Contract With a Shadow
Cylus 12, arc 719
They were not as stupid as they first appeared. Their leader had the wit to keep their night fire confined within a thick-fabricked tent. The bit of lit smoke wafting up from the tip of the inverted cone was far less noticeable than an outright open campfire would have been in the vast, clear desert night. So they made their plans in a lit space while keeping their location as secret as possible.
But Eddrick Brodon, the chief of the newly Raskalarn-aligned Rhakrii Raiders, had learned of some Yaralon-based mercenary groups being hired out to Nashaki to aid in that city's war effort against the Eternal Empire. The Rhakriis were honor-bound to take steps to thwart these would-be allies. While the few that were inside the tent would be considerably night blinded by their very own campfire, the bulk of the troop outside, easily an hundred-strong, were not. And while the Rhakriis could match that number, they would be at the traditional attacker's disadvantage.
Of course, there were details that would balance that disadvantage, and Eddrick was looking through one of them right now. His Night Glow gem spyglass; a singular trinket made from a very rare and translucent blue stone that lit the view that one saw when gazing through it with what equaled bright sunlight. He had found it some time ago, during a horrendous ordeal with risen dead from the Bone Yard. Once he had realized how to taunt the cadaverous attackers to try reaching through his prison wagon bars, so he could hack their arms and accessories off, the loot began pouring into his reach. In one such bag, cut free of an ancient torso clinging to the bars, the stone and the design for the spyglass had been acquired.
He'd then had it fashioned by a gem cutter in Nashaki at considerable cost. The narrow escape from that enemy city, with the spyglass now boasting a ground Night Glow lens, had only added to its value, albeit "sentimental" value. So all these mercenaries' efforts to hide their doings were no more effective than they would have been in broad desert daylight.
The other, equally important, balancing factor involved in the impending confrontation had their leader standing beside Eddrick, nodding at the strategy he was employing against the camped enemy. They too, were completely free of any night-blindness as a result of any campfire. Their eyes were directed away from the tent, and focused more on the sentries, whose positions were given them courtesy of Arrow, Eddrick's trained hawk. Eddrick spotted out the sentries, whose overconfidence in the dark, made them easily located. These locations were then written down, strapped to the hawk's leg, and sent to various counter-sentry teams of his men.
As a result of a bizarre event while Eddrick had been in Yaralon, he'd gained what was called a Zero Contract with a group of all-naerikk mercenaries called The Shadow Bitches, and had decided to call it in against these invading mercs. With their numbers added to his own, he had more or less three times the number of the current target group, who called themselves "The Swords of Sandroli", no doubt after their leader, Calasto Sandroli. The fact that his allies were naerikk, in the pitch black of the desert night, only added to the advantage.
