Cerasus Township – Recovery
For at least 115 years before the founding of the Grove Protectorate proper, the Unitarian Armies have been hounded by rumors of corruptibility and instances of traitorous scandal irrespective of where they are or which of the original five organizations one is discussing. One need look no further than the dastardly acts of Vladi Battalion at the Fanged Pass to recognize the depths with which certain membership of the prestigious martial council have fallen in our past. Likewise, the electoral malfeasance which, it has been rumored, goes on within the halls of Keeptown has been a common point of the socializing public for generations on end within Avium and the other Citadels.
Why then do we yield our power of protection and policing to these maleficent mercenaries? Sending away our gold and silver tabs so they can play power games amongst themselves and those of the Protector’s court. In fact, it is known just how close the ranks of Sinea Battalion have cozied up with the lustrous elites of Highhill, the green-and-gold bedecked bastards manning all the northern roads to the Protectors’ Palace, the Grand Market, and the High Docks as well! All this to say nought of their status as the sole unit allowed garrison outside the walls of Keeptown, a clear violation of the terms of service of all other Unitary members!
One must be curious as to the machinations which have led to such a situation within our revered capital city. How the most prized areas of Avium have become the informal territory of a mercenary company which opposed the Grove Protectorate during its establishment some four centuries ago. Yet today, they stand resolute at every corner of the Grand Market, the deepwater docks, and at every major intersection in the northern quarters of the city. They enforce their law without scruples or fear of reprisal, shielding themselves behind the informal nickname they seem to have bequeathed upon themselves: The Protectorate’s Shield.
-Scribbled note discovered in Unitarian Library, Keeptown
In celebration of his temporary freedom from the panicked claws of death and with appreciation for the sun that now warmed his brow from the sky above, Simen leaned against the half-collapsed wall of the smoking bakery on the far edge of Cerasus’ now-silent market square. He did what he did best and lazed, looking at things with a bored expression that belied the intensity of his racing thoughts. He moved his dark eyes with mild interest from a pouch he held to the figures who were already beginning to rescue the dead from their horrific final poses, taking them through the north gate for sorting and cataloguing. He returned his gaze to the sticky, green, leafy substance he was clumsily rolling with a piece of only slightly singed paper he had found in a trampled accounts book.
‘Too damned thick…’ he grumbled to nobody in particular after his third failed attempt at killing the time more pleasurably before they were inevitably found and set about some mind-numbing exercise or duty. He gave up his attempts at dulling his senses with a sigh, shifting his perpetually indifferent umber eyes to the two figures engaged in the task of removing a crumpled helmet from an increasingly irritated Pica’s head. He grinned almost imperceptibly as young Pellia and Sergeant Tacca took turns trying to wrench and twist the helm free, one pulling while the other dumped buckets of well water onto the cursing and sputtering man as they attempted to loosen the coagulated blood, grit, and sweat gluing it to his skull.
With a grunt, Tacca was finally successful, gripping the sides of the helmet’s face slits in her strong, sun-bronzed hands, the sergeant pulled the helm wide, splitting it along a crack and ripping it from Pica’s battered head as he let out a yelp of pained surprise. ‘The absolute hell is the matter with you?!’ he shouted at her, getting angrier as her rebuking gaze shifted to one of incredulity and a glint of laughter alit in her eyes.
Pellia’s already large eyes grew somehow wider in disbelief; she slapped a small hand over her mouth, smothering the smile that threatened to appear on her pale lips. She stared fixedly at the side of Pica’s head and said nothing, a corner of her mouth twitching as she endeavored to look ignorant of his complaints.
‘Didn’t realize you wanted to live in that thing’ Tacca responded, attempting to match his indignance but a dry laugh escaping her deep voice, ‘and boy if you don’t get prettier with every passing day.’ Her words hadn’t fully fallen from the air before her hand darted out to flick Pica’s swollen and freshly flowing ear lightly. He hissed and clutched at the bloodied cartilage, shrinking away from the pestering women and stumbling over the wooden cask he had been seated upon in the process. The sergeant chuckled at her riled cub.
‘The death of me, the both of you!’ Pica barked. He gently fingered around the edge of his ear, frowning as he noticed a section conspicuously absent; it was a mangled thing, torn from top to bottom in a ragged diagonal rip and hanging by the barest bit of skin just above his earlobe. He flinched again at Pellia’s attempted touch, pawing over his ear protectively and feeling the dangling flesh now lightly tapping against his neck. He touched it again carefully, marking the area of his ear that was missing with tiny gentle touches of his fingers. Pica looked between the women repeatedly, feeling betrayal at their mirth and moving from shock to anger to resignation in a record amount of time as they stifled laughter and offered backhanded compliments.
