Khollo nodded in thanks, his mouth suddenly dry. “Well,” he began, swallowing. “I’ll start with the facts and go from there. We know that the vertaga first attacked an isolated trade caravan near Ishkabur. Not long after, Lord Kurkan and Ondus found a small force of the creatures and fought them. More recently, there was the attack on Ishkabur’s docks by a force of thirty. Finally, a village has been wiped out.” Khollo hesitated. “This appears to be the work of the vertaga, but since there were none sighted it is hard to know with absolute certainty.
“Based on the location and the reported numbers involved in each of these attacks, we have concluded that there are multiple bands of vertaga in the Fells. We do not know where their main stronghold is, or even if they have one.
“The beginning of the first war was marked by many of the same events,” Khollo continued. “Villages were razed, trade caravans went missing. But there were not many survivors and they were too terrified of what they had seen to make much sense. The then lords of the East Bank and West Bank dispatched forces to protect the remaining villages.”
Khollo paused. “So far, I think you can agree that we are still totally within the realm of fact,” he said, looking around the table. “Now, things get more complicated. We have reports on record that a large town once existed near the northernmost reaches of the Basin. It was a trade center, a crossroads where the road from Ishkabur to Ardia intersected the road from the East Bank to the West Bank.” Khollo paused. “That town was reduced to ash, and it was a substantial settlement with walls of stone and trained soldiers. And the attack came immediately following a lull in raids in the Basin.”
“Who’s to say they won’t change tactics?” Wilkes demanded. “They lost last time. Why would they try the same thing again?”
“They did not lose,” Khollo explained. “Contrary to what history would have us believe, the vertaga did not lose and we did not win.”
“What?” Garren asked, clearly shaken.
“The last battle in that war was the defense of Ganned’s Gorge,” Janis said. “I was there. The vertaga had overrun the South and were pushing north. The kingdom’s armies were finally on the march, racing south as fast as they could. But only a few hundred soldiers stood in the path of the enemy advance, under my command.” Janis’ face hardened. “We alone stood against the enemy. Outnumbered a hundred to one. When the rest of the army arrived, their main contribution was to herd the vertaga back to the Fells.”
“I don’t understand,” Garren said, frowning.
“Ganned’s Gorge is a narrow defile that runs somewhere north and east of here,” Ondus supplied. “It is a key strategic point. Janis’ force was small enough that it should have been easy to defeat, but large enough that the vertaga didn’t want to have it behind them. Janis arranged his camp so that he was protected on three sides by the gorge, and the only way to attack was from the north by a treacherous, narrow trail. The vertaga could either file along in ones and twos, getting shot down by Janis’ archers, or they could drop into the gorge and try and climb up the other side.”
“They did both, as I recall,” Janis remembered dully. “We caused avalanches to rain on their heads, filled them with arrows. Three days in, their attack was halted by a storm that blew up out of the southwest and dumped massive amounts of rain across the lands north of here. The gorge turned into a raging river overnight and the battle halted for five days while the water drained.”
“By that time,” Ondus said, taking up the story again, “Forces had begun to arrive from Ardia and the Heights. The vertaga’s window of opportunity to overrun the kingdom was disappearing rapidly. When the king finally arrived with the bulk of our forces, the vertaga were retreating. We fought a few skirmishes on the way back to the Fells, but nothing major. At the time, it was believed that all the vertaga had been wiped out between the battle of Ganned’s Gorge and the subsequent weeks of minor battles.” Ondus exchanged a look with Janis. “But over time, some of us came to realize that the numbers didn’t add up. Thousands escaped back to the Fells.”
“Hang on, thousands?” Wilkes asked, paling.
Khollo said nothing. He hadn’t heard that estimate before, but he had read the rest in some of the material Janis had given him. In his research, he had always assumed that the vertaga numbered a few hundred at most and was admittedly skeptical of Janis’ claim that a full-scale war was possible. Now though, everything lined up much better. The pieces were starting to form a clear picture of what was to come.
“There’s something bothering me still though,” one of Wilkes’ captains said. “Their big advantage last time was surprise. Why have they revealed their hand so early this time?”
“Ah,” Janis said. “We do not think that they meant to originally. But there were survivors in two of the four encounters Khollo reported earlier. That did not happen in the first war.”
“But the attack on the docks was a dead giveaway!” Wilkes countered.
“Only after they thought they had already been revealed,” Ondus replied. “Realizing that Janis and I would be raising the kingdom, they must have decided to strike a larger blow early on and put fear
