Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king-Chapter 1042: Slight(3)
White clouds of dust erupted on the horizon, at first no larger than needles pricking the blue sky, before swelling into towering plumes that threatened to swallow the very light of the sun that gave them life.
They moved with the great speed only men on horses could have, a rolling wall of grey that heralded the end of the morning’s peace.
The makers of the storm were thirty in number, each donned in interlocking rings of chainmail that hissed with every gallop. As they drew closer, they hoisted their swords and heavy-headed axes into the air; the soon to be red iron of their blades caught the midday glare, flashing like a rhythmic distress signal across the unstoned road.
Most carried lances strapped to their saddles, but they left the heavy timber in its rest. There was no sense in splintering a costly, well-balanced lance just to skewer a few hired guards who were likely to break and run the moment the first throat was opened. Lances were the tools of knights and the ruin of budgets that were already pressed; for the "bronzii" peasant-hired dregs of a merchant caravan, common steel was more than sufficient. Even an honor some could say.
A voice tore through the rhythmic thundering of hooves.
"Same routine, men!" he bellowed, leaning low over his horse’s mane to cut the wind. "Five of you peel off to the flanks! I want you on the skirts of the formation, hit the stragglers the second they find their coward’s legs. The rest of you, stay on my tail! We’re going in straight!’’
A chorus of hungry voices rose in answer, a sound that was less human and more akin to a pack of wolves sensing a kill.They stoked forth in a feverish mania, like the characters of a boyhood day-dreaming , becoming heroes through the blood of their enemies.
"All right!" "Let’s do this!" "Blood for blood! Skulls for skulls!"
The riders kicked their mounts into a final, bone-shivering sprint. The distance between the dust cloud and the lumbering wagons vanished in a heartbeat. The ground began to vibrate with a low, visceral hum that rattled the teeth of every man in the caravan.
The defensive formation was a mirror image of the massacres they had orchestrated twice before. It was a textbook reaction: men scrambled onto the carriages, hoisting their spears in a desperate hedgehog meant to ward off the momentum of a mounted charge.The only thing they could do, except, of course running away, not that any of the two would serve them.
Theoretically, the tactic was sound. Practically, it was a death sentence. Sure it could have worked...had they bigger numbers and firmer resolve. Unfortunately for them, they appeared to be lacking both.
Even from dozens of paces away, the riders could see the tell-tale rattle of the front-line spears, trembling wood held by men whose resolve had already evaporated. As they had done with the previous caravans, the riders did not plunge blindly into the points; they began to circle like sharks, weaving a perimeter of dust and steel to ensure that no messenger could slip away to tell the tale.Then when the time was right they would charge in and make slaughters of the pigs.
This was to be a dirty and yet thorough clean business. No survivors. No witnesses.
Because the resistance had been so meager in the past, a dangerous laxity had begun to rot in the riders. Even before the main line was broken, a small band of three horsemen peeled away toward the rear of a heavily clothed carriage.
All they saw after all was a dozen trembling men guarding a dragon’s hoard.
"Oi, let’s see what the luck of the road has brought us today, eh?" one of them leered. He sat tall in his stirrups, watching the trembling merchants with the cold, appraising eye of a butcher watching goats being led to the stump.
He was that sort of boy who unwinged a fly to watch it squirm around, only of course to never grow out of that boyhood phase.
"Can’t you wait until the work is done, Dona?" a comrade called back, his voice as rough as sandpaper on stone. "What’s got you so eager?Got debtors drilling on your arse?"
"Oh, come off it! Aren’t you curious what they’re packing?" Dona replied, his horse’s hooves kicking up plumes of dirt as he trotted closer to the wagon.His eyes appraising the cloth that hid the haul,
"I’d wager we hit the jackpot today. Maybe some of that Yarzat cider? Remember the first haul? That port was ambrosia, tasted like a good lay and better dreams. The woman may have been average, but damn if the drink didn’t made her to be mouth-drooling and make me even beg for second, I tell you that is a fucking aphrodisiac. What’s the hold-up, hey?
Don’t tell me you’ve got the jitters over a dozen mushy tradesmen.It ain’t even going to get our blades wet...."
"Be quick with it, then," the second man grumbled, though a pinch of greed had sharpened his own tone.He too was curious to see what was inside. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝚠𝚎𝚋𝗻𝗼𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝚘𝐦
"That was most certainly not what she said last night," Dona winked, sliding off his horse with a graceful and smooth movement . He brushed his hands together like a man sitting down to a feast, his eyes fixed on the heavy canvas curtains of the carriage. "Come on, come to papa..."
He had visions of cider casks or perhaps fine silks that could be fenced for a small fortune. Wandering blades like them were neither lords nor merchant princes; they lived and died by the steel at their hips, getting what they could through it, and usually, that steel only bought them half-full stomachs and cold beds. Fine enough to get by but not to satisfy eager soul, a good life? Yeah, probably that would be their only taste of it. They could only get the crumbs and be satisfied with that.
Dona reached out and yanked the canvas flap aside.
Inside the dark interior, there was no ambrosia. There were no silks. What was there to be offered however, were axes.
They were beautifully made, heavy, bearded heads of Yarzat steel that would have fetched a horse’s ransom at any armory. It would have been the haul of a lifetime, were it not for the fact that the axes were not resting in crates. They were gripped in the white-knuckled hands of men who were smiling with a lethal joy.
It was their death.
The outlaw understood it far too late.
"IT’S A TR—!"
He tried to scream, but the warning died in a wet, muffled choke. Vain, just as his life had been.In his youth he had dreamed of becoming a champion, unhorsing knights left and right, giving the laurel of the victors to some lady that could give him her favour.In his adulthood, he desired opulence and to sleep on walls that would shelter him from the cold wind; now at the end of the line, he desired not to taste his own blood with each breath.
The word he tried to whimper with his last breath was severed by a broad-headed axe that buried itself deep into the column of his throat like a ram hitting a gate at full speed, the force of the blow pinning him momentarily against the wagon’s frame, like a kebab on a spiedo.
Eyes wide, he saw the hands of the pale lady reaching for him. The last good lay he would ever get.
Through the haze of his final seconds, Dona saw a set of bared teeth through blood-choking breath,belonging to his killers as he spoke the only eulogy of a funeral no-one would be attending.
"SWYRNNN MORNAEEEE!" the man who smashed the outlaw’s threat howled, the war-cry of the Yarzat mountain clans.
Half as good as the legionnaires, but twice as mad.
Cold went through Dona’s skin.
The mountaineer yanked the axe free with a sickening squelch of parted flesh, letting out a howl of pure, primal pleasure that came only from slaughter.The blood splattered upon his smiling face, eyes droopy with the feast of bloodshed.
The last moment of awareness of the outlaw was spent wondering how it was possible for him and the barbarian to even share the same species.
He died with that thought, spared to see the far longer consequences of their work. Their betters had wanted for war, and they were the first to have a taste of it.
The canvas on every single wagon in the caravan exploded outward at once. The "merchants" shed their wool cloaks to reveal the blackened mail of armed men. The "trembling" guards dropped their clumsy spears, acting to draw the firmness of seasoned killers.
And soon the hunters had become the hunted, as from the bellies of the wooden beasts, the Fox’s own hounds leaped out to unleash hell upon the unready, their cries rising into the sky forebearing of the slaughter to come.
