A military commander has many weapons at his disposal, and any one advantage might be enough to win the day. The first and most obvious is numerical advantage, followed by superiority of weapons, food, supplies, and so on. Even a child can understand that the larger army has an advantage but history is replete with examples of the seeming underdog winning.

Terrain is often the second aspect of battle discussed, how one might use the height of hills, or press an enemy into water. More exotically, battles have been disrupted in Skaldheim because invaders didn’t understand the lay of boiling geysers and of course Aillesterran campaigns had never been able to pierce the jungles. Flood plains, salt marshes, tide pools and more can be used by a sly commander to compensate for a numerical disadvantage. Later in Lucius’ own wars, he waged what became the definitive example of using a mountain pass to negate a larger army.

Unique stigmata can swing a battle, but no serious text on the art of war has ever accounted for them because to plan an entire campaign around one man’s ability invites disaster should sickness or assassination take him. Lucius’ stigmata being of course an exception.

With those accounted for, a commander begins reaching for ways they might have the upper hand. Composition of forces may, at times, be advantageous. The three great resources of an army are the melee infantry, the ranged infantry, and the cavalry. A camel charge had only ever been effective in western Giordana for the simple reason that the wastelands lacked enough camels or any beasts of burden at all.

Bravery and morale can win the day, but this was not a factor for the thralls and he had no direct means of communication with the bishop’s besieged forces. Once again, he thought of his coded communication strategy, but if the bishop could discern such signals without prior knowledge then so could the enemy. What was more, he had no wood to burn to make smoke.

Lucius had but two advantages. First, the trained soldiers of Giordana and Jeamaeux were worth more than half-mindless conscripts if he could rendezvous with them without endangering his position. Second, he had been trained by me in the art of war and that tactical advantage had to count for something.

Unfortunately, in a nearly flat, open desert between equally skilled troops, the advantage clearly laid with the larger force. After all of Anubi’s work, a few travel mishaps, and simply losing forces for reasons unknown, Lucius had less than one thousand troops at his command. The force between him and the ley mine was estimated at two thousand.

Such a foe was enough to make him grind his teeth, for he didn’t even know how they were equipped, if they had a method of command, or any training at all.

The standard advice when facing such an overwhelming force would be retreat, to pull the enemy into your territory while uprooting all the resources. To stretch supply lines thin, to seed disease among their troops and wear them down. Lucius could not retreat. He was the reinforcements. Sitting his army on their haunches a short march from the enemy could occupy some of their defensive forces but not many.

This was, however, not a repeat of his rescue of Rackvidd. Most obviously, the bishop was in dire need of rescue. She did not have the forces to fight off two thousand wasterlanders the way Lord Raymi could have cut down the rebels. Secondly, there was something Lucius could do besides outright attack.

After their three day march, he had Golden brought to the front of the army. The former angel sprawled across one of the supply sledges long since depleted of food rations but not abandoned. Golden gazed at the sky, half awake and almost dreaming while Lucius imagined what tactics might be used. He was not idle however, merely waiting. Eventually, he sprang up and swung his finger.

Lucius bellowed his command to the priest and horns blew quickly. Nine hundred pairs of feet pounded across the sand as his diminutive army made a seemingly meaningless pivot across the sands.

While the ley mine was like a canyon through the desert, it formed a sort of wall that the enemy could only press against without committing themselves to an invasion. It was also so long that they could choose any point they wished to prepare against, so Lucius’ movement did not force them to relocate their camp.

But they should have.

If they had realized what he was doing, they would have charged in mass and chased them off. Prudence kept them rooted as the sky opened and showered water upon the spread pots of Lucius’ army. Open mouths drank the spill and the thralls filled their bellies.

One momentary oasis would not sway a battle. Indeed, it didn’t even stir their camp as they crafted siege tools. The second oasis came while Lucius slept and nearly came to blows with the enemy but only a trickle came down and retreat quickly sounded. My pupil’s retreat that was. He drew the wastelanders to him, away from the mine.

In due time, an oasis sprang down from the heavens to their rear and the wastelanders scurried back to claim the water. With the full host between them and the water, Lucius could not press in for it, but that was within his calculations. On the second day of keeping the wasterlanders on edge, he played his gambit and pressed the luck of his tactics.

His ploy, the product of days of thinking, was a simple one. Of course, he prepared for outright combat. The open field allowed for a fighting retreat that could prevent encirclement while his slingers whittled their forces away and that might have proved effective. To risk a fight like that, however, would not have been wise, merely wasteful of resources.

Of course, that arithmetic only applies at scale.

When Golden next identified the coming water fall, Lucius charged to it but sent his army in the opposite direction. He took with him only one battalion of one hundred and left orders to array his primary forces as though to defend a coming water fall. He used himself as bait, appearing like he was there to outflank the wastelanders.

In truth, he had his slingers carry empty pots and arrange them beneath the coming water while surrounded by shields. For how flat the desert was, only the press of bodies could camouflage their activities.

When the water poured upon them, confusion erupted in the ranks of their enemy. A shield wall had been lazily erected between Lucius’ “flanking” position, but their minds had only idle defense in them. The sight of the water made them panic, more out of rage that they had been duped.

They charged him.

At once, the blob of one hundred morphed about their bannermen. They spread out and returned the charge, abandoning the pots to the gushing fall behind them. The water was nobody’s true concern. Stone’s whipped through the air as wastelander’s bellowed at one another. Each sling was like a hammer. Meager shields cracked and skulls shattered. The sand was littered with blood and teeth as men howled over broken fingers or wheezed with broken ribs.

Then the butchery began.

Spears clashed against shields, twisting and slashing through air as bodies collided. The two lines surged into one another. Grips shortened and the melee became a shoving and stabbing match. Animal roaring filled the desert as the greater parts of the army hesitated to act.

Then Lucius himself swept in from the side. Heedless of slings and indifferent to their spears, he alone flanked the contingent. He fought with a two-sword style that wasn’t his forte but it was the fastest way he could break down such a rudimentary force. Their spears and clubs rained across the Vassish steel that girded his body. Their attacks glanced off his helm and grazed his arms. For every attack against him, he returned two.

His thrusts ran through chests. His slices opened arteries. Blood showered the desert as the oasis dried up beyond him. It took only seconds before his bannermen wrapped the edges of the enemy wastelanders and the encirclement began.

Then lightning struck him. Not from the sky but the fingers of the enemy leader. The energy leapt from body to steel and burned through his body. Muscles locked in place while those near him were blown back. Burned hair and flesh fouled the air as the enemy leader shouted, “Kill him!”

A dozen speartips blindly punched through his arm and chest, sliding through muscle to bone. His armor held the crude weapons from killing him though. They had to pull back and try to thrust again, but by then it was too late. The collateral damage of the stigmata attack had been too much. The distraction to cut down Lucius too total.

The wastelanders were soon encircled and cut down like huntsman prey. Lucius personally opened the throat of the leader who had blasted him, helped in no small part by his bannerman. The leader shrieked words and pleas in half-thought bargains.

My pupil paid it no heed. That the lightning user was the upraised spawn of feasting on the godling was obvious enough. It mattered little, only that the fight had taken longer than expected.

Across the sands, both armies raced along their line of confrontation, spilling over themselves to extend to the left: towards him. The priest wasn’t able to move the troops fast enough to outmaneuver such a larger force and Lucius no longer had the time to regroup. Already some four hundred savages had closed ranks and begun charging his wounded few.

“To the mine! Grab the water or dump it,” he barked, and they fled to the only safety they could reach: the very people they had come to rescue.