Bastion

irritation in a couple of candlemarks . . . no doubt by making sure Lita was within earshot of stories she couldn’t respond to and had to pretend not to hear. That was when Mags swung himself out of the caravan and managed to get Amily up behind him, all without anyone stopping or slowing down. The road—if you could call it that—was little more than a track among the trees at this point. Mags had the feeling that if the supply wagons hadn’t worn it down some, they’d have had a hard time tracing it.
    There was a great deal of wildlife out there among the trees. More than once, they heard something crashing through the underbrush, running away from their convoy. :Deer,: Dallen informed him. Once, a fox just stood there and watched them pass, bold as you please. Rabbits fled, as did tree-hares, and squirrels by the dozen raced up trunks and scolded them from imagined safety. Since several of the Guardsmen amused themselves by taking out tree-hares and rabbits for their dinner tonight, the squirrels wouldn’t have been nearly as safe as they thought they were.
    Overhead, birds flitted among the branches like leaves, watching them without any sign of fear. Evidently, few people came here, and fewer still hunted. Mags wondered why.
    “You can see why the bandits picked this part of the country,” Milles said, as another deer went blundering away. “Plenty of game. It’s been so long now that the wildlife has gotten fearless again. Impossible for anyone to get through here without alerting the wildlife, so if you paid attention and were quiet, you could easily tell when someone was coming up on The Bastion. You only need to put out a few sentries to guard quite a big area.” He shook his head. “We must have scouted through here dozens of times. I was just a first-year Guardsman at the time, so I was part of that. All they had to do was to pull back into their caves and make sure we never found the entrance to the pocket valley. We probably went past them a hundred times before we finally got someone to guide us in.”
    “And then?” Jakyr asked.
    “We sent one scout to verify that The Bastion was where the informant said it was. He was truly a genius at what he did and was undetected. We gave them no indication we knew they were there. We waited until we had a double garrison ready to go, and if you’ve ever seen the report, you know how that went.” Milles let the sentence trail off, inviting Jakyr to say he had or had not. Mags eavesdropped shamelessly.
    “I only found out about the gang because of The Bastion being central to my Circuit,” Jakyr lied smoothly. “When I did my research. It looked like a natural place to set up a headquarters, rather than relying on the Waystations. So?”
    “So, we’d planned all this in as close to absolute secret as we could. No one outside the Post knew about it. We even managed to hide the doubled manpower. On the day, we sent men in over the top of the hills before dawn, and killed their scouts as they took up their posts, then filled the hills with archers. We blocked off the entrance, then one full garrison went in, on foot, wearing full plate. Hard to move in, but it made it almost impossible for them to do us much damage. We moved in squares of four, so nobody could get hit from behind. Anybody who tried to escape up the cliffs and over the hills met the archers. The entrance is barely wide enough for a supply wagon, so men in armor could just bull right through until we got ourselves a foothold; then we just kept feeding them in. The bandits tried a rain of arrows, but they never got anything going thanks to our archers above.”
    “Good gods,” Jakyr said, sounding stunned.
    “Aye. It was a slaughter. A sheer butchery. Mind you, they got quick deaths, which was more than they deserved. Remember, we caught them by surprise, so they got very little chance to get into armor themselves. It wasn’t so much a fight as—well, we were like some sort of reaping machine that took men instead of wheat.” Milles ran his hand through his hair. “Not the sort of battle you boast about. When we got a look at what they’d been up to in that camp that we didn’t know about, I have to say I’m glad they’re gone, but it was the sort of fight that sickens a man of fighting.”
    Some of Milles’ memories were strong enough that he actually projected them, and Mags felt nauseated by them too, before he shut them out. He hoped he would never find himself in