Once several minutes passed without a draugr in sight, Cinna shimmied her way backwards until she had enough of the hill covering her to rise into a crouch. Then she made her way back to the bottom where she’d left Lilia. The girl didn’t look up as Cinna approached, which came as a surprise given the constant clinking of her chainmail coif.
“Is everything alright?” Cinna asked softly, wary of speaking too loudly.
“Mm? Yes. Nothing wrong here,” Lilia replied through a strained smile. A lie, obviously. Lilia couldn’t lie to save her life and wore her emotions openly on her face. Something had unnerved her. That made Cinna nervous in turn. The only dangers around were undead; what threat could they possibly pose which would worry a necromancer?
Cinna cursed her lack of knowledge on the subject. She’d never needed to know before the Day of Revelation now no one remained whom she could ask…except Lilia. However, even if she thought now was the time to press Lilia on her identity—which she didn’t—it would have been much to dangerous to do so with so many draugr nearby. Both because if Lilia turned hostile she would have plenty of reinforcements and because if Cinna turned out to be wrong they might still attract the wrong kind of attention.
“Very well. We have a window of opportunity to move, so let’s be along before more draugr come along,” Cinna said, deciding to let Lilia hold onto her secrets for now. She would just have to hope it wasn’t something immediately relevant.
“Ready!” Lilia declared a bit too loudly. She slapped her hands over her mouth a moment later. Cinna sighed and shook her head. She didn’t think Lilia had been loud enough to be overheard at a distance, but it would still be best to move immediately.
“Let’s proceed, then.” Cinna led Lilia through a narrow pass between the surrounding hills. Her next goal was a dry gully she’d spotted while checking the surroundings. It looked deep enough that she and Lilia could stand up straight inside it and continued for long a good long distance. Assuming no draugr had stumbled into it, which was far from a certainty, the gully would bring them most of the way around to the far side of the nearby town.
As she walked, Cinna felt acutely aware of the noise produced by her coif. Not for the first time did she consider discarding it. Without the padding on the inside of her helmet Cinna had nothing to quiet the mail. That would leave her head exposed, though, and Cinna had seen more than enough examples of what happened to a soldier on the battlefield without a helmet. Her mail might mean the difference between surviving a surprise attack and being killed instantly.
Aside from the coif, her armor made very little noise. The inside was padded, as were the edges of individual plates were they made contact. Even the soles of her sabatons were padded, though that had more to do with maintaining traction than with stealth. If she’d been placed in this situation in winter she would have had a much harder time staying quiet; the spiked soles of her winter sabatons were far less suited for stealth.
All the other soundproofing built into Cinna’s armor made it that much more apparent to her when something made noise. Her coif probably didn’t make more than Lilia’s untrained footsteps at a normal pace, it since it covered Cinna’s ears, it sounded much louder to her. Every time they crossed between pieces of cover Cinna had no choice but to listen to the chain links jingling against her ears and hope nothing else heard.
Fortunately—or perhaps courtesy of Lilia—the pair made it to the dry gulley without incident. Cinna breathed a sigh of relief as she slid down the shallow slope to the bottom with Lilia close behind.
“This gulley should take us most of the rest of the way, but don’t let your guard down. We’ll have a harder time seeing anything coming from the bottom of it,” Cinna warned. It probably wasn’t necessary. Lilia didn’t seem like the type to notice if Cinna neglected to share information that would only be unimportant if she were a necromancer, and she probably had her own ways of seeing the undead coming anyway. Still, Cinna would have been remiss if she’d kept silent and that would have gone against her nature.
“Right,” Lilia agreed distractedly. Whatever had come over her earlier still appeared to be bothering her.
“Lilia, focus,” Cinna admonished. Even if she couldn’t address the actual problem, she hoped she could influence Lilia into letting it go for now. The girl blinked a few times before seeming to come to her senses.
“Sorry. I’m paying attention, promise,” Lilia replied.
With that taken care of, the two proceeded through the gulley. By Cinna’s estimation it had been dry for many years. Plants were growing along the bottom. A thick layer of dirt had settled there as well. If this gulley were only dry seasonally that dirt likely would have been washed away before it could build up. The dirt provided softer footing than a layer of rocks might have.
