The precise details are not yet clear, but enough is that the nations of the world are Extremely Worried about what to do.

The Whispering Way has struck. Ten thousand undead masterminds, plotting their return and the slaughter of mankind; the dark captains of the Whispering Tyrant's armies, have taken the moment to unleash their full strength across northern Ustalav, bringing terror and butchery across the continent. In Ardeal, the great plains, breadbasket of the land, are filled with the marching ranks of the undead; the dark monastery of Renchurch has summoned its foul flock; ghouls stalk near the mirrored waters of Lantern Lake, black knights ride forth from the Furrows, and all across northern Ustalav, the dead walk the ground openly. Each victory by the Whispering Way leads to more and more necromancers coming out of hiding as the world seems powerless against them.

It is not, in fact, clear who leads them, or if anyone leads them, or if this is all some elaborate plot of the Whispering Tyrant or the plague-goddess Urgathoa finally coming to its centuries-long conclusion rather than a mortal captain, but the most common name spoken among the scattered refugees is that of Wielki Ksaize - a name that, when the dust is blown off ancient books of the Shining Crusade and the spell Tongues is cast as aged scholars read down a list of Tar-Baphon's dark captains, begins to bear a disturbing resemblance to that of Uachdaran Mòr; that Uachdaran Mòr who was Taldaris II, one of the mightiest lieutenants of the archlich, millennia ago necromancer-king of Taldor who names himself Grand Prince by whatever tongue his minions speak, and who has tried to reclaim the land of his birth dozens of times over the millennia, most recently under the name of Remek Czaszar.

You know. That Uachdaran Mòr.

Of course, Ksaize is not the only problem northern Ustalav has.

The last Count of Barstoi, dying on the field of battle with all his knights in arms, called upon Cheliax, the Mouth of Hell in Golarion, for help. When Cheliax arrived (Cheliax was very busy) he and his knights were all dead, but this did not particularly stop Cheliax from replacing his magic-hating utilitarian-totalitarian tyranny with a magic-loving, Hell-worshipping, tyranny-for-the-sake-of-tyranny tyranny, or, in a very technical sense, suggesting that the Hellknights of the Order of the Pyre do this. Since the Order of the Pyre was one of the Hellknight orders least happy with being under the direct control of Queen Abrogail (it being an open secret that its leader does not, actually, worship any gods, even Asmodeus, however much she supports tyranny as a general concept), this agreement worked out in both sides' favor; the Pyre were removed from where they could pose court difficulties for the Queen, and sent to somewhere they could, instead, pose difficulties for the undead. And the Church of Pharasma, who Rouen Strought likes even less than she likes the Church of Asmodeus, who she agrees to tolerate since He is at least Lawful and they are helping fund her. And the peasantry of Barstoi. And the peasantry of Numeria, which is right there across the border...

... The Order of the Pyre is very enthusiastic about causing problems for people.

They are not the only ones.

The Tiger Lords ruled all of Numeria, once. Most of Numeria is covered by a bubble, now, but not all of it, and Armag the Twice-Born is - from one of the bits that weren't. So Numeria is barren? So the lands are savage? So be it. The Tiger Lords are savage as well. He had time as a mercenary, in the petty, decadent south, learning the way of war as they practiced it; he prefers his people's.

Ustalav is vulnerable. The River Kingdoms, where he once found easy prey, are not. Armag is not a cruel man, but Gorum is his god, and under his blade the cities of Ustalav will fall.

Yeah. Right.

Koldunya Ognya would have been queen; she was the daughter of one of the Jadwiga, the frost witches of Irissen, granddaughters of Baba Yaga herself, who rule the icy realm with their magic of frost. Daughter of a queen-under-the-Queen, sister of a queen-under-the-Queen, Koldunya Ognya could steward a realm as well as any - 

But she had no powers. No power, no magic, no hope.

So she obtained it. And now she is the Witch of Flames, tyrant of Sinaria; now those born to magic are her slaves, purchased abroad from fathers who did not want a mistress's brat contending with the wife's and mothers who could no longer hide their daughters from the witch-hunter, and she may drink their magic to replenish her own, unleashing the devouring flames on any animated corpse or sorcerer that dares to threaten her power. The Sons of Flame are behind her as an army, and the shattered remnants of the forces of the self-proclaimed and now utterly destroyed Living God rally to her banner, a banner which will one day fly over all of Ustalav -

Minor correction, here: The Living God is not "utterly destroyed." He's not "slain." He's still giving us spells, TRAITOR AND HERETIC WHO DARES TO BLASPHEME AGAINST THE MAJESTY OF THE LIVING GOD, RAZMIR!

Lake Kavapesta was once the center of the Pharasmin faith in Razmiran. In one sense, it probably still is; that is, geographically. But its cathedral has been turned into a temple of the Living God, and its priests have been butchered, and for the reason of its long and hard resistance to Razmiran tyranny, it was the place where Razmir's armies gathered most - and where, after the conquest of Razmiran, most refugees traveled. It is not a Great Power; Razmir could challenge the Great Powers of Avistan, but only in the specific sense that he could personally blow up their cities if they tried anything. But compared to most of the warlords of northern Ustalav? It might as well be. Razmir's priests have healing, Razmir's priests have kill-spells, and Razmir's priests have artifacts forged by the Living God and armies of outsiders summoned by Razmir and still bound to the cause of his servants, not to mention the shackleborn tieflings that Razmir bred for war. Kavapesta will be a foothold with which to conquer the rest of Ustalav, free Razmir, and save the world from the enemies of Razmir and of all humanity.

Did someone say "enemies of all humanity?"

The Worldwound is really under control. Really. The Forces of Law and Good swear it, and they're the Forces of Law and Good, so you can trust them. They are that tiny selection of all entities where, when they prefix factual statements with "I swear," these factual statements will reflect reality.

And we are the rest.

All the rest.

If the watch slackens... if your grip lifts... for instance due to gigantic armies of the undead cutting the supply lines to your fortresses...

We will be ready.

And, faced with these armies of darkness bent on conquering, enslaving, eating and/or just murdering humanity, what, exactly, are the Forces of Light and Law that stand against Evil achieving dominion over Ustalav?

... Well, there's the King of Ustalav.

You know.

I guess.

Reneis Ordranti-Caliphvaso is, probably, the son of royal mistress Millaera Caliphvaso (younger sister of Countess Carmilla "I Swear I'm Not A Vampire" Caliphvaso) and, reputedly, also the son of Prince Valislav Ordranti, usually known as "The Eunuch Prince" for the fact that she was not his only mistress (to say nothing of his wife) and absolutely none of the others had remotely credible pregnancies. The lords of Ustalav did in fact completely ignore him in the line of succession, instead acknowledging Prince Aduard, Reneis's uncle and an experienced military man, as the next "ruler" of Ustulav. Reneis is generally agreed to be a polite young man and nobody has anything bad to say about him, largely because nobody has anything to say about him.

... He's a wizard of the third circle?

This is, of course, because they are instead talking about Countess "I Swear I'm Not A Vampire" herself, Carmilla Caliphvaso, popularly known as "The Queen of Caliphas," one of the dominant figures of Lake Encarthan diplomacy prior to certain regrettable events in Galt. Star of court and salon, expert assassin, and on excellent terms with both the monarchs of Avistan and the ruby-eyed gentlemen of the Caliphvaso sewers (who eliminated Prince Aduard very slightly on her behalf), she looks like she's in her thirties, and has for the past forty years. She helped coordinate Razmir's assassination, and plausibly got another rogue level out of it, which, if true, would make her the most deadly non-vampire in the city. 

... She does not, to be clear, have, like. 

Territory. Armies. Land. The ability to pass a Detect Alignment check as Lawful, Good, or, for that matter, nonevil-after-a-Dispel-Magic-or-three. Her writ runs in "Southern Ustalav," as it is sometimes put, which means her own county of Caliphvaso and most of Versex (arguably the most cursed if least haunted region of Ustalav), and while she would like to establish a tighter dominion over Versex, her writ running anywhere at all is strictly conditional on the aforementioned ruby-eyed gentlemen of the sewers not feeling like killing her.

(They mostly don't. They have... other priorities. Like incurring as close to a 0% yearly chance of being staked as they can.)

Still, she has foreign diplomatic recognition, the wealthiest city in Ustulav to tax in her own Caliphas, and control over the physical capital and physical crown of the nation of Ustalav, for whatever those are worth.

There's also, of course, the people whose job it is. The people who have not been subverted by any evil, who are not in it for themselves, who are actually prepared to make meaningful sacrifices of their own joys for the good of the many, even to devote their life to that genuine good, regardless of the cost. In Golarion, people of this sort tend to get funneled into paladin orders or the churches of Good gods, and such people often find themselves at Lastwall, where they can devote their lives and afterlives to engaging in Lawful Good war against the forces of Evil. In Lastwall, government positions are offered to Good people who seem to have being good at these jobs, and if a lot of these are nobles rather than commoners, Lastwall would point out that nobles have received an unfair advantage in training and childhood nutrition from childhood, and that they are not in this to be equal, they are in this to win a war.

Now, someone from a world with rather less magic might think that all this would all end in a disaster, after perhaps; that people, aiming to be good not to do good would end up optimizing for signaling-goodness, and thereby fail to ever accomplish anything. And this would be a risk, even on Golarion! Except that the show is in fact run by Iomedae, Goddess of Defeating Evil, and the Lord Watcher of Lastwall is not actually chosen from among Her priests, because they are not professionals whose comparative advantage is choosing Lord Watchers of Lastwall - It's the generals who do that - it's Iomedae's priests are, rather, in charge of making sure that everyone in the hierarchy is focused on the job. So the claim that trying-to-be-good is having devastating consequences for Lastwall is, actually, false. What's having devastating consequences for Lastwall is that it set its taxes at the peak point of the Laffer curve when the Worldwound opened and they concluded that optimizing for maximum short-term revenue was necessary to stop the world being overrun by demons.

Or, in other words, Lastwall's actual problem is that there are so, so, so many threats. They were founded to keep the Whispering Tyrant under control, but the Whispering Tyrant happened to live next to the Hold of Belkzen when they trapped him in his fortress, so they also needed to serve as the shield of Avistan against the orcs of Belkzen (against whom they have lost ground), and then the Worldwound opened and guess whose job it is to stop that, and Hell conquered Cheliax from which they drew most of their membership, and - 

Lastwall is generally just in crisis. Too many crises. It wants fewer crises.

What, then, are Lastwall's advantages?

First and simplest: Nobody, actually, wants to go to Hell. Lastwall is the chief force Maximizing Doing Good On The Planet; everyone rich therefore knows - everyone rich as far off as Imperial Lung Wa - that if you are a rich person who has done some shady things in your life, donating lots of money to the Church of Iomedae is the easiest way to escape an evil afterlife, and the Church of Iomedae will then pass it on to Lastwall, and Lastwall will use it for operating funds and/or preventing the destruction of Golarion. Lastwall is therefore much, much richer - and capable of sustaining a much larger and more competent army - than you would expect from its tax base.

Second, they are not dumb. If an Abadarian priest proposes that they would get more taxes over the next five years with a reorganization of their entire taxation structure, they will let him make his case, check his math, and then try to do the thing that maximizes their actual goals, instead of ignoring him, laughing at him, or executing him, as practically everyone else on the continent would. The same applies for almost anyone else with good Ideas; if they go to Lastwall, they can engage in collaborative work to get them implemented or determine they shouldn't be, not get shooed or exploited by those in power.

And, third, they have a comparative advantage in hiring adventurers (or anyone else) both because these adventurers (or other people) credibly know both that Lastwall will Actually Pay, and that they will get Not Going To Hell Points if they do Lastwall missions. The Church of Iomedae really hates the way that they benefit from being able to pay people in Not Going To Hell Points, but they can, actually, do that, and most countries can't.

Oh, and lots of clerics and paladins. Lots and lots. It has those advantages, too.

... And, in the context of Ustalav, it has the western third of the country.

This is not something that came up, much, in histories of the campaigns of Razmir's regime. He was Lawful enough that when an ally said "we purchase the right of these autonomous republican regions to become independent under our protection," he kept his deal, and the giant disaster that was the conquest of Ustalav was contained to the eastern two-thirds, while refugees from Ardeal and Odranto fled to the west side of the Vhatsuntide River. Vieland, Lozeri, and Canterwall occupy the northwest quarter, and the southwest is completely uninhabited Virlych, which Lastwall was founded to contain, and largely uninhabited Amaans, which seems to be Lastwall's on the grounds that nobody else can defend it. All three have at least vaguely popular governments, extant armed forces, and popular militias that will eagerly rally to defend their borders.

And, right now, they have subsidies from Lastwall to triple the size of their armies real real fast, and Lastwall is hiring drillmasters to train the Palatine militias and engineers to try to build defensive constructions on the west bank of the Vhatsuntide and put out the call that it's looking for famed adventurers out to kill undead, because it can teleport those up with bags of gold a lot faster than it can teleport up armies and supplies for armies.

(It is using money that otherwise would have gone into repairing and expanding Worldwound fortifications for that. Lastwall has lots of resources, not infinite resources.)

It formerly had the advantage of a really, really good spymaster, who was also an eighth circle wizard. Then he successfully pitched the government on allying with Razmir to remove Razmir as a Chelish ally (minimal goal), get lots of ninth circle magical support such as in road building (expected goal), improve conditions in Razmiran (expected goal), and build a secret Lawful Evil god who could construct his own afterlife and steal souls from Asmodeus (stretch goal), a plot which ended in their spymaster getting killed (bad) and damned to Hell (bad) with the loss of almost their entire spy network in Cheliax (terrible), Razmiran being annexed by Galt (good), Ustulav being conquered by Razmiran (bad) and then collapsing (terrible) to a united Whispering Way (there are, technically, other things that are worse than this).

What are Lastwall's actual top goals, that look potentially at all achievable under these circumstances? They want to keep the Worldwound from getting worse. They're pretty sure the gods can do it if they're fine with creating a new ocean from Lake Encarthan through Mendev and a ten percent chance of destroying all life on Golarion, and that they will be fine with it if the situation gets worse. Lastwall would like to do better than that. They want the Whispering Tyrant not to be awakened. They want to not have to accept the concessions Cheliax would demand for fixing this (if, horrifying thought, it is even within Cheliax's power to fix.) They want Iomedae to not have to make huge concessions to Urgathoa, goddess of disease, gluttony, and undeath, in order to take her new favorite playing pieces off the board, or to all the other Evil gods to do it against her opposition. After that, they would like it if the Whispering Way did not kill very many people or do very much damage before its inevitable collapse into backstabbing.

