by Guy Antibes
Fatigue finally caught up to him, and he lay back on his bloody bed and closed his eyes.
~
“Wake up, boy,” Bentwick said.
Sam lifted one eye open and then another. The sun was still a way off from rising, and the lamps had burned down. The room was dark. “Is Harrison awake, yet?”
“Not quite. Why am I in his bedroom?”
Sam sighed. His stomach began to remind him of his wound. “Temper did something to the cups, not the drink. I didn’t touch either, so when I heard Harrison fall, I dragged both your bodies to his room and positioned myself for an ambush.”
“There are men outside?”
“Dead,” Sam said. “I got three of them, and they killed the constables on duty.”
“The bodies are still out there?”
Sam nodded. He pulled the covers around him, struggled to his feet, and opened the door. The two dead assassins were still there. He walked to the stairway that led to the front foyer and pointed down. “There are more bodies down there,” Sam said. “I’m going back to lie down for a bit, at least until Harrison is awake.”
“He’s awake,” the healer said from the doorway to his bedroom. “And not feeling too well,” Harrison said. He looked at Sam. “But not as bad as you. I can tell by your face you are wounded. Come into my room.”
“The boy is hurt?” Bentwick said. “He has covered himself.” The chief constable looked at Sam. “You should have told me.”
Sam turned around and staggered into the sitting room that stretched between the two bedrooms. Harrison pointed to Sam’s bedroom and helped Sam to his bed. He ripped the boy’s shirt open and unwrapped the blood-soaked bandage. Sam looked at an ugly wound. Harrison walked out and came back with a jug of water and some alcohol. Sam had no idea where the healer got that. He left again and returned with his medical bag.
The healer cleaned Sam’s skin first. Harrison put the opening of the bottle of alcohol to Sam’s lips. “Take a good drink. We don’t have time to deaden your wound.”
Sam nearly spat out the burning liquid, but Harrison had him take five more gulps. Sam began to feel woozy.
“That will have to do,” Harrison said. Sam was so distracted by errant thoughts while the healer worked on him that he finally dozed off.
The bed sheets had been replaced by the time Sam woke up in the late afternoon in an empty bedroom. He struggled to a sitting position and staggered out into the sitting room before peering into the corridor. Bodies and blood had been cleaned up. He retreated back to the couch in the living room and sat down after his head began to pound from the exertion.
He didn’t know how long he had had his head back against the couch when Harrison walked in.
“Need something for the headache you undoubtedly feel?”
Sam nodded, but that even hurt. “I do. What did you and Bentwick find out?”
“Temper was obviously one of the gang members. You killed the escaped pollen-artist downstairs. It looked like Oakbrush slipped on a pool of blood. Did you lure him? No one knows the other man who you fought upstairs.”
“I couldn’t think of another advantage when I fought Les Oakbrush. He was much better than I was. I gave him an opportunity to thrust when he stood in a pool of blood, hoping his foot would slip. When it did, I had to move as quickly as I could since he had already wounded me.”
“You gambled with your life, but I can see you didn’t have a choice. He would have killed you had the floor been clear of bodies and blood. The wound wasn’t very deep. That was why you could move around like you did, but it was beginning to become infected, so I had to work to clean your wound. Sorry about that.”
“Nothing to be sorry about,” Sam said. “I did everything in self-defense.”
“Not just yourself, Sam. You saved Bentwick and me. It’s too bad about the constables. One of them escorted you around Mount Vannon, the tall one.”
“Oh.” Sam felt awful. “That makes it worse.”
“Why?” Harrison asked.
“If we weren’t here, Temper wouldn’t have attacked.”
Harrison shook his head. “Bentwick would have died, just like Ralt did. The alternative would be to turn away from the gang’s activities. To ignore them.”
“Chief Constable Bentwick wouldn’t do that.”
“And neither did you or I. It isn’t a pretty war, but war it is. You won a battle all on your own.”
