Previously, Tiber finally met the paladin leading the defense of Thunder's Vale, under the approaching shadow of Point Radovic. Given a field commission, Lady Bochra tasked him to lead the rendezvous with the leader of the hobgoblin cohort and the latter's final century of warriors escaping the destroyed Morningstar. Before venturing underground, he met Alyosha: a member of the Russet Kites who learned their boss was aligned with the invaders. They struck a deal: Runt's safety for information on the people behind the Kites' working with the enemy.
Now Tiber Klepacki bears a heavy weight in each stretched hand: make contact with the escaping century and capture the inferness and her band.
23:00, Palicas, 15 Moiraios, 14389
Corridors, once streets and hallways under an alpine sun, laid silent under dark earth. The only wood not reduced to dry fiber over centuries where thorny olive-purple plants slowly pulverizing stone with iron-barked stems. Of the former, where wooden beams and construction gave way over the centuries and caved-in, came the underground’s unique fingerprint of a layout. Vapor misted out of the stone and played spider webs like sails among soldiers drifting in the macabre atmosphere.
Here and there Tiber and the seventy-odd men and a few women saw how the buildings' design and purposes shifted over a few meager centuries--which were single-purpose affairs or served several roles, which ones had spiritual as well as material purposes.
According to Praecantrix Lau, it got wilder the deeper one went, but the enemy were not that deep. Only the statues usurped Tiber's focus from command: granite and even a few of brass as on the surface, many of them were intact except their broken-off faces, the coloration of which showed it all happened at least recently, if not all at once.
The company drifting among the whispering stone bore the shape of an arm thrusting with a buckler, Tiber located at the boss. The left side were Joker, Shorty, and other wayward hobgoblins who sortied with him the past week plus those Joker--the defacto leader of them--trusted from a recently-arrived century. The sight of the whole unit of hobgoblins volunteering as one when Joker must have said in their language it was for the Prime Century was one to behold.
The right side were all red-clad Niyarodans similarly motivated, pleasantly surprised, after Tiber put out word he was about to capture the infamous Russet Kites. These men Tiber would lead apprehending the brown birds; to a man they had the manic smiles of leopards stalking prey, except Tiber himself. His was the calm exterior of a bear's catastrophic wrath.
The arm of the formation were regular Arcadians and other fighters--the ordained and the paid. The Irinian cleric who invited herself on his sorties before--and whose name he finally learned was Alizibet--invited herself to manage the arm, possessing the subtle female knack for multitasking. Tiber knew what she was doing as soon as a few days ago when she showed up; he let her do it. It was a welcome sight to see the paladins again, and the Deacon-Lieutenant MacCormagt clapped Tiber on the back for his promotion.
Only Bochra and MacCormagt would ever know it was the latter's emphatic suggestion to promote Klepacki.
The vial Alyosha gave Tiber--his own blood, those mad Nagoriyi!--he packed in foxtail and kept in a threaded brass sleeve next to his dogtags and tubelike whistle. Muttering the verbal elements, and hastening the gestures in the hand clutching the vial completed the spell just well enough to get a rough idea what direction Alyosha the man of stealth was.
Repeated readings gave him an idea of the direction the Kites took, and thinking back to his memory of the airdocks' district, what entrance(s) they took to get into the underground. From there, he figured where in Lady Bochra's lines they snuck through and narrowed it down to three guards who were likely dead. Trailing the Kites like owls, the men in red eagerly kept out of sight when they saw Kites and quietly reported back.
Several hundred feet and dozens of columns and walls to the left, Shorty knew the runner was a Tetsubo by the gait. He saw a familiar face with an unfamiliar eye-patch. "Bilgun!" the so-named hobgoblin slid to a halt, and they took each other’s arms like a toad and a frog. Bilgun had stripped his armor down to his iron breastplate that blended with his navy clothes, a single straight sword through his belt. "Thought you hated running."
"Still do, Shigegn, got volunteered for makework until I get used to this," he gestured to the patch. "Primus is five minutes away and coming in hot; who's in charge?”
"A white ape you'd like. Tumlegk's his second for this fight…"
Shorty and Bilgun percolated through the subterranean stonework, finding Joker and Tiber and a gaggle of Arcadians who dubbed Bilgun 'Patch' with his approval. "Primus Lau's cohort are being pursued by a sizable enemy horde," Patch began, "they're going to need a screen so their sappers can continue on and mine the area, then we all fall back and bring everything down on the bastards." The same plan Bochra gave Tiber--this was preplanned, he realized. Patch appraised everyone what kinds of horrors the invaders fielded in the tunnels, what their size was--and of the leave-behind party still somewhere in the black fathoms under the city.
