B3Ch62-Arrival to the Summit (Patreon)

The Blackjaws had been getting bigger for a week, and now they filled the sky. Harold rode in under them at the head of ten thousand men, and the last mile of frozen road ran down into a valley. And the road was disgusting; five hundred lords and their retinues had been trampling it for a week before he got there.

He sat the stallion easily. He had been quite the horseman in his past life, and it was something he hadn't realized he missed. The big animal wanted to run at everything — a banner, a cookfire, the smell of other horses — and Harold had needed to maintain firm control over him. But he was pretty sure he and Mors had an understanding. As long as Mors listened to him during the day. He would allow him to trample things when they got into a fight, and he would give him a few carrots and apples in the evening. Bribes worked surprisingly well on the massive horse. Food and violence. Who knew.

Carter had the point. Ren and Corwin flanked wide, Jack two steps back off his shoulder, and out past all of them Fitch's cavalry came down the slope in a broad screen, four hundred lances riding a slow arc around the column's flanks. Fitch said there was a reason for the screen, but there wasn't. Mostly Fitch just wanted to show off his cavalry.

He'd timed his arrival wrong on purpose. He was nearly the last lord of any weight to arrive — Adeline's morning forum search said as much; the good ground was taken, the politicking was already a week deep. All of the major and minor alliances had some representation here. Let them think he'd dawdled.

Most of those 500 lords didn't come with their army. Most arrived with retinues of a hundred or so men, but that still meant the valley hosted over 50,000 humans. It was the largest gathering of humanity anywhere in the human sphere at the time. And he meant for them all to see him arriving for war.

Kinda depressing, actually, riding down into it. Five hundred lords representing over 2,000 other lords. The whole gathered weight of human power on the Blackjaw Peninsula — and it fit in one muddy valley. You could stand on the ridge and see all of humanity's lords at once and still see grass past the edge of them.

He looked out over them past the sea of banners and saw the quartering party was riding up out of the mud to meet him.

Two riders: a woman with some kind of sash and an excited-looking boy with a slate. The woman took in the column behind him — the cohorts still coming over the ridge in blocks, and coming, and coming — and Harold watched her recalculate whatever she'd been about to say.

"Count Calder." She found her voice. "You're — larger than we planned for."

Harold snorted, "I try to impress."

Behind him, Elroy made a strangled noise. "And the man says he tries."

"Modest," Jenkins wheezed. 

Harold kept his eyes forward and did not turn around. It only ever encouraged them.

"We have the east flat set aside for you. It's, ah." She glanced at the slate the boy held up. "It's sized for a lord's retinue. Two hundred, we were told, but we can allow you to take the plots around it as well."

"We'll make it fit," Harold said. "Lead on."

Hale approached him, muttering viciously around his staff, who edged away from him nervously.

"Look at this place. It's crap; the water is downstream and dirty, and we are furthest from any exit of the valley."

Harold looked at him, amused. "It is what it is, Hale. Not like we didn't come prepared for something like this."

Hale just glared at him and began spitting out orders to his staff, who, in turn, began handing out orders to settle in at the site.

Harold looked at the work being done with no small amount of pride. They had done drill after drill after drill on their way here in order to prepare the Legion, and it showed now in how they worked.

The perimeter went first. A cohort dropped shields and packs and picked up entrenching tools, and a ditch opened along the survey line one bite of frozen dirt at a time, the soil thrown up and back into a rising rampart. Behind the diggers came men with bundles of sharpened stakes, seating them in the ditch face angled out, a hedge of points a charging soldier or monster would have to climb. Earth-crafters walked the rampart line in the crafter company's brown, and where they laid their hands the loose spoil was compacted. The single water crafter they had walked behind them and pulled the moisture from the earth, while behind him the few fire crafters they had hardened the soil and stone into a wall that could stand off light artillery.

Timber towers rose at the corners and over where the gate would be, and Marshal's crews walked the heavy ballistae up into them, pinned them down, and swung them out over the field, and by the time night started to fall, there were engines looking down every approach to Harold's ground. A fort, square to the compass, ditched and staked and toothed. Harold knew the other lords looking at them must be stunned by the fort he had thrown up in just a couple of hours. In comparison to their camps, his looked far better. He had come to impress, and this was only part of his plan.

The other lords' camps sat right on the open mud. Rows of good tents, painted pavilions, a lord's standard on a pole and a ring of guards around it, cook smoke going straight up in the still cold. Nice camps but for the most part soft camps. Only about a third of the camps had bothered digging in for a fight, and they were a hard rain away from misery. And a hard raid away from a massacre.

