In the end, there was no sign of D’s statue in or around the temple, just as there was no sign of any traps or ambush laid for them in the village. Whatever the bandits had done with the statue, it wasn’t readily apparent. While D was Jadis’ patron deity, she couldn’t say that she felt anything more than confusion over why anyone would purposefully remove a religious statue from a temple. It was just a statue, after all. But there were stronger reactions from certain members of her guild.
“Such disrespect!” Eir fumed. “To seek refuge inside a temple when in need is one thing, but to remove, or perhaps even destroy an icon venerating one of the gods is inexcusable! These bandits act more like cultists than simple thieves with such behavior and if that is how they chose to act, then they should be treated as such!”
Jadis had never seen the elf so angry. In fact, she couldn’t recall Eir ever being angry at all. Worried, anxious, or agitated, sure. Never angry. The removal of D’s statue from his temple, though, that had put a righteous fury in the priestess. If she wasn’t such an utterly harmless person, Jadis might have felt some pity for what she’d do to the bandits.
As it was, though, Jadis would just have to enact Eir’s judgement for her.
They couldn’t spend too much time worrying over the missing statue, though. They still needed to secure the village and seek out the bandits. With the temple cleared, the whole of their forces headed up the hill where the mining structures sat in front of the entrance to the cave. It seemed ever more likely that the bandits had chosen to flee underground rather than fight them directly. There was no way of knowing how many men total the bandits had, but maybe with the loss of three of their number during their ultimately failed ambush they had been convinced fighting was a futile effort.
The top of the hill on the western side of the village held an artificially created pond. A stream ran out of the mouth of the cave and the miners who had once worked in the village had dammed the stream to make a pond that now extended back into the cave, disappearing into the dark. The surface of the water was covered in a layer of ice, thick enough that unmarred snow rested on top of it, though Jadis couldn’t tell if it was solid enough to support a man’s weight, much less hers.
Around the eastern edge of the small lake, at the immediate end of the dirt road that led up the hill from the village proper, were five buildings. One was made of wood and was an old barracks. The other four were made of stone, like the rest of the village. Three of the buildings had been workshops, though one was a half-crumbled mess of stone. The largest structure was a warehouse that was still mostly intact, except for a large hole in one wall.
“We lived in this one for a while,” Dys said as she took a look inside the destroyed remains of the smithy. “There was an anvil in here, I think. Sabina, you might want to take it.”
“No, we threw that anvil,” Jay corrected after a moment of thought. “Should be over there along the shore somewhere, though.”
“Why would you throw an anvil?” Bridget asked incredulously as she poked her own head into the ruined building. “And what happened to this place?”
“Bone thief matriarch,” Dys replied simply.
Searching the five buildings revealed no more traps than there were down in the village proper, though there were many signs of boot prints going into the cave mouth with none coming out.
“We never explored this cave,” Syd advised as she stared into the fading light of the cavern, looking for any sign of activity. “It didn’t seem like a good idea to go poking around in the dark when we weren’t sure how deep it went. Plus, most underground places are a tight fit for us.”
“According to my notes,” Willa said from where she stood next to Syd, “This should be the entrance to a fairly extensive natural cave system. It hadn’t been fully explored yet before the demonic invasion struck, but the miners here had already been pulling eleria out of this mine for months before evacuation was necessary. We have a map of the tunnels that were explored, however, I’m not inclined to rush inside after the bandits just yet.”
“I have no doubt that they would have laid traps behind them as they fled into the cave,” Aila added her own assessment. “It’s what I would do. It’s a narrow passage, just the one way in or out. I would fill it with traps to hinder or kill anyone that might pursue.”
“So what’s the plan?” Syd asked, turning slightly to address the captain. “We’re willing to help you however we can since we’d love to beat the ever-loving shit out of those bastards, but we do have our own goals here.”
