My shoulder slammed into the stone wall of the transport with a dull thud as I tried to keep my tablet laden pack secure between my feet. We’d ridden in this transport for the last two hours and unlike the carriage we drove to the Virtanen spire in this one was bare of any creature comforts. Long, narrow, and filled with un-cushioned seats of the same design as the one the spiress sat in last night during our meeting. My party and I were the only ones who had any trouble with the seating as the other fifteen tailed aranae in the carriage with us were not only secure, but looked comfortable as well.
I’d held high hopes for the ride when I first saw the transport this morning. Pulled by two of those centipede-like creatures and made entirely of stone with the same lattice design as the last one, I’d expected us to travel at least comfortably, if not in luxury. I had my expectations dashed when we saw the unsecured stone seating and over hours of travel over rough terrain. I was sure that out of the four of us still susceptible to this kind of bruising, I’d be the best off as I’d put my sleeping bag under me early, but I did not doubt I’d exit the transport bruised either way.
“Bran, I swear to the divine. Keep smiling like that and I’ll come over there and wipe it off your face myself.” Ellen snarled as we hit a nasty bump and she got thrown into the narrow walkway that separated our seats.
“Oh, be nice.” Nora said, coming to my aid and helping Ellen up. “It’s not his fault you have no ass.”
Ellen growled at the smaller woman and looked like she might throw herself at her, but Mika, who sat next to Ellen, grabbed her by the shoulders.
“Listen to her Bran! I don’t know how much longer I can hold her!” He mock shouted, miming as if he held onto a charging bull.
We laughed. It was good to do so, always helped with the pre-battle jitters.
As we continued to joke and tease each other, I noticed the same thing happening with the others. The nervousness present in their postures, hunched shoulders and furrowed brows, relaxed.
By the time we arrived and the carriage finally came to a halt, we’d bounced around for the last five hours and all of us were sure to have bruised tailbones come the morning. With no fanfare, the aranae women behind us in the carriage hustled us into a mustering ground. Looking around the cavern, I realized that calling it a mustering ground was probably premature.
There was no permanent infrastructure anywhere in the cavern. Loose crates and goods sat in a rough semi-circle around where the carriages we’d arrived in stopped. Further separating the space from a mustering ground was the fact that I couldn’t see an officer anywhere. No one marshalled the hundreds of reinforcements that just arrived and instead all the aranae women just knew where to be and who to report to.
“Anyone know where we’re supposed to be?” I asked.
“Not a clue.” Nora said, her tone carrying a nonchalance her posture didn’t.
As I searched for someone who could be an authority figure, I noticed another variant of aranae I’d never seen scurrying between the feet of the others. They were no larger than an adolescent wolf and, rather than moving with purpose, this new variant played. They chased each other and clung to the clothes of the larger aranae around them. I watched them for a while before I decided they were most likely aranae children and put them out of my mind.
After what felt like forever of just waiting in the center of the ‘mustering ground’ for someone to tell us where to report to, a young woman with two heads approached. The woman’s left head was mauled at some point and never given treatment. One of its eyes was missing. Multiple long scars around the eyes showed it got carved out and her bottom jaw was badly misaligned, broken and never set or healed. Her broken jaw revealed dazzlingly white serrated teeth.
“I am to lead you to where the spiress and her advisors are in conference.” Both heads said in unison. The sound was discordant. Her intact head produced a voice that was loud and crisp while the scarred face spoke in a coughed whisper. Further confounded by the choking accent.
“Lead on.” Nora replied.
The woman did. She pushed her way out of the circle of goods and people towards the fortress we’d be staying at for the next three weeks.
Composed of five towers and red stone walls, the fort stretched from one side of the tunnel to the other. The stone work merged into the rough tunnel wall almost seamlessly. At the top of the walls, the stone curved outwards in a half arch, like the beginnings of a tree’s canopy.
As we neared the fortress, the cavern around us shrunk from kilometers wide to only two hundred meters across, and the dots at the top of the wall realized into aranae women scurrying from one damaged section of the wall to another. Most of them carrying tools or supplies to the women already working there.
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None of the damaged portions of the wall looked bad enough to compromise the rest in the unlikely event goblins attacked from behind. The defects were numerous enough, however, to pose a serious concern about the fort’s recent history.
The woman led us through a tunnel in the wall that was lined with blue-tinted steel and disrupted by three steel gates. All of which were held up to allow new arrivals ease of access into the fort.
The interior courtyard was a hurricane of activity. People rushed from tower to tower, some carrying supplies, others in full combat equipment. Everywhere I looked, people were engaged in some task of getting the fort back up to defensible condition.
Teams of [Masons] worked tirelessly at the base of the wall to repair missing chunks or chips in the stonework. [Bricklayers] were hard at work rebuilding some kind of warehouse destroyed in the previous fighting.
The only person besides ourselves not scrambling about or locked into the repair efforts was a small elderly woman with two sets of eyes, serenely surveying the courtyard. She sat at ease atop a large stool, her legs hooked up to hold the underside. Occasionally the woman delt out orders to the rare few who slowed enough in their labors to attract her attention.
