Sister Svangerd and the Not Quite Dead - Loyal Opposition Trilogy

Ancillary to that purpose, it needs to stay alive long enough to find a mate and do the job, which means it has to find and eat food. The walls of Mavais are built out of hundreds of thousands of absolutely identical, perfectly straight and square one-ton blocks, mortared together and faced with more of the magic dust paste so that it looks like the whole wall is one solid piece of stone. Sighvat the Peacock overcame his walker by goading it into rushing at him, then holding out his magic sword so that the walker impaled himself on the point; Sighvat wasn’t strong enough to drive a sword through the monster’s hide, but the monster was. Sulpicius calculated that as a result of the Third Social War, the population of the empire declined by just under forty per cent; that was a thousand years ago, when there was still an emperor, and things were properly organised, and most of the knowledge hadn’t been lost.