Chapter 113: Wish me luck (2)

Kerrass grinned. “Amber's crossing is number one. The thing with the dragon is number two.” He was counting them off on his fingers. “Summoning the ghost of a king is number three although it's possibly tied with that time that we stood up to an elder vampire and told her to behave. So that's three and four. Five? Five was that time we walked into a nest of werewolves.”

“I don't remember that?”

“That was because I lied and told you that we were going in to speak to someone I knew who could tell us about about werewolves in general.”

I felt my mouth fall open.

“I flirted with his wife.”

“Yes, and she thought you were very gallant.”

“So there's a separate list for things that I have done?”

“Oh yes.”

“Go on then.”

“Freddie, I should really get going.”

“Yes, but You might not make it so how else am I going to find out about these things.

“Ok. Number one is talking to Jack. Number two is chasing after Laughing Jack without me. Number three is asking Letho about Witchers and the trials. Four and five are all to do with the fact that you agreed to marry an elder vampire. I know that those last two are technically only one thing that you've done but I feel that it's so important a point that it bears mentioning twice.”

“Yeah,” I mused. “Yeah, but to be fair to me. She is really hot.”

Kerrass turned to go.

“Kerrass wait.”

He sighed and turned back.

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“What are your own personal top five stupid things that you've ever done?”

“I don't know really,” he mused. “I'm pretty sure I know what number one is though.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, agreeing to let you tag along with me on my travels.”

We both laughed.

“Good luck Kerrass.” I told him.

“Good hunting Freddie.”

Then he was gone. I climbed back up to the top of the hill. There was no way that I wasn't going to watch this whole thing happen.

Kerrass had left his silver sword with our main cache of equipment. The bags were buried under a rock about half a days walk from here along with the sword as well as some other letters that might be important. I had told Ariadne where to look for them if she didn't hear from us which was when we had our first proper fight.

Having a fight with a woman that you love is never fun. Having a fight with an Elder vampire that you love, who can also rip your spine out of your back with her bare hands, is even less fun. Thanks for reading on ManaNovel!

In the end though, we went on her way. I would like to say that we did so with her blessing but I'm not entirely confident that that would be true.

Kerrass had his steel sword, I had my spear, his crossbow and his potion box as well as a number of bombs that Kerrass had spent a bit of time putting together with a certain amount of relish. We also had some supplies for the long night ahead. Some water, some food and my first aid kit completed our equipment inventory.

So, Kerrass walked up to the main opening in the fence. He did so openly and without any attempt at stealth. He walked past the two, astonished guardsmen with a jaunty wave and a greeting and just walked past them.

It was almost comical watching the two men do a double take straight from the stage-shows in Novigrad.

They looked at Kerrass, looked at each other, looked at Kerrass again who raised his hand in greeting before walking past them. One of them even partially raised his own hand to answer.

I had the strongest suspicion that Kerrass was whistling. He had that, easy, relaxed posture he had when he had just visited the brothel.

I found that I was smiling in appreciation of the showmanship of the scene.

One of the two guards, presumably finally realising that things weren't going the way that they were supposed to, finally called out to Kerrass who turned and shouted something back before carrying on walking towards where the prisoners were chained up.

The two guards looked at each other again. It was easy to imagine what they were thinking. It was as though they were checking with each other that what they were seeing was real.

One of them drew a sword which was when it suddenly became a lot less funny.

Kerrass ignored them until one of them put their hands on his shoulder. Kerrass spun, the metal of his sword flashed in the firelight and the man who had placed his hand on Kerrass' person, lost that hand. He stared at the stump for a moment, he had dropped his sword to grip the stump and even though it was too far away and too dark for me to see, I knew that the stump would be gushing blood. He stared in what must have been in disbelief and shock before the pain and the awful realisation hit him.

Then he screamed.

The other guard had drawn his sword by now and made a good attempt at a stab at Kerrass' right hand side. Kerrass simply rolled his sword over the blade and disembowelled the poor man.

