Valkyrie's Shadow

Empire in Chains: Act 6, Chapter 4

Empire in Chains: Act 6, Chapter 4

Chapter 4

?Check the field for Hobgoblins! Report in as soon as you find one.?

“This might complicate things,” the Captain pursed his lips.

“They’re not common here, I take it?” Lady Zahradnik asked.

“Not common and always trouble when they show up,” Captain Randall answered. “Have you fought them before, my lady?”

“A few.”

“I guess you already know what the problem is considering you pointed this one out. Let’s get out of this mess.”

Joachim followed Lady Zahradnik and Captain Randall as they walked past the line of Death Cavaliers. He paused to take a breath of fresh air when they finally got upwind of the battlefield and its stench. The Captain scanned the sky for several moments before the flight that had been harassing the raid landed nearby. One of the Dragoons dismounted to join them.

“And here I thought we were going to get to drop in,” he said. “How many of those things did you find?”

“We’re still sifting through the bodies,” Captain Randall said. “Where are those other flights?”

“Less than five minutes away now,” the Dragoon replied. “I’ll ask headquarters to send them out to reconnoitre, but they’ll want a thorough accounting first.”

The Dragoon’s gaze slid over to the nearby Death Cavaliers, who remained where they had been since they were ordered to intercept the Demihuman raid. As if in testament to their obedience to Captain Randall’s command, they had created a distinct line of corpses; not a single raider had gotten a step past it.

“The Sixth Legion is going to be ecstatic about this,” he said.

“No doubt,” Captain Randall’s voice turned sour. “We can all kiss our sleep goodbye. Those upstarts are going to go all-out once word reaches them.”

“There must be some law for this,” the Dragoon muttered.

“Why would there be?” Captain Randall threw up his hands in helpless frustration, “I can’t imagine that anyone expected an Imperial General to incite savage tribes to raid the Empire in some mad plan to make expansion more ‘efficient’. Now, they won’t order him to stop because the anticipated gains are greater than anything that the Empire has seen since its founding.”

“So we just grin and bear it? If this keeps happening, people are eventually going to die and there’s going to be blood.”

And the side to strike first would be in the wrong. Joachim had thought this behaviour the realm of civilian Nobles – manoeuvring behind paper shields in their games of intrigue and subterfuge. Then again, General Ray was very much one of them despite being born to a martial house.

The Empire and the Imperial Army had laws that regulated the conduct of its military and the citizens, but those laws were mostly to do with domestic affairs. It was assumed that, as the Imperial Army answered directly to the Emperor, what they did was by the Emperor’s will. Disciplinary actions of course existed for those who breached military regulations, but imperial law did not cover what the Sixth Legion was doing.

As the Dragoon asserted, eventually someone would take matters into their own hands and there would be blood. In the worst-case scenario, a conflict would break out between the Fifth and Sixth Legion. Presumably, the Emperor would act to prevent this. Thus far, however, Arwintar had been completely silent.

Joachim glanced at Lady Zahradnik. She appeared to be personally displeased over the developments, but, like the Empire’s martial nobility, she was bound by the will of her sovereign. Her intercession would require an event that she perceived to be strictly against her nation’s policies. Like the Empire, those policies assumed that expansion was in its best interests and conducted under the direction of those with the authority to do so.

Once the riders chasing down the fleeing Demihumans returned, they concluded that there was only one Hobgoblin in the entire raiding party. Captain Randall’s expression turned grim.

“Will that be enough for headquarters?”

“I think so,” the Dragoon replied. “It’s a huge problem or none at all. Either way, we’re going to be busy for the next little while.”

The Dragoon rejoined his flight, taking off and disappearing in the night sky to the south.

“What did he mean by that?” Joachim muttered to himself.

“Have you ever heard that old saying: ‘Orcs have hordes; Hobgoblins have armies’?”

“I have, sir.”

“That’s exactly what it means,” Captain Randall told him. “Hobgoblins are soldiers; they build armies as if it’s second nature to them. They’re rarely found in the wilderness around here, but they don’t hold back when they do appear. Our question right now is whether this bunch was this Hobgoblin’s ‘army’ or whether this is a single detachment of a much larger army sent to probe our defences or acting as part of a much larger offensive.”

How quickly that could escalate wasn’t lost on Joachim. Enough Hobgoblins could rally the entire wilderness and forge its population into a massive army that could bring ruin to multiple nations. It felt unfair that a race could just naturally understand how to create what Human civilisation took generations to accomplish.