The chaotic rush of people split around us like rapids against a stone as we moved through the center of the courtyard and into one of the towers lining the far wall. We climbed a spiral staircase briefly; the climb disorientating, with no windows to guide myself by. When we emerged onto the wall itself, I noticed just how wide the walls were. Large enough to fit the transport I arrived in comfortably, the wall wasn’t holding anywhere near its capacity.
Even with the amount of people I saw running from task to task in the courtyard, the only people on the wall was the odd patrol from the variant of aranae I was coming to understand as their [Warrior] caste. Occasionally someone setting up caches of projectiles or lighting the braziers.
As we walked along the wall, we passed several teams of three hanging off the wall on small wooden platforms attached to small pegs in the walls with metal cables. I watched one team briefly as they worked.
The trio worked together with the ease and familiarity that came not only with trust but with the help of many, many mastered skills. Two members of their trio worked, placed, and molded stone into the various holes in the wall while the third of their group handed them supplies and sometimes cast a buffing spell on the pair.
While it is always a pleasure to watch the skilled work at their craft, no matter what said craft was, I found the extensive damage done to the wall made me far more nervous than the damage to the rear wall had. I stopped to look again when we came across a massive chunk of damaged solid stone wall. Four teams of three worked in concert to repair the damage. Checking on our other defenses, I noticed that aside from the wall, the only siege defenses we had were four shallow ditches. They weren’t enough to barricade an enemy from approaching on foot, but they were deep enough to give anyone trying to bring a siege engine forth a real shit day.
The woman led us into a tower that connected to the central portion of the wall, but not the courtyard, and led up a dozen flights of stairs to the top. Unlike the spire we’d been in before, this tower consisted mainly of stone, however, the silk that was present in the construction was of a much higher quality.
Compared to the silk I’d seen in the city, which was smooth and delicate, the few strands of silk present in the tower looked more akin to iron cables our [War Smiths] forged for our siege engines than they did a fabric.
When we arrived at the top floor, the woman who led us here knocked thrice on the door and introduced us all by name before she let us in. Stepping into the room, the sight of a large map room greeted us.
At the center of the room was a massive table, made from the same red stone as the rest of the fort and, lining every wall, were dozens of maps. Some fresh enough that the ink hadn’t dried and ran in places.
Seated at the table were four women, one of whom was the spiress Sylvi herself. Seated to the left of Sylvi was an elderly woman and beyond that was the largest aranae I’d ever seen.
On the other side of the elderly woman was Sanna, the three headed woman who’d shown us through the Virtanen spire. Sylvi watched us enter cooly and beckoned for us to take a seat at one of the dozen vacant spots that surrounded the massive piece.
“Gunilla, Saga, I’d like to introduce you to the adventurers I acquired.”
The two women looked over us. The elder looked displeased, I still didn’t know which was which, while the large woman just looked curious. Eventually, both of the gazes landed and stayed on Maggie.
“So, you have a steward.” The large woman asked the crowd of like ten.
“They do Gunilla. Arnhild said that their stewards were –“
“She knows what a steward is, child.” The elder, Saga, interrupted. I wasn’t sure why they were speaking in Trade Tongue, but I wasn’t going to complain about being unable to understand my employer. “She was just surprised; the Guild usually is far more circumspect about sending us their prospects.”
“They would have been, but I asked my father to make an exception for us.” Maggie said in reply to the unasked question that dominated the space between us.
That wasn’t the most subtle way I’d heard Maggie do it. She played it off well, but she was worried about how that comment came across and how much she would.
“Relax girl.” Gunilla said. “I will not kill our charges pointlessly. Spiress Sylvi paid too much for that.”
Gunilla gave the four of us a speculative look before she shifted her attention to me.
“Since I am to be in charge of you four for the next three weeks, we may as well be comfortable around one another. Relax.”
I took my hand off my hammer head where it rested and removed my shield from my arm, but otherwise, I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to relax.
“The spiress has told me why she decided to blow half her funds on your services.” Gunilla said with a look at Sylvi. “And I intend to use you the way you were advertised. You four are going to be my stop gaps. Anywhere along the lines we falter, I’m going to send you to plug the hole.”
I’d been in large-scale battles before and been the stop gap option in the battle lines plenty of times. That was always the bloodiest work. You not only had to charge into a situation where the enemy had all the momentum and your allies are close to breaking. You also have to constantly remain aware of your surroundings because even with extra support, sometimes the section you reinforce breaks and runs. Which almost always leads to a slaughter.
Something must have passed across my face because Gunilla caught it, and made a gesture equivalent to an eye roll.
“Relax boy, I will not bring down the wrath of Erhard on my spiress for a suicidal charge. If the situation is lost, I won’t send you to your deaths.”
That was surprisingly comforting. Back home, because of my position as Ylena’s chosen, they often sent me, along with my squad, to where the fighting was deadliest. A large part of my duty there was to pull the line from defeat.
“Great. Now that introductions have been dealt with. Spiress, may I bring you up to speed on recent developments?” Gunilla asked with a sincere deference that was absent in every one of her previous interactions
“You may.”
“Yesterday, one of the [Scouts] report the last of the First Oracle troop carrier arriving. Your scholars’ current estimate is for the first assault to be launched within the next day and a half, depending on how fast the First Oracles can get their new arrivals settled.”
