The Puppet King

by Doug Niles

  Shaking off his concerns, he stalked away, knowing that he had an army to raise … and just a few hours during which to do it.

  The dragon snorted derisively. “So the elves thought they could resist, could stand against the onslaught of blue dragons?”

  “Yes!” Silvanoshei insisted. “And some elves, such as my father, did manage to give Lord Salladac pause for thought!”

  “Indeed,” Aeren said, “I had heard something about that.…”

  A Night of Glory and Blood

  Chapter Twelve

  The outlaws found Palthainon on the muddy field. His hair had been seared off by a dragon’s lightning bolt that had also knocked the warrior elf unconscious, but other than that, the general was unharmed.

  The same could not be said for two of his three companies of recruits. Nearly four hundred elves had been caught in the clearing when the blue serpents had flown over, and nearly three-quarters of them had been slaughtered by dragon breath or by the talons of the monsters and the swords of their riders.

  Only the elves of the first company—the group that, ironically, would have been the first to suffer the lethal strike of Porthios’s aborted ambush—had survived unscathed, by taking shelter in the thick woods that would otherwise have been their undoing. Though these city elves had tumbled among archers who had been prepared to attack them, both bands of the sylvan folk had been so startled by the arrival of the greater foe that their initial conflict had been immediately forgotten.

  Fortunately the dragons hadn’t stayed long after working their butchery on the field. Neither had they discovered the outlaws’ griffons, who had been sheltered in small clearings very near the site of the intended ambush. Now these savage fliers had been gathered, and the survivors of the Qualinesti force had joined with the bandits preparatory to falling back into the forest. General Palthainon was still dazed and disoriented, so Porthios had assumed command of all the elves.

  “Get the wounded back to our camp,” he directed. “See that the general is made as comfortable as possible, but don’t waste any time.”

  “Lord Porthios!” The cry came from the skies, and the shadow of a griffon’s wings momentarily passed over. One of his Qualinesti warriors gestured wildly as the creature came to rest before him.

  “There’s a whole army to the north. It’s a full-scale invasion!”

  “All under the banner of the Dark Queen?” he asked, dumbfounded.

  “Knights, and columns of marching troops as well—great, blue-skinned brutes, they look like they could crush an elf’s skull with their bare hands. It looks like the dragons are winging back to rejoin the infantry.”

  Porthios didn’t know where this army could have come from, but the attack on the elven formation made its objective clear enough. “How far away are the ground troops?” he asked, trying to think, to plan.

  “Twenty miles. They’re finding slow going in the woods, but they’re coming this way.”

  “Let’s get away from here, then. We’ll make plans as soon as we reach the gorge.”

  Together with about three hundred survivors from the Qualinesti militia, the outlaw band made its way back to the encampment. Because so many elves had to travel on foot, the journey took quite a bit longer than the one-hour griffon flight that had led the band to the ambush site. The wounded were loaded onto litters, which further slowed down the party’s progress, and it wasn’t until well after sunset that the weary elves marched down the trail into the deep darkness of the cool gorge.

  Once back at the camp, they learned—from Dallatar’s Kagonesti, not surprisingly—that another force of Dark Knights had invaded the eastern end of the kingdom and was even now drawing up against Qualinost itself. Flying scouts had given Porthios an idea of the size of the army marching along the coast. It seemed likely that at least five thousand troops were headed almost directly toward his camp.

  The wild elves had come with another fifty or so warriors—“braves,” as they called themselves. With this addition, Porthios found himself with a force of some six hundred elves, but nearly half of them were unblooded recruits, fresh from the streets and courtyards of Qualinost. Furthermore, he had serious questions about whether or not those elven warriors would have the stomach to battle a truly dangerous foe.

  The bandit leader met with Dallatar, Samar, and Tarqualan around the firepit in the center of their encampment to discuss a course of action. They were warmed only by a low bed of smokeless coals, for with dragons abroad, the elves knew the need for camouflage and concealment was drastically heightened.

