Dark Tide: Book Five of the Phantom Badgers

by RW Krpoun

  With roughly a quarter of the city garrison on patrol at any one time the lid was kept on large-scale violence for the moment, although popular speakers within the refugee community were growing in support and posing a greater and greater danger to the city with each passing day.

  The overall picture was the least of Bridget’s concerns at the moment; she concentrated on patrolling her sector and keeping order while ignoring a growing level of fatigue. The Badgers were maintaining a high level of activity for such a small unit, which meant very limited sleep for each individual mercenary. Their issue rations were leaner than one would expect in garrison, especially coming after a long march to the Realms followed by a hard month’s campaigning which had stripped the mercenaries of much of their body fat, but their carts had been heavily loaded with looted food when they had arrived, and the patrols were bringing in food as well, so the Badgers were eating better than most of the garrison, and far better than any of the refugees.

  Day patrolling was hard on the advocate, whose heart ached for the crowds of villagers and farmers who had been forced to flee from their homes with what they could load into their carts and wagons at the advance of the Hand; when they had reached the coast they found their wains were banned from entering the city, selling off their transport and teams at ruinous prices to military quartermasters who were replacing wagons lost in the battles to the east. Now reduced to the belongings that they were able to carry on their backs, their slender savings eroding with each passing day, these honest folk stared out at a strange new world with a bewilderment that was harrowing to observe.

  Fighting to keep her face impassive the lithe advocate led her platoon through the crowed street and prayed that help would come soon.

  Night patrols were normally conducted in section strength to cover more ground while the refugees sought sleep and the locals locked themselves into their homes. The night patrols hunted the arson teams which stalked the city targeting warehouses, ships, and workshops, while black marketeers moved their goods and criminals plied their illicit trades.

  On this night, however, Gold Platoon was operating as a single unit, with Doctor Kuhler and Henri in support; as the city bells marked midnight and the end of the fourteenth day of the month, the platoon marched down a street lined with sleeping refugees, the city skyline brightened here and there by fires started by Hand teams, the silence punctuated by the occasional crash of a projectile sent into Sagenhoft by a Hand war engine testing the range; the light siege train had arrived two days ago and had moved into position with the ease of long practice. Only a few of the trebuchets and catapults brought with the train were powerful enough to reach the city from the Hand trench-lines; the vast majority would not be employable until the trenches advanced closer to the city walls, projects which had begun in earnest on the thirteenth.

  Problems were increasing: water rationing had to begin as Bohca Tatbik began a dedicated campaign of fouling the Bercer River with manure from their thousands of horses and oxen, and with corpses recovered from the battlefields and disinterred from graveyards. The government ordered the boiling of all water consumed for drinking or used for bathing and cooking, but fuel supplies were limited, and despite a new law that every ship entering the port had to carry at least five hundred pounds of coal or pay double the docking fee sicknesses from bad water were beginning to sweep the poorer quarters.

  Maxmillian leaned against a wall and waited for runners to bring him word that his sections were in position. The siege was coming to the mid-point of its second week, and already he was heartily sick of it. They were trapped in an ugly routine: one day of marching around the city under the summer sun in full war gear trying to keep order while tempers frayed and hope ebbed, then practice some night maneuvers, sleep late, drill until sun down, and patrol all night. Rest until noon, with sentries posted in shifts on the wall, and then drill until dark. Get a full night’s rest, and patrol all the following day.

  The bulk of the Company were young men and women who could function on such a schedule, and certainly the long hours of drill were polishing an already skilled unit, but the historian was one year short of his fortieth birthday.

  Elonia materialized out of the darkness. “Everyone’s in position.”

  “Good.” That was one thing he could say for the siege: the Company, which traditionally had operated in rural areas, was rapidly picking up the skills needed for urban operations. Another month and they would be experts. “Let’s get moving.”

