Dark Practices: Book Four of the Phantom Badgers

by RW Krpoun

  Dodging a spear point, Rolf decapitated the spear’s wielder with a solid swing of the enchanted great sword Moonblade and shouted for his squad to guide to the left; the eleven Badgers were formed in a loose circle, edging towards the johat as they fought off desperate attacks by unarmored, lightly armed Goblins who came at them in twos and threes without organization or plan. He had seen Janna, the black steel bastard sword she called Rosemist in hand, the enchanted weapon’s blade slick with blue-gray Goblin blood, darting between two huts to check on his progress; apparently satisfied, the Silver Eagle had ducked away to check on another squad.

  Silver Troop, advancing more or less on line, cleared the last of the huts on the north side of the kanketa and came to the cleared ground that surrounded the johat, where they halted to reorganize. The surviving Goblin warriors were swarming around the long house before them, desperately donning clothing and armor and trying to sort themselves into units before the attack resumed.

  “They’re going to make a stand in the johat,” Janna observed as she trotted up to her Captain on the edge of the clearing. “And rooting them out will be a pain in the arse.”

  “Is the area behind us clear?” Durek asked, recocking his crossbow; like most of the Badgers awaiting the attack, he had been sniping at the Goblins.

  “Pretty much; a few stragglers, but no serious force.”

  “Good. Put a squad in position to flank the johat on either side, get Elonia’s squad ready to assault the tower, and leave the fourth here with me.” The Dwarf studied the position before him. The johat was sunk into the earth, its interior floor three feet below ground level, its walls made from large tree trunks squared off on two sides and laid horizontally, with mortar between beams to seal the structure against the elements. A steeply-pitched timber roof was covered with baked-clay tiles, and boasted ornate carvings at the eaves and peak. What few windows it had were mere slits, and the low doors would make entering difficult for armored Humans. The watch tower rose a few feet from the east side of the long house, to Durek’s left as he faced it, and Goblins were already scampering up the ladder to its platform carrying the greased leather cases that bows were stored in against the winter damp. With archers on the tall platform and footmen in the long house, the Goblins would be able to dominate the center of the kanketa and make any attempt to bypass the johat expensive. Or so the Goblin chieftain believed.

  Durek waited until the Goblins were fully deployed, his few wounded had been Healed, and his Badgers given a chance to catch their breath and get a drink of water before giving the order for the second phase of the attack to begin. Lieutenant Axel Uldo rode his mule to the center of Silver roop, a handsome man of average height whose coal-black hair was thickly shot with rich silver despite the fact that he had yet to see his thirty-fifth birthday; he was mounted as both legs had been badly broken, shattered in fact, five years earlier, and while he was fast regaining their use, the frozen ruts and hard-packed snow in the rude streets of the kanketa would have taxed his walking abilities to the utmost. He studied the Goblin’s dispositions for a moment, a faint smile on his good-natured face, before sketching a series of shapes in the air before him, faint gray sparks trailing his fingers and lingering for half a heartbeat after the passage of his hands, careful words in Latava, the dead language of magic, rolling from his lips. A brief, swirling mist swept across the platform, and all activity there ceased.

  Pausing for a quick sip of water, the wizard carefully addressed a second spell, thankful that this kanketa had no shaman to oppose him, but the Purple Spider had only a few magic-users left after years of constant fighting, and these would be far closer to the centers of power of the Keiba. Finished, the second enchantment created a sudden flurry of melon-sized balls of ice which swept across the east end of the johat, sending a spray of shattered ice and broken tiles cascading to the ground, followed closely by a second flurry. Wiping the sweat of exertion from his brow, Axel saluted his Captain. “You may proceed, sir.”

  Janna barked an order and a squad of Badgers trotted across the open ground heading for the tower, each pair of mercenaries carrying one of the squat hatch-like doors from a Goblin hut in front of them as protection from archers while their comrades fired at the johat’s window-slits to cover the attack. A few arrows leapt from the long house, but all missed or stuck the protecting doors, and the squad gained the tower without loss.

