Lost Souls

by John Van Stry

  Yes, that had to be it. She decided, convinced. After all, she had the letter. It had come from him, there was no doubt. He had forsaken her, so she had forsaken him. There was no stain on her promise; he had been the one to break it. And he would be the one to pay. Her master had told her to waste no time on revenge, but her master and she did not always see eye to eye. Besides, she'd never known him to shy from revenge himself when the opportunity presented itself, and that which he did not know of, he could not disapprove of.

  She drew the cloak about her and decided. The strange male in the valley must be him, and she would proceed as if it was, with her plans for revenge. However, she would not mention her beliefs to her master, as she had no proof, knowing from other painful experiences how he reacted to conjecture.

  "Mistress!" A slave stood up in the hall as her personal guards came to attention when she opened the door. "Word from mister Rammart. He has learned that our spy in the castle is dead."

  "Yes, I know." She dismissed the slave with a wave of her hand, inwardly annoyed that the spymaster did not wait himself to present her with this information, but instead left a lowly goblin slave. She'd be sure to mention to her master that his use was almost at an end once the gathered army marched for the tower. He had but one spy left in the valley now, and once the army was out of it he'd not be talking much with them about it anyway.

  She debated the idea of watching her master reward the spymaster when his time came. Usually she only watched such things when forced to, she cared not for the painful executions her master seemed to enjoy. She used to fear the day she would be the guest of honor at one of those, but she'd since learned her master wanted more to mold her than to kill her. As long as she didn't resist the process too much, she'd survive.

  Survival was a lesson she'd learned well at his hands she reflected. That and how to deal with pain, both physical and emotional. She entered her sleeping chambers and threw off her robe, climbing into the comfort of her bed, slipping naked between the sheets. Thankfully her body did not scar, those of her race could not. Otherwise she'd be a road map to the many teachings of her master, looking as ugly and used as she often felt deep inside.

  She curled up and fell asleep, dreaming for the first time in years of comfort and safety, the two things she missed the most.

  Parade Grounds - Elsheval

  I woke up early and headed down to the parade grounds, the previous night had been a quiet one of just me and my immediate family. We spent time catching up and reliving a few old glories. I sounded my father and mother out on some of the politics that had been going on since I had left. Quite a lot of it stirred around my old nemesis Elantisfey, though there were a few who were happy to play on his side at times for the benefits they perceived to be available. He wasn't actually rabble rousing, but he did seem to be agitating for more power in the crown and less in the council since leaving it. He was actually well on his way to becoming a temple priest, which was rather interesting, I didn't see him the type to be solely involved in temple concerns. I gathered from my mother that the high priest at the temple was not keen on Elantisfey either.

  That my clan didn't care for him I think was a reflection of my own feelings. I'd been at loggerheads with him for years prior to my exile. This was why I had kept my relationship with his daughter a secret. I felt now that perhaps that had been a mistake. I can only imagine what he had done to her when he had discovered what he no doubt felt was a personal betrayal. I had often thought that what he did to me was probably because he couldn't take it out on her. Now I wasn't so sure about that.

  I put those thoughts out of my mind when I hit the parade ground. The large open field was used to practice military maneuvers, as well as to do training drills. I went up to the small reviewing stand at the end of it and sat down to wait.

  I didn't have to wait too long before people started to show up. Some came in pairs or trios, though most showed up singly. They all gathered around me, sitting on the ground. Clint showed up last, bringing a dozen more shrean with him, his personal pick from the guard I guessed.

  I waited until they all settled in and looked over the group. Except for Clint's group, I recognized all of them from when I had been in charge of the queen’s army and her guard. More than half were still in the uniform of the queen's guard, including Tam, which surprised me. There were sixty-three in total, which I felt was a good turn out.

  "Okay, how many of you know about the princess?" I pitched my voice low; I didn't want it carrying on beyond the immediate group.

  All of them raised their hands.

  "Good. In a few days, I’m leaving to go deal with that issue. Before I go into specifics, who's going with me?

  All of them raised their hands again.

  I smiled, "Thanks for the vote of confidence. We'll be leaving with a larger force that will serve as cover for our own movements. We'll be leaving them behind as soon as we're out of range of the valley and prying eyes. Then we'll be paying a visit to some lands many of you are familiar with." I heard a mumbled Zaranfeld or two in the group. I nodded, "Yes, Zaranfeld. But we have an advantage over them this time."

  "Howso?" Asked one of Clint's troops.

  "Simple, Zaranfeld is dead. Whoever has taken over his grounds doesn't know everything about them, nor the best ways to control them. We've fought there before and the veterans in this group know a secret or two about them. Don't we?"

  I smiled at the nodded heads of several of the troops. "We're going to go in fast, and we're going to hit precisely, like the point of a rapier. This is going to be a light raid with a single objective in mind. We're not going to try and wipe out whoever holds the grounds, just get what we want and go."

