The on the walls of Castle Alder: approach and the plan revealed

The castle looming in front of you as you take your place in front of several hundred of your assembled 'Rabble' militia and Baroness Tula's landless knights is formidable. Hewn of light gray stone, Castle Alder is quite beautiful and picturesque, romantic even... but when the walls are manned by hundreds of archers and men at arms, with cauldrons of oil ready to be kindled to a boil at a moment's notice and each of six turrets along the walls sporting a crossbow-like 'scorpion' ready to launch spear-sized bolts at attackers, it looks more like a pretty way to die.

Fortunate, then, that those who are marching towards it are already dead.

Even as your soldiers queue up to hear you speak, some 300 shuffling zombies - the dessicated 'laborers' from Undrek joined by bloated and sickly villagers who dared take up arms against your troops still wearing their bloody farm clothes - are staggering towards the northern wall, carrying iron chains with grappling hooks and hauling wagons full of finely-chopped kindling (about half of which is made from the disassembled homes and furniture of the aforementioned disagreeable villagers). Already, the defending archers manning the walls have started peppering them with arrows and crossbow bolts. However, although zombies are too slow, clumsy and fragile to be a threat to trained, properly armed soldiers in melee, they are remarkably resistant to missile file. Maces knock them apart, axes and swords dismember them like straw men with one or two swings... but arrows just stick in them uselessly, penetrating organs that no longer serve any purpose. Before long, the defenders stop shooting and hold their fire, perhaps suspecting you are just trying to waste their ammunition on Johari's undead thralls.

How wrong they are. If Count Mace were to have his knights sally forth from the gates right now, they could likely trample and chop the undead into oblivion in time to make a fighting retreat from Tula's counter-charge and get back in the gates with minimal losses. But, feeling secure in the sturdiness of Castle Alder's high walls, they don't.

"Well, don't look so down, Johari," you say to your necromancer, the bespectacled, deep-brown-skinned woman standing near you and looking even more grim than usual. "I let you put on your full robes for the day even though seeing your tits in that lovely skull-themed lingere I gifted you would no doubt distract the enemy nicely. You aren't fretting about the impending loss of your labor **** are you? Depending on the terms of Count Mace's surrender you will probably have plenty more to replace them before the day is done. I'll even pay you and your order a premium - can you imagine how much gold Mace has in his war chest, since he never paid these mercenaries?"

"That isn't my concern. I..." Johari's voice cracks a little and she straightens her glasses as she always does when she's feeling nervous, glancing over at the Gray Star mercenary pikemen where the bald, gray-bearded Sir Nasheim is organizing his troops while his towering, powerfully-muscled son Claude takes his place in the second rank where he can inspire the men. Johari clenches her jaw and trembles unsteadily for a moment, putting her hand over her stomach. "Nevermind. Let's just be finished with this awful charade as quickly as possible."

You decide to leave her be and turn back to the others. "Mmm. I don't know about awful..." you say to Marzena at your side as you go about unlocking the silver shackles on the wrists of her, the pigtailed young ingenue Nancy, the short haired, tanned (and VERY popular with the men) Olivia, the bratty blue-haired Rima, and a few other witches. Rima in particular grimaces and holds her hand up as if to cast as spell on you as soon as she's freed... but an amused glance by Marzena, as if daring her to try, causes her to growl and lower her hand.

You continue. "I think I'm starting to see the appeal of assaulting and ransacking your neighbors as all the swaggering Kings and Dukes are always doing. It's a very powerful feeling to point your finger and send waves of troops to destroy something, isn't it? You know, Marzena, it's a bit unfair that we so seldom get to make a man gasp and quiver in silent fear like proper little maidens are supposed to, isn't it?"

"Ha! Why do you think I bargained with a demon to unlock the ability to use magic?" Marzena gives you a playful (and, as always, a little too hard, jab of her elbow). You smile. "Ah yes, but even so, when it comes to the matters of love, it seems like no matter how bold we are, it's always the men who control the situation when they're bending us over or pounding us into the bed. Even when we get up on top they'll always be just sitting there in smug contentment, knowing all the consequences will be with us, especially since marriage is off the table. Magic or no magic, I've seen you more than once smiling only to hide your unsteady nerves when you're squatting down to drip out the cum some ill-mannered traveler has filled you up with."

