Dark Tide: Book Five of the Phantom Badgers

by RW Krpoun

  The Direbreed were still a mass of confusion; scant minutes had passed since the Company had been detected and the slower of the beast-warriors were still donning armor, while no organization above Fist existed. Obviously expecting the raiders to charge across the open ground in front of them and wreck the two Gates in their pole-sheds, the Markan in charge was recalling the garrison to a point between the keep and the Gate-sheds, which was fine with Durek. Tonya and a detail of Badgers and irregulars were breaking into the first of the selected warehouses, Dayyan had rounded up some handcarts, and Axel was opening the Gate; within minutes loot would be heading into the Company’s base.

  Rolf trotted up. “Blue Platoon lost one irregular killed, one Badger and three irregulars wounded, none seriously. Bridget is sapping slaves for transport.”

  “Good, carry on.” Moments later Elonia reported two wounded Badgers and three wounded irregulars from Gold Platoon, and Silver Platoon reported one irregular dead and four irregulars wounded, one critically. The total was a bit more than the Captain had expected, although the irregular’s inexperience and lower level of armor protection did place them at a higher degree of risk than the mercenaries.

  Dayyan thundered up to report that the Gate was open and both the loot and slave-rescue details were passing their charges through the Gate. Brandywine had passed through the Gate with the critically wounded irregular in order to set up an aid station at the Company base, as per the plan. The hulking standard-bearer remained near his Captain after delivering his report, bloody axe held in eager hands.

  The Dwarf was pleased with the raid’s progress so far: the Company was resting in a defensive line while details evacuated loot and rescued slaves, losses were acceptable, and the plan had developed as they had hoped. Things wouldn’t remain so simple, however: he could see that the Direbreed were rapidly becoming organized, and had moved forward to a point on line with the Gate sheds.

  The attack started minutes later, two hundred-odd Direbreed surging forward in a howling mass behind four handcarts piled high with bales of straw, which the attackers set ablaze at the onset of the charge. As they rumbled towards the Company arrows rained into the garrison’s ranks, and a fireball engulfed one cart, killing the pushers and setting the cart itself afire so that it could not be propelled any closer to the defensive line. Axel manipulated a length of chain to fly out across the intervening ground and foul the wheels of one of the remaining carts before sending clouds of fist-sized hail raining into the ranks of beast-warriors.

  As usual, spells and arrows weren’t enough to break the charge, although they took some of the strength out of it, and the line of Direbreed roared across the remaining ground and crashed into the waiting raiders. The two forces howled war cries and hewed at each other with enthusiasm, the screams of the wounded rising like a chorus of the damned. The defensive line gave a few feet in places, especially where the burning carts came to rest, but the Badgers held.

  Durek parried a spear-thrust with the haft of his axe and then slammed the weapon’s enchanted edge into his opponent’s calf, chopping down to, and through, the bone, toppling the vastly taller creature to the ground, where the Dwarf split its skull. To the Captain’s right and left the battle line surged and receded, but his trained ears told him that the garrison was getting the poorer end of the exchange.

  The Direbreed that stepped up to Durek wore an Arm-Lord’s insignia clipped to its greasy leather tunic and carried an Orcish renac in one hand and an oddly-shaped war hammer in the other, an elk-faced creature coated with black fur mixed with eye-twisting swirls of ocher. The thing stood nearly seven feet tall, but Durek, like any Dwarf, was accustomed to facing opponents with a height and reach advantage.

  The Direbreed feinted with the hammer and then slashed with the renac when Durek reacted; caught off-guard, as Direbreed rarely employed subtlety in their weapons-use, Durek was too slow to block the blade, which tore a line of fire down his left arm. The sudden wave of pain cost the Captain a response attack and the Dwarf withdrew a step, watching the Arm-Lord with new respect; obviously he faced a veteran.

  The war-hammer bothered him: the Direbreed kept it moving so he couldn’t get a really good look, but it was different; it was coated in runes and stigils, of course, but Void weapons often were without having any real effect. Rather, it was the shape of the weapon, the way the upper two-thirds of the shaft were twice as thick as normal, or the bulge just above the handgrip, and what Durek thought was a socket set into the shaft’s side. It didn’t look like enchantment or Dark Arts; Durek’s own axe was enchanted, and but for the rune-work looked just like any other axe; this appeared to be some sort of design.

