“What chance do we have to push them back?” Ryin asked, turning his question to Thad. “A hundred thousand or more, yes? How do we break an army of that size? How many would we need to do it?”
“More than we have,” Alaric said. “I suspect that they will not be driven away as easily as they were the first time now that they have reinforcements. We can defend the walls against that number by keeping them at bay, but by bottling us up, they achieve their directive-they hold total control over the plains. There is no way we can effectively guard against the predations of their soldiers against the farms without being able to move our army to do so.”
“Perhaps we cannot control the Plains of Perdamun while they have us cornered so,” Vara said, speaking at last, “but we can give them pause and keep them from extending that control.”
Alaric’s eyebrow came up behind his hands. “You mean to fight a small war, to distract them, to split their forces.”
“Yes,” she said. “I mean to take a small force and do what they accused us of two years ago-find their convoys of stolen goods and strike them, then teleport back here with the spoils. They’ll be forced to move soldiers off the line of siege to escort the convoys, and as we move closer to harvest time that will be a larger and larger group necessary to keep them safe. With a druid and a wizard we’ll be able to teleport out of trouble before any army can reach us, and we can cause enough trouble and discord north of here to force them to keep splitting their forces.”
“I like it,” Vaste said, nodding his head at a sideways angle. “It almost sounds like something that could really work, as though perhaps it had been done at some point in the recent past.”
“It seems a shame to let our enemies have all the fun,” Vara said archly, “seeing as when Goliath and the goblins tried it, it worked very effectively at keeping all parties concerned fully off balance.”
“Yes, and also prompted every power in the area to send in more troops,” Ryin said. “What’s to stop the Sovereign from doing so again?”
“Just package up another division or five and throw them into the Plains of Perdamun?” Thad asked. “The Sovereign has to be reaching a limit at some point. There are only so many able-bodied dark elven men still living in Saekaj. Sooner or later, the Sovereign will run dry of forces. He can’t maintain any semblance of a line south of Reikonos, keep armies on the eastern frontiers with the Northlands and the Riverlands to keep them from interfering with his siege of Reikonos, and still keep the River Perda buttoned up the way he does while sending fifty or a hundred thousand more troops to the Plains of Perdamun. Something will give.”
“And let us hope it is not our walls, and our forces, and our flowers,” Vaste said.
“So we send a force?” Ryin asked, looking around, as though gauging the response around the table. “We do what the goblins did to us, raid the transports of the dark elves, wreck their convoys and cause them to spread out their forces, pull them from here?”
“It does seem somehow fitting,” Alaric said from behind his hands, “that the war started in that very way, and now we return to the beginning for our own purposes. Vara, since it is your idea, I would ask you to spearhead this attack force. No more than a hundred at any given time are to go with you, and no fewer than three spellcasters with the ability to cast a teleportation spell to return you here. I will not have us lose people to mere accidents. Keep a wary eye around you, even if you travel at night, and be certain to be doubly careful so as to avoid ambushes. The dark elves will not long tolerate us raiding the fruits of their thievery.” Alaric smiled and the hands came down. “I do appreciate the irony, though; they steal from local farmers, and we proceed to steal it back for our own purposes.”
“Yes, it is somewhat delicious, isn’t it?” Vaste asked. “It’s like pounding your enemies as if they were mutton and then licking the tears off of their faces.” There was an uncomfortable silence. “Oh, as though none of you have ever done that.”
“Where are you going to begin?” Erith asked, looking to Vara. “The Plains of Perdamun are huge, and traversing the whole thing, even with all the portals available to you-I mean, the Sovereign will have sent out wagons by the hundreds to collect the bounty of the plains.”
“We start in the north,” Vara said, and she felt her mind harden in resolution. “Near Prehorta, the closest to their home and where they’ll be paying the least attention. Then we’ll move west, toward the river and then …” She felt a thin, malicious smile crease her lips, and she wondered idly if it stole the color from them when she did it. “If we do this right, we’ll keep them rather busy …”
Chapter 58
Cyrus
The tent was stuffed, filled to the brimming with servants and clingers-on for both Syloreas and Actaluere. The men from Syloreas were big, of course, the rough and marked sort whom Cyrus had come to expect, with their beards and long hair and fierce looks. There were not many useless, effete ones surrounding Briyce Unger, but the few there were made up for the lack with annoying precision.
The men from Actaluere, on the other hand, were swarthier, smaller on the whole, and reminded Cyrus of the men who worked the docks in Reikonos before the dark elves had moved in and taken over the labor force there. Their hair was short, the fighters were easy to tell from the talkers-and there were talkers aplenty who had come with Milos Tiernan.
Cyrus sat on a cloth stool that had been provided for him by one of the talkers of the Actaluere delegation. It was a small thing, annoying in its way, and it made him yearn to stand, especially now that the most troubling aftereffects of his injury had passed. Every eye in the tent was on him, and he had just finished speaking about the bodies, the ones that had come down the stream while he had been there beside it only the night before.
“You’ll forgive me, Lord Davidon,” Milos Tiernan said, a slight grimace on his face, as though the very news pained him, “but … how many bodies were there?”
“More than I care to count,” Cyrus said. “I stopped trying after thirty.”
“And they were men of Syloreas?” Tiernan asked, couching his words in a tone that sounded uncomfortable to Cyrus.
“So it would seem,” Unger said. “I looked them over when Lord Davidon’s people came for me. They look like village folk from the foothills, judging by the goatskin clothing. I would presume that they washed down after their village had been wiped out.”
“Fair to say.” Cyrus stood, hearing the clink of his armor, unable to bear sitting any longer, not on the tiny stool. “The scourge is sweeping out of the mountains it seems, coming south now, just as we expected.”
“Have you been informed of our battle plan?” Briyce Unger asked, the smell of sweat thick in the tent, the breeze of yesterday gone and replaced by the hot sun overhead, which turned the tent into a makeshift oven. The mountain men around Unger were shifting, listless, even though most of them remained seated.
“Seems simple enough,” Cyrus said. “Form a line in the middle of the plains north of here when we know they’re coming, sit and wait, and let them fall on us like wave after wave on the rocks.”
“There’s a bit more to it than that,” Tiernan said, with that same slight grimace. “Though not much, admittedly. Every suggestion I put forward with the idea of a flanking maneuver was roundly rejected.”
“If they come in as great numbers as we suspect,” Cyrus said, “we’ll be too busy protecting our own flanks to launch a counterthrust. With our healers at work, this seems like the best solution. If they come at us in a small number, we can get elaborate and envelop them. If they’re going to mass and swarm at us with the ridiculous amount of them that we think are lurking in the north, then we’re better off keeping it simple and defensive.”