CHAPTER SEVEN

HOW COME WE JUST GET RID OF ONE PROBLEM, and ten more pop up in its place?” Niklas Theilsson muttered his question to the wind, not really expecting an answer. He sat astride his warhorse, looking out over the windswept Northern Plains. In the distance, the Riven Mountains jutted skyward.

“I could have done without coming back here, after the battle.” Ayers, Niklas’s second-in-command, put words to what Niklas had just found himself thinking.

“‘Never’ would have been too soon,” Niklas agreed. Not far from here, Niklas had commanded Blaine McFadden’s army against the forces of Pentreath Reese and Vedran Pollard in the Battle of Valshoa. Now, months and many battles later, Reese was imprisoned and what remained of Pollard’s troops had been sent running with their tails between their legs. For now. Niklas had learned the hard way that no enemy should be counted out until the body was in its grave. And perhaps, not even then.

“They’re vermin, compared with what we’ve fought before.” Ayers’s voice cut through Niklas’s thoughts.

Niklas shrugged ill-humoredly. “Vermin can be dangerous, if there are enough of them and they’re cornered,” he observed. “And there are other things we should be doing, rather than hunting down a bunch of bandits and marauders.” The list of other priorities was long and exhausting: Rebuild Quillarth Castle and the city of Castle Reach. Reinforce the seawall by the main harbor in Castle Reach, and rebuild enough of the shipworks to set about repairing the seaworthy vessels that had not burned or sunk in the Cataclysm. Help the farmers and the millers and the brewers with their work so that neither the army nor the people would go hungry. Even with an army at his disposal, the tasks were endless.

“Makes you wonder how bad it is in Meroven, if they’re coming over here to raid,” Ayers remarked.

Niklas nodded. “And from what Rikard and the other mages have been able to scry, I’d say it’s every bit as bad as it is here, maybe worse.” Even here, in the sparsely populated plains, the devastation from the Cataclysm and the Great Fire was unmistakable. Farms, barns, and houses, even whole towns, abandoned and in disrepair. Manor houses, burned and left to rot. Those who survived the fire and wild-magic storms, the magicked beasts and the Madness, packed up what they could carry and gathered together in small settlements farther south.

“I thought Castle Reach had a long way to go,” Ayers said, eyeing the dilapidated, lifeless village ahead of them. “And then we come out here, and I realize how much there is to do before Donderath comes close to being where it was before.”

“One foot in front of the other,” Niklas replied. “Just like when we marched back from the war. At least now, everything’s not on fire.” Niklas had led a group of weary, wounded, and soul-sick survivors across war-torn Donderath after the Cataclysm. Their journey had taken months, foraging for food, dodging storms and magicked beasts. The devastation had been fresh, then. Walled cities and small farms still smoldering from the Great Fire. Starving livestock, feral dogs, and desperate men seemingly around every corner.

“Aye,” Ayers agreed. “We’ve come this far. Perhaps we can roundly trounce the marauders, send a few survivors home to warn off the others, and go back to what we were doing.”

Niklas gave a deep sigh. “I doubt it will be that simple.”

Ayers shot him a wicked grin. “Neither do I, but we can dream, can’t we?”

Five hundred men had ridden north with Niklas and Ayers from Castle Reach, leaving the bulk of the army to protect the city. Now, Niklas rode at the fore of a small team riding along the foothills to drive back bandit gangs.

“If there are brigands holed up in there, they’re mighty cool about it, with us sitting out here, sizing them up for the taking,” Ayers observed with a nod toward the silent village a few hundred yards away.

Niklas snorted. “What choice do they have? It’s too open to make a run for it, too far to the mountains to find cover. They’ll wait us out, hoping we’ll ride on.”

“Do you think they’re mages?” Ayers asked, eyeing the village suspiciously. If the bandits had claimed the village for their own, they had taken pains to hide their presence well. No telltale hoof marks or footprints marked the southern approach. The buildings, worse for the wear after a year exposed to the elements with no one to maintain them, were dark and silent. There was no motion except for the wind through the tall grass.