  The two exchanged blows, feints, and parries for the space of a minute and a half, an amazing length of time in personal combat, leaving Durek with a small cut on his left forearm and several new dents on his helm and breastplate, while the Arm-Lord was cut on its left thigh and across its stomach. Around the two leaders the attack was faltering and Direbreed were beginning to fall back, but neither let their attention waver.

  Durek’s unease about the strange hammer had mounted throughout the fight, causing him to shift more to a defensive style than was his usual wont. It wasn’t just the odd design of the hammer, but also the way the Direbreed was using it: a hammer was an armor-cracker, a weapon you could swing without any great precision because you didn’t have to concern yourself with protecting the weapon’s cutting edge (which it didn’t have), or the thickness of the armor the enemy wore. Logically the Arm-Lord should have been leading with the hammer, good solid strikes aimed at center mass, while working the renac towards Durek’s lightly armored arms and legs, but instead it was just the reverse: the Direbreed led with the renac and was trying for deft strikes with the hammer; it even thrust with the hammer’s head a couple times. The Captain wasn’t having any of it: he worked to keep the hammer well away from him until he could get in a clear shot.

  The opening finally came: the renac slid across his steel cap with a nerve-rattling screech as the Dwarf ducked, but instead of retreating a step he moved forward and brought his axe down in a short powerful chop that neatly severed the Arm-Lord’s backward-bending leg at the fetlock. The Direbreed was quick, too, the hammer catching Durek’s tortured steel cap with a glancing blow as he back-pedaled, the near-miss denting the metal and turning the mercenary’s legs to jelly.

  The Arm-Lord hopped forward awkwardly, ignoring its own wound to close with the dazed Dwarf, who was trying to back away until his head cleared, only to stumble over the out-flung arm of a dead Human and sit down hard.

  Durek, blinking against the roaring in his ears, brought his axe up to the block position as the Arm-Lord closed, but the renac was caught in mid-swing by a powerful axe-strike coming in from the side that sent sword, hand, and several inches of forearm spinning away on an independent flight as Dayyan Reinert leapt in to protect his Captain.

  With hesitation the Direbreed thrust the spurting stump into the standard-bearer’s face, a gout of thin brownish blood catching the burly Human across the eyes, blinding him momentarily. As the Badger staggered back swinging his axe in short arcs across his front to block incoming blows, the Arm-Lord thrust the head of the war hammer at Dayyan’s face; there was a metallic snap and the hammer seemed to buck in the beast-warrior’s hand as a hole erupted in the Badger’s forehead.

  Durek roared an inarticulate cry and levered himself to his feet as the standard-bearer fell with the boneless quality of the mortally wounded. Hooking the hammer with the beard of his axe as the Arm-Lord turned to face him, he jerked down and released his own weapon, the sudden added weight pulling the hammer aside. Lowering his head, the Dwarf slammed his battle-worn cap into the Direbreed’s midriff as he jerked the dirk from his belt .

  The savage impact would have knocked the Arm-Lord off-balance even had it still had both hooves; as it was, the tall beast-warrior was punched off its feet. Durek landed on top, kicking, stabbing, and head-butting in
a white-hot rage. The Arm-Lord discarded the hammer in order to draw a serrated-edged fighting knife from its belt, but the weapon never came into play, Durek having already stabbed it three times in the chest, smashed its snout with a steel-shod head-butt, and kneed the air out of the creature’s lungs. It was probably dead after the sixth or seventh dirk-thrust, but the Captain didn’t slow down until the twentieth, and did not stop entirely until he had stabbed the creature at least two dozen times, churning its chest and belly into a bloody trough.

  Dragging himself off the still-twitching corpse as the last of the fighting died out around him, the Captain recovered his axe and then kicked the Arm-Lord in the head a few times for good measure, cursing bitterly. A single glance showed that Dayyan was dead, killed by a steel spike which had struck him in the forehead, driving nearly its full length of four inches into his skull. Picking up the Arm-lord’s war hammer he saw where the spike had been launched from a hole in the top of the hammer; the thickened shaft housed the spike while the bulge held the spring coils that drove the missile. The socket he had seen was where a removable handle was inserted to twist the springs to full compression, while a ring set into the top of the grip released the springs and sent the spike on its way.

