Thaumaturge

by Terry Mancour

  “You’ll get them,” promised Sandy, unenthusiastically. “Infantry and archers, both. I don’t know how good they’ll be . . . or how fast I can get them mustered and deployed . . . but you’ll get them.”

  “I’m putting Tyndal in charge of the reserve cavalry, unless you have any objections,” I offered. “Bendonal has agreed to lead a contingent of Megelini Knights, about five hundred, as many as can be spared from the defense of his lands. Bendonal will be in charge of our main cavalry force. Tyndal can ward the northern flanks, and Azar can picket the south.”

  “Five hundred cavalry isn’t going to be able to do much against tens of thousands,” Carmella said, uneasily.

  “It will be more, after the southern baronies finish sending their men,” I told her. “There are a few gentlemen in Vorone who want to wet their blades, too. It won’t be enough to attack,” I reasoned, “but plenty to protect our flanks. Besides,” I added, “The Megelini Knights are more powerful than their numbers suggest. Azar is trying to make an art out of a magical cavalry charge. We can probably use them to slow down the advance of the vanguard, too.”

  “Every little bit helps,” agreed Mavone. “Gurvani are still pretty skittish about horse cavalry, and the Nemovorti have never been on the wrong side of a charging lance. If I can borrow some of Azar’s Knights ahead of the battle, I think I can purchase us a few extra days preparation.”

  We got into the specifics of troop deployment and timing, and outlined several contingencies – everything from sudden dragon attack to an unanticipated rout along the way. We were creative people who had access to a troubling amount of power in difficult circumstances. Some of those contingency plans were as mad as they were brilliant.

  In the days after that initial meeting, we had several more as new information arrived by Mirror, pigeon, magic and dispatch. Terleman convened a coven of wizards in an unused workshop at the bouleuterion and had them begin nonstop assays of the approaching forces. At any given time there were from four to ten magi hovering over bowls of water, mirrors, or peering into crystals as they sought to spy on our foes arcanely.

  The flow of observations and reports allowed Mavone and Terleman to fill in a more complete account of what was transpiring in the wilderness west of Vanador. While our folk were getting in the last of their crops and shutting their homes down, Gaja Katar’s goblin vanguard began slogging their way toward our new city. I’m sure they had planned on the journey taking no more than ten to fifteen days, across unfriendly territory. After all, what resistance could a few tribesmen, magi, and peasants offer such a large and glorious force?

  As Gaja Katar was about to learn, Mavone doesn’t mind overwhelming odds. Indeed, I think he’s actually more comfortable that way.

  ***

  The first pitched battle of the war, as distinct from the pre-war raiding, was fought fifty miles southeast of Otter’s Point, a week after that first meeting. It was fought in a nameless section of hills that provided the easiest route for Gaja Katar’s armies to approach Vanador from the west. The region was virtually unpeopled, compared to the eastern bank of the Wildwater, so while there was little to defend, there was also precious little to defend it with.

  That didn’t stop our resistance. Those hills were worthless to us. But we were dead-set against the goblins going through that land unscathed. Every gurvan who fell before they reached the pass was one fewer we’d have to contend with at Spellgate. Since leading my army out from a defended position into a vulnerable field position to attack them was just poor strategy – my militia and infantry forces were not ready for that kind of deployment, yet – I let Mavone’s Ravens and the Vanador Rangers take the initiative to harass them while the rest of us continued preparing.

  It should have taken the gurvani around two weeks to move their army through that country. That was the minimum, in good weather and unopposed. The Ravens’ goal was to slay as many of the enemy as they could while slowing their advance to a crawl. With luck and the grace of the gods, we could keep them out of striking distance until the first heavy Wilderlands snows buried them.

  Mavone had good intelligence that the politics of our foes had already begun to affect the march at its inception: the most reluctant gurvani legions were driven ahead of the larger column of Korbal loyalists, where the Nemovort’s officers could watch and punish the more dubious soldiers if they had a sudden attack of cowardice or mutiny on the way to the battle.

  Behind the main column was a long train of siege engines and massive wains full of gear and supplies, mostly pulled by trolls. More than a thousand Fell Hound cavalry ranged on the flanks of the main advance to act as screeners against attack . . . or, more likely, capture deserters and bring them back to justice.

  Mavone’s approach to the advance was practical, even artful. He did everything he could to discredit and dishearten the vanguard and estrange it from the rest of the column. An army with an unreliable vanguard has inherent problems, as everyone who ever went to War College knew. Mavone planned to exploit that fact with a combination of misdirection and confusion.

  First, he sent his rangers and scouts ahead with some of our better warmagi to prepare the battlefield. This involved an ingenious array of deadly snares and traps that the Kasari’s woodcraft provided. It also involved equally ingenious spellwork from the Magical Corps and some inspired assistance from the Tera Alon that, when taken together, conspired to direct the route of the vanguard with far more control than Lord Gaja Katar could possible exert on it.

