I made my way into the keep, where Astyral was busy getting the men ready to go. For his part, that mostly meant informing their captains that action was expected soon, and they would be moving out. After that, he could let them contend with the awesome task of putting an army on the move, and he could help me figure out just where to move them.
We began our strategies around a sprawling and not poor a map of the region in Astyral’s study. Azar was on his way back from his latest rescue mission, and the other warmagi who’d accompanied me to the Umbra arrived. Wenek was there, too, and Carmella, who was recently arrived from the region we were considering – and who didn’t look happy about it. I let her brief us on what she’d observed. She didn’t hesitate to step in front of the map on the wall and nervously address us.
“Let’s start off with where the horde is now – or was, a few days ago. I rode north with a few friends and got as far as Nandine before I hit serious resistance. Thing is, it gets real serious past Nandine. The village itself is a ghost town, burnt and pillaged, and the local manor is a hollow shell. But beyond the castle, there’s easily six thousand goblins bivouacking in the hilly country just north of Nandine.”
“Only six thousand?” asked Delman, his brow furrowed. “I thought we were facing ten times that number?”
“The forces at Nandine are only the vanguard,” continued Carmella, unhappily. “We skirted their sentries to the west, along this ridge, until we were able to get past them. We rode north, scrying the whole way, and only saw small bands of them . . . until we came to a valley, here,” she said, using the point of her dagger to indicate a spot at the very edge of the map.
“That valley is filled with goblins. Their camp is vast. It was difficult to judge, given how difficult to stay under cover, but . . . I’d say there were no less than eighty thousand goblins, Captain. In that valley, alone. There were probably another six or seven thousand broken up into smaller camps around the perimeter. I’m no expert at gurvani heraldry, but the smaller camps seemed to be made up of more tribal warriors, a lot less disciplined than the main force. The main force . . . it was . . . there were some strange things going on there, Captain,” she said, worriedly.
“Like what kind of strange?”
“How about giant goblins?” she offered. “Some as tall as six feet. And some broad, almost fat. With big shields and axes. And some . . . some other beasts, too – or maybe monsters – but they weren’t goblins. Trolls maybe? Giants? Some other horror? We couldn’t get close enough to tell, because there were – and I am not exaggerating, here – there were over thirty gods-damned shamans there, Min, over thirty!”
“Duin’s beard!” whispered Cormaran, fingering his own chin. “Ninety-thousand goblins, giants, monsters, and at least thirty shamans?”
“Those were just the ones in the main group, and a lot of them were those white-furred ones. The really tough ones, the urgulnosti. But there were others, too, the lesser sort. Possibly as many as a hundred, all together.”
“Any more gleeful tidings?” Astyral asked, joylessly.
“Yeah, actually,” Carmella said, brushing her dark hair out of her dark eyes. “They’ve got humans working with them. Some sort of slave soldiers, maybe, or – I can’t believe there is such a thing – collaborators. But we saw men in armor working with the gurvani, maybe a couple of hundred, all together. We thought they were captives, at first, but they had chances to escape they didn’t take. What kind of a shit of a human being sells out to the Dead God?”
“Garkesku, for one,” snorted Delman. He filled Carmella in on the horror of the Terrorhall and its mad master. She looked horrified.
“So how fast and how far do you think they can move?” I asked. She shrugged.
“I’m not really good at that sort of thing, but my friends—”
“Friends?” I asked, curious. Carmella didn’t seem the sort to have many friends.
“Four Swordsisters of Feshara,” she explained. “They hire out to me, sometimes.”
I was impressed – the cult of Feshara was an old militant all-female monastic order from Merwin, dedicated to the goddess Feshara. Or demi-goddess, depending on which version of the myth you prefer. But Feshara was the originally a goddess of the Fondolan peoples, who had been fishing and farming southern Merwin since before Perwin sank. There was an entire myth cycle devoted to her skill with a blade and how she bested her brothers and how she dueled the old Imperial gods. The Feshari Sisterhood, like the Gobargan Order, were frequently hired as mercenaries, from special forces units to mere armed guards. Some of them were quite good, and they were all passionate about their goddess.
