Umber

Klavicus was still making his way toward Urik at a measured pace, pausing frequently to perform some small ritual or simply to look out across the desert wastes for extended periods of time when he heard the sound of wings behind him. He turned and waited as a small pterodactyl flapped determinedly toward him. It hovered in the air, croaked, “They have been and gone,” in a rasping voice reminiscent of snake scales rubbing together, then flew away again, back toward its master in the mountains.

He traveled until the dark hours of the morning that day, stopping only when he reached an isolated oasis he knew of, at an hour when it was likely to be unpopulated. He kindled a fire and set it, as was his intermittent habit, to replaying events of the last few days while he ate.

He watched eighty Jura Dai slip past guards and into the very midst of Rikus’ army in the middle of the night, coolly breaking their fast as Tyr’s warriors awakened. They had come in search of Skarp’s youths and they were ready to fight, now that they had prowled the periphery of war and found themselves more than simple fodder. Hamanus with an army of iron doesn’t suit you, does it? he thought as Rikus waved away his suspicious men and spoke with the Jura Dai leader. Power consolidated bodes ill for marauding nomads. The youths rode up on kanks, and as Po and Saphira slid from their mounts the Jura Dai greeted them with as much respect as one of the feral elves ever granted a human. It went without saying that they would accompany the paladin and bard and their companions, not remain with the larger body of the army.

Rikus gave them several additional units of gladiators and their twofold task. “Urik’s army is too big for us,” he said with a certain cool understatement. “You need to find a way to draw some of them off – disrupt them – whatever it takes.” He studied the maps laid out on a table in his tent. “If we can choose the point of engagement…” he paused, letting a broad finger wander over the parchment. “We can take on a force twice our size and likely prevail. No more than that.”

The youths’ faces collectively blanched. “That leaves us responsible,” Regan said, “for diverting several thousand of the enemy.”

“With less than two hundred troops of our own,” Kerac pointed out.

“Yes it does.” Rikus gave them a thin, humorless smile. “Good luck. I’ll leave you to your strategizing.” He paused at the tent entrance, holding the flap aside as he glanced back at them. “By the way, it would not serve the cause if an Urikite scouting party managed to carry word back to Hamanus’ captain of just how small our army is.” Then he was gone.

The stares the young people gave each other spoke more eloquently than words. Draw off thousands of enemy troops and watch for advance scouting parties? Impossible. Then they shrugged and began planning how to accomplish it.

They pored over the maps for several hours, though Sugar Primrose listened with the usual distractedness of a druid more interested in animals and elemental forces than people, and Reign took to sharpening her weapons, grumbling that the whole process was taking too long and she was ready to fight.

“Here.” Po pointed to a spot on the map, a narrow gully surrounded by high mesas, a natural spot for an ambush.

“The terrain is impassable for miles around,” Zane agreed. “They’ll have to bring the army through, whether they want to or not.”

Po dashed out to speak with Rikus and returned grinning. “We can have some engineers. If we rig up a rock fall – here – ” he pointed again.

“Hide, let most of the army pass, cut them off from their water supply,” Zane said. “They’ll have to stop to defend it.” Kerac and Regan both chimed in almost simultaneously, questioning whether they might just decide to press on and take Tyr’s after they’d won, a suggestion that met with a frown from the psion. “No sane commander would take that risk.”

Kerac and Regan glanced at one another, both looking as if they were thinking, sanity has been in short supply in this world, but they acquiesced and let the plan proceed as designed. Po, Regan and Zane were to take the bulk of the units assigned to them to the designated ambush spot and prepare, while the majority of the Jura Dai, accompanied by Kerac, Reign, Saphira, Sugar Primrose and three units of speed enhanced gladiators went searching for enemy scouts, planning to meet up with their companions in time to set the trap.

“And will you find scouts? Apparently so,” Klavicus murmured, speeding the display and then slowing it again as a cloud of dust resolved into several units of enemy kank riders and halflings. Kerac, Saphira and Sugar Primrose quickly took the Jura Dai and made for higher ground and cover, Reign manning a choke point with the gladiators. They hoped for surprise, but when Sugar Primrose’s Jura Dai had obviously been seen shifted to intimidation. The Jura Dai had shared a trick, passing slowly between two visible points and doubling back rapidly while hidden to make their numbers appear far larger than they were; employing it now was sufficient to cause one of the halfling units to break off and run.

