BECMI Chapter 137 – Vikings get Viked by Southern Cross

“That’s far enough, Skrotti,” Pious Godfrey, Paladin and Champion of the Realm of Darkmoor, stated firmly, his brown eyes sharp and unyielding. The Jarl weighed the measure of the man in front of him, and decided very quickly that it was not a fight he was going to win.

“I’m here, Antius. What do you want?” the Jarl asked bluntly.

“I’m here to dictate terms to you. We are not going to dicker on the terms. You’re going to agree to them, or I’m going to kill every single soul in that pile of stones you call a castle behind you, and it’s not going to cost me a single man.”

The Jarl’s face went pale as he could not help glancing at the sundered tower, now just a collapsed set of walls open to the sky and useless in defense, at least a dozen men slain inside of it. “Get on with it,” he snarled in what seemed to be pitiful defiance.

“One, you’re going to offer me a ransom, a tribute, and a bribe all in one, whatever you want to call it. It’s going to be big enough to buy me off the task of killing you all and taking everything important that you have,” Antius began cordially. “You’re going to start it off with the weapons of everyone inside that keep, and that includes yourself.”

The man’s face twisted. “And how do we know you won’t cut us all down once that happens?”

“Easy. Turn around, march back inside, and in about ten minutes you’ll all be dead and fed to the Land, regardless. You can take your treasury, weapons, armor, and pride to Hell with you, I won’t make any off you at all.”

The Jarl shuddered, looking around for signs of crimson and black, seeing none, but what needed to be said about the elven Wizardess who had wiped out the Khirifi?

“What else?” he growled, knowing that couldn’t be all of it.

“Second, you’re going to want to consider how badly you want me to have a trading ship breaking the ice come spring, now that your whole fleet is in flames along the shore… a trading ship laden with food. So, you best have something ready to trade them come the spring, too. We’ll magically you a message to see if you’ve something to trade for grain and wine at that time.”

That statement brought the Jarl up a little short in surprise. “Why would you do such a thing?” he growled.

“Thirdly, it ends here.” Antius stepped forward of the lights, the Sword of Darkmoor in his hands, long and black and the most feared Weapon of his kingdom, the Jarl taking a step back on seeing its ebon length unsheathed in his hand. “All of it. The raiding and the piracy of Darkmoor and Elb’s shipping.

“The next time we come, we come to kill you all. Every man, woman, and child. There won’t just be burning and plundering. You’ll find there’s been no rape, and no killing of those who did not fight this night. But the next time we come, it’s death for everyone. I’ll bring cavalry, and we’ll wipe this town from the map, and every family that lives within a league of it or more.

“We’re not putting up with it any more, Jarl Skrotti. We’ve had enough of you and your shenanigans, and if your gods don’t like it, tough shit.

“You either change your ways, or we end you. There will be peace between us, or there will be no us, because there will be no more Ertobolle. You will leash your people and teach them about being good neighbors, fair traders, and honest men, or we will teach them about cold graves on sea and land.

“Do you understand those three terms, Jarl Skrotti?” King Antius asked coldly.

The Northman hesitated, wondering if he should say anything flippant, but the look in Antius’ eyes did not encourage a flippant attitude. “I do, Antius,” he managed to growl. “But even you know that my authority is not absolute.”

“True, and some will deride you passing on my words as caving in to some weak southerner, not that you could ever truly be trusted, anyway.” Antius watched the Jarl’s face sink as those words hit. It was true, he held respect by strength, and his strength had just been gutted. “I think, however, that the number of jarls willing to say that to your face is going to be much, much less once you start sending out messengers, because you are not alone in the fun and exciting times that you’ve had tonight.

“As a matter of fact, six of your more infamous compatriots will not be sending back messages to you, ever.” The Halfhand’s eyes flashed as he realized the ramifications of that. “Nor will there come a fleet of longships to your shores to relieve you in the spring.

“You weren’t the first clan and holding of the Ertobolle we visited, Halfhand.

The Jarl looked past them, to the greatest city of the Northmen raging in flames and southerners in armor walking away with the spoils of war, burning the houses behind them.

It was going to be a long, cold, brutal winter, the same kind he’d inflicted on so many southerners, only worse, up here in the North.

“I will also tell you that you might want to get your surviving men ready for a smaller, yet significant problem,” King Antius went on smoothly. “Lady Edge is on the hunt, but you probably did not yet hear that.” The Northman could not hide the flash of dismay in his blue eyes, but covered it quickly.

“What of her?” he growled in an attempt at showing courage.

