Demontech: Rally Point: 2 (Demontech Book 2)

by David Sherman

  There was more Plotniko told them, but they already knew what happened to the women.

  “I will make them suffer for that,” Haft muttered at the telling. He stroked Maid Marigold’s hand where it rested on his shoulder, she settled more closely against his back.

  As horrible as was the number of dead and the telling of their dying, the living still had to be cared for. There wasn’t enough food in the valley to feed the thousand people, nor was it possible to feed them for longer than the shortest time by hunting and foraging in the nearby forest. They couldn’t stay in the valley, they had to move and soon. But as short as food was, everything else was in even shorter supply. Their options were limited.

  They could stay where they were and fend as best they could until starvation and deprivation overcame most of them—or the Jokapcul found and killed them, whichever came first.

  They could strike out to the northwest and hope to find succor at the bandit base. That wasn’t a good option either. They had no reason to believe the remaining bandits—if any had survived that battle with the Jokapcul—would welcome them with anything other than violence and death. Besides, the bandit village was too close to what had been Eikby; the Jokapcul would find and destroy it soon enough.

  They could go north as one group. But the way would be slow and painful, many would be lost along the way—and the Jokapcul would inevitably find and kill the survivors.

  They could break into small groups and head north. Any individual group would stand a better chance of making its way to the gulf intact than would the whole, but any group also stood a good chance of being lost to starvation, bandits, or Jokapcul patrols.

  The one option nobody discussed was returning to Eikby. Not at first.

  They met again when Silent came back. If the steppe nomad noticed that Doli wasn’t hovering near Spinner, he gave no sign, but he did cock an eyebrow when he saw Maid Marigold clinging to Haft. He got down to the business of telling them what he found in his observation of the Jokapcul camp after the raid.

  “They seem thoroughly disorganized,” he said to the others gathered around the fire. “I didn’t see any officers and only one sergeant.”

  “If they don’t have any officers left,” Spinner said, “it’s no wonder they’re disorganized. They’re trained to do nothing without orders from an officer.”

  “Right.” Silent nodded, that was a well-known oddity of the Jokapcul army. Even sergeants did little more than relay officers’ orders. “They haven’t even collected the bodies of their dead from the west forest. I counted sixty of them and more than a hundred dead bandits in the forest fringe to the west.” He looked at Alyline. “What happened there?”

  She told him quickly rather than repeat the detailed debriefing she and Sergeant Phard had already given the others.

  “You say most of the Jokapcul who followed you were unarmed?”

  “No more than belt knives, most of them. I don’t know about the horsemen, but they were probably well armed.”

  Silent whistled appreciatively. “They certainly are fierce warriors, if they began mostly unarmed and still killed so many.”

  “The Blood Swords accounted for nearly a score of the bandits,” Spinner reminded him.

  Silent looked at him for a moment. “Then they still killed better than one to one,” he said with the respect of one good fighting man for another.

  He resumed his narrative. “I didn’t see any movement in the hospital pavilion. Either their wounded are already recovered, or they stopped attending to them now that the healing magician is no longer there. I suspect they weren’t taking care of them and I’ll tell you why: I saw some of the Jokapcul fighting among themselves. If they’re fighting among themselves, I doubt they are caring for their wounded. The dead I counted at the forest fringe? Not all of them were killed in the battle, several of them looked liked they lived for some time after being wounded. I think many of their injured could have been saved had anyone bandaged their wounds; instead they bled to death.

  “Not all of the fighting I saw in the camp was with hands and weapons, many of them contented themselves with yelling at each other. I couldn’t get close enough to hear what they were yelling about, though.” He snorted. “Not that I can understand their gibberish anyway. Some of them were digging through the ashes of the tents, but it didn’t look like they found much that was usable.” He nodded to Xundoe. “It’s good that you thought to burn their tents, that increased their disorientation.”

  Xundoe smiled broadly; he had never gotten much praise when he was in the Zobran army.

