Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king-Chapter 1068: Foreign station(3)

Ahead of the four massive walls of the Bastion, the League began to scar the earth. Three distinct camps rose like cysts upon the landscape. To the left hung the Orange Sun of Oizen, its banners snapping with a desperate, frantic energy to reclaim their lost honor. To the right, the Singing Cock of Ezvania fluttered over a city of silk and noise. In the center, dominating the approach, flew the Twin Towers of Habadia alongside the Charging Bull of Kakunia.

They hadl all agreed that for the first week, there would be no blood.

No desperate rushes, no suicide runs against the stone. Instead, they would labor. They would fill the outer ditches with earth and wood, assemble the skeletal frames of siege towers, and prepare for a grind that would be measured in months or in weeks, depinding on the assaults would go.

"Have the soldiers dig specific latrines. They are to lower their britches there and nowhere else," Nibadur commanded, passing from one business to the other. ’’Whip to bloody backs those that do not obey.’’

He was speaking to Ser Gallow Gervaise, a man who had served Nibadur’s father as a landless knight before Nibadur elevated him, granting him governship over the rich city of Brinis.

"Your Grace is taking tactical cues from the enemy’s handbook now?" he noted his tone sliding toward a dismissiveness that made the skin on Nibadur’s neck prickle.

"The Fox has led a dozen sieges and never once has his army been hollowed out by the bloody flux or the shaking plague," Nibadur countered. "There is no shame in stealing a another man’s ideas if it keeps my front line from shitting themselves to death before the first wall falls."

"As I see it, the Gods decree who rots and who thrives,we shall stand as talls as the towers in your banners Your Grace, I believe the gods won’t dare send us plagues.." Gervaise said, his hand straying to the holy medal at his chest. "Shitting in a specific hole won’t change the fate written in the stars. But if His Grace wishes for us to spend our first week digging for dung, I am but his servant."

Nibadur watched the knight retreat, his eyes lingering on the thick, purple-ridged scars that etched around Gervaise’s neck like a permanent noose.

Gervaise was a prickly bastard, fervent to the point of zealotry, but his loyalty was a bloody thing that had never snapped. As a boy, Nibadur had heard the legend: Gervaise had been captured by sea-pirates and hanged from a makeshift gallows outside the walls of Cormium to bait the Ezvanian garrison into a suicidal sortie, of course alongside him there were also some other nobles. Then Gervaise wasn’t even a knight after all.

He had swung there for quite some time until Nibadur’s father shattered the pirate host at the Battle of the Red Scythe, earning a marriage of the Prince’s son with his daughter, which brought them to the present.

Of the dozen men hanged that day, Gervaise was the only one the healers could bring back from the brink of the abyss.

And even then death had left its mark on him.

He had claimed the Gods had reached down and held the rope slack, of course it had been an Habadian blade but some entity must have sent him there no?

Whatever the case after that he had sworn a blood-oath to the Royal House of Habadia that had lasted thirty years. He was a miracle in plate armor, a living icon that the common soldiers looked up to.

Nibadur’s father had been wise enough to use that legend, and Nibadur had been wise enough to reward it.

Gervaise had won him half of Hashandeia with his stubborn brilliance on the field when he shattered the enemy left with a flanking charge, smashing an enemy unit that held the ford before going toward with his calvary in two, winning him the battle and leading to the consequent peace treaty.

Soon, Nibadur intended to have the other half. He already had the plan spinning: his next daughter would be wed to the Hashandeian Prince’s grandson. It would be a velvet conquest; the Prince would keep his title for his twilight years, and Habadia could add another tower in his banner once the dust settled.

But that was for the future, for now he had a siege to wrap his mind around.

Turning his eyes away from the knight, Nibadur lifted them toward the teeth of the battlements he would soon be forced to climb. Banners he didn’t recognize, the heraldry of minor Yarzat lords who had chosen to stand their ground, fluttered in the wind like mocking tongues.

In the center, the great Falcon of Yarzat draped over the stone. Its presence confirmed that this was indeed the seat of the Crown’s power here, but it told him nothing of the man himself.

He knew at the very least a good portion of the Fox’s army had made stand there. That was something at the very least, though not much.

Alpheo’s absence was a weapon in its own right, or so Nibadur believed. Most of the host, however, fueled by the arrogance of their numbers, saw it as a sign of cowardice. His brother-in-law was the chief among those fools.

"You called, my dear brother?" The Prince of Ezvania cawed, drifting toward him with a glass-eyed, vacuous smile plastered across his face.

Nibadur felt a single huff of air escape his nostrils as the smell hit him: the sweet, cloying scent of opium.

"Yes. I called for you twenty minutes ago," Nibadur said, his voice flat as a grave marker.

"My deepest apologies. I was... getting myself ready. I had company with me, you see. A most enchanting distraction,had to offer them the right hospitality if you get my meaning.Can’t have fair ladies sings that I am a bad host, am I right?" the Ezvanian giggled, smoothing his silks and winking to the other prince.

Nibadur sighed.

