Valkyrie's Shadow

Chapter 25

“I want those engineers up here right now!” Captain Hawke said, “If some bullshit comes boiling up this pass, we got nothing to fight from!”

“Yes, sir!”

The War Wizard turned and cast a Message spell. Joachim rested his shield against his leg, working off his gauntlets as he scanned the pass. The rocky saddle was bare of even grass; a bald groove between the peaks scoured smooth over the ages by the whistling wind. Its eastern descent was so gentle that he couldn’t help but think it unfair compared to their western approach.

A scarce handful of large boulders dotted the landscape, nowhere near enough to create any fortifications or shelter on the rapidly-cooling mountain face. Spring might have come to the valley below, but snow and ice still crusted the ground here. Captain Hawke divided the company into watches and three squads stood shivering in their mantles as they watched for potential attacks from the east while the rest busied themselves with preparations for the night.

“We can’t pitch our tents, sir,” one of the Third Company’s Sergeants reported. “How long ‘till the engineers get here?”

“Why do you need engineers to pitch your tents?” Captain Hawke frowned.

“Ground’s pure stone,” the Sergeant replied. “We can’t get our pegs in. Couple of my guys’ve already broke a few. The engineers have that magic that’ll change the ground, yeah?”

“The engineers will be fortifying the pass,” Captain Hawke told him. “They won’t have any mana to spare.”

The Sergeant turned away, scratching his head as he looked around. Joachim went over to his own squad, wondering how they would set up for the night. He frowned at the spot where Lady Zahradnik had piled her furniture, then looked over to where Pol was busy unpacking their tents and supplies.

“Where did Lady Zahradnik and the others go?” Joachim asked.

“Back down that defile with the others,” Pol answered. “Went to get firewood and some other things.”

Joachim joined the Cavalier, trying to make the best out of the bleak situation. With the excitement during the unexpectedly-easy occupation of the pass long faded, the only thing he could think about was the cold and the wind.

“It’s no wonder there were barely any defenders here,” he said, “this place is inhospitable.”

“Yeah, and now we get to freeze our asses off guarding it. You Clerics got some magic for that?”

“We do,” Joachim replied, “but let’s see what else we can come up with first.”

Endure Elements was a First-tier spell that made its target impervious to a wide range of temperatures for a full day, but they were in a situation where their mana might be required for battle at any moment.

Ten minutes later, Baroness Zahradnik and the rest of the squad returned, carrying four tree trunks between them. They set down three in a loose triangle while the fourth was set to the side.

“Pol,” she said, “start chopping this one up firewood. The rest of you head back down and get the rest of what we need.”

“Yes, m’lady.”

The Baroness knelt in the middle of the three logs, producing head-sized stones from her magical containers and arranging them in a large circle. She dumped a pile of dried pine branches into the circle of stones, breaking them up before leaning close to strike her flint against them. A small fire rose from the makeshift fire pit and the young noblewoman rose to look down at it with a satisfied look.

“That’s amazing, my lady,” Joachim said.

“I could be mistaken, Priest Ward,” Lady Zahradnik replied, “but I believe you’ve seen a campfire before. We might be a couple of steps ahead here, but there were other squads collecting firewood.”

“No, that’s…I don’t think that’s what I meant. It’s this weird feeling – the entire company’s had this lost look since they got up here. They’re sort of wandering around trying to figure out what to do. You make a single move and suddenly there’s structure. A campfire. Seats. I can imagine the tents around it already. The air growing warm; the wind lessening from the camp coming up around us; the smell of dinner. Everyone’s noticed and now they’re moving to do the same.”

“That’s just how Humans are, isn’t it?” The Baroness said, “They structure the world according to what they associate with their ideals. Children imitate their parents and that behaviour doesn’t stop upon reaching adulthood…though I suppose I’m being a bit manipulative about it.”

“How so, my lady?”

“This company clearly has no experience surviving in this terrain, but if I try to verbally instruct them I’ll be tied up for the rest of the night. Instead of trying to convince them to do anything and endlessly answering questions after that, I’m using our squad to indirectly instruct them on what needs to be done. Every step in setting up the camp that they take, the rest of the company will see and imitate. With simple examples, they’ll start associating foreign things with familiar ones and develop a sense of direction from there – just like you did from seeing his campfire with its seats.”

Lady Zahradnik went over to retrieve Pol’s growing pile of firewood, adding it to their campfire before setting up an iron tripod. She hung a cauldron over the fire and half-filled it with water before going over to sift through the squad’s supplies. Steam was rising from the cauldron by the time the men returned with a boulder under each arm.

“What do we do with these, m’lady?”

