Chapter 386 — Gao Song's Wartime Preparations
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 3
When the fires began to burn at Longwind Fortress, Gao Yang was just about to cut his connection with the satellite.
The images were far from clear, but he could confirm that the border negotiations had ended; judging by the fact that neither delegation had come to blows, the talks, even if they had failed, had at least not degenerated into a war between nations. So after the king returned to Longwind Fortress, Gao Yang prepared to suspend his watch on that region for the time being.
Then the flames rose.
The fire had started inside the fortress; from the satellite feed there was no sign of any external attack. It spread through the western district but never beyond it. For all its ferocity, it looked like something under human control.
Something had gone wrong.
Gao Yang made his judgment at once and tried to adjust the satellite lens's focus, but no matter how he adjusted it, the lens itself was aging and smoke and flame blocked the view, and he could not make out what was happening down there. Only one thing was certain: tonight, something earth-shaking was going to happen.
Without hesitation he summoned Hetty, who had not yet gone to bed, and called in Byron and Philip, who had been on the point of retiring.
The grim, dark look on Gao Yang's face startled even Hetty. She stifled the yawn she had been about to give and studied him with open curiosity: "Ancestor, you've called us together so late. Has something happened?"
Gao Yang hesitated briefly; explaining the source of his information to others was clearly going to be difficult. But after that moment's delay he spoke decisively: "Something is happening at Longwind Fortress. I suspect Francis II is in danger. Deadly danger."
"What?!" Byron was so shocked that his jaw nearly creaked. The middle-aged knight's eyes went wide. "My lord, is your information reliable... no, how did you even come by this information?!"
Longwind Fortress was a thousand li away; news from there could not possibly travel so quickly to Cecil. Yet Byron had plainly heard Gao Yang say that Francis II *was* in danger, in a tone as though he had just witnessed it with his own eyes!
"A special channel of information," Gao Yang said, his expression unchanged as he glanced at Byron, deciding to brush the detail aside with the most unreasonable logic available: I am your ancestor, therefore I know everything. "In any case, we must prepare for the possibility that the king is dead. Even for the possibility that Prince Edmund is dead as well."
This astonishing turn left the three before him dumbstruck. Philip instinctively pressed a hand to his chest and invoked the God of War: "Kael, God of War... what is going to happen tonight..."
"If the king dies at the eastern border... Ansul will surely face war," Hetty said, her mind already racing ahead. "The key now is what the Typhonians have to do with all this..."
Before Hetty could finish, the study window was suddenly pushed open by a pair of unseen hands, and a cold night wind swept into the room. Amber's figure leapt lightly from the windowsill and landed before Gao Yang. She was gasping violently; clearly she had run all the way back at the fastest speed she could manage.
In truth, to race from the southernmost tip of Defiance Fortress all the way back to the lord's manor, she had for the first time in her life squeezed her shadow power to its very limit. By slipping again and again between the Shadow Realm and the waking world, she had covered a journey of nearly a day and a half in a mere half hour.
Amber had clearly not expected to find Hetty and the others in Gao Yang's study, and the intelligence she had opened her mouth to shout was swallowed back. But when she caught Gao Yang's grave, questioning look, she said it anyway: "The king is dead! Prince Edmund killed his own father!"