Eye of the sturm musket.., p.1
Eye of the Sturm (Musket Men Book 11), page 1
MUSKET MEN
BOOK 11
EYE OF THE STURM
By Gilbert M. Stack
Amazon Edition
Copyright 2025 by Gilbert M. Stack
Cover Copyright 2025 by Chris L. Adams
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Map of the Three Empires and the Surrounding Regions, 1197
Map of Madinat Alharir
Table of Contents
Map of the Three Empires and the Surrounding Regions, 1197
Map of Madinat Alharir
Dedication
The Commandments of Wotan
The Rule of Wotan
Prologue
Part I: Bir Malakiun—The Royal Well
Chapter One: Entering Madinat Alharir
Chapter Two: The Fountain of Bir Eamiq
Chapter Three: The Gates of Bir Malakiun (The Royal Well)
Chapter Four: Trouble at Nahr-Mahwel Bridge
Chapter Five: Securing the Wall
Chapter Six: The High Sheik’s Palace
Chapter Seven: Prisoners
Chapter Eight: Cannon
Chapter Nine: The Damaged Pump
Chapter Ten: The Battle Over the Bridge
Chapter Eleven: What Do We Do Now?
Chapter Twelve: Through the River Gulley
Chapter Thirteen: Schemes
Part II Hulwat Jayidan—The Sweet Well
Chapter Fourteen: A Change of Plans
Chapter Fifteen: Buying a Cannon
Chapter Sixteen: Where’s Sturm
Chapter Seventeen: Grapeshot
Chapter Eighteen: An Unexpected Arrival
Chapter Nineteen: A Perplexing Problem
Chapter Twenty: The Conquest of the Sweet Well
Chapter Twenty-One: The Mob on the Road
Chapter Twenty-Two: Sturm’s Speech
Chapter Twenty-Three: Exciting News
Chapter Twenty-Four: The Slave Revolt
Chapter Twenty-Five: Frustration
Chapter Twenty-Six: Secret Orders
Part III: Raqiat Jayidan—The Pure Well
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Street Fighting
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Consolidating Control
Chapter Twenty-Nine: Sir Osric, Duke of Candeleda
Chapter Thirty: An Unusual Interview
Chapter Thirty-One: The Walls of Madinat Alharir
Chapter Thirty-Two: At the City Gate
Chapter Thirty-Three: A Minor Development
Chapter Thirty-Four: A Matter of Authority
Chapter Thirty-Five: A New Plan
Part IV Bir Mushtarak—The Common Well and Ain Hilweh—The Sweet Spring
Chapter Thirty-Six: Gunner Reports
Chapter Thirty-Seven: Rising Temperatures
Chapter Thirty-Eight: The Riot Begins
Chapter Thirty-Nine: Orders
Chapter Forty: A Man Like Him
Chapter Forty-One: Good News
Chapter Forty-Two: Rage
Chapter Forty-Three: A Family of Physicians
Chapter Forty-Four: Guilt
Chapter Forty-Five: Rock Salt
Chapter Forty-Six: An Unexpected Development
Chapter Forty-Seven: Confidence
Chapter Forty-Eight: An Ignoble End
Chapter Forty-Nine: An Enticing Opportunity
Part V: Bir Mushtarak (The Clear Well)
Chapter Fifty: The Impact of a Sleepless Night
Chapter Fifty-One: Permission or Pardon
Chapter Fifty-Two: The Nomads’ Charge
Chapter Fifty-Three: The Danger
Chapter Fifty-Four: The Path to Plunder
Chapter Fifty-Five: Desperate Plans
Chapter Fifty-Six: Street Fighting
Chapter Fifty-Seven: Granite Knights
Chapter Fifty-Eight: Chasing the Göçebe Insanlar
Chapter Fifty-Nine: Muskets and Arrows
Chapter Sixty: Closing the Gate
Chapter Sixty-One: One Careless Action
Chapter Sixty-Two: Respect
Chapter Sixty-Three: Life
Excerpt: What the Storm Blew In
The Seven Wells of Madinat Alharir
Kriegsturm Calendar
Ranks in Kriegsturm and Anjou
Ranks in Ahl-Alnaar
Army Units in Kriegsturm and Anjou
Army Units in Ahl-Alnaar
About the Author, Gilbert M. Stack
About the Cover Artist and Mapmaker, Chris L. Adams
Other Works by Gilbert M. Stack
Contact Gilbert M. Stack
Dedication
This one is Fritz Lieber, the creator of the iconic fighter (barbarian) and thief, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. While his stories are always fun and established some of the classic elements of fantasy role playing games, I think his best is The Swords of Lankhmar, in which he brings the cityscape to life inspiring many others to recognize the importance of the city to the story. Thank you, Mr. Lieber.
