Potsdamer Platz, Berlin
Merchas Schröfel had been busy for about an hour now, cutting vegetables and meat for the stew. It was 10:30 and he had about an hour before the first Germans would emerge from their offices and look for a lunch. His stall used a place where a "Döner" stall had been before the Weltensprung. The Halfling had come to Berlin to learn more about cooking the German way a few years before. He had been hired before very long and found German kitchens a marvel to behold. The gas and electric ovens could be adjusted just so, a fridge was a gift by the gods and nobody thought a knife needed to last several generations. And while the Germans might complain how much some spices cost these days for him they were dirt cheap. If he had not been told tall tales some of these spices were actually flown in by airship.
He had found the German cooks a curious lot. They were very hardworking, putting in very long hours. And they partied as least as hard as they worked. He had heard them called "The crazies with the knives" more than once and thought it comparatively accurate. The good news was that he could hold his own, even if the kitchens were not really his size. The bad news was that payment was so-so if one lived in Berlin. He heard enough about what other halflings made from their "Stew Stands" and invested his savings into a formerly "Bundeswehr" field kitchen. It allowed him to cook two stews at the same time and keep them warm as long as customers could be expected.
The first thing to hit the pots bottom was a dab of rape seed oil, followed by 20 "Mettenden", smoked sausages that had to be cooked by the customer before consumption. They were a bit spicy and very tasty. Now they sizzled in the oil and gave some of their fat into the liquid. A few minutes later two kilogram of onions, cut into rings went in and were fried till they turned glassy with brown edges. He introduced two liters of chicken broth into the pot, followed by three kilograms of potatos and two kilogram of carrots which he had cut into slices before. He sat the lid on the pot and let it cook for nearly an hour. When he went at it again most potatoes had cooked into a sludge, enriching the broth to the point where it was semiliquid. If they had not he would have mashed some into submission, so he gave half a liter of Crème Fraiche, a bit of pepper, a serious dollop of mustard, honey and assorted herbs inside. The result was finger-licking good and went well with his customers.
The Internet, same time
It was hard to say where the rumor started, but before very long there were reports from "reputable" sites like who stated that Leon Curvier had abused his Bretonian orphan Sarah. That he had made up the pictures and videos with the help of the Rebels to get Germany to aid the Rebels. While this was either ignored or dismissed by the majority of those who read it there were those who would accept it rather than anything what the "established media" would tell them. These readers were a strange alliance from the far left and the far right. The ones on the left were sure that Germany was prepared for the next war while the other ones saw this as an attempt to gather sympathy for "refugees." The established media would only report what the government would allow them, didn`t they?
76 kilometers from Castle Artois
Pierre de Lescroix was bored, frustrated and apprehensive. He was bored as he was commanding the troops of knights and the Men-at Arms that escorted the caravan of wagons that held the supplies for the Royal army. He was bored as the only things that he could see were the seemingly endless forest through which they made their way. The wagons that rumbles over the age-old cobblestones were of many shapes and makes, betraying the fact that they were hastily commandeered from their previous owners. There was the braying of mules, the oxen`s mooing and the low-level banter of those who drove and guarded them. None of this could hold his interest, he had seen and heard far too much of it anyway.
He was frustrated as he was not part of the Lady`s great host. He was the first to admit that he had not done too well in the last jousts, but that did not mean he could not ride with the glorious charge. Yes, he had heard often enough what important work he did, but he really doubted that the minstrels would sing of his deeds any time soon. And he was apprehensive as an attack might come at any time. There was only one road that the caravan could take and the forest had never been cut back sufficiently from the road. The potential for an amush was there any bleeding moment. It had been there for the last two weeks and it would be there for..
The crossbow bolt was one of five or six. Most missed their targets, two pierced armor and flesh. A coachman slumped on his seat, a Knight swore at the thing that struck in his shoulder. The reaction was immediate and forceful. The last year had taught the Royals the many ways Rebels would ambush caravans and troops. One of them was simply shooting a few crossbow bolts and then fade when everybody got into cover. At other times they would leave traps for the unwary to stumble into so the Rebels could escape and inflict more losses. The Royals had learned from that and found answers to this tactic. They had drilled hard for this, the army that was to relive Artois Castle needed to be well supplied. The Barony had supported the Royal army for quite some time and the serfs were either in fortified villages or gone. You cannot squeeze stone and so the Royals had to bring their own supplies.
They had used the winter to look at what had happened to them and formulated an answer. Pierre had them drill hard and used it a couple of times already with good results. The first part of the drill was unleashing the hounds. They had been taken with their serf catchers or came with the game wardens who looked after them. They were no purebreds, they were not to please the eyes of the user. They were huge, ugly and lumpy. They weighted close to the serfs they were to catch and their bite would crush any limb in their way. They were released and several clutches of them raced into the woods. They would not trigger most traps the Rebels had invariably placed in their way and they would kill small groups. If there were more they would at the very east slow the Rebels to the point where the Men-at-Arms and knights could catch up with them. These were entering the woods now, not at the attack had happened, but a hundred meters up and down the road. This should avoid the traps the Rebels invariably left in the way of their flight. The two arms of the assault would close on the attackers. Lescrois hoped that there would be some live ones. Nailing them to the trees aside the road would frighten off the next asshole who wanted to take potshots at his men.
