Dark Practices: Book Four of the Phantom Badgers

by RW Krpoun

  “Elonia, I’m here.” He tried to sound calm and heroic, but in actuality he sounded a bit winded.

  “There’s two outside and two in here, one’s Myra,” she turned her blindfolded face towards him.

  “Not anymore. Maxmillian von Sheer, Corporal of the Phantom Badgers,” the historian nodded to the Suflander, who had pulled a poniard from the top of one hand-tooled boot. “I’m afraid your two lads outside are dead.”

  “A shame; Zari Wiali, at your service,” the cultist nodded politely and circled to his left. “I must admit, your arrival is a bit of a surprise.”

  “Disposing of van Feuchter’s body went much quicker than we thought; I only missed you by a few minutes.” Maxmillian side-stepped and watched the dirk’s point. “And I had some help.”

  Too late Zari realized that he had moved away from his captive, who might have made a hostage, but excused himself with the thought that swordplay and fighting were hardly his forte. Unfortunately, the man in front of him with the bloody sword, battle-scarred shield, and half-unbuttoned coat seemed right at home with it. So van Feuchter was dead, was he? That was interesting, and Myra was dying unless they could get her to a Healer quickly, and more importantly, unless he could come up with something clever and that right quick, he was likely to die.

  Maxmillian led with his point, going for the center chest with a good step-in thrust; Zari parried with the poniard, a bad choice: the dagger was knocked from his hand as the barely-deflected blade skidded across his ribs. The cultist stabbed with his dirk, but the Badger caught it on his shield and skipped away, half-turning to deliver a savage blow which severed the steel link connecting the cuff on Elonia’s right wrist to the strap around the bedpost.

  The two faced each other, Zari bleeding badly from the gash along his ribs. He managed to grab a cauterizing iron from the brazier to replace his lost dagger as Maxmillian closed, but he was unhappy with the sight of Elonia, still blindfolded, busily unbuckling her left arm.

  The scholar picked a central spot and stopped: Elonia would be free in a minute or so and then things would go badly for the cultist; Zari realized this, however, and hurled the iron as he leapt in. Wishing he had had time to grab his helm or armor instead of just his shield, crossbow, a handful of quarrels, and Elonia’s crossbow back at the boarding house, Maxmillian ducked the hot iron and blocked with his shield, running the point of his sword through the cultist’s left calf, then chopping a deep cut into the man’s left forearm as Zari hastily retreated, catching a light cut on his own cheek as the dirk’s point skidded off the rim of his shield. The Suflander’s dirk was lighter and faster, but the shield was the clincher in the fight: Zari had no protection once he committed himself.

  A quick glance showed that Elonia had crawled backwards to a squatting position to get at her ankle cuffs while discarding the blindfold; a nimble side-step kept Zari from the brazier and its irons as the two exchanged feints. There was a rack near the cultist, but nothing on it was heavy enough to parry a broadsword or long enough to act as a weapon; Zari grabbed a riding crop off it with his wounded hand anyway.

  “I don’t suppose we could negotiate?” the Opatian tried with a sweaty-faced grin, eyes squinting against the pain; he was losing blood fast from his side, and his left leg would barely support him. Surrender and the group might be able to rescue him before he hanged.

  “Sure, drop your weapons and I’ll turn you over to the Trident,” Maxmillian lied. He was astounded when the cultist tossed the dirk down and left the crop fall. Rallying, he gestured with his sword. “Put your good hand on top of your head.” When Zari complied he stepped in and stabbed him through the throat, getting the windpipe and the big artery in one smooth thrust; the cultist had a second or two to look shocked before hysterical panic set in.

  Stepping over to Myra, Maxmillian ended her hoarse yelling with a thrust to the base of the neck and turned to Elonia, who was sitting on the edge of the bed sobbing with relief. Grabbing Zari’s coat off the hook next to the door, Maxmillian draped it around the Seeress’ shoulders and sat next to her, his arm around her waist and his bloody sword across his knees. In the corner Zari finished his thrashing and gurgling as the life left his body.

  Finally Elonia took a shaky breath and composed herself. “That was too close for comfort. Back in the earlier days, you know, I always carried poison where I could get to it with my teeth, but I quit after Alantarn. How did you know where to look for me?”