Of particular interest to this blonde ape was Bilgun's account of the invaders as they massed on the highest terrace: the drilling grounds and military headquarters commonly called the kaczarn. This was when they could still see out the Morningstar, before enemy casters and snipers forced retirement to the shaft under the huge keep. To Bilgun, it seemed his account raised a few flags in the minds of these haergiothans.
Time to make Officer decisions, thought Klepacki. He called for Alizibet, who showed up with five older men in lighter armor bearing axes and picks with heavy packs--artists of mayhem, some bearing their past work in the form of scars and an artificed replacement forearm. "Main force on line to support our hobgoblins, give the century time to catch their breath and form up with us when the Tijaks show up." He was speaking to everyone, but to Patch in particular, who moved his head with the words.
"Mister Patch, inform these five gentlemen how they need to mark columns and walls so your bombers know to ready them for detonation. We're going to buy them time to lay down at least three lines of explosives. Then give us three whistles when they finish, and to continue laying explosives until they hear our four whistles to signal withdrawal." Patch took the men aside. "As we form the line, I'll take the right flank to capture the Kites. Have some of the men in the rear follow us to flank the enemy. We'll capture who we can of the Kites, and leave the rest for the hobgoblins' leave-behind party." Patch finished informing the Arc Royal sappers, nodded, and sped off the direction he came.
And then the operation became its own living thing, approaching in the surreal underground wilderness. Its vocalizations the distant rushing din of running feet, clanging armor, swordstrokes and shouts. War. A chthonic thing born at the start of every battle that dies at the end of every battle, never really alive or dead, somehow always alive and dead. Not unlike the cosmic un-gods that supposedly lurk past the stars in the sky, Tiber thought.
Word coming from the two arms of the front they were meeting more and more harried Tetsubos, Joker placing the back elements on line, the left reinforcing the front while the right slowly followed Tiber and his group, while the hobgoblin newcomers caught their breath and took offered canteens.
As Tiber led a final approach to the Kites he finally lost sight of the main force, the red-clad men following him ghosts. His hand already grasped the haft of his truncheon, muscle memory taking over even his thoughts. In the distance he saw movement not of his men—he sprinted.
The distance closed, he quiet as a bear's tread. The movement ahead bore colors like the Nagoriyi; a teen girl of all things with a sword! He flicked the truncheon up, it hung midair for an instant—she turned and raised her blade, eyes wide with mad thirst for violence—he, lancing both hands out to grasp the management end of the truncheon and introduce the business end to her head with a blow like a felled tree.
Tiber followed through to the next target, a boy hardly older, and rapped the lad in the ribs while his sword-arm was still low; Tiber knew his own kept pace right behind him and heard his subordinates cleaning up. Ahead the last of these saps [!], another boy, raised his sword in an unskilled guard, and was unprepared for Tiber shoulder-checking him into a stone column.
LIEZEL AND HER COUSINS were bested by their own tricks, dragged away by fast men with truncheons--according to their distant relative, a young man in leathers who could keep his sword up even after a run. Enochab did not even pay him or the missing simpletons any further heed; he ordered everyone to double-time forward, the casters at the front to keep the path clear. Not all of them rushed to the fore, and normally he would have waited for them to get in position; now they would have to be an acceptable loss.
"Runt! Get us to that center!" he called out, shoving an adolescent (given powers by something eldritch) and her cat (something eldritch) out of a wide gallery intersection down which he saw what must have been the invading force's infiltrator-scouts. But they did not see him or his. "We need to stay ahead of everyone!"
Antique tile walls, carved columns, and underground flora danced past in the Kites' mad flight to get away from the growing skirmish. Enochab heard the kid with the strong arm shout as he joined his relations. The rear guard--hard men who plied their trade with steel--began calling out the sight of soldiers in red catching up with their flight.
Enochab pulled aside the senior of some deserters he recruited years ago and cultivated for just a purpose as this. “Protect our rear with a running defense, the casters will clear the path ahead so we can move as quickly as we can!”
“Staying together is going to be a challenge!” the leader responded, checking one of his men just struck prone with a clay-tipped arrow.
“Don’t worry, we won’t move too far ahead,” Enochab replied, motioning some other ex-soldiers to collect the prone man. Once they were out of his view they were out of his thoughts as he walked to an arcane counterpart to the ex-soldiers. “The swords will cover our advance and go to ground. Speed us up and ready your cover.” An older man with wild hair, a large book, and mean eyes affirmed. Enochab moved on to tell the rest of the casters; along the way, Alyosha progressed down side corridors of columns, loosing arrows to shield casters running between cover and generally creating an impressive light show now that stealth circled the drain. “Head back and support the swords, make our pursuers hesitate to follow us!” Alyosha acknowledged and went off while he told the covering magicians the plan.