Catching the eleria thieves wasn’t actually Jadis’ purpose for returning north, after all. The promised ally D had told her of had to be near one of three split-peaked mountains, the first of which lay to the east of Sweet Pine Valley. As much as she would like to see the people who’d tried to kill her crushed under her boot, catching them wasn’t a priority. They were on something of a time crunch, what with the winter storms coming soon. They needed to find the avatar who could help her understand how to connect with Lyssandria and then get back to Far Felsen before the snow made travel impossible.
“For now, we should secure the entrance to this cave to make sure the bandits don’t sneak out,” Willa said firmly. “We’ll set up a blockade in case they try to push us. We’ll need to consult the maps, see if there are other documented cave exits connected to this tunnel system. Our plans will change going from there.”
“Fair enough,” Syd nodded before turning away from the cave. “We’ll go get the wagons. It’s late enough in the day that we probably shouldn’t try to leave for the east, so we’ll help you set up the barriers.”
In no time, both wagons were brought up the hill and set up in a defensive formation with the old buildings. Fortune’s Favored laid claim to the warehouse while the soldiers took the two undamaged stone buildings, with different members of both groups working to make the structures suitable for a night’s rest. To expedite the process of setting up a barricade across the cave entrance, Jadis used her strength to quickly dismantle the old wooden barracks. Ripping the logs apart from one another, she carried them to the cave where under Willa’s direction a series of walls were constructed that would make it easier for the soldiers to guard and block off the cave from anyone that might try to exit it. To be doubly sure no counterattack would come in the night, Aila spent practically all of her magic reserves laying spike and snare traps inside the cave entrance as well as around the perimeter of the encampment.
By the time everyone was done, the night had set in and darkness shrouded the valley. A stew was made using the frost drake meat which helped to warm everyone who had been chilled by the long day spent working in the winter weather. Sitting around a large bonfire with friends and lovers, bowls of hot food in hands and real clothes on her backs, Jadis couldn’t help but see how different her life was compared to how it had been the last time she’d spent a night in the abandoned village.
“This cave should connect here,” Willa was saying as her finger traced along the line of a map. “Which means they could exit the tunnels on the other side of that mountain there.”
Willa had set up a crate next to her and laid out a collection of maps on top of it. Most were of the cave systems that had been documented throughout Kalters Wall by miners exploring the mountain range in search of eleria. From the looks of the maps on display, there had to be dozens, maybe hundreds of miles of different unconnected tunnels and mines that had been surveyed all along the southern side of the mountains. Still, when compared to the overall size of the mountain range, it was clear that were was far more unexplored than there was documented, by a large margin.
“That would be, what, a few hours travel overland?” Jay asked as she leaned over Aila to look at the collection of maps. “I mean, that’s that mountain up there to the northwest, right?”
“No, it’s the next one after it,” Aila said with an exasperated look on her face. With Jay leaning over her, she was getting squashed by Jay’s breast against her head. “Considering the mountain terrain, it’d take a day to cross that distance, at a minimum. Much longer with wagons or carts.”
“Is that the only exit?” Jay asked, content to squish up against Aila despite her girlfriend’s obvious frustration.
“Possibly,” Willa answered, her whole attention on the maps. “But these maps are incomplete. The tunnels shown here and here, and also here, they all are marked as un-surveyed. They could lead anywhere, or nowhere. It’s possible these bandits might have found an alternate route out.”
“Or they haven’t even discovered this route,” Aila pointed out. “There’s no way to know. But I don’t think they’d flee into these caves without some idea of how they’d be getting out again.”
“Yeah, who’d run blindly into caves without knowing if they’d find a way out again,” Jay said dryly.
“They might be planning on waiting us out,” Willa mused as she rubbed her chin with one hand. “They might expect us to leave to avoid the winter storms, which is a fair assumption. We can’t weather the long winter here, not with the supplies we have with us. All they have to do is wait until we retreat and then they can flee to a new location.”
“They won’t get far in the winter,” Aila countered. “The snow that’ll drive you back to the city is the same snow that would keep them from traveling.”
