Demontech: Rally Point: 2 (Demontech Book 2) (39 page)

“You get your hands off him, he’s mine!” Doli stalked forward. “I don’t know who you think you are,” she snarled, “but you stay away from him. He’s spoken for.”

Surprised and flustered, Spinner took a moment to collect himself. “Doli—” His voice cracked and he tried again. “Doli! What are you doing? We just rescued her from the Jokapcul.”

She spun on him. “She’s the one you spent that night with in the inn, isn’t she?”

“Ah—”

“Don’t deny it, I can see it in your eyes.”

“But, Doli, you know I—”

“Don’t you ‘but’ me, Spinner. You not only cheated on me, you cheated on that Alyline, too!”

“Spinner,” Maid Primrose recovered enough to speak, “is this woman your lover? Were you unfaithful with me?”

“No! No, nothing like that.” He held his hands up defensively. “She’s not my lover, she’s
never
been my lover!”

“That’s not from lack of opportunity!” Doli spat.

Maid Primrose grabbed Doli’s shoulder. “You’re not his lover,” she said angrily, “yet you attack me for kissing him after he rescued me?”

Doli covered her face with her hands and bawled. “He doesn’t want me,” she wailed. “He only wants her!” She took her hands from her face and turned around, pointing. She kept turning, but didn’t see Alyline anywhere. “That Golden Girl, she’s the only one he wants, and she won’t have him!”

Maid Primrose turned on Spinner. “You pine for someone else, and you took
me
when you couldn’t have her?” She stormed right up to him. “Am I just some convenient vessel you relieve yourself with when you can’t get what you want?”

“But that’s not what happened.”

The two women turned to each other.

“He betrayed you and this other woman?”

“He used you?”

“The nerve of him!”

“That beast!”

Doli suddenly noticed Maid Primrose’s bruises. “Oh, you’ve been hurt! Come with me, let me take care of that.”

The two walked off together, arm in arm like old friends.

All around people were staring at Spinner and Haft.

Xundoe and his party came in with the healing magician a couple of hours later, sweaty and weary from a long trek with heavy burdens. So far as they knew, the Jokapcul had made no attempt to follow them.

It was after sundown when Silent returned.

Just a week earlier Eikby had had a population of more than two thousand people. Including those the raid had freed, barely a thousand people had found refuge in the valley—and more than a hundred of them were from the company. Some of the townspeople were known to have fled east before the Jokapcul arrived and it was certain that some who fled north deliberately bypassed the valley to head for Princedon Gulf on their own. There were likely other terrified people still wandering in the forest west and north of the valley. But all of those combined were only a fraction of the missing thousand. The people just brought in confirmed that most of the missing had been killed. They also told what they had been constructing.

“It was an elaborate pyre,” Plotniko, the master carpenter, explained to the leaders of the company. “The Jokapcul commander told me through an interpreter that the pyre was modeled after the principal castle of their king. King wasn’t the word he used, it was a title I’d never heard before, but it meant king. It was a great honor, he said, for conquered dead to be cremated in a replica of the king’s castle.” He shook his head. “They slaughtered us. How could anything after that be thought of as an ‘honor’?

“I saw the bodies lying about, those that hadn’t been burned in the houses and buildings when the Jokapcul torched the town. Swordsmen and archers stood outside the burning buildings to drive people back inside when they tried to escape the flames. Still, hundreds of people were killed in the open. I don’t know how they decided which of us they would kill and which they would keep alive to do the work they required. The way they chose seemed completely random. I was with Master Builder Stupnikow, hiding in a stone storage shed when they found us. They dragged us out and threw us at the feet of an officer. Their leader said something. I looked up and saw him point at Stupnikow. Two of the soldiers plunged their swords into his back. Then the officer spoke again and pointed at me. I was certain they were going to kill me then. But they didn’t. Instead, two of them grabbed my arms and yanked me to my feet. They dragged me to a growing knot of people inside a circle of mounted lancers. Many people screamed and cried; we thought they were going to murder us for sport. Instead, they kept us to work the fields, gather bodies—and to build that pyre.”

