Demontech: Gulf Run

by David Sherman

  “You saw?” Haft asked. Kovasch nodded. “They’ve been like that since I first saw them. We haven’t found any sentries.”

  “But those rocks are such an obvious place to watch from,” Kovasch said in wonder.

  Haft nodded. “Yes, it’s very strange. Lyft and Naedre searched nearly half a mile from the road to the north and didn’t find any sentries or signs of anyone but this group.”

  “There’s another group like them south of the road,” Kovasch said. “And the Border Warders found Jokapcul with magicians on the beach.”

  Haft grimaced and looked to the south, then back to the Borderer. “We need to find out if anyone is farther north.”

  “That’s what Lord Spinner said. He agrees it’s very strange. He wants to find a way around them.” He nodded in the direction of the Desert Men.

  “What does Sergeant Rammer say?” Haft asked.

  “He agrees.”

  “How many of you are there?”

  “I have ten men with me, all good forest men and trackers.”

  “Good. Split into pairs and scout to the north, cover as much ground as you can. Are your horses with ours?” When Kovasch nodded, he continued, “Leave one man with the horses.”

  “That was my plan also.”

  “Good. Go. Report back before sundown if you don’t find anything. Or sooner if you do.”

  Kovasch nodded once more and grasped Haft’s extended hand. He turned and hurried back to where he’d left his men. Haft watched him for a few seconds, then returned to watch the Desert Men.

  Five pairs of Skraglander Borderers, clad in homespun and the skins of shaggy animals that didn’t live in this odd forest above Princedon Gulf, headed north and fanned out. One pair went to the escarpment to look for passage through it or to its top—either as a route for the caravan to take, or that by which the Desert Men had come to where they now waited. Another prowled an area half a mile wide by two miles long directly north of the Desert Men; they had to have left sign there. The third pair searched a similar area directly to the north, and the fourth a mile-wide strip reaching north from that area to half a mile south of the escarpment. The final pair headed west, in search of any Desert Men who might be closer to the caravan.

  They didn’t know if the Desert Men had enough skill to hide their tracks, but it didn’t matter. The comites—the beasts the Desert Men rode—couldn’t hide the soft marks of their feet, splayed wide to allow them to walk easily on sand. There was a clear trail along the side of the stream by which the Desert Men sat in such unnatural calmness. The Borderers examined the trail and pondered. The trail looked like the padding of several hundred of the beasts—but the way the prints went in both directions, southbound over north, it could have been the same couple of hundred making the round trip more than once, or maybe the Desert Men camped by the stream now had relieved an earlier band.

  The stream itself came out of a wide gap in the escarpment. Kovasch and Dongolt cautiously entered the gap. Its walls were very steep but not sheer, and scree piled at their bottoms. The ground of the gap’s bottom sloped gently down on both sides to the watercourse, which showed signs of frequent flooding and course change. Knee-high, hardy grasses and a few low-lying bushes grew between the scree and the watercourse; it was barren of trees, but there were trees visible beyond the gap. Both men nocked arrows and ran crouched through the hundred yards of the gap. They knelt behind trees and examined their surroundings.

  Beyond the broad gap in the escarpment’s face was a huge bowl with sides that sloped up to the height of the south-facing cliffs. Inside the bowl they saw the same bumber and fan trees they’d seen between the escarpment and the road, mixed in with leafy trees that cast proper shadows. A wide swath on the south side of the bowl was clear of leafy and fan trees and only sparsely dotted with the bumbers. The north side, or as much of it as they could see from where they knelt, was modestly covered with leafy trees. In between, the trees were thick enough that it was hard to see all the way through in any direction other than to their rear or directly to the sides—and hard to estimate distances. They were pretty sure the bowl was more than a half mile in diameter, but less than a mile. It was probably deeper than it was wide. The undergrowth was thinner than they would have expected had it not been for the signs of flooding in the gap—frequent floods would kill undergrowth before it could flourish.

