Holding Steady

 

What was one to do while being sieged? Especially when the enemy was only sieging one side of the burg. It was entirely possible to evacuate the citizens out toward the east. But to the east was Evastani’s goal. Anyone fleeing toward Cliff would just have to face them again down the road. Some had gone on their own. Others stayed behind.

Perhaps they could have headed north or south once they cleared the valley. Those weren’t safe either. This army of Evestani’s wasn’t their only force in the Duchy, just the one pushed into the territory the most.

“At least your mausoleums are keeping them well away from the walls,” Hawkwood said, lowering a telescoping spyglass. Since setting up their encampment, Evestani had done something to obstruct scrying. It wasn’t the complete shutdown that the inquisitors had tried. The crystal balls just fogged over, making it difficult to see anything through the glass.

Did they know they were being scried upon? Or were these typical precautions anytime they made camp? Arkk couldn’t be sure as he had only scried on troops on the move in the past.

It was annoying. Crystal balls, along with the teleportation rituals, were his greatest advantage, in his opinion. Even more so than the likes of Vezta or Agnete or gorgon. Having people shut that ability down didn’t help his paranoia. It was perfectly rational to shut down magics like that. Arkk even wanted to do it as well, even though he wasn’t sure that anyone was actively scrying on him. Still, he couldn’t help but wonder what all these people who couldn’t be scried upon were doing where he couldn’t spy.

“I shudder to think what might happen if their archers got close enough to fire their golden arrows into the burg,” Hawkwood continued. “One of those monstrosities in confined quarters? Evestani would have a whole burg of golden soldiers by nightfall.”

Arkk lowered his spyglass. They stood on the wall of Elmshadow Burg, watching out over the snow-dusted fields. The Evestani army had set up a camp, looking like they were going to stick it out here rather than try to go around the bulky mountains.

The golden soldiers that Agnete had fused to the ground had all stopped moving. Without venturing closer, he couldn’t tell if they had given up on trying to free themselves or if whatever magic animated them had finally run dry. If it was the latter, they had lasted about twenty-four hours. Plenty of time to cause widespread destruction within the burg’s walls. He couldn’t help but nod his head, feeling numb at the thought.

He glanced over. It had been three weeks since he last saw Hawkwood in person. Through the use of Swiftwing harpies, they had remained in contact and Arkk had scried upon the man’s position several times. Still, it was disconcerting to see his mentor and friend as he was now.

At the Duke’s party, Hawkwood had been a bit large. Not fat—the man kept himself in shape—but still with plenty of girth. His neck had hardly fit inside his collar. He wore his hair styled in a wealthy fashion, slicked back, and had a bushy yet tidy mustache.

Now, if Arkk had to describe his appearance in one word, it would be haggard. Gone was any spare fat on the man. He might have lost some muscle mass as well, forced to survive on rations of hardtack and pottage. His brown hair, longer and unkempt, traded its groomed luster for frayed and wild strands. A beard had joined his mustache, both of which looked like he had forgotten about them entirely, leaving them to fend for themselves out in the wilds of the Duchy.

“The Duke’s Men will be here soon,” Arkk said, trying to console the man. “Combined with White Company, we’ll outnumber them by a few thousand.”

“A few thousand doesn’t mean much in a protracted battle. Getting two armies to fight isn’t easy either. Not to mention… I am no longer convinced that a large force is wise.”

“Those arrows?” Arkk asked.

Hawkwood nodded. “My casters have determined that they are miraculous in nature, though my bishop claims to have never seen anything like them.”

“Your casters and bishop?”

Hawkwood put on a smile, thin and lacking humor though it was. “You aren’t the only one who has recruited those well-versed in magic. Proper utilization of casters is a force multiplier. A squad of ten has even odds against ten men. Add in a caster and they can take on twenty with confidence.”

“Yeah. Learned that myself.”

Zullie wasn’t that much of a force multiplier. She wasn’t much of a combatant. Agnete, on the other hand? Arkk doubted she could take on the entire Evestani army before someone got a lucky hit in but he didn’t fear much for her safety if he sent her alone against ten or even twenty opponents. More if they were fighting from a position of ambush. The gorgon and Vezta acted much the same, though they weren’t spellcasters.

“That said,” Hawkwood continued, “I don’t suppose your people have come up with any countermeasures?”

Arkk winced. “No. They are… working on something else,” he said, feeling a bit guilty.

