Chapter 064: Revolution
Somewhere else, in the countryside of Vanvyra.
COLONEL GUNTHER VON OSTEN
“So, looks like the enemy has finally picked up the trail.” I said loudly, looking over the latest report. “Not really surprising, though it would’ve been preferable if it hadn’t been so soon. Finding the Stone Throne is… less than ideal.”
“It was only a matter or time.” The Prophetess of the Hand of Freedom answered with a sigh and leaned against the backrest of her armchair. Giving us all a pretty nice look at her… assets.
She was one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen. So unnaturally beautiful that it could only be achieved by flesh sculpting. Her clothing was extremely revealing, but she herself looked quite uncomfortable with it, and tried to avoid being seen publicly. Most likely she was mindsculpted into exhibitionism.
Forcefully mindsculpted into exhibitionism. Probably to serve as someone’s sex slave. Which she most likely did, at least until something happened. Something that ended up with her being set free.
Dragonspine Mountains. I hate this place.
Of course, it was pure speculations on my part, since the Prophetess suddenly forgot how to speak each time the talk seemed to drift that way, and our intelligence officer that seemed to have all the information on her wasn’t even a part of our command chain and denied us information on the whim.
It was idiotic from the start to end.
“It still doesn’t help the plan.” General Kirill Hnatiuk added. He was my superior officer accompanying the mission to this Godsforsaken place. He only stopped smoking his cigar when he spoke up - which wasn’t often.
He looked to be seventy years old.. Then again, as a rank 67 aura manipulator he was probably going to see his hundredth birthday at least, unless something bad happens. Like lung cancer.
“It’s not that bad of a problem.” The Prophetess answered him. “All we have to do is temporarily retreat from the area. There is nothing of value to them in the Stone Throne, so they should leave the place after a while.
“And that’s precisely why we should start moving.” Adghar, leader of the Hand of Freedom’s armed forces, decided to go for it. “Ambryxis already knows we are a threat. Scurrying around helps us little. We need to assault the valleys right now.”
“I agree.” General Hnatiuk decided to go for it as well, it seems. He leaned towards the table we sat around.
It was a marvel of imperial techmaturgy. It was less of a table and more of an interactive map. Before we departed, High Command generously shared some old satellite maps of the area. Sure, Apostasy fell a while ago, but it was still much better than the maps that locals had.
He moved the map from the area of the Stone Throne to the northeast.
“We have fifty warriors in the Handar’s Retreat. Twenty five more in the South Valley Watchtower, and an additional one hundred scattered around the surrounding hamlets and villages. Sooner or later the enemy is going to find out our hideouts in that area, and with our main fighting force.” He moved the map south, towards Vanvyra. “I say we mobilize them now. And then start pushing towards the city. Simultaneously, the rest will attack the enemy adventurers and start recruiting people openly, gathering forces in the countryside. Hopefully reinforcing the Vanvyran group before they reach the city.”
“I thought you wanted to wait until spring?” The prophetess seemed undecided. Well, being a very competent magician didn’t make you a competent tactician.
“I wanted to.” The general flinched. “By spring we would have enough soldiers to easily pull off the original plan. Vanvyra… Gehenna, maybe even Ambryxis would fall. But they’ve caught onto our scent. If we give them time, they’ll simply pick us out like sardines from the can. One by one.”
Silence.
Unfortunately, he was right. The situation wasn’t really in our favour. The enemy had numerical superiority and was heavily entrenched. Plus, Long Night. If we hadn’t prepared beforehand, we would be paralyzed. Even then, it still slowed us down and made logistics a major pain in the ass.
Yeah, this was unfortunate. I give it to the Hand, they were motivated and quite smart. With imperial advisors and instructors they quickly changed from a local group of societal undesirables into an armed rebellion in the making. But…
… plan B was pure desperation. Relying on summoning to topple the balance of power, rather than on soldiers and tactics, was always a desperation.
“We know of the location of the Ambryxis adventurers.” Let’s add my own input. “Plus all local garrisons. Outside of Vanvyra there is little to stop us from taking over. We can use the winter to our advantage, actually.” I moved the map over towards Ambryxis. “If we pin down the adventurers in the opening skirmishes, we could send significant detachment to Sankyrion Pass. Blocking it with enough soldiers would force Ambryxis to send its forces through the much longer roads. And if we cause avalanches on at least some of the secondary roads…”
I paused meaningfully. It was a plan I figured out yesterday. Required me to spend some time incognito with local hunters, but I was pretty much sure that with merely a few surgical strikes you could at least double the time required for Ambryxis to send reinforcements, if they decided to risk doing that in the middle of the Long Night.