  After several moments of observation, during which they spotted nothing more than a covey of quail skittering from underbrush patch to distant underbrush patch, they nodded at each other and sprinted to the cover of the nearest leafy trees. After a time, moving with swift caution from one cover to another, they moved with less speed.

  They found the tick tracks of more quail, pads of several foxes and small cats, hop tracks of hares, and the skitter tracks of other small animals. But no sign of people or the Desert Men’s beasts other than their tracks alongside the stream. The stream itself bubbled and rushed down a deep cut in the north wall of the bowl. On the east side, they found traces of a rutted road angling up the slope. They paralleled the roadway to the top and looked over a flat land coated with the same hardy grass that grew in the gap. The grassland seemed to extend to the horizon. They followed the road, overgrown with grass, for a quarter of a mile. It went straight northeast for as far as they walked and a short distance beyond where they could make it out without following. Here and there were small pools of water, not all of which were fed or drained by rivulets—none seemed to be pools left over from rainfall, so Kovasch and Dongolt knew they must be fed by underground streams.

  From there they looped around to the northwest and found where the stream began its cut into the bowl. Trees grew along the banks, which were firmly packed from the back and forth padding of the Desert Men’s comites. Here, they were able to see more clearly that the most recent tracks headed north, away from where the Desert Men camped near the road the caravan was on. Kovasch climbed a tree and saw that three or four miles away the trees thinned out to nothing and the stream meandered alone through grass that seemed to fade into sand before the horizon. He spotted a small herd of gazelles in the grassland, but nothing else other than a few carrion-birds drifting high in the sky. The two returned south of the escarpment and searched to the east of the stream, but found nothing more of interest.

  The other pairs found nothing other than the stream side tracks. They reassembled where they’d left their horses. Kovasch reported back to Haft. Half of the Borderers stayed with the watchers. Kovasch led the others back to Spinner and the caravan.

  It was a painful decision to make, but they weren’t strong enough to attack the Jokapcul guarding the prisoners—Birdwhistle and Tracker had reported that there were seven hundred guards over more than five hundred soldier-prisoners. Another three hundred women and children were kept in pens farther east than Tracker could see from where he first watched. Even if they managed to catch the Jokapcul completely unaware and quickly beat them, there were the two groups of Desert Men bracketing the road to the north. Between the Jokapcul and the Desert Men, if they attempted to free the prisoners they would most probably be soundly defeated and the entire caravan lost. They had to go north, around the enemy forces in front of them.

  “There wasn’t sign of anybody else?” Spinner asked yet again. He studied the map Kovasch had drawn as though, if he looked at it long enough, it would speak up and tell him things that weren’t marked on it.

  “Only alongside the stream,” Kovasch replied, giving the same answer he’d given every time Spinner asked.

  “Then maybe, just maybe …” Spinner murmured and let his words trail off. He traced the arrow-straight road that went northeast from the bowl.

  “I’m bothered by all the tracks that go back and forth along the stream,” Kovasch said, not for the first time. “There are far more than the Desert Men ahead of us could have made. And the last tracks went the other way.”

  “Could the tracks have been laid down by group after group go
ing to that place and returning?” Spinner asked.

  “Why would they do that?” Alyline asked. “If they keep a group near the road as an ambush force to catch unwary travelers, they’d more likely keep one there all the time instead of changing them frequently.”

  Kovasch nodded. “That’s right. They’d have to change forces every couple of hours to make the tracks I saw. I couldn’t tell for certain in that sandy soil, but I think none of them were more than a few days old. And Lord Haft says the group he’s watching has been there since Lyft and Naedre first saw them.” He pretended he didn’t hear Spinner’s muffled groan or the Golden Girl’s amused sniff when he said, “Lord Haft.” Spinner and Haft were the commanders he’d sworn to follow. In his eyes that made them lords, no matter how much Spinner insisted they weren’t.

  “But there was no sign of anyone else,” Spinner asked one more time.

  “None that we found.”