The Commandments of Wotan
Thou shalt always remain faithful to Wotan.
Thou shalt always defend your king.
Thou shalt always maintain your oaths.
Thou shalt always face your honorable foes blade-to-blade on the field of battle.
The Rule of Wotan
A man is:
Brave
Loyal
Trustworthy
Strong
Steadfast
Zealous
And
Right
Prologue
Tief Graben, Eisenland, Kriegsturm
The Pink Moon, Day 28, Year 1197
“Thank you all for coming so quickly,” Sir Steffan Lamm, Graf of Tief Graben, Knight of the Order of Freyr, greeted his guests as he entered his dining room which doubled in this instance as a conference room. His actual conference room was not large enough to hold all of the people he had gathered—and honestly, a stranger, more mixed lot had not been in his house together since he inherited his father’s title and lands. There were vicars and ministers, Settlers, Old Eisenlanders, and Eisenlanders, storekeepers, farmers, and miners, and even a banker who had moved to Tief Graben from Aachen to support the earl of Fortaleza’s financial needs in the area.
At the far end of the table sat Aleit Sturm, the grandmother of the said earl, Marshal Sturm. Beside her sat her son -in-law, Carsten Lang. At Steffan’s end of the table was Vicar Gunther, and his new constable—both close confidants of the graf. The representative of Steen Bank sat next to the vicar, while the rest of the table was filled with the leading men of Tief Graben and the surrounding villages. They were, in short, the people he would need if he were to act on the request of Earl Sturm—the man who had saved Steffan’s life and made it possible to actually rule Tief Graben again by helping him put down the Night Riders.
The graf took his seat. “Yesterday, I received a letter from Earl Sturm with news about the situation in the south and our boys in his militia.”
Everyone except for Aleit Sturm, her son-in-law, and the banker leaned forward. Those three had obviously received letters of their own. The rest were desperate for news. Everyone knew someone who had joined the earl in his journey to reestablish law and order in the south.
“I’d like to read you portions of the letter to focus our discussion this afternoon,” the graf continued as he picked up the document. “I warn you that it is disturbing.”
“I will not try and sugar coat this, Steffan. Adler and Ahl-Alnaar’s plot badly hurt the northerners in the city and the militia took casualties. They used a strange rite of Naar to secretly drug nearly every southerner in the city and turn them into mindless cannibals for three terrible nights.”
Just about everyone sitting around the table gasped—further evidence that this news had not leaked to the town yet.
Steffan kept reading.
“You read that correctly. Adler and Alh-Alnaar tried to force the southerners living in Cidade Fortaleza to eat all the northerners. If not for the brave men of Eisenland, they would have succeeded and Ahl-Alnaar would now rule Al-Andalus.
