The Caverns of Kronos

The Breakup - Part 3

     Sergeant Brast was woken by a hand shaking his shoulder, and he gave a sigh of relief as he escaped from a disturbing dream of blood and slaughter. “What is it?” he asked, rubbing his eyes wearily.

     “Sorry to disturb you, Sir,” said the watchman, one of the youngest of the forty eight men in the scouting expedition. “A carrier bat just came in and Corporal Tosca says its important.”

     Brast groaned as he struggled to his feet, and the air was cold as he climbed out of his sleeping blankets. Tosca thought everything was important. “All right,” he mumbled. “Get back on guard. I’ll see what it is.”

     The watchman nodded and returned to his post on the eastern side of the campsite.

     The Corporal had already taken the message from the bat’s leg and spread it out to read it when the Sergeant joined him in his tent. “What is it?” he snapped irritably.

     “Fort Dirk says there’s a Shadowpatrol camped in our area,” said Tosca, looking up. “About five miles north of us. We’re ordered to break camp immediately and take them out.”

     “How the hell do they know?” said Brast in disbelief. “We’re five hundred miles from Fort Dirk. How the hell do they know the exact location of a Shadowpatrol way out here?”

     “A spy, perhaps?” speculated the Corporal. “A spy might have come across it and sent a bat back to tell them. Or perhaps a wizard finally got lucky with a crystal ball.” Some of the braver off duty wizards would sometimes spent time scanning random tracts of countryside with crystal balls and scrying mirrors in the hope of discovering enemy movements, but so vast were the tracts of wilderness east of the mountains that their chances of finding anything were small. Also, such random scrying was dangerous. A sufficiently powerful enemy wizard inadvertently glimpsed in this manner might sense it and send a powerful death spell back through the scrying link to kill the wizard spy.

     “Possible,” agreed Brast doubtfully. “Never mind. Let’s go see if they’re right.” He left the tent shouting orders, and soon everyone was milling around busily as they prepared to move out.

     Ten minutes later, the forty eight Beltharan soldiers were lined up in two columns, grumbling to themselves as they rubbed the sleep from their eyes. They left the camp in place behind them, expecting to return when the Shadowsoldiers were disposed of (or, more likely, when they found nothing there, thought Brast irritably) and marched off into the night.

     Brast sent a few scouts ahead to find the enemy camp, and one of them returned an hour later to report finding it in a fork of a nearby river.

     “Five miles north of us!” exclaimed the Sergeant in perplexed admiration. “Just like they said! But how in the names of the Gods did they know?” He put the puzzle out of his mind, though, and gave orders for his men to move in quietly and surround the enemy camp.

     As usual, there were about a hundred Shadowsoldiers in the camp, a typical patrol. It would be unusual for a unit this small to have a wizard, but Brast took a spyglass from its carrying case on his hip nonetheless and scanned the camp. He saw thirty canvas tents, twenty pack horses, a crowd of fifty zombies milling mindlessly around in a small group and a dozen Shadowsoldiers in bone armour and skull helmets on guard around the perimeter.

     He saw no sign of a wizard, though. Shadowwizards were prideful and arrogant. They saw themselves as the elite. Destined to be raks one day, the very pinnacle of the Shadow hierarchy. A wizard in a unit this small would feel himself slighted, therefore. Unappreciated. He would be unhappy, and that would reveal itself in the way the rest of the camp behaved. Fearing his temper, they would tend to avoid the wizard’s tent, betraying it even though it appeared identical to the others so as not to give themselves away to spies and assassins. Brast saw no sign of this, though. That wasn't proof, of course, but he began to feel confident that there was no Shadowwizard present.