  This was only the third time his platoon had undertaken a search like this, but they had practiced it a dozen times in the last few days. The target was an old house in North Town near the docks, a structure which had seen better days, having once been a residence of some prosperous merchant or ship owner; those days were long gone, however, and it was finishing out its time as a boarding house. The front faced Seahawk Lane, while the back opened into a narrow, nameless alley; to the right (south) of the house was an empty lot where a similar structure had once stood, now home to a cluster of shanties housing thirty-odd refugees, while to the north the building leaned against a house of similar age and decrepitude.

  Arian had ordered a thorough search of the building, acting on information culled from street-rumors, interrogations conducted by Badger patrols, and Philip’s sources; night-time was the preferred time for such operations, as the streets were largely deserted. Maxmillian had deployed his platoon carefully: First Section was poised to storm the neighboring house to ensure that there were no connecting passages while Second Section watched the front and rear, the side facing the vacant lot having no openings. He would enter the two-story structure with Third Section, his two Corporals, and Henri, while Kuhler stayed outside unless needed. Third Section had been split into three teams of three, one team each to Elonia, Bulldog, and himself, with Henri as a free agent. Bulldog would take the cellar, Elonia had the second story, while Maximilian would lead the search of the ground floor.

  At a signal from his Serjeant, Bulldog kicked in the front door as Mad Dog kicked in the door on the adjoining house. The Badgers immediately stormed in, the various teams charging off to take control of their respective areas. Maximilian trotted in at the head of his team, a small tin lantern fastened to the front of his shield illuminating his path, hammer at the ready. “City Garrison, this is a lawful search,” he announced loudly as similar cries echoed from above and below. He found himself in a narrow hallway, the only remaining vestige of the original foyer and parlor being the carved staircase curving up to his right. Four doors opened off the hallway, which ended in a filthy common kitchen area.

  “Henri, take the kitchen, you two, check the rooms on the left, you come with me to do the right.” The search did not take long; each ‘apartment’ consisted of a single large room partitioned off with curtains or blankets as the occupants desired. All boasted at least five occupants, usually a young family with a refugee boarder or two to help pay the rent; no one did more than complain at the sudden appearance of heavily-armed mercenaries in their midst, and none of the complaints were voiced very loudly. At least four babies and young children were crying when Maximilian rejoined his team in the hallway, and several more were howling upstairs as Elonia led her people down the stairs.

  “Bulldog’s got a rat farm in the cellar,” Henri advised the serjeant. “I’ve sent Kuhler down to take a look.”

  “Good.” Maximilian headed downstairs to have a look himself. The cellar had been carefully enlarged, a well-shored area extending under the lot next door; the ‘farm’ consisted of a storage area for food and tools, and man-high rows of stacked cages, each containing two or three rats in various stages of development.

  Bulldog tossed his Serjeant a casual salute. “About two hundred of the little bastards, all told. There was a guard posted, but he bolted out a new passage the instant he heard us coming, ran right into Mad Dog’s section next door. Stinks, doesn't it?”

  “It does, indeed.” Despite the presence o
f a dozen lanterns burning scented oils, the reek of excrement hung like a pall. “Doctor, are they sick yet?”

  “No, all healthy from the looks of things, but there’s four sealed kegs there in the corner that I wager contains the tainted meat that would make them very sick indeed.”

  “Post guards at both entrances until we get a crew in here to dispose of them,” Maximilian advised Bulldog and fled the stench.

  The guard was a scrawny young man in ragged clothes who was bleeding from an abrasion on his cheek, sitting with his wrists bound together behind his back. Maximilian watched while Elonia sat cross-legged in front of the man, a shield-mounted lantern illuminating the two.

  “So, what’s your name?” The Seeress asked, keeping her tone light.

  “Tal,” the young man muttered unhappily.

  “And what was your job here, Tal?”

  “Nuffin.” Tal yelped as a boot caught him in the lower back.

  “You see, Tal, my friends aren't as patient as I,” Elonia smiled. “And they carry knives. What was your job here?”

