A runner found the companions as they gathered themselves. They were wanted at the command tent. Vinny and Yacob were pale. The horror of a battlefield like this was a first for them. Sas’cha was quiet, her usual aggressiveness subdued. Wali’s face was hard, his thoughts locked in, and his mind spun.
The runner led them to a large cluster of tents at the edge of the city. The central tent was bustling with activity. Runners came and went every few seconds; bloodied soldiers also entered and left the tent. None of them looked triumphant. They looked haggard. Inside the tent was a hive of activity. One table had a gathering of officer around it. They were gathering messages from the runners. Another had a different group of officers, one of which moved back and forth between the messenger’s table and their own. The sand table had been moved from the platform into this tent. The situation had changed and looked grim. The yellow barrier was well represented on the sand table, with trolls and Rags on one side and the army’s remains on the other.
Marshal Elimon stood next to the table, conferring with a collection of senior officers. He looked up as the companions approached. His face darkened, “Thank you for achieving the first goal of your mission. Do you have any idea of what that thing is?”
Wali walked forward to stand at the table; command briefings were something he knew well. He had been a senior enlisted advisor for years. He looked at the Marshal, “He calls himself Rags, a herald of one of the Demon Lords that were sealed away long ago.”
The collection of officers looked at Wali, confused. One of the mages leaned forward, and she was the oldest-looking elf Wali had seen. White hair hung limply down to her waist, and her silvery robes shimmered diaphanously. Her gaze narrowed as she looked at Wali closely. He felt the magic in that gaze but did nothing to respond. “He speaks honestly.” She said. “What do you know of this boy?” She said in her high crackling voice.
“First, don’t call me ‘boy.’ I’m not yours to command nor disrespect.” Wali said in a stern rebuke. Yacob and the others looked at Wali, surprised to see the change in his demeanor. The elven woman was about to say something when Wali continued, “The heralds are the lieutenants of the Demon Lords. The bindings holding those ancient beings are crumbling. This is the first herald we have encountered. Beyond a frightening amount of power, I don’t know anything about it.” His tone was calm and professional, unexpected for a human child of sixteen. She paled as Wali’s words left his mouth; her spell had already established the truth.
Marshal Elimon looked at the mage next to him. “You are the Loremaster. What do you know?”
She looked to have aged a hundred years as she thought through the implications of Wali’s words. “The Demon Lords are old myths at this point to most civilizations. We have scant records in our libraries that predate the city itself. They speak of monstrous entities that sought to challenge even the gods themselves. They brought a nearly endless war but were defeated and sealed away eventually. That’s the short version. Each Demon Lord had three heralds. Some were killed, some banished to other realms, and some disappeared. These heralds were shadows of their masters, but each wielded unique and powerful magic. It was said that a single herald stood his ground against a dragon that would not bend its knee to the Demon Lord and defeated the dragon. The ancient lore is not my specialty, but this is what I know.”
“If it helps, he called himself the Skintaker. His skirt is made from the flayed flesh of intelligent creatures.” Wali said.
The loremaster pulled an alabaster tablet from within her robes. She wrote with a finger on its surface. She looked up and said, “We will share this and see what the loremasters of the elven kingdoms find out.”
Marshal Elimon looked wrung out as he said, “I think we have a day before his army is reconstituted. The current estimate is that we were able to kill about thirty percent of his forces, and they removed about forty percent of ours. I think that Rags creature will be able to puncture the barrier if he chooses to exert himself. He will come in at some point. We need to find a way to stop him.”
Wali sat staring at the maps for a bit, thinking hard. This was a tactician’s problem, something he knew well enough. He had been trained by the best of the 1958 US Military and then honed over twenty years. Magic changed things, but mundane ways of setting a static defense against superior numbers were a specialty of his. He looked up at the marshal, “How much of the city’s supplies can we draw on?”
There was one Field Manual that Wallace had read extensively, for entertainment even. Military FM’s were notoriously boring. However, this one was more along the lines of the Anarchist’s Cookbook. Wali couldn’t remember the numbering anymore, but the title Herbicide and Flame Field Expedients had stuck in his head for decades.
Wali shared his plan with the Marshal. Elimon liked the idea and had the quartermaster detailed to assist Wali. The workforce was simple. The whole city was filled with people watching and waiting. Word spread quickly of the needs that Wali had detailed to the quartermaster. Coopers opened their doors, and distilleries, tanners, and chandleries were raided for supplies. Carpenters were dragooned into service, and wagons of supplies were dragged out of the city. Wali and the quartermaster directed traffic as people and barrels were dragged out onto the field.
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Several hours later, lines of barrels stood out on the field inside the barrier. More were being carefully delivered as time went by. Rags watched the operation, and it was clear the herald was making plans. He had directed the trolls to feed and sate themselves, then to gather at the edge of the barrier. Now the green-skinned monsters were pounding on the wall with stones and logs turned into clubs. The sound of impacts could be heard across the field.