“But they did not succeed, even when, on the third night of the horror a battalion of Ghulam attempted to take over the city. Eisenland and Fortaleza stood strong together and destroyed the invaders, just as we went on to demolish Adler and his pretensions. But unfortunately, the danger is not over yet. I have received word that Ahl-Alnaar has invaded Al-Andalus through the southern pass and even now I am rallying a force of Eisenlanders, Granite Knights, northerners of Al-Andalus, and southerners of Al-Andalus who want vengeance upon Ahl-Alnaar for the atrocities that their drugs forced them to commit. I have no doubt that we will successfully drive the enemy out again, but in the absence of direct support from the royal army, I am asking you to stand by me again and raise another battalion of stout Eisenlanders to journey south and join my militia. I have also sent a letter to our friends in Steen Bank authorizing this expenditure, but they can’t raise an army for me. That is something that only you and the leaders of Tief Grabben can do.”
Doug Ra
“There is a list appended to the letter,” Steffan informed him. “I am afraid it is quite lengthy. It must have been truly terrible.”
“That list will be longer now if Marshal has been fighting the southerners,” Sturm’s grandmother noted in the dry and practical voice she was known for. “War isn’t pretty and it has always eaten up Eisenlander boys.”
Many of those gathered bowed their heads, considering the truth of that statement. Eisenland had always been poor and its boys had long enlisted in the army to help them make their way in life.
“I hope,” the banker ventured, “it is some small comfort to those who have lost loved ones that the earl has arranged for them to receive very generous pensions.”
“It will help,” Aleit acknowledged. “But it doesn’t make it right.” Her voice dropped in volume. “Nothing makes losing a loved one right.”
As people nodded in agreement, Vicar Gunther made a suggestion. “Perhaps, we should say a short prayer for the souls of our lost friends and neighbors.
Everyone bowed their head.
“Mighty Wotan,” the vicar prayed. “Once again, our sons, brothers, fathers, and husbands have marched off to battle to protect your lands. Strengthen those who remain in the fight and gather those who have fallen into your hall.”
“So be it!” those gathered around the table intoned and everyone looked up, ready to continue the discussion.
“I hate to have to ask this question,” Minister Roth began, “but is it legal for us to recruit for the earl as he asks?”
“I don’t care if it’s legal!” The graf announced. “The man who brought prosperity back to our community has asked for our help. He, together with our sons and brothers, is holding off the worshippers of Naar practically by himself. We are not gathered here today to find reasons to sit on our hands. We are gathered to figure out how we can help him!”
“For what’s it’s worth, minister,” the banker noted. “That letter is a formal request from the earl to help him recruit for his militia. It is legal for us to do so.”
“The last recruiting drive took a lot of men out of our community,” another man noted. “While it’s true that we had a lot of people out of work last fall who needed a job, that really isn’t true any longer. Taking more men from this region will hurt us.”
“I quite agree,” Steffan told him. “But I don’t see why we can’t recruit from further away.”
“I’m not trying to raise an objection, graf,” one of the Settlers announced. “My nephew, after all, joined the earl’s militia. But how are the other grafs going to respond to us recruiting in their territory?”
“I have considered this,” Steffan assured them. “I plan to travel with the recruiters myself so that I can speak with my peers, explaining why the men are needed, and how the wages will help their communities. They already send men off to the army. I think that when they read the earl’s letter, most will be more than happy to accommodate him.”
“Is a thousand men enough?” another man asked.
The banker cleared his throat. Based on my conversations with Earl Fortaleza and my own letter from him, I am willing to authorize payment for one thousand more militiamen. But really, gentlemen, Mrs. Sturm, I don’t see how we can go higher than that.”
“Marshal would have asked for more men if he felt he needed them,” Aleit Sturm informed everyone. “To my mind, the most important question is how will we arm them?”
“I have been thinking on that problem,” Steffan informed her, “and I think we will ask all the recruits who have them to bring their own muskets. If we don’t get enough men with muskets we’ll send them as pikes. But what is most important now is time. We must get them to Al Andalus before winter. So, I suggest we turn our attention to how and where we will recruit these men, and who will go with me to do the recruiting.”
With no further objections, they got down to planning.
