Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king

Nibadur looked up at the mountain of stone that stood between him and his destiny, and for the first time, the word victory suddendly didn’t come so easily upon his lips

Mh.

He had always been a man of iron certainty, but looking at the Bastion made that certainty waver. Calling this a ”castle” was like calling a mountain-lion a common house cat. He had received reports of its construction, of the years of labor and the staggering costs Alpheo had poured into the earth, but words on parchment were hollow things.

They did not prepare the soul for the reality of it.

The walls rose ahead of him, tall and impossibly thick, like the petrified trunks of ancient oaks.

The architecture was queer but its purpose was undeniably deadly. Scaling those walls would have been a nightmare under any circumstances, but as he peered through the crisp air, he saw the glint of sun on thousands of helmets.

It was also well-manned.

Worse , it was a fortress comprised of fortresses.If that even made any sense.How did the Peasant Prince even thought of this?

Four distinct, massive strongholds were joined by colossal curtain walls, creating a killing field that made Nibadur’s blood run cold. There was only one gate, positioned in the very center of the line. To approach it was to walk into a tunnel of death; the bastions on either side were angled so that archers could rain arrows upon an attacker’s flanks without ever leaving cover.

To take the gate, they would first have to silence the strongholds. That would require bodies upon bodies.

There were no doors into the end-point castles from the outside; they were smooth, seamless towers of stone. His men would have to assault them with ladders and towers as if they were the walls of a capital city.

Each stronghold was a damn island.

Nibadur closed his eyes for a moment, and in the darkness of his mind, he saw the butchery to come.

He imagined the siege towers, grand and expensive, groaning as they rolled forward only to be turned into towering pyres by fire-pots. He saw the ladders being pushed back, falling away from the stone like matchsticks, carrying dozens of screaming men to the rocks below.Because the defenders had even put stones deep into the heart as a final welcoming gift , that’d be enough to make a fall that would normally break bones , break whole bodies.

Thousands would die. Perhaps a third or even half of a normal princely host would be fed into the maw of the Bastion.

A cold shiver traced his spine, but he forced his eyes open and hardened his heart.

Thousands, he thought the number suddenly so small now that he could hear the shifting of more than twenty thousand boots behind him, his gaze sweeping over their endless lines.

Well. If there was one thing they had in abundance, it was men.

He contemplated what his army would look like after they tried to summit that mountain of stone, nothing good came no mind.... But they had no other choice. Starving the Bastion was out of the question.

His twelve thousand swords and two thousand horses too big a stomach to nudge with the stick of hunger.

They would be reduced to eating their own leather boots and slaughtering their finest mounts long before the garrison inside even considered skipping a meal. Alpheo had likely stockpiled enough grain to feed a small city for two years; to challenge him to a contest of hunger was pure foolishness.

But he wasn’t the only one feeling the sudden weight of doubt. Behind him, the murmurs of his captains rose like the buzzing of disturbed hornets.

”Gods be merciful... we have to take that?” The Lord of Pardum whispered, his voice cracking. He clutched his reins so hard his knuckles turned white against his plate armor.

”It should have taken a decade to build walls that thick,” another lord, which Nibadur cared not of what, said . ”How did he raise it in two?”

He may have not known the man but Nibadur knew the answer: gold, blood, and a lot of effort. He wouldn’t praise Alpheo aloud, but he found himself coveting the engineer who had dreamed up this monstrosity. A man who could turn a hillside into a death trap in twenty-four months was a man worth his weight in diamonds.

He would get this man for himself after this war.

Some were awed by the constructions, others instead took it as a challenge.

”The heretic prince must be in there!” Sir Left-Hand Mers roared, breaking the somber mood with his characteristic madness.

True to his name, he had only a left hand, having lost the other in a trial by combat six winters ago. He was one of the Ezvanian’s pets, who compensated for his master’s lack of spine with by holding double the rage. ”We ought to challenge the coward! Force him into the field where we can trample him!The Gods are watching us punish the heretic-lover!”

Clack. Clack. Clack.

He began striking his sword hilt against his helmet with his only good hand, the rhythmic metallic banging echoing loudly through the ranks.

”Oh yes, and how do you propose we do that, you one-handed fool?” the Lord of Contia snapped back.He was one of Nibadur’s own men, and far more pragmatic. ”We outnumber them four to one. Only a madman or a suicidal idiot would march out of those walls to face those odds. Look at the masonry! Would you trade twelve feet of stone for a ’fair fight’ in the mud?”

”I’d get inside just the same!” Mers shouted back, his face reddening. ”The Peasant Prince could at least save us the trouble of scaling the damn thing and meet us at the gate!”

”You going to take the lead on the ladders then?” Contia sneered.

”Think I won’t? I’ll be the first over the parapet just to boast it in your face!No one dares call me a coward in front of the Warrior!I was cutting off bodies while you were at your mother’s teats!”

Of course no one did called him that. Last thing Mers could ever be was a coward.

Nibadur turned away tired of his men antics.’ He had no time for such ramble, not like he would lose much of that, he would probably get tired of it throughout the campaign.As he came to discover having so many lords from so many princedom, kind of stoked the fire of their souls.