  “If they didn’t find any sign, there must not be any to be found,” Jatke said. He assumed the tracking abilities of the Skragland Borderers were as good as those of the Zobran Border Warders, and he knew the Border Warders were better trackers than he was.

  “There are about two hundred Desert Men camped on each side of the road,” Spinner said. “All heavily armed and without women, children, or oldsters.” He looked at Kovasch, the only one in this group who had actually seen the Desert Men, for confirmation. He wished Rammer were there to give him some guidance—or better yet, take command, if the others would only accept him as commander. But Rammer had agreed it was more important for him to spend his time training his company of recruits, drilling them in basic formations and weapons use. “That way,” he’d said before he left to do it, “if we are attacked by a large force, they won’t get slaughtered quite as quickly—and they might do some good before they die.”

  “Two hundred on each side of the road, and they don’t have sentries,” Kovasch said. “I don’t understand why they don’t have sentries.”

  Neither did Spinner or anybody else; they all found the lack of sentries bothersome.

  “All right,” Spinner said after thinking it over, “I want the stream, the gap, the bowl, and the road out of it watched overnight. If no more Desert Men come, and if those already near the road stay where they are, we’ll go cross-country to the gap in the morning and take that old road.

  “Fletcher, can you find a safe route for the wagons during the night?”

  “If Jatke goes with me, between us I think we can.” He looked at Jatke, who nodded. “But where does the old road lead?”

  “Someplace where there aren’t Jokapcul, and away from the Desert Men next to this road.” Who else might be along the old road, Spinner had no idea. There might be danger along that route, but he knew for certain there was danger along the route they had been following.

  Here and there during the night, near where Borderers and Border Warders set their observation posts, and along the route Fletcher and Jatke found for the wagons, scrub-covered sand drifts shifted unnoticed. Men in green-flecked, sand-colored robes emerged from the drifts and, drifting like small clouds of mist, made their way elsewhere. A few went to the two Desert Men camps that flanked the road. Most went to the escarpment and made their way to its top by openings and slopes that were less obvious than the broad gap the stream flowed through. None passed near enough to the sentries to be detected.

  The caravan hadn’t unloaded to make a proper camp, and the people didn’t take time to properly break their fasts, so the lead wagons moved out onto the route scouted by Fletcher and Jatke less than half an hour after the sun’s leading edge appeared above the eastern horizon. In under an hour the entire caravan was on the move, away from the coast-paralleling road. Mounted soldiers from Company B, the Zobrans, rode up and down the length of the caravan, enforcing the no-noise rule Spinner had imposed. Silence, or as much quiet as possible with so many people and wagons on the move, was essential if they were to avoid detection by either the Desert Men or the Jokapcul. The people ate cold rations as they went.

  Along the coast, two pairs of Border Warders kept an eye on the Jokapcul. Two more watched the Desert Men lounging south of the road, and two Borderers watched the Desert Men north of the road. None of the groups gave any indication they were about to move, and the improvements the Jokapcul slowly made to their camp suggested that they planned to remain where they were for a long time. The Desert Men made no improvements, but no one knew enough about them to know whether that signified anything. The watchers were to stay in place until mid-morning the next day, then rejoin the caravan—unless the Jokapcul or Desert Men began to move. In that case, they were to observe long enough to be certain of the direction of movement, then report back.

  The best case, or so Haft said, would be for the Desert Men to move south or the Jokapcul north. “Let them fight it out between themselves,” he declared. “Then we won’t have to worry about either.”

  Despite grumbling and complaining from the people, Spinner and Haft didn’t allow the caravan to stop at midday. They wanted to put as much distance as possible between them and the bands of fighters between the escarpment and the Gulf. The other leaders concurred wholeheartedly. The caravan stretched out as the day went along, but the Zobran soldiers kept urging the slower movers to pick up their pace so the caravan wasn’t as extended as it might have been. By nightfall, when Spinner and Haft finally allowed a halt, the end of the caravan was two miles north of the escarpment, to the northeast of the bowl they’d used to mount it. The steadily blowing wind, which had brought the scent of the sea from the south all during the day, changed and came steadily from the north.