RUNT LOWERED HER CLAW an iota, looked past the thrall she electrocuted point-plank, and raised it again to invoke forked lighting against the shadows loosing arrows coming her way. One sailed past as she muttered the last reflexive syllable and she heard whoever it tagged gurgle. “We’re blocked in this direction, give me a second to find us a new route!” she shouted to the faint silhouette with antlers further back. She kicked her other claw free where her talons plunged into the neck of a thrall she could actually handle and plucked the sheaf of maps from under her arm.
She felt a tap on her shoulder and looked up from where she crouched, still verbalizing the ward. Alyosha avenged their tagged ally with an arrow of his own and pointed in the direction of a musty archway. She kept her gaze away from the prone alchemist with the arrow shaft in his neck; he was always eager to try making her new medicines.
“I think that old barracks will give us a bypass around the attackers, come!” he lifted her up by the arm and she stretched out to get the maps. Papers in claw, she even went ahead of him to check it out.
“This looks good, but it’s open to the city guard pursuing us. But I’d rather deal with them than the freaks and their demons…” she said, looking around with a purpose.
“About that,” he said behind her, a needle between fingers…
TIBER ROSE from the prone form of another adolescent woman, her hissing cat under one arm; he knew a familiar when he saw it, and going by the age she was ’blessed’ by some unnatural power with the cat as watcher and go-between. He turned and saw the Nagoriyi giving him a hard look, half-lit by effervescent light. He held up the long sap in his other hand before dropping it and taking a wet rag out of a pouch and holding it over the cat’s face. "They live,” he plainly said. Alyosha’s look softened and he stepped fully into the light; over his shoulder was nigh-seven feet of Runta Sarlatova. Tiber rested the then-slumbering cat on its mistress, approached, and the ex-soldier shifted the woman onto his shoulders. She must have weighed a buck-forty. The walking siege engine, practically a bird.
“You’ll protect her,” Alyosha said, and Tiber nodded.
The rogue looked over to the gray tendrils of a fog bank’s extremity—it was not there a minute ago. “The escape trick of Enochab’s favorite wizard, a creep I made sure to keep her away from.” As they locked eyes, Alyosha's sharpened. “I expect the same care from you, boy Klepacki. Don’t make me come back in anger.”
“Whatever you know or hear of us, every Klepacki has a few scars from protecting a woman. I will, her; and call on the resources of Lady Abigail and Arc Royal likewise. And…" his face softened. "…you’ll casually stroll into creeping danger for us to eavesdrop, like a mad Nagorynayan.” His manner must have reassured Alyosha, because he returned Tiber's smile. He re-lit the same cigar as before, with the same mundane lighter as before.
Tiber heard footsteps behind him and a subordinate’s offer for help--in a moment Alyosha vanished. The man in red got to work shouldering the girl and her cat while other red soldiers caught up there and further out in the gloom. “Nobody goes into the mist. Capture anyone outside it.” He made some gestures with his free hand, verbalized a ward into being—motes appeared around Runt’s still body over his shoulder and disappeared. “I’m going to support the skirmish. The boys and the Tetsubos need to see the leader in action,” he said flatly, drawing a long, thin number with a basket-hilt. Over the soldier’s protest that he needn’t carry the woman, he blithely said “she stays with me.”
ENOCHAB AND THE CASTERS were pulling out (along with the more fleet-footed regulars) and he looked for Runt—to no avail. Frustration beaded along his brow as the silhouettes of Arc Royal's dogs shuffled about the margins of the fog picking up his regulars left as a decoy.
He wanted to introduce her to the Cabal, saw great potential in her and her eventual progeny, to say nothing of the genetic diversity she offered. No matter; the casters he had with him would be enough, and the mundane lackeys would serve a purpose--his mission took him to the center of the city, the unknowable core that slumbered under the mortals’ petty masonry for untold millennia--no time for personal ambitions, his or his favorite wizard's. The wild-haired man scowled meaningfully between focusing where his fog went when Enochab asked out loud if anyone saw Runt. Whether or not the ex-warmage deserter could realize his ambitions for the woman were up to the Cabal.
For once today and in a manner more his usual self, Enochab watched over his underlings, partially because the ones he needed were the casters and precious few in number, partially because the four regulars who caught on to his plan merited keeping an eye on them for treachery, and partially in the vain hope Runt would come stumbling out of the fog away from the bedlam around them at the last minute--but still in vain. He groaned his frustration and backed into the darkness.
