by RW Krpoun
When the meeting broke up she saw her opening, drew, and released, snatched up the second arrow and fired it while the first was still short of its target. She nocked and aimed for Afra with the signaling arrow, seeing two shamans down with solid torso hits as she released. Everyone was shouting and scattering for cover as she fired; her arrow missed the girl, but it really didn’t matter: instead of a leaf-blade or steel bodkin point for armor-penetrating, the signal arrow’s head was a hollow container pierced here and there with tiny holes that created an amazingly loud shrieking as air was forced through the chamber by the shaft’s flight. Afra threw herself behind a large chest as Starr drew another, ordinary, arrow from her quiver; muttering a Dwarven oath, the Lanthrell put the shaft into one of the jugata assigned to guard the spell-weavers.
Rolling backwards out from under the cart, Starr darted to a stack of water barrels and crouched, unstringing her bow and sheathing it in its case. Settling her buckler on her arm and drawing Snow Leopard, whose clear blue crystal blade was blackened with boot polish to avoid glare, she darted across to a pile of brush the loggers hadn’t gotten around to burning before the Spider had arrived and watched as warriors carried the two wounded shamans to the Healers while others searched for her. Healing would save the Goblin spellcasters’ lives, but the strain of being wounded and then Healed would leave them weak and helpless until long after the battle was decided.
Now all she had to do was to avoid the Goblins until help came.
In the camp the outburst of shouting was clearly heard, followed closely by the abrupt scream of the signal arrow, the latter indicating that Starr had seriously wounded at least one shaman. Three elevated walkways created by Rods of Bridging arced silently over the abatis and stake belt, each so close to the next as to create a nine-foot-wide roadway.
Durek was the first onto the walkway, leading his assault force out of the camp with the standard of the Phantom Badgers at his right. He had his Company, Haakon and his nineteen remaining able-bodied Dwarves, and four squads of loggers under Herbet’s command; two squads of loggers and two recently-recovered Badgers remained in camp to defend the wounded and noncombatants against any ambitious Goblin scouts or stragglers. In all he was leading one hundred seven warriors into battle counting himself, putting the odds squarely on the side of the Purple Spider, but he was hoping that magic, organization, and surprise would be on his side.
The assault force spilled off the walkway and formed up on line, the Badgers in the center, the Dwarves on the left, and the loggers on the right. They had been rehearsing the maneuver for hours, and it came off well; surprise would only be an advantage if they moved fast enough to exploit it. The last logger in place, Durek signaled the horn-bearer to blow two blasts and the entire assault force moved out, each man aligning himself with the one on his left, which meant that the Dwarves set the pace; they trotted, and the Men walked.
Theirs was not the pure surprise of the ballads, but that is almost unheard of in warfare; rather, it was the real form of surprise, tactical surprise. The Goblin sentries had raised the alarm as soon as the first Rod had been used and there was a call to arms as Durek crested the highest point of the arch, but the vast majority of the Goblins had been napping peacefully in the shade of woven mats of branches; they had to awaken, don their armor and arm themselves, and then form up as their Hets raced off to the Seranns, struggling into their own armor as they did so, to find out what was going on and to receive orders, then race back and begin carrying out those instructions.
As the assault force neared the tree line that marked the north edge of the Goblin camp a Serao of Goblins spilled out and hastily formed ranks to bar their path, many of its members still struggling with the ties on belts or weapon harnesses, sixty jugata in all and far too few for the job at hand. Hail smashed down onto the Goblins as a lightning bolt incinerated the Serann and three other Goblins, and the entire assault force let loose with every missile weapon they had before charging.
Kroh hurled his enchanted throwing axe, summoned the bloody weapon back, and hurled it again, only to blurt a curse as the weapon struck true in a Pa’s skull and then shattered in a flash of blue-green sparks as the enchantment failed. But there was no time to complain about a lost weapon: they were storming forward, and the Waybrother had to run to keep up, bellowing his rage at the unfairness of the weapon not having held out for a third cast.