"Gods Zoe, it's like you WANT me to make fun of you in front of Tula later, talking like this. Before you know it she's going to have you practicing swinging swords with her!" Marzena giggles. You smirk back and put your arm around her back affectionately. "Ah, perish the thought! Well perhaps I'll get lucky and she'll get a deadly rock dropped on her fat head from a **** hole before you get the chance, eh?"

Clearing your throat, you address your troops briefly. "Ahem, listen!" Your breathy, feminine tones don't lend themselves well to projecting in front of a crowd, quite in contrast to Tula's fog-horn of a voice that you can hear from a hundred feet away as she belts encouragement to her knights. You do your best anyway: "These yarn-spinning, dung-shoveling farmers are so proud of their nobility, their traditions, their legacy. They think that people like you are contemptible driftwood, greedy and soulless nobodies.... mercenary cut-throats, out-of-work laborers, contemptible drunkards only after a little coin to salve the ugliness of their lives by living down to their worst instincts in the brothel walls... and of course, the whores like me and my friends who grease those wheels while the wholesome villagers and their caring, devout landlords avert their eyes from us in shame. They use us when it's convenient and try to push us out of their sight or into a hole in the ground as soon as they can! Well, they can't very well look away now, can they? I'm not going to tell YOU that you should be proud to be here! I'm not going to tell you that any snot-nosed stable boys are going to look up to you or call this a great day in history. But what I ask you to do... is laugh!"

You point at the stately walls of Castle Alder. "Laugh at how little their pretentions are worth! Smile, when you see how little their vaunted nobility really means to a King! Kick dirt on them when they see for the first time that the lofty fairy tale of a proper kingdom they thought they could have if they just cast me down won't save them when they really need it! And if that isn't good enough, remember that once those arrogant walls come down, you can take, take what you want, and then come back to my town and take some more! Because whether you die young or old, what you'll really regret isn't serving a bad woman like me or Baroness Tula. It's not having gotten YOURS! So grip your weapons tight and watch the show at the walls! And laugh with me when they come down!"

While you have been speaking the tireless undead have piled up a massive heap of kindling and charcoal all along the castle wall. The soliders above it shout jeers and insults. After all, the walls of Castle Alder are all stone, with no wooden support beams like some more primitive forts. Belatedly they notice that Sergeants Gregor, Duran and a few other unlucky militia have been dressed in bloody rags and smeared in filth and mud, blending in with the stinking zombies. Once the undead thralls have done their work they take torches and cans of oil and begin pouring them all over the piles of wood. When the troops on the walls notice that they move with purpose and celerity that the shuffling undead lack they are singled out by archers, forcing them to try and use the press of undead around them as cover.

Unfortunately, Sergeant Duran is a big target and skewered by a shaft with a piercing head, the high angle and close range making a mockery of his brigandine armor. When he slows down he's an easy target, and a dozen more shafts penetrate him - it's almost a mercy, the sheer number of hits making his demise come as quick as a stuck pig. Gregor doesn't fare well either, taking multiple hits in his leg and shoulder, but he manages to drop the torch, setting the piles of flammable mateiral ablaze. Fortunately for him the giant pall of greasy smoke it produces covers his retreat as he limps away bleeding profusely.

Many of the zombies are too stupid to avoid the flames and are consumed - Johari doesn't bother to approach and give them fresh commands. Those with the chains dutifully throw them up to the walls. Distracted by the **** smoke, many of the troops on those walls have backed away from the edge and gone to seek rags to cover their mouths, no doubt expecting that the smoke itself is the intended weapon.

They are quite wrong, but fortunate nonetheless to have withdrawn. The fire burns hotter and hotter. Half an hour passes, and zombies bring more and more kindling to throw on the huge bonfires leaning against the castle walls. Only a handful of soldiers remain on the parapets; the defenders expect this is a diversion and redeploy most of their troops to other sections of the walls.

At first, it seems they are correct. When you throw a flag into the air, trumpeters blow and over two thousand infantry begin advancing towards the walls from three sides. The east wall, where scouts spotted the Amazon warriors gathered together, is the destination of those peasant mercenaries led by the jumped-up farmers Yig and Ulf; you and Tula had decided that since anyone who scaled the walls and took on those Amazons in a defensive position was going to get turned into mincemeat anyways, why not throw your lowest-quality 'meat' into that particular sausage grinder? The Gray Star mercenaries advance on the opposite wall while Tula's knights and the bulk of your milita slowly advance behind the smoke of the fire.

