Necromancer: Kingdom Building with My Legion of Undead Knights-Chapter 66: Miscalculation

The shrubs were dense enough to hide five grown men if those men stayed still and kept their voices low. The darkness helped, the leaves turning them into uneven shadows under a thin wash of moonlight.

They weren’t doing the second part very well.

"That’s a lot of goats," one of them whispered, leaning just far enough forward to see past the leaves at the dim shapes moving along the road.

"That’s a lot of knights," another whispered back immediately.

There was a pause.

"Goats are easier to count," the first one said.

"You’re an idiot."

"I’m not an idiot, I’m observant."

"You’re about to observe us getting killed."

"Will both of you shut up?" the third one hissed, crouched slightly ahead of the others with a better view of the road. He didn’t turn his head when he spoke. "You whisper less when you’re not arguing."

The first one leaned back slightly. "I’m just saying, that’s enough meat to last us a month."

"And I’m saying there’s over a hundred armed men walking with it."

"Walking," the first one repeated, like that was the important part. "Look at them. Slow and stretched out. Not even tight formation."

"They’re knights," the second one said. "Doesn’t matter if they’re walking or dancing."

Their names were Bress, Ferris, Colm, Ott, and a fifth man called Reed, who hadn’t said anything yet.

Bress was the one who had spotted them first, the distant sound of livestock and boots on road carrying through the quiet of the night with the clarity that open ground gave to sound.

He had put his hand out and they had all gone still, crouching in the undergrowth at the roadside, watching the darkness to the south as the column emerged in pieces—shapes, movement, the occasional glint of metal catching stray torchlight from further ahead.

They were professional robbers. Or at least that was how Bress thought of it. Professional implied skill and planning and a degree of operational discipline, all of which they had demonstrated at various points in their careers, though not always simultaneously and not always on the same job.

The column had come into view and the five of them had been doing their private calculations ever since.

Colm was the one with the better eyes, crouched furthest forward, reading their formation with focused attention.

"Two knights in front of the cattle," he said quietly. "One at the back. Rest are well ahead. There is a big gap between the cattle group and the main body." 𝚏𝕣𝐞𝗲𝐰𝕖𝐛𝐧𝕠𝕧𝚎𝚕.𝐜𝚘𝗺

"How big?" Bress asked.

"Big enough."

Bress looked at Ferris. Ferris was already looking back at him, and Bress could see Ferris had already decided to object.

"Just the back," Bress said. "We go for the rear knight, take the cattle and move east into the trees. Clean."

"Just the back," Ferris repeated, his voice uncertain.

"Ott," Bress said.

"There are a lot of them though," Ott said.

"Ott."

"Yes?"

"Stop."

Ott stopped.

Bress looked again.

Colm was right, the rear arrangement was loose. One knight behind the cattle, the two flanking guards positioned well forward, a gap between the cattle and the main force that was wide enough to work in.

The rear knight was walking, not riding, which put him at ground level and made him approachable from behind without the height problem a mounted man created.

The cattle alone would keep them eating and trading for months. Take the cattle, leave and don’t push further. Clean and simple.

"We go for the rear knight," Bress said. "Quietly. Colm and Ott, you handle him. The rest of us hold until the cattle are clear of the guards’ sightlines, then we move them off the road fast and into the eastern trees. Nobody engages the main force. Nobody does anything stupid."

He looked at Ferris specifically when he said the last part.

Ferris looked back at him, offended.

Reed said nothing, as was his way.

"Right," Bress said. "Go."

Colm and Ott moved out of the shrubs and onto the road behind the knights, keeping low where the moonlight didn’t reach cleanly. The rear knight was walking with the slightly distracted posture of someone at the end of a long night who had stopped expecting anything to happen. His attention was ahead of him, on the cattle, on the road and on whatever was in his head.

He didn’t hear them coming.

Colm took him from behind, hand over mouth, quick and certain. The knight’s hands came up but the moment was already gone. They dragged him off the road and into the shrubs on the western side in under twenty seconds, and the road behind the cattle was empty again as though nothing had passed through it.

Bress watched from the undergrowth.

The cattle kept walking. The two flanking guards kept their positions. The main group ahead was oblivious.