The assault force smashed into the disorganized Serao and overran it, the outnumbered jugata fighting with their customary courage for half a minute before the survivors broke and raced away deeper into the camp. The assault force paused to sort itself out, finish off the Goblin wounded, and send their own wounded back to camp while Axel and Henri took on, and slew the remaining able-bodied Shaman in a brief flurry of mystic attacks.
By the time they had reformed the Goblin Vaiar had two Seraos formed up with his personal guards in the center, roughly two hundred Goblins all told, and was advancing to close, unwilling to wait for the other two Serao, the dog packs, or the spider riders. Seeing the relative strength of the units approaching, Durek realized that they had hurt the Goblins a bit worse than he had expected, although some of the missing jugata would have been sent back as escorts for the wounded.
So far his plan was working: break the spellcasting deadlock and assault the Goblins in such a fashion that they could be engaged piecemeal in defeat-able numbers. The Goblin leader was rushing to engage the assault force in the mistaken belief that this was a spoiling raid and that the assault force was planning to withdraw back across the walkway and set fire to it, having cost the Goblins their spellcasters and gutted a Serao at very little cost, which actually was a pretty good plan in and of itself.
But Durek, like the Spider leader who faced him, wanted a victory, a violent settling of his problems with the Goblins, if not for good than at least for a while. He wanted to engage and defeat the Spider’s main force before the two wounded shaman could recover from Healing. Break the siege, hammer the Spider, and perhaps this time they would learn to leave the Badgers alone. And most importantly, a resumption of operations at New Fork so that the Phantom Badgers could fulfill their contract and receive the remainder of their pay.
The Goblins closed as both sides let fly with whatever missiles were to hand.
She had ducked, crawled, and run from hiding place to hiding place until the deployment of the assault force took everyone’s minds off the assassin in their midst; Starr eased forward to a good vantage point and watched as the Goblins desperately tried to get their force under arms and into formation, and wondered what sort of mischief she could create to help her comrades.
Sheathing her sword, she drew out her bow and strung it, choosing a normal arrow as she moved to a better position. Aiming carefully, she dropped a Lapla who was marshalling his section, then darted back into the shadows, circling around the back of the camp, dodging the sentries who were abandoning their posts to report to their Seraos; to the north she could hear the assault force close with the Goblins.
Choosing a spot near a supply tent, she killed a Pa and wounded another Goblin before slipping away; the Goblins responded by wasting javelins and arrows at every shadow in the direction she had fired from, orders holding them in place to deal with the larger threat. To the north, the sounds of fighting tapered off, and soon the little Badger saw disheveled Goblins fleeing through the camp. She shot down three of them, picked off a Het in the company forming up on the left of the Vaiar’s personal guard, missed a shot at a Serann, and slipped away before anyone got a fix on her position.
An idea struck her, and she again exchanged sword for bow; creeping up to a Serann’s tent, she peeked around a flap and found it empty but for a Goblin orderly who was sitting on the dirt floor drinking wine. She came through the tent opening moving fast, running Snow Leopard’s point through the orderly’s throat before his wine-fuddled senses could react. Giving the thrashing Goblin a thrust to the kidneys for good measure, Starr hunte
d through the chest and bags in the tent until she found several flasks of lantern oil. Snatching the storm lantern that illuminated the tent’s interior, she closed the cover over the light ports and slipped back outside. The Goblins had few tents, the vast majority simply weaving branches together to give them shade and basic rain protection, but they needed canvas to protect their supplies, and their senior officers could not be expected to live as simply as the troops did.
Uncorking one of the flasks, she splashed the sharp-smelling oil in a wide fan across the back of the tent. Cutting a six-inch length of rope from one of the support lines, she wet one end with oil and then lit it from the lantern before tossing it against the oil-wet wall of the tent. Instantly the canvas was ablaze, the flames roaring out across the film of oil and then crawling up the canvas nearly as quickly. Grinning, the little Lanthrell raced towards a nearby supply tent.
