“He tried to give you a bribe?”
“According to him, it was a welcome gift! Can you imagine, an estate house with an attached vineyard as a welcome gift!?”
“What was he even trying to get out of giving you that? Political support?”
“The senator who offered Severina a chest of gold wanted us to put her son in command of a military division so he would be given glory and prestige. I would wager Senator Neratius wanted the same.”
“At least it wasn’t another marriage proposal!”
“You getting offers, I understand. But the ones directed at me? Ludicrous! If I left you and married a senator’s child, I would lose all of the political capital that would make me worth anything to them in the first place!”
Jadis laughed at Aila’s recounting of her previous days’ time in the senate hall. Part of her was upset that her lover had been forced to deal with such petty politicking, while another, less noble, part of her was just glad she didn’t have to talk to those people herself. At least Aila had the patience to handle those sorts of interactions without blasting anyone with a force bolt. Jadis wasn’t sure she would have had that level of restraint.
While the endless discussions, debates, arguments, counterarguments, bargaining, bribing, rumor mongering, and grandstanding had been a blight on the soul, Aila and Severina could say that their time at the Aurum Senaculum had been successful. At least, temporarily so. What the future would hold for the nation was debatable, but for the moment Jadis and Fortune’s Favored had the support of Volto’s senate for the proposed campaign against the Demons holding Kastoria. In all honesty, Jadis was all but certain that the only reason why things had gone as smoothly as they had so far was because Volto was genuinely losing the war and they were running out of options. They had to cooperate, otherwise they faced literal destruction.
Whatever the motivation behind their willingness to work together, Jadis was just glad that her efforts weren’t being stupidly delayed by self-centered and corrupt bureaucracy. Just moderately harassed by self-serving politicians who were too clever to let any opportunity for advancement pass them by.
Regardless, Jadis and her crew were proceeding with operations as planned. That was why she, Aila, Alex, and Severina, accompanied by Wilhelm and Rein, were flying through the skies over Volto towards the front lines of the Demonic invasion. Having left early that morning, they planned on surveying the land in preparation for the coming advance into Demon held territory.
“Do you think Taube will be able to fly all the way to Kastoria?” Syd asked the Hero as she flew next to the gliding griffon. “Does he have that kind of stamina?”
“With the potions Amarantha gave me, there should be no problem,” Wilhelm answered. “Taube has the speed. Don’t you, boy?”
Wilhelm affectionately patted the feathered neck of the griffon, causing the beast to let out an earsplitting screech. The way the griffon held his head up and puffed his feathers made Jadis think that Taube understood that he was being praised and more tellingly, was feeling prideful. She didn’t know how smart griffons were but considering that the beast had the head of an eagle or similar avian, Jadis felt it was safe to assume a high degree of intelligence.
Doing aerial reconnaissance of Kastoria was a goal, but an optional one for that day. Mainly they were going to be scouting out the potential routes that a military force would take by land. Direct inspection was necessary despite having access to detailed maps since the topography of the Demon corrupted areas had been altered. It wouldn’t do to march their force along a particular path only to find out halfway that a river had been dammed and what they had thought would be a clear meadow had been turned into a poisonous bog.
Ideally, Jadis would have preferred that the Voltonian soldiers were transported via sea in ships. However, many of the republic’s ships had been damaged or destroyed during the second attempt to retake Kastoria, and there simply were not enough vessels left to convey an adequately sized force to the captured city. Volto was working on rebuilding their fleet, but constructing ships took time and resources, both of which the invaded nation had in short supply. That didn’t mean that sailing vessels wouldn’t play a part in the coming campaign; they just wouldn’t be able to carry the whole army.
“Look,” Severina called out to Dys, who she was flying closest to. “The northern end of the line!”
“I see it,” she called back. “Let’s circle the fort and then head south until we hit the sea!”
Curving her flight path so that she would come at the military fortifications from the north over the mountains, Jadis got her first good look at the frontlines of the demonic invasion.
A vast earthwork of dirt and rubble stretched from the base of a bare mountain cliff face to the southern horizon. The mound was thirty feet high and had sharpened wooden stakes crowning it for its whole length that Jadis could see. Thousands of torches and fires were burning, lighting up the smog of toxic fumes that drifted across the corrupted landscape beyond. Behind the earthwork were hundreds of military encampments with wooden palisades surrounding them. Even from hundreds of feet in the air, Jadis spotted the flurried activity of thousands of soldiers moving under the blanket of a persistent mist.
“How are they staying healthy with the all the toxins in the air?” Jay asked as they slowly followed the manmade mound southward.
“They are not,” Aila answered bluntly. “Soldiers are constantly being rotated in and out of range of the miasma. Healers and alchemists are doing what they can as well. But many of those soldiers are taking constant damage from the bad air.”
“The winds help,” Wilhelm called from Jay’s other side as Taube glided closer. “It’s the same on the northern and eastern fronts for the empire, wherever the Demons have managed to fortify. They poison the land and turn it hostile for all other life. The empire uses mages to keep the winds moving away from our soldiers.”
While the empire had those kinds of resources, it didn’t look like Volto had the same fortune. As they flew, Jadis saw a few signs of mage work: pockets of fresh air, large fires that couldn’t be natural, or stone structures that looked to be made by magic rather than tools. However, there didn’t seem to be the same level of magical presence in Volto’s military as in the empire.
As they followed the line south, it became clear that the army had dug in where it could and had used features in the land to their advantage, as well as already present villages and towns. Sometimes the earthwork mound would change direction to follow one bank of a river for a few miles, and other times it would disappear entirely as it was temporarily replaced by hill or a rocky canyon. However, it was around the settlements which had been incorporated into the defenses where the true signs of Demons were visible.
