Dark Key: Book Two of the Phantom Badgers

by RW Krpoun

  The two pen-pushers were frozen in place, stunned by the sudden death. Durek grinned at them. "Have a seat. Ale?"

  The dogs threw the odds off, but in any plan things went wrong, Arian reminded himself. The windows on the second floor were an unforeseen problem, too, but that was life. Or death, if Dmitri’s crew couldn't keep the rest of the garrison busy; the windows, as attested to by the sounds of men and dice, opened into the garrison's barracks. They hadn't known that when they had planned this raid.

  The plan called for Rolf or Kroh charging in to start the dance, but before they could there was a silent, intense flash of light from one of the second story windows: Henri's work, to blind those of the garrison who were relaxing there. Aware of the entire plan, Arian had been expecting such an event from the instant he had seen the windows. A veteran simply went with the flow, and adapted.

  When he saw the flash from the corner of his eye he lifted his crossbow and shot the left-hand dog. Dropping the weapon, he snatched up Rolf's and aimed carefully, killing the second dog halfway to the wagon.

  Behind him was a rattling of chains and movement as the three 'captives' dropped their manacles and grabbed weapons from the straw; the guard in the hay loft toppled into the courtyard with Starr's arrow in his skull, and the smith fell with Elonia's quarrel in his chest. As he leapt from the wagon, the monk noticed the bodies of the two guards who had been examining the merchandise crumpled on the ground, clothes still burning: Bridget's work.

  An arrow took the stunned cook in the throat as Rolf charged up from behind. Arian squared off to meet the charge of the guard who had loosed the dogs, but the man's rush was ruined by Elonia's fighting net which enveloped his head and shoulders; a quick broadsword-thrust finished him before he could tear the mesh from his face. As suddenly as it had begun, the fight in the courtyard was finished.

  A captain's job really begins as the fighting ends, Durek often reflected. Keeping an eye on the two prisoners in case either suddenly developed a hero complex, the Dwarf moved to the kitchen door and bellowed for Bridget, keeping one ear cocked to the sounds of fighting overhead. If things worked outas they had planned he was hearing the sounds of a cold-blooded massacre of blinded cultists.

  The lovely priestess of Hetarian, sword-rapier in hand, swept through the kitchen, still clad in her grimy dress, her sword-belt of amber plates slung over her shoulder. The matching amulet and bracelet caught the light, the set a relic they had rescued from the forces of Darkness three years ago; Durek still had no clear idea as to what good they did, but Bridget assured him it was potent.

  "The cultists down out there? Good, any losses? Great. How many were there? Eight plus our five... all right, you've got six Badgers," the Captain gestured towards the courtyard. "Send two outside to watch for anyone trying to get out of the windows or showing an interest in the place; take these two clerks and stay in the courtyard so you can supervise our people and watch them. Have the others start searching the ground floor in pairs."

  The serjeant tossed him a salute and motioned with her sword blade for the prisoners to precede her through the door. As Durek pounded up the stairs he heard her addressing them. “Understand that I am a priestess of Hetarian, sworn to the Light and my goddess; do not, however, let this confuse you into thinking I have a passive nature. Move along.”

  The barracks was a bloody mess. Henri's flash spell had blinded nearly all the cultists, but one or two had put up enough of a fight to have wrecked the room. Dmitri and Janna were liberally splashed with blood and breathing hard.

  "Anybody hurt?"

  Dmitri shook his head. "Couple minor scratches on me; the other two are fine. If we had had more room there wouldn't have been a fight at all, but those who weren't blinded were far enough to the back to arm themselves before we could get to them. We got nine, all told."

  "Good enough. Janna, go back outside, Bridget's sending two sentries out and I want you to ensure that they're in good positions. Keep a sharp eye out-just our luck somebody will pass this way and hear the noise. Did you hide the bodies of the patrol?"

  "Not enough time." Janna shrugged. “It was touch and go just taking them out without alerting everyone else.”

  "Take care of that too. Dmitri, you and Henri start searching up here; work as a pair, and be careful. I think we got everybody, but don’t take any chances."