“So…” Adghar was the first to comment. “We block the way out. We descend from the mountains. Strengthen ourselves with local recruits. Then… Vanvyra.” He looked at the Prophetess. She looked at the map, deep in thought. Finally, she made a decision.
***
Later that day.
“It’s a good plan.” General Hnatiuk sat on his favourite armchair and sighed with relief. “Damn arthritis.”
“It didn’t seem to trouble you when I saw you sparring with our soldiers.” I couldn’t stop myself from this.
Snarky comments to your superiors? One of benefits of coming from the highest echelon of imperial aristocracy. My great-great-great-grandfather was an Imperator. My great-grandfather sold half of his family to Pentagram and collapsed our family’s manor (plus the surrounding countryside) into a magical anomaly, so my heritage wasn’t all bees and daisies, though.
Each family had a skeleton in their closet. We had skeletons in our manor - in the closets, rooms, pantries, everywhere.
“Hah, I can’t help it, they obviously needed some guidance.” I’d still keep the comments to myself, if not for the fact that general was pretty cool with them.
He fell into his thoughts.
Ugh, not again. He is going to rant about this again. Worse, I have additional information about the mission (another perk of being from a rich family), and he will not like it. I was still thinking of how exactly should I relay them to him, and… this wasn’t going to be pretty. At least he kept himself civil when Hand members were around.
“Fucking mission. Fucking Ambryxis. Fucking High Command.” Aaand… it starts again. “This whole mission is pure bullshit. We’re dancing around, playing nice. ‘We can’t antagonize the Tyranny?’” He was almost growling at this point. “Who the fuck cares about the fucking Tyranny’s feelings?! One of us is going to kill the other, it’s written in stone. I don’t fucking care about those assholes.”
He was still using High Imperial. Thankfully. Sometimes he switched to rathenian or varthavian, and oh boy. He knew a lot of curses in them. High Imperial was much more limited in that regard. 90% of it was the word ‘fucking’ in various coniugations.
“General, we aren’t ready for that.” I reminded him.
“We’ll never be ready. We should mobilize the district right after the snow melts. Send cavalry and auxilia as vanguard to scout and cause as much chaos as possible. Send warmachines to secure key mountain passes. Infantry right behind, capturing those shitholes locals call fortresses. Two weeks. Two fucking weeks and Ambryxis is a forgotten memory.”
“Then two weeks more, and Tyranny kicks our asses back to the starting point.” I sighed. “We already did that, remember?” I sat on the other side of the desk, just in time to see the general pulling a bottle from the drawer.
“More varthavian booze?” He shook his head.
“It’s called vodka, you damned barbarian. I know I’m on duty. Report me to the crows if you want.”
Heh. Like I’d do that. I already saw him drinking. His aura cultivation gave him enough poison resistance to drink a bottle of booze like that and barely feel anything.
“I don’t even fucking get what the fuck the Command wants from us.” Aaand… we get closer to the subject. “The two of us to advise the cultists. A logistics specialist to help them survive the winter. Weapons and money. A squad of platinum badge auxilia to teach them how to fight like adventurers, plus for the summoning. Ten soldiers and four knights to guard us. That asshole Numerian.” He sighed. “What a half fucking assed way.”
I was beginning to understand Command’s decision to assign me here. General Hnatiuk was an expert tactician and great organizer (that I was honoured to learn from) but he was also pretty much as politically adept as my dog. He would probably cause an open war already. Probably civil one, if his disdain for politicians went a bit too far.
But yeah, even I saw this as half-assed. Imperium did everything it could to be able to pull out at any given moment. In fact, it actually ordered us to pull out after the Great Summoning concludes.
Which was a stupid name, but locals already had it figured before we came. Couldn’t they make it a bit… harder to figure out? Like, ‘An Awakening’? Or ‘Reckoning’? Or ‘My Grandma’s Apple Pie’?
