Battle · Book 10 · Necromancer
The audacious three-pronged raid on Korbal's seat at Olum Seheri. Anguin's Westwardens broke Princess Rardine out of the Tower of Despair, Terleman's Gatebreakers held the Waypoints against Korbal's field force, and Minalan's Scholars team penetrated to the Ghost Rock vein beneath the city. The Scholars retrieved the Handmaiden enneagram (which became the working core of the Magolith), killed the Nemovort Reshtitelin, lost the Aronin and Lord Aeratas to Mycin Amana's blade, resurrected Aeratas and his wife Hynalinae into the Tera-Alon-style host bodies Korbal had been preparing for himself, captured Mycin Amana herself, cracked Sheruel's sphere with Sire Cei's hammer, and bound Korbal's enneagram permanently into his decaying corpse with the freshly-loaded Magolith. The Raid of Emancipation, executed separately and immediately before, served as cover and freed tens of thousands of human slaves from the Wilderlands and Gilmora.
The Battle of Olum Seheri is the single most ambitious operation in the saga: an audacious three-pronged raid against Korbal the Necromancer's personal seat, conducted simultaneously across the necromantic island-city built on the ruins of fallen Anthatiel. Every prong achieved its primary objective; each one came at significant cost.
Before Olum Seheri itself, Duke Anguin's court ran a separate large-scale operation, the Raid of Emancipation. Coordinated by Count Salgo, Mavone, Sandoval, Pentandra, and the Kasari under Arborn, the Emancipation swept eleven major slave-camps, estates, and gurvani holding-points across the Wilderlands and Gilmora simultaneously, freeing well over a hundred thousand enslaved humans. The Alshari Third Commando provided the conventional military backbone. The Kasari laid the distractions. The freed captives were funnelled north to Vorone, Vanador, and the Magelaw's settlement centres, where their absorption became the demographic foundation of the Magelaw.
The Emancipation was not part of Olum Seheri proper; it ran ahead of it and beside it, drawing Sheruel's and Korbal's attention onto the Penumbra and away from the strike at Korbal's seat. Operationally it succeeded on both counts.
The raid itself had three operational teams, each with its own commander and objective. The text repeatedly calls it a "two-pronged" attack, since the Westwardens and the Gatebreakers were the publicly-visible prongs and the Scholars went in quietly behind them.
The Scholars' first major engagement was with the Nemovort Reshtitelin, the steward of Korbal's host-body chamber, fought in the empty pool-bed of an unfinished alchemical bath. Reshtitelin held three opponents off at once with a double-ended staff: Mavone with a mageblade, Sandy with spells from his own blade, Sir Cei with hammer and shield. Reshtitelin moved at warmage speed; Cei was almost overmatched.
The killing came in three coordinated strikes. Cei used Reshtitelin's overhead block as leverage, spun his Wilderlord shield around, and rammed the steward back-first against the pool wall. Sandy blasted Reshtitelin's feet and knees with blue fire. Mavone ran his mageblade through Reshtitelin's neck, nearly severing the head. Cei brought his hammer over his shoulder with his sport-Talent shockwave, struck the Nemovort in the breastbone, and the entire chamber boomed as bone exploded outward and the empty pool stained black with ichor. Cei climbed out concussed.
The Scholars pressed on to the Chamber of Ages and the silver pillar that held the Ghost Rock vein, where the freed Aronin was recovering. As Aeratas turned to speak, Mycin Amana stepped out of his shadow with a strange blade in her hand. She had been waiting. The blade struck Aeratas across the lower back; the wound was both physical and necromantic and consumed his cells from the cut outward.
Sire Cei and Hance closed with Mycin Amana. She killed the Aronin with the same blade on the way past, then fought Cei and Hance until Cei's sport-strikes dropped her. They bound her unconscious in enchanted steel manacles.
Lord Aeratas was dead before Minalan could intervene. So was the Aronin.
In the next chamber over, Korbal had been growing two host bodies: a near-finished giant ankotrum frame intended for himself, and a smaller female version intended for Mycin Amana (or so the Scholars assumed). They were complete, just waiting for enneagrams.
