The sound of the mammoth war horns was like the wailing of a dying world.
Carved from the stone-hard tusks of ancient ice beasts that had roamed the northern tundra ten thousand years ago, the six-foot horns needed four deacons blowing all at once to produce a sound. The sound wave rolled down the Ashen Valley like physical thunder. It shook through the shale cliffs and shook loose cascades of frozen gravel that clattered into the dry riverbed.
At that signal, the sixteen corpse pens in the central basin broke into timed together motion.
Lin Tao and Tie Shan watched from their hidden vantage point on the eastern bluff as three thousand armored corpses marched out of the stockades in four massive phalanxes. Behind them, from the dark mouth of the deep necropolis cave, two thousand extra heavy siege automatons emerged into the dim morning light.
Five thousand armored walking dead.
The sight was overwhelming in its scale.
The vanguard was composed of two thousand light infantry corpses armed with notched cleavers and round hardwood shields. Behind them marched fifteen hundred heavy shock troopers wrapped in royal cavalry plate. It carried six-foot barbed glaives and heavy iron axe-spears. The center of the column was dominated by massive, eight-foot-tall siege corpses. Former barbarian body-refiners from the northern steppes whose skeletons had been chemically enlarged by rotting potion-made baths. It dragged three-ton battering rams carved from stone-hard cedar trunks.
