He looked around the clearing for a final time. Eventually the forest would reclaim all of this. The wind gusted around him and he shivered from the cold.
'You still have the Marauders,' Gregory whispered.
Dennis nodded and looked down at the Tsurani bodies scattered about the clearing. All that they have taken from me, he thought. He glanced up the trail where the men waited and while none of them was from Valinar, he saw faces that had become as familiar to him as those from his home. The Marauders still lived, and he had a responsibility to them.
He nodded. 'And the war,' he replied coldly, 'I still have the war.' Without a backward glance Captain Dennis Hartraft turned from the grave and left the clearing, disappearing into the darkness.
Gregory watched him and sadly shook his head, then followed him on to the path to Brendan's Stockade.
It was cold.
Force Leader Asayaga threw a handful of charcoal on the warming brazier, pulled off his gloves and rubbed his hands over the fire.
'Damnable country,' he sighed.
He picked up the orders addressed to him and studied the attached map.
Madness. The first heavy snow of the season was falling from the skies and yet he was expected to start out at once with his command to reinforce a column which would strike a Kingdom outpost at dawn. Why now? A day march would have been easy, but now darkness was closing in. Outside his tent the wind was stirring, the frozen canvas cracking and rattling, and he could hear the heavy snow falling from branches in the woods surrounding the camp.
The Game, always it was the Great Game, he realized with a detached fatalism. He knew with certainty he was being sent on a futile mission so that shame might be attached to one of his clan cousins. His House, the Kodeko, was not significant enough to warrant attention on its own, but it was related to those who were in the Kanazawai Clan. He put down the orders and sat back in his small canvas chair, wishing not for the first time that it had some sort of back support. Even more, he wished the frozen ground was covered in the soft lounging cushions that provided such comfort in his home. He ran his hand over his face, shaking his head. He was growing too suspicious. This was not necessarily part of another Minwanabi ploy to embarrass a political enemy back home; it could simply be a well-intentioned, badly-planned attack. Either way, his duty was clear.
Asayaga called for Sugama, his newly-appointed second-in-command.
'Order the men to form. Full marching gear, five days' rations. Make sure they have on those new furs and footwraps. We march before sunset.'
'Where, Captain?'
He handed over the map and Sugama studied it intently.
Asayaga said nothing. Sugama, without a doubt, didn't know a damned thing about what he was looking at on the parchment, but nevertheless he was staring at it determinedly, acting as if he were a scholar thinking profound thoughts.
'Kingdom outpost. We were to take it today but the commander, in his brilliance, decided he needed more men first, and thus we are volunteered.'
'It is an honour then that our commander selected us.'
Asayaga snorted.
'Yes, an honour. In the Kingdom's tongue our destination is called 'Brendan's Stockade'.'
Asayaga stumbled over the last two words, dropping the 's'.
'Then it shall be a name of glory for the Empire.'
'But of course,' Asayaga said, features frozen in a mask that revealed nothing. 'Another act of glory in a glorious war.'
TWO. DISCOVERY
Icy rain lashed down.
Carefully, silently, Dennis Hartraft slipped through the column of weary troops. In the early morning downpours, his men crouched motionless, many with arrows nocked to their bows. In their dirty-grey cloaks they were one with the forest. Even so, he could sense their tension; something was wrong. Their eyes followed him as he darted from tree to tree, staying low. During the night the snow had changed to a mix of sleet and icy rain. It had made the night march a misery, but some inner sense had compelled Dennis to push on, a decision that Gregory and Tinuva had fully endorsed. Swinging east of Mad Wayne's Fort, which had fallen to the Tsurani the previous spring, they followed a path little more than a game trail back to Brendan's Stockade, approaching from the north-east.
They were less than a quarter of a mile from Brendan's when Alwin Barry, leading the advance squad, ordered a halt. A keen anticipation of downing pints of hot buttered mead and cold ale in a cosy tavern at the fort, instantly gave way to a grim foreboding.
Raised in these woods, Hartraft knew them intuitively. More than once that intuition had kept him alive, where sound logic would have got him killed.
Jurgen had taught him long ago truly to listen to the rhythm of the ancient woods, to be completely still, so quiet that eventually you became one with the forest and could sense the beating of its heart.
That sense told him to be ready for the worst.
Jurgen… He pushed the thought away as he passed the head of the column and cautiously followed the tracks of the advance squad. Looking over his shoulder he saw Gregory stealthily moving opposite him on the trail to his right.
The two pressed forward as the rain began to let up.
Dennis heard the chatter of a squirrel, looked up and caught a glimpse of Alwin, crouched behind a fallen tree just back from the top of a low rise. He made for him, crawling the last fifty feet to stay concealed from whatever might be on the other side of the ridge.
Alwin didn't talk, he simply pointed to Dennis, then pointed with two fingers to his own eyes and gestured towards the top of the rise, the hand signal for Dennis to go forward and see for himself.
Dennis nodded, crawling under the fallen tree and followed Alwin's track on the slushy ground, trying to ignore the icy dampness seeping through his clothing.
As he moved slowly, he suddenly became aware of the scent of smoke hanging heavy in the air. It had been masked by the rain. On a clear day, he would have smelled it a half-mile farther back. There was more than wood scent to it, something else – cooking meat, perhaps?
He reached the crest, picking a spot between two boulders, crawled up between them, then cautiously raised his head.
Smoke concealed most of the clearing. The smoke was thick, clinging to the ground, and there was far too much of it to have come only from morning cooking fires. He knew what it meant even before an errant breeze blew the smoke away for a moment. The entire clearing, several hundred yards across, was revealed. In the centre, on top of a low ridge, Brendan's Stockade was nothing but a flame-scorched, still-smouldering ruin. With a cold chill he realized that the scent of cooking meat was the stench of burned bodies. What had happened?
His eyes darted back and forth, trying to soak up information, to evaluate if there was an immediate threat to his men, to see if they had just walked into a trap.
Nothing moved on the far ridge.
The wooden stockade had been breached at the gate with a battering ram mounted on rough wooden wheels. Scaling ladders leaned drunkenly against the wall to either side of the gate.
The moat had never been much, really nothing more than a ditch full of water that stank in the summer and froze over in the winter. He could see where the ice had been broken and had yet to refreeze. The fort must have been attacked late yesterday evening or during the night.
The open slopes around the fort were carpeted with Tsurani dead, perhaps a hundred or more. He stared at them for a moment.
Curiously, many were lying facing downslope, as if killed while running away – and Dennis knew the Tsurani never ran away; a knot of them were clustered in the south-west corner of the clearing, piled on top of each other.