It might have been a combat like any other if not for Reign. When the warrior taunted the enemy leader for hiding among his men – a warlord by the look of him, Klavicus thought – he stepped out and pointed a finger at her, then himself. “You, and me.”

She accepted the challenge, and the two fought with eyes and weapons only for one another as the battle raged around them, even as Reign at Kerac’s urging ordered a badly wounded unit of gladiators to retreat, even as the warlord’s men fell around him until he stood alone.

When Reign collapsed and Kerac intervened to heal her, as far as the warlord was concerned the challenge was ended. He held out his hand. “Your sword.”

She held the sword of Camelok out before her, threatening. “No.”

The warlord looked surprised and displeased. “As well he might,” Klavicus said to the flames, listening with raised eyebrow as Reign demanded information, as Kerac tried to insist that the warlord travel with them for several days at the least to ensure he did not return to Urik’s army even as the man insisted he would not. “He was victorious, even if his men failed him. One doesn’t make demands of the victor merely because of superior numbers. Unless one is a thug.”

Complicated emotions played out across the warlord’s face: disbelief, anger, resignation. His grip tightened on his weapon as he prepared for his own last stand. Surrounded by the enemy as he was there could be only one outcome for him, but his stance and the purposefulness in his eyes suggested he hoped he could at least take the woman warrior with him.

The youths seemed genuinely puzzled by their opponent’s response, and Kerac’s efforts to defuse the situation met with only partial success, not least of all because he refused to take the warlord’s word that, his men all lost, he had no desire to return to the main body of Urik’s army but intended to head for the mountains to ruminate on his disgrace. Kerac’s posture suggested he believed the man to be telling no lies, but still he refused to let him go. “It’s a treacherous world, true enough,” Klavicus muttered, “but if you won’t trust your own instincts you’ll be jumping at beetles’ shadows and overlook genuine threats.”

It is difficult to say how the standoff might have ended if a cry from the Jura Dai hadn’t drawn their attention to a cloud of dust, much larger than the one before, headed in their direction. The halflings may or may not have fled from fear, but certainly they had a direction: back to Hamanus’ captain to obtain reinforcements. The Jura Dai’s trick had worked well – more than a thousand troops were headed straight for the cleft where they stood. A moment’s shocked horror – how are we going to deal with that? – turned to elation as they realized what it meant: not merely a thousand men bearing down on them, but a thousand men who would not be bearing down on Rikus and his men. After making sure the enemy had seen them they turned and ran, at last releasing the warlord to go his own way: not, perhaps, because they trusted him, but because their position was revealed in any case and his information was of no use to Urik any longer.

Shaking his head Klavicus turned the flames toward the ambush site, where the engineers’ finishing touches were interrupted by the approach of an enemy unit. Po, Regan and Zane huddled together watching its advance, urgently conferring. “Never seen thri-kreen before, have you?” Klavicus said as their eyes widened at the sight of the tall, insectoid warriors bearing swords in one pair of hands and strange crystalline throwing wedges in the other pair. “Or chatkcha?”

Adding to their evident discomfort was the vaporousness of their potential opponents. “What is that effect?” Regan asked Zane. “Will our weapons penetrate it? Should we even let them know we’re here? Should we try to hide? Perhaps they’re scouting the obvious chokepoint on their route, and permitting them to find nothing would be the best course of action.”

Zane was relatively confident that while the misty forms might make an initial strike more difficult, penetrating it once for one individual would cause the spell to fail for them all. He pointed to the templar at their head. “Hopefully we can keep him too busy to think about reestablishing it.”

The exercise became a kind of dry run for the ambush they planned for later. Zane took the noble guard and the Jura Dai up to one mesa, Regan the Tyrian templars and the unruly halflings up the other, and Po led the ground troops out of sight, to close in behind when Regan gave a signal. The thri-kreen and their templar commander were both formidable opponents – one of Zane’s noble guard units broke and ran after sustaining heavy damage, and he ordered some of the Jura Dai to withdraw when their casualties grew untenable, but Po and his gladiators proved a useful distraction and Regan’s troops, though hampered by distance, emerged unscathed.

