I claim no ownership rights to any of the works of Rumiko Takahashi, or anything I've borrowed and modified from the Banestorm setting published by Steve Jackson Games.

The mega-map of Yrth can be found at www. sjgames [.com] /gurps/books/banestorm/img/banestorm_world. jpg (remove spaces and brackets).

I would have had this chapter up last Thursday, but the 4th of July got in the way. I hope everyone living in the US had a fun and safe Independence Day!

Sir Geoffrey twisted around at the rustling sound behind him, and his eyes widened at the sight of Baroness Bronwyn crawling through the fallen leaves toward him. Waiting until she joined him to peer out between the trees at the edge of the copse at the two scattered lines of bowmen contesting the dirt road below, he murmured, "What are you doing here?"

She chuckled softly. "That was rather impolite, your pursuers would wonder where the suave shining knight has gone."

"My pardon, what are you doing here, My Lady?" He eyed her lithe form stretched beside him. "Especially dressed like that."

Now her soft chuckle turned into a soft laugh. "Brightly polished plate and chain might be appropriate for battle, but can you imagine trying to quietly sneak around while wearing it?"

Geoffrey rolled his eyes. "True, but soft leather without even a shield is likely to make your son a baron well before his majority."

Bronwyn looked over his own soft leathers. "I'd say the same about you, except your child won't even be born for months."

"I'm not planning on leading any charges, just yet."

"Nor am I."

"Which leads back to my original question. What are you doing here?"

Bronwyn sighed, all humor vanishing from her face. "I'm fetching you. I've gotten the final word back from the King—we're on our own, except for whatever Redhall might be able to get through to us, which isn't likely to be much and is over a week away at best. King Conall is expecting Lord William's army any day now, and has no intention of removing his own army from Castle Sterling until it's come and gone, and when it goes it'll be headed south instead of northeast. So collect your bodyguard and leave the scouting and harassment to those that actually know what they're doing, we have a battle to plan."

/oOo\

Sir Geoffrey strode into Bronwyn's tent, now wearing his more typical chainmail, followed by Maid Ukyo with her giant, really strange axe on her back, the two glancing at Bronwyn's Captain, her son, and an earth-haired stranger in rumpled, scorched, and stained scholarly robes, before focusing on her, and the Baroness had to keep her face stern. The situation was too serious for happy smiles, but she was pleased to see the life returned to their eyes, replacing the almost-emptiness that had lurked there when several of her foresters that had been tasked with watching the road to the east had escorted them into her castle ... along with the dirty, stumbling, injured, exhausted, hungry survivors that might well have been all that was left of the entire population of Pilton.

The thought of those survivors banished any temptation to smile.

"My Lady." Maid Ukyo bowed to the Baroness on her camp stool, and Sir Geoffrey—Lord Geoffrey, and Bronwyn was happy that word of his brother's death and the serious wounding of his sister-in-law hadn't snuffed out that returning life in his eyes all over again—dipped his head in the salute of one equal to another. Now that they were social equals the game the two had enjoyed playing where he would flirt and she would pretend to be dismissive when she wasn't oblivious, to the amusement of all around them, simply couldn't continue.

Bronwyn nodded in acknowledgement then waved for them to be seated. She waited until they sat—Lord Geoffrey on the camp stool next to Ranulf and Ukyo beside the tent's other occupant—and her son acting as her page handed them wooden goblets and filled them with wine, then opened the impromptu meeting. "So, the Hospitallers are finally on their way. I'm surprised they waited so long, any thoughts on what delayed them?"

Her Captain shrugged. "More of their men must have been caught in the inferno Pilton turned into than we thought, perhaps enough to need the extra time to care for them and ship them home. Maybe even some of their important leaders—not their Sir Geoffrey, unfortunately, if they'd lost the Grand Master they would be in retreat."

Bronwyn shrugged. "We'll just have to ask them before we send them home with their tails between their legs." Now she did grin at the dumbfounded look on Geoffrey's face as she waved toward the man Geoffrey and Ukyo wouldn't know. "Sir Geoffrey, Maid Ukyo, be known to Master Marc, master of Firmont Tower."

