Demontech: Rally Point: 2 (Demontech Book 2) (16 page)

He shook those thoughts off. “Tell us what happened here.”

“I was inspecting the ranks when they came at us,” Fletcher explained. “The men were relaxed, I think they were relying on the listening posts to give warning. I was relying on the listening posts. They were nearly on us by the time anyone shouted. They killed the women and children before any of us could strike back.”

“How many of them were there?” Half asked.

Fletcher shook his head. “I was too busy fighting to count, there were more of them than of us, though. Maybe eighty of them.”

Haft snorted. “They were good when they got the listening posts, but they aren’t good close up.”

“How do you figure?” Spinner asked.

“They had surprise and outnumbered our men, yet we killed more than a dozen of them and we only lost thirteen, including women and children, that’s what I mean.
Hrmmpf.
Given those odds in our favor, I’d expect an easy victory with fewer casualties on our side.”

“They weren’t ready for our counterattack,” Spinner reminded him.

“That wasn’t it,” Fletcher said. “The bandits who weren’t engaged with our soldiers broke from the fight and attacked the camp itself. Some of them managed to carry off booty before you arrived.”

Startled, Spinner looked at him. “What about people? Did they carry off any women or children?”

“No, none. Zweepee already told me all women and children are accounted for.”

Relieved on that score, Spinner turned to the mayor to ask his opinion of what the bandits might do next, but the mayor had slipped away unnoticed while Fletcher gave his report.

“That’s odd,” Spinner murmured.

“I don’t trust him,” Haft said. He glared about for the mayor, his hand twisted around the top of his axe where it hung on his belt.

They walked into the camp to see how the wounded were being cared for. Nightbird had managed to set up an efficient field hospital in a hastily erected pavilion where the wounded were being tended. Women and a few soldiers bandaged and splinted the less severely injured, and did what they could to stop the bleeding and ease the pain of those who had to wait for better treatment. Nightbird and Eikby’s healing witch mixed their herbs and applied mixes and poultices to injuries. The town’s healer went about setting and splinting broken bones so they would knit straight and strong. They were diligent in their attempts to avoid interfering with each other, and not offer further pain or hurt to the wounded. Xundoe alone didn’t grimace and flinch away from the healing magician, who had set his various demons to work on wounds that demanded their attention.

“Aralez,” Xundoe whispered, awed. “You have aralez—three of them!”

“I do,” the healing magician affirmed. He watched his demons carefully. Shaped like miniature dogs, the three small aralez scampered from wound to wound, lapping at the injuries. The healing magician moved them along from one wounded man to another as soon as his wounds perceptibly changed from raw, ragged, red to deep pink under the ministering tongues of the little demons. He kept a closer watch on his fourth demon.

“What’s that one?” Xundoe asked of the gray demon that the healing magician watched closely. “I’ve never seen its like.” It was the shape of a man but less than half a man’s height. It went from casualty to casualty, lifting and peering under bandages. In one place and another without cause Xundoe could detect, it probed into a wound with a hand and drew out something that glowed an insubstantial green. It vanished when the demon threw it off its hand with a flick of its wrist.

“It’s a land trow,” the healing mage answered.

“A land trow!” Xundoe wove his arms in patterns he hoped would protect the people under the pavilion.

“It’s all right,” the healing magician assured him. “The trow likes me. It’s safe to use in healing as long as I keep it away from young mothers and infants.”

Xundoe looked at him in disbelief. “I’ve never heard good of trows,” he said, but low enough the demon couldn’t hear. He hoped the trow couldn’t hear, anyway.

The healing magician shrugged. “Demons have their own motives,” he said. “When one wants to help me, I don’t question why.”

Xundoe watched suspiciously for several minutes as the trow went from pallet to pallet, probing at wounds, horned fingers drawing out glowing green things.

“Do we have any prisoners?” Haft asked as they neared the pavilion.

“Two. Over there.” Fletcher pointed at two men lying on bare ground at the outer edge of the pavilion. They turned to them.