  “We can stay here and hope they pass us by, or we can pick up the camp and move,” Porthios began. “Or we can choose to fight a battle against outrageous odds. We have to discuss the question. It’s too important for me to make a decision by myself.”

  “I say we attack them from ambush,” Samar urged. “They won’t be expecting it, and we can hit them hard while they’re marching, then use the griffons to get away.”

  “My braves fight on the ground,” Dallatar declared. “We have befriended griffons through the years but would not ride them into battle. They should be free to make their own choices.”

  “Believe me, these griffons are choosing their allegiance,” Tarqualan said. “They have refused to serve the elves of Qualinesti ever since the Thalas-Enthia ordered Alhana Starbreeze imprisoned.”

  “Be that as it may,” Porthios interjected, “there are a little more than two hundred griffons allied with our band. That’s not enough to move all of us anywhere. If we fight, two-thirds of us will have to go into battle on the ground.”

  “Still, an ambush is the only way—hit them as they march, then fall back into the woods,” Samar urged. “We’ve spied on these brutes. They move like ogres, and they’ll never catch an elf in thick terrain.”

  “I agree,” Dallatar said somberly. “We cannot just move away from them, and my pride will not let them take our woodlands without a fight. We wild elves have already decided—we will attack the invaders. What the rest of you do is a matter for your own councils.”

  “I applaud your courage,” Porthios replied with equal sincerity. “And I urge you to remain with us. Surely you can see that, together, we can strike a much harder blow than any part of us working alone.”

  “Then you, too, are determined to fight?” the Kagonesti chieftain asked.

  Porthios looked at his companions. Samar nodded curtly; he had already made his opinion known. Tarqualan drew a deep breath, then spoke. “Neither I nor my scouts could ever sleep well again, knowing we had turned our backs on such a menace. Even if it leads us to the endless sleep of death, such a battle is preferable to flight.”

  “Then we are unanimous,” the outlaw who had once been Speaker of the Sun declared. “For I, too, cannot bear the thought of this incursion passing without a fight. If we are fortunate, Qualinost will stand against the attack from the east, and we can sting this western army hard enough that they will have to rethink their strategy. At the very least, they will know that they have attacked a proud, brave enemy.”

  “What of the elders and the little ones?” asked Dallatar. “As a rule, they do not fight beside the male and female braves.”

  Porthios thought of Alhana and Silvanoshei. He had a fleeting wish that his baby could have been born into a time of peace. Such eras, he realized grimly, were all too rare. “Nor is that the case with us,” he replied. “I suggest that we choose our battleground as far from this camp as possible. Perhaps by doing so we can keep this gorge safe. If the worst happens, the new mothers, the elders, and the children will learn of our defeat, and then they will have to make a quick departure.”

  “Madness! What are these crazy ideas you discuss?”

  The shrill voice came from out of the darkness, and then the Qualinesti General Palthainon, his head bandaged where the lightning bolt had seared his scalp, shambled into view. He was waving his arms, looking wide-eyed from one elf to another.

  “They have dra
gons—surely you saw that! They cut my companies to pieces, wiped us out almost to the last elf! The only solution is to take to the woods and try to make our way back to the city. Once there, we can sue for peace!”

  Dallatar looked at the Qualinesti general with ill-concealed scorn. Porthios kept his expression neutral but rose to his feet and gestured that the commander of the troops from the city join them at the low fire.

  “I am glad to see that you are recovering from your wounds,” he said graciously. “But you have been unconscious. Perhaps you don’t know that more than half of your troops survived the attack.”

  “Survived? How?” demanded the general.

  “They joined us in the woods,” Samar said curtly. “We know that your mission was to find and attack us. We were prepared to ambush you as you crossed the stream. You might say that the dragon attack actually saved the lives of a good number of your warriors.”

  “Madness!” cried Palthainon again. “I—I order you, as the duly appointed commander of Qualinesti forces, to cease this insanity!”

