novelraw Chapter 90: The Air Was Never the Problem
Chapter 90: The Air Was Never the Problem
Inside the barracks, things had changed since the last visit.
Through the windows opened, he zoomed the perceptive glass and noticed that the men were sleeping differently.
Some had cloth wrapped around their faces, covering the nose and mouth. A few had fashioned something closer to a proper mask from whatever fabric was available.
Candles burned in several rooms, left on through the night, which meant the men inside had decided that darkness was part of the problem and were fighting it with light.
They thought it was the air.
Bad air, travelling through the dark, settling into the lungs of sleeping men and killing them without warning. It was the most logical conclusion available to people who had no other explanation, and it had produced a set of countermeasures that were thorough and completely useless.
The bats bit their legs.
Darion watched through the binding as the first room cleared in under five minutes. Thirty men, most of them masked, none of them protected in any way that mattered. The bats moved fast and low, landing and lifting... landing and lifting, the whole room processed and done before the candle in the corner had burned down a noticeable amount.
He almost smiled.
The second room took eight minutes. Larger, the beds more spread out, the men sleeping in positions that required more navigation between them.
But the bats handled it. They had gotten better at this. He had gotten better at this. The binding felt more fluid than it had on the first night, his navigation of nine simultaneous connections through confined spaces had developed into something closer to instinct than conscious management.
He wasn’t thinking about each bat individually anymore. He was thinking about the room as a space and moving them through it the way you moved fingers, the individual actions happening below the level of deliberate thought.
Room three. Ten minutes.
Room four. Six minutes.
He was tracking pace now, comparing against the previous operations. The first infiltration had produced fifty-one dead. The second, a hundred and twenty. The difference between those numbers wasn’t just time spent, it was proficiency. He had been careful to the point of slowness on the first visit, routing each bat individually, pausing frequently to check guard positions, losing time to caution that the improved binding now made unnecessary.
Tonight the caution was still there but it cost less.
He ran the bats through another section. Some rooms had windows that hadn’t been fully closed, the men inside apparently deciding that ventilation mattered more than the slight risk of whatever they imagined coming through an open window in the dark.
The bats used those windows to move between rooms without returning to the exterior, which saved time and reduced the exposure near the entrance.
Thirty minutes in, he heard voices outside.
Three of the watch guards were talking about going inside to sleep. One of them said his feet were cold. Another agreed. They were done with the watch, apparently, or done enough with it to convince themselves they were done.
Darion checked through the binding, one bat was still in the room they were heading toward. He redirected it through the window before the door opened.
The bat was in the adjacent room by the time the three guards came through the entrance, and the guards found a room full of sleeping men and settled in without noticing anything.
He ran the bats for another thirty-five minutes.
During that stretch he noticed something else. The conversation from the watch guards earlier had covered the previous knight deaths in detail: a hundred and twenty from the recent session, fifty-one from the first.
Not once had anyone mentioned a hunter knight gone missing. Nobody had brought up a man with a full beard who went out at night and hadn’t come back.
Either they hadn’t noticed he was gone yet, buried in the larger crisis of a hundred and twenty dead colleagues making individual absences difficult to track, or they had noticed and assumed he had been among the dead, one more body in a long count.
Either way, the absence hadn’t prompted a search of the treeline. The spot was clean.
The bats finished the last room they were working and Darion pulled them back through the binding without directing them out through the entrance. He unsummoned them wherever they were: middle of rooms, against walls, wherever the last instruction had left them.
Green light, gone. No need to route them back to him when the watch guards were awake and occasionally glancing at the sky.
This mission so far had been his easiest since starting any infiltration. There hadn’t been a moment where he had almost been caught and he moved his undead bats much faster than the previous missions.
He sat in the tree for a moment and ran the count.
Close to three hundred. That was his estimate, not exact, he had no way of being exact, but the rooms he had cleared and the approximate occupancy of each gave him a working number.
Almost three hundred knights bitten in one session. Against a force that had already lost a hundred and seventy-one to the previous two operations, three hundred more was a significant number. Not a killing blow to a force of three or four thousand. But close to five hundred total, accumulated across three nights, with twelve more days on the deadline clock.
King Aldric didn’t know what had just hit him.
Darion climbed down from the tree, checked the ground around the base out of habit, and walked back through the treeline to where he had tied the horse.
He mounted up.
The night was quiet around him, the road back to Percvale empty and dark, the trees swaying with the wind.
He set the horse moving and let the pace build, the cool air pushing back the hood slightly, the distance between himself and Valdenmoor’s barracks growing with every stride.
He rode at full speed.