Yes, these men had done awful things to a lot of people that didn't deserve it. But stomach wounds are horrible things.

Two men down. I knew that it was all but futile to start counting them off as we killed them but it was impossible, not to think, that the situation was that little bit better and that there were two less men to face.

Another pair of armed men rushed round the main church building and ran to intercept Kerrass before he made it to the prisoners. Kerrass feinted one way before leaping up and round to the right with a huge chopping motion to the man's neck. Although he didn't sever the head, he was damn close. But now Kerrass was exposed to the other man. Kerrass rolled away and came to his feet, spinning on his heel to meet the charging man. The man swung his sword before Kerrass used the momentum of his rising to his feet to cut the man up through the groin and inside leg from his knee.

Four men dead or dying. Two of which were screaming horribly.

Kerrass ran towards the prisoners again but I had to shift from my current hiding place if I wanted to see what was going on.

As I moved, carefully and away from the ridge line, the church bell started to ring. The alarm was up now and I could, all to easily, imagine men and knights, climbing from their beds, putting clothes and armour on and going out to do battle against the lone Witcher that had come out of the night with bright sword and cruel eyes.

By the time I could see what was happening again, Kerrass was limping while engaging three men around where the prisoners were tied up. These men were better fighters, able to take Kerrass on on equal terms. Kerrass was backing up which took him away from the prisoners, looking for an advantage. One of the knights, confident that he was well outside of Kerrass' sword range, turned and cut the throat of one of the villagers that was tied there.

I assume that it was to try and anger Kerrass into making some kind of mistake. Trying to provoke him or make him angry.

I know they made him angry but whether that made him make a mistake, I'm not sure I could judge.

They were trying to steer him now. There was another group of men forming up behind him under the direction of someone that I couldn't see. More and more men were coming now, putting on helms and shrugging into chest-plates. A couple of the men that I identified in my mind as being “squires” had produced bows and were doing their best to string them while also being shouted at to help the knights into their armour.

I wasn't sold on the idea of using bows though. It was still dark, with flames flickering and there was only one Kerrass while there were so many other people around that could very easily get caught in the crossfire.

Kerrass saw what was happening.

He made a complicated gesture with his hands and one of the men staggered as though drunk.

Another gesture and a different man was sent backwards with a guest of air. Kerrass fell on a third and after a brief exchange of sword strikes and parries, Kerrass found a gap in the man's armour and, once again, blood sprayed in the firelight.

My count was inaccurate now as I thought, or hoped, that Kerrass might have taken a couple more people down in the time where I had been moving. I told myself to be pessimistic though and counted that as five.

Kerrass jumped on the man that he had knocked over, knocking him back down to the ground. I saw that he must have let go of his sword to draw a dagger and used it to stab the man in the chest, twice before he rolled off, scooping up his sword as he went.

Six men down. The last man that Kerrass had quickly tried to enchant, shook his head but sensibly advanced slowly, sword in a proper guard position. I thought that he called for something and a younger man came over and handed over a shield. A squire presumably.

We had hoped, as we had made our plans, that the junior squires. Those men like the one that we had rescued, we would be able to spare. That they might be open to being rescued.

But needs must. Kerrass stepped forward and decapitated the squire with one smooth stroke.

Seven men down, but Kerrass was visibly getting tired now. Stopping to draw breath. More knights were getting better armoured now. People were calling to the Witcher. I couldn't hear what they were saying but the tone was derogatory and mocking. They were jeering him.

Oh, that was a mistake.

I knew what was coming next though. Now, he was just going to do as much damage as he could before they took him down.

Kerrass very rarely bellows with rage when he fights. I tend to note it down when it happens because it's so rare when he actually does it. He says that it tends to give the game away as to what you're thinking and what you're going to do next.

This time, he bellowed and threw himself into the middle of them, sword spinning in murderous circles. I saw blood blood splattering into the night. I heard men screaming and shouting. I saw one man coming away from the general melee, doing his best to hold his guts in. But it was a foregone conclusion now.