“You’ll be using them to anchor your tents,” she replied. “We’ll be putting them up in a circle around the fire this time. Put two boulders between each tent and tie your lines to them. My tent will be on the windward side – there should also be a couple of large tarps in the pile there to help block off the elements.”

The Baroness continued to tend to her cookpot, humming idly to herself as the men set up their shelters. Once her tent was raised, she disappeared into it for a while before reappearing in her usual equestrian outfit with its forest green coat. By then, most of the squad was seated around the fire, warming their hands and chatting amongst themselves. The camp was still catching up to them, but the pass had gone from a barren landscape of windswept stone to something that at least partially resembled an army encampment.

After serving bowls of hearty stew to the men and joining them for a brief dinner, Joachim followed Lady Zahradnik to the company’s command pavilion. Along the way, they stopped to let a large tree carried by a team of men go by towards the eastern side of the camp where a log wall was being raised across the pass.

“How are they carrying that?” Lady Zahradnik asked.

“The army engineers use a spell that reduces the weight of objects,” Joachim answered. “Between the spells that they use to alter the terrain, reshape raw materials and move things around, they can put up fortifications that would take months of raw manual labour in days. Do you have anything like that in the Sorcerous Kingdom, my lady?”

“We do, but the scale is a bit different. I believe the Dwarves have similar techniques for their construction, as well.”

They arrived at the officer’s pavilion to find Captain Hawke and a few assistants rushing about.

“Is something going on, Captain?” Lady Zahradnik asked.

“General Ray is on his way, m’lady,” Captain Hawke replied. “One of the flights is carrying him up here right now.”

Joachim nearly rolled his eyes. Of course he would come. The man always wanted to be in the position of greatest control.

“Is the rest of the battalion coming up?”

“Yeah, they’re even sending men up the mountain overnight.”

“Anything from the scouts you sent eastward?”

“No,” the Captain said. “The Rangers haven’t found anything within a kilometre of the pass. I haven’t sent ‘em beyond that: they need a good rest after all their work today. Hopefully, the General doesn’t order them out the second he gets here.”

Lady Zahradnik examined the materials being laid out in preparation for the General’s arrival. Given that nearly all of their reconnaissance thus far had been from aerial observation, it amounted to mapping the terrain and identifying the larger groups of Demihumans scattered around the plateau. Given her apparent wealth of experience in the wilderness, Joachim suspected that the Baroness saw much more in the scant details than anyone in the Imperial Army did.

“I understand that General Ray is an aggressive Commander,” she said, “but, at the same time, he doesn’t appear to be foolishly unreasonable within the framework of his own knowledge. We have nearly four thousand square kilometres to cover; maintaining a good pace is one thing, but overtaxing ourselves at this stage is counterproductive.”

“Things’ve slowly gone sideways,” Captain Hawke said. “The people in charge usually don’t like that and they’ll do what they can to get things back under control again. It’s not just General Ray bein’ aggressive – every time any Commander’s perfect picture of things gets a little off, they react to fix it up.”

“It at least appears that General Ray is trying to fortify his position here first,” Lady Zahradnik said. “I saw that the engineers have arrived and are starting to raise fortifications for the pass. Speaking of which, how come you’re not overseeing their work?”

“They have their instructions from the General, so I’m just letting them do their thing. Us regular Captains aren’t the specialists when it comes to that stuff anyway.”

Captain Hawke’s mouth parted in a wide yawn, nearly causing Joachim to do the same. They had been climbing since daybreak and with the sun setting across the valley, fatigue was starting to hit him all at once. He didn’t envy the men on the first shift of sentry duty.

“Since the Third Company secured this pass,” the Baroness told Captain Hawke, “General Ray will likely send the other companies down the other side first. If he does send your men out, it shouldn’t be so far that they can’t return by the end of the day.”

“Makes sense,” the Captain nodded, “though I never want to climb a mountain ever again. How do we even get our horses up here?”

“You probably won’t get to use them at all. The Second Legion had the same problem in The Blister, but you’ll likely have an easier time here. This place is a wilderness, but the terrain isn’t very difficult with the sparse vegetation and weathered landscape.”

“Some people are talking about how there might be caves everywhere. If that’s true, we could fight here for a decade and still not win. I still don’t get why the higher-ups never assigned those Undead to us…they’d settle things real quick, wouldn’t they?”

“It depends how your enemies choose to fight them,” Lady Zahradnik said. “Death-series servitors are strong, tireless and can break armies that attempt to fight them directly. Like the soldiers in any army, however, they have limitations based on their specialisations. Just like how you would think twice about sending heavy infantry or cavalry into battlefields unsuited for them, so too would I consider the deployment of Death Knights and Death Cavaliers along similar lines.”

