Frays in the Weave

Thunderclap, part one

They fled south. Madness, but madness with a rationale.

Ship buster missiles against cavalry. The outcome should have been obvious, but the singing horsemen just shrugged them off and continued charging.

Heinrich groaned. He still hurt where a lance had pierced his body walker. A full burst of needle grenades, enough to wipe an entire company of modern infantry from the ground, had taken down the horseman in the end. They managed to down less than a dozen more. Then several unarmed men suddenly appeared out of nothing with fire in their hands and slaughtered half of Granita's crew. At least one single burst killed all the arriving mages, but it was enough for the charge to break though.

He lost four there. Lances and swords cut through body walkers with little effort. An impossible nightmare, and one they couldn't survive.

Arthur Wallman saved the day by using his unnatural tricks in return, and Ken had been screaming at him time and time again for most of the three days and nights they fled south.

Heinrich didn't care. He had his orders, and even though Arthur seemed fully capable of protecting himself those orders still stood. How he should carry them out with less than half his command still alive was currently beyond him, but he had to try.

He compensated for a slight malfunction in the right leg motors and continued on. Nothing more he could do right now, and he had taken the rearguard. Chang was almost out of munitions and Panopilis was flat out. He served as point anyway. His sensors had taken the least damage, and they desperately needed to know what lay ahead of them.

They also needed to put as much distance between them and the riders to the north as possible. One more such encounter and they would all be dead, and that, he thought grimly, would prevent him from carrying out his orders.

***

Trindai de Laiden sent a few scouts ahead and waited for the phalanxes to get ready to march. He had lost several days and many, many more men. And yet duty called them all. By all rights he ought to be close to Krante with his troops on his way to join General de Markand's forces.

He pondered the reason he'd ordered scouts ahead. Farwriter down wasn't a message he'd expected from the south. Apparently the more militant of the religious sects didn't all rush ahead in suicide attacks. One, at least, must have gone underground while de Markand marched his regiments past their hideout.

And then they came back into the open and burned a farwriter to the ground. Trindai held no illusions about what had happened to the crew manning it. He would tread carefully so as not to lose men before they embarked on de Markand's barges and sailed to Chach. Well on the other side of the Narrow Sea losing troops would once again become unavoidable, more so now as they were already severely understrength courtesy of the outworlder invasion.

Well, they had sued for peace, or at least Admiral Radovic had on their behalf. Trindai doubted his superiors would be especially happy when they learned about that, if they didn't already know of course. Outworlder communications were a wonder to behold.

But, he thought, they had reason to accept the terms set by the council. Keen had crushed the invasion, and as far as Trindai was aware the outworlders had no way of knowing that the disgusting magic tied to Verd was one of a kind. They would have to consider the possibility of encountering defensive magic each and every time they closed on a city or town.