It also explained how Carmella had friends. She paid them.
“Any way, my friends thought that the whole army could probably move as much as twelve miles a night, if they stayed organized. And they were on the move, south,” she admitted. “They will probably reach the vanguard at Nandine in . . . two weeks?”
“That’s something, at least. So where do we meet them?” asked Taren. “And how?”
Well, that was the question, wasn’t it? “If they come south – as they come south,” corrected Astyral, “they will have to take this route,” he said, tracing the way from Nandine south. “They won’t go too far west of Nandine, or else they’ll come within range of the Green Hill castles, hard country for infantry to cross. Not that they couldn’t invest one, particularly Northhill, but they’d have to ford the river to do so – and it’s just not worth the trouble. It’s deep, they hate water, and it’s a crappy castle. More likely, they’ll stay more easterly, and come down through this region.”
“Why not the Pearwoods?” asked Delman. “They aren’t afraid of hills. And they wouldn’t have to cross a river. They are called the Mountain Folk, in some places.”
“The Pearwoods are filled with crags, blind valleys, sharp ridges, and twisting passes,” explained Wenek. “The forests are scraggy and overgrown, filled with thickets of underbrush, particularly brambles. The gurvani are nimble in such terrain, it’s true, but only individually, or in small groups.”
“Armies are like rivers,” agreed Astyral. “They will tend to go through the lowest, easiest passage, not the hardest. Even without horses, they’d never make it through the Pearwoods in force.”
“Not bloody likely,” agreed Wenek with a snort. “They might survive, but they wouldn’t be in any shape to fight. Nay, they’ll come to the west of the Pearwoods, to the east of the river. Through . . . this land.”
“That’s the fief of Timberwatch,” nodded Astyral. “Lord Sigarlan, I believe.”
“Aye,” agreed the guard captain. “He’s a doughty one, Sigarlan. His ancestors were given the fief to stand between the Pearwoods raiders and the timber men. His standard is an axe cleaving through a hill, and to look at him you’d think he could do it himself. He has fifty or sixty men-at-arms, personally, and about a dozen full knights. His castle is no country manor, it’s a stone keep with three timber palisades and some ingenious ditchwork, on the summit of the last hill of the Pearwoods. It bears a watch tower nine stories high, and his men are vigilant for the threat of forest fire from its summit. But it is small. Too small for the goblins to invest, too small for us to use as more than a place of retreat at need.”
“But they can skirt west of the Timberwatch easily enough, and then either move toward Vorone, through Grimly Wood, or turn east and attack the borderlands baronies,” agreed Rustallo, pointing out the obvious. He was a good warrior, but the boy had only the vaguest ideas about tactics.
“So it will have to be in the Timberwatch,” I nodded. “Tell me about the country?” I asked Volerin, our resident expert on the region.
“It’s rolling hills, in the east, and parts are still heavily forested. The land is not as good as even the Pearwoods and the people are every bit as prosperous. Poor. Those folk barely scrape a living out of the soil, when the market for timber in the south is bad. Its real corn-and-beans country, with a little
oats and millet, not much else will grow.”
“I was thinking more about the lay of the land,” I said, patiently.
“My mistake, Captain,” Volerin said, a little embarrassed. “The key feature is the frontier with Nandine. In the north of the fief is an escarpment which faces south, a fall of maybe twenty to fifty feet. And it runs from the river to the hills. It’s not particularly scalable, outside of the passes. If they come from Nandine there are only a few easy tracks that they could take down from the plateau, three natural causeways that gently slope down from the top of the escarpment to the base, here, here and here. And which ever way they take, or all of them, they’ll have to regroup here,” he said, tapping the map to the north of the Timberwatch. “It’s a pastureland between the villages of Hoyf and Bucaral.”
“The peasants are long gone from those villages,” observed Carmella. “Not a sign of them when we came near. And Timberwatch was the last inhabited fortress we saw to the north. That area, it could get muddy if it rains, and it’s rocky. But it’s not too broken for cavalry, not at all,” she added, encouragingly.
