----------------------------------------
Act V: River Born
----------------------------------------
Most charted settlements were abandoned, with even riverside compounds now high and dry. The rapidly drying riverbed of the Torrent was awash with wrecked boats, both local and Jean’in. They fled through an abandoned village with a burned-over motte on their way further inland. The population now lived deeper in the rainforests, away from the old riverside and some no longer viable tributaries. Vegetation grew only thicker and thornier the further they continued into the interior.
“Alright. Last time we saw each other, we were repelled from the old temple complex off the rapids,” Rita said. “You were captured by the Warden. Kur, Sam, and Lloyd were injured, Sara and I barely got them out of there.”
“Where are they?” Maat asked.
“Okay. Kur’s well enough to walk; might see him somewhere around here. Been repurposing some Jean'in healing rituals to mend casts and splints to bone. Speeding up recovery times. Rest are recuperating at a camp not far from the dam. Should be ready to go for this last push.”
War bands were gathering at this hidden settlement near-constantly. Rita’s was just the first.
“Haven’t heard from the Laval territories in a while. Maybe the young gun is going to come through? Or maybe they’re at least engaged in a bloody civil war. Either way, out of our hands.”
The leaders of various war parties gathered in a central, camouflaged yurt. Each brought a scrap of parchment with coded symbols, which was laid on a particularly flat rock. At first the resulting quilt didn’t look like anything at all. Once twelve war parties arrived, the southern shoreline could be made out along the border. When thirty war parties were present, about two-thirds of the Torrent watershed could be made out. While the actual symbols were coded, Maat could make out a bird-blood died X marking the location of now-abandoned compounds. There were smaller, burnt-in X shapes. One hovered over the hollow in which this very camp resided, so Maat presumed this marked the locations of war-camps or transplanted settlements.
By the time night fell, the now-completed map was illuminated by torchlight. Two blemishes remained – one missing patch near the corner and one just east of the dam. The war parties responsible for these corners of the map never arrived. More likely they were either delayed or dead, a no-show either way, so the meeting continued without them.
“Alright. Messenger birds have come in. Quarterchief has the brunt of our forces down near old Secondhome. Going to attack the keep right at nightfall two days from now.
“If we march now, we can join them!” said a representative from a clan from the far-western coast.
“To the keep!” came a cry from roughly half of the attendees. “Make a trophy out of the skull of the flayed eared one!”
“Hold your horses,” Rita said. “Balls, guess you guys don't know what horses are. Moving on. This attack is going to cut off all resources and reinforcements to the dam. The garrison currently there is going to turtle up, complete their defenses, and work a small nation’s worth of forced laborers to death while they finish the dam. Meanwhile the stormheaths will continue to slowly die, and with everyone at war during peak harvest season there will be neither food nor water left to starve them out.
“Yeah,” Kur’iel entered the yurt. “If we blow the dam before the main offensive, the river should return to its maximum extent. Reinforcements can row up to the very edge of the keep.”
“And there’s the slave labor currently suffering at the dam,” Sara entered the yurt at Kur’s side. “If we infiltrate the dam and free the prisoners, they can help us overthrow the camp from the inside.”
“These prisoners. They’re a bunch of subaltern,” said a local war-commander of some Bird-herder clan. “It’s said some are even Jean’in convicts from overseas. What use do we have for these untouchables and other-islanders? We are going to fight and potentially die for the good of others? This is not how we do things.”
“Look, the Jean’in – the mercenaries, not the forced laborers – would kill us all, left to their own devices. Their forge priests might keep you alive, but would replace every temple, caste, and custom with foreign equivalents – which you despise. We’ve all fought together so far-”
“That was for mutual survival,” said a bird-herder.
“And mutual survival requires mutual victory – and quickly. Victory runs through both destroying this dam and then sailing down south to take the keep. The coastal clans can defend their beachheads against reinforcements from there. But without a dam, and without a base of operations it’s going to be too expensive for them to keep throwing money into trying to tame this island.”
Rita’s speech swayed the crowd, and a good six out of ten war chiefs gave their agreement.
A handful of bird-herders grumbled, took their pieces of the map, and went home. The primary area of operation remained unsullied, and so the attack was on.
