“That’s sound,” Mavone nodded. “There’s enough cavalry here to patrol and to screen an infantry force along the way. They’ve done an admirable job cleaning up last night,” he added. They had, too. Led by Baron Arathanial and some local commanders, companies of a hundred or so lancers hunted goblins by night.
There had been enough warmagi with them to make it useful – magic is great for seeing in the dark, the gurvan’s greatest ally. Thankfully few bands had the courage or numbers to stand and fight, and most were willing to run back north as soon as they saw the glint of steel.
That still left thousands and thousands of goblins roaming the countryside. Gilmora is a large place, five baronies and then some, and most of it was fighting for its life right now.
The magnificent old manors and beautiful cities of the prosperous region were in flames, its people were refugees or stubborn defenders, and its legendary fecundity was at a stand-still as crops rotted un-harvested in the fields or were trampled under the iron sandals the goblins were beginning to wear. There were a dozen small castles under siege in this barony alone, and scores of villages had been attacked, abandoned, or razed. We were doing no more than providing an aggressive defense of Barrowbell – the invasion of Gilmora was still appallingly underway.
“The good news is . . . we slew a dragon,” Terleman reminded us. “And just when we needed to. We proved that they aren’t invulnerable.”
“We also proved that they are extremely difficult to kill. It took the combined might of most of the Horkans and a good number of Hesians and volunteers to bring it down. And the help of the Alka Alon.”
“We learned a lot from the experience,” Taren pointed out, helpfully. “I can’t wait to get that thing back to the lab to study it,” he said, indicating the massive corpse of the worm.
“Enjoy,” Mavone said, bowing. “I’d prefer to study a brothel and a wine cellar myself.”
“How many High Magi did we lose?” I asked. It was the question I really didn’t want to ask.
“Eight,” sighed Terleman. “Including Delman. Nine if Asti doesn’t pull through. And four of your . . . volunteers,” he added. “They got caught by one of those silly dogcart chariots and were slain with arrows. On the brighter side, we recovered four additional stones,” he added.
“Four stones. Eight High Magi. Four spellmongers. Nine hundred infantry. Six hundred cavalry,” I listed.
“Seven hundred and eighty cavalry,” corrected Baron Arathanial, joining us with Sir Roncil and a few other knights. “And expect that number to grow. Some of those goblins were using poisoned blades. Wounds thought minor are festering within hours. The herbrothers are asking your magi for help with the malady, but it appears to be insidious.”
The Baron looked tired but pleased with himself, his armor hacked and battered until it resembled a pot too often patched, his regal-looking tabard in tatters. “But by Duin’s sweaty sack, Magelord, that was a fight I’ll remember until the day I die!”
I looked up at the dead dragon, its blood draining into huge puddles that were mixing with the puddles of rain on the broken plaza. “Baron, if there’s a man here who can forget that battle, I want to meet him. Then I want to be him.”
Chapter Fifty
The Joy Of Barrowbell, The Sorrow Of Gilmora
If you want to see a town throw a party, slay a dragon for it sometime.
Barrowbell had gotten the news of the climactic fight almost as soon as it was concluded, thanks to mind-to-mind contact. As soon as the news went out the grim-faced defenders had erupted into riotous applause and joyous celebration. Not so much that they neglected the defense of the city (there were still goblin bands harassing it daily) but the threat of immanent, concentrated attack on the city was over.
More importantly, while the threat of dragon attack was by no means over, we had demonstrated that it wasn’t indefensible. And if we downplayed how difficult it had been, I think we can be forgiven. There was the matter of counterintelligence to contend with.
We knew for certain that some gurvani shamans had fled the battlefield with bits of snowstone, for instance, and we knew that the substance was essential for dragon slaying. The Dead God had to have learned as much himself from the incident. In any case, the cloudy skies over Gilmora and Barrowbell were free of bat-like wings for several days.
After policing the battlefield, arranging for the dead to be buried honorably (if human) or burnt (if gurvani), and moving Terleman’s command to his secondary castle, my men and I spent three days riding hither and yon across Gilmora, doing our best to chase down gurvani bands or relieve sieges. Twice during that time there were battles where over a thousand on each side contended, but the Battle of Castle Cambrian was by far the largest engagement of the campaign, even without the dragon.
Baron Arathanial was in his element, leading his gentlemen against the goblins at every opportunity, making friends with the local beleaguered lords and generally helping re-establish the credibility of House Lensely as a military and political power.
That he was using his new friendship and alliance with Magelord Minalan the Spellmonger didn’t bother me – I didn’t hesitate to drop his name when I thought it would do me good. Under his leadership Sir Gimbal and his crew were put into steady service on the field, though they cursed the Baron quietly under their breath at every turn. It didn’t seem to bother the old man.
Pentandra, of course, quitted the field as soon as she was able, and escorted a large party of wounded who could be moved back to temples staged as field hospitals back in Barrowbell. She was already busy sending word of our victory to everyone she could, in order to spread the novel idea that we knew what the hell we were doing.