“If I was to choose a battlefield to our best advantage, that would be it,” agreed Cormaran. “Timing will be important, of course . . . but if we catch them just as they are finished descending that escarpment that could prove decisive.”
“There are also plenty of things we can do to the area, once we’re sure that’s where the battle will be,” agreed Reylan. He had a knack for booby traps and static battlefield spells. “With a week’s notice, we can make the whole place into one big trap.
“Can we be certain that they will come down by that route?” asked Astyral. “What if they decide to turn west and try to come down through Green Hill? It might be difficult, but if it means they could avoid our defenses . . .”
“We could always do a decoy spell around there to warn them off,” suggested Rustallo, which wasn’t a bad idea. Of course, not everyone was familiar with the term.
“A what spell?” asked the guard captain, confused.
“A decoys spell. Just like we use cloaking spells to hide our troop movements from enemy scrying, you can also use magic to suggest that there are troops – or more troops – someplace where they aren’t.”
“Sneaky,” said the captain approvingly.
“Yes, we can use the garrisons at the Green Hill castles and cast Trager’s Augmentation on each one. It’s a simple spell and will last for a few days – few weeks, maybe, with irionite. It will make every man there appear to be five, when scried. And if we do it carefully enough, we can make it look like we’re trying to hide them, which will make them believe that we’re preparing an ambush.”
“Excellent suggestion,” I agreed. That would keep them away from those keeps – or conversely, it would pull enough of a screening force away from their main band to weaken the goblin horde that much more. “Anything else?”
“That field would be a perfect field for artillery,” suggested Terleman. “If they are going to me massed together there, what better place to fling some big heavy rocks?”
“Magically or mechanically?” asked Rustallo, eagerly.
“We can do both,” Terleman said, nodding and studying the map. “We’ll have to scout out the territory, but we should be able to build or haul a couple of mangonels or trebuchets, easily. Well, not easily, but we could do it,” he amended. “If there’s sufficient lumber.”
“It’s called the Timberwatch. They are wealthy in lumber. So assuming we have everyone we can realistically get on our side,” Carmella asked, uneasily, “just how many boots are going to be facing that thing? Because there had better be a lot. That’s an awful lot of gurvani.”
“Five to seven thousand from here,” I ticked off, “most of whom came with us, or are local. I’ve got Mavone and Isily working Duke Lenguin to get him to commit his forces, which would be another twenty thousand, maybe more – I heard a rumor that he’s hired three companies of mercenaries to strengthen his troops, but it will be another month before they arrive from the south.”
“Twenty seven thousand? Against ninety thousand?” Carmella asked, dazedly. “Still not enough.”
“I know,” I sighed, worriedly, as I studied the map. “Hey, Wenek, you said you were from the Pearwoods?”
“As a child,” he agreed. “And a thrall.” Ouch.
“You said they were tough fighters with the hills at their back. Well, Timberwatch is about as close as you could ask for. If the whole land was raised, how many men could they put in the field?”
He looked surprised by the question, but he took a moment to consider. “Maybe five to seven thousand. At least half of them would be archers, but they’re really good archers. Not much cavalry at all, but a decent grade of light infantry. Hell, some of the clans even fight naked.”
“Do you think they could be raised?”
He looked at me discouragingly. “I don’t know, Min. They mostly fight each other, and there are a dozen bloodfeuds going on at any one time. None of the Pearwoods lords is respected widely enough to command them all, not even that so-called baron.”
“What about someone from outside the Pearwoods?”
“Like Duke Lenguin? Maybe. They wouldn’t be happy about it, and two of the clans have been officially outlawed by him, but they might. Or at least half of them might.”
“What about you?” I asked.
“Me?” he said, eyes wide with shock. “Captain, I was a slave when I lived there. A bastard slave, the lowest of the low, in a land that’s already considered the lowest of the low. The Pearwoods may have been where I was born and spent my boyhood, but this is the closest I’ve been to it since I left home!”
