B3Ch80-Battlefield Simulation Stone (Patreon)

Hale ducked under the lintel of the command bunker and walked into the heat of two braziers, twenty bodies, and a pot of coffee somebody had made strong, judging by the smell.

The staff saw him and kept their heads down. A runner flattened against the wall to let him by, the clerks at the map table found something urgent on their slates, and every good morning in the room stayed behind its owner’s teeth. He had trained them well.

He went straight to the pot and poured a cup to the brim.

Harold had kept him up past the middle of the night laying out this morning’s exhibition. The Count had a little ploy he wanted to run on the visiting lords, something to make the lesson stick, and he had sprung it on Hale somewhere around the beer. He approved of the ploy. He had always approved of a dirty trick played on peacock Lords, and this valley was ass-deep in peacocks. He just wished he had more warning.

He got the cup under his nose and breathed the steam in, and the sigh went out through his nose where nobody could hear it. He kept the scowl on while he drank. A staff that thought the Colonel was in a good mood got comfortable, and a comfortable staff started making mistakes.

“Sleep well, sir?” Tran asked from behind the supply ledgers, grinning down into them.

“Like a baby. Woke up every two hours and shit myself.” Hale took another swallow. “Where’s my wagon count?”

“On your table since the fourth hour, back when some of us were working.”

“Some of us were working past midnight, Captain.”

A clerk coughed into his fist and bent lower over his slate.

Lady Maren had been standing at the map table, turning a stub of chalk end over end between her fingers. The whole staff learned to let him drink his coffee before talking to the Colonel.

He had made her Staff Tactica on the march north and handed her the S3, or plans section. That made her the Legion's third in command. The grumbling didn’t last long after she led a couple Cohorts in the various drills and successfully counterattacked into a series of goblin ambushes on their way here. She had a head for ground and timing he’d have paid cash for, and every week he caught himself handing her a little more responsibility.

She stopped at his shoulder and kept her voice under the noise of the room. “It’s been taken care of.” The chalk was still turning in her hand like Caldwell's coin. Terrible habit that. “When I told Centurion Parker, you’d have thought it was Christmas morning. I have never seen that man so happy. He’s excited.”

“Course he is,” Hale grunted. “If Harold’s little ploy comes off, whoever those lords pick is going to get stomped flat, and Parker knows it.”

“He asked me to tell you he owes the Count a drink.”

He grunted. “Tell him to get in line.”

Hale stepped over to the firing slit and squinted out at the east wall of the town. The sun had cleared the ridge and laid a hard yellow line halfway down the stone.

“All right. Get the staff together and let’s head over. It’s about time we kicked this off.”

Maren set the chalk down on the map table and went to work. She had her people out of the room and standing in the cold inside a minute: the two plans tribunes, the signals officer and his horn-callers, a clerk hugging the rosters, and a string of runners behind them. Hale topped off his cup, since the walk was long and there were lords at the other end of it. And Halloran. The Lord Captain. Ridiculous name.

Outside the walls of Hell’s Edge, the earth crafters had scraped a field flat, the size of a few football fields laid side by side, with room to stand five thousand men at either end and leave room to maneuver.

The Legion of the Empire stood on the near side, cohort after cohort in blocks, and it was quiet enough over there that he could hear the standards snapping.

Across the field stood the five thousand the lords had picked, and they were a quilt. Forty colors of surcoat, a banner for every couple hundred men, and a steady roar of officers trying to get them dressed on one another.

They were eager, and he’d give them that much. Harold had told the lords the stakes, had certainly motivated them. Beat the Legion, and every lord and every soldier on the winning side would get a reward based on their contribution. For the best of them, he had put Paths on the table. After that, the lords quit asking whether to compete and started fighting over whose men got a slot. There were even a lot of Lords who were going to fight as well, as they fought for the chance to get a Path.

They were going to lose, of course. The Legion doesn't fight fair.

A knot of lords stood near the middle of the field with Halloran and Vayle at the front of it, and Hale steered for those two. Out of every lord in the valley, they were about the only pair he respected, and it galled him that Halloran was one of them.

He had spent the whole march north trying to rattle the man. Alarms in the dead of night, routes changed an hour before step-off, drills sprung at the tail of a long day, and the son of a bitch had performed well doing them. So had his adventurers, and that part annoyed him more. The Iron Order was as close to a perfect reserve as Hale had ever commanded. They were a few thousand irregulars carrying every strange trick a monster had ever coughed up; they hit like a truck when he committed them, and they could come up on a Legion flank and dress on it without fouling a single file. Their abilities made them the perfect counter to different monsters when a line needed that extra oomph. He had asked Evan and Mark to build him that back home, and they’d gotten about halfway there. Halloran had gotten all the way, and he’d done it with his brass polished.