Using the staff to augment and focus his art and own flagging resources of power, Axel hit the Goblins with two volleys of hail and a gust of frost that dropped seven dead in their tracks while Henri cut three down with beams of brilliant light and then threw two Storms of Disruption, his powers spent. Out of the corner of his eye he saw everyone else let fly with whatever they had handy. It wasn’t enough, of course: in open battle it was very rare to break a charge with missile fire or magic alone, but you could chew up the attackers and disrupt their formations.
The Goblins closed with the assault force with a tremendous clash of weapons and war cries; although the Spider force was easily twice as strong, the Goblin line wasn’t much longer as the smaller and slender Goblins put more warriors into a given frontage than Humans or Dwarves.
Tonya had planted the standard deeply into the turf and now stood before it, wielding her hammer and shield for all she was worth. Standard-bearer was an honored position, one which assured early promotion or an early death: a standard was a natural rally point for a unit, and an obvious target for the enemy, thus the bearer was always in the thick of things. She was the third Badger to hold the position, and keenly aware that both her predecessors had died while holding the office, but service in the Legions had imbibed her with the concept that being a standard-bearer marked you as one of the very best. Janna was to her left and Philip to her right, with plenty of Goblins to the front. Still, given a choice between a battle in the blood-red light of a setting sun and another trip to the Basement with Gerhard, she would have instantly chosen the former. There were, she had learned, worse things than war.
It was a glorious battle; Kroh was enjoying himself hugely as the sun slipped beneath the horizon. He was near the center of the defender’s line, and was facing the Vaiar’s own guard, hand-picked veterans clad in studded leather and occasionally mail, armed with polearms, short swords, and shields made of iron-bound wood, the best the Goblins had. There was, as he was fond of pointing out to his comrades, nothing so fine as worthy opponents. He tried for the Goblin leader with his Named Axe, but some blasted flunkey had accidentally stepped in the way, so they would have to do it the hard way, not that the Waybrother minded. He chopped a Goblin down and roared a welcoming cry at the next jugata to step up to face him.
Deflecting a sword-point with her main gauche, Bridget brought her rapier up from a low position and ran the point into and through her foe’s eye socket, leaning into the thrust to force the enchanted steel on into the jugata’s brain. She had argued to stay behind with the wounded, which were her primary concern, but Durek had insisted on taking every Badger into the fray. Not for the first time did she regret that the Captain had placed her in the conflicting position of being both a combat leader and Healer.
Her formed blurred by one of her slender stock of spells, her manoples strapped to her arms, Elonia was fighting near the left flank, a Badger or two down from the Dwarves. She used speed to compensate for her light weapons, working as a team with Henri who had come into the line when his spell-energy ran out, the two light combatants ganging up on individual Goblins. She needed a battle, she knew, a good hard fight to restore the confidence that Zari and Myra had taken from her in that deceptively ordinary cottage, and which had not been fully restored by the lighting raid that had destroyed the Orbsheart. She wished she had had a hand in killing either of her captors, but you don’t come as close to the end as she had and complain about the conditions of your rescue. She side-stepped a spear point and ripped open the wielder’s throat, a hard smile touching her face, a smile of growing confidence. Maxmillian had been right, a good mixing-up with the Spider was just what she needed.
Slamming the iron-bound rim of his shield into a Pa’s head, stunning the Goblin, Maxmillian finished the creature with a full-armed stroke of his hammer and cast about for another foe. The Goblins were giving way, their formation breaking up and their confidence failing. As usual their enemy had (except for the loggers) a sizable advantage in arms and armor, and hail and killing frosts continued to harry their flanks; the Vaiar’s guards were holding steady, but the two Seraos were breaking and falling back. Only the timely arrival of the remaining two formations was holding the Goblin line together. Beyond the fight the scholar could see flames roaring skyward as Goblin tents burned, and the war dog handlers moving their charges to reinforce the guards at the slave camp and the mules. Then fresh Goblins were pouring into the fight and the historian had his hands full staying alive.
