Dark Path: Book Three of the Phantom Badgers

by RW Krpoun

  They passed a dead and partially charred trapper lying in an alley mouth near the brewery; Durek picked the spot to halt, catch their breath, and make a plan. The latter proved unnecessary when he scouted the brewery and observed the Me' Coner brothers and Axel guarding five trappers in the street.

  "Where's the rest?" Durek gripped his Lieutenant's hand in greeting.

  "Dead," Axel shrugged. "They were making torches and fire-barrels to burn down the village; seems they doubled back like you expected, saw the guards, and headed here to wreak some havoc."

  "Is Bridget all right? Picken made it sound bad."

  "No, she's fine. The two outside guards jumped her; her dress got torn and splattered with blood in the fight. She's in the tavern washing up." And getting dressed, the wizard added silently. He had taken the time to put his own clothes in order, and with a little luck the Captain wouldn't ask too many questions.

  "Well, damn." Durek sighed. "Much damage to the brewery?"

  "Not too much; the distillery got broken up a bit, but the trapper's property should repay it. Made a mess, mostly."

  "Good enough." The Dwarf stretched and worked his shoulders. "Might as well march them down to the docks and lop off their heads right now, won't be as much of a mess by the water. Mount 'em on pikes with some sort of sign, get the message across to one and all."

  "That's a bit hasty, don't you think?" Axel objected. "After all, we're not in the field; this is the Empire after all, albeit on the very edge. Why don't we give them a fair trial and hang them on the following Market Day? A public hanging's always a festive event, the more so for there being six of them. The townsfolk can attend the trial, too, it ought to be hugely popular. Everybody likes a bit of official entertainment."

  Durek stroked his beard thoughtfully. "Wouldn't hurt, I suppose, and like you say it would be good for the settlers. All right then, Starr, take your three back to the Festival and resume your duties. Have Rolf march that other trapper back here, send Picken to find our Watch, and then to tell Henri to stand down; no point in guarding the girl now. I'll go find the brewer and break the news to him. Watch these carefully, Axel; no point in cheating the crowd by killing any before the hanging."

  "Before the trial, you mean," Starr observed.

  "Either one," the Dwarf shrugged.

  Chapter Three

  Kustar Pravas took another drink of wine and sighed; pushing back a stray lock of her wavy black hair away from her green, cat-angled eyes, she tried to work up enthusiasm for the paper-shuffling yet to come, as the scope of the task before her beggared the imagination and there was no end in sight.

  She stood up from her desk and stretched, a tall, lithe Nepas (mixed-blood Dark Threll, in her case, half-Human) woman, an officer in the ranks of the Pargaie, the dreaded spy corps of the Dark Threll nation of Arbmante. She held the rank of Chora, or senior captain, but the foot-long carved ivory baton that lay on her desk with its bands of green jade every three inches, capped by a blue jade disk bearing the dark blue and scarlet shattered tree of the fortress Alantarn proclaimed her to be a personal agent of the Hold-Master himself, with authority within the fortress second only to her master's. Of course, the authority vested in the baton (called an atingo) was temporary; a word from Hold-Master Peria would return her to normal duties.

  The assignment that won her the atingo was simple in concept: six months earlier a Felher raid was mounted into the Inner Keep of Alantarn by the Night Sun Weehoc, or Felher clan-nation, using several prepositioned Gate egran or Gate exits. The previous Hold-Mistress had been killed in the raid and the new Hold-Master wanted to know how the Felher managed to open those egran inside a heavily-guarded fortress, and wanted to know in the worst possible way. Five Pargaie officers, Kustar aomg them, were hand-picked and assigned to investigate via conventional avenues after both Seers and wizards failed to explain how the raid has been mounted. Army officers were investigating the possibility that the egran had been carried in by scouts who had simply crept over the fortress’ physical defenses, but that was an extreme improbability. Somewhere someone in security had made a mistake or been bought off, and Kustar was determined to be the one who found out which.

  The magical background to her investigation was straightforward: the magical sub-art known as Abedo Vardo, or Gate-transport, creates a limited but highly effective means of magical transportation: an primary (egrai) and secondary (egran) portal are assembled, each physical structure being a tripod or box-frame five or six feet high made of enchanted rods or bars. Complex incantations cause a door-sized enchanted field to appear before each of the two structures. A person or thrown object entering one portal’s field will immediately appear out the other in the manner of stepping through a door. The distances between the egrai and egran can be up to hundreds of miles, and transport is instantaneous. The shortcomings are that the portals cannot be much larger than an ordinary doorway, the assemblies are expensive, opening a Gate is extremely easy to detect and pinpoint by trained Watchers, and the physical assemblies of the Gate are fragile and cease to function if damaged.

  Kustar had been chosen because her authorship of a daring report exposing considerable inefficiency in the Pargaie section charged with the entrance security for Alantarn, said section having been her current assignment. By fortuitous chance, she had submitted the report mere hours before the raid hit. Of course, the fact was that her career had been in ruins after her first field command having been overrun by unknown attacker, so she had nothing to lose. Peria had restored her rank and promised to substantially advance her career if she succeeded; mere diligent effort, he had assured her, would erase the stigma of her lost command.

