When Dragons Rage

15

General Markus Adrogans, leader of the Jeranese Horse Guards and commander of the Southlands expedition liberating Okrannel, stood on a windswept hill to the north of the city of Guraskya. He granted that it was a city, for it was the capital of the Guranin Highlands, but compared to the sophisticated cities to the south and east—cities of stone and soaring towers—it seemed little more than a village grown beyond all proportion.

Though the Guranin highlanders did pay allegiance to the Okrans crown, having long ago been conquered, they did hold themselves as a people apart. Younger sons and daughters of the Okrans conquerors had married into the highland clans and instead of bringing city sophistication to their new home, the Okrans nobility were seduced by the strength of highland bloodlines and custom. For generations, lesser nobles fled to the highlands when cities could not contain their dreams and rebellious spirits, and the Guranin welcomed them openly.

Guraskya had been laid out in highland fashion, which meant it really had not been planned at all. Rectangular longhouses of wood, with thatched roofs and smoke holes, provided shelter. The buildings did not rise above a single story, nor were wings built onto them when a clan grew beyond that single structure. Other buildings would be raised, some nearby, some far, none connecting and all canted at angles that made them look like debris left from tossed jackstraw.

From the hilltop Adrogans could see two or three marketplaces, but from their size and location he assumed they had sprung up over what had been a longhouse that had burned down. Stockyards dotted the settlements south, west, and east, with barns and warehouses nearby. To the north a “foreign quarter” had been created, but until the arrival of his troops, it had consisted of two inns and a single tavern, since visitors were rare and accommodations were not meant to encourage long stays.

That foreign quarter had expanded rather quickly in the last month. He and the Alcidese general, Turpus Caro, had stationed their troops in Guraskya, along with a fifth of the Svoin refugees. Other units had trekked further to the north and west, stationing refugees in villages and hamlets, small towns and clan centers. The highland clans, while normally having nothing but contempt for lowlanders, showed incredible compassion for the wretched people who sought sanctuary in their land. The clans had vied to house the people, and Adrogans’ early days in Guraskya had been spent listening to clan leaders explain all they had to offer.

In accord with their sizes and wealth, Adrogans had scattered his charges. The vast majority, a thousand of the sickest and most malnourished, had remained in Guraskya. The Tsuvo, Bravonyn, and Arzensk Clans shared the city and had been more than generous in dealing with the refugees. While they had not opened their longhouses to the foreign troops, they went to great pains to sort through genealogies to pair refugees with families that might share even a drop of blood, and he’d been assured that a lot of common links had been discovered in a very short time—much to everyone’s satisfaction.

Snow blanketed the city, but still people moved about. The troop staging areas, which ringed the hill on which he stood, showed the most activity. It might have seemed an illusion because the round tents housing troops fluttered and twitched in breezes, though the snow built up around the sides did help insulate those within. The troopers had plenty to do, however, drilling, organizing woodcutting expeditions, and scouting the various approaches the Aurolani might take to attack.

Adrogans stroked his chin with a mittened hand. On the plains before Svoin he had met with Nefrai-kesh, the sullanciri who had been Kenwick Norrington and who, in Chytrine’s name, commanded the Aurolani garrison in Svarskya. Chytrine’s general had promised Adrogans that he would not attack until spring, but the Jeranese leader knew better than to take the sullanciri at his word. If Nefrai-kesh needed an excuse to cover a treacherous attack, he could hide behind the fact that he’d been referring to a campaign against Svoin, not against Adrogans’ troops.

As a Gyrkyme might fly, less than a hundred miles separated Guraskya from the Okrans capital, so the threat of attack remained almost constant. While the approaches to the highlands were few and easily guarded, Okrans troops without the benefit of Chytrine’s magicks and dragonels had been victorious centuries before. Lack of an active threat from the highlands before this had saved them from any concerted Aurolani effort to conquer them, but Adrogans refused to repay the highlanders’ kindness by permitting an Aurolani invasion.

Ideas and strategies rolled through Adrogans’ mind, but two things distracted him from studying them too closely. The first was the slow filtering of people onto a training field down to his left, on the east side of the encampment. He counted a hundred and a half—a task made easy as they organized themselves into companies of thirty. A week previous, a quarter of that number had been on the field. The people, men and women alike, still had a skeletal thinness to them, but in their eyes he saw the lean hunger of human wolves.

