by RW Krpoun
“Mail call!” Dayyan bellowed. “Mail is here, sound off when I call your name. Milo, you’ve got an orphan letter, Edrie, same thing.” Rosemary, the chief cook and housekeeper back at Oramere had her staff, which was made up of orphans the Company had taken to raise, write letters to the Badgers in the field on a roster system so that every Badger would get a letter now and again. “Here’s one for Beck, I guess word hadn’t reached Sunny that he didn’t get out of the Great Fallow; what’s this, Kroh, you’ve got a letter.”
The standard-bearer passed the Dwarf a letter and went on distributing the mail; other than Kroh and Arian (whose family wrote him), nearly all the letters were from the orphans, which was not unusual; few of the Badgers had family ties. As usual, Duna and Picken received several letters each, written from the orphans who had been rescued with them by the Badgers; the eight young people had always maintained close ties. The mail was carried by professional couriers from Oramere to the Heartland Army and back, hired by Durek so he could stay in touch with what was happening back at the Company’s base. The courier also picked up any mail for Badgers with outside family from the Imperial Post at Teasau.
“Who wrote you, Kroh?” Starr asked, looking over his shoulder at the runic Dwarven letters on the sheets of vellum.
“My mother and a cousin, they put both letters together, and he posted it when he passed through Teasau.”
“Your mother? What does she say?” Starr leaned closer, although she could not read Fiadaich.
“Nothing, it’s personal,” Kroh held the letters away from the little Threll.
“Oh, come on Kroh, read me some; I would read you mine if my family ever wrote me,” the little Badger wheedled, draping herself across the Dwarf’s wide shoulders.
“I can tell you what your mother would write: she would write, ‘come home right now’,” Kroh tried to shrug the Threll off, but she grabbed a double fistful of beard-braids and hung on. “Oh, all right, let go.”
Rolf, seated nearby grooming Tumbler, smiled and edged a bit closer as Kroh adjusted his beard, assumed a dignified air, and peered at the writing. “ ‘Dear son’, that’s me, ‘I hope the storms and such are not too severe and that you dress warmly and smoke your tabba so the attacks do not return. Be careful of the ale, you know Humans cannot brew worth a bit, and be cautious with your money.’ Always ready with a bit of advice, that’s my mother. ‘Your father is well and sends his regards.’ Let’s see, ahuh, ahuh, yep, ahuh, this bit’s about the work my father’s doing in the smelting-works, rather interesting, but I don’t think you would get much out of it. ‘We hope that the war goes well, we know you are fighting hard and bringing great honor upon your family, Fuar, and the Guardians of the Way. Your uncle and his sons are marching east to do their part in the Thunderpeaks, and your father wanted to go but for his leg’.”
“What’s wrong with your father’s leg?” Starr asked.
“Only got one,” Kroh pointed to his left leg. “Lost the right one at the knee fighting a big bear sixty years ago, when they were Outside cutting timber. He’s a hammer-lover, my father, which was always a point of disagreement between us; I’m a traditional axe type myself, but not dad. Still, when one of those big brown buggers with the drooping lower lip comes for you, axe or hammer it’ll be a rough fight. Chewed up half the wood-cutting party, it did, before they brought it down. No one died, but Father lost his leg, and a couple others weren’t the same, either; the Healer had to concentrate on saving lives.”
Dayyan trotted past the group. “Officer’s call, officer’s call, all officers to Durek’s fire.”
“What now?” The Waybrother grumbled as he climbed to his feet, carefully refolding the letter and stowing it in his pouch.
