The City of Gim. Command Headquarters of the Lourian Eastern Army.

  The heavy, stagnant air in the meeting hall, which had been hastily set up in the surviving house of the former governor, pressed on the lungs. It was thick with the scent of expensive wine, sweat, and poorly concealed fear. Outside the boarded-up windows, shadows crept over the ruins of a city where no one slept soundly anymore. The news of the fleet's total rout off Rodenius had torn a hole in the carefully crafted illusion of invincibility. Although the command staff diligently concealed the scale of the disaster from the common soldiers, the horrifying rumors had already seeped into the headquarters, poisoning the atmosphere.

  But today, on the agenda, was a new, more immediate and incomprehensible tragedy.

  None of them had noticed the small, cross-shaped object that had been circling at three thousand meters above the city for the past six hours. At that altitude, against a gray sky, it was invisible to the naked eye and entirely outside the detection range of any mana-sensing equipment. Its thermal camera had logged every figure who entered and left the building. The transmission was encrypted and received in real time forty kilometers to the east.

  In the command vehicle of the 2nd Artillery Battalion, a marker on a tactical map was updated. The tag read: Probable Enemy Command Node. Confidence: HIGH.

  "Report on the loss of the 15th cavalry squadron," an intelligence officer said, and in the tense silence, his voice sounded like the cracking of dry wood. "One hundred knights under the command of Captain Jupiter Jove. They were sent on a long-range reconnaissance mission east of Gim. They have been annihilated. Completely."

  A heavy sigh went through the hall.

  "At the site of the engagement, we found traces of an unknown weapon," the intelligence officer continued, his hands trembling as he held the dispatch. "The magus detachment detected no spikes of mana. No signs of wyverns. Only… scorched earth, deep craters, and the torn-apart bodies of men and horses. The only thing that survived was the squadron's heraldic banner, planted in the ground. As if… it were a message."

  "It can't be…" someone whispered.

  "With a force of that size, at least one should have survived, should have escaped!" one of the generals exclaimed. "What, were they ambushed by an entire legion from Qua-Toyne?"

  "Impossible," the intelligence officer cut him off. "The mobility of the 15th squadron would have allowed them to evade any pursuit. They were destroyed quickly, and on the spot. From the air."

  Duke Junfila, commander of the lords' corps, a massive man with a scarred face, slowly raised his goblet.

  "Doesn't this all seem strange to you?" his voice was hoarse. "We were preparing for a war with the swineherds and miners of Qua-Toyne, and instead we are confronting… phantoms. First our vanguard, destroyed in Gim by tactics that are in no textbook. And now this. Washuna, what do you say, as our chief magus?"

  Washuna, the commander of the magus corps, a slender man with a perceptive gaze, slowly turned his goblet in his hands.

  "There are no traces of magic, Duke," he replied quietly. "But… rumors have reached me. Unofficial ones. From the General Headquarters. Our fleet, the one sent to Maihark… it has been crushed. Utterly. The three hundred and fifty wyverns sent to reinforce it… they were also destroyed. They say they were attacked by steel ships that spat fire from an unimaginable distance, and by 'fiery spears' that pursued the wyverns through the sky."

  The silence that descended upon the hall was heavy and oppressive. The officers' faces were pale, their eyes reflecting a profound shock. They had heard fragments of these rumors, but they had refused to believe in a catastrophe of such a scale.

  "So… it's true," Junfila said, his goblet hitting the table with a thud. "The Russians…"

  He looked around at his subordinates.

  "Gentlemen, it appears we are not at war with Qua-Toyne. Qua-Toyne is merely the battlefield. Our true enemy is this enigmatic Russian Federation. And we know nothing about them. Absolutely nothing. And they, it seems, know everything about us."

  Duke Junfila slammed his goblet down on the table. The precious wine spilled across the oak. No one reached for a cloth.

  "Our fleet and our aerial armada could have taken any port city of the Parpaldia Empire by storm! It was the greatest force ever assembled on this continent!"

  Breathing heavily, Junfila collapsed back into his chair. His hands were trembling.

  "Be that as it may…" he rasped, pulling a sealed scroll from his tunic. "We have our orders. From Lieutenant General Adem."