Vayle was a simpler man to like. He had brought his whole host and every lord who rode behind his banner. That made about twenty thousand horse. They were closer kin to Earth horses than to Fitch’s monsters, and none of the riders had a Path, but they were drilled hard and they answered a horn. Better still, Vayle wanted the Velthari. Most of the lords here were marching because Harold had frightened them into it, and Vayle was the one who kept asking how soon.

Between the two of them they swung a great deal of weight in the Allied Legions, and they both knew it.

Hale took the last good swallow of his coffee and slung the dregs into the mud. He shook Halloran’s hand, and then Vayle’s, and Vayle tried to grind his knuckles and got the same back.

“Lord Captain. Lord Vayle.” He looked from one to the other. “We ready to kick this off?”

Halloran started to sneer, and Hale watched him haul it back down by main force. “We are, sir.” Halloran tipped his head toward a second cluster of lords further down the line, a loud bunch, all plate and elbows. “Those are the lords taking part. The men were drawn from the best formations we have, across the whole of the Allied Legions, and the lads commanding them are as fine a set of fighting lords as you’ll find among us. You’ll not get a fairer test of us than that lot.”

Vayle snorted. He was a broad, scarred man gone bow-legged from a year in the saddle, and he stood with his thumbs hooked in his sword belt. “Except mine.”

“Corran—”

“Except mine,” Vayle said over him. “There’s not a horse on that field. You’ve gathered the best five thousand men in this valley who know how to walk, Halloran, and I wish them joy of it. Put a lance in the fist of any rider I’ve got and he’s worth three of those.” He jerked his chin at Hale. “Next time your Count wants a show, he can clear a field long enough for a charge.”

Hale looked at him with one eyebrow up and held it there a while. Then he turned and looked at the Legion.

The ranks ran straight enough to lay brick against. Spear, short sword and tower shield, the same in every file, and under them the armor each man had spawned in, patched and oiled. From centurion up, they wore Landing steel and carried Landing blades, clearly above what the System issued.

Past that, it got personal. Every formation had killed its way north, some of what they killed had parts worth keeping, and the crafters marching with them had been itching to try their hands at crafting it. So one century carried a file of spears headed with something’s black fang, another had a dozen javelins fletched off a harpy, and there was an optio in Third Cohort with a horn bow he had no business owning. Hale had quit fighting it somewhere around the second week. Hand soldiers a campaign and a dead monster, and they would make something out of it, like his platoon had written on their helmets in another war. Besides, it did make them more lethal.

Then there were the archer and pike cohorts. The pikes stood over the whole formation in a gray hedge three times the height of a man. Those had come out of the Landing’s shops with one job in mind: stopping Blackjaw warg cavalry dead in the snow.

Vayle saw where he was looking and followed it to the pikes. He scoffed low in his chest, and he kept his mouth shut after. He knew what charging those pikes would do to his horse.

“All right,” Hale said. “Let’s get the rest of the lords over here, and they can pick which formations of the Legion they want to fight. Lord Harold’s instructions. They can pick whoever they want.”

Maren already had a runner moving.

The fighting lords came over in a pack, two dozen of them, and no two were armed alike. They wore plate and mail and boiled hide: a big man in a wolf-pelt mantle with a maul slung across his shoulders; a woman with paired hatchets and a scar through her lip; and a lean one carrying a glaive a head taller than he was. Half of them were grinning and rolling their shoulders loose. The other half had gone quiet and were counting the Legion’s files under their breath. They were fighters, every one, and Hale would take either kind over a peacock.

“My lords.” He kept it parade-ground plain. “That’s the Legion of the Empire. You need five thousand, and our cohorts run five hundred. Walk the line, look as long as you like, and point at what you want. Lord Harold’s only rule is that whatever you point at, you fight.”

“Any cohort?” the wolf pelt asked. “The archers? Those long spears?”

“Any cohort.”

“And if we fancy the lads who guard your Count?”

“Then I’d pack a lunch, my lord, because they can go all day.”

That got a laugh out of the grinning half, and he walked them across.

The Legion stood at rest and let itself be looked at. He hated putting them on parade like this. No soldier liked this shit, but no help for it. Politics. The lords went down the front of it slowly. One squatted to study a rank of boots, another put his thumb on a shield rim and pushed, and the legionary behind the shield looked straight through him.

The first block on the right wore patchwork plate and carried a little of everything: long blades, axes, and hammers. Bows. Stacks of javelins. Every weapon imaginable.

“Knights,” the scarred woman said, and spat to one side. “I’ve seen what that lot does. Not picking them.”

Nobody argued with her. The pack swung wide of that cohort and kept walking, and he resisted looking over towards Harold.

Four blocks down they stopped.

Nobody outside the Legion would have called that cohort sloppy, and Hale would have had the hide off any centurion who earned the word. The front rank bowed a hand’s width out of line, and the files on the left stood a little wide of one another. But compared against the rest of the Legion, it showed.

