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Wedgewood
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The thinnest sliver of Lonely Soul rose in the east, dawn three hours away.
“You have the farthest to go,” Sedge whispered to Christina, “you better get a move on. We’re going through the front gate in ninety minutes, whether you’re in position or not.”
Christina looked to Perrin in the star-lit gloom of the gathering. She would lead the Zursh mercenaries in an attack along the outside of the south wall past the southern sentries of the Paleowright camp, and straight at the catapults. Her orders were to capture them, if possible, otherwise set them afire. Sedge himself would lead the eight Mearsbirch wards on a frontal assault of the camp. The attack would be in complete darkness; pandemonium would reign. He counted on it.
Pulling on a gauntlet, she asked, “Are you finished with your checks? We want no harness noise.
“Yes, Alon,” replied Perrin. “The men are ready.”
“Then let Mother guide us.” She held out a mailed hand, palm down. Sedge, Perrin, and the other commanders stepped in and placed their hands on hers to hear her blessing.
“The world turns. The sun rises, the moon sets. We live, we love, we cry. In spring the snow melts, in summer the grass grows, in autumn the leaves fall, in winter the hearth fires glow. Such is the wheel of Mother’s life. We are all on the wheel. Together we roll it forward. Tonight, we roll it forward to an uncertain future, but it is a future of our making. Mother calls.”
“Mother calls,” came the chorus.
Outside the wall, a young, female Timberkeep scout waited. Following behind Perrin were a hundred of the fittest of Barrigal’s and Perrin’s companies. Perrin was Christina’s mercenary captain as Barrigal’s wound kept him, grumpy and complaining, on the command deck as Ordern’s advisor.
The scout waited for her cue and the column set off. Downhill, through the Ungerngerists, on the thick carpet of needles, she led them. When well below the shoulder of the mountain they cut left. Their course took them parallel to the Ungern Way, where the Paleowrights camped. In time the scout signaled a halt. “From here we go uphill to our position.”
Near the attack position, Christina whispered, “Where are the sentries?” Through the forest the near-death campfires of the churchmen camp flickered. The Paleowrights were trying to burn green wood, she noted, live pine needles still on the limbs. She held sympathy for the anger and shame that coursed through the Timberkeeps. The Paleowrights greatest insult came not in the slurs they used, the demands they made, or even the ruin of Wedgewood, but in how they villainized the forest. Of all ironies, the Paleowright’s greatest affront was least appreciated by them. Until now, the stewards of the forest had been powerless to stop the malodorous ilk. Until now.
The scout made a motion of a finger across her throat.
Christina acknowledged. The two nearby Parrot sentries were dead. “They won’t come to check on them?” she asked.
The scout shook her head and crept closer. “They’re lazy. We’ve been watching for two nights now. Their watch rotation is the same. These are city troops; they mount a night guard like they are on a wall.”
Christina watched the scattered camp, fire pit embers glowing in the dark. “Where are the catapults?”
Pointing, the scout whispered, “Through there, Maybe two hundred yards.”
Perrin swallowed. They were about to charge into an enemy of over a thousand soldiers. The Alon crouched close, then asked, “We’re set?”
“Yes,” he answered.
Studying the tents for signs of movement she said, “We wait for the message from Sedge.” Their telepath, a teenager, kneeled behind them. When he saw them look to him, he shook his head at the implied question. No message as yet.
Time crawled like a slug on a forest trail. Seconds slowed to minutes.
“Is this your first battle,” Christina asked the telepath. He wore no helmet in the style of other pathics. His long brown hair hung lank on his leather jacket. His longbow was the hornbeam version, stout and stiff. He carried two quivers full of the green and white fletched arrows of his ward.
“Yes, Alon. But I fought on Hallow Meade and then Archwood.”
Perrin grunted in satisfaction.
She nodded. “Tough fight at both.”
“Heard Archwood gave uppance to the Britches.” Perrin watched for signs of movement by the fires.
The lad nodded earnestly. “We did. The smoke, fire,” he swallowed, “the Britches thought it would help, but we shot them anyway.”
“How old are you?” she asked.