“Something that will help with the war?”

“I hope so.”

Hawkwood stared for a moment before offering a brief nod of his head. He didn’t ask anything more, simply bringing his spyglass to his eye once again.

Arkk started to follow, only to freeze as he heard a noise. A building drone like a bow drawn over a dozen stringed instruments all at once, reaching a high crescendo without any harmony. At the peak, the sound went silent. A low, vibrating tone echoed out over the vacant fields, slamming into the wall along with a brief flash of light out in the distance.

He tensed, fearing an attack that had gotten through the mausoleum defenses. Taking up his spyglass, he swept it over the distance only to spot a deep gouge in the land. A perfect void, like someone had taken a spoon and carved out a bit of land.

A black sphere formed in the distance, surrounding a trio of the golden soldiers, bringing with it another discordant noise of rising strings. Except, it wasn’t quite a black sphere. The colors inside the expanding sphere were wrong. The snow turned black but the gold of the soldiers turned blue-white. Shadows turned light and light turned dark. The sphere expanded until it encompassed the three golden statues, hitting that crescendo once again. With the low-toned thrum, the sphere collapsed along with everything inside it. The soldiers disappeared along with another scoop of the ground.

“They’re… exploding?”

“Not quite,” Hawkwood said, tone gruff. “To the left.”

Arkk, noting Hawkwood pointing a finger, followed along until he spotted three figures standing out in the fields. The one standing ahead of the others pinched the tips of his fingers together, using both hands. As he spread his hands apart, another of those inverted spheres began growing around the next group of golden soldiers. It was not a quick process. If those golden soldiers could move, Arkk imagined they could have walked out of the sphere even with their sluggish movements.

That said, when the process finished and the man clapped his hands together, Arkk couldn’t help but shudder at just how everything was gone from inside that inverted sphere.

He watched another dozen spheres, each consuming the unmoving statues, before he focused on those working the magic. He didn’t recognize any of them but his heart skipped a beat nonetheless. One woman stood back with another man, watching with keen eyes as the one in front made sphere after sphere. Their uniforms, long black coats with a series of straps holding them closed in the front, were uncomfortably familiar.

The man creating the spheres was thin, gangly so. He kept hunching over and shuddering between working his magic, clutching at his stomach the way someone might if they couldn’t control their laughter.

Neither of the other two looked amused. The man, the shorter of the two, looked like he could have been Chronicler Greesom’s brother. Arkk couldn’t make out too many details at a distance but he was shorter, thinner, and had a gleaming pendant dangling from his neck that bounced lightly as he wrote in his notebook.

The woman stood tall, hands on her hips as she watched. Her long cloak fluttered behind her in a breeze while the brim of a peaked cap hid most of her face. Flowing silver hair—perhaps tinged with a hint of blue—made Arkk wonder if she was an elf. She didn’t look quite tall enough. Perhaps a half-elf. Either way, she, along with the others, had beads of sweat forming on the back of Arkk’s neck.

“Inquisitors,” Arkk said, stomach dropping. He couldn’t make out the eye-shaped pin from this distance, even with the spyglasses, but there was no doubt about their identity. The way one stood back, one wrote in a small notebook, and one performed the dangerous magic only confirmed that suspicion.

Did that mean the man creating the spheres was another purifier? Arkk had imagined all of them as flame-wielders like Agnete. Not… whatever this was. Though, given what he knew of Agnete, he supposed this made sense. Agnete was a chosen of one member of the Pantheon. Vezta had implied that there would only be one avatar for any given member of the Pantheon at once. Both Zullie and Agnete said that there were other purifiers.

Thus, other purifiers had to belong to different deities or else there was some other explanation for their powers.

The man creating the spheres turned away from his task for a moment, looking straight at Arkk with wide, manic, and strange eyes. His solid black eyes, illuminated by a single ring of white, made Arkk shudder. Not just because of the strange appearance but because of the way the supposed purifier looked directly at him despite there being no way even an elf could pick him out at this distance.

Arkk lowered the spyglass, knot tightening in his stomach. “I… should go.”

Were the inquisitors here for the war or him? He honestly couldn’t guess one way or the other. If it were Vrox, he would have said the war. These new inquisitors… he didn’t know anything about them. He couldn’t trust them like he trusted Vrox.