... They would, sort of, like Lastwall to keep existing. They think it would be bad if Lastwall stopped existing. It's good, to have a purely Good organization that is not under the thumb of whoever the most powerful warlord in Avistan is.

This is a problem because of just what the obvious way to solve every problem they possess is.

The First Consul of Galt objects to this description. Cyprian is not a warlord, but a faithful servant of the people of Galt. Under his rule, defeat has become victory, worthless paper solid gold, chaos become order. A new law code has been codified and received praise from Nirmathas to Osirion, the tax system has been rebalanced to be both fair on the people and capable of supplying the national deficit, endless purges of whoever was least politically fortunate (or least politically murderous) replaced by a policy of recruiting and promoting all regardless of political affiliation. His post of First Consul was created to the celebration of the crowd, desperate for something other than the frank butchery that had characterized all previous regimes, his constitution received by a larger majority than any other for the balance it struck between radicals on the one hand and conservatives on the other. He has widened the streets of Isarn to permit light and air to enter the metropolis, and even now is the primary champion of Good against that abomination of tyranny and monarchy, the Chelish state.

No, Cyprian is not an evil man, nor a cruel one.

He just really, really likes conquering things.

Cyprian spends most of his time at war. Occasionally, whoever Cyprian is fighting will surrender, and when they do that, he briefly reorganizes their state as a republic, organizes a constitution, arranges their contribution to the revolutionary treasury, sends most of his army home to reorganize, and then he is briefly at peace until he goes and conquers someone else.

He does not... lose... wars. That's just not a thing that happens, or more accurately, it happens to other people, not Cyprian. 

Because he's Cyprian.

This cycle most recently played out in Razmiran, now a liberated republic instead of a false theocracy, and basically the only place he's invaded that was actually grateful for Galtan armies to come rolling in, with religious tolerance for all non-evil gods yes including Erastil who even bans the worship of Erastil. He is now looking at the borders of Ustalav with a seriously considering look on his face. It would be somewhere he would be popular. It would be good for his alignment and his soldiers' alignment. It could help get the support of the Good churches behind him, even in the liberated republics that are not Razmiran. It would bring him closer to the Worldwound, where so much Chelish might is based.

And it would be something to conquer.

So, then, is this all the pieces of the board? Is this the complete list of everyone who is going to horrifically meddle with the political situation in Ustalav, to the probable detriment of the poor tormented population?

Well, no.

Absolutely not, in fact.

But, you know, let's not let the political situation get too complicated yet.

After all, we have a military situation to pay attention to.

The campaign, of course, began with the night of blood and terror that the free vampires of Ustalav unleashed before returning to their tombs, but that was only a foreshadowing of the terror that would come.

Ksiaze/Csaszar/Mor did not march his troops out of the deep mountains, for that would alert the living that there was a threat. He had his undead servants use disposable skeletons and Stone Shape spells to dig a great tunnel, first down from the cellars of his fortress, then north through the bedrock, modeled after the wide enough for fifteen skeletons to march abreast. The last work on it was only completed the day of the attack, so when the undead army emerges from a valley in southeastern Ardeal it completely bypasses what defenses existed against the necromancer-lords, because it assumed they would not deliberately steal the corpses of dwarvish artisans, raise them as undead to steal all their secrets, and then use that to spend a century digging a tunnel that was completely pointless for all purposes except launching a surprise attack.

Kind of a dumb mistake, really.

And what is this deadly army, that Wielki Ksiaze has unleashed upon the world?

Is it, basically, just a bunch of skeletons and zombies, and a single-digit number of the powerful undead with their own companies of skeletons and zombies that he controls through necrofeudalism? Because skeletons are about a match for a trained warrior apiece, sure, and zombies might be a little tougher but they're unbearably slow, and they can't use weapons, but the traditional Avistani army before Cyprian was in the tens of thousands.

(The question of why undead armies do not dominate the entire planet, given that they don't need to eat, at least has to be asked. But, when asked, it turns out that the general answer is very simple.)

Well, uh.

No.

Wielki Ksaize is good at his job.

Graverobbing dwarven masons? Yes, yes, sure. If you have an international graverobbing operation anyway.

And why does Wielki Ksiaze have an international graverobbing operation?

You see, it happens that, every once in a while - standard necromancy textbooks, if you learn wizardry somewhere like Cheliax that has standard necromancy textbooks, will tell you nobody knows why or how to tell in advance - a skeleton or zombie raised through Animate Dead will rise as a skeletal champion or zombie lord, an unusually powerful undead that keeps its full skills from life, while gaining undead resistances and losing any petty shackles of morality that held it back, in possession of free will and a mind of full mortal cunning. (It will then usually kill the necromancer who raised it, since most people don't like being undead.)

In the opinion of Wielki Ksiaze, who has a phylactery and therefore does not need to worry about blowing himself up, "nobody knows why" is the answer of a godsdamned coward, "nobody knows how to tell in advance" is a question that should be asked after a 200-year research project rather than before, and "most people" means "find the people who disagree."

Every culture has, somewhere, an one or more organizations with the duty of disposing of bodies, and Wielki Ksiaze has made it his second-highest priority to infiltrate as many of these organizations as possible that have access to the corpses of powerful Evil (ideally Lawful Evil) wizards, assassins, and especially warriors. If the bodies are buried, quietly exhuming them when nobody is paying attention and teleporting them to his stronghold is simple; if the bodies are burned, arranging substitutions is harder, but it can still, often be done. These are, of course, organized in a cell system where no one knows precisely where they are sending the bodies to, and every few years a band of adventurers discovers and rolls up one wing of his organization, but this is simply an operating cost in Golarion.

Because, you see, once someone has spent a year or two in an Evil afterlife, they are very, very grateful when Wielki Ksiaze digs them up, raises them as a skeletal champion with his special Create Undead variant, and pitches them on "so I invented Mark Two undeath and I plan on inventing Mark Three undeath, which is less terrible, once I've got my empire back, but until then, aren't you grateful you're back on Golarion?"

It is in fact possible there are more Hellknights working for Wielki Ksiaze than for Cheliax.

Iomedae isn't the only one who can pay in Not Going To Hell Points.

- And so Wielki Ksiaze does not, actually, have a retinue of sixty skeletons that can kill civilian commoners, he has a retinue of four hundred years' worth of oathsworn champions recruited from the Chelish civil war and the tyrannies of Irissen and the orc-lords of the Hold of Belkzen, with the skills they mastered in life, freed from Hell and Abaddon and the Abyss, clad in armor of black steel laid away in oil for the day they would be needed and bearing deadly weapons forged for their own hands by master Lawful Evil smiths who labor in death as they did in life.

(They are, actually, mostly using nonmagical or barely-enchanted weapons and armor, vastly less powerful than they wielded in life. Wielki Ksiaze has not actually came up with a good way of turning his resources into money without revealing himself, and the handful of magic shops he and his underliches supply basically have basically all their profits routed into keeping his graverobbing operations going. And he's per capita very short of channeled energy, relying pretty heavily on antipaladins of Gorum and Urgathoa, who you should really not have to rely on.

He still has more adventurer-caliber soldiers in his army than, plausibly, everyone else in Ustalav combined.)

And so his army erupts onto the fields of Ardeal, under the iron discipline they have trained under while they serve him, and his contingents begin marching, cutting west across the fields towards Ardis (ancient capital of Ustalav before its removal to Caliphvaso) and fanning out as they move to seize castles, towns, fortresses, before any resistance to their activities can form more meaningful than that of petty local lords.

(One might, perhaps, note, looking at a map of Ustalav, that Kavapesta, stronghold of the Razmirans, perhaps ought to be directly within the natural path north out of the mountains of Ulcazar where he made his lair, if he had not done an elaborate dog-leg bend to bypass it.)

(One might note that, and consider just what it meant.)

Chiefly, it means that the state of New Razmiran is in danger. They have crystal balls, they have scouting-demons; they can see just how surrounded they are. It isn't just Wielki Ksiaze coming up from the east; other undead are swarming straight north out of Ulcazar towards and west out of hidden fortresses in Amaans towards the Senir River, and their channeling does not work on undead, which is a weakness they would prefer not to share just at the moment. (It does explain why the undead aren't attacking immediately, though, if they think that they can surround them first.)

Kavapesta has been an excellent fortress, but Ardis, just up the Senir River, would get them the diplomatic advantage of controlling the capital of Ustulav, the ability to link up with the Palatines to engage in mutually beneficial trade, and has no visible disadvantage. Time to load up their riverboats with all their loyalists and head north around the river before the undead cut off their line of retreat.

Just as planned.

There are not a great many underwater undead, and there are as many water elementals that can search the riverbed for skeletons, so Ksiaze does not, actually, have a river ambush planned; the undead cutting off their line of retreat were mindless fools or nameless allies, not his disciplined legions, for he intended to make Ardeal the center of his return to power, not simply a scene of slaughter.

- But there was chaos in Ardis. The night of blood in Ardis was not a long night, with so much of the garrison south in Kavapesta; when it ended the duchess still fanning herself in her chambers, glazed eyes straight ahead as she insists that there's no danger, Razmir promised he'd fix that, a very kind gentleman, while her daughters and their husbands bicker over the question of authority. The countess's knights were dead or gone, the Razmiran vicar, control of the countyside cut, officials in charge of tax administration all dead, the town guard slain at their posts or fled. In a sack, all crimes become legal, property up for whoever can hold it; no one can stop fires if they burn out of control, or shield the innocent from murder and assault without greater strength of their own.

Under these circumstances, it's natural to turn to those people who have actual experience with dangerous situations, and who might have survived the night of blood when the vampires attacked.

That is to say, retired adventurers.

Ailson Kindler is generally accepted as both the richest and the scariest of the retired adventurers who did not die in the Night of Blood, being Avistan's premier gothic novelist. Basically everyone who has read one of her novels - who is, to be clear, everyone literate in Ardis; she writes for the penny papers - has run into her being seduced, tortured, and psychologically scarred by vampires who she nevertheless killed at the end of the book. Vampires who, let us be clear, formerly tormented the people of Ustalav, in her parents' generation, and who have not been seen since she retired.

Also, she can write stories that give you magical fighting abilities. (Ah, Golarion.)

She's kind of the obvious choice to pick to lead the city's defense, really.

... But, unfortunately, while she leads a sizable fraction of the population, it is also the case that she isn't the only leader they're accepting.

Ardis was once the capital of Ustalav, and still has an aristocracy sized for the capital of Ustalav, even as the productive population has greatly diminished. A generation ago, there was a war with Barstoi, when bold young noblemen rode off to free their lands from Count Neska's invasion; their ghosts still haunt the ruined Furrows. That was, though, a generation ago; in the years since the population of swaggering young braves who insist the commoners treat them with respect because their great-great-grandfathers were heroes and claim eagerness to do the same has only increased.

Dalis Marchand is plausibly their leader; he was briefly an adventurer (killed some ghouls, an ogre...) and is generally better with a blade than most of them, stronger and faster.

Ailson has the literate poor, Ailson has the sensible adults, Ailson has the adventuring community, and Dalis Marchand has the idiots with swords who didn't all get killed by vampires.

But, you know. There's a lot more idiots with swords than there are retired adventurers.

Yup.

So the banners of New Razmiran fly up towards a city divided against itself, where a half-trained militia quarrels with bravos and adventurers. 

Erna The Regnant Vision, archpriest of Razmiran, will bother to deliver the demand that they open the gates to the authority of Razmir and accept His divine authority.

Ailson Kindler will be happy to negotiate with her in person! This will probably be a trap but she works very well in a trap.

She thinks that the Razmiran government should ally with everyone else who is not undead, against the undead, who are trying to kill them all. How does that answer work for everyone?

VETO.

You aren't negotiating in person, you're hiding in the city. Shush.

... No, really, let's be clear about this? You haven't made it past second circle spells. You aren't appointed by the Countess. You don't control your city.

How about, we continue doing whatever we were doing, you submit to our authority the way you did last time we were here, and you join us in helping defend the city?

Is that "you" sufficiently plural to include the church of Pharasma?

No, why?

No deal.

Throw the traitor in jail, we have a city to conquer!

(The nature of the conquest will not actually be particularly up to debate. There's a level of skill you get to where you retire, as an adventurer; mostly between the point where you can cast Fireball and the point where you can cast Teleport. The upper level of this power is, in fact, almost, but not quite, on par with the outsiders Razmir provided his army with, the survivors of which teleported to New Razmiran along with all the other Razmiran survivors.)

But it is difficult to keep your troops properly disciplined when you've just taken a large, rich city, isn't it? Especially if you aren't even that Lawful? It's so easy for them to swarm into the streets and the cities, slaughter the peasantry... so hard for them to man the walls.

Ksiaze himself is leading an army straight at Ardis, with the main bulk of his forces. One of Ksiaze's under-liches has Teleported in to manage the submission of Kavapesta. Another is - where is that other?

New Razmiran is discovering there's still an undead army hidden in the sewers of Ardis because, what, everyone else was too distracted to check?

Not still. Again. My good friends moved out, and my servants moved in.

An undead army of highly-trained champions, many of whom have fought your sacristans and kolaryuts before when they were alive!

- Oh, how are the kolaryuts feeling about serving someone who broke a sacred agreement to negotiate under terms of peace, when they are inevitables solely dedicated to the preservation of contracts?

Technically I made no promise to her that I would let her go -

- contract termination subject to adjudication in Axis - you can't do this! No, I will not invoke the penalty clauses in my next life if it is legally proved - get back here!

There is still, actually, a battle. A force of orcish berserkers nothing but rage and bones, roaring their battle cries as they charge a shackleborn line, tearing it apart with their great axes as the masked priest first hurls fireballs and then Dimension Doors out. A sacristan bellowing the howl of deeper darkness as its chain lashes out, only to be brought down by a pair of Hellknights buried in their order-armor who simply do not care how dreadful its howl is, for it is less dread than Hell. Grave knights of Taldor riding winged, stitched-together horrors of dozens of corpses charge hovering air elementals who rip their mounts to pieces (they can be new-made) but are brought down by their cursed spells nonetheless...

... By the time the battle is over, the remnants of New Razmiran have fled upriver.

And the Grand Prince of Taldor rules the "ancient" capital of Ustalav.