"Kinda annoying how they are just looking at us," Carter said, beside him. He sounded pleased, though.

They were too. Up and down the flat, lords and their people had come out to watch the work as it happened, and not all of them looked pleased.

"Ahh, it’s fine," Harold said. "Let them."

Hale walked over, wiping his hands on a rag, looked over his own fort, and grunted.

"Adventurers?" Harold asked.

"Sectioned across the whole camp, hundred to a wedge, one wedge never more than a two-minute run from any other." Hale tucked the rag away. "Anything comes over the wall or through the flap, I've got a fast answer to it inside two minutes, from any direction." He looked at the soft camps down the flat and didn't bother hiding what he thought of them. "Half these lords will lose people to a bad night and a wandering pack before the summit's done. The scouts have already seen signs of monsters along the sides of the valleys. Probably some caves dug in there somewhere."

"Probably," Harold agreed. "Let's find them if we can. And let's make sure anyone entering our camp is tested appropriately. I would be very surprised if none of the Fae are at a gathering like this."

The command bunker wasn't ready when the sun went down, so Harold took the political brief in a tent, with a mug getting cold in his hand and Adeline working from a folding table stacked with a couple of ledgers.

She'd been working nonstop on the forum and getting updates from Margaret's section about the alliances and the various relationships the lords here had.

"So most of the talk is about the two wars coming up," she said. "Who leads the war against the Blackjaw goblins, and who leads the war against the Velthari? Everything else being said out there is people positioning for one of those two chairs."

He snorted. "How they are still worried about the credit for these campaigns is beyond me."

"For the most part. The lords are underestimating the war against the goblin city. Most say we will run over the goblins and the war will be over within a month. Every ambitious lord on the peninsula wants to be the one who led it." She turned a slate. "The man out front for it is Corran Vayle. Western lord, big holdings, cavalry-heavy, been here since the first day working the room. He's got somewhere north of eighty lords soft-committed to follow his banner into the goblin war, and he's spending coin and grain to make it a hundred before the vote."

Harold frowned. "I don't remember much about him, and I don't know if that's good or bad."

"From the reports, he's not a fool, not a coward. He was in the military back on Earth, though we aren't certain of his background within it. Still, he wins his fights." She set the slate down. "Which is the problem, because he knows it, and he's already talking like the command is his and the vote's a formality."

Harold turned the mug in his hand. "And the Velthari?"

"Uglier and quieter. Nobody wants it. The Velthari war is going to be ugly, and everyone knows it. Your name is being thrown out a lot, and Margaret thinks you are being thrown into the slot because most think you will fail, and it will knock you down a peg." She pulled a different slate. "The one pushing for it is Oksana Reeve. Northern lord — she held three villages on the Velthari line, and she's only got her town left. She wants the chair because it's her people trying to survive, and she'll take it whether or not anyone helps her, and she is not being careful about who she says that in front of."

"I think I remember her; she might have been one of the first real speed bumps for the Velthari," Harold said.

She moved down the table. "Then there's the money. There's a bloc of coastal lords who don't want to lead — they are looking to profit from all this and sell to the people fighting the war. They're calling themselves the Argent Circle, and they're playing kingmaker; Vayle's been at their tents twice this week. If they throw in with him, the goblin vote's over."

"Charming." Harold set the cold mug down. "What's the forum saying about me?"

"That you came the farthest and got here last, and brought an army when everyone else brought smaller retinues." The corner of her mouth moved. "There's a thread arguing about whether ten thousand men is a show of strength or a supply problem. Vayle's people started it. Sereth and a few others are arguing the other side without knowing they're doing your work for you." She squared the slates. "Your sister has actually been very helpful, Harold. She visited over forty different lords during her time up here, and most of them are very predisposed to you. Of course the favorable trade terms she offered them all helped, but she also helped a lot of them with various monster problems and helped their own adventurers. She's become a popular figure up here."

"That does sound like Sarah." He almost smiled, and let it fade. "The Concord. Any of them snooping around here?"

Adeline's stylus stopped.

"One, we think," she said. "We know one of the lords with Vayle has a relationship with them, but we aren't sure how close it is or how much information she is actually passing them." She looked up now.

She set down her slate and walked over to him. She smoothed out her dress quickly, and Harold turned fully toward her. Adeline picked up her dress and sat down on him, giving him a quick kiss and leaning fully into him.

