The War of the Ark

Cerberus did not begin by invading the Ark. It spent a year taking the Ark apart from the inside, with five people and no army.

The opening came from a spy: Archon had shut himself in his meditation chamber, as he does for indefinite stretches, and would not come out until he had what he wanted. Gérard Alois moved on that.

The plan was to break the censors apart rather than fight them. A young senator, Florentus Telus, had a bill before the Senate: dispossess the greatest landowners so that veteran legionaries would finally receive the plots they had been promised on enlistment. Get it passed, and the consul would be under enormous pressure to enforce it while Censor Titus Lartius, who stood to lose the land, would be furious. Then Florentus dies, and his grandfather Markus Telus goes to war against the other censor over his murder. The Ark tears itself in half without Cerberus firing a shot.

Alois chose his agents for what they lacked. They could function on very little magic, and they did not have the recognizable faces of the great houses. He gave them earrings that held an undetectable transmutation—one appearance, changed once a day at a fixed hour, and above all a complete mask over their magical aura—and attached a Stoneheart to handle barriers. Communication home would have to run through the marriage-link between Gyllyn Leblanc and Mathilde, because the Great Barrier blocks divination.

They went in as deckhands aboard the Victis Moralis, a slaver and supply ship of Censor Sylla's making the Brazzant run. When the barrier opened and closed behind them, the curtain came down over the ship and the Partage took everything they had. They spent the first weeks of the operation as ordinary men in a foreign country.

The Death of Polymarch

Two of Sylla's officers ran the Victis Moralis: the Torturer Polymarch, one of the censor's five best warriors, and the Inquisitor Talus, one of his twelve inquisitors.

They died on Zurion, a rock island whose villagers live off a cyclops who eats some of them and attracts rich visitors who make up the difference. Senator Gaius Picolus had sent an expedition there to buy a prophecy—he wanted a male heir—and used a knight of the equestrian order, Petrus, and his hired mercenaries as the price. The letter he gave Petrus to open afterward instructed him to feed the cyclops with his own men, and named the two officers sent to make sure of it.

The mercenaries were the Cerberans, and their mana had come back that morning.

Polymarch had never lost a fight. He cut his own throat rather than be taken, declaring his love for Archon as he went. Talus was interrogated first and killed after. What he gave up—the mechanics of the Partage, the state of the censors' politics, the Ark's own account of Antoine de Cerberus and Vlad Varanov—was worth more than the battle.

The Ark could not explain the deaths. That was the point at which the operation stopped being espionage.

The Minotaur of Telus

The creature born to Olga Varanov had spent its life underground beneath Telus Island, digging a labyrinth whose walls repair themselves, whose air refuses flight, and whose corridors turn teleportation back on the caster. It hoarded treasure and stole beautiful women to keep, and it hunted its own origins with divination and captives for as long as it hunted anything—the journals in its library are the reason any of this is known.

To the people of Telus it was a legend and the sworn enemy of the censor's house. When harpies began ruining the Telus vineyards and the trail led into the labyrinth, the Cerberans went in after it. It tore an arm off one of them and killed another outright before it fell.

They came back out with its head, and the island lost its mind. Markus Telus himself came to hear the story, tested them by putting his captain of guards against their best swordsman, and pronounced the verdict that mattered: the Heroes of the Minotaur were blessed by Archon, who had taken people of the commons and made them heroes. He sent a scribe to write it down properly and leave the explosives out.

Asked what reward they wanted, they asked for Florentus Telus's land bill. The censor backed it, warned them that Censor Crassus would never forgive it, and was right.

The Dwarves Come In

Cerberus needed an army, and Askenon had two hundred thousand soldiers and no reason to care.

Marcin Sobiesansky carried the request to Kaz'Nakaram and was refused before he finished it; Merenin was not greedy enough to go to war for territory or metal he already had. So Sobiesansky called Gérard Alois through, and Alois brought the one thing that would work.

