Chapter Twenty: The loss of her brings only despair
Balthier was almost grateful for the squadron of Dalmascan fighter gliders the Strahl encountered en-route back to the Highwaste.
Evading strafing fire from the nippy little fighters at least provided adequate distraction from his thoughts. Balthier had decided that thinking too much or too long on anything at the moment was simply not a good idea.
With Nono's efficient aid keeping a keen eye on the radar screen Balthier was able to lose his pursuers by doubling back towards Nabudis and risking an unplanned and decidedly uncomfortably emergency landing, not to mention, burned out engines by hiding within the dissipating Mist cloud that had consumed Nabradia.
Taking a long, tedious detour around the cusp of Rozzaria's north-western most border and sweeping south over the Ozmone Plains before heading sharply north easterly he was eventually able to dock the labouring Strahl in the Highwaste close to the Salikawood.
Hamish' camp was in a state of just barely controlled panic. They had seen, as Balthier brought his ship down to land, cloaking device active before he docked, the ant trails of Imperial battalions and artillery advancing on Nalbina from the Phon Coast.
'It begins.' Guido intoned with a ridiculous solemnity that caused Balthier to grit his teeth against some form of sharp, mocking reproof.
It wasn't beginning, he might have snapped, it was ending. This was not the beginning of hostilities it was the culmination of them.
Raminas of Dalmasca was a fool if he sent troops from Rabanastre to Nalbina; the Empire no longer needed to fight when they could lay waste so effectively to a civilisation such as Nabudis with out sending a single garrison onto the Nabreus Plains.
Balthier did not say any of it however, the shallow scratches on his face from Bethesda's nails stung a little in the gritty gale that whistled through the gulley's and passageways of the Highwaste but Balthier did not even consider using some form of curative, for once his vanity was forgotten.
Instead he strode down the gangplank of the Strahl and toward the camp without a word, not even acknowledging the presence of Hamish at his side. Balthier, with Nono, still and quiet, held protectively in the crook of his arm, was trying not to acknowledge anything or anyone at all.
He was trying not to notice or acknowledge or even consider the conspicuous absence of his partner. He did not want to accept that Fran was not present in the whirl of activity within the rebel camp.
Keeping his eyes set dead ahead, seeing, but not truly comprehending except in the most superficial of senses, anything that went on around him Balthier could pretend in some unacknowledged part of his psyche that Fran was merely behind him helping to sort through crates of munitions and sharpen arrow points in preparation for the futile defence of Nalbina Hamish and his people were preparing to wage.
'Cap'n, the Imperial scum are gathering at mouth of the Phon Coast. They send scouting groups through the Salikawood to make a path. Transport ships are launching from the Hunter's Camp and making for Nalbina.'
One of the rebels ran to Hamish and gave his report in a breathless rush. Balthier continued to walk until he stopped, still in hearing range of the discussion, by one of the fountain pools. Nono climbed out of the cradle of Balthier's arms and fluttered to the ground.
'I will look for Mistress Fran.' He said large eyes glittering with a sorrowful depth and luminance. Balthier, all his concentration maintained on thinking of nothing, barely acknowledged him.
'How large a force?' Hamish sounded a little less gruffly confident than usual, a creeping hint of defeat, exhaustion and a sense of over-whelming futility that could drown a man if he let it entering his tone.
Of course it was possible Balthier was simply projecting his own emotional state on the Landissian at this juncture. Landissians were all blunt instruments after all, no doubt incapable of the finer, more complex gamut of Hume emotions.
Or was that Archadian's? Apparently he and his kinsmen lacked the souls for such depth of feeling also.
Balthier pressed his shaking fist to his forehead and squeezed his eyes closed. It was so interminably difficult to think and Balthier was nothing if not a thinker.
'Some forty thousand, best estimate. Twenty thousand ground troops, maybe ten thousand of those mounted, then ten thousand pilots, the rest arming the siege engines and the cannons.'
Balthier's attention snapped back to the conversation going on just behind him.
It seemed strange to him that they still discussed such things. It seemed as though time had become distorted and convoluted.
It took so long to formulate some form of coherent thought, so long for these rebels to discuss trivialities, and yet it took no time at all for an entire civilisation to die. That, to Balthier, did not seem quite logical.
Hamish was talking again and Balthier found it difficult to understand the man. His accent suddenly becoming harsher, thicker, rougher, their common language mangled under the man's tongue.
'Intimidation tactics; twenty thousand ground troops and heavy artillery can not go through the Salikawood. They seek to lay out a force on the borders to intimate Dalmasca.'
