Chapter 1919: Incoming!

Skarn of the wolfkin rounded the western palisade for the fourth time that night, and the sentries posted along it had learned to stop breathing when he passed.

Below the wall, the heartlands of the Beastman Confederation were digging.

The deep drums had run nightly since the war-lodge council: sharpen, stockpile, drill.

Then, days ago, a blood-run relay had carried the word over the border passes: the dwarven mountain had fallen. Not besieged for a season, not starved out. Fallen, in a single night, to the Villain.

The same relay carried the rest of it. The Villain granted the dwarven king a warrior’s death in front of his whole city, and the city swore hammer oaths to their conqueror. They chose him.

The drums were joined by shovels within the hour.

The digging was days old and looked it. Palisade stakes still wept sap. Boarkin crews cut trench lines by torchlight. Runners crossed between the lodges with stores manifests nobody had finished tallying.

On the near field, a row of cubs drilled with wooden claws strapped to their paws, each tiny war-cry arriving a breath behind its swipe.

Invasion was coming, the Confederation had decided, and it intended to be found awake.

"You have walked that wall all night," Rajah observed from beside the great fire, sprawled along a bench that had seated four soldiers before he arrived. Amber eyes tracked the wolfkin lord with lazy patience. "Walk it a few more times. Perhaps it grows taller."

"Someone on this council should be awake."

"We are all awake." The tigerkin’s tail swayed once.

Across the fire, Gorruk worked through a stack of border slates, twice the height of the soldier who kept bringing them, reading each report to its end before setting it down. "Passes are watched," he rumbled. "Dens report at the moon. Stores fill before the cots do." The last slate went down. "The Confederation prepares as one."

Vargis Ironfang sat where he had sat since the council, giant blade across his knees, whetstone circling the edge in slow, even strokes. His proposal, to send for the Villain and ask what terms would fit both sides, still lay on that fire where he had set it down.

Not tonight, the fire had ruled, and no night since had been the night either.

Then the deep scouts began coming home.

They were the pairs that had been living inside the Villain’s lands since the mobilization began, and they came in through the gray morning, spaced out along the ridges, each pair leaving the fire circle quieter than they found it.

The first pair brought the labyrinth gates. "He has thrown them open, great lords. Labyrinth gate after labyrinth gate across his lands stands free of charge, by his own decree. Farmhands are walking in with spears, and the queues run out past the city walls."

"What is he, retarded?" Skarn scoffed. "Such an imbecile..."

The next pair had seen the camps, and the older of the two kept his eyes on the flames while he gave it.

"The three races train together now on the old border between Vraven and Elvardia. They’re trying different formations, making use of each race’s advantages while wearing armor our forges could not match on our best day." He swallowed.

"They drill against the Villain’s dead legions, the Vesper Consortium’s forces, the Scarlet Lilies, summons of an alleged wife of the Villain, and a few of their own powerhouses who act as hostile. Even retired King Alexios partook. The armies had to keep their own commanders alive while he and Morgana Ravenshade hunted them."

The fire cracked into the silence that followed.

The four of them had survived a combined span of years measured in a lot more than a single millennium, and the instincts that had carried them through those years were howling the same warning at once.

That sense had never once lied to any of them.

"Days ago the dwarves were a nation," Rajah said. "Now they sharpen his spears and sing while they do it."

"Us versus the world." Skarn’s growl stayed low. His tail did not move at all.

The last pair came in at dusk, from the western road, and they came in running.

"A column has left the mountain, great lords!" The scout got his breath under control on the second try. "It came out of the east mountain gate and it’s following the pass road toward our border. We counted a long train of wagons under guard, driven by dwarven crews. At their pace they’ll reach us within two days."

Nobody slept that night either. The walls gained a third watch, the reserve dens stayed woken, and every eye the Confederation owned pointed west, waiting to learn what the Villain sent a conquered nation’s wagons to do.

The horn came at midday, and it hit the war-lodge like a thrown spear.

One long note came off the western pass, and a second climbed over the top of it.

The fire circle emptied between one heartbeat and the next. Skarn crossed the compound as a gray blur and hit the palisade with his claws already out, hackles standing the length of his spine, snarling at a column he could not see yet.

Rajah arrived a blink later at a speed nobody’s eyes could confirm. The tigerkin lord had never once hurried anywhere in front of witnesses, and he spent his first breath on that wall gripping the timber hard enough to print his claws into it.

Below them the camp detonated. Trench crews came up out of their own trenches with shovels held like axes. Kennel-masters bellowed over each other.

The cubs’ drill instructor herded her entire class behind a woodpile with her body, and three different horns answered from three different walls in an order no signal-book contained.

"It’s them!" The runner was screaming it before he cleared the gate, voice cracking through two octaves. "The column, on the western pass!! Banners! Wagons! They’re here!!"

"Form lines!" Skarn’s roar flattened the compound. "Archers to the wall! Wake the reserve dens!!"

A tigerkin quartermaster sprinted past the great fire armed with the ladle she had been counting rations with. Somebody loosed a signal arrow that meant flood, or possibly fire, or possibly both.

On the wall, a hundred claws came out with a sound like a forest icing over.

The column crested the western pass, slowed, and stopped in plain view of the entire western wall.

Then, politely, it raised its banners.

The banners were white. Trade-white, parley-white, on each wagon of a long mule train. The train had arranged itself into neat rows on the pass road, where dwarven crews in town clothes were now sitting down on their own crates to wait.

A single figure detached from the column and walked up to the gate under the aim of a hundred arrows, unhurried, consulting a ledger as he came. A dwarf, gray-bearded, dressed for market day.

He stopped before the gate timber, looked up at the wall of drawn claws above him, and knocked. Twice.

"Reparations delivery for the honored Beastman Confederation!" he called up. "Requesting entry and a flat place to unload, if it pleases the great lords!"

The wall gave him nothing.

The herald consulted his ledger again. "We are also instructed to ask whether the honored Confederation would prefer the crates under roofs," he added. "It is snowing."