War Maid's Choice-ARC (48 page)

He met his son’s gaze levelly, and Bahzell nodded slowly, reading the other part of his father’s message in the shadow deep within Bahnak’s eyes. Even if Leeana lived a very long time for any human woman, he himself would be little past middle age for a hradani when he lost her. Yet it wasn’t how long he’d have to miss her that mattered. What
mattered
was how long they’d have together, the life they would share. The memory of that would keep his heart warm to the end of his own days, happen what would. And, he reminded himself a bit more briskly, he
was
a champion of Tomanāk, and as Tomanāk himself had told him on that long-ago day, few of the war god’s champions died in bed.

“I’ll not be calling it good sense myself, Da,” he said quietly. “It might be that’s not so very bad a way to put it, but it was the heart of her that took me by the throat, and there was no turning away from her, come what would and sense or no sense.”

“Aye?” His father reached across and squeezed his shoulder firmly. “Well, that’s not so bad a way to be starting a life together, either, now I think about it. Not so bad a way at all.”

* * *

“Bahzell, it’s good to see you!”

Vaijon stood, reaching out to clasp forearms as Bahzell, Tormach, and their father walked into the council chamber. Trianal of Balthar and Arsham of Navahk rose a heartbeat later, and Bahzell smiled as he gripped Vaijon’s arm firmly.

“And the same to be seeing you,” he said, but his smile faded slightly as he studied Vaijon’s expression. There were lines of fatigue in that face, and he looked at least two or three years older than the last time Bahzell had seen him. The Horse Stealer glanced at Trianal and saw an echo of Vaijon’s weariness in the Sothōii’s face, as well.

“And Brandark?” Vaijon asked, leaning to one side as if to look around the three massive Horse Stealers and spot the Bloody Sword.

“As to that, I’m thinking he’ll be along in a day or three,” Bahzell replied, and snorted. “We’d some letters from Tellian to Kilthan, and the little man allowed as how he’d just be taking them on to Silver Cavern to collect Kilthan’s response before he was joining us here. He’d some business of his own he wanted to discuss with Kilthan, and he’d some strange notion of giving Leeana and me a mite of privacy on the ride from Balthar.”

“Did he now?” Vaijon chuckled. “Brandark as an exquisite soul of tact. The mind boggles.”

“Oh, he’s not so bad as all that,” Bahzell replied, and glanced at Trianal. He’d been more than a little worried about how Trianal might react, given the younger man’s original attitude towards hradani in general, but Trianal only smiled at him and extended his own arm, in turn.

“So Leeana finally caught you!” His smile turned into a grin. “I’d wondered how long she was going to wait.”

“And was it every living soul in Hill Guard—except myself, of course—as knew what was in her mind?” Bahzell asked a bit aggrievedly.

“Oh, no,” Trianal reassured him. “I’m pretty sure at least three of the undergrooms never suspected a thing. Of course, that was probably only because she paid us so few visits over the last few years.” Bahzell snorted, and Trianal squeezed his forearm firmly. “The truth is she and I did discuss it—well, discuss
around
it, I suppose—in some of our letters, Bahzell. I doubt she realized how much she’d let slip, but there was enough for me to be happy for her. And for you, of course, although speaking as her cousin and someone who was fostered in her father’s household, I have to warn you that you’re going to find your hands full the first time you manage to do something that truly pisses her off. And you
will
, you know. She comes by that hair coloring honestly!”

“Bahzell is a champion of Tomanāk,” Vaijon pointed out, looking down his nose at Trianal, “and as all the world knows, champions of Tomanāk are wily tacticians, skilled strategists, and complete strangers to fear. The first time Leeana picks up something to throw at him, Bahzell will demonstrate all of those championlike qualities and run. Quickly.”

Everyone but Arsham chuckled, and even the Navahkan smiled.

“It’s an approach as has served
me
well on more than one occasion,” Bahnak observed after a moment, then shook his head. “Still and all, I’m thinking we’d best get to it.”

He waved at the chairs around the council table, and all of them settled into place. Arsham and Tormach got their pipes lit and drawing nicely and Bahnak lifted the moisture-beaded pitcher and poured ale into all of their tankards with his own hand. They sat for a moment, gazing out the council chamber windows at a fine, misty rain filtering down across the broad blue waters of the lake, and then Bahnak inhaled deeply.