He looked at them with haunted eyes. “Somehow they found out I was the master carpenter. They gave me plans and put me in charge of building the pyre. It didn’t take long to realize the pyre I was charged with building was far bigger than was needed for the dead we were gathering. It was big enough for all of the dead—and for all of the living. I only hoped they planned to kill us first and not simply herd us into that place before they lit it.

“I knew there was only the ghost of a hope that someone would come to drive the Jokapcul away and rescue us, but I never gave up on that ghost. So I made sure the work went slowly. Maybe it was too slow; they killed workers every day to frighten the rest of us into working faster.

“Then someone attacked two nights ago and they suffered severe losses. Was that you?” He smiled wanly when Spinner said it had been. “Some of them started killing us, but their officers made them stop. They needed us to build a hospital pavilion and carry their wounded to it. It was the first time since they first attacked that we’d seen them care for their own wounded. No one told us why. But the attack,
your
attack, told me we were going to be rescued. I didn’t expect the rescue to come so soon, though, and for that I and all the others who survived thank you.”

There was more Plotniko told them, but they already knew what happened to the women.

“I will make them suffer for that,” Haft muttered at the telling. He stroked Maid Marigold’s hand where it rested on his shoulder, she settled more closely against his back.

As horrible as was the number of dead and the telling of their dying, the living still had to be cared for. There wasn’t enough food in the valley to feed the thousand people, nor was it possible to feed them for longer than the shortest time by hunting and foraging in the nearby forest. They couldn’t stay in the valley, they had to move and soon. But as short as food was, everything else was in even shorter supply. Their options were limited.

They could stay where they were and fend as best they could until starvation and deprivation overcame most of them—or the Jokapcul found and killed them, whichever came first.

They could strike out to the northwest and hope to find succor at the bandit base. That wasn’t a good option either. They had no reason to believe the remaining bandits—if any had survived that battle with the Jokapcul—would welcome them with anything other than violence and death. Besides, the bandit village was too close to what had been Eikby; the Jokapcul would find and destroy it soon enough.

They could go north as one group. But the way would be slow and painful, many would be lost along the way—and the Jokapcul would inevitably find and kill the survivors.

They could break into small groups and head north. Any individual group would stand a better chance of making its way to the gulf intact than would the whole, but any group also stood a good chance of being lost to starvation, bandits, or Jokapcul patrols.

The one option nobody discussed was returning to Eikby. Not at first.

They met again when Silent came back. If the steppe nomad noticed that Doli wasn’t hovering near Spinner, he gave no sign, but he did cock an eyebrow when he saw Maid Marigold clinging to Haft. He got down to the business of telling them what he found in his observation of the Jokapcul camp after the raid.

“They seem thoroughly disorganized,” he said to the others gathered around the fire. “I didn’t see any officers and only one sergeant.”

“If they don’t have any officers left,” Spinner said, “it’s no wonder they’re disorganized. They’re trained to do nothing without orders from an officer.”

“Right.” Silent nodded, that was a well-known oddity of the Jokapcul army. Even sergeants did little more than relay officers’ orders. “They haven’t even collected the bodies of their dead from the west forest. I counted sixty of them and more than a hundred dead bandits in the forest fringe to the west.” He looked at Alyline. “What happened there?”

She told him quickly rather than repeat the detailed debriefing she and Sergeant Phard had already given the others.

“You say most of the Jokapcul who followed you were unarmed?”

“No more than belt knives, most of them. I don’t know about the horsemen, but they were probably well armed.”

Silent whistled appreciatively. “They certainly are fierce warriors, if they began mostly unarmed and still killed so many.”

“The Blood Swords accounted for nearly a score of the bandits,” Spinner reminded him.

Silent looked at him for a moment. “Then they still killed better than one to one,” he said with the respect of one good fighting man for another.

