it quiet.
No overwhelming firepower. But all of these people had at least some experience facing undead, some had actual lifetimes of it, and they were cool and collected as they went about their jobs.
First was using Divination magic to suss out the tombs, barrows, towers, dungeons, caves, and other locations their targets were sequestered in. Follow-ups once the layout was known were made to ascertain defenses and inhabitants, revealing copious numbers of traps, guards, tricks, secret doors, pits, magical Wards and defenses, and guardian creatures living, artificial, and dead waiting for those unlucky enough to venture past entrypoints often sealed shut, camouflaged, concealed with illusions, and trapped on top of all of that.
But magic was spent to neutralize all those traps, if cunning hands and skilled eyes couldn’t do the job smoothly once such tricks were known to be present. Indeed, the Rangers accompanying the teams did much of that work, taking the load of those spells and leaving the spellcasters of the teams completely full and ready for killing as, forewarned and forearmed, they plunged through tunnels Shaped out of the stone, creating their own entrypoints and flowing smoothly into the dungeons and chambers beyond.
It wasn’t as smooth as something we could rehearse in the mock-up chambers, but neither were the undead ready for intruders who seemed to know the ground as well as they did, were somehow aware of where all the traps and secret chambers were, and the ones with white flames on their Weapons had no fear of soul-sucking or paralytic touches, baleful gazes, charnel breath, or dreadful necromancies that could stop a heart or disintegrate an attacker to dust.
No, the Forsaken weren’t exactly worried about them at all...
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The lich’s skull was still quivering on the blade of Laird, unholy black flames whispering around the remorseless adamantine impaling it, while vivus was gnawing away happily at the death-infused bone in pulses and surges as the soul of the thing was consumed. The corrupted Radiant energies glittered as they were purified, released, and consumed in turn by the vivus.
Somewhere he heard a whisper as the vivus followed the remnants of the lich’s spirit back to its phylactery and had a distant feast. He could vaguely hear something crinkle and break, a surge of horrified fear and denial that death was finally coming for this thing, and then the vivic flames reached up to rage over the skull of the lich, crystallizing it quickly and forming another Dreadskull of a trophy to be worked on and welcomed.
“What’s the word, Laur?” he asked his wife, who was looking about the master spellchamber of the lich with burning golden eyes.
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Divination magic was not her specialty, but one didn’t learn under Lady Edge without being a master of ferreting out secrets and killing the other party with them. The two of them had spent decades in Darkmoor, seen the glory and wonder of what the kingdom and the technology had been able to achieve for the people in a short amount of time, and they had spent time going all over the world, too, fighting things that didn’t have the sense to stay dead, or didn’t know they should have died off.
His kids, bright little sprites that they were, were on other teams, keeping up the family business in the best incorporeal-burning, vivus-flaming way they knew how.
“Eggerdon Caliumphral. He’s from Fuireze, if the number of Stone Elementals about wasn’t a giveaway. I vaguely recall him being a Viscount of Clormfast over a century ago, died in some magical explosion. Must have been Radiance overload that turned him into that.” She eyed the bones still glowing with sickly green-white gammathaumic radiance, as deadly as any negative energy Aura from another kind of lich.
-That cracking sound you might have heard was the Radiance Receptacle bursting under a vivic injection,- Tomins McNarven /reported from higher up in the tower. -Relaying to the Lady that her belief that the Receptacles are the phylacteries of the Radiant liches seems to be true.-
“All Master links seemed to be snipped before he was hit,” Laurentine nodded. “I’m guessing that ghost, the revenant in armor, and the skull druj that were reported were his servants, passing instructions down through to the rest.”
The stones about them trembled, off in the direction of the barrows where the Radiant lich had kept his personal horde of lovingly Animated corpses armored up, reinforced with magic and metal, ready to ride out and wreak havoc once their silent stone halls were thrown open.
Firestorms, Incendiary Clouds, and amusingly enough, Acid Fogs of holy water had swept through those chambers, reducing the powerful if stupid undead there made from hapless warriors to ash and slime which vivus had reduced to white dust and less. It meant using several hoarded Runes of Magic, but that was exactly what those were there for, as nobody wanted to get into tight quarters with so many undead if possible, and the explosive power of Fireballs couldn’t be trusted to not blow free of the tombs in such tight quarters.
A thousand undead scattered through half-a-dozen hidden barrows and mass graves were now scattered circles of white that would be growing flowers after the morning.
“Dear, your Null,” his wife indicated, pointing at a desk off to the side, a well-made thing of wood that had little, if any, of the necromantic taint that was present in much of the stone, although he could feel the vague after-touch of the Radiance the lich emitted from being seated in a remarkably simple stone chair there, a real wooden chair probably having crumpled under its irradiated arse before too long.
He focused his Null, tightening it down and sending it along Laird’s point as he pulled the crystallized skull off his Claymore, the rest of the lich’s glowing bones already Burning and crumbling down.
Laird flipped over in his hand to the size of a Dirk, and he calmly traced it around the edge of the desk, then into the locks on its drawers, then the seams of the drawers themselves. Taps of his fingers gave him a fairly decent view of at least two poison spike trap mechanisms related to the drawers, there was a Glyph under the main surface that would blow the entire thing to ash and worse if someone besides the lich sat on the chair, and two secret drawers were present along the base of the right side and up inside the left inside of the seating area.
Laird hissed across Glyphs, Sigils, and Runes, disrupting all of them without needing to use his wife’s magic to Dispel or suppress them. The adamantine tip also bit through the wood like soft putty, snipping a few key springs or counterweights and disarming the traps and triggers attached to them, although the undead cobra waiting in the bottom drawer was stabbed right through the side of the drawer and set to Burning before the Mick even hauled it open.
A half-dozen Scrolls were snatched out and set on top of the Desk, the Seals on them promising interesting things going to happen if they were opened rashly. The most-Warded and well-locked drawer held a pair of hefty tomes, the like of which he was quite familiar with, although he was sure the purse hanging from the belt on empty robes there actually held the lich’s true set of spellbooks.
There were also a fairly large number of letters and other correspondence. He calmly and carefully began to go through them, Laurentine waiting to the side and watching what he was doing with flaming eyes.
He felt her tense up as he revealed a heavy letter with elegant script on it. There was residual magic on it, inactive under his Null, and he glanced at Laur inquiringly, the two of them having worked together for a very long time.
“Set it at the far end of the desk, out of your Null,” she whispered suspiciously.
He did so without fail, and the paper instantly went blank, all the writing upon it fading away. He extended out his hand again… and the writing didn’t reappear.
“You were turning the pages with Laird,” she reminded him softly. He swiftly reached out and passed the blade of his shrunken Claymore over the page, and the writing flowed into being as it passed over, vanishing swiftly once it was more than a couple handspans away. “It’s only visible under gammathauma, such as that coming off the bones of a Radiant lich,” Laurentine guessed, shaking her head. “And I’m pretty sure I know whose handwriting that is.”
It was a strong, elegant script, worthy of a scribe… or a master wizard used to whipping up scrolls, copying spells with demanding precision into a spellbook, or writing down the knowledge or wisdom of the ages for others to read.
Ink only visible in the gammathauma.
Well, wasn’t that something a bit special…