Iron war, p.15
Iron War, page 15
part #4 of The Jack of Magic Series
“I wish I could have hidden my kingdom that way,” said Iva under her breath, staring at the goat path where the entrance had been. “Hey, where are you going?” she called as Portia slid down from her horse and walked towards the general and the mage.
“Nowhere,” Portia called back.
Rather than stopping by the mage and the general, Portia kept going to where the door should have been. The ground rose up below her, forcing her to climb a steep ascent. It felt just as it looked. She jumped up and down—the ground was solid. She grabbed a bush alongside the path, only to quickly pull back her hand and wipe the blood from her thumb that had found a thorn. This was not like her duplicate magic. It was solid. She could make the illusion of duplicates, but they were like smoke—a hand could pass right through them.
“Hey!” the mage said behind her. He drew in breath to launch a tirade, but the general clapped him on the back. They looked up at Portia, whose feet were now at their eye level.
“She’s mighty impressed with your work, I guess—had to see it up close.” The general’s smile was contagious, and the mage’s indignation melted. His shoulders relaxed, and he gave out a soft huff instead of yelling at Portia.
Portia climbed back down the goat path to the mage and the general. “I am impressed.” Her face flushed red, realizing how the words might be taken as arrogance on her part. “Not that I’m an expert, of course. But I’ve never seen that before. Could you show me how you do it?”
The mage’s face softened at Portia’s praise. The general, her arm still around the mage, answered for him. “I’m sure that is possible, but it will have to be around our campfire tonight. We have a schedule to make.” The general pointed to their horses. “Shall we?”
They rode down the mountain path single file, the path down looking as much like a goat trail as the path behind them. The horses were surefooted. Iva hung onto hers with almost affection as the horse walked down the steep rocky path.
A lush green forest spread out before them. In a few moments, the path opened to show the ground below the mountain. Puffy clouds raced over the land, leaving shadows on the greenery as they were pushed by the high winds above.
The lower they went, the warmer and more humid the air became. The greenery increased. Finally, the path widened and dumped them down to a lush forest that pushed up against the base of the mountain. Birds called in the trees. Sunlight dappled through the leaves onto the bare forest floors far below.
They walked some distance along the road that ran along the base of the mountain, skirting the forest, before the general called a halt for lunch.
Portia dismounted gratefully and stretched.
Iva slid down from her own animal and then straightened. “Ouch, ouch, ouch,” she said.
“Wait until you sit down to eat,” said Portia, unable to stop the smirk on her face. This was far too enjoyable.
Iva sent her a sour look, but rather than going through her packs for food, she took her horse’s reins and led it forward to the stream where soldiers were watering their own animals. Portia watched, eyebrows raised, as Iva then took the animal to a patch of grass and tied its reins to a tree so it could eat its lunch in leisure. Only then did Iva dig into the packs on the animal to find the meal wrapped in linen the dwarves had packed for her.
She walked back to where Portia stood. “What?”
Portia shook her head, unable to answer.
Portia cared for her own animal before returning to where Iva sat. She dropped onto the grass in front of her. The soldiers had grouped themselves apart from Iva, except a few soldiers who were arming themselves with additional knives and crossbows from their packs and then standing before the general.
“I wonder what they’re up to?” Portia nodded in the direction of the soldiers and the general.
“Something about a scouting party and a nearby village,” said Iva around a mouthful of sandwich.
“I should be a part of that,” Portia said, rising again and going to the general, ignoring Iva’s call to come back.
“I volunteer to be part of the scouts,” Portia said to the general, flushing as she realized she had interrupted one of the soldiers making a report.
General Seren held her hand up to the soldier, requesting a moment, and turned and gave Portia a gracious smile. “That is much appreciated, but for now please wait here.”
“I know how to sneak,” Portia said, thrusting out her chin. She had survived for years on the streets as a thief when many would have liked to punish such wrongdoing with physical harm, all while in a crowded street. She had also found her way through Rodaine as a spy. It would be so much easier in an empty forest.
The general spoke firmly. “No. It is safer for everyone if you stay behind. Our scouts have protocols that we’ve no time to teach you.” She couldn’t have said it in a kinder manner, but Portia’s stomach flipped.
The general’s tone softened. “This protects everyone, including you.”
Portia wished she could disappear into the ground on which she stood. Instead, she nodded stiffly at the general and the other scouts and walked back to Iva. She had to go around the other soldiers sitting in the grass eating their lunch. She hoped they didn’t notice her flaming red face. She didn’t check if they were looking at her. Her neck felt too rigid to move.
Sitting down heavily by Iva, she grabbed the sandwich she had dropped earlier. “They don’t want me,” Portia said, roughly unwrapping the linen.
“I’m sure that’s not it. What did she say to you?” Iva asked.
“Something about not knowing protocols. But that doesn’t matter. I… I’m really good in dangerous situations. I’d be a help.”
Iva chewed, considering what Portia said.
“You are good. But if you don’t know how they operate, you might put them in danger. You can’t do everything, you know,” Iva said and dug around in her bag for a waterskin to take a drink of water.
