Chương 34: I'll Find a Way

The afternoon sun was already sinking behind the mountains, casting long shadows over the snowy valley. From his balcony, Jack watched the logging crew return from the woods. It was a miserable sight. Many men, including Giles and Old Miller, were trudging through the snow. They were stumbling like defeated soldiers. Behind them, tied to frayed hemp ropes, were three freshly cut pine logs. Jack frowned, leaning on his cane.

In the past weeks, they had cut and carried timber with some effort, but the winter was now nearing its absolute peak. The snow in the valley had grown much deeper, reaching past their knees, and the bitter cold made the raw pine sap freeze solid. Jack hobbled away from the balcony, made his way down the stone stairs, and walked out into the courtyard to meet them. Giles dropped his end of the rope and collapsed onto his knees in the snow. His chest was heaving violently.

The other men didn't even bother kneeling; most of them simply fell flat on their backs, staring up at the gray sky in exhaustion.

"Three logs, Giles?" Jack asked quietly. Giles looked up, his weathered face pale and drawn.

"I am sorry, Lord Jack. The chopping is easy. The axes are sharp, and the woods are full of tall, straight pine. We felled twenty trees by noon. But moving them…" Giles pointed a shaking finger at the nearest log. It was incredibly long and covered in frozen sap.

"They weigh more than stone," Giles explained, his voice ragged.

"When we try to drag them, the rough bark catches on every buried rock and root in the deep snow. We sink up to our knees. We pushed ourselves to the absolute limit just to get these three back before dark." Jack looked at the exhausted men. They were eating well now, and they were finally sleeping in warm cabins, but human strength had hard limits. Jack did some quick calculations. To build a palisade wall that completely surrounded the new village perimeter, they needed hundreds of logs.

If the men could only haul three or four logs a day, the wall would take months to finish. The Beast Tide was expected in less than four or maybe five weeks. At this pace, the wild beasts would arrive to find a wall that barely covered a single cabin.

"You have done well, Giles," Jack said smoothly, keeping his face entirely neutral.

"The men have worked hard. The timber is cut, and that is half the battle. Go to the bathhouse, wash the sweat off before it freezes to your skin, and get your hot evening meal." Giles looked confused.

"But the wall, My Lord? Three logs will barely build a gatepost. We have to try again tomorrow. We can build sleds, maybe."

"Sleds will break under the weight of raw pine," Jack replied simply.

"Do not worry about the hauling. Just focus on resting tonight. My retainers will handle the rest." Giles blinked, then a look of profound relief washed over his face. He quickly bowed his head.

"Praise the gods for your mages, Lord Jack. We will leave the rest to them." As the exhausted men dragged themselves toward the steaming bathhouse, Jack let out a long sigh. He tapped his cane against the frozen earth. He had promised his people a wall. Which meant he had another long, sleepless night ahead of him. By midnight, the village was completely silent. The only signs of life were the gentle plumes of smoke rising from the cabin chimneys. Up in his locked bedroom, Jack sat in his high-backed chair.

He wrapped himself in three blankets, closed his eyes, and pushed his mind down into the dark depths of the castle crypts. He found the dormant mental threads of the Night Shift—his fifteen hard-working, literal-minded skeletons.

"Awake," Jack commanded. The familiar pressure settled over his brain. Down in the dark, the fifteen skeletons rose silently to their feet.

"Wait," Jack commanded before they marched out.

"Go to the storage room. Put on the old boots and wrap yourselves in the black cloth and rags." He couldn't risk a villager waking up to use the latrine and seeing bare bone glinting in the moonlight. If the skeletons wore boots to hide their skeletal feet and black cloth to cover their ribcages, anyone looking out a window would simply see shadowy, cloaked figures working in the dark. It fit the cover story of private mages perfectly.

Once they were dressed in the crude disguises, Jack directed them out of the crypts. They emerged into the freezing night. Jack marched them to Barnaby's blacksmith shop. Outside the shop was a pile of scrap iron and chains leftover from the ruined mine carts they had salvaged weeks ago to build the winter cabins.