Durek surprised everyone by ordering Starr to post her section as sentries around the meeting to keep everyone out of earshot, a very uncommon practice. “What we have facing us is a desperate mission which will rely heavily upon secrecy,” the Captain announced, his face grave. “As you know, the Hand has taken Dorog, pinning us between a fortified ridge line and the Hand army. Grand Marshal Laffery has a trick up his sleeve, however: at dawn tomorrow two Gates are being opened on the ridge, and Sagenhoftian troops will be attacking through them to help secure the ridge and the gap the Highway passes through. I have volunteered the Company to lead the attack into Dorog itself, passing through the Gate ahead of the Sagenhoftian First Cohort. Our task will be to clear and hold the central portion of the village while the First Cohort seizes the redoubt overlooking the gap, termed Point North. I have discussed this with Axel and Elonia, and both believe that because of the enchantments used to create so many Dayar so quickly in the area of the town that it will be impossible for the Hand to detect and locate the Gates.”
“Why, if I may be so bold, have you volunteered us for some of the roughest fighting anyone is likely to see tomorrow?” Henri asked.
“Loot and a way out.” Durek let that sink in. “Dorog was the primary supply point for the Heartland Army; all manner of useful goods will be in and around the town, not to mention anything of value the Hand agents brought, plus the loot the Goblins will be carrying. We ought to be able to grab more gear than we can carry, if we can take the town. I don’t need to remind you that if the ridge-line holds not many of the Heartland Army will be going anywhere, but if we’re in the town we could break out to the west.” He laid out a map of the town. “We won’t let the troops know where or how we’re fighting until we form up in the morning; full water skins, one day’s rations, four loot-bags, and a double issue of missile weapons each. Now, we’ll go through the Gate in the following order....”
An hour before dawn on the sixteenth the Phantom Badgers were mustered into ranks, briefed on their part in the coming battle, and marched to the area where the Gates would be activated. The mercenaries were cautioned as to how they were to use the Gate: a plank walkway with rails would led to the egrai; each mercenary was to close his or her eyes a couple feet before the door-sized sheet of shimmering blackness and walk steadily forward, the railings serving to keep him or her on line with the Gate. Once through, they would be grabbed and directed as to where they were to go. After much thought, Durek had determined that he would lead in person, followed by Axel and the command group, then the Scout Section, then the platoons: Blue, Gold, Silver.
The Company formed up in single file under the clouds of stars that filled the warm summer night’s sky, with the Sagenhoftian cohort formed up by companies a short distance away. Talk was muted and nervous; the Badgers were all too aware of how dangerous their task was.
“So, what did your cousin have to say in his letter?” Rolf asked Kroh just to have something to say.
“Not much.” The Waybrother turned to face the half-Orc. “He’s part of the force our Fuar sent to help the Thunderpeaks clans fight the Felher and Cave Goblins the Hand incited. He said that a force of Dwarves, just a small company, was sent to serve with the Heartland Army as engineers, which is odd as they should have joined up by now; actually, to judge from the dates he mentioned, they ought to have reached us not long after the battle at Mancin.”
“These are bad times to be travelling,” Rolf observed. “No doubt they’ve seen action along the way.”
“True. Well, here we go.”
Durek stepped through the Gate, eyes closed, and felt the static ‘shiver’ of energy go through him as if he had fallen to a vertical pond of glacier-fed water. He opened his eyes and hefted his axe as a hand fell on his shoulder, finding himself in a cellar below what he guessed to be a stable from the smell of horses and hay. The hand belonged to a pallid, bearded man who had been a long while without a bath holding a finger to his lips to signal silence. “There are Goblins sleeping in the stable above us,” he whispered.
The Dwarf nodded and looked about; the cellar was long, obviously the size of the stable above, with a wide stairway in a corner leading to a trap door in the ceiling; the room was lit by a half-dozen oil lamps. A th
ick coating of tar on the planks above him prevented the light from escaping. “Are we safe?”
“Yes, for now. Hurry.”
Durek scratched the symbol for stealth onto the clay pot and tossed it back through the Gate; a moment later Axel stepped through, staff at the ready. At Durek’s nod, he tossed a white stone back through the Gate and the rest of the command group began filing through. Bridget replaced the man in guiding Badgers through the portal while the Dwarf spoke with him. “What can you tell us about the town?”
