V2Ch84-War Council
The beastfolk marched.
They pushed carts or carried supplies slung in packs over their backs, walked or flew, clutched spears or moved with bows and arrows or daggers of uncertain make.
A well equipped, well trained army, they were not.
But they moved with determination and conviction - the fanatic conviction of religious zealots, Dero recognized - and when they lost track of their own physical discomforts, the dark elf caught many of them smiling.
They want their revenge that badly, Dero thought. It was somewhere between chilling and admirable, but this was the stuff that fueled much of success in warfare. Passion.
This was the third day of walking. The first, Tybalt and Andric had mostly been seeing to early logistics. Making sure that the troops were keeping in good order. Tybalt had found it important to tell them how to march, which Dero thought was something of a good sign. Details like that would matter in a long campaign, which this promised to be.
She stepped away from the others and marched a little more quickly until she caught up with Tybalt and Andric. They had asked her, Victoria, Mariella, Tatiana, and the harpy’s sister Sabine to join them for a tactical discussion as the group neared the first village, still a few miles out. Everyone but Dero was gathered when the dark elf approached.
“We could just overwhelm this first village with a dozen or so zombies,” the necromancer was saying. “It won’t put up much of a fight. But it’s a good opportunity for our living troops to learn discipline and not to overstep orders, so I say we should let them be the front line this time.”
Tybalt had Valmont today - the necromancer and dark elf had decided to share custody of the pet, after a fashion - so the falcon stood on his shoulder, tilting his head as he quietly listened to the conversation.
“If they lose even a single man, they’ll want some sort of reprisals against the village,” Mariella observed. “We have to be careful… not to feed too much into the hatred you’re trying so hard to moderate, Tybalt.”
“Does the village need to be destroyed at all?” Andric asked quietly, surprising Dero. She had thought he’d be the most passionate about killing humans, given that he had apparently led the previous offensive against the Army. “It’s just… I know the way these folks live. It’s not so different from our own people. They’re just eking out a living in the desert, barely getting by. There is an uncomfortable similarity in destroying their villages to what the Kingdom does to us.”
“Tybalt promised to pay evil unto evil,” Victoria said before the necromancer could speak for himself. “I don’t think the men will be happy if we start sparing villages from the very beginning. The Kingdom would never do that for us. That’s why we’re fighting.”
“I can see both points of view,” Tybalt said. “Ignoring the moral factors, I think it’s a logistical necessity to destroy the settlements between here and Fort Hadrian. If we leave anything that the Army can feed upon, they’ll just consume it to support their troops. That will destroy it anyway. With us being the ones responsible, we’ll take the actions necessary to keep it from ruining their lives. We can let them accompany us to the next settlement. March with us. Eat with us. Start to understand our point of view. Some of them might be made into loyal soldiers for our cause. Eventually, any who don’t try to rebel against us can be settled in land we seize from the Kingdom. There is a lot of unoccupied territory in Niet.”
“What do you plan to do with the elderly and the cripples?” Dero asked, raising an eyebrow. “If you let them march with you, your pace will slow down to about one mile per hour.”
“We could put them in the supply carts,” Mariella said.
Tybalt shook his head. “That won’t be practical with the number of settlements we’re going to destroy,” he said gently. “We shouldn’t set that as the standard of behavior. If people are old or crippled enough that they can’t keep up, I’ll grant them a quick death and the option of resurrection as an intelligent undead or a zombie. My undeath ritual should be able to guarantee that they come back intelligent if we’re willing to take the time to set it up. Until then, we can carry the bodies with us.”
Dero snorted. “So they’re literally more valuable as dead meat. Undeath is your answer to everything.”
“Undeath is more than most of those who have abetted the Kingdom’s actions deserve,” Victoria said coldly.
Damn. Wasn’t she one of the soft ones? I guess not when it comes to how to treat the humans from the Kingdom. Tybalt, watch out that she doesn’t start to see you as just another one of them…
Not that Dero truly cared, of course. It would just be an anticlimactic end to the necromancer’s life if he was suddenly betrayed by one of his own wives.
An awkward silence followed Victoria’s remark until Tybalt steered the conversation to a new topic.
“I was mainly interested in getting opinions on what to do with walled towns. I tend to favor letting our living beastfolk do most of the fighting, for the same reasons I gave earlier, but attacking walled settlements, even a crappy little town in the middle of nowhere, is usually a good way to lose more people than you kill.”
“Besieging them would take too long, right?” said Andric.
“For our food supplies?” Tatiana said. “We’d be lucky if they last long enough for us to loot the first town without a siege.”
“We always have the option of just swarming them with the undead,” Tybalt began.
“I think you’re putting too much stock in the capabilities of the undead,” Dero said, raising an eyebrow.
“You haven’t seen everything that they can do,” Tybalt replied. “I think you’re putting too little faith in them.”
“Don’t get too cocky,” she replied, shaking her head. “You assume your undead could carry the day in any little skirmish out here, but if you run into a single elderly priest with a class or a bit of consecrated ground, you’ll discover the limits of your power very quickly. It would at least be very costly.”
“Lord Tybalt’s plans are divinely inspired, and his undeath power was given to him directly by our god,” Victoria said in a tone that sounded like she was trying to pretend to be neutral. “We have a good number of our own clergy here, if it becomes a religious conflict, and we could certainly stand up to a single elderly priest.”
