On the good side, this approach meant that the floating plates could get a really powerful reinforcement enchantment instead of just a quick and dirty version. But the tiny gaps between them meant they wouldn’t work as well against something like a high-velocity water jet as they did against solid weapons, so I decided to add a normal force field between them and the dispel field. Then I realized that walking around with that dispel field destroying any magic I touched was liable to be inconvenient, so I wrapped a much weaker force field around it just to keep people from accidentally bumping into it.
At that point I had a defense that would laugh at any of the weapons I was currently carrying, so I figured it was good enough for now. I set the factory running, slowly churning out enchanted pins, and started thinking about how to get them in place. It would take hundreds of them to properly cover the surcoat I’d bought, and the cloak might need a thousand. Maybe I could make something that would place them automatically, using telekinesis to uniformly tile a surface?
“Don’t be absurd, Daniel,” Alanna scoffed. “Why should you waste time and magic creating such a thing, when you have a skilled seamstress and armorer at your disposal? This is little different than the more elaborate sorts of studded armor. Finish enchanting these garments, and I shall place the studs by hand.”
“But that could take days,” I objected.
“And how long will it take you to make some mystic wonder to do the job?” She asked. “Besides, you underestimate my skills. A few minutes of work every hour will keep up with the fruiting of this lazy tree you’ve made, and it will give me something to do besides worry. Focus on the tasks only you can do, and allow me to handle the mundane chores.”
“I suppose you have a point. Alright, Alanna, I’ll leave the assembly work in your hands. It’s going to take several days to make enough pins to cover everything, though. Where do you think we should start?”
“The cloak,” she said firmly. “I’ll start with the hood, and work my way down. Now that they know a knife to the kidney won’t kill you, they’re liable to go for your head.”
Chapter 13
A cold drizzle fell over the Golden City as the Moon Ghosts assembled for the mock battle I was to take part in. I’d dragged myself out of bed before dawn for an early breakfast, silently grumbling to myself about irritating schedules that don’t take a mage’s habit of working late into account. Alanna just laughed at my sluggishness, and told me to get used to it.
“War waits for no man’s convenience, and our future shall surely be filled with battle,” she told me.
An hour later I found myself standing in the rain alongside the rest of the Moon Ghosts, in a plaza full of soldiers. The men bore the weather stoically, but I couldn’t help wondering about it. Wasn’t Asgard supposed to be some heavenly realm of perfection? Did Odin summon up foul weather for his men to fight in on purpose, or was this some reflection of the Fimbulwinter that blanketed Midgard?
Not that I had much reason to complain. Alanna’s armored form was probably waterproof to begin with, and a little rain certainly wasn’t going to penetrate my new cloak. The morning chill wasn’t even worth mentioning, when my enchantments were designed to weather arctic conditions. But I hated to waste my time standing around when I had so much work to do.
“What are we waiting for?” I asked Captain Arnor.
“They won’t open the gate until the whole battlegroup is drawn up and ready to march through,” he replied. “Until then it’s hurry up and wait, as usual.”
“Gate? What gate?”
He raised an eyebrow at that. “Did you think we’d march all the way to the battlefield? Asgard is surrounded by forty leagues of farmland, and the Vanir would never stop bitching if we ruined their crops. There’s a gate in the plaza here that will take us out to the battlefield.”
“That’s convenient. Does the battlegroup we’re fighting use the same gate?”
“That would give us too much free intel on each other. No, there are nine gate plazas in Valhalla, and each of them can open anywhere within a hundred leagues of the Golden City. For these training battles each force marches through a different gate, then they give us our objective for the day.”
I considered the implications of such a system. “So when Loki marches his army near Asgard you’ll be able to appear anywhere you want to engage them? You rangers are going to have a lot of fun with that, aren’t you?”
“That we will, Daniel. Hel’s navy will have a devil of a time protecting their transport ships, and the frost giants will have it even worse. There are only a few passes for their armies to march through, and more importantly for their supply lines.”
A stir went through the crowd then, and I felt a surge of magic from the middle of the plaza. Sure enough, someone had just opened a gate there. This one was just a shimmering field of golden energy, with no physical pillars or arch to outline it. But the glow was bright enough that it would be hard to misjudge where the edges were, even in daylight.
The band of troops nearest the gate immediately began to march through at a rapid pace. There were easily a couple thousand men gathered here, but the gate was wide enough for them to go through four abreast, so this wasn’t going to take long. Maybe ten minutes?
“Looks like I’d better find the commander, and see where he wants me,” I said. “It won’t hurt anything if I fly through over the heads of the men, will it?”
“Nah, we train that sort of thing with the Valkyrie sometimes. I still can’t believe he hasn’t already briefed you, though. He’s seen you fight. Surely he knows what role he’ll need you for?”
I shrugged. “Maybe he wants to see the terrain first? Good luck out there.”