  He broke the seal and read aloud. His voice was hollow and lifeless.

  "'The Lords' Corps is to advance immediately to Fortress Ejey. Establish a camp three kilometers from the walls. Conduct a reconnaissance-in-force. Identify weaknesses in the defense. Await the arrival of the main forces for the general assault. Any delay will be regarded as treason.'"

  When he finished, no one in the hall uttered a word. Everyone understood what kind of order this was. It was a death sentence.

  "He's sending us to the slaughter," one of the lords said quietly. "Without reconnaissance. Straight into the jaws of whatever it was that exterminated the 15th squadron."

  "To refuse Adem's order is death," Junfila hissed, his face twisting with a powerless rage. "Not just death. Death for our families. Disgrace for our houses. Damn him!"

  He was suddenly seized by a sharp pain in his stomach. His hands grew cold and clammy with sweat. He was pursued by an inescapable feeling of impending doom. But he was a duke, a commander. He had no right to show his fear.

  The complete lack of information was the most terrifying part. If the ones who had incinerated the 15th squadron were indeed somewhere near Ejey… another massacre awaited them.

  "My knights… my best warriors… my horses…" he thought with anguish.

  The next day, having received minor reinforcements, twenty thousand soldiers of the Lords' Corps—grim, silent, with desperation in their eyes—marched out of the ruins of Gim and headed east. They did not march as conquerors on their way to glory. They marched like a herd being driven to the slaughter. To an inevitable massacre.

  Fortress Ejey.

  That night, the twenty-thousand-strong vanguard of the Lords' Corps, led by Duke Junfila, reached Ejey without a single shot being fired. They made camp five kilometers from the walls, and the plain, which had been dark and silent, was instantly transformed into a sea of lights. Thousands of campfires and torches illuminated the night landscape, and their glow, ominous and inexorable, fell upon the fortress walls, painting dancing shadows upon them.

  Atop the main tower, in his keep, General Nou stared at this ocean of fire. His normally grim face was pale, and his hands, clenched on the stone parapet, were trembling. Twenty thousand. And this was only the vanguard. He knew that behind them, the main forces were on the march—hundreds of thousands. If the Lourians were to begin their assault right now… his garrison would be swept away. The tension in the fortress had reached its breaking point. The nerves of the defenders were stretched as taut as the string of a war bow.

  Nou, his face etched with wrinkles, peered into the night. The wind whistled through the narrow arrowslits, carrying with it the cold and the distant shouts from the enemy camp. For a moment, he was seized by the temptation to send all fifty of his wyverns on a night attack. A surprise strike, a firestorm over their camp… But he immediately dismissed the thought. In the darkness of night, the wyverns were nearly blind. Such an attack would turn into a suicidal slaughter and, worse, would give the Lourians the perfect excuse for an immediate, full-scale assault.

  "A siege…" he murmured, running a hand over his weary face. "They won't assault. They'll wear us down. Wait for the main forces to arrive."

  And he was right. The next few days turned into a form of psychological torture. Every day, at dawn and at dusk, a detachment of three hundred Lourian cavalrymen would ride up to the walls, just within arrow-shot, and begin their ritual of humiliation.

  "Hey, you pointy-eared freaks! Crawl out of your stone hole!" they would yell, banging their swords against their shields, and the vile, clanging sound would carry throughout the fortress. "We'll stick your heads on our pikes and hang your cowardly general from the gates!"

  These shouts, mixed with bawdy songs and derisive laughter, were a calculated psychological torment. The garrison seethed with a helpless fury.

  "Filthy Lourian dogs…" one of the guards on the wall, a veteran of a dozen border skirmishes, ground out through his teeth. "Just give the order, General… one arrow… a single arrow, right in his eye…"

  "Stand down!" Nou roared as he made his inspection of the watch. "Any shot will be seen as the start of the battle! Their provocation is a lure! Be patient!"

  But patience has its limits. Days and nights without proper sleep, under constant strain, to the accompaniment of insults that struck at their honor as warriors—all of it was eroding his soldiers' morale. They were becoming irritable, sullen, snapping at each other over trivialities. In their eyes, which had recently burned with resolve, despair now smoldered.