I didn't want to watch any more and I moved off and started to count my heartbeats.

It's a trained response. When you're waiting for something, to start to count. It's also really difficult. I've talked about having to spend time waiting for the next thing to happen before and it's never easy. Some people claim that it's because the anticipation is the worst part of any kind of venture but, now that I've done this a lot more, I'm not so sure that that's the case. Now I find that the worst part of the entire thing is the knowledge of what's going to happen next.

So if anyone ever tells you that the waiting gets easier then I need to tell you now that they are either wrong, or psychopaths.

The more I see, the harder the waiting gets. By some margin. When I first started waiting for the action to start, all that time ago in a small group of trees next to a Nekker nest, I had no idea what was going to happen next. I had seen a child die and I'd seen a man have his head removed by virtue of a very sharp sword. But I hadn't seen the horror that's involved in a stomach wound. Nor had I seen the amount of blood that comes out of a slashed neck, or the phenomenal pressure behind a slashed femoral artery. I had not heard a grown man begging for water and the comfort of a mother's love. By this point though, I had come across all of those things.

The traps are there in the silence as you think of all the things that you might not be getting the chance to do in the near future. I might not get the chance to find Francesca, or marry Ariadne or say goodbye to Emma or Mark. I would never be able to go hunting with an Empress or give my first lecture.

That's where the fear comes from. Not the anticipation when you are wondering what could happen and what it might feel like.

But when you know what might happen and what it will feel like.

Yes, I know what it feels like. Any man that has tried to push a man's intestines back into his gut or has comforted a man in the last moments as they wait to die will tell you that they know how much it hurts. It hurts so much that you beg for the death to come to you faster rather than leaving you in agony, or even worse, leaving you as a cripple.

That's the worst thing. As a society, we don't look after our cripples. We leave them out in the streets to starve and beg for the scraps from our passing by. So many of them.

Three wars. Three wars worth of crippled men and crippled women.

.

I'm sorry. It's one of those things that I get worked up about if I don't catch myself.

I sat in the dark and I waited. Counting off the heartbeats.

I lost count somewhere around the three hundred and fifty mark and had to start again.

Then again at four hundred and forty four.

Then I told myself that if I could make it to two hundred then I would go for it.

Which I did on my first try.

The fear coiled thickly in my belly. I took the time to properly relieve myself, took a drink from the water-skins. Strapped the potion box, nice and securely to my back so that it wouldn't come loose, and made sure that the bag containing Kerrass' crossbow was also immediately to hand. I had all of Kerrass' leftover gear on a bandolier that I carried across my chest. I was comfortable with the bombs but precious little else, but the plan needed these things to be inside the circle.

I took up my spear and fitted the two halves together.

I remember a thought that occurred then as I stood there in the dark, listening to the knights and what was left of the squires running around like the terrified, headless chickens that they were. When all of this was over. When I was done with my travels and following Kerrass around like a shadow. What would I do with my spear? Hang it over some hearth in whatever home that Ariadne and I would choose as our home.

I tried to imagine it for a moment, the two of us, sat there, sharing a bottle of wine and reading a book with this weapon fastened to hooks above the fireplace.

I couldn't see it and the image wavered before my eyes.

Last thing.

I took hold of my medallion in a firm grip.

“I love you. So much.” I told it. “Please don't hate me for this.”

As I had suspected that she would be, she was listening and watching.

“I don't hate you,” she told me. “I just wish I was there with you. I love you too. Please be careful.”

I nodded. I had been a lot more afraid of that than I had thought I might be.

Time to get this done though.

I had a cautious look over the rise to see what was going on. It looked as though, if Kerrass was alive, he had been taken indoors. In all truth, I wasn't that worried about his survival. He was right, these fuckers would want to take him alive and torture him for a few days before letting him die. He was also right that they would just kill me unless they thought that I might have some information that they might want.

