CHAPTER 89: Revenge is sweet
“The bandits crossed the Old Forest Road into Berelli Estate’s territory. My scouts are continuing to track them. I know the way.”
“We can move faster but we’ll be at risk if we come across monsters without warning.”
“Don’t worry, we have a large escort scouting the way ahead and around us since morning.”
“Seriously you need to tell me these things. We could’ve made double time if you’d told me that from the start.”
“I’m sorry Sustelia, it’s a bad habit.”
“Yeah, get over it.”
I sighed. She was perfectly right.
“Anyhow, let’s get moving. We can make it to the skirmish site before dark if we hurry.”
It promised to be a long day.
With Ara’s map in my heads-up display, our arrival at the skirmish site early evening meant we still had some time to review the site before the light faded into black. Once again I appreciated the thoroughness of the scolems because Ara’s interpretation of their data looked spot on. Our observations certainly couldn’t add more clarity to it. It was clearly an ambush with no time for Hana to use her deadly bow. Although both Hana and Karato put up a decent fight. Hana’s cracked fist marks lay on the ground in more than one place. I didn’t feel sorry for the bandits who connected with those fists of hers. Sampling the blood found in the environment, Ara determined that the wounds most likely belonged to the bandits, no doubt Karato’s doing. Thankfully, missing were any evidence of Hana, Karato, Schneider or the cart. I assume they were either overwhelmed by bandit numbers or they eventually surrendered.
We camped there for the night but tolerated a steady downpour of rain. All Sustelia and I could do was sit in the tent while the scolems did the scouting for us. Luckily my stored provisions could feed us to which Sustelia scoffed them down faster than I could properly chew them. Relaxing under those circumstances would prove difficult so I asked Ara to read to me an elvish book on plant poisons called, ‘All Mushrooms are Edible at Least Once’. Ah, how quickly sleep blissfully settled on me.
By first light we had already started the next session of walking. Rain the previous evening washed away any indications of the bandits and we reacted solely on the regular information updates I received from the scolems. We discovered the camp stopover the bandits used. They were particularly messy, not worrying to clean up after themselves, as if certain in the knowledge that no one would bother to look.
When they camped, our scolems finally caught up with them having run through the night and confirmed three prisoners were kept in a makeshift cage on Schneider’s cart. From eavesdropping on the bandit’s conversation, we determined that the bandits were heading to their base of operations, a small forest village they must have seized from the locals some time ago. Also, they managed to determine Hana’s, Karato’s and Schneider’s identities which led me to believe their actions may not have been as happenstance as it seemed on the surface. If that was the case, I needed to find out who was the person ultimately responsible for their actions.
“It seems the bandits stopped in a village about a day’s walk away. I think that’s their base of operations.”
I mouthed my thoughts out as Sustelia commented at them.
“Good strategic position. Lots of forest to quickly retreat into and disappear. Ideal for bandits.”
A few hours on and Sustelia’s words proved truer than she realised. We found the beginnings of a small road leading towards the village.
“Why are we stopping here? Did that creature thing of yours tell you something?”
I nodded.
“Yeah, there’s a guard post with four bandit guards up ahead.”
“Should we attack them?”
“I could send the scolems to ambush them but then our time for action will be limited.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because missing guards will at the very least put the whole place on alert and then we’ll find it many times harder to take any action.”
“Oh, yeah. You got a point there. So, going around then?”
I nodded as we quietly entered the forest and headed left side of the road, deeper into the trees. That took us up a steep incline we found difficult to traverse. It turned out that the bandits picked that spot for guarding because at that point and the road ran through a natural cutting between two steep hills running parallel with the road. As we sweated each step up that steep sided hill, I marvelled at how clever those guards were in putting a guard point in the middle of a natural choke point. In fact, if I were them I would even place some traps somewhere around there.
“Stop.”
