Pronos stood at the edge of the pile of destruction. Nearby, a crushed hand stuck out from between blood-smeared stones. A few yards further, a boot-covered foot dangled from a shattered lower leg.

Dead. They were all dead-- and Andral with them. 

A strange buoyant feeling came over Pronos, as if enormous weights had been pressing him from all sides, then abruptly lifted. He could simply leave, disappear. He was free to do whatever he wanted. The whole world was open to him now. Where should he go?

The rattle of falling stones drew Pronos' attention to an angorym shoving its back upwards through the debris. The creature emerged, shrugging off great stone blocks, while underneath the place it lain, Andral rolled over and coughed. More angorym crawled out of the pile. Andral rose, battered and bloody. He dusted himself off and noticed Pronos. "What are you doing here?"

"I came back to help you."

"Where are my trophies?"

Not only does he not care, he doesn't even notice, Pronos thought. "They're with Bania."

"Who's Bania?"

"One of our most dependable tacarchs."

Andral looked up at the cliffs. The gates were now a hundred feet or more above them, the battlement, nearly a hundred feet further up. Only a narrow ledge of broken stone remained before the gates.  "We're going to need ladders. Very tall ladders." He turned back to Pronos and poked him in the chest. "And if even one of my trophies is missing or damaged, you're drwg food."

Not all of Andral's forces had been on the ramp, and among those who had, most of the angorym had survived. He leaves his human spearmen to pay the bulk of the price for his ambitions. Pronos ground his teeth. He certainly has plenty of those. Pronos led the surviving reavers back to N'shia-Potoma where he set his men to constructing enormous ladders.

They had barely started when Andral came clomping back toward him."I'm afraid I'm going to have to start using my trophies sooner than I'd hoped. Still, it should be quite amusing." The grin on Andral's bruised face was jarring. A cold tickle of fear warned Pronos: Andral was inspired. "Your father once gave you a knife. One you still keep on your person."

Pronos sucked in a suspicious breath. "How do you know that?"

"The spirits. They tell me what to say and what to do." Andral held out his hand. "Give it to me."

Pronos reluctantly dug into his belt pouch and pulled out the small copper knife his father had given him long ago. It was  all that remained of his former life. "What do you want it for?"

"To question the dwerka. As I lay under that rubble, I remembered a rumor regarding the source of the Pardos. I mean to find it and I hear the dwerka may know something of it."

Andral took Pronos' knife and entered the building where the dwerkan prisoners were kept. He didn't come out for over a sennight. The men of the soreav continued felling trees and making the tallest ladders they could manage while accompanied by the  intermittent shrieks and groans of the dwerkan prisoners. The men avoided that area of town, especially at night.

Strange dreams stole into Pronos' sleep. Each night a growing number of men reported waking in a panicked sweat from a recurring dream whose memory could not be recalled. Around the seventh night, Pronos wandered the streets unable to sleep. Without warning, the drwg all took up a mournful howl which they had never before made. The air grew heavy with the weight of an unnatural presence. It fell across the entire town from out of the cold dark sky and the air shuddered with a strange pulsing vibration. An inexplicable light bruised the night, its violet shafts piercing every tiny crack in the warehouse's walls where the dwerkan prisoners were kept.

Pronos hurried away and stumbled upon Bania in a small building with a low-walled courtyard and windows whose shutters were hinged to fold down into countertops. Bania and a handful of men were hiding along with a cache of beer they had discovered. Forced to buy Pronos' silence with a generous share of their horde, they spent the night in silent drinking,  occasionally casting wary glances in the direction of Andral's work. Pronos woke the next morning exhausted and hung-over. He stumbled past the ominous building just as its doors creaked open and Andral shuffled outside.

Dried sprays of blood encrusted him all over. The space beyond was similarly decorated with small bits of meat and bone strewn together in a web of carefully excised tendons, nerves and blood vessels. Pale pink tissues, stretching from pillar to post like a web or hanging in shrouds, filled the warehouse with a charnel stink. The individual dwerka corpses had disappeared, merged together into the monstrous construction which the room.

"By the mountain!" Pronos doubled over and vomited.

"No," Andral slurred. His eyes, drooping and bloodshot, looked as if he had spent the sennight drinking. "Not the mountain, never the mountain. The mountain does not see or hear or care what happens down here in the Land of Judgment. We have all of us already been cast out. No. There is only us and the Void to which we are all destined."

"What have you done?"

Andral gave him an apprehensive frown. "They didn't know. I had to make certain. And when I was sure, I used them to summon death."

"I can see that, but why?"

