Dark Tide: Book Five of the Phantom Badgers

by RW Krpoun

  Descente wasn’t surprised to see that only Arturians emerged from the melee, but the sacrifice of the elite Hand warriors had bought him time to position the First, Third, and Seventh Holdings in ranks paralleling the river, thusly reforming his left flank at right angles to his center. It had meant pulling back the Darkhosts that were engaging the Arturian foot so that they could not be taken from behind, but that was a price Descente was being forced to pay. Radet was content for the moment to reform his battered divisions and finish off those survivors of the Tenth and the two Sacred Bands that were to hand, allowing the Grand Commander to direct his attention to the rest of the battle.

  Things were going poorly on the left: Nicholas I had plowed into the Eyade and wolf-riders, who had learned early in the campaign to stay mobile and not try to meet heavy cavalry head-on, but the Hand troops had gotten absorbed by the fight so that two of the Imperial squadrons (who had walked through the Threll traps with Lanthrell guides) were able to take them on the flank and maul a lardina. Meanwhile, the third squadron had peeled off and hit the Fire Knives Horc on the flank.

  Dispatching the Second Holding to help the Fire Knives and the Eighth to the left flank shored things up for the moment, but left him with only four Holdings, a lardina, and three Sacred Bands in his reserve, with his center line bogged down in heavy fighting and opportunities going wasting.

  Radet had tidied up his lines, recovered all his wounded and most of his dead, and was leading his command at a walk down the narrow corridor between the marsh and the new Hand right flank, heading for safety. The Grand Commander was tempted to order his infantry to charge and try to drive the Arturians into the mud, but stayed his hand: Radet’s men were in battle formation, and while his horses might have been too tired for a full charge at the moment, they were still ready for a defensive fight. The odds were too close between the two armies to risk troops on uncoordinated, impulsive actions. On the Hand’s left the additional troops were forcing Nicholas I to withdraw behind the Lanthrell screen; turning his attention to the center, Descente ordered his winged beasts to strike at the First Legion, which seemed to be performing the poorest of the Heartland infantry, and sent the Ninth and Thirteenth Holdings in to raise the pressure on the Legion.

  The sly trick with the marsh haunted Descente, forcing him to watch Laffery’s every move with care and to hold back his three remaining Sacred Bands as insurance against another sudden assault. The distraction caused by the flank attacks had diverted the Grand Commander and his staff for several vital minutes, during which the fighting will of the Direbreed and Orcs were sapped and their unit cohesion disrupted, although not fully lost; by the time Descente could focus on the center again much of their initial advantage had been lost, and the battle degenerated into a slugging match, toe-to-toe combat with heavy losses on both sides.

  Bohca Tatbik threw every soldier it had into the fray save the three remaining Sacred Bands, and the Heartland was likewise committed, even bringing up the squadrons guarding the baggage train. Imperial cavalry was dismounted and sent into the line, while the Arturians made squadron-sized counter-charges at points where the infantry were taking the most pressure, and Nicholas I’s horse kept the Eyade and wolf-riders from over-running the Lanthrell by sheer weight of numbers. The artillery threw every stone it had brought to the battle, and every suitable river-rock they could gather from the nearby fences.

  The stake belt was torn up, the caltrops were trampled into the boot-torn ground, and the ditch filled with bodies as the center line swayed back and forth. The death-toll was measured in the thousands, with more lives and limbs lost every minute. The battlefield throbbed with a din of weapons-clatter, death-howls, the screams and moans of the wounded, and the horns, whistles, bells, and cymbals used to control the various units.

  Descente was everywhere as the battle raged, riding well within the range of the enemy’s artillery as he sought to spot the critical weak point, the proper place to send in his reserves, exhorting units to reform, for officers to attempt one more charge, for every warrior of Bohca Tatbik to do their utmost to win the battle. Three of his bodyguards and Kansa's chief assistant were killed by crossbow and artillery fire as they followed him about the field, along with countless messengers. The Hand commander used every trick, every ruse, every bit of military lore he possessed, and still the Heartland held, bleeding from a thousand wounds, but it held.

