Chartomancy

Chapter Forty

1st day, Planting Season, Year of the Rat

10th Year of Imperial Prince Cyron’s Court

163rd Year of the Komyr Dynasty

737th year since the Cataclysm

Uronek Hills, County of Faeut

Erumvirine

There are generals who look at war as a game. They study maps, not battlefields, and think of their warriors as toy soldiers. They think of casualties in terms of “acceptable losses” or “inevitable costs.” While they may be wise, they have their troops fight to shift colors on a map and, in their minds, all is reduced to dipping a brush in ink and painting.

I would give my opponent the grace of judging me and my troops based on the Virine troops he’d faced during the invasion. Doing that, however, would inevitably lead to the conclusion that he was stupid, precisely because he assumed I was stupid and that my men were incapable of fighting. He chose to underestimate us, which is as sure a sign of intellectual weakness as a military leader can display.

The first axiom in war is to assume the enemy is as clever as you are, if not more so. This forces you to look at all his actions and to ask yourself why you would be doing the same thing. If you can find no advantage to his action, then you may have discovered a mistake. If you can see a gain to exploiting that mistake, then you exploit it.

My difficulty lay in choosing which of his mistakes I would exploit.

Our withdrawal from Kelewan resulted in no serious pursuit. Once we had eluded the battalion he’d sent after us, we moved northwest through the central Virine plains toward the County of Faeut. We followed the Imperial Road, but I did send riders out to villages and towns advising them to evacuate north. My people found many of the villages already deserted, and these we put to the torch after hauling off anything of use.

We did leave one village intact, after a fashion. We put livestock into pens, then arranged every manner of trap we could think of in the houses. We poisoned the wells and prepared everything to burn. I left a squad there to observe what happened when the enemy reached it.

The refugees who preceded us raised the alarm, so local nobles met us on the road with whatever household warriors they could muster. They thought initially to oppose us, but when Captain Lumel introduced them to Prince Iekariwynal, they decided to join us. This swelled our number to over seven hundred, which was a decidedly useful force in the rugged hill country of County Faeut. Moreover it gave us guides and scouts who had an intimate knowledge of the battlefields we might use to engage the enemy.

Here was another mistake my enemy made. Because his army lived off the land, including the people, he had no locals to advise him. While the invaders advanced in good order, even the best maps could not account for places where spring runoff had collapsed part of the road, or where seasonal flooding turned a plain into an impassable marsh. The terrain forced his troops to stop where they needed to keep moving, and to take paths they knew nothing about.

Our campaign was not without surprises either, and the Prince turned out to be one of the pleasant variety. Though quite young, he did not lack for intelligence. He trusted Captain Lumel and struck up a friendship with Dunos. Dunos’ unwavering confidence in me became transferred to the Prince, and among our company, my word became law.

I divided my force into three battalions. Captain Lumel had his Jade Bears and had we ever arrayed ourselves for open battle, they would have held our center. Deshiel commanded the Steel Bear archers and two companies of local troops. Ranai commanded our heroes and whatever other locals came to fight.

Not all of my heroes led companies or even squads, for heroes do not always make good leaders. If they expect of others what they can do because of years of training, they willingly thrust their troops into situations where survival is impossible. I made it clear to all of my officers that our intent was to hurt the enemy as much as we could, and to allow them to do as little as possible in return. We would not duel with them, we would not engage them in any honorable pursuit. We would strike when they thought we could not, we would escape when they thought they had us trapped, and when they attacked from their right, we would strike from their left.

Urardsa attended all the briefings and watched the proceedings carefully. Many of the fighters found having a Gloon among them rather unnerving, but the fact that he never predicted doom was heartening. Even without suggestion, he would spend time peering off south toward the enemy host, then shake his head and turn away. My warriors’ confidence that he had seen doom for the enemy was worth ten warriors for every one I already had.

One night, when I woke in my tent, deep in a forest, I found him crouched in a corner, a ghostly presence that sent a chill through me. “What is it, Urardsa?”

The quartet of small eyes closed. “Your life is a tangled skein. I cannot find a clean line.”

“Should I be disturbed by this, or is it enough that you are?”

The Gloon smiled, then crawled closer. “Strands tangle, but yours are merging. Your future mirrors your past.”

“Those who forget their journeys are forever doomed to tread the same path.” I threw my blanket off and came up into a sitting position. “I know I have fought battles like this before. Perhaps even here, in Faeut.”

“You have been here before, many times.”

“Not just as Moraven Tolo. I have his memories, and they have been useful.” I wiped sleep sand from my eyes. “I am tempted to ask you if what you see is strong.”

The Gloon shook his head. “You will not ask. I will not tell.”

I smiled. “Battle is a place where possibilities shift too quickly for me to believe your predictions regardless.”

The Gloon laughed, not an altogether happy sound. “But you have told your people that a battle is won before the first arrow flies.”

“And it is. So it shall be tomorrow.”

What I had learned from the village helped greatly in planning the first significant fight. The vhangxi had been under slightly better control than at the graveyard, and the kwajiin made up more of the force pursuing us. Even so, the vhangxi tore the village apart. Many fell prey to our traps, and the kwajiin dispatched the most seriously wounded. The blue-skins did get ill from the water, though not as grievously as a man would have. Even when the village began to burn, they were not prone to panic and withdrew in good order.

In the troops themselves, we only noticed one flaw. The units seemed made up of clan groups, which did not mix and even seemed hostile to each other. The commander of the troops coming after us fought under a banner of a bloody skull, and all other troops chafed under being subordinate to his kinsmen.