“Weeell… I might have got some information about that.” He even stopped smoking the cigar, and looked at me… very seriously. “I used some of my family… assets. Von Ostens made a bit of an investigation back at home. It seems that… how should I put it… we are working for the Palace of Prophets.”
“We’re doing WHAT?” He almost let the half-burned cigar fall out of his hand. “What the fuck do the seers want from this?”
“No idea.” I sighed. “But it seems that they are veeery interested in the Great Summoning succeeding. I don’t think they really care about the Hand other than that. Some prophetic bullshit about the Summoning being of grave significance to the Twilight War. And guess who’s helping them.”
The Palace of Prophets had some importance, but it’s influence barely extended outside of the Imperial Ministry of Religious Affairs. If they wanted to have any say in Imperial Army actions (like our mission), they obviously had to have a backer.
“I’m not going to like it, am I?” I sent him a sad smile in answer.
“Brotherhood.”
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
“Oh for Love’s tits.” Not being an Imperial Religion adherent - he followed the varthavian monotheistic Bright Lady. It certainly gave him a leeway in using words like that. At least he didn’t do that publicly. “This just gets better and better, doesn’t it? At least I now get why Numerian acts like he’s number one in this shitstorm. “
An alliance between the imperial assembly of prophets and the Raven Brotherhood was… original. ‘The Crows’ were to the Imperium what Brides of Ambryxis were to Ambryxis. To “Imperium”, not to its Gods.
Nationalistic fanatics, rather than religious ones. Or, to be exact, a nationalistic murdercult that believed that it had a ‘divine’ mission to make sure the Imperium followed the right track and stayed close to the Codex. The Codex was essentially an archive of texts written by the Gods of the Imperial Religion (that only the Brotherhood and the newly enthroned Imperators could read, though there were summaries existing in the open), describing what the Imperium should look like. Including everything, from the notes on how agricultural works should be done to dozens of chapters about military tactics, strategy and logistics, written personally by Warmaidens, Ember and Audacity.
Ravens were useful. It was hard to find an Imperator gone crazy (with or without Pentagram’s help) that didn’t end up suffering a sudden heart attack caused by their blades. When Imperium worked well they prefered to stay in the shadows, serving as spies for it. But sometimes… sometimes they started scheming.
For the greater good of the Imperium, of course. Which was quite a noble goal, at least until Numerian stabs us in the sleep for that very reason.
“So… The Crows, together with the seers… are using us to make sure the summoning succeeds.” General decided to sum this up. “A summoning that is for some reason important for Twilight War. Which, if I remember correctly, is some great war during which, just as in Dawn War, Gods are going to get their hands dirty. I remember that correctly?”
“More or less. It could end up being like the Dawn War, the key word being ‘could’.” I answered him. “The prophecies are obviously vague. It isn’t written in stone. There’s some sort of apocalyptic trigger after which the war will either happen or not. It might include the entire world, or not. And it might lead to the End Times… or not."
“So we know literally nothing. Prophets. Ugh. We should just load them in one of those fancy Apostasy period cannons and launch them someplace where they won’t be making trouble.” He went silent for a while. Thinking. Then he returned to me. “Well, if the Twilight War truly is coming, maybe I’ll actually see the war against Ashkar. At least I know they are in for real.”
“Hmm?” What was that last part?
“You didn’t notice that?” He chuckled. “You still have to learn a lot. You are good, I give you that, but you still lack experience.” You don’t have to remind me that my position is a pure case of nepotism. I’m twenty five years old and I’m already a colonel! At least imperial houses kept pushing their more competent members up the imperial ladder, to avoid becoming the Crows’’ target for rampant corruption and sabotaging the Imperium. “The map the Command gave us… it includes changes to the terrain that happened recently. Despite the satellites being decommissioned after the end of Apostasy.”
“Wait, you mean…” Oh. “They weren’t decommissioned completely. At least some were left in secret. And now, someone above us is concerned enough to risk the world learning that the Imperium can watch them from the skies.” He nodded.
“Good. Just don’t divulge that any further.” I nodded. This sounded like the type of knowledge that might make Numerian stab us for real. “For now, I think we should figure out a plan B just in case everything suddenly went to gehenna.”
“We are already using plan B.” He sighed.
“So it’s plan C.” Yes. That might be a very good idea.
***
In the manor.
