Necromancer: Kingdom Building with My Legion of Undead Knights

The knights looked at him.

A plan?

Darion caught the mild surprise on their faces and thought, with some amusement:

’Did you all think I was just going to march you into those trees and hope for the best?’

”A plan is why we’ll be killing Bogoarts and coming back with all our limbs still attached,” he said. ”The times you all went into those woods before, did any of you have one?”

The answer came without words. Every head in the circle shook slowly in the negative.

”Right.” He looked around the group. ”Who has a map of the woods? Even a rough one?”

Silence for a few seconds. Then, from somewhere near the back of the crowd, a hand shot up with considerably more enthusiasm than the situation probably required.

Darion gestured for him to come forward. The knights parted and a young man stepped through, he was lean.

”I draw,” the knight said. ”In my free time. I’ve been in those woods before and survived a few times, so I sketched what I remembered. It’s rough but it’s close.”

”Where is it?”

”Inside, m’lord, I can—”

”Go get it.”

The knight turned and jogged back through the crowd toward the barracks. The group waited. A minute later he was back, moving through the parted knights and holding out a folded piece of paper that had clearly lived a full life, it was old and slightly soft at the creases, stained at the corners and folded so many times the folds had become part of its structure.

Darion took it and unfolded it carefully.

It was a sketch, charcoal on the paper actually, the lines confident and deliberate rather than hesitant.

The woods were laid out from above, the tree line marked with clustered shapes that varied in density to show where the forest thickened and where it thinned.

A stream cut through the lower left section, thin and winding. The northern section of the woods was marked with heavier, closer lines: denser canopy and less ground visibility.

Several clearings were noted, two of them with small symbols beside them that might have been rocks or fallen trees or landmarks only the artist would know. The paths that existed, narrow things, more trampled-down grass than actual road, were traced in lighter lines weaving through the heavier mass of the forest.

For a rough sketch done from memory, it was genuinely impressive. The proportions felt right. The landmarks had the specificity of someone who had actually stood in those places rather than imagined them.

Darion almost forgot what he was supposed to be doing with it.

”You draw portraits?” he asked, looking up at the knight.

”I do, m’lord.”

Darion nodded slowly, folding one corner of the map back so it didn’t obstruct his view. ”You’ll be helping us with sketches going forward. More maps, and other things.”

The knight looked quietly pleased by that and laughed, a few others in the group laughed with him too.

”Now,” Darion said, and the laughter settled immediately. He held the map out flat where the nearest knights could see it. ”You all know those woods better than I do. Where do you think the Bogoarts are? Where have you seen signs of them, where do you think they den, where do you not go?”

That opened things up.

A broad-shouldered knight near the front, one of the senior ones by the look of him, older, with a scar across his jaw that had healed badly, leaned in and pointed to the northeastern section of the map, where the lines were tightest.

”That’s where we’ve lost the most men. Every group that went deep into that part didn’t come back.”

A second knight pointed to the stream in the lower left. ”We’ve seen tracks near the water. Large ones. Whatever made them was heavy.”

”Bogoart tracks are wide,” Garren said, stepping into the circle now and looking at the map properly for the first time. He pointed to the two clearings marked with symbols.

”These are open ground. Bogoarts avoid open ground, they’re ambush hunters, they need cover to wait in. So those clearings are probably safe to cross. The danger is the approach to them, coming through the tree cover on either side.” He traced the path between the two clearings with his finger.

”This corridor here, this is where I’d be careful. It’s narrow, good cover on both sides, exactly the kind of place they’d sit in.”

More knights added to it after that, small observations actually, things remembered from hunts that hadn’t ended in disaster and hunts that had.

Someone noted a section of the western side where the undergrowth was thinner and the trees spaced wider, which made it harder for anything to hide close to the path.

Someone else mentioned a ridge in the northern section that gave elevated sightlines down into the denser areas below.

Darion listened to all of it, eyes on the map, occasionally asking a short question and then going quiet again.

He was building something in his head, a picture of the forest that was more detailed than what he’d had yesterday, when he had ridden in alone with no information and had relied entirely on his undead scouts to keep him from walking into something blind.

Which reminded him.

One undead. That was what he was working with today. The Decaying Tier skeleton sitting in his inventory.

Yesterday he had gone in with five and come out with one, and that one had barely survived because the others had kept the Bogoart occupied long enough.

Today he had a hundred and twenty-one knights alongside him, which changed the equation considerably, but it also meant he couldn’t use his undead openly without explaining what they were.

He decided to keep it back. A last resort, for if something went wrong and he needed it. Let the plan carry do the trick today.

He looked at the map for a long moment after the knights had finished adding their observations. His eyes moved back and forth between the stream and the corridor.

The stream was where the Bogoarts came to drink. The corridor was where they waited to ambush. Both of those facts pointed to the same area of the forest, the same general zone, which meant the creatures weren’t randomly distributed through the trees.

They had a territory. They moved between the water and the hunting ground.

Which meant if you knew where they were going to be, you didn’t have to go looking for them.

You just had to be there first.

He looked up from the map. The knights were watching him in silence, the whole group of them, waiting.

Darion’s mouth curved slightly.

”Bait!”