Book 6: Chapter 5
Kay set aside another set of reports that contained the details of what Amanda and Cindy reported to him. Amanda had the government and civil matters handled, while Cindy was going over what military and adventurer related items she knew about. Kay would need a more detailed report both from General Curcius, the leader of Avalon’s military, and Meten, the oni who was in charge of Avalon’s directly controlled force of Adventurers, the Sentinels, in the future but both of them were busy and Cindy had been involved in fighting back vampyr incursions fir the last few months, so she knew enough to give Kay a summary.
“A civil war breaks out in Nelam, a flood of refugees show up begging for sanctuary, then vampyr attack everyone to our west and more people run to us for safety, all while I’m gone.” Kay shook his head. “Thanks to that we’ve got rampaging vampyr everywhere and a horde of people to deal with.” He tipped back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. “If it wasn’t crazy talk I’d say someone is after us.”
“Looking for an enemy pulling the strings isn’t wrong necessarily,” Amanda grabbed the papers Kay had set down and organized them before setting them back down, “But spending too much time on the idea might lead to madness. The level of power someone would need to engineer all of this just to strike at Avalon would be able to attack us on their own.”
“True.” Kay let the moment pass and sat up, his back straight and his posture open, doing his best to portray himself as a confident leader. “Alright. I’ve got the top level summary, so let’s talk details. What’s most pressing?”
Amanda shuffled through her documents and pulled out a sheet that she handed to him. “The refugee issue is the one most likely to boil over quickly or turn into something that needs handling. They’re inside our borders and can make plans of their own, which makes dealing with them the first thing to handle in my opinion. Foreign policy can wait until we have our domestic issues solved and the military side of things is holding to my knowledge.”
Cindy nodded when Kay glanced at her. “She’s right. Curcius has built the army up enough that we can train new recruits in relative safety and still have forces to deal with threats. Our territory is basically a peninsula so we’ve only got one land border to deal with. Thanks to that the army has been able to concentrate along the edge most of the vampyr are coming through and have been holding them off there. Sentinel forces have been filling in the gaps between larger deployments and picking off anything that tries to move inward.”
“We’re pushed out that far?” Kay drew out some blood and shaped it into a floating map of Avalon’s territory. The rounded shape looked a bit like a fish’s fin from an angle. Kay pointed at the Kay pointed at the far western end of the map. “That’s the edge of what we claim, but that’s hundreds of miles away. We don’t have that many soldiers.”
“You’re right, we don’t. We don’t need that many right now though.” Cindy tapped at two different points on the map. “That’s where our two deployments are right now. On our side of the border that’s all undeveloped land but both of those spots are close to large roads that lead west. A lot of the refugees take the roads for speed and then have been cutting over the border as soon as possible. We aren’t facing an actual invading army, the vampyr we’ve been seeing are animals chasing prey. We don’t need to defend the border, just where the people are coming.”
“My people were originally using less obvious paths,” Amanda added, “When it was better to be slow and draw less attention. Now that its more important to get as many people out of danger as quickly as possible I’ve been ordering them to abandon stealth and head for our army.”