And Ailson Kindler escapes her cell onboard the ship with half of the Regnant Vision's magic items, a couple of defectors, and an idea for her next book, because, you know, adventurer.

More fighting is, of course, taking place elsewhere in the country.

There is very little conflict in the south, but there is some; there are Razmiran priests in distant holdings who have not yet been purged, and lords who do not respect the authority of the new monarch.

Her nephew can handle some of this, of course; he'll need real risk to gain the experience he needs to fend off assassins, more than the carefully-managed challenges she's put him through so far, though she'll make sure there are priests outside the spell blast area with Raise Dead diamonds. You know. Just in case. Her chief focus is on making sure that the remnants of Aduard's army support their new monarch, and if it takes a few assassinations, well... that's all right with her.

This will provoke small-scale revolts!

Stab stab stab torture stab stab stab brainwash stab stab stab did you miss the part where she's the equivalent for lethal politics and assassination of an archmage.

The new Prince of Ustalav is going to try to lead armies in battle! He's in decent physical shape and a third-circle wizard. How hard can it be.

... The new Prince of Ustalav is going to take twelve arrows to the face, which will bounce off because Protection from Arrows, Mage Armor, Shield, and various other enchantments from army wizards.

The Prince of Ustalav will put down the extremely minor rebellions and not get much XP out of it.

And soon Free Ustalav has all of Caliphas secure, and its armies move to properly secure western Versex, where lie county's largest towns and the start of the Razmiran Road.

Eastern Versex, of course, is another story.

Eastern Versex is a part of the world where buried horrors lurk, where tiny villages say "we don't want strangers here" and anyone who stays overnight is never seen again, where every other church worships a nightmare-god from the Dark Tapestry forgotten in all parts of the world save itself (different nightmare-gods for different villages), where if an abandoned house is just haunted or a noble family just has a mad relative in the attic you're lucky.

It is plausibly more cursed than any other part of Ustalav, which is saying something. Razmir's road cuts through it as little as possible, but it does need to hit Lantern Lake.

The most powerful warlord in eastern Versex is, however, not one of these at all.

There has been a ghoul burrow near Lantern Lake for centuries; the ghouls have raided lightly-defended settlements, but have largely been content with the findings of the marsh, flesh of fish and beasts and only the occasional graveyard raid. They have not, particularly, had plans to expand; expansion is risky. It might lead to paladins noticing you - and ghouls are not, in the strong sense, immortal, and are damned if they die. Why risk it all to gain what he will soon lose?

Uuuuup until Wielki Ksiaze bribed him and everyone else at the Conclave of the Whispering Way with secret dark knowledge if he swore an endless campaign of war against Lastwall and threatened everyone with destruction as a traitor if they did not join in.

That is, broadly, enough for Pakhhan, sixth-circle ghast necromancer, to get off his ass and start conquering Versex. Lantern Lake - the key junction of the Razmiran Road - is his, and his next step is to continue expanding the control of the swamp ghouls over Eastern Versex and western Varno, and so onwards until all of Ustalav belongs to the undead!

Mmm. Well. The swamp people are heretics and demon-worshippers anyway, and their Count is a nonentity. The Queen of Caliphas will continue organizing and drilling her forces before starting a war; the fundamental structure of the necromantic system limits the ghouls' ability to mass forces, and, frankly, she would rather pay some adventurers to do it. Her top priority after securing the economically valuable territory in Western Varno is securing diplomatic recognition from the world at large for her nephew's rule, which will both increase her access to foreign aid from the church organizations and make hiring adventurers to solve all of her problems much easier.

To continue this southwest-to-northeast sweep of southern and eastern Ustalav, it is time to move further north.

Northern Versex (north of Eastern Versex; sorry the map isn't more helpful) is separated from Eastern Versex by the swampy Forest of Veils in the south of the border, a spur of the Hungry Mountains in the western border, and it is actually pretty good farmland. Somewhat swampy, yes, but they still grow valuable crops in the soggy ground, and the ground is mostly cleared farms instead of occupied by wasteland and forest, making it much harder for monsters to go around, and Razmir's road is a pretty nice addition to a region whose key shortage is infrastructure more than population.

The North may, in theory, be slightly less haunted than the other parts of Versex, overall, but Carrion Hill makes up for that. On a scale of Least to Most Haunted regions of Ustalav, Carrion Hill is an outlier, and an outlier beyond all others if you limit it to areas that more than a thousand humans live in. Yes, more haunted than Odranto and its doomed and cursed family dominated by the rotting skull of their vicious ancestor, yes, more haunted than Ardis and its millennia of accumulated ghosts; yes, more haunted than Caliphvaso and its nation of vampires living in the sewers. Carrion Hill has a death rate comparable only to Awaiting Consumption, and has been continually inhabited from the time of the first Kellid settlers to the present in spite of all the times the entire population mysteriously disappeared and it had to be completely resettled.

Officially speaking, the disappearances are the product of ghouls in the sewers. Pakhhan would disagree; the oldest ghouls in his tribe when he was turned were aware that their ancestors had once lived in Carrion Hill, and they got the hell out of there because it's Carrion Hill. Attempts to interrogate the ghosts of the first settlers about the city involved the discovery that the mound the old city is founded on is not, actually, the sort of mounds that continuous habitation causes when you keep knocking down old houses and building new houses on them. What is it? Hell if anyone knows! The Church of Pharasma suggests nobody pokes it.

Carrion Hill is not, at present, dominated by warlords! Mayor Vanton Heggry has a level of paranoia appropriate for someone correctly averaging the correct level of threat that Carrion Hill poses across history, rather than the level it poses if you only average the past century. He spends quite a lot of his city's tax income on the Crows, the black-clad city guard who have the job of putting down cults of the Old Gods (haha) and patrolling the ruins for ghouls, morlocks, and similar people-eaters, and the Crows, unlike most city watches, have enough actual experience (see "It's Carrion Hill") to be a functional military force, at least in defense of the city walls that Mayor Heggry has made sure in good repair since his two northern neighbors started a war.

There's some kind of horrible monster in the sewers eating people who nobody has ever seen, but, you know, that's just business as usual for Carrion Hill.

Nonetheless, the undead would like to conquer it.

Presently, the undead who would like to conquer it is Kolothure Hellblade, one of the many independent warlords in Ustalav, who was not, actually, one of the undead at the Conclave of the Way, a fact that might, under some circumstances, prove important. That was the former master of her forces, ancient nosferatu-vampire Vilyer; the Hellblade was not at the meeting because she was dead, the enchanted adamantine armor bearing her soul floating in a vat of acid - also courtest of Vilyer. The vat, not the soul.

Let's back up.

Born of a mortal man and a champion of Hell, the Hellblade forsook her infernal heritage for the simple task of engaging in as much brutal warfare as is possible, abandoning lord after lord as soon as their wars were concluded to seek out another to whom she could turn her sword, ultimately transforming from mercenary to warlord around the same time Gorum made her His chosen, thanks to running out of battles to fight. When she was finally put down her raging spirit did not depart her body, and though aeon after aeon she was slain, each time her spirit rose again, clinging to the indestructible armor that her patron had blessed for her so that she could live again.

So, when an oath required all undead to unleash their secret weapons upon the world, Vilyer, who already had her corpse sitting in his laboratory, provided her with a highly expendable army, magic items, drained the acid from her containment tank, and hightailed it over to a backup fortress to work on his next plot against Lastwall before she decided that he would be more interesting to murder than whoever was running Carrion Hill today.

Her army is not very large; the elder breed of vampires, the nosferatu, cannot create spawn as their moroi cousins can, and all necromancers who Vilyer trusted he took with him. Nonetheless, she commands a few hundred skeletons, zombies, and assorted other minions, as well as whatever petty undead she happened to find on the way and the trembling apprentices who greeted her rebirth.

(Kolothure Hellblade was, broadly, willing to trust the judgement of Vilyer that he stood no chance of defeating her, and would therefore be uninteresting to fight. Carrion Hill also stands no chance of defeating her, but guiding mortals to indulge in war is a minor virtue for a cultist of Gorum, at least a cultist of those virtues of Gorum which she embodies.)

She will, however, allow them to surrender first, striding up to their gates in full armor, complete with a horned helm to fit her actual horns and great metal wings over her actual wings to demand that they join her army, flee like the Gorum-cursed cowards they are, or allow her to bring glory to them both by meeting them in battle.

Mayor Vanton Heggry will consider his options.

In brief, he can either let the first undead warlord who tries run over his city, or see if Carrion Hill can stop the aforementioned first undead warlord. Or he can try to be clever.

He is, sensibly, a worried man. 

He tries to be clever, and suggests that probably she could find someone much tougher to fight -

I'll fight you today and them tomorrow.

... Right.

Can he write down a list of all the very powerful Evil entities and trade this for -

WHY DOES EVERYONE TRY TO BE SO ABADARAN WITH HER?

She points at the mayor. "I will ride back to my army now. You may surrender before I get there, or you may die. This is now your choice."

- Evacuate everyone you can by river and see what the Crows can do about one big scary undead and a bunch of skeletons and zombies.

And the Crows will man the walls, and - 

- And Kolothure Hellblade will blow a couple of thirty-foot-wide holes in the walls and order her undead armies to swarm through!

The Crows can, actually, Just Beat an army of a couple hundred skeletons and zombies, even with the enormous morale shock of their walls not actually mattering. They have pikes and shortswords for zombies and maces for skeletons, and they live in Ustalav, they know what they're doing.

It just does not, actually, matter. Kolothure's mob of skeletons and zombies will be massacred; her petty undead have no chance against trained and well-disciplined troops, even a town guard like the Crows. Her necromancers will fall back once they're out of spells, she will sigh, and then she will kill every one of the Crows. Individually. With a big sword. If they run away she supposes she will not bother to pursue, but it is not, actually, possible for a nonmagical weapon to hurt her, and their pathetic wizards lack the power to scratch her hide.

Once the Crows are dead, Kolothure will order them brought back, personally dominate any loose undead she can find, and start planning her next conquest.

Well, that's Versex!

... Actually, the terrifying horror from beneath the sewers that tries to destroy her sanity and/or eat her when she goes down there hunting for it is properly Versex. She and the fact that she kills it with an unholy sword and comes out with a smile on her rotting lips, are really more Ulcazar or Virlych.

But that covers the geopolitical situation in Versex.

Next up is Barstoi! The Hellknights have established control over the capital of Vische, and they're sending patrols to all the other towns that are at all meaningful and to reinforce their main defensive castles on their eastern and western border, and they've started trying to recruit the remnants of the previous count's forces wherever they've gone and to Raise any sufficiently powerful knights or Hellknights who didn't survive the night of blood. They advertise religious tolerance of all Lawful deities, permission to use arcane magic with negligible restrictions, and very enthusiastic killing of undead, to grudging tolerance from the populace.

Once that's secured, they'll start patrolling the Razmiran road north to Sinaria and south through the hopefully now less haunted Furrows to Carrion Hill, to see what the situation is on the new and exciting major economic artery that's just developed and that they would like to be able to tax.

Koldunya Ognya is, as a fellow Lawful Evil monarch, happy to discuss terms for international tariffs and mutual defense agreements with the Order of the Pyre! 

... You know our entire purpose is to wipe out demon-worshippers like you, right?

Daemon employees, please.

We're watching you.

... The Church of Pharasma would like to suggest that the Order of the Pyre shouldn't persecute it.

The Church of Pharasma is not Lawful, but it admittedly does have Lawful priests, and has been part of a Lawful system of government in the past.

We would still rather not work with you, but we are Lawful, and so can cooperate.

So: These are the required tithe-sharing agreements. We demand all priests in administrative positions above this rank be Lawful. And we're drafting you to help fight undead.

... Acceptable given the local apocalypse, the Church of Pharasma supposes.

So, how's the campaign against the undead going?

Well, as it happens, the first Hellknight scouts made it through the Furrows to Carrion Hill, a bit late.

So. In unfortunate manner.

Kolothure does not, particularly, bother to butcher the population of Carrion Hill. They're too weak to be a challenge; to be meaningful, conflict must have the possibility that the weaker side can triumph. Tyranny is not war, it is the domain of Asmodeus; slaughter is not war, it is the domain of the demon lords.

But she's not going to stop other people from doing it. She's Evil, and Gorum doesn't disapprove of picking on the weak, the way He disapproves of very powerful people carefully negotiating to resolve all their problems without any conflict, He's just agnostiic to it. So while she pens up her enslaved undead so they won't pose a traffic hazard, she does nothing whatsoever to stop her necromancer or ghoul minions from doing whatever murdering or oppressing they feel like during the spare hours she is not focusing on intensely drilling them into a ruthlessly efficient fighting force; if she's been hired under terms, she obeys them, but if not, that's fundamentally irrelevant to her nature.

But it is not a decimated population that Kolothure rules over, merely a distracted one, when the Hellknight scouts make it to the north side of the Kingfisher.

At which point she has a new priority.

"SERVE! OR! DIE!"

The Hellknight party was sufficiently well-armed and well-armored to go straight through the Furrows like a hot knife through butter; that is, they were mostly adventurer-class, veterans of many campaigns and full members of the Order with Worldwound experience.

Kolothure Hellblade is somewhere on the "legendary hero from a forgotten age" tier, with Remek Czaszar. Razmir and the Whispering Tyrant and, you know, probably Felandriel Morgethai, are stronger than her.

Some of them get away.

Okay, this is a problem. It is not really an Order of the Pyre specialized problem, or a Cheliax specialized problem. It is the kind of problem that you hire four to six high-level adventurers to solve.

Any adventurers of appropriate power scale out there interested in doing this? Anyone?

Yeah, Kolothure has decided her army isn't scary enough, so she's decided to infect the entire population of Carrion Hill with ghoul fever, on the grounds that (a) anyone strong enough to survive deserves it, (b) anyone too weak will transform into a stronger, scarier ghoul who she can then draft into her army, and (c) Urgathoa might give her some clerics or paladins if she does and then her army will be better at crushing the world beneath her iron boot.

The entire population of Carrion Hill that can get away flees east in whatever boats they can find, or south along the Razmiran Road, or north along it through the Furrows because this still seems better than Kolothure's lunatic tyranny.

So, there is a very strange thing about the Order of the Pyre, that may confuse people who go "ah, this is the Chelish puppet state in Barstoi," as so many do.

They are not, technically, Evil.

