Arm Of Galemar (Book 2) (87 page)

“In all likelihood,” Dietrik continued, “they have. 
But from my own experience in the army, I will tell you how it has probably
been handled.  Any information brought back goes straight to the top officers,
who pass it to analysts whose job it is to make sense of it.  Then it goes back
to the officers, who wrangle over it, then they spend session after session
arguing about the best method to proceed.  Decisions are slow, everyone has
their own ideas about what the next best step should be, and when orders do
finally emerge, they are usually only simple instructions to move forces here
or there.”

Marik nodded, thinking how much that sounded like the
few officers he had come into contact with.  Most had been young nobles given
temporary military ranks, yet to work with the existing officers, they must
have had at least a few similarities.  “And I bet further information comes in
during all this and starts it all over.”

“Not quite that easy.  New information is sent to the
analysts, to be sure, but in addition to the original task of developing the
intelligence, they must also make it mesh with the previous information.  If
they can’t, then that means they must have misinterpreted the original
information, or the new information, so they must start from scratch with
both.”

“Ugh,” Marik groaned.  “I can see why you left the
army, wanting to get away from all that.”

“Oh, it is not that simple, or difficult.  I think the
army tends to overcomplicate it, but no doubt Torrance and the clerks must go
through similar processes when they consider each contract proposal.”

That cast a shadow across Marik’s view of mercenaries
versus the kingdom army.  He liked how the band was direct and cut to the
chase, unlike the army.  Perhaps it was not quite so simple after all.

Atcheron meant to reach Lysendra by nightfall.  Baron
Lysendra had four towns under his rule, the southernmost sitting four miles
north of the outpost.  Though the Stoneseams’ last true peaks were twenty miles
further beyond, there were two wide gaps in Lysendra’s territory that could be
easily used as passes through the mountains.  The scout must have crossed back
through one yesterday.

They had been to the small town before, named
Armonsfield, as well as further on to Lysendra’s holding outside Elmsmeadow.  
Armonsfield lay much closer to the mountains than either baron’s manor. 
Lysendra must have relocated since last the Ninth had come this way, concerned
about the passes.  The column arrived in good time with a full candlemark
remaining before dusk.

Over a mile away rose the Stoneseams Mountains with
nothing in the way of a gradual rise.  Atcheron’s force arrived in time to see
Lysendra’s men running west toward the first pass.  They were quite a distance
off and too far to hail.  Everyone looked to the mountains.

They could see, boiling over the slope’s horizon, a
writhing jumble of motion.  The pass’s surface underwent an upheaval as if the
gods’ own gardener were running a massive, invisible plow between the steep
walls.  Brown and black churned upward through the solid white snow.  But it
was not the ground uprooting itself in a furious turmoil.

People, by the hundreds, by the
thousands
,
broke over the pass’s crest in a riotous tide.

Atcheron ordered full speed.  Riley echoed the command
in a bellow heard by all.  Marik cursed.  He had hoped the baron would decided
to proceed into Armonsfield and learn what they could from whatever men
Lysendra had left stationed there before running headlong into unknown
trouble.  It would have allowed the men to rest after the miles on their feet,
and more importantly, to Marik, it would have afforded the chance for him to
drift through the etheric, seeing what he could.  No matter how hard he pushed
himself, he’d never duplicated his feat of drifting while physically moving, as
on the night of Hilliard’s near assassination.

With probable trouble before them, the column
reorganized under Riley’s orders.  The guards hustled forward to form their
customary twin rows of double-file.  Each Crimson Kings unit gathered with its
sergeant in the lead, Fraser leading the First in addition to Kineta.  Sloan
led the Fourth Unit in the rearmost position.

Dietrik enjoyed this development as little as he. 
“This is madness.  We have perhaps a mark of true light left, and a
quarter-mark of light that will be fading fast before our eyes!”

“I know.  I think Atcheron is leaping before he—
hey
!” 
Marik glared at Colbey, who had jostled him rudely sideways by pushing forward
to walk between him and Dietrik.

The scout’s eyes were alight in the evening
illumination.  For the first time in Marik’s memory, he looked eager, nearly
excited.  His fingers endlessly clasped and released his sword hilt while his
features resembled a hunting forest cat more than ever.  “Are you ready for a
fight, mage?”

Marik replied cautiously.  “If there is a fight to be
fought, I am ready for it.”

Colbey cast a speculative look over him.  Marik felt
his worth being weighed on a scale slightly different from Colbey’s usual. 
What that difference might be, Marik struggled to determine.

“You think you are ready for what is to come.  You
will learn soon enough.”  The scout directed his gaze to the mountains, locked
on the pass, leaving Marik to stew.

That
was
vintage Colbey, at least.  Never a single lesson passed where he missed an
opportunity to scorn Marik’s abilities, proclaiming his student unknowledgeable
and foundering in a sea of delusion.