“Sixteen summers, Mam.”
She breathed at that, feeling her chest expand in her armor. “Who is your partner?” Telepaths operated in partner-pairs, the familiarity between the two critical for connecting across the trackless ether.
“My sister, Alon. She is one of five with Sedge.”
Five? She’d not expected Sedge to have five pathics with him in the attack. “How old is your sister?”
“Eighteen.” The pathic raised his hand and dipped his head. “The First Ward is through the Main Gate.”
Christina set her jaw. Standing, her greaves creaked, binding at the ankles. She bent and undid the buckles, laying the plate and leather guards aside.
“What?” asked Perrin, seeing her strip them off.
She shook her head. “Speed my good captain. Speed. They’ll slow me down.”
Taking a step forward, no hue or cry heralded her appearance. Perrin made a signal, and to either side, the Zursh mercenaries stood. They quietly drew their weapons from padded sheaths and muffled slings. A long line of silent, dark shapes.
Christina raised her sword high. Then swept it down and with no preamble launched into a sprint. She ran, the cold air flowing through her armor. Peripherally she sensed the black and silver shapes of the mercs slicing in, compressing behind her, a long wedge narrowing as she charged forward. Like a Barren's Leopard, with fluid grace, following the undulations in the ground, Christina ran, trusting her innate senses. In a breath, she swept past the first fire ring of orange coals. Amongst the enemy tents, she dug into the soft loam, flashing past tent stakes, guide ropes, and stacked pikes. Her armor, shield, and sword mere feathers to a hawk. Wind rushed through her helm to carry her flaxen braid behind. Behind, the merc company pounded, chain mail crinkled, greaves and gauntlets rattled, but not a word was uttered. Where she was the mist, the men were the rain. A churchman in a tent said, “Hey? What’s up?” Another groggy voice answered, “What, I’m trying to sleep; leave me be.”
Christina ran.
“But someone just went running past our tent.”
Christina ran.
“Well, then go and look.”
Christina ran.
“Ach, that’s the sergeant’s job. I’m not interested. If they need us, they’ll get us.”
Christina leaped a pair of crossed guide ropes and angled hard to her left where an angular shaped squatted in the greater darkness. More by sense and intuition than by sight, she headed for a second hulking shape. A churchman stepped from a tent to relieve himself. She came up from behind at full tilt and drove her shoulder into his head, sending shivers down her arm. The man shot forward and crashed into a tent.
She drew up in front of what was indeed the second catapult, skidding to stop in the pine needles and spinning round in search of a sentry. The man she clocked lay still, thirty yards away, his tent dark and silent. Her telepath arrived, hard on her heels. He quickly notched an arrow.
Perrin met her. “Anyone challenged us?” she asked quickly.
He shook his head, his eyes wide at their good fortune. Christina stared at him, at a momentary loss of what to do next, for she had expected to fight their way in and face a melee around the machines. “Well then,” she exhaled a cloud in the cold air, trying to catch her breath. She was sweating. “Organize the men into three platoons. Station one,” another breath, “to the east, one to the south, and one here in the center.” Another breath. “The center platoon will be reserve.”
With Perrin gone she asked, “What is your name?” The young telepath held his longbow low, ready to draw. “Mitchern, Alon.”
“Well then, Mitchern, tell the command pathic we’ve captured the catapults with no casualties. The Paleowrights have not challenged us.
The lad searched the darkness, “I have.”
Hoarse cries sounded in the distance to the west. The distinct clamor of metal clashing against metal carried to them. A Paleowright bugle sounded briefly before it abruptly cut off. Christina listened. “I expect we’ll have company soon. Can you sense any interest in us?”
Mitchern stood still, his gaze straight. “They are waking up. Around us. More of them. There are tremors, questing, confusion,” he sought a description, “an edge of rising fear.”
“Tell Perrin I’ll be over there,” she pointed to the westernmost catapult looming black in the night. “You stay here with the command sergeants. There’ll be deserters fleeing Sedge; we’ll need to divert them, give them a fright on top the one they just had.” She tapped a sergeant and a runner to come with her.
