Milc/C.J. Milnes
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Chapter 41 - The man was dead, he just didn't know it yet
🕑 Added 2025-04-21 21:16:26 +0000 UTCI was busily sketching out maps of the enemy positions based on the visuals I had received from Glimpse. Fay and I were alone in our tent. I glanced up and smiled as she stretched out on our fur-lined bed and rolled over to face me, head propped up on one fist, elbow sinking into the primitive mattress. I was proud of the invention, although spring-steel had recently climbed to the top of my to-do list.
“This is a lot more comfortable than our old bed,” she said with a sigh. She hitched herself around, trying to find a position that eased the burden from her swollen belly. I moved over, pulled a cushion from behind her, and tucked it under her bulge. “Thanks, love. So much better. How hard do you think the battle will be?”
“I don’t want to jinx it. But with a bit of luck, we should be able to bait out the amalgams and their cavalry. I’d bet my left nut our boys are better in the saddle than Mortimers, and we’ve got plans to deal with amalgams now we know their weaknesses. Then we nuke the centre and the undead, while the nomads encircle them and wear the flanks down. The legion smashes them apart down the middle and we destroy them in detail,” I replied as I returned to my maps.
“You think it will be so easy?” Fay asked with a skeptical tone. I glanced up and flashed her a smile.
“Nope. But good plans should be flexible. We’ll keep the main camp well back from the front so we’ve got room to manoeuvre, and the captains know what they’re doing now. Most of them, anyway. There’ll always be a few hotheads who get themselves and their men killed.” I grimaced as I traced another line between the small port town and the main forts to highlight a supply route.
It’s time, Ray, Glimpse sent.
“I’m going to zone out and watch the killers move into the enemy camp, love. Give me a few minutes?” She nodded and rolled over onto her back, crossing her hands on her belly and trying to sleep.
“I’ll be here when you get back,” she said softly, but I suspected she’d be long asleep before my attention returned to my immediate surroundings.
I closed my eyes and focused my attention through the borrowed senses of my crow companion. It was a dark night, thin clouds were lit with silver light by the moons behind them, but all the stars were blocked out. More or less perfect conditions for what Janko and Herpatik were about to attempt. Dark enough to be able to slip through the shadows easily, but light enough that they weren’t operating in pitch black.
The two men had chosen to approach a camp behind one of the western forts. It was a morass of barely clothed men huddled around thousands of campfires that stretched out behind the more heavily defended hilltops.
My killers stayed low as they approached, flitting from shadow to cover, and back to shadows. Glimpse circled overhead, ready to warn them of any patrols. The pair had done their prep work. They knew where the sentries were and skirted between them. The wandering patrols were easily avoided by the occasional judicious caw from Glimpse to tell them to hold or push on.
They were sneaky bastards. I was impressed. Once they were past the outlying sentries and patrols, they set up an ambush by the latrine that was furthest out, and thus the least vile. The pair of them mobbed the first poor bastard who wanted to take a dump without smelling everyone else's shit. He was throttled. Not a nice way to go, but it’s quiet and when it’s two versus one, the one is shit out of luck. Steel-wire garottes were mandatory equipment for my kill teams.
The victim was stripped, and Janko put the stolen clothing on. He skipped the loincloth but put the simple kilt-like skirt on over his own. His original clothes, as well as the body, vanished into a storage bead. The only thing marking him out from the norm was the simple necklace of stones, all worked smooth and no larger than a pea, while it was an anomaly, it shouldn’t stand out too much in the dark.
Rinse and repeat. Two blokes who liked to crap at night were dead and my boys were kitted up to blend right in. They abandoned stealth from that point and began walking in the open. Goddamn, they were professional about it. With a tidy suit and a clipboard, you can walk into pretty much any office complex on Earth as long as you look like you know you belong and can smooth-talk the outer security. People just assume you have a right to be there. A knot of pride formed in my throat as they casually wandered through the camp towards the main supply dump.
