Necromancer: Kingdom Building with My Legion of Undead Knights-Chapter 61: Ready

Garren was in the great hall when Darion got back, sitting at the table with a cup and a candle. From the look of things he had been there for a while and hadn’t felt the need to fill the time with anything.

He looked up when Darion came in.

"It worked," Darion said, pulling out the chair across from him and sitting down.

Garren set the cup down. "The bats?"

"Yes. Nine of them actually. Venomous, same as the knights." He leaned back. "I tested the Distant Command on them too, those in the air respond differently from those on the ground, but cleanly enough. The commands landed."

Garren was quiet for a moment, processing. "So how do you direct them during the operation? They move fast and in three dimensions. If they scatter you lose them."

"The binding keeps them within range of my commands as long as I’m issuing them actively. They won’t wander, they are obedient as I want them to be, and the Distant Command holds at the distances we’re working with. I direct them the way I directed the undead knights at Valdenmoor, through the binding rather than voice. The difference is I’m tracking nine things in the air instead of four things on the ground."

"Can you manage that simultaneously with the ground units."

Darion had thought about this on the ride back. "I split the attention. Bats go in first, I direct them through the settlement until they’ve covered the target area, then I pull them back and shift focus to the ground units. I don’t run both at full attention simultaneously, I run them in sequence with the bats doing the initial sweep and the venomous knights following to hit what the bats missed or couldn’t reach."

Garren nodded slowly. The questions were satisfied. He moved on without needing to be prompted.

"I’ll brief the knights tonight," he said. "Senior knights get the full operational picture, the phases, timing and their role in phase two. Junior knights get what they need to execute without the full context." 𝙛𝒓𝒆𝙚𝒘𝒆𝓫𝙣𝓸𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝒄𝒐𝓶

"They should all know we’re hitting Gonnb and why," Darion said. "The three who came back in their undergarments, they know what this is about. I don’t want men going into a night operation without understanding what they’re fighting for."

Garren accepted that. "I’ll frame it accordingly."

They went through the remaining details: equipment checks, the order of march, how far back the living knights held during phase one, the signal for phase two to begin.

Garren had the kind of operational mind that caught things before they became problems, and he caught three things Darion hadn’t fully resolved, all of which were fixed in the conversation.

By the time Maret came through to ask about food they had covered everything worth covering.

They ate. Something simple, the kitchen had been working with the vegetables bought from the neighboring settlement earlier in the week and the meal was the best evidence yet that the barony’s diet was slowly becoming less exclusively meat-based.

Darion ate without much conversation, which Garren matched without appearing to find it unusual.

Then they went to the barracks.

The knights assembled in the training ground outside, all of them, the full living force standing in the cold night air with the candles and torches from the barracks throwing uneven light across the ground.

Darion stood in front of them and looked at the group for a moment before he spoke.

He told them about Calder first. Not in detail, they already knew, word had moved through the barracks faster than any formal announcement could have managed, but he said it plainly.

Calder had ridden out as a messenger carrying a reasonable letter asking reasonable questions, and Gonnb had put his head on a spear and planted it in the road.

Before that, three of their brothers had been stripped to their undergarments, beaten, and sent running back to Percvale on foot because the people who did it had looked at men from Percvale and decided there was no cost for doing whatever they wanted.

He told them what they were doing about it.

Not exactly everything, he didn’t give so much detail on the phase one which was his part.

But it was enough, really enough actually.

They were hitting Gonnb tomorrow night.

Phase one was Darion’s to manage. Phase two was theirs, they would know when to move because he would tell them, and when they moved they moved hard and they didn’t stop until it was finished.

The training ground was quiet while he spoke and quiet for a moment after he finished.

Then a knight near the back, one of the junior ones, young enough that Darion didn’t know his name yet, said: "For Calder."

It moved through the group the way those things moved, the words picked up and repeated until they were a sound rather than a sentence, and Darion let it run for a moment before it settled.

"Get some sleep," he said. "We leave at noon."

He slept better than he expected.

The plan was solid, the inventory was full and the knights knew what they were doing. There was nothing left to resolve that a night’s sleep would improve, and his body had apparently internalized that logic because he was out quickly and didn’t surface until the morning light was already coming through the window at a reasonable angle.

He bathed, dressed, ate what Maret put in front of him, and spent the remaining morning hours doing nothing particularly productive, just checking the inventory stats he already knew, walking the courtyard, watching the knights prepare their equipment with the focused determination of people who had been told the night before what was coming and had slept on it and decided they were ready.

Garren found him by the stable at mid-morning.

"Everyone’s ready," he said. "Equipment checked. Horses fed and watered."

Darion nodded.

Noon came.

They moved out through Percvale’s gate in a column, Darion and Garren at the front, the living knights behind them in an order Garren had arranged the night before, the horses steady and unhurried on the road out of the barony.

The townspeople watched from the sides of the street the way they always did when the knights moved out in numbers.

Word traveled in Percvale the way it traveled in any small place, ahead of itself, carried by whoever saw something first and told the nearest person, so by the time the column reached the gate there were people out who hadn’t been out ten minutes earlier.

Darion was sure they didn’t know the reason for them leaving, but many had probably guessed. While others just watched because a column of knights moving at noon was worth watching.

Darion didn’t address them this time. He rode through and looked ahead.

The road stretched out in the pale afternoon light, heading east, passing through the borderlands, running toward the territory where Gonnb sat on the roadside with its wooden fences and its scattered huts and its warriors who had made a series of decisions over the past week that were going to finish being made tonight.

The sun was at its highest when they left. It would be well down, the sky dark, by the time they arrived.

Darion rode and said nothing and thought about bats.