Chapter 18 - Part 8

Ackvar thanked the soldier who had brought him the tea and got back to his notes. Beneath his feet, chickens clucked in their coops. It was somewhere between midnight and dawn in the early hours of the eighteenth of Sypheros, and the tired shifter reconnaissance officer still had more reports to go over before presenting his official recommendation to the head of the Wardens of the Wood here in Owl’s Perch.

He smiled grimly reading the after-action reports that had been stolen from the Aundairian General’s base of operations. They referred to the Eldeen Reaches as a ‘meat grinder.’ The Reachers were killing five Aundairians for every three of their own that fell, if all estimates were right – and this fit with Ackvar’s assessment of his own side, and the enemy general had orders wizards to be pulled from the Thaliost push to the front with the Reaches. There was a small bit of gloating about killing the Reachers’ best strategic thinker in a catapult barrage quite recently. Ackvar snarled at that, shifting his fangs several inches longer as he did so.

He spent another hour going over more reports, all of them grim. The army was running out of food, the land was being stripped for resources, the people were complaining about the taxes to fund the war, a small return-to-Aundair movement had started, and House Cannith had suspended warforged sales to both the Eldeen Reaches and Aundair until the Merylsward matter could be cleared up – an act which hurt the Reaches far more than it did Aundair. Ackvar could smell the fat, dragonmarked house pressuring the Reachers to drop the complaints against Cannith, and he snarled again. Except for Vadalis, he thought all the dragonmarked could jump into the sea as far as he was concerned.

Ackvar sighed. The other reports were even grimmer. The front with Droaam was an open wound, the monsters seemed to come and go as they pleased. The Aundairians kept taking ground, if by the inch, and almost never lost it. The blademark companies were demanding to be paid weekly now, not monthly, and Kundarak was refusing to lend the Reachers any more gold until they could demonstrate that Aundair was not going to conquer them all over again within the next year.

Ackvar threw the reports aside and stood, buckling on his swordbelt. He would take the news straight to his superior officer without delay. The free people of the Eldeen Reaches had to accept the Brelish offer. They had no other choice.