  General Nou watched this with a heavy heart.

  "This is bad…" he whispered to his aide-de-camp, watching as one of his best archers gripped his bow with such force that his knuckles turned white. "Their fighting spirit is collapsing. They will break before the assault even begins. The Lourians are winning this battle without firing a single shot."

  "Perhaps the wyverns, then?" the aide asked hopefully. "A short, demonstrative strike on their camp? Just to show them we're still alive?"

  Nou slowly shook his head.

  "Too risky. That's exactly what they're waiting for. We launch our dragons, they'll launch theirs. They have three times as many. We'd lose our only advantage, our control of the sky. And after that, they'll begin the assault. And that… that would be the end. For all of us."

  He stared silently at the enemy camp, at the endless rows of tents, at the thousands of lights that seemed like the eyes of a gigantic, hungry beast. And he understood that time was working against them. With every day, with every hour, that beast grew stronger, while his own army grew weaker. He was in a tactical dead-end, a zugzwang, where his every move only worsened his position. And the walls of his impregnable fortress were slowly but surely becoming the walls of his own tomb.

  The days dragged on like an eternity. The Lourians, just as General Nou had predicted, did not assault the fortress. They waited patiently for the arrival of their main forces, continuing their grueling psychological war. The garrison of Ejey held, but the tension had reached its limit.

  In his chambers, lit by the dim glow of an oil lamp, Nou sat at a table buried under maps. His face, normally stern and resolute, was drawn, with deep shadows under his eyes. Over and over again, he sifted through intelligence reports, trying to find a weak point in the iron ring that was tightening around his fortress. But there were no weak points.

  A sudden knock at the door made him start.

  "Enter!" he growled.

  His aide-de-camp came into the room.

  "General," his voice was quiet, almost reverent. "A message… from the Russian command."

  Nou froze. The Russians. He had almost forgotten about them. After their visit, they had remained silent, not interfering, just as he had ordered. He felt a prick of irritation, mixed with… curiosity.

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  "Read it!" he commanded.

  The aide unrolled a scroll. It was not a dispatch. It was a sheet of thick white paper with neat lines of text, printed in their language.

  "'To General Nou. Command of the Western Garrison,'" the aide began to read. "'Our aerial reconnaissance assets confirm a concentration of enemy forces five kilometers west of your positions. Their numbers and deployment indicate preparations for a general assault within the next 24 hours. In light of this, the command of the Russian Operational Group proposes a preemptive strike to suppress enemy fire positions and command structures. We request your authorization to conduct an artillery preparation at the indicated coordinates. Furthermore, to avoid friendly-fire casualties, please confirm that there are no patrols or observation posts from your forces within a two-kilometer radius of the enemy camp.'"

  Nou was silent, processing what he had heard. "Artillery preparation"… "coordinates"… the words were unfamiliar, but the general meaning was clear. They were proposing an attack. An attack on the very horde that had held him in a grip of mortal fear.

  "I ordered them to keep their heads down!" he grumbled, more out of habit than anger. He paced the room. Two feelings warred within him: pride, which refused to accept help from outsiders, and the cold calculation of a strategist, who understood that this was their only chance. "Well… to hell with them," he finally said. "I am curious to see how these Russians fight. We'll see what lies behind their arrogant confidence. Relay to them…" he paused, "…that I give my authorization. Let them conduct their 'artillery preparation.'"

  "Yes, General!" The aide, not hiding his relief, saluted and hurried from the room.

  Nou was left alone. He walked to the window and looked to the west, where thousands of enemy campfires were visible on the horizon. He did not know what "artillery" was. But he had a feeling he was about to witness something that would forever change the rules of war in their world. And for the first time in many days, he felt not only fear, but a dark, predatory anticipation.

  The next day. Firing positions of the 2nd Self-Propelled Artillery Battalion. Seven kilometers east of "Sloboda."

  A low, leaden sky hung over the plain. In carefully camouflaged positions, several kilometers behind the main perimeter of "Sloboda," steel predators stood motionless. Two batteries of 152mm 2S19M2 "Msta-S" self-propelled howitzers and one battery of 300mm 9K515 "Tornado-S" multiple launch rocket systems. The air vibrated with the low hum of their auxiliary power units.