He felt the particular warmth that came from a plan working.

"See," he said quietly to Ferris. "Clean."

Ferris said nothing, which Bress chose to interpret as agreement.

Colm and Ott emerged from the shrubs on the opposite side of the road and gave the hand signal. Bress signaled back: hold position, wait for the cattle to come level.

They held.

The cattle came level.

And then Bress, who had told himself very clearly that the operation ended with the cattle and the plan was clean and simple, looked at the two guards flanking the herd and thought about how much easier the cattle would be to move without those two particular men in the vicinity.

He looked at Ferris.

Ferris looked back at him, already planning to say he had been against it.

Reed, for the first time, spoke. "Don’t," he said.

"Just the two of them," Bress said. "Then we’re done. We can’t move the cattle with them there."

Reed said nothing further. He had said his part.

They came out of the shrubs on both sides simultaneously, which was the correct approach for isolating two targets and had worked reliably in the past.

What it had worked on in the past were travelers and merchants and the occasional poorly-organized supply group.

The knight on the left turned at the sound of movement with the speed of someone whose body had made the decision before his mind finished processing the noise.

He had his weapon up before Bress reached him, which was not the way this was supposed to go, and when Bress grabbed for him the knight twisted and drove an elbow back in a way that connected with enough force to make Bress’s vision go briefly white.

The knight on the right was handling Ferris with similar efficiency.

Then one of them shouted.

It was sharp, a carrying sound that said threat in the register of people trained to communicate danger quickly to other people trained to respond to it.

The response was immediate.

The knights reorganized in motion, turning and moving back toward the rear with weapons drawn before the sound had finished traveling up the road. They came fast and in numbers.

The five robbers had planned for two guards.

They got considerably more than that.

Bress ran. There was no longer strategy to this, no coordination either. Bress knew the only correct response was distance. He heard Ott shouting something behind him and didn’t look back to find out what. He heard Ferris, who had been against this from the beginning, make a sound that suggested running hadn’t worked for him.

They were surrounded in under a minute.

Three of them down before they covered thirty feet, knocked off their feet and pinned by knights operating efficiently.

Colm made it to the shrubs and out the other side before two knights came around the edge and were simply waiting for him when he got there. Bress made it the furthest, nearly forty feet down the road before a knight ran him down and put him on the ground.

Reed, who had said don’t, had not run at all. He was sitting on the ground with his hands visible when the knights reached him.

Darion had heard the shout and turned with everyone else.

By the time he walked back to the rear, it was already resolved, five men on the ground or restrained, the cattle moving with the indifference of livestock who had been through worse, the knights standing in a loose group around the captured robbers with weapons still drawn.

And at the edge of the road, partially into the shrubs on the western side, one of his knights. On the ground, not moving.

Seren just sat on her horse and watched.

Darion walked to the dead knight, crouched down and looked at him for a moment.

He hadn’t known this one’s name well.

It was a junior knight, young, one of the ones who had come to the hunt that first morning before sunrise with his weapon already sharpened.

He had survived the forest. He had survived Gonnb. He had survived the entire night, and he had died at the edge of a road not too far from home.

Darion stood up.

He looked at the five men on the ground. They were disheveled and frightened. They weren’t soldiers and weren’t even particularly dangerous either. Just opportunists who had done a calculation and gotten it catastrophically wrong.

Bress started talking. Something about a misunderstanding, about not knowing who they were, about circumstances.

Darion looked at him without expression.

Bress kept talking.

Darion looked at his knights instead. At the faces of the men standing in a ring around the five on the ground, looking at the body at the road’s edge and then back at the people responsible for it.

"Do what you think is right," Darion said to his knights.

He turned and walked back toward the front.

Behind him the talking stopped very quickly, replaced by other sounds that were briefer than the talking had been and then stopped too.

He didn’t look back.

Garren came up beside him after a minute, falling into step without comment. Seren just looked at the scene, not particularly surprised or frightened, none of that showed on her face.

The group reformed. The cattle settled and two knights carried the body of the fallen knight with care.

Darion looked at the road ahead.

"Be more careful for the rest of the way," he said.