Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king-Chapter 1083: A job well done

The hope of a swift campaign had withered as quickly as the summer blooms, replaced by the cloying, sweet and mouth-watering stench of three weeks’ worth of rot rising from the base of the ramparts.

The morning songs the highborn had once brayed about hunting foxes, caroled over plates of soft bread and honeyed ham, had melted away like mountain snow come spring.

He sat in the gloom of his tent, nursing a phantom ache in his shoulder. It had finally dawned on them, he supposed. Gods knew he had tried to tell them about it, he had hoped they would learn from his mistakes, but they had laughed into their wine and made jokes about his abilities.

Though it was true that it was his shame, it was not his fault..

He had ridden out with a thousand spears and thirty knights of the sun, a glittering column of steel and pride. He had crawled back with seven hundred men and not a single destrier to his name, save for the four half-starved nags kept in the auxiliary stalls. Two hundred had been claimed by the fires that first night; the rest had been plucked away in the long, dark retreat.

Night after night, the shrieks had torn through the air. Men would wake from a fitful doze to find their messmates pinned to the earth, javelins of black wood quivering in their bellies or throats. Sometimes it would be arrows, but most of time javelins.

Because they had anticipated a parade rather than a war, the supply of bandages and poultices was a joke. For every ten men who felt the bite of a hidden blade, only three saw the next moon.

He had tried to defend his honor, to explain the way the enemy was waging war but the Council of Princes had ears only for their own glory. They had sent more parties ahead to forage, and even more back toward the Oizenian border to press-gang the peasantry. Those men, too, had met the phantoms. Even deep within what they thought was secure territory, the shadow of the Fox lingered.

The attackers bore no banners.And bore no honour to themselves.

They made no sound. As if they had always been there, and then they were gone, leaving only the wet, gurgling screams of the surprised that bore their gifts.

The few who could boast of catching a glimpse of the specters spoke of men who did not share the soft features of the South. These were not the golden boys of Yarzat or the broad-faced hinds of Herculia. No, these were the ones who served the Fox with a terrifying, silent devotion because there was no other master that would accept them. Heretics. Dogs.

The terror began to seep into the very marrow of the camp, not that of the scouting parties, but instead the very camp where the league sat.

Groups of five, sometimes ten, would vanish between the watch-fires. The next morning, the sentries would find their answer at light’s first, decapitated heads and dismembered limbs arranged in circles a dozen paces from the camp’s edge. Sometimes they were piled like cordwood; other times, they were mounted on pikes, their dead eyes staring back at the host with a silent frozen cries.

The back of their heads, where once hair stood, was but a red carpet.

That had at least been able to convince the high lords of what he had been trying to say for the last weeks.

This was not to be a normal campaign.

There was only one unit in the Fox’s service capable of such savagery, the Voghondai. Faithless curs who worshipped dust and piss, men who had no concept of the Warrior’s grace or the Father’s justice. They made up in savagery what they lacked in honor.

Honor....

The flap of the tent snapped behind him like a bone breaking. He stepped into the day, letting the biting wind scour his skin, an icy caress for a face that had been facing the tension of an army ready to break. Above him, the Bastion loomed having denied them every prayer and every drop of blood they had offered up.

Honor was a phantom. It had been the first casualty of the siege, and he stood as a witness to its burial.

He looked up at the battlements and felt a sickness that no physician could purge. There, silhouetted against the green of the moss on the walls, hung the response of the defenders to the attacker’s insults.

A dozen knights of the League, captured in the failed sallies of the previous week, dangled from the ramparts. They were stripped of everything but their helms, their pale, naked flesh looking like maggot-skin in the moonlight. Their bellies had been slit open as if they were trouts, the grey-pink coils of their entrails spilling out to hang like the vines of some fleshy tree.

A murder of ravens had descended upon them, their black feathers shimmering as they thrust their beaks deep into the cavities of men who had once dreamed of glory. When the stench grew too thick even for the gargoyles of the wall, the defenders simply cut the ropes, letting the butchered remains wet-thud onto the stones below, joining all the others of rotting corpses.

A holy war, the Princes had called it.Fighting against those who harbored the faithless ones.

He closed his eyes and whispered a prayer to the Warrior for strength, and to She who brings mercy with the blind fold, for something he knew was not coming. He was a man of the Word, a man who believed that the rites of steel were sacred, but he was surrounded by heathens wearing crowns.