  It explained the Direbreed’s odd style: it couldn’t make a full-impact with the hammer with the spike cocked without risking damage to the tense springs, and because of the radical height difference, it hadn’t been able to get the hammer close enough to Durek’s face for the short-ranged spike-launcher to work. Durek spat another stream of curses and kicked the dead Direbreed some more.

  Janna skipped over the rapidly-decaying corpse of a Direbreed, the vinegar-soaked rag tied across her nose failing to cut the stench from the enemy dead. These might be ‘young’ Direbreed, but that was a relative term; most of the sixty-odd dead were now just slimy skeletons, with the Fist-Lords piles of dried bones, and the gaseous stench created by their rapid rotting hung over Green Reach like a dark cloud.

  She found Durek near the Gate watching as the bodies of the fallen were passed through; the Company had lost Dayyan and a new-hire from Gold Platoon killed, and three more irregulars slain, plus a number of wounded who would not be returning to action for some days. The Captain had taken Dayyan’s loss hard: the Company was his family, and he their patriarch; losing a member of the Inner Circle, especially a three-year veteran of such sterling qualities as Dayyan badly upset the Dwarf.

  She stood next to the Captain and waited for him to acknowledge her presence. When the last corpse was passed through and the handlers returned to pitching loot the Dwarf turned to her. “What is it?”

  “Elonia says they’re opening that Gate, Captain,” she waved to indicate the pole-shed to their left, where a Fist stood guard. “They might be bringing reenforcements through.”

  Durek turned and studied the structure standing fifty yards beyond their defensive line. The garrison had paid dearly for its too-hasty assault: they had lost roughly sixty Direbreed, including at least one Arm Lord and six Fist-Lords; best estimates put the garrison was reduced by at least a third, likely more.

  “Take Henri, some Scouts, and a section; launch a sortie and see if you can wreck the Gate, but don’t take any chances.”

  “On my way.”

  Within minutes she had her First Section with ten irregulars attached, Henri, Duna, Milo, and Jepson Plumer ready; Jothan hurried up at the last minute and volunteered as well. “All right, we’re going to head straight for the shed, mingle with the Direbreed, and if possible wreck the Gate. If things get too heavy I’ll sound the horn and we’ll pull back. This is just a sortie, nothing heavy, nothing important, just something to let us stay around and loot for a few extra minutes, so let’s not have any heros. Remember, the Company can’t pay you if you’re dead.”

  Axel hit the Fist at the Gate shed with a flurry of hail as the little detachment trotted across the corpse-littered ground; the Direbreed guarding the shed wavered for a moment, then steadied their formation. Janna, jogging along behind the main line, was surprised to see them stand fast: they were outnumbered, and the two Fists hurrying up from the area of the Keep to help would not reach them before the Badgers did, and even then would not bring the odds to anything more than even.

  The reason became clear as they drew close and the scout-archers fell out to ply their bows, followed by Henri: two Humans with Markan insignia were standing near the Gate itself, an old-style tripod egran erected on the slab floor beneath the pole-mounted roof. In a fight like this, where Breedstones were not at risk the Direbreed would be difficult to move, and virtually impossible when their priest-masters were on the scene.

  Henri hit the Direbreed with a fireball, Duna dropped one of the Markan, and then the Badger foot charged to close with the singed survivors as the two Fists sent from the mob at the Keep drew close. The Human dying with Eclipse’s arrow in his chest, the Serjeant noted as she rushed under the shed, Jothan at her heels, was a Markan-Ra, likely the garrison commander or his deputy. She hit the other priest with a throwing axe and closed to stab him to death as the scouts moved up to the shed and the last of the guard-Fist died.