  Back down in the tap room, Durek eyed the bodies of the slain cultists; taking them had been quick and bloody, but not too difficult as the Gold Serpent were merchants, not warriors, counting on their position as go-betweens in the Void-worshipers society to protect them. Shaking his head, he began looking for a place to take reports that was not contaminated with the smells of violent death. Off the tap room to the east was the kitchen and a clerk's office; the latter was suitable. After lighting several candles he went out to check on his troop's progress.

  It took the rest of the night to sort out the cultist hold and its contents; keenly aware of how vulnerable they were in this place the Badgers worked frantically to accomplish everything before dawn.

  Durek was slumped in a chair in the little office listening as Bridget, in her usual clothes but still wearing the layer of dirt that had been part of her captive disguise, ran down a list of captured goods.

  "We're done with the search. Let's see, where to begin. In the strong room in the cellar we found twenty-six two-pound blocks of pulvas..."

  "Keep them for 'sale' when we go into Alantarn."

  "... bunch of occult stuff..."

  "Burn pile unless it could be sold to the Direthrell."

  "...a quantity of coins of all sorts of nationalities; to judge from their records it will be worth about twelve hundred Eisenalder marks, plus about two hundred ounces of silver in ten-ounce ingots..."

  "Keep it." The response was automatic.

  "...a box containing twenty-five of those poison quills like they used on Johann..."

  Durek thought on that. "Anybody feel comfortable with them?"

  “Elonia said she’s seen similar things used in the Suflands.”

  “She’s welcome to them, then. “ The Dwarf shook his head. “Don’t care for poison, myself, but each to his own.”

  “Pounds of really sick drawings.”

  “Burn pile.”

  “Henri’s already taken a bunch of them.”

  “Let him keep them provided they’re not occult-ish.”

  “No, just nude young women.” The advocate’s sniff was audible. "...and, let’s see, a big rack of what Henri says are exceptional wines."

  "Henri and Kroh can take five bottles each, two apiece for the others, dump the rest."

  "In the personal quarters and offices we found about ninety pounds of ledgers and documents..."

  "Take them."

  "...some personal moneys and jewelry, worth about three hundred marks, all told..."

  "Keep them. Have Kroh pull the stones from the settings and melt down the metal; no point in taking a risk that one piece or another might be identified later."

  "...two Storms of Disruption..."

  "Take them."

  "...some mystic odds and ends from the priest's quarters..."

  "Burn pile for anything you don't definitely recognize."

  "Everything, then. Arms and armor?"

  "Keep what we need for disguises, toss the rest down the well. The burn pile probably won’t get hot enough to pull the temper from the weapons."

  "Cult clothing and symbols?"

  "Keep what we need and burn pile for the rest."

  "The storerooms are an even mix of loot bought off Goblins and bandits, and trade goods. The most interesting is a large amount of tools for working metal, especially arms and armor."

  "Tools in the burn pile; arms, and armor down the well. Anything that we would sell to the Direthrell, we keep, provided it's small and portable. We can't load up on too much stuff without tipping off the staff that something's unusual."

  "There was a kind of chapel
in the old coach house."

  "Deface, destroy, and otherwise render useless the cult implements; burn the rest."

  "A cart and two teams."

  "Break the cart's axles; we'll take the horses along and turn them loose near a farm."

  "Twenty human and four dog corpses."

  "Down the well first; then as much of the arms and armor as will fit."

  "There are two wells so we've plenty of room for all. Last but far from least: there are six girls in that little cell block off the courtyard. They were acquired much as we were supposed to be, and have been kept for the morale of the troops. All are in pretty rough shape emotionally."

  "What have you done with them so far?"

  "They're still in their cells. I told them they were rescued, and took them a hot meal myself."

  Durek drummed his fingers and scowled. "They're a real problem. We have got to keep our identity a secret. We can't just take them with us and turn 'em over to the first friendlies we meet; that sort of thing starts talk. Plus, when the other cultists return, they'll probably look for the girls to find out who did this."