Lictor Rouen Stought despises the gods and all their works, and, yes, despises Asmodeus. Cheliax is a cruel, inefficient tyranny. The point of Law is Law. Cheliax has a few advantages over other states but is basically a completely dysfunctional disaster.

And, sorry to say this, infecting the entire population of a city ? Is just too evil for Lictor Stought. The armies of the Pyre mobilize and march south in force, to escort the refugees of Carrion Hill into Barstoi and secure control of the city for the forces of Law and order. 

EXCELLENT YES, COME TO ME MY ENEMIES, COME, COME

The Order of the Pyre has, actually, heard of Kolothure Hellblade. They know, broadly, what sort of enemy she is; they know she cannot be harmed by fire, poison, cold, or lightning, is resistant to all other elements, is impossible for any wizard below Razmir's level to successfully enchant, and in addition to being massively armored and impossible to harm with nonmagical weapons smaller than a ballista had adamantine armor that will reduce the impact of any other blows.

Nonetheless.

The Order of the Pyre?

Has archers.

As is usually the case, the fight is a few hundred lesser undead, the Hellblade, and some necromancers trying to stay well out of the way - 

(this time reinforced by a few packs of ghouls, who have not yet learned or relearned tactics, and the reformed Crows, who do not want to be here but have undead on all sides of them)

- 

Against three hundred armigers, trained veterans but not at the adventurer level that the Hellknights demand of their full members, a hundred true Hellknights (one in five signifiers, almost always arcane), another three hundred militia archers and slingers, and twenty or thirty clerics of Pharasma. Not the full might of the order, but all the troops they could spare under the circumstances.

Kolothure is not ignorant of tactics, for all her lust for battle, and it is to be expected she will draw up her troops in a reasonably capable formation, lead them bravely, and by her might blast holes in the defensive fortifications of the Order which her troops can exploit. The clerics among their infantry are ready to Bless and Channel, the glaive-wielding armigers readied in a half-moon to defend against superior numbers -

- But the might of the Hellknights is not, largely, drawn up in massed ranks of horsemen, ready to charge into and trample underfoot the ranks of the enemy infantry; the signifiers have not readied fireballs, to blast her formations to pieces themselves. The signifiers have spent most of their spells of second circle on Resist Fire and Cat's Grace or Bull's Strength, most of their spells of the first circle on Magic Weapon, and most of their spells of the third circle on Haste.

And the Hellknight warriors have gathered in a solid square, the most High Priest of Pharasma ready among them, their horses held by their grooms ready to mount, with longbows ready.

"FOR GORUM!" as the sweeping shadow lifts herself, an aura of dread and fear surrounding her, great wings blocking out the sky, great blade in a single hand as her steel claws and vicious fangs are drawn back in a shout of joy -

(Kolothure Hellblade: AC 30 [+1 dex, +11 armor, +2 deflection [vs Law], +6 natural armor], DR 10/magic and 3/-, 180ish HP.)

"IN THE NAME OF THE LAW!"

And eighty hellknights with hastily-transmuted +1 Composite Longbows shoot her simultaneously.

(Typical Hellknight: +15/+15/+10 [+7/+7/+2 BaB, +3 dex [Cat's Grace], +1 enhancement, +2 Smite Chaos, +1 morale [Bless], +1 haste], 1d8+9 damage)

(summed damage over 1 round, after DR: 605, approximately)

They start at quite long range, so she holds out more than the three seconds of concentrated fire it would take to kill her at point-blank range and gives her a few chances to heal herself, but the actual consequences are inevitable. Her necromancers flee when she goes down, and her army either flees, surrenders or, being undead, fights to the last.

(This is why the undead have not previously tried to rule openly, in Ustalav.)

And the Hellknights, not having the faintest notion of how to permanently destroy her but knowing The Basics about Why You Do Not Steal Graveknight Armor, will "liberate" Carrion Hill, establish hospitals for those recovering from ghoul fever with glaive-wielding armigers standing by just in case, and then disassemble her enchanted armor and store it in several tanks of acid.

Continuing the counterclockwise sweep, one reaches Sinaria, where the Red Witch reigns uncontested, largely because she was the only person on the continent, during the entire Night of Blood, to actually destroy vampires.

(Two of them, admittedly, but it was at that point they broke and run before they learned she'd drained her Devouring Flames power dry doing it.)

The forces Razmir left have been suborned, eliminated, or exiled, but the Red Witch is, by the standards of seventh circle arcane spellcasters, not very ambitious. She sends scouts south to the northern corners of Barstoi and west to Odranto, looking for easy-to-exploit ground, but Koldunya Ognya does not think conquest is a very high priority, not compared to securing her gains and returning to her slaving ways. Ustulav is, after all, of interest to her only as a springboard to return to her home in Irissen in conquest; she is as comfortable returning to her life of slave trading and being named a queen as she is actually ruling her domains, and more comfortable than going off to campaign in dangerous wars at her steadily increasing age.

Odranto is not, right now, being tremendously exciting! The young count and his fiancée evacuated to Caliphas after the night of blood with everyone they could take with them (by hired teleport, the roads aren't safe), which is frank cowardice but (people whisper) well, wouldn't you do the same? He appointed one of the barons as regent, but mostly authority has devolved to whoever currently has troops.

(There are not, actually, a large number of old and powerful undead in Odranto. There is Malyas the Red Tyrant, and Malyas is enough for any province all by himself, but Malyas either doesn't care about recent events or else hasn't noticed them. So far the barons are handling them.)

... And as for what will happen when the flotilla bearing the remnants of New Razmiran arrives in Odranto, well, that's another question.

But it hasn't yet. Let's focus on Round One, shall we?

And then, of course, there's Lastwall and the Palatinates.

It is, basically, reasonable to call Canterwall a protectorate, ruled by its council in consultation with Lastwall's paladins, who are providing a significant part of its defense against both the orcs of Belkzen to the west and Virlych to the south. It is somewhat less so with the others. Lozeri largely consists by land area of the Shudderwood, which largely by mass consists of trees and wolves, and to say that anyone rules it is nonsense, though the Palatine Council in the overgrown farming village of Chastel would certainly like to. It will be quite some time before anyone learns what's been happening in the Shudderwood, let alone is capable of responding. And Vieland is hardly haunted at all! Admittedly there's a thirty-three foot tall egg where the old counts used to live, but it's been five hundred years and it's not like it's hatched, and the intelligent, literate scholars of Leipstadt (the electors here pays proper respect to intelligence) have no time for petty superstitions when they can engage in SCIENCE!!! instead. They'll accept Lastwall's help and send troops to the frontiers, eventually, once the council finishes discussing the latest education bill.

(Admittedly, some of the saner member of the councils will send private adventurers to try to investigate crises in advance, or private guards to try to cover more of the Belkzen border to take pressure off Canterwall. But saner members are few and far between.)

Lastwall is, therefore, going to have to do everything with just the resources Canterwall and a few river towns in Lozeri can support.

The fundamental issue in western Ustulav can be described very neatly: Lastwall would like to reinforce the Palatinates. Between the Shudderwood in the north and the Hungry Mountains in the south, there's a fantastically defensible thirty-mile stretch of the Vhatsuntide that could be fortified, which would shield the vast majority of the Palatine territory from the undead and provide an excellent base for reconquest of Ustalav. Of course, if they fail to hold it, then there's then ten miles of swamp behind two-thirds of it which will absolutely slow down any reinforcement and render the southmost third totally indefensible, losing them tremendous territory and any chance of reclaiming Ardis in the near future.

But to do that, it needs to be able to trust its back.

And in its back is Virlych. Which is where the Whispering Tyrant's stronghold was and is, although he and his servants can no longer leave his tower, it is still a fortress. The last time Lastwall gave a serious try at clearing the entirety of Virlych out was during the Shining Crusade when they had Iomedae and Arazni both working together in person, and that was when Arazni died. Lastwall patrols and raids and does not, really, rule Virlych.

But there is one part of Virlych that the Whispering Tyrant's forces are known to use as a base, that their own spy reports claimed was the center of the active forces of the Whispering Way and the Cult of Urgathoa in the province, which though destroyed in the war remained a refuge for his followers who could not be hunted down, and has ever since been a lair to which they inevitably slink whenever driven from it...

Renchurch. That blade-spired fortress-monastery where the Whispering Tyrant's servants gather amidst the shadows of the Witchgate forest at the entrance to Ustalav. Julian-Raymond Theissen, Precentor Martial for Cavalry, is in fact the person in charge of foreign expeditions (the Precentors Martial were established when the Knights of Ozem were more of an army than a nation and there has been some responsibility drift over the past nine hundred years), and he thinks that that's where the armies of the Tyrant's Faithful are gathered.

The problem, of course, is that if they send only the people they can Teleport, that's a very small force, and if they send a land army, the army needs to travel up to the headwaters of the Path river into Belkzen with the mountains of Virlych looming overhead, fend off the orc tribes, maintain supply lines in hostile and lawless territory, then cross the border into Canterwall and pass through an extremely haunted forest to attack a mighty fortress of the Undead.

(There are reasons they wanted to be able to just go downriver to Caliphas, take a ship along the Lake Encarthan coast, and then make their way up to the Worldwound by road.)

This would be a lot easier if they could negotiate with orcs.

Unfortunately, nobody can negotiate with orcs.

This includes, to the everlasting frustration of the orcs, the orcs.

People argue about why. "When the races were originally created, Lamashtu made the orcs, and she wanted people who would BREED CONQUER KILL, so this is what orcs do." "The influence of Rovagug, whose rage seeped into their bones." "I'd like to see you invent Law and Good on your own if you grew up in a culture that thought the idea was funny." "Evolutionary pressures in the Darklands, where new threats could come from all sides, forced a focus on the short-term at the expense of long-term planning." 

Either way, the evidence is fairly clear: In the Hold of Belkzen, three out of four orcs are Chaotic Evil, and most of the remaining quarter is close. Exactly one tribe in Belkzen has a Good leader, and she's still a slaving warlord, just a slaving warlord who thinks there's Good in everyone and tries to stop slaves from being mistreated too badly and looks after her own people after they've outlived their usefulness to her.

Orcs aren't lawless, to be clear. There are old customs, deep in their bones, that everyone recognizes as needing to be obeyed; You Do Not Kill Members Of Your Tribe, It Is Not A Thing That Happens. The flood truce is obeyed. Duels are recognized and you wait to kill someone in a duel until after he's finished his duel. But, really - if an orc takes money to not kill you, once he has the money, he (statistically speaking) will realize he could keep the money even if he then kills you, which will allow him to feast upon the power of your life to grow stronger. So he either gives up all the money you didn't give him for nothing, or he gets to kill you. It's a really very simple deal!

(It is less that orcs are stupid, you understand, and more that the average orc child's performance on the marshmellow test is "eat the first marshmellow, then try to beat up the adult so I also get the second.")

The person who is most frustrated about this, of course, Grask Uldeth, warlord of the Empty Hand tribe.

It isn't that Grask Uldeth isn't chaotic evil! He is! It isn't that he doesn't go into screaming berserk rages in which he disembowls his enemies with a warhammer, something that is very hard to do, because he does!

It's just that he is capable of doing this at a latter point. He is not only capable of recognizing that it would, actually, make sense to, instead of killing the farmers and taking their stuff, to take part of their food, and then leave them food, so you can do this next year, even though this involves giving up food, but he is capable of doing it. Grask Uldeth is not merely capable of recognizing that it is profitable to let traders through if they pay you lots of money, but of personally beating up any orc who robs traders after they buy a pass, and only those orcs. And via this means he has made himself the single greatest warlord in the whole of Belkzen, ruler of the great orc city of Urgir!

And it still isn't enough because he is practically the only sane person. He's tried picking the smartest orcs and giving them lectures. It hasn't worked. He's tried picking the wisest, and maybe some of the shamans get it a little, but you can't have a tribe ruled by its shaman! Shamans hardly beat people up at all! Deep in his heart, Grask Uldeth is worried about what will come of him when he starts getting old and slow and some bigger, tougher orc shows up to claim his crown, but no solution has yet presented itself.

(It is, to be clear, rumored that the source of Grask Uldeth's brilliance is that in an ancient ruin of fallen ages he found a magical crown which possesses the spirit of Zutha, Runelord of Greed, which has whispered to him in dark ages, spreading his dark council, whispering in his ear the secrets of true magical power and everlasting immortality and guiding him to strategies alien to the orcish race...)

(That story's false, to be clear, Tar-Baphon ate Zutha's soul centuries ago. It was just a normal +2 headband.)

Nonetheless, Grask Uldeth, who is a smart enough person to actually make deals with Lastwall and keep them if the situation doesn't change, is not ruler of the Hold of Belkzen. He is the ruler of the city of Urgir. Anything far enough outside of Urgir that his secret police (of course he has secret police, what do you take him for, a person without summed enhanced mental stats over 50?*) can't let him know about it, and where he can't just take Zone of Truth testimony about it, and he can't go invading people close enough - 

Is just out of range, for the Empty Hand tribe. It could invade Lastwall, if it wanted to. It does raid Lastwall, when it wants to. But it cannot provide road security for Lastwall even if it wants to - that's a different and much harder problem entirely.

(*: He's up to a +6 headband by now.)

And the orcs of the eastern plains know perfectly well that they are performing suboptimally; that the civilized people have better stuff than they do, that the civilized slaves know more than the slaves born in captivity, that Grask Uldeth is the most successful warlord amongst all the orcs and that he has no successor - 

It's just that moving from a bad equilibrium to a better equilibrium is hard, actually.

The two main orc tribes in the southeast of Belkzen are the Cleft Heads, distant vassals of the Empty Hand with a reputation for un-orcish cowardice but a love of extortion, and the Open Barrows, who have taken to necromancy with a fervor appropriate for people who spend so much time in Ustalav while they raid it. Per Lastwall's spy reports (their Belkzen intelligence service took the least damage with Riudaure's death), they have some reason to suspect the Cleft Heads are embezzling from the tribute they are supposed to pay to Uldeth, which would produce a war if they wanted to have one, but probably the Cleft Heads would invade Canterwall if they tried that, so probably not the best idea.

What Lastwall would really like to do would be to pay the orcs to attack the undead, using money. Unfortunately...

... Lastwall will try to send reinforcements up through the hills of Amaans, where they have support, and putting their spy service in charge of dissuading the orcs from invading Lastwall or Canterwall while they're busy. And they'll Teleport reinforcements up to link up with the garrisons in western Canterwall, and take the risk of trying to raid Renchurch with the forces they have there, because -

- Ardis already fell?