“Not according to Rikard. Unless they’ve got mages good enough to hide themselves from ours,” Niklas replied.

By now, Niklas’s men had circled the decrepit village. Even before the Cataclysm, the tiny hamlet of Irkenford had been little more than a crossroads trading town. The inn had burned in the Great Fire, along with the barns in the fields on the outskirts of the village. Two dozen sod houses with damaged thatched roofs circled a center green with a silent bell tower that had somehow escaped the flames and storms.

The village was small, but Niklas still had no desire to fight a battle through its narrow streets. Even against a smaller force, a street fight could go wrong in too many ways, especially when the enemy had time to set up defenses and claim the territory for their own.

“Let’s bring the bastards to us,” Niklas said grimly. “Do it.”

Rikard raised his hands, closed his eyes for a moment in concentration, and then made a gesture in the direction of the lifeless village. A bell rang, clanging as if a madman swung from its ropes.

“Fire!” Niklas shouted.

Archers let loose a volley of flaming arrows. The arrows stuck in the roofs, catching quickly on the dry thatch and spreading on the wind. Smoke rose from the rapidly burning buildings as the bell clanged on.

“Look there!” Ayers shouted, pointing as a figure stumbled from one of the deserted houses, barely dodging another round of arrows that drove him back inside under the burning roof.

Niklas glanced toward Rikard. Thin, prim, and fussy, the mage had once been in service of a noble house. Now, he had gained an unwanted amount of experience in battle magic, and despite his preferences for the relative safety of a workshop, he had turned out to be quite good at creating havoc under pressure.

“At least twenty of them, with horses.” Alsibeth had moved up close enough to where she could speak without shouting. Rikard had an arsenal of handy tricks he could do with his power. Alsibeth was a seer, frighteningly accurate, so her abilities were best utilized behind the lines of battle.

“Can you see what kind of weapons they’ve got?” Niklas asked, never taking his eyes from the burning village.

“Nothing unusual,” she replied.

“Here they come!” Ayers shouted.

“Let’s go get them!” Niklas shouted, standing in his stirrups as he led the charge.

Riders on horseback streamed from their hiding places, whooping and shouting fiercely. Mounted archers returned the bow-fire, sending arrows back toward Niklas’s men even as his soldiers tightened their circle around the raiders, giving them nowhere to run.

“Fire!” Niklas ordered, and another round of arrows shot toward the marauders. Three of the men fell from their mounts, arrows protruding from their chests. Still the raiders rode on, caught between their burning hiding place and the incoming soldiers.

The marauders fired volley after volley, but Rikard made another gesture, and the arrows dropped from the air and landed harmless on the ground. The riders veered away, only to be shunted back again by the tight circle of soldiers, who bided their time, in no hurry to engage with swords when magic and arrows could harry their enemy at a distance.

“Behind you!” Rikard’s shout warned Niklas an instant before an arrow zinged past his ear. He turned to see a dozen more Meroven raiders riding hard toward them from the rear, swords out and bows at the ready.

“Where in Raka did they come from?” Ayers growled.

“Somewhere we overlooked,” Niklas muttered. “Listen up!” he shouted to his soldiers. “Every other man, turn to face the rear. We’ve got trouble! The rest of you, hold the line!” Riding like storm winds, a second wave of raiders thundered toward them from behind.

Meroven had been known before the Cataclysm for having some of the finest horses on the Continent, bloodlines coveted and prized by kings and nobles. That blood showed in the fast, sleek horses the marauders rode, horses that had seen enough of battle not to shy away from the clang of steel or the battle howls of their riders. These aren’t mere brigands, Niklas thought, even before he first crossed swords with one of the wild raiders.

Twenty men rode at Niklas and his soldiers fearlessly, swords gleaming in the sun, disciplined in their attack. Half of Niklas’s men turned to fight the enemy behind them, while the others fended off the raiders trapped between them and the burning village.

