Kales laughed, jumped to his feet, and slapped Yozef on the arm. “Very nice, Yozef. I saw that coming, but you were too fast and too strong.”
“Let’s say we let that be the last fall of the day, Wyfor,” said Yozef. “I’d like to end it with a win, even if it does only make it thirty times of me dying to your once.”
The women walked to the house, followed by the men carrying the chairs back to the veranda. Yozef again missed odd glances thrown back by the women and their whispering, as he listened to Kales explain Yozef’s mistakes and Carnigan admit that Yozef might be able to outfight a drunk at the Snarling Graeko II, assuming the man was elderly enough.
20th Hour
The 19th-hour bell had passed while Yozef and Kales sparred, and the rest of the hour slipped by while Yozef bathed, donned fresh clothes, and took half an hour to review the day’s mail and messages coming to their home.
Precisely at the 20th bell, they sat for the evening meal. Yozef and Maera ate alone several nights a week, but not this evening. While Mirramel cared for the two babies, the diners included everyone who was a regular in the house and present that evening, be they family, friend, staff, or bodyguard: Yozef, Maera, Anarynd, Gwyned, Carnigan, Kales, and Serys. As Yozef looked around the table, he thought it an odd collection. The women and two of the most dangerous men on Caedellium. Yet somehow it didn’t seem all that anomalous.
21st Hour
The meal finished, Yozef said goodnight and made his nightly visit to Aeneas’s crib to kiss the child’s soft forehead, then he walked to his study to deal with more paperwork: filing, writing responses to mail and messages, and making notes. The incoming had been light this day, so he spent a half hour staring at a wall-mounted map of the island. He had marked X’s at St. Sidryn’s and Moreland City and, as he had many times, wondered where more X’s would eventually find themselves on the map.
22nd Hour
On the strike of the bell for the 22nd hour, Yozef put away the paper still sitting in front of him on the desk, took a last look at the map, turned off three kerosene lanterns illuminating the room, and walked through the quiet house to their bedroom.
Maera met him at the bedroom door. She had just finished bathing Aeneas and left him with Mirramel.
“I asked Mirramel to take care of the feeding tonight. I didn’t get much sleep last night and need to get up early tomorrow.”
Yozef felt disappointed but understood. He had thought about him and Maera delaying sleep while they engaged in other activities in bed, but there would always be tomorrow night.
23rd Hour
Yozef didn’t hear the bell for the 23rd hour. He had already been asleep for forty minutes. His last thought was that he didn’t know whether he’d achieved much that day. Thus did the days blend together, with more to do than he could possibly accomplish.
CHAPTER 30: WHAT LURKS IN THE NIGHT
Beach
Esyl Havant’s every sense probed for warnings, and every muscle was poised to act. He felt more alive at such moments than at any other time, and he honestly knew that these moments made his chosen profession the only one he wanted. He felt alive in a sense that he knew Gethin Drifwich never experienced. The Nyvaks spy crouched next to the rock face, as if making himself small would provide safety.
Tonight was the appointed night communicated by the hand-delivered message to Drifwich from the Narthani sloop. Havant pulled out a pocket watch, the only one of its type he had seen during his time posing as a Keelan semaphore station assistant in Caernford. He had brought it with him when he inserted into Keelan, then buried it along with other items that he didn’t want found in his possession. They hadn’t envisioned a specific use for the watch, but he and Hizer had planned for contingencies, such as needing accurate time at some unknown future date, like tonight. By prior agreement, they had synchronized the watch to the 1st-hour bell of Keelan abbeys. The Keelanders remained unaware that the effort to keep their abbeys on the same time worked to the Narthani’s advantage on nights like this. Havant and the sloop offshore could hear the Salford abbey bell and ensure synchronization.
Havant held the watch next to the lantern and partly lifted the flap that allowed signaling to this sloop, with the other three sides of the lantern painted black. It was time.
