February, Samarkand Gap.

General Suhail El-Mofty opens his eyes sharply as he hears the sound of raised voices outside. At once he snatches for his Zulfiquar, the curved twin-pointed sword still hanging in its ornate sheath next to his bed, rolling out of his hammock and rising to his feet, sword already coming out of its sheathe. However as he looks around, his eyes getting used to the light of day flooding through his tent, he realizes that he can’t hear the pop-pop of gunfire. The ground isn’t shaking with the percussive detonation of artillery, and surely, if there was an attack, his orderly would have awoken him?

He growls, irritably sliding his sword back into his sheath as he listens to the sounds coming from outside his tent. Hundreds, no, thousands of Khan voices are raised in shrill ululating tones, rising in the cadences of a prayer chant. Suhail narrows his bright yellow eyes, his tail twitching as his fur fluffs out. These damn priests and their damn prayer meetings. Suhail knows his train of thought is potentially blasphemous, but he has no time for anything that interferes with the proper running of his frontage, and the fact that the priests insist on getting the troops up early to pray, thus depriving them of a good night’s rest, ranks high on Suhail’s list of problems. He considers calling for a chaplain to get them to knock it off, but then he shrugs and reaches for his uniform.

Ever since Suhail had arrived to take up his duties commanding this most troublesome of troublesome points, the priests have been a pain in the scruff. Getting underfoot, insisting on attending staff meetings to make suggestions that are impractical or impossible is the least of it. Suhail is looking forward to actually getting this war underway so that he can fuck them all off to the rear echelons where they should be, and let him and his men get on with the business of fighting the war.

With a nod, Suhail reaches for his uniform, pulling on the maroon tunic and the white jodhpurs. As he reaches for the tea-set by the door, he narrows his eyes slightly. Reaching out, he clamps the back of his hand against the elaborately engraved kettle. It’s still cold.

Now Suhail is irritated. His salt and pepper grey fur fluffs out still further and his whiskers twitch with irritation. Samir is late, again.
“Not even the simplest things. Hot tea ready when I wake up is not much to ask, is there nothing that boy can do properly?” He snarls.

“Samir!” Suhail bellows, “Where in the Divinity’s name are you, boy?” He barks as he finishes buttoning up his tunic, making sure his rows of medals are straight as he does so. He draws his lips back and, grabbing his pistol belt, stumps out of his tent into the cool morning dawn.

Here, the sound of the Khan voices raised in a chant that Suhail has never bothered to learn are louder, and there’s something about them that sends a tremor travelling up Suhail’s spine. Other voices can be heard above the din, voices raised in… some kind of chant, what kind of chant, Suhail has no idea.

He looks around his headquarters encampment, now bright enough to see in the golden light of the rising sun, trying to find anyone who he can talk to, but the camp is a shambles of turned over chairs and stacks of paper. Boxes have been kicked over and meals have been left untouched. Suhail feels a tremor of fear starting to ripple up his spine… and then he hears a voice raised in prayer. High pitched, even above the yowling of the other Khans, Samir’s voice, young and effortlessly rising in the words of a prayer. The words of this one, Suhail does know.
O Divinity, watch over us now, be our protector in this, our dark hour. Our need is sore, and our want is desperate. Our circumstances are dire, and though we go brave to our end, please forgive us our fear.

“What in the name of the Prophet?” Suhail mouths, almost to himself as he stalks around, intending to find whichever priest is leading this prayer and introducing him to the sharp end of his sword. Such prayers and sessions will discomfit the men.

However as Suhail comes out of the camp, he realizes that the men might have quite a bit to be discomfited about.

Suhail’s headquarters has been chosen for its commanding position. Occupying one of the rolling hills overlooking the Samarkand gap, it’s the ideal spot from which to direct the battle, in Suhail’s estimation. The Khan trenches are spread out like a picture-book before him. Sharp double rows, serrated like the blades of a saw to cut into the ranks of the Equestrian offensive, with anti-aircraft guns positioned to keep the curs’t imperial navy at arm’s length.

Beyond them stretch two miles of empty space, and the dividing line between the Holy land and the country of the damned, and Suhail can just make out the Equestrian positions with the naked eye, and the sight that he beholds there fills him with abject terror.

The sun is rising, bathing the Samarkand gap in gold. The long grass whispers back and forth in the morning breeze, which smells fresh and clean on this, most damnable of days, and the sky is a brilliant blue above the Khan lines, flecked with white clouds.