“I need to get Agnete out of here,” he said, tone slightly more urgent. He did not want to see what a fight between two purifiers looked like. Even if, with how long it seemed to take to form those spheres, he figured Agnete might win. And that was only true if the inquisitors didn’t have another countermeasure to Agnete’s abilities along the lines of those ice marbles.

“Arkk.”

Arkk paused, looking back to Hawkwood.

The man reached out, clapping a hand on Arkk’s shoulder. “Thanks for all you’ve done.”

“I hardly did anything. I wish I could do more. Maybe those inquisitors—”

“Nonsense. Were it not for your mausoleums, I fear we would all be golden soldiers by now.”

“Ah. Speaking of that, if the inquisitors give you trouble over it, feel free to blame it on me. They already don’t like me.”

“To be fair, those mausoleums were all you,” Hawkwood said, smiling properly now. “Go. I can handle a few inquisitors.”

Arkk dipped his head. “I might be back if I think of something else I can do to help. Otherwise… you know where to send the Swiftwings. Stay safe.”

“You as well,” Hawkwood said, giving Arkk one firm squeeze of his shoulder before letting him go. “You as well.”

Arkk took the stairs off the wall and hurried through town. Elmshadow was a fairly sizable burg. Not as big as Cliff but larger than either Darkwood or Moonshine. Its garrison and keep stood tall at the center of the burg, currently occupied by about half of White Company while the rest of Hawkwood’s men camped out outside the eastern wall. A large market, currently devoid of any people, sprawled out around the main garrison entrance.

While White Company occupied the majority of the garrison, Company Al-Mir had a few rooms for their personnel. At the moment, that consisted of Agnete, four gorgon, and six orcs. Hardly anything in comparison to White Company’s four thousand or the local baron’s guard which had several hundred.

It took only a few seconds to round up the gorgon and orcs. Arkk had to check in on where Agnete was using his employee link, though he wasn’t too surprised to find her down in the garrison’s local smithy. Ever since hearing fully about her patron, the Burning Forge, smithies tended to be her regular haunts, whether in Fortress Al-Mir or elsewhere. She didn’t usually participate in the work, often just watching or, occasionally, sitting entirely within the kilns and forges.

Whatever made her comfortable.

Today, she stood hovering over the shoulder of some poor member of White Company as the man fixed up a battered breastplate. The embers in her eyes lit bright as she watched and scanned, observing—even judging—the way he beat down the bent metal back into place.

“Agnete. We need to go.”

The wild mane of black hair she had shifted as she turned her head. “An attack?” she asked, embers in her eyes intensifying.

“No! No…” Arkk said quickly, both for her sake and the sake of the tense blacksmith at her side. He motioned, taking her outside and well away from anyone else before continuing. “Inquisitors. With a purifier who… I don’t even know how to describe it. He made spheres that destroyed everything inside them.”

“Purifiers wield holy flame,” Agnete said with a numb tone in her voice. She didn’t look worried but the glow under her skin started to brighten.

Arkk blinked, frowning to himself. Had he misunderstood? Perhaps there were more like Agnete and this new inquisitor was some other class of enforcer. Whatever the case, it didn’t matter at the moment. He could try to figure out what to call this new inquisitor later. “Whoever they are, they’re dressed like inquisitors. I’m not too interested in meeting them and I doubt you want to either.”

“Can you scry on them?”

Since scrying hadn’t been working on Evestani and the other inquisitors Arkk knew of had ways of blocking it, he hadn’t even tried. He quickly conjured his crystal ball. Fortress Al-Mir possessed two, one he kept to himself for the most part. The other had a team working day and night, scrying on various locales of import. Mostly areas Hawkwood had pointed out as being strategically valuable.

It did feel a bit bad that he kept one near himself when he wasn’t even using it every second of the day.

The value of being able to peer across a battlefield without resorting to Hawkwood’s limited spyglass couldn’t be understated.

He first did a quick check of the Evestani encampment. The crystal ball just went foggy. It was like Evestani had some spellcasters summon up a thick fog. That could easily have been what they had done. Arkk didn’t envy sitting around in a cold and wet fog in the middle of winter. Then again, he didn’t have that golden light staving off the elements.

Hawkwood had sent out lookouts throughout the mountains, making sure that no forces were hiking through with the intention of dropping those golden arrows on the burg. The mausoleums only protected the valley, after all.

