Necromancer: Kingdom Building with My Legion of Undead Knights

Darion left before sunrise.

The castle was quiet when he came downstairs, the perspective glass box in his saddlebag alongside a wrapped bundle of food Maret had left on the table without being asked.

He didn’t wake anyone. Garren knew he was leaving, they had said everything that needed saying the night before, and the knights on the early watch nodded at him as he led his horse through the gate and said nothing about the dark clothing or the hour.

The attire had been Garren’s suggestion, simple stuff: dark wool, nothing that caught light, nothing that made noise when he moved. Not elaborate. Just the absence of anything that would announce him in the dark.

He rode.

The road to Valdenmoor was different at this hour. Empty, which he had expected, but also somehow more honest, without the daytime traffic of merchants and farmers and people going about ordinary business, the road was just a road, and the landscape on either side was just land, and the contrast between Percvale’s pale exhausted soil and Valdenmoor’s maintained fields was even more apparent without people on it to draw the eye.

He rode at a steady pace, not pushing and not dawdling. He had timed it the previous evening using what he knew of the distance and the light — leave before dawn, arrive at Valdenmoor’s outer territory by late afternoon, find a position before dark settled fully, wait for the camp to go quiet.

By midday he had crossed out of Percvale’s territory. By mid-afternoon the farms around him were the well-kept ones he had ridden past on the way to the meeting with Aldric.

He left the road before the final approach, cutting into the treeline that ran along the eastern edge of Valdenmoor’s agricultural land and following it north toward where the military barracks were positioned.

He had paid attention on the way back from the meeting. The barracks sat on the northern side of Valdenmoor’s main settlement, slightly separated from the civilian buildings, standard placement though, keeping the military presence distinct. He had noted the tree cover on the approach, the angle from the road, the rough distance from the outer wall to the nearest substantial treeline.

He found a spot and waited.

Full dark arrived around the third hour after sunset.

He had tied the horse well back into the trees, far enough from the outer edge that it wouldn’t be heard from the road, and had chosen the spot carefully, away from the densest undergrowth where things moved at night, with reasonable ground visibility around it.

The memory of four knights falling from trees with venom spreading through their skin was not something he had forgotten, and he checked the bark of every tree within ten feet before he was satisfied.

He found his tree, a broad one, mature, with a first branch low enough to reach and a canopy dense enough to sit in without being visible from below, and climbed.

From twelve feet up the perspective glass gave him what he needed.

He extended it, braced it against the branch, and looked.

The barracks was a long, low building, not so different in shape from Percvale’s, actually, though considerably better maintained and considerably larger.

The main structure was flanked by two smaller ones, storage or auxiliary quarters by the look of them.

Torches burned at the entrance and at two points along the outer wall, the light throwing orange pools on the ground that made the dark between them darker by contrast.

There were supposed to be guards. He could see the positions: a man at the main entrance, another visible at the far corner of the building, the torch at the midpoint of the wall suggesting a third position there.

He watched.

The man at the entrance was sitting. Not standing at his post with a spear, instead sitting on a low block of stone to the side of the door, his head at an angle that suggested it had been making its way toward his chest for some time.

Darion watched for two minutes. The head didn’t lift.

He moved the glass to the far corner. The guard there was upright, at least, but had his back against the wall and was looking at the ground rather than outward.

As Darion watched, the man shifted his weight, resettled, and went still again in the way people went still when they were fighting something and losing.

The man was fighting the urge to continue sleeping but he was obviously losing.

The mid-wall torch position was empty.

Darion lowered the glass and sat with that for a moment.

He had expected guards. He had built the plan around the assumption of active guards, which was why the perspective glass mattered: good direction, redirecting the undead away from whoever was moving and constant monitoring of the sightlines.

What he had not expected was this. Mid-night and the watch was asleep, or close enough to it that the distinction didn’t matter.

He checked the barracks entrance again. The sitting guard’s head had made it to his chest.

It was clear that valdenmoor rarely had attacks or invasions in the night so this was how it normally was, guards sleeping and not really guarding

Perfect, he thought.

He had been realistic about his objectives coming in. Four venomous undead, one operation and one night, he was not going to devastate a military force of several thousand.

That had never been the goal. The goal was enough. Enough men waking sick dead in the following days that panic started moving through the barracks.

Enough deaths without explanation that the healers were called in and found nothing. Enough disruption to Aldric’s internal situation that the thirty-day deadline stopped being his primary focus.

Achievable and specific. That was what tonight was for.

He checked the tree bark one more time, it was sort of an old habit now, automatic even, almost a paranoid one. He ran his eyes over the branches immediately around him and checked the ground below. Nothing moving that shouldn’t be moving.

He reached into his inventory.

Time to bring them out.

The four appeared on the ground below his tree, the green light fading immediately, four figures standing in the dark beneath the canopy.

He could see them clearly from above, the grey flesh, the dark vein markings, the green eyes dim in the shadow, all four looking up at him with the patient emptiness of things that had no opinion about what came next.

He extended the perspective glass again, checked the barracks entrance one final time. The guard’s head was on his chest and hadn’t moved.

He looked back down at the four.

Loyalty sitting at sixty-five to sixty-nine. Three days of training, barely sleeping, pushing the binding harder than he had pushed anything since arriving in Percvale. This was what that had been for.

He was about to see if his sufferings were worth it. If the relentless training on the venomous undead had actually worked, the little hours he slept, all for this moment.

He pointed toward the barracks wall, keeping the gesture slow and deliberate.

Then, barely above a breath, he explained in quite some detail what they were to do.

The undeads moved...