The Paleowright battalion camped outside the Main Gate ceased to exist. Hundreds of Timberkeeps struck the camp, which in the Paleowright hubris, had no defensive works to protect it. They cut down anything that did not have white cloth streamers tied around their arms. The few churchmen to emerge from their tents and have the wits to immediately run survived.
The camp near the catapults began to come alive. First one lantern then another lit the inside of the large troop tents. A figure came striding out of the darkness, his silhouette instantly recognizable by his fluted helmet and shoulder boards. He walked past the catapults several wagon lengths away, oblivious to the silent men of the eastern platoon. They dared not stir, lest their invisibility dissipate with the Savior’s attention. “You in there,” the Scarlet Savior demanded of a tent shadow, “did you hear a horn blow?”
“Uh, no, I was asleep. But someone said there was a lot of running.”
The fluted silhouette, caught against the wan glow of a tent lantern, paused, “You,” he pushed on the tent corner, “did you hear a horn blow?” A man’s shadow could be seen to buckle on a belt. “Aye, I heard something, but it was cut off. I was going to check.” The fluted silhouette grumbled and began to move past the catapults but then, by premonition, turned and approached the silent line of warriors, stone boulders for all that they moved. “You there! Speak up! By the Ancients, you heard my question.” The Scarlet Savior walked right up to the line of warriors. The man before him stirred, and in his heavy Lamaran accent, stark against the Herberian lilt from the tents, said, “Horn? I didn’t hear no horn. Howbout you fellas?”
A cheerful chorus rippled amongst the black statues, “No, not me. No horn.” Then another added, “Who’d be daft to be blowing a horn and waking all yonder sheep?”
The Savior’s intake of breath rasped like an axe on a millstone.
Swords sprouted from the dark statues, and the paladin fell gurgling, his warning choked off. A yell of alarm came from the nearest tent.
“At ‘em boys!” the eastern platoon launched themselves at the tents, cutting guide ropes and bodily heaving themselves onto the canvas like children jumping on beds. They flattened the tents into death traps where anything that moved was stabbed.
Mitchern, with a message from the command sergeant, found Christina, her sword drawn, waiting for the enemy to form a counterattack. “Eastern platoon killed a Scarlet Savior,” he hurried. “The platoon is attacking the tents near the third catapult.”
She whirled to the east. Shadows, shapes, men running, and a growing commotion raised her fear. “Runner!” she called out, not caring who heard. “Get to the eastern platoon and tell them they are to stand fast.” She sought Perrin and found him with the reserve platoon. He was tense, staring in the direction of where the eastern platoon should have been. “Trouble,” she said.
“Aye,” he said tonelessly, “we’ve been discovered, and the eastern platoon is attacking.”
“Trees and leaves,” she cursed. “Take the reserve to where the eastern should be and have them stand their ground. Do your best to extricate them.” She spun on Mitchern, “How soon till Sedge gets here?”
He covered his ears with his hands and concentrated. “My partner is running – wait she’s stopping. I’m getting her attention.” Mitchern fell silent, then said, “She doesn’t know. Maybe five, ten minutes.”
“Have her ask Sedge if we can attack. We still have the initiative.” She thought about it. Many of the churchmen were just now rousing from their sleep. Done right, they could corral the hapless ones force them to surrender.
“Wait,” Mitchern said, “She’s trying to find Sedge. Seconds drained away. More Paleowrights were emerging half-dressed from their bivouacs and grabbing pikes. She could hear the eastern detachment clashing with spears and hacking at shields, bashing anything that moved which was easy as they were in the midst of a full battalion of pikemen. Eventually, the thirty warriors of the east platoon would have to fall back or be overwhelmed.
“No. We’re to stand and hold. They are coming.”
She glowered in the dark, then made up her mind. Running back to the southern platoon anchored dutifully where she’d left them, she told them. “Sedge will be coming from the west. If the churchmen organize a counter-attack, it will come from the east. Follow me.”
Finding the line of the reserve platoon, she arrayed the southern detachment beside them and formed a semi-circle about the catapult. She looked up through the canopy of the trees to see a purple glow in the east. Dawn approached.
