Dragon's Trail

IV: ACCELERANDO-3

Carter followed her to the corpse of a sheth. He was unsure of what he was supposed to be looking at, so he asked.

“The armor,” she said.

It was the same armor he’d noticed on the large one that he’d killed. “Nice.”

“Oh, yes,” she agreed. “Look, here,” she walked over to one of the corpses in the field. He followed, and looking at the body, now he noticed a difference. This one’s armor was a haphazard collage, many suits of armor tied, sewn, and riveted together into a jerkin.

“That one,” she assessed, jerking a thumb back toward the big one with the scale armor. “They don’t wear armor for its protective value. It’s a trophy. See? This one,” she pointed again to the closest corpse, “He’s killed four humans. Two in mail, one in brigandine, and one knight, probably, for the leather armor.”

“Okay. So we need to find out who’s missing.”

“Yes. For starters.” She walked back over to the largest one. The lesson wasn’t over yet. “So where’d he get this?”

“You’re asking me?”

“You’re the adviser to the king.”

“Hm. Could he have made it?”

“They don’t make armor. They don’t even cook their food.”

Carter scratched his head. “Someone made it,” he assessed.

“Right.”

“Could he have killed someone my size?”

She glared at him like a cat with its ears back. “There is no one ‘your size.’ Besides, he couldn’t fit in your armor any more than you could fit in mine.”

“So, someone out there’s making armor for these things.”

“That’s a Gavrian helmet. Gavrians use iron plates set in their mail like this. Not all of them, but their knights do. Gavrians rivet their mail, and this crap is just pinched shut. It's cheap, and weak, but still, where’d he get it?” She bent to work the helmet off. The head beneath was equal parts warthog and bridge troll.

“Christ, that thing is ugly,” said Carter.

“They’re far prettier dead.” She turned the helmet over, looking for a manufacturer’s mark. “Are you hurt?”

“Tired,” Carter said.

“Good. Let’s call it a day. Get its legs.”

“Jarrod?”

It was Javal’s voice at the door.

It was well before sunrise, and though the room was lit from the moon and the coals in the fireplace, it was still nearly freezing. Jarrod untangled himself from the spectacularly defined limbs of a visiting girl from Longvalley named Eothe.

“Hey, sire,” he said.

He kissed Eothe on the forehead and rolled out of bed, apologizing. She mumbled something and buried her face under the pillow.

A frank conversation with a healer some weeks back had brought up what Jarrod intended to make the lynchpin of his entire experience here: the wonderful, wonderful moon.

Reproductive cycles were in lock step with the big stripy bastard that took up a tenth of the horizon, and women were only fertile every hundred and four days. Because humans here reproduced much more slowly than their counterparts on Earth, Mother Nature had never seen fit to introduce venereal diseases as a method of de facto population control. The practical upshot of this was that Jarrod now found himself in a world where shaking the sheets is treated as a competitive sport.

“I’m sorry, rider,” said Javal. “It’s important.”

Jarrod tied his kimono, slipped on his moccasins, and met Javal in the hallway, closing the door and shivering.

“Who’s in there?” Javal asked.

Jarrod rubbed his arms to warm up. “Eothe.”

Javal’s brow furrowed. “Eothe, the singer from the banquet? Well played, rider.”

Jarrod brushed his hair back. “I’m only banging girls from out of town from now on. This way, when their boyfriends want to kill me, I’ll at least see them coming.”

“I can’t argue with your logic.”

“What’s up?” asked Jarrod.

“A report from Regoth Ur. Attacks by sheth.”

“Okay. That happens.”

Javal had a note in his hand, and he referred to it. “Your man Carter dragged back quite a trophy: a sheth in a coat of plates and a helmet.”

Jarrod looked at the note. He couldn’t read most of the words but someone had sketched out the armor. “Well, that doesn’t make any sense.”

“Right.”

“Are they sure it wasn’t just horse barding, cut to fit?”

“Boy, that’s good,” Javal admitted, turning the sketch sideways and back again. “According to this, it was armor. Coat of plates, arming jack, everything.”

Jarrod was now fully awake. His heart raced. “Who the hell would make armor for sheth?”

“Who’d pay for it?” Javal asked. “That’s a lot of iron.”

“Well, we know who has iron.”

