Dark Tide: Book Five of the Phantom Badgers

by RW Krpoun

  Studying the nomads, who were watching the travelers below, Axel noted that they were from the Cometfire moorugh, and were of the Sun Thrower nokta, the latter being an unremarkable society open to both genders and nomads of both pure and mixed blood (the Eyade were known for slave-taking). Fingering his staff, he cleared his mind and prepared himself while Janna mustered her platoon.

  The nomad commander made his decision and gestured; immediately the nomads swept off the low mound with a chorus of screamed war-cries and the growing wail of the pierced-clay whistle-globes called dula, which several nomads spun as they charged. The Eyade were charging at the wagons ahead of the Badgers; casting about, Axel spotted a stump and a stone mile marker that would serve his purposes and gestured, muttering. Snake-like, the end of a light chain with an open lock hooked through its last link slipped out of a keg mounted on the side of the wagon and slid along the road, passing in front of the stone marker and sliding through the grass to the stump fifty yards away.

  As Axel focused upon the chain, the Eyade swept in, howling and using their bows. The footmen guarding the wagons were cut down within seconds, and the wagon-drivers moments later, along with the lead horse of a team that began to bolt. Swarming around the wagons, the nomads amused themselves by prolonging the agonies of those draymen or guards who were unfortunate enough to have survived the flock of arrows, while junior members of the Kia unfastened the horses’ harnesses from the wagons and used lead-ropes to gather them into a single long file.

  The chain rose a foot up the tree-stub before slithering twice around the stump, the lock snapping closed through three links after the fifth try. At the wagon’s side Picken took in some of the slack in the chain and swiftly bolted it to a bracket on the tongue while the driver released the brake and ran to his lead pair.

  “Places, everyone,” Axel called as the Eyade, less two nomads who were leading the captured horses off to the south, formed up for a charge. “It’s our turn next. Janna, I don’t suppose our Lasharian allies are advancing at the double to come to our aid?”

  “Not hardly,” The ex-Silver Eagle observed, taking a few practice swings to warm up her arms. “We’re as ready as we’re going to be, Lieutenant. I hope this idea works.”

  “I’m for a decoration if it does,” the wizard grinned. “And we’re in for one hot fight if I’m wrong. Yes, here they come.” The Eyade advanced at a trot, somewhat surprised that the guards and draymen were not fleeing, merely taking cover amongst the wagons; the Shukia gave a command and bows were stowed and lances were lifted out of their saddle sockets as the line of horsemen swept forward.

  Holding his staff low so as not to attract attention, Axel concentrated and created two storms of fist-sized hail which swept into the Eyade from behind.

  Assuming that the attacking wizard was behind them, the nomads spurred their ponies into a gallop, lying flat along their horses’ necks, their shields held over their heads.

  “Now,” Axel called, deliberately keeping his voice calm; the drayman obediently led his team sharply to the left, pulling the chain taut, drawing a puff of stone-dust from the mile-marker as the tight chain slid up to hang a foot off the ground. The chain snapped up out of the grass six feet ahead of the nearest nomad just as the Kia was engulfed in a blinding, swirling snow-storm.

  The wagon swayed and jerked as the lead ponies plowed into the chain and crashed to the ground, hurling their snow-blinded riders into the sod with bone-shattering force. The chain snapped under the strain after a second or so, but by then a dozen horses had been felled, a half-dozen more tripping over the downed beasts before their riders could see the danger.

  The Shukia expertly wove his mount through the dangers in an impressive demonstration of horsemanship, closely followed by a single bodyguard, the guidon-bearer, and an Eyade who wore the single horsetail on his helm that marked him as a Shunya, literally a ‘leader of five’; Wheeling his horse around, the troop-leader got a single good look at the tangled mass of screaming horses and injured men that now comprised his unit before Starr’s arrow caught him in the neck, two other arrows from the Scout Section (which was hidden in the right-hand ditch between the two groups of wagons) punching through his rusty mail shirt, while the rest of the volley killed the bodyguard and wounded the guidon-bearer.