  Finally the Grand Commander ordered the horns sounded ordering the recall; one hour eight minutes had passed since battle had been joined, an eternity in terms of combat. It was time to rest and reform their units, tend to their wounded, and plan. In two or three hours they would sally forth and try again. After all, they had all day.

  He had climbed down from his horse to study unit reports at a folding table, a glass of wine and a plate of sandwiches at his elbow when a courier galloped up on a blown horse to report to the duty officer. Moments later the man was taken to Kansa, and just as quickly was escorted into the commander’s presence.

  It didn’t take long; Descente asked a few perfunctory questions while an aide dug into a map case, and then dismissed the messenger with a curt wave. Squaring a map sheet to lie flush with the table edges, he studied the lines and symbols, feeling light-headed, almost dazed; it felt like his eyes would lose track of what he was seeing if he moved his head too quickly, or that he would fall down if he tried to stand.

  For the first time he was keenly aware, no, could feel the hundreds of miles that separated his army from the homeland.

  Chapter Thirty

  The chamber the Badgers were waiting in was spacious, easily large enough to hold the entire Company. The mercenaries were largely uninterested, however, being tired and dirty from their journeys. It was not long after midnight on the twenty-eighth, and they had been told that the Heartland Army was expected to face Bohca Tatbik near the Royal Bridge as soon as it was light enough to see to fight, but that was a far-off battle of little interest-they had their own portion of the war to contend with in the meantime.

  After traversing the Gate at mid-day on the twenty-sixth the Badgers had found themselves north of Lake Apartia in the central Realms; they had marched fifteen miles that day, suffering badly under their heavy loads as they had lost their marching edge during the siege. The twenty-seventh’s march began before dawn, and ended after another fifteen miles were covered, but that was hardly the end of their ordeal: they still had miles to traverse, only these were underground. Only the presence of the komad, who labored along under heavy loads of Company supplies kept the Badgers going by reducing the poundage of unit gear each individual Badger had to carry.

  Along the way they learned that a contingent of Dwarven engineers had been sent from the Mondschien Mountains in the western reaches of the Empire to represent their clans in the ranks of the Heartland army while their main force fought alongside their cousins in the Thunderpeaks against the Cave Goblins and Felher. Not long after he took command Grand Marshal Laffery had ordered these Dwarves, who were still some distance from Apartia, to go into in hiding. Employing a Gate (operated by the same two brothers who had served at Dorog and Sagenhoft) and a well-paid smuggler, he brought the Dwarves and their equipment into Apartia without exciting any notice, the deployment held secret even from the late King Henry. Well-provisioned, the Dwarves (helped by a few Human spell-casters, Watchers, and other specialists) immediately began digging a tunnel out of the city.

  Staying out of sight as the battle was fought and lost outside the city, the siege begun, was completed, and the city taken, the Dwarves tunneled onward. When Bohca Ileri moved westward taking with it nearly all the Watchers, the Dwarves began to augment their ordinary stone-work with Sobrann, the Dwarven Stone-Art. Their task was ambitious, but in the four months they had had to work with the engineers had accomplished wonders: a tunnel extended from an unused sewer-works out under the walls and onward to a point over one thousand yards from the city defenses, opening out of the base of a sheer
cliff on the lake coast which was only accessible by a two-mile hike along the lake shore, and well out of sight of the city. Since every hull of any size in the city had been burned or used to flee the invaders, the Hand was unable to watch the lake beyond what wall-sentries and land patrols could observe, so the raid force was able to approach and enter the city, or at least its nether regions, unseen.

  The Captain and Axel returned from the briefing with maps and a slightly stunned air about them; a call was passed for all officers, and Axel addressed the gathered leaders.

  “First: we’ll leave our excess gear and the pigs here, a Mondschien Dwarf will watch them for us. Everyone is to take his or her canteen, two day’s rations and an empty back pack for loot.”

