“I hate boats.” Alysia announced behind Daveth crossly.

“I’m not fond of them either.” Daveth replied calmly as she came alongside him to stand at the rail. Out across the sea, the continent of Rothgar slid by.

Alysia threw a look of shock at him. “You seem so used to them, somehow.”

Daveth glanced at her. “I’ve had experience on boats before.” He paused and then smirked, “Don’t mean I like them, though.” He explained, and gestured at Stronghammer, who was limply draped over the gunwales vomiting up the contents of his stomach for the past twenty years.

They stood in silence next to each other as the land slid by.

“I think that might be Blackwall.” Alysia murmured. Daveth thought back to what he knew of Blackwall, which wasn’t much at all.

“Is that where the Order of the Wolf calls home?” He asked casually, and Alysia stiffened, her face going blank.

“No, Lord Commander.” Her voice was frosty and cool. “It’s merely where Lynnabel and I took passage to your lands.”

“Ah, from Blackwall to Einsamkeit?” He offered, and her voice thawed as she agreed.

“So where is the Order of the Wolf?” Daveth asked casually, and Alysia cooled again.

“Our demesne is in Philippa.” She stated flatly. “It is a contentious land since what you call the War of Liberation. Kingdoms seemingly rise and fall overnight, and make war upon each other constantly.”

“What I call the War of Liberation?” He mused.

“There are many on Rothgar that refer to it as the War of Betrayal, or ‘The Betrayer's Rebellion’." Alysia replied.

Was it just him or had she moved closer to him?

“I don’t know history very well, but Konstantin lon Pavlenko was a liberator.” Daveth argued, confused. Alysia looked up at him, her silvery eyes gleaming in the sun.

“Do you believe that?” She asked him curiously.

“Do you?” He rebutted. She grew pensive for a moment. “Our lands predate the War. We have always been at war with the Anglish for our survival. Our kind have been called mutants, or beastmen, monstrosities and abominations.” She paused in thought for a moment. “But it doesn’t matter what others call us, we are an honorable sorority.” She paused again. “Not one of us would stand in betrayal of another.”

“So he’s a betrayer.” Daveth affirmed, but she shook her head. “I thought he was, but strangely, bafflingly, your people call him a liberator, instead.” She shrugged. “Who am I to judge?”

Daveth nodded at that.

“May I speak freely, Lord Commander?”

Daveth gave her a puzzled look. “Haven’t we been doing just that?” He asked.

Her mouth twisted, and the line between her brows drew down.

Daveth rolled his eyes, and gestured at her.

She closed her eyes in thought, and he could see them moving behind her eyelids as she chose her words carefully.

“You should... wash... yourself.” She offered.

Daveth took a step back at that. “I bathe. Regularly, too.” he argued, and her glare was back, hot sparks in her eyes. “Your clothes and bedding, you fool! They reek of her!” She spat, and whirling, stomped off the deck to the stairs below.

Stronghammer weakly raised his head at the outburst, but lowered it again as he regretted his life choices.

*****

They came at him with no tactics, no strategy, only the press of bodies and the thrusting of spears and swords. They panted and shrieked that he was a violator, a profaner, a blasphemer.

For some reason he was fighting Yamato Shrine Maidens, their eyes burning with zealous, murderous intent. A sword was in his hand, a brutal cut opened one from guts to shoulder and she flew back, spraying blood.

He was unstoppable, relentless. Every move of his sword severed arms, limbs, slashed torsos, separated heads from necks. ****** was beside him, a bow blurring as arrows slipped through the gaps in Maidens, seeking throats, heads, chests. The ground was slick with offal and gore; his knees were drenched in blood, and still they came.

They were fighting in a cavern, and in the center of the cavern, a massive blood-red crystal pulsed with malignant power.

The Shrine Maidens began to pick themselves up, reattaching lost limbs, horrible wounds sealing themselves. As they rose to their feet, their eyes sought his. The fight would not be over so easily.

*****

Daveth woke with a start at the light rapping at his cabin door.

“Who is it?” Daveth groaned, rolling to his feet. He mopped his brow and whispered to himself his mother’s charm.

Audra slipped into the room. “Hey Boss.” She greeted casually, and eyed him carefully. “You’re sweating an awful lot.”

“Nightmares.” He muttered before he caught himself.

“You do seem to have a lot of them.” Audra agreed. “You know, my father claimed a surefire cure for them.” She offered helpfully.

“I’m listening.” Daveth muttered, looking around for his clothes.

“A warm fire, a comfortable life, and a woman that loves you.” She ticked them off on her fingers.

Daveth snorted. “Was he a mercenary?”

She shrugged. “He was a soldier for a while, but when the nightmares became too much for him, he met my mother and settled down.”