“Leave some of them alive!” Niklas shouted to his men as they rode hard after their attackers. “I want to find out what they know!”

“You won’t be alive to ask us.” One of the raiders rode straight for Niklas, veering off only when Niklas lowered his long sword and braced it like a lance. They circled again warily, and this time, Niklas took the offensive, swinging his sword hard enough to hear the snap of bone as the blade connected with the rider’s arm, slashing through flesh. He swung again, and this time, his sword took the man’s head from his shoulders, and the body toppled slowly from the horse, blood covering the corpse and its mount.

A second rider was after him by the time he had barely cleared his sword from the last man’s body. The marauder looked to be barely out of his teens, but he rode as if he were born to the saddle, and he carried the sword in his hand with practiced ease.

This rider made no grand challenge of headlong attack. Instead, he made a swipe with his blade at Niklas’s horse, a strike Niklas only barely deflected before it gutted his mount. Grinning with his near victory, the marauder turned and came at Niklas again, looking for a weak point.

The raiders wore no uniform. As with Niklas’s men, it was enough in these years after the Cataclysm to have clothes. Yet each wore a woven armband around his left arm, made of rope and fashioned with bits of stone and metal. Niklas had no idea whether it was a talisman or a symbol of the riders’ group, but it marked them as a team, as did the black kerchiefs they wore loosely tied around their necks.

Before the raider could strike again, Niklas bellowed a cry and rode straight for him, and the sudden reversal of tactics threw the marauder off, just for a second. That was all the time Niklas needed to make his charge, swinging his blade to catch his opponent in the left shoulder, severing the arm with one blow. Grievously wounded, thrown off balance, the rider scarcely got his sword raised before Niklas cleaved him shoulder to hip.

The fight had turned. Niklas dared not look behind him, but more and more of the men who had held the perimeter against the raiders in the burning village now joined the skirmish against the new arrivals. Two of the raiders tried to turn tail and ride away, but Niklas’s men easily rode them down. The marauders’ numbers were waning, and Niklas saw only minor casualties among his own men.

“Remember, leave a few for me!” Niklas shouted. Dead or dying riders littered the ground. The tall, swaying grasses had been trampled down and sprayed with blood. Only two of the riders remained, and as Niklas watched, his men made short work of them, running one through and knocking the other from his mount with a deep gash to his thigh and a partly severed left arm.

“That’s all of them.” Rikard rode toward Niklas with Alsibeth close behind. Niklas turned toward the village, and saw nothing but smoke and corpses.

“How in Raka did we miss the second half of their men?” Ayers demanded, still flushed from the fight. He had a bloody gash on one arm, and was sprayed with enough blood that for a moment, Niklas feared Ayers had taken a serious wound before he realized his second was covered in the gore of his enemies.

“We didn’t see them because they weren’t here,” Rikard replied matter-of-factly. “There was no one close. My guess is that they happened into us, perhaps scouting farther afield and returning to base.”

Ayers thought about it for a moment, then gave a curt nod. “Could have happened like that, I suppose,” he ventured.

“Geir said he’d join us after he took care of some business with Penhallow at Glenreith. I want him to read the survivors, see what we can learn,” Niklas said.

“We’ll find the least injured, see if we can patch them up long enough to live until nightfall,” Ayers replied. “I’ll take care of it.”

Niklas looked to two other soldiers who were within hearing range. “You there. Gather up any horses you can find that the raiders left behind. Those are good mounts, and we’re in need of some.”

The soldiers headed off, and Niklas eyed the burning village. “Pity we can’t get closer, see if there’s anything we could learn from their camp.” The flaming arrows had torched the thatched roofs of the closest buildings, but the fire had spread quickly in the dry summer heat, so that most of the structures were now ablaze.

“Every tactic is a trade-off,” he sighed. “I can’t complain. We would likely have lost more men if we’d had to fight them house to house.”