He resumed his narrative. “I didn’t see any movement in the hospital pavilion. Either their wounded are already recovered, or they stopped attending to them now that the healing magician is no longer there. I suspect they weren’t taking care of them and I’ll tell you why: I saw some of the Jokapcul fighting among themselves. If they’re fighting among themselves, I doubt they are caring for their wounded. The dead I counted at the forest fringe? Not all of them were killed in the battle, several of them looked liked they lived for some time after being wounded. I think many of their injured could have been saved had anyone bandaged their wounds; instead they bled to death.

“Not all of the fighting I saw in the camp was with hands and weapons, many of them contented themselves with yelling at each other. I couldn’t get close enough to hear what they were yelling about, though.” He snorted. “Not that I can understand their gibberish anyway. Some of them were digging through the ashes of the tents, but it didn’t look like they found much that was usable.” He nodded to Xundoe. “It’s good that you thought to burn their tents, that increased their disorientation.”

Xundoe smiled broadly; he had never gotten much praise when he was in the Zobran army.

“They’ve lost half the force they arrived here with,” Spinner said after a moment’s thought. “And all their officers and nearly all of their sergeants.”

“That’s right,” Silent said with a wolflike smile.

“No leadership, disorganized, fighting among themselves,” Haft mused. He looked up sharply. “We can take them. We can wipe them out!”

“Not so fast,” Xundoe interjected. “What about magicians? You haven’t said anything about magicians. We know they had at least two with them. Just because I took away two magic chests doesn’t mean they can’t still do us serious harm.”

Silent shook his head. “I saw nobody who looked like a magician. And
no one
held anything that looked like a demon weapon. I don’t think they have any, and if they do, they’re probably too disorganized to use them effectively.”

“Fletcher, how many men do we have?” Haft asked.

“There are the thirty who went with you on the raid and the forty who stayed here. We haven’t finished sorting out the people you freed, but there are at least a half dozen more Eikby Guards and a couple of our own men among them.”

“What about the men who aren’t soldiers?”

Fletcher scratched his jaw in thought. “We haven’t finished counting them. Probably two or three hundred.”

“Do any of them have any training? Can they fight?”

Fletcher shook his head. “I don’t think any of them have training, but I’m sure most of the men who lost their families will be willing to fight.”

Haft closed in on himself to think about it. Then he shook himself out of it and asked, “Silent, how many Jokapcul do you think are still there?”

“More than two hundred.”

With a shake of his head, Spinner interrupted, “It’s no good. We have maybe eighty soldiers and veterans. I don’t like the odds, they outnumber us by too much, unless we use the untrained men. But that’s no good; untrained men going up against Jokapcul will only get killed. We can’t attack.”

“We’ve got demon weapons,” Haft said eagerly. “They don’t. We can reduce the odds right away and hit them while they’re confused.”

Xundoe jumped in. “I haven’t finished cataloging the contents of those two magic chests yet, but already I’ve found more phoenix eggs. I think Haft is right.”

Alyline spoke for the first time. “Remember what only eight of you did against them with demon weapons two nights ago? Only a few of you went into Eikby this morning. . . .”

“Seven of us actually went in,” Xundoe said proudly. He really did deserve that promotion he never got, and now it was too late—there was no more Zobran army to give him one.

She nodded at him. “Only seven of you went into Eikby with demon weapons this morning and wreaked great damage—and you killed all of their remaining officers. I say if we hit the Jokapcul fast and hard with demon weapons, then Haft leads a charge into them, we will completely defeat them.”

Haft swallowed at the hard way she looked at him when she suggested he lead the charge. She
could
be thinking he was the best man to lead it—or she could be thinking the man who led the charge would get killed. He didn’t know what he had done, only that her former dislike for him seemed to have turned to a white-hot anger.

“I think Haft and Alyline are right, Spinner,” Fletcher said.

“But—”

“We can do it!” Xundoe said gleefully.

“They’re right,” Silent said.

Spinner sighed. “If we attack we’ll lose more people. And we’ll have to leave here immediately after because the Jokapcul will send more troops as soon as they learn about the defeat.”