From Ukyo's expression she didn't recognize the name, but Geoffrey's own gaze sharpened. "Mad Marc," he murmured, just low enough that she could hear it, but that he could deny any intention to offend if the wizard took offense.

But 'Mad Marc' was both aware of and unbothered with his reputation, and he simply smiled back with a nod. "Yes, 'Mad Marc'," he agreed, "but not mad enough to want the Hospitallers for neighbors, not with their suspicious views of magic."

"Master Marc has volunteered

To help us see off the invaders," Bronwyn continued, "and has come up with an alchemical mixture of ... an eruptive nature. The trick is how to get it placed so that it will do us the most good. I believe we can take a page from the classic stories..."

/\

As the meeting broke up and the others left, Sir Geoffrey held back. Waiting until everyone was gone but her son, he stepped close and spoke low enough that anyone lurking about outside wouldn't be able to hear him. "My Lady, this alchemical mixture of Master Marc's ... would it require a great deal of charcoal, sulphur, and saltpeter?"

Bronwyn stiffened, and she slowly nodded. "Yes, I believe it does."

Geoffrey gazed at her determined eyes for a long moment, then sighed and ran one hand through his hair. "You're taking an enormous chance, My Lady. If they figure out that you're playing with gunpowder they will not be happy."

"Formally, I'm not the one playing with gunpowder, Marc is," Bronwyn replied. "And I would think that if they figure that out they would be happy for the example we are about to provide of what can happen when you mix gunpowder and magic."

Geoffrey barked a laugh. "Considering the Hospitallers' opinion of magic, I don't know how they'd feel about that."

"Oh, they're going to be very, very unhappy," Bronwyn replied, her smile like that of something from the deeps she'd never seen. "Considering what we're about to do to them? Very, very unhappy."

/oOo\

Sergeant Jacques frowned as he peered around the trunk of the tree he was lying behind at the edge of the woodlands, at the dirt road running along the river through the open rolling grassland that would normally be covered by any number of grazing flocks. Those flocks were long gone, of course, the shepherds warned of the approaching army that would be all too happy to supplement the supply barges following on the river with fresh meat.

But those flocks weren't the only thing missing, so were the foresters that he and his men had been skirmishing with for the past almost two days—and skirmishing hard, they'd slowed him and his men down until they were almost pressed up against the army behind them.

It's just the open ground, they don't want to get into a pissing match with us with them out in the open and us in the trees. There's no way that ground is as flat as it looks, there have to be any number of places they can hide.

And he really believed that, about the ground at least. But there was an empty feel, the absence of eyes on them that he had felt ever since shortly after the last of the most seriously injured had died or recovered enough that they could be placed on barges headed back downriver to New Jerusalem, and the army had finally left the camps around the burned out shell of Pilton.

(The good sergeant could understand why they had waited, between the Grand Master's concussion and how vulnerable the worst wounded would be to anyone that swung around the Hospitallers' army to fall upon those left behind, but he wasn't sure that they'd saved all that many lives—not with the scouts that had been lost in the skirmishing that had started almost as soon as they'd started moving.)

Finally he sighed. "All right, pass the word along the line to remember that anyone out there will see us long before we see them, and just because no one has used crossbows so far doesn't mean they aren't out there. Be careful going over any hills, someone might be waiting on the other side. Let's go."

/\

Hours later, Sergeant Jacques could feel his nerves singing like so many over-tightened mandolin strings, ready to snap at the first pluck—he and his men hadn't encountered a single person since leaving the woods behind, not on the other side of the occasional hill the road they were following had circled, not in the occasional dip in the ground they hadn't known were there until they were walking down into them, not in the occasional grove of trees within a few hundred strides of the road. And in all that time, the feeling of hidden eyes upon him had never ceased.

But now it didn't matter, as the tops of the roofs of Castle Durham's towers were coming into sight as they climbed what was probably the last hill before the town outside that castle. (the road went around, of course, but scouts that stuck to roads often ran into nasty surprises.) The town would be empty, of course, with as much warning as its inhabitants would have received and word of what had happened at Pilton, and Jacques suspected that the Baroness Bronwyn wouldn't be as quick to surrender to the Hospitallers' host as he'd heard some of that order's members boast so things were likely to get bloody soon, but the dangerous part of his job was just about over—he wouldn't be one of those trying to climb the ladders or swing the battering ram to force their way in, he and his archers would be tasked with trying to keep the defenders' heads down.