“She has declared that she is going to wipe the beast-folk off of the world.” Jarl Skrotti Halfhand blinked twice at those words. At the audaciousness of them. At the… implications of someone who might actually be able to do that!

“Darkmoor is almost free of them, and she has moved on to the caves and caverns in and under the Duchy of Elb. They are slaughtering nigh unto a thousand beastials a day down there in the depths, led to them by her arts and the Doom she has placed upon them.

“The beast-folk may come boiling out of their caves in fear of the death that is coming at them from below. Generally, she’s been letting local military forces deal with the consequences of that, since they won’t be going back to ground.

“So, you might have a horde of barbaric savages falling upon you in the depths of winter, desperate for food and shelter, as they flee from death in the depths of the land. It is the only warning I am going to give you.”

And he’d just lots hundreds of his warriors to the mercilessly efficient attack of the Darkmoor Marines, inside the walls and taking out all the strongpoints before anyone knew what was happening. The docks aflame, the city starting to burn, and squads of Marines going around and ambushing patrols and squads of warriors trying to see who and what was happening, wondering how they had gotten in without being seen, how they could possibly be attacking at this time of year…

All words, the impossibility of it useless, because it had happened and they had been attacked and defeated before they could mount any kind of a defense.

“We will be ready for them if such a thing were to happen!” he grunted in scorn, but his eyes flashed as he considered what would have to happen to forestall such a horde coming. Desperate, starving, cold, knowing they would have to win the fight and defeat the humans or perish themselves…

He hid his grimace. This was going to be a winter of wolves, indeed…

I could have dropped the whole castle into a hole by transmuting the area under it to mud, crushed the hiding troops under the weight of their own fortifications, then filled the area with a accented with vivus to burn away bodies and souls so as to create no undead.

It really would have taken no more than ten minutes. Don’t mess with high-level spellcasters, especially those who know and Runes of Stone.

I stayed long enough for the forces of Darkmoor to withdraw with all their plunder, and then closed the , being the last one to exit. I did no more than transport and help Heal the wounded, and left most of that duty to the Clerics serving the royal forces. The unstinting use of magic to Heal the wounded without compensation was the key to the generosity of spirit needed to unlock Healing Reserve, and without that core of a Good heart, it simply could not be triggered here… much to the frustration of many a Priest who’d been dutifully Healing their faithful in return for worship and obedience for years.

I had no sympathy for the Northmen, ‘just obeying the will of their gods’ or whatever. The Immortals wanted war and spectacle, I was more than familiar with such things, and basic decency had absolutely nothing to do with their ambitions and desire to see mortals striving at one another.

To the victor went the spoils, sure enough. The next time, there would be nothing left of them… and that held true to those fools that thought they could get away with piracy and raiding on their own.

We hadn’t raided all of the holdings of the Northmen, just most of them. The smallest holdings held by minor clans were going to be the only ones left with ships, and would either profit thereby or be attacked by larger clans wanting their ships. They were also the ones most likely to ignore the warnings and think they could act like the larger clans had, blaming them for anything going wrong, and ignoring just how readily we might be able to get to the truth of the matter.

Well, it was a lesson they would learn the harsh way, since any other way was soft and unworthy of them.

Me, I had to return to the task of making sure orcs and other anthroids didn’t come about in this timeline… or, at the very least, crushed them so hard their ascendance might be delayed by millennia or more, depending on how much the Immortal making them was willing to double down on this.

It was one of the black holes in the , a place where artificial, not natural forces, had chewed through the stone and cut it out of the awareness of the land.

I reached out to touch the stone here, the striations worn by time and condensation over the course of thousands of years.

It had been bored through, not even mined. It was a thirty-foot perfect circle, a tunnel cut at about a five degree angle, rising in the distance from this living cavern we were in, itself five miles long and nearly a mile wide at its widest, it and its connected caverns home to hundreds of beast-folk in all their shapes and sizes, as well as mushrooms and water flowing down from the mountains of the Duchy of the Mounts located above… some of it coming down this pipe.

The others were gathered around, looking at the perfect and unnatural expanse of the tunnel, definitely not formed by any kind of animal or digging thing they knew of, and even magic didn’t work so clinically.

“What made it?” Bjorn asked for everyone, not sure how to regard the tunnel before him. We’d traveled hundreds of miles of tunnels underground by now, some spacious, a great many not, but this stood out for just how non-alive it was, with nothing growing in it whatsoever.

The unnaturalness of that division was definitely enough to earn everyone’s attention here.