Another man would have been insulted by the blatant hedonism, the smoke, and the paramours on the eve of a siege. But Nibadur didn’t care whose bed the man occupied or what poison he put in his lungs, so long as he stayed out of the way. His sister had already provided the Ezvanian with two healthy sons; Habadian blood was already secured on the Ezvanian throne. The man himself was merely a decorative accessory to the campaign.

On the contrary it was even better for him to be such a fool as it meant he would pose no risk to Nibadur’s future plans.

"I noticed that several of your sworn men’s banners are missing from your camp,"The prince of Habadia continued skipping the pleasantries. "Am I seeing correctly?"

"Alas, sharp as always, my dear brother! Yes, indeed. Some of my lords have ventured out in the unkown." he chuckled ’’They shall sing songs of said pioneer’’

The casualness of the remark sparked a flare of irritation in Nibadur’s chest. "To do what, pray tell?"

"We are in enemy land, Nibadur! What else?" the Ezvanian asked, waving a limp hand toward the horizon. "I sent them to forage. We can’t trust the Kakunians to do all the heavy lifting of feeding us, can we? My men have a taste for fresh meat, and the villages in this valley looked ripe for the picking. I gave them my leave to make a true harvest of it."

Nibadur felt his jaw tighten. Technically, those lords were sworn to Ezvania, not Habadia, but Nibadur was the architect of this war and held supreme command. He was the one holding the leash, or trying to.He wanted to know of such things. 𝕗𝚛𝚎𝚎𝐰𝗲𝗯𝗻𝚘𝚟𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝕞

"You should tread lightly, brother," he advised, fighting to keep his voice level. "We still do not know where the Fox is. Do not give him the opportunity to strike at our scattered parts."

"My lords petitioned me for the right to scour the area," the Ezvanian countered, his smile turning slightly defensive. "What is the wrong in that? Is that not how war is made? We burn, we eat, we conquer."

"I just explained what is wrong," Nibadur snapped, his patience fraying like a worn rope.

"Yes, yes. A prince who is not here to defend his own land. Am I supposed to be trembling? If the Fox strikes at those foraging parties, even better for us, no? At least then we would know the danger is around. The mystery would be solved at the price of a few men!"

Nibadur stared at him, stunned by the sheer, staggering idiocy of the logic. He reached out and gripped his brother-in-law’s shoulder, fighting the urge to shake him until his teeth rattled.

"That would be ’good,’ indeed," Nibadur hissed, "except for the fact that as I have told you twice now, we don’t know where he is. If he hits your lords, what then? We send a retaliatory force? Into the dark? Into the woods?Would you lead such force? We would be blind men swinging at ghosts.

Every time you divide your strength to find him, you give him a chance to make meat of our men and prompt us to send more, for the lords won’t take the fact they lost men in such conditions down. Next time, you convene with me before making such a decision. I am not against the idea of foraging, but it must be done with order."

He shoved the man back slightly, turning his gaze away before his temper broke completely.

A messenger on a grey horse was waiting a few yards back, his posture stiff and expectant. Nibadur gave the man a sharp nod of permission, and the rider hurried forward, pulling his mount to a skidding halt.

"Report," Nibadur commanded, his eyes returning to the silent towers of the Bastion. "Did the garrison heed my call for parlay, or do they intend to hide behind their stones like children?"

"Your Grace," the messenger began, his voice trembling with a mix of rage and shame. "I rode to the gate as ordered. A man appeared upon the battlements. He called himself Lord Asag."

"Lord Asag," Nibadur muttered, his mind cataloging the name. One of the Fox’s inner circle. A man who had risen from the gutter on a tide of blood. He had defied the late prince of Oizen for two months back at Aracina, buying time for the Fox to come to his aid and smash the Oizenian host in the darkness of night.

He was an hard men, if rumors were to be trusted.

"He may have declared himself lord, but he was not chivaliric in behaviour. I delivered your grace’s demand," the messenger continued, wiping a fleck of dirt from his ear. "I asked for a formal meeting. The enemy commander... laughed at that .

He told me to inform you that they would deliver the same response they gave to ’that worm-ridden Shamleik.’ And then..." He hesitated, his face reddening.

"And then?"

"And then they tipped a cauldron of night-soil and dung directly over the parlay flag," the man hissed. "I was forced to ride back through the camp under the laughter of their own sentries, smelling of the garrison’s latrines and shouting at me to inform your Grace they have enough of it to make a bath for you, if you comes again calling for their hospitality."

Nibadur let out a long, weary sigh. He looked up at the high, silent towers of the Bastion, where the Falcon of Yarzat seemed to stare down at them with a cold, glassy eye.

"It seems the rumors are true," Nibadur said, his voice dripping with a freezing distaste. "The men the Fox sees fit to raise to lordship have shit for honor, quite literally. They have no interest in the rules of war or the etiquette of princes."

He turned back to the Prince of the Ezvanians, who was still waving his handkerchief in a desperate attempt to ward off the smell of the messanger.

He realised however that perhaps they were in no position to complain on that, when they entertained such men as princes...perhaps inviting him south was a mistake, he should have just requested for his men and his silk banner.

At least he wouldn’t have needed to look at his face so many times a day. Just the sight of him made his blood boil.

Still, you may choose your friends but you can’t choose your family...