Dark Obligations: Book One of the Phantom Badgers (4 page)

“In any case, we have dealings both in
Gradrek Heleth
and in the
raith
beneath. By dint of exploration and luck we Badgers know of a vent opening on the surface that leads to the outskirts of the
argalt
, which we used in our previous raids into the hold. We will enter Two from the
argalt
, and make our way through the city to Five, stopping along the way to get the tiles we owe Helvin and any other loot as seems appropriate. At Five, we will enter the
raith
for our repayment to Leofric Bluefire. It seems that Bluefire sent another bunch of his underlings into
Gradrek Heleth
to recover a set of written works, whether Dwarven property or ones lost by other raiders I do not know; in any case, the group tasked to recover them did so. It seems that this group knew of and used an entrance to the
raith
, and was on its way out when it encountered a group of Void-followers and a running fight ensued. Some portion of the group fought its way clear, but it lost the written works while crossing a Goblin bridge over a mud pit. Our task is to recover the books from the mud.”

“I take it the books were protected,”
Arian observed.

“Yes, in a chest custom-built for the purpose; Bluefire assures
us that they would be unharmed and gave us this prism: when you look through it, the chest’s position will be illuminated, provided you are within a hundred yards of it. We’ll take chains and grapnels along to fish it out.”

“Do you think it will be that easy?” Trellan sounded doubtful.

“A great deal will depend on how thick the mud is, of course. In a worst-case scenario, if we do not recover them this trip, at least we will know what we are up against, and we’ll get them on a second run. Are there any questions?” There were none. “Fine. We leave as soon as it is light enough to see, so look to your equipment and get as much sleep as you can. We’ve hard riding ahead of us.”

From the tent the Captain made his way to a stump some
distance from the Badger’s camp to smoke his pipe and ponder the future. Squinting at the stars peeping through the rents in the layer of clouds overhead, the Dwarf stroked his beard and worked at the timing of it all.

This
was the tenth day of Zahmteil, the ninth month in the Imperial calendar in the fifty-first year of the Age of Enlightenment, or Third Age; they would depart on the eleventh, and should reach the Ward on the thirteenth, paralleling the mountains while riding due north. Barring complications, they would swing east into the foothills on about the thirtieth (allowing two days to rest the mounts en route), and should be at the entrance sometime around the first of Hoffnungteil, the tenth month of the year. By that time frost should be on the ground every morning, and snow flurries were very possible. Figure ten days to two weeks in Gradrek Heleth, a day or two rest when back out, and they would not see Oramere until sometime in early Forsteil, the eleventh month, by which time winter would be firmly in place.

Cold weather was very dangerous to soldiers: it made wearing metal armor a constant frostbite risk, the heavy clothing made fighting difficult, the cold sapped endurance, they were easy to track in the snow, and fires were essential at night to keep the troops
warm. Small surprise that the Imperial Legions, whose mantra was always to attack, stayed close to their bases and defensive works in the winter. For that very reason the Orcs, who were armor-poor, swarmed in winter time, the worse weather the better.

He had no choice, however, no choice at all: they had to undertake the raid this fall. The Eight and Luck would see them through, that and their own prowess. He hoped.

The smoothly rolling expanse of the Northern Wastes swept out in every direction like a brown-furred sea, spotted here and there with shoals of green brush and the odd clump of leafless trees, the misty wall of the Thunderpeak Mountains to the east the only break in the dun-colored landscape. Gabriella Zanetti studied the grassland with a practiced eye from her vantage point under a low shrub, one of the plant’s hard, waxy leaves dancing between the fingers of her right hand. The Ward was eight day’s ride south, not counting yesterday, which was spent resting, or today, which was likewise given to recovering their strength.