  “What we have is a force made up of us, three Sagenhoftian cohorts who Gated out of the city just ahead of us, and four hundred Dwarves from the Thunderpeaks clans who Gated in from the mountains with no more explanation than anyone else, all under the command of a Dwarven clan chief named Garmil Forgetamer. This force has been able to assemble under the city without much chance of the enemy being warned, all the more so because the units were drawn from sources outside the Heartland Army.”

  “The Heartland Army is going to go into action against the Hand near the Royal Bridge today to slow them down and thin their ranks; it’s not too likely that they will win, but that doesn't appear to be the issue: if we can take Apartia Bohca Tatbik won’t be able to replace the bulk of the troops killed in today’s battle, at least until they retake the Royal Bridge and Apartia.” He waited while a chorus of pleased exclamations subsided.

  “We’re outnumbered, of course: the city garrison consists of the Sixth, Eleventh, and Thirty-Seventh Holdings, which combined have about six thousand Human troops, one Sacred Band of three hundred fifty, and about a thousand support personnel. We have twenty-two hundred Sagenhoftian troops, the Badgers, forty Ilthanian knights, thirty-five Ilthanian militia footmen, and four hundred Dwarves, plus the element of surprise. Additionally there is a sizeable resistance organization building within the city; while they have not been warned of this operation we can expect a general uprising once the populace realizes what’s going on. Obviously, we have to hit hard in the opening hours to narrow down the odds.”

  “Each of the Sagenhoft cohorts will assault the barracks of one of the Holdings while the Dwarves attack the Sacred Band’s barracks. We will strike at the headquarters complex which administered the city as a diversion while the Ilthanian knights go after the area in that complex where the enchanted items used for communication are stored in order to keep the news of the attack from Bohca Tatbik for as long as possible.”

  “There’s bound to be a lot of troops there,” Henri pointed out. “And no small amount of fighting.”

  “True, but that is where the greatest concentration of loot and enchanted goods will be, as well,” Axel grinned. “Laffery was impressed with the reports of our raids on the Hand establishments in Sagenhoft, and wants us to mount a similar raid here. We’ll ignore patrols and outlying guard posts, as will all the other units; our main aim will be to catch as many of the enemy as possible still in bed, unarmed and unarmored. That’s where we’ll narrow the odds the quickest.” The Lieutenant shook his head ruefully. “We take no prisoners; kill everyone in the Hand ranks, armed or no, crying surrender or not. We can’t spare the people for guarding prisoners, and we’ll only have one shot at this. Make it count.”

  “No quarter!” Kroh bellowed. “Kill ‘em all and make the world a better place for the doing of it.”

  “What about the resistance?” Arian asked as the chorus of assent faded. “By the time they understand what’s going on the issue will be decided.”

  “No, that’s where those militiamen come in: they’re no great shakes at soldiering, but every one of them is at least twenty-five years old and spent their entire life in this city. A few will be assigned to each of our units to act as guides, while the rest will seek out and alert the resistance leaders even as we move out. I know they won’t amount to much, but we should get a few hundred locals stuck into it and any help we can come up with will be welcome. Now, the order of attack will be as follows...”

  The complex of buildings that had served the Kingdom of Ilthan as an administration headquarters had been gutted by fire during the two-day battle through the streets as the Hand secured the city, so the Markan assigned as garrison commander had established her headquarters in the Royal Palace, with the Sacred Band garrisoned in the adjoining barracks. The headquarters contained the work areas and living quarters of the garrison commander, her staff, the intelligence section assigned to the city, and the Hand priests assigned to administration and supply of the garrison.

  It meant that the palace had to accommodate roughly five hundred people, not counting captives, slaves, and sentries, but it meant that the job of guarding the vulnerable staffers and support personnel was vastly simplified. And the need was both real and great: too many trained Ilthanian soldiers had slipped back into the city population during the fighting, and far too many weapons had disappeared; after the Orcs and Eyade had entertained themselves upon the populace while waiting to march westward the resistance had no shortage of men and women gripped with a burning desire for revenge. Those support personnel not at the palace were gathered into two smaller (but equally well-guarded) complexes elsewhere in the city, and the Hand patrols that roved through the streets of the battered capitol were both sizeable and alert.