Well, his swordsmanship had improved dramatically,
both under Colbey’s eye and over the last summer.  That he could fend off
Colbey during their latest training sessions only proved it!

They walked in the snow path plowed by Lysendra’s men
and arrived at the slope’s base as the first Tullainians reached bottom. 
Marik’s hand automatically clutched at the hilt protruding over his shoulder. 
The refugees they encountered before had been haggard, starving and haunted.

These were a wild-eyed cattle herd in the midst of a
stampede.

Lysendra could be seen with his men, pushed to one side. 
With only two-hundred guardsmen there was no hope he could stem the flow, nor
even direct the Tullainians to either return to their homeland or to the
Southern Road.  His men shouted as he did, hoping to garner attention.

Riley quickly brought the column to the northern side
of the slope before the first terrified runner reached them.  The mob saw
nothing at all.  They kept running the moment they reached the flatter ground,
stumbling or wobbling every third step through the drifts, caring for nothing except
reaching the opposite horizon.

Marik stood with his shieldmates, eyes widened, hardly
able to believe what he saw.  Here and there, people fell, immediately crushed
by those behind who never noticed their plight, or did not care for anyone
else’s skin but their own.  Panic whipped them mercilessly, a cruel driver bent
on running his horses to death.

Their noise reminded Marik of the tournament crowds,
but the din there had been born of cheer and exuberance and good times had by
all.  The differences were acute.  Marik could feel his spine shiver while he
listened.  Mixed in with the mindless yelling came the pained shriek of a woman
being trampled to death, a child wailing in fear, a man selling his soul for
deliverance to whatever god would listen to his plea.

“Bloody hells,” Edwin muttered, or so it sounded.  The
archer must have said it fairly loud for Marik to hear it at all.

Most bizarre of all, mixed into the swarming mob were
countless animals.  A few head of cattle, brought with the fleeing people from
their homes, yet mostly herds of deer and other wild beasts.  All ran
side-by-side with the Tullainians, as hell-bent on escaping the vicinity,
rubbing shoulders with men without apparent care.  White and brown fur flashed
from around pumping legs, revealing foxes and squirrels that miraculously
avoided death from pounding feet.  Marik stared, dumbfounded.  What could
possibly induce such insanity?

Only Colbey seemed unaffected by the furor.  He peered
on it as he did on every sparring match Marik had noticed him watching, or as
he did on the peddlers who hawked their wares by the roadside.  The scout was a
cold storm that cared little for those who froze to death in the midst of his
icy blows.

Sloan shouted orders.  The meaning was lost under the
chaotic exodus.  It drew their attention to him and they saw what he must be
yelling.  Riley had moved further up the slope with Atcheron, making for
Lysendra’s group.  The Fourth Unit followed the others.

“What in the name of the gods are we supposed to do
about this?” Marik shouted into Dietrik’s ear.

Dietrik’s shoulders bunched in bewilderment.  What
could
they possibly do?  They could never hold back a stampede unless they started
killing unarmed noncombatants, and that would not do the trick either.  If they
stood before the charge, they would be run over and trampled as well, despite
their armor.

Marik hoped the barons or the Ninth’s officers knew
what to do.  He could conceive of no possible action they could take that would
affect the situation.

They stopped when they drew close to Lysendra’s
group.  Marik strained his ears, hoping to catch any shouted orders from the
captain.

Instead, a wholly different sound arose.

“Bloody Twelve!”  The curse erupted from several
mouths at once, not merely Edwin’s alone.  “What in the hells was that?”

Marik glanced around sharply, looking mostly to the
slope’s crest.  While doing so he noticed Colbey.  The scout wore a ghoulish
smile, lips and teeth parted.  He breathed harshly through his mouth, his jaws
never quite closing as his teeth rose up and down.  It gave Marik the unnerving
impression the man was about to bite through someone’s throat.

Most unsettling, the scout’s gaze never came close to
the officers, the furious refugee torrent or searching for the source of the
blood chilling sound.  He peered up at the skies, his head darting around like
a humming bird feeding from multiple blossoms.  Colbey held his gaze in one
spot for two or three seconds, then whipped around to study another.

Marik cast his gaze skyward to see nothing, and he
puzzled over what Colbey sought.  He nearly asked when the horrible sounds came
again.

It was a chorus of the damned.  Ten-thousand tormented
souls boiling in a molten rock ocean.  Had Vernilock opened his hells’ gates
onto the mortal world?

A third time it echoed, and it sounded closer.  Close
enough that Marik could hear it for what it was.  Not the tortured screams of
sinners, yet a chorus nonetheless.

Roars, as of a thousand massive predators bellowing
their triumph while they made ready to feed on their kill.

