The Call of Crows

Chapter 19: Impending Doom

Lokapele sighed and composed herself. Her path was one of passion. She would keep going. But she would not conform to apathy that other soldiers drugged themselves with to do so.

Or at least, she hoped she didn't. It was becoming harder and harder to catch herself from settling into depressing thoughts.

She feared the one day she wouldn't catch herself at all.

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Najeem hopped from shadow to shadow, his feet never leaving the ground at the same time. The moon light and fires were making shadows a bit more scarce than usual.

Kameko had provided Najeem with about half a dozen scouts. Shahla had accompanied him as well. But their low numbers weren't a problem. All they had to do was light some fires. Command had afforded them several jars of oil to help start them, and carrying these is mainly what Najeem had planned to use the scouts for.

The muffled noises of battle in the material world signaled to him that if they had a chance of breaching whatever precautions the Nikan had set up, now was the time to take it.

One flaw with the Nikan army was that all of their weapons and armor were state sponsored. Since no one actually owned their arms, they were all kept in communal storage tents. Najeem didn't know this for sure, but based on what he had heard of how the Empire operates and the patterns he'd witnessed, that was more than likely the case.

Najeem peered into a shadow and found the first tent full of crossbows.

"Gimme some oil and a torch." Najeem hissed.

A scout handed him one of the clay jars and a lit torch. Najeem half-way emerged from the shadows and threw the jar against the racks of crossbows, soaking them in oil. He then threw the torch and sank back into the darkness. He backed into another shadow as fire consumed the tent, eliminating any safe areas near it.

"Let's move before the fire spreads."

Najeem and his scouts set fire to the five tents of crossbows methodically and quickly, leaving only the wooden barriers Nikan soldiers would hide under. Like the other mobile siege engines, they were all stationed in a yard.

Upon finding it, Najeem got a rough estimate of the yard's size. He turned to his scouts, "Help me spread the oil."

"What about me?" Shahla asked.

"You're our trump card if someone intervenes. Stay here. If we need you, we'll yell." Najeem said as he helped the scouts through the shadows into the material world.

The yard was just a large patch of land that housed what remained of Nikan's siege engines. Quite a few of them had singe marks and burns from Najeem's fire the night before.

There was evidence of a guard post set up, though they'd all fled to fight off Kameko's raid on their food stores.

He heard their fighting from a distance. Najeem hefted his jug of oil under his arm and uncorked it, spilling the flammable substance as widely as he could.

These fires needed to spread quickly before they could be extinguished.

Just as he finished dumping his oil, the Asasiyun glanced up. He smelled...iron?

No, it was blood. Najeem whirled around to look for his scouts, only to find himself at chest-level with a monster of a man as a giant hand dropped a scout whose neck it twisted in a full circle.

A fist was the last thing he saw before his vision went black.

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