Javal looked down the hallway both ways, saw that it was clear, and leaned in to Jarrod to whisper regardless. “This is something new,” he whispered. “This is something you’d know about, yes?”

“Yes and no,” said Jarrod. “I’m familiar with the concept but I had nothing to do with it, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Absolutely not. Can you advise the lord’s council?”

“When?”

“After breakfast.”

“This is brilliant,” Jarrod told Sir Dahl and the others at the Chambers On Nine, a large, lavish meeting room that overlooked the valley and lake far below. “If you want to knock out a militarily superior adversary, you first need to distract them. Get them looking the other way. Classic misdirection.”

“This is how you fight, where you come from?” asked Sir Dahl.

“Pretty much,” said Jarrod. “Look, you don’t have big armies here. That’s why you don’t have mooks.”

“Mooks?” asked Javal.

Jarrod tried again. “Flunkies. Meat shields.”

Javal choked on his wine.

“You have soldiering as a profession, here,” said Jarrod, “Because you can’t afford not to. Your soldiers have to be as effective as possible, as highly-trained as possible, because you don’t have very many of them. In my homeland, countries have armies in the millions. A thousand-thousands,” he offered, since they had no word for millions. “Historically, in my homeland, armies have had units of marginally-skilled, low-paid soldiers whose only job is to absorb damage and hold ground. They’re what we call mooks.”

Javal let out a breath. “Who gets that job?”

“People with nowhere else to go,” said Jarrod. “You don’t have that here. You can’t; you don’t have the manpower. But that means that Gavria doesn’t have the manpower either. Unless, of course, they’ve been reproducing like crazy. Anyone been there in the past twenty years?” He looked around the table.

“Seriously? Nobody?”

No one said anything. “Okay, look. There’s no way they could possibly have more s*x than us, right?” He looked at Daelle, who blushed and giggled. “I mean, come on. Really? We’ve got to assume that their population density is roughly equal. So, what do you do when you don’t have manpower?” Jarrod asked.

He took a quill, dunked it in ink, and made a dot on a piece of parchment. He dunked it again and drew a circle around the dot. “You augment. We call it a force multiplier. My people do it with numbers. Here in Falconsrealm, we do it with training. Gavria does it with steel. They’re arming the gbatu to try and divert our attention. They have the steel to augment the gbatu and make them into something we have to worry about.” He looked to Albar.

“Why are you looking at me?” said Albar.

“I’m asking you, sir,” said Jarrod. “What do you think of this?”

“I think it’s preposterous,” said Albar. “There’s no possible way this happened.”

“Do you think Regoth Ur lied about this?” asked Javal.

“No,” said Albar. “I think this is a fluke, a freak occurrence. If it was happening at the scale you’re proposing, we’d have seen it, here.”

“Oh, no,” said Jarrod. “That’s the thing, sir. We wouldn’t see it. Look out the window. You’ve got this mountaintop that we’re on. Below here is the lake, in this deep valley with cliffs on all sides, and a town on each end. There could be an army of sheth on the other side of those hills behind us, or even right down the road, and you wouldn’t see it from here.”

“He’s right, you know,” said Javal.

“And what?” asked Albar. “They’re going to lay siege to us? The gbatu? They can’t even fight in a line.”

“They don’t have to lay siege,” said Javal. “They just have to tie up our forces and stretch us thin. While your best knights are running down armored sheth in the corners of the mountains, Gavria marches right up the road and knocks on the door.”

“That’s what I would do,” said Jarrod. “I’ll tell you what, sir,” he said to Albar. “If you start sending patrols deep into the mountains around here, they’ll run across sheth in Gavrian armor within a week.”

A couple of war council members grumbled.

“That is one thing we will not do,” said Albar. “If we start hunting for phantom sheth knights, then we will certainly be left undermanned. I will not see that happen.”

Jarrod ground his teeth and let a long breath out through his nose.

“Nothing changes,” said Albar. “We never speak of this outside this room. The last thing we need is panic. Or more, as you say, misdirection.”

The Gavrian War Room was a bedlam. Men jumped from the table, yelling and pointing.

“Enlisted the gbatu?” Loth shouted, lunging at Ulo. Ulo stood, and with a sweep of his hand knocked Loth over from five steps away.

The room settled. Loth rose.

“Anyone else?” Ulo asked.

No takers.

Ulo looked to Mukul, who rolled his eyes and threw up one hand.