The head of one of the bandits was swathed in bloody bandages, only his nostrils and most of his mouth weren’t covered. His hands were bound. The other was missing an arm from the elbow and had a leg crudely splinted. Spinner saw that the soldiers engaged in completing the pavilion’s canvas covering and making pallets were less careful about where they trod around the two bandits. Five older children were guarding the prisoners. Three of the children were boys one or two years too young to become soldiers, the other two were girls of about the same age. The boys looked serious, as though they wanted to prove themselves worthy of the trust placed in them. Haft grimaced at the expressions on the girls’ faces; they reminded him of how Alyline, Doli, and Zweepee had looked after questioning a Jokapcul prisoner taken during the battle in Zobra. The prisoner had died horribly under their questioning.

“We’ll question them shortly. First, let’s see to our own people.” Spinner led the way under the pavilion roof. He and Haft spoke briefly to each of the wounded and assured them they’d done well and would soon be on the mend. The most painful for them to see was the boy who’d fought and lost a hand. They were suspicious of the demons controlled by the healing magician, but they saw how eagerly Xundoe followed him about, so they kept their distance. Then it was time to question the prisoners.

“Where’s Silent?” Haft asked as they moved carefully among the wounded to the injured bandits.

“I don’t know,” Spinner answered as he looked around. “I don’t think I’ve seen him since we got back from checking the listening posts.”

“I didn’t see him come back with us, either,” Fletcher said.

“Did the others who went with us come back?”

They looked around and saw the six Bloody Axes who had gone into the forest with them. They had returned safely with the bodies of the three lookouts.

“Where’s Wolf?” He was nowhere to be seen either. They wondered where the steppe giant and the wolf had gone, but felt no need to worry about their safety, particularly not if they were together.

Four soldiers moved the prisoners away from the company’s wounded and the rest of the camp. The soldiers weren’t gentle about it, neither did the two Frangerian Marines want them to be.

“Now, we’re going to have a friendly little talk,” Spinner said after he settled himself comfortably on a camp stool next to them, “and you’re going to tell us everything we want to know.”

Haft grinned wickedly at the two from his camp stool and said, “You look like smart men who want to live, so I know you’re going to tell us what we want to know because you know it’s the right thing to do, not just because we make you tell us.”

The bandit with his head bandaged spat in the direction of their voices but, lying supine as he was, wasn’t able to put enough force behind it and the saliva landed on his own leg. The one-armed bandit tried to scowl, but was in too much discomfort and pain to look dangerous.

“Maybe they don’t speak Frangerian?” Spinner said, looking at Haft.

“Inlanders? You’re probably right.” Haft repeated what Spinner said in Zobran but got no response.

“What’s this?” Spinner yanked on the belt of the one-armed bandit. His hand came away with a Skragland army badge. “Are you a Skraglander?” he asked in that language. “Or did you steal this from someone you murdered?”

The bandit’s only reply was another scowl, but a flicker in his eyes made it clear he understood the question.

Neither Marine spoke more than a few words of Skraglandish. Haft looked around for someone who spoke it. The nearest person was Doli, who hovered nearby.

“Doli,” Haft called. “Can you help us, please?”

“What?” Doli asked as she joined them.

“We need a translator,” Spinner said. He wanted to glower at Haft, but couldn’t with Doli right there looking lovingly into his face. He wished his friend had called someone else to translate for them.

Doli gave the prisoners a sweet smile. “Tell me what you want to know. I’ll get Zweepee and Alyline. We’ll question them the way we did that Jokapcul soldier. They’ll tell us everything we want to know.”

Haft leaned away from her; he didn’t want to subject another prisoner to that kind of questioning. Not until they’d tried gentler methods.

Spinner swallowed; he didn’t either. “Ah, I don’t think that will be necessary, Doli. These two look like reasonable men, I’m sure they’re willing to talk without that kind of, ah, ‘feminine persuasion.’ ”

Doli gave him an exaggerated look of disappointment. “But, Spinner, you know how much information we can get from a man.” She smiled sweetly.

“We want them alive and whole afterward,” Haft snarled.

They spoke in Frangerian, the language they had most in common, so they were surprised when the head-swaddled bandit spoke.