“All right, Drifwich, send it,” Havant said. He could have sent the message himself, but he wanted his nervous colleague to be involved. Doing nothing but crouching would only increase the man’s trepidations about what they were going to attempt.
Drifwich sent a single word, “go,” followed by a string of numbers that Havant gave him. Only he and the sloop captain knew that the numbers confirmed it was Havant sending the message.
Three spaced flashes of a lantern came within a minute. They couldn’t see the sloop in the darkness, but the flashes came from where the ship should be. The message sent, they left the hidden signaling position and followed a narrow game trail down to the beach.
Then they waited.
Havant didn’t check the time again, but his innate sense of passing time could not have been more than two minutes off when a longboat appeared, riding in on white surf. They could barely make out movement, and then men dressed in black jumped into the water. Several raced to shore, bypassing Havant and Drifwich and setting up a perimeter. The rest of the men pulled the boat ashore.
A figure in black walked up to Havant, intuitively ignoring the Nyvaksian. “Havant?”
“Yes,” Havant answered. “And you are?”
“Uzcil. Captain. Are we a go for the mission?”
“Everything is set, Captain Uzcil. Gather your men. We’ll have to hike a mile to where we left two wagons that will take us all to Caernford, the Keelan capital. Travel will be only at night. It will take two days, and I’ve selected a site where I believe we can stay during daylight tomorrow, but we’ll need to move quickly to make the overnight site before light.”
Havant looked toward the longboat. He could see several men standing with the boat, none of them carrying weapons or packs.
“I assume the navy men will take the boat back to the ship?”
“Boats,” corrected Uzcil, as a second boat beached. “The seas are high enough that the sloop captain didn’t want to overload one boat, and he said they’d need six rowers.”
“How many men do you have?” Havant inquired.
“Twenty, including myself. As planned. We’ll be ready to move out shortly.”
Seconds
Twinor Madof wasn’t supposed to be roaming the woods this far from home, and his father would have been furious if he’d caught his son disobeying—but not being caught was what made it fun. Besides, only in the thickest forests with heavy undergrowth did the adult flat-footed murvor come out of its burrow and forage for insects. The Anyarian avian was a delicacy, once the feathers were removed and the flightless murvor roasted. The canvas sack over his back could hold up to four of the creatures, all Twinor’s eight-year-old body could carry. If he could catch even one, his father might scold him but nothing worse, and should the hunt yield three or four, the family might sell one or two at the village market for a price equal to several days’ wages for a skilled craftsman.
“Shh,” cautioned the sentry, as Uzcil crept near. They had pushed the horses to exhaustion to reach the site Havant selected for them to wait out the daylight hours before continuing to Caernford. Most of the men slept in the dilapidated barn a mile off the Salford-Caernford road. One of the four sentries had roused Uzcil and led him a hundred yards into the woods.
“There’s someone nearby. I know it’s not an animal, since there was a clank of metal to metal. Whoever it is, they’re moving carefully.” Both men froze at the sound a branch breaking.
* * *
Damnation! Twinor cursed to himself. What an oaf. How do I expect to sneak up on one of them tasty murvors if I clop around?
He listened, not moving, breathing slowly and carefully. Despite their name, the word stealthy could
have been invented for the flat-footed murvor. Twinor had once seen one cross a glade covered in dry leaves and twigs without disturbing whatever it stepped on or eliciting a sound. When combined with feathers mottled in greens and browns, the murvor was almost invisible.
He listened for a minute. Two. The tasty creatures were stupid. If he waited quietly, any murvor within hearing would eventually forget it had heard something and would continue foraging. Five minutes of silence satisfied him that no murvor had heard his misstep, and he shifted the sack and slowly moved again.
Uzcil’s hand on the sentry’s shoulder tightened its grip. Both men heard rustles of cloth against foliage. Whoever it was had gotten closer. If the person kept the same direction, heading straight for the barn, they would see the wagons or hear the staked horses at any moment.
