BECMI Chapter 103 – A Massacre for a Massacre

Duum was up in the sky, once again , looking over the connecting roads nearby to make sure there were no patrols coming that might surprise us.

Brother Tunnex took over command of everything quickly, Master Velient was immediately impressed into service as his aide. In less than an hour the base camp here was picked clean, what was useful was piled up on , and we were riding out for the supporting forts, which also had food supplies, horses, and military gear worth saving.

While they looted the forts, I swept around the mountains and retrieved the hidden gear of the patrols I’d cut down out here, adding them to the armories that were being built up here. My were fairly heaping with the amount of stuff bundled on top of them, but they took the weight without a problem, and indeed had no problems lifting up wagons balanced on two of them so that even more supplies could be carried around.

I was gliding ahead of the long line of on one side, former slaves all mounted on horses or riding hovering wagons on the other, with Brother Tunnex riding my personal Disk next to me, when I glided to a halt with a word to the horses and a raised hand.

“Master Velient, there’s one final sentence you need to read.” I made sure everyone could hear me, and would hear him. They all sat up alertly, ears cocked to listen. The had already done great things for them, what more would I be giving them?

I flicked up the words, he read them once, and then turned to look back at Mon Burromos behind us. His smile was feral as he stood up and pointed back at the hellhole they were riding away from, all of their oppressors dead.

“I WISH,” he screamed at the top of his voice, pointing excitedly, “THAT THE PIT OF SOULS AND ITS FORGE HAVE AS VIOLENT AN ENDING AS THE EVIL THEY WROUGHT DESERVES!” he howled, and his screams were all taken up by the ex-slaves turning to look back at the tor behind us.

“GRANTED!” I stated coldly.

There was only a breath, a stillness coming across the world, as if the land had inhaled. All the horses froze, sensing something was about to happen.

And then Mon Burromos wasn’t an inactive volcano anymore.

The lava blew right through the top of the thing, gushed out the dungeon entry, and tore one entire side of the tor completely off as it ruptured out. The thunder and boom of its explosion ripped past us, louder than any thunderclap, but for all that there was precious little chaos from anything and anyone, even as the earth rumbled underneath us for a moment and fountains of molten lava began to spray up into the air, well on their way towards building a caldera.

I told horses and men alike, and all of them looked to face me as, Wings filled with stars out, I led them down the road to the east.

I’d have to fix up the crossroads I’d messed up, and Duum said there was a patrol milling around there, wondering what to do.

Caravan magic I’d wound upon the horses would give them incredible endurance and enhanced speed, and they weren’t carrying overmuch, anyway. We had far more horses than people, which was very good, and the wagons were all sitting on top of and moving without any difficulty whatsoever.

In short, we were moving at the speed of a mounted patrol already, not a supply train.

A lot of people were turning back to look at the mountain gushing molten rock and raising a big ole plume of ash and cinders into the sky. The wind was blowing west, so we didn’t have to worry about that stuff coming down on us, at least, and it was really agitating the patrol up ahead as they saw where it was coming from.

They got enough of a good look at it and promptly turned north and rode hard away down the road, off to give word and warning to their commanders and let them know that something had gone really wrong at Mon Burromos… which, among other things, should dry up the demand for slaves heading to the place.

It was five miles from the Mon to the crossroads, another six miles from there out into the plains where the slaves had long since fled their road-building job. From there it was fifteen miles across the rest of the plains, across the Barrier Swamp, and returning to Moonraven in triumph, such as it were. We arrived late at night to the city, whose scouts saw us clearly coming, identified me leading the way, and turned out to meet us all in celebration as the gift of horses, men, and supplies was welcomed into the city.

Contact had already been made with rebels, and a few surviving officers had returned to the town to help take charge. Brother Tunnex joined them promptly, the towering sollux an alien yet vibrant contributor who had no difficulty exerting influence and taking command firmly and dynamically.

“You’ll not be staying, Lady Edge?” Brother Tunnex asked, giving Duum a gentle scratching on his overlong ears. Duum’s tongue was lolling in delight at the gesture, like a big ugly long-fanged puppy with a monocle over one eye.

