Douglas Niles - The Puppet King

The marshal assigned a score of griffon-mounted elves to observe the monsters that were busily plundering the wreckage of the First Division’s landing.

“Keep an eye on that dragon,” he warned them. “Get out of here in a hurry if it shows any signs of coming after you.”

“Aye, Lord Marshal,” pledged a Qualinesti captain, an archer who had put one of the arrows into the serpent’s eye. “But may I beg permission to give it another stinging before we go?”

“Granted,” Porthios agreed. Then he led the rest of the fliers across the island, toward the surviving elves of his once mighty army. He thought fleetingly of Samar, missing the warrior-mage’s steady courage, not to mention his skill with the lance. Perhaps the ever alert Samar would have even discerned the ambush before it was too late. He could only hope that same alertness and competence were being employed to protect and serve his wife.

As the formation of griffons came into sight of the second landing zone, Porthios saw that the construction of the fortifications was progressing well. Already the elves had cleared a large swath of ground at the riverbank, and the spiked palisade that would surround the camp was more than half completed. Frameworks of towers had been made, marking the sites of the four battle platforms that would soon rise thirty feet into the air. Everywhere General Bandial’s Silvanesti were working hard, certainly worried about their comrades, but not allowing themselves to be distracted from their task.

In obedience to his orders, the other half of the griffon-mounted Qualinesti had remained with the Second Division, flying circular patrols overhead and scouting the environs of the camp. Now these fliers pulled into formation besides their brethren from the west, shouting for news.

Porthios let Tarqualan’s elves mingle with their fellow Qualinesti. While all the fliers continued to circle over the camp, the marshal guided Stallyar to a landing in the midst of the Second Division’s camp. He was vaguely pleased to note that, despite the added distraction of his arrival, the elves remained busily working at their assigned tasks. Sadly he suspected that the fortifications here would be tested, and very soon.

General Bandial met him as he landed, and the one-eyed veteran listened grimly as Porthios quietly told him of the First Division’s fate.

“They were waiting in ambush?” Bandial asked in disbelief.

“As certainly as if they’d known the time and location of our landing,” the marshal replied. Once again that circumstance rankled at the back of his mind, but he knew he had to attend to more urgent matters. “As soon as you get the fence up, get your men working on a ditch on the outside of the walls. And we’ll want double the usual number of towers. Also, you had two of the dragonlances in your boats, right? Get them out and place them in the hands of a couple of your biggest, steadiest warriors.”

“And Lady Cantal-Silaster?” asked Bandial, his eye narrowing.

“She fell leading the defense, overwhelmed by draconians.

The one-eyed general blinked, silently grieving at the news even as the tough commander’s thoughts turned to the next matter. “What about news of the First? Do you want to try to keep their fate a secret?” asked Bandial, shrewdly eyeing his commander.

Porthios shook his head. “You know as well as I do that won’t work. No, it’s best to give them an announcement, let the troops know where we stand. You can spread the word that I’ll talk to them as soon as the wall’s done.”

“All right, Marshal. I think you know that these are good warriors, men and women as steady as you could want in a fight.”

“I know that, General,” Porthios said with a sigh. “But we both could have said the same thing about the First Division.”

Five minutes later the marshal got his next dose of bad news. He and Bandial were looking into the case that held—was supposed to hold—two dragonlances. Instead, they saw only bare shafts of wood. The barbed, razor-sharp heads of the enchanted weapons, the lethal metallic killers forged by Theros Ironfeld and the Hammer of Kharas, were missing. Scuffs showed where they had been pried off the hafts.

“Stolen?” asked the general, gaping in disbelief. “I can’t believe any elf would do such a thing!”

“They would be worth a lot, but even so, I’m inclined to agree with you,” Porthios said. “They were obviously taken off the shafts, but I doubt—I can’t believe —that the motive was personal profit.”

Again suspicions whirled in his brain, but like his questions about the ambush, none of these thoughts would do them any good in their current predicament. Still, he resolved that they would be addressed in the future.

“We’ll have to stop the green dragon with arrows,” Porthios declared. “At least, we already gave him a stinging to remember.”

Despite his bold words, he was remembering the dragon’s single-minded pursuit of him. That was yet another suspicious thing about this campaign, a question that would eventually demand some answers. But for now, the dragon’s motivation, like everything else, must simply be accepted as a fact of the battle.

Perhaps an hour of daylight remained as the last stakes of the palisade were driven into the soft ground. Now the Second Division was protected by a semicircular wall of stout posts, with the river—and the landed boats—at their backs. Towers rose every fifty paces, each a squat, sturdy platform for a score of archers.

At about the same time, one of the Qualinesti scouts landed to report that the horde of draconians and ogres had marched into the woods, bearing on a line toward this camp. The green dragon had taken to the air, and the other scouts were giving it a wide berth. The wyrm, for its part, seemed content to remain well beyond the range of the elven archers.

Knowing it would take several hours, at least, for the file of creatures to make its way through the tangled undergrowth of the island, Porthios had Bandial gather his division around the center of the camp, though he didn’t neglect to have plenty of pickets posted on the wall tops and towers. The white-robed wizards among the elven force cast spells of detection and alarm through the woods for a quarter mile in every direction, so the warriors were fairly confident of notice prior to the enemy’s approach.

The marshal stood upon a broad stump in the middle of the camp, high enough that he could see across all the elves ranked before him, but close enough that he could project his voice across the entire gathering.

“Elves of the Second Division,” Porthios began, “you have already heard rumors of the disaster that has befallen our comrades in the First. It grieves me to tell you that those rumors are true. Their camp was overrun before the palisade was built. The boats were taken, and casualties were many.”

He paused to let that sink in, pleased to note that the faces before him remained stoic. The changes, where he did note them, were not expressions of fear or resentment. Rather, these elves were getting angry, becoming grimly determined to exact revenge.

“We now know that a force of denizens, including ogres and draconians and one dragon, is on its way to try to repeat that victory over us. But you should know that your comrades did not yield their ground without a bloody fight. Nor did they turn and run, even when disaster was certain. Two green dragons lie dead there, fodder for maggots and worms, and more draconians than you can easily count spilled into acid, burst into fire, or froze into stone as they gave up their lives on the swords of the First Division.

“I do not try to mislead you into thinking that the fight will be easy, or the result certain. But you men of the Second Division have a sturdy palisade, and you know how well these walls of wood have served us over the last thirty years. Not once—remember that, not once —has an attacker breached the walls of a fortified elven camp.