"Are you sure you know what you are doing? This is going to be messy."

Harold let his forehead rest on hers. "I hope so. We'll see what happens in a week. Everything will change from here on out."

Marshal came for him after full dark, grinning and mud to the knee.

"It's done, Count. Come see it before you sleep in it." He held the flap. "The earth-crafters outdid themselves. I only pointed."

Harold ducked out into the cold and followed him across the fort to where a low stone entrance sat sunk into the shelf, lamplight coming up out of the ground. It didn't look like much from the surface — a hard-roofed mouth, a ramp going down. Then he went down it, and it opened up, and he stopped and looked.

They'd built him a keep in an afternoon, and they'd built it into the ground.

Two stories up — a hall at the surface where the ramp came in. It was wide and warm, with a long stone table already set for court and a gallery running the second level above it where guards could stand and watch a room full of strangers. And two stories down below that, cut and hardened out of the shelf itself, the lower levels went down into the cold earth. His own quarters were at the very bottom, a plain room two floors under the ground, with a cot and a brazier and a door a battering ram would tire of.

"Two up, two down," Marshal said, unable not to. "We figured you'd be getting a lot of visitors, and you sleep at the bottom where they can't get to you. Stone the whole way — we pulled it up out of the shelf." He rubbed the back of his neck. "The earth crafters did it. I just told them where the walls went."

"It's good work, Marshal; make sure to thank the company for me. I know using that much mana isn't easy," Harold said. He put a hand flat on the hardened stone of the wall and felt the mana still humming in it. "Tell your crafters I said it's obscene. They'll know what I mean."

Marshal beamed.

At the foot of the ramp, Harold went to swing his own pack off his shoulder, and a young woman he'd never seen stepped in out of nowhere, took it off him mid-motion with a bob of her head, and was gone with it down the stairs before he'd got a word out.

He watched her go, empty-handed, and huffed a short laugh.

Adeline, coming down the ramp behind him with an armload of slates, didn't miss a step.

"Valets," she said. "I hired camp-followers for the captains and up. The important men shouldn't be carrying their own gear when someone glad for the coin can do it and eat because of it." She passed him, heading for the hall. "You're the most important man here. You're getting the best ones. Just don't go looking at her for too long, Mr."

Harold blanched. "I wasn't even looking at her!"

"You looked like you might."

When he got to his quarters at the bottom, he found a lamp lit and a man already in them, sitting on the single stool with a cup of warm coffee in his hands. His face fell at the door.

Garrick looked up. He looked tired.

"Count," he said.

Adeline had followed Harold down. She stopped at the door, took one look at his face, and she nodded once, stepped back, and pulled the heavy door shut behind her without a word.

"How did it go?" Harold said.

Garrick took a slow pull of the coffee. Then he leaned over, picked up a sheaf of papers off the floor by his boot, and held it out.

"I tell you, these are some serious scum," he said. "I don't blame you for remembering what they did. The things a lot of them did. I took my best stealth people and the adventurers, and we went and looked at every one of them that's here for most of the last couple of weeks. We found the proof you were looking for." He shook the papers once. "We found most of it. Some of it even worse than you remembered."

Harold took the sheaf and didn't open it yet.

"This one first." Garrick pulled the top sheet free before Harold could and set it on the cot between them. "These ones — if you don't do it yourself, I'll make sure they die. Tonight." He didn't raise his voice for it. "The worst of them. There's a man on there who keeps a slave pen the way you'd keep a woodpile. Nightly, he and his people pick people from that pile to do whatever they want with them. It's disgusting. There are two more like him. You said they'd be bad. But this… Harold, they have to die."

Harold looked at the first page. His finger moved down it, name to name, slowly.

"This one." Garrick laid a second sheet beside it. "The gray list. These I'll leave to you. There's slaving on here too, but for the most part it's — I don't have a better word than humane. No brutal beatings we could find. Everyone fed, everyone housed. Nobody being raped that we could turn up. Some I found evidence of them planning raids on other Lords while their armies were away. Bad men, most of them. Not the same kind of bad." He shrugged, tired. "Your call, not mine."

"And this."

"The cleared list." The third sheet. "These ones we couldn't find anything on. Not saying they're clean. Saying that from what you remembered and a week of my best people looking, we came up empty." He drank. "Some of them you might've misremembered. Some of them just haven't done it yet, this time around. Not sure what to do about them."