According to her, in conjunction with our new Alka Alon allies the Arcane Orders and the Spellmonger had engineered a surprise counter-attack that had daringly driven the gurvani away from the city, and had just happened to slay a dragon that had gotten in our way. She entirely underplayed the dragon-slaying part, which I thought was the most important, but she set me straight.
“If we act like it’s a big deal, so will Rard,” she explained, the day before she left for Barrowbell. “Rard made it a big deal at coronation. So if we take this and toss it back to him and say, ‘yeah, we did that – what else do you have?’ then everyone will feel a hell of a lot safer.”
“Everyone except me, who knows just how damn hard it was for the combined might of the Arcane Orders to do more than put a dent in that damn thing,” I reminded her.
“Try not to mention that too much,” she counseled me. “That kind of undermines what I’m trying to do for us, here.”
“What are you trying to do for us?” I asked. I thought I had been doing all the doing in this battle. She looked at me, amused.
“I’m trying to capitalize on your success,” she finally said. “I’m trying to promote the Arcane Orders as the saviors of the Kingdom, the cornerstone upon which the throne rests. I’m trying to improve our image, which the Censorate has been doing its best to sully, I’m reaching out to the common folk as their savior and the nobility as their solution, I’m playing off region political powers against centralized political authority, and I’m trying to get the common people enthusiastic about supporting the new magical regime.”
“I . . . just fought a dragon,” I pointed out, weakly.
“So did all your friends,” she dismissed. “I just got us free lodgings in Barrowbell, when you decide to join us,” she shot back.
So we didn’t act like slaying a dragon was a big deal, officially.
Unofficially, the people of Gilmora were ecstatic. The springtime raid from the sky which had demolished or incapacitated five garrisoned castles had dispirited the Gilmorans. Hearing about a dead dragon did wonders for morale.
Gilmora in general was a shambles. After spending four days touring the once-prosperous territory in its defense, I was depressed about the prospects for its recovery. As long as the goblins continued to harass, t
here wouldn’t be cotton or tobacco or flune or indigo moving down-river. It takes a fairly sophisticated infrastructure to produce cotton, for instance, and with most of the peasantry more concerned about fighting for their lives than showing up for work, it was unlikely they would be returning to the fields any time soon.
After the Battle of Castle Cambrian, however, the gurvani did their best to avoid meeting us on the field in pitched battle. Despite their innovations in cavalry, most of their forces were still light infantry.
Most. But not all.
Taren bade me to visit him at a remote farmstead a few miles off the Great Cotton Road three days after we’d slain the dragon. That’s where he lectured me on the evolution of gurvani weapons and tactics . . . and gurvani.
“This is the standard, pre-war gurvan,” he said, lifting a tarpaulin from over a freshly-killed specimen. “You’ll note the short stature, the black hair, the piggy little eyes . . . armed with a club and a shield, he’s a raider, not much else. One of the rural tribes recruited for shock troops, I’m guessing.
“This,” he said, rolling the tarp back more and revealing a second corpse, better armored than the first, “is what happens when you take a standard gurvan and outfit him for war. A light chain or leather shirt, iron or leather helmet, sword or axe or spear instead of a club. Much deadlier, harder to kill, but no stronger or larger than the tribesmen. This is who the Dead God is using as his backbone troops, guards, and regular infantry.
“Then there are the hobs,” he said, rolling the tarp back even further. The next goblin corpse was fully six inches taller than its mates, the black hair was gone revealing a well-muscled but wiry dark skin underneath.
“These are the ones the Dead God took as cubs and castrated. These are his best heavy infantry, now. Once they’re hobbed, the gurvani grow larger, have more strength, and are much more of a match for your average infantryman. They might be more docile than the un-augmented tribes, but not to us. We also think they are being controlled partially through some drug or narcotic – there’s a distinctive smell about these hobgoblins, compared to the tribals.
“Finally, we have this. This is new,” he said, simply, and unfurled the tarp completely. The last figure was similar to the third, but was another six inches or more taller. Indeed, it looked like a lantern-jawed, bow-legged shadow of a man, not a goblin. There was no hair, and the gurvan was tattooed around the face and hands in a ghastly white dye.
“It looks like a hobgoblin,” I shrugged.
“Ah, that’s what I thought, too,” he nodded, “but then I looked more closely. These aren’t hobs, Min. They’re intact. They can breed.”
It took a moment or two for that implication to sink in. “What? They can breed?”
“They can,” he nodded. “I wasn’t sure, either, so I did some tests. Somehow the bastard in the big green ball figured out how to grow them bigger. This was the biggest one I found, but more than a quarter of the ‘hobs’ I inspected in the field were actually from this variety.”
“It’s wearing livery, too,” I noted. The goblin’s leather armor had been over-painted in red ochre in a variety of gurvani writing I couldn’t decipher, but there was a central motif involving a severed hand. “Bloodletters?” I asked.
The thaumaturge nodded. “Right, a regular gurvani tribe, not just a drone in the warrior society. Big, mean, nasty . . . and big. As big as a man, almost. And if he can make them this big . . .”
“He can make them even bigger,” I said, with a depressed sigh. “How long before they’re tilting with us on the field like gentlemen?”
