Wartorn Obliteration

'Do you see anything?' she asked.

'By the madness of the gods,' Merse hissed, 'quiet.' He too was studying the woodland, eyes narrow in his aging leathery face.

Praulth took her horse's reins from him but didn't climb back onto the saddle. She patted the creature's sides, and it quieted. She listened, intensely aware now of every sound that emerged from the surrounding trees.

Perhaps later she would laugh, too. Her expertise was military history, the study of the strategies of the grandest wars, but that did not include knowledge of something so base and coarse as banditry.

'Are we in danger?' Xink asked. This time Praulth hissed for silence.

She heard movement. Her heart beat even harder. There were deliberate footsteps approaching, leaves crunching. She peered deeper into the thicket.

She saw movement. A shape appeared beneath the interlocking branches, amidst the complex shadows.

'Come, then!' Merse cried out. 'You won't have an easy time of it.' He slashed the knife through the air.

The figure paused. At the same instant another arrow sprang from the woods, faster than the eye could completely follow. This one whipped past Merse's cheek and struck the same tree as before, a mere handsbreadth above the first arrow.

'Godsdamnit, Frog! Stop showing off!'

A female voice. She emerged into view, walking as steadily as before. She was short and extremely muscular.

'Keep the blade in hand or put it away,' she said. 'Makes no difference. Obviously you won't get to use it.' She had halted just beyond the trees, at the roadside.

Praulth gazed at her. She looked... rugged. Someone who spent her time outdoors, on the move.

'You sound confident of that,' Merse said, voice stony, betraying no fear. Praulth wasn't sure she would even be able to form words at the moment. But she made certain her face didn't reflect that fear. She was a personage of importance, and her dignity mattered, even now.

'I've got cause to be,' the bandit said. 'My archer could put shafts in both your eyes before you got off your saddle.' She held up a hand, shook her head. Her tone softened. 'But—but that's how we used to do things. The truth is, we're no longer in that business. We only want one thing.'

Praulth held her horse's reins in a fist. She held herself still, very still. She didn't glance behind her, at Xink, didn't seek comfort there. What did their party have that these bandits could want? What was of value?

The answer was manifest. They must want her. Someone somehow had set this band after her, to capture her, to—

'This isn't our territory,' the bandit woman said. 'We're looking for the city of Petgrad. Where is it?'

Atop his horse Merse cocked his head, as if wondering if this were a joke. Finally his mouth twisted, just slightly, and he said, 'Petgrad's along this road.'

The bandit shook her head again. 'We don't take roads. It's a bad habit. Just point it from here.'

Merse appeared to orient himself, looking up at the early sun, nodding, muttering a few barely audible words. At last he lifted the knife and pointed. It was off at an angle from the road.

'Our thanks,' the bandit was saying, already turning away, disappearing back into the trees.

Eventually, when all had been silent for several moments, Merse returned the knife to his coat and looked down at Praulth.

'Back on your horses, you two. That's going to count as our morning rest stop.'

Praulth struggled and scrabbled back up into the saddle, silently glad she hadn't said anything aloud.

When they were moving once more, she glanced back over her shoulder and saw someone tall emerge from the woods to retrieve the arrows from the tree.

* * *

She understood, halfway up, the true and implicit meaning of this summoning. Cultat wanted to see her, yes. That was understandable. But their meeting was to take place on his ground. It was the fact that the premier's 'ground' was so very high in the sky that gave the occasion its unspoken significance.

Praulth, on arriving in the huge bustling city of Petgrad, had been awestruck by many things. The scope of the place was amazing, the number of inhabitants, the very noise of it all. Really, it was a frontal assault on her rural sensibilities. But dwarfing all else, literally and mentally, were Petgrad's mighty towers.

They were improbable, fanciful, magnificent, dominating. They reared into the sky higher than anything Praulth had ever seen in her life. They were level atop level atop level of stone construction materials that somehow didn't fall over when the wind blew. They were spires as a child might imagine them to be, impossibly grand; but these had been made real. In the city's heart they rose like trees in an ancient woods, where the eldest timbers rose regally above the younger.

Praulth now squelched her earlier fancy with much darker thoughts. It even annoyed her that she had resorted to similes about trees, knowing that it no doubt related back to her girlhood spent in the timber town of Dral Blidst. Her family had thrived in that particular industry, the same family that had drubbed her with their scorn and ignorance until she had fled to the University at Febretree, there to embrace her true calling of a life in academics.

'Can I lend you a hand?' Xink asked as she sagged against the wall of the apparently endless stairwell in which they had been trapped for what felt like days.

'And what do you intend?' she returned tartly. 'Throw me over a shoulder and carry me the rest of the way up?'

Something flickered across Xink's face. 'Is that what you want?' He might have asked it sharply, sarcastically, but he didn't. Instead, it was meek, submissive. He didn't have the will to defy her. Or perhaps his feelings for her were so genuine that he couldn't bring himself to speak a harsh word to her.

At the moment, either way, Praulth didn't care.

This climb was murderous, and it was supposed to be so. That was the great revelation she was having, halfway up this monstrous tower, this insane architectural feat, which was a monument better observed than experienced, she judged.

But as drained as she now was, as heavy as her legs felt, she was also determined. Cultat wanted to see her. That was fine. She was ready to prove herself at any time.

Merse, when he'd arrived at Febretree, had told her she was needed in Petgrad. Her talents at predicting the movements of the Felk invaders, as led by the commander they called Weisel, were crucial to the alliance that Cultat meant to build. Praulth understood the history of warfare as perhaps no one else alive did... no one, now that her mentor Master Honnis was dead. She comprehended tactics; she grasped battle strategies that belonged to conflicts hundredwinters old. She had identified the swift and sure hand of Dardas the Conqueror in the movements ordered by General Weisel. She had thought him a brilliant imitator, one shrewd enough to have studied and absorbed the skills of the Northland's most successful war commander.

But Honnis had corrected her assumptions. Imitator? No. Weisel was Dardas. It was almost impossible to accept. Equally impossible was the explanation for it, a thing Honnis had called resurrection magic. Dardas had been reborn somehow within the body of a Felk noble named Weisel.

Praulth believed it, though. She believed all of it. Master Honnis had been an irascible creature of vast knowledge. He had also been possessed of magical abilities that she had known nothing of until the University's war studies head was lying on his very deathbed.

Cultat had called her to Petgrad, and she had come, inviting Xink along with her. Now that she was here and settled into her new quarters, Cultat was summoning her to his royal presence. Again she was acquiescing. The premier had charged her with devising a battle scheme to resist the seemingly implacable Felk advance. She had proposed a reenactment of an ancient engagement, the Battle of Torran Flats, one of Dardas's many celebrated victories some two hundred and fifty years ago. Her version of it, of course, had Dardas/Weisel falling into a cunningly constructed trap. That plan could still work.