  The work was intense. The crews in grease-stained coveralls, acting as a single, well-oiled machine, were making their final preparations. Giant rockets were being fed from transporter-loader vehicles into the belly of the "Tornado-S" launchers. Soldiers checked the encrypted communication channels and cross-referenced the targeting data streaming in from the Orlan drone that was already hovering over the enemy camp. The smell of diesel fuel, burnt powder, and ozone mingled with the acrid scent of lubricant.

  The battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Granin, stood by his command and staff vehicle, staring at the screen of a tactical tablet. On it, in real time, the enemy camp was displayed, illuminated by the thermal imager of the UAV.

  "Targets confirmed," reported the chief of staff. "Command post, heavy cavalry concentrations, ammunition depots. It's all laid out for us."

  Granin nodded.

  "'Tornado' will handle the area targets, the main forces. Objective: suppression and demoralization. 'Msta' will conduct precision strikes. Command posts and siege engines. Objective: decapitation."

  He picked up the radio handset. The silence on the firing line became almost tangible. The crews froze in anticipation.

  "All batteries—prepare for fire!" The command went out on the encrypted channel. The gunners had been in position for twenty minutes; they had needed one.

  Granin watched the readiness indicators on his tablet cycle from yellow to green, battery by battery. He had fired artillery in two theatres of operations on his own world. He had never before fired at a target visible to a drone in real-time, with zero possibility of counter-battery return fire, into a formation that had no defensive earthworks and no air cover and no radar and no radio-jamming capability. The professional part of him noted this as an almost ideal fire mission. The rest of him was focused entirely on the checklist.

  "Batteries ready," the chief of staff reported.

  Granin keyed the handset.

  "We fire in volleys! We'll show them what for!" his voice, rough and sharp, cut through the air. "TRISTA! TRIDTSAT! TRI! (Three hundred! Thirty! Three!)"—he glanced at his watch again, as if counting down the seconds to their deaths.

  The earth shuddered. The twelve launch tubes of the "Tornado-S" vomited fire and smoke. The rockets, with a roar like the cry of a mythical beast, tore into the sky, leaving white contrails in their wake. They carried death—each rocket was armed with a thermobaric warhead—a weapon designed not for armored vehicles but for the specific problem of large concentrations of personnel in open terrain. Against cavalry and infantry formations without overhead cover, it was as close to optimal as ordnance got.

  Without waiting for the first volley to finish thundering, Granin commanded again:

  "'Msta,' rapid fire on all targets! Five rounds per gun! TRISTA! TRIDTSAT! TRI!"

  And then, hell began. Eighteen 152mm howitzers opened a rapid-fire barrage, sending dozens of high-explosive fragmentation shells screaming into the sky. The ground shook violently, and the roar was so immense it seemed as if the very heavens were being torn asunder. This wasn't a battle. It was a job. The heavy, dirty, and deadly work of the artillery. And they were performing it with a cold, machine-like efficiency.

  Without waiting for the first volley to complete its flight, Granin keyed the second channel.

  "Msta-batteries—five rounds per gun, rapid fire. Execute."

  The 2S19s fired in sequence, not simultaneously—the crews had been trained against the mechanical sympathy that made simultaneous volleys slightly less accurate. Eighteen guns, staggered by three to four seconds each, sent their shells arcing northeast. The drone feed on Granin's tablet showed the impacts beginning before the last gun had fired its first round.

  He watched the thermal imagery for eleven seconds. The pattern was consistent with a well-executed suppression mission. He noted this without particular emotion. The target was a cavalry army that had been besieging an allied fortification; the mission was to neutralize that siege before the main Lourian forces arrived to reinforce it. He was doing his job.

  The radioman beside him—a young sergeant from Pskov named Dymov, on his second deployment—had not looked at the drone feed at all. He was watching his equipment readouts. That was also correct behavior.

  Neither of them spoke until the last Msta gun fired its fifth round.

  "Confirm expenditure," Granin said.

  "Confirmed. All batteries expended. No malfunctions."

  "Reload. Second fire mission on standby."

