Bazil Broketail (22 page)

“Quoshite!” snorted Kepabar. “They taught you to eat all sorts of weird stuff down there, didn’t they? Like fish. I bet you even ate fish.” He said the last word with a peculiar tone of disgust.

Bazil guffawed. “Fish is good, very good especially roasted over hot coals, or baked in an oven. Mind you, I like it raw, too.”

Kepabar slapped a huge forepaw against his big belly.

“Ugh, you know they are right when they say that Quoshites are not like others.”

“Bluestone is the most beautiful land in the Argonath,” said Relkin proudly.

“Ach, dragonboys!” grumped Kepabar. “Grilled troll for dinner, providing we fight.”

“We will, I think. I can feel it,” said Relkin.

“Feel it? Can’t count on feelings, boy Relkin.”

“I always get this feeling though, before we fight. I know it’ll happen.”

“There are raiders out there. That much we do know,” said Tomas.

Bazil gestured around them at the tumbled stones of the ancient temple. “Maybe this place of war god, eh? Maybe war god know that we will fight today. Maybe war god tell the boy, eh? You know boys are susceptible to these things.”

“Mmm.” Kepabar looked at Tomas, who grinned back.

“I don’t know,” said Kep. “Some dragonboy have heads of wood, so I don’t see how they could be susceptible to anything. Maybe Relkin is different.”

Tomas ignored this.

“I bet Marco will know who this place was built for.”

Relkin nodded, “Possible, definitely possible. Marco grew up in the Argo country.” But long before they saw Marco Veli, dragonboy for freemartin Nesessitas, the order to move forward came once again. With a collective groan they got to their feet, shouldered packs and gear and set off. They tramped through the tumbled stones of the ancient temple. Mysterious pylons, carved with the heavy runes of Veronath thrust up from the stones.

Then the temple was behind them and they moved on into the forest of oak, pine and hemlock that cloaked the mountainside at this elevation.

They came to an outlying piece of the temple, a small fane, with bas-reliefs cut into the stone blocks. Sergeant Duxe, tall, pale and hard bitten, came by, marching at his habitual double stride, with his second in command, Poulters, breathing hard to keep up.

“Pick it up there,” he demanded. “Go down this track until you see Lieutenant Weald. He will direct you to your places.”

“We’ll be fighting then, today, Sergeant?” said Tomas.

“You’ll be fighting in less than twenty minutes, I’d say. Get moving. We’ve got our work cut out for us. There’s a party of the enemy coming up the mountain and they’re coming fast.”

Standing by the fane, Relkin adjusted his quiver and looked up into the cold eyes of a face, carved long ago. War god? The face seemed fierce enough to Relkin. Would the god aid them in the upcoming fight? And if it did, how would they know? This was always the problem with the mystical realm for Relkin of Quosh. The signs were so subtle that one might easily mistake them for the actions of pure chance.

Of course there was always magic, and that was real enough, but Relkin was ignorant of the mystical background to the great art. Bored by the memorization of the Birrak he had shirked his few classes at the little temple in Quosh.

The fane fell behind and they went on down the track that led through the woods to a wide meadow.

The raiders had first been spotted in the forest of Tunina, a mob of imps, squads of trolls, the whole under the direction of fell men on horseback.

First they were seen in the northern woods, crossing the Thun at the shallow ford of Riunna. Then they had come south along the flanks of great Snowgirt and rocky Raptor.

There, not far from the Argo itself, four hunters were surprised in their tents at night and taken. After questioning, three were eaten by the trolls. The fourth man escaped and ran all the way to the outposts at the landing.

Within hours the news sent tremors of alarm up and down the Argo country. It had been many years since such a large raid had reached this far back of the frontier.

The raiders had evaded the patrols of the militia and crossed the Argo somewhere upstream from the landing. They passed through the farm of the unfortunate Hansert Kapel. His body was found nailed to a lamppost at the crossroads, horribly mutilated.

Why the trolls had not eaten him was of course the major mystery to most. But even as they pondered this they got out their wagons, hitched up their mules and set out for the fort at Argo Landing.