  “They’ve lost half the force they arrived here with,” Spinner said after a moment’s thought. “And all their officers and nearly all of their sergeants.”

  “That’s right,” Silent said with a wolflike smile.

  “No leadership, disorganized, fighting among themselves,” Haft mused. He looked up sharply. “We can take them. We can wipe them out!”

  “Not so fast,” Xundoe interjected. “What about magicians? You haven’t said anything about magicians. We know they had at least two with them. Just because I took away two magic chests doesn’t mean they can’t still do us serious harm.”

  Silent shook his head. “I saw nobody who looked like a magician. And no one held anything that looked like a demon weapon. I don’t think they have any, and if they do, they’re probably too disorganized to use them effectively.”

  “Fletcher, how many men do we have?” Haft asked.

  “There are the thirty who went with you on the raid and the forty who stayed here. We haven’t finished sorting out the people you freed, but there are at least a half dozen more Eikby Guards and a couple of our own men among them.”

  “What about the men who aren’t soldiers?”

  Fletcher scratched his jaw in thought. “We haven’t finished counting them. Probably two or three hundred.”

  “Do any of them have any training? Can they fight?”

  Fletcher shook his head. “I don’t think any of them have training, but I’m sure most of the men who lost their families will be willing to fight.”

  Haft closed in on himself to think about it. Then he shook himself out of it and asked, “Silent, how many Jokapcul do you think are still there?”

  “More than two hundred.”

  With a shake of his head, Spinner interrupted, “It’s no good. We have maybe eighty soldiers and veterans. I don’t like the odds, they outnumber us by too much, unless we use the untrained men. But that’s no good; untrained men going up against Jokapcul will only get killed. We can’t attack.”

  “We’ve got demon weapons,” Haft said eagerly. “They don’t. We can reduce the odds right away and hit them while they’re confused.”

  Xundoe jumped in. “I haven’t finished cataloging the contents of those two magic chests yet, but already I’ve found more phoenix eggs. I think Haft is right.”

  Alyline spoke for the first time. “Remember what only eight of you did against them with demon weapons two nights ago? Only a few of you went into Eikby this morning. . . .”

  “Seven of us actually went in,” Xundoe said proudly. He really did deserve that promotion he never got, and now it was too late—there was no more Zobran army to give him one.

  She nodded at him. “Only seven of you went into Eikby with demon weapons this morning and wreaked great damage—and you killed all of their remaining officers. I say if we hit the Jokapcul fast and hard with demon weapons, then Haft leads a charge into them, we will completely defeat them.”

  Haft swallowed at the hard way she looked at him when she suggested he lead the charge. She could be thinking he was the best man to lead it—or she could be thinking the man who led the charge would get killed. He didn’t know what he had done, only that her former dislike for him seemed to have turned to a white-hot anger.

  “I think Haft and Alyline are right, Spinner,” Fletcher said.

  “But—”

  “We can do it!” Xundoe said glee
fully.

  “They’re right,” Silent said.

  Spinner sighed. “If we attack we’ll lose more people. And we’ll have to leave here immediately after because the Jokapcul will send more troops as soon as they learn about the defeat.”

  “The Jokapcul are going to send more troops and we have to leave anyway,” Alyline said. “But if we defeat this force severely enough, those who come after us will come less eagerly.”

  Spinner sighed again; he knew they were right. “Dawn tomorrow,” he said.

  They began making plans.

  Shortly after midnight, one hundred men, all but twenty of the soldiers—who remained behind to guard the camp—plus the veterans, and several hunters and former poachers, began moving from the valley to Eikby. When they were directly north of the fowl ponds they split. Under the command of Haft, twenty archers, the Bloody Axes, and the few survivors of the Eikby Guardsmen, left the forest to assume positions on the banks of the southmost ponds. Haft and three of the others were armed with demon spitters. Spinner took the bulk of the small force around to the east of Eikby’s burnt-out ruins. They stopped well short of the guard post on the east road.

