Forest For The Trees (Book 3)

by Damien Lake

  They looked shocked, the faithful pair included. Then the moment passed and they set to work.

  Xenos basked in his power. Simple minds. Give them concepts to worry over, and they concentrated on them to the extreme of not causing problems when the work that mattered was laced with moralistic conundrums. Especially if the concept struck them as abhorrent at first. Their minds, once over that initial hurdle, would embrace the idea tighter with each passing day until Adrian was condemned to sentencing without trial.

  People were indeed easy to manipulate if you comprehended their basic nature. All to the good that Mendell and Harbon had purged their forces of all known scrying anchors before embarking on god’s mission. It came in so very handy now.

  He passed time in front of the window while they worked. Four feet high, fifteen feet in length, it looked out into the central cavern hollowed from the mountain. Entire castles could be stacked within that yawning space.

  From the ceiling descended a thick stalactite that narrowed to a fine needle. Below it rose an equally titanic stalagmite. Between their points beat one of the magnificent gems bestowed on the Fallen Lands by Humus.

  It was a three-foot diameter stone with uncountable facets. Rich, crystalline brown, the color of freshly plowed earth, its shade changed in time with an interior heartbeat. Unlike the beat of living creatures, each pulse required hours to complete. The colors shifted to a nearly pure white with brown overtones at the beat’s peak. A genuine heart of the very world.

  How deeply ironic that it currently served the ancient enemy against whom Humus had bestowed these gifts on mortals in the first place.

  A mere elemental blessed with earth power thinking to stand against the god of the very same. How impudent.

  Xenos left them at their work to settle into his quarters. They were stark, which suited him. The walls were thick, which suited him better.

  He traced his finger along the stone. Power seeped from his flesh, carving a flat niche in the rock. After a moment he had a secret store in which he could keep the objects he wished to conceal. Everything except his personal scrying ring went in, then he passed his hand over the hole. To all appearances it reformed. The illusion of solid stone would fool any person, mage or otherwise, who happened in his chamber.

  Sitting on his bed, he called forth images from Galemar. Yes, there was the place in which Harbon had mysteriously met his end. He could do more than simply see through the ring. Xenos could feel the lingering energy traces imbuing the far away earth.

  The view shifted, following his thoughts. Deep in the Rovasii, under a ruined village of age-old caretakers. A forest pond over submerged roots. And deeper…

  Yes. The pulsing power…hidden deep for so many centuries. What glories it would revive once he controlled it! Such magnificent…and awesome…glories…

  Chapter 13

  During the subsequent planning sessions, one fact became abundantly clear to Marik. The primary flaw in the earlier plan had been the path the riders would take during their flight. It brought them between the archers and their targets for far longer than he had anticipated. Several other details had erred as well but that one major fault had been the worst strategic mistake.

  The three squads separating at different speeds was a human error, unforeseeable for the most part until the men proved themselves through trial by fire. He had only recognized the other flaws while looking down from the etheric, and later wondered why Torrance had not pointed them out to him before.

  With so much at stake, the commander would never have left mistakes like that in the plan strictly to teach the fledgling a lesson the hard way. His superior should have pointed out the risk to him as soon as he reviewed Marik’s proposed plans before the raid.

  Only during the long reviews did Marik come to realize what had transpired. By dint of his phrasing while relating what he had seen from the etheric in addition to the scout reports, he had implied far greater knowledge concerning the enemy than he truly possessed. Torrance had assumed Marik commanded information specific enough that the crown-general had solid reasons behind positioning his forces the way he had.

  In war, nothing should ever be assumed. Everything should be verified regardless of how certain a person is of the answer.

  No one told him that. Marik arrived at that conclusion on his own. In his mind, he called it Lesson Number One; if the general fails to communicate clearly with his men, the resultant failure is his alone.

  He kept the truth private. Revealing the depth of his blunder to Torrance would cause him no small amount of shame. The mercenary commander had placed a good deal of faith in him.

  Not to mention it would start Gibbon frothing at the mouth as if rabid. The army lieutenant had made it plain he would send a full report to Thoenar at the earliest opportunity relating every detail of the first attempt. With luck, real strategists would be sent to assume control over the debacle.

  Marik was determined not to make the same mistake twice. Nor to make another as foolish. He spent two days straight in the meager tent, mostly consulting with Torrance who offered whatever advice was on his mind. Gibbon, the six band leaders, various Crimson Kings lieutenants and army officers rotated through at Marik’s summons.

  He still believed in keeping the plan as simple as possible. Except, as he quickly learned, even the simplest plan had dozens of details that could effect the result. The last plan had relied on specific outcomes influencing a multiple of factors. At the time he had not realized how much it depended on one thing going right after the previous.

  Every step for the new plan must be carefully considered. Possible outcomes must be weighed, examined to see if events could unfold to results other than what he desired. Once the first step was set, the next, which wholly depended on the first, could be planned, examined, peeled apart and judged. Endless possibilities seemed to branch out from any action, making his head ache while he attempted vainly to evaluate each. After a time, he felt as if they piled at his feet while he stripped away consequence after consequence, finding still new ones lurking underneath, like…a gods…damned…onion...

