BECMI Chapter 135 – There is no Glory in This

King Antius sighed as he looked through the rest of the report. It had details of mineral deposits in the local area that might be of interest, what spoils they’d managed to gain from the slain (mostly plunder from the surface over decades), enumerated all of the various monsters they’d encountered (and which, amusingly enough, also formed their primary source of revenue/compensation from sale of body parts and blood). “You’ve read all these, Catcher,” he spoke to his spymaster, who was waiting patiently as he thumbed through the report written in the elegant, deadly black-and-crimson script of the Lady Edge. Just reading the letters brought to mind a funeral dirge and the faint screams of the slain, making no mistake whatsoever of the fact you were reading something scribed by the Lady herself. “I went on one of the trips as a contributor, seeing if it was as she had said,” the Catcher said softly to his king. “It was not war, and it was not battle. It was butchery and hunting down things that needed to be killed. That was all, Antius. “When she brought up all those souls and offered them a chance between vengeance and rest, I swear my soul almost left my body. Facing down over a thousand souls you’ve just slaughtered without blinking…” The lean, professorial man, a far better swordsman and fighter than all but his closest friends knew, shook his head sadly. “Her numbers are far more accurate than I could trace, but do not doubt them, my king. You know how painfully honest she is, and she has about as much interest in misleading anyone as to the extent of what they are doing as she does in stopping.” “It does not appear you’ve engaged in anything resembling true wide-scale warfare?” King Antius asked, glancing at the other folded, ‘stapled’ reports laying flat, none of them in traditional scroll tubes. They were in a ‘binder’, threaded with metal rings and organized for easy and rapid thumbing through by date. “We are intending to go after the tribes under the Nacht Tarnes next. There is one major cavern under the mountains there, with a dozen tunnels worming their way up to scattered lesser cave systems on the surface. There are over five thousand beast-folk in that one cavern, with thrice that number scattered through the range and lesser cave systems. “We are expecting to reclaim a heavy toll in blood gold. Himmelstern is beside himself that he is not allowed to join in the fighting there, and can only organize patrols along the border to catch any beast-folk who try to flee.” King Antius nodded. “All the relevant parties in the south, like Torwell and Duke Arsmar, have been notified to increase their patrols in their lands, heading off any horde trying to flee to the surface.” “If the past month has been any indication, the Lady Edge will be tracking them and the hordes will flee right into our ambushes,” the Catcher said dryly. “And then she opened the mines, established mineworks and roads after they sealed the whole off and even excavated the first tons of ore and metals to demonstrate their viability. The tax revenues have already repaid tenfold what we are spending to support her assault force… and we’re training up some wonderful cooks in the Inn, to boot.” The idea of preparing massive cooked meals and then the lot of them for large numbers of men to enjoy out in the field was quite original, and the officer corps of the army definitely wanted to implement such a system for themselves… if not for the rote soldiers. The need of a skilled wizard to pull off the trick definitely put a damper on things there, but if you had someone like that, the ability to eat a gourmet meal, or simply have fresh ingredients available to cook, was incredibly appealing. It had also made the grim elven wizardess a considerable amount of gold, although who knew where the gold went to. She seemed to have no problems spending vast amounts of it, after all. It was just a distraction. “The National Reserve is accumulating slowly but steadily. The spell she handed out has indeed proven capable of extending the duration of both and spells indefinitely. They are dispersed to the edges of the Kingdom as requested, for use in catastrophe, and secured away by trusted hands,” the Catcher informed his king smoothly. One from a VIII Slot could hold as much grain as a good-sized silo, be covered in time-freezing Quintessence with a couple spells, and then secreted in a hole in the wall which could be shut, giving no indication it was there at all. A good hammer-blow would break the rock, the could be hauled out, and unfolded to disperse its supplies. In the meantime, it was basically immune to sabotage or poisoning from enemies of the realm. “What of the Code Black Protocols?” Antius asked quietly. Stolen content warning: this content belongs on NovelFire. Report any occurrences. The dread wrapped around the words was weighty. The only way to avoid the catastrophe that was coming was to be strong enough to endure it… and clever enough to escape it in a way that those beings triggering would not be able to catch them. “It is a good thing we have time to work on such things, because it will indeed take time to accomplish what she wants to happen. The level of destruction that the disaster brings means that we must make sure it happens… yet do it below the notice of the Immortals playing games with our lives,” the Catcher replied in a cold voice. “If she is correct about the beast-folk being nothing more than another Immortal invention meant to bedevil us…” King Antius closed his eyes and breathed deeply, anger rippling across his weary face, caught and marshaled, channeling it into something