  “Ah, well, there I had some help,” Maxmillian admitted.

  Dooaun prodded the cultist with his toe, gave him a couple more thumps across his now-misshapen skull to be sure, and discarded the bloody length of wood. He had pounded in the heads of both men while he waited for Maxmillian to return; slipping his hand into a pocket, he cupped a crystal, closed his eyes, and concentrated. Yes, it was over, and they had won. Good.

  Wandering over to a handy rock fence, the Watcher seated himself and extracted a small pipe, a pouch of tabba, and his tinderbox from one of the many hidden pockets sewn into his voluminous robes. As he had pointed out to the cultist before he had killed him, freedom was an entirely different business than he had expected, not that he had had too good of an idea of what to expect. Fortunately, he had been taught Pradian during his training, and Leta had learned a few words from slaves captured in the Empire, and they had had money; still, it had been one long and harrowing adventure learning to deal with this new life.

  Lacking experience and alone in a huge and unfamiliar nation, Dooaun had chosen to head for the only people he knew even slightly, the Phantom Badgers. It took just over five weeks to reach Teasau, five weeks which had polished his rusty grasp of the Imperial language and vastly improved Leta’s knowledge of the tongue, although neither was ever going to be mistaken for natives. Through trial and error, and the years-honed skill of adaption that is the mark of slaves living with hostile masters, the two had learned to adapt. They sold off their excess gear, Leta bought clothes appropriate for the Empire, Dooaun acquired robes which while hardly common to the Empire were none the less far finer than any he had ever possessed before, and they did their best to remain unobtrusive.

  By the time they reached Teasau she was in the city with a detachment of Badgers while the main body was dealing with Goblins and smugglers in New Fork; the two had taken a room in a cheap boarding house and Dooaun had studied the situation. After a day or two he figured out that they were hunting a cult, and a day later he identified their drop point, helped more by years of Pargaie service than by his Art.

  The two had taken up a position near Pug’s stand and watched for the right time to make themselves known; Leta’s dancing was rapidly becoming quite good, and even Dooaun’s flute-playing was improving, but the pennies they earned were not enough to support them. While they had stolen enough money from Vargrat to sustain them for at least two years, and the sale of their excess gear had helped, neither of the two had ever had to support themselves before and thus worried constantly about money. Dooaun made up the remainder of their needs, and a little more, by playing cards and careau, using his Art to cheat; he salved his conscience by playing with men of criminal occupations.

  Freedom, he had learned, was nerve-wracking in its variety, bewildering in its lack of structure, and oppressive in the absence of orders and authority; if not for Leta, whose youth let her adjust far more quickly than he ever would, he would surely have ended his own life just to escape the unending series of decisions and adjustments one was forced to make. Her enthusiasm had carried him through the first days, and he had reclaimed a goodly amount of his mental equilibrium, but he would be very much relived to be part of an organization again, with clearly defined duties and leaders who would issue the necessary orders. He wondered if he would ever truly be as free in his mind as he was now in body.

  Although he couldn’t See the woman or the Suflander, he could observe the two thugs, and had Seen Elonia taken; using the amber plate that was his best focus he had tra
cked down the rest of the team and while the swifter Leta went to contact Tonya and Philip he had found Maxmillian and explained the situation to him even as the Seeress was being taken through the city gates. Luckily, she had seen fit to confide her past to her lover, which had served to convince the historian as to Dooaun’s bona fides. The scholar had raced to his rooms and come out with weapons and money as the short-legged Watcher had waited.

  They had purchased the first good horse they had found, a basket-maker’s, along with the cart it was hitched to and the cargo, all for no more than twice what it was worth, but Maxmillian hadn’t cared about money. The Badger Corporal had driven while Dooaun Watched, difficult to do while moving, but the half-Goblin was one of the best, and had a strong emotional tie with the subject. He had scouted the cottage and surrounding terrain with his Art, and then approached to act as a distraction while Maxmillian slipped in close on foot. The plan, he smiled to himself, had worked brilliantly.