  Corporal Elonia Starshine halted on the tower’s ladder at a point level with the johat’s roof, waving four of her squad, all skilled crossbowmen, to continue on to the platform above where they could provide covering fire. They would find six hoarfrost-coated corpses up there, she knew, the Goblins’ blood frozen within their very hearts; Elonia had seen Axel’s magic before. She was a tall, full-figured woman of mixed blood, with a cat’s easy grace and level green gaze, and the aloof, serene beauty of a temple statue. She held herself apart from the Company without offending, a stranger to all but Starr Brightgift, a distant cousin, and Maxmillian, who was her lover, and neither of these knew the complete, or even partial truth of who Elonia Starshine was.

  She admitted to mixed blood as anyone who looked at her could see the Threll race in her grace and expanded life span (Elonia was one hundred thirty two years old, while wearing the weight of age appropriate for a Human woman in her early thirties), but declined to say much about her ancestry beyound stateing that her father had been a Harthrell, a sea-fareing Threll, and her mother Human. In truth she was the daughter of a Lanthrell (forest-dwelling Threll) female slave given to a Direthrell (Dark Threll) officer in the fortress of Alantarn. Her mother had achieved some measure of influence within that fortress of Void-worshipping Direthrell by dint of her singing ability, and had seen to it that her child had been spared the usual fate of molestation and adherence to the Dark One that was the usual fate of slave children. Instead, she secretly taught Elonia the ways of the Light, and how to conceal this from her dark masters.

  In time Elonia’s mother was sacrificed in a Direthrell ceremony, but her lessons had taken deep root in her daughter, who had gone into Direthrell service with her true allegiances still secret. Over the following decades Elonia faked her own death and assumed the guise of another mixed-blood (called Nepas within Dark Threll society), whom she had killed, serving in the ranks of the Pargaie, or spy-assassins of the Direthrell. From within these ranks Elonia had changed identity several times, using the secrecy and cell structure of the spy corps to hide that fact, each time killing those whose identity she took and gaining authority and power with each change, and always betraying Direthrell operations and spy rings to their enemies.

  Finally leaving her charade for good after faking the death of her last identity, she assumed the name her mother had given her (but which she had never used before), and undertook her finest and final revenge: the death of her father, who had mistreated her mother, and the death of the Hold Mistress who had given her mother to her father as a plaything, and whom had ordered her mother’s death. She had also managed to recover her mother’s bones, which had been part of a Direthrell trophy collection of such victims’ remains.

  Her revenge complete, her mother laid to rest, the lithe Badger had been at a loss as to what she could do with her life, finally deciding to remain with the Phantom Badgers, as the vehicle she had needed to complete her revenge had become a sort of family to her. She served now as the Company Seeress, having some minor skill in the arts of Amplus Novo, or the Inner Sight, and even weaker abilities in Vectius Meum, the art of the mystics, rather petty magic.

  Her skills, while unique within the Company and rare elsewhere, were not of such a degree that she was held back from danger in the manner that Axel was, although being a Corporal made her eligible for some of the Company’s lean stock of enchanted items; she bore two, in fact: a brass torc that, like Janna’s, gave her the protection of a full-face helm, and a wide, ornately decorated belt that conferred the protection of a shirt of chain mail, a useful item as the S
eeress was a practitioner of jednostavan, the deadly Navian art of knife-fighting, and disdained armor as an impediment to quick movement. The girdle supported a pair of yataghans, the curved long knives popular in the Principality of Navio, a fighting net folded over each cross-draw scabbard, several odd-sized pouches, a quiver of quarrels for the crossbow that rode on her back at the moment, and a battery of throwing knives.

  Her Threll-ness was not as apparent as it might have been, for although the physical differences between the three tribes of Threll appeared to be small to non-Threll, they were distinct enough in their own way; Elonia’s mixed blood thus served to cloak her Threll-ishness, as the two different blood-lines tended to neutralize each other, as well as leaving her sterile. The Threll in general tend to be six to eight inches taller than the average Human, with a lighter build, slender frame, and a pronounced delicacy in their facial features and small bone groupings, such as the hands and feet. Facial and body hair are minimal, and Threll ears lack most of the curling and ridging that is common to Humans, being mainly smooth, slightly pointed, and much more mobile. Being of mixed blood Elonia had broader features and a wider body build than most Threll of either parent’s bloodline, although at five feet five inches she was tall as compared to a Human woman.