Across the valley, an incongruously massive black thundercloud is coming steadily closer, moving against the morning wind. Spread from horizon to horizon, forks of brilliant lightning flicker in its depths. The massive cloud rises in the centre into a titanic pillar of roiling inky blackness, and occasional deep peals of booming thunder roll across the valley.

Suhail stares at the huge cloud and his eyes narrow. He reaches for his sword. This is charlatanry, Equestrian daemonic trickery at work! His mouth curls as he looks around for his raptor. Seeing the animal still lashed to its mounting post, the general stalks over to it and yanks his lizard free. Scrambling up onto his lizard, he cracks the reins and the lizard screeches, opening its mouth wide before it breaks into a loping trot.

Suhail guides his mount with his knees through his camp, following the sound of Samir’s voice until he comes to a small knot of his staff officers, all improperly dressed in a combination of uniform and bedclothes. They have their heads tilted skywards and tears are streaking more than one face.. At the head of the group is Cleric Kamaz Udin. The sight of him offends Suhail. His paunch offends Suhail, the way he is always behind the lines and interrupting Suhail’s planning sessions to be asinine… and now his loud and obnoxious prayer session seems to have unsettled Suhail’s entire staff.

“What is this?” Suhail barks, reaching out with his sword and swatting Samir with the flat of his blade, cutting the boy off with a squeal. At once, Udin draws himself up and levels a quivering fat finger at Suhail.

“This is damnation General! Damnation of the worst kind! The enemy is at our door, and they come with sorcery in their van, they-”

Suhail draws his service revolver quite calmly, drawing the hammer back.
“Cleric Udin, you stand accused of provoking panic and disorder among the ranks, how do you plead?” He snaps, levelling the pistol at the fat cleric, whose eyes widen in horror and his mouth drops open.

“I thought you would see it that way, Cleric.” Suhail slaps his pistol back into its holster. “Now we may be fighting the spawn of hell, gentlemen…” He says as all eyes turn to him, “But we are not such quivering lunatics as to desert our duty like this. It shames you, it shames me, and it shames my entire army group. Now, if you wish to redeem yourselves, I suggest you return to your posts and start doing your curs’t jobs! Communications, get a report back to the Military ministry at once! Planning, I want estimates of remaining force available in thirty minutes! ”

The group of Khans hesitate for just one moment, and then they scatter through Suhail’s headquarters as proper military discipline reasserts itself. Suhail nods to himself, narrowing his eyes. With that out of the way, hopefully he should be able to get the rest of his army back into fighting trim, but that means… Suhail draws his sword, pointing it at five of the slowest Khans who haven’t yet returned to their duties.

“You five, grab mounts and rifles, you’re coming with me.” He barks out orders, relaxing into the flow and knowing instinctively that this is the right thing to do. “We’re going to the trenches to try and reverse this fucking mess! Get the army back into some kind of order. I will not face the daemonic hordes with half an army… besides,” He gives them a grin “If that is the spawn of hell crossing the border down there, then you can bet I’m going to kill the first of them.” He reins his mount out, pointing it down toward the plain and spurring it onward.

By the time they reach the front lines, Suhail is glad that he’s come. On the journey, he’d passed scores of soldiers making their way to the rear on ‘errands’ or whatever else. He could have shot them, but if he did that, the trickle would become a flood… so with a kind word and a gesture, Suhail gathers them about him in a knot, and as the knot increases in size, so more and more soldiers see it and start returning to their own positions, and so by the time Suhail has reached the front lines, the trenches are filling with soldiers staring up at him.

“Soldiers!” Suhail barks as his mount steps over the lead trench to stand before the trench, in the field in plain view of the Equestrians. His words carry up and down the ranks, and though the singing continues, it seems to diminish in volume somewhat. This close, he can hear the Equestrians distantly chanting slogans of their own, a distant howling growl of discontent.

Suhail wheels his mount to face the Equestrian lines and he draws his sword, pointing it forward.

“There are the Equestrians!
There are our enemies!
Enemies of hope and propriety, of dignity and reason!”

“They are the enemies of our God and our people!
"Our rulers are wise and merciful. Beings of peace and mercy who do not wish to entangle us in a war with the powers of darkness.
The time is not right. The advantage is not ours… but we are here, gentlemen!
We are here to stand against the darkness regardless, and stand we shall!”