The glaive man saw it first and put an elbow into the wolf pelt. “There. Look at their left.”

“Green as spring grass.” The wolf pelt showed his teeth. “That one, Colonel. We’ll have that one first.”

“It’s yours,” Hale said bored. Though inwardly he scoffed.

Maren’s chalk scratched once on her slate.

After that they shopped in earnest, up the line and back down it, arguing over shoulders and shield arms and the set of a centurion’s jaw. Even picked one cohort because their tribune was too pretty. Hale left them to it and stood off with Halloran and Vayle. The commanders of the Allied Legions had trailed along behind, and their talk droned on around him, wagers and fodder and whose column had been promised the harder route.

Halloran stood with his hands clasped at the small of his back. “They’re hunting a soft spot. I’d not fault them for it.”

“I’d fire them if they weren’t. It just won't help.”

“That fourth cohort.” Halloran’s eyes had gone back to it twice already. “The front rank’s a hand out of dress, and your left files are gapping. I went over your whole line while we waited, Colonel, and it’s the one block in ten thousand I could fault. I’m surprised you’d stand it out here in front of guests.”

Of course he had gone over the whole line. “Every army’s got a fish cohort.”

“A what?” Vayle asked, confused.

“Fish? You know, fresh from training and wearing new scale armor. Takes a few months to teach them to stand still, so you put them in line with the grown-ups and hope they don't die.”

Halloran started to sneer but stopped. “Sounds like you need to drill them more.”

“In your day they’d have been blousing their boots.”

Halloran’s eyes bulged, and he turned to the front.

Vayle had his arms folded and was scowling at the Legion as a whole. “They’ve stood half an hour, and I’ve yet to see a man scratch his arse. Mine would be dicing by now.”

“Look across the field,” Hale said. He raised his voice a notch so it carried to the commanders behind him, and the drone about fodder tailed off. “Your picked men have been shouting at each other since sunup. Every one of them’s burned a third of his legs before a horn’s blown. Mine are bored.”

“Men need their blood up,” one of the commanders said. He was a heavy northerner with scars on both cheeks. He commanded the Second Allied.

“Men need their wind. The blood comes up on its own when somebody tries to kill them.”

The northerner grunted, and he looked across the field at his own people a good while longer than he had before.

The fighting lords came back loudly. The wolf pelt ticked the picks off on his fingers, ten cohorts and every one of them line infantry, with the fish at the head of the list. They had passed over the archers, and they had passed over the pikes.

“No bows?” Hale asked.

“We want it settled hand to hand,” the scarred woman said. “Take the arrows out, and it’s a shoving match, and we like our odds in a shoving match.”

Hale grunted and looked at Maren. She was already turning with the slate, and three runners went down the line at a dead sprint. Ten cohorts stepped forward out of the Legion on a single horn call, and the fighting lords jogged back across the field toward their own banners, shouting to each other the whole way.

The earth crafters had raised a viewing platform on the long side of the field, packed dirt faced with timber, in two tiers. Hale climbed to the lower one with the Allied commanders crowding up behind him. Harold stood at the rail of the tier above with a cup in one hand and the stone in the other.

“We ready, Hale?” he called down.

Hale stuck a thumb up over his shoulder and kept his eyes on the field. The damn ploy had worked. That meant a short fight. But at least the show would be good.

Halloran had caught the thumb, and he was watching Hale now with his eyes drawn narrow. The man had caught onto something. He had played politics too long.

Then the mana came down off the upper tier, and it was dense. It had weight to it. Hale felt it push through his coat and settle in his back teeth, and the northerner beside him took hold of the rail with both hands. Out on the field a blue haze rolled over ten thousand men, thick enough to dim the snow behind them, and then it sank. When it cleared, every blade and every body out there wore a layer of the stuff, close as oil on water.

The Battlefield simulation stone could change how they trained every soldier in the Empire, and he badly wanted to know what it did to perk gain. If they could train their fish using these stones instead of throwing them into battles they were unready for, it would decrease their attrition dramatically.

Horns went off on both sides, and the game was on.

The Legion folded in on itself. Ten cohorts slid across one another at the walk with barely a shout he could hear, and inside a minute there was a spearhead five thousand men deep, pointed at the center of the far line and already moving.

The other side answered it fast. Their center thickened as officers shoved rank in behind rank, their line drew in tight, and both wings began to swing forward to close on the Legion’s flanks once it struck.

“Textbook,” Hale said to the commanders. “That’s the right answer. Against an even match I’d have done the same.”

“Told you we know our trade,” the northerner said, pleased.

“I said against an even match.”

