Leaving Gorfang to explain the plan to Shathil the ogre, Eloy took to the skies to rain spells and arrows down on the Sarkrith once more. Hitherto, his Invisibility had protected him from retaliation, but this time a Sarkrith Spelleater got lucky - a Disenchanting Ray struck him squarely and every active scrap of his magic suddenly blinked out.
The most immediate problem caused by this was the suppression of his Ring of Flying. With a startled curse, Eloy found himself falling, well over half a mile behind the Sarkrith lines. He was still racking his brains for something to do about this when he crashed into the enemy ranks below. Fortunately, even anti-magic takes a little time to negate a Fly spell, and he was not going as fast as he might have; but the impact still left him sprawled bleeding and bruised in a circle of aggravated Sarkrith soldiers.
Heart pounding, he lurched to his feet, Bereloth sliding from its' scabbard as he did so. The Sarkrith were already beginning to shout and draw weapons as he reached into the belt of his dark master and invoked his Nullity, blessing the power of the relics that defeated the antimagic of the Sarkrith. Two of the leaders continued to watch him as he moved, one shouting angrily at the lesser soldiers as they returned to what they'd been doing, oblivious to his presence. So,he thought, they have Fateless on the battlefield.Quickly he ducked between the ranks and was away before the officer Sarkrith could reach him.
He had half a mile to make to get out of the enemy lines, so time was of the essence. Putting his head down he started to sprint through the Sarkrith soldiers, ducking and weaving to evade collisions. However, less than half a minute later, he crashed headlong into a tall, well-armoured Sarkrith thane, who turned furiously and glared straight at him. This one wasted no time on gathering reinforcements, but reached over his shoulder for his huge sword. Eloy hefted Bereloth hopefully, aware with a sinking heart that without the magic his blade and corselet normally enjoyed, he was no match for any of these creatures. Snarling, the Sarkrith closed in and unwound a blow that should have cut Eloy in half. A follower of Sabath, however, always has someone else to take the fall for him if he can, and Eloy's Pass the Buckpower was just exactly what was needed. As the blade crashed home, the Sarkrith discovered to his absolute astonishment that it was buried in the skull of one of his soldiers. The reptile dropped and he hauled the backswing across towards Eloy. Once again, the weapon slashed into the vitals of someone else, and another Sarkrith dropped, leaving Eloy unscathed. The third strike fared no better, and the creature paused, bewildered, before raising his sword again. Eloy flinched; he'd expended all his ability to tweak fate this way - this was going to hurt.
It did.
Parrying and dodging desperately, he managed to keep the sword from biting into anything he couldn't spare, but within seconds he was wracked with pain and covered in blood. He'd managed to return a few cuts, but he could see the monster's adaptive resistance getting to grips with the damage and the later cuts were even less deep than they should have been. Gritting his teeth, he tensed his legs to disengage and flee, despite the risk of turning his back on such a skilled foe.
At that moment, with a rush of sensation, he felt the magic return to his equipment as the Spelleater's ray wore off. A very nasty grin spread across his face as he spun and resumed the fight. Magic notwithstanding, he couldn't evade the Sarkrith's next attacks, but with his armour once again enchanted he shrugged them off. Bereloth glittered as he lashed out, and a brief skirl of steel ended in a scream as he hewed the Sarkrith officer's legs out from beneath him. Others were already turning towards him as he drew on the Ring of Flying and soared back into the skies, leaving his foe sprawled in the mud yelling for archers.
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The next day, Gorfang and Eloy spoke at some length with Shathil, explaining the whole plan to him. The ogre proved far more mentally versatile than the ogres found in Alair, his mind identifying problems even the orc leader hadn't spotted. "How do we get our females and young out, and our warriors in the barracks?" he asked. "I intend," said Gorfang levelly, "to get everyone out." Shathil was reassured; unfortunately, Gorfang wasn't - he had no idea at the moment how he was going to do that....
Much discussion and planning brought out some more facts. Each slave city was guarded by members of a neighboring race, so in order to get the orcs to co-operate, the ogres had to be in on the plan, for the ogres, the red near-humans, for the near-humans, the lizard men and for the hobgoblins the lizardmen. The Pink Flash plan was workable, but only if as many as possible of these races were included in the plan. They would have to expand their operations, move into the different theatres of conflict around the bridgehead and repeat their recruiting.
"I'll be ready for a beer by then," said Eloy jokingly to Shathil. "Where's the pub?" The ogre's face crumpled in puzzlement. "Pub?" he queried. To Eloy and Gorfang's dismay, it emerged that the Sarkrith were unaffected by alcoholic drinks, had never provided them for their slaves, and there was no such thing as a tavern on the entire plane of existence. It was going to be a long, hard war....
