Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king-Chapter 1044: Slight(5)
The skirmish had lasted about as long as a virgin’s first night in bed. It was a pathetic display of bravado; as it turned out, these lawless ruts were masters of claiming victory against harmless merchants, but the moment they struck a real wall of iron, they disintegrated. Most were already meat for the rats and ravens, their bodies cooling in the dirt. Those who survived were left shivering at the mercy of their betters.
"Mercy! By the gods, mercy!" one cried out, his voice a shrill, cracking thing.
"Painu alas, ryyppää!" a warrior snarled back.
The prisoner didn’t understand the words, but he understood the massive, calloused hands that slammed him into the dry dirt. He was forced down until both knees were buried in the gore-slicked earth. Those whose heads still stood unbowed looked up to see the "merchant" stepping down from his cart. He observed the meaningless struggle of the vanquished with the bored, unimpressed air of a god watching ants.
Beside him stood the hulking masses of muscle who leaned on their axes and looked at the prisoners with the same flat, hungry appraisal they had given their salted beef that morning, most of them did not even like their breakfast.
The only thing keeping these savages from finishing the butchery was the presence of the man in the wide-brimmed hat. He walked among the kneeling men like a reaper deciding which stalks to keep. But, as in any harvest, there was an exception.
"Oi, tämä tuntuu tarpeeksi rohkealta!" one tribesman shouted, pointing at an outlaw who refused to go down.
"I kneel to no savage!" the prisoner declared, his chest heaving. His pride, it seemed, was as unbent as his joints.
The declaration didn’t inspire anger as he might have expected; it inspired amusement. The tribesmen burst into a chorus of laughter that sounded like stone grinding on stone.
"Roynakh, mitkä ovat hänen jalkansa silloin?" one of the Valakii asked, peering his neck forward with a wide, yellowish grin to see the commotion.
The man who had been trying to press the prisoner down stopped his efforts. He stepped back, a glint in his eyes. "Sait sen oikein!" then he laughed.
The prisoner looked confused, his eyes darting between the laughing mountaineers. He didn’t understand the joke until a massive warrior moved to his right. What he could not learn through the Old Mountain Tongue, he learned through the weight of iron.
The warrior raised his bearded axe high, shouting a few guttural words that sent his brothers into a new fit of hysterics. Then, with the casual force of a man splitting a log, he brought the heavy blade down directly into the man’s knee.
A high-pitched howl soon tore through the air as the axe-head became wedged deep in the shattered bone and gristle. He collapsed sideways, pissing and bawling like a child.
The tribesmen didn’t stop. With a grunt of effort, the warrior planted a boot on the man’s thigh and yanked the axe free with a squelching pop. As the man continued to shriek, the savage raised the weapon once more.
"Toinenkin!" someone cheered.
The second blow fell on the remaining knee. The bone shattered instantly, the blade biting through the leg and into the dirt beneath.
The outlaw’s howls turned into a ragged, breathless sobbing, his body twitching in the mud.
The circle of mountaineers erupted in fresh laughter, slapping their armored thighs and pointing at the heap of broken meat, then they turned and looked at the other prisoners, their grins wide and whetted, waiting to see who else felt like standing. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝕨𝕖𝗯𝚗𝚘𝕧𝕖𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝕞
As it turned out that was the only one.
"I recall having given an order to cease this butchery."
Despite its owner’s weary tone, it cut through the air with the precision of a razor, rising above even the shrieks of the man in the dirt.
The veteran who had executed the unruly savage earlier stepped forward again. He filled the space between the speaker and the tribesmen, his massive chest heaving beneath his mail. The laughter died instantly. The Valakii and Mashki warriors, who lived for the thrill of the kill, found their gazes suddenly fixed on the mud or the horizon. No one was foolish enough to test their luck against him.
But the leap of trash on the ground remained.
"Clean it up, please," the merchant said, his tone turning bored, as if he were asking a servant to sweep a spill of wine.
The hulking veteran turned his head, the last order apparently was too much. "I am not your dog, Ebran!" he snarled.
Yet, for all his defiance, he moved. He stepped over to the sobbing wreck of a man and brought the poll of his axe down. The shriek finally ceased.