It was a vision made by Christophe Leblanc, dead forty-four years, who had kept it secret for most of the short life he had. It showed the night Askenar disappeared. The god was at his forge, making a sword—unusual for him, who preferred armor and buildings—because he had been uneasy for several days. A man came in: twice a dwarf's height and not a giant, red and black beard, scarred, tired eyes, no weapon, and a presence that made a god want to stop working and look. He said he had settled his people in the lands to the south and asked whether that would be a problem. Askenar told him that his dwarves went where they liked and took what they liked. The man said it was the wrong answer, caught the hammer blow in his open hand, and the shockwave wrecked the gallery. The last image is Askenar held by the throat above the ocean, still gripping his hammer, and then the water.

Archon killed the dwarven god—or so the vision says. Alois apologized on behalf of every man of Cerberus for a murder his people had not committed, which cost him nothing and bought him a war. He knew the vision did not show Archon; he had met Archon. He did not know who the man was, nobody did, and he let the room settle on the answer that raised an army. Sobiesansky, who had gone first and been refused, was not told.

Censor Sylla, dying, told Merenin something else: that he had been there the day it happened, and that it was not Archon. He did not know who it was. He said it was a secret only Archon holds. Merenin has no way to test either account, and he went to war on the first one.

Valin called it a good piece of theater. So Sobiesansky set a chest down in the middle of the throne room, and it held the hammer of Askenar, damaged, recovered, and given back to a king of Askenar's own line. Merenin picked it up and the runes lit.

Seventeen centuries at the bottom of the ocean, and the only record of where the god had gone into the water was another of Christophe Leblanc's divinations. Alois and Sobiesansky brought it up themselves and told no one they had. A dead man's archive bought that alliance twice: once with a lie about who swung the hand, once with the relic that made Merenin a king worth following.

He committed one hundred thousand dwarves—half his strength, and not one nugget of the Valerium. His terms were colonies and mines in the Ark's mountains after the victory. Alois accepted, on the condition that those mines buy their meat and grain from men. Askenon's dependence on Cerberan magic became Cerberus's dependence on Askenon's soldiers, which is the whole basis of the alliance that still governs the free era.

Merenin also opened a room no living dwarf had entered: Askenar's own workshop, its walls covered in the god's rough drafts, samples of every metal but Valerium—he had disliked working it—and on the forge, the sword from the vision, unfinished, with the war runes already struck into the metal by the god's own hand. He gave it to Portin to finish, with Askenar's hammer to do it. No one will ever make another.

The Last Barrier

The dwarven fleet could not land while the Great Barrier stood, and Merenin would not pay to keep an army waiting. Cerberus gave its agents one week.

The barrier was run from the Crassus Peninsula, out of the castle of its governor Flavius Marcus—an enormous man, reclusive, formidable, and surrounded by necromancers: half-dead, half-living soldiers built by the Crassus out of alchemy and black magic, who heal from the same negative energy they attack with. They had been Crassus's answer to being outclassed, and they were a good one.

The Cerberans arrived at the port of Licinius as a diplomatic escort for Florentus Telus, walked up the tower on the first night, and killed the six necromancers in the room. Gyllyn Leblanc died in that fight, and what was left of him went into Aldor's pocket. Charlie Stoneheart lifted the abjuration artifact—a prism with red light moving inside it—and put it in his bag, having already disarmed the barrier and waited for someone to be there to watch it fall.

The curtain came down at dawn. A kilometer of standing water that should have drowned the peninsula simply stopped existing and left a few lights behind. Flavius Marcus told them their trick had been elegant and pointless, that no one had the army to conquer the Ark.

The dwarven fleet was already on the horizon.

The Divine Knight

Flavius Marcus could have withdrawn to Licinius and organized his army. He had been hurt by cannon fire he had never troubled to learn about—dwarves were a godless, feeble race, and their capabilities were sitting in his own archives at Licinius, unread. He chose to stay, on the reasoning that a victory would glorify Archon and a defeat would buy his men time and warn the Ark what it was facing.

He cast Divine Right. Divine spells are not complex in their words and gestures; the complexity is elsewhere. Two words, and thirty great amphorae appeared floating around him, holding water mixed with the blood of the Ark. It poured out and circled him faster and faster, his back tore open into enormous wings, and he began to grow. A knight who completes it becomes an Emissary of the Ark, colossal and winged.

He did not complete it. Frolix worked out what the amphorae were for and threw seventeen of them into Aldor's wall of fire while Aldor pinned him with a dimensional anchor. Flavius came out of it gargantuan instead of colossal, and could not dispel the anchor, which told him something he refused to believe: the wizard who cast it was stronger than he was.