Sam nodded, but he couldn’t help but feel numb from it all. “At least we recaptured the pollen-artist,” Sam said.
“That is one way to put it,” Harrison said. “Rest up. Bentwick has promised a catered dinner tonight.”
Harrison prepared a potion for Sam’s pain. He warned it would make him drowsy for a few hours.
Sam woke up on the couch. His head felt better. He stood up and walked out of the bedroom. He heard voices in the second-floor conference room and found Harrison, Tom Elbow, and Bentwick talking.
“Please have a seat, Sam. We are going over some last-minute information from Constable Elbow.”
Sam did just that and leaned forward to look at the documents spread out on the table.
There is another organization behind the mining company,” Tom said to Sam. “We don’t have the information on it in Mount Vannon. The Chief has sent birds to Baskin while you were sleeping. Hopefully, we will have an answer in two or three days, but it may take more.
“So the army might arrive before we find out?”
Bentwick shrugged his shoulders. “The king still needs to take over Shovel Vale and Worrier’s Flat, regardless of who is behind all this mess.”
“So what can we do?”
“Recover, for you,” Harrison said. “Bentwick has allowed us to bring Emmy upstairs, but you will be responsible for walking her around the constabulary stables a few times a day. You need to walk just a bit to help you recover, but not too much. In two or three days, you should be fine.”
Sam smiled for the first time since the attack. It felt good. “I would be happy to, and so would Emmy, I think.”
“It depends on what kind of scraps the inn’s cook is giving her,” Harrison said.
~
Sam stayed around the constabulary for the next week. Word hadn’t reached them from Baskin concerning the real owners of the Fealty Mining Company, but that didn’t stop the constables from finishing up the miner interviews.
Ionie Plunk had left Mount Vannon. Bentwick had tested every face at her establishment and even sent a message to the constabulary at Shovel Vale, ordering them to pick her up and detain her in their cells should she show up. “I did it for show more than anything,” Bentwick said to Harrison and Sam in the conference room. “They won’t respond. I’ve tried enough times since you two arrived.”
They kept going over their evidence once a day, but it was clear they had reached a point where they wouldn’t make any more headway in Mount Vannon. Without the missing Ionie Plunk, the dead pollen-artist, and the dead Constable Temper, they had exhausted their leads.
A constable arrived with a small piece of paper. “That army is camped a league away and requests the presence of Harrison Dimple and you, sir.”
“We will leave within the hour,” Bentwick said.
Sam’s stomach still ached a bit, riding Harrison’s wagon through the town and into the countryside, but he was eager to move ahead. It was war, and he was a blooded warrior, so Harrison had drilled into him. Perhaps they could rid the mountains of a plague of gang members.
The army wasn’t all that big, Sam thought, when they saw their camp nestled in a little valley. Five hundred soldiers. When Bentwick first talked about them, Sam had thought they would have enough men to stomp on all the thugs in Shovel Vale, but what he saw gave him a few doubts.
They reached the army, but Sam was told to stay out of the command tent, for now. He walked through the rows of tents and then found himself at the edge of the camp. Emmy received more notice that he did, and Sam was fine wi
th that. There seemed to be nearly as many quartermasters and cooks as men. He returned with Emmy and waited for Bentwick and Harrison to exit the command tent.
“Do we have enough men?” Sam asked.
“No,” Bentwick said. “You want overwhelming force. Five hundred soldiers against a walled town isn’t enough. We will head back to Mount Vannon and call up the town militia to join us. I am told we can field at least five hundred men, but they aren’t real soldiers.”
“Like me,” Sam said.
“Not quite like you,” Bentwick put his hand on Sam’s shoulder, but Bentwick didn’t tell him what Sam was like.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
~
I N TWO DAYS, BENTWICK RODE AT THE HEAD of a long column of the local militia, augmented by more constables. The townspeople used a variety of weapons. Most of them carried spears, but many had swords of varying quality. They would make their own pollen armor in a simple pattern they had been taught by the constabulary.