Then his head topped the hill, and his eyes widened at the sight in front of him—he'd been right, the this was the last hill before the town, but what he hadn't expected was another road from the north joining the one he'd been following well short of the town's outskirts ... and a several wagons large enough and with enough filled bags piled up that they took two oxen to pull them, right at the intersection with eight men-at-arms striding alongside.

Instantly he was over the hill's crest, shouting for his men to follow. His shouts alerted the men-at-arms and they spun around to look even as he was drawing the arrow he'd held nocked to his bowstring up to his ear, and a moment later that arrow took one of the men in the chest. The other seven men took off running with the drivers throwing themselves off their seats to follow, but Jacques' second arrow and those of his men took down the nine men before they'd managed more than a few strides.

The oxen were bellowing, startled by the sudden noise, but there was a good reason why they weren't usually used for transporting army supplies—oxen were slow. The scouts had no trouble catching up to and stopping the ambling beasts, or tossing the ten bodies on top of the wagons' piles. Turning the wagons around to get them behind the hill he'd first seen it from was harder, but they managed it. And apparently no one at the castle had seen anything, since there wasn't anyone boiling out of the castle's gate.

Once they were again hidden from view, Jacques pulled the bodies off the wagons (they'd leave them at the side of the road, to feed the birds if no Caithnesser patrol found them) and opened one of the bags, and frowned at the dark brown powder he found inside it. He shook his head at one of his men's question. "I have no idea what it is." He hastily checked some of the other bags. "But whatever it is, there's a lot of it, and they think it's important enough for an armed guard." Looking up at the sun's position in the sky, he sighed. "Let's back up a few hills and wait for the army, maybe one of the Order's knights will know something. They should be here soon."

/oOo\

Ukyo stood between Sir Geoffrey and Baroness Bronwyn, all three leaning over the bowl of water sitting on the collapsible table in the Baroness's tent. Her face tight as she watched the images that the magic of the wizard standing across from her showed instead of her reflection.

The other two were no more happy about what they had seen than she was, and it showed in the flat tone of the Baroness as she looked up past Captain Ranulf at Mad Marc. "They should have been closer to the castle, farther away from Sheep Hill before the scouts showed up. Why was your signal to start late?"

Marc sighed as the faint glow surrounding his hands cupped on either side of the bowl vanished, and the image in the water with it. "I gave it on time, for the speed the scouts were moving. They must have speeded up after your men pulled back."

"It could have been worse," Captain Ranulf said. "If they'd been any faster they might have missed the wagons completely and then where would we be?"

"In serious trouble," Bronwyn said, and Ukyo had to agree as she thought of all the soldiers camped around them ... and the bare handfuls still in the castle, just enough to put enough men on the walls that the castle would appear to be manned if any of the scouts had gotten close enough to see.

Geoffrey straightened. "Well, the trap's set, it's time for us to get into position for our own parts now that the scouts are pulling back. Let's go." He turned to Ukyo and offered a hand. "I'd say it's too bad we didn't think to teach you how to ride, but you and that strange ax of yours are probably more effective with the infantry anyway. Good luck and God bless."

Ukyo accepted the hand, and pulled him into a one-armed embrace. "You be careful, Sugar. Remember that you'll be able to kill more of those butchers if you don't lose your temper and get yourself killed early."

"Hey, you, too," he replied, hesitantly returning the embrace for a moment. "Don't think I haven't seen how angry you get whenever anyone mentions the Hospitallers."

"No need to worry about that, I got too many people I want to see again." Ukyo waved a salute at Captain Ranulf and nodded to the Baroness as she left.

Once away from the tent she paused for a moment to close her eyes and lift her face to the sun, enjoying the warmth on her skin, listening to the birds that seemed to fill the fields around her (a lot more birds than she had ever known in Japan, she'd never realized until she'd arrived on Yrth how much the massive modern populations had emptied Earth of other life), and thought of those familiar faces she hadn't seen since leaving the Keldara—those she had walked away from ... and one who had followed her when she had, that she had expected to join her in Durham weeks before.

"Konatsu, where are you?"