The Exiled Duke's Lottery system

The drying-house, the last hour before the quiet broke

Two knights stood at the north firing step with their backs to the moor. It was the last mistake either of them made.

"—and I say when it’s finished, it’s finished," the taller one said. "The four of them. The moment the last drawing’s copied and the courier’s away, you don’t keep four men who’ve seen the inside of this."

"Corran said to hold them."

"Corran’s gone east with the papers. Corran doesn’t have to feed them, or watch them, or explain them if a Valdris patrol wanders up here counting frost." He spat over the palisade. "I’ll do it myself if the Veil won’t say the word. Cut throats are cheaper than kept mouths. Scholars most of all — a scholar will sell you for a warm room. I’ve seen it."

"You’re cheerful tonight."

"I’m practical to—"

He never finished the word.

There was no sound from the dark that anyone would have called a shot. The wind was up, and the rifles on the rock were quieter than the wind. The tall knight simply folded at the middle, as if something enormous and invisible had walked through him. The second knight turned toward him, mouth opening.

Then he stopped turning.

On the rise, Daren worked the action and found his next line.

"Two," he said on the channel. "Both talkers. One of them had opinions about the scholars."

"Then he’ll be pleased to learn he doesn’t get a vote," Arven said. "Three more."

The three remaining took eleven minutes, and none of them ever knew there was a fight.

The first stopped to piss against a cart wheel — still, side-on, lit by the fire behind him. He lay down against the wheel and stayed there. The second came out of his tent stretching, a big shape yawning at the stars, and the stars were the last thing he saw.

The third was the careful one.

He’d felt something. He came to the edge of the tent block with a hand on his sword and his head turning, reading the dark, doing everything right.

"He knows," Daren murmured. "Look at him. He can feel it."

"From four hundred yards?"

"No."

"Then he knows nothing useful. Take him while he’s being clever."

Daren took him while he was being clever.

"Five. The five that mattered." A pause. "Wait there’s a sixth tent I don’t like. Big. Set apart — apart even from the apart ones."

Arven let that sit for half a second.

"Note it. We don’t wait on a tent." He shifted, and the whole shield-line felt him shift. "The five who could organize this camp are dead and nobody’s woken. That gift doesn’t keep. Varro — the caster. On my word, the quiet ends, and it ends with him."

The sentries found the bodies.

A shout went up from the north step, then ran the length of the palisade. Lamps came up. And in the middle of it, the warded door of the drying-house opened and the caster stepped out into the frost, his two apprentices behind him, and raised his hands, and began — in a calm, educated voice — the words of something that would have been very bad for the men in the heather.

He got four words in.

Varro had been holding on him since the first shout. What arrived was not a spell or a blade, and not anything the man’s education had prepared him for. It was an anti-armor launcher round, fired from the high side of the north wall — and it took the caster, and the warded threshold he stood in, and a good part of the doorframe, and turned all of it into one hard bright noise in one boom.

One apprentice was simply gone. The other sat down in the ruined doorway and stared at the space where his master had been, and did not get up, or cast anything, ever again.

"The educated always assume everyone else is stupid," Arven said, watching the doorway smoke. "He spent his life being the most dangerous man in every room. Never once asked what happens if the room brings a launcher."

"Caster’s down," Varro reported, reloading. "Both greenhorns out of it."

"Then say good evening to the garrison. All of it."

The machine guns opened, and the night became something the men inside that palisade had no word for, because no word had been made yet.(word in discovery)

Five hundred men in a timber square. And on the north wall, two squads of sealed armor commandoes— standing and firing while the suits ate recoil that would have thrown an unarmored man down the slope — drums on their backs feeding belts of exploding rounds into guns that did not stop.

It was not a battle. A battle has two sides shooting. This had one side shooting, and one side discovering — by lamplight and muzzle-flash, one man at a time — that everything they had trained for their whole lives did nothing at all.

Arrows rose out of the square in flights and struck the shapes on the wall, and the shapes did not fall. The arrows found starforged adamant at the vitals and skidded. They found dragonbone-backed plate and were swallowed. The men who loosed them nocked again, out of pure discipline, and by then were usually no longer there.

"They keep shooting us," Brant said, working his gun in short bursts, his voice full of honest wonder.