  That she was still in the scutwork phase of her investigation was no fault of hers: five weeks after the initial raid, and before the preliminary data-compilations had been completed, the Felher launched another Gate-borne raid on Alantarn. The origins of this raid were easily determined: in the initial raid the Felher had left behind a disassembled Gate egran and the magical supports needed to open it, the various parts cunningly, and widely, concealed. Several key Felher were left behind to blend into the fortress' slave population, which actually outnumbered the non-slave population and contained a significant number of Felher. These Felher took the places of actual Felher slaves who were slain.

  This ruse worked perfectly: while the garrison turned the Fortress inside-out looking for assassins and stragglers left behind to harry (which the Felher had left behind in numbers), the slaves were inventoried by a simple headcount, and since the twisted rat-men are nearly impossible to tell apart by a non-Felher, no one noticed the newcomers. Five weeks after the first raid, the Felher 'slaves' opened their egran and out poured more Felher, who swiftly opened several more egran. Worse, the false slave Felher had used the weeks spent in Alantarn to make contacts within the slave population, so the raid was accompanied by a good-sized slave revolt.

  It took three hours to drive the main Felher force back out their Gates, and two days to dig the last rebel slave band out of a barracks it had forted up in. Then more time was lost searching every nook and cranny of the Fortress for stay-behinds (of which there were plenty), while doubling the guards on the slave compounds until steps could be taken to cow them back into line.

  Eventually things were restored to order, and every Felher slave left in the Hold was summarily executed, along with plenty of other slaves to set an example. Time had been lost, however: Kustar had spent a month commanding an ad hoc guard unit made up of various rear-echelon personnel, and another month was lost getting everyone sorted out and back up to speed in the investigative teams, a fact complicated by the death of several key support officers in the fighting.

  After the initial raid teams of officers had spread out with laborers and clerks; every location that had seen fighting or looting by the Felher was sketched and any captured equipment was secured, and every officer involved in the fighting was interviewed, as were anyone who was present at locations con
sidered to be key areas. This mass of paperwork, comprising hundreds of reports, site examinations, item lists, and damage estimates, was over three-fourths of the material Kustar was employing in her search; the rest consisted of reports and logs regarding traffic into Alantarn. The chief difficulty involved was establishing the time frame: as the second raid showed, it was possible that the egran could have been smuggled in earlier.

  Kustar doubted this; she felt that the egran were employed with a few days of their arrival in Alantarn, as the timing of the raid was not the best: all fortresses receive outside traffic for supplies, but Alantarn received much more than was usual due to the presence of the potential anverax site, which required large quantities of odd and rare substances in the various ceremonies and enchantments needed to develop it. The raid was launched at the onset of winter when outsiders were thin on the ground; a better time would have been the middle of summer, when Alantarn's guest quarters were jammed with Golden Serpent cultists and outlaw merchants. The actual raid had taken place on the twenty-sixth of Hoffnugteil (the tenth month of the Imperial Calendar) awfully late in the year for such an operation.

  For some reason, she theorized, an organization of non-Felher smuggled the egran in and opened them for the Felher. The weakness in this theory was the Why of it: what could motivate such a group? The smuggling and opening of the egran was a desperate venture, made all the more so by the need to escape afterward. What price could induce a group to undertake such a risk?

  The dark-haired officer frowned and took another sip of wine, staring thoughtfully at, and beyond, the wall of her office. Her chief suspects at this point was a band of Golden Serpent cultists who had arrived a day and a half before the raid. Most of the traffic into Alantarn was Golden Serpent, the merchant-cult of the Dark One, the professional go-betweens and neutrals in the usually mutually hostile ranks of the followers of the Void. What made her suspicious was that this group, the Third Green Den of the Inner Circle, had never traded at Alantarn before; security doctrine stated that they be kept at the Outer Line checkpoint for their first trade mission and not allowed into the Inner Keep until they had made at least one trip to Alantarn and undergone a background check by Pargaie field assets. This procedure had been circumvented by a written request by Era Ludio, head of one of the merchant power blocs, and the Den was allowed into the Inner Keep. The reason given for such a breach of procedure was that the Den had a large quantity of andern to sell, including several pounds of black, the most potent and a commodity ever in short supply. That this reasoning was valid did nothing to allay her suspicions.

  The Den had apparently fled their building and been wiped out in the fighting, their bodies identified by jewelry, cult insignia, and gems used in payment; an awfully convenient situation, Kustar thought, although once again it was not conclusive: several other merchant groups in the Hold had suffered serious losses which they had difficulty explaining to the Direthrell, although leaving their quarters to loot while the Dark Threll were busy elsewhere was the likely reason. Additionally, the Den had left behind two wagons fully loaded with trade goods they had obtained from the Direthrell, the total cash value being quite a sum, another weak point in Kustar's suspicions.