  Standing on a supporting cross timber while her squad arranged themselves around her, she plucked a foot-long shaft of wood from a belt pouch and unwrapped the sheet of vellum that was bound around the thickly-engraved rod. Bracing one end of the engraved rod against the beam at her feet, the Seeress studied the curled page before her for several minutes before carefully uttering a phrase of twelve words. After a moment the rod disappeared in a puff of dust; Elonia hastily drew her hand back as the vellum crumbled into tiny fragments and a swirling ball of mist gathered where the rod had been. Slowly the ball of mist rolled away from the beam in a shallow arc, ending at the roof of the johat twenty feet away, leaving a six-foot-wide plank walkway with a waist-high railing behind as it moved, the wood of this instant bridge fresh and yellow, the steel nails binding it together bright and unrusted. Below the unnatural bridge supports of freshly-cut pine, bark still clinging to the trunks, extended downward to embed themselves into the ground.

  Unslinging and loading her crossbow while the enchantment of the Rod deployed, Elonia gave last-minute instructions to the rest of her squad who were readying tools brought for this purpose. When the bridge was complete the Badgers crossed to the roof of the johat, the bridge’s planks serving as a bulwark against Goblin arrows coming through the holes smashed in the roof by Axel’s hail. While Elonia and two others sniped through the roof-holes at the Goblins, the rest of the squad plied sledges and long pry-bars, widening the holes in the tile roof. Meanwhile, covered by the crossbowmen on the tower, Rolf’s squad flanked the johat to the east while Maxmillian’s moved around to the west.

  Inside the johat the Goblin Serann (the Goblin rank equal to Captain) who served as the village’s chieftain saw that with the tower in Badger hands and the breaching of the roof his position had become untenable; wasting no time, he issued his orders and the Goblins burst from the various doors of the johat, lean, leathery figures in well-made garments of goat’s wool and leather, carrying spears, light shields, clubs, and small axes, a few wearing studded leather armor or captured mail, but most having only cord armor made from tightly-woven cords bound together into many-layered tunics.

  Coordinating his command with horn signals, the Serann ordered the noncombatants to flee while he and the fifty remaining jugata fought a rearguard action to delay the Badgers. The mercenaries chose not to press home an attack on the slowly withdrawing rearguard, instead holding back and sniping at the Goblins, mounting the occasional squad-sized rush to close and kill a few of their poorly-armored foes before withdrawing.

  Fifty paces outside the southeast gate Serjeant Arian Thyben lay in the defensive ditch with his linen scarf over his mouth and nose to hide the stream of his breath and a bleached ox hide beneath him to keep off the worst of the cold and wet, a tall, thin man in his mid-thirties whose country-courtly air and oddly pitched voice often gave a first impression of foolishness, an impression which his gangly build, dominating hatchet-nose and red hair reinforced. It was an impression he cultivated, and one which had no basis in fact: Arian was a Brother-Emeritus of the Order of the Fiery Staff, the latter being the arm of Beythar’s priesthood charged with hunting down hidden cults dedicated to the Dark One. The thin Badger, who thus by rights could be called a monk, had spent nine years hunting cults before retiring, a longer span than most who undertook such a dangerous path. Rather than spend his days training the next generation of cult-hunters or tending a shrine or temple to his goddess as a Brother-Almoner, Arian had chosen to travel and see something of the world, and had ended up in the Phantom Badgers. Now he waited with Blue Troop, which was actually more of squad strength.

  A few feet down the ditch Corporal Starr Brightgift crouched against a finger-drift, her deadly yakici, or Threllian recuve bow in hand, a row of white-fletched arrows laid out before her, a slender vision of Lanthrell beauty in miniature: at five feet one inch, Starr was a full six inches shorter than the norm for her race, a sensitive point with her. At sixty-one years of age, Starr was at the stage of development of a Human woman of twenty or twenty-one, a delicate-featured beauty with shining blond hair and flashing blue eyes, a merry and attractive member of the Badgers for the last four years. She was serious now, wrapped in white linen until only her slightly slanted eyes showed, watching the gate with an expert archer’s intensity.