"I summoned the death my father summoned. He will come and lead me to the source."

"He?" The cold hand of suspicion dragged a chill finger down Pronos' spine. Somewhere in his memory, the image of a walking corpse, its eyes and mouth glowing with unnatural light, rose to the surface. "Ctonos?"

Andral did not respond. He only shuffled away.

<====|==|====>

For twenty-four hours, the entire town of N'shia-Potoma, lay as if dead. Then Andral, still stinking of the grave, yelled for Pronos to ready the soreavs. "Make my trophies carry the ladders. They dare not slay their own."

Pronos organized the soreavs with teams of captives in the fore to carry the ladders. They marched to Har-Tor where they stumbled across the broken debris at the base of the newly formed cliff. Atop the wall, the defenders watched with anxious expressions while former friends and family packed snow and ice among the rocks to serve as platforms for the ladders. Then the prisoners raised the ladders and were forced to climb up at spear point.

The faeyn archers started shooting them, but other defenders forced them to stop and a scuffle broke out between them. Pronos smirked at the effectiveness of the ploy. A sizable group of attackers managed to get themselves on the narrow ledge before the main doors and more ladders were hauled up and leaned against the ramparts.

With a prisoner at the lead on each ladder, Pronos' men began to climb towards the top. The faeyn archers returned to shooting, though being more discriminating in their targets. Pronos' men hid behind the prisoners as they climbed and so fewer were hit.

The defenders rushed forward to grab the prisoner at the top of the ladder and were met with a spear thrust from the warrior behind. The warrior injured another man before a faeyn arrow took him. As he fell, he knocked another prisoner from the ladder behind him. Meanwhile two other spearmen had made it onto the battlement from another ladder. One was wounded and the second was using the prisoner as a shield. While they fought the defenders, still more spearmen leaped over the wall from two more ladders.

Pronos watched the fight from below. For a moment it appeared the defenders would be driven back, then the attacking spearmen were overwhelmed in a surge of swords and knives. More shouting ensued among the defenders, of which a harried looking Karux seemed to be the loudest voice. Afterwards, the defenders pushed the still occupied ladders away from the walls with their spears, ignoring the screams of their former friends. One by one the ladders toppled backwards. Some men let go and dropped while others clung to their ladders as they flipped over, plunging down the cliff upside down. In a few short minutes their promising attack lay dead or dying in the rubble at the base of the cliff.

"Next group," Andral shouted.

Stunned, Pronos gave Andral a disbelieving look. "You saw what happened."

"Have you another way to take that fortification?"

"No, but--"

"Then, do it."

Pronos glanced over at the nearest tacarch. "You, take your men up."

"B-but, how are we supposed to d-do that?"

"Go faster and take more prisoners with you."

Dutifully, the man complied. The fae picked off several of his men on the approach so that they were forced to hide against the cliff as the prisoners raised the ladders. The tacarch made them repeatedly call out their names as he forced the prisoners up the ladders. Going up last, the tacarch managed to drop back to the ledge as his ladder was pushed backwards.

"Next!" Andral shouted as the last ladder fell. He had to personally select the next group to go up the ladders in something like his old judging of the soreavs. The other reavers, relieved that they were not yet chosen, forced them to the growing pile of debris and corpses with their spears.

This continued for days.

"You can't keep doing this!" Pronos shouted one morning as Andral ordered him to round up the men. This was taking longer each day as more men hid among the abandoned buildings. "You're just throwing your reavers away."

"What else am I going to do with them?" Andral asked.

"But this isn't accomplishing anything."

"These men—all of these men—are here to do what I say." Andral's voice rose to a shout. "It doesn't matter what that is."

Pronos bit back on his reply knowing nothing would change Andral's mind. He wondered briefly if it might not be better to take off his armor and join the ranks of the prisoners. They seemed to be dying at a slower rate than the reavers.

<====|==|====>

In his quarters, Garanth's arcanths sat around his table in grim silence, consumed with thoughts of the mounting horrors outside their gate.

What kind of monster would kill so many of his own men? How confident was he to throw away his own forces and still attack as if he thought victory was inevitable? Garanth shuddered. "I remember Karux warning the elders that the enemy would climb up here on a mountain of his own dead. I always thought that was hyperbole."

The other arcanths shook their heads and drank their beer, saying nothing.

"They're going to force us to kill them all," Anankaes said.

"Some of Z'taes men were in that last group." Tekmos paused to take a deep breath, swallowing a tremble in his voice. "I heard them calling out their names."

Macander's fist crashed against the table. Nothing spilled as their drinking bowls never left their hands. "We have to do something."

