Kingslayer (10 page)

Hmmm, true. And it still left a lot of protection for the soldier. “Third one,” Darius agreed. “Ramin, see to it. And make sure that you have at least some holes on the left side instead of the right, just for anyone that’s left handed.”

From the blank look on Ramin’s face, that option hadn’t even occurred to him. “Of course, sir.”

“Good.” Darius returned to his seat, catching Navid’s eye as he did so. “How long will it take to assemble a special hit-and-run team to deal with the wagon manufacturers?”

“Assembled already,” Navid assured him, seeming to form each word before saying it. “Ready to leave on your command.”

Darius carefully kept a frown from forming on his face. Why was this man so cautious in speaking to him? “Can they do both the supply trains and the manufacturers?”

“Yes, sir.”

A
little
more detail would have been appreciated rather than that curt assurance. Darius heaved a mental sigh and let it go. “Good. Give them the order to go as soon as we’re done here.”

Navid inclined his head in acceptance.

I’m going to make that man talk to me even if I have to get a steel bar and pry his mouth open,
Darius promised himself in frustration. “Kaveh, you and I are going to deal with the defenses. Have you come up with a layout for the wooden barriers?”

Kaveh handed him a rolled scroll, which Darius accepted and rolled out. The eastern front of Niotan stretched out for five miles before the flat desert landscape changed. On the northern end, it turned into low foothills and mountains. On the southern side, it went into craggy land that would break an unwary traveler’s ankle before it went into rolling sand dunes. Five miles of barriers would be difficult to construct, but Darius actually
wanted
some space in between them to encourage soldiers to come through, and that would take up quite a bit of space by itself. Difficult, but not impossible: or at least, that was the conclusion he had reached.

As far as he knew, Kaveh had as much experience on the eastern plains as Darius himself did—at least, that’s where he’d run into the man the most often. The few times he’d tried a more northern invasion was when he’d ran into Ramin and Navid. He’d divided up their duties based more on their experience than anything else. So he expected that Kaveh would come up with a decent layout for barriers. And it would be effectual, but… “Kaveh, why did you only plan on two layers?”

Kaveh had too much political upbringing for him to show any hint of nervousness, but he did blink before his expression became impassive. “It was my understanding that you wanted the barriers simply to break up any possible formations. Is this not to your satisfaction?”

Well, it would certainly do that, but…wait a moment. Darius sat there and thought about it. Had he ever run into artificial barriers in this country? They certainly used the natural formations in the mountains to their advantage, but he’d never run into them on the plains. “Kaveh, when was the last time that someone tried to put up barriers on the eastern front?”

“Not in living memory,” Kaveh admitted and for some reason looked at Sego for a moment, who was standing at Darius’s shoulder. “I had to research it before I could make any plans.”

Great sands. Research?!

Sego cleared his throat slightly. “In fact, General, we did research this before when you first came to attack us. But your attacks were so ferocious and unusual that we could not find any time to construct the barriers.”

So, in other words, he had three novices when it came to barrier tactics at this table. Darius resisted the urge to bang his head against the desk. Later. He’d teach them the specifics later. Right now, he had to cover the basics.

“This,” he tapped the plans with one finger, “would work to break up formations. But only two layers do not do the job, not really. Especially with this wide expanse of plains behind the barrier, with no natural formations to help, you have to do more than two. Otherwise the first wave of men through the formations will quickly form back into the ranks on the other side, and you’ll have to fight on
both
sides. What you need to do is something more like this.” He grabbed a nearby quill and started to roughly—very roughly, as his artistic skills left much to be desired—sketch it out.

“Don’t do a straight line like this. Construct it more in a curve, that way each side can see the enemies of the other and can aim at them. You were right in staggering them, leaving them spaces to go in between the first line. If you try to stop them dead at the very beginning, you usually just have a pileup and it becomes a complete standstill. But continued this staggered line like this—” the quill scratch against the parchment more rapidly “—all the way back at least until this point. It’s alright to have a little space in between. Just don’t give them enough to perform maneuvers on.”

Kaveh followed this closely and then picked up a quill himself and started sketching in the other side. “Like this?”

Darius beamed at him. “Exactly like that. Now, the last two lines shouldn’t be lines at all. Just puddles of oil that we can light ablaze anytime we wish. It makes it impossible to pass through for a whole day, and that’s plenty of time to rout them out and send them running.”

“But where are you going to find the time to build all of this?” Ramin asked, not really in objection, but more out of curiosity.

To Darius’s complete surprise, Navid gave the answer. “Supply trains.”

Ramin stared at the other commander for a moment before he smacked his forehead with his palm. “Of course. That’s why you want the supply trains hit first! They’ll have to draw back temporarily just to secure whatever supplies they have left.”

“That and scrounge for any food and water in the nearby area,” Darius admitted. It had been another tactic that had given him nightmares, when he’d been on the Brindisi side. In fact, he’d taken a lot of measures to prevent it from happening, but from what he’d seen and heard on the way to Niotan, the current general was sloppy about things like this. He was trying to rashly bull his way through and capture the capital. Darius couldn’t tell if this choice in tactic was because of impatience or idiocy. Likely both. “Which reminds me: do we have any civilians still living in this area?”

“There are not many there to begin with,” Sego informed him while leaning forward slightly to draw an invisible line on the map with one finger. “This whole area is not suited for agriculture or livestock so there are few towns. Ever since Brindisi’s attack, most have left and retreated further into the country’s heart.”