Last night a Habadian soldier had apparently put his sword into the shoulder of an Oizenian, after a real unlucky game of dice, for who he was not sure, since one was brought to be stitched up by the medics, another was instead given a rope.

And that was just one of many. As it turned out there were still bad blood running among them. The Oizenians had after all invaded the Kakunians but twenty years ago, something that was still fresh in the mind of the eldest among the allied host.

There had then been a case of bride-kidnapping from some years ago from an Ezvanian lord from a Kakunian.

And even though that would have made them kin between each other , it did not really made their steel any less sharper when the brothers of the victim issued a duel against the perpetrator, which thanks to both princes intervention only became to first blood.

First blood that however came from a sword into the throat of the brother of the sister.

As stated before, bad blood run among them.

He shifted his gaze toward Latio, the Young Bull. The boy wasn’t arguing, thanks the gods for that, he was simply looking back at the twelve thousand men trailing behind them.

Nibadur felt a bit of thankfulness for that, at the very least those at the top could entertain civil discussion.

He also wanted the boy to see this. He wanted Latio to understand the sheer, world-bending power they could wield if they stood together. With this many men, they could oppose any King or Emperor who dared cross them.

And there would be plenty of crossing to come.

Dark rumors were drifting down from the North like a cold fog. The Kingdom of Sarlon, once a bastion of civilization, had supposedly fallen to barbarian tribes who now turned the cathedrals into orgy-houses and nefarious ceremonies of false gods and demons. Even more worrying were the reports from the East: the Sand Palace of Azania, the golden jewel of the coast, had reportedly been razed by the Scourge of the Sea.

Between the two, the sea-scourge was the true nightmare. They were closer. They were hungry. And they didn’t care for walls given they just ate those of the biggest city on the other continent...

He preferred when they were simple raiders...

A sigh rose in the air as Latio turned his eyes away from the glittering, serpentine lines of the host behind them, spurring his horse forward to close the gap with the older Prince. The iron horns of his helmet caught the afternoon sun, casting long shadows across the dry earth that woon be sated.

”We are slow,” the Young Bull muttered, his voice tight with a tension that hadn’t left him since they crossed the border.

”We ought to be,” Nibadur replied smoothly, not taking his eyes off the Bastion’s silhouette. ”One does not expect a mountain to move with the agility of a mountain cat. An army of this magnitude is a glacier. It moves at its own pace, crushing everything beneath its weight.”

”That’s... not what I mean. We have been marching at a snail’s pace, even for twelve thousand,” Latio repeated.

The Habadia knew the boy was sharper than the singing fools and the beggars in their company, so he remained silent, waiting for the point he knew was coming. He watched the way Latio’s hand hovered near his sword hilt.

”The Crownl... Prince Sorza,” Latio continued, carefully choosing his words. ”He has spoken many times of how the Fox appeared from nothing before at the Dip of Apurvio and at the butchery of Aracina. He spoke of how fast the Yarzat legions moved, marching through the night, appearing on flanks, sailing through the sea, always appearing before the scouts could even scream a warning. And yet...”

Nibadur finished the thought for him, his voice dropping into a low, cold register. ”And yet, we have heard nothing of him. We have seen no banners on the ridges, no smoke from raided outposts. You fear the Fox appearing at our backs while we are staring at his front door?”

Latio’s face twisted into a grimace. He didn’t look like a man comforted by the fact that he was being understood.

”I am not disparaging your concern,All knower save us if we did.” Nibadur said, his tone unusually gentle for a man of his reputation. ”It would be a wise worry to have. I am certain his Late Grace of Oizen held no such worry at Aracina, and we all know how the crows feasted upon his overconfidence. We ought to learn from the dead if we don’t want to join them.”

Nibadur looked back at the monolithic stronghold ahead, then scanned the vast, rolling expanse of the countryside surrounding it. The woods were too quiet. The valleys too empty indeed....

”We will put double the men on watch tonight,” Nibadur promised. ”We will organize the camp in a proper way. I have no intention of being remembered as the man who lost twelve thousand souls because he was too busy admiring a wall to check his own back. Am I right?”

He broke into a confident smile, one designed to inspire loyalty and calm, but Latio’s expression remained flat. The boy could not bring himself to match the Prince’s bravado.

”I wonder why he has not yet appeared...” Latio whispered, more to the wind than to his ally.

”Maybe he is simply inside,” Nibadur offered, gesturing toward the Bastion. ”Perhaps he has poured every ounce of his strength into that stone cage, betting everything on a siege that he believes he can win.”

”Perhaps,” Latio said, his eyes narrowing as he studied the queer, deadly geometry of the walls. ”But that would mean he has restricted his own options. Putting shackles on his own feet... is that really what that man would do? To wait for us to surround him?”

”Maybe it was his only choice,” Nibadur countered. ”Even the Fox can be backed into a corner if the hounds are numerous enough.What could he do even if he were outside?He would just waste men that could instead be on that castle defending his throne.”

Latio looked at the high towers of the Bastion, then back toward the vulnerable tail of their own supply line stretching leagues into the distance. ”Somehow... I find that very hard to believe, Your Grace’’