Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king

Alpheo turned away from the place where his ”death” had just been unceremoniously trampled into the silt.

The nerve of the man, he thought with a bitter taste in his mouth. To claim the title of an ending, only to find it himself in the gut of a dying horse.

He watched for a moment as one of the Kakunian zealots roared at the sky, hoisting that fool’s headless corpse as a trophy while another began stripping the fallen knight’s sword and dagger.

A relative of the Prince, the man had claimed. Alpheo scoffed internally. The notion was as likely as a horse sprouting wings; royalty didn’t wander the belly of a slaughterhouse without a wall of steel surrounding them.

Then again, Alpheo was here.... still he was a special circumstance, perhaps,in any other case he would have himself be drowned in white cloaks. But life rarely let him have his way.

He sucked in a breath, his lungs burning, before remembering that while he had been playing games with an arrogant fool, his ally was still drowning in the press.

But his worries were missplaced when his eyes laid on him.

Merelao was exactly where he had left him, ganged up on by a trio of opponents. For all the good it did them, they might as well have been five; no one fought quite like the Mad Bull.

He realized then how long he had harbored the wrong opinion of this man. He had allowed himself to fall into the comfortable trap of prejudice, heeding only the whispers that confirmed his bias. Merelao might be a dog with a dozen screws loose in his head, but he was a bloody-minded hound of the first order.

He didn’t just fight; he danced. He moved through the enemy as if they were soft pastry. He parried, riposted, and pirouetted, occasionally ignoring a strike entirely to let his golden armor take the brunt of a blow he deemed unworthy of a dodge. He was everything Alpheo was not: a true warrior, a creature of reflex and lethality.

Not a single movement was wasted.

He ducked a blade by the barest fraction of an inch, allowed a spear to clutter uselessly against his ribs, and used the space bought by that maneuver to take the head of a third man who hadn’t even finished his swing.

And then on and on he danced, warming his steel in the throat of the spearman. It was an easy kill, a man with the barest of armor and even less hope, but Merelao took it with a lover’s intensity. The third opponent turned and fled, sensing the cold breath of the grave in the Kakunian’s laughter.

For indeed he was laughing as he killed.

The Horned One didn’t chase him; he didn’t need to play the jackal. New prey was always arriving. Man after man threw themselves into the meat-grinder, as if the sight of so much death acted as a siren song for more untill all break on that golden tone.

The horned one lunged forward, parrying a blade to his flank before leaping over the tangled heap of the dead to catch another strike on his own edge. But the tide was thick.

He was turned on his back, a man pressing from his left, another from his right, and two more closing in from the shadow of his blind spot.

Even a legend can be drowned by numbers.

He is going to die, Alpheo thought.

As much as he loathed the man’s madness, he respected the steel in his soul, and it would serve Yarzat no purpose to have the Kakunian’s golden corpse rotting in this ditch. He was the only weapon he had to bring the field of fight to Kakunia and away from his own home.

Against the protests of a body begging for the mercy of collapse he was far too impart to lose now. Against all senses Alpheo charged.

His head felt heavy, as if his skull had been filled with wet sand, and the warmth spreading across his left cheek was a raging forest fire he could no longer ignore.

But still, like a blaze fueled by desperation, he stormed across that field of red muck, his boots trampling shattered shields, tangled guts, and the faces of the fallen.

He took one of the man from behind, driving his blade down through the nape of the neck just below the helm. The soldier never saw his killer though he felt him as he simply ceased to be, a heavy weight sliding off Alpheo’s steel.

A strange, flickering light passed through Merelao’s eyes as he caught Alpheo’s gaze and presence.

The Prince opened his mouth to shout a warning about the two closing from the rear, but the shout died in his throat. Merelao wore the coldest, most predatory smile Alpheo had ever seen.

And as if he could smell the intent of the men clamoring for his life, the Kakunian simply let himself go.

He threw his weight backward, slamming his armored spine into the chest of the attacker behind him. The man’s swing was strangled in its infancy.

Then, he waved like a spinnin top of gold. He ducked his head low, lunging forward with a brutal, serpentine grace of the snake that bit him when he was young.

When he had gifted the armor to the Bull, he had meant it as a jest, a flamboyant nod to a house herald. He had never imagined it could be used as a weapon.

The prince of Yarzat was showed the err of his ways soon enough.

The horn tore through the stumbling man. The screech of steel on steel grated against the air as the horn went agains the flat cheek of the helmet, followed instantly by the wet, muffled thwack of the horn shearing through the socket.

The last thing that man ever saw was the milky, dead eye of Merelao’s previous victim staring back at him.

Without even finishing the movement, Merelao dismissed the blinded, screaming wretch as beneath his notice. He whirled, his blade a flash that sheared through the parrying sword of the final man as if it were made of tin. Five more slashes and the sixth found scabbard in the man throat.

He was magnificent. He was a monster.

Determined not to be eclipsed by a madman’s shadow, Alpheo lunged toward the man Merelao had left in his wake, a soldier standing mesmerized just as the prince was, by the sight of the man-eating bull.

Alpheo didn’t strike with Merelao’s operatic flair; he didn’t have such skill.

He closed the distance in two sliding strides, his sword high to hide its trajectory. As the soldier finally shook off his trance, Alpheo’s blade rose like a strike of lightning.

He parried the man’s desperate downward hack with a flick of his wrist, the vibration humming through his gauntlets. And then spurred by the dance he had just seen, instead of pulling back, he stepped into the man’s guard, slamming the heavy piece of his elbowed armor into the soldier’s visor.

The metal buckled and the man staggered.

Then all at once, he spun on his heel turning at the man’s back diving down his armpit, the black plates of his armor grinding together like the cogs of a clock, and delivered a backhanded slash that caught the man in the unarmored gap behind the knee.

By then it was all over.

He didn’t look at the man’s face. He simply drove the point home through the armpit, pinning the man to the earth he had tried to conquer.

He stood over the cooling corpse, his chest heaving in painful lunges. Even the Bull, after so much exquisite slaughter, seemed short of breath, his golden ribs rising and falling like a bellows.And he had killed far more than Alpheo had.

Still he had killed too, and so there, amidst the harvest of iron and meat, the Fox and the Bull stood in a pocket of sudden, impossible quiet. The roar of the battle had not ceased, but in the immediate circle of their own violence, a small hush blossomed.

They watched one another, each finding in the other a dark mirror of his own survival. The ranks of the dead stretched toward the horizon, a carpet of broken dreams and cooling flesh. In that silence, their minds wandered, one hysterical and dancing on the edge of a precipice, the other bone-tired and sinking into the grey. It was a fascinating, terrible thing; how the proximity of the grave could make the mind blaze with such frantic, vivid life.

The spell was shattered by a riderless horse drifting off.

The stallion thundered through the gap between them, a beast trained never to abandon a charge once begun. It hammered through the muck, eyes wide with a mindless, ancestral fury that was forged by generations of high-breeding, even as its rider remained trapped it still let on to its ancestral tradition.

The man’s foot was caught in the stirrup, and his armored body bounced and dragged behind the beast, brushing away the dirt with his breastplate in death.

Merelao was the first to chuckle and Alpheo was quick to follow. It was a low, hacking sound that tasted of copper and grit, of murder and kill, of joy and mirth.

The blind were leading the blind toward a shared, inevitable madness. For what else could be said of men who, standing in a field of a thousand ghosts, found a reason to laugh?