Daveth shrugged his massive shoulders and shrugged into his shirt and laced up a leather vest. “You really think a mercenary with nothing to his name could do that?”

“My father did.” Audra replied. “In any case, Aldric wants you to know that we’ve arrived.”

“Swell.” Daveth grumbled.

*****

At some point in its history, the port capital of Metzcal had a name, but it had fallen by the wayside of history’s advance, and was now simply known as “The capital”. Even the Anglish, who technically owned Metzcal, simply referred to it as “Metzcal’s capital.”

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The city itself looked like a haphazard tumble of children’s blocks scattered everywhere, some several stories tall. In the city’s center a ziggurat rose with stately grace, each tier carved deeply with reliefs of fanciful depictions of feathered cats, winged serpents, and other beasts.

The harbor itself was protected in the typical Anglish fashion, with massive squared blocks of stone dragged out into the water to provide a protected cove.

“So this is Metzcal.” Daveth eyed the city from the deck of the ship. Audra nodded wonderingly beside him, eyeing everything with the undisguised curiosity of a country bumpkin.

“Don’t get your throat cut.” Daveth warned and Audra laughed.

“I’ll blend in soon enough.” She replied, and disappeared belowdecks as Aldric began hollering for the Seventh Seal to begin the process of disembarking.

It took several days to disgorge the two hundred troops as well as their Tross, their camp followers. Horses and wagons had to be moved, crated foodstuffs and rolled up tents, and on top of that a good site for a camp had to be located and negotiated for outside of the city.

The leader of The Brotherhood was a robust and powerfully muscular redheaded man by the name of Edwin, and he greeted Aldric with a firm handshake and a word of gratitude for his arrival.

*****

The principal meeting was held between Aldric, Daveth, Edwin, and Moore, the Anglish governor that managed the province of Metzcal, which was uniformly hot, incredibly humid, and teeming with riotous, verdant growth.

“We used to have six major cities besides the capital, you know.” Moore was saying to Daveth as the two of them pored over maps of the province.

“What happened?” Daveth asked curiously.

“The jungle took them back.” Moore replied, and gestured at the map, pointing out where the cities used to be, the snaking river that emptied into the sea, the short ridge of mountains that separated it from Tassili.

“Took them back?” Daveth repeated, turning it into a question.

“Well, the cities were abandoned. Not enough people to keep the roads clear, or even live in them.” Moore replied.

“What happened? Plague?” Daveth guessed.

“Take your pick: The disaster at Sarkomand, the Betrayer’s Rebellion, and the abandonment from the Anglish.” Moore waved his hand.

Daveth frowned in thought. “The Black Plateau incident happened almost four hundred years ago.”

Moore nodded. “The Empire pulled heavily from its territories. We lost more than half of our entire country’s population due to levies. They were determined to beat back the disaster that claimed the Jeweled Cities.”

Daveth nodded thoughtfully at that. If you didn’t have enough people to manage the upkeep of a city, it gradually fell apart. “And then the War of Liberation happened, what, sixty years later?” Daveth offered.

“The Betrayer’s War.” The man corrected, shooting a glare at the giant. “We lost a lot more people when they came to loot and burn our temples to the Golden Lady.” He paused. “We stopped being relevant to the Empire when we no longer had the manpower to send foodstuffs and lumber to them.”

“You’re the Anglish Governor, though.” Daveth pointed out.

Moore snorted. “In name only. I can’t gather any resources or request aid.”

Daveth shook his head at that.

Meanwhile, over at the desk occupied by Edwin and Aldric, a conversation of a different sort had sprung up.

“Beastmen, you say.” Aldric mused thoughtfully.

Edwin nodded. “We got the job you recommended us; growing this city in preparation to reclaim the land. It’s good work; challenging.” He leaned forward a little bit “The heat can be a bitch, though.” He murmured in a low voice, and Aldric nodded in complete agreement.

This wasn’t the thin, high, dry heat from the deserts of Bel-Arib, this was a heat that made the air thick and difficult to breathe. It was so uniformly hot that water actually condensed on people the same way water would condense on the outside of a cold drink on a hot day.

“The first beastmen we ran into were the pig kind. Snouts, tusks, you know the type, I’d imagine.” Edwin explained, and Aldric nodded. They weren’t as populous on the continent of Hesperia to the north, but Aldric had seen them.

“They were easy to kill. Sometimes we didn’t even have to do that; they’d just run away into the jungle.” Edwin continued his explanation. “But then the cats came. Big, brawny, and very pissed off. We’re not real warriors, Aldric, you know this. Moore’s a good man, but he can’t raise an army.”

“...and so.... Me.” Aldric finished. Edwin nodded, and Moore, who had twisted around when he’d heard his name called, nodded as well.

