Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king

Hey guys! Since I was asked many times, I have decided to make a discord server about the book. I will share soon the link. Also if there are artist willing to take commission for art-piece about the novel. Please let me know. Or if you have a friend willing to do that. (I don’t want to use ai, for my character. I am willing to pay.)

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They rode their horses as if death itself had reached out a hand and clutched at their heels.

The wind gushed across the open plain, cold, biting, and utterly unyielding , making their heavy wool cloaks flap against their armor with the crack of war drums. Beneath them, the horses snorted in loud, lathered disapproval at the brutal pace. The ground was a treacherous slurry of half-frozen mud, and already, those whose steeds lacked the iron lungs to maintain the rhythm were falling back, swallowed by the gray mist.

”We will form up at the destination!” Torghan bellowed into the gale, his voice clashing against the howling wind. His breath rose from his mouth in thick, ragged plumes of steam.

If there is even a destination left waiting for us, he thought grimly.

Barely two hours ago, the scouts had shattered the peace of his own camp. When the heavy wooden gates had yawned open to let them in, the riders had practically tumbled from their saddles, chests heaving like broken bellows, their eyes wide and white as oranges. Torghan had expected grim news the moment he laid eyes on their panicked state.

, It had been far too sunny a day for grim tidings.

And yet these southern gods loved their cruel joke, and there was nothing funnier to them than bringing fire on a beautiful afternoon.

Yet, even Torghan could hardly believe the words that had rolled out of the scouts’ bloody mouths.

It seemed the recent quiet had not been peace at all. While the Voghondai had lazyed about, scraped mud from their boots, or otherwise jerked off to pass the idle hours, the Vulture Lord had instead waited, planned, and moved his pieces in the dark. His objective? The Western Resettlement Camp.

When Torghan’s relief force had originally rolled out of their gates, they had numbered fifty fresh blades. Now, after seven grueling hours of relentless, bone-shattering riding, they were thirty-six.

By the time the ninth hour rolled around, the Western Camp finally lifted into sight on the bleak horizon. Torghan and his people were many magnificent things, they were hunters, trackers, and terrifyingly efficient warriors, but master riders? That they were not. If Alpheo’s legendary Hounds of War had been tasked with this ride, they would have swallowed the distance in six hours flat, their horses bred for the brutal sprint.

But Torghan’s men were not the Hounds, and their stout mountain horses were unaccustomed to flatland racing. The delay showed in the lathered blood-sweat coating the beasts’ necks.

As the perimeter of the camp drew closer, Torghan’s worst fears materialized in the sky. The first thing to greet the relief force was smoke, a dozen thick, greasy gray pillars rolling upward toward the heavens like a dead man’s reaching hands.

As they closed the distance, Torghan’s hand drifted instinctively to the pommel of his axe. At the very least, no battle-shouts rose from the palisade. The smoke was a deeply depressing thing to behold, to be sure, but it was the lingering aftermath of a strike, not the roaring chaos of an active siege.

Panicked shouts finally echoed down from the wooden watchtowers flanking the main gate as the guards spotted the approaching dust cloud. Torghan squinted through the haze, his lip curling.

Local militia. He completely missed the sharp black-and-white tunics of the Fourth Legion, or the sun-bathed, scarred skin of his brothers and cousins’ tribes. These guards were soft-skinned Oizenian conscripts. Not very good in a real fight, barely enough to keep the man the guarded from gutting each other.

All the conquered locals who had been herded into these resettlement camps were usually given two very simple choices by the Yarzat crown: either pick up a shovel and work, or pick up a spear and fight for the lcrown. There was, of course, a third option that none willingly chose, and that was to slowly starve in the ditches.

Speaking of his tribal cousins, Torghan looked past the militia to see a few mercenary clansmen leaning against the palisade. He had fought side-by-side with those wild bastards on the left flank during the Battle of the Ford, packed tight behind the great banner of the Bull. Together, they had cleaved through enemy lines left and right, bathing in southron blood and letting out terrifying, primal howls as they ran the Oizenian lines into the dirt.

It had been a magnificent honor to be part of the iron thrust that broke the Oizenian heart. The memory of that victory was fiercely loved by all those who had won it, the tribesmen mercenaries included.

They were good men to have at your back in a meat-grinder, certainly, or at least loyal enough to those who shed blood in the same ditch. But truth laid bare, many of them were as black as the midnight sky in character and soul. They were too bloody, too needlessly cruel after the field was won, and they possessed a distinct, arrogant hatred for taking orderly military commands. They were brutes with sword and armor, simple as that. For the time being, at least.

Torghan knew for a fact that many of those mercenaries wished to carve out homes down here in the south. And why the hell not? They had seen the sheer bountifulness of the land, how incredibly good the food tasted, and how profitable a bloody fight could be under the king’s command.

Murders, rapes, and lawlessness would undoubtedly bloom across the province once the Vulture Lord was finally dealt with, and that would cause a massive headache for the governor. But Torghan believed a firm hand, a heavy rod, and a few dozen public hangings along the highway would set their rebellious heads straight.

Order imposed with a hard, unyielding rod was the only kind made to last. The people of the mountains respected strength above all things. In truth, all people across the world either respected strength or feared it into submission. This wretched southern province was no different. All they needed to do was find that fucking Vulture Lord, tear his wings off, and give his carcass to the crows.

The heavy timber gates finally yawned open, and Torghan forced his exhausted steed inside the perimeter.

