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food,
mana
, and materiel to support the Host through a single week-long schwerpunkt maneuver. All-Highest, his headquarters staff, and his magi might live like rats in a cellar for another decade or two while they searched for a way out past the rampaging nightmares that stalked the hellscape above: but the end-game was becoming clear.
    The Host was originally a perimeter force, surrounded by the savages of the outlying archipelago. Its task was to guard the empire’s sparsely populated western coastline against invasion by the enemies who dwelt beyond the chilly ocean. All-Highest had originally been no more than a slave-general, bound by the iron will of his queen, the undisputed ruler of the Morningstar Empire. It was not a choice command, far from the seat of power in the lush lowlands of the drained inland sea far to the southeast. But the empire had fallen, the queen and her heirs crushed in the capital by the fall of a kilometer-long meteor early in the Necromancers’ War. Of all the far-flung war camps, only this chilly northern outpost had survived unscathed – nearly fifty-five degrees north of the equator, far beyond the zone of bombardment.
    When the imperial court and army high command died together in the meteor strike, the intricate network of magical bindings that held the empire together had propagated down the chain of oaths of fealty, until it landed like a dying god’s battle hammer on the brow of the highest ranked survivor in the hierarchy. The slave-general was driven half-insane when the royal
geasa
wrapped themselves around his mind, bringing to his will the power to command and release an entire empire: but he survived the fall and its aftermath, and now all that was left belonged to him.
    The general’s quarters were built within a natural limestone cavern, the roof of which was decorated with the dangling ossified fangs of stalactites. In shape it resembled a castle in the antique mode, built from pink marble imported from the southeastern uplands; in truth it had been forged as a single structure from heat-metamorphosed limestone, assembled by war-magisters at the command of one or other of a previous general’s military architects. Flying buttresses supported its decorative, steeply pitched roof; crenelated battlements adorned with the fossilized bodies of name-stripped felons gathered a bone-pallid patina of limestone beneath the constant drizzle of underground rain. The fruiting bodies of bioluminescent fungi lay in shelves and smears of color around the walls of the grotto, and a meandering underground stream wrapped around the palace in its horseshoe wandering. The hiss and rumble of underground falls could be heard, very faintly, from the stream bed as it flowed out of the chamber beneath a scaly pelt of living rock.
    While small and austere by the standards of a God-Emperor, the palace is pleasing to the eye and is furnished with all the conveniences that a commander might require during years or decades under siege. There are carpets of sweet-smelling purple grass, furniture carved from exotic hardwood timbers from other continents, walls hung with tapestries and paintings of limpid beauty that depict scenes of leisure and comfort forever lost to the devastation of war. Within the principal audience room at the center of the chateau there is a throne of white bone, intricately carved from the mortal remains of the honorable regimental dead. (Felons may be left to fossilize by rooftop happenstance, but it is a sign of recognition to be incorporated after death into a seat of authority.) Around the throne are arrayed the All-Highest’s counselors, children, and concubines: variously standing, sitting, or abasing themselves as their respective ranks dictate.
    In their midst All-Highest broods upon his charnel throne, listening as a brazen golem merges the reports of the scouts who go about the overworld into a stentorian rumble of intelligence. Words cascade through All-Highest’s