Divinely inspired? She’s not even fucking him yet, right? Is this what a marriage proposal does to you? Both foxgirls had come back from the Council of Elders meeting at the village with new white bone rings on their fingers, and of course, no one could have missed all of Vidalia’s noises throughout the following evening. And late at night. And in the early morning, for Lord Mudo’s sake…
“Not everything I do is divinely inspired,” the necromancer said gently. “I am happy to accept constructive criticism of my plans. What are you driving at, Dero? Are you actually specifically thinking about priests and consecrated ground? Because I do have counters in mind for both of those possibilities.”
She bit her lip. “No, not specifically that. The great flaw in all the old conquerors’ thinking is almost universally the same. They feel like they’ll live forever when they’re winning. They think they’re invincible. But they all lose eventually, or even if they go through life undefeated, death gets them. I stuck around here because I want to influence the nation you’ll build if you win your wars. So it’s in my interest that you not die stupidly. I’m just - if you aren’t offended by someone questioning your divine wisdom - I’m just going to raise objections or worst case scenarios whenever I think of them. Because you and the prince of the beastfolk village here- ” She tilted her head at Andric - “aren’t experienced with war, either of you. Not really.” She looked Andric in the eyes. “You fought one little miniature battle, I understand, with Tybalt and the undead saving your ass from certain death.” She turned to face Tybalt. “And you’ve basically just been surprise attacking opponents and getting lucky. If you come across someone who’s prepared for a fight, it might go differently.”
Tybalt nodded with an expression of surprising humility on his face. “Fair enough. What I was going to say about walled towns was actually, we could swarm them with undead, but I would rather try to sneak a handful in, pretending they’ve been wounded, and then when we attack from the outside, our agents within open the gates and kill any defenders from behind. Leaning into my strength of playing dirty.”
“At least you know what you’re good at,” Tatiana said.
Dero snorted. “Yeah, what the pretty bird lady said.”
“You should listen to what the short, pointy-eared one advises, necromancer, even if her words may sound harsh,” Tatiana added. “She seems wise beyond your years, and she clearly possesses acute senses.”
Andric looked amused, while the necromancer just shook his head.
“Anyway, I think the best tactic for dealing with walled towns is surprise from within,” Tybalt said. “Some of my undead will be very good for pretending to be injured, and as much as I want to make sure it’s living troops who are getting most of the battle experience, it’s not worth it to risk higher than necessary casualties on our side. If we get into a longer fight, I’d just ask harpies to fly over the walls and drop undead troops onto the other side. I can’t emphasize enough how effective a tool a simple wall is.”
“It’s one of the most basic things we learn in officer training,” Mariella agreed. “Don’t just attack a walled position head on unless you have to, try to lure them out or sneak inside or starve them or something.”
“Can’t you teleport them in?” Sabine, Tatiana’s sister, spoke up for the first time, looking at Dero. “Um, just, I remember Andric said you could do that.”
The dark elf noticed that Sabine and Tatiana were both standing close to Andric, much as Mariella and Victoria did with Tybalt, each pair of women often touching the man who stood between them, either on his clothing or his bare skin. She hadn’t realized until just now that she was in the presence of two harems.
So, there will be no decision-making in this little ragtag army that isn’t clouded by lust, she thought. At least you idiots will have fun before we all die.
“No, that doesn’t work,” she said after a moment. “Teleportation as a military tactic went out before I was born.”
“How?” Andric asked. “It seems pretty, um, useful.”
“Most people don’t know much about mystic runes anymore,” Dero said. “But they were an old method of using magic, before the gods created their current system. At least that’s how I understand it. Runes still work. They never stopped. And it became a tradition, a long time ago, to carve an anti-teleportation rune into any settlement’s walls. It’s one of the only runes that’s still in common use. Builders think it’s some kind of a good luck charm now, I guess. As long as a wall with that rune remains largely intact, and the protected structure is enclosed by it, you can’t teleport inside. So I’m not even going to attempt to teleport myself or anything else into any walled location. At best, I’d just end up with a bad headache. At worst, you get either me, or whatever I’m trying to teleport, exploding. So, it’s a problem.”
Everyone looked surprised except Tybalt.
“It’s still incredibly useful magic,” he said.
“I know that,” Dero replied. “I just wanted to make sure that everyone doesn’t think it’s war-winning magic, because it isn’t. Setting aside the difficulties of teleporting long distances, and the limitations on how many people or undead I can teleport at a time, I will never attempt to teleport myself or anyone else into a walled setting. Those are my biggest limits.”
And I don’t need reassurance about how valuable I am. I know what I bring to your wannabe empire, Tybalt.
“That reminds me, Dero, could you talk to the catfolk?” Tybalt said. “They made some special stone tablets for me, and I want them to do something similar for you.”
The necromancer explained his thinking, and the dark elf immediately nodded.
“It’s an inspired idea, actually,” Dero said - and then scowled at the smug look that instantly spread across Tybalt’s face.
Of course, he immediately lets a little bit of praise go to his head. Remind me to shut up next time.
“Guys, I can see it!” interjected Sabine. The harpy had taken to the sky and was gently flapping just overhead. “The first village is very close.”
“Time to put your little army to the test,” Dero said.