The madness had truly begun in the third week, when the Red Pox began to bloom like poisonous flowers across the chests of the levies. The high lords, terrified of the contagion and yet looking for a way to win the siege, had suggested an abomination that made his blood run cold: to butcher the infected dead and hurl their diseased meat over the walls with the trebuchets.

He had raged against it. He had stood in the council tent, his voice shaking with a holy fury, telling them that to deny a man his funeral pyre was to invite the Father Protector of Law’s judgment. He had spoken of the sanctity of the soul and the just conduct of war.

"Victory has no room for the priest’s drivel," the Prince of Oizen had sneered then, wiping grease from his chin during the banquet where they announced the order. He was more than happy to see it done if it mean seeing his hated enemy fall.

He would be the first among which divine justice would fall.

And so, the dead were desecrated.

The air of the Bastion had been filled with the flying filth of their own brothers. But the Gods are not mocked. The Warrior had turned his face away, and She Wro bring mercy had brought a lantern to their sins. The pestilence did not stay behind the stone walls; it turned back upon the camp with a vengeance. The Red Pox and the Grey Fever began to wring the life from their ranks, a divine retribution for those who had sacrileged the proper rites of the fallen.

Some of the lords even fell to it.

In response the defenders hung the knight that he was gazing at.

The slaughter only ceased when the rope met the neck of the few high-borns they had . It was not the sight of a hundred rotting knight that moved the Princes to parley; it was the sight of the young heir to House Valerius, an Ezvanian lion’s cub, standing upon the rampart with a noose of hemp tight around his throat.He had been captured on the first week.

Only then did the "noble" lords find the tongue for just conduct. Only when their own blood was at risk of swaying in the wind did they suddenly remember the Father’s laws.

They had finally agreed to burn the dead. The great pyres now choked the valley with a thick, greasy soot, and the quarantine tents were filled with the moans of the few hundred who had survived the blades only to be broken by the plague.

Of the twelve thousand five hundred who had first marched beneath the proud sun of Oizen and the twin towers of Habadia, barely ten thousand remained to see the moon rise over the charnel house that was their camp, luckily more reinforcement were coming their way.

A third of the original host had been claimed by the steel of those insides or the creeping rot of the Red Pox.

They were a harvest of ghosts, yet the Princes remained gluttons for the slaughter.

Every week, the press-gangs were sent out like hounds to harry the countryside, dragging mud-stained peasants from their hovels to serve as fodder for the breach. These poor souls were given a spear they didn’t know how to hold and a gambeson that smelled of the last man who had died in it, then herded toward the walls to die so that a knight might find a foothold upon their corpses.

They learned of that when all the knights they sent were dying, so they realised that to win the siege, they would only use them after a breach was made.

Of course the enemy made responses to that.

Many of these reinforcements never even saw the Bastion. They were swallowed by the woods, dispersed by the faceless shadows that haunted the Fox’s lands, their screams lost to the wind. But those who did reach the lines were immediately outfitted with the tools of their execution and sent to the front.

He watched the latest tally of the dead with a heavy heart, his fingers tracing the prayer beads at his belt.

The Council of Princes had finally turned their eyes toward him. One by one, the great lords had seen their glory turn to ash. The lords of Oizen had lost their pride at the southern gate; the Habadians had seen thier finest knights gutted in the stone and fell into the green below.

Now, with the towers charred and the spirits of the men fraying like old hemp, they had called for him.

"The Warrior demands a sacrifice of true steel," the Ezvanian prince liege had announced making his name "Let the pious lead the way."

He knew what they were doing. They were sending him to the slaughter, some had taken offense at the way he had raged against all of their plans and many times led loud prayer whenever a body was burnt, it wasn’t much they hoped for piety to do what vanity could not, but more likely, wanting a convenient martyr to blame for the final collapse.

He did not argue, it was not his place, for he was sworn to his prince. He went to his tent and donned his hauberk, the iron rings cold against his skin. He did not seek the glory or riches, he truly believed that a prince who housed infidels in his land, must been shown the right way.

And if to do that he had to make it red, so it shall be.

He sought only to bring a shred of justice to a war that had forgotten the face of those who stood above even the princes and kings of this forsaken land. 𝚏𝕣𝕖𝚎𝚠𝚎𝚋𝚗𝐨𝐯𝕖𝕝.𝕔𝐨𝕞

They were always watching. If only they could understand that.