"They don’t have anything else to do," Arven said. "Bows are what they brought. It’s a hard lesson on a cold night — that what you brought was a mistake."

"Should I feel worse about this?"

"Feel about it after. Right now you keep that wall a thing their whole camp is afraid to face, so my half can walk to the building without four hundred men on our backs." A beat. "Shields — up. We go."

They went through the gap Varro had torn and into the square, and the fight folded around them.

Close work now. Ugly. One-sided . Soldiers came at them with spears and courage — everything a brave man brings — and the spears skidded off adamant, and the courage met a Thunderbolt at arm’s length. The shield-line advanced through the middle of a garrison at a walking pace. Unhurried.

Hurry was for people who could be hurt.

"Left. Pell — the door. Ward-breaker, on the move. Don’t touch it. Shoot it."

Pell put a round through it soon a scream sounded.

And that was when the sixth tent emptied.

He came out without armor and without hurry, sword already in hand, and the pressure that rolled off him was not the Grand-tier weight of the cleaner at Anley.

It was more.

It crossed the square and landed in the base of every Commando’s skull — cold, enormous, patient. High Knight. Two full ranks above Arven. He had slept through five of his lessers being shot in the dark, and he woke into a battle already lost, and did not appear to care in the slightest.

"Well," he said, looking over the commandoes with professional interest. "There you are. I did wonder what could kill five knights without one of them shouting." He rolled his neck. "New. Very new. Whose are you?"

"Funny you should ask," Arven said. "You took two machines off a road a month back and never asked whose they were. Turns out the owner’s quite particular about it."

The High Knight smiled, and moved, and the smile was the last unhurried thing in the next thirty seconds.

He went through the shield-line.

He was faster than anything they had trained against, stronger than the suits’ assistance, and he fought like a man who had been killing since before any of them were born. He caught Pell first and put him down with a blow that cracked the outer plate across his shoulder and drove him into the frozen mud — and Pell kept his arm only because the strike found adamant, and adamant was built to survive worse. He hit Arven’s shield hard enough to ring the whole square and turn Arven’s boots in the mud. He opened a third man’s guard and drove a thrust straight at the throat seam — the killing line, the one gap that matters — and the moonweave took it, and the adamant collar beneath the moonweave stopped it dead.

The knight paused. For the first time. A killing blow had simply declined to kill.

"That should have worked," he said, and sounded genuinely put out.

"Yes," Arven said from the ground, hauling himself back up. "People keep saying that tonight."

But the man was going to kill someone. That much was plain. He was better than all of them together, and the armor was the only reason the squad was still a squad — and armor that won’t break still lets its wearer be beaten into the mud, one man at a time.

"Full auto," Arven said, flat and fast. "Everyone. On him. Now."

They almost never used it. The 25mm devoured itself on full auto; Ironbreaker wept over the ammunition; every drill taught single shots placed like a surgeon’s knife. This was not a night for surgery.

Four Thunderbolts opened up at once, at arm’s length, and poured fire into one man— rounds that punched in and detonated inside (Thud-Thud-Thud-boom)— and even a High Knight, even a body reinforced by a rank most men never live to see, could not stand in that storm and keep coming. It didn’t kill him but It held him. Drove him back a step, then another, staggering, his strength spent on keeping his feet while the rounds went off inside his guard — and for the first time all night, the man stopped being hunter and became a prey.

"Brant."

"On him."

"End the argument."

Brant put a launcher round into a High Knight who was, for one crucial second, too battered to get out of its way.

The argument ended in the middle of the square, all at once, in a way that left very little to burn later.

The silence afterward was enormous.

Arven stood in the frost with his shield arm ringing, Pell groaning up onto one knee behind him, and looked at the smoking place where a high knight had been.

"For the record," he said on the channel, "that is why we never ask for a fair fight."

He turned to the open, unwarded door of the drying-house — and the four men somewhere inside it who were, whatever they’d been told, no longer scheduled to die when the job was done.

"Pell. Can you walk?"

"I can walk."

"Then walk. We’ve scholars to collect." He glanced once at the frost-ring glittering in the firelight, out of season, patient as ever. "And I’d like to be off this ground before it tells me why it’s cold."