  "Yes, sir."

  That was the entire conversation.

  The Camp of the Lords' Corps. Five kilometers west of Ejey.

  Duke Junfila, to his surprise, had slept well. Nightmares had tormented him during the night, but with the first rays of the sun, they had dissipated, giving way to the cold confidence of a professional warrior. He conducted a morning inspection of his troops. Twenty thousand soldiers, arrayed in perfect square formations, their polished armor gleaming in the sun. Their battle standards flew proudly in the morning breeze. Looking at this unbreakable wall of steel and courage, the Duke felt a surge of pride. This was his army. A force capable of crushing any fortress.

  But his contented mood was torn apart like a thin sheet of parchment. Suddenly, without any reason, that same chilling feeling of imminent doom he had experienced at the walls of Gim gripped him. He instinctively raised his head to the clear, cloudless sky. He didn't know what he was looking for, but he felt with his entire being that death was on its way.

  And at that very moment, a strange, air-tearing sound carried from the east—a hiss that grew into a howl.

  In the next instant, the ground in the center of his camp exploded. Not a single explosion, but hundreds. From the sky, like a fiery rain, tiny but deadly submunitions began to fall. They pierced helmets and cuirasses, tearing flesh and turning the perfect ranks of infantry into a bloody mess.

  BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

  Immediately following this, heavier shells began to land with a deafening roar. The earth trembled. The Lourian army, which just a second ago had been a symbol of order, was transformed into a boiling cauldron of fire, steel, and agony. The shells detonated, throwing up fountains of earth and human remains. The screams of the wounded and the dying blended into a single, horrifying roar. This was not a battle. This was a massacre.

  On the walls of Fortress Ejey.

  General Nou, glued to the eyepieces of the finest dwarven-made spyglass, watched in horror as the events unfolded.

  "This… this is impossible…" he whispered. "They're firing from their own positions?! From ten kilometers away?!"

  His mages were reporting that they could not sense even a hundredth of the mana that would be required to conjure such a firestorm.

  "Gods… so this is what they call… 'artillery preparation'!"

  Even at such a distance, the sickening smell of burnt flesh and blood drifted to the fortress.

  In the Lourian camp.

  Junfila, paralyzed by terror, stood on his command hill and watched as his army, his pride, was being turned into twitching, screaming meat. The shockwave from a nearby explosion knocked him off his feet. Shrapnel whistled just over his head.

  He saw something strike the exact location of his command tent, where just a minute before his officers had been planning their assault. The tent, along with everything inside it, simply vanished in a flash of fire.

  This was not a battle against men. There was no analogy for it in his experience. He had participated in sieges. He had seen cities burn. None of it had looked like this. Not even the legendary dragons of myth possessed such destructive, impersonal, and methodical power. And in that moment, the old, battle-hardened Duke Junfila, for the first time in his life, wept. He did not cry from fear for his own life, but from the helplessness and horror of seeing his world, his very conception of war and valor, burn away in the fire of an incomprehensible, alien science.

  He staggered to his feet.

  The ground was wrong. The ground was soft in places where it should not have been soft. He did not look down. He had seen enough battles to understand what soft ground meant after a barrage.

  Washuna was beside him, hands pressed flat to the earth, face ashen. The magus had been trying to reach the source of the attack through the channels of mana-sense for the past forty seconds, and he had found nothing. Not suppression. Not interference. Nothing. As if the agency responsible for this had never been in contact with any principle he understood.

  "There's no mana," he said. His voice was completely level, which was worse than screaming. "There's nothing. There's nothing there at all."

  Junfila looked east. Ten kilometers. Behind the tree line. Somewhere behind the tree line, something had done this.

  He tried to formulate the thought and could not.

  A second volley landed three hundred meters to the north. Then another. Not aimed at him specifically—aimed at the camp generally, walking back and forth in a pattern he couldn't predict and couldn't avoid. He understood suddenly, with the clarity that comes only when the body has processed information the mind hasn't yet caught up to, that there was no position of safety. There was no higher ground, no cover, no tactical maneuver that addressed what was being done to them. The field of war had been defined by the enemy before they had fired a single shot, and he had marched twenty thousand men directly into it.