Eight hard days, with thirty miles covered before the evening camp, cold food at dawn and dusk, and the only hot meal at noon to reduce the chance of smoke drawing unwanted attention. Starr and Janna had hunted along the way, bagging several fat antelope and a goodly number from the endless supply of big rabbits to supplement their limited rations. It was hard travelling but safe: they left little sign of their passing, and covered ground fast enough to throw off anyone who might stumble upon what tracks they did leave.

Gabriella flipped the leaf to her other hand and set it to dan
cing between those fingers; she had volunteered when Durek had asked for someone to mount a foot patrol a mile or so out from the nearly-dry riverbed that served the Badgers as a rest camp, bored after a day and a half of inactivity. Starr and Trellan lay a short ways below her, partially hidden in the tall grass; the little Lanthrell had volunteered as well, eager to make her mark as a scout, and the ex-sailor had been sent along to keep him from causing any mischief. He was safe enough on this patrol: Kroh had vowed to tear Trellan’s arms off should he bother Starr, a statement which no one (especially Trellan) took as a figure of speech, while Gabriella and Trellan had long since worked out any problems between them, that is, she had offered to sever any portion of his body that he dared to touch her with. The dark knife-fighter scorned warriors as her bedmates, preferring men with soft hands, clerks or book-keepers who would buy her gifts and treat her as if she was one of the wonders of the world.

But it was not lovers which was foremost on her mind at the moment: she had spotted something to the north as they neared the mile limit to their patrol, a disturbance in the grass too regular to be made by wild ani
mals. The little patrol had crept a hundred paces to the highest crest in the area and seen grass trampled in a path that suggested carts and moving feet, a trail that wound into a shallow streambed, back up the next gentle slope, and disappeared over the crest. What was annoying was that although the top of the following rise in the prairie was higher, and thus visible, it was apparent that the trail did not cross it. Leaving the other two scouts behind the crest, Gabriella played with her leaf and studied the markings in the grass below her, a thoughtful frown creasing the smooth walnut skin of her forehead. It was possible that whoever made the trail had followed the shallow fold in the ground to either the east or west instead of crossing the next crest, but she doubted it, which meant that the travelers could still be in that fold of ground. It was difficult to tell from a distance, but she would guess that the trail hadn’t been made more than a day or so before, if that long.

Easing backward an inch at a time, pausing at irregular intervals to break up the pattern of her movement, the dark Badger slipped below the crest to join her companions, knowing that Trellan’s eyes were locked on the seat of her tight riding breeches as she wriggled backwards, and wondering for the thousandth time why
Durek kept the demented little bastard around.

“Trellan, go back and report to
Durek,” she kept her voice to a bare whisper, outlining what she had seen and what she summarized. “Starr and I are going to circle around and see where the trail leads. We’ll report back when we know more.”

Moving at a crouch, the two scouts circled around to the east, moving with
caution and in complete silence, ears straining for any hint of danger. It was slow moving, careful steps taken with irregular pauses to look and listen, wary like a wild animal. Gabriella had been jealous of the young Lanthrell’s scouting skills during the two day’s travel through the forests to reach the Ward, skills honed by Threll training and five decades spent in an ancient forest, but here on the plains she was still Starr’s superior, albeit not by a huge margin.

The two crawled the last fifty feet to the crest of a shallow rise that should afford them a view of the dip the trail had disappeared into, the better to conceal their approach. As she eased through the grass, Gabriella noted approvingly that Starr had drawn and strung her bow, and crawled with an arrow clenched between her teeth; the dark knife-fighter’s sling was held loosely in her hand, a lead ball already fitted within the weapon’s pouch.

When the pair gained the crest and peered through the frost-browned grass they saw the makers of the trail and an odd scene laid out below them. The expanse of grassland between the crest the trail had last surmounted and the next high point in the rolling prairie was broader than either scout had been able to determine at a distance, being over three hundred yards across. Squarely in the middle of this sizeable meadow was an odd stone structure, a roughly circular floor of slate panels twenty feet across with eleven crudely-hewn pillars of tarred and iron-banded wood set at irregular intervals around the ‘floor’s’ circumference, each post half again as tall as a man, although none stood at the same height. A short stump of blackened and heat-warped iron was set into the slate panels near the center of the floor.