Harold read the kill list again, top to bottom, and his finger stopped on each name for a breath. He nodded, small, to himself.

"Can you make this happen tonight?"

Garrick's face firmed, and for a second the tiredness went out of him, and he looked almost eager.

"All but two. The rest, I've got. Me and mine can make it happen, and it'll be obvious they were killed. I'll stake their heads outside their shelters. All but two."

"Which two?"

"One camps like a man expecting exactly this. Ditch, stakes, double watch, dog line, sleeps in the middle of his own soldiers. He's built a version of what Hale built us. I don't have a shot at him."

Garrick sucked on his cheek for a second before continuing.

"The other never leaves his camp. Not once, all week. I got into his quarters one time, and I had to earn it." Garrick's mouth went flat. "Turned some goblins loose upwind of his lines and let his sentries deal with the fire they started, and slipped in behind while everyone was busy. Which meant first I had to go catch live goblins and haul them across half the valley without any of them screaming the whole way." He drank. "Annoying job, that. Don't ever ask me to do it again."

"You know I just might." Harold set the three sheets down on the cot, side by side, and leaned back against the cold stone wall, and rubbed the flat of his hand hard across the back of his head. Then he lifted his voice, just enough to carry through the door. "Adeline. Can you get me Hale, please?"

The door cracked. "He's up top with the wall. I'll send for him."

"Thank you."

She signaled someone, and a valet's feet went off up the stairs at a run, and the door shut again.

Harold pulled the door in and turned back to Garrick.

"Okay. That's the lords." He picked the kill list back up, folded it once, and held it. "What about the crafters and the adventurers I asked about?"

Garrick nodded, sipped, and reached down for a fatter thing — a bound ledger, corners soft from a week in a pack.

"All in the book." He set it on his knee but didn't open it yet. "It's messier than the lords. A lot of what's in here is circumstantial." He tapped the cover. "But there's a handful in here that are for sure. No question, saw it, or as good as. Most are supporting others on the kill list or enabling it. The muscle. The moneymakers. The lords are only as bad as they can afford to be, and this is how they afford it." He looked up. "I'd need Mark to action most of it, though. My people can find them. I can't handle killing that many adventurers in one night, though."

"Yeeep, alright, let's bring Mark in."

"Good, because there's one on here you're going to want to talk about." Garrick opened the ledger to a marked page and turned it around. "The adventurer calling himself Hierophant. He's here."

Harold went still.

"You're sure."

"I watched him myself," Garrick said it flat, the way a scout reports ground. "I'm not going to make you read the page. I'll tell you I watched him rape a woman four nights ago, then slit her throat right after, and I'll tell you it wasn't the first time. He's involved with a group of others doing the same thing, and he's very, very careful. He almost caught me a couple of times." He let a breath out through his nose. "Here's the problem. There's no way he doesn't have a quest going. So." He tapped the page. "How do you plan on killing a man we know is just going to respawn?"

Harold looked at the name on the page for a long moment and didn't answer; someone had just knocked on the door.

He went up and let Hale in himself.

"Hale. Come in. A couple of things I want to confirm."

Hale came down the last of the stairs, filling the low doorway. He clasped Garrick's forearm.

"You're back in one piece," he said. "Margaret'll be relieved. She's fond of you for reasons I've stopped trying to understand."

"Colonel." Garrick almost smiled. "My condolences to the wife. Married to a cantankerous old bastard like you."

"Cantankerous." Hale didn't smile back. "Spell it."

Garrick didn't look up from his coffee. "C. A. N. T. F. U. C—"

"Close enough," Hale said, and the grunt he gave might've been a laugh.

He pulled the door shut behind himself without being asked. "All right. What is this?"

Harold picked the kill list up off the cot and held it.

"I'm going to tell you a thing most people here haven't worked out," he said. "And the few who have worked it out aren't saying." He turned the folded list in his hand. "You know an adventurer respawns. Dies on-quest, then respawns based on his respawn timer. You know off-quest death is permanent — no respawn, gone for good. Yada yada."

"Buuuut, there's a catch. Every adventurer has to bind his spawn point to a stele. Which is part of why we sent Dalen north to start that village. I wanted our adventurers to be able to respawn closer." Harold's voice had gotten quiet. "If we destroy the stele he's bound to. Then kill the adventurer before they can rebind to another stele. They won't respawn."

The room was quiet as they thought it through. "That's part of why we lost so badly last time," Harold went on. "The Velthari hit so fast nobody could form a line. People died by the hundreds of thousands. Adventurers by the thousands. And whole towns went with them.”

