As Baratheus and his convoy approached the figures, he indicated the squire closer. “Send some recruits to pull them in towards us. I wanna talk to them without any nasty surprises from the forest.”

  The squire turned and tapped someone on the shoulder. Baratheus couldn’t tell any of the recruits apart, so for that at least he was glad to have the squire. Not, of course, that he knew the squire’s name either. Thus were the privileges of power.

A pair of recruits, one long and lanky, the other short and pudgy, jogged out to the waiting individuals and started trying to convince them to come along. Their body language was quite loud, and Baratheus had to contain his laughter as he thought he saw the pudgy one stomp his foot in frustration. The cloaked figure on the left did him no such courtesy and laughed out loud, so loudly in fact that Baratheus could hear it at range.

  Eventually, after what Baratheus could only assume was begging verging on tears, the pudgy one managed to convince the two to come speak to his commanding officer. When the one who had laughed stood up, Baratheus was surprised to see a massive longsword strapped to his waist. It made him nervous. He muttered to the squire “Be ready to either fight or run. Those two are bad news.”

  “Why are you inviting them over, then?” Baratheus looked down at him in disgust.

  “Would you rather meet them on their own turf, risking the possibility of traps and concealed reinforcements, and watch as a hidden regiment slaughters half our ranks before the recruits can even find their swords? I’m calling them over, squire, because it puts them on our turf, and if they attack we can have them surrounded almost instantly, regardless of how useless the recruits are. I like living, you see. I’d much prefer to keep it up a while longer.” He hissed the last words out as the two pairs, recruits and travelers, began making their way through the ranks.

  “Right you are, sir. My apologies, sir.”

____________________________________________________________

  Reynald the Great lamented his age. In the past, he had known an individual who could make equipment with any enchantment he could imagine. He had, at the time, rejected his friend’s kindness, but in the days since he had regretted his decision numerous times. Never before, though, had he regretted failing to ask for something as grand and selfish as immortality. Nevertheless, every time his bones creaked or he struggled to open the heavy wooden door to his office, he thought back to the 30-second conversation that could have changed his life forever and he cursed his youthful naivete.

In his prime, Reynald had been a force. He had torn through battlefields like butter and rewrote destinies like a tiny god. Now, however, he was frail. Feeble. It stuck in his mind at all times. It was a heavy burden. A knock at the door interrupted his self-pity session.

  “My lord, there’s news.”

  “Well, come on in, then.”

  Dmitri came in brusquely and closed the door behind him.

  “What’s the news, old friend?”

  “The scouts we had set on the northeast road have found trouble.”

  “That’s sort of what they were there for, Dmitri. Remember? Bandit attacks? Merchants threatening embargo? No survivors? We put scouts out there specifically with the purpose of finding and ending the troubles we already knew were there. What of it?”

  “Well, they found something else on top of that. They found the bandits, no doubt, but they also found a platoon of Church-affiliated military marching our way.”

  “...Working with the bandits, or...?”

  “Unclear, sir. It seems they’ll come in contact with each other shortly.”

  “I see. If they are working together, that would explain how the bandits are so well-trained and well-equipped. If they aren’t, however, the Church was coming here for a different reason. I take it we didn’t know they were coming? No missives or official notice?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Hmm... Don’t deploy our militia. Let whatever happens, happen. If they prove to be working together, we’ll know where our problems are coming from, and if not, well, I have a feeling I know exactly what kind of urgent business they would be sending people here for without warning. I’d bet Frank let something slip. Knew we should have had him killed before he had a chance to leave town.”

  “Yes sir. And, if I may?”

  Reynald extended his hand to Dmitri to imply offering the stage to him.

  “Sir, we won’t let them take him. Not as long as there’s a single hand that can hold a blade left in Twin Bells.”

  “...Thank you, Dmitri. That means a lot.”

____________________________________________________________

  The situation had turned bad quickly. As the figures had approached, Baratheus thought he saw the larger of the two pull out a horn, and he’d heard a blast, and from there all he’d seen was a darkened sky as the people around him died in a rain of arrows from the woods. Archers! How did I forget ARCHERS!? He slung a shield over his head as he ran. The volleys were decimating the recruits. No one had been prepared for this. Baratheus was having a hard time tracking the battle. He was primarily a diplomat, after all. He slipped and fell in a pool of blood. He tripped over the body of a recruit. He tried to make his way to the armored wagons, but the ground was littered with the bodies of his platoon.

  All around him, recruits were just standing, dumbstruck, as their comrades collapsed around them. They were disoriented. Of course they were. This was probably their first combat scenario. He grabbed one of them by the shoulder as he ran past. “GET TO COVER, SWINEBRAIN!” The boy looked like he’d been asleep standing up. He turned to Baratheus with an arrow sprouting from his head. Baratheus cursed to himself and kept moving. He managed to drag a couple more recruits to cover, alive this time, but there weren’t many left. Three armored wagons were crowded with soldiers who’d actually managed to react in time, and a fourth was filling quickly. But more of interest to Baratheus was the fact that there was a familiar figure sprinting toward the fourth and closest wagon. The figure of the large, cloaked longswordsman. Baratheus threw his shield and picked up his pace to try to intercept what was about to be a disaster.

  The longswordsman was dancing. He mowed down recruits like training dummies. They offered no or next-to-no resistance. Likely they simply lacked the ability. Baratheus tackled the bastard from behind. He rolled over his shoulder to get back to his feet and grabbed a sword someone had dropped. The hilt was slippery with blood, but it didn’t matter. He just needed anything to take this bastard down. He swung at the prone figure and missed as he dodged at the last second. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. The warrior on the ground grabbed his own sword from a crouch and came up swinging it in a large arc around him. Baratheus was forced to give ground to avoid being cleaved in half. He stepped in to take a swing in the trail of the wide strike, but the warrior kicked out at his hand and redirected his sword. The warrior recovered and swung in a wide arc again. He was making use of his weight and flexibility for heavy strikes. Baratheus would have berated him for it, if he had any leeway at all to fight back, but he knew he didn’t have a strong enough grip on his blade to take one of those blows and keep fighting. It was the kind of low-skill muscle-brain tactic he hated, and he was about to die a miserable death to it in the middle of nowhere.

  He looked around. His people were in need of a miracle. Even if he beat this swordsman, who knew how many archers and whatever else lay in wait in the woods to quash the survivors. They weren’t making it out. He plunged his hand into his neckline and brought out the pendant. He snapped the brittle metal in twain.

  And then Hell burst forth.