Dark Tide: Book Five of the Phantom Badgers

by RW Krpoun

  “Courier to me; my compliments to Lord General von der Strieb, and advise him that he is to take command of his force save the cohort on the extreme right flank, which will remain under my command, the Lasharian division, and the Sagenhoftian Second cohort; he is to begin withdrawing this force to the baggage train as soon as it is practical.” Couriers were sent to the Lasharian division commander and the commander of the Second Sagenhoftian cohort instructing them to place themselves under the orders of Lord General von der Strieb. Yet another courier went to Duke Radet asking him to keep the pressure on the enemy and to support von der Strieb’s withdrawal. There seemed no way to get word to the Ilthanians or the Sagenhoftian First cohort, but they should be able to withdraw under the Apartian artillery without serious difficulty in any case. The Arturian foot and the Imperial cohort on the right would be withdrawn on his personal order when the time was right.

  It was galling to admit defeat and withdraw when every bone in his body screamed to throw the last reserves into the breach on the left and fight on, but he suspected that the dragon wasn’t the Hand’s only surprise, and that the breach on the left was a distraction, a ploy to draw every reserve the Heartland possessed (which it very nearly had), while a second blow turned the right flank and allowed the enemy to flood troops into the Heartland’s rear, turning a defeat into a slaughter.

  He may be beaten, but if he could extract his army the Hand’s goals would have been thwarted.

  Chapter Eleven

  The Goblin foot poured into the Great Fallow and hit the Arturian line hard, closely followed by Hand troops, and in mere minutes the division commander threw pride to the wind and called for the reserve unit. The problem lay in the Arturian preference for medium to heavy cavalry on the field of battle; in their eyes, footmen were there to guard the (lengthy) baggage trains and the herds of spare mounts and to hold onto terrain objectives once the horsemen had driven the enemy from the vital ground. Their foot were largely militia levies and men drawn from the city garrisons and rural patrols.

  The militia levies were poorly armored in padded tunics, while the garrison units had studded leather; both wore iron caps fitted with wide brims for added protection, armed with polearms (halberds and glaives), or crossbows, while secondary arms were spiked clubs or side arms procured by the individual. On the positive side, they had been extensively drilled as units and had seen action at Mancin; they had all the feckless courage of their mounted countrymen, and just as much pride, too. It would take more than a Lardina of Goblins to drive them from their positions.

  The Great Fallow was a rough rectangle of twenty acres enclosed within a poorly-maintained waist-high (on a Human) wall of mortared field stone encased in white-washed clay. Inside the Fallow similar walls split the cemetery into sections based on various factions, the fields dotted with scores of grave markers and dozens of above-ground tombs, some of the latter being simple block houses of mortared field rocks seven feet square, while others were more elaborate structures of quarried stone with extensive decorations, the largest reaching the size of a cottage.

  The Arturians had deployed within a one-acre area on the edge of the Fallow nearest the Imperial lines, using the boundary-wall as a defense line; while they had stood in place they had built up the wall with stones they took from other interior walls and added the caltrops sent out by Grand Marshal Laffery. They were thus in a good position and fighting well, but the sudden flood of Goblins and Human troops threatened to flank them unless the line could be extended; the Duke’s little reserve force seemed made to order. Advancing at the trot, the Lifeguards and Phantom Badgers entered the Great Fallow and engaged the enemy.

  Janna twisted to dodge the Jugata’s (ordinary Goblin foot warrior) spear-point and brought Rosemist around in a hard swing, chopping the Goblin’s left leg out from beneath him, then skipped back a step as a Pa (Goblin Corporal) came boring in from her right swinging a glaive. One of her platoon, she didn’t see who, decapitated the Pa with his halberd and the Serjeant turned her attention elsewhere. The reserve was set up in a skirmish line, engaging Goblin foot who had slipped further south along the Arturians’ flank while the Human Holding assaulted the main line; another Holding was moving up, and the ex-Silver Eagle didn’t think that they would be holding the Fallow much longer, as pressure was mounting, and there were no real reserves left. She checked her platoon’s line, then fended off another spear-point and riposted with a savage thrust that punched through the Goblin’s leather tunic to spill his intestines free of his belly.

