Chapter 112: Wish me luck

“This is a really stupid idea.” I told Kerrass. “I know that we've done some pretty stupid things in the past. I know that many of them were my idea but this one? This one takes the cake.”

“This one?” Kerrass was watching the knight's enclosure carefully. “This one doesn't even break the top five stupid ideas that we've acted on.”

I frowned as a question occurred to me.

“There's a top five?”

“Yes. Definitely.”

We watched as the sentry knights, although we couldn't definitely confirm that they were knights, were relieved of duty by another pair of men. Their armour wasn't as ornate and expensive as some of the other “knights” that we had seen and so we had wondered if these men were actually closer towards being normal men at arms, or squires.

From what we had learned about “The Knights of the Flaming Sword” they weren't the kinds of men that enjoyed standing outside, in the rain, watching out for enemies. From what we had learned, the thought that they could be attacked was nowhere near the top of their priorities when stacked against the prospect of a good nights sleep and some warm food in the belly.

So I suspected that they followed their normal pattern which was that they would send their squires to do it. Their arrogance was overwhelming.

“This is pretty bad though isn't it?” I wanted to check. I was fascinated with the idea that Kerrass had been grading our stupid decisions and ranking them in order of our stupidity.

“It's not that bad. It has a fairly decent chance of working.”

“Isn't the plan a little complicated? You're always telling me that the simplest plans are the best.”

“And normally that would be true.”

“So hang on,” The thought just wouldn't go away. “What's the stupidest plan that we've ever come up with?”

“You're kidding right?”

“No. Just curious.”

“This from the man who thought it would be a good idea to try talking to a dragon?”

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“Hey, that isn't fair. The dragon thing worked.”

“That doesn't make the plan any the less stupid.”

We watched the four sentries exchange some words, probably updating the new sentries on anything strange that they might have seen in the meantime. You know the kind of thing “Watch that bush, it's a tricky fucker. Could easily hide a man behind it.” and “Wagon train of people passed a while ago, gave us a glare.” and also, the ever popular, “Patrol went out earlier, on their way back.

The new sentries settled into their positions and waited. It was getting properly dark now and as we watched, one of the sentries leaned back into the enclosure to see if anyone was watching before producing a small cloth bag and producing a chunk of what we assumed was tobacco and started chewing.

Kerrass and I looked at each other.

“Definitely not knights.” We said at the same time.

“This is still a dumb idea.” I told him.

“Well, let's run through it again.” He told me backing down from the small hillock that we were laying behind so that he could do some exercises and limber up a bit. “Do you have a better plan?”

“I do actually. You should send me in there first.”

“Now Freddie, we've talked about this. I will do more initial damage, but also, they will want to keep me alive for the torture when they inevitably overwhelm me.” Thanks for reading on ManaNovel!

“I know, I know. I know that the plan requires for one of us to get captured so that the other can run around and cause havoc. I just think that you are going to be better at causing havoc than me.”

Kerrass stopped his exercises and looked at me for a while.

“There's something else though isn't there?” He asked me.

“As a matter of fact there is.” I admitted. “I'm not sure that I can slit the throats of anyone that's still asleep. Killing people in self-defence? ok. I can do that. But murdering them in cold blood? I'm not sure I can do that Kerrass.”

“Even despite everything that we've seen and heard?”

“I'm just....I know all of that but....”

“These people need killing Freddie.”

“I know, I know and I agree.” I told him, and I meant it. “But I'm not convinced that, when it comes down to it. I'm not convinced that I won't hesitate at the worst possible moment.”

Kerrass went back to his exercising. “I can't take them all out by myself.” He told me. “There's too many of them for that. TO do it myself I would need to pick them off piecemeal. I would need to draw them out, isolate them and pick them off one at a time. We both agree that that would make people run off and start spreading the news that someone is killing church knights.”

“I know that but...”

“So we need to kill all of them tonight.”

“I agree with that too.”

“To manage that, we need to keep them all in one place.”

“Kerrass we've been over this and over this...”

“So we'll go over it again.” He snapped. “To keep them in one place we need to attack them. But it's certain that the person that attacks them will be overwhelmed, right?”

“Yes.”

“So, I'm fairly attached to my skin as I assume you are to yours. So we need a way for that person to survive that initial attack. How do we do that?”

“We need them to want to keep the person alive.” We really had been over this time and again.

“Correct. They will want to keep me for torture. I am a filthy mutant deviant freak and they're going to want to torture me for what I know and their own enjoyment. You, why wouldn't they just kill you?”

“Because I am a noble. They would want to keep me for ransom.” I had tried this point before.