  Dooaun Wisebee, Company Watcher of the Phantom Badgers. It had a ring to it, he felt.

  Limping to favor the welt across the sole of her foot, wearing Zari’s fine jacket (which, fortunately, nearly reached to her knees), his scabbarded dirk, her own shoes, and nothing else, Elonia came outside and took a deep breath of fresh air. “That was far too close for comfort.”

  Burdened under his sword, shield, and a few items wrapped in Myra’s shawl, Maxmillian nodded. “We cut it fine, but that was all we had to work with.” He motioned to a small robed figure who was standing shyly to one side, a smoking pipe unnoticed in its fingers. “This is Dooaun Wisebee; he used to be a Watcher for the Arbmante Pargaie out in the Wastes. He Saw you last year on the White Necromancer raid, and when he escaped a few weeks ago he headed to Teasau to join the Badgers, having nowhere else to go. He knows about you.”

  “Everybody seems to, these days,” Elonia said with a wry grin. “I owe you my life, Dooaun.”

  “Actually, to Maxmillian, I think,” the half-Goblin said diffidently. “I just pointed the way.”

  “To both of you,” the Seeress said firmly. “And I won’t forget it. Now, I would like to go and get some rest, more clothes, and my weapons.”

  “We’ll take the cart and get a room at an inn, someplace outside the city,” Maxmillian mused. “We can say you fell into the mud, or something; then I’ll go back into town to get together with the others, we’ll all gather our gear and meet back up with you. We’ll set the carriage horses free and put the bodies in the cottage to avoid notice for the next day or two, although I imagine the cultists will come looking in a few hours. Tomorrow we’ll hire a Healer and raid the place where they’ve stored the Orbheart. Dooaun found it, or at least its general location.”

  “That sounds good,” Elonia nodded, wiping flakes of dried blood from his cheek. “And then we’re through with Teasau, and not a moment too soon.” She stretched and winced. “Killing cultists sounds very good right now.”

  Dooaun shuddered and congratulated himself on his wisdom in getting over the infatuation. It was one thing to see death and mayhem at a distance, or to have to kill a wounded cultist who was dying anyway, but to actually look forward to an assault on a cultist stronghold made her a far thornier rose than this old bee wanted. He would stick with his sweet little yellow buttercup as a wise old bee should.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Axel opened his eyes and tossed aside the crumbled bits that were all that remained of the enchanted feather, one of a dozen the Badgers had received from the Threll for the return of the bones of six Lanthrell captives taken and killed by the Direthrell. The feather had allowed him to concentrate and project his vision and hearing as if he was seeing through the eyes and ears of a hawk; it had taken some getting used to, but he had been able to scout the fort most effectively.

  “Incredible,” he murmured, and shook his head. Looking up to see his Captain watching him with undisguised impatience, he grinned. “Haven't got a rabbit on you, by chance? No? Then to the matter at hand. There are forty Goblins dug into that tree-pile with what appears to be at least a week’s worth of rations; apparently they plan to hold the fort until their supplies are gone and then scatter, having proved their point.”

  “They boarded the Silly Bitch and put the fires out,” Starr pointed out, ears flushing a bit at the vulgar name. “Then stripped it of everything useful, beached it, and burned it down to the waterline. That was a good day’s work for them.”

  “The chains are the worst,” Kroh observed around the stump of a cigar. “There’s a few hundredweight of iron that’ll be coming back at us as arrow, spear, and axe heads once they melt them down and carbon ‘em up to make steel.”

  “Coming back to the point,” the Lieutenant said with a touch of exasperation. “The fort is made of freshly-cut trees piled in a complex pattern, not haphazard as one would guess to look at it from the outside. The base is set into trenches which add stability, and the logs are arranged so as to provide limited overhead cover for the garrison. The branches on the inner side have been cleared away, while the outside, as you all know, looks like a hedgehog’s back. They’ve a stone-lined fire pit going, with fire pots such as they used on the Silly Bitch ready to hand, just in case we try to use a Rod of Bridging; the bridge created is new wood, but the planking is dry, so a fire pot or two would make it impassable before we could get troops into the fort. The same is true even if Bridget created the stone arch she can call forth: it won’t burn, but the pitch will stay ablaze longer than the spell lasts; unlike the Rods, her construct is temporary. ”