Ebran let out a long, shuddering exhale. He reached up, arching his back until the vertebrae popped with a series of sharp, audible cracks. He looked at the scene, the wagons, the piles of dead, and the few remaining prisoners whose eyes were now wide with the realization that their lives were being weighed by a man who felt nothing for them.
"Now," Ebran asked, his voice echoing in the stillness, "isn’t that much nicer?"
No one answered. The wind hissed through the charred remains of the caravan’s canvas, the only sound in the vacuum of the aftermath.
The right hand of the Carrio Raven tilted his head, a faint, mocking glint in his eye as he looked toward the tribesmen. "Eikö nyt olekin mukavampaa?" he repeated in the Old Tongue, his accent flawless.
The tension broke into a wave of guttural chuckles and approving nods. Only the veteran, Ebran’s apparent second-in-command, remained apart from the levity. He stood with his arms crossed over his gore-stained harness, his face a mask simmering plain distaste
Through the laughter, Ebran turned his full attention back to the survivors. Of the thirty men who had charged the caravan with dreams of easy gold, only eight remained. They were huddled in a pathetic knot of trembling limbs, their faces pale beneath the grime of the road.
He clapped his hands together, the sound sharp as a whip-crack in the quiet morning.
"Now, little rats... here we are!" he chirped, his voice regaining its levity. "I’d like to be the gentleman here. I’d please myself and say that those who cooperate, those who sing for us like little starlings, will have their lives spared. That we’d let you walk away with a pat on the head."
He watched as a flicker of desperate, pathetic hope sparked in their eyes. They leaned forward, shoulders slumping in relief.
"Unfortunately," Ebran continued, his smile turning thin and razor-sharp, "that would be a lie. And I truly hate lies. Almost as much as I hate you pillagers."
The hope died instantly.
"There is no more hope of life for you," Ebran said, pacing a slow circle around them. "All you get to decide today is the manner of your exit. You can go the easy way, or you can go the way that makes you wish you’d never been born." He raised a mockingly curious eyebrow at their crestfallen faces.
"Oh, come now! You knew who my sender was the moment the first axe fell. What did you expect? You slaughtered our merchants and pissed upon the Royal Herald. Did you really think we could wash away that kind of shame without using your blood as the lye?You should know that the one holding my leash sees shit through..."
They looked at the ground, silence their only shield. Deep down, in the black pits of their hearts, they had known. There was a reason why the Falcon was feared. They did not even last five days...
"Now, the fact is, I need information. And I need it with a certain... haste," Ebran said, his tone shifting into the clinical dryness of a clerk. "Normally, I wouldn’t even bother speaking to a lot like you. We’d find a nice, quiet cellar and go straight to the classics, torching toes, pulling nails, peeling skin.
But we are on a fast track, and I can’t exactly have you screaming like stuck pigs on the open road for hours. It draws attention.And that’s something I don’t want"
He clapped his hands again, a bright, manic smile breaking across his face. "So! I thought to myself: how do we make men of your particular character speak quickly? How do we bypass the stubbornness of the ego?"
He turned to the hulking tribesmen standing behind the prisoners. "Pois housujen kanssa!"
Confusion rippled through the captives, followed quickly by a cold astonished fear as five of the massive warriors began to unbuckle their heavy leg armor.
One minutes in, they were with their hoses on the open air.
"It seems our dear friends from the mountains don’t have much of a preference for which side of the river they navigate," Ebran noted, his voice dripping with a casual malice, as if he were just telling what he ate that morning. "So, here is the plan. We are going to separate you into groups. We will question each of you individually, and then we will compare the stories. If we find even a single discrepancy, a name that doesn’t match, a date that’s off, a coin-count that’s wrong, we leave you with our dear friends for, shall we say... ten minutes of recreation?"
He leaned down, his face inches from one of the outlaw’s ear. "Then we question you again. And if the stories still don’t match? Another ten minutes. We’ll keep going until you fess up, or until your arse is a bloody cake. You get the gist, don’t you?"
The outlaws went a deathly shade of grey. One of them stared, paralyzed, at a Valakii warrior who was built with the staggering proportions of a plow-horse. Suddenly, the quick, cold death of an axe to the skull didn’t seem unsavory at all.
They would have never thought they would so eagerly call for their deaths.