“Nothing,” the weary Human shook his head. “I haven’t been out of this cellar since I arrived six days ago. I heard the Goblins come in last night and not leave, but that’s all I can tell you. The trap door’s the only way out, but the hinges are heavily greased and it appears from above to be a section of floor with several nail-heads sticking up to discourage anyone from sleeping on it.”
“Thanks. Janna.” The ex-Silver Eagle came over from where she was arranging her platoon. “There’s Goblins sleeping above; I need them killed quietly, and I don’t want to use any of Bridget’s spells. Take care of it.” The Serjeant nodded and went back to her platoon. Durek motioned Axel over. “Blue, Scouts, Command, Silver, Gold,” he advised the wizard. “I’m going up with Blue. With a little luck we’ll get a ways into town before things get ugly.”
After checking the hinges, Rolf removed the bars from the trap door and squatted on the top step with his back braced against the trap door. Pushing with his knees, he opened the door with a single smooth motion, the hinge-pins moving silently in their coating of grease, leaning the door against the wall behind him. Stepping out, closely followed by Kroh, he found himself in an average-size stable that was empty of horses, but which now contained eleven Goblins laying here and there on whatever straw or hay they could find, sound asleep.
Kroh tip-toed to the far end of the stables as Janna joined Rolf and Edrie Pecheux took up a guard position at the stable’s half-open door. Working carefully, Janna and Rolf moved from Goblin to Goblin, killing each in turn; Rolf would pin the small humanoid down with a horse blanket and his body weight while Janna clamped a feed sack over the Goblin’s face and slit his throat. When the body stopped trying to thrash around, the pair moved on to the next. Durek joined Edrie while the Me’Coner brothers (Dolan and Royan) grabbed up a blanket and a Goblin’s cloak and went to work on the sleepers as well.
Despite everyone’s best efforts, noise was made, and a Pa sat up to see what had roused him, only to be decapitated by Kroh before he realized what was going on. The Badgers quickly stabbed the remaining Goblins to death, ignoring their thrashing while stifling any cries or screams as best they could.
“Grass Vipers,” Janna advised Durek, handing the Captain a broach bearing the Keiba’s insignia she had taken from a dead Lapla; behind the Dwarf the Scout Section slipped up the stairs.
“Good, search the bodies and stand ready; Starr, come here.”
As the cellar filled with Sagenhoftian troops the Company formed up in front of the stables and marched down the street with its standard furled and hidden inside its leather case, a Hand company guidon (a copy made from the one Henri had captured) fluttering at their head. The sun was a bloody sliver at the eastern horizon, but the morning sounds were drowned out by the sounds of the Heartland army forming up for battle a mile to the east.
Bridget swung along at the head of the column, heart hammering in her throat, on a deeply rutted dirt road lined with small two-story houses thatched with straw or reeds; about half the buildings on this street had a shop for their lower floor and living quarters above.
Few people stirred as they marched along the road heading for the town square; they passed a half-dozen Goblins of the Grass Viper Lardina who were cooking some chickens over a fire they had built on the side of the street, but the jongalas merely watched them as they marched by.
The square was only a few hundred yards from their stable; in fact, the entire town was only six streets wide east and west and four north and south. The town square was square in fact as well as in name, sixty yards on a side of bare dirt that served as a farmer’s market one day a week and a place to park wagons the rest of the time. Four streets crossed it, two north-south and two east-west, while the square itself was bordered by four large buildings: two inns (one on the north side, one on the south), a store (west side), and a temple dedicated to all eight deities of the Light. The latter was just a pile of charred beams and blackened masonry.
It was hard to get a good look at the square, however, as it was filled with long ranks of Dayar standing motionless as only Dayar and statues can, row upon row of stark white figures armed with steel-flanged maces and iron-rimmed ‘dragon's scale’ shields, the term referring to their shape, not their construction. These were young Dayar the advocate saw as she ran an expert eye over the ranks: the ‘bone’ was clean and white as milk, without chips or cracks from old battles, without the darkening and horn-like projections that came with age and experience. They would not stir until they were ordered to do so by the adepts who carried the enchanted batons, or when their standing orders indicated that they should.
