"That old hare's not the only poet on board, eh?" said Richards.
"Mmf," said Tarquin.
In the morning they woke to war.
"Troopers!" A shout roused Richards from where he sat, bored, staring out over the plains. "Prepare to disembark!"
"Now there's a man who enjoys his job," said Tarquin.
"Jesus, he's worse than Otto," Richards said. His limbs cracked with unpleasant organic noises as he stood. He'd barely moved since he'd woken, and now felt as brittle as a straw doll. There was more to a human's constant, twitchy motion than staying upright, he was learning, like not letting their irritating meat outsides seize up.
The soldiers hauled themselves from the trucks to join a stream of troops marching beside the tracks.
"Right, my sleeping beauties," said the sergeant. "We are going to go for a walk. Word has come down to me that the line has been blown ahead by Penumbra's saboteurs. All you lot should think on how nice and healthy you'll be once you've walked. Who knows, there might even be time for a spot of breakfast before the war starts."
"Really, sarge?" said an eager trooper.
"No!" roared the sergeant. "Now get a bleedin' move on, or I'll shoot you myself and save Penumbra and his monsters the bother."
Richards fell into step with something like a rat. It gave him a filthy look.
"Charming," said Richards.
The day was the kind autumn shares with summer: a cold morning with the promise of a hot afternoon. The sky was a uniform grey, its light joyless. Ahead it turned to an angry black, a thick band of deeper cloud foreshortening the horizon. Bursts of lightning lit it from within, thunder answered by tremors from below.
"Look!" said the rat. "A storm!"
"That's not a storm," said the hare with some amount of awe. "That is the death of the world. The Great Terror. I must record it in my poem."
"Quiet in the ranks there! You can all have a natter after you've had a battle," bawled the sergeant. "Until then, keep your cakeholes shut."
They walked five abreast alongside the railway embankment on a plain of grass that was almost completely flat. No farms, nor mines, only one small building, after the railway line curved west, red-brick, about a mile from the route of their march.
"Last Station," said the hare. "From there the railway heads out to cross The Rift."
A familiar odour percolated into the air. Burnt ground. The army took in the wasted land before them with a chorus of mutters and shouts.
"Will this be the fortune of the Magic Wood?"
"And the city?"
There was an abrupt change in scenery, the plateau ending in a thick scar where two world fragments clumsily joined. Beyond it lay a plain criss-crossed with ravines and gullies, giving the landscape the look of an angular brain.
It was scorched black. Charcoalled trees clawed at the sky, the gullies steamed, the grass was burnt down to the roots.
"The broken lands, twice broken!" said the hare.
The army marched onto the brow of the hill and fanned out, directed in columns to their positions. The centre of their battleline was a low blister in the slope. Commander Hedgehog and his best warriors had taken up station there. A mix of large forest animals armoured head to toe surrounded him and his staff. Behind this position were the army's artillery pieces, globular balls of crystal sporting long brass barrels. They looked spectacularly dangerous.
"See!" whispered the hare from behind Richards. "Hedgehog has the men of the city at the heart of the army. He is guarded by the Big Animal Division and the City Guard. They have lightning lances, terrible weapons. I should expect we will be stationed out on one of the flanks, behind a skirmish line of lancers. When the enemy breaks through them, range will no longer matter, and we will be able to put our swords and spears to deadly use at close quarters!"
The hare was mostly right. The Pylon Guard were few in number, so Richards' regiment was stationed behind a line of arbalesteers. These crossbowmen were not of Pylon City and wore colourful clothes at odds with the Pylonites' sober garb. Their forms were not so well rendered, their language a musical tongue he did not recognise. Protecting their right flank was a detachment of foundrymen. Further out roamed groups of skirmishers backed up by squadrons of light thog cavalry.
"They'll stop anything getting round the back," the hare explained enthusiastically. "Or, when we break the enemy's line, force it apart like a wedge."
"He's enjoying this far too much," muttered Richards to Tarquin.
From behind came a rhythmic clatter: armoured weasels, well over a thousand of them, marching to fill the gap in the allied lines to Richards' left. They wore scale and plate, articulated to accommodate their sinuous bodies. Each carried a pike and a steel buckler with a spiked boss. Blood-red pennants fluttered from helmets and shields and streamed from the ends of their pikes.
"Aren't they glorious?" whispered the hare in awe.
Richards raised an eyebrow. "Don't weasels eat hares?"
"They do indeed," said the hare, nodding, not rising to the bait. "And I know I should not admire them, for a pack of them did devour a sister of mine. But still, all that is behind us now, now we are part of the League of Humans and Small but Brave Animals!"
"Snappy," said Richards.
"How could we fail to lose with such ferocious beings at our sides? A thousand armoured weasels, each a born killer. Glorious!"
"Yeah," said Richards slowly, remembering their behaviour in the bar. "And each a born weasel."
Richards had time to re-experience the boredom part of the boredom and terror warfare combination. They stood in their position for several hours, and once again he became uncomfortable. He was debating taking a piss right there when the hare spoke again.
"Oh my!" said the hare. "Here they come!"
The sky went dark. A hush came over the army of men and beasts. The enemy approached. Shadow preceded it, and darkness followed.
The horde of creatures came from the south, appearing over a ridge three miles away, drawing toward them with unnatural speed.
"Oh my," said the hare with a tinge of fear. "There are rather a lot of them."
In the main the army was composed of vile-looking humanoids. Like the alliance, monsters brought from all manner of places on the Grid.
"Every hero needs his mob," said Richards grimly, doing a quick calculation on the balance between heroic human players and system-controlled monsters in your average game. The odds he came up with were unfavourable. Not for the first time he wondered how the hell he'd ended up in this mess, and decided to blame Hughie.
Steam curled from haemites. Immense war-beasts studded the horde like rocks on a polluted beach. Steam-powered towers, bristling with cannon, crawled across the broken lands on caterpillar tracks. Around these marched monstrous trollmen, swishing tree-trunk clubs as they walked.
"Look!" said the hare, his lips wobbling with fear. "Morblins! There… there must be over five thousand of them! And daibeasts. And, by lord Frith, that is a low-dweller. A low-dweller!" An unpleasant chant filled the air, a droning that made Richards' skin crawl. An oily reek descended across the battlefield, the exhaust of engines, steam, the stink of unwashed bodies.
Nearby, one of the soldiers began to cry.
"Shut it, you," said the sergeant. There was a tremor in his voice.
The front rank of what Richards took to be morblins, small, pot-bellied, grey-skinned creatures, had a great many armoured hounds amidst it. The largest morblins held onto the leashes of these dogs, who half-dragged them towards the allied lines.
The enemy stopped, facing off against the league.
Silence fell. Thunder rumbled. Pennants cracked in the wind.
Then a howl as the dogs were set loose. They rushed across the plains, baying.
"Steady, Richards, steady," Richards told himself. The rush of fear his human facsimile provided him was powerful.