He still nearly won. He cast Total Destruction and destroyed half the dwarven fleet—everything not covered by the Valerium-fed shields the crews raise by turning a great wheel in the belly of each ship. He caught Aldor's fire elemental in one hand and threw it through a ship. He swatted Gyllyn out of the air and killed him.

Gyllyn stood back up. The Armure had brought him back once already, quietly, inside Aldor's shrinking pocket where no one could watch, and had chosen that moment to give him the whole of itself. Death does not take him now. Flavius Marcus watched a man he had just killed get up, understood what he was looking at, and lost his nerve. A being that divine should not exist. He fell to Gyllyn fighting in Antoine de Cerberus's style, and his last thoughts were for Archon. He spared none for his censor.

Three Landings

The Crassus Peninsula was one front of three, and the smallest.

Merenin insisted on taking the Sylla Peninsula himself and took the bulk of the dwarven army with him. Nothing was left standing there. It is also where the war was actually decided, and it is described below.

Telus was the main effort, and Cerberus put most of what it had into it: Alfred and Ivana Varanov, Gérard Alois, Cosimo Leblanc, with dwarven support.

Crassus got the fleet, the five agents already in place, and General Vilebarbe, who restored the bombarded colonnades of Licinius on the grounds that dwarves dislike disorder—in dwarven style, over his assistant's objection that the originals were still standing and rather good. Marcin Sobiesansky came ashore disguised as one of his own soldiers, on the principle that a real wizard studies his enemy before attacking, and put the agents back to work: find Marcus Crassus and cut what feeds his priests and paladins.

The censor was not on his own peninsula. A memory taken from the medallion he had given Flavius Marcus showed him leaving into the dark, and the thin, quick silhouettes that followed him had red eyes. Marcus Crassus went into the Underdark, and the drows went with him.

The Last Experiment

Frolix, Gyllyn, Aldor, and Charlie Stoneheart followed. Gérard Alois had passed through before them and left a Time Sphere among sleeping Hook Horrors, with an offer the four could not sensibly refuse: twenty days of study while almost no time passed outside. He also left family grimoires that Cerberus's great houses would normally never share.

Stoneheart learned Shroud. Frolix and Vidock built Coherent Story, surrounding a real mind with plausible false ones. Aldor used the armor taken from Polymarch to construct his first epic spell, Battlefield. Gyllyn studied Cosimo Leblanc's divination and was told by Armure that he was already strong enough.

They found Crassus in Nelvia's drow settlement, demanding more Nectar of Power. Sobiesansky arrived behind them with a heavy wooden crate and offered the censor an alliance: Crassus would finance the alchemist's work, and the two would rule the empire that replaced the Ark. Aldor ended Shroud and confronted him. Crassus caught the first Fireball in gold, then left with the drows and Sobiesansky's alchemists while Sobiesansky blocked pursuit.

The Grand Alchemist had sewn three living Psychic heads into his torso: Sven, Skarde, and Baltix, Frolix's father. Their fused power let him fight as three Psychics while mutagens, poison, and flying syringes rebuilt his body whenever the apprentices damaged it. When that still failed, he opened the crate. Inside was Jerax, the petrified Aboleth from which the Psychic Project had been made. Sobiesansky restored her with a new long-lasting poison and ordered her to kill the apprentices, then dominate Crassus.

Jerax drove three of them from the cavern and left Gyllyn paralyzed. Armure chose the moment of her mental attack to close his mind, but could not keep the Aboleth from hurling his body with telekinesis. Frolix returned with Aldor and Stoneheart under Coherent Story. Then Aldor cast Battlefield.

The cavern became June pasture beneath a summer sun, and enchanted weapons rained into the grass. Gyllyn took them up against Jerax; every worthy opponent who wielded one fed power back into Aldor. Jerax answered with epic telekinesis, raising the weapons, the farmhouses, and the broken cavern around them. Aldor burned the entire attack in an Elemental Barrier of fire and sent a final Fireball through the Aboleth. Battlefield refused Jerax's teleportation. Nothing remained of her.