Thinking of the valley, the viewpoint changed, dragged over to dozens of scooped-out divots in the terrain. The inquisitors were still working and were not doing anything to hide their presence from scrying eyes. Able to look closer with the crystal ball, Arkk spotted the familiar eye-shaped silver pin with a vertical bar in place of the pupil.

“Inquisitors,” Arkk said. “Recognize them?”

“No.”

Arkk felt a chill run down his spine as a new thought occurred to him. Were they inquisitors? They dressed the part. They had the right numbers, including one man who had a notebook, but that might only mean that someone had done their research. Taking an extra moment to think about it, something didn’t quite add up.

Where had they come from? They were out in the fields between the mausoleum defenses and the burg. They hadn’t passed through the burg or someone would have noticed them. Hawkwood’s scouts around the mountains had a whole system in place to check in on each other, making sure nobody disappeared and let anyone through. Thus far, the alarm hadn’t gone off.

Did that mean they had come from the mausoleums? Somehow avoiding that mental magic? Judging by Vrox and Greesom reflecting a gorgon’s petrifying gaze back upon the gorgon, Arkk wouldn’t be surprised if they could get past easily. But that meant that they were coming from the Evestani side of things.

“Are these inquisitors?” Arkk asked, voice a little more intense. “Even if you don’t recognize them, could they be new or just unknown to you?”

“That is likely,” Agnete admitted. “I can name… six inquisitors. Not including myself.”

“Six… that’s… Is that a lot? How many inquisitors are there?”

Agnete shrugged. Pinching a length of black hair between her fingers, she rubbed it in thought. “Three dozen? Maybe four. I don’t have exact numbers. That is a guess based on our typical operating area.”

That wasn’t many but it also meant that Agnete wasn’t likely to know any given inquisitor. Arkk bit his lip as he stared into the crystal ball, eyeing the woman, who he presumed to be in Vrox’s role within this group. She did not have pointed ears, he noted. The man at her side didn’t quite look like Greesom from a closer perspective. Their similarities ended with their height. Where Greesom was fairly rotund in a muscular manner, this man was thin and had a gaunt face. Maybe he had been ill recently, even.

The last man, the one causing the imploding spheres, looked mad. He had wide, crazed eyes and kept descending into fits of laughter. The woman snapped at him nearly constantly, though Arkk couldn’t hear what she was saying through the crystal ball.

“Is there anything that gives them away as impostors? Their clothes or that strange magic?”

Their clothes were almost identical to what Agnete was wearing now. Agnete’s weren’t official inquisitor clothing, but rather something made by the fortress tailor. From a distance, it was doubtful that anyone would be able to tell the difference—not taking into account Agnete’s lack of sleeves, having burned them off at some point or another. From close-up, it was a different story. The seams were bulky while parts that should have been protruding were flat. The stitching lacked regular finesse and the hems weren’t even. Were Agnete to stand next to a proper inquisitor, she would look like a cheap copy.

“Inquisitors seek out strange or anathematic magic. We don’t merely destroy it, however. We contain and, oftentimes, utilize that magic. Anathematic magic went into the Binding Agent that was used to control me.”

That fit with what Vrox had said to him in one of their meetings. He wanted Vezta and the artifact used to control her. With that in mind, it wouldn’t have surprised Arkk in the slightest if they intended for Vezta to take on a similar role as Agnete or this black-eyed man.

“As for their clothes,” Agnete continued, peering closer into the crystal ball. “I see nothing amiss. So long as they have the proper credentials, I wouldn’t blink an eye if they introduced themselves to me. Does something stand out to you?”

Arkk pursed his lips, staring down into the crystal ball. “The situation. They show up and start destroying the golden statues. Great. But where did they come from? With Evestani’s penchant for disguised assassins… Hawkwood will just let them in at the gate. They walk in, act like inquisitors. As soon as night falls, they take out anyone in a leadership position. Maybe try to find a weakness in the mausoleums. Assuming they don’t just use that magic to destroy them.” Drumming his fingers against his thigh, he looked to Agnete. “These proper credentials, would someone like Hawkwood be able to tell if they were true or forged?”

“Hawkwood has mentioned in the past that he doesn’t have much experience with inquisitors.”

That was a no, then. “Can you?”

“Unless something drastic has changed since absconding from the organization.”

Arkk ground his teeth, hating what he was about to ask. “How dangerous do you think it would be to meet them if they are real inquisitors?”

“Not any more dangerous than if they were assassins.”

“That’s what I was afraid of.”