  The sortie had been too late, however: even as Janna ran Rosemist through the priest’s throat a sheet of blue-gray iridescence slid across the air in front of the tripod and coalesced into a doorway-sized sheet of sparkling darkness. “Watch it,” the Seeress called to Jothan and the scouts, trying to keep an eye on both the portal and the line of advancing Direbreed. “It’s open.”

  Jepson poked warily at the apex of the tripod with the tip of his bow, then cursed and backed away, fumbling for his sword as the Direbreed broke into a run and rushed the shed; behind them, Mad Dog urged his section and the irregulars forward.

  “Just get around back and kick a leg,” Janna yelled, then cursed as she ducked a wild swing from a halberd, hopping back stay out of reach of the Direbreed. Around her the shed was engulfed in a wild melee as the hard-running Direbreed collided with the disorganized Badgers; she saw Henri cut down three beast-warriors with brilliant beams of light, then shove his staff into the back of his belt and draw his sword. An irregular went down, blood pulsing in hot red jets from a deep wound in his thigh, and a Badger she didn’t know turned from the fight and trotted back towards the main body cradling a broken arm against his body. She slapped the persistent halberd away with a parry that nearly knocked the weapon from the Direbreed’s grip and tried to get in close enough to kill the beast, who nimbly skipped back a pace to keep her within his weapon’s range.

  The maneuver held her at what was a safe distance for the Direbreed, but Jothan stepped around the Gate and slid the point of his long sword into the base of the creature’s skull, booting the dying beast in the small of it’s back for good measure. The Serjeant shouted a warning, and the interpreter spun just in time to deflect the bloody spear-head that had been aimed for his back with his shield, but the sudden stance-shift caused the ex-slave’s booted foot to come down on the shaft of a discarded mace which rolled on the slab floor, throwing Jothan off-balance.

  He hopped back and to the side to regain his balance, something any warrior in melee has done many times before, but this time he did not realize his mistake until his shoulder touched the black field. With the abruptness of a rock hitting a pond, Jothan vanished through the Gate.

  For the first time in years Janna was struck dumb, so startled as to be held motionless in the grip of utter surprise. This was too strange a development to have been considered.

  Her confusion lasted but a pair of heartbeats, but it was profoundly unsettling for someone who had based her life’s actions on the steely strength of her nerves, and her shout was both too late and ignored when Duna flashed past her and plunged into the inky sparkle of the Gate after her lover.

  The Silver Eagle screamed, trying to be heard over the clash and crash of battle, the battle cries and howls of pain, the rattle of weapons and the grunts of effort, trying to tell her people n
ot to wreck the Gate, to leave it open so that the two Badgers could come back from wherever they had gone, but her words were swallowed up in the din. In any case their message was moot: seconds after Duna’s charge a Fist-Lord with a huge raw-lipped wound splitting its face and skull reeled back into the rear of the tripod with enough force to knock one of the legs out of the drilled brass plate at the apex of the tripod. The instant the leg left contact with the plate the doorway-field flickered away into nothingness.

  “All right, you two, help him, Jepson, you finish that bastard there; you with the blue bandanna, give that sheep-faced bastard by your left leg another whack, he might not be dead.” Mad Dog turned from organizing his section, the last of the Direbreed having just been disposed of. His blood-spattered face registered his surprise to see Janna slumped against one of the poles which supported the roof, staring off into the distance. “Henri’s counting heads...,” he began, obviously looking for a wound and seeing no sign of injury. “Serjeant, what is it ?”

  “Jothan and Duna went through the Gate just before it closed,” she said in a voice gone flat and hollow.

  The hawk-faced Badger turned and looked at the long, engraved brass rods lying on the stone floor partially covered by corpses and discarded weapons. “Oh, shit.”

  Chapter Forty-Two

  The stars stood out sharply in the inky sky overhead as the ninth drew to a close and the tenth day of the month was born; the Grand Commander stood under the great dome of the night outside his command tent and enjoyed the feel of the cool evening air on his tired body. It was nearly midnight, and the Third Battle at Dorog had been over for nearly ten hours, time Descente had spent re-forming his army and answering the blizzard of questions the Council had sent him via the enchanted communications devices. He had held his army within their night camps and had been grateful that Laffery had stayed around the ridge; Bohca Tatbik had seen enough fighting for one day.