Glimpse hopped from tent to tent ahead of them, a quiet caw letting the pair know when to stop or when to hurry on. They found the horses' fodder first. Bales of hay were piled up and left uncovered due to the warmth and lack of rain. Janko pulled out a series of jars from his storage, and the pair carefully threw the liquid in them across the huge piles of hay. Herbs I didn’t recognise were added to what I assumed were barrels of oats, and the pair moved on, nodding happily to the guards they passed on the way towards the command section, and they were politely ignored in reply. Glimpse knew where he needed to lead them, and they made a beeline for the officers' food supplies.
“Halt! What are you two doing?” demanded a guard in a gruff voice. Glimpse let out a double caw from above.
“Looking for a pisser. This place is fucking maze!” grumbled Janko.
“You two piss together do you?” the guard narrowed his eyes at them.
“Herpa here doesn’t like the dark. Hasn’t done since we were kids. Gotta look out for your old friends, don’t you?” Janko laughed as he pointed a thumb at Herpatik, who scowled in reply.
“Hadesti lurks in the night, Jankit. You know that better than most!” Herpatik replied.
“I don’t give a fuck what you do in the dark but the latrines are back that way!” the guard pointed back towards the edge of camp with the spear in his right hand.
“That way?” asked Janko, stumbling as he turned and putting himself just beneath the spearhead. The guard growled and slammed the shaft of the spear down into Janko’s shoulders. He did not get the response he expected. Janko must have burned a charge of Enhancement. I’d enchanted those beads myself, so he had just become nearly twice as strong as he ought to be.
The wood clacked on his shoulders, and he moved faster than should have been possible. One hand latched onto the shaft and pulled, throwing the guard off balance. His back foot flicked out in a blur to smack into the guard's stomach, doubling the man over and winding him.
Herpatik stepped in smoothly and wrapped a wire around the man's throat, crossing his arms quickly to yank it taught and make it bite into the throat through the cartilage. He shifted his hip, forcing the guard back upright and stretching him out when all his body wanted to do was curl around the pain in his gut.
“A little help?” he asked as he struggled with the guard who was scabbling at his throat and trying to throw his weight around so he could snatch a desperate breath. It was pointless. The initial tightening of the garotte had crushed his larynx. The man was dead; he just didn't know it yet.
Janko punched the guard in the chest, and the man stopped trying to pull the wire from his neck and curled his arms across himself. Janko broke his nose with his other fist, then stepped back to rub his shoulder.
“You’re the fucking bait next time, Herp. That shit hurts. We’re still just mortals.”
“Not for much longer. If we survive we’ll get the bond and join the nobility –quit fucking wriggling!–” he cursed the man suffocating in his grip, “and then we’ll be satraps with our own little kingdoms to rule in Mond’s name. We could found our own tribes!” Janko yanked the guard back into the shadows of a nearby hut, letting his body fall to the ground but keeping the noose tight around his throat.
“I admire your optimism.” Janko stepped forward and kicked the still-struggling guard in his left kidney. “How big are this prick’s lungs?”
Glimpse gave a warning caw, and a dagger flashed into the guard's chest to finish him off. His body vanished into storage, and Janko assumed the guard's position as a group of enemy soldiers wandered past. Herpatik lurked in the shadow of the hut and seemed to fade from sight as far as Glimpses could tell.
He’d used a trinket to create an illusion. I had no experience with the Light –or maybe it was the Darkness?– affinity, but I could see the effects were impressive. He blurred out, blending into the background. It sparked a tickle of paranoia. Predator-stealthed assholes could be sneaking through our camp at any time. Note to self– figure out a countermeasure for those kinds of shenanigans.
“Where’d Gruku go?” called one of them. “He’s promised me a game of stones once he finishes his shift!”
“To the pisser, the bastard roped me in to cover for him!” Janko called in a jovial voice, waving his snatched-up spear in the direction of the latrines.
“Typical. Have fun standing there for the rest of the night for him, you dumbass! He won’t be back!” called one of the others as they moved away laughing.
“I don’t like these shit-sitters,” muttered Janko as Glimpse moved over to sit on the hut beside the assassins.