I rose into the air, and zipped across the plaza to pass through the portal. It was a good fifteen feet high, and the unit passing through right now was all sword-and-board infantry, so there was plenty of room.
The other side was at the bottom of a small bowl-shaped valley surrounded by hills. The ground was rocky, with patches of grass broken up by stretches of exposed rock and the occasional large boulder. The slopes were steep enough to be tough going in most places, but at least it wasn’t raining here.
I glanced up at the overcast sky, and amended that thought. It wasn’t raining yet, but it obviously wouldn’t be long. Great. What a lovely day to be outdoors.
Sure enough, Caspar’s command group had already gone through. A group of aids was setting up an awning over a large, suspiciously flat-topped rock where someone had laid out a map. Caspar and a couple of other officers were standing next to it, having an animated discussion. I flew over and landed at the edge of the group.
“Daniel!” He called. “Just in time. How far can you see from the air?”
I looked up, and considered the question. “Depends on the weather, and what I’m looking for. In these conditions I can find their main body easily enough, but small groups would be easy to miss. If they disperse and take advantage of the terrain there’s a good chance I could lose them.”
“That’s fine, I just want to know which direction they’re in before we deploy. Today is a mutual search and destroy mission, so they could be anywhere.”
“Alright, I’ll take a quick look and come back,” I said.
“Don’t go straight up,” one of the officers called as I lifted off. “They know you’re on the field today, and we’ve trained to fight with air support. They’ll have spotters looking for you, so don’t give away our position.”
“Good to know,” I replied.
I rose just high enough to pass over the gathering army, and zoomed off towards the mountains that dominated the western horizon. They were the best landmark I could see from here, and I really didn’t want to embarrass myself by getting lost. I passed over a ridge line into another valley, crossed that and climbed the slope of a taller hill before gaining altitude.
Flying never gets old. The rugged hill country dropped away below me, and a breathtaking vista spread o
ut all around. From half a mile up I could see that the horizon seemed to be much further away than normal here. We were in the foothills of a mountain range, which ran north and south as far as I could see. To the east the hills extended another few miles, and then flattened out into a broad expanse of lush farmland. Little clusters of colorful buildings dotted the plain, connected by a branching network of roads paved with yellow bricks.
Far off to the northeast, I could make out an improbably massive wall rising to enclose a settlement vast enough to look like a proper city even to my jaded 21st century eyes. That was obviously Asgard, even if it was too far away for me to pick out any familiar landmarks.
About the same distance to the south, the farmland ended in a rocky coastline. Beyond that an ocean stretched off as far as I could see. There were a few small settlements along the coast, and while ships were just tiny dots at this distance I could see a surprising number of them.
So this was where the battle of Ragnarok was supposed to take place?
I wondered what preparations Odin had made, with hundreds of years to scheme. If I were in his shoes that whole plain would be a killing field, one way or another. But I wasn’t here to scout out Asgard’s defenses.
I turned my attention to the hills and valleys below me. Caspar’s army was easy to spot, still assembling in the valley I’d come from. But where was the enemy? The nearest valleys all looked empty, and I was pretty sure I couldn’t miss two thousand men drawn up outside a gate.
Then again, our opponents were probably a lot better at this than Caspar. What were the chances they had an effective system for hiding troop movements from a flying scout?
Yeah, just about a hundred percent. Instead of looking for people or visible movement I concentrated on my mage sight, and tried to pick out the gate.
Aha!
It was an elegant spell, with layers of baffling to smooth out the disturbance it caused in the local mana field. But it isn’t easy to hide a spell powerful enough to teleport an entire army hundreds of miles. The best they could do was make it stand out like a searchlight instead of like the sun, and that wasn’t nearly good enough.
Once I’d spotted the magical signature it was easy to find the glow of the gate itself. But sure enough, there was no army gathered around it. At this distance, with the haze of impending rain in the air, I could barely make out the tiny shapes of men marching through the gate. After passing through they immediately turned and started to spread out, their camouflage-patterned cloaks blending into the rocky ground as they moved away.
On the good side, the guys I could see were headed off at an angle that took them away from Caspar’s army. So they probably didn’t know where we were, they were just doing some kind of pre-planned deployment maneuver.
I dropped straight down to the hilltop below me, and then headed down the slope a bit until I was sure the terrain would hide me before circling back. It added a few minutes to the trip, but I made it back to Caspar’s little command post just before the gate closed.
“Finally,” he grumbled. “What took you so long?”
“Making sure they couldn’t see where I was going,” I replied, moving to the map. “They’re northwest of us, several miles away. Let’s see. There’s the narrow valley, so that must be the hill with the pointy top… there, that should be the valley where their gate opened. But they’re dispersing right out of the gate instead of assembling like we are, and their men are all camouflaged. It’s going to be hard to spy on them from the air without giving our own position away.”
