Chapter 221 — Ahead of the Warning II

Chapter 221: Chapter 221 — Ahead of the Warning II

Ronan knew inside fifty meters that he was not going to catch mounted scouts on a borrowed horse, so he stopped trying.

"The ground!" he shouted. "Not the men!"

Cillian stopped aiming at riders.

His first bolt hit the track twenty meters ahead of the leading horse and blew a crater of dirt and stone up into the animal’s face, and both horses threw their heads and slewed sideways.

His second split a pine across the narrowest point of the path. It came down in a tearing crack, and a wall of green and broken timber dropped across the road east.

Both riders fought their mounts around, and both made a decision in the same second, and they made different ones.

The first went back along the ridge toward Greybridge, flat to the neck, riding for the alarm.

Ronan put his horse across the path, came out of the saddle at the last moment, and took the charge on the flat of his shield. He aimed low, at the shoulder, because a dead horse in that gap would have been a wall he might need to move later.

The animal went over into the loose earth with its legs still running, the rider spilled clear, and Ronan was standing over him before he stopped rolling.

The second rider went the other way — off the track, downhill through the trees, running with the fall of the land.

South. Toward Redfield.

Cillian had one second and two things to do with it. He could put a bolt into the sky and tell James the patrol was only half held, or he could catch the man riding for the depot.

He went after the rider.

It took nearly a minute of hard riding through broken ground to get an angle, and then he did not bother with trees. He took the horse’s legs out with a low arc that cracked flat across the slope, and the rider went into the leaf litter and did not get up.

Only then did Cillian look back toward the fort ridge, and understand that his signal was going to be late.

James, Finn, and Maeve watched Greybridge’s eastern gate swing open below them, and three riders came out at an easy walk.

No flash had come off the ridge.

"They’re moving," Finn said. Both axes were already in his hands, and his eyes were not on the riders at all. "James. Look at that gate. It’s propped wide for the convoy inspection and it will not be wide in ten minutes. We go now and we’re in the courtyard before anyone on that wall gets a horn up."

"No."

"We are watching the one open door we get—"

"And if we take it, those three ride into the sound of it, turn around, and carry everything they’ve just seen to Redfield." James kept his voice flat, because he had argued this exact minute with himself for four days. "The gate is worth twenty minutes. The riders are worth two hours."

Finn breathed out through his nose. Then he moved, because he had never once argued past the point of decision.

They let the three clear the gate and get well out onto the road, far enough that a horn would reach the fort thin and distant rather than as a shout at the wall.

Maeve raised a dome of pale light across the road behind them, angled to stand between the riders and Greybridge, so that whatever happened on this stretch of road, nobody on that wall would be watching it happen.

Finn came up out of the ditch on the far side and closed the road with his body and both axes.

James took them from the front.

The first rider reached for a sword instead of a horn, which was the wrong instinct for a scout, and Durendal went through him before the blade cleared its scabbard.

[CROWN SCOUT SLAIN — EXP GAINED: 150]

[JAMES GANNER — EXP: 44,375 → 44,525 / 54,000]

[CALL OF SOULS ACTIVATED]

[MANA RESTORED: +30]

James spent eighty mana putting the body back on its feet before it had finished falling, and the first skeleton of the attempt stepped into the narrow verge on the inside of the road.

[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON — MANA COST: 80]

That took away the only line the second rider had left. He turned into Finn instead, and Finn took horse and man down together, one swing with the flat and one with the edge.

The third had the horn at his lips and his lungs already full.

Maeve dropped a dome over him.

The note started inside the barrier and stopped there, flattened to nothing before it reached the air outside, and the rider was still blowing into it when James reached him.

Ronan and Cillian came down off the ridge two minutes later.

"Both down," Ronan said. "Neither one got past the treeline."

Five out of five. No rider reached Redfield, and no warning reached Greybridge.

[05:19:26]

Greybridge did everything right, and none of it landed.