A bush branch moved aside thirty feet away, and a boy carrying a sack stepped around the bush and carefully set the branch back in its original position. The sentry slipped a knife out of its scabbard and looked questioningly at Uzcil. The strike leader’s face appeared stern. With a resigned nod, he released the sentry to silence the boy. Unfortunately, he saw no option. If the boy saw them, and they lost him in the dense woods, an alarm could be raised and jeopardize the entire mission. However, it was only three hours before dusk, and the boy might not be missed until it was too late to search the woods. They wouldn’t find his body until the next day at the earliest.
The boy had his back to them. Uzcil pulled his hand from the sentry’s shoulder. The sentry shifted the knife in his hand, placed the other hand on the ground to help catapult him out from cover, when—
“Twinor Madof! You answer me! I know this is where you go to hunt flat-footed murvors. You get back to the farm before your father realizes where you’ve been.”
“Oh, Mother,” Twinor moaned. “Every murvor within a mile heard you and is already back in its burrow.”
Dejected, Twinor turned and trotted toward his mother’s voice.
Uzcil had grabbed the sentry at the woman’s voice calling out. They heard the boy’s disappointed utterance and saw him disappear back in the opposite direction from the barn. They listened as the boy met his mother, her chastising audible until it faded with distance.
“Well,” said Uzcil, “that’s one boy who’s never going to fully appreciate the rest of his life.”
Six Miles from Keelan Manor
The stars had faded with the lightening sky when the two wagons left the Salford-Caernford road ten miles south of Caernford. They followed an old track another four miles to where it brushed a cluster of rocky hillocks, within which lay a depression forty yards across, where they made camp. They quickly set up tents and lit fires to prepare their first hot meal in two days. They extinguished the fires and coals before any smoke became visible in full daylight.
Uzcil made sure the camp was secure and his men fed before seeking out Havant, who had sat to one side—dozing, Uzcil thought, until his eyes popped open when the captain came within ten yards.
“Captain,” said Havant, acknowledging the strike leader’s rank and approach. “We’ll go over the mission now. We need to confirm that I’m in charge.”
Uzcil knew he had to establish lines of authority right from the beginning. The mission was precarious enough without adding a layer of confused command.
“According to my instruction, you are in charge of the mission’s timetable and of providing the information needed about the target. However, I will decide the details of how we make the strike, given the information you provide. You are not in tactical command.”
“Understood, Captain,” said Havant. “The men are yours, and even if I was so inclined and felt I had the authority, it would make no sense for a stranger to them to assume command. However, up to the point of the actual strike, it’s my duty to select time and place.”
Uzcil nodded. “Within limits,” he said. “I trust that your information will give us a reasonable chance at the hetman and a plausible chance to get away. This is not a suicide mission.”
Although Havant didn’t care whether any of the strike team survived, as long as they killed Hetman Keelan, he understood that the likelihood of success depended on Uzcil’s cooperation and his men’s belief they could escape.
His own priorities were, in this order, ensuring his own survival, assassinating the Keelan hetman, making a strike at this Yozef Kolsko, if possible, and safeguarding the strike team members. Least important was the fate of Drifwich, as long as whatever happened to the Nyvaksian didn’t impact Havant.
“I believe we can work out any issues, Captain,” said Havant. “The one change in the mission that I want to mention right off is an addition to the strike. The original plan was against the Keelan hetman, obviously because he’s considered a focus of resistance. A weakness to my assignment is that I couldn’t get detailed updates back to Preddi City. It’s only recently that I’ve uncovered another individual who seems at least as important as the Keelan hetman and possibly even more important. The individual is named Yozef Kolsko and apparently has been instrumental in several of our failures. I’m invoking my authority to add him to the mission.”
“Now wait,” said Uzcil, “it’s dicey enough to be hitting a hetman in the middle of his clan. We won’t have time to race around more sites, I don’t care how important you think this Kolsko is.”
