novelraw Chapter 94: Exposure
Chapter 94: Exposure
The knights didn’t wait for gates.
They went over the fence like it wasn’t there, moving at speed toward the treeline. Darion had never seen men move like that. They were moving like orphans who had identified the person that killed their parents and were dashing to take Vengeance.
He watched them coming from the tree and his mind was moving in several directions at once.
They had identified him. They hadn’t guessed or suspected, but had identified him. They had clearly spotted that someone was on that tree with a perceptive glass looking at them.
Someone had been watching the treeline specifically, with enough patience and enough focus to catch him in the tree at distance in the dark.
Which meant them not being asleep wasn’t because it had happened by chance or they just been having fun they lost count of time.
Instead, it had been about looking, finding and waiting for whoever was responsible to come back.
He had underestimated them.
That thought landed clearly even in the middle of everything else.
He had run three successful infiltrations, the knights had died, the surviving ones had panicked, and somewhere in that panic a mind had been working through the problem properly.
Not just accepting the illness explanation. Not just adding more guards to a night watch. Actually thinking about what the pattern suggested and setting up a response to it.
He had assumed they weren’t thinking that clearly. They were.
His fault. Entirely his fault.
The men were covering ground fast. Not hundreds yet though, the ones who had spotted him first and started shouting were maybe thirty, forty, crossing the open ground at a run with swords drawn.
But the shouts were carrying back into the barracks and men were coming out behind them, more every second, and in another minute it would be considerably more than forty.
He assessed the tree.
Coming down was the obvious move. Drop, run, horse is tied back in the treeline, if he could get clear of the immediate group he could reach it.
But dropping meant landing in the middle of men who were already arriving at the treeline edge, and arriving in the middle of them with no weapon drawn would end one way.
They would grab him, and once they had hands on him the numbers made everything else irrelevant.
He had to clear the path before he came down.
His mind was already moving through his inventory when the first sword came spinning up at him through the branches.
He twisted on the branch, nearly lost his footing, caught himself with one hand on the trunk while the sword clattered through the canopy and fell somewhere below.
"Shit!" He muttered, words that were only audible to him.
A second sword followed. He pressed himself against the trunk and the second one missed by enough.
A voice below, from a senior knight, carrying authority, shouted something at the men throwing.
"Our aim is not to kill! Stop throwing! We take this one alive!"
The throwing stopped.
They wanted him for interrogation, alive, if possible. Which told him several things simultaneously: they didn’t know who he was yet, they thought capturing him would give them answers, and they would shift to killing if he proved too difficult to take alive.
He had a time frame, and it was exactly as long as it took them to decide the time frame had closed.
"It summoned skeletons!" someone shouted from below.
Darion had already released five undead knights from inventory, felt them materialize at the base of the tree, heard the collective shout that followed as the men closest to the treeline encountered something they had not been expecting. "It summoned skeletons to protect it!"
"What?"
He didn’t wait for the question to be answered.
The remaining thirty undead knights came out next, releasing from inventory in sequence, the green light of each one briefly visible through the branches below him.
Then the wolves, all five of the pack wolves, and the original undead wolf, six of them appearing on the ground and immediately doing what they were bound to do.
He gave a single command through the binding.
’Fight!’
The sound that followed was significant.
The knights who had been advancing on the treeline encountered thirty undead knights and six wolves simultaneously, and the advance stopped being an advance.
The wolves moved fast and low and without any of the hesitation that living animals had when facing numbers, no pack instinct to preserve themselves, no assessment of odds, just the instruction and the execution of it.
They hit the front line of advancing men and the line broke sideways.
Men who had been charging forward were suddenly dealing with things coming at them from unexpected angles at speed, and the ones behind them were pressing forward without knowing what the ones in front had just encountered.
The undead knights held the base of the tree, forming a rough perimeter, fighting off the men who were trying to reach the trunk, taking swords they picked from the ground or from valdenmoor knights as weapons.
He summoned the bats last.
In the chaos, the shouting, the fighting, the general collapse of any organized advance into something much less organized, the bats were invisible.
Nine of them releasing into the dark above the treeline, dropping down into the mass of bodies below, landing and lifting and landing again. Men who were already dealing with undead wolves and skeleton knights grabbing at their legs were not paying attention to the brief sensation of something landing on their arm for half a second.
The bats worked. Biting so fast and well.
Some of the knights had started climbing the tree. They weren’t many, the tree was tall and the branches were not accommodating and the undead at the base were discouraging the attempt, but two men had gotten enough purchase on the lower trunk to be making progress.
The undead knights below noticed them and dealt with it, pulling one down by the ankle, the man’s surprised shout cutting off as he hit the ground.
The second one held on for a moment longer before a wolf’s jaws closed on his boot and he made the decision to let go.
Darion looked down through the branches at the scene below.
Thirty undead knights. Six wolves. Nine bats moving through the crowd invisibly. A mass of Valdenmoor’s soldiers who had come out expecting to catch one person in a tree and had found something considerably more complicated waiting for them at the base of it.
He needed to come down.