  Haft paired his men, archer and blade, and set them behind the coops and trees clustered on the south side of the ponds. When they were in place he let them sleep in shifts, one man awake watching while his partner slept. That positioning, as slow and silent as it was, didn’t eat up all of the time remaining before dawn, and he had nothing to do but wait once he took his own position.

  “Sleep, Sir Haft,” Sergeant Phard told him. “You will need all your strength when dawn comes.”

  But Haft was too tense and too eager for the dawn’s attack to sleep; it was all he could do to keep from fidgeting. He would have occupied himself by checking his men’s positions, but they were too close to where he believed many of the Jokapcul slept for him to risk moving about. Everything was quiet save for the hoots and squees of night flyers and the buzzing of insects.

  When the larger group reached its area of operation, Spinner grouped his men more closely than Haft had placed his and let two men out of three sleep while he took the Skragland Borderer named Kovasch and continued forward to see if the guard post was manned. It was, and the Jokapcul manning it were far more alert than those of the night before. He made out four sentries sitting up, but couldn’t tell how many were lying down, either awake or asleep. Spinner wondered if an officer had survived and Silent simply hadn’t seen him. If not, someone else must have managed to take command. He left Kovasch in place to watch the guard post and returned to the rest of his men. There, he briefly conferred with Xundoe and Silent. The mage and the giant each took a Lalla Mkouma and vanished.

  “Ooh, oo biggun!” Silent’s Lalla Mkouma burbled as she perched on his shoulder—she giggled when he tickled her under the chin with a fingertip as big as her head.

  Xundoe slipped his right hand through the whirlwind that flowed around him and the wind that swirled around Silent and reached up to the level of his shoulder to take hold of the back of the giant’s belt. As quietly as his name, Silent walked out of the forest into the clear. Xundoe kept pace to his left rear. Together, they moved into the Jokapcul camp and trod softly among the sleeping bodies scattered here and there with no apparent concern for units or discipline.

  The mage wasn’t very happy that he hadn’t had time to catalog all the contents of the chests he’d brought back from the Jokapcul camp. He’d had to use too much of the short time available to instruct the men with Haft on the use of the demon spitters. He’d argued that Haft give the instruction, but the Marine insisted he didn’t know enough—which, coming from the normally supremely self-confident sea soldier, surprised Xundoe. The chests might have held demons he’d find useful in these wee hours of the night. The handful of phoenix eggs he’d secreted about his person were wonderfully usable, of course, but unlike most demons, a phoenix egg could be used only once and no matter how many of them the chests might hold, the supply was limited. He couldn’t help thinking that the chests might hold a tome that would tell him other, perhaps better, ways of using the demons he already had. He’d love to get his hands on one of those tomes Lord Lackland had conjured that told the Jokapcul magicians how to use demons that had never before been used in warfare. Of course, he’d heard that the tomes were printed in some language not even the scholars at the University of the Great Rift could decipher with certainty. Still, no matter how few people had actually seen them, the illustrations in the tomes were legendary for their exquisite detail. Why, he—

  Silent reached through the twin whirlwinds and touched Xundoe to signal that they were at the southernmost corner of the pyre. Nobody was nearby.

  Xundoe wrenched his thoughts away from the chests, and flinched from the stench of decay that came from the structure. How could he have gotten so close to it without noticing the smell? He breathed through his mouth to keep his gorge from rising as he poked a hand inside a recess in his robe and withdrew a dowel and a cone. He propped a cone next to the corner of the structure and held it in place with the dowel. A phoenix egg came out of another recess of his robe. He gingerly placed it in the inverted cone. Breathlessly, he withdrew his hands, ready to close them on it again if it showed any sign of falling, but it stood steady. He signaled Silent to go to the pyre’s next corner before he gave the top of the phoenix egg a half twist and drew softly away. The egg kept its balance. He did the same at the next corner, then they headed north and he planted eggs at each of the north corners of the pyre. He was certain the Jokapcul would trip all of them and release the four phoenixes if they counterattacked Haft’s group to the north. If not, then he’d have to find a way of releasing the phoenixes when the battle was over. There was no possibility he’d try to retrieve any uncracked eggs—he doubted they could be safely handled after their tops were given a half turn. He looked north, but could barely distinguish the coops and larger trees from the dark bar of forest beyond them.

