Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king

Asag squeezed his hand onto the crenelated stone of the battlements, the roughstone biting into his palm. High above the valley floor, the winds howled and yelled, snapping the silk banners of the League with a sound like rhythmic whip-cracks.

Ahead of the Legate’s vision, the horizon was a forest of enemy heraldry. The Golden Sun of Oizen burned with a false heat; the Cock of Ezvania sang a silent, arrogant tune; the Charging Bull of Kakunia strained against its poles; and the Twin Towers of Habadia stood like a looming promise of subjugation.

They were like mushrooms sprouting on a green field of grass. So many it seemed they spread from the very ground.

Asag deigned to look at those banners with the same cold indifference he reserved for the contents of his chamberpot at the day’s end. It mattered little how proud they flew; they would all end in the same gutter.

This castle was not theirs. They had no place here and they were not welcomed.

They had arrived with the stench of easy victory clinging to them, dreaming of a short summer campaign followed by a winter of feasting on Yarzat’s grain. Even now, the camp below radiated the unbearable smugness of men who believed numbers were a substitute for soul. Asag’s eyes scanned the sprawl. He had never seen so many.

By his count, there were at least eleven thousand footmen and two thousand knights, that would be the sum of the enemy he would have to kill.

He ground his teeth, the sound audible over the wind. They will all rot in the dirt before I grant them a single inch of this stone, he thought.

The clank of heavy plate armor announced a visitor before a word was spoken. Asag didn’t need to turn to know it was Xanthios, only he could come to him unannounced, all the other lords would have hailed themselves.

”Impressive, eh?” Xanthios said, stepping up to the edge of the wall to flank the Legate. He leaned a hip against the stone, whistling low through his teeth as he took in the sheer scale of the besieging host. ”One has to wonder what the Prince of Habadia promised to raise a swarm like that. I’ve seen armies, Asag, but never a mountain of meat this high.”

”We had similar numbers at Romelia,” Asag grunted, his voice a low rasp. ”But I was in the reserve then. I saw the back of the host, not the face of the beast. And when the fighting started, it was like being buried alive. For every man you cut down, two more sprouted from the mud like mold on damp bread.It was madness that one, never swung my halberd so fucking hard as that day.”

”Any other thoughts on the matter? Does your mind not wander, seeing so many knights in one place?” Xanthios asked, his tone deceptively casual.

”I’ve got no thoughts to share on them unless it’s about the most efficient way to open their throats,” Asag replied with a derisive snort. ”Little good those shiny sets of plate and pampered destriers will do them against these walls. Unless they’ve spent the morning teaching their horses how to fly, they’re just expensive targets. And look at them...” He gestured vaguely at the chaos of the enemy camp. ”They’ve been here over a week, and only now are they moving to fill the ditch? Bah. If it were our legion, the camp would have been fortified by the second sunset and the laborers would have been breaking ground by the third, and ladders and rams sent forth by the fourth.”

”It took them by surprise, finding nothing but ash and empty hovels in the valley,” Xanthios said, leaning over the edge. He worked up a thick glob of spit and launched it into the abyss. It fell short of the distant enemy lines, lost in the wind. ”They wasted days chasing ghosts in the woods. Not that we should grumble. Are you not pleased to see them throwing their own soldiers into their death so early in the game?”

Asag didn’t answer. Instead, he leaned forward, his eyes tracking a movement at the edge of the ditch.

The League had finally given up on finding local peasants. Lacking forced labor, they were now pushing their own men forward. Long lines of infantry were dragging wooden carts piled high with dirt and stones toward the yawning moat where they would then discard their holdings to build a path for the siege machine...

But of course from the walls around them, the Yarzat response began as soon as they would come in range.

The stones cut the air with their high-pitched, demonic shrillness.

Asag watched with no little pleasure as below, a Habadian soldier who was struggling with a heavy barrow had a fist-sized stone take him square in the helmet.

