Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king

The freezing wind howled across the muddy bank as the stallion charged once more, hooves tearing fresh gouges into earth already churned to ruin. The remaining men had scrambled to their feet, gripping their weapons with white knuckled desperation as they braced for the impact bearing down on them.

It served them precious little. Hundreds of pounds of pure muscle thundered toward them like an avalanche given four legs and a foul temper. The bandits were smart enough to hurl themselves clear of Chestnut’s iron shod hooves, diving into the grass with all the grace of men who valued their skulls intact.

Unfortunately for them, they were not smart enough to account for the knight riding above the beast, longsword swinging low and hungry.

Chestnut wove between two of the men, their chainmail clinking loud and useless as they dove for the safety of the weeds.

Five, before. Now four.

Vilon picked his next target, a man wielding a small, rusty hatchet who was trying to scramble up the bank on all fours like some frightened crab. The brigand threw himself sideways, but Vilon willed Chestnut forward, leaning deep out of the saddle until his ribs strained against the mail.

He brought the blade down fast, and raised it up red.

Steel met wrist, cutting through meat and bone with the sickening ease of a warm knife through suet. Vilon felt the brief, stubborn resistance of the joint before the blade cleaved clean through, leaving a fine spray of crimson suspended for one strange, frozen instant in the icy air, like something a court painter might have wanted to capture and never could.

The severed hand and the rusted hatchet hit the grass together with a wet, heavy whump, landing side by side as though they still belonged to one another.

It was far quieter than Vilon had expected. For a single beat, there was no scream at all, only the snorting of the horse and the strange, ringing hush that seemed to follow in the wake of violence.

Vilon whirled Chestnut around in a tight circle just in time to watch the bandit take stock of his own new state One moment the man was whole. The next, he was down on his knees in the mud, clutching his spouting stump to his chest, a strangled, wet shriek finally tearing loose from his lungs as blood painted the ground black around him.

He was out of the fight for good. He might linger a few minutes yet, screaming and clutching and bleeding, but his only remaining contribution to the skirmish now would be fraying whatever scraps of morale his companions had left to fray.

From five, to three.

I... I can actually do this, Vilon thought, his heart thundering wildly against his ribs, some wild, disbelieving joy threading through the fear. He had slain one outright and crippled another beyond usefulness. He needed only double that count, and add one more besides, and this would be over.

The remaining three men traded uncertain glances, none of them eager to be the next to test the knight’s blade. In their scramble to avoid the thundering stallion, they had scattered well clear of the bank, and in doing so had given Martha exactly the opening she needed. She scrambled to her feet, mud caked and shaking, and made a desperate dash for the tree line.

She passed within an arm’s length of Vilon as she fled. Through her red, glassy eyes, he caught a flash of sudden, blinding recognition, and with it, a well of gratitude so profound it seemed to steady even her stumbling legs.

That single look was all the thanks Vilon required. Doing what was right was its own reward, or so he had always told himself on colder, hungrier nights than this one. Though if the Five saw fit to grant him a swift victory on top of it, he certainly wouldn’t be the one to turn such a gift away.

He turned his attention to the survivors, sizing each up the way his father once taught him, back before his father had given him much reason to hate the lessons. One held a crude boar spear in both hands, bracing it low at the level of Vilon’s knee, his stance weak and untrained. Vilon judged he could cut the man down in three heartbeats even afoot, but ahorse, a spear was a different animal entirely, one that could gut a charging horse as easily as the man riding it.

The second man wielded a plain arming sword, and was the youngest of the bunch by far. Vilon felt an unwelcome pang, realizing the boy could be no older than Owen himself, though whatever heart beat in that young chest was clearly carved from something far blacker than the dirt caked beneath his nails.

Young or not, he reminded himself, smothering the soft, unwanted spark of pity before it could take root and cost him dearly, that same boy had been moments away from raping and butchering a woman in the mud for sport.

He turned his visor toward the third man, plainly the leader of this sorry pack, and froze.

He was a broad, ugly bastard, easily four times the young one’s age, a matted, unkempt white beard swallowing most of his chin. Dried grease and crumbs from meals long past clung stubborn to the beard hair, but it was the man’s nose that truly caught and held Vilon’s eye. It was the most y broken nose Vilon had ever laid eyes upon in all his years of soldiering, shoved flat and twisted upward like some crooked finger forever pointing off to the side, the mark of a break that had never once seen a healer’s hands.

Vilon had seen that broken nose before. Long ago, back with Rosh’s caravan, over a shared fire and a shared bowl of stew.

”Logen?” Vilon called out, the name tumbling unbidden from his lips before he’d even decided to speak it.

Recognition flashed in the old mercenary’s bloodshot eyes too. A broad, filthy grin stretched across his face, revealing the four yellowed teeth the gods had not yet seen fit to claim. He spat a gob of phlegm into the grass. Beside him, the man with the severed wrist had stopped screaming, collapsing onto his side like a sleeping babe, slipping quietly into the long dark.

”I thought I smelled something familiar,” Logen rasped, his voice sounding like two grinding stones. ”Reeked of self-righteous shite the second you topped the hill.” He sneered, raising his blood-stained blade. ”You owe me a whore, ser.”

”I owe you nothing but my iron,” Vilon said, reining Chestnut in.

Logen jeered, his tongue rolling over his remaining teeth. ”And where’s that little bastard squire of yours? I was looking forward to taking a blade to his tender throat, too. Irritating little shite, always blabbering about priests and virtue.”

”Far away from here,” Vilon growled. Safe from a dog like you.

”Did you send him off to light a candle for your soul?”