“It’s glad I am to be seeing the lot of you,” he nodded particularly to Arsham, “but it’s not so glad I was to be reading your reports.” He shook his head, ears half flattened, and Vaijon sighed.

“I wasn’t exactly delighted to be writing them, Your Highness,” he said, and glanced at Bahzell. “Have you had a chance to read them since you got here?”

“Aye. That’s to say as how I’ve skimmed them all, but it’s more attention I paid to the last two or three of them.” Bahzell shook his head. “No one but a fool—and I’m thinking there’s none of them around this table—would have been thinking it was going to be all sunny skies and fair weather once we’d got this deep into the Ghoul Moor. Still, having said that, it’s in my mind none of us were expecting this.”

“It’s not really as bad as it could be,” Trianal pointed out. He took a pull at his tankard, then sat back in his chair, his expression serious. “It’s not as if our casualties have gone soaring—yet, at least. Not compared to what they could’ve been under the circumstances, at any rate. But I admit
I
didn’t see it coming, and I’ve studied everything I could get my hands on about previous expeditions into the Ghoul Moor. This is something new, and those casualties of ours
are
going to climb if it continues and we’re not very, very, careful.”

“It’s buried I’ve been—if you’ll be so good as to excuse the phrase—in Silver Cavern, my own self.” Tormach’s tone was half-apologetic. “I’ve not been back more than a day or so, and I’ve not read those reports as Bahzell has. But I’m thinking this hasn’t been going on for so very long?”

He looked back and forth between Vaijon and Trianal, and Vaijon shrugged.

“Actually, I think it may have started before we ever noticed,” he admitted. “The first engagement or two, it was more the weather than anything else that made problems. And the weather still
is
making problems, for that matter. But looking back, we should have noticed even then that there seemed to be an awful lot of ghouls in those villages. Especially the first one, given that we’d cleared and burned it to the ground
last
year.”

“I’ve been reading Yurgazh’s reports, as well, Sir Vaijon,” Arsham put in, “and I don’t see any reason you should have thought anything of the sort on the basis of what you knew then.” The Bloody Sword prince shook his head. “I know Yurgazh thinks all of you you let yourselves miss it because of your ‘contempt’ for ghouls, but I think you’re being too hard on yourselves.”

“You may be right, Your Highness,” Vaijon said after a moment, “but whether we should have spotted it then or not, we’ve damned well spotted it
now!
And it was only by the grace of Tomanāk—not to mention Yurgazh’s good sense—that it didn’t cost us a lot more than it did, too.”

“That’s true enough,” Trianal agreed with feeling, and grimaced. “I wish certain Sothōii nobles and armsmen whose names I won’t mention could see what a solid line of hradani infantry is really like! There wouldn’t be any more stupid talk about riding down the escarpment and ‘dealing’ with your folk once and for all!”

“Well, as for that,” Bahnak said with a slow smile, “it’s not hurt a thing, a thing, for some of our own hotheads to’ve been seeing why it is no man in his right mind’s any desire at all to find out the hard way what your ‘wee little pony-riders’ can be doing to them as might be foolish enough to poke their noses where they’ve not been invited!”

Arsham snorted in agreement, and Trianal acknowledged Bahnak’s point with a wave of his tankard. Then the young Sothōii shrugged.

“True enough,” he repeated, “but it really was Yurgazh’s steadiness and those Dwarvenhame arbalests that saved all our necks, Your Highness.” He shook his head. “I never thought there were that many ghouls in the world, and when they came boiling up out of that valley...”

His brown eyes went cold with memory of how the sudden, unbelievable tide of ghouls had flooded up over the hill when his own men had dismounted to water their mounts. They’d swarmed his pickets right under, then charged directly towards the rest of his command, screaming their bestial warcries and waving their weapons of stone and wood like some furious, hungry sea. Only three of the men on picket duty had survived, but at least they’d given enough warning for the majority of his men to scramble back into the saddle before the ghouls hit them. That was
all
they’d managed to do, though, and it was only the gods’ own luck that Yurgazh’s scouts had seen the attack uncoiling from the other side of the valley.