  The scouts finished off the guidon-bearer and cut down the Shunya as Janna led her platoon in a howling charge across the grass, Bridget trailing along a dozen paces to the rear to deal with any Badger wounded.

  Only one of the eighteen unhorsed Eyade was dead, but five more were too badly injured to stand and face their attackers, while the remaining eleven were easy meat for thirty well-armed mercenaries acting as a unit; none of the nomads got in a solid blow before dying.

  “Right, Rolf, take First Section and deal with this lot, Kroh, finish off the horses and return to the wagons, Second Section, back to our wagons, Third Section with me.” The scarred Badger Serjeant led the nine mercenaries towards the six horse-less wagons abandoned in the center of the road, wiping the blood from Rosemist’s blade with a filthy dust-scarf she had taken from a dead Eyade’s body.

  Never one to assign a dirty task to a subordinate, Rolf wiped Moonblade clean on a fistful of grass and caught up a discarded lance. Going from nomad to nomad, he stabbed each fallen enemy in the throat or back of the neck, depending on how the body lay, to ensure that each was dead, while Kroh finished off the injured mounts with sure swings of his axe and the Scout Section shot down the uninjured animals.

  “It sure is...sudden,” Picken shyly observed to his master’s wife, the tow-headed twelve-year-old apprentice looking a bit green. “I mean, just a minute or two ago they were alive, and now they’re all dead.”

  “That is the way of war,” the advocate nodded, wishing the boy was back at Oramere. She and Axel had quarreled long and loudly about whether the boy should come on this campaign, but her husband had proven to be unmovable: Picken was an apprentice wizard, and with his master was the only place he could be. The boy would remain at Axel’s side for four or five years more, and then be sent off to one of the formal schools of the Arts to refine and develop his abilities. “They should have settled for six wagons.”

  “That new spell Master Axel has learned, the snow-storm spell, is really effective,” Picken scooped a melting handful of snow off the grass and licked it. “Too bad he didn’t know it last summer, we would have really showed the Goblins something, then.”

  Bridget opened her mouth to point out to the boy that there was more to life than war and magic, and then closed it with the words unspoken. Picken, like Duna, had been rescued by the Badgers while awaiting their turn to die on a Void-priest’s altar to fuel that bloody master of the Dark Art’s spells; since then they had been raised in Oramere, always within sight of the Company. Small wonder that for both battle and the Company were all that mattered.

  First Section split into three groups of three and expertly dealt with the remains of the Eyade troop; the first team went over the dead mounts, breaking the saddletrees, cutting up the reins and harnesses, searching the saddlebags for valuables (which went into the Company coffers), and water skins, the latter to be used for only for washing as Bridget did not trust the nomads’ ability to judge clean water. The second team went from corpse to corpse, stripping off the silver bracelets that marked battle-honors, the torcs which marked rank, and searching the pouches and pockets for valuables. The third team swept the area, picking up gear lost or dropped by the nomads, including the unit guidon.

  Third Section man-handled the wagons into the ditch to re-open the road while Janna checked each’s cargo. As the little caravan the Badgers were guarding drew alongside she supervised the transfer of certain cases, kegs, and boxes from several of the abandoned wagons to their own loot-cart while Second Section cleared the dead from the roadway and stripped them of useful arms and valuables. Bridget, in her capacity as a priestess of the goddess of birth and death, said the funeral-cant over th
e bodies to ensure that their remains would be safe from the attentions of a necromancer. Janna released each section in turn to loot souvenirs off the Eyade dead or from the abandoned wagons as their fodder-wagons creaked on by, then re-formed the platoon into its defense posture and reported to her Lieutenant.

  “That went well,” the wizard could not help the gloating tone in his voice. “That beats driving them off with spells and arrow-fire.”

  “Yes, sir; did enough chain survive to try it again?”

  “Yes, and Picken recovered the lock; how did we fare on the loot?”