His triumph complete, Wielki Ksiaze rides through the city on the reanimated corpse of an armored gryphon, his core force of skeletal champions and zombie lords marching alongside and behind him, gilded armor and shields concealing the rot and bones within. Behind him flies his own flag, a crowned lion, silver on black, with the ancient flag of Ustalav behind it, and behind him marches a chariot with the body of Dalis Marchand, unscarred by the spell that slew him. His herald announces his glory and mercy (the city is not being sacked; Geb's is no longer the army that doesn't rape and pillage) as the trumpets celebrate his return, and Wielki Ksiaze makes his way from the city's east gate to the great citadel of Stagcrown and lifts the corpse with a spell and bears it into the fortress after him.

There he climbs the Palace Tower, sealed a hundred years, where the shrieking souls of kings and villains from two thousand years of Ustulav's history echo out their ruined, tragic lives time and again, and there the might of the Grand Prince of Taldor rises, and he speaks mighty words of a spell of great power - 

- And when he returns it is with King Vasilas Ustav, who ruled with an iron hand age nineteen hundred years ago, striding behind him in Dalis Marchand's body and dressed in the regalia of a king.

"Behold, people of Ardis! The throne of Ustalav is returned to you, and he who rules Ustalav by right of blood shall rule it forever!"

(And, behind his glowing eyes, laughter - "For while some may say they are finished with the past, the past is not finished with them.")

And Vasilas will swear allegiance to Wielki Ksiaze, also known as Taldaris II Emperor of Taldor, as his overlord, and so establish the legitimacy of Ksiaze's government over Ustalav! This is very important, for the next stage of Ksiaze's project!

Because the next stage is the extremely obvious one that, really, you'd think anyone would realize was the most obvious move, which is to send an ambassador to the Worldwound alliance offer to take over the defense of the Ustulav border of the Worldwound in exchange for his puppet monarch being recognized as overlord of the entire country.

... This is obviously a trap, right? Obviously? International community, let's get together and condemn it.

...

Ksiaze is not, actually, Lawful Evil...

No, but my vassal who you'll be acknowledging as lord of Ustalav is!

Cheliax will think about it.

Nobody actually recognizes them, but the thinking about it is audible.

All right, now that we've dealt with that hand grenade thrown into the waters of international politics, Lastwall will adapt to the necessary geopolitical situation by trying to hire adventurers to murder all the big scary undead in Renchurch and hoping the mildly reinforced western defenders of Canterwall can hold out. They cannot, yet, carry out first-few-days attacks; their forces are not mostly based in Lastwall, the Palatines rely too heavily on militia, and they are going to have to gear up more, and send out diplomatic feelers to Caliphas and Barstoi to see if they can make any regional alliances with fellow enemies of the Undead.

Caliphas - that is, Carmilla Caliphvaso, though she has Lawful Neutral diplomats do the talking - thinks that in fact this is an excellent idea. She wholly supports it. Lastwall should give them lots of money and troops and acknowledge them as legitimate monarchs of all Ustalav and together they can cooperate against the undead who seek to wipe out all life in Avistan if not Golarion itself.

... To be clear, these troops should not, actually, set foot in the city of Caliphas. Caliphas is under control; all the undead were decisively defeated. They should go to the front, where they are actually needed.

The Hellknights are in fact prepared to recognize that Lastwall is also Lawful, and is also concerned with destroying the Undead. They see no reason for any hostility towards Lastwall. Their purpose here is to protect innocent people from agents of the Whispering Way and cultists of dark gods until such time as they can find a Lawful successor for Count Neska, which they plan to determine by using Sending and eventually a purchased Plane Shift to contact him in Axis once they have respectable candidates and dossiers on them.

(The most annoying thing about Hellknights, from the perspective of Lawful Good organizations like the Knights of Lastwall, is that every once in a while they act like sane people.)

Sounds like an alliance of Lawful and basically reasonable organizations can be formed against the undead, then?

How about officially organizing a Crusade? Get some more Hellknight orders involved, get some more Paladin orders involved - 

Still thinking about it.

Taldor is at least tempted. Taldor is not functional enough to commit to contributing resources to a crusade, but it is functional enough to diplomatically decide that "crusade" is the appropriate word to use for its polite suggestion to its dukes that they go to war against a pretender to the throne.

You know. In exchange for bribes.

(Things do not get done, in Taldor, without bribes.)

Andoran will just support this.

Seriously, people. Not everything needs to be a big deal. You can just support good things.

Amen!

Did someone say internationally accepted excuse to conquer things?

... The opinion of the Queen is now very rapidly shifting towards the belief that armies of undead trying to take over Ustalav is actually a good thing, as was, perhaps, inevitable.

This it is, actually, true about New Razmiran: They can learn from their mistakes. It takes a lot of mistake for them to do a little learning, to be clear! But they can do it.

The remnants of the Razmiran flotilla, arriving downriver at Odranto, would like to negotiate a deal with the barons of Odranto in which they provide food and money to the Razmiran army, Razmir is accepted as a recognized god of New Razmiran, the Church of Razmiran is given a special place, and all other religions except ones everyone wants to persecute are legitimate. And, in exchange, New Razmiran will ally with them against the armies of undead.

The number of Odranto barons who are capable of standing the slightest chance against a seventh-circle sorcerer are few and far between. They'd like to go for it, especially as the Red Witch over in Sinavia is causing them problems and, uh, they can notice the undead armies.

The independent Whispering Way warlord nearest to them is the greater ragewight Righ Curaidh, a Kellid champion whose death three thousand years before did not rob him of his desire for vengeance, but who possessed enough of a mind that, when awakened, he could be talked by the individual who was shaman of the same tribe two hundred years later (reanimated at roughly the same time as he was), into delaying his conquest until the reanimated Kellids combined a clue with a hope. This ended up only being twenty years, but the army of wights that he accumulated is still pretty impressive.

They would like it if the armies of New Razmiran made him go away.

Ragewight with an army of wights? Yeah, New Razmiran can do that.

(It was mostly the more powerful characters who survived the defeat at Ardis; wizards who could afford Teleport spells had a real advantage getting away compared to ones who couldn't.)

Cairn wights, technically.

The difference is that they know how to wear armor, they know how to use weapons, and some of them are clerics of Urgathoa. 

Now. Ahem.

BLOOD AND VENGEANCE ON THOSE WHO SLEW US! DEATH TO THE VARISIAN SCUM!

Right. What's the actual geographical situation look like, for this battle?

Having attacked nearby towns, two or three hundred wights and crypt wights along with scattered other undead, under the command of Righ Curaidh, his shaman Sul Dorcha, his strategic advisor Vormygon (an independent necromancer of the barely-fifth circle allied under the Oath of the Way) and a few other ragewight commanders and Whispering Way necromancers of lesser power, are now laying siege to a castle under the control of one of the more minor Odranto barons.

... Two or three hundred?

... Yes? Necrofeudalism doesn't stretch that far.

Insert mad cackling here.

A single New Razmirani regiment, modeled after an unreformed Chelish tercio of the sort that won the civil war for Queen Abrogail I and has since become standard model to imitate among most countries that can afford professionals, marches to face them. Its companies have all been completely gutted in the fighting - more than fifty percent losses, after the units too maimed to fight have been disbanded and their remnants integrated into the surviving tercios - putting it at, oh...

Twelve hundred troops.

All veterans, because anyone who survived the Night of Blood and the Battle of Ardis is a veteran.

Plus Razmiran Priests! Plus their Called outsiders!

The other two tercios are going to start recruiting while the Second Tercio, under the command of the Second Vision, Eike, annihilates these barbarians.

These CR-3-at-the-weakest barbarians whose actual regular troops (crypt wights) have AC 21-plus apiece, not counting buffs? And whose swords drain the life from anyone they touch?

Drain the life from anyone they touch in hand-to-hand combat?

... This isn't good news, is it.

Sorry to tell you this, but combat has moved on since your day.

Wights at the run move 120 feet a round, which coincidentally is the exact range increment of a heavy crossbow.

The first volley the blessed crossbowmen fire off has very little effect, even though they direct it at the unarmored lesser wights. The second has a little more. The third has more. The fourth has more.

The wizards start throwing fireballs at the sixth volley.

Heavy crossbows are not very damaging weapons. Especially if you're up against undead, and can't score critical hits, and especially if they have clerics of Urgathoa.

It takes an average of five to kill a wight, without channeling. There are only three hundred crossbowmen. Some wights will make the infantry lines, even if the fireballs, and they will be very mad.

And the crossbowmen will fall back behind the pike wall, and the wights will get two Attacks of Opportunity and three readied attacks apiece before they get to attack anything.

The standard-issue army pike has a fifteen-foot reach. That's five opportunities for braced troops to stab attackers before they get to them, each. Two from the front row, two from the second row, one from the third row.

And it's even more effective if the wights are straggling, of course, and can't maintain a disciplined formation while being Raging barbarians charging people who just ticked them off quite a lot.

Righ Curaidh, his shaman, and his scariest ragewight will teleport out with Vormygon. 

Ah, my good fellows of the Whispering Way! Have you all learned the lesson about 'small, independent undead warlords' yet? This rebellion is only going to get anywhere under my direction. Your 'dozens' and 'hundreds' simply will not cut it before the UNITY and DISCIPLINE of my marching legions! Sign up or get crushed!

And, having absolutely not withdrawn his aid to Righ Curaidh in any deliberate attempt to sabotage him, but merely because he thought he could serve the war with Lastwall best by deploying it elsewhere, Wielki Ksiaze will finish up his conquest of Ardis and get ready to crush all his neighbors.

There are other ways of making war, Remek, that do not depend on your armies. Perhaps when the time is right, this you shall see.

(There are many reasons why the Mirrorgrave is one of the few who might claim the title of 'first among the faithful servants of the Whispering Tyrant'. They do not involve his rather petty host of necrofeudal minions, nor his cloak of mirrors crafted by the Whispering Tyrant himself that renders him nigh-impossible to harm nor affect with spells he does not permit, nor his extraordinary teleportation abilities; nor, for that matter, his fanatical village of trained assassin-monks fed by zombie labor and armed with dark relics. Everyone has one of those, really, if they're anyone.)

To briefly summarize the geopolitical Map of Ustalav, prior to the campaigns that are about to take place:

Southern Ustalav, which consists of Caliphas and most of Versex, is separated from Northern Ustalav by the Hungry Mountains. The Razmiran Road, connecting them, is blocked by ghoul armies under Pakhhan, sixth-circle ghast necromancer. Southern Ustalav is therefore not participating in the second round of the war now brewing.

Eastern Ustalav, which consists of Varno, is not participating in any of this nonsense because Count Ristomaur Tiriac does not care which of Wielki Ksiaze or Carmilla Caliphvaso becomes overlord of Ustalav, and neither of them care about him and his experiments in the slightest.

Western Ustalav, consisting of the Palatinates of Canterwall, Lozeri, and Vieland, is the three autonomous republics who are united with Lastwall in an alliance against Wielki Ksiaze.

Northern Ustalav is divided between Wielki Ksiaze and his VAST ARMIES OF THE UNDEAD in Ardeal in the center, New Razmiran and its local allies in Otranto in the north, the Red Witch in Sinaria to the far northeast, and Barstoi under the Order of the Pyre to the east. None of the three living factions like any of the other three.

Virlych (west of Southern Ustalav and south of Western Ustalav) has not exploded yet but probably will soon. Undead forces are amassing at Renchurch, on the western border of Canterwall, for some unknown purpose.

Lastwall and the Order of the Pyre are allied against Wielki Ksiaze, and nobody else likes him much, either.

The obvious observation: Wielki Ksiaze is completely surrounded from all sides by his semiunited enemies, who may, perhaps, have higher priorities than bickering with each other, related to, say, utterly crushing him.

The non-obvious observation, but the observation Wielki Ksiaze has nonetheless made, would involve putting numbers on things.

The armies of Odranto have between between three and four thousand professionals, plus baronial retinues. The armies of Lastwall are deployed on three separate fronts, neither of which is with him; the troops they have bordering Ardis are - perhaps five or six hundred, scattered across sixty miles of border, and a town guard in Chastel that will also number in the hundreds, with a militia well under a thousand; between Ardis and the verdant fields of Canterwall and southwest Lozeri are thirty miles of swamp and forest broken only by thin streams. The forces of Lastwall are still mobilizing. Sinaria, no doubt, has its own host, but though their elite companies of sorcerers are of great value in war, Ksiaze would guess their full numbers at under two thousand; the old structure of the counts that once was has been destroyed, and the Red Witch has not yet rebuilt her forces. Any militias or town guards she calls together will be under a thousand, for Sinaria has never been a warlike province. And the Order of the Pyre have no more than three hundred Hellknights and a thousand armigers, and the same number of Barstoi militiamen; hardly a threat to the Grand Prince.

And what, pray tell, does Ksiaze have? Ksiaze has client necromancers, and scattered lesser allies of the Way who have placed their thralls under his command, and undying beasts of war... and four hundred years of skeletal champions.

A reasonably competent crafting wizard may make four hundred gold a week; one gifted enough, as Ksiaze and his underliches are, to reach the point they do not need to be careful about every petty detail can make a good deal more than that. There are upkeep costs, yes... but bodies are not expensive. The main cost of his graverobbing expeditions is the Scry and the two Teleports required to collect the bodies, and he made a crystal ball to handle the scrying for him generations ago. He pays his graverobbing operations well enough to let them drive out competition, and yet, in actual fact, he still spends less than four thousand gold per corpse he obtains.

And, frankly, the costs of maintaining these stealthy operations are the main limit on how many minions he can obtain, not how many Evil adventurers die in Golarion. If all else fails, he can just set up in another city, somewhere else in the world. It's a big world!

Or, in other words, he has spent the past four hundred years raising more than sixty thousand skeletal champions.

Now, his numbers are not quite so good as you might think. Some broke under the strain of undeath and went mad; some refused to serve and had to be put down, some were useless after their time in Hell or, for that matter, destroyed in his recent battles. But the actual core of his force is terrifyingly immense, for the graves of the Hellknights are filled with the bodies of random peasants whose corpses were easy to swap with their fallen paralictors.

But he still has the largest army in Ustalav.

And the mightiest.

But that's not necessarily something that anyone else knows, especially if they assume he has some technique for controlling very large number of skeletons, which is really more plausible than him having a technique to control very large numbers of skeletal champions.

