The Spellmonger Series: Book 02 - Warmage

by Terry Mancour

  Wait until you get home to plot sedition with your father, okay? I’m trying to save the world here.

  That sounded like whining.

  I just survived a siege, argued with a Duke, and am volunteering to ride off to a war I can’t hope to win. Now you’re telling me I have to schmooze the entire court in anticipation of being banned by the Censor General. I reserve the right to whine a little. Especially to you. If it hadn’t been for you, I’d be curled up next to Alya back at my parent’s house, instead of sleeping alone in a draughty castle, I accused.

  Understood, she thought, smugly. You may whine at me at will. By telepathy. Don’t do it with your voice, you’ll just annoy the nobility.

  I don’t mind annoying the nobility, I thought diffidently.

  It won’t do our position any favors if you do, she reminded. You get the Bans lifted, and it won’t matter where you were born, you’ll be a hero to all magi!

  Fine, fine, I’ll be a hero. I’m a very tired hero, though – they kept me waiting for hours, then kept me talking for hours.

  Then get some sleep, hero. Tomorrow is another battle.

  Thanks ever-so-much for the encouragement, I thought, sourly. Good night, Penny.

  Good night, Min!

  The castellan, Harren, came back soon after that and tapped on my door. Not only had he found an excellent bottle of red wine, he had also scrounged half a loaf of brown bread, an apple, and a hunk of cheese, along with a smear of honey butter. I thanked him profusely, but he was still so grateful for his improved vision he wouldn’t hear of it.

  Then I drank the wine, ate the food, and passed out cold on my luxurious bed, still in my borrowed finery.

  Chapter Seven:

  The Gathering Of The Order

  Green Hill Castle, Late Summer

  The day after the Battle of the Lantern, the peasants in the bailey were celebrating our victory, too, cheering us as we came in formation from a hard-fought battle. Celebrating, that is, until they found out that six hundred more people from Honeyhall were arriving to share their rations. That dampened their enthusiasm a bit.

  I spent most of the next day dealing with the aftermath of the battle. No, my work wasn’t done with the cry of victory, and the great heroic epics never talk about the minutia of command after a battle. Scrying for where the survivors were lurking, visiting the wounded, meeting with the Baron about shoring up his defenses . . . meanwhile, I sent out Curmor to scout the western roads and had Isily try her skills at scrying out the northern reaches of the barony, out beyond Honeyhall.

  She turned out to be adept at the practice, once she found a mode of divination she was comfortable with. Baron Magonas graciously allowed her the use of his daughter’s chambers (she was “safe” in Vorone, with the Duke and his army, a hostage to his willingness to stand and fight) and after only an hour she brought back word to the chamber I was planning in.

  “There is a band of five to six hundred, broken up into little clusters, all the way around here,” she said, pushing pebbles into position around the far northeastern corner of the map. “The village – former village – of Nandine. They aren’t moving, they’re just . . . waiting.”

  “That is ominous,” I agreed. “I would figure that they would move east, into the hills.”

  “Only if they want to get shot at,” snorted Baron “Iron” Magonas. He was a big, thick slab of rustic nobility, with long, stringy blonde hair he oiled and combed into his equally stringy beard down from his broad face in ringlets. The style did him no favors, but the baron’s chain around his neck almost made him stately. “That’s the Pearwoods. The hillmen there don’t acknowledge any lord as master. The don’t have nobles as much as headmen of their clans. There are four clans on this side of the border, and none of them love the Duke.”

  “As long as their hatred of the goblins is greater,” I suggested, “they won’t be lax in their own defense.”

  “You can count on that,” chuckled the Baron. “Last year they caught a tax collector from Vorone away from his escort and hung him. No one was ever caught, of course, but the Pearwoods clansmen are dangerous.”

  “So perhaps the goblins fear the hillmen?” asked Isily, doubtfully.

  “A band five-hundred strong? I don’t think so,” I said, shaking my head. “Nor have they moved south, against these villages, which are largely unprotected. Empty, but unprotected,” I said, tapping the map with my wand.

  “They probably just don’t want to be caught in the open if there’s cavalry about,” observed Kaddel, who was still riding high after his charge at the Battle of the Lantern. He was just being boastful, but there might be some truth to what he said.

