So!

Shadows. 

Spot-checks by scrying say the shadows made it roughly 50 miles along the coasts - following populated roads along the curve of the bay, not as the crow flies - more than half the way to the walls of Veldraine. 

Yowch.

So today we fight for Veldraine, that they might avoid the doom that transpired here, and tomorrow we battle for Palin's Cove?

We should be so lucky.

The shadows crossed 50 miles in the six and a half pre-dawn hours after the attack began in the city of Korvosa.

I'm trying to make sense of what happened, but napkin math paints a frightening picture.

If we blindly extrapolate seven and a half miles per hour by eight hours of night, that's more than 60 miles a night - and they'll reach Palin's Cove too before next dawn.

It's the middle of Neth. From dusk to dawn is eleven hours.

Good catch.

....Good? ...Catch? 

Not really??

Do you never go outside?

Cressida Kroft goes outside quite frequently!

But she's usually indoors when the sun is setting, and tends to think of the day in terms of three 8-hour shifts. 

If the shadows are all racing away towards Veldraine as fast as they can, why are there still so many outside our front door?

If they were moving as quickly as they could, they could cross 16 miles an hour.

They've gone less than half of that - Kroft doesn't know why, perhaps she would if she knew more about what motivates shadows.

I've always heard that shadows are reluctant to travel far away from where they spawn.

The shadows travel like a wave in a medium.

I have Knowledge (religion), which as a matter of convention also covers the undead.

I don't have Knowledge ("waves" "in" "medium").

Assume that a given shadow will be satiated after draining the strength of one person per night.

(Or one person per week or month or year or however long - I get the impression that it might vary by the shadow, and that satiation isn't quite the right concept. 

Something like half of the shadows up there shouldn't have had a chance to eat anyone yet in their unlives, that's how exponential growth works.)

There are something like 200,000 Korvosan citizens still alive up there, densest along the coast, the Jeggare, the Falcon, the Sarwin, and the Yondabakari. 

It takes less than half a minute for a shadow to drain a person's strength to zero and of them make another shadow.

That new shadow hasn't eaten anyone ever in its life, so assume it goes out looking too. 

Abstract away a few minutes for munching yummies, and imagine that each shadow spawns another shadow that travels a short distance up the road to spawn another, which travels up the road to etcetera.

Even if no individual shadow cares to travel more than a stone's throw from where it spawned, death rolls through the agrarian world.

And if some shadows are motivated to move quicker than others, the shadows expand at the speed of their quickest. 

In practice, it looks like that's been 7ish 8ish miles an hour. 

If they keep that up, and stick to the roads, they'll fill every nook and cranny of the country within the week, even if no single shadow moves travels further than five miles from where it first spawned.

"If they stick to the roads"?

At the seven-and-a-half mph pace, if a shadow cut across the rivers and open country it could be at the Storval Rise in a fortnight.

If it also moved as quickly as it could, it could be there tomorrow night with hours to spare.

This seems pretty apocalyptic, to me.

Probably more important than the Vault Colonel thing, so I'll drop the topic even if I'm not about to publicly walk any of it back.

You've a gift for understatement.

I figure we can solve the rest of the problem later, but by nightfall we need a way to secure all who live within 160 miles of 50 miles of the city of Korvosa - 

160 miles of 50 miles?

We cannot rely on their not having been any single shadow that has already quietly made greater haste than the others. One shadow slips through and this all begins again.

Will you bet everything that there is no lonely nightmare that left the beaten path, and visited no place which was scried on?

...Good point.

And one shadow at the foot of the Storval Rise means no more Sirathu and also a second spreading front.

Okay.

How do we know that there aren't other fronts spreading within Korvosan territory already?

If there are, they opened after I had the holdings checked for raiders close to 4 AM this morning.

And only Veldraine has sent me with concern.

We should check again.

I concur.