When a party of girls aboard a coach was chased into the landing by a dozen imps, a general panic set in and the small towns along the Argo began to empty as their inhabitants went north to Dalhousie or south over the pass and into the Razac.

Farms were abandoned, cattle and pigs left behind to the ravening trolls, so great was the fear. It began to look as if the season’s planting would be given up, and thus there would be no crops from the Upper Argo this year.

And then down the pike from Dalhousie came Captain Hollein Kesepton and his command, appearing in the nick of time. With him young Kesepton had seventy-eight men from the Marneri 13th Regiment, twenty-three troopers from the Sixth Talion Light Cavalry, and the six survivors of the 109th Dragon Squadron with their officers and handlers.

And of course this raid was the last thing Kesepton had been expecting. This patrol on the Upper Argo had been meant to give his small force a well-earned rest.

And thus young Hollein Kesepton faced an immediate crisis in his career as a full captain. Newly promoted during the winter, this was his first rank command in his own regiment. During the winter he had been a volunteer, seconded to a regiment in the New Legion, raised in Marneri the previous year and sent against the Teetol.

It had been a harrowing campaign with many casualties on both sides, and in the end the raid had failed to catch Wishing Blood, the war chief of the Shugga Teetol.

Hollein had proved himself in the assault on the Lodge of Elgoma. First he had steadied the men of Marneri who were on the verge of breaking under an intense assault from Teetol bowmen, and then he’d led them to rout the archers and drive them from the forest and into the killing ground outside Elgoma’s walls.

And so here he was, the grandson of the great General Kesepton, now with his first real command, a battered company from that same New Marneri Legion, along with some Talionese horse who had also seen the winter out in the Teetol country.

To add to his difficulties he had the insubordinate Sergeant Duxe to run the 13th Marneri and the completely impossible Subadar Yortch in command of the Talionese horse.

Liepol Duxe was a dour, hard-nosed fellow contemptuous of weakness in others, a sergeant of the old school, quick with his sword and just as quick with criticisms. He had come up from the ranks of the Marneri First Legion and had seen action in ten years of fighting on the frontier.

Unfortunately, Duxe resented Hollein’s swift rise to captain. Liepol put it down to the influence of General Kesepton working on behalf of his grandson. Liepol, like his men, had not been involved in the winter campaign and knew little of the young Kesepton’s success at Elgoma’s Lodge.

Hollein understood the sergeant’s feelings and wished he could tell him that he was absurdly mistaken. If Duxe knew the general, he would have known that old Kesepton would never show the least sign of favor to a relative. The general was also a soldier of the old school. Alas, nothing could be said; Duxe would only take it as a sure sign of weakness, and that could not be allowed.

Furthermore, while Duxe was a handful, he was at least a known quantity. Subadar Yortch, on the other hand, was as close to impossible as an arrogant Talionese braggart could be. All pride, ferocity and stupidity, the subadar was two years older than Hollein and convinced that he, rather than this jumped-up half-captain of infantry, should be the commanding officer of the patrol.

Yortch had been a full subadar of light horse for three years and he found it hard to take orders from someone younger than himself.

Kesepton had ended the subadar’s initial refusals to obey orders by announcing that he would place Yortch under arrest if he did not immediately obey. He would then be sent back to Dalhousie to face court martial. A great silence had fallen. Yortch had struggled with himself for thirty seconds while Kesepton and Lieutenant Weald had watched with fascinated eyes before he capitulated.

Reined in but still surly, Yortch exhibited all the baffling qualities of Talionese arrogance. Young Kesepton did not relish having to undertake a fight with Yortch as his cavalry arm, but he had no choice. Their mission to the Argo had plunged them into the thick of a bad situation.

The sheer presence of the men, the huge battledragons, the dust of their column had helped to calm the panic to a degree. But even as they marched around the bend of the Argo the smoke of burning farms on the hillsides began to rise into the sky. Gangs of evil imps were abroad, trolls had been seen eating cattle.

All day they had climbed the flank of Mt. Red Oak, passing through near deserted villages, with those smoke columns rising ahead of them above the trees.

In the mid-afternoon they were finally given a halt, and they rested among the ruins of the ancient temple not far from a broad meadow that extended far up the side of the mountain.