Part I: Bir Malakiun—The Royal Well
Chapter One: Entering Madinat Alharir
Bir Eamiq (The Deep Well), Madinat Alharir, Disputed Territory
The Strawberry Moon, Day 9, 1197
“Well, they’re rioting,” Sir Marshal Sturm, Earl of Fortaleza, Knight of the Order of Harald the Conqueror, Hero of Steil Pass, and Liberator of Hekt observed from astride his horse as he approached the famous city of Madinat Alharir from the south together with his army, his loot, and his thousands of prisoners. He was a tall, blond man with the blood of Sturmkuste in his veins, even though he was raised in his beloved Eisenland. He bore a wicked scar above his right eyebrow, a memento of the treachery of a sergeant who had tried to use the confusion of a major battle to murder him. The lines in his face were hard, testament to a lifetime of battlefield experience packed into the previous fifteen moons of the young man’s life.
Ahead of him, the city rose high on a great hill so that it was actually possible to see a tremendous portion of it as one approached on the road. And what Sturm saw was a city on fire with swarms of humans made tiny by distance running about in anger or panic.
He shook his head in disgust. “We aren’t even there yet. Why are they killing each other and destroying their homes?”
“They probably think that we’re going to slaughter them when we arrive and begin to plunder,” Knight Captain Leandro Lima of the Order of the Granite Knights explained. He was dressed in the full medieval armor that distinguished his men from everyone else in this modern age. The knights still trained and fought as if gunpowder had never been invented. What surprised Sturm the most was how effective they were here in the south. While Ahl-Alnaar produced excellent cannon, their infantry still depended largely on the bow for ranged attacks. The exception was their elite Ghulam who had adopted the blunderbuss. As a shock weapon, the blunderbuss was quite effective against lightly armored foes at close range. Each shot fired half a handful of small lead balls which spread as they left the muzzle of the gun and knocked down their opponents. But the knights’ armor made them mostly immune to such tactics and once they actually reached the infantry on their charging horses, they were devastating in battle.
“Most of them will expect you to kill or enslave everyone you can find and steal everything you can carry,” Lima continued. “So, many see this as an opportunity to enrich themselves and settle old grievances, gambling that they can escape the city before you catch up with them.”
Sturm glanced at the long line of manacled prisoners trudging beside the wagon loads of treasure that Sturm had confiscated as the upper crust of Ahl-Alnaar society tried to escape down the southern road. The prisoners included everyone from base born slaves, to merchants and craftsmen, to the very elites of the nobility of this land including High Sheik Rami, himself, and his top officials. To guard them and the treasure he had taken, Sturm had only twelve hundred musket men, three hundred Granite Knights, and six hundred regular army pikemen—a force outnumbered by their captives and stretched out along the road to a degree that any commander would be uncomfortable with.
“So, they think we’re going to kill and enslave them?” Sturm clarified.
“It is what they would expect their own armies to do to them,” Lima explained. “That is why the mob often turns on a high sheik who is losing a war so that they can offer the city as a gift to the man who defeated him and beg him not to pillage them.”
“But they didn’t do that to High Sheik Rami,” Sturm pointed out.
Lima shrugged in his heavy metal armor. “It’s not clear they understood he was losing until yesterday. And, as a northerner, they probably expect you to sack the city and return home whatever they do.”
“This is a terrible thing you tell us, knight captain,” Sturm’s aide, Zane, noted. He was southern by birth and had been born into slavery and sold to northerners living in Cidade Fortaleza. After Sturm had freed the slaves and Zane had joined his militia, he had earned the nickname, the Voice, because of his ability to speak like a native of Ahl-Alnaar. Sturm kept him close because he needed a translator and Zane had quickly taken on the added responsibilities of an aide-de-camp. “Imagine being as afraid of your own soldiers as you are of the enemy’s.”
Lima ignored the comment and directed a question at the earl. “Have you decided what we are going to do?”