“I am going on a mission of extermination,” I said, shaking my head. Tales from the slaves of what the Khirifi had done to the Elbers had filled my ears, and made my heart go cold. The level of purging and slaughter of civilians, including women, children, and the elderly, had been horrific. If they couldn’t be set to work, the Khirifi had massacred them without a care, and they’d also cleaned away the entire ruling and wealthy class of Elbers, executing all the leading citizens and their families that they could catch, leaving the Elbers mostly leaderless and unable to resist.

Mithar’s First Rule was a hope for a high standard of behavior, of honor shown and returned in kind… and if you were a fucking evil bastard, then you were going to reap what you sowed.

The level of genocide and depopulating the territory was emblematic of the worst kind of conquering tyrannies, opening up living room for the marauding nation advancing this way from the west. What Elbers remained were basically slaves or abused servants, no better… and only now were the Khirifi realizing what it cost them, as the economy of what had been a prosperous Duchy of independent and motivated freemen farmers and merchants was now a guttering wreck producing basically little beyond survival fare. They’d wanted a land whose people could no longer hold it, and what they now had was a land that couldn’t truly support their empire, either.

I mused, streaking around the roads that had probably cost the life of a score of slaves with every mile they extended. Barbarians often made shit-arse rulers, and fanatic barbarians ruled by uncompromising priests of an uncaring god were even worse. These idiots needed to read some books on the politics and economies of empires.

These barbarians had never faced a pissed-off archcaster, and I was mightily pissed, indeed.

I could have brought in a Sim to help me out with the purging of the Khifiri, but this was the worst kind of war on Evil, one that had to be done without remittance or mercy. They had already shown the Elbers that surrender was a path to destruction, there was only fighting left at this point… and the Khirifi were also learning the math of occupying territory, namely that it could not be done and hold an empire. There was too much territory, too much ground, and if you were not living on the ground, holding it for your own, trying to occupy it rapidly took up so much of your manpower that your empire would collapse under it.

Rome had found that out under its Caesars, which was why it had tried to convert the peoples it conquered. Resistance movements across the centuries had found out that if you resisted long enough, the cost would be too great, and the conquerors would either leave, or mercilessly they would butcher you all.

Conquerors had found out that the only way to fight determined resistance movements was with absolute ruthlessness, so that the movement’s own people turned on them to save their lives. But that presupposed that the survivors would be treated fairly and not be punished themselves, or it just created martyrs.

The British had brought that tactic into the modern age in India back on Terra. Empires, indeed.

I was moving with great speed, and giving the Khirifi little if any time to realize what was actually going on. I was not a cavalry person, I didn’t have to travel on the ground, and just force of arms and numbers was not going to do much to or for me at all.

Unlike them, I could just go out and hunt, and kill them all. Gritting my teeth at the necessity of it, I proceeded to do just that.

Every patrol of horsemen out on the roads that I came across I killed. There was no alarm, no terms, no escapees. I eyed their Auras, shook my head, and tore through them all, dusting them and leaving great mysteries for any who stumbled upon them. I told the horses to make for Moonraven where nice men would be able to get the saddles off of them, while bundling the armor, weapons, and clothing of their riders up on them. The horses took off, I continued on.

The Khirifi knew something was wrong with the site of their great religious undertaking having exploded, but not precisely what, or how bad their own situation was. So it was that I swept north up the new roads towards the forts that the Khirifi had stationed along the rivers and coastline there.

There was one double-size patrol riding south that I came across, so I expended a full set on them, crisscrossing Skulls riding javelins spit from a colossal Black Rose that tore the riders completely apart before they could respond while on their urgent mission to investigate the new volcano still belching stuff in the sky to their south.

Fort Kirshnar itself was abandoned when I arrived there, leading a string of forty horses returning to their stables after the elimination of their riders.

It was not, however, empty.

Duum glided past the four men hiding in the fort, peeking out at me and trying not be seen. I could their Auras without fail, so that didn’t work, but it saved me some work.

They sort of peeked out as Duum swooped away, both of us going back into . When they saw the twoscore warhorses waiting happily outside to get back into their stables and be fed, they realized that something really momentous was indeed going on, and I was probably at the heart of it.

The military situation in the Duchy of Elb was changing with great speed, indeed. I was aware that if I was truly serious about this I should have gone south instead of north, but freeing up more territory and wiping the occupying forces could be done with a speed that they wouldn’t be able to respond to effectively, and give the resistance in the north here a breather and a lot of hope.

Hope was coming, and man, was she a bitch when she got riled up.