It’s 1841, in an alternate fantasy world where the Fey have rubbed shoulders with humanity for centuries. A world where Napoleon’s Empire of France unified Europe under its control. At least until the Elven Dominion emerged from the shadows and launched a deadly war against humanity.
Jacques Guinyard is a well-regarded airship captain who’s been loaned to the secretive Section Six, an organization fighting a shadow war against the nefarious Elven Dominion. There’s a battle shaping up, one that will decide the fate of humanity in their war with the Fey.
Check out this chapter from my novella Pivot Point…
Onslaught
The aerial battle was over, though sporadic fighting continued amongst the shattered airships strewn across the Marne Valley. The Dominion air fleet had swatted the Armée de l’air and the remnants of the fleets of a dozen other vanquished nations out of the sky. The elves had suffered grievous damage in the process, but the road to Paris was now wide open.
Jacques expected Paris to fall within days at most.
Still, the elvish war machine was a well-honed mechanism—their relentless factories would already be churning out new airships and weapons. Only now, the last significant obstacle to their complete subjugation of mankind had been smashed into worthless kindling.
A truly bad day for humanity, Jacques thought, surveying the valley and leaning against a timber that had been jammed into the ground when the Shapiro, had made its hard landing. With its spine smashed, she would never fly again. He felt a pang of sorrow; she’d been a good ship. Excepting the past year, she’d been his for six years.
Collectively, they’d done better against the Elven fleet than he’d expected, but victory had never been even a remote possibility. He’d always known that; he’d had access to all the relevant intelligence.
“There’ll be more coming,” Otto said in his gravelly voice, taking a moment to spit on the ground.
Jacques shrugged. “Undoubtedly.” His ordonanz was likely right. They’d repelled two small bands of ground-based attackers already, scouring the battlefield for new slaves to send to the enemy’s factories and mines. The elves were always hungry for more slaves. Jacques had every expectation that their troublesome presence had already been reported to higher-level commanders, maybe even the elvish elite.
He turned to the cook’s boy beside him. With less than half his crew left and even fewer uninjured, and no more need for cooking, he’d pressed the young lad into use as a messenger. “Tell Pasqual to be ready. No more than half an hour, and we’ll see a larger force coming up that defile right there, right beyond the flags.” Sticks with ribbons tied to them had been planted in the ground at intervals all the way up to the defile; the flags waved desultorily in a minor breeze. The boy, Sacha, nodded and scurried off.
Jacques’ estimate was off, but only by a few minutes. A century of armored orcs marched up the defile and arrayed themselves downslope from the wrecked airship; the terrain above the wreckage was too steep and rocky for a conventional assault. Then a pair of horses hove into view behind the enemy troopers, each carrying an elf in gleaming armor.
The enemy soldiers outnumbered them by roughly four to one.
“Safely outside of musket range,” Otto observed.
“Indeed,” Jacques said, absently rubbing his jaw in a vain attempt to relieve an ongoing toothache. “But not out of rifle range.”
A shot boomed and blood splashed from the head of the first elf, who toppled bonelessly from his steed. The other elf wheeled his horse and ran for safety back down the defile. A mistake, Jacques thought, he’d have been better off hanging from the far side of his horse. A second before the terrain would have hidden the elf from Pasqual’s deadly view, another shot took the elf in the center of his back; undoubtedly a heart shot, and far safer than a head shot for a moving target.
“Right, time to get you back undercover,” Otto growled, pushing Jacques behind the frame of the airship as the first line of orcs fired a ragged musket volley. All of the shots hit low, which Jacques had anticipated; firing uphill, they were well out of their range, which any competent commander should have known.
He wished they’d had more rifles earlier in the war. Maybe more airships, too. There’d been a point where they might have had a chance, where the conflicts hadn’t yet become nightmarishly lopsided, despite the Scourge, the wave of plagues the elves had unleashed on humanity starting in 1833 to soften up their ancestral enemies. That time was long, long past, though.
A moment later he was clambering up a rope ladder to the tilted but somewhat intact bow of the airship, listening to another volley of musket fire as his men targeted the enemy troopers charging up the slope. He rolled over the railing, then clambered to the opposite side of the deck to take a quick peek at the battlefield through the drifting gunsmoke, before ducking back down again.
He’d seen at least ten dead; the orcs were big targets. Still, they were already halfway up the slope. All told, they might take out another twenty, but they’d still lose. Badly.