When the room had settled, Ulo sat, and sipped his tea, treading carefully. “I’ve been driving those little bastards out of my lands since the day I arrived. Gbatu, by their nature, fear an even fight. They fight us only when they outnumber us.”

“i***t!” Loth added.

“That’s how you win,” said Ulo.

“You’re mad,” Loth grumbled. “And you’re a fool.”

Ulo sipped his tea. “By your logic, perhaps.”

“By any logic!” Loth shouted.

“By arming the gbatu in Falconsrealm, giving them rabbits to chase while we move northward? Your problem is solved.”

“What about Hillwhite?” asked Marghan. “We were of the impression that you were working with him.”

“I am. Hillwhite likes this plan better. His hands are off this. Nothing leads back to him.”

“So we take the risk,” said Kaslix.

“And we get the reward,” said Ulo. “Falconsrealm and the Shieldlands, as part of Gavria. Ruled by . . . I don’t know. You decide. I don’t care.”

The room went quiet.

“How long have we been at war with gbatu?” Ulo asked.

Loth spoke. “Since the world began.”

“And they’re still a problem, right?”

This brought hesitant agreement.

“Why?” asked Ulo.

A long moment passed with no one saying anything.

“Numbers?” someone ventured.

“Resourcefulness,” offered Loth. “When they’re cornered—when they must fight—they can be fearsome.”

More nods and beard-pulling.

“So we arm them,” said Ulo. “We armor them. We turn them loose in the far quiet corners of Falconsrealm—the deep places—and when Albar sends his legions to rout them, they’ll have to fight. They’ll fight hard. Falconsrealm already has a war on its hands, though it doesn’t know that, yet. While their troops are occupied we move north, through Ulorak, along the Teeth of the World.”

“The Eastern Freehold will never—”

“The Eastern Freehold,” said Ulo, “Won’t raise a hand. I’ve got a champion watching those passes from a throne made of their generals’ skulls.”

Hanmin made a religious gesture. “You’re mad. He’s mad,” he told the room.

“No,” said Marghan. “I want to hear this.”

“We buy off the lords of the Shieldlands,” said Ulo, telekinetically picking up several troop markers and sliding them across the great map on the table. “We skip Axe Valley, we skip Longvalley. We stage at friendly towns and keeps, and when the weather clears, we cross the mountains and walk into Falconsrealm.”

Much conversation.

“It could work,” said Loth.

“Once we have Falconsrealm,” said Mukul, “we’ll have the rest of the Shieldlands. We won’t even have to fight for them.”

“It will work,” said Marghan. “And now, it seems we have no choice.”

“We use my ore to continue to arm the gbatu,” said Ulo. “My iron, my smiths. Hillwhite buys the arms from me, at my prices. You tax me on it.”

“Done,” said Hanmin.

“I’m heading back to Falconsrealm in the morning.”

“What for?” Loth demanded.

Ulo smiled. “It turns out the Hillwhites are just as resourceful as the gbatu.”

In a straw-strewn corral, barefoot and filthy, his feet frozen and knuckles swollen, Jarrod circled Rider Henck of Blood River.

“Come on,” Jarrod said. “Keep your hands up.”

He healed quickly here. Organic food, lots of sleep, daily massages. And magic. Sweet, sweet painkilling magic. His bruises had faded and he was strong today. Still a bit sore when he moved wrong, but he was having a pretty good morning.

It surprised Jarrod that a martial people such as Falconsrealm would not have developed a distinct style of unarmed combat. Very few of these men wrestled better than schoolboys, and those who did employed only the most rudimentary forms of catch wrestling; not one of them knew how to employ any manner of advanced throw, bar, or sweep. Nor did they box, nor use their feet for more than occasional kicks to the shin or groin. When they grappled, they were strong and they fought dirty—butting heads, kneeing, and clawing—but they had no technique to speak of past headlocks and brute-force takedowns. Quick boxer’s jabs, snappy blocks, hip throws, and leg sweeps vaulted Jarrod through wrestling practice—here, any sort of unarmed combat was called “wrestling”—and quickly earned him an even greater level of respect. He’d known it was only a matter of time before he’d be asked to teach.

Every now and again he’d whip out la savate and really give them something to ooh and aah about. Kicks to the face, he’d discovered, were really cool to Gateskeep fighters. As was the rear naked choke.