“I was at Katze,” Captain Hawke said, “so I’ve seen ‘em in person. I can’t imagine those things losing to anything.”

“There are powerful beings in the world that can destroy them easily,” the Baroness replied. “Environmental hazards are a problem as well. They can lose their footing and fall off of cliffs or just get forced off of them through various means. Beyond that, different types of terrain affect mobility and adversaries that can move easily in poor terrain will run circles around them. Flying opponents with countermeasures against projectile attacks are a problem as well. Last spring, a Druid lit one of my Death Knights on fire and it could only burn there impotently as the Druid couldn’t be reached.”

Were Druids that strong? The vast majority of them were considered pests by the Empire as they constantly acted to impede development and resist frontier expansion. Imperial progress would come to a standstill – or perhaps even regress – if they were strong enough to defeat a Death Knight.

The rest of Lady Zahradnik’s claims were plausible when brought to their attention. Though many believed that raw power was the be-all-end-all, the world was generally not so straightforward and there were realities that even the strong could not simply ignore.

General Ray arrived within the hour, as did the battalion’s mages who used Fly spells to rapidly ascend the pass.

“Good work with the pass, Hawke,” the General said.

“Not sure if it was ‘good work’ or not, sir,” the Captain replied, “we sorta just walked up here.”

“It was more than we could manage with the other two passes. How are things looking up here?”

“Aside from cold and bleak, not much. I think the Demis know we’re here but there hasn’t been any sign of retaliation on its way.”

The General nodded with a satisfied look as if Hawke’s words were just what he wanted to hear.

“It’s as I expected,” General Ray said. “They might be organising but they’re nowhere near ready to fight. We need to press the attack and keep them off balance. Our next move will be split into two parts. We’ll send a detachment north to secure a pass for the Fourth Division while the rest of us head eastward. How we’ll advance will depend on what we find out over the next day, but I suspect that we’ll be overwhelming them up here just as we’ve done below.”

“‘Cept that we don’t have our horses,” Captain Hawke noted.

“Our logistics will be affected, yes,” the General nodded, “but a soldier can march the same distance as a horse in a day. In this terrain, we’ll probably be moving faster than if we had horses. As far as combat is concerned, our striking power will be reduced but we’ll still be able to clear out the tribes while they’re still disorganised. Aerial reconnaissance will keep track of Demihuman movements in the region and we’ll eventually figure out where this enemy Commander is. By striking him down, we’ll decisively put an end to their attempts at organised resistance for the foreseeable future. I doubt that any more Hobgoblins will pop up after we deal with this first batch.”

General Ray’s confident tone left little room for doubt. Joachim’s sense that the General was being aggressive was still there, but everything stated was based on simple, irrefutable truths.

The organisation of forces took time and the Imperial Army had no issues with the poorly-equipped and disorganised tribes in the wilderness thus far. Once their reconnaissance elements identified Demihuman warbands large enough to threaten a company, they would have as hard a time hiding from the Imperial Army as the Imperial Army had hiding from them. Hobgoblins did not mysteriously spawn out of thin air as the Undead did, so once they were dealt with, the unification of the wilderness tribes against the Imperial Army would become slow and difficult. Once they knocked out the would-be leaders of the enemy forces, the Imperial Army could take their time with the rest.

“For the detachment headed north,” Captain Hawke said, “I heard Cheswin couldn’t make any ground at all. Will our luck be any better from this side?”

“His orders were to fight defensively,” General Ray replied, “and that’s what he did. From his report, it was pretty much a standoff with a lot of rocks and arrows being traded. The air wing got a decent count – a medium-sized Demihuman tribe of around five hundred. Mostly Goblins, of course.”

“Five hundred…there’s bound to be at least one Lord in all that. More, depending on who’s leadin’ it.”

“Captain Cheswin noted that it looked like Trolls were in charge, so we probably have one powerful Troll acting as the leader of the tribe.”

Captain Hawke stared at the pass marked out on the map, expression turning grim.

“Dealing with a powerful Troll and its tribe’ll be a lot of work, sir,” he said. “How many companies are you sending?”

“I’ll be sending the Tenth Company…along with Baroness Zahradnik.”

Joachim blinked, his gaze going between General Ray, Captain Hawke and Lady Zahradnik. Was the General really planning on using her like this? Would she so simply agree?

“A-are you sure about that sir?” Captain Hawke asked, “I don’t doubt her abilities, but…”

“I believe that there was something that Lady Zahradnik wished to bring to our attention,” General Ray answered as he glanced at the Baroness.

“You’re right, Your Excellency,” Lady Zahradnik replied. “It presented itself sooner than I expected, but this appears to be an ideal opportunity. I suspect that it will be an eye-opening experience.”

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