“Not in our lifetime, I’d wager,” Taren agreed, after a moment’s consideration. “They might be large enough to ride a horse, but that’s something else again than riding in armor and then fighting from horseback. But this doesn’t bode well, Min. One of the biggest advantages we have is our size. If they can match us in that, this war just got a lot harder to win.”
“They have dragons,” I dismissed. “A new, improved goblin isn’t concerning me so much.”
“It should,” he said, shaking his head. “Our intelligence indicates that Shereul has less than a dozen dragons at the moment. He has hundreds of thousands of gurvani. And only a third of his total force is invading Gilmora at the moment. The rest are guarding his dark realm, overseeing the fields the Soulless tend, skirmishing with our northern command, or . . . training.”
“Training?” I asked, surprised.
“Training,” Taren confirmed. “Training under human officers, about human tactics and human weaknesses. Mostly Soulless, but some have signed on with the Dead God for gold. Or . . . irionite.”
“What?” I asked, alarmed. “He’s giving it freely to humans now?”
“A rumor, so far, no more,” Taren admitted. “But it is concerning. If humans are freely signing on with the foe of all humanity . . .”
We all shook our heads at that prospect.
“So this is what the future holds,” Taren finished, recovering the corpses. “Larger gurvani, trained to fight and armor themselves like humans, and more of the same. And for all of our valiant struggle, this year we have lost hundreds of square miles to the foe, and scores of estates have been rendered useless or fallen into darkness.”
“And yet the struggle for Gilmora continues,” Mavone pointed out. “There’s still fifty or sixty thousand gurvani in the region, and more on the way. There are thousands of humans fighting for their lives against them. If we can prevent Barrowbell from falling until Duke Rard –sorry, King Rard arrives with his reinforcements, we may at least be able to preserve the southern baronies. Through the winter,” he added.
“Gilmora accounts for more than a third of Castal’s revenue,” Taren pointed out. “Losing it would be devastating to Rard.”
“Gilmora accounts for less than a fifth of the Kingdom of Castalshar’s revenue,” I pointed out. “While that’s still significant, it isn’t the blow it was. Losing Gilmora will hurt the coffers, but it will hurt the levies more.”
“It would be most strategically prudent to abandon the region,” Taren said, dispassionately.
“We aren’t abandoning Gilmora,” Mavone said, flatly. He was from here. This was his home.
“We can’t afford to abandon Gilmora, and not just for the money. If we let the goblins get a toe-hold in the Riverlands, next year will be twice as bad. They won’t stop at Barrowbell, they’ll be besieging Lans, Garwood, the Lazy River fiefs, even Castabriel itself. Gilmora is to be our laboratory, where we discover the best way to fight them and beat them. The Dead God builds his strength and trains. We should do likewise.”
“But Min, we’ve poured in over 60,000 men, and the province is still just as invaded as it was last spring,” Taren pointed out. “What happens if they move their strength in a different direction? Perhaps make for the coastal regions of Alshar, or try re-taking the magelands?”
“Then we move all of our people around to face him. But he won’t. He wants Gilmora. He needs Gilmora,” I emphasized.
That drew a curious look from Baron Arathanial. “Does the beastie have a preference for cotton?”
“He has a taste for human sacrifice,” I said, darkly. “Gilmora is one of the most densely populated lands, until you reach the coastal cities. He’s already sent back thousands of victims for sacrifice in coffles over a mile long.”
“Oh,” the Baron said, his face blanching.
“Not all war is as clean and neat as our victory over the Warbird this summer,” I pointed out. “In this struggle, every human life needs to have value to us . . . because every human life is valuable to Shereul. Every one he puts to the knife expands his realm just a little more. Every one who takes his foul pledge slays five of their fellow men for the privilege of being his field slave. If Shereul sees our people as resources to be harvested, then we must see them likewise . . . or we lose this war.”
* * *
Five days of day-and-night running raids, bitter fighting in
the bush, and relief of local manors in distress was enough. I was exhausted, as were most of my men, and the local situation was stable, more or less. When we couldn’t find a band larger than fifty-strong south of Renvor, I quit the field.
Terleman, freshly restored after a two-day mandatory leave I’d ordered him to take, was firmly in control of the countryside. Commanding from his new, smaller, but more defensible command post, he had fifty-lance strong patrols screening for any more large bands approaching Barrowbell, and a team of three High Magi scrying the region continuously.
So I took a break. I gathered the warriors of my household, and after seeing to the supply of my brave Bovali, who were encamped in the ruins of Cambrian Village, guarding the slowly-rotting corpse of the dragon (which continued to resist magic even in death; the body had to be seeded with snowstone to get the most basic of preservations spells to work).
The Bovali were in good spirits, despite the dead. Over two hundred of my people would not be returning to their happy little valley, including some I would miss. Ancient Vren, of the Diketower watch, had fallen in battle, as had my wise Yeoman Loas the Shepherd, Gorker the Guard, and Headman Brandine of Gurisham.
The Spellmonger Series: Book 03 - Magelord Page 92