“If they’ve been out here mining for more than a year, which is possible, then they likely have the supplies and the experience to travel across the snow. They could also have other safe houses set up in other mines.”
“We haven’t seen any sign of vehicles or horses,” Aila frowned. “They could have sleds for transportation. In fact, they have to have some kind of method of transporting their eleria, right? I doubt many of them have the kind of strength and stamina that they can drag heavily loaded carts or sleds across miles of territory in the winter. Most people aren’t Nephilim, after all.”
“Maybe they have snowshoes.”
Jay’s offhand comment brought on a silence from the two debating women that Jadis hadn’t expected. As Jay lowered the bowl of stew from her mouth, she saw that both Aila and Willa were staring at her with a frown.
“What?”
“What are snowshoes?” Aila asked.
“Are they some kind of enchantment?” Willa followed with her own question.
That was a bit of a surprise. Jadis had used snowshoes a few times before in her youth back on Earth. They were a common enough concept that she didn’t think they’d be a foreign idea to Aila or Willa. Then again, some technologies that were commonplace to her weren’t present on Oros. It seemed snowshoes were one of them.
“Snowshoes,” Jay said slowly. “They’re, um, wide, long, flat shoes that you can wear on top of your regular ones. They displace your weight across a larger surface so you don’t sink into the snow when you walk on it. You stay on top. Makes it way easier to travel across snow on foot.”
“Nephilim thing?” Aila asked, one eyebrow raised.
“Nephilim thing,” Jay confirmed.
It didn’t seem likely that the bandits had snowshoes since none of her companions or the soldiers had heard of them before. That didn’t mean the bandits didn’t have some other method of easy travel across snow-covered terrain, but the mundane answer was crossed off the list. However, with the idea now out there, Aila and Willa were both interested in learning more about the Nephilim technology. With Sabina’s eager assistance, it only took a short time for a very basic set of snowshoes to be fabricated for a quick demonstration.
The snowshoes made from wood and leather straps entertained the soldiers for the remainder of the evening as they took turns putting them on and walking across the snow. They definitely helped, even though there were only a few inches of snow covering the ground. Willa seemed particularly interested in sharing the snowshoe design with the military once they got back to Far Felsen. The equipment could definitely make it easier for troops to patrol during the long winter.
As the activity died down and the different groups retired to their respective buildings, Willa stopped Jay from leaving to have a brief word.
“Don’t worry about standing guard tonight,” Willa told her. “We’re going to be without your backup soon enough anyway. We’ll handle the night watch from now on.”
“Are you sure?” Jay asked. “We really don’t mind—”
“No, it’s fine,” Willa assured her. “The Magistrate sent us out here with the expectation that we’d be operating alone. We’re more than capable of handling this situation. I can assure you, it’s not the first time my men and I have been sent after bandits. Though I suppose it’s the first time we’ve done it during the demonic invasion. Either way, we’ll be fine.”
“Alright then,” Jay conceded the point. Willa and her troops were professional soldiers, after all. “You know your people.”
With the knowledge that she wouldn’t have to worry about standing watch that night, Jay parted ways with the captain and followed the rest of her group into the warehouse to give them the happy news. As soon as she’d made her announcement, Aila approached Jay and took her by the hand. Letting the redhead lead her, Jay soon found herself pushed down onto a seat that someone had made out of old crates covered in a blanket or two. With deft hands, Aila undid the buckle on Jay’s belt.
“What?” Aila asked innocently at Jay’s questioning look. “I used up all my magic reserves today. It’s time to recharge.”
“Right,” Jay said with a wicked grin. “We’re just recharging, huh?”
“Yes,” Aila answered primly, but with a twinkle in her blue eyes.
“And I’m helping,” Kerr abruptly said, appearing next to Aila and aiding her in removing Jay’s pants. “You just lean back, Big Stuff, while Blue and I have some fun.”
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