My hand gripped Sustelia’s shoulder like a vice. She had been a step ahead of me when I lunged forward, forcefully stopping her by grabbing her. For a microsecond her fist impulse was to retaliate, but her common sense quickly corrected her, forcing her to look down at the ground where my hand pointed. A trip wire lay pressed by her foot. The clever buggers placed a thin thread, low down, between two tree trunks where human nature always took the easiest path.
“Slowly. Very slowly. Release your foot’s pressure.”
I whispered in her ear. From my vantage point I couldn’t see the trigger mechanism. If I had, I would’ve known that releasing the pressure would also trigger the alarm. The wooden rattling noise the trap made wasn’t that loud but for us, it was enough to wake the dead. We heard a commotion on the road and through the trees as the bandits rallied themselves. Distant voices started coming closer.
After three scolems left my core, Sustelia and I hid behind a small fallen rock near the top of the ridge. We couldn’t get any higher because a small, but sheer, cliff stopped us going any further upwards. It also limited our movement forward and backwards, parallel with the road. Our scolems though, behaved admirably. Whatever Ara programmed into them, they used to trigger traps heading away from us, as if some creature had stumbled across the wires. Slowly and surely the voices headed away from the direction of the village until we were clear of the traps and the natural cutting between the hills. That was too close.
The village came into view about an hour later. Fortunately, we found a small hill overlooking the village to the side, off the road. From that vantage point we could watch the comings and goings for a short while. The scolems already had a lot of information regarding the village that Ara collated and rattled off to me while we watched.
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In a nutshell, there were close to two hundred well-armed, and vary mobile bandits. That every one of them seem to have horses meant they had money backing them. A good horse could cost around a gold and then the ongoing maintenance costs hadn’t been included, like supplementary feed, shoeing, and any other costs like stabling. Good horses didn’t usually just feed of grass, they received feed. Stables fed and groomed the horses, keeping them in prime condition. Only the military and merchants kept horses in good condition. Judging by the condition of the horses in the village below us, bandits would need to be included in that list. I didn’t know banditry was such a lucrative industry that such a large group of bandits could each afford horses. Usually, bandits were ex-farmers or ex-military men fallen on hard times and pushed into highway robbery.
“Hey Shane. Do you think those guys are bandits?”
It seemed Sustelia was onto the act as well.
“Not if they keep on saluting each other like that.”
Bandits didn’t need to salute each other because they weren’t military with ranks. Those guys were so hardcore military that they couldn’t casually pass each other without saluting. Obviously they weren’t expecting someone outside their unit to be watching them. That obvious faux pas and the surprising level of armoury they carried said those knights were pathetic actors.
Liberally peppered amongst the so-called bandits were normal village folk going on with their daily lives. I didn’t observe any negative interaction between the bandits and the villagers. The village held around seven hundred villagers and most of the housing, including the outside palisade wall looked well kept. Where some of the house roofing in Dathrod Village used cheaper grass thatching, the houses below us all used more expensive wooden slats. There seemed to be more money in the Berelli Estate. Later, in the evening light of the setting sun, the village lay in forest hues of green and black. White smoke quietly puffed out of chimneys as people went about preparing their suppers, still oblivious to our presence.
The so-called bandits slept in houses apart from the villagers and there were even a few tents accommodating the overflow. From our position it was difficult to say if any villagers were willingly cooperating with the bandits, not that they could say otherwise anyhow. It did seem that food was being made by villagers and passed onto the bandits.
Thanks to the scolems, we already knew where they kept the prisoners, in a locked house towards the rear of the village where regular checking visits by the guards confirmed it. Retrieving our three comrades would be the easy part of our rescue plan. It was the escape that would be difficult given the number of men looking for us we would have to face. My retrieval plan was simple and similarly based on what happened at the dark-elf village. I learned that surprise, superior numbers, speed, and transfer skills were potent weapons.