  All intentions of civility vanished in the rush of anger that swept through Porthios. He whirled on the general, his hand going to the hilt of his sword, knuckles whitening as his grip tightened. Frightened by the gesture and by the expression on the dark elf’s face, Palthainon stepped hastily backward.

  “I remind you, General—” Porthios’s voice was heavy with scorn—“that you were appointed to the command of a force with the task of seeking and attacking my band. Also, that you failed dismally in that task. You led your companies into the perfect site for an ambush. If the blue dragons hadn’t come along, you would have been cut to pieces! Now you speak of tactics that any loyal elf can only describe as treasonous!”

  “You are the traitor!” hissed the Qualinesti commander, apparently deciding that his life wasn’t in immediate danger. “You hide here in the forest, taking the rightfully earned goods of loyal elven merchants! How dare you—”

  With lightning quickness, Porthios reached out a hand and slapped the general, spinning him around, sending him tumbling to the ground.

  “You will not address me with contempt,” he growled, standing over the cringing elf. “Nor will you ask how I dare to do anything. You have drawn your own sentence. I would have willingly treated you as an ally against the greater menace of the Dark Knights, but now I can only see you as a craven coward. You will be treated as a prisoner, and even that is a role of higher honor than I think you deserve.”

  Palthainon looked as though he wanted to speak, but he gulped and reconsidered his words.

  “Guards!” shouted Porthios. Several of his warriors came running. “Bind this elf securely, hands and feet, then tie him to a tree. I want him watched at all times!”

  The elves quickly did as they were told. In the meantime, the outlaw leader looked around the encampment, seeing that all of the elves had observed the confrontation between the two leaders. Porthios also considered the problem of the general he had just ordered bound to a tree. There were not enough elves in his band to spare any for guard duty, and as long as he was here, Palthainon was an obvious irritant and distraction.

  He decided that this was the time to address the issue of the band’s past and future loyalties.

  “Elves of Qualinesti,” he declared, speaking loudly. His words were directed at the warriors who had marched with Palthainon, though all the elves in the camp listened attentively. “I offer you a choice—a choice that you must make now, tonight.

  “My loyal scouts and the braves of the Kagonesti will strive to resist this new invasion of our homeland. Our opponents are many, and include blue dragons among their number. But we are elven warriors, and we are fighting for our own forests, so I promise you that we will give these invaders something to think about. We will let them know that Qualinesti is not a nation to be violated with casual arrogance.

  “There is at least one among us who feels that this is a doomed course, that we should crawl back to the city, and there try to make peace with these invaders. He has not said what he is prepared to pay for this peace … his treasures? His woman? Who knows—and who cares? I only know that such a choice is repugnant to me.

  “But know this, also: I intend to release General Palthainon, to allow him to make his way back to the city and to sacrifice whatever he feels is necessary to save his life. He will be taken into the woods before dawn and pointed in the direction of Qualinost.”

  Here Porthios drew a deep breath. He was about to make a tremendous gamble, and he could only hope that he had judged these elves properly.

  “I offer this opportunity to any of you who would accompany the general back to the city … back to his negotiated peace, or whatever that course holds. For the rest, I ask you to sharpen your swords and make ready your souls. In the morning, we march to war.”

  After a few minutes of deliberation, only about two dozen of Palthainon’s original company elected to desert the band in the gorge. The outlaw leader had these elves escorted southeastward from the camp. They were divested of their swords—“You won’t be doing any fighting,” he pointed out with inescapable logic—but allowed to keep their bows and a few arrows for hunting.

  As he was led from the encampment, the general tried to bluster some threats about returning with a new army, but the outlaws took the sting from his words by laughing in his face. While a strong escort of Kagonesti insured that these refugee elves kept going, Porthios met with his other chieftains and discussed a plan for the attack on the Dark Knights.

