Necromancer: Kingdom Building with My Legion of Undead Knights-Chapter 70: A Head on the Wall

The knight who came in wasn’t moving with urgency.

Darion had noticed that first. It was the pace of someone carrying out a completed task rather than delivering bad news. He was holding something wrapped in cloth.

Darion relaxed slightly.

The knight stopped in front of the table, bowed placed the wrapped cloth on the ground.

"It’s been done, m’lord."

Darion reached over and unwrapped the cloth.

The skull sat cleanly in his hands.

Whatever the smith had done to it, he had done thoroughly, the flesh was gone, all of it, the bone beneath pale and dry and smooth to the touch.

The eye sockets were hollow, the jaw intact, the whole structure clean. It was obvious the work had been careful rather than hurried.

There were faint marks in places where tools had worked, but nothing crude. The inside had been cleared out completely, which removed the smell problem, and whatever treatment had been applied to the outer surface had left it slightly harder than raw bone, sealed against further deterioration.

Darion turned it over once, checking the back of the skull, then set it down on the table in front of him.

"That was... fast," he said. "Really fast actually."

Garren looked at the skull, then at the knight. "Gregor did this?"

The knight nodded. "Says when he heard it was for the Baron, he did it at no charge, m’lord."

Darion looked up. He hadn’t given the knight any coin to take to the smith, partly because he had forgotten in the chaos of arrival and partly because the castle’s coin situation made forgetting easy, there wasn’t much to remember.

"Tell me about him," Darion said, looking at Garren.

"Gregor has been in Percvale his whole life," Garren began. "Stayed when most people with a trade left, smiths were in demand everywhere during the decline, he could have gone anywhere and found work. He chose to stay." A pause. "He’s more skilled than a barony this size normally has access to. His father was an armorer, military grade. Gregor learned from him and then broadened, he does blade work, structural metalwork, and apparently this kind of thing too."

Garren glanced at the skull. "In Percvale now, people take on whatever needs doing. There aren’t enough specialists left for anyone to do only one thing. Gregor smiths, but he also handles anything requiring detailed handwork that nobody else can manage."

"He stayed out of loyalty to the barony," Darion said.

"I think he stayed because this is his home," Garren said. "Which ends up looking the same as loyalty but comes from a different place."

Darion looked at the skull on the table for a moment. He picked it up again, feeling the weight of it, lighter than he had expected, the treatment having dried it thoroughly.

"Where’s the spear it came in on?"

The knight produced it from beside the doorframe where he had leaned it on entering. Darion took it, examined the shaft, and then fitted the skull onto the point carefully, making sure the mount was secure.

He stood up and walked to the wall beside the dining hall door, the interior wall, the one any visitor coming into the room would see immediately on entering.

Not above the fireplace, not somewhere theatrical. Just beside the door, at roughly eye level, where someone walking in would encounter it naturally rather than having to look for it.

He pressed the butt of the spear into the bracket on the wall, there were brackets there already, old ones, probably used for torches or decoration at some point in the castle’s better years, and stepped back.

The skull sat on the spear at eye level, hollow sockets facing the room, the pale bone catching the morning light from the window.

Darion looked at it for a moment.

"Good," he said.

The knight bowed and left.

Garren walked over and stood beside Darion, looking at the mounted skull with an assessment expression.

"The work is clean," he said. "Gregor did well."

"He did." Darion looked at it a moment longer. "I’ll go see him soon. Pay him something properly."

"He’ll appreciate that. He won’t say so, but he will."

"What kind of man is he?"

"Eh..., he’s quiet and direct. Doesn’t involve himself in things that aren’t his business." Garren paused. "You’ll like him."

Darion nodded slowly. A smith who was skilled, loyal to Percvale by choice rather than obligation, and able to do work outside his primary category, that was exactly the kind of person a rebuilding barony needed to know about and keep onside.

He added it to the list of things to follow up on, which was getting long enough that he was beginning to think the list needed its own system.

He looked at the skull one more time.

There was something satisfying about it that he didn’t feel the need to examine too carefully.

The village leader of Gonnb had sent Calder’s head back on a spear as a statement. Darion had responded by burning the village down and bringing the man’s own head home in the same manner.

The skull on the wall wasn’t a trophy in the way trophies were usually understood, it was more of a record. Evidence that the calculation people had been making about Percvale for thirty years was no longer accurate and that updating it had consequences.

Anyone who visited this castle and walked into this dining hall would see it before they saw anything else.

Garren was still looking at it.

"Hang your enemies’ heads on the wall," he said. It was not quite a joke, not quite serious either, instead somewhere in the dry register he used when he found something genuinely amusing but felt restraint was appropriate.

Darion smiled. "It’s a start."

"A good one." Garren looked at him sideways. "Wonder whose will be next."

Darion thought about Aldric the Second of Valdenmoor. His formal letter, his indifferent tone, his indifferent refusal and his thirty-day deadline.

The barracks full of soldiers who had been sleeping soundly while venomous undead moved through them in the dark.

"Aldric’s," he said. "Probably."

Garren looked at him.

Then they both laughed.