The incongruous structure, the fir
st artificial construction they had seen in over two hundred miles of riding trapped their attention for longer than an experienced scout would consider wise, but the structure’s lack of any symmetrical proportions, spacing, or scale held the eye like a magnet gripping iron. Finally Gabriella broke the numbing fascination of the odd pavilion and rubbed her eyes, reaching blindly to her side and jabbing the Threll in her mail-covered ribs until Starr hissed a response.

Blinking hard in the manner of one crossing snowy ground on a very sunny day, Gabriella ignored the pavilion (as she chose to term the
strange structure) and was shocked to see that the meadow was well-occupied, a fact that had completely eluded her until now. From the sighing grunt next to her she knew Starr was just realizing that they were not alone.

Below them was parked a two wheeled cart such as they themselves had brought along on this expedition, a high-wheeled, durable vehicle that could be easily drawn by a single sturdy mule across the roughest terrain; this cart was still loaded, a worn tarp stretched tightly over its load, the harness hung neatly from the driver’s seat. A patch of ground had been cleared of grass and a circle of stones for an eveni
ng cook fire had been assembled, a five-gallon water bag and a partially opened sack filled with dried dung for fuel nearby. Five bedrolls were laid out near the fire pit and two more a short distance away.

A person was slumped against the inner side of one wheel of the cart, barely visible at this angle; two armed men lay a few feet from the pavilion’s edge, either dead or unconscious. No mounts were visible, although a length of rope still tied to a picket pin was visible a short distance from the cart. None of the figures were stirring, and nothing about them gave any clue as to their origins or
alliegences at this distance.

After studying the scene for several minutes, Gabriella eased over and tapped Starr on the elbow. Without lifting her head, the
Lanthrell turned her face towards the knife-fighter and wagged her eyes in the gesture that equaled a helpless shrug. The dark woman moved one finger in a half-circle and pointed with her chin towards the pavilion, whose ability to fascinate seemed to be broken. Slipping back from the crest, the two circled around to enter the meadow with the pavilion between themselves and the cart.

The two were closing on the odd structure when sudden movement in a
clump of low bushes sent Gabriella diving for cover, the harsh
snap
of Starr’s bow and a ragged scream ripping the silence. As the dark Badger rolled to her feet she heard the bow release again and the sobbing howl abruptly cut off.

“Moving,” she warned the
Threll, shoving her sling (she had lost the bullet when she had ducked) under her belt and drawing her yataghans, the deadly Navian fighting dirks whose expert use rivals the quarterstaff and the sword-rapier in terms of death-art. Darting to the twitching form in the bushes, she kicked the figure in the shoulder, rolling the Human male out onto the grass. It only took a moment’s glance to know that he was no longer a threat: one arrow, likely the first fired, had caught him high on the chest, going in at a steep angle between the left shoulder and the throat; the other, likely the second shot, had struck him in the center of the throat, sliced open the airway and at least one major blood vessel, and then embedded itself in his spine.

The man had been in his late twenties, a fighting type from his build and
equipment, Gabriella noted as she expertly searched the body while Starr knelt nearby on guard, arrow nocked and ready. He had been dressed in unremarkable clothes, with a padded undertunic marked with the snags and rust marks from being worn under a mail shirt. He had a broadsword and a dagger of good quality at his belt, and a belt pouch that yielded a few coins and the usual odds and ends a traveler accumulates.

“Take a look at this,” Gabriella called the other Badger over. She indicated the man’s face: the left side was unmarked and normal; the right, however, was blistered and puffy, the eye swollen shut and oozing sticky fluid. The line between healthy and injured flesh was
unnaturally straight, running vertically from the hairline to the tunic’s collar and very nearly centered on his nose.