“Any doubt about where they came from?” Ayers asked with a knowing glint in his eyes.

Niklas shook his head. “None at all. They fought like Meroven and they looked like Meroven. Gods above! I had hoped never to see one of those bloody bastards again in all my life.”

“Let’s get the prisoners situated, and get back,” Niklas said. “I want to be in camp before nightfall, in case the raiders have more friends along the way.”

Niklas watched as his men looted the dead and dying raiders for any weapons or supplies that might be useful. In a ‘regular’ war, such behavior was held in contempt. But the reality of Donderath’s reduced circumstances had elevated scavenging to an art. Make it do or do without, Niklas thought with a sigh.

One of the raiders lay nearby, his chest still rising and falling as the man struggled for breath. A sword had taken him through the abdomen, and his entrails spilled out in a slick, stinking mass beside him. Niklas drew his sword and approached cautiously.

“Tell me what you know, and I’ll give you a quick death,” he offered.

The raider looked up at him, eyes shocky and unfocused. “What I know?”

“Why you’re here. Who sent you? What you came for.”

“Food,” the man gasped. “Anything… we could carry. Not much left. Heard it wasn’t… quite as bad here.”

Niklas let out a short, bitter bark of a laugh. “You heard wrong,” he replied. Then again, he thought, he had no idea how bad things were on the Meroven side of the border.

“Who sent you?”

“Captain…”

“You must have a commander, a warlord, someone in charge—”

“Nagok,” the man gasped. His color was bad, pale and sweaty, lips faintly blue, eyes wide and white.

“Who is Nagok?” Niklas pressed, but this time, the man’s lips worked like a fish out of water, and a rattling breath was the only answer he received. Honoring his word, Niklas brought his sword down like a stake through the heart. The man shuddered and went still.

“We’ve got five men who might live through the trip back,” Ayers said, walking up and eyeing the scene as Niklas withdrew his bloody sword and wiped it on the dead man’s cloak. “No guarantees. If we lose a couple of them, there will still be some left to interrogate. But Geir had better hurry. None of them are in good shape.”

“Kill the rest of the wounded,” Niklas ordered. He had long ago lost any compunction about killing in battle. But there was nothing to gain by leaving men to suffer or face predators in their dying hours. He could spare them that, at least.

“Aye, sir,” Ayers said with a nod, and turned to shout the order.

Alsibeth came up beside Niklas so quietly that he startled and nearly drew his sword. “What do you make of it?” he asked her.

“I see… edges of a larger whole,” she replied. “The hem of a garment. The point of a sword. Waves, as they break on the sand.”

“What does that mean?” Niklas pressed.

“We don’t see the whole, only the parts,” Alsibeth replied, her voice dreamy and unnerving. “The tide is coming.”

“Tide?” Niklas asked.

Alsibeth sighed and shook her head. “I can’t tell you more, at least, not right now,” she said, chagrined. “It’s not like reading the answers from a book. More like stealing a glance at a tally with some parts smudged and other parts covered up… hard to put the pieces together until you have more information, and then, it’s sometimes too late.”

That’s a cheery thought. “So there’s something bigger to come? Something bigger in the works?”

She shrugged. “I’m sorry. That’s all I can see. But if I had to guess—and guessing can be dangerous when information is missing—I’d say that the riders are more than they appear. Spies maybe, or scouts. I don’t know just yet.”

Niklas nodded, reining in his frustration. “If you get any amazing insights in the middle of the night, wake me up and tell me, will you?”

Alsibeth managed a tired smile. “I will remember that, General.”

The ride back to camp seemed longer than Niklas remembered it. A supper of trail rations awaited them, but he was too hungry to quibble about the menu.

“For once, you brought the troops back in reasonable condition,” Ordel, the senior healer, said a few candlemarks later when he stopped by to provide a status report. “Patched up some gashes and cuts, a few bruises and scrapes, but on the whole, not too bad.”