STANIS AND PETR both felt one another's unease between steel pushed at gibbering shadows. Their boss personally tasked them--Stanis being the 'adult' and Petr being the only cuss bigger than the kid--with watching his younger cousin, the favorite of their grandfather and founder of the Coal Hounds, and presently their ward was engaged in another of his increasingly-harebrained schemes.
A pioneer with a warrior's air and a drawn blade for Stanis failed to watch his flank and darted into a stone column. The boot that launched him was Tiber's, who followed with a haymaker of his basket-hilt and drawing his blade across the pioneers neck. Tiber's expression mutated from a placid mask to a curled snarl. The boy growled--like a hound, of course--and kicked the dying foe before loudly expressing the family mean streak. He carried what looked like a rug over his left shoulder, but for the horns Stanis noticed. "Ty, is that…"
"Yeah, it's her!" he said between more kicks and meaty cuts into the stooped, masked cretins.
“How did you find her again!?” asked Petr, harrying a small mob of cretins on his own.
“Later!” he looked around, pointing his weapon obliquely at a hobgoblenne in a breastplate over plain robes trying to be someplace else. “Woman! Are all the sappers behind us?” The woman jumped and looked up with blush-on-blush eyes at a vision of pale barbarism and nodded speechless. He curtly shooed her away and returned his alert gaze to the fracas before him.
In the frenzied darkness cut with desperate torches and lanterns and flares, Tiber saw between his wild pants and hammerlike slashes an avatar of war. Someone bred not just for fighting, but leading the fore; and no whiff of hesitation or uncertainty typical of young nobles. The strange, beautiful armor of the grey foreigners, and this specimen finer than the rest--a match for the warrior. Not a muscle moved outside of intense focus, every cut with curved blade a rote demonstration of practice--and for an instant Tiber Klepacki felt jealous and inferior for his beastlike fighting.
Then something ugly dared touch the parcel over Tiber's shoulder, and he spun his blade around howling somewhere between a badger on cocaine and a bear with a testicular hernia.
"That him?" the avatar asked of his adjutant in a language close to rolling boulders.
"Yes, Primus!" replied the subordinate keeping several humanoid monstrosities away. The Primus did not even make any attention for the fodder, focusing exclusively on pioneers and whatever fathoms-blessed champions, priests, and minor demonlings came his way.
"Man's an avatar of war," the Primus opined, making a well-timed cut. "Glad he's on our side."
Letting the burning in his arms subside with his fury, Tiber saw the avatar holding a pioneer back by the neck; he had severed the enemy's knife-arm, who tried grappling out of the finely-armored warrior's grasp. The Lieutenant saw this figure regarding him, then make a salute with his sword-arm. Tiber returned the salute and saw the figure dispatch the pioneer, then raise something to the mouth of a mask like a devil's nightmare. Three cries of a whistle, at last, and Tiber nearly ripped a tendon in his snarling face cocking an eyebrow. He just saw the nigh-mythical leader of the hundreds of hobgoblins.
The forgotten streets and buried buildings made defense easy for the men of Arc Royal and a nightmare for the demons, bosses, and their disorganized gangs pushing through closed-in spaces. Tiber kept time—five to seven minutes passed since the Tetsubos came running and wheeled among the Haergothians and the foe arrived not thirty seconds after; it would be ten before enough of the freaks rolled in to invoke claustrophobia and, as the crippled survivors had yet to be proven inaccurate, twelve before they were overwhelmed.
Tiber paced back from the loose front line to assess the fight and felt a tug on his shirt—it was the rose-eyed hobgoblenne again, speaking in a husky accent. “This gagglefuck move faster than usual, you’ll be overwhelmed in ten minutes. We have lines of explosives going back five hundred feet.” she said as she took hold of the signal whistle on his dogtag chain. He let her put it in his mouth as way of acknowledging and blew four sharp notes, shooing her away again.
“Joker! Alizibet! Stanis! Tell everyone to withdraw, Tetsubos first!”
“We’re not going to just let you protect us, haerg!” answered the former. By way of response Tiber repeated Joker's words with a mocky-jocky warble accompanied by a dance.
"wEer NoWt GoWnnA JuSs LeT yOu PoWotec TuS, HYRRRG! Move your bony ass!" The hobgoblin protested the word 'bony' but assented while Tiber swatted… well, someone's. It was crowded. Could have been a pioneer's, we'll never know.