“The enemies of our people shall not relent!
They shall show no mercy, as they advance to crush our country beneath their booted heels!
We must stand firm against the darkness, level our gaze upon them and dare them to do their worst!”

“You are here, fathers, sons and brothers, fishermen and farmers who have willingly volunteered to pay your debt to our fatherland!
To serve your God, though you are not skilled in the ways of war!”

Rumbles ripple up and down the line, soldiers nodding approvingly and so Suhail continues, raising his sword high above his head and then sweeping it down at the Equestrian lines.
“Over there are the powers of darkness arrayed against us. Men and women who have sold their souls to Daemons, who have been instructed and taught in the ways of murder!” His voice rises to a furious shriek, “They are professional soldiers, killers to the core, but they have not the strength that we do, the conviction that we do. We are soldiers of God. We need no training! We need no Navy! We need no-”

The hammer-blow throws him from his mount. It punches into his very soul and leaves his ears ringing, a sound that is more than a sound but a solid fist of thunder that rattles him to the bone and flattens the crops around him. Less a sound, than a raw, undistilled force of nature. Suhail pushes himself up onto his elbows as the clouds roil and writhe, boiling like a seething cauldron of malevolence.

Suddenly a shape bursts out of the thunderhead like a massive leviathan breaching the waves. The knife-like prow breaches the clouds first, the broad spearhead shaped… thing comes thundering out of the clouds drawn in its wake. Suhail has never seen anything quite so big taking to the air, the thunder of its engines seeming to make the earth tremble under his feet as the massive slate grey warship comes arrowing out of the cloud.

His first thought is that someone has taken one of the Equestrian towers of Canterlot and turned it upon its side. His mind is unable to accept, for a second, that the vast thing is actually a warship. However as his eyes take in the details, he has to accept the machine is in fact a warship. The huge ugly contraption is so different from the other Equestrian warships now bursting out of the cloud around it. Iron-grey, with the deep blue stripe of the Night Queen’s personal heraldic colour running from the upper deck, down the sloped armour to the ship’s belt.

Guns are studded along its sides, massive bombardment cannons set into boxy triple barrelled turrets and smaller casement guns and heaven knows what other ordinance protrudes from the impossibly massive creation, backlit by huge reaction drive engines, each one capable of fitting a house inside its nacelles. The machine is plainly a warship, graceless and titanic with no pretensions of grandeur or decoration in its construction. It is a machine whose singular purpose, to kill, has been distilled into a hard-edged, angular shape.

The hammerblow of sound roars again down the line, and Suhail gropes for his cap as all his courage of just moments previously flits out of his reach. He finds himself whispering prayers that he never thought he’d bothered to learn. Behind him, he can hear men whimpering as along the broad frontage of cloud, hundreds of other golden ships burst into view, thundering forward in their glittering golden splendour, banners flying and telegraph signals flashing back and forth.

Drawn up around the leviathan like pilot-fish around a shark, yet more ships in black and silver, flying no heraldry but the deep blue of the Night Guard. The Queen of Night has brought her praetorian guard with her to do her killing, for as sure as one day follows the next, Suhail knows that the Archdaemon herself is up there, consulting with her dark allies and fomenting her schemes.

It’s one thing to know the Equestrians have a huge navy. Suhail has heard that umpteen times and he’d accepted it as fact, but it was an academic fact, the sort of thing you listen to half disbelieving, but as the airships come out of the cloud, suspended beneath their gas-balloons and arrayed in tight formation, Suhail realizes that the blaring, whooping reality is something entirely different. The reality of hundreds of points of blue light in that deepest black cloud shining like tiny stars, hundreds of reaction drive engines burning and snarling.

Airships of every size fill the skies and stretching from horizon to horizon, cruisers, heavy cruisers, battleships and frigates all arranged into squadrons, formed up into tight formations, and visibly straining like bloodhounds at the leash. Presiding over them all is the vast unholy machine. Letters glittering along its side proclaim its name, HMS Umbra.

Suhails lips move in the words of a prayer he'd forgotten as tears streak his muzzle, his sword hanging limply in his hand.
Our circumstances are dire, and though we go brave to our end, please forgive us our fear.

Next Chapter: Chapter 18: The Dark Side of the Crown Estimated time remaining: 50 Minutes