  Bridget tapped her chin thoughtfully. "Why don't Henri and I take them in the cart? I can keep them drowsy with a potion added to wine, using dried chamomile petals, and... anyway, I can keep them safely unaware of their surroundings and condition. We'll take them southwest and leave them with a temple or chapel; drop them off at night with a letter telling the basic truth: hide them from the cultists. We'll leave the cart with them, and catch up with you later."

  "Good; take Janna too. We'll tell Maximilian's staff that you went to visit a shrine, and the other two were for security. Leave forty marks with each girl; they'll need dowries or whatever." Durek studied the blade of his dirk to avoid Bridget's smile. The priestess had been the unit's conscience since the beginning, strongly supported by Janna. It had rubbed off over the years; as the Badgers grew more successful (and prosperous), Durek found himself making more and more humanitarian decisions. Oddly enough, it seemed to pay off more often than not; he was growing to believe that good deeds could, in some way, buy you luck. And the Eight knew they needed all the luck they could muster.

  The Badgers left shortly after dawn, Bridget's party leaving an hour before the others. As the main party pulled out a pillar of smoke rose from a bonfire in the middle of a horse pen. Buried under coal, firewood, and all the straw the stable had were the cult items and other goods Durek had ordered destroyed. Kroh estimated that the fire would burn for four hours, and the last embers would not be gone for at least a day. Reluctantly, they abstained from firing the inn as it would only draw attention. Arian performed a rite of purification in the coach house and another, more general rite throughout the building to inhibit the performance of any cultist ceremonies in the immediate future. A warning to all cultists signed with the Fiery Staff of his order was left nailed to the front door, so it was likely that those cultists who found the place would never suspect that it was anything but a normal cult-hunter action.

  Elonia lounged against a tall stump watching the back trail while the Badgers emptied the rocks out of the boxes and kegs that would now hold their disguises. Arian was moving from Badger to Badger, making sure that they had everything they needed to pass as a Golden Serpent group. Deceptions within deceptions, the story of her life.

  She stretched and yawned, tired. It had been thirty hours since any of them had slept and their next rest was another five hour’s ride away. Still, it had been a good raid: the heart ripped out of a cult, a good sum of money and other gear denied to the forces of Darkness, their own Company strengthened, six rescued from a dark fate. It had been easy given a good plan, good troops, and good luck; the cultists had been complacent, familiar with their surroundings and feeling secure, for cult-hunters did not seek the Golden Serpent as much as they hunted other, bloodier groups.

  She knew that to be a mistake for she knew the Serpent all too well: when she, posing as Moonsong, had reached her first station, it had been the Serpent who had carried her safely across the hundreds of miles between Alantarn and the West. They carried the messages from station to station, served as initial contacts with criminal elements, and performed a hundred other tasks for the Pargaie that made their mission and operations logistically possible. If she were a cult hunter she would devote herself to the hunting down of the Golden Serpent groups and thus deny their services to the whole web of Chaos activity.

  That first station: she remembered it well. She had been apprentice to Doralon (Lieutenant, more or less) Nefarian, an up and coming Direthrell who controlled various groups wandering through the southern reaches of the Eisenalder Empire disguised as Lanthrell traders and players. The cells he controlled had as their primary mission the gathering of intelligence to aid the raiders who struck at the Lornax Forest in the Empire and the Solus Forest in Arturia, the two Forests being nation-enclaves of Lanthrell.

  Nefarian answered to an area controller, a Chora who went by Cat's Paw. Nefarian was a good teacher and she learned a great deal; enough that in less than a decade Nefarian, recently promoted to Chora, had reported Moonsong as having been ambushed and murdered by bandits who likely were in the employ of the Lanthrell. In reality, it was Nefarian who had died; due to the secrecy of the communications, Elonia was able to assume his position, being careful to never have face-to-face meetings with anyone in the cells working for her.

  It had been a large risk but an acceptable one. Nefarian's mission had changed with his promotion: his job now was to spy upon the rodent-like Felher, and to report on how the Direthrell could aid their historic allies, the Cave Goblins, in their battles with the rat-men. The Felher were moving into the Thunderpeaks, focusing on the Cave Goblin holds as an alternative to challenging the Dwarves.