“This is true but, also you are a normal human and they are aware of how famous you are. They're not going to want you to get away and start publishing your stories about them. They also know that if they do let you go then you are going to tell people who and what you saw as well as reporting them to the nearest garrison. So why wouldn't they just cut your throat and throw you in a ditch. You have nothing that they want.”

“I might.”

“But we don't know that. So it needs to be me.”

I sighed. He was right of course. We had had this argument several times since we had found the enclosure and I had lost every time. Mostly because, he really was right. There was absolutely no reason. At all. For the knights to keep me alive. If I attacked them, then they would just kill me. But Kerrass had the skills and the talents to really make them mad. Mad enough to keep him alive to torture him.

The plan then went, that I would follow Kerrass into the enclosure while everyone was still crowing over their capture of a Witcher and cause havoc by virtue of setting fire to the buildings, poisoning the well, setting the horses free and killing a few more knights. The idea was that I would get Kerrass' bombs and potions to him which he would then use to really go to work.

My problem was that I just wasn't sure that we could do it.

“Hold on,” I said as a thought occurred. “What about my going off to speak to Jack? Surely that should be the number one, most stupid thing that we've done?”

“Ah, but that was your plan. I had nothing to do with that plan. If we were making a list of stupid things that you've done, separate from me, then this would be a whole different conversation.”

“That's not reassuring.”

“It wasn't meant to be.”

“I still think that this is a bad plan that is, at the very least, going to get you tortured and probably killed.”

“If the things that we've seen and heard over the last few days are any indication. I would be quite happy if we just managed to take a few of the bastards with us.”

“That's not the ideal though is it.”

“No, we need to kill them all. And that Bishop too. That fucker needs to die.”

I thought of some of the atrocities that we had seen and heard about. “No,” I said. “That bastard I could definitely murder in his sleep.”

“Could you?” Kerrass seemed surprised. “Personally, I want him to be awake so that he has the chance to realise what was going to happen to him.”

“Now that's a cheerful thought.”

Kerrass grinned nastily as he came up the hill to watch as it was now my turn to limber up, keep my body warm in the rain and make sure that I didn't get cramp.

Calling what we were looking at “a fortress” was a little bit ambitious. It was more of a....I want to call it a fortified monastery. There was a central church building which seemed to have a large and rambling building attached to it which was also made from stone. Those were the original buildings and had clearly been there for many years but since adopting the place, the Knights of the flaming sword had made some changes.

There was a hangman's scaffold there as well as well as a large stone that prisoners were manacled to. There were also a number of outbuildings.

We had spent the better part of a day scouting the place out, looking through the gaps in the pallisade to see what could be seen and preparing our entrances and how we were going to play things that evening. We had identified the stables as well as several storehouses which we knew stored the food as well as all the bounty that they had looted from the surrounding areas. We had also seen a dormitory for what we thought would be the servants.

The entire enclosure had been surrounded by a log palisade although there were obvious signs that it hadn't been particularly well made. They had also made a ditch round the outside of the fence but this had actually had the effect that it had weakened the wall itself, meaning that the spacing of the logs wasn't entirely uniform.

Several of the weaknesses in the perimeter opened out into enclosed areas where no sentries could easily see into which meant that infiltration would, in theory, be easier.

The problem was that these kinds of places, often have large and complex catacombs underneath them. It's not just cities that are built on the top of old elven ruins. Old shrines, burial sites and old homes are often fair game. There are even many instances where churches and abbeys are built on the top of what I hesitate to describe as “pagan” sites or sites of natural disaster. Shrines to Veyopatis, Melitele, the Lionhead, old mines, caves and more are often re-purposed into churches. The logic goes that the new and imported holiness goes on to combat the old pagan powers.

There's also the theory of “holy coincidence” which is that “Holy events” are often drawn to the same areas and similar circumstances. The Lay line phenomenon is also a thing, that holy builders are drawn to the same places and build their places of worship, by sheer coincidence, are built in the same place. It does happen, more often than we care to believe.

But my concern was that there were more soldiers and things underneath that we knew nothing about. I was also worried that there might be some kind of escape tunnel to it. As well as watching the place and getting the lay of the land, we had spent some time looking into other buildings to see if we could find an exit for a potential tunnel but we had failed to find anything. We had even moved some large stones aside to see if there was anything hidden underneath but no....nothing there.

But it was still a concern.

Seeing at night wouldn't be an issue as the place was all but covered in torches. This is a common feature in places that have been dedicated to the Eternal flame as the practitioners tend to want to keep the fire around themselves as much as possible. As though it would ward off evil. Practically, in this case though, all it would do would be ruin the night vision of all the people in the enclosure.

