The previous autumn I was a spellmonger in a quiet mountain village called Minden’s Hall, in a peaceful little valley stuffed full of happy peasants and contented cows, far to the west. I was doing a pretty good job of curing warts and casting love spells and making hens lay more prodigiously, while trying to forget about my service in arms, when the Dead God decided the time was right to launch his very inconvenient genocidal horde of goblins on an unsuspecting humanity – and he picked Minden’s Hall for the honor of first slaughter.
And the first item on their agenda was the conquest of the blind valley of Boval Vale in which I was living. It had once belonged to them, had some deep religious significance to them, and was also the perfect staging area for a wider war against the scourge of humanity in the Five Duchies.
Shereul wasn’t just relying on his magical innate power and half a million goblins pouring in from secret mountain caverns to conquer us; he had also given to an elite corps of magic-using gurvani shamans shards of irionite chipped from his sphere. Each one made the shaman the match of any warmage. Luckily their skills were crude. But their enthusiasm and the sheer power of the stones left the control of Boval Vale never in doubt. The local lord, who had some inkling that his generously large castle would someday have to defend against vindictive goblins his ancestors had betrayed, conned me into staying to protect the villagers and defend his indefensible fief from the inevitable conquest.
I fought like hell those few desperate weeks. I won my own little chunk of Irionite, endured a siege, and met some magical Tree Folk (non-humans, like the gurvani. Unlike the gurvani, they generally don’t want to kill us), found a girlfriend, knocked her up, founded an elite unit of irionite-augmented warmagi, led numerous covert missions to harass our besiegers, led a peasant’s revolt against the rightful lord of the Vale, and ended up saving almost everyone using a powerful spell through a mystical tear in the fabric of the universe fueled by a four-hour long session of magically powerful sex. With my ex-girlfriend.
Of course, I couldn’t escape through a portal that I was holding open, so I got stranded at the castle with my warmagi comrades and only narrowly escaped with my life, mostly because the Tree Folk figured I needed to warn the Five Duchies about what we were about to get pounded with.
And that’s how I spent my summer. As I said, it was eventful.
Ishi’s tits, I had to pee.
Things had been almost calm since the great escape from Boval Vale. No one tried to kill me, I just travelled a lot. After we warmagi regrouped and celebrated the unlikely fact that we were still alive, we all agreed that the invasion deserved the utmost attention from those in power, and we needed to start pushing the Dukes of Alshar and nearby Castal to raise a defense of the realm. I split them up and sent them on various missions, and then I made my way back to where I had sent the rest of the villagers, the grounds of the magical school I (and my ex-girlfriend) had attended. What a spell had done in the blink of an eye had taken two weeks by horse.
By the time I got there, the refugees from Boval Vale had all been relocated to a ducal castle fifty miles up-river, and after thoroughly debriefing my old masters at the academy, warning them of the imminent danger and showing off my new witchstone (that’s what the peasants call Irionite), I had to spend another seven days on a barge up-river to make a similar report to the Authorities, namely His Grace, the Duke of Castal, who was spending his summer at his cool riverside northern palace, Wilderhall.
I arrived just in time to be summoned to a full Ducal council to explain the situation to Duke Rard of Castal, who was suddenly coping with a full-blown invasion on his frontier when he had planned to be hawking and fishing and hunting. Duke Lenguin of Alshar – where Boval Vale sent its tribute and pledged its fealty – had received two other Alshari warmagi from my unit to warn him. Duke Lenguin, who was likewise in his summer palace at picturesque Vorone, had a reputation as a connoisseur of fine wines and had an excellent knowledge of hunting hawks, but he had never been to war.
I was born in Castal, myself, so I went to the Duke of Castal not only because Castal was the next Duchy that would have to contend with the invasion, but because by all accounts Rard IV was a wise, just, and responsible leader of men while his brother-in-law Lenguin was . . . not.
That being said, it still took a while to convince Duke Rard and his ruling council that I knew what I was talking about, and even longer before he appreciated the magnitude of the threat, and even longer for him to grant the resources and troops necessary to face the threat. The Dead God and his furry minions weren’t just another goblin uprising you could throw some local knights at, after all. They were employing battlefield magics that no baronial court mage or common warmagi could hope to counter.
The Duchy needed me and my newly-augmented warmagi, they just had to see it. They were reluctant, especially when I named my price, but in the end they came around, after over a week of me playing at intrigue and court politics. Then there had been problems with the Magical Censorate, and an irate meeting with the Censor General, who wasn’t at all happy about recent developments and expressed that displeasure with a warrant for my head, but in the end, after many things were decided and many secrets were revealed, I prevailed.
Now I had in my war chest a warrant and commission naming me Special Marshal of Castal, and another one from Alshar, and over three-thousand men to lead into bravely into battle. I had been ordered to conduct an expeditionary raid into the vanguard of the invasion of northern Alshar to see . . . well, to see if the horde had any chance of being defeated. A force of three thousand troops wasn’t enough to even make a dent in the legions that were marauding across Alshar, but that wasn’t our purpose. I was here to make it look like Duke Rard of Castal was Doing Something, instead of sitting back and waiting to see if the incompetent Alshari could handle it alone.
Lucky me. Three weeks later, here I was, on horseback, in the field, bravely leading my men into battle while trying hard not to think about how badly I had to pee.
Our force had moved out from our staging area at the village of Cleston, the last one in Castal, and had marched northwest as far and as fast as we could. We stuck to the Great Western Road at first, but soon after crossing the marker that delineated where Castal stopped and Alshar began, we moved off the road and headed out over-country. The roads were getting too clogged with fleeing civilians, anyway, and for lack of anything more productive to do the Alshari Duke at Vorone was drafting every man he could get his hands on. I badly wanted to avoid getting sucked into another round of court politics, so we avoided an unpleasant diplomatic incident and ranged northwest through the scenic Alshari Wilderlands.
The further from the road we went, the more we saw signs of the invasion – peasant refugees on the road or crossing fields, nervous merchants moving stock to more easterly locations, priests relocating to sister temples across the river. The local lordlings were shutting themselves in their castles and sending what men they could spare to Vorone. I’m sure we looked like just another column of mercenaries.
We had crossed through two little fiefs without incident, and as far as the tiny lordship known as Grimly Wood (comprised of about twenty square miles of scrub forest, discouraged fields and rocky hills in the bosom of the Wilderlands) before we encountered the first direct evidence of the invasion: smoke on the horizon in three or four places.
Soon after that we had a couple of skirmishes between our scouts and theirs. I was pretty certain we’d hit the tip of the spear of their invasion. Or one of them. The scant dispatches that had reached Wilderhall before I left indicated that there were at least three and possibly as many as five columns of goblins marching from Boval now, each legion comprised of upward of ten thousand. Each seemed to have a different task, but all were bent on looting, raiding, and killing along the way. Their stated aim was to kill every human in their path: men, women, and children.
I tried not to dwell on that. Needing to pee helped.
Grimly Wood w
as nearly deserted, because your average peasant has a lick of common sense and went elsewhere at the first sign of trouble. The decrepit motte-and-bailey Castle of Grimly Wood (home and seat of House Grimly, the head of which, Sir Geston of Grimly, was still holding forth – because your average petty noble doesn’t have a lick of common sense) was fortified and ready to receive our people if the battle turned into a rout. I didn’t think that was a likely possibility.
I had taken counsel the night before last, using my arcane powers to scout ahead and measure the strength of our foe. I had a pretty good idea of the enemy’s composition. Warmagic is good for that. We were in luck, in that it seemed to be an outlier of a larger force. There were roughly seven hundred lightly-armed goblins in the dense woods of Grimly Wood, more of a marauding mob than an infantry unit.
They had found their way into the thickest part of the wood at dawn. It was a stand of trees too twisted to be timbered. They probably liked it because it was dank and dark and foreboding, choked into shadow by neglect and overgrowth. It’s not that they have bad taste. Goblins are nocturnal, and prefer such places to sleep during the heat of the bright day. Plus they have the advantage of being largely cavalry-proof. Goblins don’t ride horses. And horses don’t like goblins.
But I didn’t let their defensive position worry me. If there was ever going to be an easy victory, it would be here. We had the advantage in almost every way. We couldn’t lose. So the previous night when I realized we could strike and be victorious, I called a quick council, hammered out a simple battle plan, ordered the men readied, the castle prepared, and certain magical defenses and preparations made.
So here I was. Ready to attack.
And I really had to pee.
“Marshal Spellmonger!” one of the mercenaries called to me – Ancient Fargal, if I recalled correctly, from the Orphan’s Band of light infantry – a big, lumbering hulk of a man built more for plate armor than a bowman’s jack. He spoke in a wide Wilderland drawl. “Scouts report most of the furry bastards are in loose formation now, at the north end of the wood. Lots of spears. Some have hung back deeper in the wood, though, milord.”
“The spears are for the horses,” I nodded. “Probably looted them across Alshar. But I doubt they really know how to use them yet. Gurvani use javelins, not thrusting spears, and certainly not pikes. Behind and above them you can expect the shaman and chief, where they can direct the battle in safety,” I decided out loud. “Expect to see a bodyguard of about ten for each of them.”
“I’ll alert the men, Marshal,” he promised.
That shaman had me almost worried. I’d seen him during my field-scrying, or at least glimpsed the spark of his shard of irionite. The Dead God had been giving out robin egg-sized chunks of irionite to the goblin shamans like it was candy in preparation for the war, and while they were undoubtedly potent devices, the shamans themselves were very limited in the kinds of spells they could cast. Irionite gave you power, but it didn’t give you the imagination or the technical tools to use it effectively. It’s a matter of sophistication. Technically speaking, we human, Imperially-trained warmagi were miles ahead of them in technique. It might prove to be one of our only real advantages.
I sighed and forced myself to quit stalling. I had to pee and I had to fight, and the sooner I did one or the other the sooner I could get to the other one.