We set our trap carefully to utilize all we had learned. We picked a point where a wooden bridge on the Imperial Road had been washed away and, in two days, cleared enough trees from a hillside track to make it appear as if woodsmen had created a road paralleling the gorge. It went east up and over two small hills, then through a ravine that angled back to the southeast. At the far end, the land dropped away into a deep cut that led down into the gorge roughly a thousand yards east of where the bridge had stood.

The thick forest, save where some discreet clearing had been done, allowed for a hundred feet of visibility. A sodden carpet of leaves and needles hid the ground, and the troops entering that southeast ravine might as well have been boxed up in a large coffin.

The kwajiin vanguard advanced under the bloody skull banner, and when they reached the gap in the road, they had no problem in deciding to head up the hill onto our track. They had already outstripped the rest of their force and posted two men on the road to inform the others. Ten minutes separated the vanguard from its main body-though when they twisted back into that ravine, the only thing that separated them from the bulk of their force was a steep wooded ridgeline paralleling the gorge.

The sun had reached its zenith by the time the vanguard started off on the detour. Once the last of them passed over the first hill, two archers killed the men they’d left behind, then we dragged the bodies into the gorge and let them float down among bridge debris. When the main body reached the bridge, the direction the vanguard had taken seemed obvious and, after some deliberation, they set off in pursuit.

The head of the vanguard stopped when the trail ended, and four blue-skins headed down into the ravine. Halfway down they fell into tiger traps, impaling themselves on sharpened sticks in six-foot-deep holes. To their credit they did not scream in pain, but they did implore others to help them. Those who did advance found themselves under attack by a handful of archers.

Then, from atop the ridgeline behind them, a full volley of arrows struck the vanguard. The kwajiin bolted up the sides of the ravine and a number of them encountered staked pits. Most of these were simply post holes with a single stake in the bottom and several pointing downward. The single stake punched through even the thickest boot, and the others prevented the warrior from pulling his foot free.

Kwajiin archers shot back in both directions, but had no real targets. They advanced as best they could, squeezing through on a serpentine path that took them up the ridge. They crested it and started down the other side. Suddenly arrows shot up at them from below. They shot back and charged downhill.

Their own rear guard, who had likewise been shot at by Deshiel’s men on the ridge, fought fiercely. The kwajiin archers shot at each other and while they did not kill many of their own, the fight left the vanguard among their own rear guard, exhausted and without an enemy in sight.

And by that time Deshiel’s men had withdrawn further southeast, then north, crossing the gorge over a narrow, makeshift bridge created by two felled trees.

The hardest work we had done in preparing lay not in creating the road but in creating the surprises along it. The kwajiin walked four abreast, and on my signal, ropes were pulled that released stake-studded logs. They swung down out of the trees and swept the road at waist height. The luckiest men were knocked from the road to tumble down into the gorge. Others were impaled, while the least lucky got stuck on the log and pulped against trees.

The wounded did scream now, and the blue-skins’ composure broke. Two of my best archers-one who might one day become a Mystic-shot the kwajiin leader. Their arrows might have killed him, save he moved so swiftly-preternaturally so-that he took them in his right arm and flank instead of breastbone and stomach. His wounding made the others cautious, and the only people we shot after that were those seeking to help wounded comrades.

Well before darkness fell, my entire force had melted away and was miles ahead of the kwajiin.

That evening I assembled my leaders, this time including the Virine nobles who had brought troops but who I had not allowed to lead them. I praised the leaders for their troops’ performance-citing cases of bravery which had been communicated to me. I singled Deshiel out for special praise, since he had deployed his people between two enemy forces and had withdrawn them with no more harm than a sprained ankle.

Lord Pathan Golti-a small, sallow man who, though a good archer, hadn’t the temperament needed to be in Deshiel’s force-stood up to protest what had happened. “You have let them get away. We could have feathered the lot and avenged Kelewan.”

I watched him for a moment, and I’m certain many thought my hand would stray to one of my swords. “Would that have gotten Kelewan back? Would that raise your Prince or your nation again? Would that raise all the dead?”

“Of course not, but it is a matter of national pride.”

I spat at his feet. “National pride is the province of those who have a nation, my lord. You do not.”

The man looked stricken. “You have no right to speak to me thus.”

“If you wish to resolve this as a matter of honor, Lord Golti, draw a circle.” I pointed outside the circle of firelight and back in the direction of the battle. “The troops we faced today are but a fraction of those the kwajiin have in Erumvirine. For all we know, they’ve likewise invaded Nalenyr and the Five Princes. We do not fight for what is lost because we are not strong enough to regain it. We fight to prevent more from being lost-and this we might well be able to do.”

I stared at him hard enough that he took a step back. “Every time one of them thinks of leaving the road, he will remember the screams of the men who had their legs trapped. He will remember their flesh rent and bloody, and he will hesitate. Every time one of them sees the stump of a fresh-felled tree, or wood chips or leaves which are wet where others are dry, they will imagine a trap. If we knock down another bridge, they will fear another slaughter.”

Golti met my stare. “But they will not be dead.”

“We don’t have to kill them; we just have to guarantee they will not fight. Every day they must eat and sleep and drink, but if they have no food, no water, and no rest, they cannot fight. And all that they seek to threaten will be free. And we shall be alive to enjoy it.”

I gave him a cold smile. “But rest assured, Lord Golti, there will come a day when we will meet them in combat. If that is the day you desire, I will keep you alive until then, and place you in the front line so you can kill to your heart’s content.”

The man stood straighter. “I won’t shrink from that assignment. I am not a coward.”

“None of you are. Nor are any of them.” I folded my arms over my chest. “But by the time we face them in open combat, they will know hunger, thirst, fatigue, and fear. They will come to the battle knowing they will lose. That will be our victory.”