I also wondered at the psychological aspect of all of that fire. As I say, it ruins your night vision if you're near all that flickering flame, but the other thing that this does is that it makes the blackness outside of the circle of fire all the more oppressive, thus driving home the point that the knights were surrounded by evil and things to fear. That they should be on guard at all times and the only times that they were truly safe was when they were close to the flame, both literally and spiritually.

Our information was that there were a total of twenty five knights in the order with, maybe, another twelve squires and another eight men that were describes as squires but were actually more the kind of armed man that does the kind of jobs that no-one else wants to do. From looking at the behaviour of the current sentries we guessed that they belonged to this particular caste of “squire”. We assumed that they were lower born men who wanted to join but, because they weren't “properly” born, they weren't allowed to be proper knights. But likewise, they were too good at their jobs to behave like the other kinds of squires, who were essentially glorified slaves. So they were made into “men-at-arms.” They did the military jobs that the knights considered as beneath them but needed more expertise than what the squires had.

The knights also didn't enjoy letting the younger, more impressionable squires out of their sight.

The knights themselves slept inside the main building. They slept, ate and prayed in the main building. Training was done out of the main enclosure on one of the flatter fields immediately to the north. Both tilting and fencing. To be fair to them, they did look as though they worked quite hard at their fighting skills but at the same time, to my mind at least, that went even further to reinforce that we were running a huge risk.

The Bishop, Sansum, had his own room in the complex. We had no idea where it was as we hadn't been able to get inside the building itself to have a look around. We made some educated guesses though. We knew, from a couple of sources that he had a large collection of books which he liked to show off to visitors and the other members of his little order. So we reasoned that they would need to be kept above ground where there was less danger of getting damp and rot into the written word.

I also thought it was a bit rich that the library that Pula, Saffron and Sally had protected and maintained, had been burnt while Sansum collected books himself.

Sansum was a thin little weasel of a man. He had straggly hair and whiskers that grew in tufts around the top of his head and he looked like a younger man that had aged before his time. He had a huge forehead and a rapidly retreating widow's peak. He would tip his head forward so that he had to look at people through his eyebrows which also made him seem sly and slimy. He moved around at an incredible pace. The rumour was that he didn't sleep and existed off the power of prayer but I don't believe that. We also heard that he would regularly go off to “study” where he wasn't to be disturbed and I strongly suspected that he used those opportunities to have a nap.

He could regularly be seen around the complex. Preaching to the knights at training, preaching to the prisoners, tied to the stone and exhorting the men onto greater efforts. Whenever a group of horsemen went out, he would come to the gates to bless them all, in turn, before they were allowed to leave.

He worked hard, I'll give him that, but it was the kind of work that made me want to punch him. I didn't see him lift a stone, or carry some goods or even help an injured knight. It was as though he was allergic to doing any kind of physical work for himself.

We were delayed for another couple of days while we waited to have all the knights in the place at the same time as we didn't want to lose one that could turn the whole lot of them into martyrs as that would be the worst possible thing that could happen.

Kerrass' plan was to walk up to the open gates and move towards where the prisoners were and attempt to free them. He figured that would gain him more than enough attention to be going on with as he quickly supposed that people would flock out of the various buildings to try and stop him and he intended to go down swinging.

My own plan depended on what the enemy did from there. They would either assume that Kerrass was alone, in which case they would simply all gather round his capture, laughing and hooting which meant that I could simply walk in through the main gate. The other option was that they would be a little wiser and reinforce the outer sentries.

In theory, this would be better for me. Kerrass could be depended on to kill at least four men but probably a good few more than that which would mean that I re-inforced sentry presence would mean that there would be less people walking around the main enclosure to spot me. I would climb in, using one of the gaps in the defences, before making my way over to the stores which we knew contained lamp oil and start spreading it around the place before setting fire to it. I wanted to aim for the stores, then the stables and the stables before I figured that I would have to start closing in on where Kerrass was.

I secretly wanted to get at the prisoners and burn down the scaffold as well. But the three buildings I was fairly certain that I could set those fires in secret. The scaffold and the prisoners were in the open and I wouldn't be able to help them, or set the fire without being seen.

It was full dark by the time that Kerrass was satisfied.

“Right then, here we go.” He said. “Wish me luck.”

“Kerrass, are you sure that I can't convince you to let me go in your place. You will be far better at the chaos and murdering aspect of the plan.”

“You'll do fine.” He told me, clapping me on the shoulder. “But seriously though,” he said, taking care to properly look me in the eyes. “Thanks for doing this with me. I'm not sure I could have done this alone.”

“Of course you could.” I told him. “You just wouldn't have done it with quite as much class and sex appeal.”

He told me to fuck off and went to walk off.

“Wait,” I called out and he came back, a look of concern crossing his face.

I let him stew for a minute.

“What are the other things in the top five most stupid things we've ever done.”