  Marik had come to loath onions. Landon’s casual comparison of warfare to the layers in an onion many years before had been uncannily apt.

  Torrance warned him of the new danger he faced. In this fresh determination to craft the best plan, he could easily flip to the opposite extreme in over-planning. According to him it was far better to take an immediate action, dangerous and half-effective as it might be, than to paralyze oneself with indecision.

  Through it all echoed the old maxim that battle plans never survived the first engagement with the enemy. He could spend each moment of the day thinking about the most efficient methods to assault their enemies. In the end, nothing would play out the way he had anticipated it would.

  It was a truth he had known since his first year with the Kings. It persisted in popping into his mind, usually in Kerwin’s voice, suggesting that the victor in any battle was determined by Fate rolling her cosmic dice. No influence from presumptuous men would effect the outcome.

  One thing he was certain of; they needed better battlefield communication than the Screamers alone could account for. He needed to be closer to the various elements to send orders that would reach the leaders in time to have useful effect. The only reliable method seemed to be keeping a company of riders close to hand, ready to gallop off on an instant.

  Scouts came back on the third evening after the raid with unsettling news. Their long-range scouts had ridden hard to report a reinforcing regiment on the move. They would make the ruined town by afternoon of the next day.

  Marik would have liked to remain invisible. If the Arronaths had believed their raid to be a strike force that hit where opportunity allowed before escaping to wreck havoc elsewhere, they might have been able to make a second surprise raid.

  Except the Arronaths had deployed plenty of scouts as well. His own, mostly drawn from Second and Fourth Squads in the Kings’ ran
ks, had noted the ones further away, dropping the ones who strayed too close. Seeing which scouts failed to return undoubtedly told the Arronath leader all he needed to know about where his enemy was.

  So surprise was out. But with reinforcements, being able to retake the town became a far trickier business. One that would surely involve losses his force could ill afford.

  The next attack would have to be that night.

  * * * * *

  Instigating a second raid following the same natural corridor through the trees seemed foolish. For this assault, Marik finally decided on splitting his forces. He placed squads from the Kings at each force’s core with soldiers attached as backup strength. They had proven reliable enough for that, providing they had experienced men like Skelton at their head.

  The six lesser bands were the great debate. Rodolph swore he had followed the orders he heard through the Screamers on the very instant he deciphered them in his head. It had taken him longer to remember the signal for ‘speed up’, especially mixed discordantly with arrows for the other squad, than it had for him to recognize the single ‘retreat’ command.

  Gibbon flatly disbelieved him. Marik also wondered at the truth of Rodolph’s claim, but found it impossible to dismiss any men still able to fight.

  He kept the bands back for this raid. Marik moved much closer to the combat front this time to enable faster orders to be sent via rider. This increased his danger. Torrance accepted the decision after stating once that leaders usually stayed back in a fight to preserve command structure. Killing the general was a sure way to create instability within the enemy ranks. Gibbon attempted no dissuasion. If King Raymond’s mercenary pet bought a hole in the earth six feet deep during this attack, it would suit him very well.

  According to Marik’s logic, the Arronaths would expect two likely courses in the event of a second raid. If the Galemaran leaders were fools, they might attack through the exact same corridor as before. If the Galemaran leaders wanted to surprise them, they might creep through the dark to assault a point on the opposite side of their camp.

  After much thought he chose a point roughly an eighth further along the compass to the north. This put him north-northeast of Drakesfield’s remains rather than slightly south of the western tick on the compass rose.

  Sun had set two marks earlier. The Arronaths followed the rigid schedule Marik’s scouts had observed since the first day. Watch posts changed to the next shift…the signal.

  Marik had focused hard on obtaining every crossbow available before departing Thoenar. In a patronizingly token gesture, the quartermasters had offered the damaged bows left behind by the Arm’s forces. No doubt they thought the mercenary would refuse in anger, enabling them to claim they had tried to supply the irrational crown-general. He had taken them along on the belief that every bad bow would have salvageable components.

  Most were junk, only good for providing miniscule materials to repair others. Several were split along the grain so badly that no amount of tightly-wound leather strips would hold them together. The sixteen serviceable bows had joined the two-hundred odd issued to members of the Crimson Kings.

  After the shift change, his bows began firing shafts blindly into Drakesfield’s ruins. Clatters resounded through the night rather than the hoped for screams. No lucky shots in this flight.

  Among the quarrels streaked flaming meteors from fire arrows arcing across their shorter range. Little flammable material was left in the town after the Arronath’s rampaging entrance. Burning arrowheads bounced off earthen streets pounded hard as stone by generations of residents. Several ricocheted from cracked walls until they tumbled into a barren corner. Only one landed in a wagon’s bed, unfortunately empty.

  It succeeded in its primary objective. Alarmed shouts flew from every corner. In a matching rendition, forms ran out of the darkness, gathering to ward off a renewed assault. Marik could see the Taurs angrily resisting when white-robed sorcerers forced their minds from slumber back toward the wakeful world. The beasts were not nocturnal by choice.