Klavicus saw a faint tinge of dawn on the eastern horizon, and accelerated the flames’ vision, watching with half an eye while speaking an incantation over the still waters of the hidden pool. After a few minutes a craggy, non-human face appeared like a mismatched reflection in the pool. “Ancient One,” a rumbling voice said.

“Druid.” Klavicus sighed to himself; sometimes he wondered if he’d ever hear anyone use his actual name again. He inclined his head in a curt bow. “My apologies again for requiring you to leave your vale untended for a time.”

“The need is great, and in the end the defiler’s violation bore – interesting – fruit.”

Klavicus smiled slightly. “How interesting?”

“The staff has been reclaimed.”

He had seen the staff the young druid took from the dead defiler. Servants of the land were rare these days, and between them he and the vale’s elemental guardian had concocted a small way to honor her service. Not without a cost, of course; there must always be a cost. “Does it bloom?”

“With the long-extinct primroses of which you spoke? Yes.”

“Did you kill her?”

The druid shook his head. “She was too young, too earnest, too timid. It was enough that she persevered in the face of possible death.” The fire vision left scenes of battle to show the young druid pressing on through poison, through disease, through deep water, wide-eyed but determined. “And her friends were quick to aid her. Perhaps in time the trials will be sterner, but for now that is all she needs.”

Klavicus smirked. “You’re getting soft.”

“Look to the pebbles pelting your own glass house,” the druid retorted in a rolling growl.

The smile faded. “I don’t need reminding of what I’ve become.” He returned his attention to the fire for a few moments; the ambush – successful – flickered by, then the clash between the two armies proper. The Tyrians took severe casualties, but the Urikites were taken aback by the ferocity of their enemy and in the end were forced to retreat.

The elemental druid’s heavy lids hooded its eyes and his stony lips turned downward in regret as he changed the subject. “The trinkets you left have found their homes.” The rumbling extended into something like a laugh. “I added a few trifles my pets have found over the years.”

Klavicus looked toward him again. “The scroll of enchantment?”

“The young avenger took it for her great sword.”

The old balor nodded in satisfaction. “Good.”

“It is no longer the same.” The druid eyed him curiously. “And I do not refer to a simple enchantment. It is – awake, when it was not before.”

“Of course it is,” Klavicus said. “That was the whole point.” He spared a moment’s thought for Go and Malik. Of all the men and women who charged around Oerth behaving like ‘heroes’ they had been, to him at least, perhaps among the most interesting. They too had believed in costs, and exacted them from themselves no less than others. How different times are now.

The druid seemed to sense his brooding. “The sword of Camelok has lost its healing virtue.”

“It was never inexhaustible,” the demon shrugged.

“The paladin attempted to restore it.”

Now Klavicus looked interested. “Did he succeed?”

“Not yet. Perhaps he will try again.”

“Has he taken the sword for himself?”

The druid shook his head. “The psion urged him to – called it a paladin’s weapon – ”

“Which it is,” Klavicus interjected.

“But the warrior was plainly disappointed, so he returned it to her.”

The balor tapped the top of his pack thoughtfully. “Perhaps he’ll become the Galeb Duhr’s paladin yet – in fact as well as title.” He dismissed the fire and began gathering his things. “Time for me to be on my way.”

“There will be a celebration in Tyr, and then the young people will be ready to travel.” The old elemental gave Klavicus a hard stare. “You will wait?”

“That was the price of your aid,” Klavicus replied irritably.

“It is a dangerous thing you mean to do,” the druid replied, unperturbed. “You should not attempt it alone.”

“I’ve done everything else alone. I prefer it that way.”

“And always known the outcome,” the elemental chided. “We none of us understand this thing.”

“Is that a reason not to attempt it?” Klavicus challenged.

“It is a reason not to attempt it in a vacuum. If they are not needed, they will never know. If they are, better to be close at hand.” He ignored Klavicus’ snort of disapproval. “They are the earth’s Children. We would have them near our daimon at such a time as this.”

“I said I’d wait,” the demon replied in ill humor, hoisting his pack on his shoulders. “I’ll go to Urik, and wait for word.”