‘Think Pan can stitch it?’ he asked, fearing the answer.
‘Should just pull it off,’ Simen said merrily from his vantage against the bakery’s last vertical surface, ‘might make a good necklace.’ He winked. ‘Or an earring.’
‘What do you think I’m doing here? The boy won’t let me!’ Tacca laughed again as she feinted another attempt to remove the ruined appendage from its unwilling host.
Pica ducked away once more and froze, reddening deeply as a ghostly, white cloaked figure and its matching retinue strode with confident purpose into view from the market. Here it comes, he thought, Doc Pan, as ever, on-schedule to embarrass, harangue, or otherwise embarrass him. It wasn’t that the doctor was a mean-spirited man, he just had a nose for a soft target and appreciated the role of comradely jest in keeping soldiers’ morale up to acceptable levels; Pica’s ability to garner such attention was unassailable after so many unfortunate or downright stupid injuries over the years.
The Doctor was a grumpy, generally unmannered man of ancient years by army-standards, and he was legendary in his own right for his work both in the field and the surgeons’ theatre of the gatekeep hospital. Naturally, his assistants, after years chasing after the tireless old man across battlefields and long corridors, were near-replicants of him and despite coming in any variety of sizes, shapes, backgrounds, and prior specialization, all had been hand-recruited by the doctor himself over the long miles and years. They shared the same rough style of nurturement and unquestionable professionalism as their surgeon-commander and they were a fright to behold for the uninitiated; dressed in stark, white-painted leathers and perpetually masked with cotton covering their mouths and noses, they were a symbol of hope on the battlefield, sure to either save your life or end it expeditiously and without unnecessary dramatics.
‘What the hell is the matter with you now, Pica?’ Pan barked at the young man standing suspicious and defensive against a blackened brick wall. ‘Got some sort of fever I reckon,’ he leaned to a pre-nodding assistant knowingly, ‘sickly lad, flushed like that in this heat. You been drinking that ditch water again, have you? Remembering to take your boots off at night?’
Pica sighed, rolled his eyes, and removed the cupped hand he was using to cage his ear protectively from the teasing women, Doc Pan eyed the dangling thing and was unimpressed.
‘Mmhmmm… been touching the old toolrod after cooking curries? Getting into a scandal with those girls from the swamps again, eh?’ The doctor continued unabated, smiling as the young soldier flushed deeply before him.
Pica groaned as the heat of shame navigated to the exposed nerves where his ear used to be attached to his head; he flinched again at the involuntary contraction of the muscles as his jaw clenched tightly.
Obligatory ribbing out of the way, and another broad smile extracted from Simen and Sergeant Tacca alike, the doctor nodded officiously and stepped smartly up to Pica. He reached out to the man with the practiced care of a hog breeder dealing with a particularly venomous sow, gently tracing the wound with a floating finger before looking back to an attendant expectantly. Pica's eyes followed naturally, wondering what terrifying instrument the aide would produce.With a sharp yank, the doctor plucked the offending flesh from Pica’s head like a bird snatching a worm.
Before the young soldier could make a sound, one of Pan’s minions was upon him, wrapping his head in thick, white bandages with practiced efficacy while the other dashed a toxically bitter draft of cold willow bark tonic into his surprised mouth. The medic clamped a hand over Pica’s mouth as he began to protest, gag, and cough, forcing it closed and tilting his head back until satisfied that the drought had run its course down the miserable lad’s gullet.
‘The sound’ll come back eventually,’ Pan said a little too loudly near Pica’s good ear. ‘Can’t say the same for the ear itself, but I suppose we can hope that the rumors that your mother was a salamander are true afterall!’ A drop of mirth flashed across the brow of the assistant currently trying to force Pica’s eyes to focus on a proffered finger. ‘The tonic will ease your pain for a few hours, if you haven’t been over-indulging with your friend over there that is,’ he continued, throwing a somewhat sour glance toward Simen who was still smirking at the circus playing out before him. ‘What else did you manage to break this time?’
Pica pointed to his thigh without looking at it, ‘splinter from that damned exploding cart. Hit me in the leg pretty good, glad you preach the Book of Tourniquet as if it’s a service or I probably would’ve bled out down there.’