The marshal had not been idle either. The remains of his forces had been healed, rested, fed, and reconstituted from the city’s guard forces. Earthworks had been dug and erected by mages and hard work, but they would be of little consequence to the trolls. They were there to contain the battle to this side of the city. If the herald decided to take his forces to another side of the city, all the preparations would be lost. Rags appeared to want to defeat the elven defenders in detail before entering the city. The trolls saw the city as a big pot of tasty elven meat, and Rags was in-charge.
The loremasters had been able to discover very little. The herald known as Skintaker or Rags was not in recorded history. The Demon Lord Gavo had been the first one bound into stone, the first victory for the world in the endless war. The heralds of Gavo were not more than footnotes. Two had been “defeated” in earlier battles and bound like their master; the third was said to have gone missing. Wali supposed that Rags was this missing third herald.
According to Marsai, the bindings on the Demon Lords and their heralds were weakening, but all were actively monitored. How and why Rags the Skintaker had been in hiding for so long and just now chose to rear his head was still a mystery.
The plan was in place, and the preparations were incomplete but in progress when Rags finally decided it was time to move. Night had fallen hours ago; the battlefield was lit by magical lamps floating above the area and the glow of the barrier.
When Rags stepped up to the barrier, horns sounded across the elven side. The loose formations of troops quickly reformed. The herald appeared to say something, but no one was there to listen, nor could sound pierce through the barrier. The demon sneered and slammed a fist into the barrier. A spiderweb of cracks shot out from where his fist fell. The boom-crack of the punch was heard across the city. The cracks started to seal themselves when he struck again. Boom-crack! Rags struck again in the same place, widening the spiderweb faster than it could heal. Boom-crack! He struck again and again. He wound up for a fifth blow, and they all saw a swirl of dark blue energy gather around his fist.
That was the final blow for the elven barrier. The blue energy flowed into the cracks Rags had made, chasing through the spiderwebs and pulsing with power. The elven city watched in horror as the barrier shattered like tempered glass. Something exploded in the towering palace in the center of the city. Smoke billowed from the side of the white marble structure. The golden shards of power dissipated into motes of dust, and the trolls came rushing forward.
The line of slavering green monsters lumbered forward. Gathering speed, they charged through the widely spaced barrels. Some kicked at the stout wooden kegs shattering them. Dark oily liquid spilled out from the drums, sticky and pungent. The liquid did not harm the trolls, so they began to ignore the obstacles.
Wali watched and waited, glancing at the Marshal. The marshal would trigger this phase of the battle. He raised a wand and fired a shrieking yellow flare into the sky. A hundred mages worked spells, and the barrels began to burst. They exploded outward as a hundred spells pressurized the interiors of the liquid, shattered the wooden staves, or crushed the kegs. The oily liquid spread out across the battlefield. Sticky, oily stuff covered the trolls; some had it up to their knees while others were drenched.
Rags knelt and dipped a finger into the liquid as he walked forward. He raised a finger to sniff, and his eyes went wide. A shrieking red flare shot up from the marshal as Rags began to yell.
Flames rippled forward from the lines of troops and mages. The fire caught the oily stuff and spread through the ranks of charging trolls.
Most folks could make a little fire magic if just to light a candle. When everyone capable of this tiny bit of fire coordinates their efforts, a sheet of flame shoots forward from each formation of troopers. It held little heat or power. In fact, it was not intended to harm. It was there solely to ignite. The oily fluid quickly caught fire, and blue and orange flames spread quickly through the rapidly panicking trolls. Fire was anathema, and they were running through a field of it.
Wali’s studies of Army FM’s and his own experience had taught him a few things. Tar, pitch, lamp oil, and high-purity alcohol make pretty good napalm. Of course, they would separate given time, but a touch of magic could delay that. The alcohol provided something easily lit, generating the heat needed for the oil to burn. This, in turn, caught the tar pitch.
With a whoosh and crackle, trolls began to scream and flail around. Sticky pitch and tar burned into their flesh, leaving wounds that would not heal even with their prodigious regeneration. The trolls at the front of the charging line tried to push forward, but here was where a few earthworks came into play. A simple ditch had been cut, the dirt piled on the defender’s side as a bulwark. The panicked and berserk trolls charged at the rampart and ditch.
If the trolls weren’t in fight-or-flight mode, it wouldn’t have been more than a simple leap to clear the ditch and be atop the bulwark. As the few that made it to the bulwark leaped, they were met with a line of raised pikes. The leaping trolls were on fire and could not stop from impaling themselves on the waiting pikes. The pikes were released as the trolls fell back into the ditch, where they fought like crabs in a bucket—bellowing green crabs on fire in a bucket.
Wali watched in sickened satisfaction as his plan decimated the trolls. He watched eight of the trolls, slow ones who had been at the very back of the mob, turn and flee.