Minalan, refusing to leave Aeratas's sacrifice unrequited, did something he had never done before: he reached into the Ghost Rock vein and lifted the most recent psychic imprint Aeratas had left there in his many lifelong visits. He did the same for Hynalinae, Aeratas's long-dead wife (whose imprint the Aronin had once shown them). Then, with the freshly-installed Handmaiden in the Magolith doing most of the delicate node-work because she found his pace too slow, Minalan installed the two enneagrams into the two waiting bodies and brought them to life. Aeratas woke. Hynalinae woke. The reunion was a quiet, private one.
Minalan asked the resurrected pair to remain in the chamber as its permanent guardians, then sealed the Chamber of Ages and the entire Ghost Rock vein behind them — a contingency Hance had quietly prepared earlier in the descent. The cavern flooded over years. Aeratas and Hynalinae would not be seen again on the surface for the rest of the saga.
Mycin Amana, still unconscious and bound, was carried out by Azhguri and Suhi. She was the most valuable prisoner taken from Olum Seheri, the consort of Korbal himself, "condemned to share his fate" in Aeratas's phrase. (Her later escape from this captive body, and her possession of Baroness Isily of Greenflower's coma-bound body, is the long thread that produces the Darkfaller arc of Books 14-16.)
The Gatebreakers, meanwhile, had built the Sudden Fortress (a Carmella-engineered field-redoubt) at the contested Waypoints, killed several thousand gurvani, and had Korbal's field force pinned. When Minalan emerged from the under-caverns with the Magolith now hosting the Handmaiden and Mycin Amana in chains, Korbal himself finally took the field in his oversized, tattooed, scarred, half-rotted host body, with Sheruel's sphere hovering at his shoulder.
Minalan called a parley. He, Terleman, and Sire Cei met Korbal, the Nemovort general Nadziratel, and Sheruel between the lines. The exchange of insults was unusually creative on the magi's side. The parley broke down predictably; Korbal attacked.
In the engagement that followed, Sire Cei struck Sheruel's sphere with his hammer hard enough to crack the irionite shell of the great orb that contained the Dead God's severed head. (Korbal carried a long grudge over this; Cei spent the next several books being hunted by Nemovorti who wanted him alive for his sport-Talent.) Sheruel was diminished as a free working force; his subsequent appearances are noticeably weakened. Korbal had already, in fact, been quietly subverting Sheruel from the inside, turning the Dead God from an independent ally into a working enchantment in the Necromancer's service.
Korbal was eventually downed in the melee. Minalan stood over the unconscious body with the Magolith in his hands and used the Handmaiden — who was a healer and a stitcher, not a killer — to do something nobody had thought of: she permanently bound Korbal's enneagram into the decaying corpse he was wearing. No new body. No transmigration. No alchemical bath. Korbal's immortality was put into abeyance and he was condemned to whatever timespan his current rotting vessel could maintain (the figure Minalan later quoted to Khudoz was "a year or two"). It was not death; the Handmaiden could not kill. But it was the strategic equivalent.
Pentandra extracted the surviving raiders back through the Ways. Rardine was out. Aeratas and Hynalinae were sealed in the Ghost Rock chamber as guardians. Mycin Amana was a captive in steel manacles. The Magolith was working. The Aronin and the original Aeratas were dead. Reshtitelin and several lesser Nemovorti were dead. The Tower of Despair was on fire. The Sudden Fortress was abandoned. The Dradrien master smiths the Scholars had freed from the city (including Master Suhi) had joined the operation and would later be settled in a small workshop at Sevendor under Master Cormoran.
The cost: the Aronin dead, Aeratas dead (resurrected), Sire Cei concussed and injured, several Tera Alon and Westwardens dead at their respective objectives, multiple senior warmagi wounded. The toll among Wilderlord infantry and gurvani auxiliaries was heavy by raid standards but light for the scale of objective achieved.
The strategic consequences were enormous:
Olum Seheri was Korbal's seat and the centre of his court. The raid did not destroy it, but it did everything else.
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