‘A pity’ Tacca interrupted softly, ‘had my eye on that weapon of yours for a while now.’ She smiled at Pica lovingly as he glared at her.
‘Always something else.’ Pan looked at the crusty red-and-gold rag and sighed. ‘Thought I’d get lucky and only have to waste a half roll of bandages on you this time.’ He leaned back as if in deep thought. ‘I’m tempted, in fact, to just cut that leg off for you right now and be done with patching you up forever. Save us a whole bale of cotton, I expect.’
He unwrapped Pica’s improvised battlefield bandage with a remark about gangrene and filthy rebels doing ‘god knows what’ with their equipment before poking at the wound in search of wood fragments. Satisfied it was clean enough, Doc Pan accepted a bandage from the mirthless medic who had been diligently layering sticky, garlicky unguent into its fibers from a green clay jar hanging from his belt. It clung to the skin as he laid it across Pica’s thigh, the grease in the mixture suctioning itself onto the leg and deep into the wound as he pressed it flat with stinging pats. By the time a second roll of bandages had been wrapped around him from knee to groin, his leg felt as though it was wrapped in stinging nettle. It was, he would later learn, exactly that, with the noxious herb comprising a primary component of the offensive salve.
‘Stay off that leg now, it starts festering and I really will cut it off’ the doctor said cheerfully before giving Pica a quick smack to the back of the head for making him work harder than he already had to. He wandered off quickly, noting that the rest of Fourth was, as usual, largely unscathed beyond their own means and taking stock of his medical kit. The assisting medics followed hot in pursuit, chatting to one another animatedly behind their tight masks now that official duties had concluded for the moment.
Tacca and Pellia sidled closer to Pica’s side, the former to help wipe the thick blood that was ingrained into his neck and shoulder and the latter to pick up the discarded, thoroughly deformed helmet from the ground. Meanwhile, Simen moved to sit contentedly on a nearby barrel and, having managed to secretly haggle a few rolling papers off one of Pan’s medics, sat wreathed in pungent smoke and with a shit-eating grin, throwing pebbles at the slowly growing red target on the side of Pica’s head.
Pellia grimaced and in interference of the large man’s self-amusements, stepped wordlessly between the two as one came close to bullseye. ‘How do you always manage to get so banged up, Pica?’ she asked gently, tossing the rent helm into the dust of the street. ‘I swear, you are always getting shoved into the mud or trampled by a horse or pulled out of a brawl you started for no reason...’ her high, soft voice trailed off as she saw his eyes glazing over as they tended to do when she rebuked and clucked over him. ‘Are you trying to get killed?’ she demanded with a sulky punch to his chest.
Pellia was the youngest of the group, a tiny woman of some twenty winters and draped in slate-and-rose-painted leathers liberated from some supply tent long ago; not even an official Mellivora trooper, yet one with Fourth Squad. Like those of the northern climes usually do, she had the compressed build of the hunter-acrobat, her hair black enough to look almost blue in the sun. Her eyes were large and strikingly dark, they flared with the wild energy of a hunting winter fox as she moved ghost-like on light, leather-padded feet, looking upon everything around her with an off-putting intensity and fascination.
She had been informally adopted by Fourth Squad after they discovered her wandering aimlessly on the jagged rocks of Ochre Bay, shivering and bleeding from a hundred cuts and purple bruises with no idea of where she was or had come from. Tacca had sprinted and tried to help, scaring the wounded girl who then leapt at the Sergeant with a chipped blackstone blade she had hidden somewhere about her person. It was lucky for all involved that Pica, and by extension Simen, had propelled after Tacca thoughtlessly and were there to catch, disarm, and detain the small attacker on the ground before she did any real damage to the stricken officer.
Within a month of finding her on the edge of the northern territory of Picea, Pellia proved herself both a survivalist as well as an adept archer; using a white ash bow near as tall as herself pillaged from the Mellivora baggage train, she was able to bring down large game and outlaws alike during the treacherous hikes through the jagged Hemati mountains that separate Fraxinus province from the northern territories. She had saved Pica’s life twice on that first operation alone: once when he stepped out of line crossing a glacier-filled valley and almost disappeared into a bottomless crevasse imperceptible under a thin layer of crusty snow, and again when they were ambushed by the very outlaws they were in the mountains to detain or destroy.