  Past Starr along the ditch was Corporal Henri Toulon, a bearded young wizard from the Kingdom of Arturia and a Company veteran of three years, including the raid on Alantarn and a trusted member of the inner circle. Not yet thirty, Henri held only basic skills in the art known as Vectius Menana or wizardly magic, but spellcasters are rare, and the Phantom Badgers were glad to call him a wizard and include him within their ranks, confident that his skills would improve with time. Henri’s face was marked with numerous small scars he had acquired in the raid on the White Necromancer’s hold last year, a raid which had also cost him much of the hearing in his left ear. The close cut beard merged with the neatly-trimmed walnut mustache and hid the worst of the scars; unfortunately, the wizard’s close-cropped hair was steadily receding, leaning him with a higher forehead than most men a decade his senior.

  Beyond Henri were six more Badgers, all chosen for their accuracy with a bow, archery under combat conditions being a rare and difficult skill.

  Soon Blue Troop saw the gate unbarred and a half-dozen jugata eased out, weapons at the ready; apparently satisfied that the way was clear, they called back into the kanketa and set off down the road leading out of the village at a trot, followed closely by the surviving Goblin noncombatants, all burdened with children and whatever belongings or wealth they had been able to snatch up in the hectic minutes since the raid had begun. The watching Badgers hunched deeper into the ditch and let them pass, waiting.

  They didn’t have long to wait. Before the small advance guard had reached the trees the main force of jugata appeared, retreating through the gate in good order, their unit totem standing proudly above the ranks of warriors. They were down to forty effectives, but still an organized force worthy of respect despite their shortcomings in armor and weapons.

  When the Goblin formation had just cleared the gate and was backing down the road that zigzagged through the stake belt Arian gave a soft whistle; further down the ditch Henri extended his arm, palm held vertically as if pressed against an unseen wall, and carefully spoke a three-word incantation. Pale lighting exploded around the totem-bearer in the rearguard’s ranks, killing that Goblin and two more jugata and plunging the entire formation into confusion as blue-gray balls of electricity darted from spear-points to small axe heads, terrifying but otherwise harmless, the spell’s real power spent on the three blackened victims.

  As the crack of the lighting-bolt di
ed away the archers opened fire, sending shaft after shaft into the rear of the disordered Goblin formation. As their comrades shrieked from arrow-wounds and the balls of blue fire died away the jugata milled about in complete confusion, some holding their places in the ranks, others turning to face the new threat, some breaking to race down the road, and still others falling, dead or wounded.

  Before the Serann could restore order Durek bellowed a command and led Silver Troop in a charge, Janna at his right and Tonya Oesau, the Company standard-bearer, at his left. Outnumbered, beset from the rear by archery and another lightning-bolt, their ranks disordered and their totem down, the Goblin formation dissolved into a mass of individual warriors turning to flee as the wall of better-armored and armed Badgers bore down on them. Without the security of a formation, those who held their ground lasted only a few seconds against Silver Troop, while those who fled were shot down by Blue Troop before they covered half the distance to the sheltering trees. In the span of a hundred heart-beats it was all over.

  Durek took a long drink of ale from his flask before turning to the business of wrapping up the raid; fighting was thirsty work, no matter how short or one-sided the engagement. No Badger had been killed, although Bridget had three seriously wounded to Heal from this last clash and a dozen with injuries of lesser degree which could wait for Arian to come up, the monk being the Badger’s other Healer.

  “Right, let’s get this taken care of,” he bellowed to get the milling Badgers’ attention, not a simple task given their easy victory; finally the yelling and back-slapping died down. “Rolf, take your squad and sweep this village from south to north, every hut, hutch, and habitation - make sure no Goblin remains here alive; send all slaves to the north gate, looks like they’ve abandoned all of ‘em. Elonia, head back to the johat with your squad and loot it, then set fire to it and the tower. Maxmillian, take your squad and sweep the village north to south, same as Rolf. Kroh, take your squad and kill all the goats in their pens; see if you can find a couple teams of mules and some carts to move the loot while you’re at it. Janna, take Tonya and make sure every jugata here at the gate and on to the tree line is really dead; take a couple of Blue Troop as well.” The Captain eyed Arian’s command, which was sniping at a few straggling Goblin non-combatants. “Tell Arian to come up to help tend the wounded, and have Starr take command of what’s left as a squad and watch the road in case any Purple Spider patrols are in the area. I’ll be in the cleared area north of the johat.”