At this point, I shall leave much of Lucius’ preparations as an exercise for the reader. There were many days of trial and error that I will soon come back to, for the structure of the army he made was a rather curious adaptation of standard block formation that Vassermark had been molding for centuries. Without drummers, buglers, or complex commands however, he was forced to improvise.

To tell this story chronologically however, I must focus on resolving a question that I am sure has bothered at least some of my readers to this point. The reasons for Lucius being in the desert, his motivations, his worries, and his obligations, have all been laid out well enough. The function that Golden provided was also demonstrated, but not how we motivated him to help.

Lucius himself did not question the matter because he assumed that I had already paid him, as I had in Giordana, or that it was further compensation for glutting himself in the Misty Isles. These theories seemed to hold water for him but were not the truth.

The bird had his own motivations that were in a sense deeper than Lucius’. The boy was practically running away from his own self-imposed chains in a juvenile adventure. He couldn’t think of it that way because he didn’t know how to think about Aisha’s condition. He was too immature at the time. With the blessing of age and hindsight, much can be forgiven.

The bird went with a purpose, to barter with Anubi for something I could not provide him. In fact, all the effort of putting him in a human guise and giving him a stigmata worth persevering in the wasteland was for this purpose.

While Lucius argued with the priest, he slipped the watch of Lupa and sent off his cadre of stolen thralls so that he could mount the steps to Anubi’s stone garden. With a word, he banished the desert lord’s thralls and stood before my kin almost as an equal.

Anubi had been at work on some project, some construction of magic that I cannot speak to, but he set it aside and met gazes with the divine beast. At this point I think it is more appropriate to call him a cast off splinter of a god. Anubi asked, “What do you want, Reaper?”

Golden scoffed and glanced around the oasis. “I don’t reap anymore. If I did, I would have no end of work here, returning these scraps of soul to the cycle.”

Anubi had a staff, a wonderful thing of gold internally inscribed with more runes than I can even fathom. It throbbed with intent as he slammed the butt down. The noise resonated with the city like a beat upon a drum. “I have never before quarreled with your mother, but that can always change.”

“I’m not here to fight. You think I would be in this ape skin if I wanted to fight, Wolf-slayer? Come now, I’d have either stayed true or at least fetched the form of a dragon.”

“I’ve slain dragons as well.”

Golden continued to fidget like a man hunted by loan sharks. “Yes, in fact we killed one on the way here. Not what I would usually consider good eating, but neither are these walking husks.”

Anubi sank back in his throne, releasing his walking staff once more. “What have you come for then? We both know it is the way of my kind to allow barter even with enemies.”

Golden sneered. “Yes, but you adjust your costs accordingly.”

“Of course.”

“I’ve come to barter nonetheless.”

“We shall see if you can pay my price.”

“I could fly about this desert and slaughter your misbehaving children in an instant. I could return before–”

Anubi cut the air with his hand, his intent almost fracturing the tenuous veil. Helios’ light could only just mend his scratch. “That deed has already been bartered off before you and I shall not renege.”

“The traditional way then, power.”

“Of which you seem to have plenty to give. What is it you seek?”

“I wish to leave this world.”

Golden’s statement caused quite a few reactions that might be expected. Anubi hesitated, recoiled, frowned, turned over the words for deceit, and then deduced his meaning. “You know as well as I how trivial it is to descend. I take it that you don’t mean that, so you must mean how to reach up, how to fly close to the sun without your wings melting.”

“You’ve done it before, haven’t you? Wolf-slayer.”

Anubi chuckled. “It’s easier to summon them–”

“Liar. You did not summon Roma to this world, you dragged down an aspect, an imprint of her being. It’s not the same. That would hardly be different than meeting my own sibling.”

Anubi began to say, “The scale is–”

“I have named what I ask of you, now name your price.”

For a long time, the two of them stared at one another, not because of animosity but because a proper accounting had to be taken. Power is not something easily quantified. Consider a king with his many realms and fiefs. How much power does that king have? He can call on his dukes, he can tax the temples, he can rally the peasantry, levy armies, and imprison merchants for evading his tariffs. But which of those is more important than another? How much tax would you exchange for the loyalty of a duke? There is no heavenly account book in the world that can make such a sum.

Many hours passed before Anubi declared, “You have enough to trade, but you would be little different from a human after.”

“Would I still be me?”

“You would still be you, at your core. You might find it strange to drag around such a colossal piece of inanimate intent though. It would be like a lame limb.”

“Then I will make the deal.”