  “Clever bastards. What about the bombardment?” Durek asked. The Badgers had moved into position the night before, on the twenty-second, and this morning one of the three river boats trapped north of the fort had pushed a large log raft into position. The raft, which had been securely anchored in mid-stream, had a wall built across the bow made of freshly-cut tree trunks covered with old sail cloth which the raft’s crew kept soaked with water, protecting the craft from the fire of the flat-trajectory ballista within the fort while the onager on the raft, crewed by members of the Ravenmist, lobbed stones and fire pots into the fort. It was now noon, and over a hundred shots had hit the Goblin outpost.

  “We’ve knocked out both ballista, but not much beyond that: the Goblins stick close to the walls where the overhang deflects the stones, which are too light to break through.”

  “Blast and thunder,” Durek scowled at the circle of Badger officers around him. “That leaves us with a frontal assault, then. We can’t let the Goblins get away with cutting the river for ten days; losing one boat will make other Captains nervous, but closing the river for another week will double the hauling fees, if not cutting off service entirely. Without the river Badgerhof will die and New Fork will be delayed until the road reaches there in late fifty-seven. We have to take the fort and kill every Goblin inside to show the Spider that this isn’t a game worth playing.”

  “Can’t be too hard,” Kroh shrugged. “We crawl over the logs and hack ‘em up once we’re inside. Fort or no fort, they still Goblins, and a pile of logs isn’t a real defense works.”

  “How did they cut so many trees, anyway?” Henri asked.

  “Saws captured from logging crews, Hohenfels has lost several since spring,” Bridget explained. “Will wiping out this fort really warn them off, Captain?”

  “Yes; forty warriors for one looted boat, not to mention the war engines they’ve lost, is not a fair balance sheet for the Spider these days. Fifty years ago, yes, but then they had near ten thousand warriors in their ranks, but not today. We’ve killed nearly a hundred Goblin warriors this year, plus whatever they’ve lost around Hohenfels and elsewhere, a tenth part of their total strength. They can’t keep risking their forces without something positive happening to change the balance. More families will desert their chieftains and flee north to join keibas out on the Wastes unless something changes soon.”

  “Nothing will,” Henri shook his head. “With the road
will come more settlers, more fighting, and constant losses. Even trading Man for Goblin the Empire will wipe out the Spider and never notice it. If the Hand strikes west next year they might get a reprieve, but not for long.”

  “True, but that does us no good here and now,” Durek put an end to the discussion. “We will attack in an hour. I will lead the assault on the south side, while Janna leads the charge on the north. Axel will support with magic, while Arian and Bridget stand in readiness to treat the wounded.” Not for the first time did the Captain regret that both the Company’s Healers were also officers; it created problems in times like these. “Now, this is how it should proceed.” Leaning forward, the Captain began drawing in the dirt, while the officers leaned to watch. Another plan, another battle.

  Janna stood poised on the edge of the clearing the Goblins had made by cutting down trees for their fort, a javelin balanced on her shoulder; beside her Kroh watched a time-candle burn down. She had eighteen rank and file Badgers and eight Silver River boat guards in her force, the latter drawn from the boats trapped north of the fort; Durek had an equal force on the fort’s other side. She eyed the tangled pile of logs and the hedge of sharpened branches jutting from it with distrust; Goblins were wily, and she doubted things would go as easily as the plan suggested. Still, sometimes there was no other way than hey-diddle-diddle, straight up the middle, that was just the way of it.

  “Time,” Kroh said, and she hefted the javelin, an odd-looking weapon with a fire-blackened shaft and a head which was discolored with heat-induced swirls of blue and gray, one of a half-dozen captured on the raid against the White Necromancer last year. Uttering the command word, she hurled the javelin, which arced out to strike the log fort in the center of the north wall; instantly the entire wall was engulfed in roaring flames which howled and twisted for three long heartbeats before winking out as fast as they had appeared. The javelin was intended to be used against structures of worked wood; against the sap-heavy, freshly cut logs they had limited effect, burning away the bark and most of the branches while failing to ignite any lasting fires.