Sparatar-Havien Border Region
00:00
-10°C
It was midnight – the witching hour. They slipped across the border like wraiths, cloaked in a white that perfectly matched the snowy mountain backdrop. Their footsteps, balanced and muted like those of any good warrior, left deep impressions that were nevertheless swiftly buried by the raging blizzard. A single file of men, threading their way through the treacherous landscape like a formation of foraging ants - scarcely the most impressive invasion force ever assembled. Yet these were the elite of Sparatar’s armed forces: the Fictos Nocte, or Night Daggers, trained from birth for war. It had taken them days to reach their vantage point on the cliffs beside the border fence. It had taken even longer to reconnoitre their target, painstakingly recording the number of occupants and the timing of patrols. But this investment paled in comparison to the years they had spent in barracks, hunting in forests, crawling through mud and dirt and coating themselves in blood for the sake of the Empire. Now they had a new foe – the Republic of Havien, Sparatar’s soft southern neighbour – and they intended to channel all that hardship here tonight. Their training would prove its value here, in the snowy foothills of the border region, in the prelude to a red dawn.
Lucinius, their point-man, halted suddenly in the middle of a snowfield. A tremor of anticipation ran down the line: had they been spotted? Were they about to be on the receiving end of a Haviennic artillery barrage? The wind offered no answers, howling around them incessantly, prying into gaps in their cloaks and sucking the warmth from their cheeks. Several minutes passed, punctuated only by that deathly howl and the occasional shriek of a hawk in the night-time. Then word began to filter back, slowly – the fence had been breached. Lucinius had been working on it with a pair of bolt-cutters. They each sighed deeply, not with relief but with disappointment. Blood had been promised, and the men were keen to test their mettle against Havien’s finest. Yet for now they were compelled to resume their silent march across the border, filing sullenly through the jagged hole Lucinius had torn in the chainlink.
Half an hour later, they saw it - a watchtower, standing like some time-worn geographical feature, its legs buried in the snow. At its apex rested the real target of their incursion: a bundle of radio and satellite antennae. It was strange, many of the Sparatites thought, to have come so far for such a tiny and seemingly insignificant handful of metal. At the base of the tower were two men, evenly sized, each resting lackadaisically against the walls of their improvised corrugated iron shelter. Snow had piled up on the shelter’s roof, and the rusted walls appeared to be quivering under its weight. Nevertheless the Haviennic troops stood trustingly beneath, shifting against their rifles every so often or stamping to warm their feet. Behind them, a snow-crusted steel staircase led tortuously up towards the structure’s summit.
Apius, the patrol’s youngest member, padded forward to join Lucinius next to a conveniently placed snowdrift. They crouched behind it, peering cautiously ahead at the sentries. Then, tapping his comrade on the shoulder, Apius drifted onwards like a ghost on the wind. A knife flashed briefly in the sterile moonlight as he transferred it upward, into his palm. Lucinius followed, drawing his one true love – a balanced throwing hatchet – from its loop on his belt. The pair stood stock-still, not five metres from their adversaries. Then, in a flash, it was over, blood and bodies falling in gruesome pirouettes, viscera steaming in the cold night air. The troop crept up to join the two, sidling past the corpses in a sickening parade. Finally, huddled under the corrugated iron, they could stand up straight, unbent by the wind. Josephine, the patrol’s grizzled matriarch, stepped forward from the semicircle they had formed. Pausing only to murmur a few brief instructions, she headed for the ladder, silenced pistol at the ready. As the troops fanned out, forming a perimeter below her, she began to climb – one rung after the other, taking great care not to slip on the frozen metal. Had her hands been ungloved, her skin might well have stuck to the naked steel; yet the Sparatites had come prepared, and Josephine climbed with unmatched zeal for the summit.
There were three soldiers in the watchtower. The first stood just feet from her, his mountain boots dominating the centre of her vision. The second lounged against a brightly lit console to the left, half-asleep, floating on an endless stream of radio chatter. The third stood facing the ladder, apparently mid-conversation with the first. He had just opened his mouth to speak when Josephine’s gun snaked up through the floor – his words turned quickly to screams as the pistol coughed, once, twice, three times. He collapsed, blood seeping from the perfect trifecta of perforations that had appeared on his torso. The second guard wheeled, issuing an animal cry of alarm. His boots whirled in front of Josephine’s eyes as he struggled to bring his gun to bear. Two more shots and he was down, the clatter of his rifle alerting his sole surviving colleague. As the groggy sentry rose from the console, fumbling for the revolver at his belt, Josephine took her time. She wanted to do this right. She aligned the pistol’s iron sights with his forehead and fired, the bullet passing cleanly through his skull and out through the watchtower’s starboard window. Josephine paused for a second, watching the apparent corpses for any hint of movement – then hauled herself up and into the control room. Her comrades were already moving up the ladder behind her.
Ten minutes later, their task was complete. The radio apparatus had been thoroughly decommissioned with the help of a sledgehammer and some wire-cutters. All three bodies had been arranged in the peculiar posture required by the Red Sacrament, their fingers interlinked behind their heads and their ankles crossed. And, in the centre of the control room, spelled out in blood, were four words: ‘heathens will not prosper’. Pleased as she was with the group’s performance, Josephine could not pause to congratulate them. The eastern terminals of the sky were reddening already, flush with summer’s early dawn. Fleet as foxes on their booted feet, the Sparatites dissolved into the waning blizzard like white revenants. In a couple of hours, Havien would wake to grisly news. No less than seven of its border outposts had been wiped out, their inhabitants subjected to the brutal religious discipline of the Republic’s northern neighbour. And, as the cacophony of accusations mounted, Sparatar would stand in proud acknowledgement of its bloody deed. The Red Sacrament had been performed, and now the hills screamed for war – the war that Sparatar had waited forty years for, the war that would finally propel this mountain kingdom into the stratosphere of global politics. Josephine could hardly wait.