  Stepping into the stirrup of his crossbow to re-cock it, Durek pulled the string into place with a grunt and nocked a quarrel, looking about as he did so. “Henri, come here.” When the bearded wizard loped up the Captain gestured towards the main battle line. “It looks like the Legions are making a fighting withdrawal, but there’s too much dust going up; get over to the wall and take a good look.”

  “Think we’re in trouble?” Henri cocked an eyebrow.

  “No, it looks like Laffery may have some sense, pulling back while the left’s breakthrough is held in place and the right hasn’t broken yet. But I still want to know what going on.”

  The lean Arturian tossed a salute and trotted towards the north, heading for a particularly large and ornate tomb complete with a surrounding walkway that was raised a good two feet off the ground. The stone walls were deeply engraved with carvings of various sorts which ought to make climbing easy, and the roof should offer a first-rate view of the area in question. Keeping a close eye out for any Goblin which might have slipped through the lines, Henri crossed behind the Lifeguards and hopped over the remains of the inner wall the Arturian foot had dismantled for rocks to add to their barricade.

  The young wizard was not upset over his assignment as many Badgers would have been; he was no death-and-glory type eager to earn decorations and Honor Roll entries at the risk of life and limb. His promotion to Corporal had been done more to mark him as a member of the Company’s Inner Circle than as a recognition of his leadership abilities, and he was confident that he would advance no further in the coming years. He liked being in the command group where he could ply his Art, lead the occasional special detail, and otherwise leave the decisions to someone else. In the field he concentrated on living as comfortably as he could and the study of his Art, and in garrison he studied whenever women and wine were lacking. The Badgers brought him travel, steady pay, and the opportunity to meet woman, and asked no more of him than he was comfortable in providing, so Henri Toulon found no fault with his Company, and had no interest in looking elsewhere for employment.

  As he had expected, the carved walls of the tomb made for easy climbing, and within seconds he was on the tiled roof with as good a view as anyone could ask for. To his front and right the Arturian foot was engaging the Goblins and the first elements of a Human Holding; to his right rear the Badgers and Lifeguards were likewise fighting Goblin foot, while to his left the neat blocks of Imperial troops were backing away from the Direbreed a slow step at a time, pulling back in good order. The entire battlefield was hazed with dust as tens of thousands of booted feet surged to and fro, a brown haze that stung the eyes and further parched throats that were already dried by the exertions of battle.

  More than dust encased the field: the noise of the battle was a solid roar, an almost physical pressure on the skull that echoed in the bones, a ceaseless rumble of feet, armor, weapon-use, screams, moans, battle cries, thundering hooves, commands, horns, drums, whistles, and cymbals that merged into a vast ear-numbing background that left the listener dazed and a step removed from the world.

  Far to the left the Arturian horse charged yet again as the left wing slowly folded backwards, the weight of the armored horsemen slamming the advancing Dayar and Orcs back a dozen yards and taking scores of lives, both natural and unnatural. The Imperial artillery crews were swiftly dismantling their engines and packing the timbers onto the specially-designed carts as the infantry fell back; near the
Grand Marshal’s tiny command post Henri could see the reformed Grand Reserve, now perhaps six hundred horsemen with more joining in dribs and dabs. The Heartland Army was pulling out again, but doing so in an orderly fashion, with no panic and no waste, carrying off its wounded and quite a few of its dead as well, a defeat but not a rout.

  Sweeping the lines with one last look as he crouched to descend to the walkway, the lean wizard froze, blinking against the dust as he stared off to the right. At first he thought the dust and the hammering of sound had caused him to see things, but such was not the case. There was a cloud of winged creatures sweeping towards the Arturian lines, a strange flock of dissimilar flying beasts that confused the eye and gave no sense of proportion. Henri adjusted quickly, however, having seen such creatures before.

