73

Michael was lucky. The man that was running for the stairs tripped on an uneven bit of stone, and by the time the Penitent had reached him, he decided to fight rather than be stabbed in the back. He drew a shortsword and leapt toward Michael, who didn’t slow but instead twisted his body so that the shield on his back would absorb the blow as he slammed his shoulder into the man, knocking him back onto the ground. He drew the aelven dagger from his waist and drove it quickly into the man’s chest.

He stood, panting for a few seconds, and looked, around seeing Bayle holding up a hand toward him and a finger to his mouth. They stayed quiet for a few moments, but there was no sound of footsteps approaching or any indication that they’d been heard.

Bayle nodded and gestured for Michael to come closer.

Aside from them, everyone else was on the ground coughing and recovering from the gaseous poisoning they’d experienced in the sewer tunnel. Michael held up a hand and started to heal them. He couldn’t remove the poison itself from them, but he could recover the tearing in their lungs and rupturing of the capillaries in their noses. He kept it up for several straight minutes until the toxin had worked its way through their systems.

As he did that, Bayle dragged the corpses of the guards they’d killed to the sewer entrance and tossed them inside. He then lifted the sewer door itself and closed it. It wouldn’t stand up to close inspection, but at a glance it would suffice. After that, he muttered something under his breath, and the bloodstains left by their struggle were cleared from the ground and his clothes. He then moved over to Michael and cleared the blood off of him as well. Bayle wasn’t a mage, but he seemed to have picked up a number of very useful little spells.

He looked at the rest of them as they recovered.

“The easy part’s done. Now we need to get to the side gate before anyone raises the alarm. We need to move fast; I wasn’t expecting them to have guards down here. Remember to stay silent and let me do the talking.”

With throats too sore to talk, everyone nodded, and they fell in line behind Bayle as they made their way to the same stairs that the guard had been running toward. They climbed them and found themselves in what looked like a storeroom. There were barrels, crates, and baskets filled with fresh water, wine, ale, flour, and all other manner of goods. They seemed very well stocked for a long siege. Stent would lose a lot of men before they would be able to starve them out.

Outside the storeroom, they found themselves in the courtyard. It was dark, and there were only a few tan-uniformed soldiers going about their business. He saw some moving supplies up to the wall, others training with spears, and a few just sitting around small fires, talking in hushed tones. He imagined they were anxious, seeing the large camp outside the walls, knowing this fort has fallen before. Bayle walked at a relaxed pace toward the eastern wall. While there was a main gate at the front and the back of the fort, there were also smaller gates on the eastern and western side. They could only let a few people in or out at a time, but they only needed to bring in enough people to get the main gates open and send the signal.

They reached a door that would lead them from the interior wall to the exterior, and Bayle pushed it open. They all shuffled into the narrow hallway and noticed some other soldiers, one of whom seemed to be a sergeant, approaching from the other side. Bayle put his back against the wall to let them pass and saluted with his fist on his chest and no fingers extended; the others copied his gesture and went against the door. The sergeant had nearly passed them when he stopped and looked back at Michael with a frown.

“Where’d you get that dagger?” he asked, taking a few steps toward him. Michael had never heard a Tusynian speak more than a few words, but the man’s voice had a bit of a lilting quality to it, like an English accent.

“I, uhh…”

“He won it off an aelf in a dice game, sir,” said Bayle in an accent that perfectly matched the sergeant’s.

“An aelf that played dice? I’ve only ever seen those pointy-eared bastards play their odd little word games.”

“He was with a pretty big mixed group of mercs. Maybe he picked it up from them.”

The sergeant frowned. “And how did you win? Those fucks are quick and clever when they want to be.”

The question was directed at Michael, and Bayle gave him a subtle nod to answer for himself.

“Cheated,” said Michael, hoping a one-word answer would hide his lack of accent.

The sergeant laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. “Good man. They keep paying these mercs more and more but can’t raise our goddamned stipends a single copper. Take them for all they’re worth.” He gave them all a nod and continued walking with his men trailing him.

Bayle dropped his salute, and they started walking through the hall toward the outer wall.

“That was well done,” said Pyotr.

“I just channeled Marcus.”

Marcus snickered behind him.

They kept moving in the dark. It was dark enough that there weren’t a lot of people out, as it had been with the interior wall, but not so dark that no one was out. Michael assumed the timing of that was intentional on Bayle’s part. It let them avoid large crowds that may call them out but also gave some cover to a small group moving around without arousing suspicion.

They reached the portion of the wall that connected to the gate. There were five guards on the gate itself as well as patrols on the gates in groups of three that swung through every twenty or so minutes.

Bayle had them all adjust their pace as he carefully watched the most recent patrol leave the gatehouse, then sped his pace along with them.

“We’re going to get in close and end them quickly. We want quick and quiet, understood?”

They all nodded and started to spread out around Bayle a bit as they moved toward the guards.

“Hail,” said Bayle, doing a salute as he moved toward them. The guards looked at him with confusion but returned the salute. “We’re here to relieve you.”

One of them moved toward him with a look of confusion. “We only got here less than an hour ag⁠—”

Bayle drew a dagger and jammed it under the man’s chin, killing him instantly and not adjusting his pace at all as he moved toward the next nearest of them.

Marcus unslung a bow from his arm, notched and loosed an arrow in the time it took to take a breath, dropping another of the guards. Pyotr crossed ten feet in the blink of an eye to run another through with his sword, and Ollie raised a hand and sent a rock Michael hadn’t even realized he’d been holding flying toward another of them, hitting the man in the skull and dropping him. Michael and Davi weren’t even able to close in on one of them before it was over, with Crick having killed the last of them without Michael even seeing it. Instead, they grabbed some of the bodies and dragged them into the guardhouse to hide them.

Bayle pointed Davi and Michael to the crank and sent Ollie and Marcus up onto the wall. Pyotr watched their backs with Bayle as they slowly pulled the crank, flinching at the sound it made as the metal gate creaked. Still, no one seemed to react, and the next patrol would still be ten minutes away.

Bayle moved to the open gate and held up a hand, summoning an orb of light once, then dismissing it, then summoning two and dismissing them, then another one, which he held for a few seconds, then dismissed. Black-cloaked figures started to run toward the gate, becoming barely visible in the gloom, and began to quickly file inside the walls. There were four groups of fifteen, and three of the groups made their way for the main gate, while the last squad had its own mission to create diversions at the opposite end of the castle.

Once they were through, Michael and Davi tied off the gate. There would be more men coming through when action on the main gate started off. The general had only allowed them sixty until it was open, and even that had taken threats and cajoling from Bayle, from what Michael had gathered.

“Let’s go up to the wall to meet the others. We need to clear the incoming patrol to buy time. After that, we move to help get the main gate opened.”