"Grab the chains," Jack ordered. The skeletons gathered the iron links. Jack then marched them out of the village and into the woods. Through the empty eye sockets of the lead skeleton, Jack saw the results of the humans' labor. The edge of the forest was littered with freshly felled pine trees. Giles hadn't been exaggerating; there were twenty logs lying in the snow, stripped of their branches and ready for use. Skeletons were incredibly strong, and they never got tired, but their bodies were just bone.

If they tried to pull a log using just their hands, the grip strength required would likely snap their finger bones. Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

"Wrap the chains around your ribcages," Jack commanded carefully. He guided them to take the iron chains and loop them securely under their cloaks, through their rib bones and over their collarbones, creating makeshift harnesses. Once harnessed, Jack had them tie the other ends of the chains securely around the felled logs. He assigned three skeletons to a single log.

"Lean forward," Jack instructed.

"March back to the village. Do not stop. And do it silently." The skeletons leaned into the iron chains. For a moment, the pine log didn't move. Then, with a quiet crunch, the log broke free from the snow. The undead didn't slip. They simply drove their feet into the snow and marched in perfect unison. They dragged the logs through the deep snow easily. Jack watched from his chair in the castle. It was a perfect display of undead logistics. The Night Shift hauled the first batch of logs to the village perimeter.

Jack had already instructed Giles to dig deep trenches around the cabins days ago. The skeletons dragged the logs to the edge of the palisade trench, unhooked themselves, and shoved the timber into the holes. They stood the logs perfectly upright, side by side, creating a solid wooden barrier. Then, they kicked the loose dirt back into the trench and stamped it down hard to lock the wood in place. It was going flawlessly. By the fourth trip to the woods, Jack was beginning to feel the mental strain.

Maintaining the connection for hours while managing complex tasks was exhausting. His eyelids were drooping, and his head throbbed. He was watching lazily through the eyes of a skeleton dragging a log back toward the village. Wait. Jack's eyes snapped open in his bedroom. His heart skipped a beat. Because Jack was tired, he hadn't given the skeletons a specific path to take back from the woods. He had just told them to walk to the edge of the village.

Skeletons always took the most direct, perfectly straight line to their destination. They were walking straight toward the new latrines. Jack had insisted the villagers dig a deep waste trench and line it with fired red bricks to keep the village clean. The skeletons, dragging a pine log, were marching blindly toward it. If that log dragged over the latrine, it would crush the fragile bricks and cause the entire trench to cave in, ruining days of human labor.

"Halt!" Jack screamed in his mind. The skeletons instantly froze in place, less than ten feet away from the edge of the brick-lined latrine. Jack let out a shaky breath, wiping sweat from his forehead.

"Turn right," Jack commanded, his mental voice sharp and focused again.

"Walk twenty paces. Then turn left. Avoid the brick trench." The skeletons obediently adjusted their path, dragging the log safely around the latrines. Jack pinched the bridge of his nose. He could not afford to get sloppy. One mistake with the undead, and he would destroy his own village faster than the Beast Tide ever could. Trip after trip, the skeletons dragged the timber from the woods. Log by log, the first section of the palisade wall grew.

By the time the sky began to turn a pale morning orange, they had hauled and planted all twenty logs. It wasn't the entire wall—not even close—but it was a solid, twenty-foot section of impenetrable wooden palisade. Jack knew this would be his routine. The men would cut the wood during the day, and his skeletons would haul it at night.

"Return to the crypts. Dormant," Jack commanded. He severed the link, collapsed back into his bed, and fell into a deep, exhausted sleep. A few hours later, the village awoke. Giles stepped out of his cabin, holding a wooden mug of hot water. He took one look at the village perimeter and dropped the mug in the snow. Where yesterday there had been an empty trench, there was now a tall wall of solid pine logs. It stood ten feet high, guarding the eastern edge of the settlement.