  “Feed the rats at midnight, muck out the cages, keep people out.”

  “Who paid you?”

  “Dunno.” He tried to squirm aside, but one Badger grabbed his hair to hold him still while another kicked him.

  “Now, Tal, you’ve have to do better than that. You know that what you’re doing is a hanging offense, that’s why you tried to run out the back way. Now tell us what you know or you’ll dance at dawn.”

  “I gets ten pennies a shift, work from sun-down to sun-up,” Tal tried to pull his head away from the grip on his hair, and failed. “Good pay. The man who spells me in daytime hired me, I live in the lot there beside the house, he pays me regular at the end of every shift. He just came over and offered me the job two days ago, told me it was permanent, and to run if anyone showed up.”

  “Do you know what the rats are for?”

  “Don’t care, got a wife and two kids to feed,” Tal shot back. “Sold near all my flock at a tenth of what they’re worth, smoked the rest and that’s nearly all gone, sold my mule for half what it should have brought when we got to the city, and haven't worked a day since we left home three weeks ago. The wife and kids are sleeping on dirt under canvas with no end in sight. Man offers me ten pennies a day, I don’t ask no questions. I figure the money’ll run out before this war’s over ‘less I find work. And even after the war, what am I goin’ to do with no sheep?”

  Maxmillian motioned Mad Dog over as Elonia had Tal describe his employer. “What did he have on him?”

  “An old hatchet, a skinning knife, and the usual pocket junk. No tattoos or ritual scarring of any sort. He didn’t try to fight.”

  By the time Elonia gave up on getting any useful information from Tal a half-dozen hand carts and refugee porters showed up, escorted by a couple Sagenhoft soldiers. The rats and kegs were escorted by a section of Badgers to the naval base on Dragon Isle; after dawn a navy vessel would drown the rats at sea. Tal and his family would be aboard the first merchant vessel leaving the port in the morning to protect them from retaliation by the Hand, and the rest of Gold Platoon resumed normal patrolling. Theirs was not the first rat farm found, either by the Company or by the garrison as a whole. The workers who did not resist and who cooperated with the garrison were evacuated from the city in an attempt to weaken the Hand’s holds on their hired help.

  Arian Thyben made an entry in a file, then cross-referenced it in another portfolio before setting the pen down and working his fingers. The much-vaunted secrecy of cult and spy organizations were woven principality in that they both were carefully compartmented. But if one categorized hundreds of seemingly minor or trivial incidents, rumors, and irregularities, it was often possible to uncover at least part of such a group. And once you had one corner of the network, you could unravel it like an old blanket. With luck, anyway.

  He had spent untold hours in this musty little office in the base of their tower going over the patrol reports and informant interviews; Elonia helped him, and surprisingly Duna had volunteered no small amount of time as well. All their efforts had paid off, and paid well: by the twentieth they had a name. Not the leader referred to by Meredith as ‘A’, of course, that would be far too difficult, but instead that of an associate, a low-ranked man, but clearly a friend of the Hand within Sagenhoft.

  And hopefully, the thread with which they would unravel the Hand’s network.

  Loudon Simer was a man well-content with his life when he woke on the morning of the twenty-second of the month. Certainly the siege was underway, but given the Treasury clerk’s secret alliance to the Hand of Chaos that was hardly bad news: when the Duchy fell, Loudon would hold a position of power within the new government that would rise under the symbol of the seven-fingered Hand. In the meantime his duties were hardly onerous, and served to hold him exempt from the military. Besides his government pay he received a substantial stipend from his secret employers which lately had been paid in foodstuffs, which were better than gold at the moment.

  Of course his masters would be displeased to discover just how heavily he was dealing on the black market, but what they did not know could not hurt him, and besides, there were fortunes being made out there. Hunger hadn’t even begun to settle in, but everyone was stockpiling as much as they possibly could in defiance of governmental edicts, driving prices through the roof, while the cost of all manner of entertainments fell away to nothing.