It was clear that they were getting close to the enemy now. The nearest smoke columns were less than a mile away. Kesepton sent out the Talionese to reconnoiter in the woodlands ahead, further down slope.

The troopers vanished into the woods and were gone. Half an hour later Kesepton heard the loud sounds of a running, slashing fight in the forest in front of them.

Warned by the sounds of combat from across the meadows, he ordered the men and dragons out of the temple and brought them forward to deploy in a line along the forest margin, men on either flank, dragons in the center.

Before it was done a lone rider came galloping back across the meadow with a message from Yortch.

The captain scanned it and conferred briefly with Lieutenant Weald. “Yortch says we’ve got at least one hundred imps coming up the trail toward us, and more somewhere behind them.”

“Trolls?”

“No sign, yet. But they’re out there—remember the report from Tunina.”

Weald nodded gloomily. “Right. Well, we’ll be formed up very shortly.”

Kesepton looked across the meadow. It would be best if he could disengage the cavalry and pull them back for a mobile flanking force. He was outnumbered, heavily by some reports; it might be essential to keep the horsemen for a reserve element. Of course it would be difficult to get Yortch to disengage, however. He scribbled instructions on the reverse of the parchment and sent it back to Yortch. The rider thundered away.

Kesepton looked along the lines. Arranged just inside the margin of the forest, the men were set out in pairs, with bows and spears ready. On the order they could close up in a defensive phalanx or an offensive skirmishing line. In the center the dragons were massed, a solid bulk of thigh and sinew.

There was the sudden sound of horns, across the meadow, and a huge shout went up. The horns blared again—dull, heavy horns, not the cornets of Marneri or the bugles of Talion. These were the large brass horns of the enemy.

And there began the infernal yipping of charging imps.

Kesepton cursed under his breath. Too late now it seemed. What was Yortch doing?

There was motion now on the far side of the meadow; figures on horseback were galloping back. Arrows seemed to rain around them as they came, but by great good fortune none were hit and they continued to close up rapidly on Kesepton’s line. Now behind them emerged a dark mass with horsemen in black uniforms at the front. The shrilling of imps grew very loud.

Weald was back. “Looks like more than a hundred to me, sir.”

It looked that way to Kesepton, too.

“Damn those Talionese. I don’t need a skirmishing line, I need a flank force.”

“They’re coming, sir. Looks like the subadar got into more of a fight than he bargained on.”

A horse went down in that moment and the imps uttered a shriek of delight and rushed forward, nocking fresh arrows to their bows as they came.

An officer galloped back and snatched up the man and escaped with him clinging to the back of his saddle just ahead of the first arrows.

“They’re brave enough these Talionese, they’re just too damn difficult to work with,” said Kesepton.

“Aye, sir,” agreed Weald.

Now the Talionese began to thunder into the lines, passing through the men and then slowing in the underbrush and bunching up on the paths.

Yortch appeared last, with the unhorsed trooper on the back of his saddle. He paused beside Kesepton, who greeted him with upraised hand.

“Good of you to turn up, Subadar. I thought we’d lost you for the day there.”

Yortch was aroused, his face flushed, his breathing hard. His wild corn-colored hair was escaping from beneath his helmet.

“My apologies, but we were detained by the enemy— they thirsted to taste our steel and we were forced to oblige them.”

Kesepton sighed inwardly but bit back his reprimand.

“I want you to form your men up and keep them together behind the line now. Let them rest—we’ll be needing them soon enough.”

For once Yortch made no protest. He nodded his leonine head. “Yes, that’s the best thing to do, I think.”

Kesepton chuckled tightly and looked to Weald, who simply wore a resigned frown. “Carry on,” said Kesepton. Yortch spurred his horse away. Hollein turned back to the meadow.

He immediately saw that which caused his heart to sink. Behind the imps came a party of tall, massive figures.

“By the blood,” he murmured.

“Doesn’t look good, sir—at least a dozen. Maroons, I’d say.”

“Have the drags seen them?”

“Looks like it, sir.”

And indeed there was a stir within the clump of dragons. Massive figures moved purposefully through the woods, big heads on long reptile necks craned to get a good view of the approaching trolls.