”I sent him to the highway to fetch the watch,” Vilon lied smoothly, his eyes narrowing behind his visor. He caught the young bandit flinching at the words and leaned into the opening. ”We passed a dozen Hounds patrolling the road not an hour back.’’ he lied ’’ If the Weaver is merciful, my boy has already found them. One way or another, your turn on the gallows has come.”

The young brigand’s face went chalk-white. He took a nervous step back, looking toward the old man with wide, frantic eyes. ”Logen... the woman is gone. The road is crawling with Hounds! It’s over, man! This was a mistake! We should have stayed with the main war-band, we can still go back before—”

”I am done following that fucking cunt!” Logen roared, turning on the boy with such violent fury that the youth recoiled. ”I rode under his banner half my life, and what did it get me? Half my teeth knocked out and my coin-pouch empty! I am finished taking orders from that failed cunt! I ride for myself now, and I take what I want!I don’t need that bastard!”

Logen snapped his iron gaze back to Vilon, his broken nose twitching with madness. ”I wanted that whore! But since your noble horse stripped me of her... I suppose I’ll just have to settle for taking your armor, your beast, and your life!”

He gestured with his sword toward the terrified young bandit beside him. ”And as for you, boy... keep whining about the Hounds, and I’ll cut your balls off right here and feed them to the crows before the knight even gets a swing at us!The only way out of here is through that horse, always if he is telling the thruth.”

Vilon gripped his hilt tighter, feeling the tension stretch like a bowstring. ”You’re a mad dog, Logen. And mad dogs only get one kind of ending.”

”Then come down off that fucking horse and give it to me!” Logen bellowed.

”Hya!” Vilon half-obliged him, digging his spurs into Chestnut’s flanks and sending the great beast surging forward.

Only three left. I can take them.

He willed the warhorse straight toward the pair, deliberately veering away from the spearman. Taking a braced spear from the saddle, especially on an unarmored mount, was a swift way to gut the finest horse in the principalities. He needed to clear the sword-arms first.

He locked his sights on the easiest target: the boy. The youth’s face drained to the color of curdled milk as he grasped, in one horrifying instant, that the thundering steel and muscle bearing down on him had chosen him and no other.

His arming sword trembled violently in thin, twig like arms that looked better suited to hauling water than swinging iron. His posture was so wretchedly poor that a shepherd’s crook would have made a more dangerous weapon in his grip than cold steel ever could.

He has no training at all, Vilon realized in a single flashing instant.

It mattered little on the field. It only meant the lad would die all the sooner for it, and with considerably less dignity than a trained man might have managed.

Leaning deep out of the saddle, Vilon drew his blade back for a sweeping cut. In sheer panic, the boy jerked his sword up into a clumsy, static guard, eyes squeezed nearly shut, as though not seeing the blow might somehow spare him from it. Green to the very core, no one had ever bothered to teach the fool that aparry set before a blow even begins its descent is no parry at all.

Vilon delivered the lesson, along with the reason for it.

His longsword sheared straight past the boy’s desperate block, punching clean through the iron rings of his mail coif. Vilon had aimed true for the soft flesh of the throat, but the boy’s panicked flinch dragged the blow down into his collarbone instead. The sword bit deep there, like some starving hound snapping onto a bone and refusing, with everything left in its jaw, to let go.

The momentum of the warhorse hauled the youth clean off his feet for one surreal, suspended second, legs still churning at empty air. He was flying, and then he was no longer as the blade ripped free and dumped his body back into the churned red mud.

The lad howled in agony, a sound closer to something animal than human. Dark blood welled thick through his shattered chainmail, pooling fast around his fallen sword. He curled into a tight, shaking ball in the grass, eyes screwed shut, weeping openly now.

”Mercy!” the boy shrieked, both hands clutching at his ruined shoulder as though he could somehow hold the blood inside by will alone. ”Mercy, ser! I, I just wanted a girl! Mercy!”

Vilon felt a dark, bitter urge rise in him, an ugly wish to wheel Chestnut around and let the stallion’s iron hooves finish what the sword had started, to crush the squalling bastard’s skull into the mud and be done with it.

’’Just wanted a girl.’’

The sheer, vile stupidity of the excuse turned Vilon’s stomach worse than the blood had. As if wanting were ever license enough to take. As if the whole rotten world hadn’t been built by men who wanted things they had no right to and simply reached out and took them anyway.

Yet he forced his eyes away from the boy, pushing the darker urge back down where it belonged.

Three down. Only two left standing.

If the Five possessed even a shred of kindness between them, the remaining pair would break and run for the tree line, tails tucked, and leave this whole miserable business behind them. Vilon had no burning desire to trade blows with Logen. The old mercenary was a seasoned killer by the look of him, desperate now and doubly vicious for it, and the spearman remained a constant, gnawing threat to Chestnut’s belly, spear points being notoriously indifferent to whether the flesh they found was horse or man.

Run, Vilon prayed silently, gripping his reins tighter. Just cut your losses and run, both of you, and let this end without more blood spilled on either side.

If the gods were good, they would do just that.

”NO! NOT THE HORSE, YOU FOOL! WE NEED THE BEAST TO ESCAPE!” Logen’s throaty, bull like roar tore through the cold air, shattering whatever fragile quiet had settled over the bank. ”THE CUNT! GUT THE CUNT!”

Vilon whirled in his saddle, blood turning to ice in his veins faster than the wind could ever have managed alone.

Through the narrow steel slit of his half helmet, he saw the iron head of the boar spear rising fast through the grey afternoon air, driving hard and true for his torso. He had turned his back on the spearman for one heartbeat too long, distracted by a weeping boy and his own ugly urges.

Indeed. The gods, it seemed, were seldom half so kind as a desperate man might hope.