  A quick count showed that bearing down on the embattled Arturians were around fifty harpies and a dozen or so wyvern, both beasts the products of experimentation in Void-lore that was now even forbidden by the major dark powers such as the Hand of Chaos. The harpies each had ten foot wingspan, with the twisted, warped upper torso of a miniature human growing from a massive bird’s body, semi-intelligent beasts who were drawn to the carrion of battle much as their vulture ancestor’s had been. Few roamed free these days, nearly all having been enslaved by one dark power or another and bred in captivity for war. The wyvern were much larger, being thirty feet of leathery hide from their snake-like faces to the great barbed knobs on their long, flexible tails; indeed, they resembled nothing so much as a great flying serpents with vast leathery wings, their rudimentary rear legs folded bird-like against their bellies. Like dragons, wyvern were too heavy to fly naturally, having an inherent enchantment in their very bones which lightened them to the point where their wings could lift and propel them. Like the harpies, they were not much more intelligent than a dog, and were almost never seen outside of Void-worshiper’s armies. Each wyvern had a Goblin astraddle its back, guiding the creature’s actions the way a cavalryman guided a war horse.

  The harpies, he knew, would be wearing a simple harness festooned with small darts and other missile weapons which they would hurl upon their foes from a safe height, while the wyvern would use their spiked tails to wreak havoc. Henri had seen harpies before, and once a wyvern at a distance, but never had he heard of so many of either type of beasts concentrated for one task. Hefting his staff, he eyed the distance and closed his eyes in concentration, fixing all his attention on a lengthy and intricate series of evocations. Opening his eyes, he gestured with the richly-engraved length of red oak, and a bolt of lightning darted from its end with a crack that went unheard amongst the din, darting outwards to strike the nearest wyvern as it swept through the air.

  The blue-white bolt enveloped the creature in a brief, flickering nimbus of energy, killing it instantly. As the rest of the deadly flock swept onward, the stricken wyvern plummeted like a rock, crashing into an advancing Hand company like a battering ram, killing several warriors and scattering the remainder of the unit.

  Henri slew two harpies with brilliant beams of light as they closed, and someone picked off a third with a crossbow, but it wasn’t enough to break the airborne formation. As they swept over the Arturian line the wyvern dipped down to strike with their tails while the harpies rained darts and balls of bone-shattering baked clay into the ranks of men.

  The initial attack lasted about a second as the winged creatures flashed overhead, killing or wounding perhaps sixty or seventy men, but the effect was far beyond the numbers of casualties: few, if any of the Arturians had ever seen such beasts before; more importantly, few knew what the creatures were capable of, and many in the ranks could not tell the difference between a wyvern and a dragon in any case. Henri scrambled down to the walkway and hugged the tomb’s wall as the harpies wheeled and swept back over the line, killing one with a beam of light as crossbowmen bagged three more. The second barrage from above was more effective than the first, as it came from behind, and more men were aware of the beasts’ presence.

  Slowly at first, but with gathering momentum, the Arturian foot broke ranks and fled, sped along their rout by the return of the slower-turning wyvern, who killed or maimed twenty more men in their second pass. Within seconds the Arturian foot division was transformed from an orderly battle line into a mass of individuals and small groups falling back to the rear.

  Cursing bitterly, Henri leapt onto the railing and bellowed for his countrymen to halt and stand fast, but few heard his words and none heeded them. Murmuring a pair of words in Latava, the wizard caused balls of light to form at each end of his staff, green at one end, gold at the other, keenly aware of what a target he was making of himself. Brandishing the glowing stave drew attention to himself, and a serjeant leading a dozen men instinctively obeyed the orders being bellowed in his native tongue, leading his section up onto the walkway. Individuals likewise reacted to the lights and the sign of organization, stopping their retreat and forming up on the growing battle line forming first upon the walkway and then to the north of the tomb.

