novelraw Chapter 89: They Thought They Were Safe Tonight
Chapter 89: They Thought They Were Safe Tonight
Some of the knights had started drifting out of the barracks to watch.
They stood in loose clusters near the entrance, arms folded or hands in pockets, watching Seren walk the line of ten recruits and correct their stances one by one.
Nobody said anything much. They just watched. This was something to pass the time.
Darion had left already. He collected the perspective glass from his room, wore the dark riding clothes, and came back down. He told Maret to pack him some food and a bottle of water for the road, she did so.
He went to the stable, took the same horse he had been using for these rides, and came back out through the gate. The knights near the barracks who had been watching the archery turned when they heard hooves.
Garren stood at the gate.
"Best of luck, m’lord," he said.
Darion nodded and rode.
He didn’t stop to rest this time.
Usually he left early morning and built rest breaks into the journey because the full ride in one stretch was long enough to matter.
Today he had left at noon which meant arriving in darkness if he pushed, and arriving in darkness was exactly what the operation required.
He kept the pace up and ate in the saddle from what Maret had packed, and the road unreeled beneath him and the light changed from afternoon gold to evening grey to the flat dark of a cloudy night.
He tied the horse further from the usual spot this time. Not dramatically further, but enough. A different tree this time, a different angle of approach to the treeline too, in case anyone had been studying the ground near the previous tie-off point since the bearded knight had gone missing.
Then he walked.
Slowly, checking around him as he moved through the trees. He wasn’t rushing. Rushing made noise and noise made problems.
He was fairly certain the previous night’s operation wouldn’t be read as an attack. What Valdenmoor had was a pattern of men dying in the barracks without visible cause, the first time weeks ago, the most recent session two nights ago. Both times, nothing external to point at. No evidence of intrusion, no signs of forced entry, no enemy soldiers found lurking.
From their perspective it was an illness. A brutal, fast-moving illness that took men in their sleep and left no trace of itself beyond dead bodies.
He reached the treeline edge and looked at the wall.
No one on top.
He stood still for a moment and watched the whole visible stretch of wall. Nothing moving. No torches up there, no silhouettes against the sky.
He found his tree, checked it thoroughly before climbing. He checked the bark, branches, the underside of every limb he put weight on, and went up.
He subconsciously checked for snakes. He saw none. The perspective glass came out.
Ten guards on active watch outside the barracks. Not two half-asleep men on a routine shift. They were ten and were clustered in a loose group near the entrance, talking.
Talking that came from people who had been told to stay alert.
Darion focused the glass on them and listened.
Their voices carried on the still night air.
"Sleeping again, Ghoff?" one of them said, nudging the man beside him.
"I’m not sleeping," Ghoff said, clearly having just been sleeping. "I’m thinking."
"About what?"
"About whether I’ll be alive next week."
Nobody laughed at that.
A different knight spoke up, older-sounding. "The king said stay vigilant. Eyes open and report anything unusual immediately."
"What counts as unusual?" someone asked. "Because the men dying in their beds every other night seems unusual to me and nobody has an answer for that."
"One hundred and twenty," another voice said. "Just the day before yesterday. That’s how many lost."
There was silence for a moment.
"One hundred and twenty knights," the first one repeated. "From nothing. No wound... no... no enemy... no explanation. They just stop breathing."
"The first wave took Fifty one," the older one said. "A week apart from the recent one. Different count each time."
"What kind of sickness works like that?" Ghoff said, fully awake now.
"That’s what nobody can answer. The healers have been through the barracks four times. They’ve checked the water, the food, the bedding. They’ve checked the men who survived. Nothing."
"Maybe it’s not sickness," someone said.
Nobody responded to that immediately.
"What else would it be?" Ghoff said.
"I don’t know. But sickness doesn’t take fifty one men and then stop for a week or thereabout and then come back."
"Yesterday was quiet," another knight said. "Nothing happened yesterday."
"Which means we’re probably safe tonight," Ghoff said, some hope in his voice.
"Or it means it’s coming tonight?," the older one said. "
They were silent at that.
"Next time it could be you," one of them said.
"Or me," said another.
Darion lowered the perspective glass slightly and allowed himself a moment.
A hundred and seventy one knights. That was what two operations had produced. He hadn’t known the number before tonight, he hadn’t had any way of knowing, sitting in Percvale with no direct intelligence from inside Valdenmoor’s walls.
A hundred and seventy one out of a force of three to four thousand was not a crippling number yet. But it was a real one. And the guards down there were scared, which meant the men inside were scared, which meant morale was doing what morale did when soldiers started dying without explanation and nobody in authority had answers.
He didn’t even know that his first infiltration had killed that much. Four undead knights had been responsible for the deaths of fifty one knights in just foury minutes. And his bats the day before yesterday, due to how fast they moved and because they flew, managed to kill one hundred and twenty.
Brilliant!
He watched the ten of them standing in their cluster, facing each other and talking, not watching the entrance they were supposed to be watching.
They thought the next one was a week away.
Fuck them!
He reached into inventory.
The bats came out, nine of them, settling briefly on the branches around him before orienting. He gave the instruction through the binding, low and fast, follow the far edge, stay out of the torchlight near the entrance.
They dropped from the branches and spread outward in the dark.
The guards were still talking when the bats crossed the open ground, low and fast and completely silent, following the angle of the wall where the torchlight didn’t reach.
And then they were in.