----------------------------------------
Night was spent packing up the camp, gathering a few last stragglers, and prepping weapons and foodstuffs for a long march. Tamed centurion birds were in short supply here, as the more uneven terrain of the upper stormheaths rendered them less effective. As a result, everyone not actively holding a war club (and even some who were) needed to port the war band’s food rations on their backs.
At the earliest rays of sunlight, the combined war party took off to the north and east. They marched through the heat of the afternoon, meeting up with three of four expected war parties before the stifling midday humidity began to wane.
By afternoon they’d reached a scantily forested hilltop, the point of no return. Everywhere else in the stormheaths was flat, and so they could see clear to the dam and cliffs, still a half-day’s march away, and even just barely make out the shoreline to the south.
“The rest of the bird herders must have taken their ball and gone back across the river,” Rita said. “No matter. We’ve doubled our numbers. Should be enough, so long as our cover isn’t blown.”
Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.
Maat looked about as the entire camp prepared to move out. He traveled light – most of his affects being confiscated aboard that prison ship. There wasn’t much to park.
“Mind if I spend some time crafting something?” he asked Rita.
“Hmm? What do you have in mind?”
“Just a weapon.”
----------------------------------------
Maat first had to choose some wood. Even parched, the stormheaths had plenty to choose from. Just a cursory check around the camp revealed a near perfect specimen: a stillborn whitewood sapling, poking near ramrod straight up through some rocky soil near the cliffs. It would never grow to the towering heights of its fellows further down near the coast. But it could serve Maat well enough for his purposes.
With the labor of only an hour, he cut off a span of straight wood a bit larger than his arm. It was blocky and round and would take a great deal of effort before it could be forged into something useful, even as a club. But he had all night to himself.
The details of what he was trying to do were relayed in one of the ancient ancestral textbooks. Rita translated it for him. He marked the wood every few finger lengths. A rough approximation of some Earth measurement. Next, the text called to ‘sand’ the wood down into a shape ideal for pummeling and swinging. But they had no sand handy, and less of a clue how it could possibly be used in this manner.
Again, the Stormheaths would provide.
Maat found an acid-dripping plant and, oh-so-carefully, melted the wood down in a uniform fashion. By morning he had forged a new war club – replacement for his father’s old bat, thick at one end and tapered off and narrow near the handle. Some fabric tied taught around the handle helped form a splinter-free grip, completing the weapon. If there were time still he’d imbed thorns, briars, and bits of obsidian into the thick end, to cause further damage to his foes. But this rounded model was where instructions for the ancestral Texan war bat ended.
The elders claimed these war bats were used for hitting balls long distances in ritual combat. This first attempt at making one with local supplies from the camp would not work so well for those purposes. But whitewood was far denser and heavier than the wood available to the elders of ancient Texas. Anyone who got hit by this would feel it through their barkwood armor.
----------------------------------------
By the next evening a long column of five combined war parties numbering in the hundreds fanned out all along the west shore of the Torrent, now barely just a trickle in a barren riverbed.
“Alright. This barricade before us is called ‘barbed wire,’” Rita said. “Popular back home. Probably one of Rick’s ideas to bring it here.”
There was only one spyglass for the entire war party. Rita tossed it to Maat.
“So, the labor camp is over there.” Rita pushed the spyglass over towards a group of wooden shacks near where the Torrent’s western shore once was.
“Huh. They cut down all the vegetation for a good mile around, then used that spare wood for their defenses,” Maat said. “Flatten the heaths and use the refuse to fuel further conquest. Clever, for a bunch of murderous bastards.”
Indeed, the very shacks used to hold the prison labor were made of whitewood.
“Careful, or you’re goanna start swearing like your dad when he was your age,” Rita said, scanning with the spyglass. “It’ll take decades for the larger trees to even begin to grow back. That’s if anyone survives to replant them. But there’s no chance of that happening if we don’t blow that dam. Preferably tonight.”
----------------------------------------
Now how to get in…
Either bank had multiple layers of wooden ramparts, spiked pits, and barbed wire.
The Torrent riverbed had a relatively paltry layer of defenses; guess they didn’t expect anyone to try to swim into camp. Of course, there were also watch towers and on-the-ground sentries to worry about.