“Fortunately, Kolsko lives only a half-mile from the hetman,” Havant said. “It turns out he’s married to the hetman’s daughter. I’m intimately familiar with both residences, and we should be able to make a pass at Kolsko after finishing with the hetman, since the exit route I’ve planned goes near the Kolsko house. If we miss him, there’ll be no time lost, we’ll just keep going.”
Uzcil’s expression told Havant the strike leader was dubious, but he hadn’t outright rejected the proposed addition to the mission.
“Let’s go over the plan I’ve come up with, Captain. You can evaluate whether the addition promotes any unnecessary risk, but I think your genuine doubts can be assuaged.”
Havant pulled out several sheets of paper, and the two men moved to a blanket spread out on the ground. He laid the sheets side by side. The first sheet was a diagram with squares, rectangles, line, words, and symbols.
“Here’s the layout of the hetman’s house. They call it the manor. The drive runs about eighty yards from the road to the front of the manor, here.” Havant continued with a description of everything marked on the diagram.
“There are four regular guards for the hetman. Two of them have fixed positions: one at the entrance to the drive and one on the front veranda.”
“Only four guards?” interrupted Uzcil. “You’re sure? I would have expected at least ten. I had figured that unknown number to be the biggest obstacle. My men are good, but for the attack to go forward, I was prepared to cancel if the opposition strength made it seem impossible. Only four guards? I may start to think this might actually work.”
“Four,” confirmed Havant. “I’ve been to the manor dozens of times. Even four is something new. Until a few months ago, there were no guards, only whatever working staff happened to be around.”
“Stupid of them,” said Uzcil, “but that’s fine with me. You mentioned two of the guards are stationary. What of the other two?”
“The times I’ve been at the manor when the hetman was at home, I couldn’t detect a pattern to the other two guards. Often, one is at the rear of the manor, and the other one walks the grounds, though it’s not consistent.”
“No matter,” said Uzcil. “With only four guards, we should go through them without hardly slowing. I assume they were picked for fighting ability, but so were my men, and we’ll outnumber them five to one.”
Havant pointed again to the manor house. “The obvious problem is that we can only attack when we’re confident the hetman is at home. Fortuitously, the hetman’s family keeps a rigid evening meal schedule. Within ten minutes of the Caernford main abbey ringing for 20th bel
l, the family is in the dining room.” Havant had pulled a diagram of the manor to the top of the sheets. “Here it is—to the left of the main entrance, down a hall. The only two exits from the dining room, besides windows, lead to the kitchen and the great room. You’ll have to account for the windows. We wouldn’t want to get this far and end up letting him slip away.”
“Besides the four guards, who else can we expect to be there?” asked Uzcil.
“Just the immediate family servants. The hetman, his wife, three daughters, ages about twelve to twenty years, three servant women, and a teenage boy around fifteen years. It’s not uncommon for the hetman to have guests, but we can’t predict who else might be there the night we attack. If there are guests, the number should be small—usually couples or families—so they shouldn’t present a threat to your men.”
“I agree, to a point,” said Uzcil. “The other factor is you can’t be sure the hetman will even be at the manor when we’re ready to strike. You’ll have to confirm the hetman is on site before I’ll commit my men. We’re not here to kill indiscriminately.”
Havant didn’t argue. Not that he had qualms about noncombatant deaths, but if the hetman disappointed them by his absence, there was no need to risk exposing himself. He would then send the strike team and Drifwich back to Salford as fast as they could travel. One of Uzcil’s men had already planned to drive the second wagon on the return trip.
Tomorrow night was the assigned date. Havant would make a final scout of Keelan Manor and attempt to confirm the hetman’s plans for the evening. For now, he needed to get back to Caernford to sleep and make final plans. He would arrive at the semaphore at dawn the next morning. If it turned out to be an average day, several messages should come in for the hetman, and Havant would establish whether the hetman would be home that night.
Heavier Than a Mountain (Destiny's Crucible Book 3) Page 41