And this means that he must strike quickly, before the news spreads and his forces can be diminished by attrition. When the armies marching from Ardeal march out, they will fork, splitting to go after individual targets. Ksaize had divided his armies into four when he began the campaign; the largest, now based at Ardis in western Ardeal, will leave only as many troops as are needed to maintain order in Ardis before linking up with the smallest (hardly more than a detachment) at Kavapesta and move to control the shores of the Whitsuntide, driving Lastwall from its improvised fortifications on the west bank of the river and leaving a few forces to hold and enhance those fortifications, before moving upriver with its main force to seize Chastel (in Lozeri, but on its eastern border) and invade Odranto from the west. The other two, under the control of various of his lieutenants, have already begun swinging to take control of Ardeal; as the castles of the knights of Ardeal fall, they will concentrate on the borders of Barstoi and Odranto. And if any suspect that these forces are of mere skeletons unfit to serve as more than laborers - well, his champions will provide any such fools who seek to challenge them with a rude awakening.

The day Razmir began discussing his plans to conquer Ustalav with them, Lastwall began drawing up plans for fortifications on the western banks of the Whitsuntide. This was not so much foresightedness, which would have told them not to encourage Razmir to conquer all of Ustalav that moron, but simple prudence.

There are, of course, two possible locations to build this fortress line, if one wanted to defending the Palatinates from the rest of Ustalav. The first, and more ambitious, would be the two river junctions that separate Ardis from Canterwall; where the Vistear flows into the Whitsuntide at the Ardis-Canterwall-Lozeri junction, and where the Senir and Upper Whitsuntide form the Whitsuntide. The problem is, of course, that Ardis has built fortresses there to cover an invasion from the west, and that it is indeed a much better defensive position from the east than from the west; there's about a hundred and fifty square miles of swamp where the rivers meet, with the only really good solid high ground being on the east side of the Whitsuntide (behold, Ardis sitting there) or north of the Vistear at Chastel.

Lastwall there only started with watchtowers at the two locations; building a castle in a swamp is very tricky business if you don't want it to sink, involving a lot of summoned earth elementals to steer the stone to where you can turn it into a foundation, and the construction of a castle at Chastel occupied most of Lozeri's attention. (Also, they weren't sure just when it would be needed.)

The other option for a defensive line is twenty miles further west; the Vistear-Whitsuntide marsh hinders any crossing from east or from west, and the soggy trees west of it (and the massively, tremendously haunted ruin at its heart) are a serious barrier for an army. But where the Vistear flows between the Rotwood and the Shudderwood (USTALAV!) it is the sole pathway between northern Canterwall and the east, and a pair of fortified and warded castles on each side of it can command the river against almost any assault - while that assault would, yes, need to get all its supplies from the Vistear and through Miles And Miles Of Bloody March.

The problem, of course, is that this leaves southern Canterwall, which has a fifteen-mile border instead of any kind of chokepoint, vulnerable to raids across from the flatlands of far-northern Amaans and hills of central-western Amaans, which have been swallowed into Wielki Ksiaze's empire of undeath, and abandons the most populous stretch of Lozeri between the Whitsuntide to the Shudderwood, to the enemy.

Lastwall would say they hate hard choices but in fact they do not, actually, hate life that much.

The forward watchtower in the south, a rapidly-improvised keep built to overlook and protect workers for the site they planned to establish the real tower on, evacuates most of its garrison downriver when it sees three thousand skeletal champions coming for it, while a small garrison stays to trade bodies for time. The half-built line of secondary watchtowers on the marsh's edge is similarly abandoned. 

(Razmir's empire lasted weeks. Weeks. They thought he'd hold out for a year or two at least.)

A small force on the swamp side of the Vistear holds the half-built tower there, but the bulk of their army on the east side of the Shudderwood is mustered in and around the half-built castle, and when the force around Chastel gathers, it has four hundred knights, with a city guard recently expanded to two hundred men, and twelve hundred light infantry - most of the male population and some of the female - drawn up in a militia along with it.

It is, in fact, legitimately true that a downside of recruiting your armies from across more than four hundred years of time and military development, and recruiting heavily from elite specialist organizations and/or Chaotic societies, is that your army will not be optimized for modern warfare. A great many of his berserkers are wielding greataxes, greatswords, and orc double-axes; a great many of his Hellknights fight with longsword and kite shield, as knights fought from foot four hundred years ago, and fewer than one champion in ten is drilled in the pike square. His cavalry rides slow zombie horses or necrocrafts that come out of his and his under-necromancers' Animate Dead budgets, for horses cannot be grateful for being rescued from Hell, or else are the rare handful of knights with a knack for bonding with their steeds so well that the horses could bear the stench of the dead, and there are few of those. On this battlefield he has little strength of horse, though still a little more than Lastwall's four hundred knights, and he would not pit his against theirs and risk the losses he might face.

On the other hand, numbers.

Fourteen thousand skeletal champions and assorted other undead who are heading downstream on riverboats or marching on the banks of the stream will amass their vast forces of infantry, including several thousand archers, and it can be fairly said that they offer the Lozeri militias a quizzical look.

Ksiaze, flying circles above the army on his zombie gryphon, will send a herald across the banks - one of the villagers who grew up under the shadow of his rule:

"The great Wielki Ksiaze offers you an opportunity to surrender."

The militia is largely armed with pointy sticks. (Technically, 'longspears', which can be distinguished from pikes by the fact that it is much, much easier to train someone with no idea what he's doing how to use a ten-foot spear than a fifteen-foot one.)

This is not the correct weapon against skeletons.

They are also armed with devices for propelling pointy sticks at their enemies at very high speeds. (Classically known as 'hunting bows'.)

This is also not the correct weapon against skeletons.

(In their defense, they're from Lozeri, where the undead take a back seat to wolves and werewolves as a threat.)

... What are the surrender terms?

"Should the people of Lozeri acknowledge the reborn Vasilas Ustav, once and present King of Ustalav as their rightful lord and Wielki Ksaize as Emperor over him, drive out the treacherous usurpers of Lastwall on whose arms the tyranny of the false god Razmir was founded, and yield their fortified places to the armies of Wielki Ksaize, then the great Wielki Ksaize will permit the people of Lozeri to retain their palatine government under His protection. Should they defy him, no mercy will be shown; the city of Chastel will be utterly razed, its people slaughtered, and no captain of your armies nor counsellor of your court shall receive the rest of death."

... Seems fair to them.

Did they forget about their Aura of Courage?

There's fear resistance, and there's threat resistance, and these are not, actually, the same thing.

... The militia archers are already inside their fortifications.

Paladins are incapable of feeling fear. And the offer to the knights of Lastwall?

The herald is to tell them that if they abandon their fortifications without sabotage and flee for their pathetic lives, the great Wielki Ksiaze will give them a three-hour lead before hunting them down like animals.

Paladins don't feel fear. It will, actually, be a horrible bloody disaster in which quite a lot of them die if they need to start fighting their own allies inside and outside the walls, or if the people of Chastel get massacred because they weren't willing to turn against the paladins who were their captains and drillmasters.

But you cannot extort paladins like that, and bar the pointless and counterproductive massacre it would still be better than all their stores of money and gear falling into Ksaize's hands without a fight. The deal is that they get twenty-four hours to evacuate, counting the right to remove all the stuff they can carry and/or load into their riverboats, before Wielki Ksiaze starts taking any hostile actions towards them, and any of the people of Chastel who would rather evacuate into the interior than be ruled by an undead tyrant can do that.

Any of the people of Chastel except the palatine council. Ksiaze wants them as hostages for his puppet government.

Any who claim the status of members of the Palatine Council of Lozeri who wish to flee will not have the knights of Lastwall obstructing them, but will also not have the knights of Lastwall providing them passage. Acceptable?

Make it "were recognized by the people of Chastel as possessing the status of members of the Palatine Council yesterday" and you have a deal.

The evacuation commences.

And Ksiaze's soldiers will reoccupy the fortress once the paladins have evacuated and if a couple of members of the Palatine Council flee nobody's stopping him from hunting them down, but most of his army isn't waiting twenty-four hours - it's occupying Lozeri and then heading further downstream towards Odranto. 

Though he, himself, has higher priorities. Ksiaze's chief purpose for arranging a surrender was so that he would still have all his spells remaining, even if Lastwall made a heroic attempt to kill him personally, for which all of his personal wards and staying at very long distance would not suffice if they had significantly stronger resources than he expected.

(Ksiaze is much harder to kill than a typical wizard, being a lich, and does not stay dead if killed, being a lich, and also well aware that in the Great Taxonomy Of Life he is a squishy wizard and four hundred adventurer-class paladins pulling out enchanted longbows and Holy Smiting him from four hundred feet away might be a serious setback in his plans.)

This is because he thinks it is really quite likely that another fight will occur before he can prepare spells, and even if he can't command it he wants to be able to teleport over to join it.

What battle is likely to be fought? Why, the two battles that his armies have been marching through Ardeal to fight. The battle, as his troops press up towards Odranto from two fronts and to Barstoi by one, to stop the enemy forces from forming a coalition, from adapting to their own territory and training new recruits and hiring mercenaries and adventurers in this, their most desperate hour, even if it means dividing his own troops, even if it means detaching small contingents to besiege strongholds in Ardeal and leaving them - if encircled and helpless - in his rear. The battle to cut the Razmiran Road, separate the Order of the Pyre from its bases, and so prevent foreign reinforcements from reaching the north, and the separate battles to seize the Whitsuntide and so cut any support from the west, drive the Razmirans from the river and ultimately crush them, and so the plot for Ksiaze to unite Ustalav under a single reign from which he can begin extracting taxes and labor before any serious foreign (or Southern) intervention occurs, and also demonstrate to Ksiaze's fellows in the Way that nothing will threaten his power except another Shining Crusade, which would be as deadly to them as to himself.

King Ustav has sent a letter to the Red Witch suggesting that he would recognize her, as a fellow Lawful Evil monarch, as a fine choice to rule Sinaria, offering undead immortality, protection from foreign monarchs and not conquering her, should she agree to pay him homage. (He is not, as she might notice, offering to delay the war until she has time to think about the letter. He's Lawful Evil, and while Ksiaze would be pleased if she accepted, his purpose is simply to make her pause and think and not join his enemies until he has the resources to demand, not request, submission or death.)

He has also sent ambassadors to the major powers requesting recognition, though Ksiaze expects to get it from only Geb...

... And, his riverboats proceeding up towards the Worldwound border, Ksiaze has sent a letter to Lastwall politely explaining that he would like it if all their soldiers presently at the Worldwound were declared neutral in the present war, so Lastwall's soldiers don't need to take preemptive action against attacks from the south and he doesn't need to worry about the need to slaughter their pathetic soldiers preemptive attacks from the people who are supposed to guarding the Worldwound.

(He will seal that with his personal seal and get Ustav and all of his most capable Lawful Evil lieutenants and allies Lastwall knows he has to sign it, too. The Worldwound not expanding is everyone's problem.)

Lastwall observes that he is not, actually, offering to not interdict supplies headed for the Worldwound, which will vastly increase their dependence on Mendev and the strain on Mendev's resources, but will still grumpily accept. The Worldwound not expanding is everyone's problem.

His terms for peace with them have now expanded to being that they acknowledge him as rightful overlord of all of Tar-Baphon's former territories, including their whole home territory!

They're still the same terms for everyone else.

The messenger to the Red Witch's court reports that she's off being a high-level adventurer more than a monarch and dealing with some crisis in the swamps. Her governor will pass the message on to her.

Woe to the weaker, woe.

And what pathetic armies have been assembled to bar the path of his marching legions?

Well, whether they bar his way or not depends on just how many troops he has, doesn't it? The Hellknights think they can put together around a hundred and fifty hellknights and eight hundred armigers, all with mounts, as well as perhaps a thousand militiamen, a couple hundred local knights, and one to eight hundred men-at-arms depending on how quickly they need to pull this together?

Ten thousand skeletal champions!

Also some other stuff. But, mostly, ten thousand skeletal champions.

Then he may have some problems with this.

Kindly explain.

The War Without Rivals ('87-'93) was fought between Count Aericnein Neska of Barstoi and the unled and chaotic nobles of Count Olomon Venacdalia of Ardeal over the question of whether Ardeal was mismanaged, or criminally mismanaged. Threats of foreign intervention (that is, from the Prince of Ustalav) eventually persuaded Neska to withdraw, burning the land behind him, which produced the infamous Furrows.

Threats of foreign intervention did this because the entire thing had been bogged down into an endless train of sieges and Chevauchée raids, in which the purpose was to devastate the country so the opponent couldn't live there rather than to gain actual achievements. Neither accomplished anything, and by the end of it a long, long line of fortresses stretched down the entire Ardeal-Barstoi border, the Ardeal ones little more than towers intended to hold off wizards and trebuchets, but the Barstoi fortresses were built with the full prosperity of the most flourishing county in Ustalav and were full-scale castles, manned by knights and well supplied and equipped, from which long-range fire could devastate any attackers.

We got them while you were messing around in Ardis.

... Yes, Wielki Ksiaze's general does have a problem.

If the army leaves behind troops to invest every castle on both sides of the border, it will be exceptionally vulnerable both to the Hellknights of Barstoi winning a battle, and, worse, to them riding around the army with their cavalry and relieving the castles.

And if the army settles down to besiege fortresses, the Hellknights have freedom of movement to do whatever they like.

Fortunately, says Ksiaze over his permanent Telepathic Bond, this is a very temporary problem. Our triumphs in the west have shielded us against Lastwall, and soon we shall control the north as well. More reinforcements will arrive shortly; invest what fortresses you safely can, maintain surveillance of the enemy, and prevent them from carrying out any attack that might delay our inevitable triumph.

And how commences his campaign against Odranto? There is a great host of his champions marching north, with the better part of his cavalry and many dreadful specters and powerful necromancers, under one of his own Lich-lieutenants, Kasimir Konor, a wizard of considerable (if, well, less) repute.

New Razmiran would be much, much happier if it had a week to train new troops, seriously, what is this "marching all day and night straight past castles which you have the strength to besiege and bypass simultaneously because you don't care about supply lines" nonsense, but with every baronial levy they can pull together, and the support of the Regent of Odranto, New Razmiran has nonetheless assembled about forty-four hundred heavy infantry, mostly their Razmiran veterans, in the usual eight-to-two pike-to-shot (heavy crossbows or longbows) mixture with every cleric of Pharasma in the county drafted to stiffen it with healing, bolstered by their usual outsiders and Razmiran Priests, as well as two thousand militia troops (archers and slingers) that can be expected to rout the first time things go badly, eight hundred aristocratic heavy horse and four hundred light horse scouts and skirmishers, and with this army they intend to hold the ford of Berus against any advance.