“How much do you know about this wilderness to the south?” Lady Zahradnik asked.

“Not a whole lot, to be honest,” Captain Randall answered. “On the west side is Katze; the Draconic Kingdom and that Beastman Kingdom are across from us about three hundred kilometres to the south. Somewhere on the southern side of the wilderness is the territory of the Wyvern Rider Tribes. East is the City State Alliance.”

“The tribes of the wilderness don’t have any political affiliations or economic ties?”

“No one ever says anything about us killing them, so I don’t think so. If they had some sort of trade going on with that Beastman Kingdom or Karnassus, they’d be better equipped. What you see these fellows with is about the extent of their arms and armour.”

For the most part, they had crude garments made from unprocessed animal hides, shells and woven grass. Their weapons were fashioned from wood, bone or stone aside from a few tarnished metal weapons of unknown age and origin. The ignorant might scoff at the use of such primitive implements, but even a stick in the hands of a Bugbear could kill men in full plate armour with a single blow.

“Aside from Katze,” Lady Zahradnik said, “they’ve been surrounded by civilisation for centuries. Why do they remain isolated? A case might be made for them not getting along with Humans, but Karnassus is a multiracial state and that Beastman Kingdom is an entirely Demihuman one as far as I know.”

“I believe that Beastman Kingdom is exclusively a few types of carnivorous Beastmen,” the Captain replied, “so they’re just as likely to fight them as they are us. As for Karnassus, I have no idea. I know the Empire’s reasons for not expanding into the area, which would probably be the same for the Draconic Kingdom, but what’s keeping those other states from moving in is beyond me.”

Flickering flames filled the corner of Joachim’s eye as a makeshift pyre was lit. The men piled corpses on as the fire grew, turning into a blaze that cast its glow over the cold battlefield.

“At least you get some fertiliser out of this,” Lady Zahradnik noted.

“I guess that will give the locals something to be happy about,” Captain Randall said. “I’ll have to let Baron Owyn know so he can bring out some wagons to cart away the ashes. He’ll have to contact the Temples to cleanse the area, too. I wonder who foots the bill for that…”

Baroness Zahradnik scanned the battlefield as if she were expecting Skeletons and Zombies to pop out of the ground.

“Is a battle of this magnitude enough to give rise to the Undead?” She asked, “You mentioned that raids were relatively small and very infrequent, so there shouldn’t be an unmanageable buildup of negative energy even with the type of development in these lands.”

“That’s, uh…Priest Ward?”

Joachim flinched in surprise as the question was unexpectedly bounced to him. What she suggested was not something that even the foremost Undead-slaying experts in the Temples could offer a coherent counterpoint to.

Was it something that Lady Zahradnik had learned as a Noble of the Sorcerous Kingdom? Or were her words that of a worshipper of Surshana? Followers of The Six had many strange and superstitious notions and information that stemmed from a nation ruled by Undead, Demons and all manner of evil Monsters was naturally suspect. His mind worked as he sought a way to approach the topic diplomatically as a Cleric of the Four.

Clerics of Earth oversaw several central aspects of Human society, one of which was dealing with death. Morgues, mausoleums, cemeteries and crypts were managed by adherents of Earth and burial rites performed by the Earth God’s priesthood. This, of course, also meant that Clerics of Earth were specialists when it came to fighting the Undead and dealing with the effects of negative energy on the land.

As one such Cleric, Joachim had to wrestle down his disgust for the Undead that had come with Lady Zahradnik. That an otherwise vibrant and proper young lady could tolerate them was unfathomable.

He mentally sorted through his knowledge of the subject matter, but most of it had to do with funeral rites, fighting the Undead and his experience as a chaplain in the Imperial Army. Very little, if any, had to do with understanding negative energy and how it asserted its influence on the land.

“It’s always best to cleanse the land in the aftermath of a battle,” Joachim finally managed a response. “There is no known way to ‘measure’ negative energy and by the time its presence is tangible to our senses, things will have progressed to the point where Undead may manifest at any moment. Since we know the exact location of the event, it is best to promptly enact the proper rites.”

That felt like a reasonable enough answer. He wasn’t well-versed in the beliefs that followers of The Six held for the Undead, but it should at least be in line with what was conducive to a functional society. It was a religion that zealously promoted humanity, after all.