Portia narrowed her eyes at Iva when she wasn’t looking but didn’t say anything. What did Iva know? Portia had not asked to be a Jack of Magic, but somehow, she was one. There was so much responsibility with the role. She was supposed to save humankind—she was created to do it by magic. Didn’t that sound like doing everything? It surprised her to realize she felt like crying.
How nice it would be to not have to do everything.
Instead of allowing tears to fall, she took a bite of her sandwich, and then, in three more bites, ate half of it. She had not realized how hungry she was until she started eating.
And she hadn’t had to make the food or steal it. Perhaps it was okay letting others help.
There had been another sandwich in the pack, along with some nuts and a strange fruit she’d never seen before, but she’d decided to leave it uneaten for now in case they couldn’t find any game or other foraging on the road. They were still several days’ journey to the kingdom of Haulstatt.
General Seren was looking at a map spread out upon a stump when the scouts returned. They looked haggard and panted as if they had run the entire way.
“General, sir, the village is gone,” the scout leader said.
By then, Portia and Iva and the other soldiers who had been resting under the trees had gathered around. A murmur of unhappy reactions greeted that news.
“What do you mean, gone?” General Seren asked, her characteristic smile replaced with a tense jaw.
“Gone… All the people and animals. Most of the buildings were flattened into rubble. We didn’t find a single resident. The smith’s shop was as if it had never been—the anvil gone, the bellows too, the wood of the walls… Even the ground where it had stood was swept clean.” The scout leader squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again and continued with a shaking voice. “I’ve never seen the like before.”
“Could you tell when this happened?” asked the general.
The scout shook his head. “Not exactly, but the hearth stones we did find were cold. Bone cold. There’d not been a fire in that village for days.”
“Those were Dragonoids, those who did that,” said Iva. She shook, rubbing her hands rapidly up and down her arms despite the warm air. “That’s what they did in Jukhnovo to the fishing villages before they invaded inland. Our king thought the destruction was done by Haulstatt bandits, at least that’s what they told us. We only found out later what had happened to the fishing villages, how they had been razed. No human bandit would do such a thing.”
She turned away from the skeptical look the dwarves gave her. They did not share her opinion of humans.
“The Dragonoids are in your lands,” said Portia.
“This land is Lusatianan, but yes, they are closer than we thought, or at least have been so,” said the general, her eyebrows drawing together. “We must hurry.”
If they were in the human kingdom of Lusatiana, they had traveled much further east than Portia realized before emerging out of the Dwarven caverns into the land above. The hair on Portia’s arm rose at the thought of the Dragonoids so close.
Continuing down the road, the group went north and further east, bringing them close to the capital city of Rodaine. It seemed like a lifetime ago she and Mark had traveled to that city to see if his suspicions were correct about his employer teaming with the invaders. They had barely escaped with their lives.
The general allowed the group to use the main road to make speed, but they traveled at night and in the clear hours just after dawn and just before dusk, when it was possible to see especially far. The scouts continued to look for any Dragonoid encampments but saw none. There were no fires in the distance, nor signs of war wagons dragging their weapons down the dusty country roads.
Portia knew the Dragonoids were out there, somewhere. The jumpy looks of the others betrayed their same thoughts. Not knowing the whereabouts of the dangerous forces was almost worse than seeing the war machines. Almost.
A crossroad leading directly east into Rodaine met up with the road they were on, while their road turned sharply left to go north to the border with Haulstatt. The juncture sat at the top of a large hill that afforded a view of the surrounding countryside and down into the valley holding the city of Rodaine nestled up against the sea. Or where the city had been.
The group rested on horses and stared into the valley as soon as they crested the hill. They looked down the long slope to the burned foundations and scattered debris of the city, and then to the sea and crumpled piles of stone—what remained of the seawall peeking up through the waters. Despite Portia having watched the seawall’s destruction, along with the attack on the city, the sight was still unnerving.
The city was just as the scout had described the vanished village—gone. The crowded buildings that had ringed the harbor before were gone. The warehouse district to the north, gone. And the residential houses to the south, gone. Here and there, smashed piles of lumber lay, giving notice to where especially large houses had once been. Those piles were the largest structures of anything left.
“What use is it to them to destroy a city so completely?” asked the general, almost to herself. “Burning the fields, that I can see if they were trying to avoid our following them in a retreat, but they’re not retreating. It required much effort to completely flatten all that.” She waved to the brutal scene below. “What could they gain by that?”
No one had an answer. The tight pit in her stomach told her that intended or not, one of the results was terror.
The Dragonoids had whisked away the city as if it had never been.
Following the general’s order, the battalion turned the horses to the road going northwest and resumed their journey in silence.
They reached the border to Haulstatt the next day. Portia exhaled when she saw the town that marked the border between the two kingdoms was still there. There were tents and caravans around it, but not nearly as many as she’d seen when the populace of Rodaine had been fleeing the invaders. Where were the Dragonoids? There were a few roads leading into Haulstatt. The invaders were not in Rodaine, and last she had heard, they had been heading inland. That had been many weeks ago, before her stay on the Dragonoid world. Much might have changed since then. It was too much to hope for that the invaders had retreated back to their own lands.