  “They’d have to come down the Timberwatch Escarpment,” explained Baron Magonas, tapping the map with a fat finger. “There’s a drop in the land betwixt the Timberwatch and Nandine. Twenty feet in some places, up to fifty in others. It follows east to west from the Pearwoods to past the river. South is fairly level country, pastures and clearings and meadows with a few patches of unharvested timber. And the knights of Timberwatch are fierce – they have to be, being neighbors of the clansmen. A band of five hundred caught below that line, they’d make fair game for the Timberwatch knights. Three hundred horsemen in open country would dash them about like a maiden’s dainties on her wedding night.”

  That was one clear advantage we held over them – we had cavalry, and damn good cavalry, and they didn’t. At all. Goblins only understand infantry, which was strange, considering every war we keep mopping them up with cavalry. I guess when you’re too small to reach the stirrups, cavalry is a luxury you couldn’t afford.

  “Regardless, we have an unfought foe on our northern line,” I sighed. “And one too far away to reach easily. The good news is they don’t look like they’re going anywhere. The bad news is that they’ll probably soak up the survivors of the Lantern. Any shamans?” I asked Isily. She looked concerned, which was terribly attractive on her.

  “One, perhaps,” she said, hesitantly. “he was obscuring the scrying.”

  “They can do that?” the Baron asked in surprise.

  “It’s not that hard,” Mavone dismissed. The dark-haired Gilmoran warmage was adept at the gesture. “A simple scry, in any case. Sometimes you just have to change what you’re looking for to see something they didn’t think to hide. For example, gurvani fight with a lot of iron weapons. If they’re hiding out someplace, even if their shamans hide their soul-lights, it’s unlikely that they’ll think to hide their ironmongery,” he explained, just this side of patronizing. “Go filter your sight and seek for iron where there should be none, and you’ll find any hidden scrugs.”

  “I’ll go see to that,” she nodded, trying not to blush. Mavone is a handsome man, and his confident attitude and charming manner was devastating. Isily shot me a brief look and returned to her makeshift study.

  “So we have over six thousand men, here – why aren’t we going after them?” grunted Magonas. Since Nandine is deserted and not on his own lands, he didn’t seem too concerned by the prospect of fighting them.

  “Because I don’t think that would be wise,” I murmured. “If we go toward Nandine with enough men to defeat them – say half of what we have here – then it will take two, three days to reach the escarpment, and we’d be exposed to raids along our flanks the entire time. They’d see us coming from their vantage point. I’ve got people scouting up there now, but the Nandine legion isn’t the immediate threat.”

  “So we sit here and wait?” Magonas asked, impatiently. “Eating my stores and fodder? Not that I mind helping out in this damned invasion . . .”

  “No, Your Excellency,” I sighed. “We cannot afford to do that, either. Mavone, how fast do you think you could be in Vorone?”

  “Captain? Maybe two days. Hell, maybe one day. It’s not that far.”

  “I want you to go and bear a message to Duke Lenguin.”

  Mavone looked at me curiously. “I thought we wanted to avoid
any entanglements with the Duke?”

  “To keep our little expeditionary force from getting impressed into that rabble he’s trying to make into an army, yes. To advise him on grand strategy, well, that’s why I have brave men like you. Charming. Insistent. Charismatic . . .”

  “. . . fast on my feet, well-versed in court etiquette, and a good liar,” Mavone finished, lightly. “You expect to dictate strategy to His Grace? I’m thinking that’s not the best thing for a foreign military commander on his soil to do in the middle of a war,” he observed, amused. “He might just take it amiss.”

  “Oh, yes,” I nodded. “As a matter of fact, I’m kind of counting on it. I’ll have a formal message for you in an hour. But mostly I just want to be able to communicate with Lenguin via magic, without a chance of miscommunication. And thanks to Penny’s thaumaturgy, that’s just what you can provide. I want you and Isily to go infiltrate the court, deliver a message, and report back to me whether or not Lenguin’s got any kind of real force there. We’ll speak mind-to-mind, but . . . don’t let Isily in on that little secret, all right?”

