Chapter 81: Second Infiltration [2]
The bats worked the place for an hour.
Darion stayed in the tree the entire time, his perspective glass moving between the four guard positions and the barracks entrance in a rotation he kept steady.
The two guards who had been talking at the far corner were still at it, quieter now, the conversation having wound down to the occasional exchange of a few words, the kind of talking that was really just proof of consciousness rather than actual communication.
The two sleeping ones hadn’t moved.
Inside, he tracked nine points of awareness through the binding, each one moving through the barracks at the speed bats moved. They were fast, direction changes without transition, covering ground in the dark that undead knights would have needed twenty minutes to work through carefully.
He aimed for all of them. Every sleeping man in that building.
It wasn’t possible. He knew it wasn’t possible, he had nine bats going a barracks full of soldiers, an hour of available time before the risk of detection became too high.
But aiming for all of them meant pushing further than aiming for most of them would have. Low targets produced low results. Aiming at the impossible and falling short still put you further ahead than aiming at the comfortable.
He pushed the bats through every section of the building.
Twice, something close to detection.
The first time was a knight who had woken to use the latrine bucket at the far end of the room, moving through the barracks with the shuffling half-consciousness of someone not fully awake.
One of the bats was crossing that section of the room when he stood up, and the movement of it was noticed. The man stopped, looked up at the ceiling and turned his head slowly.
The bat had already folded against the wall in the shadow below a high beam, still, pressed flat.
The knight stared at the ceiling. Then at the wall. Then at the ceiling again.
Then he went to the bucket and went back to his bed.
The bat continued.
The second time was more serious. It was a guard doing an interior check, apparently one of the four outside rotating in briefly. He came through the main door with a lamp, holding it up and sweeping it slowly around the room.
Darion saw it from outside through the perspective glass: the light appearing at the entrance, the slow movement of it moving through the interior.
Two bats were in the far section of the room. He felt their positions through the binding and redirected them simultaneously, up and back, into the high corner above the door where the lamp’s light didn’t reach, where the wall met the ceiling in a junction of deep shadow.
The guard moved the lamp around, satisfied himself that the room was as it should be, and went back outside.
The bats came down from the corner and continued working.
This was different from Gonnb in a specific way that sat in the back of his mind throughout.
At Gonnb, the bats had been a first operation. Nobody there had connected the deaths of their warriors to anything, they hadn’t had a prior event to compare it to, no pattern to recognize and no reason to look at a bat flying through the settlement at night and think anything beyond bat.
The two villagers who had spotted them had swatted the air and moved on.
Valdenmoor had already had one event. Men had died in that barracks weeks ago, without explanation. Healers had been called, answers hadn’t been found, and the men had been buried and life had continued.
But the memory of it was there. If soldiers started dying again, and someone started looking for a cause, and a guard happened to see a bat moving through the barracks, the connection between bat and illness carrier was not impossible to make. It required a specific kind of thinking, the right person paying attention at the right moment.
He just hoped the bats weren’t seen.
He tracked the bats through the binding and kept the glass moving and worked the problem at the back of his mind without letting it distract him from the front of it.
If one of the bats was caught, not just seen, but actually caught, held, examined by someone who understood venomous animals, the chain of reasoning that followed was uncomfortable.
They might start to investigate and trace it...
He had not survived the last month in Percvale by assuming things would go the way he hoped.
He started preparing to wrap up.
The hour was nearly done. He had a feeling. It was inexact, but he just had a feeling. He began unsummoning.
First bat into inventory. Then... Second. Third. Fourth. Fifth. Sixth.
He had three remaining inside when he checked the guard positions again through the glass.
Both of the awake guards at the far corner were asleep.
He stopped.
Looked at the two figures, heads drooping, the stillness of men who had been fighting it for two hours and had finally lost.
He redirected the three remaining bats through the binding outside, through the entrance, to the four guard positions around the building’s exterior.
They went.
He watched through the glass as four guards received what the soldiers inside had received, quick and silent and painless, the bats landing and lifting before any of the men stirred. Then the three bats were airborne and moving back toward his tree.
He held out his arm and they landed on it in sequence, and he unsummoned them one by one.
He exhaled.
Phew!
Mission accomplished.
He started climbing down.
His boot found the second branch, then the first, then the ground, and he turned to move toward where the horse was tied... and stopped.
A man was standing behind a tree fifteen feet away.
He was not moving. Just standing there with his back against the trunk and his face turned toward Darion, a face full of beard, his eyes wide.
He had the expression of someone who had seen something very shocking.
He thought Darion hadn’t spotted him.
Darion had spotted him.
They looked at each other in the dark.