The logs were packed so tightly together that not even a draft of wind could get through the gaps. The other villagers began stepping out of their homes, staring at the wooden barrier that had appeared overnight.

"The mages," Old Miller whispered, taking off his wool cap in reverence.

"They worked through the night. I didn't hear a single sound." Giles walked up to the wall and pressed his hand against the bark. He shook his head in pure disbelief.

"To move twenty trees in the dark… they finished the first section in a single night. The power of Lord Jack's retainers is beyond human understanding." Up in the castle, Jack was already awake, ignoring his headache. He drank a cup of bitter herbal tea Karen had brought him, grabbed his cane, and walked down the mountain path to the village. He didn't stop to admire the wall. He walked straight past the cheering villagers and headed directly for the blacksmith's shop. A wall was just a shield.

To survive the Beast Tide, they needed a sword. Barnaby's forge was roaring. The blacksmith was wiping soot from his face with a dirty rag as Jack approached.

"Thirty boar spears, Lord Jack," Barnaby reported, gesturing to a neat stack of weapons leaning against the side of his shop. Jack inspected them. They were brutal and perfect. The iron spearheads were razor-sharp, and the cross-lugs jutting out from the sides were solid enough to stop a charging bear.

"Excellent work, Barnaby," Jack said.

"And the other project?" Barnaby wiped his hands and pointed toward the center of the village square. Sitting in the snow was the ballista. Giles had built the frame out of the strongest wood they could find from the ruined castle outbuildings. It looked like a giant, terrifying crossbow mounted on a wooden stand.

"I forged the iron cranks exactly as you drew them," Barnaby said, walking over to the siege weapon. He pointed to the metal gears attached to the sides.

"And Giles brought the strongest animal sinew we had in the stores to use as the torsion string. It is ready to test."

"Show me," Jack ordered. Barnaby stepped up to the back of the ballista. He grabbed the iron crank handles with both hands. Barnaby was easily the strongest man in the valley, a man who swung a forging hammer for hours everyday. He braced his feet against the wooden frame and began to turn the cranks. The gears clicked loudly. Click… click… click… Barnaby's face almost immediately turned red. The veins in his neck bulged under the strain.

The twisted animal sinew that provided the weapon's power was incredibly tight. It took Barnaby a full minute of effort just to pull the string back far enough to lock it into the firing mechanism. When it finally clicked into place, Barnaby let go of the handles and bent over, gasping for air.

"It works," Barnaby panted, his chest heaving.

"But the torsion on that string… it is too stiff, My Lord. I am the strongest man here, and it took everything I had just to winch it back once." Jack stared at the locked ballista, his expression grim. A siege weapon was only useful if it could be fired repeatedly. When the Beast Tide arrived, dozens of starving beasts would be charging the gates at a dead sprint.

"If it takes you a full minute to reload," Jack said flatly, "we will fire exactly one bolt before the beasts are climbing over the walls. It is too slow."

"I can try to thin the sinew string," Barnaby suggested, still catching his breath.

"Make it easier to pull."

"If you make the string weaker, the bolt won't fly fast enough to pierce a beast's skull," Jack countered. He tapped his cane against the side of the wooden frame. They needed the high tension to kill the beasts, but human muscle was simply too weak to reload that tension quickly. Jack looked around the village. Out of the entire population, he had maybe fifteen able-bodied peasant militiamen. They were brave, and they had the boar spears, but they were just regular men.

He had fifteen skeletons, but they were currently restricted to the night shift to keep his secret, and regular human skeletons were too light to operate siege machinery efficiently anyway. If they were going to hold the gates against a tide of monsters, Jack realized he was missing a crucial piece on the board. Jack turned away from the ballista and looked up toward the dark, imposing peaks of the castle above.

"Leave the ballista exactly as it is, Barnaby," Jack said softly.

"I will find a way to wind it."