Necromancer: Kingdom Building with My Legion of Undead Knights-Chapter 6: The Dead Have Use

Garren immediately answered the call and made his way out to the great hall.

"You summoned me, m’lord?" Garren asked, mild surprise evident in his voice. He hadn’t expected to see Darion so soon, hadn’t expected to be summoned at all, if he was being honest.

For any reasonable man, one look at the state of Percvale would have been enough to send a new lord retreating into his chambers for hours, perhaps longer, wrestling with the weight of what lay before him. Garren had assumed that was exactly what was happening.

But a summon this soon?

He had quietly decided the lord had simply called for water, or perhaps to ask where the kitchens were...

"Where are the dead knights buried?"

Garren, who had been keeping his gaze respectfully low, looked up sharply.

Dead knights buried?

Of all the questions he had braced himself for, that was not among them. It was a strange question, oddly specific and, frankly, unsettling.

Still, Garren answered without hesitation.

"There are mass graves towards the east of the barony, m’lord. Dedicated ones, reserved for knights alone. The common folk of Percvale are buried separately."

Darion said nothing for a moment.

It was, if he was being honest with himself, a more useful answer than he had anticipated. In a kingdom this broken, this starved and stripped bare, he wouldn’t have been surprised to hear that the dead were all thrown together regardless of rank.

But the knights had been given their own ground. Some dignity in death, at least, even if they had been robbed of it in life.

"The graves are mostly full," Garren added. "Packed to the point where, in time, there will be no space left to bury anyone new."

"Thank you, Sir Garren," Darion said, turning his gaze toward the door. "Tell me, does Percvale still have horses? Or have they starved along with everything else?"

"Almost, m’lord," Garren replied. "Many died from hunger in recent months. Their carcasses weren’t wasted though, the meat was cooked and eaten. What remains now is twenty."

"Twenty?" Darion repeated. "I had expected close to none. Though now that you say it... isn’t twenty still pitifully few?"

"You’re not wrong," Garren said. "Just a month ago, there were hundreds. But the hunger became too severe. Knights began slaughtering the horses themselves, for some, it was horse meat or nothing at all for nearly a month."

"Poor things," Darion muttered, almost smiling.

There was something darkly absurd about it: proud knights, trained for war, reduced to butchering their own horses just to survive another week.

Eating an animal that had died of starvation or battle wounds was one thing. Killing a healthy horse with your own hands because you had no other choice was something else entirely.

But in a land like this, nothing should surprise him. Even the notion of cannibalism, if things grew desperate enough, wouldn’t be beyond imagining.

Desperate times call for desperate measures.

That won’t happen under my watch.

It was time he turned things around.

He studied Garren more carefully now, the man standing before him, calm and present as though this were any other morning.

The more Darion thought about it, the more he found himself quietly impressed. The barony had been leaderless for months. The debts were crushing. The kingdom was visibly dying. Any man with sense and options would have left long ago.

But Garren had stayed. And when the Emperor’s knights had ridden in and deposited a complete stranger as Baron, the man had simply straightened up and served.

That was a rare thing.

"I wish to visit the graves," Darion said. "The ones where the knights are buried."

He half-expected Garren to hesitate, to ask why, or at least let the question flicker across his face. Of all the ways a new lord might spend his first hours, riding out to a graveyard ranked among the stranger choices. It warranted an objection. A gentle suggestion, at minimum. 𝐟𝚛𝕖𝚎𝕨𝗲𝐛𝚗𝐨𝐯𝐞𝕝.𝐜𝗼𝗺

Garren simply nodded.

"As you wish, m’lord."

The next fifteen minutes were spent preparing to ride out, the bulk of that time consumed by the business of armoring up.

Getting the armor on alone had proven a quiet disaster: pieces refusing to sit right, straps pulling the wrong way, but with Garren’s hands guiding the process, it came together without much trouble.

Darion left the helmet behind. A servant had pressed a sword into his hands earlier, rusty and dull-edged, the kind of blade that looked like it had spent years at the bottom of a chest, and he had no intention of wearing that either.

Garren, without being asked, produced a far better one: clean steel, no rust, the grip worn but solid.

He had been maintaining it, Garren explained. Polishing it now and then, keeping the rust from settling in.

Small thing. But it said something.

They stepped outside and made their way toward the stables. Along the walk, Garren mentioned that he had spoken to the knights and persuaded them to stop killing the horses, given how few remained, the animals were worth more alive for transport than dead for a single meal. The knights had agreed.

For now, Garren added quietly. Until the hunger returned in full, at which point he doubted any prior instruction would hold.

At the stables, Darion chose a large brown horse: broad-chested, with the kind of build that obviously suggested it could cover ground without wearing down quickly. Garren took a smaller one alongside him.

"From this day forward," Darion said as he mounted, settling into the saddle, "No more horses are to be slaughtered. Not one."

Garren smiled, the tight, carefully neutral smile of a man who wanted to believe that but had seen too much.

"I’ll address the men myself when we return," Darion added. He drew his sword briefly, then paused and gestured ahead. "Lead the way. I don’t yet know where anything is."

"Yes, m’lord."

Garren had suggested, before they set off, that Darion take a small escort of knights with him through the streets.

Darion had considered it for exactly a moment.

"Starving men make poor bodyguards, Sir Garren. Bringing them along wouldn’t be protection, I’d just be the one protecting them."