Massive piles of mire hound corpses rose up along the eastern-facing walls of the first town Jadis and her companions flew over. The stench of muck and decaying Demon blood choked the air, and the smoke of fires burning away the rot and filth competed with the ever-present miasma. Along one section of the fortified town, Jadis spotted hundreds of soldiers working to dig out the dead Demons so that their bodies would not form a ramp up to the top of the walls.
“This will affect our chances for success,” Rein stated as he examined the scene with a critical eye.
“What do you mean?” Jay asked, head turning to look at the elf who was riding on Taube behind Wilhelm.
“We will have to ensure there are enough soldiers left to defend this line when we attack Kastoria,” the gray-skinned man said without looking at her. “If we pool all of Volto’s forces for one push into enemy territory, the Demons on this front will breach the line and invade the protected lands.”
“That was already part of our plans, wasn’t it?” Jay pointed out. “We were always going to leave soldiers behind to defend the rest of Volto.”
“Yes, we were,” Rein finally looked up to meet her gaze. “However, seeing the state of these fortifications and those that man them, we will have to leave far more behind than I had originally calculated in order for these defenses to be effective. This line is long and poorly maintained with its current level of manpower. It will not fare better when those forces are routed elsewhere.”
“Things may be better further south,” Wilhelm added optimistically. “There are still many miles to go before we reach the sea.”
For a short while, Jadis shared the Hero’s hopes. However, the further south they all flew, the worse things looked, and the lower her expectations fell. The damage to the land and the defenses Volto had made only increased. Huge craters, vast tracts of blood-fouled mud, broken walls and burnt villages, and a persistent stench that made Jadis gag passed below them on their flight. At one point, they flew over what had once been a forest that had been transformed into a rotting graveyard of dead trees. The green and purple growths that she had seen festering on the orchards around Thracina had overgrown into leaking tumors of sickness that spread and devoured all of the plant life that had once existed in those woods.
“Tiernan will need to burn that place,” Wilhelm said grimly. “That the Voltonians have not yet done so under their own power is a bad sign.”
When Jadis and the others eventually came within sight of the Siren Sea, she let out a sigh of relief. While the middle and lower sections of Volto’s line had been rough, the fortifications on the southernmost tip were in far better condition. It was good to see that there were some areas where the military’s defenses looked like they were handling the invasion well.
Old mountains carried the land on a gradual slope upwards before they were cut off on tall cliffs that overlooked the Siren Sea. A small city had been built into the eastern side of those mountains, and tall walls with stone watchtowers stretched from the cliffside far into the farmlands. A pass had been cut into the stone, creating a wide staircase that led from the city all the way down to the water where a manmade harbor with stone seawalls was set.
The air here was cleaner, with the ocean breeze blowing the fetid miasma of the corrupted lands away from the shore. Without the cloud of fumes in the way, Jadis could clearly make out the condition of the walls. While there was damage, it all looked like it was being regularly repaired. Further, the land for a half mile out from the city’s walls had been cleared of all Demon corpses and any other sort of debris that would allow rot to fester. The result was a lifeless wasteland where nothing but dirt and stone could be seen. It was ugly, but it was at least not a source of disease, nor did it provide any cover for approaching enemies.
Jadis recalled from the maps that she had studied that the seaside cliff city was called Cautis Major, and that it had been recently rebuilt as part of a ten-year long project that had been funded by the senate before the demonic invasion began. Apparently, the seawalls and streets had been falling apart at the time due to decades of underfunded maintenance programs, and the senator from the area had been elected on a campaign of rebuilding the city to its former glory. Jadis imagined that the man had to be feeling an immense sense of vindication that he had managed to finish restoring the walls just a few months before the invasion began.
“Look there,” Aila pointed to the western side of the wall. “I think they are heading north to relieve the troops stationed there.”
Jay angled her flight to get a better look at what the mage indicated. She had both Aila and Alex clutched against her chest, mostly so that the Demon could use her tentacles to make sure that the redhead was firmly held onto. Gliding to the west, Jay spotted what Aila had seen and slowed down to get a better view.
What looked like a company of more than a thousand soldiers were marching along a cobblestone road on the safe side of the wall. There were multiple wagons of supplies being wheeled along behind them, and at least one of those wagons looked like it was filled with white-robed priests.
“Hey, I think that’s a Valbjorn down there,” Jay said as she motioned with one hand towards the front of the column. “That, or a really big guy wearing a furry helmet.”
“I think that would be either Bern or Dern,” Aila commented. “Of the Gavia clan. There are supposed to be two Valbjorn brothers who have been a key part of the defense of Cautis Major.”
“Well, they’re doing a good job,” Jay nodded in approval. “Things look much better around here than—”
“Jadis! Look east!”
The shout of warning came from Wilhelm, and while it was Syd who was closer to the Hero, all of Jadis fell silent as her attention turned towards what had caught the man’s attention. She spotted the issue right away and let out a series of curses at what she saw.
A large, lumbering mass could be seen making its way from the east towards the city. Countless smaller creatures were surrounding the creature, whatever it was, and Jadis didn’t need her Succubus Eyes to see the telltale runes of arcane magic being cast in the air around the horde. Even as she watched, Jadis heard the sound of horns being blown from the watchtowers below, alerting the city to the approach of an enemy force.
“You know, my timing is never this good,” Wilhelm laughed. “We are usually either arriving long before a fight or chasing the tail end of one. We must have fortune on our side to get here right when a battle is about to begin!”
“Yeah, I bet we do,” Syd grumbled as she aimed for the Demons and dove.
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