Finn wedged the main gate’s closing leaf at the same seam he had found the hard way a week ago, and Ronan levered it open without testing anything, and the supply convoy was still crowding the courtyard exactly where it had been.

Up on the eastern wall, the beacon crew got four rungs off the ground before Cillian blew the ladder and the lower stair to splinters underneath them.

Maeve did not probe the entrance wards to learn what they were. She went straight at the third layer, the one that had cost her four minutes on the first attempt, and had it open in under one.

James raised two skeletons from the courtyard’s first bodies and sent one of them at the inner gatehouse passage, not to fight, but to stand somewhere behind the shield line and be a door.

[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON x2 — MANA COST: 160]

"Portcullis!" the commander shouted from the gatehouse steps. "Drop it!"

The chains ran, the iron came down — and Finn and Ronan were already through, having gone for the passage before he gave the order, because they had watched him give it a week ago.

"Archers to the second walk!" he tried. "Cover the courtyard!"

His archers repositioned onto the wall walk above an empty courtyard, and stayed there, waiting for a crossing that never happened.

[GRAVE STEP — MANA COST: 120]

James stepped out of the courtyard and arrived beside his skeleton behind the Crown line, with his back to a wall he had picked from the ridge, and took his one bad second where nobody could reach him for it.

Then he came off that wall swinging into the rear of a formation that was still facing the wrong way.

[3 CROWN SOLDIERS SLAIN — EXP GAINED: 420]

[JAMES GANNER — EXP: 44,525 → 44,945 / 54,000]

[CALL OF SOULS ACTIVATED]

[MANA RESTORED: +90]

The elite guard fell back into the bridge-control chamber to make their stand, which was the correct decision and the last useful one available to them.

Maeve walked in already reading, and named the two ward anchors before the first exchange finished. Cillian broke both. Ronan and Finn worked the left side of the chamber, where five people who had fought this room once already knew the guards would refuse to give ground, and the line folded from that side in under three minutes.

The commander died on his feet with his sword up. Nineteen minutes had bought him nothing this time, because he had not been given nineteen minutes.

Then the winch, the chain drums, and the locking gears — the span went up, and came down into the river with a crash they felt through the stone, and twisted away downstream from the piers.

[GREYBRIDGE CROSSING DISABLED]

[STRATEGIC TARGETS CRIPPLED: 1/3]

The flare went off the southern wall, red into the evening.

[04:59:38]

They were mounted before it finished falling.

Twenty-three minutes south through the low hills, the ridge above Redfield gave them the answer.

No beacon burned over the fort.

No archers stood along the battlements, and no robed figures were spaced between them. The entrance was open, with a work party rolling barrels through it, and near the gate a quartermaster was arguing with a driver about where a wagon was meant to be parked.

Nothing moved on the southern road. The medicine that had been forty minutes gone by this point in the first attempt was still sitting in a storehouse a hundred meters from where the five of them lay.

Far to the south, Highwatch’s ridge showed only the ordinary lamps of a garrison at dusk. No answering beacon. The artillery frame stood dark and unhurried against the last of the light.

Nobody down there knew that Greybridge had stopped existing.

Cillian looked at the timer for a while before he said anything.

"Four thirty-six. Last time we sat on this exact ridge at four twenty-eight." He blew out a breath. "Eight minutes. A week of work for eight minutes."

"The eight minutes aren’t the prize," Maeve said, watching the quartermaster walk out through the open gate, still arguing. "That is."

[TIME REMAINING: 04:36:20]

[STRATEGIC TARGETS CRIPPLED: 1/3]

James lay still and watched the gate stand open.

One thread cut, and no way to know how many the weave had. The beacon crews. Whatever Greybridge’s garrison did when a patrol failed to return. Whatever Redfield did when a convoy came in late. A dozen quiet mechanisms a kingdom used to notice something had gone wrong, and they had only ever seen the one.

"Now we find out," he said, "if the patrol was the only mistake."