The Goblins were pulling out, at least in part, Starr realized as she used the last of her oil to set a cart afire and faded into another hiding place. The shamans’ and Healers’ retinues had been hastily packing carts and harnessing mules for some time, but she had assumed that they were just getting their valuable charges out of danger’s way; when she saw the spider-riders go scuttling off to the southwest, however, it became clear that no matter how determined the Vaiar might be to fight a final, decisive battle there were those on his staff who were less committed: the Titan spiders were being used to scout a way clear for the carts, which were being hastily packed with wounded and supplies even as the mules were hitched up. The three Seraos which had broken were being rallied, but instead of being hurled back into the fight, they were dragging wounded back from the fighting line and deploying to escort the carts. The war dogs were being used to guard the flanks and rear, forcing her back from the growing caravan as it prepared to pull out; win or lose, she saw, the Spider was lifting the siege and salvaging what they could.
Nocking an ordinary arrow, the short Badger eased from vantage point to vantage point, watching the shamans’ carts, sniping at the jugata and hoping for a shot at Afra.
Philip drove the point of his short sword through a cord-armor tunic and levered the blade up under his smaller foe’s sternum, twisting as he withdrew. The fresh wave of Goblins had numbered barely a hundred, fewer than what the two units they had replaced had mustered at the start of the fight, although there were fewer in the assault force to meet them. The Badger got a couple seconds to catch his breath before another Goblin closed with him, the jugata showing signs of waning enthusiasm for this battle as their losses grew. This was exactly the sort of battle the Goblins hated: a stand-up, toe-to-toe slug-fest where their weaknesses in height, armor, and weapons told the most strongly.
The end was coming soon, Durek could tell: both sides were taking a beating, but his force had had a victory under its belts when they closed, and their morale had been bolstered by the two Seraos falling back. Only the presence of the Vaiar (and his guards) on the field held the last two Serao in place. Axel was using the staff to send the killing frosts into the Goblin ranks wherever they seemed weakest, and arrows were dropping members of the Vaiar’s guard from behind, proof that Starr was alive and well. Of course, the loggers were taking a beating and there was a steady stream of stretcher-bearers crossing the bridges leading into the camp, but the war dogs and spiders had not appeared, nor had any of the other three Seraos returned after reforming.
The Dwarven Captain feinted, ducked and slammed the edge of Aran Kir R
auko, his enchanted long axe, into the chest of the Goblin before him, shattering the jugata’s sternum like a dry shingle and crushing the heart beneath it. Twisting his axe free, Durek advanced a step and saw the Vaiar standing next to his personal standard, surrounded by the half-dozen guards he had left. The Goblins facing Haakon and the Company’s left wing were falling back, their ranks thinned and their spirit gone, while those on the assault force’s right flank were still game for the moment. Plucking one of the last two Storms of Disruption the Company still possessed from his belt pouch, the Captain uttered the command word and snapped the device into the circle of guards, charging the instant the winds ceased. He beheaded a stunned Goblin, saw Tonya kill another to his right, caught a glimpse of three more dropping coated in hoarfrost, and then found himself face to face with the Vaiar. The Goblin commander was taller than most, perhaps four inches over five feet, the blotches on the otherwise smooth skin showing his age, a grim-visaged Goblin wearing a good mail shirt and carrying a broadsword made for someone his height.
The ballads are full of duels between the leaders of respective forces, and they do occasionally happen, as military arts work the same for most races, ensuring that the leader will generally be at the center of his line, well-marked by standards or insignia and surrounded by guards and aides. As some point enthusiasm or frustration frequently moves one or both to fight their way over to their opposite number and settle this business while there was still a chance.
Seeing his guard dissolving around him, the Vaiar hefted his sword and shield and made for Durek; the Dwarf was no expert on Goblin facial expressions, but he guessed that he saw resignation added to the anger on the cramped features overshadowed by a conical steel helm decorated with a wolf’s skull. All around the Goblin line was breaking, and behind them the rest of the force was pulling out; the Spider had become too accustomed to losing, too used to being driven off. Their courage was undiminished, but their hearts were forever broken. The Goblin leader, however, had reached his last battlefield, Durek could tell; here he was going to die with as many of the foe as he could manage, beginning with the Dwarf in front of him.