  “You don’t trust the Wenshari wench?” he asked, surprised.

  “She’s comely enough, and as polite as a duchess, but you should never trust a Shadowmage overmuch. Their craft is deception in all of its forms. Their loyalty is always suspect due to the nature of their work. And I think she’s working for someone already.”

  He looked thoughtful. “You can count on me to keep watch on her. Very close watch,” he said, a hint of leer coming through his civilized tones.

  We stayed three days at Green Hill Castle after the Battle of the Lantern. The men needed the time to recover, glean shafts, fletch arrows, repair armor, buy new horses, and prepare for the next battle. I was doing my own preparation – I was gathering my warmagi.

  The third Gilmoran warmage, Astyral, arrived two days after the battle, leading an ad hoc company of mercenary horse he had picked up while scouting the area around Farenrose. After the fall of the castle (by treachery, it was whispered) there were plenty of stragglers who’d regrouped in a yeoman’s tower and were eager to fight. By the time he crossed the Piede River, he had over two hundred men with him. More importantly, we had Astyral, who was an excellent warmage – probably the best of the three Gilmorans at battle-magic. At least, he looked most like an infantry grunt of the three.

  And he wasn’t the only one to arrive. On the third day, Terleman and Azar and Wenek all arrived together. At my direction they had been scouting the town of Tudry to the west, where ten thousand gurvani had massed, and even beyond into the former barony of Glandon.

  Their report was dire. Castle Glandon and its picturesque villages was now home to fifty thousand goblins who seemed to be digging in and making themselves at home. They were problematic, but not the big problem. Glandon was hundreds of miles away to the northwest, above the escarpment, and the gurvani there weren’t threatening anyone anymore, because they had enslaved or sacrificed the few humans who hadn’t run. Glandon was unassailable, and would be for some time to come.

  The eight to ten thousand goblins who lingered outside of Tudry were the big problem. As of yet they hadn’t begun an active siege – that was the good news – but they had all but cut off the city by blockading it and patrolling the countryside. The thirty thousand men of Tudry weren’t going anywhere any time soon.

  My warmagi weren’t happy to report what they’d seen, but all three of them were happy to see me and looked like they had been in the field a little too long. After they reported I had them rest, eat and relax until we were ready to depart. Working magic with a witchstone is exhausting, and if you don’t maintain your body it will drain you to the point of uselessness.

  Finally, on the third evening, Hesia and Horka arrived from Vorone. They had been ‘spying’ on Duke Lenguin’s growing army there, and I guess I could have used them to interact with Lenguin, but the fact was I wanted them both with me. They had been pretending to be beggars, Hesia disguised as an old crone (with her face, not a stretch) and gigantic Horka her idiot son – he acted addled to avoid impressment into the army. Hardly the folk to approach the Duke’s palace with a serious message. It would be hard enough to get in to see Lenguin without having to convince some guard that you really were an emissary from a friendly power, not an unwashed mendicant.

  Nor were they the best warmagi for the job. I wasn’t completely joking about Mavone’s charisma – he knows how to behave among the aristocracy, and he’s incredibly persuasive. Hesia’s personality is bland on her good days, and she’s socially inept. Horka is far too willing to indulge in sudden displays of violent anger. If I had to strong-arm the Duke into doing what I wanted, Mavone had the best chance of doing it without offending him . . . or boring him . . . or killing him.

  But Horka and Hesia’s report wasn’t much more encouraging than Azar and Wenek’s had been . While Vorone itself wasn’t being attacked yet, there were skirmishes all over the outlands of the town as small bands probed its defenses. The Duke refused to send a force to relieve Tudry, in fear of leaving Vorone defenseless. In essence, he had committed to abandoning Tudry so that he had more time to prepare to defend his northern capital.

  That irritated me for a couple of reasons. I’d been in Tudry recently, to hire mercenaries for Boval Vale before I’d realized what a monumentally stupid idea it was to stay there. It wasn’t a great town -- it was worn and shabby and rough around the edges – but I kind of liked the place. Lenguin had recalled his bannermen from the town, leaving only the city militia and a handful of mercenaries to protect it. And there were almost ten thousand gurvani rummaging around outside. Once the gurvani sappers dropped a wall, it would be a chaotic bloodbath that we, unfortunately, would probably loose.