Pica and Simen, ever together, had formed the vanguard tracking through the coniferous forests of one of the range’s innumerable valleys; the route they were on was hardly a small-game trail, the platoon walking one behind the other, stooping and stretching to navigate the tight-packed trees and snarling undergrowth. As many had expected, but were powerless to prevent, they were fallen upon by a considerable force of bandits well adept in guerilla warfare, first dropping pre-felled trees among the soldier’s ranks to scatter them before barreling in with fire and steel from the slopes above. Many good troopers died horrifically in the cold, mud, and snow during that encounter; one would have likely been Pica had Pellia not bounded across the chaos, traversing obstacles both natural and manmade to intervene as he was pinned low against a tree root by a particularly ferocious bear-man wielding a barbed cudgel.
Like lightning, one hundred and five pounds of black-haired savagery leapt upon the giant’s back, striking him in the neck and shoulder with a vicious tempo, her long, thin belt knife plunging deep into the outlaw as he thrashed and attempted to rid himself of the lethal tick draining his vibrant lifeblood. His attention stolen, the man was brought to the earth instantly by Pica’s battlepick, the hammer head crushing in a knee before the point struck home on the backstroke and seated itself deeply within his exposed flank and heart. As if a puppet had lost its strings, the hands stopped in their vain attempts to capture the slippery girl on his back, dropping to his side as the giant keeled forward with a crash.
Pica and a deeply grateful Simen had naturally taken her under their wings completely; they fed her, allowed her to sleep between them when she was struck by night-terrors, and ensured she was safe from the unsavory intentions of the less-honorable members of the company. Now, she sat on the ground before the tall, skinny man, radiating dismay at the incessant carelessness for his own health and wanting to smack him roundly on the back of the head for it. Like any little sister, Pellia was as deeply protective of Pica as she was constantly annoyed with his stupidity.
Behind them, Tacca exchanged a look with Simen. She rolled her eyes at the young troopers and laughed as she always did when the two got like this. ‘A real pair, you two,’ she observed merrily. ‘From day one.’ Her voice was rich and husky, a deep timbre that matched well with her broad, well-tanned frame. Like Pica, she was tall by any standard, let alone those of women from the southern lands who were, by and large, generally shorter than average for the Grove overall. But where he was wiry, she was broad and thickly muscled, closer in build to Simen; moving with the confidence of a champion brawler, her presence preceded her like a rolling tide, her competency with an axe renowned throughout the Southern Expeditionary Forces at-large, and legendary among every member of her beloved Badgers.
Initially, the leader of the small group had been unenthusiastic about Pica and, especially, Simen, joining her squad after they had graduated expeditionary training and requested Mellivora as their primary unit of choice. But over the five years they had spent in her care since, the two she affectionately thought of as the Boys had certainly grown on her. She had become immensely proud of them in that time, watching as they grew from fresh, if wily, meat and into highly competent, if unorthodox, fighters serving the Grove, Protector, and Empire.
A whistle shrilled through the largely empty streets of the town.
‘Time to go’ The sergeant said to the three. ‘Don’t want to be the last to assemble or Strozzi’ll strip your back raw.’ She intentionally omitted herself from the prospective punishment. ‘Scribe and the Triplets were rounding up some victuals and fresh water, I’m sure they’ll meet us at the muster grounds to strike camp.’ She looked to Simen expectantly. ‘Hop, hop!’
With a groan, the drugged and almost drowsing Pica looked around in vain for something to use as a temporary crutch. He sourly accepted the help of Simen’s rough hand under his arm and arose without additional complaint. The muscled man slipped his head into the crook of Pica’s arm and helped him begin to limp forward to muster outside the northern entrance to the market.
They were passed at the gate by two black-clad, wraith-like figures and a retinue of similarly attired scribes going the other way, toward the scene of the initial fighting. The Auditors were of an identically off-putting height and wore the equally indistinguishable clothes of their order: thick, tightly woven black robes, a black and white rodent insignia sewn onto the left shoulder, and a black mask of indeterminate material speckled with tiny silvery flecks and splashes. The insignia was a fearsome thing, a mottled rat on its hind legs, fangs bared and plunging a curved dagger into a skull covered in intricately stitched fractures. It was said that the pattern of the cracks in the skull indicated rank or to which coterie that specific specimen belonged, nobody ever looked long or close enough to know for sure. They disappeared around the corner pausing only briefly at the smoldering bakery before turning the corner out of view.
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