“This is the most hare brained scheme I’ve ever been a part of,” Bianca complained, brushing irritably at the cloud of mosquitos that seemed to manifest wherever she went. Torm cast her a sidelong look. He seemed untroubled by the mosquitos, while this immunity was annoying, Bianca found that the image of mosquitos trying to beat their beaks straight on tiny anvils after trying to bite through his plate mate was strangely cheery.

“You wen’t through the tunnel at Palona,” he pointed out.

“Yes but…”

“And set that tannery on fire to stink the garrison out of Soledai.”

“I suppose…”

“And didn’t you deliberately wreck that merchant ship so you could…”
“Well I..”
“And weren’t you one of those that took that hot air balloon over that cathedral when..”

“Yes yes, fine,” Bianca conceded, crossing her arms defensively and trying not to sulk. A moment passed but she was unable to control herself.

“It is still a pretty hare brained scheme,” she added petulantly. Torm unslung a dwarven watchglass from his saddle and extended it with a series of clicks.

“Well, I didn’t say you were wrong,” he agreed. The night was black as pitch, there was no moon and scudding cloud obscured most of the stars. Even so, they could make out the silver line of the Wadi Ira river a mile and a half away. At this time of year it was nearly a mile wide, and that was still only a third what it would be after the monsoon rains began. That could be any moment of course and if the Company of the Silver Swords was still on this side of the river when that happened, they were all going to die.


“Nice of them to carry torches,” Torm observed, nodding towards the river. The soldiers of the Priestess-Queen were patrolling the banks, their positions clearly visible as clusters of bobbing flames. Fucking amatuers, Bianca thought her lip curling up in a sneer. She would have whipped any of her scouts that was damn fool enough to suggest patrolling at night while carrying a torch. Not only would the flame trumpet your position for miles around, but the bright light would burn your night vision away till you were half blind. She would have whipped them, then found them some other line of work, preferably far away from her.


“Small mercies and all,” Bianca observed, leaning forward on her saddlebow. There were hundreds of torches, ranged along the dark bank of the river for miles in both directions. There must have been a thousand of them out there, every one of them filled with a fanatical desire to stop the Silver Sword from crossing the river. A larger cluster of flames was centered around a large palisaded fort, its ramparts dark against campfires. It looked like a flaming jewel on a string of beads, a rather more romantic description than the reality of slit latrines and horse pickets, unwashed flesh and the reek of sacrificial fires.


It had been a long retreat from Palona. Nearly three months of endless retreats, desperate delaying actions, and occasional half routs when the crafty enemy got the better of them. Of the thousand men who had broken out of the siege, there were now just over four hundred survivors. There were another hundred or so survivors of other mercenary groups who had been more or less informally joined to the company, folded in as their own numbers fell to death and desertion. They were exhausted, tired, hungry, and only pushing on because the Priestess-Queen offered no quarter beyond a knife over the sacrificial altar. Bianca took a wine skin from her saddle and unstoppered it. She lifted it to her lips and swallowed half the remaining volume. The wine was sour and tasted of leather and vinegar.

“You still have wine?” Torm asked in obvious shock. He had thought no one had wine, had thought no one had water for that matter, given the dry country and lack of chance to forage. Bianca handed the flask to Torm without a word and the knight tipped it upward and drained it. His face twisted at the taste but he chose not to comment. There were many things more unsatisfactory than the wine. Bianca twisted in the saddle and looked back over the party. Twenty one knights sat on their exhausted and saddle sore mounts, the great destriers looking haggard and half starved. The men didn’t look much better, their eyes hooded in the dark, their faces gaunt with weeks of eating whatever could be scavenged, meals and sleep taken, as often as not, in the saddle. Most of the Silver Sword were infantry, and those footsore bastards complained constantly that the cavalry got to ride around while they tramped over half creation. Their sore feet might make them complain, but the cavalry were called to the charge at all hours, harrying and harassing the enemy so the infantry could break away to reach the next ridge or get across the next stream. Bianca couldn’t see the infantry but she knew they were out there, crouching in the dry water courses and waiting for the signal to move out. Speaking of which… she drew the dwarven chronometer from her shirt by it’s leather cord and opened it. Nearly time. As if summoned by the thought, a figure on a boney nag emerged from the darkness at the base of the bald. Black Ryann, one of the company’s two wizards, trotted up. He was a handsome man in an irritatingly suave way, normally his expression was one of amused arrogance but tonight it was set with a strain that made him seem half a skull.

“Ready?” the wizard asked without preamble. Torm nodded, and Black Ryann lifted his hands and said something in a word that sounded like the way salt water burned your throat when you were drowning. The air seemed to tremble then go still. Ryann seemed to shrivel, almost falling from the saddle. Bianca drew her sword silently.

“Go.”


Marduk lifted his tunic and pissed on the grass, sighing with relief as the pressure of an evening’s wine on his bladder eased. He idly scratched himself as he did so, staring out into the darkness. He hated it here, he had hated it almost everywhere the Blessed Queen had sent him. Dusty garrisons overseeing sullen peasants, boring sieges where the lice seemed to swarm like locusts, the occasional battle where he did his best to keep his head down and avoid shitting himself. Hunger, privation, and dust, these were the sacrifices he bore for the Blessed Queen, the cost for his admittance into one of the Twenty Three Lesser Heavens. He shook the last few drops free and dropped his tunic, reaching into his satchel for the pouch of betelnut that soothed his nerves even as it destroyed his teeth. His hand froze half way to his lips as he saw something that his mind couldn’t quite comprehend. There were horsemen coming out of the long grass, rushing silently towards him. Not quietly. Literally silently. His eyes told him that a score of horsemen were charging towards him, but without the pound of hooves and the shouts of the riders, his mind refused to admit that this was real. It wasn’t until they were less then twenty feet away that he finally managed to recover from his bemusement. He dropped his betlenut and opened his mouth to scream, before he could utter a sound he was being borne forward, spitted on the end of a lance that had punched silently into his chest.