  Some of it was quite subtle – psychomantic spells designed to inspire a general sense of dread and doom were pretty standard fare, at this point in the war, but unless there was a shaman on hand who recognized and countered the scores of similar spells that littered the approach, enough of the marchers would stumble into them to have the desired effect. Similarly, they were subject to spells that sowed doubt in the leadership, while other spells encouraged the officers’ suspicions of their underlings made the entire vanguard grumpy. While not everyone was affected by the spells, enough were to confound direction and undermined morale.

  Mavone’s goal was to convince the vanguard that they were being used as spear fodder by the Nemovort lord as punishment for their perceived disloyalty. For the common infantry that meant increasing the sense of despair and fatalism every foot soldier feels while marching to battle. Every bush and tree would conceal imagined foes for those affected by the spells. The unremitting feeling of being observed would turn every shadow into a haven for a bloodthirsty humani warrior, with those in command of the vanguard laughing derisively as they stepped over their corpses.

  The fact that plenty of those shadows were, indeed, hiding deadly snares or ruthless killers helped support that idea. A surprise attack on a patrol can take mere moments for a couple of warmagi to execute. Having their replacements stumble across their slain corpses during a shift change was disconcerting.

  For the officer corps, Mavone’s plan meant bending their minds toward the idea that they were not only considered expendable by their superiors, but that they had been purposefully selected for a suicide mission as retribution for alleged failures or insubordination. More, they suspected spies and disloyal elements within their subordinates, too. They felt the same dangers as the common infantry did, augmented and magnified by the idea that they were being betrayed by their own commanders.

  Mavone had arranged for the paranoid to be leading the fatalistic in the service of the arrogant. By the time they got to Spellgate, the goal was for them to be more of a mob than an army. If Terl couldn’t make something out of that combination, he was getting paid too much.

  The spells activated during the center of the column’s passage through the spellfields worked to subtly gnaw on the minds of the gurvani that the treacherous bastards of the vanguard were plotting to desert, or worse, turn and attack the Nemovort who led them. Their dark lord Gaja Katar, it was known, would not hesitate to exterminate every gurvan in his path, regardless of lo
yalty, the moment he thought he faced rebellion. That kind of tension made the goblin officer corps jumpy and prone to mistakes.

  We certainly aimed to give them every opportunity to do so.

  Mavone had prepared the route as best he could, seeding it with insidious spells and snares. Terleman directed the actual resistance, through his lieutenants. As the vanguard emerged from the precincts around Gaja Katar’s headquarters, a small army of raiders and saboteurs was waiting for them, just out of sight.

  Terleman had deployed more than a thousand of our best cavalry to assist in the harassment, many of them volunteers from Megelin, as well as several companies of Kasari rangers and the thousand best-armed and experienced light infantry. Most were hidden in secret outposts or bivouacked deep in the forests. The heaviest load was carried by the warmagi under Terleman. He hand-picked the Sparks who got first crack at the vanguard, and those fellows were eager.

  Attacking a column on the move is easy. It’s spread out or bunched up, with regular delays because of broken axels and lame beasts of burden or lagging soldiers. Without a definite road to march upon, units can get left behind or take the wrong route and end up splitting off if communication within the ranks is inadequate. Believe me, I know. I herded ten thousand children through these very woods three years ago, and even with magic and Kasari discipline it had been a constant headache just to keep moving. Terleman’s plan involved a series of calculated misfortunes and surprise attacks designed to take advantage of all of those inherent liabilities.

  There was little Terleman and his men could do to subvert the minds of the undead in the main column. Imperial magic did not work on them the way it was supposed to, and subtle spells of psychomancy were doomed to fail against the dark energies they used.

  But they still depended upon their eyes and ears to perceive the world. They still relied on messages and intelligence from the field. If we could not affect their perceptions magically, Terleman and his crew found plenty of ways to interfere with their perspective the old-fashioned way.

  That included leaving a contrived dispatch from the field in the pouch of a corpses of one of our men with his horse on the road, along with sufficient evidence to support the idea that he was a messenger reporting to his commanders from a spy.

  According to that “secret message,” Baron Wenek was directed to meet at an unspecified rendezvous point with the commanders of the vanguard as planned, and after bribing the gurvani turncoats with gold and other just and valuable considerations, he was to support them when they turned on their comrades in the name of the Goblin King and Sheruel the Old God. It was quite convincing. To make it more so, Mavone added enough gold and silver in the pouch to act as a show of good faith.

  Another scheme was to leave unmistakable signs of a large force of cavalry in the region. That was contrived by a few bold fellows who managed to run their few horses back and forth across various fords and boggy areas, then switch the shoes on their steeds before running it again. They left enough poop and garbage behind to make it convincing.

  Similarly, the Kasari scattered several “former encampments” across the region, with well-trodden fields and numerous smoldering campfires (built not to spread – the Kasari were terrified of offending their ursine native god with a careless fire). A couple of wizards in Mavone’s employ went along to deposit enough human waste from magical chamberpots in those sites to portend a sizeable force had recently encamped.

  None of them would have passed careful scrutiny, much less a magical investigation, but to the average gurvani scout they would scream the presence of a humani army . . . just over there, somewhere.

  Those were the kinds of reports that confounded military planning miserably. By confusing the issue so damnably, the vanguard was forced to travel the route we wanted them to by subtle suggestion.