  Seers had gone over everything the Den had left behind but had come up with little other than the usual cult images; it was likely that the Den had used magic to dampen the personal residues on their equipment, but again, that would hardly be unusual given the prying nature of the Direthrell. The Den trade group had been small, merely a dozen, and it was entirely possible that they had simply been greedy and very unlucky.

  Era Ludio could have shed a great deal of light on the subject, but he had died in the raid as well, cut down by Felher darts in the early minutes of the fighting. That was another coincidence that troubled Kustar, but again it failed to be conclusive as many high-ranking Direthrell lost their lives in the raid, including the fortress commander herself.

  Sighing, she shook her head and returned to reading the after-action reports. It was possible, she admitted, that her interest in the Den was based on the fact that it was one of the breaches of entrance security that had driven her to make her daring report; personal involvements, however tenuous, could distort an intelligence officer’s perspective.

  Two reports later she frowned and leaned back from her desk, swirling the wine in her glass. The report she had just read, one of the last in the stack of unread after-action reports, had been different from any others that had preceded it. It was written by an Anlarc, a Dark Threll who had been elevated to much higher physical and mental status by regular, long-term consumption of potions laced with andern, mutating his mind and body to achieve far greater power than any normal Direthrell could normally aspire. This Anlarc, his retinue of heavily armed troops, and an Arm of the Dark had fought a fierce, if isolated, action some distance from the primary raid area; in fact, nearly half the Anlarc's force had been killed or wounded, and the Anlarc himself had been injured.

  What was striking about the report was that the Anlarc stated that he had been attracted by the opening of a Gate egran, and that he had fought a force made up of Humans and other non-Felher, who had used hecla, the thick liquid fire that was a closely guarded Direthrell military secret. The Anlarc said that the force he faced was attempting to withdraw, and had fought bitterly, with a skill and tactical control that was unusual for the Felher or their allies. More importantly, they had carried off their dead with them. The force was estimated at thirty, with a third of those killed or badly wounded, a number far in excess of Kustar's suspected Den, but numbers are often hard to judge in a fight, although she doubted a mere dozen could have mauled the Anlarc's command as thoroughly as it had been.

  Something about the report bothered her, and it took a moment to realize what it was: it bore the wax seal of the officer who had taken the report from the Anlarc, rather than the seal of the copier-scribe who had duplicated it. Normally, the originals were kept in a central archive with copies distributed to the five investigators and anyone else cleared for the reports, the copied documents and any other distributed documents being passed out by the slave-operated mail service.

  Coke, Kustar's chief clerk, a Human Thane (willing non-Threll servitor of the Dark Threll), was summoned by a tug on the green cord hanging beside her desk; the husky, sandy-haired man readily explained the situation. "Ah, yes, that one. If you would, Curoria, when you're through with it, please let me know and I'll hand-carry it over to the copiers. Since the Anlarc, like all his elevated kind, belongs to the Temple he had to be interviewed by a Temple officer. Well, it seems they took their time, no doubt concerned with weighty spiritual matters, and it did not reach us before the second raid. The officer who took the report was slain in the second raid, and the report was not discovered and forwarded until his personal papers were inventoried. I was on hand when it came to the copiers and since I thought you might be in need of it, I took it. I realize that this was a violation of procedure to do so, Curoria, but I felt that since it was already delayed for so long..."

  "No, excellent work," Kustar assured him. "The report itself is of no real importance but your diligence is noted. I'll be done with it in an hour or two and you may pass it on at that time. Should anyone question this, refer them to me." She waved Coke out of the room, making a mental note to reward the Thane.

  Carefully placing the report on her desk, Kustar stroked the bridge of her long and delicate nose. As the original report from a dead report-taker this could be an opportunity staring directly at her. There were four other investigating officers, and by now each might be reaching the same general conclusions as she, perhaps even fixing upon the same Den as she had. In theory, they were supposed to pool their data and drive towards the central goal together, but in practice each worked completely alone, sharing nothing, hiding everything, and spying on each other. Only one would reap the reward for solving the Hold-Master's questions, and Kustar was determined that it would be her.


  After some hunting, she found the site survey for the Anlarc's battle; to hide her line of inquiry from her four competitors she had copies of every report on the raid in file baskets stacked against the walls of her office. Using a clerk to find it, or sending for it from the outer offices would simply give her competitors an indication as to the direction her investigation was taking via the spies they had undoubtedly placed on her staff. It was very wasteful of time, she knew, but better to waste time than an advantage. After all, she had spies on each of the other investigators’ staffs as well.

  The report on the scene showed that the fight had taken place in an old corral near the walls of the Inner Keep some distance from the main raid area; the corral was surrounded on three sides by buildings, and the fourth by the wall. It was quickly apparent from the sketch made by the investigating officer that the force the Anlarc had faced had indeed intended upon a defense and retreat through a Gate: all doors and window-shutters facing the corral had been spiked or wedged shut; spears had been driven in at an angle in front of crude barricades made from boxes, and leg-breaker holes had been dug at all approaches. Hecla had been used, but the only corpses on the scene were either from the Anlarc's command or dead Felher.