Campaigns
PargAddi

The PargAddi Annals - XVII

"Over the Hill"

Dying Moon/26
I moved my vexilla out of the village. We left one dead drubber in the mud - he'd argued with me about staking up a baby.

Beresta the Red, the missionary who had wanted me to show these rebels the Empire's might, without hurting anybody, had thrown a hissy fit and rode off with her temple guard. "The Synod will hear about this! Your commander will be informed of your outrageous behaviour! This will not go unpunished!"

"Yeah, yeah. Get out of here," I growled back.

"Hagrid," I turned to my senior Kastori. "Get them moving. Now!"

So we heeled and toed it down the valley about 3 miles and faded into the bushes. I heard a couple of crunches as my own boys made their way through the recruits telling them to be quiet. Maloven stayed behind watching the village. We were expecting the rebel warband to show up some time in the night to rescue the crucified villagers.

Black Moon
When Bijif started to wane - marking the half-way point in the night - Maloven's hellhound loped up and spoke with Abby.

"They's movin," Abby said.

We moved up to join Maloven. "Report," I said.

"They scouted the area at night fall and then waited 4 hours before breaking cover. There are 40 rebels, mixed quality troops with 2 or 3 good quality. Thanes I'd say." I asked him if he would be able to track them. "Sure, they're using wagons from the village to carry the scum that we staked up and I got their odour strong and clear," he said while tapping his new nose.

"Right." I looked around. "We're moving up. We'll stay a mile back. Abby, Maloven, Marakus," They all look over at me. "You're the vanguard. Move out."

So we sauntered off after the rebel convoy. I say saunter because these brunners weren't making very good time through the valley at night with wagons full of dying people.

After a while I heard a grunt and then a hideous scream - like you get from a slave tossed into the Enclosure - from ahead. I sent my eleventh to check on the vanguard and moved the rest of the drubbers up a little quicker. Hagrid took to the treetops.

Then the forest ahead of us exploded into a blazing inferno. A red slash tore the sky and the earth heaved.

I ran on and found Maloven spitting blood and Abby tapping his eye-patch thoughtfully. We all knew Abby enough by now that seeing him thinking about something was quite unsettling. There was a gash in the forest 100 kets long that had been torn to shit. "Right, what happened this time?"

Marakus, the new guy, looked over, "We were ambushed. Bastards stuck Maloven good with javelins and they nicked Abby here." I waved Verakus over to tend to Maloven.

"Abby?"

"I got hit in the dark by a javelin so I flipped my eye patch to take a look around. I saw 4 goons in the woods and charged at them." I nodded impatiently at him. "Well," he continued. "They panicked and ran so I decided to blast them with my third, my Deskorgos Eye. Well, my new eye pitched in and everything blew up."

I finally dragged the rest out of him. The 4 rebels died badly. Their flesh sloughed off their bones and it was their screaming that I had heard. The earth actually cracked and heaved. A sickly red glow came from the crack and Abby had looked down into it. He saw giant demons stirring. There was a chaotic swirl and the forces seemed to be moving closer to him. So he closed his eye and flipped his patch back down. The rumbling stopped and the crack closed. "What do you think you saw?"

"I don't know," he replied. "I've looked into several underworlds and this looked nothing like it. It felt like it didn't belong in this world. It felt like chaos."

Well, we had to check in on the rebels. Hagrid scouted them from the tree tops and reported that they had scattered into the woods. They waited for nearly an hour before setting out again. They were headed straight up the valley arrowing between two peaks ahead, to the left side of the valley. The trail that they had been following headed to the right side.

"Okay, they are leading us away from something. The 4th will detach and find out what. The rest of you shits will maintain the chase. You are not to contact the column." I jerked my thumb at the least useless Kastori. "You are in charge."

We raced through the woods. I was proud of my lads. They moved like veterans, no clanking or clinking. No heavy foot falls and they naturally fell into an open order skirmish line without any orders required. Maloven lead the way. "The smell is getting fresher," he said.

We kept going. "I can smell sweat," Maloven said. "And these tracks, there is a fast-moving man a head of us." I figured he was probably a messenger from the column.

"Take him with your hounds. We want him alive."

So Maloven's dogs brought him down and I set Abby to talk to him. "What are you doing out here in the woods at night?"

"Nothing," he replied.

Abby rolled his eyes. "Oh really?" He flipped his eye patch quickly open and closed and the brunner screamed. "I'll do worse to you than just kill you if you don't answer me now." The rebel spat at him. So Abby carved off his cock. The brunner cursed Abby in his barbaric dialect so Abby killed him.