Niklas nodded, and waved him into his tent. Ordel stepped inside, and Niklas brought a bottle of amber liquid from a trunk at the end of his cot. The tent held only necessities, not even his folding table or campaign chair, which were back at the main base at Arengarte. He preferred having less to strike and set up when they were on the move, but the sparse amenities made him long for the few personal items he left behind.

Niklas sighed. The raiders almost certainly were going to be a more difficult problem than he had hoped. It might be quite a while before he saw his tattered ‘luxuries’ again. “Have a nip?” Niklas asked, holding up the bottle. There wasn’t enough whiskey in the world to take the edge off life in postwar Donderath, but it helped, a little.

Ordel nodded and took a swig. “They’re getting better at distilling whatever goes into that stuff,” he said with a nod. Wine had disappeared with the vineyards after the war. Ale depended on surplus grain, and last winter the devastation of the farm fields and the lack of men to work them made for hungry bellies and little left over. Then there was the ‘whiskey’ or ‘brandy’—any drinkable concoction that could be distilled from whatever was on hand. Raw, potent, and sometimes dangerous, it would have to do until more stable times led to more reliable distilling.

Niklas shrugged. “It works. No one’s gone blind or died, and that stuff gives such a nasty headache that it’s sufficient warning to mind how much you drink.”

“We managed to keep two of your five captives alive. The others were too far gone to save.” He raised an eyebrow. “Do I need to tell you that my healers take a dim view of saving people just so they can be blood-read and then executed?”

Niklas sighed and looked away. “I take a dim view of it myself,” he admitted. “Just not sure what alternatives we have. Bad enough if these raiders are just separate bandit gangs. They still require men and resources that could be used elsewhere, and our soldiers can be killed by bandits the same as by warlords.”

“You’re afraid there’s more to it,” Ordel replied. He wasn’t a soldier, but he had lived among soldiers long enough to think like one.

Niklas took another slug from the flask, then carefully set it out of reach. “Yep. Alsibeth suspects so, too. And with raiders harrying the western side of the kingdom over by the Solveigs, it could take us a while to secure the borders.”

“During which you’re not fortifying Castle Reach and helping plant and harvest crops,” Ordel supplied. Niklas nodded.

“Too many threats, not enough of us to go around. And you know that, sooner or later, Reese and Pollard are going to show up again,” Niklas said.

Ordel looked over his shoulder at the dimming light just visible through the slit in the tent door. “It’ll be dark soon.”

Niklas nodded. “Geir knows how to find us.” Left unsaid was just how tired he was of fighting, how weary he had become of killing. He did not have to put it into words. Ordel knew, and shared the feeling. Niklas listened as Ordel made his report. Just as he finished, Ayers rapped on the tent pole in lieu of a door and stuck his head inside. “We’re past sundown,” he said. “Geir’s arrived.”

Niklas and Ordel exchanged a look and got to their feet, following Ayers from the tent. Ayers had cleared a tent to give them a private space to interrogate the two bloodied men, who sat bound to poles in the ground.

“Good hunting today, I see,” Geir said.

“Tolerably good,” Niklas allowed. “Problem is, we’ve had repeated attacks by raiders coming across the Meroven border. This group we fought today was too professional to be brigands. What I’d really like to know is, are they scouts? And if so, who’s the real enemy?”

Geir nodded. “And questioning in the usual manner revealed nothing?” Niklas knew that Geir disliked forcibly reading a captive’s blood. He was willing to use his talishte abilities to aid their cause, but he had already made it clear that he was not a weapon to be wielded as they pleased.

“By the time we had the ability to ask questions, they were already in bad shape,” Niklas said. “They fought hard, to their credit. But I need to know what I’m up against, if I’m to make the best decisions for Blaine on where the troops deploy.”

“Then let’s see what we can find out,” Geir said. He walked toward the prisoner nearest him. The man appeared dazed, and Niklas wondered whether Ordel had dosed both prisoners with mild sedatives, something innocuous to talishte, to spare the men pain and fear.