'Or they intend to fly them over and merely congregate on the coast ready for departure.' Guido suggested. Quite a group had formed around their captain, all eager to discuss that which did not need discussing.
Could they not tell all was lost already? It did not matter how it was done only that it was done. The Empire had won and it was over save for the spilling of more innocent blood.
Balthier could not perceive why they bothered; twenty thousand or twenty what did it matter? They had not seen a single steel plated soldier in Nabudis and still the Citadel had burned.
The wind picked up about the camp. The howl of wary wolfs' carried on the fast rushing eddies of gritty, pollen heavy cold gales. Balthier watched the surface of the fountain pool ripple, shatter and tremble in fragmentary reflections; fractured images of a world that no longer made sense.
'They won't launch more than the bare minimum of their air fleet and will avoid transporting heavy armaments by air.'
Hamish was saying swiftly as a hypothetical argument over tactics and stratagem overcame the little group. A few feet away one of the younger Landissian rebels dropped a metal case full of rifles and the weaponry clattered to the rough, red balding ground, red dust flew along with the loud and swift verbal condemnation from the clumsy fellows compatriots.
'Dalmasca's air fleet is small and lacks defensive armament but those fighters could take down Archadian transports before the Arcahdian ships, those lumbering behemoths, could begin to turn back to the safety of the Coast. No, I tell you, Archadia hopes to force Dalmasca to concede through a show of force.'
Hamish insisted irritably, Balthier shook his head contemptuously but was still surprised to find himself speaking.
'No they don't.'
Balthier turned back to the little group with a smirk in place upon his face. He saw Bethesda's face contort in an expression of disgust and hatred and met her hate filled eyes with impunity, the advantages of having no discernable conscience, he thought bitterly.
'So the Archadian speaks does he?' She spat, he was almost impressed with how vile an insult she could make of one simple word; Archadian.
Archadian. Monster. Evil. Soulless.
Hamish ignored her and looked to Balthier, 'What's percolating in that head of yours, Ffamran, what's the Empire up to?' He asked keenly.
'It is as I said before Hamish.' He shook his head darkly. Oddly irritated that even men such as Hamish who had fought and lost countless battles against the Empire could still fail to intuit how the Archadian war machine worked.
Perhaps it was true and only a child of that machine could understand its inner workings.
'Nalbina is the bait; the Empire will not send a full force, that's true, though I wouldn't delude yourself along the lines that the Empire cares for the loss of it's cannon fodder.'
Balthier took a moment to force his thoughts together. He was not a man of action particularly, at least not the sort of spontaneous, impetuous action that born warriors and the average sky pirate lived for.
He was a man of thought, layer after layer of ulterior motive and careful pre-meditation informed even his most off the cuff and throwaway statement. Thought and planning and reflection created the man; devised every last minute escape, every moment of seeming spontaneous brilliance.
Today that busily toiling mind failed him. The simple acts of complex deduction, the process of analytical combustion as his mind fed on the fuel of circumstance, conjecture and possibility to create plausible, sensible solutions and explanations, stalled and the monumentally simple act of forming sentences in the right order took all his time and energy.
'The Empire has destroyed Nabudis, it seems reasonable to assume that they do not intend the same for Dalmasca or, in all probability, Rabanastre would now be a smoking ruin in the sands.'
Another empty smile and all the while Balthier could not stop thinking, over and over, that Fran was not with him. Fran was not with him and a country that had flourished when Archades was simply a wide spot in the road was now a pit of flaming perdition.
'The Empire wants Dalmasca. Undoubtedly this desire also involves bringing Rabanastre to her knees, but regardless, the city is more valuable to the Empire relatively unscathed. However it does not follow that Archadia cares a whit for Nalbina, or her populace.'
Balthier pointed out dryly. He turned ironical eyes, now drowning in a bitterness he had not before possessed within him, on each one of the little group, seeing dawning comprehension tighten Hamish' weathered brow, watching Guido's face grow ashen and Bethesda draw in a hiss of horrified rage.
'Not again.' Bethesda whispered outraged. 'Surely they will not unleash on Nalbina that which ravaged Nabudis?'
Balthier shrugged extracting a strange, perverse pleasure from living up to her expectations of what an Archadian does and does not feel. He smirked.
'The Empire has a new formula for success in any military engagement. An efficient new weapon that appears to need no large force of arms nor soldiers on the ground to eliminate any opposition. I should imagine the Empire is quite eager to demonstrate this fact on Dalmasca should Raminas decide to be stubborn.'