The interior of the camp did not fare any better than the blackened skyline outside. It wasn’t just the gruesome litter of corpses, bodies brutally gutted, charred or clubbed into unrecognizable shapes along the thoroughfare, nor was it the acrid stench of burnt fat that lingered in a man’s nostrils whenever he breathed through his nose.

It was the unmistakable, suffocating face of defeat painted on every surviving soul. Soldiers, militia, and non-combatants alike wandered the muddy paths like hollow ghosts.

Worse still, Torghan saw that very same broken shadow hanging over the faces of the disciplined legionaries of the Fourth. They had been caught badly and the Vulture had taken his pound of flesh before melting back into the trees.

He looked around trying to see a familiar face, when he could not, he picked out a random man of the Fourth after skipping over a dead boy with his guts handing out, shaking him by the shoulder and turning him so that he could gaze at his eyes.

At the very least he could see anger and a desire of revenge in his eyes . That was good. The eyes of the Fourth should never have defeat.

”What happened here?” Torghan demanded as his men swinged from their steeds, his armor clanked heavily as his boots bit into the mud.

The soldier spat a thick gob of red-tinged saliva onto the floor, animosity flaring in his eyes until it was swiftly willowed out by a begrudging respect when he looked at the heavy, distinctive plates of Torghan’s Voghondai armor.

”The fucking Vulture happened,” the decurion rasped, wiping his mouth with a grime-caked knuckle. ”That, and a bloody trap.”

Torghan had already reasoned on his own it had to be a ruse. There was no earthly way a fortified encampment could be gutted so completely, in so short a time, by a straightforward assault. He looked around, his sharp tracker’s eyes scanning the smoking thoroughfares. By a quick head count, there didn’t seem to be even two hundred souls left standing, living or dead. The rest of the garrison was simply gone.

”I do not see many of the auxiliarii,” Torghan noted, his brow furrowing.He knew for a fact there was a great deal of them serving as garrison.

Where were their cohorts?

”Neither do I, for that matter,” the soldier replied brusquely, gesturing with a bitter jerk of his chin behind him.

He winced at the movement.

Torghan followed the motion only to see a few dazed survivors, not soldiers though, clumsily carrying packed crates out into the open courtyard, trying to salvage what grain hadn’t been scorched. There did not seem to be many of those crates left.

”And do not hope to see the auxiliaries anytime soon either,” the decurion continued, his voice dropping onto a lower tone. ”They might as well be dead and rotting as we speak. They rolled out of this camp hours before the noon sun, and they still haven’t come back. I am of the firm opinion the ravens are currently picking their eyes out in the brush.”

”There must have been half a hundred of them! Plus the legionary detachment!” Torghan tried his absolute best to keep the rising shock out of his voice, but he wasn’t particularly successful. ”Not even a single scout came back?”

The soldier shook his head ”Not a soul.”

”How did that happen? Who was in charge?”

”Centurion Coriax was holding the ledger, but really... it was the Malakii, I suppose, in the end their victory brought us our defeat,” the soldier replied wearily, ”All of them. The scouts had captured some armed scum lurking in the tall grass early in the morning. After a bit of proper torture, the bastards spat out juicy information about a rebel camp deeper in the forest. Sure as fuck, we were all pretty excited at the prospect of an easy slaughter. The men clamored for blood, and the Malakii were the one clamoring for it the loudest of all. Coriax couldn’t stop them in their bloodlust.”

Torghan didn’t even think the commander had attempted to stop them. A legionary officer hated missing a victory just as much as a mercenary, but he kept his tongue behind his teeth and simply listened.

”They rolled out through those gates with one hundred and fifty heavy blades,” the decurion said, his eyes hollowly tracking a thin spiral of smoke. ”They left me in charge of the entire local militia with exactly five of my own regular men to stiffen their spines.”

Somewhere across the ruined square, hidden behind the thick curtain of smoke, a wounded man let out a wet, agonizing cough that suddenly cut off.

”As you can see for yourself, five regulars was not fucking enough,” the decurion growled. ”It was a coordinates trap. I don’t know what grand slaughter happened to Coriax or his men out in the green. Many of my tent-mates were with him. I hope they’re not dead, but they are still not back. The way I see it, those rebel cunts fed us a ghost story; there was probably never even a camp out there to begin with. All I know for certain is that the moment our main force was a mile deep into the road, the fucking Vulture Lord paid us a personal visit.”

The decurion gripped his bloody mace with some twince of white tightly, his knuckles turning pale. ”I saw the bastard myself, sitting high on his horse in that polished steel armor,red hair sweeping past his neck, leading at least two hundred raiders.

I tried to organize a proper defense at the palisade, but we were far too few, and the Oizenian militia isn’t worth the iron armor we graciously gave them to wear. The eastern wall was the first to buckle. The moment the rebels got inside the perimeter, there was no saving the camp. They butchered every living thing they came across and spread oil and fire around like they were sowing seeds.”

The veteran let out a defeated sigh, spreading his filthy hands wide. ”I tried to rally a small wing of my men for a final counter-charge to secure the storehouses. But it was entirely useless. When the Vulture’s men had finished having their fun and the camp was thoroughly ruined, they simply rolled right out through the main gate in perfect order. And here we are.”

And indeed, Torghan thought, looking at the charred bones of the camp, there they were.

The quiet was dead, the Vulture was flying high again, and the King desperately needed to know of this.

And somehow if the wispering in his ears had reason, this would not be the last of his majesty’s camps set ablaze....