"Move on," I growled.

We ran on through the woods and spotted a hanging valley overhead. From the mouth of the valley we couldn't see anything but Maloven could smell fires. Right in the back of the valley we found a camp. Peering through the pitch black under the mountains I could see wooden shacks and tents huddled under the trees. There looked to be caves in the cliff behind the camp and a pitiful 8-foot stockade surrounding the squats.

The guard standing in the middle of the gateway looked very small. "They're probably all elders and kids. Kill everything!"

"Urrrrrunguuuummmm!" We shouted and butchered our way through the camp. The gate sentinel was a 12-year old kid, and his 80-year old grandfather. It took us 4 minutes to kill everybody in the camp.

We burned their shrine but didn't find anything worth looting.

We raced back through the woods to find the column and tore into it as Yelm rose from the Underworld.

Upstanding strode through the dying bodies shoving people aside looking for somebody, anybody who was worth fighting. He found one. "You!" he shouted and pointed at an experienced looking man.

The warrior stopped. "I am Taltran Two-Axe. Prepare to meet whatever foul depraved lunar gods you worship."

"You are a rebel. Die!" Upstanding replied.

"Come and die woman-killer," Taltran shouted and ran at Upstanding.

Upstanding leapt past Taltran and stabbed him through the heart without even looking at him. "Who else will fight me?" He shouted at the sky [1] but got no answer from the piles of dead and dying.

The recruits had heard the clash and raced up to find us finishing off the wounded.

Several of the women must have been married for even as their heart's blood fountained across the loam they were trying to drag themselves towards Abby. And Abby, well he must have completely lost it for he tore around the ground like a dog in heat screwing everything that was even partially alive.

We interrogated the few survivors that we left alive. This lot of cowards had decided to flee the area. They were headed over the mountains.

Crescent-Come/27
So we hoofed it back to the regiment. I force-marched the whole way as added conditioning for the drubbers. My beaters didn't like it but they knew better than to complain.

Along the way we passed through 2 destroyed villages and heard of two others in neighbouring valleys. The roads were lined with crucifixes. Every rebel in 20 miles had been rooted out of their bolt holes and nailed up for the world to see. They would all go before their gods missing their eyes and ears, branded as traitors and wearing Parg's shackles.

I left Hagrid to sort out billets for the vexilla and went to speak with Sengeresh.

I found the PargAdarch arguing with some crone dressed in fancy temple garb. The Synod guardsmen standing nervously behind her suggested to me that this was a leader of the Aggari church. I say they were standing nervously because most of the 1st Eleven was standing around them.

"...I don't care! Get out before I kill you!" Sengeresh was concluding as I walked up.

"You wouldn't dare," the woman shot back.

Well, Sengeresh went for his mace, our beaters pulled various blades from various places and the priestess beat a hasty retreat.

Sengeresh stalked off towards his tent. "Adarch Erdhesh! Report!" he snapped over his shoulder.

So I told him what we'd done and how we'd fared. "Good job," he said. "The missionary?"

"Fucked off," I replied.

"Good. Who cares what these provincials think."

We stepped into his tent and he turned to me. His voice dropped very low and he explained our new mission to me. "This is hush, hush. In the next few days your eleventh is going to desert. The regiment will of course hunt you down. You will make your way to Carmania where you will meet up with a private vexilla called the Fist of Doctrine. You will accompany the Doctrinaires on a mission into Fronela where you will work with the Unspoken Word while they assist the Arrolians." I nodded and started thinking of how best to get from Aggar to Carmania while being labelled a deserter.

"You will obey the orders of the Unspoken Word liaison except where those orders would endanger your unit." He went on to explain that plausible deniability was important to protect this operation from other instrumentalities within the Imperial bureaucracy.

"The Unspoken Word and the Hunter Corp are allied on this operation and determined that it will forward the strategic plans of the Empire."

We were to meet a contact in Brolia named Synod Facilitator Merkadeur, a Black Bishop from the Carmanian Church's Order of St. Blakaur. "You are authorised to recruit auxiliary troops. They will be integrated into the PargAddi upon your return to the ranks."

"What kind of funding can we expect for this? It won't be easy to move my Eleventh across the Empire."

Sengeresh pointed at the pay chest behind his desk. "There is the pay chest. Desert."

[1] Upstanding was augmented to 19w3, bid everything, spent a hero point and rolled a 1. Taltran was somewhere in the mid w2 and failed his roll. So, critical to failure, the extra mastery bumps the result down to fumble and the hero point makes it ludicrous - transfer 316 pts.