He was besides his reserves, ready to defend against another attack or support the attack group when the crackling began. It started all at once, it was punctuated by explosions and lasted for about a minute. There might have been some shouts, there were definitively the yelps and bark of dogs and some swore they heard moaning. Then there was silence. No commands to rally the troops, no battle cries, no calls for help and no cries pain. The dense forest did not allow a view beyond 50 meters at most and there was simply nothing discernible between the greens and browns. The was a deadly silence that was replaced by a faint rustling, the likes many bodies that tried to move quietly through the woods might make. It was unnerving to say the very least and he could see many a white knuckle clutching arms that seemed insufficient all of a sudden.
"Stand fast warriors of the Lady, stand fast and...
Walter heard the fool on the horse and saw by now that he was well and truly fixed on the forest to the far side of the caravan. Time to teach him to keep a 360 degree lookout.
"Feu e volonte"
Shouting at the top of his lungs did nothing to mask the accent his Breton still had, he could care less. The brushes closest to the caravan grew a crop of heads in record time. Arms were raised bearing something that looked like tin cans on a stick. Hands ripped cords from these contraptions, they ripped matches through a hole lined with a ring made from the side of a matchbox. The sulfur heads mixed with the phosphorus of the strip and formed a molecule with four sulfur and four phosphorus atoms in it. Such an unstable thing was not allowed to remain at rest in the face of oxygen and heat. It burst into flame and ignited a slow match that burned for three seconds. By the time it found the tiny bit of black powder at its end the grenades were well in the air or on the ground among the caravan defenders. The black powder exploded as violently as was its nature, exciting crystals of picric acid to do the same.
There was assorted stuff around the explosive, things like old screws, balls from bearings and nails. They were held in place by pottery inside old tin cans which added fragments to the deadly mix of shrapnel that ripped through flesh and blood with stomach-turning results. One second there had been scores of defenders, willing to fight for their lives and their charges. They might be frightened, but lead and organized. The next second there were survivors of a bloodbath, looking at their butchered comrades with horror. Their ears were filled with the ringing of explosions, the cries of the fallen and the braying of panicked animals. What they did not hear were commands to make order from chaos, what they did not see was a leader stepping forward to take command.
"Up and at them."
Walter Theodoric St. Helier was a child of a modern civilization, a man schooled in science and able to play his part in a modern society. Nobody who saw him at that moment would think so. He might be one of Drake`s men boarding a Spanish Man-o-War, storming a Chinese fort or standing in the way of Afghan tribesmen. He wielded an age-old Webley revolver and a sabre. He stormed from his hiding space without ever checking if he was followed and checked for movement. There was somebody with bits of armor turning, a huge wad of lead converted his chest to mush. There was the knight on the ground who might or might not be in the process of getting up. The fine tip of the sabre went through his neck. There was somebody coming around the corner of a cart not wearing rebel colors. His head came mostly apart when the revolver was used at three paces. The sabre deflected a sword that came his way and the revolver took care of its owner.
Walter was well able to hold himself in any duel, actually hoped to demonstrate the advantages of his school one day. That day was not today, he was on a mission, outnumbered and deeply behind enemy lines.
There were enemies who had to surrender or die, right here and now. In an hour he would care about which way the enemy chose, not right now. Now he had to survive, now his lads had to survive and a lot of supplies had to be taken.
It was over as it began, suddenly. One second he was alive as only rarely, aware of everything around him and willing to take lives, the next one there were only the dead and those who surrendered. He stood amidst the carnage, seeing every grisly wound, smelling blood and worse and his ears were filled by cries for mercy and distress. For an eternal moment there was nothing in his mind than then now and the horror of the slaughter. The next his training and the mission took over.
"Luis, Frere, get the medics over here, stat. Get our lads seen to and if there is still time left they can look after these bleeders. Frank, have a fast look at what is in the wagons. Get these mules unhitched and load them with anything we can use. You have 30 minutes, tops, then the rest burns. And we take some oxen with us, I hate these cans already. Pierre, organize the bug-out party."
The day had started well enough, now to make sure his people would survive to do it again.
Charite, Berlin, Germany, same time
Ralf Winkler was done for the day, very much so. He and the others of the five had planned for a long day with several replantations and one adaption of an artificial limb. They had been well and truly exhausted when the victims of what had to be a rather spectacular traffic accident had been brought in. They had stabilized two of them till the doctors could dig sufficiently deep to stop the internal bleeding by other means and then reconnected the nerve inside a shoulder.