  The other reason was that Tudry was far more defensible than Vorone. Tudry had originally been a walled fortress, built to withstand a siege back when the Barons of Green Hill and Fesdarlen had allied to unsuccessfully conquer the place a hundred years ago, when it was the seat of the Baron of Megelin.

  Vorone, on the other hand, had been a simple river fishing village before some Alshari Duke took a fancy with it and transformed it into his northern capital, to compete in grandeur with Wilderhall in Castal, just over the border, and fair Wenshar beyond.

  Vorone had defenses, but it wasn’t built with defense in mind. It was an administrative seat and pleasure palace, not a fortress. Tudry, on the other hand, could hold out for months in a siege, if it was properly manned and supported.

  Well, no one ever claimed the Dukes of Alshar were wise. Brave, yes. Wise, no. That’s why they were the butt of every rough joke in the Five Duchies. If there was a need for a stupid noble or an ignorant hayseed of a peasant for a comedic play in the east, you can bet that the actors use Alshari accents. While it’s an unfortunate cultural stereotype, Duke Lenguin wasn’t doing anything to disprove it. Sacrificing Tudry in favor of Vorone just didn’t make strategic sense.

  Luckily, I was representing Castal, as well as Alshar, and I had complete control over my little expeditionary force without Duke Lenguin’s oversight. And with more warmagi, and especially the seasoned Gilmorans, I had that much more flexibility in how I employed them. So I called a quick council of war the third night after the Battle of the Lantern at my tent in the courtyard of Green Hill Castle to figure out where to go next.

  I’d borrowed the Baron’s big map for the occasion, and then spent two hours with my warmagi scouts to fill in the positions of the troops on both sides before I invited everyone in to see what we were facing.

  “We’re here, in Green Hill,” I started out, pointing to the castle on the map with the tip of my wand – my all-purpose wand, not one of my warwands. No need to accidentally blast a hole in the table. “We have about four thousand troops we can use from here, not counting the garrison. Vorone is to the south, and Duke Lenguin is drafting every dotard who can still hold a spear for his grand army, so we’ll avoid any inter-Duchy unplea
santness by avoiding Vorone. That won’t make Lenguin happy, but it’s not in danger right now, anyway.

  “Now the ten thousand goblins threatening Tudry, puts it in a lot more danger. So far the gurvani haven’t attacked outright, probably because they lack the proper siege equipment, but they’re keeping anyone from getting into or out of Tudry without a fight. That’s a problem.

  “There are another few thousand ranging along the west side of the Moran River, but they haven’t crossed it in force this far south, not since the Lantern Ford. There’s this smaller band that has been seen around Nandine, but they’ll be too far away to arrive in time to help even if they did get word. And you can expect foragers and skirmishers to be under every bush from here on. There are larger bands to the south and of course to the west, but these are the forces that are within striking distance of ours. That’s the bad news.”

  I walked around the map until I was standing on the north side. This was the worrisome part.

  “But here’s the very bad news: there is a massive force, at least sixty thousand,” I said, and watched their expressions pale, “that seems to be moving east beyond the Northwardens, and growing larger as it absorbs other tribes and legions. And from our scouting reports, they aren’t just infantry, either: great wagons pulled by oxen, hundreds of pack animals, and plenty of shamans. Everything you’d need for a major assault, from a goblin point of view. But this very large horde has evaded most of the Northwardens and skirted the edge of the Crinroc territory, even while smaller bands attack the Northwatchmen. They’re heading east without stopping to take the castles along the way, when they could easily aid their comrades and overwhelm each one. And that mystifies me.

  “It could be that the Dead God wants to attack the hill clans and try to penetrate into the Duchies that way, away from the big castles, but I just can’t see that. Even they would get bogged down in those glens. More likely, he’ll bring that force into the Great Valley and try to attack Vore from the east – which is preposterous, but that’s all I can imagine. They’d have to go through the Valley People, the petty kingdoms, and a dozen robbers’ nests and savage tribes, and Vore is hardly a prize worth the trouble.