Chapter 965: A Busy Night (Part One)
The nights of winter were long and cold but no night had ever felt as long as the night when Hanrahan Town fell to demons. The attack had begun shortly after sunset, and after the slow, inexorable march of the demon army, the battle itself had lasted less than an hour.
For the people of Hanrahan, especially for those who had already gathered at Hanrahan Keep, the speed of it all hit them even harder than the fall itself. Their strong town walls, unbreached in a hundred years, had delayed the demon giants and the wolf demons for a handful of minutes. The mighty gatehouse with its double gates and reinforced portcullis had fallen to a pair of witches even faster, and not even an Inquisitor had been able to stop them from doing it.
Maybe it wouldn’t have felt as devastating if they hadn’t been given hope just before the battle began. A Templar bearing a Holy Light Blade stood forth to personally lead the defenders of Hanrahan in battle and the Disciple of an Exemplar called on the power of the stars above to smite the enemies of the Holy Lord of Light.
Hanrahan Town had never enjoyed such strong defenders... but even they had been helpless before the army of the Crimson Knight. Between the ringing of the alarm bell and the fall of Hanrahan Keep felt like an eternity, but it had only been two hours, leaving much of the night still to unfold.
Dame Sybyll’s forces moved quickly to seize control of the town and the keep in that time. Hugo Hanrahan knew the defenses of his hometown with the precision of a scholar who had long ago committed maps to memory. He sent Tuscan giants to watch over not only the town’s two great gates, but the smaller gates and access points as well.
Even the culverts where streams flowed through the town on their way to the lake saw groups of Golden Eyed skirmishers and heavily armored Iron Tusked soldiers stationed nearby to prevent people from escaping the town in the dark of night by wading through the water.
Hugo might never have drawn the blade that Lord Jalal gave him before the battle began, but once it ended, he spent hours moving between groups of soldiers, often rushing to speak to townsfolk before those who had fortified themselves with liquid courage could attempt something foolish like storming the gates with a disorganized mob.
"Go home!" Hugo shouted at the third crowd to gather at one of the town’s smaller gates tonight. The ’Jewel Gate’ wasn’t anything glamorous, quite the opposite. It was the closest gate to Gwennan’s Jewel, and even in the depths of winter, the smell of fish guts and carcasses never faded from the small plaza where fishermen sold the catch they brought in from the deep lake just beyond the walls.
"I know that you’re all frightened," Hugo said patiently. "I was frightened too when I met the Eldritch. But look at me," he said, flinging his arms out wide. "I’ve camped with them, spoken with them, even feasted with them and I’m still hale and whole. You have nothing to fear from these soldiers," he said as he rested a hand on the shoulder of a Golden Eyed warrior with dull brown fur and three small rings in one of his tufted ears.
"We don’t want no trouble, Lord Hugo," a scrawny man with a nose that looked like it had been broken more than once said from the head of the mob. His face was red and flush from too much drink and the stench of cheap ale clung to him like a second cloak in the crisp winter air. "Some o’ these lads just wanna go fer a walk along tha water an’ a bit o’ late night fishin’ ta’ calm themselves down," he said, raising slender fishing pole in one hand.
"Yeah!" the crowd behind their scrawny spokesman cried.
"We just want to go fer a walk!" someone shouted from far in the back of the crowd.
"A man’s got a right ta’ roam, ye know," another man said, though he wasn’t brave enough to step out from the crowd to join their spokesman at the front.
"You’re not going fishing," Hugo said, shaking his head at the mob. "If you were going fishing, you’d have brought nets and buckets," he pointed out. While a few other men had gathered up fishing poles, they clutched them more like they were clubs than anything else and they looked like they were ready to stir up trouble if they thought they could get away with it.
"Look, I’ll give you two choices," Hugo said patiently as he fished in the pouches under his cloak, retrieving a coin that gleamed with a pale yellow shine in the flickering torchlight of the small plaza. "Gill’s Gulp is half a block away from here," he said, mentioning the nearest alehouse where he was certain that half of these men had just been drinking.
"If you all follow me back there, then you can drink all night till my coin runs out," he said, holding a gold sovereign up high. The single coin was enough to buy at least a few kegs of ale, and even if every man here drank until they pissed themselves, they still wouldn’t run out the tab the hawk-nosed lord was offering to pay.
Hugo hardly minded the excess though. He might not have much gold in his purse, but if the few coins he had could buy a reprieve from the violence and bloodshed of the night so far, then he’d spend it gladly. Because in his mind, one thing was certain. If even one of these mobs of unruly men started trouble, the trouble would spread like wildfire through the town and he couldn’t bear to see that happen.
"Or, you can fight this out the Eldritch way," he said as he thought back to Sir Ollie’s fight with Sir Rain the day after they’d arrived in the Vale of Mists. "You can come up one at a time to scrap with my friend here... bare hands," he added quickly. "No one’s getting killed tonight. If you can beat my friend in a fair fight, then you can take as long a walk out the gate as you want to," he said.
Next to him, the lupine soldier grinned, showing his long row of sharp teeth while he flexed his claws, cracking his knuckles while his tail swished back and forth in eagerness. Clearly, he hadn’t run out of fight after the brief battle on the walls and he was more than ready to prove to these drunken humans just how bad of an idea ’scrapping’ with him would be.
"Yer, um, yer lordship," the scrawny man said, looking as if the combination of the toothy grin and Hugo’s offer had finally accomplished what common sense and cold night air couldn’t. "I think... I think we’re better off drinkin’ on yer coin than scrappin’ wit’ yer ’friend’ here," he said, looking sheepish and embarrassed as he tucked his fishing rod behind his back.
"Wise move," Hugo said as he strode forward to wrap around the shoulders of the man who already smelled strongly of cheap ale. "Come, let me buy you all a drink!"
The townsfolk seemed excited to have one of their lords joining them in the crowded, smelly alehouse and many of them invited the young lord to stay and drink with them until they could all forget that demons had come to assault their town.
There was a part of Hugo that wanted to do exactly that. To crawl into a bottle along with the townsfolk and forget the fact that his cousin, Sybyll had likely captured his father by now. If the old man had put up any kind of a fight or if he’d provoked her temper, he might even be dead already.
For all the abuses he’d suffered from the man over the years, Ian Hanrahan was still his father, and now that the moment was nearly upon him, Hugo found it harder than he’d imagined to face his father’s impending demise.
The old man was guilty of countless crimes, and he’d never once been a ’good’ father to Hugo, but he’d at least paid for Hugo’s mother to live a comfortable life in Keating Duchy. He’d also supported his bastard son with a stipend that most commoners would envy, even if it was a pittance compared to what his older brother received.
Of course, Hugo had no illusions that his father cared for him. At best, he was supported as a ’spare heir,’ a backup who was only acknowledged when Bastian was badly injured. Ian didn’t love his bastard son. He treated him like a spare horse for a cart, well fed and sheltered but otherwise unloved. It was a weak and feeble attachment, and Hugo shouldn’t have felt any reluctance now that his father was about to die, and yet...
But as much as he wanted to stay in the crowded alehouse and drink until he couldn’t even remember the old man’s name, he refused to be that sort of lord. His cousin, Sybyll, had revealed more care for this barony and its people in a few days than he’d seen from his father in as many years and for the first time, Hugo felt like he had a chance to do something that really mattered.
He might be helping a vampire to seize the throne his father once held, but after everything he’d seen, that hardly mattered to the young Hanrahan lord. What mattered was that the people in town were afraid, and he was one of the few people who could truly offer them reassurance and comfort in the midst of the greatest crisis of their lives.
And as long as that was true, he had work to do...