  Last night was a prime example: he had been leaving the cafe he normally frequented after work for a glass or three of wine when he ran into a young lady whose services he had rented on occasion in the past. She had seemed pleased to see him, and had offered not only her services, but those of two very attractive companions as well for the price of a single girl before the siege. He had enjoyed a marvelous evening and night and slept like a man well-pleased with his lot in life.

  After shooing the three laughing girls out into the pre-dawn grayness with a tidy tip for services well done, he tightened his dressing gown about his chubby form and made his way to his kitchen. As a clerk he could hardly engage servants, so breakfast would be dependent upon his own skills, but he cheered himself that this was simply one day less before he lived in a manner suitable to one of his intelligence and wit.

  Stepping into the kitchen, dimly-lit by a night-candle, his shriek of surprise was contained within the thick folds of cloth that were whipped over his head and face as strong hands seized his limbs and bore him down onto the floor. He could only splutter and whine while a keen blade slid along his body, cutting away his clothing, and even those feeble protests died away as another knife was laid across his throat with a hissed command for silence. Working expertly, the clerk was lifted up into one of his own chairs and tied in place, arms and legs held immobile by tough leather cord.

  When the cloth, which he recognized now as a blanket, was lifted from his face, he found himself facing a man and two women, while someone else behind him carefully shuttered the windows before lighting a lamp. The three were all armed; the man was a lean, hard-faced type with red hair who watched him like a ferret eyeing a cornered mouse. The nearer woman was beautiful, a full-breasted wench with a face like the statue of a goddess and eyes like emeralds. She wore no armor, but a pair of long knives rode her nicely-rounded hips. The other woman was slender and lovely in a much more conventional manner; her figure was partially hidden by a tunic of studded leather, but her breeches displayed legs that were both long and well-formed.

  Loudon shifted uncomfortably. “Whatever you came here for, take it and leave. I’m but a poor clerk with little to my name.”

  “As it happens, names interest us,” the man smiled. “We spent no small amount of effort and money to acquire yours.” He indicated the bracer he wore on one arm that was decorated with various devices; Loudon noted that both women wore similar items. “Do you recognize this?” He tapped the top badge.

  “No.” All that mattered was that
it was not the insignia worn by the Duchy’s new spy-hunters.

  “A pity, we’ll have to go the long route. We’re looking for an associate member of the Hand’s intelligence apparatus, which is why we’re here. Try and deny what you are and you’ll lose a testicle; the lady here,” he indicated the slender woman, “is a Healer, so we can be assured that no matter what or how much we cut off, you’ll survive.” He smiled without humor. “Oh, and if you’re thinking of shouting...” he held up the brass gorget they issued to garrison troops who held the power to arrest and search.

  Loudon swallowed hard. “What do you want with me?” He had first-rate locks on all his doors and windows, but it would have been a simple matter for one of the whores to slip downstairs and unlock a door for these bastards during the night.

  “Your understanding.”

  The clerk gave him a moment, but the man did not continue. “What am I supposed to understand?”

  “That you belong to us now, to me specifically, not to the Hand of Chaos or anyone else. You will do what I say, when I say, and how I say to do it. Do you understand?”

  “Of course,” Loudon nodded, wondering if the man were really so stupid as to think a bit a blade-waving and rough-handling could turn him. He kept his face bland and waited.

  “Good. Open your mouth and stick out your tongue.”

  Seeing no point in refusing, Loudon complied. The slender Healer knelt in front of his and carefully spread a grainy paste the consistency of wet dirt across his tongue. “Swallow all of it,” she instructed in a warm voice. He managed to get the mess down, alarmed at the way the touch of the stuff made his tongue tingle. The person behind him tossed the Healer a bottle of ale; she pulled the cork and held the neck to his lips. “Three nice long swallows to make sure you’ve had the full dose.”