AVHAR KHAN
We returned to the manor. Pretty beaten up (again). And much less successful than we’d all hoped. Melvar was out of commision for a while. Most of our members were wounded or just had to rest for a while. We did succeed, and the ‘enemy’ lost one of its bases, some money and about ten to fifteen combatants.
Compared to what we hoped for, it was nothing. Stone Throne was a major base of the Hand. Up to one hundred people, both combatants and civilians. Out of that, we managed to get maybe 10 to 15 percent. It was beyond pathetic.
NPCs were surprised to see Vasyr and Vhera. They shrugged off all questions.
We recuperated for few a days. Then Layla called me.
Ugh, what is it now?
When I entered her room, she was busy working over some techmaturgical contraption. She barely noticed me coming.
“Oh, you came.” She took a step back. “I… have a problem. The communication device that I used to contact the tribune seems to have stopped working. You are an amalthian, could you take a look?”
Most people that saw me thought I was human. Amalthians were rare. As in, ultra-rare. Besides, from the purely administrative point of view, most countries treated as humans. A weird subspecies, but still humans.
“Alright, I’ll take a look.”
It took me a relatively short while to understand we were thoroughly fucked.
“Sound the alarm.” She looked at me without understanding. “It’s not broken. It’s jammed.”
I had a perfect sense of time. Maybe three seconds after I finished talking, the first siege spell hit the building. Windows exploded, sending glass shrapnels through the room. But I casted Inhuman Resilience the second I understood what was happening… and I shielded Layla with my body, as I could feel the spell coming.
We were still stunned by the explosion… and almost sent flying by the shockwave. Then another explosion shook the building.
Oh God, not good. Not fucking good.
I grabbed Layla by the arm and pulled her still stunned ass from the room.
Another explosion. The door at the other end of the corridor were blew out. I could see the room on the other side burning. I quickly entered Nexus and written a message to all party members.
Avhar Khan [P]: Haul your asses away from windows and arm yourselves.
The manor was big. Almost too big.
“Shitshitshit.” Layla’s brain started working again. “We are sitting ducks here.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.” Another explosion shook the building. One of the doors opened up. Lybaer and Lena ran out. Together? Huh.
“What’s happening?!” Lybaer shouted to me.
“The Cult.” Instead of me, another adventurer answered. He was from one of the new silver badge parties. Fought in the mine with us. He ran inside, with an arrow sticking from his arm. “A whole lot of them. And they are pissed.”
Now that I think about, wasn’t he on guard before the building?
“How many?” Layla decided to dig.
“Too many. I couldn’t see well, but there are at least fifty of them.”
With Melvar in working condition and everybody prepared to fight we could at least try to take them on. Siege spells were a powerful trump card, but their casters were bound to run out of magic to power them up after a short bombardment. But scattered, without any preparations Now? We were going to get massacred.
Plan B.
“Lybaer, go find the lord’s son and the manager. Bring them back or at least have them tell you if there is a secret exit from the place. Send everyone you find to the basement. Lena, go to the lower floor and send people there as well. You, after me.” I said to the wounded adventurer.
Avhar Khan [P]: At least fifty enemies. They will storm the building after artillery preparation. Get everyone you see into to the basement. Grab every piece of warm clothing you come across.
Another tremor. Looks like the cult finally stopped fucking around.
***
The bedroom where Lord’s son lived got hit by a siege spell, and he lost consciousness. A maid that just so happened to be there with him dragged him out and got help. Lybaer brought them back, together with some adventurers. Mostly without equipment.
The slave managing the place did, however, survive unscathed. In fact, he was in the basement when the assault came. Judging from the smell, he was indulging in his lordship’s wine cellar.
There was a way out. An old tunnel. We fled through it right before the Hand stormed the building.
We had to leave the wounded that couldn’t walk. Including Melvar. The son of the Lord was lucky enough to regain his consciousness back just as we were about to leave him.
We still lost a lot of equipment. Especially the silver badges, since Players and their party members stored their weapons and armor in the Inventory. We were in no shape to fight.
Some of the Hand soldiers tried to follow us through the tunnel, but stopped after a brief skirmish. Me and my party served as a rearguard. At least until we reached middle point of the tunnel, as there was an old enchantment that allowed one to cave in the tunnel in a controlled way.
We emerged from the tunnel few hundred meters away from the manor. We could see it burning. Seems like the Hand failed to control the flames caused by the siege spells.