Sam scratched behind Emmy’s ears as she placed her head on the back of the driver’s seat of Harrison’s wagon. At least the Colonel who headed up the army from Baskin let them ride up front. Sam looked back and saw a column of dust and little else.
Harrison had imposed on the Mount Vannon healers for more supplies to support the town’s militia. It was either that or be drafted by Bentwick to accompany the troops. All four had no trouble providing what they could.
“Are you afraid, Sam?”
“You keep asking me that. Of course, I am, but that doesn’t mean I can’t fight. The gang tried to kill us. I have to defend myself. I saw how the people cower in a village. That will just spread, won’t it?”
Harrison nodded. “Unless it gets stopped. This gang has more behind it than any I’ve confronted before. Remember Bagbox, the man who wanted to be a lord at Horner’s Rest? I’ve run into his kind before, unless he is also a gang member himself, which he might be, for all we know. Sometimes it is better walking away from a confrontation, but this isn’t one of those times. Whoever is behind building the wall at Shovel Vale is after much more than a town.”
“So if someone took over Shovel Vale, where would they go next?” Sam asked.
“You tell me,” Harrison said.
“Let us say the gang has taken over Horner’s Rest. That would give them all the smaller mountain villages between Mountain View to Mount Vannon. Oak Basin and Riverville would be the only challenges. So they would want to take over those two villages last and then move on the two towns.”
“Right you are. That is a pretty good base to launch a rebellion if you have a re-opened gold mine to provide some extra cash.”
“So why send only five hundred soldiers?” Sam said.
“Do we have just five hundred soldiers?”
“No. We have about one thousand.”
“Does Bentwick look particularly stressed?” Harrison asked.
Sam looked at the healer. “He wouldn’t be stressed if he had a few thousand more soldiers coming a different way, since a dead Temper can’t report back to his real masters.”
“You are catching on, Sam.”
“But you don’t trust me?”
“It’s not me, it is a general of the royal army who doesn’t trust you, a fourteen-year-old boy.”
“I see.”
“I think you do, Sam. I’m telling you now because everyone is committed, and you have a right to know, since you’ve been in the middle of all this.”
“Does Bentwick trust me?”
“He does, so don’t worry. You will see plenty of fighting before this is all over,” Harrison said.
Sam could tell they were nearing Shovel Vale. “Where is the other army?”
“They came close to Mountain View and probably dealt with Bagbox on their way here.”
“They followed our path to Shovel Vale? They will take back Worrier’s Flat?”
Harrison nodded. “A source of reinforcements if we didn’t take care of them before Shovel Vale. The gang probably knows by now that two forces are heading their way. That’s why everything has taken so long. One of the king’s generals leads the other army, and the Colonel reports to him, so there is only so much we can do on our own.”
“Were they coming anyway?”
“Our work touring the mountain villages was what prompted the king to act. It has all been wait and see. Before we arrived, the spies that were sent into Shovel Vale never made it out.”
“So we were lucky.”
Harrison nodded. “That is why we left as soon as we found out the village had been taken over. I am a pain in the behind to those in Baskin, but since I have a legitimate purpose of visiting the villages, I can get away with more, since I do this every year. We barely made it out as it was.”
“You deserve a promotion for finding all this.”
Harrison laughed. “I am promoted out, Sam. I wouldn’t accept one even if the king himself knelt in front of me and pledged the kingdom of Toraltia in exchange for me accepting.”
“You wouldn’t?”
Sam couldn’t believe someone could reject a grand award, but he knew how Harrison lived. He wasn’t like Lennard Lager, the town lord of Mountain View, not at all. Sam wondered if he could give up riches or whatever Harrison gave up and continued to give up for his semi-reclusive life.
“No. There is nothing that I want other than to heal, occasionally, and tend to my herbs.”
“But you are a swordsman.”