A bewildered line of pikemen began to form to her front. More churchmen came running only to be stopped by the tableau. Men from the eastern platoon began returning by twos and threes with Perrin as the last, supporting a wounded Lamaran.
More pikemen arrived on the other side. As yet, they were unorganized, but one or two officers and a squad of Saviors were calling orders. Soon the mercenaries would be outnumbered, by a lot.
Grimly, Christina shook her head. “We have to attack.”
Perrin agreed, “It’s that or fall back. They’ll be on us as soon as the Scarlet Britches wise up.”
“Sound it.”
Perrin lifted his sword in the dwindling night. “For Zursh! Aregen et marinar!”
The battle cry went up, and they charged.
Sedge heard the cry. A hundred hoarse voices in the dawning light. He knew Christina would not attack unless things were desperate. He could see the looming shape of a war machine, a trebuchet of some sort. “Go! Go!” he called to the younger, faster warriors. There would be nothing fancy about this fight. Just a straight-up brawl. “Go!”
Captain Irons came up with eight squads. Decurion Uloch followed with his two centuries, but the pikemen were broken. Hundreds of churchmen were scattered, some dressed and others not. “Close order!” Irons called. “Trumpeter! Sound it!”
Uloch watched the Saviors array in a line abreast and shook his head in disgust. Their pikemen brothers were running like so many frightened cattle. He looked left and right at his ordered double line. Shields held perfectly slanted to the left ready to lock, spears pointed level, each step measured, all heads forward.
Irons slowed his pace to let the Drakans gain on him. Paleowright officers with two squads of Savior enforcers on each flank attempted to stem the pikemen route, herding them into groups. Then he saw the cause of the flight. A force of black and silver-clad Zursh mercenaries were striking down the last of the churchmen stragglers. How had they gotten this far?
Marching forward, the steady beat of forty Saviors keeping pace, Uloch watched as a tall warrior in brass and brown with a painted aegis called the mercenaries back into a line that shook itself out neatly along a low rise. He recognized her as the first dawn rays struck her shield.
Alex shouldered his way in beside Christina. “Look at all them Saviors. You’d think it was a Church festival.”
“There’s more of them,” said Perrin. “These are just the ones that aren’t hung over.”
Christina watched as the Saviors halted, then began to shift left making room for the approaching Drakans. On either flank, the Paleowright officers were having marginal success organizing the pikemen.
“There’s a large tribe of trogs coming back from fighting the Plains and Rock wards,” Alex said. “The Timber scouts are watching them. Could be more.” He listened to a Timberkeep ward horn sound muster. Then another, and another. “Going to be a hot day.”
Uloch’s eyes narrowed as more Timmy wards formed up on either side of the mercs. “Larech!” he called, then looked back to where the Washentrufel agent loitered with a pair of Church clergy. “How is it the Timmies feel free to send all their wards against us? Who’s manning the forts?” The answer presented itself on the left of the Wedgewood line. Two new wards, with strange devices on their shields, formed up. One, a red tree, and the other a house on a field. “Reinforcements,” he muttered.
“Will we attack?” asked the Scout's boss. “We have the numbers on them. The town is watched by Red Elm.” Sedge, Christina, Perrin, and the other commanders gathered in a hurried conclave. The entire Wedgewood assault force was array in a battle line along a low ridge east of the captured catapults.
Christina replied, “No.”
Sedge agreed, “We’ve achieved our purpose and more. We hold here.”
Perrin shook his head. “But we can crack the churchmen on either flank. Drive them, scatter them, and that would leave the Drakans or Scarlets to pivot. We could surround them.” Perrin wanted to finish the battle decisively. “We’ve broken the pikemen three times in three days. We can do it again.”
Christina looked grim. “We’d lose more warriors, many. We’ve been blessed by Mother. It is one thing to ask Red Elm and the Plains and Rock clans to come to our aid, but it is another to take them to war.”
“Aye.” Sedge flexed the muscles of his sword hand. “We broke the pikemen before. In all those cases, they were surprised. If they are going to stand, it will be here and now, set as they are with the Drakans and Scarlets to bolster them.” He gripped the sword pommel. “No. We will wait for them to attack.” Turning to peer at the war machines that lay behind them. “But I do think we should prepare our new toys, just in case the Church obliges us.”