For several minutes Cinna and Lilia crept along the gulley in relative silence. Cinna tried to strike a balance between moving quickly and keeping quiet. She hated not being able to see if anything might be approaching. Much as she’d warned Lilia, her line of sight was limited by the walls of the gulley. There were many twists and turns in it, as well, so she could rarely see more than a few meters ahead at any given time.
Her hand strayed to the hilt of her sword, clutching onto it for reassurance.
When a new sound finally graced Cinna’s ears, she almost felt grateful for it. Almost. She snapped to attention, her grip on her sword tightening, as a handful of rocks clattered to the ground ahead. An instant later she’d grabbed onto Lilia and pulled her flat against the gulley wall. Before Lilia could utter a sound in question Cinna brought a finger to the girl’s lips to signal for silence.
They stood there, pressed together, for well over a minute as Cinna listened for any further sounds. She held her breath just to make it easier. It was faint, but she managed to make out the clumsy footsteps of a draugr.
Cinna craned her neck upwards. A slight lip at the top of the gulley provided her and Lilia with a modicum of cover, but anything peering even slightly over the edge would be able to see them. The footsteps grew closer. Soon she realized there were at least two sets of them and the fact that she couldn’t seem to get a more accurate count made her even more tense.
A shadow fell over the gulley. Then a chin poked out. It moved from side to side, scanning the opposite side of the gulley. A second joined it, then a third. Slowly, Cinna shifted her hand away from Lilia’s face and placed it back on the hilt of her sword. She felt utterly certain that any moment one of those draugr would, in whatever passed for its mind, think to look down.
One of them tilted downwards ever so slightly. The next few seconds played out in Cinna’s head. First the draugr would notice her, then it would drop down into the gulley to attack. As it fell she would meet it with her sword, cutting it into pieces before it could hit the ground. The others would follow, likely before she could reset from slaying the first. She would need to shove Lilia to the ground and shield the girl with her own body as the second and third draugr descended, at least until she could recover her stance.
If any of them were wearing armor things would be more complicated. Cinna still carried Sir Cole’s war hammer, but it was a far cry from the axe she’d grown accustomed to. She felt confident in her ability to defeat three or four armored draugr at once, but if more than that arrived before she finished off these three she might be overwhelmed. It might be better to—
A pulse of mana ran over Cinna’s body. While she wasn’t a mage, she could manipulate mana well enough to control magic tools and weapons, and that same awareness allowed her to feel this pulse. She’d been nearby when mages cast spells innumerable times but she couldn’t recall a single occasion where she felt something like this. As far as she knew mages didn’t typically release raw mana when casting.
She might not have felt it at all from even a meter away, but with Lilia pressed right up against her body it had been unmistakable. The girl had just done something, of that Cinna was sure. That confirmed for her beyond a shadow of a doubt that Lilia could use magic. When the draugr above froze and then turned away, Cinna knew for a fact that Lilia was a necromancer.
As the draugrs’ footsteps faded into the distance Cinna felt a mix of elation and trepidation. Both her hopes and her worries had just become that much more real. Would Lilia prove to be an irreplaceable asset or a dagger poised to strike at the heart of Selkarc?
“Um…could you let me go, please?” Lilia asked softly, refusing to look Cinna in the eye. Seeing that, Cinna held in a laugh. It seemed absurd to think someone like this could ever pose a threat, but such were the burdens of a ruler.
“Of course. Apologies.” Cinna released Lilia, who took a quick step away. Try as she might, Lilia couldn’t hide the fact that she’d turned red all the way up to the tips of her ears. “That was a close call, but it seems luck is on our side. Let’s not linger and test it.”
“Reeeeeally lucky, mmhm,” Lilia replied in a high-pitched voice.
That one might have been a bit mean of her, Cinna thought to herself.
Knowing for sure that Lilia could repel the draugr roaming the area allowed Cinna to proceed with much less caution, at any rate. They made good time from that point on. Cinna continued to hide every time she detected draugr nearby, and she never let her guard down while waiting for them to pass, but the tension was gone now.
By the time Cinna and Lilia climbed out of the gulley the sun had already begun its march towards the horizon. The worst was past, though. They encountered few undead from that point on—unsurprising since at this point they were leaving the town behind them. It had been a calculated risk to pass so close to the town in the first place, but it had worked out in the end. The time saved would almost certainly prove worth the risk.
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