“Among a million others in this world,” Harrison said. “There is always someone better than I. That is the way it is. You, on the other hand, are unique in the world, and with those spectacles, you can do now unusual things.”
“I can snoop, I guess.”
Harrison laughed. “You can, at that. When we stop tonight, we will do a little sword practicing. Fighting in a battle can be different from fighting a few angry men.”
~
The partial wall at Shovel Vale rose up from the valley, but it wasn’t much farther along than it was when they left. Where the wall stopped, the defenders had dumped debris of all kinds. Sam could smell the wall from where they camped a few hundred yards away, out of arrow range. Broken wagons, furniture, and garbage all combined to create a barricade.
From the direction of Worrier’s Flat, a Baskin army, larger than the combined forces from Mount Vannon, marched to positions on the other side of the city. Bentwick and Harrison invited Sam to meet with the army commanders once the larger Baskin force made camp.
Sam could plainly see that General Torrent knew both Harrison and Chief Constable Bentwick.
“Pretty straightforward. We attack and obliterate the enemy,” Torrent said.
Sam looked at the map. “What about escaping soldiers on rafts? Do you have a strategy to stop them from taking flight?”
“And this young boy?”
“My helper, General,” Harrison said. “He has accompanied me this year and has been anything but a burden. He does have a good idea. Do we have any strategy in place to keep gang members from fleeing?”
“Gang members?” Torrent asked.
“That’s what we are calling them. I wouldn’t call them an army, but they are more like a highly organized band of thugs,” Bentwick said.
“Well, I call them an army. From your reports, Harrison, there must be over one thousand of them.”
Harrison nodded. “They don’t operate with any sort of honor. Whoever is behind the purchase of The Fealty Mining Company, is behind setting up a fiefdom in the mountains.”
“Of course. I wouldn’t have dragged twenty-five hundred soldiers all the way here were it a normal takeover attempt.”
“What did Bagbox at Horner’s Rest have to say?” Harrison asked.
“He was gone before we arrived and took most, if not all, of his men. We will likely fight them all. Worrier’s Flat was a bit more productive. I sent an advanced unit to engage them. They were rounding up many sheep to leave the flats, but we got t
here first. They engaged us, but against trained soldiers?” General Torrent shook his head. He called for a captain.
Vannon looked at Sam as he said, “Take two hundred men and cut down trees to create a dam to stop anyone or anything floating down the river towards Mount Vannon.”
“Already done, sir,” the officer said. “Large tree trunks with their branches cut long enough not to impede the river’s flow, but enough to stop traffic. Another two hundred men have taken positions on the other side of the river to thwart any kind of retreat.”
“That is a good start,” the general said. He looked at Bentwick. “Why don’t we post two hundred of the Mount Vannon militia on the other side as well? The more of our troops are on the other side of the river, the less chance there will be an armed retreat into the mountains.”
Sam smiled. He wondered what other tricks General Torrent had planned for the attack on Shovel Vale.
“See, Sam Smith? Generals have to know more than how to steer an army all the way to Shovel Vale. We have to arrive with the proper tactics,” Torrent said.
Sam felt his face get warm. He didn’t know if the general was rebuking him or complimenting. “Yes, sir,” Sam said.
On the way back to their camp, Sam had to say something. “Should I not have said anything when we met General Torrent?”
Bentwick was the one to put on a smile and place his hand on Sam’s shoulder while they walked. “No. You had an observation and shared it. The general thought enough of sealing off the escape route that he had already acted. You shouldn’t feel embarrassed that you agreed with Torrent’s approach. I thought the way he told you he had already taken care of it was well done. Did you feel he called you stupid?”
Sam had to think for a moment. “No, but was my comment really obvious?”
Harrison laughed. “Not entirely obvious, but a good observation for a fourteen-year-old boy. You have no reason to feel bad about anything that happened at the general’s command tent. Tomorrow morning, we will get our orders and attack. I’m sure General Torrent does not want to give the gang any more time than he already has.”
