The Lich King Reincarnates as a Baby

++I have finally taken an apprentice. He is an idiot, but at least marginally less idiotic than most, and is learning…almost not-slowly. His power grows as mine does, and each day my undead are more numerous than before. Soon I hope to cover the world in them. ++

- Fragment of Lord Dread’s archives, date indeterminate.

Dave Blakely was not having a very good day.

It’d started off well enough, with that Voret brat getting dangled around like a bobbing apple, but then the implications of what Vornholt had done sunk in, and suddenly everything good about the display became bad.

The humiliation was now the motive for an upcoming force far larger than anything Blakely commanded here.

He did in fact consider legging it, but banished that particular thought on account of Vornholt could fly. His life expectancy was probably higher if he didn’t fuck off than if he did. Probably.

Unfortunately, Isabel Vornholt’s interest in Blakely and his business had shot up by several orders of magnitude the very moment Voret was out through the gate. No sooner had he gone than her orders started coming, as calm as ever, though delivered with an unspoken depth of urgency that still pricked at his spine.

“You must prepare us for a siege.”

A siege. Blakely had been in a few of those before, they were never pleasant. The defences were actually worse than the attacks. At least when you were the one attacking, you had open space at your back and the theoretical option to flee. A defensive siege meant being a caged animal and waiting for the butcher.

It would’ve been bad enough to just deal with that while doing his job, but Blakely was forced to work alongside that other Winzorth woman, Paula, while he went. Just like in the army, the common soldiers had to make use of magic or else they simply stood no chance against the fuckers on their enemy’s side, who definitely would.

Like most educated magicians, she was strikingly intelligent. Learning fast and soaking up information like it was water on a sponge. Like practically all educated magicians, she was also very difficult to work with. Trying to explain to her that she didn’t understand something, let alone couldn’t, was like trying to convince the police that that guy you were following had been secretly changing the labels on all your canned food. It was simply an uphill battle.

“How much of this area could your magicians cover?” he asked her as they stood atop the wall and surveyed the land outside it. The woman looked at him with as blank an expression as Blakely had ever seen. Bloody civilians. Not being shot at was the world’s biggest cognitive impairment. “What range can they use their magic at,” he translated. “And how big of an area of effect do their destructive spells have?”

He was trying to figure out how to word it better when she cut in.

“You’re asking how much of an area each magician can attack at a time with each spell, and how far the range of those spells are, to figure out the total amount of ground they can render dangerous for the enemy each?”

“Yes.”

She seemed to do a few mental calculations before continuing.

“I’d say about…call it twelve thousand square feet each for the blast radius, and a maximum range of maybe five hundred feet.”

Blakely’s brain kind of blanked for a second. He wasn’t stupid, but he’d never been given the fancy education that magicians considered their right. If he wanted to crunch numbers it meant crunching, slow and deliberative, but guaranteed of getting there eventually.

“Not bad then,” he grunted once he’d finally visualized the area. “We’ll want to keep a dozen on the walls then.”

“Why not more?” Paula asked.

“Magicians are sniper-bait,” Blakely shrugged. “Best way to kill one is to plug them while they’re busy killing others. Something about using magic leaves them thinking they’re invincible, the stupid twats.”

“...No offence taken,” she replied.

Blakely put his head down and got to work from there, marking out regions on the wall to designate where each magician ought to stand. He’d petition Vornholt to add additional cover to those sections later, make her human artillery last that little bit longer.

It would’ve been nice to have some actual artillery, too. The plains around the oil field were so flat and clear that any approaching enemies could’ve been sighted from literally miles away. A good cannon would boast tens of times the range of a good magician under these conditions, letting them pelt their attackers from far beyond engagement range.

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But cannons were apparently expensive. Vornholt was already losing money on account of all her other preparations, and she’d looked rather like she was on the brink of a fit when Blakely made his quite reasonable request for a mere five six-inch pieces.

So here he was, improvising. He was storing up spare guns and drilling the men on moving over and around the wall, on firing from it, on standing just so to ensure they were as covered as possible without compromising their ability to plug the enemy. All tiny, insignificant little differences, barely even noticeable. But they were all he could do, and if he could stack a dozen little differences on top of each other then maybe the sum total would be equivalent to one big one.

It couldn’t make their odds any worse, at least.