  "Sir, won't that just be leaving the problem there for someone else to deal with later?"

  I shook my head. "Not exactly. I have several suspicions about the exact nature of this particular problem, and if they prove wrong, we'll have that larger body of troops that can be brought to bear to clean things up. But that's not the issue here, nor is it the mission we've been assigned. We have one, and only one priority: to rescue Lelani and return her safely to the queen. Nothing else is important to this group. Understood?"

  "Yessir!" They all responded in unison.

  "Okay, I'm going to have you all fall in and sort yourselves out before I make any changes. Clint will be my second in command for the duration; I'll fill out the other positions shortly. Hop to it!"

  They jumped up and began to sort themselves out as I walked over to Clint. "I'll need your help getting your men integrated with my vets there, I don't know them and I don't have the time to let them sort themselves out with the rest of the group." I was confident my men could do that on their own, they knew each other and had worked together before, they'd leave the big disputes for me to deal with, not that I expected many.

  He nodded, "Figured as much. But I'd suspect it will go fairly easily considering how many of your old group is still in the guard. Two of the troops I brought are good Sergeants, the rest are the remaining cream of the guard that you didn't already have."

  I nodded and he introduced me to each of them. At that point most of the sorting out had taken place and Clint and I then proceeded to make the changes we saw fit while I set out the drills I wanted each sub-group to perform and told them why. They were all professionals, so it was only necessary to make sure they all knew who had to do what. They then set about the process of making sure they could work together on a battlefield on their own. While that went on I sat down with Clint to discuss my plans.

  "Fourteen years ago when we attacked Zaranfeld's keep and killed him, it was a pretty well fortified and defended area. He had a lot of troops, mostly a mixed bunch of human mercenaries, goblins, and orcs. They had a lot of key positions heavily fortified to cover all the approaches."

  "I've heard the stories, and remember some of what was said about it when I was a cub. It took you what, a year to pull him out of there?"

  "
Actually the campaign took more like three years, but we didn't actually engage him openly for the first two."

  "So what is your plan this time? Sounds like a fairly tough nut to crack."

  "Well, you'd think that. However, after we had defeated him there was a lot of concern about just this eventuality by a number of the other commanders who fought with us; that someone might seek to reoccupy the keep and re-establish the defenses. So we razed a number of the outlying forts and defenses. Places that had taken a number of years to build and could not be easily rebuilt."

  He nodded.

  "A few of us had an equally good idea that we kept secret from the rank and file. My group knows about it because we spent weeks working on it, after the other guard groups had left." I smiled at him.

  "What was it?"

  "We made some modifications to a few of the structures we left standing. Weakened some key parts of the defenses and then covered up those parts. We picked the watch stations and defenses along the hardest path to attack, which made them the hardest to work on and the least worthwhile to worry about. I suspect that whoever has moved in probably has not had the time or desire to carefully inspect those rather remote points when they had so many other things that needed to be rebuilt."

  He nodded impressed. "Clever."

  I shrugged, "We lost a lot of good people, Shrean and Elf alike in that place. No one wanted to have to pay such a high price there again. We never told anyone because I expected to be ordered not to waste the manpower on the place, so I made up excuses as to why we stayed there afterwards as long as we did."

  "You have any other tricks like that about?"

  I grinned, "Yes actually, and if I hadn't been shipped out so damned quickly I would have passed them on to my successor who would have passed them on to you. There's a lot of word of mouth in the job."

  "So I've learned."

  "So," I unrolled the map I had brought and started to point to it, "when we all ride out of here using the northern pass, the king and I will be in the lead. Two days out we leave the main group, on foot, and make a forced march around Clouter’s peak to the west. The king will continue with the main body along the easier route, not turning west until he's entered the Becca valley. I suspect at that time he'll start to draw some raids and probes from the defenders.

  "By the time he gets to that point, we should be working our way past the southern defenses in the mountains here." I pointed to some rather nasty peaks on the map. They weren't impassable, on foot, but they weren't the kind of place you could take a large force or a conventional army. Fortunately, we were neither.

  "We'll use our two Battle Mages and the four elven archers we have to deal with each of the outposts as we come to them," I marked each on the map from memory for him. "Then we'll descend down the ridge here to attack the tower across this field. I'll leave the archers and the two Battle Mages out here and here, each with an equal number of fighters to defend our retreat. I'll take you, the rest of the fighters and Tam inside to make our grab of the princess."

  "Why Tam?"

  "She knows Lelani as well as Elantisfey, we'll need a magic user, but neither of those Battle Mages are any good with a sword, and we both know that she is however. Plus we may find the princess in an embarrassing or bad way. The other female fighters we have with us are all old rough hands like me, Tam's a lot softer around the edges, and again she knows her. Tam will have a lot less trouble dealing with her than the rest of us will should there be any problems."

  "So after we pull out we make for the main body and then come back here?"

  "Maybe. Depending on circumstances, we either do that, or just return back here and send a rider to the king. We'll call that one when we see what we're left with."