“What you want know?” His bad Frangerian was intelligible even through his fear. The one-armed bandit swore at him in Skraglandish, and he swore back. The other quieted, but looked furious.

Haft was convinced that if he could see the bandit’s face he’d see a terrified expression. Spinner wondered how the fellow knew what happened to prisoners when they were turned over to the women. Had he seen a soldier after an enemy’s women had their way with him? Did the bandits give prisoners to their women after a battle? None of that mattered, they wanted information from him: Why had the bandits attacked? How many of them were there? Where was their base? What did they know about Jokapcul positions and movements on the Princedon Peninsula? Doli’s Skraglandish helped with the questions and answers the two Marines’ Skraglandish couldn’t manage. They suspected that in her translations she embellished what they said so they carried greater threat.

As it turned out, their surmise had been right, the bandits didn’t allow anyone to get away with hurting them; they’d come to kill all the people who had broken up their ambush. Since the company beat off the first attack, they would gather more bandits and come back again as soon as they gathered a large enough force. The prisoners weren’t sure, but they thought that altogether there were three or four hundred bandits in that part of the Princedons. Most of them could be assembled for a joint action. They didn’t have just one base, there were six or eight bands, each with its own base. They couldn’t tell where the other bases were, just their own. They could find their way to a couple of others, but only from their own base, not from here. The directions they gave to their base sounded incomplete and possibly led along well-guarded roads and trails, but the Marines didn’t press the issue. If the bandits were gathering force to attack again, they needed to prepare defenses, not send out a retaliatory force. As for the Jokapcul, all the bandits could say for sure, or perhaps all they would say, was they recently took a small part of the southern coast of the peninsula. Perhaps the invaders had taken more than that—rumors of their strength and location abounded, with each rumor more fantastic than the previous one.

When the questioning was done—they didn’t think the bandits had held back much except for the location of their base—they had soldiers take them into the hospital pavilion for treatment. By then the healers were through with the most essential care of their own casualties and were able to tend to the wounded bandits. “Gently,” Spinner admonished when the soldiers started by picking up the prisoners roughly. They gathered Fletcher and Xundoe to begin planning a defense against the anticipated attack. The mayor showed up with the Commander of the Eikby Guard, who had just arrived with more guardsmen. Doli hovered nearby, as usual. Alyline joined the group without invitation.

“Where’s Silent?” Fletcher wanted to know.

No one knew where he and Wolf were. Nor did anyone notice the cloud of bees that formed, headed south, and coalesced into a birdlike formation and speeded up as it vanished over the tops of the forest trees.

Captain Stonearm, commander of the Eikby Guard, and a squad of guardsmen had been investigating a reported disturbance in the forest on the far side of the town when the company arrived. Even though he and his troops came back as soon as a runner brought word of the strangers, they hadn’t gotten back to the east edge of the cleared area until the fight was ending. The plume of tail feathers from a bird of paradise arching high on the crest of his helmet and a silver sash embroidered with gold thread crossing his chest served as the commander’s insignia of rank. A collection of badges and ribbons, none from any of the city states of the Princedons, on the chest of his red and white striped tunic testified to his experience and valor under arms. But under his finery, his grizzled beard, scarred scowl, rock hard forearms, roughened hands, and spear-for-a-spine posture said unmistakably what he had been before taking command of the Eikby Guard—a sergeant.

Stonearm ran his scowl up one side of Spinner and Haft and down the other, a looking over that never failed to make an ordinary soldier pale and go weak in the knees.

The two just looked back at him.

“Frangerian sea soldiers, eh?” Stonearm said in passable Frangerian. “You used to be pretty good.”

“Most people think we’re better than ever, Captain,” Spinner said levelly.

Leaning suddenly toward the Eikby Guard commander, Haft said with a growl, “We prefer to be called ‘Marines.’ ”

Stonearm looked pointedly at the single chevron-over-paired-crossbows on their sleeves. He’d seen that insignia before, and knew it indicated some sort of junior enlisted man a couple of ranks below sergeant. “
You
are in command of that ragtag band?” he asked sarcastically.