'Aye, no doubt.'
Hamish agreed bitterly as the gales whipped through the foliage within the clearing. The natural glen within the copse of trees and carved out of a hollow between the red cliffs protected the Humes within to some degree from the howling, slashing winds, which screamed like a Banshee.
'We can do nothing for the city should the Empire strike.' Hamish said flatly, 'But the people, aye, we can get as many of them out as we can.'
Swiftly Hamish turned to his ready and able cohorts, soldiers all but without a country to fight for anymore. The rattling wind caught on his wheat coloured braids and whipped them about his head like a crown of serpents.
'Eielle, Fitye, Clyde…..you three take your squads through the paths and make for Nalbina, lead anyone who can stand or be carried from the city into the Highwaste.'
Three tall blonde and muscular Landissians broke from the faceless, pale blurs of nameless other Landissians that loitered in the clearing and gathered other equally fair and blonde and large men and women with them, armed with greatswords, bows, rifles and axes before swiftly departing.
Balthier turned on his heel and walked away. Hamish continued to rap out orders to his troops.
Balthier did not care to listen, nor be delegated too. He did not care over much for the people of Nalbina. Oh, he had no wish to see harm come to them, but he did not know anyone in the city and thus found their ultimate fate of little interest.
In his mind, that cool, rational, analytical tool he replied on so much, Nalbina was simply a piece in a game of war Balthier suddenly realised he did not understand as well as he thought.
Even a gambling man knew when it had come time to leave the table. Even a man, such as Balthier, addicted to the cerebral thrill of pitting one's wits against capricious chance and circumstance like nothing else, knew when to call it a day.
Today was that day. Balthier had thrown in his hand, a strong hand he had thought, expecting only to make a pretty Gil from the constant war around him and possibly increase his notoriety as he did so, to add a few more pages to the glorious legend he intended to make of his life, but now found himself bereft of everything of value and consequence in that life.
He wanted to run away. Such a simple, inelegant desire, but so inescapable. He longed to flee, to scoop up Nono and point the Strahl towards the nearest horizon and simply fly. Fly anywhere, fly off the face of the map and never dock upon the soil of this benighted land again.
It was a source of some confusion to Balthier that he did not simply do this. That instead he walked calmly towards one of the fountains and sat on the lip of the pool to inspect his clothing with an absence of thought and the fastidiousness of long habit. His cuffs were stained dark with blood, rust brown splotches on the embroidered Rozzarian cotton of his sleeves.
There was an irony there, he was sure. The blood on his Archadian hands was purely his own.
He dropped his head into those hands and whispered into his palms, forgetting propriety, proper posture, and the state of his hair under the run of his hands.
'Where are you Fran?'
'Master Balthier!'
Balthier jerked his head up towards the cry, to see Nono scuttling along the ground dodging and dashing through the running, heedless feet of Humes, clutching in his hands a delicately decorative helmet of thin but durable silver.
Balthier launched himself to his feet. He recognised that headdress, it was Fran's. Striding swiftly forward Balthier snatched up his crewman before one of the large, lumbering Landissians could crush the Moogle under foot, and snatched the helmet, with its filigree decorated holes for ears, from the tiny creature.
Nono clutched at his vest with tiny hands, 'Master Balthier! Master Balthier, oh, it's terrible!' The Moogle waved a note in his closed fist, the roll of paper looking like a flimsy spear in the Moogle's grip.
'What is it? Where is Fran?'
He asked sharply, detaching the Moogle's hand from the paper as his diminutive crewman climbed up on his shoulder, which was an awkward fit, having a foot long creature straddling his shoulder and clutching onto his collar to keep balance.
Some slowly reviving sense of ironic detachment within Balthier considered how incongruous a sight it was for a man to be conversing with a Moogle on his shoulder, but that was a distant concern, a lone voice in the wind.
'I found this note on a tree, Master Balthier, it was with the helmet. What are we to do?'
Nono gabbled as Balthier unravelled the note and squinted down on the scrawl of scratchy lines scoring the paper in ink-blotted uneven squiggles that made Balthier's own sloppy hand look like the finest of calligraphy.
Balthier
I have your bunny-girl.
Come to the old Manse (you know the one) by this date or I'm going to boil her bones to make a stew and make meself a necklace out of her teeth.
Your old friend, Einar.
A date of two days hence was scratched at the bottom of the page. Balthier looked at the note again, re-read it, blinked, thought over it, shook his head and read it once more.