  The Dwarves had not dared to work too close to the primary complex, even to the degree of knocking down cellar walls or cutting short tunnels, so the Badgers emerged from a lengthy trip through the storm drains, sewers, and cellars of the capitol into a partially-ruined warehouse a hundred yards from the southern edge of the wide expanse of park land that surrounded the former palace.

  The Dwarves had scouted the area thoroughly, and had informed the mercenaries that the palace, which was built on a low hill near the center of the city, was drained by three stone run-off channels, one of which ran due south into a underground drain. The channel was a stone trough just over two feet deep and about twenty inches wide. While the entire Company could not slip past the guards in the channel, it would be possible to send a detachment along it.

  The palace was a sprawling rectangle of interconnected buildings, halls, and towers that had accumulated over six centuries, surrounded by parks and gardens extending between two to three hundred yards on each side, a waist-high fence of white stone marking the palace area’s circumference. A few tents had been set up in this open ground to accommodate the spill-over from the palace, along with several collections of prisoner cages, but for the most part the palace was able to hold the Hand command apparatus without undue crowding.

  The attack was planned for fifty minutes before dawn, with the commander of each assault force having received a lamp containing a coil of slow match whose burn rate was meticulously perfected; when the ember consumed a bit of cotton twine tied around a certain point, the commander was to order the attack. Of course, if the alarm was raised all units would attack regardless of the time, but the paths of approach as plotted by the Dwarves had taken this into consideration.

  The Company was in place in their ruined warehouse and the preliminary scouting had been completed with a good five inches of fuse left, roughly thirty minutes remaining before the attack was to commence. Durek ordered the Scout Section to crawl up the drainage channel, and instructed his platoon leaders to prepare for a conventional assault from the warehouse, down the short length of street to the stone fence, across the park land and on into the palace complex itself. Axel volunteered to accompany the scouts and Jothan offered to accompany the wizard as a bodyguard.

  The four gates in the perimeter fence were guarded by sections of Hand infantry, while additional sections of ten patrolled the parks and gardens of the palace grounds, and four full companies of seventy men each waited in reserve inside the complex itself. It made the o
dds rather long for the Badgers but the Sacred Band’s barracks was nearby and the Thunderpeaks Dwarves were to assault the palace once they had dealt with the Hand’s elite troops.

  The water drain had passed under the fence, secured from intrusion by a locked gate of iron bars, but the Dwarves had made a key for the lock and greased the hinges so it offered no barrier to the Scout Section, who had bound all their metal gear in strips cut from their blankets, and added extra strips around their elbows and knees as padding against the effects of crawling.

  Living on crutches, Axel discovered early in the trip up the trough, made for excellent preparation for crawling. But for the expenditure of huge amounts of energy in the healing Arts and the constant attentions of no less than four Healers he would have had two stumps at mid-thigh five years ago, and even today he still limped and leaned on his staff. He kept it from Bridget, of course, but it had long been obvious to him that he would never again wield a sword with anything like competence, the deft footwork that combat required being far beyond his battered shanks’ abilities.

  But he could crawl as no other Badger except the sailor-trained Jothan and the tree-climbing Starr, and took comfort in that fact, as well as the knowledge that he had been at best an average swordsman in any case. There was a light cloud cover overhead which wiped out nearly all the light from the stars and the quarter moon, but crawling in the trough required no light at all. The complex was dark; the Hand had learned early in their occupation to cover their windows as a precaution against crossbow-fire, and the trees, decorative hedges, pavilions, and statues that dotted the surrounding grounds blocked most of the little light that could be seen. The Scout Section reached the half-way point between the perimeter wall and the complex itself and ranged themselves to support the attack as per Durek’s orders while Axel crept on, trailed by Jothan.