"And that," Hale said slowly, "is part of why you called this summit. Get them all in one valley."

"Part of it, yeah, yeah; I still need the other lords to cooperate. And I'll burn a lot of capital with this move, but I want the problems gone." Harold set the list down and rubbed his temple with two fingers. "As many as I can reach. The lords who'd break and run instead of holding the line when the Velthari come. The lords who put humans in pens. The ones who hurt people because nothing's stopping them." He looked at the three sheets. "And the adventurers and the crafters who make all of that possible. Garrick found them. We get Mark's teams to action them."

Garrick set his cup down on the floor. "I'm in," he said. "You knew that."

Hale didn't say anything for a moment. He looked at Harold hard.

"If you do this," he said, "there's no going back. You understand that. The morning after, you're the lord who murdered a hundred of his peers in their sleep, whether or not a single soul can prove you did it. That's what you are from then on, in your own head if nowhere else." He held up a hand before Harold could answer. "I'm not saying don't. God knows I'm all for hitting a man before he hits you. I'd rather cut a rotten branch off in the winter than lose the tree to it in the spring. I'm saying be sure it's you saying yes, and not the thing in your chest."

Harold snorted. He poured himself another cup of coffee, and while he did it, his free hand came up on its own and started the drill without him deciding to — a small knot of mana gathered on his open palm, wound tight, tighter, spun down to a hard bright point between two fingers. He held it there a beat. Then he let it go, and it unspooled into nothing. "Yep. I know." He set the cup down. "Done caring, though."

Hale looked at his hand where the mana had just been, and said nothing about it.

"Are the eagles staged?" Harold said. "When I give the order, I need the eagles to hit the steles in the towns, all of them, the same hour — so we can hit the lords and the adventurers here and none of them are able to respawn."

Hale nodded. "Got word on the way in. They're staged and forward, riders rested. Some weapon of Finn's and the smiths rigged them with what they need to bring a stele down — it's not delicate work." He worked it in his head. "Give me a day to plan it with Mark, and we strike tomorrow night. Not before. I want every eagle over its stele and every one of Mark's teams on its mark at the same signal."

"Tomorrow night." Harold nodded once. "Bring Mark in tonight. This is his team as much as yours."

"He'll want to be." Hale was already turning it into a problem he could solve, which was the best thing about him. "One more question, and you're not going to like that I'm asking it." He nodded at the sheets. "The soldiers. After the strikes. All these lords have men — good men, mostly, whose only crime is who they swore to. What happens to them?"

"We take them," Harold said it without hesitation. "As many as we can trust. Every soldier on this peninsula we can absorb. We need every one of them we can get." He tipped his head toward the surface, toward the whole cold valley of camps. "The people from those towns — the crafters, the families — they can make new towns loyal to us, or come south to the basin, or go their own way. Up to them."

Hale grunted. "Okay," he said. "I'll get Mark down here, and we'll start on it tonight. A night of planning, then one night of work." He turned for the stairs, then stopped. "That's everything?"

"One more thing. Some of the names I want aren't kills." Harold said it more carefully. "There are people out there worth pulling out of this alive — crafters, a couple of the honest lords, some of the abused ones I'd rather recruit than bury. Adeline's going to work with Margaret's people and the templars here to reach them before the strike. But every one of those names has to be kept clear of the fighting when it starts. She'll need to be read in."

Hale looked at him. He looked at the sheets, and the ledger, and the cold coffee. "So now we're bringing your girlfriend into the war planning," he said.

"She's already in the war planning, Hale. She wrote the brief that told us who's here."

"Bringing the girlfriend into the war planning," Hale said again, to nobody, and went up the stairs shaking his head. "Two months getting here and you're the only officer here getting laid. Or at least being obvious about it. Assassinations, staff meetings, and your sweetheart in the map room. Parker's going to love this. You told him to leave Tamra behind."

The door shut behind him, and it was just Harold and Garrick again in the lamplight.

Garrick bent, picked his coffee back up off the floor, and looked into the cup like there might be something left in it.

Harold sat down on the cot at last. He set the stack on his knee and put his palm flat on top of it as he sipped his coffee.

"Get some sleep, Garrick," he said. "You did good work."

"You first, Count," Garrick said, and didn't move to leave. Instead, he refilled their cups with coffee. "Might be that I'm starting to understand why you have a hard time sleeping."