Anubi rose, picking up his staff once more. He towered over Golden and said, “I shall have to remember to bid you farewell when you leave, for I expect to never see you again. This will be the death of you.”

“Perhaps, perhaps not,” Golden said.

Anubi pierced him through the skull with his staff as though the golden rod were a spear tip. The divine beast was there crucified in the garden, caught in a cycle of death and rebirth. The remaking of his soul was a slow process, as it was when he consumed Umbra.

During that time, Anubi was forced to show his age. His walking staff was more than a mere piece of metal to prop his old body up, but an extension of his intent. With it busy, and to make a crude analogy but my options are limited when speaking to a mere human, it was as though his legs had fallen asleep.

He was forced to call for a litter. A dozen thralls nearly broke their backs hoisting him up and carrying him out of the garden. Golden was making a racket of inane gurgles and groans. He gasped in pain, kicking his slippered feet against the stone. For a time, Anubi busied himself with the routine work of repairs, of tidying up and seeing to old projects that had languished. Eventually, he felt the welling of raw power that had been extracted from Golden and he went to see Lucius.

The thralls available to him numbered approximately eleven hundred, but they would be useless without first decimating them at the least. To craft any specialists, more would have to be sacrificed and compounded, but he was not convinced that the reduction in numbers would be warranted.

The two of them met near the northern end of the oasis city where there had once been a school. The shaded slate still stood and he had scrounged some bits of chalk to dash down his ideas. At Anubi’s request, Lucius began his explanation of how he wanted to turn the thralls into an army.

“The idea came from birds, you see? Honestly, it was a bit of a fluke of boredom, but Master always said to schedule some boredom into the day. If nothing else, it helps you stay on schedule. A busy mind needs time to relax. While I was bored, iw as reflecting on the fact that the desert doesn’t have any birds. Which makes sense, there’s no food. You need berry bushes and seeds and crops and bugs and whatever to feed a great big flock of birds. That was just where my thoughts started though. You see, birds are stupid. I mean, some of them can be very smart. I’ve seen crows do things you wouldn’t believe.”

“I would,” Anubi corrected, but he let the boy go on.

“Most birds, song birds really, their heads are smaller than acorns. Their brains smaller than nuts. They probably have just as much will to them as these creatures you have here. They move around, fly, eat, shit, mate, but they also weave nests and manage territory and they stay together when they flock in the sky. How do they do that? That’s what I was thinking about. Ants are another good example of creatures too miserable to think. You can scream all you want at an ant hill and they’ll still dig and eat and spread. They must follow simple rules that complex behavior emerges from… simply, well, because if you were to write out their brains there wouldn’t be room for more than a few simple rules, not after all the biological work.”

Anubi nodded along, for he was enjoying the show. He had several solutions to the problem, but doing it himself was no longer his style. The point was for Lucius to do it.

“Alright, so starting from there, I began comparing it to how army formations work. Normally, you just want everyone who shows up to magically know what to do, but let’s be real, even professional armies are dumb and confused most times. That’s why you have to assign men to battalions and teach them what banner is their banner and once they have that figured out, they just have to stand in formation around it. Now, formations only matter if you have an array of weapons. We’ve got what? Slings and spears and lots of them?”

“A few swords,” Anubi said.

“So, how do you take a blank slate and get them to stand in formation? I could do a lot of math I barely understand about lattice coordinates, or I could just make do with blobs and say that they should back away from their friends if they are close enough to touch, but they should approach their friends if they can’t reach them. That will make them jostle around and self-organize into a formation that at least has room to swing their arms. Then I add a rule that they point the face of their shield and the tip of their spear away from their friends and just like that I’ll have a basic formation I can work with.”

“How would you move them?”

“With a bannerman that will need more intelligent controls. Then I just have to move these great big mobs like units and spread them out so I can encircle and destroy, reinforce failing groups and form lines. I should be able to utilize their normal violence for hunger to handle the melee. Their instincts are feral, so a shield wall is out of the question, but an open brawl is fine.”

Anubi said, “Think about it for another few hours and send for me when you have the sets of commands decided on. I’ll begin the decimation. But, don’t you want any of them to have stigmata?”

Lucius shook his head. “We’d have to sacrifice either bodies or pack animals and while that would mean less mouths to feed, it would weaken the army more than it helped. Master never taught me the efficient stigmata for combat.”

“Well, I hope you weren’t planning on combat support from your pet bird.”

Lucius turned back from his chalk scribblings. “What do you mean?”

“By the time your army marches, he will be no more than human.”