  Preparations had progressed to the point that when the vanguard of the gurvani approached, our irregulars were already holed up in their secret refuges, ready to strike, as their hapless scouts rode by on their horrific dogs.

  We had constructed a field headquarters on the eastern side of the hill closest to the Wildwater in a high meadow surrounded by sharp-eyed Kasari bowmen and thick arcane wards. Wards designed for war. Terleman oversaw the entire operation from there, standing around a big trestle table spread with a highly detailed map of the region.

  It was reasonably successful, and I watched it play out on the maps like a game between two opponents over the first three long days. I didn’t really have much to do with it – this was Mavone and Terleman’s kind of work. But it was fascinating to see two of the most talented warmagi I’d known use every trick they knew to frustrate our foe.

  Mavone had used his quiet cadre of Ravens to prepare the battlefield and plan a response to every contingency he could imagine, taking a personal interest in the subtleties of each engagement, learning with every encounter. Terleman, on the other hand, was a tactician who saw foes as abstract forces that could be confronted, turned, or avoided according to certain invariable laws. Professionally speaking, it was a pleasure to watch them work so closely together, like generals of two armies occupying the same overlapping battlefield.

  The goal, after all, was not to defeat the enemy in the hinterlands – although that would have been wonderful. We did not have the force to do so, not even with magic, not in the rugged countryside of the Wilderlands. Our goal was to whittle away at the enemy and deprive him of confidence as he advanced into our lands. While it would not change the inevitable conflict at the pass to Vanador, it would change the composition of the force we would face, and that alone could be decisive.

  That first day the gurvani scouts must have reported a relatively empty – but recently occupied – country that seemed safe to cross. The vanguard pressed forward into the morning before stopping to rest for the day. By nightfall they arose unmolested, ready to march.

  But not unaffected. Either the shamans in the vanguard were sleeping on duty, or they had so little expectation of attack that they didn’t bother. Not that it would matter – our fellows could cut through wards like string. As it was, they were able to approach the camps undetected, close enough to cast the psychomantic spells Mavone had prepared. At twilight, when they rose and ate a meal, the paranoia started to take seed.

  By midnight, it had taken firm root in the fertile soil of their imaginations as they first legions marched through unseen spellfields and sentries became prone to hallucinations. The doubt set in, the gnawing sense of doom, and as the moon began to set squabbles began breaking out across the van. Reports and rumors of hidden foes abounded, though there was still no attack. After moonset, the column abruptly departed the path they’d been on and took a sharp turn toward the north.

  Just before they were ready to encamp before dawn, five miles north of where they should have been, teams of snipers and insurgents slipped from their hiding places and struck. Not in force – they came singly, silently, and with daggers, not swords. Dozens of individual gurvani had their throats cut or took a punishing belly wound if they wandered too far away from the column. Individual patrols were struck with devastating accuracy by snipers concealed in the trees or from covered blinds.

  It wasn’t enough to do any real harm to the unit, but it spread fear and terror among them. Goblins are just as much prey to the anxieties of the unknown as humans are, especially after having been doused in thaumaturgic accelerants.

  Meanwhile, the center of the column, separated from the vanguard by miles, was harassed by another team of Mavone’s hand-picked warmagi. These fellows skulked out between the van and the center and bravely installed a battery of magical constructs to confront them, when they arrived.

  There were a dozen of them, each different in their presentation, their weaponry and their behavior. They activated the moment someone came close enough to investigate. Then they attacked everything in sight in relentless fashion.

  As constructs go, they were built for toughness more than le
thality. We were trying to delay them, not destroy them. The weapons they carried were deadly, but limited, and they were enchanted to be stubborn and territorial. Their flanks were built of layers of rawhide and scrap iron, and their subsidiary enchantments were designed to annoy more than destroy. They would not attack, exactly . . . but they would not let the army pass until they were defeated.

  They weren’t invulnerable. Eventually their limbs were pinned down, or their enchantments undone, or they were simply hacked to pieces, but it took valuable, precious time. Nine hours were wasted trying to pass the constructs, an entire night’s worth of marching evaporated as our cruel creations challenged their passage. If the commanders of the center had suspected treachery, and the involvement of the magi with traitors in their ranks, this was as good as proof for some of them.

  Those were nine eventful hours for the vanguard. When they started off their march – still going north, if a little more eastern than before – the news of the deaths of the sentries and stragglers had spread to all the legions, and there was general grumbling about it. The commanders pushed back. Their camp had not been molested for two nights, after all – the attacks were no worse than bandits in the woods, they claimed.

  That argument collapsed when the front of the vanguard was ambushed by archers as they passed between two hills that night. A hundred longbowmen on each hill unleashed a torrent of steel-tipped shafts on the van just after moonrise, while snipers picked off the stragglers at the rear of the unit. Enough of an attack to stir them up, but not enough to damage them seriously.

  Among those arrows were many that were specially enchanted to make the attack seem far, far worse than it was by those receiving it. No less than nine full volleys flew before the firing became ragged and men searched for their reserve quivers. In the meantime, the angry gurvani general sent his mounted scouts up the hills after the archers while he prepared to withdraw back to the unit behind him.