I must have released close to three thousand scolems from the transfer storage Ara set up for me. Sustelia watched in amazement as the flood of scolems left our position and raced away in the darkness to surround the village. I know what you are thinking. You’re wondering why I simply released thousands of scolems and doing the same old boring thing I did with the dark elves. Well, I certainly wasn’t about to go raging down the main street, waving my weapon in hand like a spaghetti western or some poorly dubbed martial arts movie. I preferred to take my lessons from a page of Sun Tzu’s wisdom and divide superior enemy force numbers to match ours. In my case, the sleeping enemy troops were nicely divided into small houses and tents, how could I pass up on such a truly wonderful opportunity? Quietly achieving that task without making a racket was the challenge. Enter the scolems.
They descended on that large village like a dark-age plague. Although Sustelia couldn’t see much in the darkness and from that distance, I could clearly see from my heads-up display. It looked like a tide of black swept around the closed front entrance gate taking out the stationed guards. A black tide climbed over the parapets, simultaneously taking out the other night watch guards. What shocked me more than the tide of scolems was the silence. Interestingly the scolems held off heading for the horses, but instead went for the sleeping bandits in the houses. Some house doors were already open and the scolems removed the occupants by simply touching them in their beds. Sometimes entire beds disappeared into the transfer storage. Those houses where the doors were either closed were opened with the assistance of a few scolems and the occupants quickly sorted.
When any doors were locked, the scolems knocked on the door with light taps like good guests should. Soon, irritated bandits still dressed in nightclothes would appear at the door and disappear just as quick, leaving their doors invitingly open for the other scolems. Tents were the easiest to sort out. The entire things fell into black holes as the scolems touched the tent fabric and instantly, four bandits disappeared at a time. Horses then followed the bandits and although they were a little spooked, they disappeared at such a rate that the horses were not even aware of what was going on. Soon, every bandit was safely stowed away.
The small prison house containing my friends disappeared as the scolems did the same thing to it as the tents. The scolems did something I never taught them to do. Because the house was somewhat larger than a tent, and one scolem couldn’t create a large enough transfer storage, a group of seven scolems surrounded one scolem, each touching it with a leg. By doing that, they created multiple conduits for all their ethereal energy to pass on to the middle scolem so when it activated the transfer storage attribute to swallow the house all the collective ethereal energy it needed was available. It was pure genius coming from the scolems. If they could cooperate like that, I wondered, what other exciting things would we see in the future?
I swear I heard Ara laugh. That was a first too.
Since everyone we wanted were accounted for there was no reason for the scolems to dawdle in the village and after they plundered the town’s stored provisions they started quietly returning to me. I smiled, even the four guards on the road were experiencing the same treatment as the rest about then. After the last scolem entered the transfer storage I placed the large mustite bar on the core and watched it disappear. Sustelia asked me a question.
“Are we heading back now?”
“No.”
“Huh, why not? Aren’t we finished here now?”
I chuckled at her ignorance.
“I heard an awful rumour about a wood eating moth.”
“Eh, what’s that you say?”
In the town of Taveil a few days afterwards, another drama took place.
“You honestly want me to believe we somehow lost over two hundred elite cavalrymen, and no one knows where they are?”
Berelli’s head of security bowed his head as he spoke, not daring to look his lord in the eyes.
“Yes my Lord. We stopped receiving messages from their captain five days ago. When we sent our troops to investigate the villagers said all the troops, including their horses, vanished overnight without warning.”
“Do the villagers take me as an idiot? How could that number of horses move out of a village without waking the dead? What excuse did they give?”
“My Lord, they all said they were just sleeping naturally. There was no feast that night. We interrogated the village chief and confirmed their story. We also sent out numerous scouts with no results.”
Lord Berelli silently looked at his head of security with a deadly gaze. If it wasn’t for all the years of diligent work, Lord Berelli would have executed him on the spot.
“You can leave.”
There was no point chasing after ghosts. If his top aide couldn’t find the men then no further command from him could change that.
“Yes my Lord.”
“Also, you know what to do with the villagers of that village. I want to send a clear message to the rest of the villages of what happens when they mess with me.”
“Yes my Lord.”
He knew better than to argue with Lord Berelli, especially since his own life hung in the balance at that moment. He also understood the negative impact that would have on the relationship with the surrounding villages. He bowed and exited the room.