Chapter 17: Distractions
Personal System Calendar: Year 00014, Day 1-28, Month X: The Imperium
Imperial Calendar: Year 6858, 1st to 28th day of the 10th Month
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The Siege of Rosette
The first week of the month brought the heaviest fighting the capital had seen since the siege began.
Magical siege engines battered the walls without pause. The walls themselves were no ordinary construction. They had been magically engineered to withstand exactly this kind of punishment, and they held longer than most besieging forces had anticipated. The stonework was laced with enchantments laid down over centuries of continuous reinforcement by the royal court's mages, each layer compounding on the last until the walls were more spell than the original stones put in places. The city's builders had known what they were making. Rosette was designed to be the last place standing, the final refuge when everything else had fallen. It had been built for exactly this situation.
But the capital being the most defensible fortified city in the kingdom also meant it was the crown jewel worth taking. And when two forces of similar strength and capacity are hammering you from multiple sides at once, even the strongest walls eventually will begin to waver.
The combined force of the Duchy of Kirios and the Kingdom of Zapata had numbered one hundred and fifty thousand each when this war began. Now they stood at one hundred and sixty-five thousand combined. Attrition had whittled them down, but what they had lost in raw numbers they had more than recovered in battle experience. Veterans of this siege moved differently than they had when they first marched on Arwen. They knew the terrain, knew the defensive patterns, knew where the walls ran thin and where they ran deep. The capital, for its part, had managed to call in lords and their retinues before the enemy arrived. Fifty thousand of their soldiers answered the call, along with roughly twenty thousand militia drawn from the surrounding settlements. It was not nothing. But it was not enough to push back that kind of force indefinitely either.
Outside the walls, the situation had grown stranger. The rebel forces that had once been at war with the Arwenian crown, and whom many had assumed would quietly benefit from watching the kingdom burn, had instead found themselves a common enemy. The invaders from Zapata and Kirios made no distinction between the Arwenian royalists and the Arwenian rebels. They killed both on sight. That fact had a way of clarifying alliances remarkably quickly. The rebels, numbering twenty thousand and heavy on militia and desperate men, had begun laying ambushes along the invaders' supply lines, disrupting convoys, cutting off scouts, and bleeding the enemy in ways that didn't show up in any formal battle count. They couldn't win the war on their own. They were too outnumbered and too poorly equipped for that. But they could make the siege cost more than it should, and that was enough of a reason to keep fighting.
War really was something. The enemies of yesterday could be the friends of tomorrow, not because anyone had forgiven anything, but because circumstances had rearranged whose survival depended on whose.
By this point in the war, more than fifty percent of the Kingdom of Arwen had fallen. Half the kingdom was gone, swallowed by Zapata and Kirios advances that had moved faster than most thought possible. Whole provinces had surrendered without a fight once the military presence pulled back toward the capital. Others had been taken by force, their garrisons overwhelmed and absorbed into the invading army's supply chain. The remaining half was holding on, but holding on was not winning. The defenders' greatest hope now was the arrival of winter. Surely no invading force planned to sustain a full assault through the harshest months of the year. The cold would slow everything down and buy time for some kind of relief or negotiation.
That was wishful thinking, and the soldiers doing the wishing knew it. The two invading kingdoms had not committed this much blood and gold to a prolonged siege only to pause for the weather. They had bled far more troops in this conflict than their initial estimates allowed for. Arwen had surprised them. Beaten as badly as the kingdom was, it had fought like a cornered animal at every turn. A tiger, even one bleeding from a dozen wounds, was still a tiger. Maybe that was part of why Zapata and Kirios had avoided open conflict with Arwen for so long. They had always suspected it would cost more than it looked like it should. They had been right about that, and it hadn't stopped them anyway.
Now they were fully committed, and stopping was not an option they were willing to consider.
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Breach
After weeks of sustained artillery fire, one of the capital's first walls finally began to crack. The magic barriers protecting that section had been spent. The mana crystals that maintained the wall's reinforcement had run dry. The siphoning device responsible for feeding those crystals could no longer keep up with the pace of bombardment being thrown at it. The wall's defenses had been exhausted section by section, and eventually the material itself gave way under what the magic had once absorbed.