From the first shiv in a groin a week ago to now, the men of Thunder's Vale were nigh-universally on the backfoot, even when these beasts and their demon masters came to them. Finally, they had a small army of chase-weary Tijakim railing from running breathless into a barrier unit of them, motivated from the however-narrow successes of Tiber's sorties through and under the city, and unfathomably incensed after nine days of collectively getting bested by the raw numbers and abominable powers of the deformed biomass. This sudden counterpunch down here--a knife-fight in a stagecoach, to use the adage--broke what little cohesion remained of the invaders' underground army when the defenders presented an opening, only to meet bombs and muskets of the very prey harried for hours after days kettling them in the Morningstar.
Able to clearly see from the number of flaming vessels hucked into the enemy, Tiber saw hobgoblins rolling grenades and bombs of every holdable size across the stone and silt. Almost game-like how they intentionally sent them bouncing off walls and through legs to make them hard to trace and harder to return, and more than once a sabot pattered across his face and shoulders--thank the gods for getting replacement goggles--from their gunners firing iron at fiendlings and choice enemies. Sometimes a rolled grenade would pass out of the enemy's collective notice and rest among broken stone or among the gloomy underground flora, only to remind them in a percussive flash and cone of razor-sharp splinters or ironwood thorns.
Of course, there was never a clean or clear breakaway from the enemy, nor did it ever seem their numbers diminished like their enthusiasm. Lieutenant and Acting Captain Klepacki simply got into the rhythm of following the hobgoblins behind him; the other men imitated that rhythm, and his own insistence being the last out checked his pace while the others kept theirs until he was at the head of a backwards-moving wedge, Stanis and Petr at either side.
For the best; he was flush with hot blood, relishing every stroke. Every iota of magical skill put to warding the prisoner over his shoulder so he could indulge mad wrath: block, parry, then a vicious cut across two, three bodies, sending them to the stone mortally wounded and trampled by their own advance, or sending them backwards to impede their own advance with wounds that were going to be mortal.
He lost all sense of time, stared into the gloom ahead for anything particularly dangerous, parrying from all angles with his peripheral vision alone, backing up with a tempo internalized and no longer conscious, his arm thrusting on its own.
Until a black curtain closed off the black voids between the walls ahead, the enemy before him disappeared for a moment in a choking cloud, and Tiber Klepacki became suddenly aware of himself, aware the hobgoblins just detonated the explosive by then in front of him, very aware of the cuts and trauma on his arms and legs, and quite aware of the mass of blue, grey, and gold jostling among his own soldiers for a turn. The battle turned into a melee when the foe realized they were cut off and surrounded. He looked up to the night sky, the buildings around him lit with braziers. Going on the stars and great chains across the sky, it must have been nearly twenty-four hundred--four hours to midnight.
Distracted by various warrior-priests making sure a clutch of demons did not take flight and attract the monoliths' attention, Tiber drank from a canteen someone offered him as he cut into whatever he could find that was ugly and unfriendly. Cursing when he realized it was wine, he cursed again when he realized he held a canteen and not a Sarlatov. He threw the canteen at a redskinned priest with black eyes and kicked the beasty into Petr and Stanis' steel arcs before stomping off to find "Runta Sarlatova! Where is that horned bint!?"
He stumbled over dead, jostled between single fights, and was pointed towards the periphery of the radial battle. He noticed his own men backing away and hobgoblins moving in. Two hands on his shoulders and Stanis and Petr were beside him. They were moving in the direction of the rose-eyed hobgoblin woman from before. "They thought she was one of our wounded, a noble no less, and moved her to safety," Stanis said a few inches from Tiber's ear. Ahead he saw the priestess at a pile of building materials. Next to it was Patch, holding a hand to his bloody shoulder with an equally-bloody hobgoblin scimitar in the other.
On a heavy tarp laid Runt Scarlet, nestled as if asleep on a nighttime meadow. The din behind Tiber faded away as he looked down at someone three generations of his family spent a few frustrating years chasing a few thousand miles away. Here her reputation came into strange contrast: a famously destructive caster of some kind--no two rumors pointed to the same tradition--assumed the leader of a widely-dispersed confederation of bandits--not entirely true, as the Nagoriyi Alyosha admitted--and the gossip of her pointed to someone whose arcane powers left her terribly frail. Here she looked harmless, helpless, delicate, somehow tied into so much of it: causation invisibly tied to a fragile heart that would all unravel were that vessel to stop beating.
Tiber dropped out of his reverie and climbed the crates. Ten feet off the ground he saw the hobgoblins' game: the century who found the Cordon earlier, whom Joker drew volunteers from, had waited outside the tunnel entrances. When the fight finally emerged from the corridors, they relieved his force the same way his force relieved the Primus' century. Exultation overcame the din. The fight was finished.