Sobiesansky survived as green vapor beneath the rubble. When Frolix found him, he spoke the command hidden inside the verchoix and ordered the worms inside Aldor, Frolix, and Gyllyn to eat. Aldor cut his out with Aeternum Gehennae. Frolix mastered his through Psychic force. Armure subdued Gyllyn's. The three grafted Psychics, briefly freed by Esprit's attack on Sobiesansky, turned their minds against their captor and stopped him from taking Stoneheart.

Gyllyn caught Sobiesansky before he could teleport and beat him to death. Sven, Skarde, and Baltix died with the body that held them. Crassus had escaped; the Grand Alchemist and the creature behind Cerberus's Psychic Project had not.

The Aqueducts

The Partage is an epic spell, but it runs on plumbing. Cerberus's spies had established that much, and Portin and Valin built the entire invasion of Sylla around it: break the great aqueducts and the god's harvest stops arriving.

That is what happened on the first day. Portin's master-vessels—enormous ships built for this war and nothing else—stood off the coast under an invisibility Daviau Morin held over the whole fleet, and put long-range Valerium artillery into the aqueducts until the system stopped working. Then a hundred thousand dwarves came ashore, pushed Sylla's weakened army off the coast, took a mountain, and dug a city into it the way only dwarves do.

Every priest, paladin, and inquisitor in the Ark was cut off from divine mana that day. The war that followed was fought by an empire living on what it had already been given.

Sylla

Sylla took it seriously only after Censor Markus Telus fell on the Telus front, to Gérard Alois, the Varanov, and Brisé. Then he cast the epic spell the Ark had last used against the desert trolls: Total Destruction, rays of divine light out of the sky that scour whole regions. The dwarves had no counter to it.

They had four Valerium shield generators, and no more—three on the master-vessels and one that travels with the king. So they abandoned every conquered region and retreated into the mountain, losing dwarves to the sky the whole way, and losing all the heavy equipment left outside. On Daviau Morin's insistence, Merenin took in the local human population, who were being burned along with everyone else.

The counterattack was a confidence trick. Sylla sent an inquisitor to parley—the Eye of Sylla, white-haired, his eyes kept under bandages because one of them was a medusa's; he turned three of Valin's elite guards to stone before Valin killed him. Daviau Morin pointed out that a censor who has just spent an epic spell with no Partage to refill him needs time. So Valin wore the dead inquisitor's face, the others took centurions', and they walked into the censor's hiding place on the island of the Cyclops—an island hidden by the cyclops's own old spell, invisible to telescope and divination alike, which is why it was on nobody's map.

They found him in a bath the size of a room, watching an image of the dwarven master-ships burning, surrounded by priests and knights who had come from every province to beg for mana that no longer arrived.

Sylla was a giant of a man without being a giant, and his power—the one that made him censor—was regeneration fast enough to close a wound while it was being made. Valerium was the answer. It had worked on Vlad Varanov, and it worked here: what a Valerium shot opens does not close.

It still took everything. Daviau Morin dropped his epic Ice World on the assembly and killed the room; Sylla walked out of it holding him and broke his back against a wall. Merenin drank a potion of Giant Form and fought him hand to hand, monk against warrior, and was outmatched. Sylla, losing, ate a berserker mushroom—picked for him on Brazzant by Polymarch and Talus, on their last voyage—which is lethal to almost anyone and merely useful to a man who regenerates.

What turned it was the hammer of Askenar, which chose that moment to speak to the king carrying it. It had him strike a column, which stood up as a dwarven golem. It had him strike himself, which covered him in runes no one present could read and put him back on his feet. Later, in the sky above the dying island, it reforged Valin's shattered Valerium cannon into something longer, wider, runed, and no longer in Portin's style.

Sylla finished his last Divine Judgment. He also handed Merenin his glaive, told him he had fought well, apologized for nothing, and was destroyed by his own spell along with the whole island. Merenin and Valin survived it inside their shield generators, which broke. When the second ray came down, Valin pointed the reforged cannon at the sky and shot back, and the Valerium held the divine light off until Daviau Morin could reach them.

One more thing came out of that cave, from a knight at the door: the censor had been hunting for the next Polymarch, and thought that enemies as hard as Askenon and Cerberus were exactly what it would take to produce one.