He was not at all certain how many of the thousand who remained in Guraskya would train and join the Svoin Infantry. The people below were the strongest of his refugees and, in many ways, it surprised him that a legion and a half were able to take the field. While putting food in a man’s belly can make him content, there is no easy way to put fire in his soul. Those below were mostly bent on revenge, for the Aurolani rape of Svoin had cost everyone at least a relative, friend, or lover.

Fight they would, and fiercely. But Adrogans entertained no illusions about their efficacy, for even three months of training would not prepare them for the sheer savagery of warfare. They would have to be held back like a fierce dog on a short lead and then released at that single point where they could do the most damage. The enemy would destroy them—of that he had no doubt—but he suspected the Svoinyki cared less about living than inflicting death on their former tormentors.

The second thing that served to distract him huffed and puffed up the hill. The white of the snow contrasted sharply with the little man’s brown flesh. More oddly, the wizened creature wore only a loincloth and a threadbare cloak. His lack of clothing made it easy to see the various talismans hanging from piercings in his leathery flesh. His spare locks of grey hair floated on the breeze, adding to the jocularity of his lopsided grin.

Adrogans found himself unable to resist returning that grin. “Uncle, it must be momentous news that brings you all the way up here.”

Phfas broadened his smile to display yellowed teeth. “You will feel the change. Try.”

“I have not the time.”

The Zhusk shaman shook his head. “Until you do, all time is wasted.”

Adrogans drew in a deep breath and closed his eyes to concentrate. The Zhusk, a primitive people who lived on a plateau in southeast Okrannel, cared little for the gods of the modern era and instead allied themselves with the primal and elemental spirits of the world. The Zhusk, through arcane rituals, bound themselves to these yrun, as the spirits were called. The talismans that Phfas wore indicated his alliance with the yrun of the air, and that spirit often brought information or wispy hints of it, trading speed for weight of information.

Adrogans had grown up in Jerana not knowing he was a half-Zhusk bastard until Phfas had recognized it and had invited him to enter into the Zhusk community. Adrogans had based many of his anti-Aurolani operations in the Zhusk Plateau, with his adopted people supporting his efforts. He had not, however, undergone the rituals that bound him to yrun until the first battle on the plains of Svoin. While the battle raged, he underwent an agonizing ritual that bound several yrun to him.

Turning within, he found a calm place and shut out all sound and sensation. He ignored the wind and the sound of Phfas’ breathing. He closed his ears to the shouts of the training refugees, the barking of dogs and the lonely cry of a soaring hawk. He pushed past physical sensation, which allowed him to focus on his spirit and the yrun who were his companions.

Earth and air, water and fire were there, but their fast strength denied them the delicacy he needed. Others he swept his mind past until he came to his mistress, the single yrun to whom he was most tightly bound. She appeared as naught but a mere slip of a girl, with soft new-budded breasts, barely past the gangly stage that presaged her womanly beauty. She took form in luminous white, almost a ghost, save that as he drew closer her body hardened and ragged, tearing edges, as serrated as the teeth she flashed in her mirthless smile, defined her. Those edges glittered coldly, and he felt the nibbling of frostbite on his toes and face.

He pushed that sensation away. I will not be distracted.

She knew his thoughts and reached for him, her hands clawing sharply into his scalp. She drew him to her, crushing her body to his. Where she touched him, pain ignited in his piercings. Then she raised her face to his in a kiss that stung. She parted her lips and sucked his tongue into her needle-filled mouth.

A jolt ran through him but he fought past the pain. Beyond it, he got a sense of the whole of Okrannel. It was not as if he were a distant hawk, soaring, able to look down on the nation. That would have been very helpful, but his mistress—the yrun of pain—instead gave him a sense of being a layer of thunderheads covering the nation. Where lightning struck, there pain dwelt, and certain loci had more than their share.

Laughing, he pulled himself from her torturous embrace and flowed out into his own flesh again. His eyes flicked open, then he raised a hand to cover them as the light from the snow blinded him. “So he has moved troops south?”

“As you said.” Phfas nodded so emphatically his talismans shook and rattled. “Spring will come early.”

The white-haired general shook his head. “Not as quickly as you would like, Uncle.”

Adrogans detested any parallels between warfare and games—precisely because a game was an abstraction that in no way encompassed war’s frightful cost in lives. Still, a certain amount of playing at warfare had to be done. Each side needed to conceal their strength, while retaining the ability to strike at the enemy or counter his moves. A game of cat and mouse it could be, in which both sides hoped their cat would not run into a hundred-pound mouse with sharp teeth and a scorpion’s sting.