Unfortunately, this force has the usual fighting-undead problem - pikes and bows are both effective at finding small vulnerabilities in armor and punching through, making them useful weapons against armored enemy soldiers. And punching a hole is usually good enough - it doesn't have to be a big hole - when you're fighting sacks of meat and bone.

They are... not... effective against zombies and skeletons.

The lords of Odranto prepared for this! Their heavy infantry (what they have of it) carries large polearms with an axe-blade on one side (for zombies) and a hammer on the other (for skeletons) and a spike in the middle (for cavalry), which don't have quite the reach of pikes but have enough reach for most purposes. And then they go to war with maces or warhammers as well as (or instead of) swords, for their backup weapons.

The soldiers of New Razmiran... did not. All they have of these fine weapons is that they were fortunate enough to get the lords to provide them. Most of their troops are just going into battle with the usual pikes.

New Razmiran really, really wanted time to rearm, retrain, and get ready for war.

Yeah, that's why they aren't getting it.

The fords of Berus, you say? Not a bad name for a battle. When Kasimir gives him his sending, Wielki Ksiaze will Teleport in in person with his personal reinforcements. He has a zombie griffon and a huge evil longbow and a bunch of big scary bodyguards and quite a lot of low-level spells he's not doing anything else with today and no intention whatsoever of getting closer than twelve hundred feet from anything that might be a massed formation of archers in disguise.

And, of course, he has his own army! Ten thousand skeletal champions fighting on foot, some with modern pike tactics and others with axes or swords, the usual mass of necrofeudal troops, lots of wizards, and, also, his cavalry.

Avistani cavalry tactics have not changed very much in the centuries since the Shining Crusade. You get on a big strong horse (or other big strong animal) with all the armor you can pile on the horse and onto you, and a pointy stick, and you ride very fast at the target and then the target either runs away or the pointy stick delivers of the mass of that metal directly to the enemy, usually fatally. The central elements of cavalry tactics - when to ride stirrup to stirrup for mass of charges, when to scatter to avoid fireballs, when to break and wheel - remain as they were a hundred years ago, or four hundred, or a thousand. And "Being undead" does not particularly change it, except insofar as it is much harder to find or make mounts for dead warriors.

A result of this is that his six hundred heavy cavalry, mounted on vampire-called wolves or animated barding over skeletal frames or jet-black horses with fiery eyes or stitched-together abominations of a dozen corpses, are actually basically the same as the Odranto cavalry except that the riders were in life and are in death the best Ksiaze could find.

(He does not use light cavalry for scouting. He uses familiars, invisible air elementals, incorporeal spirits, animated crows, and all the rest of the things you can use for scouting when you are not constrained by ordinary war.)

They have more clerics, more wizards, and a natural barrier. They've planted sharpened stakes as a shield against cavalry on their infantry's flanks, placed abattises to block the ford, raised pavises for the militiamen and some of their other soldiers to shoot from behind, and as many of the militia archers as will fit are in an old tower built to defend the ford, because they can't flee if they're already inside the most defensible position they can find.

At its core, though, this will be a battle won by wizardry and clerickry. Even the undead will have trouble crossing where there is no fords; without the weight of the flesh to anchor them, they're at more risk of being swept away than any ordinary soldier; with the advantage of the defensive and the advantage of the river, there will be more than enough time for a superiority in wizardry to play out to a decisive finish. The priests of the Living God have huge numbers of Fireball and Haste spells prepared, with wands and staves crafted by the Living God himself ready to supplement their resources. Their numbers may be few, but Ksiaze cannot bring his whole forces to bear across the narrowness of the Fords of Berus.

Oh, Ksiaze isn't leading this battle, Kasimir is. Ksiaze is just here to provide moral support and empty a few of his spell slots he doesn't need.

He does, after all, have two to one numbers, with troops who are functionally immune to arrows. He'll play their game. It's still day when he arrives, so he'll break open some bags of holding full of arrows, advance his archers in loose skirmish formation to the edge of archery range, and open a long-range archery duel while his cavalry "look for undefended crossings."

There don't seem to be that many undefended crossings, for some odd reason!

New Razmiran will return fire with crossbows and longbows and a few Acid Arrows, and its pikemen will raise their insufficient bucklers as a screen against the deadly rain, and suffer.

(And halfling sling staffs, where they have local halfling slingers.)

Yeah, Kasimir is shooting the halflings first.

New Razmiran has less archery firepower than the skeletal champions do! Funny thing about two-to-one odds, that way. The skeletal champions can retreat when they take too much of a beating, and can take quite a lot of fire before they go; most of them have trained for decades or centuries at working together, and know how to concentrate and direct fire. And, of course, they have natural armor, inhuman agility, implausible toughness, and having most arrows just go between the bones without hitting them. There's a lot of advantages to being undead.

(Also, once it's been long enough that Ksiaze is pretty sure any Resist Fire spells will have passed, he's going to start fireballing their most concentrated lines. If they cast more Resist Fire spells, he will, of course, wait an hour for them to go away and then go back to it.)

As long as they're sticking to long range, the skeletal champions cannot actually do much except deplete their ammunition reserves. You need to fire a lot of arrows to kill a veteran soldier, and they do have clerics of Pharasma to provide healing. Neither side is going to be able to do much, with this archery duel.

Yep! Both sides are going to exhaust themselves and their ammunition supplies and (with a few feigned assaults as his most heavily armored- and shielded- infantry companies fake a crossing attempt) hopefully some of their spells.

... Of course, his troops don't get exhausted. They're dead, you know. They can stand in all weather, hot sun and cold rain while arrows rain down, for days, not like the living troops. Especially not the militia troops.

You can't keep shooting forever. Cross and you die.

Oh, the point isn't to shoot forever, or fast. The point is to stop the troops of Razmiran from resting during the day.

Once it starts getting dark, the undead will start casting Light on the arrows they fire, just to mess with the Razmiran troops' night vision. 

And the Razmirani troops will cast Light on the sharpened stakes in the abbatis (well ahead of their troops, to illuminate undead crossing) and the front-center of the pavises, shining in the faces of attackers but not defenders. Same to you, jerks.

(One of the little-known facts about incorporeal undead is that they cannot go completely inside objects, though they can pass nearly their whole body through it. At some point, some of them must be outside the cover of a solid object, and in empty air.)

(One of the well-known facts is that almost all of them are vulnerable to sunlight.)

All right, do the undead intend to do anything? The Razmirani have much better supply lines.

Ksiaze will create an illusion of himself on his gryphon, and then, in the darkness lit only by cantrips, order his wizards to cast their prepared spells, and for his most-armored and best-shielded troops to be drawn up for a direct assault across the fords, ready to be propelled at Haste speed.

Any success finding undefended crossings, by the way?

Nope! The Razmiran troops have securing the fords under control.

Cast the buffs and go, shieldbearers first with shields raised high to shelter their heads from the arrows and fireballs, mass Resist Fire up, a mass of champions packed together tightly so the river won't sweep them away, the illusory gryphon-lich swooping overhead to attract fire. (Along with various other illusions, including an undead dragon just on general principles.)

They're never going to have a better target for arrows or for area-of-effect spells. Open fire.

This is why he sent armored and shielded troops with lots of Communal Protection from Law and Communal Protection from Evil and Communal Resist Fire and Communal Protection from Arrows spells! His undead warriors bear axes and shields as they go out to clear the abbatis, under fire from the Razmirani and Ustulavi soldiers.

There is a problem with the New Razmiran army, and it is this: It was created by an evil genius who had never, actually, fought in a war. He consulted his advisors, most of them wizards who had adventured up to fifth-ish circle rather than getting their experience by fighting battles, on army design, but his force is not the product of military evolution, it is the product of trying and failing to copy what the scary people down south were doing.

New Razmiran does not therefore have light infantry who are maneuverable in rough terrain and good at hand-to-hand individual fighting out of formation. Razmir didn't think of it. His army was a vast wall of pikemen augmented by wizards and Razmiran Priests and cavalry, suited for an endless broad field on which a battle could be fought. When his generals had to find someone to do it, they hired local mercenaries, and all these deserted in search of better pay and less death when Razmiran fell. and so it is local Odranto men-at-arms who are trying to fight the undead trying to clear the obstruction in hand-to-hand while the Razmiran troops rain arrows and crossbow bolts and spells from their absolutely ridiculous number of cheap wands down on them.

Unfortunately for the Odranto men-at-arms, the difference between 'feudal lord's retainers, equipped with what he could get the castle blacksmith to make' and 'corpses of former adventurers, tribal champions, elite warriors and Hellknights, equipped by master dwarven blacksmiths and animated so as to be supernaturally quick and proof against slashing and piercing weapons' is rather like the difference between these same men-at-arms and angry peasants unhappy about tax increases wielding converted farming implements.

This fight isn't going to go the way the Razmirani want it to. At all.

Except in the obvious sense that they can direct massed archery and spell fire at targets who are busy laboring to try to clear obstructions, even if these targets "are" "better" "fighters" than their own troops.

Except in that sense, yes.

Then while the champions may push the Razmirani obstructions (men and trees both) out of the way, they'll suffer heavy losses.

Channel, cycle out injured troops, shrug off arrows and live with the fireballs. They can take the hits if they must.

Still, they may control the beachhead on their side of the ford, but as they tear a path through the obstructions, roll the trees into the river, and try to put themselves into some kind of real fighting order - 

- The walls of pikes and poleaxes will roll forwards. One force from the northeast, one from from the northwest, with the light infantry falling back to fill in gaps between them and take the soggy ground too soft for the infantry.

This is an archetypical example of the sort of battle that a clever general prefers not to fight. A defending army of inferior numbers and inferior quality, but possessing the advantage of terrain, is unlikely to win, but it can inflict heavy - and, in his case, irreplaceable - losses on the attacker. Pikemen are not hugely effective against his skeleton warriors, but their defensive ability and talent for delivering bladed death from three rows at once still lets them buy time for the Wands of Fireball to inflict their deadly damage.

Which is why his commander is not fighting this fight.

That tower where the militia were hanging out with their arrows and slings? The bulk of the enemy army is now engaged, right?

... Yes...

That tower was where they put all the militia troops they didn't want in a brawl, who couldn't take fire from skeletal archers or wizards. The one that is off to one side of the place he forded.

Yes...

There's a reason he waited for nightfall before attacking, and it isn't better night vision.

Among the Grand Prince's necrofeudal vassals are certain incorporeal undead, spectres and shadows and wraiths searched out at great expense or created by dark magic to serve him. On their own, none of these undead are... plotters. Ambitious. Undeath so often dulls the mind, weakens the convictions; it takes a necromancer a hard hand and stern mind to bind them to service, to drive them out of their petty dens and into the hunger of the night. 

But give them life to feed on - life that is huddling behind physical walls, life that was left without its clerics because they were more desperately needed in the front lines, life that is weak and physical and ill-trained, militiamen with none of the magic weapons the finest soldiers of a true army would bear to protect them from this -

- and they can replicate themselves, the greater making the lesser, each bound to their creator's service to the limits of its powers.

In the darkness, the ghosts of men are invisible, especially to an enemy with poor night vision. And so now the spectral tide rushes the barred gate, passes through and there is life, life unending with little wood bows and little wood crossbows, all crammed into so little, little space -

HELP HELP HELP

The troops are committed and the troops don't matter - New Razmiran's most powerful adventurers, wizards and "clerics" and clerics and anyone with magic items, rush towards the tower - 

Too slow, too slow! The gate is barred against the rescuers as against Ksiaze's dark knights, and mortal flesh so soft and weak, and the spectral dead so swift to kill. If the adventurers had been ready to guard against this blow, it would have been one matter. But this - this is another. It takes spectres mere moments to kill and create and kill again, and though great hosts of them are lost to his command, the rest will surge out under their masters' orders, augmented with great, great numbers of the new-raised slain.

Well, that does it for the morale of New Razmiran. They already lost one battle, and a vast tide of spectral undead swarming down on them from a flank they thought their allies had covered will not do great things to convince them they can win another. Some units start retreating in good order, others in worse. (The cavalry, always at an advantage for fleeing, will do so quite rapidly.) Their Ustulavic allies are running first, but when you see people start to flee, even the best discipline will have trouble holding troops to their positions.

Another victory! Wielki Ksiaze will teleport off to the next trouble site, and let his under-lich Kasimir Konor finish up the pursuit.

(The pursuit is nasty. There were a few survivors from the tower - people who threw themselves from the top and got lucky enough that it wasn't their legs they broke - and most people can die, and don't really want to go after people who can fight back when there's someone routing to chase, and so, well - some of the Razmirani troops get away.)

They are aided in this by the fact that he wants most.of the troops who just won this battle to go southeast into Barstoi. With Lastwall distracted, he can finish subjugating Odranto with the Army of the West, which means he can send enough troops down to Barstoi that he can track down and destroy their army without needing to abandon any sieges.

Barstoi, however, has had some time to prepare.

Yes, the undead don't tire or sleep, but even undead oxen can't haul wagons that fast, and the undead need storage for their arrows just as much as everyone else. Ksiaze divided his forces and now his army is going to have to match from one end of Ardeal to the other; he can't do everything all at once.

And this means that the Order of the Pyre has time to hire mercenaries to augment their forces.

... But not, like, good mercenaries, or mercenaries from far off places, not unless they want to pay for a teleport. They are dealing with an enemy army that travels all night at walking speed. Really there's only one group of mercenaries they can hire.

Armag Twiceborn, Chosen of Gorum, would cheerfully rip the guts out of whoever made that slander. The Tiger Lords are very good mercenaries. That is, they are very, very good at killing things. Unlike the soft sellswords of the River Kingdoms, they don't just run away if the enemy outnumbers them. They kill.

Armag is Chaotic Neutral.

And proud of it.

So, are you going to pay me to fight someone else or do I invade Barstoi?

They're gonna pay him to fight someone else.