The Badgers were marching in from the north; as the lead ranks of the Company stepped into the square and halted, three robed figures stood and walked over from where they had been sitting on the steps of the northern inn. Bridget moved to meet them, noting the shattered door symbols in white on the right breasts of their worn, filthy robes: necromancers of the Sundered Gate cult, hired as mercenaries to produce and control the Dayar for the Hand. Two of the three were Human, a gaunt man and a pale-faced woman with grayish splotches of some skin disease covering her left cheek and neck; the third had once been Human, but had since entered a state of Undeath, holding its life-force within the slowly decaying shell of its mortal body by the force of dark enchantments. This was a lechtor, a minor liche, a necromancer who was not powerful enough to cross the barrier of death without the aid of its master, a full-blown liche. At first glance the man appeared to be alive, but for the lifeless gray of his skin and the dry rot that was eating away his lips, eyelids, and nose.
“We need to pass, could you have your formation move forward or back?” Bridget kept her voice calm and businesslike despite the disgust she felt; it was her temple which was most active against the perversions of necromancy.
The lector looked at the guidon, and then at the Hand insignia Bridget wore on a cloak that had been captured in the Great Fallow; the rest of the Company had merely removed their bracers. “I was not told of any Holding detachments in this area.”
“Vassals, not full Hand troops,” Bridget explained. “They sent us by Gate to help shore up the gap, there’s a full Band following.”
The other two were fingering their control batons, whether because they sensed trouble or because they expected to be ordered to move their charges Bridget couldn’t guess. The lechtor stared at the advocate for a long moment. “I smell...”
She didn’t wait to hear about what he smelled; beneath the cloak she wore the Torc of Suian, an enchanted device created by a Harthrell (sea-faring Threll) spellweaver who had been the greatest hunter of necromancers the world had ever seen; she had borne the ruby-tipped torc once before, and twin scars marked her neck from where the device had heated nearly to destruction in the battle. A scarf was wrapped around her neck beneath the Torc to prevent it from being active. Pulling the scarf off her neck, she felt the rune-etched gold settle against her skin and the surge of power that poured through her bones.
Focusing as the lechtor halted in mid-sentence and raised a hand, the bone exposed at fingertips and knuckles, the advocate harnessed the Torc’s power; murmuring a cant, Bridget gestured and the spells that bound the lechtor were dissipated.
As the corpse of the lechtor collapsed, the life-force it had housed for its unnatural span gone, the two adepts reacted; the woman gestured and shouted, sending a spray of green flames that blurred and vanished against Bridget’s wards, while
the male shouted several words before four arrows, two crossbow bolts, and a slung bullet smashed him off his feet. The woman screamed an invocation and the quarrels aimed at her were deflected, but her simple ward did nothing against the spell weaving the advocate sent which snuffed out her life like a candle struck by a gallon of water.
The clatter of bones alerted Bridget, who turned to see the Dayar clumsily breaking ranks and advancing on herself and the Company; with the deaths of their controllers they would be awkward in their movements and hesitant in their attacks, but they were still dangerous. Had the necromancer who had created them been killed, they would have been inert for a considerable length of time, but the loss of mere controllers was far less damaging. Whispering, the advocate gestured and a fine mist swirled through the Undead ranks; each Dayar it touched crumbled into dust, their weapons and shields crashing into the dirt.
The Badgers spread out, as the advocate sent killing mists into the Dayar, Blue Platoon charging into the north inn while Silver headed for the store and Gold skirmished with the confused foe. It wasn’t much of a fight; the individual Badgers simply darted away from their leaden enemy until Bridget had destroyed the last of them. Dayar were fierce in battle, but only when controlled or very experienced; without the baton-wielders the newly-minted Undead were largely ineffective.
When the last Dayar had been destroyed Gold Platoon stormed the south inn while Bridget said the funeral cant over the bodies of the lechtor and the two adepts, eliminating the corpses’ suitability for necromantic purposes. As the first company of Sagenhoft troops trotted through the square heading south Durek summoned his command group and platoon leaders together.