“Do you know where you are?” Geir said quietly, bending down to one knee so that he could look the first captive in the eyes.

“Prisoner,” the man mumbled. “Donderath.”

“Very good.” Geir’s voice was languorous and comforting, and Niklas knew from having watched the process before that once Geir met the prisoner’s eyes and used his talishte ability to compel cooperation, the prisoner would tell Geir anything he knew.

“Answer a few questions, and then you can rest,” Geir said in a honeyed tone that made the man relax against his bonds, gaze fixed on Geir with a vacantly hopeful expression.

“Yes,” the man slurred. “Questions.”

“Why did you come to Donderath?”

The man sat slack-jawed for a moment, as if it took longer for him to retrieve the memories. “They said there would be food, weapons, cattle, women,” he replied, his voice vague and dreamlike.

“Who said?”

“Commander.”

Geir gave the prisoner a patient smile. “Were the cattle for you or for your commander?”

“Gather, for troops.”

Niklas frowned. Geir, however, remained smiling at his compliant prisoner. “How many troops?”

“Lots.”

Geir glanced toward Niklas, who nodded. When Geir turned back to the man, he met the prisoner’s gaze. “You’re going to rest now. Sleep soundly,” he said with compulsion. “Feel no pain.” The badly injured man slumped in his seat, eyes closed, fast asleep. Geir took his left wrist and lifted it, palm up, to his mouth. He made a clean bite, and drank slowly from the man’s blood.

The other prisoner had been turned so that he could not see. “What’s going on?” the second man cried out with as much energy as he had left. “What’s he doing? Oh gods! What are you doing?”

After a few moments, Geir lifted his head and laid the man’s wrist back on his lap. Not a fleck of blood remained on his lips. Niklas moved to speak, but Geir shook his head and moved around to where the second prisoner sat. “Sleep,” he said quietly, and the worried prisoner relaxed, leaning forward in his bonds, head lolling. Once again, Geir drank from the man’s wrist, stopping while the prisoner was still breathing, though both captives had paled, and the first man’s lips were tinged with blue.

Finally, Geir stood up and turned to the others. “Both men are dying,” he said quietly. “They bleed inside.” He looked to Ordel. “I would consider it a personal favor if your healers can give them a deep sleep from which they do not wake.”

Ordel nodded. “We can do that.”

“Thank you.”

Niklas had seen Geir fight in battle, watched him snatch enemy commanders from their horses and rip them limb from limb in the air to terrify their troops. Yet he also understood Geir’s distaste for killing, especially when the victims no longer posed a threat. As if he guessed Niklas’s thoughts, Geir raised his head and looked at him.

“I’ve done much worse,” Geir replied to the unspoken comment with a bitter smile. “But I prefer to choose from whom I feed, and to do so without killing when it can be avoided.”

“I’m sorry for the circumstances,” Niklas replied. “But it was the only way we’ll find out what’s really going on across the border.”

Geir nodded. “And this time, it was for the best. I was able to read what the men had seen, even if they did not understand the import of what they witnessed. Their thoughts are focused on filling their bellies and bringing back cattle—or women—as spoils. But they are part of a much larger whole. Large enough to warrant being called an army.”

“And their commander?” Niklas pressed.

Geir thought for a moment. “Their commander is not the real power. He reports to someone else, who also reports upward. A chain of command, to the warlord Nagok. The prisoner wasn’t telling the whole truth about looking for spoils to carry home. Some of his missions have been spying, to uncover conditions on this side of the mountains and report back.”

“So the raiders are carrying tales back to someone with a bigger army,” Niklas summarized. “A warlord,” Niklas added. “Damn.”

“I’m afraid there’s more,” Geir added. “The prisoners have only seen the warlord at a distance. They are too unimportant to know more about his plans. But I saw the rally, where the men glimpsed their lord. He had talishte advisers.”