*        *        *        *        *

Within the ring unfolded a scene painters might craft
to describe a vile heretic’s fated afterlife.  Harbon smiled.  Taur
shock-forces swarmed through the mountain pass to strike a hammer blow against
the pitifully unprepared border force entrusted with safeguarding this foreign
kingdom.  At first contact, the defending soldiers wasted far too much time in
coming to terms with the horrors their eyes beheld.  By the time they
sluggishly started to form a resistance, the Taurs had descended and smashed
through them as a stone through a stained-glass window.

As it should be.  The Taurs were brutally strong and
predatorily ruthless.  Their sheer presence overwhelmed the soft chattel who
lived in this land where wolf packs or bears or wolverines were the only
dangerous beasts.  Long generations of fighting the Tillsars had inured those
ragged peasants to the Taurs, cutting their effectiveness drastically.  Using
them against these ignorant hayseeds restored the Taurs’ original power.

Harbon held the thin silver ring closer, a nearly wire
hoop ten inches across.  Within the ring’s empty space, the pictures showed him
Mendell waiting in the higher passes until the Taurs cleared the lower slopes. 
His human soldiers surrounded him, waiting for the shock-forces to do the dirty
work.

The Taurs swung clubs or their empty fists, either
method doing tremendous damage.  Peasants collapsed, clawing at their backs if
flesh had been shredded, falling limply if spines were shattered.  At times a
body would be flung upward to land in the midst of the fleeing crowd.  Bloody
corpses with intestines trailing behind in gory streamers raining from above
always spurred those ahead to still greater madness, resulting in nothing
except broken bodies under ankles twisting on trampled limbs.

Colonel Harbon nodded in satisfaction.  He playfully
turned the ring so the small tent’s other inhabitant could observe as well. 
“You see here?  Brother Mendell is doing the good work, opening our path to this
troublesome forest quickly and efficiently.  Soon we will accomplish our
primary goal for this campaign.  Not merely a step closer, but a full leap
toward the Day of Glory!”

Adrian stared at nothing.  A blankness filled his
eyes.  “I like the color blue,” he said in a flat voice without inflection.

“Blue, is it?” asked Harbon with interest.  His
jubilation granted him a tolerant breed of patience.  “Green and brown are
colors worthy of respect.  What attracts you to blue in particular?”

“It tastes good.”

“I understand.  Truly, you make a valid point.” 
Harbon smiled, amused, before returning his attention to the scrying ring.  He
shifted the view from Mendell’s scrying anchor and roamed the lands immediately
beyond that flyspeck of a village.  The nearest reinforcement division hardly
merited the description.  Odd though, that this isolated kingdom, cut off from
the larger world for so many centuries, chose for its livery the green and
brown hues that were sacrosanct among the enlightened.

No, not odd at all.  A divine omen, if ever there was
one.

Adrian started blowing through his pursed lips, a
broad rush of air far short of a whistle.  The general’s head tilted from side
to side in time to whatever tune floated through his empty mind.

“We will move soon,” Harbon told the vacant husk. 
“When Brother Mendell secures the forest, I have need to enter.”  Which meant
Adrian must go as well.  The general could not act as a normal man outside his
sight, nor without his directed influence.  “Order your officers to continue
securing the Tullainian lands we have conquered recently, then to stay in place
until further orders arrive.”

“Stay,” Adrian repeated in a whispery breath.

The scene within the ring shifted to a point inside
the forest.  Enormous trees larger than the royal palace towers rose from a
broad, shallow pool.  Those trees…yes.  Magnificent proof of the power shielded
within those mossy depths.  Shielded well, but shields his expertise would tear
down.

So close now.  He wanted to ride out this very moment,
ride out and plunge straight into that forest until he reached their coveted
goal.

Patience, patience.

Yes, patience.  The Day of Glory approached, heralded
by his efforts and Cardinal Xenos’ immaculate plans.  It would not do to allow
his fervor to spoil all by leaping in haste.

Yet neither would it do to tarry.

*        *        *        *        *

“Back!  Fall back, curse it to the lowest hell!”

Marik heard Sergeant Giles shouting over the
godsforsaken bellowing of these…these
creatures. 
All those tales he and
Dietrik had heard, every rumor and unbelievable description; none had prepared
him to come face-to-face with monsters who inhabited shadowy dreams his mind
quickly purged from memory upon awakening.

Tall tales or not, their blades found them real
enough.

Holding position would end with them being
slaughtered.  The few remaining guards who had survived the evisceration of
Lysendra’s party fled without pretense.  Their baron’s demise and the brutal
rendering undergone by their shieldmates reduced them to terrified rabbits.

Atcheron still lived, though he held nothing but his
own skin.  The Kings had tried to fight their way forward when Riley’s
guardsmen were destroyed with a casual ease that made Marik’s legs quiver in
horror.