As for the Torrent itself, the drastically reduced river still flowed through at a relative trickle. Just enough was allowed through for the largest Jean’in steamboats to continue up and down river. Deep in the camp was a dug-out port that could fit at least three of them, with room to turn around and continue back towards the sea.
Rita swore she had a way to destroy the dam. But they needed a disturbance within the camp to discombobulate the foreign mercenaries long enough to launch a frontal assault upon these fixed fortifications.
That’s where Maat came in. He was going to put that river luck to the test one more time and sneak in under the river. From the artificial port, it was a relatively unguarded cargo yard between there and the prison camp.
Maat dived into the Torrent. It was surprisingly clear, the silt having been left behind as the river shrunk. He could see well enough to continue onward to the north. His one lifeline was a hollowed-out reed poking out, nigh-imperceptibly, at the surface of the water.
Guards patrolled near the new waterline. They carried odd mechanical torchlight that left a blinding sheen at the water’s surface. Maat almost thought that the silt-free Torrent was going to betray him, but the false torches must have saved him, having driven the water’s surface opaque. None noticed the straw poking out of the water, moving slowly against the current.
It was only Maat here. More people would increase chances of discovery.
Maat emerged onto an empty dock. There were no ships moored, and so no reason for any dockworkers to be here. Belatedly, Maat realized that their last inbound transport had likely been the very prison ship he’d been interned upon.
A few late boxes were left in a loading area. Maat investigated and found… some leather dusters. Spare uniforms for the Jean’in. He’d been hoping for guns. These would do.
Freshly changed into a leather duster, with his face obscured by one of those wide-brimmed hats, Maat had free reign of the dock area.
Signs were posted in unreadable Jean’in script. No relation to any tongue or script on the island. Getting caught being illiterate (at least in this language) would quickly reveal Maat as an interloper.
It wasn’t hard to spot the barracks. There was a hastily constructed and austere but rather well-kept guards’ barracks on the far side of the dock. To the west, just beyond a modest supply depo full of spare lumber and massive cinder blocks, was a much larger camp surrounded by high walls and barbed wire. A single doorway with a gatehouse-controlled access, in theory.
In theory, because guard patrols, interrogators, and people carrying in paltry food rations passed through at a near-constant basis. The door was wide open, with guards merely keeping tabs to ensure nobody was blatantly a prisoner trying to escape. They waved Maat in.
Lapsed Jean’in security protocols meant gains for the resistance.
Maat peeked into the largest barracks. It was locked tight – from the outside. Almost like they never expected anyone to infiltrate the camp, rather than attempt to break out.
Nobody stirred. Maat snuck in and heard a pained groan. There were hundreds of stormlanders, mostly on the floor. Maat found one who appeared to be a Laval subaltern.
“You. I’m here to rescue you. What happened here?”
“They take our dead every night. At least they did. Now they’re just dumped in the no-man’s land.”
“This is the barracks for those who can still work,” said another voice.
“Can you all move? Walk?”
“As well as possible.”
Maat pulled out a pilfered set of wire cutters. He had two of them.
“Cut holes in the western fence. Anyone too weak to fight can escape through there once our diversionary attack hits.”
The new volunteers grabbed the wire cutters and silently passed this message through the long cabin.
Some had been keeping tabs on guard patrol routes, hoping to escape on their own. Now, they waited for a gap in the patrol and snuck out to go cut some near-imperceptible holes in the fence.
With the largest barracks on his side, Maat checked some of the smaller ones. People here were often too sick to move. They’d have to stay put until the battle was over, for good or ill.
Two more cabins contained sick and wounded. Too worse-for-wear to fight, but able to stand at least. They would flee once the war clubs went out.
A fifth hut smelled foul before Maat even opened the door. It was a charnel house, used to hold dead bodies now that their supply ships were no longer coming in regularly.
With all barracks accounted for, Maat pulled his last effect out of the pilfered duster. It was a slinger that would fling one of Rita’s strange devices some fifty feet up in the air.
Maat aimed and fired. The device bloomed into a miniature sun near the top of its arc.
There was an eerie silence, followed by a belated cry from inside the camp.
On the far side of the Torrent, a mighty war cry sounded.
----------------------------------------