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Three months later, considerable progress had been made. Groups of captured soldiers from the lizardman city of Carmir had been recruited and sent back to their people, as the ogres had been, to ready them for the day of revolt. Hobgoblins had been more of a problem; orcs and hobgoblins were traditional enemies - the wilder, more individualistic orc and the heirachical, structured hobgoblin societies were fundamentally different, but they competed for the same niche - a bad mixture. Gorfang's usual approach of a mixture of browbeating and impressing the leader of the prisoners had failed utterly with the hobbos and Gorfang'd ended up killing him instead. It took all Eloy's weasel words to talk his successor around. Things had gone even worse with the red nearly-humans of Kagora. Gorfang and Eloy had fought them before in Vorsand, and they remembered them as stubborn, stroppy and cruel; this was borne out by their attitude here. Three attempts to recruit a group of survivors had ended in bloody failure.
A chance comment from Gorfang about catapults had led to the startling discovery that there were no siege engines on either side of the battlefield. Both the Sarkrith and Githyanki were accustomed to making war by launching interplanar raids, small, highly mobile groups of troops doing as much damage as possible, and then retreating; pitched battles were not common for either. Being native to the Astral Plane - not greatly well supplied with solid ground - the Githyanki had little familiarity with fixed defences either, though they were picking the ideas up rapidly here.
Taking a backpack full of the mithril plating from the falleng’narf’taelic’dula, the pair procured a Plane Shiftback to their homeland and went to see the neighboring province of Minensal. During the war with the Kordasa, Skufruss had hired some of the best dwarvish mercenary artillerists available from the city of Kobur, and some of these had settled there before the fall of Vorsand. Initially skeptical at being approached by an orc, they had none the less heard of Gorfang Deathdrinker and were at least willing to hear his proposal. The upending of a sackful - a sackful!- of mithril onto the table, and talk of more being available, was enough to persuade them to take the deal with no further questions. Khuzâd of Kobur's company presented themselves and their tools the next morning.
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Three more months saw much greater results. To the siege engines constructed by dwarvish skill, the Githyanki had added refinements of their own - teams of telekinetics to wind the tension, pyrokinetics to heat the missiles before firing - and the bridgehead had expanded enormously. The lizardman city of Carmir had been overwhelmed in late November, a bloody mess of a process which had resulted in dreadful casualties. Only four thousand or so lizardmen had survived to be recruited. Gorfang was privately unbothered by this, as swamp-dwelling lizardmen were no use to him in his mountain kingdom, but the process had to be improved before the front lines reached Unnlor. Especially as the Sarkrith resistance had increased now they knew the Gith were destroying the cities.
Incredibly, it also had never occurred to the Gith to take Sarkrith prisoners for interrogation, something that Khuzâd had pointed out after his first few weeks on Sar'Prime. One was duly procured, and Gorfang had him strapped to a table for questioning. Although he hadn't had much practice at it, he knew the basics of his father's profession of torturer and was quite prepared to improvise. So was Eloy, who cast a Blindness on the victim and then removed it to start off. Gorfang, jealous of his subject, threw a punch at Eloy for interfering, but the Pass the Buck power dissipated the blow harmlessly. "You didn't have to become violent," pointed out Eloy. Gorfang shrugged. "You haven't any damage on you," he said roughly. Eloy caught and held his eye for a long moment. "Just remember that," he said, and left the tent. Gorfang turned back to work.
Several noisy, bloody, messy hours later, Gorfang wiped his stained hands and sat down. Ignoring the soft, broken moans of his prisoner, he pondered deeply the facts he'd discovered.
First: the city of Velgostarn, a mere thirty miles away, was not only the regional capital, but the hub of the regional network of g'dulae. Destroying the sphere there would bring down the anti-magic shell across the whole area surrounding the bridgehead - including all the slave-cities they wanted to liberate.
Second: three hundred miles to the east lay the Sarkrith captial Sar'Pinoth, a huge city of fifty thousand Sarkrith and ten times as many slaves. In the very centre rose the spires of the throne hall Sar'Drakath, where ruled the Sarkrith emperor Sar'Kal'Ost, of whom the prisoner had spoken with fear and awe. Behind his throne hung Darthang, the Master Opener, a greatsword-sized version of the black knives that 'balanced the power' of all the Openers. The prisoner had been unsure of the details, but it was well-known that the continued operation of the Openers depended on Darthang.
This was the game-winner for the Githyanki, and they were going to be very, very interested in this information. How best, then, to use it?
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Session Date: 13th June 2012 |
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