Crusader: The Sanctuary Series, Volume Four (69 page)

“The city of Reikonos is the largest in Arkaria with over two million people,” Alaric said. “Should the dark elves take it, they will not be merciful to the occupants—or the human race.”

“Oh, so we are rooting for the Council of Twelve,” Erith said, not chagrined. “Okay, well, that’s good to know.”

“Personally, I’m more worried about me, then the rest of you, then our members, then the applicants, and somewhere down the list, the flower garden,” Vaste said. “I’ll worry about Reikonos and the rest of the human race when the destruction of all of the above is not hanging over my head. Especially the flowers because they’re so pretty.”

“What chance do we have to push them back?” Ryin asked, turning his question to Thad. “A hundred thousand or more, yes? How do we break an army of that size? How many would we need to do it?”

“More than we have,” Alaric said. “I suspect that they will not be driven away as easily as they were the first time now that they have reinforcements. We can defend the walls against that number by keeping them at bay, but by bottling us up, they achieve their directive—they hold total control over the plains. There is no way we can effectively guard against the predations of their soldiers against the farms without being able to move our army to do so.”

“Perhaps we cannot control the Plains of Perdamun while they have us cornered so,” Vara said, speaking at last, “but we can give them pause and keep them from extending that control.”

Alaric’s eyebrow came up behind his hands. “You mean to fight a small war, to distract them, to split their forces.”

“Yes,” she said. “I mean to take a small force and do what they accused us of two years ago—find their convoys of stolen goods and strike them, then teleport back here with the spoils. They’ll be forced to move soldiers off the line of siege to escort the convoys, and as we move closer to harvest time that will be a larger and larger group necessary to keep them safe. With a druid and a wizard we’ll be able to teleport out of trouble before any army can reach us, and we can cause enough trouble and discord north of here to force them to keep splitting their forces.”

“I like it,” Vaste said, nodding his head at a sideways angle. “It almost sounds like something that could really work, as though perhaps it had been done at some point in the recent past.”

“It seems a shame to let our enemies have all the fun,” Vara said archly, “seeing as when Goliath and the goblins tried it, it worked very effectively at keeping all parties concerned fully off balance.”

“Yes, and also prompted every power in the area to send in more troops,” Ryin said. “What’s to stop the Sovereign from doing so again?”

“Just package up another division or five and throw them into the Plains of Perdamun?” Thad asked. “The Sovereign has to be reaching a limit at some point. There are only so many able-bodied dark elven men still living in Saekaj. Sooner or later, the Sovereign will run dry of forces. He can’t maintain any semblance of a line south of Reikonos, keep armies on the eastern frontiers with the Northlands and the Riverlands to keep them from interfering with his siege of Reikonos, and still keep the River Perda buttoned up the way he does while sending fifty or a hundred thousand more troops to the Plains of Perdamun. Something will give.”

“And let us hope it is not our walls, and our forces, and our flowers,” Vaste said.

“So we send a force?” Ryin asked, looking around, as though gauging the response around the table. “We do what the goblins did to us, raid the transports of the dark elves, wreck their convoys and cause them to spread out their forces, pull them from here?”

“It does seem somehow fitting,” Alaric said from behind his hands, “that the war started in that very way, and now we return to the beginning for our own purposes. Vara, since it is your idea, I would ask you to spearhead this attack force. No more than a hundred at any given time are to go with you, and no fewer than three spellcasters with the ability to cast a teleportation spell to return you here. I will not have us lose people to mere accidents. Keep a wary eye around you, even if you travel at night, and be certain to be doubly careful so as to avoid ambushes. The dark elves will not long tolerate us raiding the fruits of their thievery.” Alaric smiled and the hands came down. “I do appreciate the irony, though; they steal from local farmers, and we proceed to steal it back for our own purposes.”

“Yes, it is somewhat delicious, isn’t it?” Vaste asked. “It’s like pounding your enemies as if they were mutton and then licking the tears off of their faces.” There was an uncomfortable silence. “Oh, as though none of
you
have ever done that.”

“Where are you going to begin?” Erith asked, looking to Vara. “The Plains of Perdamun are huge, and traversing the whole thing, even with all the portals available to you—I mean, the Sovereign will have sent out wagons by the hundreds to collect the bounty of the plains.”

