Chapter 79: Fifteen Days to Act
Darion folded the letter and put it in his jacket.
He decided he wasn’t going to waste time. He wasn’t going to even take a break. Instead he was going to try and make those fifteen days count.
This was a big threat to Percvale, if they losed the farmlands to Valdenmoor, that would basically be the end of the Barony.
A farmland, now with a good soil that made crops grow faster so they could be harvested faster would be invaluable to them. And if Darion was to somehow get the coins and pay them, he was certain they wouldn’t be returning the land.
They had no mines or anything else apart from those farmlands.
The farmlands were the key to Percvale being successful again!
After the evening meal, Darion sat on the edge of his bed and thought through how the infiltration would go.
The first infiltration had been clean. No alarm, detection or a one near-miss that he had managed before it became a problem.
He had come in, done what he came to do, and left without anyone in Valdenmoor having any reason to connect the deaths that followed to anything external.
As far as they knew, their men had gotten sick. That was the story the evidence told and there was no evidence that told a different one.
The gap between the first infiltration and now had actually helped in a way he hadn’t planned for. Distance made it harder to connect two events as a pattern.
If he had gone back the next night, someone paying attention might have noticed that the deaths had something to them — that the bad nights had a schedule.
Leaving a gap of days made the first event feel like a thing that had happened and ended rather than the beginning of something ongoing.
Nobody was going to assume the cause anyway. He ran through it.
The actual mechanism — a Necromancer Baron sitting in a tree outside their walls, using a Distant Command ability to direct venomous undead through a barracks while the men inside slept — was not the kind of explanation that arrived naturally to anyone.
You had to know that Necromancers could have venomous undead. You had to know about Distant Command. You had to know that a recently appointed Baron of a struggling barony had both of those things and a specific reason to want Valdenmoor’s military capacity degraded.
Nobody in Valdenmoor knew any of that.
And even among people who did know Necromancers existed, the venomous undead was specific enough to be unusual. He had stumbled into it himself: four knights bitten by rare snakes in a forest, dead before he could do anything, revived because the system told him the potential was exceptional.
It wasn’t a standard Necromancer thing. Instead it was something particular to his circumstances and his territory’s specific history.
Unique, probably. And definitely not the first explanation anyone would reach for when their soldiers started dying.
The bats made it cleaner still. The undead knights moving through the barracks on the first infiltration had required careful routing which was being slow, deliberate and always at risk of being seen in the wrong moment of lamplight or a guard turning at the wrong time.
The bats moved fast, they moved in the dark, they were the kind of thing a sleeping man swatted at without waking properly.
Send them in, let them work the room, pull them back out. The exposure window was a fraction of what the knights required.
His plan was simple. Return to the same tree. He knew the tree, knew the sightlines it offered and knew the distance to the barracks entrance. Climb up, perspective glass, read the camp’s activity, release the bats with the basic instruction: enter fast, bite, don’t be seen.
Track them through Distant Command while they worked.
Fifteen nights. Not all of them required his physical presence at the tree: he couldn’t live at the edge of Valdenmoor’s territory, but as many as he could manage before the deadline.
Every night he ran the bats through that barracks was another morning where men woke up feeling wrong without knowing why, another week where the count of functional soldiers declined without a visible cause.
"Fifteen days," he said quietly to the empty room. "Every one of them needs to count."
He lay back on the bed, stared at the ceiling, and was asleep faster than he expected.
He was up before sunrise.
Maret had been told the night before and she was already in the kitchen when he came downstairs, moving quietly in the way she moved when she worked, diligent and effective to the task.
She had packed food for the road — bread, dried meat, a cloth-wrapped portion of the previous night’s leftovers — and filled a water skin without being asked about the water skin.
It was sitting beside the food on the table when he came in.
He ate quickly, standing, eating like that because he wasn’t planning to sit for long. The dark riding clothes were already on, the hood up against the early cold. He checked the perspective glass in the saddlebag, checked the saddlebag’s fastenings, and carried it out to the stable.
Wulfric was already there. Darion hadn’t asked him to be, perhaps the man had apparently heard movement in the castle and decided his job included being present when the Baron needed a horse prepared before dawn.
He had one of the better horses saddled and ready, standing calm in the lamplight of the stable.
Darion mounted up and rode out to the gate.
Garren was there.
He was standing to one side of the gate, arms folded,like he had been standing in that place long enough to settle into it. He looked at Darion on the horse without surprise.
"Good luck m’lord," he said.
"Keep things moving while I’m gone," Darion said.
"Seren should continue the soil work. The planting needs checking, make sure the spacing is consistent in the new sections." He thought for a moment. "And see if Gregor has made progress on the armors. I want to know how many functional sets we have before the end of the week."
"It’ll be done," Garren said.
Darion nodded and rode through the gate.