My party. Vasyr. Vhera. Vasyr’s slave (kept close to him all the time). Lybaer. His elven rogue. About two silver badge parties, but heavily incomplete and with many wounds. Layla. The son of the lord, his elder slave deputy and several civilian workers that decided to accompany them in exile.
Yeah, well, I could think of only one place that was obviously safe, especially if the Hand of Freedom really started its rebellion. Vanvyra. With a batalion of soldiers, a lot of witch-hunters and the city walls, it was bound to hold out for a while.
It was still going to take a while. Especially if they keep following us.
***
They did follow us in the end, though actually figuring out where we went took them a while. Long enough to break away from the enemy. So while they still followed us, we were a bit ahead of them.
I used Syna’s sniping as a deterrent. While the enemy was faster than us, each time they got too close, they were suddenly facing a well hidden sniper. Sure, Syna wasn’t going to shoot rebels loyal to the Imperium to death (unless Leria ordered her, and she wasn’t going to do that). But she could still wound them and force them to take cover for a while.
There was an open rebellion going on, after all. Feeding everyone was a major pain, since most of the villages we ran into were already occupied by the Hand. Few castles and forts seemed to still be held by loyalists, but most of them fell as well.
Jesus, these guys are good. They pulled a real blitzkrieg on the whole area. Most of the fortified positions were already infiltrated before the rebellion even started, and were promptly captured by small strike forces after the infiltrators opened the gates.
Not only were we hungry, but it was also damn cold. We lacked proper winter clothing. Only with magic did we manage to avoid frostbites. At least water wasn’t that much of a problem. And the enemy seemed everpresent.
The ranks of the Hand quickly swelled with new recruits. The quasi-adventurers they used were merely special forces, equal to imperial Auxillia. Adventurers working for military, essentially. Now they began freeing slaves that wanted to be freed and fight. Before the snow melts, they’ll have a regular army counted in thousands. Probably with help of ‘discharged’ Imperial Army sergeants, that officially weren’t a part of it anymore, so even if they were caught, Imperium could deny its involvement.
Pragmatic benevolence. Huh.
The whole region was in chaos. Despite -45C temperatures, some people still fled to the forests. This actually helped us, because you could see a lot of fires and smoke each night, so it made following us harder. There were skirmishes here and there, most likely between the Hand of Freedom and some surviving elements of local forces, probably hailing from overwhelmed fortresses and outposts, like our manor.
We steered clear of it. Nothing good could come from that. We wanted to reach Vanvyra, and that was a priority.
On the third day we were painfully reminded that it’s hard to make civilized revolutions, even in the noblest causes. We ran into mass graves. Fresh. The ground was heated with magic, the Hand had prisoners dig the holes, then…
Well, they did the typical thing you did, when you wanted to fill a mass grave. We actually found a survivor - Aurora detected his heartbeat, despite him lying beneath the bodies. The residual heat of the heating spell and of the bodies kept the guy warm enough to survive (barely) until we came.
He was insane. Mostly. He might recuperate, given time. We still learned a lot from him.
There was a significant little town in the area. One that happened to house several slaver bands. During the year they spent a lot of time raiding villages outside of Vanvyra’s sphere of influence, before retreating for the winter to live off their spoils. This changed the places into significant points in the local slave trade route.
The Hand of Freedom forced the town to surrender by suddenly assaulting it and getting through the city gates before anybody noticed what was happening. Slavers, afraid of what was going to happen to them, wanted to fight, but the mayor and the town militia surrounded them in the name of ‘limiting damages to the town’.
If they surrendered to the Hand, they might have survived. If only as hostages. But instead, they surrendered to the town mayor and the Hand decided that it wasn’t in its best interest to uphold a bargain that it wasn’t even part off.
They divided the slavers between several quarters (saying that they couldn’t find a place to house all of them at once). Then made them disappear, quarter by quarter. The survivor said he had no idea what was happening, until cultists pushed him out of the cart right in front of an open mass grave.
Maybe one hundred slavers. But from my estimates, there were at least two hundred bodies in this place. And it still wasn’t buried properly, so more transports were probably in the way. Looks like the Hand decided to end the local slavery trade once and for all.
We departed in hurry. Two days later we finally saw walls of Vanvyra on the horizon.