“We start in the north,” Vara said, and she felt her mind harden in resolution. “Near Prehorta, the closest to their home and where they’ll be paying the least attention. Then we’ll move west, toward the river and then …” She felt a thin, malicious smile crease her lips, and she wondered idly if it stole the color from them when she did it. “If we do this right, we’ll keep them rather busy …”

Cyrus

The tent was stuffed, filled to the brimming with servants and clingers-on for both Syloreas and Actaluere. The men from Syloreas were big, of course, the rough and marked sort whom Cyrus had come to expect, with their beards and long hair and fierce looks. There were not many useless, effete ones surrounding Briyce Unger, but the few there were made up for the lack with annoying precision.

The men from Actaluere, on the other hand, were swarthier, smaller on the whole, and reminded Cyrus of the men who worked the docks in Reikonos before the dark elves had moved in and taken over the labor force there. Their hair was short, the fighters were easy to tell from the talkers—and there were talkers aplenty who had come with Milos Tiernan.

Cyrus sat on a cloth stool that had been provided for him by one of the talkers of the Actaluere delegation. It was a small thing, annoying in its way, and it made him yearn to stand, especially now that the most troubling aftereffects of his injury had passed. Every eye in the tent was on him, and he had just finished speaking about the bodies, the ones that had come down the stream while he had been there beside it only the night before.

“You’ll forgive me, Lord Davidon,” Milos Tiernan said, a slight grimace on his face, as though the very news pained him, “but … how many bodies were there?”

“More than I care to count,” Cyrus said. “I stopped trying after thirty.”

“And they were men of Syloreas?” Tiernan asked, couching his words in a tone that sounded uncomfortable to Cyrus.

“So it would seem,” Unger said. “I looked them over when Lord Davidon’s people came for me. They look like village folk from the foothills, judging by the goatskin clothing. I would presume that they washed down after their village had been wiped out.”

“Fair to say.” Cyrus stood, hearing the clink of his armor, unable to bear sitting any longer, not on the tiny stool. “The scourge is sweeping out of the mountains it seems, coming south now, just as we expected.”

“Have you been informed of our battle plan?” Briyce Unger asked, the smell of sweat thick in the tent, the breeze of yesterday gone and replaced by the hot sun overhead, which turned the tent into a makeshift oven. The mountain men around Unger were shifting, listless, even though most of them remained seated.

“Seems simple enough,” Cyrus said. “Form a line in the middle of the plains north of here when we know they’re coming, sit and wait, and let them fall on us like wave after wave on the rocks.”

“There’s a bit more to it than that,” Tiernan said, with that same slight grimace. “Though not much, admittedly. Every suggestion I put forward with the idea of a flanking maneuver was roundly rejected.”

“If they come in as great numbers as we suspect,” Cyrus said, “we’ll be too busy protecting our own flanks to launch a counterthrust. With our healers at work, this seems like the best solution. If they come at us in a small number, we can get elaborate and envelop them. If they’re going to mass and swarm at us with the ridiculous amount of them that we think are lurking in the north, then we’re better off keeping it simple and defensive.”

“Yet,” Tiernan said, and stood, “if we allow our army to become pinned down, will it not mean our defeat? Will we not be pushed back, lose ground and lose heart?”

“Losing ground is an acceptable trade-off in this situation,” Cyrus said as he watched Briyce Unger nod his head. “We have hundreds of miles of open ground to lose before we butt up against a forest and have nowhere else to fall back. Losing heart would be foolish so long as we keep them from breaking through. If they flank us, we’re in trouble. If we can keep them in front of us rather than behind and continue to hammer them, we stand a chance. This battle is as much about standing toe to toe with them and bleeding them through attrition as it is about land and position. Let them have the whole plains,” Cyrus said with a wave of his hand to indicate the land around them. “So long as we can bleed them dry in the process and lose few enough of our own, we win.”

Tiernan conceded with a slight nod of his head. “Very well. This has been explained to me more than once, but the way you say it seems to make more sense than the others.” He nodded in deference to Briyce Unger. “I hope you’ll forgive me for saying so.” Unger waved him off, and Tiernan went on. “Can you guarantee that your healers will be able to hold our lines together against the death and serious injury that these beasts bring with them?”