What none of them knew was that two of Hale’s cohorts had traded clothes. That was Harold’s fucking ploy, start to finish. The fish were back in the Legion’s line right now, sweating through five hundred suits of patchwork plate and pauldrons and having the best morning of their short careers. The knights had put on Legion kit, and they spent the morning giggling to themselves as they stood badly in formation. The lords had ignored the fake knights and picked the fish-looking knights first.

The point of that spear was five hundred Tier Two and three knights of the Empire, with Parker out in front of them. The other side was fucked.

Halloran had turned all the way around to face him, and the polish had dropped out of his voice. “What did ye do, Marcus?” He looked up at the tier above and back down. “You and that Count are a pair of tricky fuckers.”

Hale chuckled, and it surprised him. “Yes, we are. Just watch.”

Out on the field, the Legion’s horns sounded the charge.

It looked ordinary at first. Five thousand men at a run in formation was a hard thing to manage. Running in kit and in formation isn't easy. The Legion made it look like a jog to the mess tent as they all empowered themselves with mana and ran nearly in step. They ate the open ground in half a minute.

Then the tip exploded.

Parker’s five hundred dumped everything they had into their bodies at once, and the last forty meters went by in about a second. The front ranks of the spear left the ground. They cleared the first three lines of shields and came down inside the formation, among men still braced for a hit from the front, and started laying waste around them. Behind them, the new point of the spear struck the shields those men held, breached them immediately, and pushed through, widening the breach.

“Mother of God,” somebody said behind him.

The Legion drove in deep, and the far formation cracked down the middle.

Give the picked men their due, they stayed in it. The wings came around as planned and fell on the Legion’s flanks, and the fighting lords, held back as a reserve, came pounding in to plug the breach themselves. Two dozen of the best combat lords in the valley hit that hole at a dead run.

They met a flight of javelins coming the other way at something close to Mach Jesus. Hale had about enough time to see the shafts leave the knights’ hands. Most of the lords went down where they stood, and they stayed down. The wolf pelt batted one out of the air with his maul and kept coming, the scarred woman went under hers in a slide, and a third man Hale hadn’t marked before turned one off his vambrace.

He looked at Maren.

“I’ll find out who they were,” she said, and the chalk was already moving.

Halloran had both hands flat on the rail, and his mouth hung a little open.

Along both sides of the spear, the Legion had turned outward and locked shields, and now it went to work. The call came drifting back across the snow, thin with distance, the same word from fifty centurions.

“PUSH!”

The shields slammed together, and the men in front went stumbling backward; short swords slipped through the gaps and did their business, then the shields closed again.

It was funny to watch, God help him. A man took a sword in the thigh and the leg locked straight under him, and two of his friends had to drag him out by the collar with the leg sticking up stiff as a fence rail. Another caught a slash across the forehead, and something red and wet ran down into his eyes, and he stood there pawing at it while the fight went on around him. The stone made a damn good copy of a battle. If perks came out of it, it was the best training tool Hale had ever laid eyes on.

“What the fuck, Hale.” Vayle had his fists on the rail. He watched another rank go over backward. “How?”

Hale came close to laughing in the man’s face. It had turned into a slaughter. Those soldiers out there had never fought disciplined blocks of men a full mana tier above them, and the gap between the two was a difference in kind. One of his legionaries punched a shield out with mana behind it, and a body went stumbling three paces. A big lad on the other side tried the same strike on the same legionary and bounced.

They had never had a chance.

He eventually took pity on the commanders.

“Lord Harold’s been getting ready for this fight for a year,” he said. “So we train them hard, and we train them all the same. There’s a set of perks every recruit has to earn before he’s allowed out of our basic training. All of them, no exceptions. Then when they leave, they move onto specializations.”

“A set,” the northerner said. “How many?”

“Enough that graduate near as strong as our tier ones.” Hale nodded at the field. “Discipline perks, so he holds. Striking power. Footing, so he stays up on ice and mud and other men’s guts. And he can put mana into his shield. Watching your people, I haven’t seen one of them do it.”

“They were never taught—” Vayle started.

“I know they weren’t. That’s my point.” Hale kept going. “Then we teach him to fight alone. A couple of dueling perks apiece, for the day his formation breaks and it’s just him.”

Halloran spoke without taking his eyes off the field. “And your officers?”

“The leaders earn command perks with an area of effect. Command and discipline.” He ticked it off on his fingers. “Then the tribunes carry those same bonuses for everybody under them, and Lord Harold has a lot for the whole damn Legion. We stack every bonus we can find on those boys, one on top of another. Leader after leader.”

He let them chew on that for a breath.

“And we cheat, of course.”

The laugh exploded out of him then. Shit, that was cool.

“It’s hardly my fault your lords walked up to my line and picked my knights.”

Vayle called him a horse-thieving son of a whore. The northerner swore in a language Hale had never heard, and Halloran said something filthy in Irish and put his face in one hand. From the tier above, over all of it, came the sound of Harold laughing.