“Ready, men?” I asked in a whisper, looking at the soldiers standing beside me along the wall. I could just barely make out their faces in the pre-dawn gloom, but I saw them nod.

“Let’s do this, then,” I continued. “Aleix.”

Aleix nodded and kicked the door in. He’d always been good at it: a single well-placed blow, right on the latch, was all that was needed to break it apart. He took a step back to regain his balance, and the rest of us poured into the warehouse, with myself in the lead.

“Royal Knights! Nobody move!” I shouted. As usual, no one heeded my advice: in the candle-lit room I saw several people spring to their feet and start running for the other door, set in the wall opposite to where we’d entered, likely to try and escape.

Until that door burst open too; after a moment I could see Andrej’s bulky shape silhouetted in the opening. “Royal Knights! Freeze!” he screamed.

Our targets hesitated; there was no easy way out for them now, except through the windows, and they’d have to open the shutters before they could get out – that would take only a few moments, but it would still be enough time for us to get across the room and grab them.

The nearest one cursed, turned to face me, and drew a knife from his belt; he squared up against me. He looked like he was barely fourteen, not a man yet though not a child any more.

“Don’t try it. Please,” I said, taking a defensive stance.

He ignored me and lunged.

We’re not dancers, we’re fighters, I heard my first battle instructor’s voice echo in my ears. It had been at least ten years since I’d last trained with him, but I always took his mantra to heart. Those words meant: no unneeded movements; no elaborate flourishes; no showing off. The aim was to obtain the maximum amount of death with as little fuss as possible.

That was how we were supposed to behave on the battlefield, at least, where chaos reigns and everyone is a possible enemy, and where you have to eliminate one threat as soon as possible before facing another. But I’d learned on my own that in some situations, against certain adversaries, you can compromise, especially when you’re fighting civilians. My foe was young and inexperienced; he’d likely never even been in a fight, his movements were slow and sloppy. There was no need to kill him.

I stepped to the side, letting his lunge miss me by inches, and I swung one arm upwards and the other one downwards. The kid’s elbow bent in the wrong direction and he screamed in pain, at the same time as his hand reflexively jerked open, dropping the knife. Then it was just a matter of bringing my foot around, catching his legs in a sweep and making him tumble to the ground. It had taken less than ten seconds from the kid lunging at me to him finding himself sprawled on the floor with a broken arm.

I looked up: some of the other civilians had also drawn steel, and were squaring against the knights, probably hoping against hope to be able to cut their way through and escape.

I took a deep breath and shouted “STOP!”

Everyone froze; that too was a trick I’d learned from my instructor, and I’d used it at the academy when getting new recruits in line – if you speak with a loud, authoritative voice, it will shock everyone who hasn’t had any formal training into complying, at least for a few seconds, before they recovered. That went double if you were in confined space, where a voice could echo off the walls.

A few seconds were all I needed. I pointed my sword at the ground and rose to my full height of nearly six feet, puffing my chest out in an intimidating manner.

“I am Count Herik Wagner von Harburg, Commander of the Royal Knights,” I said loudly and deliberately. “Surrender, and I swear on my honour no harm will come to you.”

That usually was enough. My name, and my oath, carried a heavy significance: even though most people had never met me face to face, or even knew what I looked like – I’d only graduated from the academy five years earlier, and taken over as commander three years after that – I was known in the kingdom as a honourable man, as someone who always kept his promises; once I’d given my word, I always did whatever possible to avoid breaking it.

I saw the crowd – there must have been maybe a dozen of them – hesitate; then a knife clattered to the ground, followed by another one, and then the rest of them. My words had had their intended effect.

I slowly exhaled. “Thank you,” I said. Then I turned to Aleix: “Take them outside and keep an eye on them, and send word to the City Guard to bring the wagons around. We’re taking them to the palace jail for interrogation.”

Aleix nodded, and he and the rest of the knights, save Andrej, rounded up the crowd and led them out of the door; in a few minutes I was left alone in the warehouse with my second-in-command.

“That went well I think,” Andrej said.

I nodded. “Yeah, it did. No casualties, on either side; though I did have to break that kid’s elbow. But the healers will see to it.”

I turned and gazed at the room. “What do you think?” I asked.

“Doesn’t look like much. For the supposed headquarters of the Children of Kendrik, I was expecting something more,” Andrej replied.

“Yeah, me too,” I said.

The room was mostly empty; there were some tables and chairs, and a few bookcases along the walls, but that was it.

“Also, weren’t they supposed to have a big meeting tonight?” my second-in-command said. “There were twelve of them, if that.”

I nodded. The Children of Kendrik were a self-appointed “resistance group” that had been a thorn in the side of the City Guard and the Royal Knights for several months now, after they’d been formed as a result of the growing discontent among the population; they employed hit-and-run tactics throughout Harburg, the capital city of our kingdom, and the surrounding countryside. No one had been able to catch them yet; we’d been led to this place – a nondescript warehouse in the riverside district – by a tip from an informant, but it seemed that this lead too had been bunk. The third time in a month.

“This was probably just a small cell,” I said, pacing across the room. “The leadership must have been elsewhere. It’s likely that--”

I stopped talking, and froze. Just then, my footsteps had sounded odd, walking on a specific spot on the floor. I stepped backwards, stamped my foot down a couple times; the sound was different, it was almost… Hollow.

“Andrej, give me a hand here,” I said. I took another step backwards, crouched to the floor, and inspected the boards for cracks.

“Here,” Andrej said, pointing at the floor: the space between two of the floorboards was a slightly wider than normal, just barely, but enough to be noticeable to someone who knew what to look for.

I drew my dagger, inserted it into the crack, and moved it around. After a couple minutes of finagling I heard a latch click open, and I pulled on the knife: a whole section of the floor swung on a hidden hinge, up and to the side, like the hatch of a trapdoor; beneath it a ladder descended several metres into darkness.

I grabbed a candle from one of the tables, and Andrej and I carefully descended the ladder; a narrow tunnel, just wide enough for us to pass, set off from the bottom, and after a few steps we emerged in a room that had been excavated from the earth and silt beneath the warehouse. It smelled like mud and moisture, we were very close to the river after all, and it was filled with papers, notes, books, maps, and other material, along with having many weapons – swords, daggers, spears, bows – piled neatly into it.

“I think we found one of the Children’s caches,” Andrej said.

“Looks like it,” I nodded. “We’ll have the City Guard gather everything here and send it to the palace. Right now we have to hurry back ourselves, Prince Izaak will be waking up soon and he’ll want a full report.”