  In this open land, they gathered the caravan into a tight circle instead of leaving it strung out on a line, and broke that great circle into ten smaller circles of wagons. They parked the dog carts in lines connecting the wagon circles. Most of the horses and draft animals were tied on tether lines in the center of the great circle. Spinner didn’t allow fires or tents that night, an unpopular rule that was enforced by the Skraglanders of Company A. Two rivulets, narrow enough for a man to step across without stretching his legs overmuch, ran through the great circle. A pond was fed and drained by one of the rivulets; a hundred yards downstream there was a larger pond, though it too was small. The other rivulet fed a third pond within the great circle.

  Unhappy because of the grains of sand blown by the northerly wind—grains that lodged in eyes, peppered lips and open mouths, penetrated every opening of clothing, stuck to skin—the people settled down to eat cold meals. After eating, they put out bedrolls. The lucky ones lay out their bedrolls inside covered wagons where they weren’t constantly buffeted by the wind and scoured by the blown sand. Others lay under wagons, where they were provided some slight shelter from the wind. The temperature began to drop sharply after the sun set, prompting some to believe their water jugs would be ice-rimmed come morning. Everyone who could found another body to cuddle with under covers for warmth.

  Company B sent squads out half a mile and more in screening positions to give warning in the event Desert Men approached during the night. Sergeant Rammer drilled the recruits of Company D before he released them for dinner and sleep.

  “An hour!” he spat when he joined the command group. “That’s as bad as no training at all. They need days of training before they know basic formations and weaponry. Then they need weeks of drill before they can perform without having to stop and think about every move they make.”

  “It was more than an hour,” Fletcher said. “Anyway, an hour here, an hour there. It adds up over time.”

  “Do we have the time?” Rammer asked, thrusting his face at him.

  “We don’t have the time to bicker among ourselves,” Zweepee chided. Rammer had the grace to clear his throat and shut up. Fletcher simply smiled at his wife.

  “Do what you can with them,” Haft said grimly. “If we’re lucky, they won’t have to do any fighting before they know which end
of their weapons to wave at the enemy.”

  Rammer grunted and made a sour face. He harbored no illusions about their chances of avoiding both the Jokapcul and the Desert Men for that long—not to mention other dangers they might encounter along the way.

  “Where’s Silent?” Spinner fretted.

  Nobody knew. The giant of the Northern Steppes and Wolf hadn’t been seen since they went to check the back trail.

  Then they decided that first thing in the morning they would send out a platoon of lancers to scout along the road, and a platoon of Zobran Light Horse along the escarpment to see if there was a safe route back to the coastal plain farther to the east. The caravan would ready itself and follow the lancers. If the Light Horse found another route, continuing northeast for a time before returning to the road might be a lengthy detour, but it had the benefit of increasing the distance between them and the Jokapcul and Desert Men on the coast plain.

  An hour before dawn a Zobran Light Horseman galloped into the center of the camp. “Lord Spinner, Lord Haft,” he called out as he leaped off his horse.

  “Here!” Haft said groggily, untangling himself from Maid Marigold and pulling out of the blankets they shared to stand before the horseman.

  “What?” Spinner asked, joining them.

  “Lords, a strong force of Desert Men is approaching from the northwest. We estimate nearly two hundred.”

  Before he finished his report a Royal Lancer galloped up. “Lords, more than a hundred Desert Men are approaching along the road.”

  In moments two more of the outriders reported in. More bands of Desert Men were moving toward them from the north and the west, all told about six hundred, perhaps a third of them mounted on comites, the rest on foot. By the time the scouts finished their reports, the middle of the camp was bustling with people rising to find out what the commotion was about. Most of the people in the circles to the north, east, and west were also up.

  Then it got worse.

  “Lord Spinner,” Kocsakoz, a Borderer, reported out of breath following his run from north of the coast road, “the Desert Men we watched are coming this way!”