The explosion came somewhere along the right side of the wall. Later analysis would suggest the bombardment there had been deliberately concentrated more than anywhere else, though it had been disguised well enough that the defenders hadn't caught on until it was too late. One moment the wall was holding. The next there was a breach, dust and stone and the noise of it carrying across the entire capital.
The invading cavalry reacted almost immediately. Ten thousand horsemen were moving before the dust had settled, driving hard toward the gap with one objective: keeping it open. If they could hold that hole long enough, their infantry, archers, and siege engineers could push through and force open the gates from inside the first walled tier. The cavalry weren't expected to win the city by themselves. They were the needed wedge for that to happen.
Rosette was a four-tiered walled city with a fifth and final line of defense sitting behind all of them: King Justavous's castle, the Castle of Kama'atayan. Taking even the outermost tier was unlikely to force a surrender. But it sent a message. Walls that had never been breached had now been breached. The psychological weight of that alone was part of the calculation.
Arwen's defenders threw everything they had at the gap. Spears were pushed forward to choke the opening. Arrows flew from both sides in volume thick enough to darken the air above the breach. Artillery answered artillery. The gap became a grinder, and both sides fed into it.
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The Rebel Trap
What the invaders had not fully accounted for was what was happening behind them.
The rebel force of twenty thousand had been watching for exactly this moment. While the enemy's attention was focused entirely on the breach and the brutal contest being fought at the gap, the rebels had crept along the flanks, cutting down the rear scouts that the two armies had positioned to watch their backs. One by one, quietly, the rearguard perimeter was dismantled. The rebels weren't moving to help the Arwenian military, not exactly. Their goal was the command outpost. Take the two kings, or at minimum force a hostage situation, and you had leverage that none of their other options could buy. Greedy, perhaps. Presumptuous, certainly.
They charged with everything they had, crashing into the rear camp with maximum surprise. Most of the troops there had been diverted to support the breach assault. Only a skeleton crew remained, or so it appeared.
What the rebels found inside the command tents was not a skeleton crew.
The tents they attacked were decoys.
Waiting inside were two Grandmaster-ranked mages and four Master-ranked mages who had been positioned there specifically to receive exactly this kind of assault. The moment the rebels pushed through the tent flaps, the mages acted. Over a hundred rebel fighters were dead in the first exchange, killed instantly or thrown clear by force they had no way to answer. Before the survivors could regroup, the trap fully closed. Forces that had been hidden on all sides moved to encircle them. From the ledges above, arrows and javelins rained down in a continuous stream.
None of this had happened by accident.
The Cabal had sent a tip. Vague, deliberately so, only that a rebel force was planning to strike the rear of the allied camp, with no specific timing given. That vagueness had been enough. The two invading forces had constructed the deception carefully, anchoring it to the timing of the wall breach itself. They knew that when the breach opened, it would draw every available eye toward the gap. Any opportunistic force watching from outside would see the moment and would begin to move. So Zapata and Kirios had relocated their true rear guard before the assault began, hidden them in position, and set the decoy tents to do the rest.
King Audicios Zapata XII watched from his command post as the encirclement completed.
"Foolish rebels!" he said, loud enough that the officers around him could hear the satisfaction in his voice. "It seems whoever sent that message wants this war to end without victory. General, signal the attack. Leave no one from those rebels alive."
The order went out. The pincer closed on all sides.
General Zadik, commanding what remained of the rebel forward element, recognized the trap for what it was. He did not waste time on recrimination. He ordered the militia men to the front and told the veteran fighters to use them to break the encircling formation before it could fully tighten.
"Break through their formation! Militia men up front!"
It was a brutal order. It was also the only one with any chance of working.