“I’m ordering you to counter-attack, decurion.” Viscount Helprig railed at Uloch.
“I don’t take orders from you, count. You know that.”
“Cowards. That’s what you are and the lot of your men. You hide behind your emperor like a babe behind his mother’s skirts.”
Uloch faced the prelate. Though his mouth twisted, his eyes bore no umbrage at the slight. The viscount’s tactics were obvious. Without turning from Helprig, he ordered, “Optio, relay the skirmisher’s scouting report.”
“Sir.” The light-troop commander snapped to attention. “The enemy has manned the catapults and is preparing them with scattershot. They’ve moved six ballistae into position and are concealing them behind arrow screens.”
“And how many warriors do they have?” he queried, never taking his eyes from the viscount’s fuming face. “Between three and six hundred, sir. Could be more. They’ve moved two or three wards into the forest to the north and have taken up flanking positions along our probable approach.”
Nodding once, Uloch dismissed the officer and then tilted his head. “Let us take a tally, shall we your lordship? You came to Wedgewood with a thousand troglodytes, sixteen hundred pikes, and one hundred—"
“I know all that. Are you going to fight like a Drakan warrior or are you going to stand there and whimper!”
Unfazed, the decurion continued, “You now have none of your troglodytes, and of your pikemen, you have some three hundred. Many of them are demoralized, beaten. And to show for it you have nothing. The Timberkeeps have destroyed the mine and retain control of Wedgewood. Moreover, they have captured your siege engines. I dare say, sir,” and nodded his head at Captain Irons standing next to him, “If it were not for your Scarlet Saviors, you’d have no fighting force at all.”
The viscount’s eye’s narrowed to slits in the morning sun. “I will lodge a formal complaint with the archbishop, decurion. We will take your matter of refusal and gross cowardice all the way to the emperor!”
“As you may,” the decurion replied. “I see no further purpose in supporting this attack. You promised the Empire an operating base here in Wedgewood. That is clearly not possible.”
“We cannot achieve our goals because you will not attack!” Helprig stamped his boot, though the effect was lost on the thick carpet of pine needles.
Uloch said Larech, “Our business here is concluded.”
As the Drakans walked away, the viscount yelled at them. “We will be back. We will wait for them to dig out their mine, and then we will unleash the fury of the Church and restore the honor of the Ancients. This blot on their legacy that must not stand!”
When Uloch kept walking Helprig clamped his mouth shut and whirled around, daring any of the Paleowrights to say a word. Fuming, he needed someone to blame the disaster on. The decurion was an obvious candidate, but Helprig was no fool. Leveling accusations at the Drakans would draw the ire of the emperor, and the damned Washentrufel agents would give their account. It couldn’t be the troglodytes since they were his idea. A healthy dose of incriminations should be heaped on the hapless battalion commanders, but he needed a better scapegoat, someone, or something out of his control. “Captain Irons.”
“Yes, your eminence.”
“The archbishop will require a report upon our return to Hebert.”
“Yes, my lord.”
“You will write it.”
Irons looked out the corner of his eye at the predicant who turned away.
“You will note how the entire Doroman nation, clans from across Isuelt were raised against us, including battalions of Life Believers from Lamar and all of the Mother’s precious Defenders. Write with particular attention the despicable deed of the Timberkeeps. How they destroyed the mine in desperation, and we, in retribution, razed the town. And a final point, the Timberkeeps were aided and abetted by stolen Ancient technology carried here from Tivor no less, and that Marisa Pontifract of House Marinda had a personal hand in supplying the new weapons. Note that we have identified her chief spy and will endeavor to bring him to justice.”
Irons inclined his head to the prelate. “As you command my lord. Am I to assume that after we deliver the report to the archbishop that I am to pursue and apprehend the trader Achelous from Tivor?”
Helprig straightened his back, peering loftily into the distance. “Yes, and you will deliver the report to the archbishop yourself. I have other pressing business to attend. Make my excuses to his lordship for my absence.”