“Strike the colors!” he bellowed. Everybody on deck looked at him in shock. They’d fight to the last man if he told them to, but killing orcs was a losing proposition. There’d always be more. “You heard me. We’ve done what we can, men. The war’s over for us.” Not precisely true, but close enough, Jacques thought.
The men looked at him reproachfully, even Otto, but did as he commanded. One airman took down the tricolour flag of the Empire of France from the bow’s flagmast. Otto collected all of the muskets from the men and piled them on one side of the deck. Another airman hung a white hammock over the side to further ensure that their surrender was understood.
Five of the bestial soldiers climbed aboard to make sure the surrender was real before the sarhento, the leader of the century, climbed the ladder. Muskets pointing threateningly, the soldiers took up positions around their leader as he climbed clumsily over the railing. More soldiers boarded after the commander and spread out to cover what remained of the Shapiro’s crew.
Jacques leaned against the railing and looked at his enemies with malevolent interest, though he was careful to keep a bland expression on his face. He’d fought orcs before, so he was unsurprised at their size. Around eight feet tall, and bulky, with two elongated teeth jutting up from their jaws like tusks, the orcs weighed almost three times what he did, though he’d heard that they were lucky to live past thirty-five or forty. All that strength came with a cost.
Sometimes he wondered what had ever possessed the elves to use their sorceries to breed humans into these monstrosities.
What he’d never seen before was the collars that ensured their obedience. Mass-produced in Elven factories, the collars looked like steel but actually grew metal roots like tiny threads that embedded themselves into the subject. Somehow the collars prevented the bestial warriors from ever raising a hand against an elf. Spies had reported that elves with special wands could even use the collars to inflict pain.
“Who’s the captain?” the sarhento shouted, spittle flying from his mouth.
Jacques raised his hand. “That would be me,” he admitted mildly.
The enemy commander strode across the deck toward him. “Do you know what you done?”
Jacques pursed his lips. “Let me see,” he said, cocking his head. “I believe we destroyed five of your warships, demolished the two units that found us before you got here, killed a few of your own warriors, oh, and your two elvish leaders.”
“You kill the son of the Istoiya and his bond-mate.” An Istoiya was basically an elvish deputy admiral. The elves had most likely had five or six of them for a battle the size of this one. In killing those two pointy-eared bastards, they’d done even better than he’d hoped.
“Fortunes of war, eh?” Jacques looked up at the glowering orc. “Hey, that didn’t tarnish your reputation, did it?”
By answer, the sarhento snarled at him and stepped back a few feet. He said something in a guttural language Jacques didn’t understand, then two of his soldiers stepped forward and grabbed Jacques by the arms. The leader pulled out a pistol and started loading it.
“I kill you myself for what you done.”
“Bold,” Jacques said, “but a little presumptuous for someone of your meager level, don’t you think? I’m Jacques Guinyard, airship capitain and, ahem, a noble. I might be executed, but not by the likes of you, I’m thinking.”
The sarhento snarled at him wordlessly, then cuffed him. Jacques saw it coming and ducked into it, taking it on the side of his head rather than his sore jaw. He blacked out for just a moment and came to sagging in the grip of the two soldiers restraining him. He’d have a black eye for sure.
The sarhento roared, “Find me the shooter!”
An airman named Joachim raised his hand. He had a badly injured leg, from a foot-long splinter of wood that had pierced it during their last aerial engagement. It would be over for him anyway; either the slavers would cull him for his injury, or he’d die of infection. Joachim looked over at Jacques and smiled ever so slightly. He’d volunteered to be Pasqual’s stand-in.
By now, Pasqual was hidden in the rocks somewhere above the wreck with his rifle, his escape having been covering by the billowing smoke of the brief battle. With any luck, he’d find the opportunity to bag another elf. If he was really, really lucky, an experienced outdoorsman like him might even be able to escape the valley under the cover of the coming darkness and live to fight another day. You played the odds you were given.
Joachim cursed at the leader of the orcs as he leveled his pistol at the airman and blew a hole in his face with a spray of blood and a puff of acrid smoke.
The soldiers never even bothered to look for the rifle that had done in the elves.The remaining orcs gathered up all the able-bodied airmen, including Jacques, and searched them roughly but effectively for weapons and other gear. A few minutes later, seventeen men were led away from the wreck in chains. Behind them, Jacques heard the popping of musket fire as the orcs executed the remaining members of his crew, the ones too injured to make good slaves. Sacha, the boy he’d used as a messenger, was among the casualties; he’d taken a musket ball to the belly during the brief fight.
Leave a Reply