He would have sworn he even heard the sound of the metal buckling above the winds and everything else, quickly followed by the man crumpling like a wet cloth down onto the dirt where he would forever lie.

Stone and arrows rained down the parapet like confetti after a marriage.It was good for once not to worry about projectiles, the prince had expected this war for three years, he certainly did not pass these three only by campaigning in Romelia and entertaining a madman in his home.

They had no worry about using sparingly their arrows and stones for there were so many of them, that they would first finish their food than run out of things to shoot and throw.

Asag watched with fascination as one of the invaders huddled behind a makeshift wooden mantlet. The man was shivering, his eyes darting frantically as the air around him hissed with the sound of invisible death. It took a sergeant’s sword-point pressed into the small of his back to force him into a desperate, lumbering sprint toward the next bit of cover.

He made it once. He made it twice. But on the third dash, his luck ran dry.

A Yarzat arrow, fletched with gray goose feathers, took him just beneath the chin. Had the man been wearing a proper gorget, he might have survived with a bruised ego; instead, he tumbled backward, his hands flying to his throat in a vain attempt to stem the crimson tide. He choked on his own life, his legs drumming a frantic, dying rhythm against the churned earth.

”You seem to find a particular sort of peace in watching them die, Legate,”

Asag didn’t turn to look at the Lord of Bracum. ”Is that a reproach that blesses my ears, my lord? I didn’t realize the nobility had grown so sentimental about the yelp in the field outside.”

Bracum gave a short, sharp bark of a laugh, stepping up to the crenelations. ”Hardly. While I prefer the tactile satisfaction of sending a man to the gods by my own hand, I won’t deny there is a certain... aesthetic pleasure in seeing one’s enemies drop like flies. It’s a very tidy way to kill the day....”

’’A slow way,” Asag corrected, finally turning his eyes toward the lord. ”The problem with flies is that there are always more of them. If you expect to win this by counting casualties, you’ll be waiting until the priests in our chapel are found drunk in a brothel, which is to say, you’ll be waiting forever. Habadia and the League have a surplus of meat. They can fill that ditch with corpses if they have to, and they’ll still have thousands more to throw at the walls.”

Bracum narrowed his eyes at those words. ”There comes a breaking point for every host, Asag. No matter how many men a Prince commands, there is a limit to the blood they can watch soak into the mud before the spirit snaps. What makes you so certain they don’t have it?”

”I never said they don’t have it. I’m simply stating that we won’t be the ones to break their spirit with arrows alone,” Asag said, his voice dropping into a low, dangerous register. ”We’d sooner see them break from the inside out.We are betting on their stomachs, not their hearts. An army that large is a gluttonous beast. We hold out long enough, and the land itself will starve them out. They’ll be eating their own boots before the first snow falls.”

”And what happens next year?” Bracum asked, his brow furrowed. ”They won’t stay home and weep. They’ll return.”

”Let them,” Asag shrugged. ”They’ll come back with half the numbers because they won’t be able to afford to feed another mob like this. A smaller army is easier to manage, yes, but it’s also easier for us to break on the open field. We refused the Eagle’s offer to send legions for this war because we didn’t want to be baited to a battle that would hardly be won. But for the next one? If the League returns with their tails between their legs and their purses empty, we might not be so remiss to take the field ourselves. By then, the odds will have changed. We won’t be the ones behind walls; we’ll be the ones holding the hammer.”

Bracum studied the Legate for a long moment, a slow, predatory grin spreading across his face. ”You speak like a man who has already won. I hope the Fox hasn’t infected you with too much of his optimism. I always believed his grace had a lot of it, and that somehow the Warrior, or as some say his father, never saw fit to see his hopes dashed..”

”It’s not optimism, my lord,” Asag replied, turning back to the massacre below. ”Optimism would be putting your hand in a lion’s awe and hope it won’t bite.

What we are doing is first beating it bloody dead and then putting our hand on his maw daring it to try. I can assure you of something my lord, we at this moment are the bar, not the stick...”