But when they got closer, the scars of the battle lay etched and burned into the ground. Marks of fire ran up the stones of the city’s walls. Something had happened here, but the town hadn’t been razed. If the Dragonoids had attacked, they’d been pushed back.
Smoke rose from the land on the far side of the town, its long brown tendrils winding up into the sky. They’d seen the smoke from afar, and while no one had said anything, it was clear all were expecting to find the smoky ruins of an outpost town.
When they reached the city gates, one of their scouts returned to them, running through the fields next to the road, having gone ahead earlier that night. He stopped, bent over, and sucked in air. He’d not taken a horse for fear of breaking its leg in a hole in the muddy fields in the darkness of night.
The general waited patiently. Finally, the scout straightened and saluted the general. “There’s a full army at the far side. I’d have been back sooner, but they,” his face red even in the dim light, “almost caught me. It took some doing, but I am here.”
“An army?” The general tilted her head, waiting for details.
The scout went into details of what he found. What lay on the other side of the town was a regiment of Haulstatt soldiers along with ragged remains of the Lusatianan soldiers. Those were the flags that had been visible, and the accents of those sitting and talking around the fires matched. Soldiers of both armies patrolled the wall before them. There were many wounded and far fewer horses than the scout expected for such a large force, both facts pointing to the forces recovering from deadly prior engagements. Together, the forces defended the town ahead.
“We are glad to have you back. Find your horse,” the general ordered.
The scout saluted again and then wound his way back along the line to where the reins of his horse were tied to the pommel of a fellow soldier’s saddle. Portia watched him wearily go past.
The guards above the front gate stared at the dwarf battalion as they approached the gates. More guards from inside came to look through the bars of the gate. Children from the caravans ran around them and then towards the gate to stand waiting with the guards. The children’s shouting drew more onlookers.
One especially daring child ran up to a dwarf soldier mounted on a horse and grabbed the ankle of his boot, dancing around to avoid the hooves of the horse. The child stared at the soldier, who in turn glanced at the other dwarves and then down back at the child, shifting uncomfortably. He tried to pull his foot free, but the child held on tightly.
“You look weird,” said the child with no malice, only curiosity in her voice.
“I… don’t mean to look weird,” replied this soldier.
Iva giggled in her saddle next to Portia. They were right behind the soldier, watching this interaction.
“He’s a dwarf,” called out Iva.
The child swiveled to look at Iva and then back up at the soldier she was still hanging onto by the foot.
“What’s a dwarf?” asked the child.
Iva shrugged and pointed at the soldier. “That’s a dwarf. They’re like humans but different.”
A growl rose from a soldier in the back ranks at the comparison between dwarves and humans, but a few others chuckled, mostly because of the innocent and persistent behavior of the child.
“Okay. Hello, dwarf,” said the child.
“Hello to you, too,” said the soldier, who then looked up to see a concerned mom running along the road, trying to get her child’s attention. “I think your mother is calling you.”
The child swiveled to see her mother and instantly let go of the dwarf’s foot, stumbling back and avoiding the horse’s steps. Her mother swept her up in her arms, squeezing her tight and burying her face into her child’s hair.
The fear in the mother’s face was matched in many of those lining the road watching the dwarves walk to the city’s gates. They had never seen dwarves before, despite the kingdoms being so close. For the first time, uneasiness settled in Portia’s stomach at what might happen in this human city. The dwarves were here at her behest. She didn’t want anything to happen to them.
A trumpeter called alarm, and the people along the road vanished, returning to their tents and makeshift shelters. The swiftness of their disappearance took away Portia’s breath. Ahead, the gate to the town was shut. Soldiers lined the top of the walls. A second trumpet call rang out, and the troops standing on top of the wall raised crossbows and aimed them at the dwarves on the road. A cloud passed over the sun, sending the entire landscape into deep shadow.
General Seren raised an arm, bringing the troops to a halt.
Not even insects made a noise as the two sides appraised each other. At a signal from the dwarf commander, a white banner was raised and flapped in the cold breeze that blew from the fields. Nothing from the town’s soldiers showed acknowledgment of the signal.
The clattering of armor reverberated in the air as additional troops came around the walls of the town on either side and positioned themselves facing the dwarves on the road. A few soldiers stood with crutches, ready to defend the border even while injured.
“Seems we are not welcomed,” said the Dwarven commander quietly. She turned to look at Portia. “Come join me. Slowly.”
Portia signaled her horse to move forward. The strike of each hoof on the dirt road reverberated in the air. The hairs on Portia’s arms and neck stood up. She feared making a wrong move and sending the armies into action.
“Any suggestions, young human? We are here for an alliance, but there might be too much fear here for that. Do you know any of these people? Can you vouch for them or for us?” asked General Seren, speaking low while keeping her eyes on the armies ahead.