“We can pay you standard auxiliary wages.” Moore offered, and Aldric chuckled.

“Auxillary wages? Really? You think we’re a charity? Solving problems isn’t our bag. We deal in death, friend. You want to hire the Seal, you’ll let us quarter in the city, you’ll exempt us from taxes, and you’ll triple the auxiliary wages paid daily, or we’ll get back on those boats in your harbor and fuck off. We’re not here for an adventure.”

In Hesperia, the Anglish offered jobs for “adventurers”, people with too much time on their hands and not a lot of common sense. For the lower nobility, who could afford decent equipment and training, they were known as auxiliaries, mercenaries, or detached forces and were paid a few silver coins per job.

For peasants who wanted to become adventurers, the jobs were more simple: mark this many trees for lumberjacking. Collect this many pounds of this particular herb. Check this area for signs of gold or silver or any other precious metal, things like that. Those unfortunate saps were given a handful of copper coins for their troubles.

Moore’s face grew red with anger at Aldric’s demands.

“You think for a second I’ll let some jumped up merc leader quarter his troops in my city-” Moore began, but Aldric stood up from the table.

“You know who I am, Moore.” Aldric stated coolly.

“I don’t serve under you anymore, Aldric.” Moore replied, and Aldric nodded. “No shit. But you know what kind of outfit I run. The expectations I have for my men. You think I’d let them run around without conscience, taking everything that isn’t nailed down?”

Daveth lifted his eyebrow at that statement, but wisely kept his mouth shut. There’d been plenty of times Aldric had allowed everything to be taken that wasn't nailed down.

“...Fine. They can stay in the city.” Moore finally capitulated. Aldric nodded.

“Fantastic news. Do you know where the beastmen are coming from?” Aldric asked, moving over to the map.

Moore gestured meaninglessly at the map. “You know the pig-types, right? They roam around in packs, scavenging what they can scavenge. No real territory. The cats, though- I suspect they’ve got at least one of the old cities as their territory. Can’t pin it down because we haven’t got the men.”

Aldric glanced at Daveth. “What do you think?

Daveth glanced down at his captain, and then over to Edwin. “You got one of those steam-powered beasts that maybe could clear us a road?”

Edwin blinked and adjusted his glasses on his nose. “We- ah, we haven’t had any inclination to build one.”

“Well, there goes that idea.” Daveth muttered sarcastically and armed sweat from his brow.

“No shit.” Aldric agreed. “We could’ve put the crank gun and the cannon on that thing and drive it to each of the cities, depending on the road conditions.”

“You have a crank-gun?” Edwin shot to his feet, his face painted with excitement.

Daveth eyed Aldric, who smirked back. “Yes, yes we do.”

*****

“Thoughts?” Aldric asked over dinner.

“If you want to hunt the predators, first kill the prey.” Lynnabel offered, taking a large chunk of boar and adding it to her plate. “The predators will eventually bare their fangs at you. You needn’t hunt them, they will come to you.” She offered, and Daveth raised an eyebrow.

“I disagree.” Alysia replied, fixing her sister with a glance. “A proper hunter need not waste chasing his prey; patience will bring them to you.” She disputed. “I believe my case is stronger than Lynnabels by proof- both the pig-beastmen and the cat-type beastmen have attacked. I counsel patience. They’ve attacked before, they will do it again.”

“I say we burn the forest down.” Stronghammer opined, downing a shot of the local liquor known as T’Keela. He bit into a green fruit and made a horrible face. “In Nauders, we prepared Timwaite Pass to be a killing ground for the Hymir-kin and abominations that come south during the winter. That forest-”

“Jungle” Aldric corrected helpfully.

“-Jungle, then,” Stronghammer corrected, “gives them an advantage to attack from any direction.”

Aldric twitched in surprise. “I can see why Daveth brought you on board.”

“My point stands: Burn the forest down. It’ll give us a clear area to fight and smoke out our enemies.” Stronghammer finished.

“I say we turn Eirawen loose.” Morden offered, and wiped his face with a cloth. The heat really was terrible. “Freeze it all. Everything here is probably quite used to the heat, which means they’re probably not used to the cold at all.”

“Tempting.” Aldric agreed.

“If we venture out into the jungle, it could be another Ankar-Set.” Daveth judged. “We moved from oasis to oasis. Here, we’d be moving through the jungle from city to city. There’s no real guarantee that the beastmen are staying in these abandoned cities. What if they’re roaming the countryside? We could end up blazing a path to each city and miss the target entirely.”

Aldric nodded. “For now, I think Alysia’s plan holds the strongest bet. We’ll set up shop around the sites where the beastmen were spotted and see if we get a nibble.”