He turned blankly to look at Nono, whose white furred, whiskered, face was very close to his as he sat astride Balthier's shoulder. The Moogle's dark eyes were liquid pools of obsidian worry.
'Where did you find this note?' He demanded. The prospect that Fran could have fallen afoul of Einar was perhaps the single most inconceivable part of this entire hellish day.
Ivalice could fall in fire and blood for all he cared but he could not imagine his Fran, his strong, ferocious, knowledgeable Fran, succumbing to anyone or anything except the eventuality (and in her case very much eventual eventuality) of natural mortality.
Following Nono's swift directions Balthier traversed a winding path which sliced through the high cliffs of the Highwaste, shoulders hunched against the vicious headwind, to a small fork in the winding rocky roads of the Highwaste where a gnarled lone tree stood silent sentry.
A vicious scale studded dagger that had once held the helmet and ransom note to the tree remained wedged into the dark bark, Balthier braced a foot against the trunk and wrenched the dagger out.
The blade was clean and brilliantly sharp, but it was just a dagger; the sort that could be purchased anywhere and gave away no clue to the identity of Fran's attackers.
Balthier walked about the trunk of the tree and stopped when he saw a jagged, splintered edged cut across the bark at about level with his chest.
Balthier meditatively ran his thumb across the slicing wound in the trunk; a wood splinter pierced his thumb. Balthier sucked on his thumb and tasted blood as memory intruded on reality.
Memory supplied him with the buzzing whirring echo and vision of a blue skinned Bangaa with a rotating saw blade weapon. A weapon that had sliced into the wooden boards of a hut in Safrosa Bay leaving marks just like this. The headhunters, whatever their names were.
Four Bangaa against one distressed Viera? Balthier considered this; no, he decided, Fran would not have fallen to those odds. Especially if she happened to be distressed, distressed Fran would likely not have wasted time using a weapon but instead torn them to pieces with her claws.
Yet there were no tell-tale pieces of eviscerated Bangaa to evidence Balthier's faith in Fran's abilities. He scowled as the biting, hostile wind stung his eyes and threw grit into his face to aggravate the scratches already given to him.
Balthier reconsidered the possible scenarios that could have led to Fran's downfall, even as the prospect that Fran could fall at all rankled within him.
Four Bangaa and one Seeq against one distressed Viera in an environment of high Mist content…..those odds were less favourable. Decidedly less favourable; Balthier felt his scowl etch deeper across his face, he began unconsciously tugging on his sleeve with nervous fingers.
A few feet from the tree Nono, back on his own stumpy feet, found a patch of the delightfully pollen rich bright orange flowering weeds that had such detrimental affect on Balthier's sinuses. The clump of fleshy leaves and phosphorous bright buds had been liberally splashed with crimson; blood.
After this macabre discovering it became uncomfortably easy to see the marks of violence and combat in the lonely, isolated fork in the path, the gale kicking up gritty, biting gusts of cold air as if mocking him.
Balthier reached out for a fine fistful of long silver threads of hair that adhered stubbornly to an outcropping of rock growing from the face of the cliff like a boil, the tendrils of gossamer fine hair flapping in the breeze like a flag.
His fingers reached for those threads of silver only to lose them to the screeching gale. Balthier looked down at the note clutched in his fist; the words blurring under the run of his tired, almost burning, eyes.
Nono clung to his trouser leg as the gale buffeted the poor creature but Balthier could not spare the time to notice. He was still staring sightlessly at the note when Hamish found him.
'Ffamran, gods damnit man, we make for Nalbina and we shall need your ship, this is no time for wandering the Wastes.'
Balthier might have given some acidic, sharp tongued reply, save for the fact that by the time he looked up, Hamish was gone and the cloud swirled sky, free of the stifling blanket of Mist, but caught in a resultant tumult, was suddenly rent with the sounds of war.
You play a treacherous game. You meddle in deep waters.
Fran had spoken those words to him, not so very long ago. A warning Balthier had, in customary fashion, failed to heed. Now Fran paid the price of his arrogance and Balthier was drowning in the deep waters of war, whose currents he had thought, in his conceit, that he could safely navigate.
Shaking himself and refusing to look into Nono's oddly emphatic eyes, Balthier picked up the Moogle and headed back towards the camp. There was still a little time. Just less than two days to rescue Fran, but only one night, the closing of one monstrous, blood soaked night, to save the people of Nalbina.
Balthier, with a fervent and desperate sincerity that was not generally native to his jaded, self-serving soul, hoped with all his being that neither task proved to be a fool's errand.