  “The Eyade had what we expected, easy money but nothing special; three wagons were loaded with provisions and cases of wine in equal proportions, so we took a bit, but our cart’s getting pretty overloaded. Two wagons had chests of personal belongings and camp gear; some of our people took clothes, but there really wasn’t all that much of interest there, although I had Rolf grab any good boots or shoes he could find in a quick search, footgear will get hard to find before the war is over. The last wagon had war gear, mostly polearms and spears, none of better than average quality, although I found four mail shirts packed in grease-filled kegs and a dozen long swords, so we’re ahead of the game there. We took three crossbows off the dead guards, pretty fair weapons.”

  “If things continue at this rate we’ll have to grab another cart before we rejoin the main body. Ah, I see our Lasharian allies are giving the wagons a going over.” Behind them, the Lasharian officers were issuing rations and replacement arms out of the abandoned wains. “Good, at least the cargos won’t fall into enemy hands.”

  By the afternoon of the ninth the Heartland Army assembled to the east of Salcie, a battered, weary force which had passed a harrowing test. Roughly a third of the army’s remounts had been lost, along with varying amounts of transport, ranging from the Imperial Eastern Field Force’s shortfall of eleven carts to the Arturian’s two hundred and sixty-one wagons lost.

  The Sagenhoftian force had lost only twelve carts, none of which were being guarded by the Badgers, a loss which represented about a tenth of their portage capacity. Likewise, the fodder-wagons and their teams which had been guarded by Axel’s detachment made it to the village safely, where they were returned to the Arturian’s care.

  Durek was sitting with Axel, Bridget, Henri, and Doctor Kuhler going over the accounts of the loot taken and the redistribution of the cart-loads when a messenger arrived requesting his presence at the Lord Chancellor’s quarters, the latter being a canvas awning stretched between four trees.

  The Captain was a bit irritated to be summoned away in the midst of important deliberations: various weapons and items of armor had been captured or looted during and since the battle at Apartia, and each item had to be checked for serviceability and quality (a duty which fell to Kroh), a value assessed, which was normally half its actual value, and then the gear offered to individual Badgers based on seniority. If the Badger wanted the item he traded in the weapon or piece of armor the new gear replaced (and which in turn had to be evaluated and a value established), the ‘trade-in’ item’s value being deducted from the new gear’s price. The Badger then either paid the balance or had the debt entered on the Company books, to be paid by deductions against his wages and loot-bonuses. When all the captured gear had thus been issued out, the traded-in gear would either be re-issued to Badgers who were employing equipment that was inferior, or sold to one of the army quartermasters. It was a complex and time-consuming process, but it ensured that the Company was as well-equipped as possible without bankrupting the force or the individual mercenaries.

  The Lord Chancellor dismissed his staff while the Dwarf poured himself a mug of ale. When the two were alone in the evening twilight under the gently flapping tarp-roof, the balding administrator mopped his face and scalp with a linen handkerchief and poured himself a glass of wine. “I hope never to experience anything like these last days, Captain; I’ve worked my entire life, man and boy, in orderly organizations of calm, well-trained people. To see the chaos that occurred along the highway to the east is something I still have trouble accepting.” the portly man shook his head. “I knew this war would be terrible, but until now I had no idea of the depths of human suffering ‘terrible’ could represent.” He sighed and pulled some papers from a document case. “Still, we must go on. As you know, once Alantarn revolted last year this war was accepted as inevitable, and every nation took steps to prepare.”

  “We in the Duchy did what we could, and many ideas were implemented to help prepare. One idea which became fact was one of mine, something I had been trying to make happen for some years, that is, a permanent body of men assigned to do nothing but root out spies and cults. As you know, the Duchy relies upon the Brotherhood of the Trident to patrol our city streets, and a fine job they do, being incorruptible; likewise, most of the various temples have orders of cult-hunters within their ranks. While I believe that the Duchy must continue to support the temple efforts to hunt cults, I saw no reason why we could not field a number of our own hunters.”

  “Last summer the Duke agreed to this plan and we established the Gray Bureau to hunt spies, the Green to hunt cults, while the Gold Bureau hunted smugglers. When our troops marched east a detachment from the Gold Bureau went with them to watch for signs of traitors within the force, and in fact they winkled out several spies before the battle at Apartia. On the retreat, however, they were lost, bringing us to the matter at hand.”