That still left a lot of people potentially in a high risk area. Darius looked across the table at Navid. “Whoever is left, get them out of there. When those supply trains are destroyed, anyone nearby is going to be at the receiving end of Brindisi’s desperation. I don’t want any civilian casualties.”

Something about Navid…softened. In fact, was that a smile on the man’s face? “Yes, sir.”

“If they see a lot of civilians being carted off, won’t they suspect that something is going to happen soon?” Ramin looked nervous for objecting, but gamely forged on. “Not that I want casualties either, sir, but it might be showing our hand.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” Darius assured him with a feral smile. “I’ll keep them nice and distracted.”

For the next week, Darius ran around like a mad man, trying to be in three places at once. There were too many things that needed to be done, and he simply didn’t have the time to properly see to each one. Even delegating things out to his staff only helped to a degree because there were certain tasks that he couldn’t possibly delegate. He had to go out to the front lines and see the situation himself, meet with the former lead general and do a formal change of command, and then rush back to the capital to make sure that everything he set in motion had
stayed
in motion.

The only thing that had saved him so far was the nature of the desert itself. General Jahangir of Brindisi couldn’t leave his forces on the open desert for more than two weeks at a time for one simple reason: water. That and heat exhaustion. The men weren’t used this kind of heat and fighting in it made matters worse. Every two weeks or so, he had to retreat to the foot of the mountains to let his men rest and re-hydrate. But he only stayed for a week or so, and then returned.

Darius had been forced to do the same thing, so he knew the timing of this very well. They had six more days, maybe seven, to get into position before Jahangir’s forces were at the eastern border again. If Darius failed to get all of his troops in position before they arrived…well, the consequences would be dire.

In truth, he needed a month to properly plan this out instead of the barely-two weeks he’d been given. He felt like he was constantly scrambling, trying to outpace time itself. If Shaa were with him, he’d make only the minor mistakes and miss the major ones.

When they had three days to go, Darius called for another meeting to hammer out some of the finer details of the plan and to add a few tactics he had thought of. His staff arrived after breakfast, as usual, and went directly into the war room. Darius evaluated them as he sat down at the head of the table.

Every man there looked tired. But then, he doubted anyone had been able to get more than four or five hours of sleep a night considering the insane amount of work on their shoulders. He’d been meeting with them as a group and individually for the past four days and they’d slowly been opening up to him. Even Navid now spoke without being prodded into it. (Although he still hesitated strongly before opening his mouth.)

Darius intended for this to be a quick meeting, nothing more than a status check, so he launched into it without any preamble. “Ramin, shields?”

“Ready, sir. They’re being swapped out with the troops now.”

“Excellent. Are all of your men ready to deploy, Navid?”

“Just about, sir.” Navid shrugged. “Night Raiders on standby.”

The Night Raiders were actually mercenaries hired to augment Niotan’s flagging number of troops. Darius had been half-surprised to find them here, as he had fought them once before on the opposite end of the continent. But he was
very
glad to have them. No regular foot soldier would ever consider fighting at night. In fact, any army commander would look at you cross-eyed for even considering night battles. The Night Raiders were highly effective for this very reason—they could blend in with the night so well that they could walk into an enemy encampment and do an unbelievable amount of damage without being caught. Darius planned to use them ruthlessly.

Their first task was to do something about those supply trains.

Alright, what else?

“Do we have an accurate count of the enemy’s forces?” Darius had asked that question before but had been given three different numbers. He’d requested an immediate recount to make sure he knew what to plan for.

Sego eased into a chair next to him and handed him a report. “Twelve thousand, sir. The breakdown of their deployments are as listed.”

“Twelve thousand troops.” Kaveh looked like he’d bitten into a sour lemon saying that number. “They will not be easily defeated.”

“Perhaps,” Darius responded noncommittally. “Perhaps not. From here, it’s hard to see their weaknesses. But they have them.”
And I know most of them.
He’d had a flash of inspiration at some bird’s hour of the morning, a tactic that would help whittle down those numbers with no loss of life on their part. He turned to Navid and asked, “How many stray cats are in the capital?”

Navid blinked, surprised by the question, but answered readily. “City’s full up. Why, sir?”

“We’re going to need as many cats as we can put our hands on in the next day. If I put a bounty on the cats, do you think the children will run them down for me?”

His commander still looked a little confused, but he also had a quirked eyebrow that suggested Darius had just asked a stupid question. “Kidden’s do ‘bout anything for a copper’s turn. But cats, sir?”

“Cats.” Darius had to tamp down the urge to smile evilly. “I happen to know that a good portion of that army facing us is made of barbarians. They’re excellent to put at the flanks. With that berserker attitude of theirs in war, not much can outflank you.”

Ramin grimaced. “As we’ve discovered, sir.”

Darius gave him an acknowledging nod and raised a finger in the air. “
But
, they’re highly superstitious. I learned the basics of the language and their culture, mostly because I had to, otherwise they were almost more liability than help. If they ran across anything ‘unlucky’ the day before a battle, they always tried to avoid fighting. And believe me, the list for unlucky things could fill up a man’s arm. But the thing that they fear the most is—”

“
Cats
?” Kaveh blurted out incredulously, eyes wide.

It didn’t make any sense to Darius either, so he shrugged, hands spread palm up. “To them, cats are the harbingers of evil. You do not want to test your luck when there are cats nearby. If we deliver a great
many
cats to them, their nerve will break. At the first sign of trouble in the battle, they’ll run for it.” It had happened to him often enough.