  The last thing Duke Junfila saw clearly was his standard, planted in the earth by some earlier order he could no longer remember giving, snapping in the concussive wind of a nearby detonation. He had time to think—not a complete thought, but a fragment, the kind that arrives at the end of things—that the standard would still be there when he was not.

  He was right about that.

  When the barrage moved on, the command hill was empty of everything that mattered.

  On the walls of Fortress Ejey.

  The garrison and their commander, General Nou, watched in a dead silence as the events unfolded. When the roaring had ceased and the dust began to settle, a scene that froze the blood in their veins was revealed. The plain, where a twenty-thousand-strong army had stood that morning, was empty. It had been transformed into a black, crater-pocked field, strewn with smoking remains. The Lourian army had simply vanished.

  Nou slowly lowered his dwarven-made spyglass. His hands were shaking. The Russians had crushed a mighty host without ever leaving their own positions. His garrison, his impregnable fortress, had not fired a single shot. Had not lost a single man.

  Nou held the spyglass for another thirty seconds after the last explosion, watching the dust settle. He was counting craters. Estimating coverage. Doing the arithmetic a garrison commander does when he needs to write a report.

  Twenty thousand men. Approximate artillery preparation: four to five minutes. No cavalry charge, no breach attempt, no counter-sortie on his part. No wyverns deployed. No losses on his side.

  He lowered the glass.

  "Send to the Principality command," he said to his aide, his voice entirely level. "Inform them that the vanguard of the Lords' Corps has been neutralized. Estimate four to six days before Lourian main forces reach our position. Request clarification on the status of the treaty provisions—specifically, what the Russian command is authorized to do without our countersignature, and what requires advance approval."

  He paused.

  "Also request that someone with full authority come here in person to explain their fire mission parameters to me before they conduct another one." He glanced toward "Sloboda" once more, then turned away. "I authorized a strike on the camp perimeter. They appear to have interpreted that somewhat broadly."

  His aide was staring at him.

  "General. They just destroyed twenty thousand soldiers in under five minutes. Without—"

  "I know what they did," Nou said. "I watched it happen. Write the dispatch."

  He went inside. He had maps to update and a report to write. Later, when the immediate work was done, he would allow himself to sit with what he had witnessed. There would be time for that.

  There would, he suspected, be a great deal of time for that.

  Third Civilized Area. Parpaldia Empire. Intelligence Section, Department of External Affairs.

  The dispatch arrived by manacomm relay through three intermediate stations and was decoded by the Section's senior analyst at approximately the second hour past midnight. He read it once quickly, then a second time slowly, then set it on the desk and looked at the wall.

  The field agent—a Parpaldian merchant who had been operating cover in the Rodenius trade lanes for four years—had been forty kilometers from Fortress Ejey when the artillery preparation occurred. He had not been close enough to observe the impacts directly, but he had heard them, and he had spoken afterward with a Qua-Toyne supply convoy whose drivers had seen the aftermath from the road.

  The relevant section of his report read:

  The convoy drivers described the plain west of Ejey as follows: no structures standing. No tents, no siege equipment, no horses, no men visible alive. Multiple craters of a size inconsistent with any known explosive ordinance available in the Three Civilized Areas. An estimated force of eighteen to twenty thousand had occupied the plain the previous evening. The entire force appears to have been destroyed in a period described by all witnesses as "not more than the time it takes to eat a meal." No Russian forces left their perimeter during the engagement. No aircraft were observed. The attack originated from behind Russian lines at an estimated range of eight to twelve kilometers.

  The analyst picked up his pen. He wrote a summary. He attached the field agent's report. He sealed the packet and marked it for immediate escalation to the Deputy Director.

  Then he sat for another moment, thinking about the number eight to twelve kilometers. He had read the earlier reports on the naval engagement off Maihark. He had read the assessment of the Sky Spear. He had been compiling this file for six weeks.

  He wrote one additional line at the bottom of his summary, in his own hand rather than the formal report format:

  Recommend immediate reassessment of all threat calculations involving the Russian Federation.

  He sent it upstairs.

  Whether anyone upstairs would read it before making the decisions that mattered—that, he could not control.