Of course they had to use glucose like it was going out of style, their vests had to be refilled with cold water twice and by the end of it only Mother Herad had avoided puking. The former medic knew that he needed to eat a bit before going to bed but could not bring himself to it right now. Getting a bowl of cereals he dropped before the TV Set. Making sure that it sent sound through his headphones so his wife would not be disturbed he switched on a channel at random.
The screen was filled with the face of a teenaged girl. Normally she would have been quite beautiful, now it was twisted by grief and some of her make-up had been washed off by tears. Her voice had the toneless timbre of somebody who tried to disassociate from what she had seen.
"I was at Tancred Castle, one of the few who escaped. We defended our ancestral home, having offended none and helped many. We were asked for surrender, our honor would not allow us. The Rebels were unable to take our castle by treachery and too frightened to storm the walls. Instead they turned..to them. They came at night, when we were asleep. They had claws and teeth, they were horrible. They came through the walls, they came from the deepest cellars. They were not human, they were rats that walked on two legs, rats that used arms and that killed whatever they saw. ThThey were likes demons from the depths of the Chaos Desert and when they squealed they froze the l`ame.. the soul.
They were a horror that killed our brave defenders, they gave no quarter and they ate the dead. But that was not the worst of it, that was the Rebels. The Rebels who commanded them, the Rebels that took my honor.
Oh Lady, I want to die.."
Ralf Winkler did not eat much that evening and he paid for that the next day.
It took other journalists three weeks to discover that the girl was in fact the Breton ambassador's niece and had never been closer than a thousand kilometers to the fighting. By that time the damage was already done.
Tavern Nostos, Achaes, Border Kingdoms, one week later
The man was huge in all dimensions. The red mane brushed the ceiling, his torso would barely fit into a wine casks and his belly would break it. His arms would look good as the upper legs of a strong man and his legs were like pillars to support the heavens. All of that was clad in red robes which had seen better times and displayed the man`s menu choices.
He was a capable drinker and his voice could hold a song as long as basso profundo was asked for. Fortunately he was not an irascible drunk, he just got more mellow. He had not displayed great riches during the weeks he had stayed in the tavern, but he had not been short of coin either. He neither spoke about it, yet those who had even the slightest inkling of lore easily made him for a Aqshy mage.
He had not asked around, offers for work came to him. So far he had rejected all and any, at least as far as the denizens of the tavern were aware. Now he was in a corner of the tavern, in the second or third pitcher of beer. His voice was a bit slower than in the morning, that was about the only change from this morning. On the other side of the table was one of Achates "traders". Myrmiades knew everybody, knew who needed what and was willing to provide at cost. Currently he tried to recruit another source to his portfolio.
His spiel had ran down a bit when the mage had not been forthcoming with much comment, a marked contrast to his normal behavior.
"So Master Kreuger, what do you think?"
"This guild of mages sounds right like the College of Magic that I left behind. Too hidebound, too much in the yesterday. We won`t make progress that way and if we do not, then the German toys will push us aside before I am gray."
"I do not thing the guild works that way Master. They just make sure that all magic users are registered with them. You know what might happen otherwise."
"Better than you I wager. A mage must be on his toes at all times, most when he works the Winds. But that does not mean you can do only one thing at a time and your guild has chapters for the winds, don`t they? Even the Germans are not that strict. Talking about the Germans, how about that bunch of philosophers I heard last markttag?"
"Oh god, them. Don`t waste your time with them, they are fools. They got their hands on a huge crate of dusty old tomes with the scribblings of German philosophers and ever since then they believe themselves wiser than the Asur. Not a shred of magic to them as far as I know. Doters and crackpots the lot of them. They believe they can restore the days when philosophers were looked for, when they spoke law and their advice was requested. Well, this way it won`t happen, I`ll tell you."
"Ah, that explains things. Let`s talk about this guild then, you seem to be connected."
"Oh, I know the Master myself, he might be willing to lend an ear to an old friend...
Close to Castle Artois
Andy Thrope caught his first sight of the Royal army from one of the towers. He had known of their coming for weeks. Spies had sent their reports and the pictures of commercial satellites had verified them. Walter`s light cavalry shadowed them for a week now and they played havoc with their supplies. Still they had made their way back to Castle Artois and were spreading out in the plain below his vantage point. He had a pretty good count from his balloons, there should be 50.00 warm bodies there. A bit more than he had and probably more dangerous than before. He saw Tilean mercenaries with crossbows, some with old-style cannon and even a few with what could be modern rifles. He saw many more Knights, he saw lots of archers.
He was not afraid of them, not after the last battle. He thought he had their measure and this time he had entrenched his troops well. All would be fine and dandy if he would not have Castle Artois and its garrison at his back. If he moved against the Royals they could sally, if he tried to storm the castle the Royals would kick his ass.
Well he had a plan. He might not be this world`s most experienced general, but he read a great lot. A lot was modern, from Generals like Rommel and Patton. Some of the older stuff seemed to apply better to his current situation and so he had turned to older masters. A book about Wallenstein seemed to have an answer. Now he would see how much it was worth.