In the battle for Svoin, Adrogans had succeeded in concealing just such a sting. He’d hidden troops from the Aurolani scouts and from his own people, then brought them in at a crucial moment to strike at the Aurolani rear. The surprise shattered the Aurolani host. Princess Alexia had slain the sullanciri that led them, and his troops crushed the Aurolani. The victory, in which he had been aided by his yrun allies, had given him the time he needed to liberate Svoin.

Common wisdom concerning warfare indicated that nothing could happen during the winter. Snows made travel difficult, both because roads and passes would be impassable; and because the snow would cover any forage for man or beast. Even if an army were to venture into the field and survive the frostbite and desertions that would come from hardship, a single blizzard could swallow them whole. Worse yet, a storm or avalanche could wipe out a supply caravan, leaving the army to starve.

Adrogans could not take refuge in the common wisdom, however, because the Aurolani troops were bred in a boreal realm where the worst winter in the south would be considered a mild spring day. While gibberers, frost-claws, and vylaens might not have been the most mentally flexible of troops, they did come in large groups, were used to the cold, and had a casual disregard for their own lives. Nefrai-kesh, therefore, had the ability to move troops down from Svarskya, infiltrate them into the highlands, and cause trouble.

The Jeranese general had predicted Nefrai-kesh would do just that for two reasons. The first was to sow terror in the countryside and erode any confidence won during the victory at Svoin. Besides, the Aurolani seemed to revel in cruelty for the sake of cruelty. The sullanciri had the troops, he could make use of them, and therefore he would.

Second—and of greater strategic importance, as long as Nefrai-kesh was on the offensive—was that he forced Adrogans to react. With hamlets scattered all over the highlands, there was no way to protect everyone. Adrogans would have to field a force that could be kept traveling hither and yon, trying to catch up with raiders who could fade away like ghosts. The effort to stop the raiders would exhaust his people, destroy morale, and possibly even build up resentment among the highlanders for his inability to stop the attacks.

Nefrai-kesh was operating under two disadvantages, though, and Adrogans was certain the Aurolani leader would have acknowledged neither of them as significant. The first was that while he was still human, he had been a formidable military commander. Adrogans knew that Kenwick Norrington had not been his equal even at the best of times, but he did accept that Norrington had known a great deal about warfare. This meant that Norrington might well accept the common wisdom about winter warfare. He would expect Adrogans would retire for the winter, and this gave the Aurolani an advantage since his troops could fight in winter.

The second fault compounded the error of underestimating his enemy. Nefrai-kesh likely knew nothing of the yrun, and certainly knew nothing of Adrogans’ connections with them. Wizards—as evidenced by the Vilwanese warmages in his army—tended to view the Zhusk as magickal curiosities, and Chytrine likely shared that view. Had she seen the Zhusk as any sort of a threat, she would have tried to wipe them out over the last quarter century.

Because his enemy was assuming his troops could not fight in winter, and because Nefrai-kesh was unaware that the yrun gave him enough information about where enemy troops were moving to position his own forces, Adrogans had no choice but to find a way to fight in the winter. The road to Svarskya had several key points that would cost him dearly to take, were they defended. By spring they would be, so if he could strike quickly and deep into Aurolani-occupied territory, he would save troops without which he could not possibly lay siege to Svarskya.

While the vast majority of his army was not well suited to operations in snowy highlands woods, he did have two groups who excelled at just that sort of thing. The Nalisk Mountain Rangers came from the central mountains of Naliserro and had even impressed the highlanders with their stoicism in the face of hardship. And the Loquelven Blackfeathers had fought hard and well at Svoin. Their leader, Mistress Gilthalarwin, still smarted from a disagreement with Adrogans, so she and her troops would take any opportunity they could to prove their worth.

Adrogans nodded slowly. He would use the Rangers and the Blackfeathers to track and destroy the forces Nefrai-kesh sent into the highlands. Striking out from there would be more difficult, but it could be done. If he could take the northern ford of the Svar River and then the Three Brothers Citadel guarding the road through the South Gorge, he’d be at the doorstep to Svarskya before spring rains came.

Phfas cackled. “If not early spring, a mild winter?”

“Not mild in terms of trouble, Uncle.” Adrogans slowly smiled. “Just one full of surprises for those who hate us.”