Mercedes Lackey - Winds Of Fury

"The Emperor's personal envoy is playing footsie with Hulda?" Kero exclaimed, her voice rising sharply. "Old Wizard Charliss? The Emperor of the East? Bloody hell"

Whatever else she might have said was lost as someone pounded urgently on the door. "It's Jeri!" said Kero's assistant, with strain audible in her voice. "There's been a relay-message from the east, and they sent a page out here to get you. They need you people in Council right now! Ancar's troops are attacking our border!"

"Bloody hell!" Kero cried again, then snatched open the door and headed out at a dead run, with Elspeth and Darkwind right on her heels.

The ax had fallen, and it was worse than Elspeth had feared. Nightfall brought three more messages as soon as lanterns could be seen from relay-tower to relay-tower, with word that a Herald with more detail was on the way.

But the messages, although they were clear and concise, made absolutely no sense.

Elspeth rubbed her eyes and fought back the urge to sleep; no one in the Council chamber had slept for three days. Right now Selenay was reporting what little the Council knew to her chief courtiers while Prince Daren held her seat. Elspeth was trapped between exhaustion and tension. There was no time for sleep; there was no time for anything, now. A trainee put a mug full of strong, hot tea discreetly by her hand; she took it and emptied it in three swallows.

Ancar's forces had crossed the border shortly after noon on the first day of the attack. As Kero and Elspeth had feared, they seemed to be more of his magically-controlled conscript-troops, and they continued to remain under control long past the point when spells had lost their effectiveness in the past. So the barrier was down, just as Vanyel had warned.

What was insane was that they had overrun the first garrison in their path, and had lost at least half their men taking it. Now they were fortifying it and holding it against a counterattack, while more of Ancar's troops came in over the border at their back - and given the rate at which they were losing men, in a day or two they would have to replace the entire force that had mounted the attack in the first place!

"This isn't like Ancar," Kero said tiredly, as she and the Lord Marshal shoved counters around on a map in response to every message from the border. "He just doesn't fight like this. That garrison is of no value whatsoever; there's no one of any importance there, there's nothing valuable there, it's just one more place on the border. It isn't even strategically valuable. He just doesn't go after targets that aren't worth anything - he certainly doesn't continue to hold them afterward!"

"I'd say he'd gone mad, except he already was," the Lord Marshal agreed, running his hand through his thinning hair. "I have never seen Ancar strike for anything that did not have a substantial value to it. That was why we didn't bother to fortify that town all that heavily."

"Someone else is dictating his tactics," Darkwind said suddenly, sitting up straight.

All eyes turned toward him. "He's never let anyone dictate his tactics before this," Kero replied skeptically. "That's one reason why we've held him off for so long. He's very predictable, and bad losses have always made him give up. He always follows the same pattern; he tests us until he loses his test force, then he falls back. Resist him strongly, and he gives up."

"That was so in the past, but it is not so now," Darkwind replied emphatically. "He has given over his main strategy to someone else, and we know who it is that spends the lives of underlings like sand, and leaves a river of the blood of his own people in his wake."

He looked significantly at Elspeth, who nodded. "Mornelithe Falconsbane," she said.

"The mage?" was Kero's incredulous reply. "Since when does a mage know anything about tactics?"

"Are these sound tactical decisions?" Darkwind countered. "No. But they will win the war for Ancar. All he needs do is keep driving his troops in, and they will overwhelm you. He will conquer by sheer numbers. Recall, neither of them care at all for the state either land will be in when the war is over. Falconsbane would as soon both lands were decimated, and he could very well have prodded Ancar until he cares only for revenge."

The rest of the Council stared at him, appalled. Elspeth felt her gut knot with cold fear. This was what she had felt, but had not been able to articulate, probably because she had not wanted to believe it. But now, hearing it spoken aloud, she did believe it.

"No one can win against something like that - " one of the Councillors faltered.

Darkwind only nodded grimly, and Elspeth seconded him.

"Then we are doomed. It is only a matter of time - " The Seneschal did not wail, but he might just as well have. His words, and the fear in them, echoed the feelings of everyone around him.

Black despair descended - eyes widened with incipient hysteria - and the High Council of Valdemar was only a heartbeat away from absolute panic.

"Not if we do something completely unexpected," Elspeth heard herself saying, and she marveled absently at the calm she heard in her own voice. "Something atypical. That was how Darkwind and I defeated him before. We figured out what he thought we would do, and we did something that he couldn't anticipate."

"He'll assume panic," Darkwind put in. "He'll assume that you will mount a rearguard action and attempt to hold a line while the rest of your populace flees, becoming refugees. He will expect you to go north and south, I think; he will try to cut you off from Rethwellan, and count on the mountains to trap you. I would guess that once he panics you, he will come in from a southerly direction to drive you."

Kero studied the map. "That fits," she said at last. "That cuts us off from our allies, although he probably doesn't know about the new alliance with Karse."

"We have an alliance with Karse?" squeaked someone to Elspeth's left. Kero ignored whoever it was. "So he's going to be expecting some kind of digging in, a defensive line, you think?"

"Isn't that what logic dictates?" Darkwind replied. "A large defensive attempt. Fortification. So, what is not logical? How can we strike at him in a significant way that he will not anticipate?"

Kero stared at him for a very long time, then transferred her gaze to Elspeth. "A dagger strike," she said slowly. "A very small counterattack, inside his own stronghold. We cut off the snake's head. Kill Ancar, Hulda, and Falcon's Breath, and the whole thing falls apart."

Darkwind nodded, his mouth set in a thin line, his lips gray with tension and fatigue.

Silence around the Council table, although Elspeth saw her stepfather nodding out of the corner of her eye. Prince Daren knew something of expediency.

"That's murder - " faltered Lady Elibet.

"That's assassination" said the Lord Patriarch sternly. "Coldblooded, and calculated. A deadly sin by any decent man's moral code."

"Oh, it's a moral dilemma, all right," Kero replied, grimly. "It's murder, it's cold-blooded, it's wrong. If you face an enemy, you should give him a chance to defend himself. Hellfires, killing is wrong. I'm a mercenary, my lords and ladies, and I will be the first to tell you that there is no nice way to kill. But what choice do we have? If we try to run, we either abandon everything to him - and may I remind you, at least half of our population has no means to escape - or we find ourselves running into a trap he's set for us. So the half that runs gets slaughtered, too. If we make a stand, his numbers overrun us and destroy us. And while we're dying, so are his own troops. Remember them? They're poor mage-controlled farmers, graybeards, and little boys! In fact, once he starts taking our land, he'll start turning our own people against us! Do we have a choice!"