The Crusaders

The sentry horn sounded twice in the same week, which had not happened since... ever. Helba took it personally.

She was on the wall before the second note faded, already squinting south, already cataloguing. "Not small-folk this time," she said to the goblin beside her. "Tall. Armed. Ack. Too many to count on fingers."

Falwan arrived at the gate tower to find Helba doing what Helba did when uncertain: standing very still with her ears forward and her hand on her blade.

"Twenty," Falwan said, after watching the column clear the treeline and start up the switchback. "Twenty-five, perhaps. Formation march. They have a standard."

The standard was hard to read at distance. As the column climbed, the details resolved. Heavy packs. Mixed armor, some plate, some chain, none of it matching. Weapons worn in the particular way of people who had stopped thinking about whether they were armed, the way a carpenter stops thinking about whether she is carrying a hammer. And the standard, when the wind caught it properly: a faded silver-and-blue field bearing a device Falwan had seen in books but never in person. The Inheritor's sword. Iomedae↗.

"Crusaders," she said.

Helba's ears went flat. "Mendev↗ crusaders?"

"Unless someone else has been fighting a holy war I haven't heard about."

"Ack." Helba chewed on this. She looked down at the courtyard, where two of her goblins were running through a spear drill and Pib was attempting to teach Krezek a card game that may or may not have had rules. She looked back at the column. Twenty-five armored soldiers climbing toward her gate. "Why."

Falwan didn't have an answer for that.

The column's leader reached the final approach and halted her people with a fist. She stood alone for a moment, studying the gate, the walls, the goblin sentries who were studying her back with the frank curiosity of people who had never seen a Crusader and were not yet sure whether this was a problem. She was human, mid-forties, with cropped grey-blonde hair and a face that had been weathered past any remaining interest in softness. Her shield sat on her back, canted to one side in the way of someone whose left arm had carried that weight for years and had found the angle that distributed it best.

She looked up at the wall. She saw Helba. She saw Falwan. She took a moment with this, the half-elf in practical clothes and the goblin in battered mail standing side by side on a Hellknight battlement, and whatever conclusion she drew, she kept it off her face.

"My name is Sera Voss," she called up. Her voice carried without effort, pitched for walls and wind and the distances between fortifications. "Formerly of the Fifth Mendevian Crusade, Drezen company, now unattached. I have twenty-four soldiers, all veterans, all provisioned. We've been on the road from Mendev since autumn." She paused. "None of us can explain why we're here. Something pulled us west three weeks ago. Pulled is the right word. We followed it. It led here."

Helba leaned over the parapet. "Ack. Something pulled you."

"Yes."

"To this fortress."

"Yes."

"Did this something have a name?"

Sera Voss looked at her steadily. "If it did, it didn't share it."

Helba turned to Falwan. "The courtyard. Three nights ago. The light. The gods." She spoke with the blunt confidence of someone fitting two things together. "Ack. They sent for reinforcements before we knew we needed them."

Falwan had arrived at the same conclusion, but she took another moment with it anyway. Four deities had pressed their attention into the courtyard stones. The warmth was still there if you stood in the right spot. She had assumed the blessing was for the party alone. It had not occurred to her that the gods might also have been making arrangements.

"Open the gate," she said.

The column filed through in good order, which meant they adjusted to the gate's width without instruction and reformed inside without being told where to stand. These were people who had entered fortifications before, many times, under worse conditions. They filled the courtyard with the quiet efficiency of water filling a vessel, and they stood at rest without sprawling. Packs went down in a line. Weapons stayed on.

Pib and Zarf had frozen mid-card-game. Krezek stood slowly, the cards forgotten in his clawed hand, and watched twenty-five armed humans and dwarves and others arrange themselves in the space he had crossed for the first time only days ago. Tikra, the youngest Thornscale, retreated three steps into the eastern corridor and peered around the corner.

Sera Voss walked the courtyard's perimeter with her eyes before she walked it with her feet. She stopped at the center, near the spot where the stones were still warm, and looked down. Something crossed her face. Confirmation.

"Here," she said. "This is where it happened."

Falwan descended to meet her. They stood at roughly the same height, which helped.

"Five days ago," Falwan said. "Four deities. We're still processing it."

Sera took that in. She did not ask which four. She stood on the warm stones and breathed, and the breath came out unsteady in a way she clearly did not appreciate.

A dwarf detached himself from the column and approached. He was built the way dwarves are built when they've spent decades working stone and siege: broad across the shoulders, thick-fingered, carrying a hammer that was not ornamental. He had been looking at the walls since before the gate opened, and his expression had the quiet satisfaction of a man who was already solving problems no one had asked him about.

"Dorstan," he said, by way of introduction. "The mortar on your eastern wall is in poor condition. Three, four months from structural failure in the lower courses. Your upper battlements are sound but the crenellations on the south face have been patched with inferior calciumite. The repair will hold for weather. It will not hold for siege."

Helba, who had climbed down from the wall and positioned herself where she could see everyone, narrowed her eyes. "Ack. You've been inside Helba's fortress for one minute."

"I'm fast," Dorstan said.

A half-elf woman stood near the column's rear, apart from the others by a distance that looked habitual rather than deliberate. She had a longbow across her back and the particular stillness of someone who had spent years being the person who sees things first. She was watching the tree line, not the courtyard. She did not introduce herself.

The youngest of the Crusaders, a human in his late twenties with a war-priest's holy symbol and the earnest bearing of someone who had not yet learned to mask his enthusiasm, was looking at the goblin sentries on the walls with open fascination. "Are those Bumblebrasher goblins? The ones from the original campaign accounts? I read about them in the dispatches from Breachill."

Helba stared at him. "You read about Helba?"

"About the Bumblebrashers retaking the Citadel. It was in the Crusade intelligence summaries. We tracked Scarlet Triad operations across multiple regions."

"Ack." Helba straightened. She adjusted her mail. She looked at Falwan. "Helba is in intelligence summaries."

"Apparently."

An older gnome woman, small even by gnome standards, had already knelt beside the nearest Thornscale and was examining the dull sheen of his scales with professional detachment. "Nutritional deficit," she said, to no one in particular. "Prolonged travel on inadequate forage. I have supplements." She looked up at Falwan. "Ysma. Field medic. You have other patients I should know about?"

"We have a garrison of goblins who think medicine is optional, nine kobolds who walked here from the Mwangi Expanse↗, and a fortress full of people who are about to do something dangerous." Falwan paused. "So yes."

Sera Voss had been standing quietly on the warm stones, letting her people do what they did. She looked at Falwan now with the expression of someone who had been patient long enough.

"Something called us here," she said. "I'd like to know why. And I'd like to meet whoever did it."

"They didn't do it," Falwan said. "It was done to them. But yes. You should meet them." She turned toward the great hall. "I'll find them. There's a conversation that needs to happen, and I think you're part of why."

Sera nodded once. She didn't move from the warm stones.

Helba watched Falwan go, then turned back to the courtyard full of Crusaders and kobolds and goblins and whatever this was becoming. Dorstan was already walking the eastern wall's base with Krezek trailing him, the kobold's earlier nervousness replaced by the intent focus of one stoneworker listening to another. Ysma was unpacking a medical kit. Brother Callum was asking a goblin sentry about the watch rotation with the tone of someone taking notes. The half-elf ranger had not moved from her position and was still watching the trees.

Helba climbed onto a crate. She surveyed her domain.

"Ack," she said, to herself. "Helba is going to need more soup."