There’d been no time for the Sothōii to uncase or string their bows. It had been all saber and lance, yet Trianal had dared not sound the retreat. Not only had he still had men on the ground, dismounted, hideously vulnerable to the ghouls if their mounted comrades left them unprotected, but the enemy was too fast. They couldn’t keep pace with his superb warhorses over a long course, but even the finest horses took time to accelerate. The ghouls certainly
could
have caught his troopers before they managed to pull away, and the nightmare creatures were tall enough and strong enough to pluck any Sothōii armsman from his saddle as easily as Trianal himself might have plucked an apple, if they took him from behind.

The situation had been headed towards the desperate when Yurgazh had brought his infantry across the valley at a dead run. The Navahkan general had halted to give the enemy a single, murderous volley of arbalest bolts at pointblank range before ordering the charge, and then his battalions had crunched into the ghouls’ backs like Tomanāk’s mace.

Trianal suspected the ghouls had been too focused on his own horsemen even to realize Yurgazh was approaching their town from the other side. Their shock and surprise when the hradani suddenly poured fire into them and then charged into their rear had been obvious, at any rate. Yet even then, they hadn’t reacted the way ghouls were
supposed
to react. They’d neither fled in yelping panic nor turned and fought in the grip of their own ferocity. Instead, they’d run away—run away as a
body
, in something closer to an actual formation than he’d ever seen out of any ghouls, and in clear obedience to some sort of pre-battle plan—and his own cavalry had been too disordered to pursue immediately.

“They’re better organized than they’ve ever been before,” he said flatly, “and this is the first time I’ve ever heard of ghouls doing anything that could be described as actually
planning
an attack.”

“And it’s certain you are that’s what they were doing?” Bahzell asked, ears half-flattened and eyes narrowed and concentration. “It’s not that I’d doubt your judgment, Trianal, but it’s often enough I’ve seen what looked as how it was a planned response when it was after being nothing of the sort.”

“Yes, and it’s often enough I’ve been
part
of a response like that,” Arsham put it dryly. “Just because your troops are operating like a mob—the way certain Bloody Swords I could mention had a way of operating, once upon a time—doesn’t mean they can’t get lucky and simply catch the other side unawares.”

“I’m certain,” Trianal said, and raised an eyebrow at Vaijon, who nodded firmly in agreement. The Sothōii looked back at the hradani. “It might not have been the very best plan in all the world, and they obviously didn’t have enough scouts out to watch their own backs while they concentrated on ambushing my men, but it was planned, all right. And so was the way they broke off. I lost thirty-seven men, dead or wounded. Yurgazh lost another eight, and even with his arbalests, we accounted for less than two hundred ghouls.” He shook his head. “That’s not an exchange rate we can sustain, and it’s a lot worse rate than we’ve ever had before. Worse, there must’ve been a good three or four hundred of them still on their feet when they ran for it. How often have we seen that many of them simply take to their heels when they’ve got an enemy in reach?”

Bahzell nodded slowly, cradling his tankard between his hands on the tabletop while he considered what Trianal had said.

“And not a one of their young did you see?” he asked after a moment.

“No, and that was another strange thing,” Vaijon replied. He looked more worried than Bahzell was accustomed to seeing him, and his blue eyes were distinctly unhappy. “I’ll admit it...bothers me when their young come at us, but it bothers me even more when we take one of their villages and their are
no
young—or females—in it. That’s another reason I’m sure Trianal’s right about their having planned the entire ‘battle.’ They had to have sent their young and their females away ahead of time, which means a couple of things I don’t like to think about.”

“Ah?” Bahzell’s tilted ears invited him to continue, and Vaijon shrugged.

“First, they’re trying to protect their young, and they’ve never worried about that before. Everyone knows ghouls don’t care about that—Tomanāk, they
eat
their own young! But this time, they’d sent them away, which can only mean they were deliberately protecting them from us.

“Second, they knew we were coming far enough in advance to send them off before we ever got there. How? We were over twenty miles away before we made our night approach march, and we’d been moving the other direction for two days. We’d even bivouaced ‘for the night,’ in case any stray ghouls were wandering around in our neighborhood, before we turned the men out for the attack. So either they spotted us on the way in and managed to organize the removal of all their females and their young—and you know how hard it is for even a ghoul to catch
one
of their young, Bahzell, much less round up
all
of them!—on the fly, or else they decided to evacuate their ‘noncombatants’ ahead of time simply because we were in the vicinity. I don’t know which would be more unnatural coming out of a ghoul: the ability to respond that quickly and flexibly, or the forethought to evacuate just as a precaution!”