  “Lost in the retreat was a document-chest and three Bureau staff members, an agent and two clerks. Now we were told the document case itself is unremarkable, and was filled with accounts-sheets which are meaningless; the real papers are carefully hidden within using a coded filing system; both the case and the people had been ‘marked’ by some sort of enchantment process (which I am completely ignorant of), so that Watchers or Seers can track them easily. Thus we know roughly where the case and our people are, and that the three are still alive, at least at the moment.”

  “And you want us to rescue them,” Durek said, pouring himself another tankard.

  “Precisely. Battle will be joined here tomorrow or the next day, so Watchers and scouts are reporting that the enemy cavalry is pulling back to reform and prepare for the battle; you and your troops ought to be able to safely mount a rescue attempt.”

  “As you might guess, my enthusiasm is less than overwhelming.”

  “I understand; however, the case contains data that would be extremely useful to the enemy, while representing hundreds of man-hours of careful work. Likewise, the three people involved know far too much of our operations to leave to their fate, so an attempt must be made. Naturally, the method of the rescue is of your own choosing.”

  “What do you know about the captives and their conditions?”

  “They were taken by wolf-riders this morning and brought to a in a farmhouse about seven miles south of here.” The Lord Chancellor handed the Badger a stack of papers. “Here are the Watcher’s reports, a map of the area drawn by a local cartographer, sketches of the three agents, and information on how to identify the document-case, which is a large wood chest. Apparently the Goblins are using this farmstead as a patrol base from which they watch the Hand’s left flank.”

  Durek scanned the papers. “It says here the base is being used by a Lardina, that’s around a thousand Goblins, complete with shamans and other support. Not to mention that the dread wolves they ride are just as tough as the Goblins themselves, perhaps tougher. This isn’t a special task, it’s a suicide mission.” Durek slammed the papers onto the table, expertly feigning anger.

  “Yes, true, but if you study the papers you will see that this particular Goblin force has seen heavy action with accompanying losses, and is engaged in far-flung scouting operations; our Watchers agree that most of the Goblins will not be at the base.”

  “Most is an easy term to coin if you aren’t going,” Durek informed the bureaucrat icily.

  “Ah, well, an attemp
t must be made,” the Lord Chancellor blinked at the Dwarf. “I realize your Company has performed heroically to date, especially with bringing in the Arturian fodder-wagons, but I must insist that this operation be undertaken as far as possible, Captain.”

  The Dwarf grunted disgustedly and picked up the papers. “There is an ugly tendency amongst paymasters, Lord Chancellor: once they see their mercenaries succeed in a difficult task, they tend to believe that the unit is capable of anything, anywhere, anytime. I will undertake this mission, sir, but with my entire Company, less our carts and wounded. You shall have to fend for yourselves over the next two days.”

  “I understand; the new Lord Marshal has arranged for a detachment of regular foot to secure our baggage train until you return.” The man smiled tiredly at the Dwarf. “I wish you luck and speed, Captain. May the Eight go with you.”

  “May they go ahead and deal with the Goblins before we get there,” the Dwarf grumbled. “I shall report back once the attempt has been made.”

  Durek found his Lieutenant near the carts; Axel was throwing pine cones at Picken, who was ignoring the wizard as he went about stowing captured rations. “What did our lord and master want?” the officer asked, tossing a pine cone into the air and catching it with his left hand.

  “We’ve a rescue mission, hitting a Lardina base camp seven miles to the south.”

  “Who’re we rescuing?”

  “Three spy-catchers and their files, Watchers pin-pointed the base camp. It’s the Lardina from the Brazen Shield Keiba.”

  “Good, they took a pounding at Apartia and were active all during the retreat, we killed a few of them ourselves while guarding the fodder-wains. They ought to be pretty worn out by now.”

  “Which is why they’re on flank watch instead of with the main army,” Durek nodded. “It doesn’t look too bad, although I made a fuss over the job so the Lord Chancellor will be impressed when we pull it off. Has Duna recovered?”