The Fallen World

The Moon City - Part 2

     He turned a wheel on the side of the frame, turning the lens ever so slowly so that his point of view moved gently westwards, away from the Shadow and towards Tatria. The devastated Ilandian countryside, hidden from view in places by thick clouds of smoke from burning towns and villages, sped by before his eyes until he came to an area where the beautiful gardens and well tended farmlands were more or less untouched by the invaders. A part of Ilandia far enough away from the eastern border that the enemy hadn’t been able to reach it so long as Fort Battleaxe stood, and only now that the great fortress city had fallen was it coming under the bootheel of the invaders. It would suffer now, though, and Lirenna expected that everyone who’d been living in that area had already fled further west, ahead of the tide of evil.

     Continuing to look further west, the soldier suddenly snatched his hand away from the control wheel as if it had burned him and gasped out loud at what he saw. The others, looking over his shoulders, were also shocked and horrified as, right there in front of them, in the polished glass lens, they saw a huge army moving through fields and hedgerows. Thousands of humans, shologs, goblins, hobgoblins, buglins, ogres and representatives of at least a dozen other humanoid races. Creatures of all shapes and sizes, different skin colours, degrees of hairiness and weaponry, but all wearing the same uniform; the bone armour and skull helmets of the Shadowarmies. Here and there among them they saw the massive form of a giant, or the sinuous form of a demidrake, and right at the head of the immense column were the highest ranking officers, mainly humans judging from their height and build, with horns sprouting from their helmets and with other decorations and insignia on their uniforms to denote their rank.

     The General himself, Lirenna assumed that the person in overall command would be a General, was out of sight inside a magnificently decorated silk and leather cabin perched on the back of a zombie dragon whose wings, folded along its side, were in tatters and whose rotting flesh was torn in places to reveal the bones beneath.

     “We never saw that in Fort Battleaxe,” whispered Shaun to himself. “They must have had reinforcements from the Shadow.”

     The column of Shadowsoldiers was fifty men abreast. It paid no attention to the roads, which were too narrow for such a huge army, but cut a straight path through fields, towns and woodlands headed by a vanguard of a hundred zombie ogres who tore down fences, hedges and walls, clearing the way for those behind. The main column was so long that by the time he’d scanned the lens from one end to the other he’d long since lost count of how many companies and regiments it contained. As near as he could estimate, it had to contain at least fifty thousand soldiers, though, and possibly many more, but even that was dwarfed by the two other columns that marched on either side of it.

     Both columns of zombies were longer than the column of living soldiers between them, extending ahead of and behind it by a considerable distance, and they were wider as well with the undead soldiers marching up to a hundred abreast through the clean and innocent Ilandian countryside. Their controllers marched alongside them, one zombherd for every hundred zombies, and Shaun estimated that their numbers alone must be as great as the entire armies of some city states.

     “Fort Battleaxe must have fallen, then,” said Jerry mournfully. “They wouldn’t be marching on otherwise.”

     “But they had the Orb!” wailed Lirenna. “It was supposed to make them impregnable!”

     “Supposed to,” muttered the tiny nome.

     “Was it all a waste of time, then?” said the demi shae, almost in tears. “All the trouble we went to to get it! The shae folk could have taken that Orb. They gave it up so that we could have it, and it didn’t do any good at all!”