I led Traveler down the hill about half-way and stopped to talk to a group of archers, who were happily lobbing arrows into their mist in the hopes that they would strike something – or at least make the goblins keep their heads down. They did so with impunity, because the range of the average human bow was twice that of the short bows and slings that the gurvani carried. But they might want those arrows later, when they had better targets, so I ordered them to stop while I looked around.
From Traveler’s back I could see where the gurvani were holding up. They had dug into a narrow space at the north edge of the wood, between a massive bolder and small hillock, next to a field full of half-ripened wheat that would never be harvested. They had felled a few trees and created a make-shift bulwark to discourage us from hitting them from their flanks (their leader must have been one of the bright ones). I called upon magesight – that’s a simple spell that can do a lot of things, but right now I used it to view the goblins as if they were but a few yards from me.
There were at least six hundred of them, and they were armed as I’d come to expect of goblin raiders: a leather belt or weapon harness, some colorful tribal jewelry, iron-headed javelins, a sprinkling of short bows and slings, and everyone carried a knife and one of those traditional iron-headed clubs they enjoyed bashing our brains out with so much.
They were outnumbered, out-armed, and in the blinding light of the sun. They had no reinforcements within a day’s brisk ride, so they were trapped. Better yet, tactically speaking, they were prevented from moving in formation by the very defenses they’d erected.
They were planning on waiting for us to attack, no doubt because they had their shaman telling them that with the Dead God’s blessing and the power of his witchstone, they were invincible against us, blah blah, grunt growl blah.
He might have been right, too, under normal circumstances. A gurvani shaman with a witchstone would have made an assault by even three thousand a dicey matter, if he knew his craft. I’d seen the goblin shamans’ magic first-hand. The night of that first attack in Boval Vale I’d dueled one in the vanguard of the invasion, severed his hand in battle, and claimed his witchstone. But not before he’d given me a very hard time with his primitive spellcraft.
And that was far from the last time. During the siege I’d seen the power of the gurvani witchstones in all of their glory, as the Dead God’s minions used them to bind the horde together under his will. Even without the magical head in the ball of amber, they could be formidable.
And they did have a sophistication, of a sort. There were at least two classes of shaman, the rural sort of tribal witchdoctor and the much more educated – and more fanatical – class of shaman that served as the eyes and ears of the Dead God. They were easy to spot, as they dyed their black fur with lime to make it a ghastly white, but there was no way to see that when you’re scrying.
Their spellwork was much more sophisticated, and they seemed less prone to arrogant stupidity when they used their power. I was hoping the magical corps attached to our enemy was the former, not the latter. Not that I couldn’t have vanquished one – I’d done it before – but I was looking for an easy victory here, and that would not have counted.
I suppose I could have just ordered a cavalry charge and taken our chances with both spears and magic. That’s what an ordinary military commander would have done, and damn the casualties. But that would have been messy and inept. Sure, we would have won – but we would have lost men and horses, too. We had a long campaign ahead of us, and I wanted to keep my men as safe and as ready to fight as possible.
I rode to the hay bale that had become the gathering place for the officers and captains, likely because one of the Orphans had set up a small keg of mead there. I wasn’t in the mood myself – had to pee – but I did find the man I was looking for there. I didn’t even bother to dismount, for fear of an embarrassing accident, so I called to him from horseback.
“It’s time to summon your men,” I ordered the steely-eyed mercenary archer captain. His name was Rogo “Redshaft” of Nirod, a lean and dangerous-looking man wearing red leather covered by a well-made but unadorned green cloak. He and his five-hundred bowmen were some of my best-trained forces, mounted for travel and able to work in nearly any kind of country – and his homeland was just over the Pearwoods hills in the Castali Wilderlands, so this was as much like home as he could ask. There were five hundred mercenary archers, too, among the Orphan’s Band, but they were light infantry, unmounted, and acknowledged the Nirodi yeomen their betters.
That was because Redshaft’s men took their craft seriously. They were excellent archers, either
sniping or volleying in formation. The Nirodi boys begin practicing at the butts at age seven and keep it up daily until they’re full grown. It was how they remained a Free Town amongst a knot of greedy nobles. The Nirodi weren’t mercenaries, strictly speaking – Nirod owed service to the Duchy for their free status, and this was how they were paying it. I was thankful for that as I gazed with magesight at the enemy. “How many arrows have you in stock?”
“Captain, the Duke saw fit to send eighty arrows of the first quality for each man,” he answered with a slight deferential bow – I still wasn’t used to that. He was easily twenty years older than I. “As we’ve expended none in anger, we have that full complement.”
“Have you noticed anything about our friends’ use of bows, captain?” I asked as I watched the distant goblins squint in the glare of the sun. “I value your professional opinion.”
He shrugged, making his waxed red leather armor creak. “Just that they don’t shoot as far as ours, I’m happy to say!” he chuckled. “We’ve marked a rough line ahead that I think is the limit of their bowshot. I got a couple of fellows up there watching, taking the odd shot,” he admitted. “But every shot from them furries is far short.”
The Spellmonger Series: Book 01 - Spellmonger Page 42