“I guarantee nothing in a battle save for bloodshed and death,” Cyrus said, looking at Tiernan, a smaller man than he, as most were. He saw a hint of Cattrine in the King of Actaluere’s cheekbones. “You will lose men, no doubt, even if my healers were to perform miraculous feats. The army is too large and my healers too few to effectively protect the entirety. They will do their best, especially since your army will be holding the left flank, and I have no desire to see you take casualties that will weaken my defenses in that area.”

“Fair enough,” Tiernan said, and his voice was graver than Cyrus had heard it at Enrant Monge. “Then I suppose we have our plan, we have our roles, and all that is left to do is to wait for my army, and then move north into the jaws of the enemy.”

“Aye,” Briyce Unger said, “and let us hope that this time, we bring a morsel too large for them to digest, a bone that they might finally choke upon.” With that, the King of Syloreas stood, and as though his nervous energy was in need of a release of its own, walked briskly out of the tent without another word.

Cyrus watched him go, and saw the members of the Actaluere delegation begin to file out as well, save for a few—Milos Tiernan and two of his closest advisors, men Cyrus had seen at Enrant Monge. Tiernan caught Cyrus’s eye, and the meaning was clear—
Wait a moment.

Cyrus did as he was bade by the King’s gaze, and after only another moment, Tiernan’s advisors nodded in turn and left the tent, the flap closing behind them. The air was still now, and Cyrus stared at Tiernan, his piercing green eyes staring into Cyrus’s own. The King held a brass cup that had been resting at his side during the convocation and he drank from it now, his eyes never leaving Cyrus. “So, you’re the general of Sanctuary,” Tiernan said when the cup had just barely left his lips. “You’ve caused quite the stir since you came to our land.”

“None of it was intended to harm your realm, I hope you understand.” Cyrus did not bend as he spoke, kept the deference he might otherwise have offered well out of his words. He said it harsh and firm, keeping it from being any sort of offering or concession.

“I do understand,” Milos Tiernan said, though he kept his distance. “You trespassed, and I would have been content to let you do so, because there was little margin in me keeping you from crushing Syloreas so long as you didn’t turn against me afterward.” The King of Actaluere let out a bitter laugh. “Hell, even if you had, I would have been better off than opposing you while you were in the middle of my territory; having you come at us from the border with Galbadien would have been less sensitive than letting you sack Green Hill. That was a black eye for us.”

“Yet you don’t seem that upset by it.” Cyrus watched Tiernan’s reaction; there was a subtle tightening of the man’s jaw as it slid to the side and his lips drew tight together, wrinkling as they pursed in an almost-smile.

“I don’t have to live in Green Hill,” Tiernan said, and took a small sip from his cup again. “Nor was I the one who gave the order to muster forces against you. That was your friend Hoygraf. Obviously, I don’t care to see any part of my realm destroyed, but as I said—I would have let you pass, if for no other reason than it benefitted us greatly to not stop you.”

“How does it benefit you to have us save Galbadien?” Cyrus asked, watching Tiernan carefully.

“How would it have benefitted Actaluere to go from two enemies to one?” Tiernan shrugged. “Luukessia has a delicate balance of power, one that none of the Arkarians I’ve met seem to fully appreciate, coming from so fragmented a land. If there comes a war to Luukessia—and there always does—it rarely involves all three parties. Alliances last a year, perhaps two, enough to firmly shellack one of the powers and to allow the other two to remember their disdain for each other, and then they dissolve.” He touched his chest with a single finger. “I like the balance. I like knowing who my enemies are, always. I prefer to know that I can’t trust anyone on my borders and that my best bet is to always keep a wary eye on both of them.” His expression turned sober. “And I always liked to think that if an outside threat came from over the bridge, our three Kingdoms would band together and toss them back without a second thought.”

“Second thoughts seem to be abounding in this situation,” Cyrus said, catching Tiernan’s eye after the King had seemed to go pensive. “Your whole land was almost in an uproar; you barely made it to this conflict yourself, and whatever is coming down from those mountains is looking to me a whole lot worse than most of the things that might have come across the Endless Bridge.”