“I’m sorry. I couldn’t find anything,” she said, getting straight to the point.
I had asked Margit to do something for me while she’d been watching in secret. After we had dealt with the zombie formation, I asked her to sneak into the forest in search of the one pulling the strings. Mass-produced zombies weren’t quite so handy that they didn’t need to receive orders. Of course, enchantments could allow them to react, but they didn’t have the intelligence to function as individual soldiers would. The army had been huge. If they were all enchanted, the air would be thick with the caster’s mana.
In that case, there were two methods to control this army. The first was that the one in control was giving simple orders directly. The second was that they had prepared a leader zombie and had left a number of set orders to it.
I had been hoping this was a case of the first approach. I wanted the necromancer to be in the forest giving direct orders. If they had been, this would have been so much easier. Margit would have pinpointed their location, and then a group of elites would have plunged into the forest to take their head, bringing this affair to a swift end. The delivery of the culprit’s head to the magistrate would bring peace back to Mottenheim.
Unfortunately I wasn’t quite so lucky. If Margit said they weren’t there, then either they weren’t there or they had some sort of special ability that allowed them to remain undetected. I wasn’t enough of a fool to doubt a pro like Margit. If I didn’t trust her capabilities, then there would be nothing I could believe in in this world.
“It pains me to disappoint you,” Margit said.
“Don’t say that. I trust your skills more than anyone else’s.”
“I didn’t find any traces of a necromancer...but I do have a present for you.”
Margit produced a hand drawn map. As I looked over it, I noticed a number of symbols—scribbled squares with a rounded top that looked like grave markers. The locations of the corpses.
“Thank you. This is the best present I could ask for,” I said.
“Nothing could please me more.”
There were fifteen locations marked with grave markers. If there were three or four at each location over this wide area, then it seemed like our enemy had sent almost their entire stock of what was available.
Even if I didn’t have the enemy’s head in my hands, this was still a hugely valuable prize.
[Tips] The limits of magic are usually found at the limits of one’s senses. If you wish to increase this range, then you need to use magic that can boost your sight or other senses, place markers that will allow you to identify your target from afar, or prepare another mage that is attuned with your own body.
Unable to drop their guard, everyone in Mottenheim spent the night chilly with tension. They had set up their defenses in the plaza in the event of an attack, but the thrumming anxiety made it nigh impossible to go to sleep. Of course, people said that a good soldier was one who could sleep well even while on alert, but that wasn’t so easy when one’s mind was beset with troubles.
With the moon climbing high into the sky and many of the residents left lying sleepless in their beds, two adventurers in the assembly hall were dealing with an awkward atmosphere for an altogether different reason.
One of them was a young man with a scar that stretched down his cheek to his lip. Siegfried tried to hide his displeasure with a stony expression, but was unaware that this flat affect revealed his displeasure well enough. The other was a young woman drinking a cup of herbal brew to calm her nerves. Kaya was sitting next to Siegfried and so uncomfortable she could barely taste her drink.
Kaya enjoyed the burn of a bit of charming, low-level jealousy, but this was nothing like that. Today, Siegfried’s terrible mood came from the fact that he learned that Erich and Kaya had been hiding something from him.
Despite his reputation as comic relief in many songs and being genuinely a bit slow on the uptake, the hero-hopeful was no idiot. He was a talented adventurer who had grown into a capable leader in his own right, able to command his Fellows on his own. His experience on the battlefield had digested the scene he had just witnessed and told him the shape of what lay behind it. Siegfried knew that such a terrifying magical weapon would never have been implemented unless everything had been shared right from the get-go.
Of course, Siegfried was very much aware of the dangers of a zombie—although his impressions of them were a bit more vague.
The young adventurer was a capable fighter by now, both in terms of the sword and spear—just ask any of his training partners—and could just about fell his foes in one blow. Granted, he’d yet to attain the absurd heights of skill that permitted some fighters to disable their foe’s thumb and forefinger (without which most forms of offense crumbled) while leaving the rest unscathed, but he could make sense of the whispers in the Fellowship that a blade the size of your pinky was enough to kill. Now, that wasn’t to say you could strike anywhere and be done with it, but if you properly slashed at areas with key blood flow—throats, wrists, thighs—you could kill just about any human target, be it a mensch, a jenkin, or even an ogre. Even undead folk like vampires would succumb to the right severed artery—for a moment, at least.