more productive. He had raised a rebellion in the north because the Empire did not care about the people here at all anymore. They wanted their tribute, their taxes, to fuel their decadence and corruption, and cared about nothing else. Their emperor was a madman who seemed to think he was a god incarnate, and took disobedience to his increasingly depraved wishes as increasingly heretical and blasphemous sins which could only be expunged by death. Word of what the Lady Edge was doing was being leaked out, as those who fought beside her were under no restrictions as to keeping their mouths shut, and the Inn itself still found itself with a lot of civilian business, as anyone wanting to get close to the King and his Council members knew that stopping by was a wise thing to do. How much more important the Inn had become, that was another matter. The cessation of active hostilities by both the Iron Graf and the Ertobolle Clans in the wake of the slaughter of the Khirifi had definitely given the Kingdom some much-needed breathing room, and the recruitment of the many alien Greens from the some much-needed muscle and dissuasion. Add to that the spellcasting prowess displayed by the two elfin come from the future and what that could mean for the kingdom simply in the matter of controlling the weather for a fine harvest year, and Darkmoor’s immediate short-term future was looking excellent. The knowledge of the sciences that the aliens brought with them meant their mid-term outlooks were also going up, the most intelligent of his people devouring the science and engineering with the same enthusiasm those aliens that were capable of wielding magic were doing in turn. The long-term was the Code Black. Darkmoor would rise to become a rare beacon of progress and hope in the world… and would then be obliterated. It was not going to be ALLOWED to endure, made great by the hands of mortal men and not the efforts of Immortals. All the attention of the Immortals seemed to be based around destruction, none of them around hope and a greater future. Since that future from Darkmoor would come with being unreliant on their power and visions, he could totally understand why they would seek to strike down what he was building here. So did the Lady Edge, and the Code Black Protocols were being put into place to ensure some did indeed survive the uncaring wrath of the Immortals. Indeed, her whole crusade against the beast-folk was there to impress upon them the very grim nature of what they had to do, that she would deliver on what she said. The weight of her words were there to impel obedience and motivation into those who would think her words either not worth the weight of considering, or might choose to panic and so start the destruction early. Instead, they were doing a hard and cold, perhaps even cruel task that had to be done, and that would carry over to the Code Black Protocols. It was a harsh world and they would have to be strong and committed to see it all through, but King Antius had no doubt they could succeed. His job was to make Darkmoor the country of legends, perhaps the finest nation of its kind to ever exist on this world, and in doing so serve as a distraction for the important work going on underneath it all. When it came time, they would be ready! ------- I was sure Princess Brittabelle was not expecting anything like the introduction to war and slaughter like the one I gave her. None of the elves, either those under me or the ones from this age, really were. That was fine. They weren’t supposed to enjoy this, and they didn’t. Indeed, they found it all repellent, having to do this. And they looked on the babes born Evil, with Red and Black and Purple souls despite barely being able to crawl, and they kept at it. From birth. What a cursed race these beast-folk were. There were certainly heroic stands and defenses by the warriors of the beastials, protecting their kin and families from the upper-world invaders come to kill them all. The irony of them having raided the surface in similar ways was utterly lost on them, of course, but it was quite obvious to us. They still died, and the Karma flowed. Cave system after tunnel network after buried cavern was wiped clean, sealed off, and we moved on to the next. I had no problem making a tunnel through hundreds of feet, paces, or even miles of stone if needed, could drop down into a cavern all the way from the surface if required, and so could enter or exit in ways the beastials dwelling underground could neither defend against nor expect. Blood spilled, Karma flowed. In this fight, blood gold fell into our hands, and was quietly turned over to the dwarves of Mount Krynstyr, who took it and tallied it thoughtfully. To be fair, the Nacht Tarnes was a large range of mountains, and we couldn’t hit all the surface exits at once. It was actually easier to close off a couple of the larger holdings and the beast-folk who lived in them, go down to the great central cavern under the mountains, and then rip through that location, killing anything and driving the beast-folk both up out of the tunnels and deeper into the earth in a bid to escape us. The armies up top were waiting for them, and the beastials finally broke the peace as they spilled up out of the depths, driven forth by lack of room and food and fear of the fire and steel hunting them down below, crossing the border and falling upon the waiting dwarven forces there. Word spread in the depths, and the beastials all across the North began to get restless and aggressive, spoiling for revenge against those who were doing this. That naturally meant it was time for the Ertobelle clans to take advantage of something, was it not?