  “We have seen the strength of the enemy, and we know something about the heart of our own troops,” he began as Dallatar, Tarqualan, and Samar all listened intently. “It has been suggested that we strike the Dark Knights while they are on the march, then melt back into the woods. This is a tactic that has some chance of success, but I would like to propose something else.”

  “Speak,” Samar said earnestly. “We have all seen the wisdom of your battle plans.”

  “Very well. Instead of an ambush while the enemy is on the move, I suggest we strike their camp during the quiet, dark hours before dawn. They will be weary and unsuspecting, while many of them will be sound asleep. We, on the other hand, will be able to make our escape under cover of darkness.”

  And so it was decided. The battle was planned for the middle of the following night.

  The Dark Knights marched with military precision, and the elves who spied on them from the woods soon saw the wisdom of Porthios’s suggestion. Outriders on horseback preceded the column, and skirmish companies of the blue-skinned brutes were scattered far and wide. As a result, any ambushing party of elves would have been discovered long before the main body of the enemy force was in range.

  Furthermore, the blue dragons ranged before and to the flanks of the marching column, always within hailing distance. Any attacking force would have been hammered hard by the lightning breath and crushing weight of the massive, deadly wyrms.

  Not that the army’s evening camp would make an easy target, of course.

  The Kagonesti, who were the most adept among the elves at moving silently and unseen through the woods, kept close to the force and periodically brought reports back to Porthios. The outlaw captain was waiting with the main body of his force ten miles north of the encampment in the gorge and very near to the line of the enemy’s march. Together with two hundred griffons, he had fewer than six hundred elves to attack a formation that numbered at least ten times the number of his own warriors.

  “They have stopped marching for the day,” Dallatar reported as the sun neared the western horizon. “They will make their camp on the slopes and summit of a large, steep hill.”

  Further reports indicated that the Dark Knights would apparently keep one dragon in the air all night, alternating in one-hour shifts so that the flying serpent wouldn’t get overly tired. Though the invaders didn’t build a palisade around their camp, the steepness of the hill gave them a measure of defensibility. Some th
ickets of brush and stumpy pine trees extended up the slopes, but the crest of the hill was bald, providing the knights with good visibility and easy movement from one side of the elevation to another.

  As soon as they learned that the enemy had stopped marching, the elves moved out. Like a file of ghosts in the forests, they moved silently toward the hill. The Kagonesti led the way, with the volunteers from the Qualinost recruits in the middle and the scouts of Porthios’s original force bringing up the rear. The griffons came with them, padding along on the ground in order to prevent any chance of being discovered in flight.

  Full darkness had settled around them by the time they drew near to the hill.

  “Do they have pickets in the forest?” Porthios asked Dallatar, gesturing to the fringe of thick woods around the base of the hill.

  “Not enough,” replied the Kagonesti. “Those who are there we will kill in silence.”

  “Very well.” The dark elf looked upward, seeing the shadowy form of the circling dragon pass across a pale wisp of cloud. “We’ll take to the sky and try to get that fellow at the same time.”

  The rest of the battle plan was formed on the spot, taking into account the terrain, the relative abilities of the Kagonesti and the ill-trained recruits from Qualinost. Fortunately each of these elves had a flint and a steel, and these were ingredients of a key aspect of the impending assault. The wild elves left immediately, relying on their natural stealth as they embarked on the difficult task of removing the Dark Knight pickets.

  It was nearing midnight as the rest of the elves dispersed, two bands slipping through the woods to different places at the base of the hill, while Porthios and two hundred of his original Qualinesti waited with the griffons to make up the final part of the attack.

  The minutes seemed to drag by like hours, but he knew that they had to wait. Timing was a crucial element of the attack, and each formation would have to make its presence known at the appropriate time. Finally he judged that the moment was right, and with a gesture of his hand, the prince sent two hundred elves into their saddles. White wings fluttered through the clearing, and he had a brief impression of a reverse snowstorm as the fierce griffons swarmed around and slowly lifted themselves and their riders into the sky.