“You’re a mage – not just that, but a warmage, and not just any warmage. You have irionite.”
“That’s not going to impress them in the slightest,” he said, shaking his head.
“Not just by waving it around. But you can show them how powerful you are, promise them stuff, and do everything you possibly can to mobilize them and bring them into the fight, couldn’t you?”
“Theoretically,” he said, doubtfully.
“Take twenty men from that region with you, and see what you can do. If we could arrange an attack from the Pearwoods on their flank that could be telling.”
“Twenty men?” he asked, even more doubtfully. “Even with magic, why would they—?”
“Because we’re going to bribe the hell out of them to fight. And tell them lies. And promise them all the booze they can drink. They can each bed down with the goddess of their choice, I don’t care – just get them ready to fight,” I said, resolutely.
Wenek didn’t look convinced. “I’ll try,” he shrugged.
“Reylan, Delman, and . . . Master Cormaran, I want you three to take fifty men and ride to that field. See what we have to deal with, what spells might be most useful, that sort of thing. You’ll be our advanced party. Inform the local lord what’s about to happen to him, and try to prepare him as best you can . . . but if all goes to plan, he’s going to have guests for the next few weeks.”
“I take it you want full intelligence on the area?” Delman asked, his mustache twitching.
“That would be lovely. And try to keep his scouts from reporting back anything useful. I don’t want to spook them, else they will try to go through Green Hill, as hard as that might be, and most of our cavalry would be pointless up there, and completely useless in a siege.”
All three of them nodded, and I was pretty certain they’d do it, too. Delman and Reylan were old trusted comrades, and I’d chosen Master Cormaran because he had more experience in magical warfare than anyone in the room. I could have selected Carmella, of course, since she just came from there, but I wanted to give her a chance to rest before I sent her off again. And when I did, it wouldn’t be on a scouting mission.
I drummed my fingers and stared at the map a good long while before I looked back up. “All right, let’s have the cavalry ready to go i
n a week, and we’ll send the first elements of the infantry out as soon as they’re ready.”
“ ‘First elements?’,” asked Astyral, confused.
“Yeah, in order to disguise just how big a force is being employed. We can send the infantry out in units of one or two hundred, and they can take this route – from Tudry, almost directly east to skirt the temple here, back across the ford where the Battle of the Lantern was fought, and thence to Green Hill castle. Or in a cantonment around it.
“Each unit can rest and re-provision at Green Hill or at Northhill for a day, then move out to rendezvous here, in Timberwatch. That way we won’t have a huge ungainly column to protect, and the companies can assist each other along the way if they get into trouble. Plus we can bring up our cavalry over the roads, where they’ll be able to move faster, from here to Fesdarlen, thence to Paleslan, here, and then overland between the Great Western Road to the North Road, because we don’t want to get conscripted by His Grace’s pickets at Vorone.”
“About him,” Astyral said, his eyes narrowing. “Why the hell isn’t his armored ass out here, chasing little black furry guys?”
“I’m working on that,” I promised. “As a matter of fact, after I send a dispatch to Duke Rard, I’m going to turn my full intention on Lenguin. We need to get his troops marching. Together, we can have an impact.”
“You’re going to go tell the Duke of Alshar what to do?” Rustallo said, finding the idea amusing.
“That’s exactly what I’m going to do,” I said, flatly.
“Min . . . he’s a Duke,” Reylan said, in a hushed tone. “Warmagi don’t tell Dukes what to do! He’ll have you thrown in a dungeon, or executed out of hand!”
“He might find that difficult to do,” I nodded. “Besides, I plan to have a very compelling argument at hand.”
“His Grace is known for his . . . mercurial temper,” warned Astyral.
“Even when he’s summering in Vorone,” added the Volerin, “he’s famous for changing his mind on policy, ministers, everything. His wife isn’t any better. I swear by Huin’s dirty feet that when that Remeran twat was sent to wed him, Remere got the better end of the deal.”
The Spellmonger Series: Book 02 - Warmage Page 48