Just as the ladders touch the walls and the first troops begin scaling the better-defended walls - Grey Star veterans and untrained peasants alike taking hideous levels of losses as they climb into the teeth of a storm of missile fire, wondering no doubt why your witches have not yet stepped in to provide any fire support... just as the troops on the ground are visibly starting to waver after several dozen massive scorpion bolts have slammed into their ranks, leaving dozens of men horribly skewered... a deep, echoing groan runs through the wall with the bonfires burning against it.

"Shit! Finally!" you say with your arms crossed over your chest. "I was starting to think that worthless arse Gregor gave me a useless plan."

"Er, wait, what's happening?" Marzena asks, tilting her wide brimmed pointed hat to the side as she watches quizzically. "Are you using some secret magic without telling me, Zoe? Boo, I ought to give you a pinch for that!"

"Nothing of the sort. Remember, I'm still a noblewoman, and my beautiful lips may kiss many things, but demon arse is not one of them." you say to her with a smirk. "You see, what those uneducted dung-farmers manning the walls, and that linear-minded clod of a Count leading them, do not understand... is that castle walls are NOT made of stone. They are made of many individual PIECES of stone, held together with cement. Cement... which is made by mixing things together in the **** heat of a kiln. Bring the heat of the kiln ba-"

You are cut off by an echoing rumble like rolling thunder. The gangs of zombies hauling on the chains - their dead hands fused to the metal by the heat cooking them, many left with bare, smoldering stumps by the now-glowing-hot chains - have been tirelessly pulling on the grappling hooks attached to the top of the castle wall. The troops up there, belatedly, have started to realize what is happening... too late to do anything but be caught in the disaster. The bottom of the walls sag and shift, those symbols of a proud noble family's generations of loyal service to the crown turning silly and soft, their manly and unyielding solidity proving to be quite illusory. The weight of the upper stones squeezes the lower ones out. An edifice that looks and feels solid at first proves that once one piece of the whole falls out of place, so does the one above it that depended on it... and so on. The whole proud lot of masonry comes tumbling down in an avalanche, crushing the remaining zombies and smothering the fires underneath tons of stone slabs, the layer of rubble that filled in the layers of those castle walls spilling out, the gravel seeming almost like blood from a severed limb. An entire side of the castle is now wide open, gaping larger than any catapult or trebuchet could manage with hurtling missiles. Dozens of too-slow soldiers from the walls fall to their demise, crushed in the collapse. It is now clear that Count Mace put almost all of his troops on the walls, so confident in the well-built gates that he left virtually none to hold the courtyard.

Tula can be heard yowling excitedly even over the sound of blaring horns. Hundreds of the best infantry your milita can offer come rushing towards the fallen wall in a dense block. Tula's knights charge up to the fallen wall but have to dismount when the horses shy away from the smoke and uneven rubble. Hundreds upon hundreds of armored men - and one armored woman with very prominent boob-plates on her rather impractically fancy armor - scramble up and over the still-hot ruins of the collapsed wall and charge even as the Grey Stars are flagging in their attack on the wall and the peasant mercenaries are routing completely after inflicting not a single **** on the superb Amazon warriors manning (womaning?) the western wall.

You lick your lips and eye the castle gates. If Count Mace were to ride out with the twoscore or so knights under his command right now, it is questionable if your witches and the militia you have kept in reserve to guard yourself would be enough to halt their charge even with numbers and defensive stakes on your side. At the very least, he could easily escape, since you haven't anything mobile enough to pin him down (Tula refused to give up her chance at a glorious charge through the breach).

Yet those castle gates remain closed and barred even as a savage melee engulfs the courtyard and Tula's knights start surrounding the doors of the inner keep. Count Mace, it seems, is too proud to retreat when it's sensible. That would be dishonorable, after all. So he is no doubt honorably ordering his knights to defend his keep to the last. You beckon Marzena and the other witches scowling at your back as you and your reserve start advancing towards the castle gates, having no doubt that your troops will be in control of them and open them to admit you entry by the time you arrive. After all, stepping over that heap of burning rubble might singe your dainty, feminine feet, and you need to be looking your best when time comes to gloat over your victory and take the spoils. Of course, that is assuming those fools under Mace see which way the wind is blowing and surrender soon instead of fighting to the end like headless chickens. And the keep itself might be difficult to breach without any proper siege engineers. But that's why your witches are here.