  Too much time would give the enemy an edge. They would reform into set groups. Already voices called in an alien tongue. Arronaths shifted from the open areas to hug buildings, duck behind shattered walls or put soot-blackened trees between them and the concealed archers.

  Lieutenant Baxter sneaked into the rear from the town’s western edge with his Sixth Squad. With him ran Sergeant Skelton, the only army officer playing a forward role this night. His soldiers had become minor heroes among the newest camp graduates since their face-off with the black soldiers.

  Close to two-hundred men scampered through the dark, making as little noise as they could manage. On every fourth shoulder teetered a small cask designed to split apart at the first great shock. Marik had commandeered the war oil from Harpersfield, a town twenty miles east to which the army had hastily moved as many supplies as possible when their border lines began collapsing months earlier. He’d taken it on principal when they marched past, seeing little use for it at first since he possessed no catapults. Nor did the Arronaths preside over any fortresses that the Galemarans would besiege.

  To the north, Lieutenant Devry started raising a ruckus. His Seventh Squad emerged from the trees to shout their defiance. War cries were hurled.

  The south also suddenly erupted with enemies. Every wall taller than four feet had been destroyed by exuberant Taurs over the pervious month. Lieutenants Piccary, Lydan and Bainard brought their squads over the rubble to the very edges of what was left of the town. Arronath sentries wasted no time in retreating.

  Arrows flew from the town into the southern flankers.

  * * * * *

  Lieutenant Jayran found the enemy bow fire irksome. “Can you see where their cussed archers are firing from?” he demanded.

  “From the damned town, where else?” returned an archer from the shielding gloom. A cracker from outside his squad to reply with such cheek.

  “Figure out the most likely position you could shoot from, and be quick,” he ordered. “Those are fellow Kings taking hits!”

  “Has to be from the well square,” a different voice answered. “No other good place for that many bows and see what you’re shooting at.”

  “Then all of you send your next flight into the well square.”

  “Are you serious? You couldn’t hit that if the wind were coming from your back!”

  “Shoot off your arrow, Adley, not your cussed mouth!”

  The next flight disappeared into night’s curtain. Jayran held his breath until he heard a pained cry, flowed a moment later by a second. “Good! Keep that up! We can’t take down their archer forces, but we can sure as dirt make them dance!”

  * * * * *

  Lieutenant Baxter led his men by example. He carried a cask slung on one shoulder as easily as he once had the yearling pigs on his father’s farm when a youth.

  His men with free hands ranged forward. Baxter watched six enemy watches taken down, their warning cries drowned under the din ringing through the air with every new squad that call attention to itself.

  Broken stones marked where the town had once prosperously spread. Skelton took his soldiers on a northern angle, hopping jagged barriers while the Sixth Squad continued straight ahead. Two men twisted their ankles coming down on loose fragments. With the enemy’s back turned, Baxter loudly husked for those two to remain sitting on the wall, keeping a lookout. They would be retrieved on the way out.

  Doors were missing from most buildings. No thatch remained anywhere in Drakesfield. Only a moderate-sized town, as towns went in the kingdom’s lower southwest, its buildings were clustered in grape bunches around a central square. The plank stands that had held musician performances and festival shows were splinters ground into the earth.

  The Arronaths had set camp in the innermost buildings closest to the square. Baxter held no interest in them. His orders were unusually plain.

  What little was left of these outer structures would not burn. Proba
bly that had been a deliberate safety measure on the Arronaths’ part, along with the destruction they seemed to glory in. Baxter hissed to his men. They had come as far into the town as he dared.

  Swords glistened under stray light from the moon. Also from torches set in the walls, wedged into whatever cracks were handy. The swordsmen stood guard while the cask-bearers moved slowly between the ruined buildings. At best, they only had enough oil to saturate the ground thoroughly for four or five of the narrow alleys.

  He picked a building still intact enough that the wall facing the town’s center was seven feet of scorched oak. Baxter split his cask’s bottom by thumping it down hard onto a tarnished door handle laying in the ruins and began spilling oil over the ground two feet out from the alley’s mouth.

  * * * * *

  The Taurs were coming, Lieutenant Eilow noted. Their hulking forms blotted out the torches when they moved among the ruins. It would have been a dead giveaway even if their fearsome roars had been absent.

  Which they were far from.

  Interesting how that sound could make his spine feel limp. In the countless battles in which he had fought, listening to the tortured chorus echoing up from all nine hells through a hundred warriors’ dying lips, nothing had ever made him feel his heart hammering inside his chest the way this did.

  “I see two,” he called.

  “I make it three,” countered his third sergeant. “No, strike that. Five!”

  “Every last one of you had better be cocked in the next five seconds,” Eilow ordered in a loud tone. He raised a hand no one could see through the thick trees or nighttime blanket. “Look there! Bainard and Piccary are pulling apart!”

  “Wait for it!” he heard his first sergeant shout after a quarrel was shot before the order. “Damn it, if that—”

  Eilow blocked out the noise while he strained his eyes, looking for a tumbling corpse that meant one of their own had fallen from the untrained shot.