Joachim also harboured concerns over the way that many of the Demihumans met their demise. It was well known that the Undead collected in places where death and the emotions associated with death gathered. The Undead themselves were beings purely antithetical to life, acting in ways that promoted death. Their behaviours and abilities revolve around maximising fear, anguish and the entropy of the grave.

Bringing up the fact that the Death Cavaliers might be acting to magnify the generation of negative energy through their purposeful acts of violence was decidedly not something he could bring up with a representative of the Sorcerous Kingdom, however, so he left it at that. As always, the Temples of the Four would need to attend to the well-being of an Empire whose leadership only saw them as rivals for influence.

“You don’t do anything like that for your land, my lady?” Captain Randall asked, “There are priests there, yeah?”

“My demesne is ‘nature rich’ if I was to describe it,” Lady Zahradnik answered. “Negative energy is removed from the environment faster than it is generated, so rituals to cleanse the land are unnecessary. The natural life energy there is so abundant there that a Dryad was born next to my home a few months ago.”

“…won’t that be trouble? Dryads are well-known for their unprovoked aggression against people. Like Elementals, they’re on the list of things that the Imperial Army preemptively acts to remove when they’re discovered infesting an area.”

Baroness Zahradnik gave Captain Randall a long look. Though he was not the subject of her attention, Joachim couldn’t help but shift uncomfortably as her cool voice threatened to squash him with an oppressive sense of dread.

“Dryads are peaceful unless their home trees are threatened,” she said. “Or if they’ve been afflicted by some condition that affects their mental state. They sicken and die when they leave the vicinity of their trees so their ‘aggression’ is limited by nature. Even the innate Abilities that they use to defend themselves are not directly harmful. Nature spirits manifest when life and nature are abundant – attacking a Dryad is the same as attacking those very same things.”

“I-is that so?” Captain Randall’s voice was subdued, “Then, uh, how did things go with that Dryad of yours?”

“Glasir was a bit panicked and confused at first,” the young noblewoman’s voice warmed again, “but I think she is settling in nicely. She wanders around the harbour in the mornings, goes to school with the rest of the children in the afternoons and learns druidic magic from the local Lizardmen in the evenings. She sleeps in my home’s magical solarium at night.”

Rather than speaking of a notoriously volatile and dangerous nature spirit, Lady Zahradnik almost sounded like a mother chatting about her daughter.

“You make it sound as if she’s going all over the place,” Captain Randall said. “Didn’t you just say that Dryads couldn’t get far from their trees?”

“I did,” the Baroness replied, “but the tree she was born from was in a pot. A Death Knight carries it around for her.”

“I have no idea what to picture when I think about the Sorcerous Kingdom now.”

Lady Zahradnik smiled at the Captain’s bemused tone.

“The Duchy of E-Rantel is still primarily composed of Human territories,” she said, “so it’s not much different from what you’d see in the Katze Marches. Things are slowly changing, however. Demihuman and Heteromorph populations are establishing themselves in E-Rantel and other urban areas, so living space, goods and services created with their needs in mind naturally come with them. My demesne is on the southwestern frontier and its mostly-undeveloped state makes it an ideal home for many different races.”

“Which races live there? Aside from Dryads.”

“Of the living,” the Baroness told them, “it was Humans at first, plus two Half-Elf maids in my household staff and their Elf mother. Then a people who I ended up calling the Krkonoše moved in. They are two races: one is a sort of sheep-like Demihuman Druid while their counterparts are large felid Beastmen. After that, Lizardmen moved into the marshes and a Frost Dragon started lairing in the mountain south of my capital. Once I started expanding my borders, I incorporated the local populations of Demihumans that had long made the wilderness their home.”

“What sorts of Demihumans do you have in your wilderness?”

“The same ones that you see in most wildlands in the region,” Lady Zahradnik replied.

Captain Randall looked over at the burning pile of corpses.

“Oh.”

“The Fifth Legion’s duty is the defence of the Empire, Captain,” the Baroness said. “I won’t arbitrarily censure you for doing what you are supposed to be doing. Since my work with the Sixth Legion is not guaranteed to alleviate the problems that are brewing across the border, I must first ensure that the Death-series servitors meant to supplement the Empire’s security are incorporated into your army group. Once I'm done here, I’ll be heading over to find out what I can about General Ray’s strategy.”