Necromancer: Kingdom Building with My Legion of Undead Knights

Chapter 91: Night Protocol

Ghoff had been dozing against the wall when the shouting started.

It jolted him awake and he was on his feet before he had fully decided to stand, hand on his spear, looking at the barracks entrance.

The shouts were coming from inside.

He ran in.

The first thing he saw was a man standing over a bed, shaking the person in it and getting nothing back.

The second thing he saw was another man doing the same thing two beds down. Then another. Then several men all doing it simultaneously, the shaking becoming less hopeful and more desperate as each of them arrived at the same conclusion.

"It happened again!" someone shouted. "This night, it happened this night!"

Ghoff walked forward slowly, looking at the beds he passed. The men looked the same others that had died from some unknown illness looked, the ones from the first time and the second time. Thier skin pale, the color gone out of it. Faces slack. The stillness of bodies that had stopped rather than bodies that were resting. Several had the cloth masks still tied around their faces, the ones they had started wearing to keep out the bad air.

It hadn’t helped.

Dark markings on the skin. Ghoff leaned closer to look at one man’s neck and saw something there there, small and spreading, the same dark veining he had seen on the others, working outward from small points of contact on the arms and legs.

He straightened up.

"Get outside!" he shouted. "Everyone who’s alive, outside, weapons out, check the trees, check the walls, check everywhere! Now!"

They poured out of the barracks into the dark, swords drawn, moving in every direction at once.

Men spread toward the treeline, toward the walls, toward the open ground on either side of the building.

Torches were grabbed from the brackets and carried out, the light pushing back the dark in uneven movements as men moved through it.

Ghoff went toward the treeline himself, torch in one hand and sword in the other, pushing through the first line of trees and sweeping the light around.

They saw nothing.

Just undergrowth, trunks, the sounds of his own breathing and the distant shouts of the men checking other sections.

He pushed further in, checking behind the larger trees, looking up into the branches. A branch could hold a man. A man in a branch with some kind of implement he didn’t understand, some magic thing, some way of reaching down into a building full of sleeping soldiers without entering it.

Still nothing and no one. Just trees and dark and the sound of men finding the same absence he was finding.

He came back out.

One of the other guards was standing in the open ground between the treeline and the barracks, looking at the building with an expression that had moved past fear into something thoughtful.

"This is not illness," the man said. "I don’t care what the healers said. This is the work of a witch, or a wizard, or something with magic behind it. Something is coming into that barracks at night and killing our men and we cannot see it and we cannot stop it."

Ghoff looked at the barracks, then at the torchlight from inside where men were still moving through the building, still checking and still finding what they were going to keep finding.

He didn’t disagree...

———

King Aldric sat on his throne and looked at the men assembled before him.

The throne room was not a large space by the standards of proper kingdoms, but Aldric had never been interested in grandeur for its own sake.

The room served it purpose quite alright, having stone walls, decent proportions, a raised platform for the throne chair and a long table for his council to one side.

His senior advisors occupied the chairs at that table. Three of them, men who had been managing Valdenmoor’s affairs alongside him for years and who were, in his experience, generally competent at their jobs.

Beside them sat two of his senior knights. Bravar, his most experienced military commander, and a younger knight named Ostric who had come up through the ranks fast and had the intelligence that Aldric valued more than formal credentials.

The morning light came through the high windows and did nothing for anyone’s mood.

"The count," Aldric said.

Bravar looked at his hands briefly. "Since the first incident, we have lost four hundred and ninety-one knights, m’lord. The majority in the last two events, last night we lost three hundred and twenty."

The room was quiet.

"Four hundred and ninety-one," Aldric said. He said it the way he said things when he wanted the number to exist properly in the space rather than be absorbed and minimized. He wanted the words to be really felt. "From a resting force."

"Yes, m’lord."

Aldric leaned back. "I want someone to explain to me why we have been treating this as illness."

One of the advisors, Fenwick, the oldest of the three, a man who chose his words with the care, said: "The healers’ assessment was—"

"The healers have been through that barracks four times," Aldric said. "Four times, and each time they have told me that what they are seeing does not match any illness they have encountered before. At what point does ’illness we have never seen’ stop being a category and start being an admission that we don’t know what we’re looking at?"

Nobody answered.

Aldric looked at Bravar. "What do you think it is?"

Bravar had clearly been thinking about this for some time. "An attack, m’lord," he said. "Someone is using magic to kill our knights selectively at night. The pattern supports it, healthy men dying in their sleep, only in the barracks, only knights. Citizens unaffected. The dark markings are consistent each time. The intervals between events." He paused. "This is targeted. Someone is targeting us."

"Why only knights?" Fenwick asked.

"Because knights are the military force," Bravar said. "If you want to weaken a territory before moving against it, you degrade the soldiers first."

The room absorbed that.

Aldric scratched his beard slowly. "So someone is planning to move against us."

"That would be the logical conclusion," Bravar said.

"Who."

"I don’t know yet."

Aldric was quiet for a moment. Then he looked at his advisors. "Solutions. What do we have."

The younger advisor, a man named Calvert said: "What if the knights sleep during the day and stay awake through the night? If whatever is attacking them comes at night and requires them to be asleep..."

Aldric looked at him.

"Then they would see it," Calvert finished. "Or at least see that nothing is there. Identify the window. Know when it happens."

Aldric thought about it for a moment, liking the idea.

"Yes," he said. He stood. "All knights not on active day duty, sleep in the day. In the night I want full night wakefulness. Starting tonight." He looked at Bravar. "Make it an order. I want the barracks active all night, lights on, men awake. If something is coming into that building, I want eyes on it."

Bravar nodded and stood.

"And Bravar," Aldric said. "Find out who is doing this."

———

Night time...

The barracks that night was the opposite of what it had been.

Every candle lit. Every lamp burning. The long room full of men who had slept through the day under orders and were now awake and intended to stay that way, filling the hours with whatever kept them from dozing off.

Near the center of the room, six knights had pulled their beds into a rough circle and were playing cards over a flat board balanced on a crate between them. The game had been going for two hours. Arguments about the rules had been going for longer.

"That’s not how that works," one of them said, pointing at a card.

"It absolutely is how that works."

"Show me where it says that."

"It doesn’t say it anywhere, it’s just how everyone plays it."

"Everyone where? Everyone here? Because I don’t play it that way and I’m here."

"You’re also wrong."

Further down the room, a group of older knights sat against the wall sharing a jug of beer and talking.

One of them was recounting something that had happened during a campaign years ago, a story that three of the others had clearly heard before but were listening to again without complaint because the night was long.

Near the far end, a young knight was trying to stay awake by doing exercises: standing up, sitting down, standing up again, while the man in the next bed watched him with the expression of someone considering whether to say something.

The hours moved.

Midnight came and went.

The card game reached a conclusion that two of the six disputed loudly and then restarted.

The beer jug made another round.

The young knight gave up on the exercises and sat on the edge of his bed staring at the wall. In his eyes was focused determination! A man refusing to close his eyes.

Nothing came.

No sounds that didn’t belong. No movement that shouldn’t be there. No men waking in distress or failing to wake at all. Nothing new that wasn’t happening before.

The candles burned steadily and the lamps threw their light into every corner and the barracks sat full of awake, alive soldiers all the way through to morning.

When the dawn light began coming through the high windows, a slow collective exhale moved through the room.

"Nothing happened" someone said.

"Ay," someone else confirmed.

It had just not come last night.