  They returned to the east forest for the hodekin.

  The rest of the night was quiet. Only a few times during the night did the watching soldiers discern the shadow of a Jokapcul making way from his sleeping position to the latrines and back. No sentries made rounds within the Jokapcul camp. The dome of the sky slowly grew lighter.

  North of Eikby’s ruins, Haft made sure all his men were awake. He and the other three men with demon spitters made their stealthy way closer to the sleeping enemy, where they took position and listened for the first dawn welcomings of the treetop birds.

  East of the burnt-out town, Spinner led a squad of archers and a squad of swordsmen through the darkness to where Kovasch still watched. It was a good place from which they could attack the guard post as soon as it was light enough to see.

  The first ray of sunlight hit the treetops and an avian cacophony sang to it.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-FIVE

  A Jokapcul at the guard post may have heard an unintended noise, or might have caught a vagrant scent that didn’t belong or he may have simply looked at random. Whatever happened, a sentry saw a too-regular shadow thirty yards away and shouted a warning.

  Spinner reacted instantly with a shout of, “Now!”

  But the eight Jokapcul moved just as quickly and only two of the ten arrows hit their targets. One sentry dropped with an arrow in his chest, another paused to break off the shaft of an arrow that stuck in his shoulder. The ten swordsmen charged, yelling war cries, swords held ready to slash. Spinner dropped his crossbow in favor of his quarterstaff and joined the rush. The archers got off another volley but they’d had to try to avoid hitting their own men and all their arrows went off target. They dropped their bows and took up swords to join the melee.

  Screaming, the two groups came together. Four Jokapcul were knocked off their feet by the rush of the larger Skraglanders, but only two of them bled from wounds, and only one of those two stayed down; the other bounded back to his feet. A Jokapcul ducked under a
sword swing and thrust forward and up with his lance. His Skraglander opponent staggered, clutching the shaft of the lance buried in his upper abdomen, wrenching it out of the hands of his killer as he toppled to his side. The Jokapcul scooped up the Skraglander’s sword and leaped to the aid of a sentry being pressed hard by another attacker.

  Spinner found himself sparring with a lancer who was almost as good with his lance as Spinner was with his quarterstaff—the lancer didn’t have to be as good to hold his own, the sharp blade his lance was tipped with saw to that. They thrust and jabbed and parried and slammed the shafts of their weapons together. Spinner was bigger and stronger and able to knock away the Jokapcul’s strikes, but the enemy sentry was more agile and danced out of the way of the strikes and swings of Spinner’s quarterstaff. After several moments of fencing the lancer feinted, easily dodged a strike at his throat, and turned his parry into a thrust. The point of his lance ripped along Spinner’s side as the Frangerian barely evaded the stab. He continued his sideways movement and turned it into a spin that slammed the butt of his staff into the side of the Jokapcul’s head and flipped him over and to the ground, dazed. Spinner put his full strength into a swing into the temple of his downed opponent.

  All about him, sword clashed against sword, clanged against lance head. For all the bravery and strength of the Skraglanders, individually the Jokapcul were fiercer fighters. By the time the archers reached the melee, four of the Skraglanders were down and only two Jokapcul were out of the fight. The enemy was gaining the upper hand, but the reinforcements turned the tide for the moment.

  The Jokapcul had spread all around Eikby as well as their campsite to sleep, five were waking nearby when the guard shouted his warning. Their shouts roused several others who followed them as they raced to the aid of their fellows. Farther away, on the fringes of Eikby and in the campsite, other early rising Jokapcul heard the shouts, picked up weapons, and began running east, shouting the alarm as they went.