Siege of Boval Castle

The Siege of Boval Castle is the catastrophe that opens the saga. Sire Koucey's ancestral fief, Boval Vale high in the Mindens, was a quiet cattle-and-cheese country that Minalan the village spellmonger had retreated to in semi-retirement. The arrival of Sheruel's gurvani horde out of the western mountains turned the vale into the first great test of the new age of magic.

The strength of Boval Castle

The castle itself was a stout four-tower keep with a curtain wall and outer bailey, built fresh enough to be among the best-fortified holdings in the Wilderlands. Sire Koucey commanded perhaps a thousand men-at-arms and militia inside, with another four thousand peasants and refugees from the Vale taking shelter in the bailey. Sir Cei the household knight, Tyndal the stableboy-apprentice, Pentandra the visiting Remeran adept, and a slowly-arriving Magical Corps of warmagi were the magical brains of the defence.

Minalan's improvised magical defence held longer than anyone expected. Walls were warded against goblin sappers; archers were augmented; trolls bringing down the corner towers were repelled. But the gurvani had numbers Koucey could never match.

The breach

The gurvani sappers eventually broke through under the northwest section of the outer-bailey wall, opening a hole the size of two wagons. Hundreds of goblins poured into the bailey under shaman cover before Minalan and the Magical Corps could counter-attack. The breach was held — barely — but the cost made it clear the castle could not last another assault. Koucey held a war council and admitted what everyone already knew: no relief was coming. Duke Lenguin had not committed his forces; the Five Duchies had decided Boval was lost.

The molopor in the cavern

Beneath the castle, in a cavern Koucey's line had sealed for generations, Minalan and Pentandra found something Imperial thaumaturgy had no protocol for: a stable molopor, a permanent spatial weak point that the ancient gurvani shamans had reinforced into a working portal. Minalan describes it in the simplest possible terms:

A real, honest-to-gods stable molopor, augmented by ancient gurvani shamans to let them travel anywhere, and bring anything to them that they wanted. Probably an artifact left over from the wars between the Alka Alon and the gurvani a few thousand years ago.

— Minalan, on the Boval molopor

The cavern was the reason Sheruel wanted Boval back. The reason Koucey's ancestor had built the castle directly on top of it. And the reason the Old God could not be allowed anywhere near it. The Magical Corps decided to use it.

The sex-magic working that opened the gate

The molopor was unstable enough that opening it as an evacuation portal required more raw power than any single mage could summon. The protocol Pentandra designed was an Imperial sex-magic working — her professional speciality — with Pentandra and Minalan as the prime couple, their irionite witchstones in their hands, the Five Classic Positions used in sequence to keep power building, and a relay chain of three other warmagi (Delman, Reyman, and finally Taren) handing the energy off to one another, while Taren stood at the molopor itself and held the gate open. Carmella monitored the working.

It worked. The gate opened on Inarion Academy, hundreds of leagues to the south, and over a period of hours the entire surviving population of the castle — more than four thousand people — filed past the bedstead in a long, terrified line, herded by Sir Cei and his men-at-arms. Alya, Minalan's commoner sweetheart, paused mid-procession to kiss him on the ear before stepping through. Tyndal escorted the Magical Corps's only prisoner, the gurvan Gurkarl, through next-to-last. Sir Cei was the last man across.

Sir Cei just went through, ladies and gentlemen! We have officially rescued everyone! Over four thousand people just saw your hairy, naked arse, Min!

— Carmella, calling the evacuation complete

Decoy guard-figures, lightly enchanted to mimic small movements, were left on the walls and parapets of the empty castle to delay the besiegers' realisation that the place was deserted.

The Dead God answers

The molopor working was loud, in arcane terms, and Sheruel felt it. He came in person to claim Boval — not the body, but the great mounted skull-and-witchstone artefact his shamans had built around his own preserved head. The sphere arrived in the bailey while the warmagi were still trapped on the wrong side of the gate (the sex-magic working could not be disengaged without collapsing the portal, and the warmagi could not pass through their own gate while powering it).

Sheruel turned his attention to Koucey personally. The Dead God had a private grievance against House Brandmount: Sir Brandmount, Koucey's ancestor, was the original killer who had taken Sheruel's head off centuries before. The shamans who recovered the head and embedded it in irionite had preserved Sheruel's mind. He had waited generations to settle the score:

You are the descendant of Sir Brandmount.
I have that privilege.
It was war.

— The Dead God and Sire Koucey

Koucey drew his sword and tried to charge. Minalan started to fire a stunning spell. Sheruel was faster: he reached out with his mind, took control of Koucey's body in mid-stride, and stopped him. The Dead God's spell wrapped around Koucey's mind and held.

The Aronin's sacrifice

Time stopped — literally; one of the few effects the proximity of the molopor permitted — and the Aronin, the Alka Alon adept who had lived in the vale for eleven human generations, appeared with a circle of his folk. He had been waiting for exactly this moment.

Lord Brandmont was a good and noble man, but he may be forfeit in this struggle. Knowing him as I do, he would not object to the sacrifice.

— The Aronin, on Koucey

The Aronin and his Tree Folk would engage the sphere directly — their lore was old enough to bind it, briefly — while a second, smaller portal of the Aronin's own making evacuated the Magical Corps to a tiny Alshari hamlet called Duprin, far from harm's way. The Aronin made the sketch of his portal in mid-air with a wave of his wand:

Here. In a few moments it will open and lead you outside of the valley. Not as far as you did with the molopar, but out of harm's way.

— The Aronin, sketching the second portal

One by one the Tree Folk wove a magical net around Sheruel's sphere. One by one, Minalan ushered his warmagi through the new portal. Pentandra led Traveler, Minalan's horse, across by the reins. Minalan was the last to step through, watching the Aronin's face one final moment — focused in concentration and determination, with just a hint of laughter and desperation thrown in — before the disc closed behind him.

What the Vale cost

Boval Castle fell empty to the gurvani. The Vale was overrun. The Aronin almost certainly died, though by his last instructions to Minalan his daughter Ameras had escaped earlier with certain Alka Alon arcane secrets that would prove vital generations later. Sire Koucey was not killed: he was kept alive in the sphere's grip as the Dead God's first and most important human thrall, broken in mind and re-shaped to serve. He returned to the page in the next book as the scarred, half-dead emissary Sheruel sent to parley with Minalan before the next great battle.

The Magical Corps that walked out of Duprin two days later had nine witchstones between them, the full attention of the Dead God, and the certain knowledge that the war had only begun. The four thousand Bovali at Inarion became the seed of Sevendor's eventual population. Ameras, the Aronin's daughter, would not surface again until many books later, when her hidden line and its secret arsenal of Alka Alon weapons became central to the war against Korbal. The molopor itself, still buried under Boval Castle and now under gurvani control, became one of Sheruel's strategic priorities for the next decade.