Battle of Stanis Howe

The Battle of Stanis Howe was not a desperate stand, it was a strategic lure. Terleman had picked Stanis Howe, a low pasture hill with a broad sloping face and a forested crown, very deliberately. The Magelaw garrison there was modest, around 2,500 men. Mistress Marsden, "the Mistress of the Field" and Keeper of Eastguard Tower, ran the field. Master Minalan and a small warmage team (Astyral, Caswallon, Tamonial, Buroso, Landrik) were present as observers and reserve, but the formal command of the battle belonged to Marsden.

The bait

Marsden's wards manipulated the Enshadowed's scrying to show roughly twice the real garrison strength on the hill. The intent was to convince Shakathet to draw forces off his ongoing sieges of Megelin, Forgemont, Fort Destiny, and Iron Hill to crush the apparent Magelaw army at Stanis Howe. It worked: large portions of all four siege armies broke off and marched on the howe.

The hillside

The defences were built around the weather. Forseti, the colonial Constructed Intelligence Minalan and Gareth had been working with, had given Minalan a multi-day rain forecast — an unheard-of luxury for a pre-modern army. Marsden and her engineers used it. The upper third of the hill was laid with a hydrophobic spellfield (surface tension raised to the point that water flowed off rather than soaking in). The lower two thirds got the opposite: a soil-saturation field, and the topsoil churned up with agricultural wands and earth elementals so the rain would turn it into a deep, sticky bog. Marsden also raised the viscosity of the mud directly with a charm field on top.

Above the mud bog she laid the usual menagerie of warmage furniture: berserker glyphs, pit traps, caltrops, autonomous combat constructs out of Carmella's wagons from Salik Tower. The hilltop itself was crowned with a long covered archery gallery — slanted roof against volley fire, three thousand archers with Wilderlands longbows behind it, heavy infantry in dug trenches below them. The visual line between sodden lower slope and dry upper slope was so sharp it became known on the hill as "the dry line."

The waves

Fell Hound riders tested the slope first. Their great paws handled the mud better than horses would have, but they made it only as far as the dry line, took point-blank arrow fire, and bolted.

Maragorku heavy infantry came next, in tight entrained formation under the Enshadowed iksimelis compulsion, raising shields and the new Dradrien-pattern crossbows Korbal had been quietly issuing. Their bolts fell twenty feet short of the line. Three thousand longbows answered. Half of the great goblins who started the climb survived to the dry line, where the magical constructs and the second volley shredded them. Eventually their line broke. Shakathet's herald then rode forward under truce; Marsden, with Astyral as Minalan's deputy, took the parley. The exchange of formal insults was unremarkable. Shakathet was personally in command from a wain a mile away.

Thirty trolls and a second maragorku wave came at night, in heavy rain. The trolls were the most dangerous opponent yet, tearing arcane constructs apart by ripping the legs off them. Marsden's answer was the Wheel, a custom anti-troll engine she and Carmella had pre-built: a hollow wooden wheel eight feet across, filled with rocks, two heavy chains attached to the hub and stretched out, the whole thing rolled down the slope. The chains whipped and snapped as the wheel gained speed. The trolls who survived the wheel met the heavy infantry. The line held through the night; Caswallon and the rest of Minalan's team made several counterattacks across the line when the centre threatened to break.

The giant

At dawn Shakathet committed his real secret weapon: a giant, dragged from somewhere in the Mindens and shepherded forward by a handler-party. Through the morning rain it loomed into view behind the gurvani lines, ground-shaking at every step.

The giant was scared off by birds. Dara and Nattia, leading both Sky Rider wings out of Megelin on giant falcons, exploited the creature's ornithophobia, harrying it from the air until it bolted in panic westward — straight back through Shakathet's own ranks, doing significant damage on its way out. Reports of it still moving west came in for weeks afterward; Shakathet never recovered control of it.

The night withdrawal

The chaos was the cover the plan had been waiting for. While the giant rampaged through the gurvani encampment, Minalan and roughly a score of warmagi crossed the lines for a quiet night raid: slit throats, magical duels, and the unhurried capture of four Enshadowed irionite spheres and two gurvani shaman shards. Caswallon personally chased a shaman through the camp, screaming. Tamonial and Buroso put an axe-handle to an Enshadowed and took his stone.

Meanwhile the rest of the Magelaw army was quietly walking off the back of the hill, packing up, and heading east toward the river. By the time Shakathet realised what had happened the howe was empty. The three days of rain had swollen the local rivers to flood; the nearest usable ford for Shakathet's reinforcements was at Yellin, well to the north under the escarpment. The Magelaw force crossed on Shakathet's own magical bridge — captured earlier in the campaign by Carmella — and gained days of march on him on the way to the next field.

What it accomplished

By any defensive metric Stanis Howe did not stop Shakathet. The horde was still vast, still mostly intact, and still bound for the Magelaw heartland. But none of that was the point. Stanis Howe drained the four siege armies that were keeping Megelin, Forgemont, Fort Destiny, and Iron Hill bottled up; Azar promptly sallied from Megelin and broke that siege with five hundred riders and a thousand infantry. Stanis Howe wasted Shakathet's giant. Stanis Howe gave the Magelaw four more Enshadowed witchstones. And Stanis Howe got Shakathet's army committed in the open, on Terleman's ground, for the engagement that followed at the Eastern Bank.