The cavalry were through the open gate before the alarm was raised. They swept silently in, splitting left and right by detachment. Six of Torm’s men leaped from their saddles securing the gate. The rest drove on into camp, silently crashing into the knots of men spilling from tents of painted canvas. Bianca reigned in her horse and leaped from her own saddle. She pulled a lantern from her saddlebag and sprinted up a set of stairs to the fighting platform on the inside of the palisade, taking the steps three at a time. A bleary eyed soldier stumbled upright and Bianca’s sword licked out, running him through. She twisted and kicked the dying man, allowing gravity to drag him off her blade and tumble into the gateway below with a thud. Reaching the top she waved the lantern vigorously. For a long moment nothing happened, then she saw an answering flash of light as the infantry companies began to advance at the trot. Sound crashed into existence behind her as the bubble of magical silence Black Ryann had summoned failed. Screams and alarms rang out, seeming impossible loud after the prolonged arcane silence. She could see the infantry now, coming at a jog, shields slung and swords drawn in three columns, the central one was of shorter stockier figures, dwarves with heavy mail and two handed axes. Bianca sucked in breath as the infantry reached the wall, the first column went through to support Torm and his men in subduing the fort, the second column formed a defensive box around the gate, while the dwarves set to work with their axes. They began to chop at the base of the wall with the enthusiasm of expert lumberjacks They began to rip down the wall, breaking it into six foot sections and spreading out in both directions.

“Bianca!” She whirled to see Lieutenant Gantz standing within the gate, his helmet under his arm. Judging by the sounds, resistance in the fort was well and truly collapsing, the wave of infantry turning the tide that Torm’s men had held back.

“There are no boats!” he called. Bianca cursed and ran down the stairs. The Priestess-Queen had given orders that all boats on the Wadi Ira were to be seized to prevent the mercenaries who had defied her rule from escaping her domain. For the most part they had been burned, the Queen’s soldiers liked to burn things, but the Captain had assumed there would be at least a few boats in the fort. She sprang to Gantz' side and they moved through the chaos of the fort. The dead were everywhere, bodies sprawled where lances or sword had laid them low. Here and there piles of supplies had been gathered, sometimes into improvised barricades, many of which were smashed and scattered. Untended fires smouldered and wounded men whimpered until their hurts took them or someone gave them a quick soldiers mercy. 

“Fuck,” Bianca remarked as they reached the river bank. Two dwarves were already there guiding three mules that were piled high with rope of every kind, yard after yard of it hung in huge coils. The sound of fighting in the fort had died away, but the alarm had been raised and the men who had been patrolling the bank were beginning to draw in, slowly crystalizing around them.

“Get me some light line, the lighter the better,” Bianca called. Without asking for clarification one of the dwarves produced a coil of thin rope, the sort of thing that might be used to weave a net. Bianca made a loop and tied it around her waist as she kicked off her boots and tossed her weapons into a pile.

“Keep it coming,” she instructed, then dived into the Wadi Ira and began to swim.


Bianca’s arms and legs burned. Stoke, stroke. Her lungs burned and her limbs trembled. 

Stroke, stroke, stroke. 

There was no way to tell how far she had come, the world was nothing but water as far as she could see.

Stroke, stroke. 

The weight around her waist was intolerable, she had no idea how much rope she was towing, but it grew heavier and heavier. 

Stoke, stroke, stroke. 

If she failed, and fail she must, she knew she must drown, doomed to dangle dead from the end of a rope like fishbait. 

Stroke, stroke, stroke. 

What arrogance had possessed her to try this, of all the hare brained schemes she had been a part of, she was going to drown herself in the middle of a river while the whole company died defending a half destroyed fort. Stroke, stroke. Maybe she should… her chin struck a rock and stars exploded across her vision. Bianca went under and sucked in a lungful of water as she tried to scream. Her feet went down and to her shock found mud beneath them. She thrust herself upright half screamed half vomited, muddy water pouring off her. Legs, exhausted from a swim of over a mile, refused to hold her and she fell face first into the shallows again. The terrible idea occurred that she might drown in the shallows within feet of the shore. Groaning she dragged herself forward, pulling herself hand over hand up over the mud until she lay gasping on the beach.

“Keep moving… that is the key…” she told herself, then rolled onto all fours and crawled up the beach until she reached the thick wall of twisted trees which marked the high water point. Untying the knot around her waist was impossible, so she drew a knife from her belt and cut it free. Then, with an enormous effort she tied the rope around the tree. Soaked and shivering, she drew her scouts lucifer from a leather pouch around her neck. Exactly how the lucifer worked she didn’t know, it was some kind of alchemical device, but she dutifully crunched it’s glass bulb into a pile of leaf litter. There was a stink of chemicals and then a flash of light as the trash caught fire. For a long moment nothing happened and Bianca began to fear that the the Company had been driven from the fort and annihilated. Then the rope went taut, the line lifting out of the water as it took up the strain. In her mind’s eye Bianca could see the company lifting lengths of palisade into the water, the enemies very walls providing improvised rafts, see men pouring on board and beginning to pull themselves along the line, hand over hand. Would they be able to get everyone across before the surprised enemy managed to rally and counter attack? Well, Bianca figured she could just lay here until she found out.