Garanth caught his eye with a questioning look. "But what?"

Macander grimaced thoughtfully and stared down into his drink.

"It would be suicide to try and leave the fortifications and fight them down there," Anankaes said.

The other arcanths nodded silently.

Garanth continued turning the situation over in his mind, looking for some way out. After awhile, an urgent cry carried his name down the hall. He rushed out and the other arcanths followed.

"What's happening?" Garanth asked of the messenger trotting up to him.

"Karux has sent for you. He says someone is approaching the gate."

"A whole lot of someones have been trying to do that for nearly a fortnight."  Garanth brushed past him, jogged down the hallway and bounded up the stairs. Karux waited for him on the battlement and directed Garanth's gaze downward.

The attackers had withdrawn from the bloody wreckage below. A lone figure, bundled in thick clothes and a heavy winter cloak, struggled over the broken ground at the base of the cliff. A freezing gust of wind yanked at Garanth's own cloak and he glanced up at an unbroken sheet of sullen grey that was the sky. It looked as if it was ready to dump its own mountains of snow any day.

"I know that person," Karux said.

"How?"

The man picked up a fallen ladder and set it up against the cliff face. A faeyn archer knocked an arrow and drew it back, but Karux stopped him with a gesture.

The figure labored up the ladder. He paused to catch his breath on the narrow ledge before the gates.

Karux called down to him. "What do you want, Pronos?"

Pronos looked up. "We would like to ask for a temporary cessation of hostilities."

"Why temporary?" Macander called down.

"Mac is that you?"

"Yes."

"Temporary because we assume you will not hand over Karux and Garanth so that Andral may have the justice he deserves."

"Justice? What does justice have to do with any of this," Garanth demanded.

"Justice on Karux because he killed Andral's father and Justice on Karux and Garanth because they seek to kill Andral."

"I have not sought to kill anyone," Garanth said.

Pronos looked at him. "Are you Garanth?"

"Yes."

"Then perhaps you should come down and talk it over with your half-brother?

Garanth shot Karux a glance. Karux returned a skeptical sneer. "I'm afraid I cannot, but he is welcome to come here."

Pronos looked around as if he were bored. "I see we are at an impasse."

"Even so."

"With the New Year being near, however, we thought to ask you for this boon, so that we could retrieve the dead and bury them before the snows fall."

"How would you do that?" Garanth asked. "The ground is already frozen."

"The angorym can manage."

Garanth turned to the arcanths.

"No. It's a trick," Karux said.

"You would prefer to let them lie there?" Anankaes asked.

"They don't care for the dead. They eat the dead."

"It is the decent thing to do," Macander said.

"Perhaps, with this gesture, they'd be willing to talk to us and discuss alternatives to this conflict," Labrose suggested.

Garanth sighed. His instincts told him Karux was more likely to be correct. There didn't seem to be any way the enemy would negotiate a peace. Still, he could see no harm in letting them collect the dead. If nothing else, it would stop the killing for a while. "What would the terms of this temporary peace be?"

"Simple," Pronos said. "We won't attack you unless you attack us first."

"And I suppose you'll warn us before you chose to change the terms?"

Pronos crooked a smile upwards. "Trust me. We'll make our intentions quite clear before we seek to do anything else."

Garanth sighed. "So be it."

Pronos nodded, then started the laborious climb down the treacherous ladder.

"I hope that wasn't a mistake," Karux said.

Garanth turned to Tosser who was technically one of Macander's tacarchs. "I want a full hand of hands up here watching them night and day in case they try something."

"Yes, dra."

Garanth returned downstairs, followed by his arcanths and Karux. After several minutes of staring fruitlessly at his battle map, he was just debating with himself whether it wouldn't be better to give up and go to bed, when a reaver arrived at his doorway.

"Forgive me, dra, but Tosser says you might want to see this."

Garanth sighed and slipped his boots back on and returned to the battlement. Tosser and his reavers leaned out over the low wall. "What is it?"

Tosser pointed downward. "They dragged all the dead away, then they started doing this."

The enemy reavers were carrying the bodies back and laying them out in straight even rows. As each row was completed, more reavers came with baskets of snow and dumped it over the corpses, packing it down. A third group poured slushy water over the snow and the whole process moved on down to the next row. When the last row was covered, more bodies were brought and laid on top of the snow, crosswise to the first, and the process was repeated.

"That's an odd way to bury somebody," one of Tosser's reavers said.

"It won't seem so smart come spring," Tosser said.

"They're not burying them." Garanth stomach sank. "They're building a ramp."