The militia ran at the enemy lines while the veterans pushed hard behind them. Three lines of heavy spear, sword-and-shield infantry met them head on, supported by long pikes at the rear that could reach over the shoulders of the front rank and stab at anything trying to push through. Arrows and javelins continued falling from above. The gap between the two rebel mages of Expert rank and the enemy's grandmasters and masters was the kind of gap that could not be bridged by will or desperation. It only took one master-ranked mage to occupy both of them fully, leaving the remaining five to do as they liked.
The grandmaster sorceress named Iris, who went by the title Windwrath, took care of the rest.
She produced thousands of wind blades and sent them cutting through the rebel cluster. They carved through armor, through formation, through whatever the veterans had managed to hold together. Even the strongest fighters among the rebels found that there was nothing useful they could do against a grandmaster-level attack when they were already surrounded, already bleeding, and already outnumbered three to one. The wind blades tore through them without distinction. Those who survived the initial sweep were finished off by the regular infantry before they could recover.
The rebel force that had charged the rear of the allied camp was annihilated. Every last man.
It was a significant blow. The rebel presence in the capital region had just lost one of its most capable fighting concentrations. The force that had been staging ambushes, cutting supply lines, and bleeding the invaders across weeks of operations was gone in less than an hour.
The news of what had happened didn't reach Rosette's defenders until later.
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The Real Distraction
Inside the capital, the cavalry that had pushed through the breach had also begun pulling back. The retreat came without warning and deeply confused the Arwenian defenders on the walls, who had been bracing for the push to escalate. Instead the enemy pulled back, orderly and deliberate, and the breach assault that had looked like it was building toward something decisive simply stopped.
No pursuit. No second wave. Just a clean withdrawal, as if someone at the top had made a decision and passed it down the chain before the defenders could process what they were seeing.
The general commanding the capital's defense didn't feel relieved. He felt suspicious. Forces don't retreat when they have overwhelming advantage unless they are choosing to. The breach was still there. The gap in the wall hadn't closed on its own. The enemy had pushed into it, held it, and then walked away from it. That wasn't a defeat. That was a choice. Something had been gained today that wasn't the breach itself. He just couldn't work out what it was yet.
He ordered repair crews to the gap and doubled the watch rotation. Whatever the enemy was planning for tonight, they were going to find a harder problem than the one they had left behind.
What he didn't know was that the breach assault had never been the primary objective. It had been the distraction. The cavalry charge was meant to hold that gap open just long enough to let the rebels see their opportunity and commit to it fully. Once the rebel force was eliminated and the decoy trap had been sprung, the cavalry's purpose was complete. There was no reason to press further into a prepared defense when the real work of the day was already done.
What neither side yet understood was that the defenders inside had their own waiting hand to play. The Grandmaster Wizard Helios, court magician to four successive Arwenian monarchs, had been positioned specifically for the scenario where enemy cavalry poured through the breach in force. He had prepared a lightning barrage that would have turned that narrow stone corridor into a killing ground for every soldier who entered it. He was old, impossibly so, and powerful in a way that the two relatively young grandmaster mages working for Zapata and Kirios would find difficult to match even together. The six magical assets the invaders had deployed were not there to win magical duels. They were there specifically to keep Helios occupied and manageable so the rest of the operation could proceed.
The enemy had known what waited for them inside. That was also why the cavalry pulled back.
So the day ended as a draw in appearance only. The rebels were dead. The breach had been made and demonstrated. The defenders did not know the rebels were gone. The invaders did not know how close they had come to losing their cavalry in a corridor of lightning.
Both sides regrouped for what was coming next.
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That Night
Winter was fast approaching. That much was true. But the approaching cold was not going to stop the two invading kingdoms from finishing what they had started. Not when they were this close. The cold made sieges harder. It didn't make them impossible, and it certainly didn't make ambitious kings patient. If anything, the threat of a frozen campaign was one more reason to end this before the snow settled in for good.
That night, the two kings met. They reviewed the day's events. The decoy trap had worked cleanly. The rebel concentration in the capital region was gone. The breach in the outer wall still stood open. The defenders inside did not yet know how much they had just lost on the outside.
They regrouped. They planned.
The final assault on Rosette would not be merely a distraction this time.