“Me neither. Filthy fuckers. Aresk’s Holy Trousers, we need to get this done and get out. We can hit the other officers' stores tomorrow night. No point taking risks on our first run,” said Herpatik as he emerged from the illusion he’d thrown up.
“Yeah. What poison should we use? The horses are gonna refuse water and die, what do we do to the captains?”
“What did the Dreamer call it? The shit-your-guts-out potions. Won’t look like sabotage, just disease in the camp. This lot are so disgusting they won’t suspect a thing, but it does the job. If your patriarch is puking and shitting himself to death, he isn’t making sure you’re doing your job.” The pair flinched as Glimpse let out a series of caws that sounded disturbingly close to human laughter.
“The boss is amused, at least,” muttered Janko. The pair moved quickly through the finer foods reserved for the commanders. Potions were pulled from storage and then added to casks of salted meat and grains.
“Reckon we’re done for the night?” Herpatik added as they went back past where they’d killed the guard, leaving the neatly piled stores infected and poisonous. The pair were walking along casually, a couple of locals moving around in the night. There was enough foot traffic between groups of soldiers wandering from fire to fire, and the occasional more organised patrols, that they weren’t drawing any unwanted attention.
“Yeah. Let’s get the fuck out of here for now. We swing east and hit the other end of the line tomorrow night. If the ‘disease’ spreads inward, it would look normal, right? How long have these fuckers been camping here?”
“A few weeks or more, I reckon. The latrines near the camp were overflowing,” Herpatik replied. “Shit-sitters, brother. How there are so many of the bastards escapes me!” The pair nodded amicably at a random soldier who looked up as they passed a campfire.
“Hey mate! How’s the food in this part of camp?” called Janko, receiving a series of grumbled complaints in response from the men sitting around the fire.
“It’s gonna get fucking worse!” chuckled Herpatik quietly. “You know, I think you’ve got a bit of a mean streak?”
“That’s what we got picked for, Janko. That’s why we’re here…”
I snapped back to my own body and smiled. The training and the equipment were paying dividends. I was confident that whatever nightmarish, dysentery-inducing potions and herbs Kril had loaded them up with would do the intended job.
I marked a series of faint skull-and-crossbones symbols over the storage areas they hit and sketched a loose outline over the portion of the camp I expected to be affected. Despite the shit-tier levels of organisation the human forces in Mortimer’s army displayed, it was at best a guess. Logistics was clearly not a high priority for Morty, so while I was generous, I low-balled the estimates. A pessimist is often pleasantly surprised.
When I was finished, I laid a piece of leather, soft side down, over the parchment to help it dry and hopefully avoid smudges. I looked over at my wife. Fay was laid out on her back like a corpse at a wake, but the steady rise and fall of her chest assured me she was still alive despite her vampire-in-a-coffin pose.
I took a sip of ched, the bitter tea now more familiar than any taste from Earth, and stripped down. I threw my underthings into a pile, laid the impervious tunic over a wooden chest, and slipped into the furs next to my wife. I gently pulled them up over her as I burrowed beneath the animal skins, until our skin was touching.
She sighed and leaned into me, leaving a long line of skin joining us from breast to toes. I liked my space in the night, enough room to move about and cool down, but I didn’t pull back. Her hair tickled my nose, and I suppressed a sneeze.
My hazel-eyed goddess. Mother to my soon-to-be-born first child. She leaned in, raising her face for a kiss.
“Not asleep yet then!” I grinned as I leaned down to brush my lips against hers. “Sleep now, love. I’m here. I’ll always be here. We’ve got armies to organise tomorrow and enemies to slay soon.”
“How did the killer do?” she murmured as she nuzzled into my neck.
“Well enough. Professional. I’m proud of them.”
“They lived?” she whispered casually.
“Oh yes. Going to do some more damage tomorrow night as well, from the sound of it. Good lads.”
“We’ll need to find good wives for the survivors,” she muttered. “Goodnight, love.” What savage people! But I loved them almost as much as I loved the woman pressed against me.
“Goodnight, Fay.”