Caspar studied the map with an eager look. “That’s fine. Let Rurik throw his troops into confusion trying to hide from eyes in the sky. We shall strike hard while he’s busy casting about for our whereabouts, with his men too dispersed to resist. As for you, Daniel, I have a special mission for you. I’m sending the Moon Ghosts to skirt around the battlefield to the west, and find Rurik’s command post. I want you to go with them, and cut a path through any opposition they encounter.”
I had to raise an eyebrow at that. “Is there some reason I shouldn’t just cut a hole through the middle of his army instead? I’d do more damage that way, and it’s not like they can stop me.”
“As if a man with Rurik’s experience would fall for something so obvious,” Caspar scoffed. “I didn’t bring you here to waste time arguing, wizard. Get moving.”
I shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
It looked to me like he was overthinking the situation, but whatever. I was a little skeptical about our odds of finding the enemy commander, since he was bound to have his own rangers out. But I could at least make sure the Moon Ghosts didn’t get wiped out in an ambush, so maybe they’d be in a better mood at the end of the day.
Once we were away from the clearing Captain Arnor called me over to confer, while his men deployed into a series of smaller teams.
“What can I expect from you in a fight?” He asked.
“Lots of fire and explosions,” I replied. “I can blow things up very effectively, although my accuracy falls off at longer ranges. I can also throw up magical barriers that will take a good beating before they collapse, or use earth magic to make obstacles. My wards will stop any normal weapon, or even most magic ones, and unlike most wizards I can throw out attacks all day without exhausting my power.”
He grimaced. “The damned popinjay should have put you in the middle of the line, and let you cut down the enemy’s main body.”
“Yeah, but he’s not interested in listening. So, do you want to do this loud and fast or slow and quiet?”
“How loud are we talking?” He asked.
“Well, I’ve got some single-target spells that are good for quiet takedowns. But my big AoE stuff is about as subtle as calling down lightning bolts.”
It occurred to me to be impressed that this language had a concise word for area of effect attacks. English didn’t develop a term like that until the advent of big multiplayer fantasy games, and gamer slang is designed more for easy typing than speech. I suppose having real wizards here led to some divergence in language development.
“Alright, then I want you here in the forward response team,” he decided. “I’m going to skip over the usual skirmishing and push for a speed run today. Hold your magic until we get tangled up in the enemy rangers, and then I’ll want you to take out archers and anyone dumb enough to clump up while we fight our way through them. Our strategy here is to hide the fact that you’re with us as long as we can, and then move fast enough to do some real damage before they can redeploy.”
“Got it. Think we can really catch their command group?”
“Not a chance,” he scoffed. “Commander Rurik isn’t going to have all his officers in one place like the popinjay. Not when he knows he’s up against a wizard. He’ll have worked out plans and contingencies beforehand, and dispersed his commanders with their units. He knows these hills like the back of his hand, so he’ll be tucked away in some hidden vantage point where no one can find him but his messengers. Even if we did take him out his second would just take command, and carry on with their plans. But orders are orders.”
“Yeah, that’s what I figured.”
Note to self: trying to match wits with some military genius who’s been fighting practice wars for hundreds of years is a losing proposition. If I ever have to fight these guys I’d better keep things simple, and just use overwhelming firepower to clear the field. But it would be better to stand back and let Loki bury them in monsters. The more casualties both sides take in this war, the better off I’ll be afterward.
Hmm. How was Loki planning to beat an army that gets to resurrect all its casualties every evening? There must be a limit on how fast the Halls can bring them back, or something along those lines. But still, I was starting to see how Odin thought he could win this.
The Moon Ghosts loped out of the mustering area at a pace most men would have had trouble sustaining on level ground. I kept up by using my flight magic at low power to negate most
of my weight, but it was still a pretty brutal pace. We swept west over a ridge line, followed a trail along a rocky slope for a bit, and then paused briefly just below the peak of a hill while a couple of scouts crawled up for a look.
“No movement,” they reported after a few minutes.
“Guess you really did get away without being seen,” Captain Arnor mused. “Otherwise they’d have a light band doing a rush down the slot to hit the popinjay’s command post while our main body is marching the other way.”
“Sounds like you really know how this guy thinks.”
He shrugged. “You fight a few thousand battles over the same terrain, you get a feel for what’s possible there. The flow of battle can only go so many ways, no matter how clever your commanders are. Alright, they’ve had time to get an observation post up on the Sharp Roost by now, so we’ll have to take the Lower Trail to keep out of sight. When we come out into the Boulder Field we’ll break up into teams and keep ten yard intervals so we’re harder to spot. Let’s move.”
The rest of the men obviously knew exactly what he was talking about. As the company circled down the west side of the hill I reflected that this reminded me of the way veteran players in those online battle arena games talk about strategy. Every map has a ‘meta’ - a set of tactics people have discovered over the course of thousands of games, that dictates the best moves and countermoves on that particular terrain. I guess something similar happens when you fight real battles over the same terrain enough times.
Thrall (Daniel Black Book 4) Page 19