The True Althanian Army v.s. The Brotherhood of Castigars (Osiris Legion)

[Shinsou Vaan Osiris]

More than a hundred men were abandoned in the village of Helen-Var; a place where Oyster fishermen and farmers had plied their trade for decades. They were drunk and there was nothing to be done for them. A score of women stayed with them. They were drunk too. Not just drunk, but insensible. The men had broken into a tavern’s storeroom and found great barrels of last year’s vintage with which they had diluted their misery. Now, in a bleak dawn, they lay about the broken town like the victims of a plague, amongst the dead and dying.

The drunks were Coronian soldiers, guarding the town, who had survived the initial attack. Unlike the rest of the islands forces, they had joined the Coronian army either because of crime or desperation, and because the army gave them a third of a pint of rum a day. Last night they had found heaven in a miserable tavern in a miserable Coronian town on a miserable flint road that led to the sea. They had got drunk, so now they would be left to the mercy of whoever was unfortunate enough to happen upon them.

A tall Lieutenant in the colours of the 95th Foot moved among the bodies which lay in the stable yard of the plundered inn, just west of the entrance to the town. His interest was not in the stupefied drunks, but in some wooden crates that had been jettisoned from an ox-drawn wagon to make space for the wounded and the dead. The crates, like so much else that the Brotherhood of the Castigars was too short handed to carry, would have been left behind, except that the Lieutenant had discovered that half of them contained gunpowder. He was trying to salvage it for their cannons. The other half, containing Oyster shells, were stacked up against the tavern wall. He had already filled the packs and pouches of the oxen left in the village with the powder, ones they had commandeered for the Brotherhood; now he and one other soldier tried to cram the last of it into the panniers of the ruined town’s last ox. There was still quite a lot left over.

One of the rank and file of the 95th, Gideon, finished the job and then stared at the stack of surplus crates. “What shall we do with them, sir?”

“Burn it all.”

“Bloody hell!” Gideon gave a brief laugh, then gestured at the drunks in the yard. “There is enough powder to kill them all!”

“If we don’t, those mages will come back for the crates and they’ll do it, or even the Imperials if they think we are responsible for this massacre," The Lieutenant had a slash of a scar on his left cheek that gave him a broodingly savage face. “Do you want the Coronians to start killing us with our own powder?”

Gideon did not much care what either of the enemy forces did. At this moment, he cared about a drunken girl who lay in the yard’s corner. “Pity to kill her, sir. She’s a nice little thing.”

“Leave her for the mages.”

Gideon stooped to pull open the girl’s bodice to reveal her breasts. She stirred in the cold air, but did not waken. Her hair was stained with vomit, her dress with wine, yet she was a pretty girl. She was perhaps fifteen or sixteen years old; probably married a soldier, followed him off to whatever god forsaken battle lay ahead. Now she was drunk, and the enemy would have her. “Wake up!” he said.

“Leave her!” All the same the Lieutenant could not resist crossing the yard to look down on the girl’s exposed form. “Stupid bitch,” he said sourly.

It was then that Major Paikuhan, one of Shinsou Vaan Osiris’s trusted confidents in the 95th, appeared in the yard’s entrance. “Lieutenant!”

The Lieutenant turned. “Sir?”

Paikuhan had a small, wiry moustache and a malevolent expression. “When you’ve finished undressing women, Lieutenant, perhaps you’d be good enough to join the rest of us? The 95th waits two miles north. Only the Immortals are supposed to be here.”

“I was going to burn these crates first, sir.”

“Fuck the crates, Lieutenant. Just hurry up!”

“Yes, sir.”

“Unless you’d prefer to stay here? I doubt the army would miss you, with that attitude.”

The Lieutenant did not reply. Six months ago, when he had joined the 95th Foot at Whitevale, no officer would have spoken thus in front of the men. But now the sudden situation the Brotherhood found themselves in, what with Storm Veritas aligning himself with a separate sect within Whitevale and the approaching mage army threatening to bring their power to bear against Shinsou’s contingent, had jaded tempers and brought hidden antagonisms to the surface. Men who would normally have treated each other with wary respect or even a forced cordiality now snapped like rabid dogs. Paikuhan hated the Lieutenant. It was a livid, irrational and consuming hatred, and the Lieutenant’s annoying response was to ignore it.

“Who the hell does he think he is?!” He exploded to his captain, who rode alongside him on a beautiful brown horse. “Does he think the whole 95th will wait for him?!”

“He’s just doing his job, isn’t he?” Captain Murray was a mild and fair man.

“He’s not doing his job, he’s gaping at some whore’s tits. This town is supposed to be under surveillance in case the people responsible come back. Blowing up crates? Might as tell the whole bloody world we’re here.”

“Well, perhaps that’s what Shinsou wants.” Captain Murray shrugged.

Abandoning both the drunks and the remainder of the town’s ruination to the lap of the gods, the Lieutenant emerged from the tavern yard, waving Gideon and ten other men to his side before joining Paikuhan and Murray on the road north. It began to rain; a sleet-cold rain that spat from the east onto the three hundred soldiers of the enigmatic Immortal division who waited in the village street. These men were the Brotherhood’s most advanced forces; a deadly reconnaissance unit sent in ahead to assess every situation and relay information back to the main forces a couple of miles behind. Their unshaven faces betrayed the discipline evident in their stance. Somewhere ahead of them was the army who did this, the same army that Shinsou had identified on his flank just the other day.

Their job was piquet duty: to be the eyes and ears of the Brotherhood in this part of the world until such time that Shinsou decided Helen-Var was no longer of strategic value to them. They were unsure of the reason that their leader had sent them to a wrecked shell of a settlement in the first place, when the enemy had already seemingly bolted, but they never questioned the decision. They had to trust in their leader; that there was a plan collectively bigger than their miniscule role in the battle. He clearly knew something they didn't, yet.

The eleven members of the 95th Foot begin moving two miles north to meet with the bulk of Brotherhood forces, taking three Oxen and four extra volley's worth of gunpowder for their guns. This will take one post to arrive. Three hundred men from the Immortals stay put in Helen-Var on piquet duties.