  He nodded, "All in all it seems rather clear-cut and direct."

  "Yes, so why do I feel like I've got a coat full of fleas?"

  "Because anyone who'd grab a princess, and then send a decently sized armed force packing in disarray can't be this easy to take on."

  "Exactly," I was rather happy he saw the main point as well, "From everything I've heard they've been building up there for at least six years that anyone knows about. Nothing serious at first, but the last two years apparently it got fairly busy. The survivors from the first attempt claimed to have chewed up a lot of them. So you'd expect the next group to have pretty much a walkover of it which would of course make you expect them to re-enforce heavily to prevent the next group from doing just that."

  "Yet they haven't re-enforced that our spies can tell, and they haven't retreated from their perimeter and concentrated their strengths." He finished.

  "It feels like a set up."

  "I'd have to agree. So either their true strength or forces have been hidden well from us...."

  "Or there is something else going on here that we don't understand." I finished.

  "You think Elantisfey is involved in this somehow, don't you?"

  I sighed and nodded, "Yes, to me it all comes back to him. My being here under what you can only call 'mystical' circumstances seems to point to it. I hate the Elf. I have unfinished business with him, I would love to see him dead, and the queen’s Oracles, while rare and unpredictable, have a history of being right."

  "And that bothers you as well?"

  "Of course! I'm far too focused to be objective, I have to feel I'm right, but what plan survives its execution? That's why I want you with me rather than leading the diversion forces. You don't have the same bias I do here, and you've more than proven your ability to me."

  "So you want me to look for the other answers, as well as any missed traps."

  "Yes." I left out some of my other reasons; he'd find them out only if they became necessary.

  "Well, I can think of a few things, such as a feint to draw our forces away from more important places so they can be attacked. I'll have messages sent out to our garrison commanders to warn them, and I’ll advise the council to order the other commanders to call up the reserves and assemble their companies just in case."

  "Sounds reasonable." I rolled up the map, "Now let’s go see how our troops here are doing."

  He nodded and we turned our attentions back to them.

  The review of the troops went well. I ran them through about an hour's worth of exercise, more for my own benefit than theirs. Shreans are born to fight, it's what we do. Doing it in groups is just an enhancement of that innate skill, and thousands of years of working together have refined it. There were six Elves in our group, the two Battle Mages and the four archers. A few more archers might have been nice, but these four I knew had the ability to keep up with us. As for why there really weren’t any Shrean archers, well Elves tend to excel at it, and we Shrean do not by comparison. Of course they, like the Mages, have a lot more time to perfect their art compared to us when you consider the length of their lives versus ours.

  It was noon when we finished up. By that time the group that we'd be leaving with had occupied the rest of the field. That group was more Elf than Shrean, and many of the Shrean in it, except for the commanders, where pretty inexperienced. Undoubtedly hoping their service here would help qualify them for positions in something better than the regular guard. I dismissed my people telling them when I expected them to be there next, then went and watched the newcomers practice.

  They ran through the drills fairly well, and even the most junior ones there seemed to know their way around a blade and the parade field. I wouldn't have expected much less really, there were a lot of good teachers here after all. However, the practice field is always different from the battlefield. I met with their commander and we discussed when he thought he’d be ready to take to the field. We went over his orders and I firmed up my own schedule based on his estimation of his ability to move them through the passes. After that, I left to take care of some other preparations. I needed to arrange for the rations we’d need and some other supplies that would all have to be ready when it was time for us to leave. I was asking
for some pretty expensive stuff, so a few personal checks were in order.

  There were also some particular pieces of equipment that none of my troops would be able to supply themselves, that I wanted to have, and as we would be traveling on foot, without any pack animals, I wanted the best and therefore lightest available. I also spent a little cash on myself, there were a few items I had to give up when I was no longer the captain, and I decided the queen could afford to buy me replacements.

  I smiled to myself as I made my purchase, thinking about the reaction this particular invoice would get as it made its way through the council to the queen. I was sure I'd get a lecture when we got back, probably even a harsh word or three. You see, magical swords are extremely rare and extremely expensive.

  Plus I bought two.

  Elsewhere

  She was not pleased, not pleased at all. The spymaster had not only not waited for her last night, but had gone off this morning to supposedly gather more information on the forces leaving the city. Word had been sent that they had left this morning, and she gathered that Rammart was worried about his recent lack of success, so was going out to gather some information himself.

  That or he was just making sure he wouldn't be here for the upcoming battles. That part of the plan would be successful, because she knew the full plan. But to one such as Rammart who only knew what she or her master told him, it probably looked much more likely to fail. She shook her head in frustration and kicked the orc groveling at her feet, the one who had brought her the message.

  "If he's not back in a week, I'll have him killed. Make sure he understands that slave!" she snarled at him.

  "Yes, Mistress! I'll tell him!" he screeched and taking this for a dismissal quickly fled the room.