To tell the truth though, I was also a little surprised that Ariadne had not simply ignored my warnings and come after us anyway, despite the problems with that solution.

But still.

Someone had gone round and lit a whole bunch more fires, which might be a problem. I would just have to trust my disguise in that case. There were also a lot of people walking around and trying to look busy.

They weren't really succeeding though, there was a certain amount of “Make-work” that was happening. People were picking things up and moving them some-place. Then they were picked up again and moved somewhere else. That kind of thing.

I spent a while watching them and plotting what I was going to do. There were guards on the gate again and judging from the way that they were stood, all but vibrating at their posts with suppressed emotion and, I hoped, adrenaline reaction, I decided that approaching the enclosure from that direction was possibly not the greatest plan.

The guards looked young as well which I though might make them jumpy. Which was fine, but I didn't want them to jump towards putting a sword through me.

I backed away from the hill and moved round, keeping low. The riskiest bit was that I had to cross a small road that went past the enclosure. It was almost certain that they would keep their eyes on it. It was nerve-wracking too. I knew that their vision would be reduced by the nearby firelight but at the same time, I could see them clearly.

I could almost hear Kerrass' voice. “Patience,” he told me. “Watch and wait for your moment.”

The sentry that was closest to me was shifting his weight from one foot to the other. Nerves, suppressed desire to do something, fear, anxiety and Flame knows what else.

I watched him.

Here's a thing to note down. Good sentries and guard units don't follow a pattern. Wall patrols should be varied and have different deployments every time. Guard changes should happen at different times. Officers should check the sentries to make sure that they're still awake and free of outside influence, that influence sometimes being an arrow in the face, but they should do so at different times every night.

It's a good thing for a sentry to check about himself. It's all well and good to look out from the walls of a castle but if the castle behind you is burning then you're not really doing your job.

This sentry had a pattern.

I don't know how long I watched but I noticed that he would look up the road, then down the road, then up the road then down the road, then he would look at his mate before checking behind him before beginning the pattern again.

It was like he had been told what he needed to do but not how he was supposed to do it.

I watched him for long enough to make sure that it was definitely a pattern and that I wasn't imagining it before quickly dashing over the road when he turned to look at his mate.

“Careful,” I told myself.

His mate, the other sentry, was just checking his quadrant and from that I guessed that he was the more experienced of the two.

I made it over the road and rolled, gently, into the ditch. The ditch itself wasn't wet, but it was muddy from the rains. I guessed that the land was too....absorbent to provide a proper moat. Confident that I was out of sight of the guards now, I climbed up the small slope, careful to keep the potion case out of the water.

I had seen what happened when some of those things got wet.

I got up to the line of logs and found the gap where some of them were beginning to sag away from their upright positions. I tugged on one, gently at first as an experiment. It would kind of defeat the entire objective if, in climbing through, the entire thing came down. But no, I was safe. Just the one log moved and

I pulled it a little more before pushing the one next to it in an effort to widen the gap.

I pushed the spear through first before climbing through myself.

Then I waited, counting off heartbeats and listening to see if anyone was shouting alarm.

I had chosen this gap because it put me behind the storehouse, meaning that I was obscured from view and it was closest to my first objective.

Confident that I was safe now, I turned and pulled through the rest of the Witcher's equipment and secured it back around my person.

Ok, so.....inside the compound now. Objective one complete.

It was a little too much to hope that there would be a back door into the store room to a part of the enclosure that you could only access by scaling the palisade. But I examined the back of the small building anyway.

It was, again, a simple wooden structure. The walls hadn't been planted that deep. I considered digging a hole to see if I could get in through the floor but that ran the risk of both, there being floor boards, but also the risk that, the undermining of the foundations would mean that the entire thing would collapse. With me under it.

I also discounted making a hole in the back of the building as it would make too much noise. Then the thought occurred that there might be someone in the storehouse who would be alerted by either of these methods.