  It was a job 'he' excelled at, so much so that Cat's Paw, now a Chorapel, or lieutenant colonel, summoned 'him' for a personal meeting, a rare honor. It was exactly what Elonia had been waiting for. It was her deepest risk, but a necessary one. Cat's Paw was a female, a full-blooded Direthrell, but female. Working carefully, she used painstakingly-gathered information to secretly contact the cult-hunters, monks from Arian’s own Order in fact, although Arian himself had been years from his first cult exposure when Cat’s Paw and her group suffered a surprise raid while meeting with ‘Nefarian’.

  In the aftermath, Nefarian was listed as dead (the body was a dissolute young male Nepas that Elonia had had assigned to her but who had been reported killed months before), and Elonia assumed the persona of Cat's Paw, whom she had personally killed and disposed of. As Cat's Paw she had access to vast amounts of information regarding the Dark Threll raids on the forests of the Lanthrell. Taking another risk she contacted her cousin, Starr, and used her as a conduit to pass selected information to the lords of the Forest. Starr knew who Elonia was, but not the name (Skink) that the Direthrell had known her by, and definitely not that Elonia was at the time posing as the highest ranking Pargaie officer in the area.

  Direthrell raiding groups began to fall into Lanthrell ambushes with fair regularity; several Lanthrell who had secretly gone over to the Dark ways and spied for the Pargaie were unmasked, and in general the operations against the Larnex Forest waned. The Pargaie commanders were no fools: they immediately deduced that there was a double agent in their midst. Cat's Paw was ordered to take personal charge of the investigation, find the leaks, and seal them off.

  In the space of a year Cat's Paw had forwarded reports tying various leaks to allied cults and several members of her own command; the latter were executed and information on the cults leaked to cult hunters, eliminating them. Such actions severely crippled her operations, and Cat's Paw requested, and was granted, a year to rebuild her organization. During this year, however, the Lanthrell began a series of counterstrikes against the Pargaie, using information gleaned from their previous leaks and from cultists captured by human cult hunters. One of the strikes slew Cat's Paw and her inner circle.

 
Cat's Paw's 'body' had been a Direthrell female captured on a Lornax raid and helped to 'escape' by Starr, who delivered her to Elonia. Elonia herself slipped off to Opatia, there to establish a back-trail for herself as a wandering Seeress and bodyguard. In direct defiance of the basic rules of spydom as practiced by the Pargaie which demanded that operatives blend into the population as unremarkably as possible, Elonia deliberately wore exotic weapons and cultivated her beauty on the assumption that being obvious was the surest disguise for her. Not that there was much danger to her: Cat's Paw, Nefarian, Moonsong, and Skink were all dead, all having fallen loyally in the service of their masters.

  She had had time to train and study to develop the latent Sight which she had discovered within herself, a development that had come upon her later in life than most, and to devote herself more fully to the mysteries of the arts known as Vectius Meum, a course of study she had begun decades earlier while still within the Pargaie structure, all the better to weather the tests her life of revenge would undoubtedly set before her.

  And now she was headed back to where it all had begun, going back for the final payment.

  The plan worked smoothly enough. The main party met with Roger, put the tongue joint on the wagon, and moved on to Lagaza, where they rested for two days. Maximilian recovered from his stomach ailment but was publicly warned by Arian that unless he was careful he could suffer a relapse.

  Bridget had left the girls with a temple of Terana and caught up with the main body a day after it left Lagaza. For the next ten days the troop moved northwards in pursuit of Maximilian's background information for his book.

  It was another entertaining period for Maximilian, further enhanced by his covert membership in the Phantom Badgers, an honor he had scarcely dared dream of, and his assignment as the first unit Historian in the history of the Company, as well. The scholar spent many private moments gloating over the new black bracer with the auxiliary’s badge, Historian’s silver dagger-in-scroll insignia, and the gold stud that marked his participation in the Orc-Fort battle.