  When he had rallied sixty men, Henri stopped shouting and began organizing, getting footmen out in front of the tomb and crossbowmen up on the walkway. By the time the Hand troops, advancing slowly to preserve their formation, closed, the Badger Corporal had ninety footmen in the ranks, supported by three dozen crossbowmen and a dozen footmen on the walkway.

  The Hand’s first rush was shattered by two great spheres of fire which erupted in their ranks, followed by a volley of crossbow quarrels; the Hand troops fell back as another company surged forward. The crossbowmen were now firing as they reloaded, volley fire being impractical, and Henri was conserving his strength, picking off individuals with the deadly beams of light that could slice open a man’s chest like a hot knife cutting a thick candle. The Hand troops closed with the Arturians, and the crash of battle became a solid hammering the drowned out every other noise.

  Henri cut down a Hand Section-Leader and looked about the battlefield: the winged beasts were gone, having accomplished their task. The Hand forces were advancing southward through the Fallow, but here and there groups of Arturians had been rallied and were making stands around the larger monuments, slowing the advance. The right flank was shattered beyond recall, however, and the Duke’s tiny reserve force was engulfed in Goblins several hundred yards to the south, the standards of the Duke, the Lifeguards, and the Phantom Badgers standing out proudly above the fighting. His own position was hopeless, he knew: they had driven back the second company of Hand troops, but two more companies had closed and there were three more companies in the Band that faced them still uncommitted, with another complete Holding coming in from the north. If he and his force stayed in place they would have a heroic stand such as ballads were told about, but Henri only liked heroic ballads when they were being sung in a warm and dry inn’s common room, with a pretty whore in his lap and a beaker of wine to hand. It was time to pull back and try to link up with some organized unit, be it the Company or elements of the Imperial troops pulling back.

  Running along the rail, dodging the occasional thrown weapon (he had stopped the lights on his staff once the fight had been joined), he warned every leader in his little band that they would retreat south once the company before them was broken. Stopping near the center of his line, Henri located the enemy Company-Leader bellowing orders near his company’s guidon; summoning his fading powers (he would have long since been reduced to using steel but for the his staff), he concentrated and spoke each syllable of the spell with exacting precision; he had enough strength for this casting and no more, staff or not.

  The forking tongue of blue-white energy leapt from his outstretched palm, flashed over the heads of his men, and crashed into the Hand troops, killing four outright and smashing seven more off their feet, dazed and burnt in a dozen places, their weapons blackened and smoking.

  Thrusting his staff under the back of his belt as he drew his enchanted saber, Henri leapt into the gap created by his
bolt before anyone on either side could react from the shock of the attack. Springing over the smoking bodies of the dead, the Badger Corporal stabbed the dazed Company-Leader through the throat before the man, whose eyesight was badly dazzled by the flash of the lighting, could react. Drawing his parrying-dagger as he withdrew his blade from the dying Markan-Ra, Henri parried the standard-bearer’s feeble attack and punched the point of his sword through the man’s left eye socket and on into the brain. Driving the point of his dagger into the chest of one of the Hand troops who had been knocked down by his spell, the wizard seized the guidon from the dying standard-bear’s hands and flourished it in the signal to withdraw.

  Battered and now leaderless, those Hand troops too far down the line to see who held the forked-tail flag gladly fell back, drawing the rest of the unit with them towards the north. Shouting for his men to follow, Henri immediate headed south.

  The Markan-Ra Band-Leader was not fooled, however, and immediately committed his remaining companies to the attack, and just as Henri expected, once away from the steadying presence of a tomb wall at their backs his little band immediately fell apart under the onslaught. He and a dozen footmen still under the direction of their serjeant formed up with a couple crossbowmen in a circle and began fighting their way south, having gained fifty yards between their rush south and the Hand’s charge. Other Arturians joined their group as they fought their way back to where the Duke’s force was retreating out of the Fallow, helped along by a couple showers of fist-sized hail which crashed into the Hand ranks around them, compliments of Axel.