And so the lords of Barstoi assemble their forces, ready to strike at Czaszar's army as it attacks; the Hellknights of the Pyre, the Tiger Lords of Numeria, the proud, disciplined, knights of Barstoi, and whatever scattered forces they can call up from their own domains, all to face the might of Czaszar's undead juggernaut. The odds are against them, but the Order of the Pyre does not fear death, it fears failing to do its duty. 

"This," he says bitterly to Konor, who happens to be around, "is the problem with heroes. They do what they desire, instead of what serves their purposes." The Order of the Pyre would be very useful if they were willing to recognize his status as a strategic ally of the empire that is their patron, but no, they have to do what they contracted to do. Morons.

Kasimir Konor nods. "Just as you say, Grand Prince."

(Kasimir Konor was eighty, fifth-circle, damned and nowhere near finishing his phylactery when Ksiaze took him under his wing. He is now sixth circle and his phylactery has its own extremely warded demiplane with terrifyingly powerful guardians, and that he doesn't have a tuning fork it is a comparatively small problem compared to never needing to fear Hell again. It would be an overstatement to say that he is 'grateful' to his master, a projection of mortal emotions into entities that do not really feel them in the quite the same way, but he certainly does not consider freeing himself a particularly high priority.)

Then Wielki Ksiaze will then go fly off from the Army of the North (Odranto but headed to Barstoi) to the Army of the East (Barstoi), which could probably use an eighth circle necromancer/enchanter with an absolutely ridiculous accumulation of magic items, leaving the Army of the West (sailing up the Vhitsuntide) to finish conquering Odranto, on his zombie griffin. He's taking his elite bodyguard unit with him, of course, that doesn't slow him down much.

Kasimir Konor, who as general-in-chief is in charge of the tremendous amount of work involves in getting the Army of the North organized and marching all in one direction, has his own elite bodyguard company, because everyone meaningful does. If you can't direct twenty arrows and three counterspells - at absolute minimum - at anyone who teleports next to you before the surprise round is even over, what are you even doing? And if you are going to do that, you need at least a hundred people so that individuals who are sick (if your army isn't undead) or temporarily dead (if it is) or briefly missing limbs can be exempted, and then also so you can have four shifts at a time. His bodyguards aren't mounted on flying necrocrafts or undead pegasi and griffons, because he isn't Wielki Ksiaze, but they can keep up with him as he hovers up and down the columns of march, on their steeds or with their own Overland Flight spells.

Keeping a hundred of your most elite archers and sorcerers busy watching you twenty-four hours a day in shifts whenever you aren't in a Forbiddance is, of course, a drain on the resources of your army almost totally uncorrelated with the amount of resources your enemies spend trying to murder you, but you can't start thinking that way if you want to make it to two thousand, even if you are a lich.

How elite are these archers? Well, pretty elite. Most countries maintain archer bodyguard units to protect against teleporting assassins. They had bows and teleportation spells when Aroden was a mortal, and even if Glitterdust (that marvel of efficiency, king of second-circle spells, conqueror of invisibility and a vitally important part of counter-assassin defense) is a more modern innovation which only leaked a thousand or so years back, the combination of "have people who can shoot the enemy ready to fire when they arrive, if you are Worth Assassinating and not in a Forbiddance" is not a new idea. From Absalom to Goka, every nation large enough to play with the big boys has elite archer bodyguards for its rulers and generals, and most of the ones that don't cargo cult it, and so there were plenty of graves for Ksiaze to rob.

Now, these bodyguards aren't the most elite archers. Kasimir Konor is one of Ksiaze's three underliches, so Ksiaze gets the finest archers and he needs to compete with his fellow underliches for the next-finest, but that doesn't stop his archers from being a good deal tougher than the veterans doing this service in most armies, since they're picked from centuries' accumulation of the best of them. And the guards are short on magic items, but, well, so's everyone in the Grand Prince's army. Being short on magic items is just life.

(There's a bird twittering overhead as he flies. Kasimir Konor does not order it immediately shot because he eventually got bored of wasting arrows, it's not as though his people need to eat.)

When Lastwall agreed to neutralize the forts along the Worldwound to prevent Ksaize from attacking them, they signed a formal agreement with him regarding how it would be executed. Nobody wants the world destroyed, but it's worth getting the terms of the agreement down on paper.

As part of this formal agreement, anyone who was unwilling to accept this neutralization could leave the Worldwound and travel to neutral territory, and then continue with their lives as they wish. This particular agreement was necessary because Lastwall has Crusader's Fort, which is not staffed by Lastwall soldiers but by whatever adventurers happen to have shown up to fight evil today, and trying to impose complicated formal treaties on them beyond We Do Not Start Shit At The Worldwound is often an exercise in futility.

The most elite part of the Crusader's Fort staff is, of course, the flex squad. Lastwall throws together its mightiest adventurers, drawn from every land under the sun and headed by a single tough Lastwall paladin teaching them common sense, into a teleport-based squad that is supposed to travel from Worldwound crisis spot to Worldwound crisis spot, killing the deadliest demons and getting themselves more and more powerful. The flex squad is not part of the resources Lastwall can command, for most purposes; it is part of the resources that helps out at the Worldwound, and it just so happens that most people helping out at the Worldwound prefer to volunteer at the part of the border Lastwall runs, instead of the part Mendev runs or the extra-frozen, extra-northern part that Cheliax runs.

The head of the Lastwall flex squad sent in his early retirement yesterday just before teleporting an unknown number of miles south of the border.

Kasimir Konor is presently leading the largest part of his army along the river, through the plains of southern Odranto! He is not at their head, because someone needs to prevent all the regiment commanders from feuding with each other, again, or at least hit them with pain spells when they do it and ask them if they want to go to Hell.

He has Detect Scrying active, which is surprisingly useless a very large fraction of the time.

Then everything happens very, very fast.

(Because, if you insist on looking at everything through the lens of Pathfinder mechanics, practically everything is happening in the form of a stack of readied actions in the surprise round.)

Five invisible adventurers appear in midair holding hands! Some of them are right next to Kasimir Konor!

A zombie wizard hits the adventurers with Glitterdust!

(See Invisibility is just fundamentally what you're supposed to use, here.)

You mean the giant cloud of Darkness So Deep Not Even Darkvision Can See Through It?

I mean the center of it, yes.

Some of them are now blind!

Unfortunately, they were blind before. That's not the point. The point is that firing aimlessly into the center of a cloud of darkness is a really useless way to kill people with arrows.

A Dispel Magic targets a hostile effect used by an attempted assassin, i.e., the Deeper Darkness spell.

Lastwall's flex squad is stronger than the zombie sorcerer who threw that, which could probably be deduced from the fact that they can teleport and Czaszar has been strategically not raising people who can teleport because then they would leave instead of joining his army.

The last of Konor's wizards is supposed to counter the first spell he sees a hostile spellcaster cast, but she can't see any hostile spellcasters casting spells, and all of Konor's archers are supposed to shoot at the first hostile thing they see detect using their senses, but they can't actually tell where the attackers are!

Meanwhile, in the cloud of darkness, Kasimir Konor is surprised!

(This is not, like, unexpected. Most people would be surprised if teleporting assassins tried to kill them.)

Good.

The head of what used to be the Crusader's Fort flex squad and will probably be the Crusader's Fort flex squad in a year if it's still around immediately takes a cut at him.

Your puny mortal weapons cannot harm a lich!

Yes they can. Iomedae is on his side.

Swords make a lot of noise.

Thirty elite archers simultaneously shoot Feliu Tauler.

Thirty elite archers miss Feliu Tauler.

Actually, twenty-six of them miss him and four of them bounce off his Protection From Arrows.

(Don't feel bad. Half of them are from him being invisible, and that's really an astonishingly good rate if you are trying to hit Feliu Tauler, who doesn't wear mithril full plate because it would slow him down.)

Kasimir Konor will also be taking a hammer to the face, because there are situations where you want your ranger to be shooting people and situations where you really, really don't want your ranger to be shooting people.

(Kasimir Konor will spontaneously manifest seven illusionary doubles of himself without, to any reasonable observer, casting anything, which has no particular effect on the battle because nobody can see them, or anything else)

... And, with the lich's position established by people beating him with large metal objects, then Agnipankha Asalela, She Whose Wings Blaze Like Fire, raises the small starmetal rod in her left hand.

It is not normal spheres of fire that she hurls at Kasimir, but a blazing sphere exactly his height and width summoned around him, a holy flame that sears him to the very bone, and surprised by the attack (and lacking the enhancements he'd cast before a battle he expected) he is too slow to dodge away. 

Then she'll flutter back a little, just so she's a little harder to hit -

(She Whose Wings Blaze Like Fire is heir to one of the mightier kingdoms in Vudra, possessed of immense wealth, terrifying charisma, an excellent education, and an extremely powerful sorcerous bloodline with which she decided to go off to the Worldwound since it was the planet's biggest crisis instead of wasting time at home. Her mom will probably call her back when she needs her and until then she's just ignoring her mail while she KICKS DEMON ASS LIKE A BOSS and HEALS PEOPLE WITH FIRE and is GENERALLY AWESOME.)

Then Feliu will properly smite him.

Feliu Tauler is... probably the fifth most powerful paladin in Avistan? Sixth is reasonable. Seventh isn't out there.

Either way, he smites hard.

The adventures are really very good at delivering a high quantity of concentrated asskicking in very little space! Almost as though they trained for it!

Dispel! Dispel! DISPEL!!!

Sucks to suck, doesn't it?

MORE ARROWS! This time, some of the undead champions who just happen to be around will fire into it, too!

Some of these will hit! They won't hurt, though, because everyone can take six seconds of this -

- And they're only four and a half seconds in when Feliu splits Konor's head open, grabs an armful of lich corpse -

- And teleports off again.

Scroll of Scry?

Nondetection.

... This is annoying. It is not, actually, worse than annoying. There's a command chain; Kasimir Konor had a right-hand champion, who is now in charge of the army. Most of his magic items fell off his corpse when he died, and he's a lich, so he'll come back fine in a week. And though they failed to scry the attackers, counter-assassinating them the next time they're outside a Forbiddance will not be hugely difficult, provided there's no more urgent use for the resources. Wielki Ksiaze is an archmage, and there's very little beyond an archmage.

Fundamentally, what was bought with this assassination attempt - bought with the knowledge that there is an elite paladin-and-teleporter hit squad with clerics who can cast third circle spells hard enough that fourth-circle wizards can't dispel them with four tries, bought with the small but significant chance that this plan would fail and they would all be pincushions and then, very shortly, zombies - was six to twelve hours' delay for the Army of the North while the new general investigates and gets everyone back to what they were doing.

Well.

How much is six to twelve hours worth?

(When Ksiaze hears of this, his immediate reaction is frustration, because there was a simple, effective strategy that would have solved the problem. He's not frustrated that Konor didn't have a collection of True Seeing outsiders following him around acting as bodyguards; he doesn't have the Planar Binding spells for that, not with the needs of teleportation and his general wizard shortage, and he also doesn't have the required offerings for Urgathoa-clerics to Lesser Planar Ally in their own. He doesn't even think that Konor should have stayed somewhere secure; 'his own army' should have been secure enough. He's upset that they had six seconds and not one person read one of the Greater Dispel Magic scrolls he penned them; area-cast and with Ksiaze's power behind them, the spell should have taken out their Deeper Darkness even if they had six different castings of it and left them vulnerable to his army's fire.

Still, Konor has now learned a valuable lesson about being willing to use consumable magic items, and hopefully he will be wiser next time.)

Since the adventuring party still has buffs, and since a sorceress instead of a wizard is giving them rides, it's going to be bouncing around murdering some less scary (but still extantly scary) mid-level Whispering Way independent powers until the buffs run out.

The Order of the Pyre is, through some mysterious means, alerted to the news that their opposition is going to be delayed, and they strike.

A detachment of undead is besieging the castle at Vonosrel, and Lictor Stought means to start thinning the enemy's numbers before the rest of Czaszar's troops can arrive. The Army of the Pyre moves to break the siege. They intend to fight the battle, and they will do their duty and win it.

Ksiaze has a different calculation. 

The Order of the Pyre considers him their chief enemy. They intend to defeat him through military force so their administration can maintain control over Barstoi and discharge the responsibilities their leadership has taken up. Since the odds are against them, they will need to take a large number of risks - such as engaging the majority of the strength of the Army of the East with nothing but untried mercenaries, feudal levies and a handful of knights - in order to triumph. 

The Order of the Pyre isn't his chief enemy. Lastwall is his chief enemy; Lastwall and their strategic allies in Galt and the crusaders they can muster if the war continues. In order to restore his empire, Ksiaze wishes to be able to fight Lastwall and Galt without risking Tar-Baphon's escape or the collapse of the Worldwound border. This means that he must secure control over Ustalav as swiftly as possible, so that he can begin raising living auxiliaries and collecting taxes and forcing his undead allies into submission, so that he can dedicate churches to Urgathoa and destroy Good forbiddances and hallows and wiping out the Pharasmin church that would otherwise serve as spies and agents in his rear. He is prepared to accept battle with only a strong probability of victory, instead of a certainty, to gain speed in his conflict with Galt.

Yvane Richten, second of Ksiaze's loyal under-liches, is aware of Ksiaze's strategic priorities. She has been told that Ksiaze and his aerial guard tagama are on their way to reinforce her and that she should use her initiative.

Yvane Richten considered the chief problem of liches to be that their lack of drive and ambition, and she did not cease to be capable of being bored when she died.

Initiative, she's got.

She also has an army that is much more capable than anything Barstoi can manage. Even with more than half of her army scattered in a dozen sieges and slow to be recalled, the mobile force has fifty-two hundred afoot, four hundred ahorse and several dozen in the air, supported by the floating troops - Ksiaze's incoming air force, and those wandering necromancers and mages who feel bound by the Oath of the Way to teleport in when there's a crisis and throw a few spells before leaving again. Moreover, some of the minor bands are useful; a hundred fifty of the dead knights of the Furrows have come to her aid, sixty on horses that tread the air, and this air force will give her overwhelming support.

(Those who know no discipline and serve no use can be thrown at the enemy. Her soldiers know to look down on the loose bands of the Way just as they disdain the living, and why should they care if known cowards die or flee?)

For, the Whispering Way allies who may now come to her banner aside, her troops know each other. Over the course of their centuries of drill, they have all been provided with the opportunity to train together, and former adventurers know the knacks of orcish warriors just as they know Hellknight steel or Varisian archers. They are well-armed, well-armored, trained to fight in unison, and have superior morale and confidence in the might of their forces.