The men seemed to already have figured out something big was coming. They weren’t cutting and running, so they probably didn’t know it was Vorets of all things, but they were far from happy all the same. Blakely reckoned they’d stay for just long enough to see the enemy outside, and by then it’d be easy enough to keep them. They wouldn’t want to run out with that army standing there, after all.

Hm. That was a bit unethical, though. Ah well, a man had to do what he had to do, and right now Blakely had to throw people into the meatgrinder so he didn’t end up in it himself.

“What’s Isabel like at home?” Paula asked him abruptly, knocking the thoughts right out of him with her question.

“What?” Blakely snapped reflexively. The woman bristled, but didn’t shy away.

“I’ve never been to her home,” she continued. “Never met her family, except her older brother. What’s she like there?”

Blakely shrugged. “Dunno.”

Now she just looked annoyed.

“How can you not know? You’re her family’s head of security, you live there with them.”

“Doesn’t mean I go around knowing things about nobility,” Blakely snapped. “You think I’m an idiot? Half of them are fucking their sisters, and the other half are being fucked by their brothers. They probably eat kids and stuff. It’s easier and safer for everyone if us little people remain totally ignorant about what our betters are doing. Especially when it’s usually cheaper for them to have us killed than pay hush money.”

Paula bristled, looking pathetically affronted. “Isabel isn’t like that.”

“Oh?” Blakely asked. “You sure? Have you seen how she is at home?”

The magician woman was very, very obviously angry. He could practically feel the irritation rolling off her like waves of heat. Blakely continued with his markings in peace for a few moments before she spoke again.

“She’s helped me. More than once, and never to her own advantage,” she said at last.

“You don’t know that,” Blakely told her.

“I do know that, she’s bailed me out when it didn’t benefit her at all.”

“No, you don’t,” he sighed. “You can’t ever know that, can you? Because you’re some big, genius magician. Helping you is always a benefit to the person who does it, so you’ll never actually know if someone’s aiding you out of the goodness of their heart.”

Personally, Blakely thought it was especially unlikely that Vornholt was, but he also knew his instincts had been wrong before. They were especially off with that girl. Sometimes he felt certain she was the most dangerous person, or even living creature, he’d ever seen. Blakely, a guy who’d once served as spotter for the gun crew that took down a wyvern, and he couldn’t even look at this random girl without almost pissing himself.

He hoped he was wrong about her. He really, sincerely hoped he was wrong about her. Because he was stuck with her now, and that didn’t bode well at all if his gut was right.

“Am I interrupting anything?” a new voice rang out. Blakely spun, gun already in his hand while the other drew his hidden, poisoned knife and—oh it was Sethira.

He didn’t like her either. She was all smiles and glee, unlike Vornholt, and he always got the impression it was genuine, but in the way of a cat tormenting the mouse. There didn’t feel like much commonality with him behind those eyes. She seemed to be eying his weapons now, amused.

“No,” Paula answered while Blakely remained silent. Sethira looked the woman up and down before nodding shortly.

“Good. I’m here to let you both know that Isabel will be heading off shortly.”

“Where to?” Blakely asked at once.

“You know, I didn’t bother asking,” Sethira shrugged. “Probably to call in favors and acquire allies.”

He didn’t like that casual disinterest she seemed to show in everything, like it was of no consequence to her whether the fort she was going to fight in actually got reinforced or not.

“Isabel says to ‘be diligent'," the foreign girl finished. “That was all, you can go back to playing now.” She seemed to glide away, humming happily as she went.

“Creep,” Blakely muttered. Just as bad as Vornholt, maybe worse. Vornholt was most certainly a villain, that much Blakely didn’t doubt, but at the very least she wasn’t a smiling villain.

***

My latest ocean voyage was the fastest yet. Partly, that was due to technique. I had been practicing with this new form of flight each time I used it for such a long-spanning travel, and was getting steadily better at maximizing my aerodynamics as I did.

Partly, it was simply my power increasing even more. I never missed a day of practice.

It was late evening by the time I passed over Garamon’s shore, and a brief few minutes later I was coming down onto a Laugrey street outside the Duke of Wolsinghan’s mansion. I announced myself and was swiftly escorted inside for an audience.

The Vorets, after all, were not the only people who had been ingratiating themselves with power.

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