A mixture of orange and purple highlights coated the cloudy sky. As dusk settled in, the frontier town of Devicia calmed with impending darkness in all but one place: the local tavern.
Located only forty miles from the border, Devicia was an unassuming place. At one time, the nearby Vala River had provided water for popular rye and barley crops, from which grog was distilled and sold to towns further downstream. But some fifty years earlier, the Czarian Guard had constructed a dam further upstream, to provide water for the bustling regional capital of Vecerz. Since then, the cash crops of Devicia had shrunk drastically, with the Vala River only a trickle compared to its former self.
With little in the way of an economy, what was left of Devicia turned toward supporting the nearby Czarian Guard outpost. Local farmers gathered what little surplus they had to bring to the outpost captain, who haggled with them as though he were feeding the soldiers with his own rubles. Other townspeople choose to deal with the soldiers directly, with results ranging from mild intimidation to outright theft.
The subsequent grumblings were heard by those passing through. As a border town, Devicia still held strategic significance, with a wide but little-used road winding along the Vala, through the town and into the Chenian countryside. It was for this reason that the outpost was built. In fact, during the past few months, the town had seen its share of Guard units traveling through, often under the cover of darkness. Rumors of their activities along the border, and even beyond in Chenia, ran rampant through residences and side streets when the Guard were not present. Such tales stowed away in the minds of passersby, who in turn bartered the stories with other travelers. Knowledge of Czarian Guard atrocities in Chenia became commonplace in Devicia.
For these reasons, the news that a company of Czarian Guard, two hundred strong, would be deployed to the border within the next two days came as no surprise to the residents of Devicia. For their part, the Guard reacted the same as they always did: they mumbled curses under their breath until they could drown their resentment in steins of grog.
As day faded into night, the tavern teemed with so many soldiers that the barkeep had to remove the chairs. Even the captain, who often drank only in his quarters, was seen cavorting with his subordinates.
With nearly all the soldiers in the tavern, and the rest loitering outside waiting their turn to enter, no one paid any attention to the three Chenian men on the other side of the street. The men had arrived that morning transporting hay in a horse-drawn cart. Under any other circumstances, the Guard would have questioned their journey. After all, they came from the East, from the Sacred Plains, an area once home to the Chenian nationalist movement, which remained under the watchful eye of the Crimson Citadel. The region, while dotted with farms, was not known for exporting hay; not to mention that the three men lingered in Devicia without making any effort to sell their feed. Had they arrived only a day before, they would have faced certain harassment. But fate had granted them a pass.
The three men, ever watchful, waited until night enveloped the small town. They remained seated around their cart as candles flickered in the window sills of the small Devician homes. The tavern, with its two wrought-iron chandeliers, glowed as the brightest spot in the whole town. Only then, with candles lit and all else surrounded by black, did the men rise and scatter into the night.
One of them, a portly male in his late thirties, reached into the hay mound on the cart to pull several small barrels from hiding. He handed the barrels to the other two, who then snuck off to the Guard barracks nearby. Over the course of thirty minutes, the two Chenians ran back and forth between the cart and the barracks until the stash under the hay mound had emptied. They then unhitched the horses from the cart and withdrew into the forest where they waited.
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It was nearly two in the morning before the tavern began to empty. It wasn't that the Guards had finished drinking or that the barkeeper had closed up for the night. The tavern had simply run out of spirits. While this caused an initial uproar and threats toward the barkeeper and his family, the Guard soon tired. They trudged their way back to the barracks to sleep off their drunken stupor.
The barracks rumbled with the coarse language of drunken soldiers for hours more until the last candle was extinguished. It was in that sudden darkness of the predawn morning that a wave of silence washed over the men, so that they settled into sleep almost immediately. From then onward, the entire town laid quiet and still. Neither movement nor sound disturbed this sprawling giant. All was at peace.
In this stillness, two events provided the only sense of disturbance before the breaking of dawn. One occurred only minutes before sunrise, a sound so slight and a sight so small that one could have blinked or coughed and have missed it: the flame of a match. It ignited in the woods behind the barracks for but a moment, where it flickered, then expired into a wisp of smoke.
No other disturbances followed for several minutes. The trail of Chenian gunpowder that snaked from the forest toward the barracks ignited without a crackle, for it had been so finely ground and so expertly laid that it combusted evenly, without a pop. The three Chenians, who had staked out all night in the forest, removed themselves from Devicia, with the portly fellow on one horse and the other two on the second. The horses they rode remained eerily silent, as though knowing the precariousness of the situation. They neither neighed nor whinnied. Even their hooves, which usually clopped upon the road with forceful purpose, became muted.
It was only in the moments before dawn that the second disturbance made itself much known. Just as a wave of velvet stretched from the horizon toward the black ceiling of the sky, four consecutive blasts struck the barracks, one at each corner of the building. Scarcely had the first villager been able to run into the street when a second series of explosions occurred, this time on the roof of the structure. The shell of the roof ignited like a kerosene-soaked canvas before collapsing, sending up a giant fireball into the air.
The remains of the barracks burned as tinder. Orange and yellow flames glowed as the sun rose over the Sacred Plains so that Devicia was bathed in two sources of early morning light. One subtle and comforting, round in shape and welcoming to the eyes; the other fierce and ravaging, taking only the form of wavering spears that fought amongst one another, so powerful with heat that eyes could not stare at it for long before turning away.
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In the days that followed Devicia saw radical change. The morning of the fire, the townspeople had sent two men to Vecerz to notify the regional command, while the rest went about excavating the charred corpses from the rubble. By the afternoon, twenty-five bodies had been retrieved, which were laid by the main road draped with blankets and wildflowers. By mid-afternoon, Devicia's best carpenters were busy making coffins for them.
It wasn't out of respect or admiration that the Devicians did such things. Rather it was fear that drove them to make such a spectacle. For every citizen knew that without word from the outpost, the regional command would send for the captain. Upon discovering that he was no longer there, the command would then dispatch a company of soldiers to investigate the scene and interrogate the locals. It was a scenario that was inevitable. So naturally, with resigned indifference, Devicia went about creating the impression that they were doing all they could to honor the memory of the local Czarian Guards.
By week's end, what was once home to a small band of frontier soldiers, who merely served as a patrol near the border, became headquarters to a battalion of eleven hundred troops. Although fresh from the graduating class at the Crimson Citadel, the new troops nonetheless possessed a sense of brutal professionalism, a sensibility they immediately put to use on the Devicians. For all their efforts to cooperate, the townspeople met consequences reserved for traitors. They were immediately corralled into makeshift barbed-wire pens, with the Guards wasting no time in interrogating them.
The Guards' methods, which ranged from mild insults to brutal beatings, had two objectives. The first, and most obvious, was to extract whatever pertinent information they could from the townspeople. The second was far more clandestine. The Guards in Devicia sought to hone their skills of manipulation and intimidation so as to impress the town's next visitors: Morgard and his seasoned veterans.62Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡZCaiZrTNpU
